Marge Roper stood in our church’s forecourt, already running interference. She explained that everything was fine, though Doc was not himself quite yet. Everybody guessed his loss must feel particularly bitter. You can buy new TVs, etc., but your own art hand-carved . . . ? Odd, today I remembered wondering why this man had not—given his amazing skill—carved small people, instead. They surely outrank everything. Me, now, if I could sculpt or write, as a subject, only people would interest me. Why they do stuff! There’d be so much to know! But, making decoys, hadn’t he just been doing further xerox copies of known imitations of what started as pure waterbirds? With human portraits, no two can ever look alike. Hell, if I could have ever been a great artist, I bet I could’ve been a great artist.
I SOON NOTED Roper standing by himself off in back. Everyone had heard, his coveted works were inhaled by deluge. And we’d turned up just as somebody brought one of his lost decoys back to him. The gal had found it, floating, head forward, right-side up.
She hand-delivered it straight to this service, guessing Doc might be here. The young woman served cocktails out at the Starlite and maybe on Fridays “danced.” After her mother’s cancer, the family was said to still owe Roper huge back-bills. Delighted, she turned up in her full barmaid war paint. Hadn’t the young doc once swapped service? Well, she’d fished this relic from a ditch near her trailer seven miles from Riverside. Had it wrapped up special in a Hardee’s burger bag! Gal must’ve felt in an amazing position to now barter down those thousands overdue. She did not ask aloud how much this art was worth to him; but you saw that question buckling her tender made-up face. “Bless you,” Marge said, simple. As if human thanks were all the payment needed. The poor girl blinked. But, even if disappointed herself, she lingered, expecting it would cheer him.
This cedar teal had drifted through some spilled barn-red enamel. One whole wing’s paint flapped free like burned human skin. Contact with water had already ruined its side, though the ably-carved neck and head remained unwarped. The finder, meaning well, now handed this duck to Roper right here before the church for all to see. Unpaid, she’d still waited for the smile, his recovery. If Marge wondered how exactly to stop this happening, she maybe felt too drained to intervene.
DOC SIMPLY HELD the thing. He looked down at it resting in both his hands. Roper’s blue-white eyes were fixed right on it. And yet Doc acted as if he’d never seen a duck before, much less a carved one, much less the odd concept of a “decoy” meant to fake out a real one as one of its own kind.
Made a fairly sorry sight. Seeing Roper at a loss, Julia Abernethy and several other former lady-patients “tuned up” pretty good. I stared at the awkward way he clutched the object. Later, during service, I’d note how Doc absently gripped it as some child might—by the head—fist around its neck. You sensed he was anywhere but in our shared present tense. I watched him so. One word came to me: “adrift.”
Doc stared ahead as if awaiting some signal or alarm from right in back of him. Not much paint was really left on the recovered carving. That let me know. Floodwater must be highly acidic, petrochemicaled, so much hog waste. It would prove terribly toxic to us all. Just twelve hours in water had burned paint off his carving, the equivalent of an hour’s belt-sanding.
Already, I think, we knew. It wasn’t just the water’s doings that seemed bad. Water itself was.
STRANGE THING ABOUT people old as us. Some get visibly rickety for a while, then they’ll briefly heal right up on you. Others look youthful forever till, after catching one cold, after your not seeing them for three weeks, they turn up at Les Wilkins’s pool party. And you must ask your host, “Who is that shaky old one on the end?”
“Why, that’s Emmie, silly. You-all were in Miss Thorp’s third grade together. Your eyes are failing.”
“Something round here’s falling apart, boy-o. —Ain’t just my eyes.”
Was like that now with Roper.
During service, as the German organ’s Bach processional sounded particularly sad because especially perfect, Roper leaned forward, spine clear off the pew. He stared, fixed, ahead. Doc seemed to have forgotten the liturgy he’d had by heart since age three. (Selfish, I couldn’t help hope he’d remember a long-range plan he’d mapped out once to keep my sad-sack heart at click.)
When others, exiting, spoke his way, Doc did try, did nod. Did fight to seem polite. But that in itself looked unlike him, his acting just dutiful. Roper squinted as at strangers. He still cradled that peeling bird the way some college running back will nurse the pigskin in the crook of his right arm. Odd, but behind Doc, a stained-glass Madonna held her bandaged babe in the same darn cradling pose.
