Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 12.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Bravery, or folly?  Friends in high places.  Straight-spined Jason sailed between the clashing rocks, Hera's unwavering eye on high watching him.  Hera's protection.  Right into the teeth of the Planctae.  Sprays of plankton-seething streamers of foamy sea ribbons, surging jets spurting heavenward among gnashing, grinding chondritic molars.  Release a dove into India inky storms raging on a rolling, churning dead man's sea.  Thanks a lot, the emancipated fowl of fate must have mused, eying her liberator coldly.

But he was more Odysseus than Jason, he thought, bereft of benefactors or well-wishers.  He worked alone.

Day after day, solitary, brow furrowed, taking up dividers and compass and charts, he sought to contrive intricate windings beneath the beetling rocks, down dangerous alleyways and dark avenues toward another rendezvous contrived as if by chance.  And he had only argyle socks for luck.  They looked foolish, but they remained hidden under the cuffs of his slacks.  Mostly hidden.

In reverse the movie he ran, as if, at first, but warmer in the car it was, and no wind, and then:  quitting the cemetery he retrograded townward northwise, up (you know what happens when you're), but wanderingly veering off, he divagated wonderingly down past the grain silos and across the train tracks (grottle, grottle) to Riverfront Park, still on the Kansas side of the river.  He was feeling satisfied and ready to go (up up), but one obligatory observance first there was to enact.  He'd come up (and when you're up) just south of the sky-blue bridge's doubled arcing spans (they're kicking you) like a capital B knocked down (when you're down) and lying on its back.  Gemini arches.  Clear away all.

Max parked the car.  He faced again into the sharply cutting breeze.  Soberly walking down the seam line cut straight in the concrete slab, small grassy tufts striving fitfully on (the smallest sprout shows there is really no death), he trundled down a muddy-plunging boat ramp to the urgent river's very shoaly limit.  He knelt and gazed over the channel, watching the river flow, trying to see the past in it, or through it.

Through the water, eternal river.  But no go.  Time swirls away as if down a drain.

This river had run half way across the country already.  He envisioned its silty, turbid volume redoubling that of the Mississippi at St Louis, rounding the corner and disgorging its dross and uselessly acquired floating artifacts and souvenirs and castoff couldabeen lifetimes at the base duality of parabolic paradigmnity, that silvery sovereign solitudinarian as yet light-years removed from conceivable in the spring of 1850.

Formerly a deck hand on the steamer Minnesota was found.  Passive voice.  Dispassionate reportage on the last deportage.  The Minnesota on the Missouri.

Bobbing snags twisted and turned along in the flow.  Somewhere upstream those grapplers swept free had left gashed-gums of waterlogged banks bleeding red clay trickles into the water.  He thought of the shallow-drawing steamboats that had battled every inch of these devious waterways, floating along the river surface in dawn's early light like a dream, their great big pincers in front struggling to sweep a path through the perils of floating debris.  The West Wind and the Benton, loaded down with green recruits, Old Tom among them, had steamed past this very point where he now stood, plying the shallow brown waters to a fateful rendezvous with confederate raiders half way across the state.  On past Sibley and little Camden and Wellington they went, to Lexington, and on to Glasgow.

Curtis was here in Leavenworth, too.  I forgot him earlier.  A tough old Iowan.  No nonsense.  None of this brutish Southern rebellion for him.  He ignored Sigel's advice and won the day at Pea Ridge.  Good boy.  And a passion for gardening, of all things.  Harding came through here with the boys.  And Fisk?  Clinton B Fisk was all over northern Missouri.  Lewis and Clark came poling up this river fifty years before Old Tom ever saw it, fighting snags all the way.  Sandbars melting and reforming before they could properly ink their maps.

He reached down to feel the swift, cold river rushing by, peering out toward the dense thicket of trees on the opposite shore.  His mind filled with bloody-minded bushwhackers and border warriors whose horses had to swim back and forth across the torrent.  Dangerous to cross in the winter, frozen or not.  But much drier in the summer.  Shallow enough to wade, sometimes.

It's fare thee well my dear, I'm bound to leave you

Look away, you rolling river

Shenandoah, I will not deceive you

Look away, we're bound away across the wide Missouri

The Eastern man forever sundered from his love, from the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Cast alone and lonely into the Wild West beyond the untamed waters.

Maps had filled his mind, then:  different maps.  For the negotiation of time and space, all shattered glass and a dying, flickering flame.  A slim needle slipping through ruffled fabric.  What faithful companions had he?  All lost and forgotten.  No heroes, only the ghosts of the accursed and condemned.  Tantalus.  Sisyphus.  Orion.  How far can the rules bend before they snap?  Seeking out random passages through a Brownian sea of strangers and ragged people.  Newtonian, sailing strange seas of thought alone.  Faces.  Prefer always morphing, interchangeable unknown gray-brown souls to friend or foe.  Intersection video mounted high on traffic light poles to freeze frame speeders red light runners and license plates.  Flatten four dimensions to two with a court-admissible timestamp.  To butter you like a butterfly pinned on a toasty time slice.  Spies everywhere, their bowties are cameras.  Melt into anonymity.  Draw no attention to one's self.  Now chose:  light or shadow?  Either Orwell.  Paranoia's encircling coils.  Long suburban runs and short series of arcs in poorer quarters and backtrack past the horseless racetrack where fish skeletons school in the Rialto and dart past Grant Glenn Fort Lowell Prince, culminating for a too brief flickering moment between bookstore stacks or a glimpse from the floor level to an upper walkway in an acid bright-lit shopping mall or, just once, for two hours in the back of a cool, darkened movie theater.  Unrepeatable.  Eschew pattern.  Wander.  Stagger.  The crowds of anonymous passersby are suggestive of half-aware stragglers, but secretly sharks prowl the cold waters.  Like police cruisers gliding through crouching, dubious fire-blackened neighborhoods.

Fare thee well.