Of Song and Water (8 page)

He steps out of the Jackpot, the first leaves falling, and checks to see if he's being followed. It's the same here as on the river, he thinks. The odds are no different, especially when the wind picks up and the boat feels sluggish. He's been chased five times this season and turned away from landfall more than once.

Despite the risk, he never tires of the Detroit skyline: the Penobscot Building, the Union Trust, and the Barlum Tower. He considers it a privilege to see it so often from the Windsor side and from the boat.

For a long time, whether in daylight or after dark, he'd kept a close eye on the construction of the Ambassador Bridge. At the opening in '29, they called
it the greatest suspension bridge in the world, one hundred feet longer than the one in Philadelphia. After that, they dug a wide tunnel so that trucks and automobiles could travel in both directions beneath the river.

Not even the crash – not even laborers drowning or being buried alive – could stop the march forward, he thinks. Not even ice storms or the water's will.

 

HE REMEMBERS listening for a low and cautious breathing, waiting with his mother in absolute silence. Then a fist pounds on the door. His mother shakes her head, implores him to be still with a raised hand.

He freezes, tightening the muscles of his body as he once did, lying facedown in an open field with the sound of enemy boots close by. The knocking begins again, harder this time, more insistent.

Calling to collect at this hour is unusual. The city is bitter cold and the streets are empty. The knocking stops and starts.

He can hear the man breathing. He's heard it before. It's the sound a man makes when he's desperate for something – food or cash – when secrecy and stealth are no longer his concern.

 

THE RADIO plays old songs, whets desire, drips sound like sweet liqueur – then the music fades and a voice floating on the air speaks of love and fresh-cut flowers.

He remembers how quickly it all happened, his first glimpse of Faya on a Monday and then meeting her father by the end of that week, how Faya had adored him and how her father had written him off as a man of insufficient means. The embarrassment pained him, of course, but it also spurred him to save money and stow it where it couldn't be found.

He'd made his first attempt at betrothal on a cloudless day after cutting his hair and buying a new suit, but Faya's widowed and pigheaded father dismissed the idea.

“You're a boy with an uncertain future,” he said. “She will wait for a shopkeeper, for someone of real substance.” He mopped his brow with a hankie. “But do come again if circumstances provide.”

After that, Faya's father dispensed with formalities and complained about his feet. “No circulation,” he said. “The tip of my little toe is black.”

When Faya realized that her suitor had gone, she wept and threatened to run away.

Her father changed the lock on her bedroom door and kept the only key.

On the same day, he ordered new shoes, his third pair, from the finest boot maker in England. These, like the previous pairs, were too tight, stopping enough blood at his ankles to leave him standing on senseless feet. Having spent so much money on the shoes, he wore them everywhere, to work and to church, for a stroll near the river, even to the Jackpot, where the shiny leather commanded more respect than any man deserves.

A year or so later, Faya sent a letter, this one more urgent than the others. “My Dearest Havelock,” it said, “I've now refused a well-to-do butcher and a middle-aged banker. If you don't come soon, I fear I'll be carried off.”

Charged by the letter, he once again donned his suit and called on Faya's father.

He stood on the welcome mat and knocked.

After a long interval, Faya's father, red-faced and grimacing, opened the door. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he leaned and swayed, his swollen feet crammed into the shoes. He winced when he took a step. He hated to admit it, but several of his toes had turned black. “The leather needs more stretching,” he groused. “How difficult can cowhide be?” He said he appreciated the visit but wouldn't discuss an engagement. “These feet are causing me too much trouble. Give it a month or two,” he said, “and we'll see where things stand.”

“Father can't hold out forever,” said Faya. “Do what he asks.”

“All right,” he said, “I will. But it's all for you, not him.”

In pursuing Faya, he'd been obliged to suffer a fool, a snob plagued by ill-fitting shoes, and so he felt nothing but satisfaction when he showed up for the third time, hat still in hand, and discovered that the old man could no longer answer the door. The gangrenous foot was gone, lopped off by a doctor who, according to Faya, dumped the shoes at the curb and burned them, expressing with some gusto his contempt for human vanity.

The patient suitor spoke his piece, refusing to sit, unruffled in his shirt and tie, while Faya's father reclined in a leather chair, his bandaged leg resting on a stool.

“Only one?” said the man without a foot. “What kind of shipping business uses one boat?”

“Someday I'll have a second. Maybe a third.”

“Faya is my only child. Why should I give her up for ‘someday'?”

“I've made a considerable sum. More than you hoped for.”

Faya's father scratched his leg near the edge of the bandage. “And you can prove this?” he said.

“If I must.”

“You realize, of course, that I can't go with you to the bank.”

“It's not in a bank.”

“Are you a fool? I should have for a son-in-law a man who stuffs money in a mattress?”

“That's not where I keep it,” he said. “I don't keep it in the house.”

“And where you keep it is safe?”

“Safer than a bank.” He stepped closer to Faya's father and saw the old man, his red face twitching, shrink in his chair. “I plan to take her,” he said. “She's packing her bag as we speak. So you can give us your consent, and she'll stay here until the wedding, or you can refuse me and she'll leave now.”

Faya's father was apoplectic. “You're impert – ,” he sputtered, reaching for his crutches. “I'll have you arrested.”

“We'll be gone before you can pick up the telephone,” he said, glancing at the bandaged stump. “And it appears that chasing us is out of the question.”

“We'll be married,” said Faya, descending the stairs with her suitcase, “before you can find us.”

“Faya, you can't go. Who'll care for me? How will I walk?”

“We'll hire a nurse,” said Faya.

“You're ungrateful,” said her father. “It cuts me. It's like losing my other foot.”

“So it may go,” said Faya. “You know what the doctor said.”