I could tell that Roper hadn’t wanted to come. Probably dreaded facing sympathy, a crowd. But Marge, usually fairly agreeable-acting, had likely forced him. Hoping his being near familiars might jolt Doc back toward normal. He must’ve begged to keep away from church, while hiding where? They had no above-water home or car. The guy suddenly looked like someone scared to be left alone.
This past master at teasing people, at remembering our exact lipid-triffid totals—today failed to start or hold one conversation. I briefly tried. “Got to be mighty upsetting . . .” was my own brilliant start. But Marge cut me one sad look, no-go. Doc blinked. I knew she was right. I shut up but it hurt me that I, of all folks, had just failed to make true contact. Given what I had to mean to him, this stupid blurt of mine would just slay me later.
After service, in the crowd, he attempted answering others but only if Marge forced him: “They’re talking to you, honey. You see Whit and Cora here.”
“Cora,” he nodded. “Cora, how’s your bad athlete’s foot?”
Cora, slowed, said, “Better,” but looked away. Never before had Doc revealed one office secret aloud. Cora here had just lost her house, family photos, bull terrier and cars. Itchy feet—the least of her problems.
We all noted how Margie stared at Doc—now an ancient-looking white man stuck vulnerable out in midday glare. He as yet stood carrying one wooden duck by its neck; the thing hung at his side with no more care than a commuter offers the usual battered briefcase.
Not him! people said. Of all our unlikeliest strong ones, don’t let it be our Doc unravels all at once.
Sure he’d just lost his handiwork. But what else personal had drifted off with Marion’s copyrighted aquatic birds? Hadn’t Doc carved those things to float? Hadn’t he weighted their chests with molten lead he then painted over? Surely he’d intended their superb balance, sailboat poise. Doc’s cedar exemplars had proved so streamlined they hadn’t simply sunk in his backyard, had they? There he might’ve retrieved them, saved the paint. But, no, his proved far too lifelike. Doc’s birds, painted bold as little flags, rode sudden currents perfectly; become real emblems of American freedom. Born indoors, they’d gone off in search of true wilderness. They took to it. Like, well . . . like what they were. Or at least so perfectly resembled.
Their very excellence scattered Doc’s the fastest!
WE’D ALREADY HEARD how at dawn yesterday he paid big money, hiring a speedboat from one of Tomothy’s friends. We guessed this vessel should’ve been out saving people, right? But Roper’d commandeered it. The Bixby kids did owe him a favor, big time. Doc had ordered wide sweeps to track his waterfowl. No luck. Disobedient creations, creatures! To risk sounding biblical a sec: having tasted of the water of the knowledge of good and evil, they left home and Roper fast.
I could already fancy them, spread out like some little floating Chaplin-tramps bobbing on stray trenches along farm roads, working their way at twenty-feet-an-hour up woodland creeks. A few by now must probably be a hundred miles of standing-water away, rocking clear out on the chill Atlantic.
EASY TO SAY his were only “fakes,” hacked from wood then enameled. Being all thumbs myself (including the one with stitch marks in it), I knew his task’s great difficulty. I sensed how rare was the quiet talent for making what appeared literally wild. (His bird
s never looked farm-raised; instead Roper’s were visibly little scrappers, criminal renegades living by their strengths in the unfair open.)
You might say: people who love something too much, live at greater risk. And yet, that’s bound to be the one sane way forward. Surely our determination to never lose what we’ve made to love, that, in itself, means an early sort of decoy death.
I’d seen our house go under. Naturally, I missed it. All afternoon, while wandering the reopened armory, I kept patting my pockets for keys (now underwater). I hated how our kids couldn’t now come home and stay upstairs in rooms full of their Little League trophies and the complete Nancy Drew. They’d never rewalk literal ground where they first crawled then stepped then struggled upward to battle one another. I found I even missed their little squabbles. An only child myself, I always loved the role of referee.
I mostly fancied sunset light in the northwest corner of our foyer, thrown against old willow-bough wallpaper through bubbled glass at six o’clock on winter afternoons. That picture hit me with a daily pang like lost love. It was, I guess.
