The River Queen Read Online Free

and you’ve got about twenty of those between here and St. Louis. You need a person to steer and at least one other to hold the lines. Really you need two. You can’t tie up on your own. How’re you going to anchor by yourself? What’re you going to do if you find yourself in fog? With a barge coming upstream? You probably don’t know how to navigate, do you?”
    He took a gulp of diet Dew, crushed the can, grabbed another. “You probably don’t even know how to stay on the main channel. And how’re you going to sleep on a riverbank alone? I wouldn’t let my girlfriend do that. I wouldn’t let my dog do that. Basically, forget about doing it on your own.”
    I agreed to forget it.
    â€œWhat you really need,” Tom went on as he popped open his second can of diet Dew, “is someone who wants to move a boat. You don’t want to hire an outfitter cuz that’s gonna cost you an arm and a leg. You know, fuel downstream and back because they gotta come home. You need to find a person who has a boat and wants to take it south. If I had a boat, I’d take you, but I don’t.…”
    I looked at the boat we were standing on. “Well, what about this one?”
    â€œBelieve me, I wish I could.” He shook his head. “She’s not made for travel. Oh, she’s fine for around here, but I wouldn’t trust her in a storm. What you should do,” Tom said thoughtfully, “is talk to Jerry Nelson. Jerry was one of my first tormentors. He got me into my first boat. I’d trust him with my life. Jerry moves boats, big boats sometimes. You could just go stow away on one. Maybe just stick out your thumb and hitch a ride.”
    4
    T HE FIRST time I was ever on a river was with my father. We had rented a boat on the Fox and my father steered. I was surprised that he knew how to pilot, but it seemed he had lived a different life before I was born, one I would rarely be privy to. My mother had packed a picnic of fried chicken and potato salad. My brother, John, and I were navigating. As we cruised the river, Dad said things like, “Mark seagull on right; mark tree on left.”
    We laughed because, of course, we understood even then that you cannot mark seagulls or trees. The seagulls will fly and the trees are everywhere. But we laughed because it was funny. Because my father laughed. We were happy that day, which wasn’t always the case.
    I hadn’t thought about that time on the Fox in years, but it came back to me as Matt and I pulled up to the French Island Yacht Club, where Jerry Nelson moored his boat. The docks were lined with houseboats with colorful awnings and painted trim, screened-in porches, and gas barbecue grills on the back. I admired the window boxes, where plastic flowers bloomed, and the beautifully appointed decks with vinyl furniture, where you could dine as the river drifts by. And they had nifty names like Shady Lady or Martin’s Fling, and, my personal favorite, Naughty Buoys.
    We wandered up and down the wooden planks, shouting for Jerry Nelson. After a few moments a tall and fit sixty-year-old man, pale for someone who spent all his time on the water, appeared on the bow of a houseboat. He wore khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. “Are you Jerry Nelson?” I asked.
    â€œYes I am.” He had a quizzical smile and just stared at me. I explained that I was a writer and I wanted to take a journey down the Mississippi. “I’m looking for someone who has a boat he wants to move,” I said, parroting what Tom had told me to say. “Someone who could take me down the river.”
    â€œOh,” Jerry said. “I see.” He stood perfectly still as if he were frozen in space, and Matt and I were motionless beside him. He cocked his head at me in a way that I recognized from my father. I could tell that Jerry, like Tom, was hard of hearing in at least one ear.
    I grew up with a deaf man.