Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

I break out into a junkyard of rusty steel hawsers with caches of trapped driftwood cemented by dried whitened mud, chunks of Styrofoam, tires, Clorox bottles. A rusting hulk of a barge fitted with a crane conveyor is toppled and half sunk. This must have been a transfer facility, no doubt a soybean depot.

The river is on the boom. It’s been dry here. They must have had late summer rains in the Dakotas or the Midwest. This stretch is the Raccourci Chute, which goes ripping past Angola even at low water. But now it’s up in the willows and a mile wide, roaring and sucking and jerking the willows and blowing a cool, foul breath. A felon might imagine that if he could get over the levee and into the willows he could make it, but no. He’d get caught in the sucks and boils. There’s nothing out there but roiled, racing, sulphur-colored water flecked by dirty foam from Dakota farms, Illinois toilets, and ten million boxes of Tide. Angola could just as well be Alcatraz. Looking across toward Raccourci Island, I could swear the river swells, curved up like a watchglass by the boil of a giant spring.

Old Tunica Landing is nothing but a rotten piece of wharf. The raised walk of creosoted planks is solid enough and high enough to clear the rising water in the batture. There’s nobody here and the gravel road from Tunica is grown up in weeds. I pick out a dry piling I can sit against and from which I can see up the road without being seen. The landing was used first by the Tunica Indians and then to service the indigo plantations. I came here once to see the Tunica Treasure, a graveyard which somebody dug up and then found, not gold, but glass beads which the English, my ancestors, had given them for their land two hundred years ago. It is nine-thirty.

A little upriver and a ways out is Fancy Point Towhead, an island of willows almost submerged but long enough and angled out enough to deflect the main current and make a backwater. Foam drifts under me upstream. There’s another noise above the racket of the current in the batture downstream. It’s a towboat pushing fifteen or twenty rafted-up barges upstream. There’s not enough room inside the island for him to use the dead water. He has to buck straight up the Chute and he’s having a time of it. The current is maybe eight knots, and with his diesels flat out he’s maybe making twelve. He sounds like five freight engines going upgrade, drive wheels spinning.

I watch him. There is so much noise that I don’t hear Vergil Bon until the plank moves under me. He’s carrying a pirogue by its gunwale in one hand, two paddles in the other. The uncle is right behind him, face narrow and dark under his hunting cap. He’s carrying his old double-barrel 12-gauge Purdy in the crook of his arm and ambling along in his sprung splayed walk as if he were on his way to a duck blind. They both seem serious but not displeased.

“How you doing, Vergil, Uncle Hugh Bob?” The towboat is noisy.

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

We shake hands. They gaze around, not at me, equably. They are Louisianians, at ease out-of-doors. The uncle nods and pops his fingers. We could be meeting here every day.

“Did you bust out of there?” asks the uncle companionably, flanking me.

“I have permission. Don’t worry about it.”

We watch the towboat make the bend, creep past the concrete of the Hog Point revetment, which looks like a gray quilt dropped on the far levee.

“Uncle Hugh Bob, what are you doing with that shotgun?”

“You asked him about that little Woodsman.” He nods toward Vergil as if he didn’t know him well. “We brought it. But I didn’t know what kind of trouble you’re in.” He’s jealous because I asked Vergil.

“We’re not going to have any trouble — beyond maybe a mean dog or a snake.”

“I’m not going to shoot no dog with a.22. This won’t kill him.” He pats the shotgun. “What we going to do?”

“We’re going to drop down to Belle Ame and pick up Claude. After that you and Claude can take the pirogue on down to Pantherburn. My car is at Belle Ame. I’ll bring Vergil back up here to get the truck. We’ll see.”

That seems to satisfy him. “I brought along my spinning tackle, right here.” He pats his game pocket. “Claude can go fishing with me.” Then he thinks of something. “What you doing at Angola?” He screws up a milky eye at me.

“It was a misunderstanding. Some federal officers thought I was a parole violator. I have to be back up here at two to straighten it out. Nothing to worry about.”

“They not looking for you?”

“No. It’s like having a pass.”

He nods, not listening. But Vergil is watching me closely. He says nothing.

“Vergil, how long will it take to get down to Belle Ame?”

He answers easily, gauging the current, without changing his expression. “It’s not all that far. Just past the hills and where the levee begins again. And in that current — half an hour.”

“Twenty minutes,” says Uncle Hugh, willing to argue about the river.

“Do they still have a landing?”

Vergil and the uncle laugh. “A landing?” says Vergil. “Doc, that’s where the new Tennessee Belle and the Robert E. Lee tie up when they bring tourists up from New Orleans for the Azalea Festival and the Plantation Parade in the spring.”

“Do you think that pirogue will hold the three of us out in all that?”

“It took me and my daddy and two hundred pounds of nutria.”

“Not out in that,” says the uncle. He’s offended because I didn’t ask him.

“Yes, sir, out in that,” says Vergil, telling me. I wish he would pay attention to the uncle. “Right over there on Raccourci Island is where my daddy used to run his traps.”

“What do you think, Uncle Hugh Bob?”

The uncle considers, breaks the breech of the Purdy, sights through it. “Well, the trash will be going with us. All we got to worry about is getting run over or hit by a wake like that.” The last of the towboat’s wake is slapping and sucking under us.

“I tell you what let’s do, Doc, Mr. Hugh,” says Vergil, appearing to muse. “Mr. Hugh knows more about the river than anybody around here. Anybody can paddle. So why don’t we put Mr. Hugh in the middle so he can judge the river, look out for snags, and tell us which way to go if something big is coming down on us. You know those sapsuckers will see you and still run over you.”

Thank you, Vergil, for your tact.

“They will,” says the uncle, mollified. “But what’s he talking about, paddling in that thing? Y’all just worry about steering, ne’ mind paddling.”

“How much freeboard you reckon we going to have?” I am eyeing the pirogue, still in Vergil’s hand. A pirogue is designed for one Cajun in a swamp, kneeling and balancing with a load of muskrat, nutria, or alligator. It can navigate in an inch of water and slide over a hummock of wet grass. It was not designed for three men in the Mississippi River.

“Enough,” says Vergil.

“Two inches,” says the uncle. “That thing supposed to be in a swamp.”

“Not to worry,” says Vergil absently, looking on either side of the wharf for a place to launch, and as absently: “What’s going on at Belle Ame, Doc?”

“Did Lucy tell you anything?”

“She just said there was some humbug over there and that was why you took Tommy and Margaret out and why we ought to get Claude out.” He appears to be inspecting the river intently.

“I don’t think we have to worry about Claude, but I thought it better not to take any chances. We’ll go get him. I also want to get a line on Dr. Van Dorn. As you know, he’s involved in that sodium shunt and maybe in something else.”

Vergil says nothing, after a moment nods. “All right, then.”