Sunday Scribbling #182: Mississippi Cheese

Fragment from Ignes Fatui, an unfinished novel:

Joe was on his third lap of the D’Lo Water Park exercise trail when he felt a pinch on his bottom. ‘Lo, Livvy would have been his usual greeting, but his dark mood wouldn’t bring it up. A feeble wish in a county where all knew all, but he’d been hoping for invisibility. Three generations of Choctaw relatives going on all the time about how easy it was to disappear, he could hope, couldn’t he?

Olivia Wade, oblivious to social cues, swept by, then turned to face him, walking backwards. Navigated the trail curves better than Joe did plodding forward. Olivia Wade, the one ray of light in Joe’s dismal career at Mendenhall Middle School. Principal at the time, she’d hired him. Knew – and told him – he wasn’t long for the job (“you’ll take it too seriously” – and he did), but wanted him around for his fine face and lovely voice. Made it a point to stop into his classroom every day at the end of last period, slip off her shoes and listen to him read. Tolkien, mostly, though sometimes Twain, or from Narnia, or – her favorite – the stretch of days when he’d read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. Probably lost on most of the drowsing seventh graders, but no matter. To the consternation of half her faculty (the Baptists, the ones who got her fired) and to the astonishment of the other half (the Episcopalians and assorted other pagans), she kept a decanter of sherry in her office window throughout the school year. Joe was the only one to dip into it, without even asking. Best way to read Yeats aloud, he said, and then, to her great pleasure, did.

“Bad day?” said Olivia, smiling brightly, deftly sidestepping a bobbing urchin from the other direction. Joe was not so quick: fat red toddler head careened into his right knee.

“Dammit!” Throwing down his walkman, stumbling to the nearest green bench. Olivia followed, years of playground diplomacy writ large on her face. Sat down beside Joe and reinstalled the batteries of his now cracked walkman. Punched a button, put an ear to the headphones.

“Mmm, Satie.”

Joe glowered on at his three foot tall assailant and the oblivious mother in its wake.

“Fucking – ”

“Well, good afternoon to you, too, Mr. Campbell.”

“Goddamn – ”

“I’d say the little Hindenberg did you a favor. From the looks of it, you didn’t want to be out here anyway.”

That pulled him in. Still frowning, but his noise had settled. Olivia pulled a silver flask out of her back jeans pocket, set it on the bench between them.

“I’ve only had one sip, you can have the rest.”

“No, thanks.”

“You don’t have to read me a thing.”

“Really, Livvy, no thanks. It’s okay.”

“Well, finally. Nice to be noticed.”

She followed his gaze to a stand of trees a hundred yards west of where they sat. In between, an old man was laying out home sweet home astroturf in front of and alongside his Winnebago. A woman twenty years his junior was hanging out pots of yellow and red plastic flowers.

“Been there lately?” said Olivia.

“There?”

“The river. You think I was talking about Strom and his child bride over there? Of course I meant the river.”

“What river?”

“The Strong River, you fool. The river you schlep your, pardon my French, fat ass over every time you drive over to this godforsaken water park. You think D’Lo Water Park stood for the water fountains?”

“I’ll be damned. I never noticed.”

“Most men of your intelligence would be blushing by now. That’s downright idiotic, Joe.”

“Choctaws don’t blush,” he said, blushing.

“Liar. Some Choctaw you are anyway. As I recall, one hundred and seventy years ago, when the assholes up in Washington were shipping the Greenwood LeFlore toadies off to Shangra La in Oklahoma, your smarter ancestors just hightailed it off into the woods. You think they didn’t notice a river unless they fell in it?”

“Alright, maybe I did know something about it.” Still blushing.

“Liar again. You’ve really never been over there, have you?”

“Well, I – ”

“It’s no sin, Joe. Choctaw or not, it’s just strange.”

“Thought you said it was Strong.”

“Ha.”

He stayed on another ten minutes with Olivia, polished off the rest of her flask, then set out across the bright green lawn in search of the river not seen. Breathed a warm sherried smile at the homesick Winnebagons, stepped into thick woods, and teetered onto a wooden bridge that had seen sturdier days. He looked in vain – and foolishly, he finally realized – for the river beneath his bridge: it spanned a dry ravine. The sound of water pulled him further into the trees.