And yet, unlike Doc with all his powers to forfeit, I was left feeling, if admittedly poorer, about a decade younger. Now I got a clearer picture of my first house, before Paxton’s oddball legacy to Red. It had been set up on four unsteady-looking piles of bricks, the simple white of a country box. Our lawn grew tobacco. We had, not a river stealing around behind, but one whole honest horizon that stayed put.
Having lost our place on The River Road, I felt shaken simpler. I did feel lighter-weight. Poor, I felt adventurous.
5
SIX MONTHS AFTER the flood a few locals still believed it: believed they could simply dry out their old homes, soon move back in. Seemed as logical as most painful delusions.
Already four pulmonary deaths among our crowd: all the heaviest smokers went that quick. Especially those two-packers-a-day who’d insisted on then going home to dig up their better inherited peony bushes. Peonies can live over sixty years. Our coughing diggers breathed in all that fresh shovel-loosened filth. And, after the pain of home-delivered oxygen tanks, four amiable locals died that first half-year A.D. —After Deluge.
The minute we’d seen maple-syrup-brown liquid burglarize our homes, most of us had known. No going back. Hadn’t we decoded the ruined paint on Doc’s first recovered decoy? Old folks now, we, like him, lived symptomatically. He had been the first to send a dove across the flood, a test case to see if, finding no land, it might not return safe. It came back okay but immediately blistered. It had not made him hopeful that his bird looked soaked in kerosene, then red paint, with a final wash of hog-piss battery acid.
Receded water left a scummy chalk, pink-brown across our every twig and doorknob. It was a dangerous-looking color, right out of our 1950s science fiction films.
There’s a Bible line about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God, God’s. Riverside’s new variation ran, “When in doubt, side with the River. Render unto River whatever’s River’s.”
Which was?
Everything except our wits.
Everything except our dry ole dry-martini lives, thank God!
WE COULD ALL list our treasures lost. We agreed about what had been most valuable moneywise: Les Wilkins’s two-million-dollar antique car collection, stored in the lately-Chapter-Elevened Wilkins Tobacco Auction Warehouse.
Poor Les had sunk many an inherited penny into his two 1937 Cord Phaeton convertibles, a squadron of early Bentleys and Jags, plus, best, the 1928 Hispano-Suiza touring car elaborate as its maker’s name. It had been all beaten silver and lacquered burgundy, commissioned by Gloria Swanson. Streamlined, fitted inside with blond-wood carving, it’d always seemed more a ship than any auto. Its silver horn played a song about blowing bubbles. All submerged in four minutes. Asked how he felt, Les answered for months after, “Flat tire, flat tire.”
His wife finally admitted she’d had to keep Les restrained those first ten days. She’d locked him in their borrowed home’s attic sewing room. Poor guy kept wanting to swim underwater in order to simply sit behind the wheel of Swanson’s sunken Hispano-Suisa and sound its silver trumpets and end his life down there, in style.
Also gone to mud: Julia Abernethy’s real Degas drawing, a beautiful racehorse one. Raleigh’s art museum had been after it for decades but you know how close-fisted most Abernethys are.
Still, we all concurred about the loss that stirred us most. Unlike Les’s Hollywood town cars or Julia’s French pastel, this was the one lost masterwork made here. Carved by someone who’d stayed, and likewise meant his creations to. He’d chosen birds he knew as peculiar to our region. —A fleet now scattered to the Seven Seas.
At our Recovery Talent Show, everybody’s favorite gossipy ophthalmologist brought down the house playing a borrowed banjo as he hound-dogged:
I left a million five and change,
Down by the river-side,
Down by . . .
Four full-tilt divorces had been well and nastily in progress. Then water rose many feet. And, once these bickering folks, the parents of assorted pretty semi-disappointing children, spent hours pulling each other through a million gallons of sewage, by the time they were found high up the Blanchards’ water oak, they appeared to be French-kissing. They proved so wet if fused, it was hard to get the lovebirds separately saved!
They’d never split now. They would only fight like beasts of burden for the right to carry one another forward; out of this world into whatever if any adventure’s coming next. A childhood sweetheart rededicated herself to her first husband, after having committed five children and one half-century to another, some Yankee. “And you, my lifelong friends, whyn’t you tell me?—Tony never friggin got Falls.”