He stood beside Faya and looked down at the footless man. “You have a choice,” he said.

Faya's father lifted his short leg and dropped it back on the stool. “This is blackmail,” he said. “I don't have a choice.”

“Of course you do. It's very simple. Either the three of us will agree on a wedding day, or Faya and I will marry this afternoon.”

Faya's father agreed to two months from that moment, believing that he'd be able to change his daughter's mind or spirit her away. He was consumed, quite naturally, by a vengeful desire to prevent the marriage. He was also consumed by gangrene.

Before the nuptials, he lost his other foot. On the prescribed day, bound to a wheelchair, he found himself drugged, fevered, and disintegrating, unable to kick up dust or walk his daughter down the aisle.

Not long afterward, he put a large sum of money in an envelope and left it on the hall table. Then he died, footless and alone.

Faya found herself unable to weep. “It's revenge,” she said. “My father's curse on our honeymoon.”

He wrapped his arms around his wife. “Don't be angry,” he said. “There's really no point. Most men plan their revenge. What happened to your father was nothing he planned.”

AT THE apartment, in the silence just after the War, the knocking begins again, but this time he opens the door, his body still sharp, and sees the leather boots dropping water on the mat and the face of the landlord that flinches – a register of surprise, the shock of greeting a soldier as opposed to a woman.

“Is your mother home?” says the landlord.

“Any business you had with her,” he says, “you can now take up with me.”

The landlord almost smiles. “I'm afraid that won't be possible.”

His military training calls for a quick, but accurate, decision. He observes the distance between the landlord's hand and shoulder. The arms of the man are thin despite his winter coat.

 

ALWAYS worried about Peche Island, he sets out under fair skies or, if need be, in the face of high winds and rain. He grows anxious on the way. Visiting once a month was adequate when he was a bachelor, but now, with a wife and child, he makes the run each week, anchoring in a hidden cove in the half hour before sunset.

He pulls on rubber boots and slogs ashore, a spade resting on his right shoulder like a weapon. When he reaches dry ground, he doffs the boots and hides them in a cluster of shrubs.

At this point, his routine becomes ritual; he checks and double-checks his markers to confirm that nothing's been touched. As he loses sight of the river, he turns around, watching and listening for any movement or noise. From here, it's not far. He follows a dry creek bed to a stand of scruffy trees.

He crawls behind a screen of branches, bushes, and tall grass. With the edge of his shovel, he sweeps aside twigs and leaves – debris that he'll carefully put back before he goes.

He digs until he hits the chest, keeping the soil in a neat pile. He clears only enough earth to lift the lid. Then he inspects his treasure. He often makes
a deposit or a withdrawal, but what he really wants is the reassurance of seeing it.

He hopes someday to keep his fortune in a more accessible place. There's no going to it in winter. And lately he's bothered by a buzzing in his ear, the voice of Faya's dead father saying it's a fool's game to live without combinations and vaults. The words get under his skin like a sliver. He wants no financial institutions meddling with his money. He wants no unsolicited advice.

He remembers reading Emerson, the argument that society is a joint-stock company prepared to sell a man's freedom for higher dividends, for the benefit of preferred investors. I'll leave my money where it is, he thinks. I'll wait, see what comes. What I must do is all that concerns me.

 

STUDYING the river on clear days, searching its vague surface for new information, even the most fleeting, he pictures old pilots on the Mississippi and imagines a bend where two rivers join, where clear water mixes with brown.

He drifts and takes a few soundings on the Windsor side.

He drops the lead line at the stern. Watching it go, he thinks of Huck and Jim. He imagines them on the Detroit River, the two friends floating down from Windmill Point, resting easy in free territory, lying together on a raft beneath a blanketing sun.

He's fond of this image.

He can't explain its comfort to himself or to anyone else. It takes him back to his own youth, when all things seemed possible, when the silliest games became a hero's journey and no defeat – no competition or battle – was made up entirely of defeat.

He sees the ideal forms of Huck and Jim, their arms and legs splashing in the silver stream.

He rests his mind on this picture, a habit that shores up his strength, his substance, and provides a ready escape, at least for a moment, from the
odd fear that grew in him during the War, a belief that his skin and bones were fading, turning into fog, as if his body were white vapor and nothing more.

 

WHY DID his mother, having lived so long in Detroit, give the landlord her trust? He blames the War. He blames himself. He could've stolen the money and figured out some way to send it back. He should've realized that a woman like his mother, so entirely alone, makes an attractive and challenging target.

The landlord owns the place. He can toss her out. He can force her to make a choice.

Without money, she has no protection.

The lesson, he thinks, is a hard one. A man's decisions must stand as a bulwark against vulnerability. There's no time for regret. The best way is to choose, pursue an available course and take it without ambivalence or shame. To do otherwise is a sad resignation, a dull surrender to forces left unchecked.

 

THE RADIO speaks of rain, a late spring, and now, after all the speeches and ballyhoo, the repeal of Prohibition.

The end seems entirely clear – the shipments drying up and the river less crowded than before – a new amendment, the Twenty-first, and Michigan, the Wolverine State, leading the charge for approval.

Faya rubs the stubble on his face. “Fetch your razor,” she says. “I'll give you a proper shave.”

“Let it be,” he says. “I'm ready to grow a beard.”

“At least a beard, a real beard, would be softer than this.” She runs her fingers along the edge of his jaw.

“I don't care much for shaving,” he says. He gazes out the kitchen window. The flower beds look bowled over, flattened by the heavy rain.

Faya removes her apron, folds it, and hangs it on the pantry door.

“It'll be finished soon,” he says, leaning on the counter. “I'll be out of a job when the truckers and distributors get up to speed.”

She squeezes his hand. “It isn't your fault,” she says. “We'll be fine.”