he hadn’t yet. His balls ached.
They floated easily through the afternoon in clear, blue-sky weather, above the leaf-caked bottom, with the shadows of alligator gar, prehistoric monsters with dagger-lined jaws, passing like torpedoes under the canoes. And the blunted hulks of paddlefish hung in deep water, cruising with mouths open a foot for microscopic prey, some going a hundred pounds or more. The air was crisp like a green apple. He watched the other man and woman, Pablo and Rita, to see what was going on with their lives that particular weekend. Bill made up a drama, that Pablo wanted a baby but Rita wasn’t sure. They sometimes struggled with their canoe, he noted, and it wandered shore to shore.
Bill was trying to write a book about the famous Lewis, but had tried before and never finished, chucking it in disgust. Emily admired the attempts, like you admire someone who’s been struck by lightning but still ventures out. As for Jasmine and Leslie, no need to fabricate. They were gay, and that was probably drama enough for anybody. Every one of them had been married before, he wagered. He and Emily had. Yet here they were again, having plunged like polar bears into those freezing, icechoked waters, like it was nothing. The other guy, Pablo, didn’t look Latino, white hair shaved to a fuzz over his scalp, tan and athletic, and heretic-skinny with bulging John Brown eyes. Rita was just Rita thus far, a pretty redhead.
They took the easy bends in the river. It was starting to gall him all over again that he’d picked Lewis as his subject. So the country was celebrating the expedition. Two hundred years! Woo-hoo! And you say the hero blew his brains out after? Hot dog! But what else could one add to that, so long after the fact?
Maybe it was just a story about a bunch of white guys setting off to oppress people of color. But many in the crew were only half white. Peter Cruzatte was half Omaha, and George Drouillard half Shawnee. Sacagawea was Shoshoni and her husband half Otoe. Or maybe Paiute, he could never remember. He’d surely get it wrong. What he’d come to believe about the expedition would screw with the facts, causing unconscious omissions, errors. They didn’t allow married men to sign on, which indicated just what they were getting into. Private Frazier, it turned out, was a fencing master, and sort of a throwback since gunpowder had made swordplay obsolete. Naturally, the one guy who died on the trip, Sergeant Floyd, signed up to rid himself of chronic health trouble. It worked! Lewis told his mom not to worry about him going, that he was just as likely to die at home. Which could be read different ways.
Whiteness was a big preoccupation. In fact, whenever they met a light-skinned Indian, it always excited them like they’d found proof of something. The ten Lost Tribes of Israel? Or was it something else? The darkest member of the party had the least power, and that was Clark’s slave, York. And Clark was treated like Lewis’s equal, but he wasn’t. He was called “Captain” by the men, but wasn’t. And Lewis promised Clark he’d fix it, but it was actually Bill Clinton, forty-second president, who finally did.
Jasmine and Leslie drifted up beside. Jasmine, in an Aussie bushmaster hat, smiled at him. “So what do you do?” she asked.
“History,” he said. “I’m a historian, of sorts. I teach high school. And this is my wife, Emily. She works with the learning-disabled and the behaviorally disordered, which is how she got me.”
“Funny. Leslie’s a PE teacher. I don’t know what I am,” Jasmine said, with a laugh. “A kept woman, I guess.”
“Bill’s writing about Lewis and Clark,” Emily said, paddle across her knees, squinting back at Jasmine.
“Oh. So I guess this is research for you,” she said. “So tell us something interesting about those guys.”
“Um, okay,” Bill said. “At the very end of the trip, Clark makes a promise to Sacagawea that he and his fiancée will take her little boy, Jean, and raise him as their own. Without consulting the fiancée, of course.”
“Whoa, that is interesting. So, in your book, you’ll say he was Clark’s bastard?” Leslie asked pleasantly, making a sun shade with her fingers, grinning at him.
“Actually, she was already pregnant when she joined them. But she had another baby right after, and the Clarks took that baby too.”
“I bet the fiancée was pissed beyond reason,” Jasmine said.
“So, a little native action on the side, huh?” Leslie said. “A little squaw action.”
“I heard all those guys died of syphilis,” Pablo said, pulling their canoe abreast with vigorous paddle strokes. “Weren’t they all dead before they were thirty-five?”
“I guess that’s somewhat true,” Bill said, “although—”
“When you get done writing about them, I’ll tell you who else would make a great buddy story,” Pablo called back to him. “Hitler and Eichmann!”
Bill shrugged, letting that go, dragging his paddle and allowing Pablo’s canoe to get ahead in the line. He mostly didn’t mind when people talked smack about the captains. Something about the subject was provoking. Even the most civil people said things they hadn’t planned to say. Ahead of them, Pablo continued loudly, “So where are the Indians on this trip, anyway? Somebody point out a Native American for me.”
“But Lewis was just a patsy, wasn’t he?” Leslie asked him, moving the canoe in behind his. “I mean, all those guys thought they were enlightened, didn’t they? And weren’t they really just Chapter Two in a final solution against nonwhiteness?”
He shrugged again, and noticed he was becoming spiritually blank, losing the ability to know his feelings. They kept paddling, though the current was taking them where it wanted and at its own speed. He never knew what to say. Not that he wanted to defend the captains but, after all the research, he felt like he knew them. It was a symptom of the depression, too, a tendency to freeze up and not be able to really reach other people, or yourself. And though they called and called to him, he made no answer, and could make no answer.
They swung around a bend, and their outfitter’s teenaged employee was there as promised, waiting to help them unload the canoes and portage them to a trailer. He’d pitched the tents, stacked the firewood, even started the fire. Two propane stoves waited on a table and the coolers full of “provisions,” on ice, rested underneath. They didn’t have to do a thing, having paid a lot not to. But still they complained about how easy it all was, and how lavish. Russ, their teenaged cook and valet, furrowed his brow at their guilty remarks but said nothing. One whole cooler was full of wine, and Russ pulled the corks and poured the icy-cold stuff into real glasses. He was starting to smile as he handed them out.
Bill rallied after his first glass, and found he was able to enter the moment again. Emotions were such tricky, roller-coastery things anyway, and his were worse than usual. For instance, he’d got fixated on Rita over the past several miles. How serious she was! And how little she smiled or talked, and how private she was with her expressions, her eyes. Rita was having a different experience of the river than the rest, it seemed. And Bill noticed. If there was an unhappy woman nearby, he always knew it. Pablo wasn’t doing anything about it, nor did he seem aware. But Bill often felt this, that other men were waiting for him to step in and help them out of these puzzling situations—so he did. He didn’t even mind, and did it with one hand tied behind his back.
As for Rita, some kind of darkness was trapped around her. She wasn’t comfortable with these strange women. She was afraid they’d figure out . . . something. He couldn’t pick it up from where he was and got closer. “Rita, how’s the wilderness treating you?” he asked, setting his pack down near her.
“Better,” she