Certain other marriages, from their wedding days forth, had been called “disasters waiting to happen.” Now one had. Would it make these shipwreck unions seem better or worse? We’d best wait and see. What else had we to do?
Our gang lived uneasily reestablished in an over-new development. “Hilltop” is no more a hill than Falls is a waterfall. But this clay tract rises a scant two feet above-sea-level, much higher than dear sunken Riverside. Cotton grew here and so our newly planted grass still shows plowings’ crenellations.
Our homes up here they’re all smaller-blander than the grand half-timbered barns we once filled with kids and junk. Prestige? a goner. Disaster claimed our antiquities and made us finally efficient! We sacrificed elbow-room but spared ourselves five daily huffing ascents toward a second story, only to forget why we climbed. Our crowd was sixty to ninety now; the river had done editorial home-downsizing for us.
Finally, we all now lived “maintenance included.” No need for hiring daily maids, weekly yardmen. Free at last! I will never touch another lawn mower.
Age has its privileges.
6
THE MARION ROPERS bought into Hilltop last. They took that smallish skylighted unit at our block’s far end. Post-flood, us refugee Riversiders tended to party hardier. Frantic weeknight dance things. We played Benny Goodman, James Brown, Sarah Vaughan, the Beatles. Anything. No, anything but rap. Somebody’s kid had given them discs. “No rap!” Diana de Pres cried. “After what we’ve been through?” Our crowd certainly drank more, or maybe just more openly. “Like fish,” was one flood joke now out of favor, overused.
“How you feeling? You look washed-out.” That was another line we’d long since bored of. Every English phrase and pun suddenly seemed liquid-based. Each brimmed with refreshed permission to sip bourbon. By now, why the hell not?
What was the bank going to do, come confiscate your Chippendale highboy, your things, your house? Would they punish us seniors with sledgehammers, forcing ladies to go make little rocks out of rocks big as the Broken Heart? Might they stick us into nice dry jail cells, serve us three meals a day? If so, right now might be good.
Our long cocktail blasts featured finger foods scarcely underwriting-offsetting vodka and gin. O
ur parties grew feverish again and endless. We felt moneyed the way four-year-olds at birthday parties feel, cake and candles all the proof of luck we’d need.
Today was today and we would gobble it. Shrinks from Raleigh commuted, overbooked. IRAs, “wealth management,” we had just enough put aside not to think constantly of that. Of course, there was always a worry of outlasting nest-eggs, depending on our kids, becoming bores, then nuisances. Foreign travel seemed a threat now. Venice? Water for streets? Been there, swum those. As for cruises!
I used to say things like, “So much of life comes down to our river.” Well, it could all come up on you overnight like food poisoning.
Old neighbors now live within easy hearty-partying distance. —Given yards so small—true drinkers can literally crawl home. Poor Les Wilkins sometimes does. Down on all fours like a basset hound. He misses specific cars so much, he’ll tell you how he got ahold of each. Like Casanova, ancient, recounting servant girls seduced. Les still lives in mourning for sixty antique autos. Odd, the fates waiting each of us. My own? To mythologize the farm-boy past of a dad who wanted all that “country” sheared off him like bad wool. To die in sight of the one off-duty doctor who might’ve saved you.
We seem to be returning to our old dance-card days, reliving certain engagement party blowouts of our crazed youths. Last night, Diana de Pres got sick from Brandy Alexanders and the outcome looked even less pretty than it had on her, all over her, at age sixteen.
MARGE ROPER WOULD turn up alone at a few cocktail hours but never did stay long. The few times she brought Doc he’d hover in the foyer. He would answer only direct questions, eyes averted. That brilliant gift for diagnosis—wasted scanning floor tiles, an umbrella stand.
Doc kept mainly to himself. Nothing new in that. But now he was seen taking walks. People claimed his therapist had suggested hikes might be good for him. Might give Doc something “focused” to do, mornings-evenings. Roper’d dropped a lot of weight. People said he now looked “ropy,” an accurate word that contained both his curious name and new unknotting appearance.