On the River Styx by Peter Matthiessen

Author:Peter Matthiessen [Matthiessen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81968-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

1963

ON THE RIVER STYX

On the pale flats the lone trace of man was a leaning stake marking some lost channel that a storm or shift of current had filled in. On the end of the stake perched a ragged cormorant, its drying wings held wide in a black cross against the wind. The archaic bird, the rampant mangroves, the hidden underwater life raising ghostly puffs from the white marl dust of ages of dead creatures, deepened Burkett’s sense of solitude, of pointlessness. Earlier that day they had seen a silver horizon off to the west, where the Ten Thousand Islands opened out onto the Gulf, and this window of light, for a little while, had dissipated a vague dread that had been gathering for days.

The marl reaches were too shallow for the outboard, and the skiff moved so quietly across the flats that Burkett could hear the minute fret of water on the hull.

Facing astern, he tried to befriend the black man standing on the thwart, who always worked as if he were sneaking up on something, even in the open water, staring about him, catching his breath, as if emptiness itself were a thing to fear. On his sculling pole, leaning out over the stern, as far away from the white people as possible, the bony figure—the shadowed face under the straw hat, the tattered shoulder of his faded shirt, the unnameable odor—swung in arcs on the hot white sky, back and forth and forth and back against the wild green walls. The water, browned by mangrove tannin, turned gray when the sun clouded over, and the dark islets spread away, parted, regathered, always surrounding. With their silent boatman, his wife had said, it was like traveling the River Styx.

Behind him, Alice sat unprotesting in the bow. Her rag-doll smile, still pretty and fresh at forty-three, required no lipstick, and she rarely wore it. Why, he wondered, had she worn it to go fishing? The red smear of lipstick on her bucktooth, the funny sun hat, the white sun paste on her nose, the incongruous earphones of the tape player clutched too tightly in her hand—her eccentric aspect intensified his instinct that they had no place here. (She knew what she looked like and performed a whimsical fishing routine when he asked how she was doing, brandishing her rod, crying fiercely, “Fisher Woman!”) If only for her sake—since she was no fisherman—they should have gone deep-sea fishing out of Fort Lauderdale, or bonefishing out of Islamorada in the Keys, where there were friendly people to relax with, drink with, where she might have spent a day around the pool. In this wild region the inhabitants held them away, even this guide, who was too makeshift in his preparations to bring along his lunch and too uneasy to accept a part of theirs.

Burkett, who had his own small boat at home near the Potomac, was rather proud of his knowledge of boats and fishing. It seemed absurd to pay good

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