The River Queen Read Online Free Page B

This was truly a wreck of a vessel, but I’d already taken leave of the college where I teach, my family and friends, and, some might add, my senses in order to make this journey in September. I’d squirreled away the money I’d need. If I was to begin in the fall, I had to come up with a plan.
    This seemed like a boat I could afford. Definitely within my budget. And she was only going one way. Besides, for whatever reason, perhaps a drug-induced haze, I had a vision of this little ship all white and shiny, carrying me downstream. Somewhere beneath the rust and peeling paint, I thought she had class.
    â€œWill you fix her up? I mean, before our trip?” Jerry looked puzzled as if he wasn’t sure what I meant. “You know,” I explained. “Clean her up.”
    â€œWell,” he said. “She could use a paint job. I’ll take care of that.”
    â€œAnd maybe get some … chairs? And, urn”—I gazed at the top deck—“some shade?” He nodded in what I assumed to be agreement. “Would she make it to Memphis?” I asked, trying to hide the skepticism in my voice. She looked as if she wouldn’t make it to the first lock and dam.
    â€œOh, she’ll make it. She was built for Lake Michigan where the waves get high. But I’m only going to St. Louis.” The wheels in my head started to turn. I didn’t want to have to change boats in St. Louis. I wanted this boat to take me farther south.
    â€œWell, I have to get as far as Memphis … on this leg.” I had decided that I’d go to Memphis, take a break, then finish the trip.
    Jerry grumbled. “I don’t like the lower Mississippi very much. You ever looked at that part of the river? It can be boring and monotonous. You need to bring a very long book.” This coming from Jerry gave me pause.
    I had looked at the lower Mississippi. If you turn the map on its side, it looks like somebody’s very agitated EKG. As Mark Twain wrote, the lower Mississippi, which begins at Cairo, Illinois, is the “crookedest” river in the world. You go almost twelve hundred miles while the crow flies six hundred. Often on the lower Mississippi you are traveling as much east and west as north and south. And many of those miles had levees that kept you from seeing much beyond the riverbank itself. “But we’ll see,” Jerry said, nodding his head. “Memphis isn’t that much farther.”
    â€œCan you go slow?” I asked.
    â€œThe only thing I do better than slow,” Jerry said, “is stop.”
    5
    I N THE fall of 1965 when I was applying for college, my mother told me to go east. She said that sometimes in this life an opportunity presents itself and you have to grab it. I know when she said this she was wishing she had. Though I had never had any intention of leaving Illinois, it is what I did. I went east and never looked back.
    With AAA maps marked in thick blue Magic Marker, my parents drove me to college. They rode in the front and I spent the entire ride staring at my mother’s thick red hair, rolled in a tidy French twist. She was once voted Redhead of the Week at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. There was so much luggage in the backseat that the customs officials in Windsor didn’t know I was there. We went to Niagara Falls and put on yellow rain slickers. I stood with my parents on the ledge behind the falls, water spraying our faces. Then they dropped me off in Boston, and they were gone.
    Years later I opened a drawer by my father’s bedside table looking for a pen. As I began to rifle through, I came upon hearing-aid batteries, assorted Father’s Day and birthday cards, photographs of grandchildren as babies, my brother’s college graduation diploma from 1973, a Life Magazine from 1962.
    Then I found the maps. They were old and folded, salvaged from the glove compartment of a car we hadn’t owned in years,