Read Old Glory for Free Online Page B

bee, the voices of little girls chanting in a primary-school classroom:
    Mrs. M., Mrs. I., Mrs. S.S.I
.
    Mrs. P., Mrs. P., Mrs. Ippi, Ippi, aye!
    The condom went off in pursuit of my cigarette pack—a “French tickler” with a nasty semblance of swimming life. I suppose that some indigent peasant in Yucatán might find a use for it when it finally washed up on his beach.
    It was a forlorn walk upriver, through the chunky, honey-colored arches of the old Burlington Northern railroad bridge. I had not expected to feel quite so elegiac about the Mississippi quite so soon. That was supposed to happen later on in the plot.
    Beyond the bridge, I came on the last of the fetters that Minneapolishad built around the river in order to cramp its style, the new lock and dam at the top end of what had once been the Falls of St. Anthony. It had been finished only sixteen years before, in 1963, and it had turned what remained of the rapids into a watery equivalent of a split-level putting green.
    It wasn’t picturesque at all. No romantic German would have wanted to set up his sketchbook in front of it. Yet one had to admit that the thing was a wonder of sorts in its own right. I was used to the tiny, pretty wooden locks on England’s eighteenth-century canals—dripping little chambers seven feet wide and sixty or seventy feet long. This was a monster. Two city blocks could have been comfortably sunk in its basin. Its fifty-foot drop looked more, a dizzying black pit in the river. The lockmen were talking to each other over walkie-talkie radios. With a hundred yards or more of bald concrete between each man, the place felt more like an international airport than a device for ordering a river. Why, too, on this empty afternoon when the only things stirring were the crickets in the overgrown railroad tracks, was all this Oscar-Lima-Charleying going on over the short waves? The lock was a gigantic toy. The lockmen were playing at being lockmen; gates and valves and sluices were being opened and shut for the simple boyish pleasure of watching that staggering quantity of rancid Mississippi water boil up in the basin.
    I found the lockmaster, captaining this pointless operation from an upper deck, his handset squawking incomprehensibly. He had the contentedly abstracted look of a man listening to a favorite piece of music. I felt I had a useful hold over him, having caught him out tinkering with several million gallons of river just for the hell of it.
    “Just fillin’ her up,” he said, gazing happily down into his private maelstrom. It didn’t sound like much of an explanation to me. If I’d come along fifteen minutes later, I suppose he would have said that he was “just emptying her out” in exactly the same tone of voice.
    “She’s real quiet today, real quiet …” The entire building thrummed under my feet as water from the river raced through the tunnels to fill the chamber. “Feel it?” the lockmaster said. “That’s twenty-three thousand gallons a second coming in down there.” He stood at the window, alternately shouting into his radio and waving his arms at the men below: Bernstein conjuring the
Dies Irae
through its fortissimo climax. There were the giant bass drums, there the massed choir, there the trumpets, there the trombones. He was a maestro of water. I found the performance splendidly exciting, but from a practical point of view, I didn’t like the look of it at all. A sixteen-foot boatwould be … I tried to measure sixteen feet against the lock wall. Hardly more significant than an empty Budweiser can or a fallen leaf.
    “I’m going to take a sixteen-foot boat down the river to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico,” I said. “At least, that’s what I
was
going to do.”
    “Sixteen feet? That’s a pretty good size of boat. You won’t have too much trouble at all. I seen guys go down the Mississippi in all kinds of things. Twelve-foot jonboats … canoes … why, just a month or two back, we