A small asphalt road crossed in front of him, ran to a ghostly playground in the trees to his right. The sound of water was still up ahead. What looked like a trail and break in the trees turned into a dirtslide – one step and all two hundred pounds of Joe Campbell toppled down twenty feet of riverbank. He landed on his feet, tried to look as if he had planned his impromptu descent, but no matter: the river was completely deserted. Looked, for some reason felt, as if it had always been deserted, not just his first time there, but anyone’s. He shivered.

Then took a deep breath. The sound of the river, its black water, filled him. He stood on a wide shelf of stone, dragon’s back, he thought, stairstepping down to the water’s edge. No fiery eyes or nose, just smooth curve of the creature’s spine. On the final step down, his hand rounded the shape of the stone, haunch, Sally’s haunch in dark night, Sally’s haunch as out of dark dream tunnels he came crawling.

To his right, the black water ran smoothly down under a canopy of cypress trees, small eddies and roils, but mostly black glass, a glass he might walk on. He wished he’d come without Olivia’s flask of cheer, wondered how he would have seen this new world without it, wondered, was the peace descending his or hers.

To his left, the river came tumbling out of a sweet bend, cascades of white water across blackened shelves of stone. Up above the falls were more pools of still water, in the center of which was an island of rhododendrons. He felt the dormant green man within him stir beneath layers of stone, years of flight. Across the river stood a huge cypress, fairy knees strewn at the foot of its girth, and a flat bed of stone in its shade. There, he thought, seconds before what followed: I have never crossed a river.

The water was black, but clear. Looking beyond fear he could see leaves like multicolored jewels in the bottom of the shallows. He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his socks, this man for whom barefoot meant the beige carpet of 264 East Street. The smoothness of the stone startled him, oddly warm and cool at the same time. He set one foot tentatively into the water, stepped upon the bed of soft leaves. Not slick, the floor held him. Halfway across, no way to avoid this, the water sluiced through a cut of stone, picked up speed. He paused, gazed over at the isle of rhododendrons. Tolkien was in the water, was in his ears. Mississippi?, he thought – and laughed. Native American?, laughing even louder. Tis the land of the Fairie Queene. His nerves settled. He stepped into the sluice, felt the pull of water around his knees, felt submission cry, did not obey, though his knees did, for a moment, buckle. I’ll see thee yet, and as if wings took him, he raised up out of the sluice and into the far shallows. The fairies in the cypress knees did greet him, and the green man within bade him sit.

High thick trees across the river from where he’d come. Ludicrous to think of what within them lay hid – deserted playground, half a dozen RV camping pads, the winding asphalt snake of a half mile exercise trail beneath incongruous yet uncomplaining pines, Olivia Wade behind the wheel of her blue Honda, eyes closed to Erik Satie through a cracked walkman. Might have been worlds away, not just a Strong River’s width.

The green man took him down to the waterfalls, some trickling, some fast and loose. Knots in arms, legs, and back unwound in the fast white foam, hands gathered flat stones to fill pockets from the falls that trickled. Two men – the green and the red – slid into the deep pool of water basined in the river’s bend, but only one emerged from a quarter hour’s baptism. Polarity sank, swept away. Not green, not red. Cypress, spawned in the shade of a father.

Newborn, the not green, not red man stretched, touched sky. He filled the river, felt himself around its bend, followed. Night was coming, but light from somewhere still poured into what seemed like a wide lake of water up ahead. He moved boldly into this new aspect of himself and then suddenly stopped. He was not alone.

The bird stood two hundred feet off, all in profile. Stock still, a thin yet regal bird, in the middle of the River Strong. Dusty blue, a long beak. The green man would have heard, would have felt, I can wait. The green man would have known of the black tips on the wings when unfolded, would have known the telltale s-profile of flight, would have known, heron, great blue, but the green man was gone. For the man left behind, it would be an unsteady crawl back across river, up hill, across bridge, and back to his car. The long drive to Jackson to Lemuria Bookstore, the usual comfort of its overstuffed fifteen foot high bookshelves, the long drive back, almost – almost – heading for the coast, none of this would steady the nerves of the man left behind. And most certainly not the confirmation he found in the pages of this decidedly unnatural man’s new copy of Audubon’s Birds.