Cold iron fills his chest, and desolation. It is over now—this apprehension of the end comes to him simply, as if body and soul were giving up together. The earth is taking him, he is far out on the edge, in the turning current.
The duck floats belly up, head underwater, droplets of Adirondack water pearled on the night blue of its speculum, drifting downriver from the sunny bend, from the blue mountains.
His cold hand is dull as wood on the stiffened duck.
The cold constricts him and his throw is clumsy. The effort of the throw takes too much strength. The duck slides away downstream. He swallows more water, coughs and spits, and overtakes it, rolling onto his back to get a breath.
A rock nudges him. He sees bare trees whirl on the sky. The point-head purple hoods loom up, dark faces break.
“Yo, man! Lookin good, man! You all right?”
From the shallows, he slings the duck onto the shore. He crawls onto the rocks, knocks away a hand.
“Easy, man! We tryin to help!”
“Yay man? What’s happenin? How come you jumpin in the river?”
“October, man! Bad river, man!”
“Never catch no nigger swimmin! Not out there!”
“No, man! Niggers sink! Any fool know dat!”
They yell with laughter.
“Niggers sink! Tha’s about it!”
“Goodbye cruel world, look like to me!”
“Cruel world!” another hoots, delighted. “Tha’s about it!”
His wet underwear is transparent. He feels exposed, caught in the open. Rage grasps him, but he has no strength. He fights for breath.
“Hey man? You hearin me? Next time you need duck meat bad as that, you let me know. Go walkin in the park, toss me some crumbs, noose all you want! Two bucks apiece! Yeah man! Gone give you my card!”
They laugh some more. “Gone give the man his card, that nigger say!”
“Like to eat fish? We gone fry fish!”
He gazes from one black man to another, trying to bring the turmoil in his head under control. Four are middle-aged, in old suit trousers and broken street shoes. The fifth might be a son, and wears new running sneakers.
LUMUMBA LIVES
They smile at him. He knows these Africans, he knows how well they feign subservience and admiration, laughing at someone when they have him at their mercy. He gets slowly to his feet.
“Who’s Lumumba?” he inquires, playing for time.
“Who Lumumba is?”
This man looks down, he spreads his lettering with all eight fingers, then looks up at the younger man, who must be twenty.
“My boy Junius our Lumumba man. Who Lumumba, Junius?”
“Frag!”
“Who Lumumba, Frag?”
The white man coughs. Wasn’t that the problem? That he had not liked Lumumba? Wasn’t that it?
Ashamed of his elders, Frag rolls his eyes. Frag is feverish and skinny, wild-eyed, angry. “Have Lumumba on your fuckin shirt, don’t know who he is?” He glares at the white man, who smiles at him.
“Who he was, Lumumba Man. He’s dead.”
Frag shrieks, “You makin fun? You makin fun with me?”
The white man does a stiff shuffle, almost falling. “Wholumumba, wholumumba, wholumumba, WHO!” He is foot-numb, goosefleshed, shuddering with cold. Nothing seems real to him.
The faces in the purple hoods look mystified. He thinks, Come on, get it over with.
He starts out along the rail bed for the relay station, on the dead city stones and broken glass and metal litter.
At a sharp whistle he turns. Frag pitches the duck underhand, too hard, straight at his gut. He lets it fall.
“Shot it and swam for it, almost got drownded,” one man says. “So why you leavin it? Ain’t got no license?”
He points toward their fishing poles, upriver. They have no license, either. And possession of striped bass, he says, is against the law.
They exchange looks of comic disbelief. One raises both hands. “Whoo!” he says.
“Ol’ fish washed up out of the river!”
“Yessir, that fish all washed up!”
They hoot, delighted, then frown and mutter when he will not laugh with them.
“Hey, we ain’t gone possess that fish!”
“No, man! We gone eat him! You invited!”
When he tells them that their fish is poisoned, they stare back in mock outrage.
“Shit, man! Ain’t niggers poisoned it!”
He goes on, knowing they will follow. They are after his wallet, and the gun.
“Where’s that gun at, Whitey?”
There it is. They have come up fast, they are right behind him.
“None of your business, Blacky,” he says, and keeps on going. He feels giddy.
“Blacky” is repeated, bandied about. He hears a whoop, a cry of warning, and he turns again.
An older man with silver grizzle at the temples, dark wet eyes, has his hand on Frag’s arm. In Frag’s hand is a large rock. The others jabber.
“What’s happenin, man? What’s up wit’ you?”
“Come downriver see if we can help, and you just don’t do right.”
He resumes walking, paying no attention to the rock. Hauteur, he thinks, will always impress Africans. All the same, he feels confused, and tries to focus. On impulse he admits over his shoulder that he hid the gun, since they know this anyway.
“Scared we steal it, right?” Frag’s voice is a near-screech. “Seen niggers hangin around, right?” Frag bounces his big rock off a rail.
He wants to shout “Right!” but restrains himself.
An older voice says, “Easy, Junius, don’t excite yourself.”
“Frag!”
“Easy, Frag, don’t excite yourself. You okay, Frag?”
At the relay station, his clothes are undisturbed. He sees the corner of his wallet in the crevice.
NAM COKE RUSH
He pulls the pants on over his wet underwear, realizes that he does this out of modesty, stops himself, strips. They whoop and whistle. When he reaches for his pants a second time, Frag snaps them from his hand.
“Don’t like niggers, right? Scared of ’em, right? We smell it! Oh, we hate that honky smell, man!”
His foot is right beside the board, he slides his toe beneath it.
“Mister? Frag excites hisself, okay?”
“Truth!” Frag yells. “Fuckin truth, man! We can take it! Don’t like niggers, right?”
“Right,” he says, because the timing is so satisfying. He doesn’t care whether or not it’s true. Five blacks, one white—a clear case of self-defense. He flips the board, stoops quick, brings up the gun.
“Let’s have those pants,” he says. “I’m tired of this.”
The black men back away, form a loose circle neither out of range nor close enough to threaten him. Breathing raggedly, beside himself, Frag stays where he is, as if transfixed by the twin black holes of the gun muzzle.
“Don’ point that mothafucka, man!” he gasps at last.
“Toss the man his damn pants, Junius! Go ahead, now!”
“Man might do it, Junius! See them eyes?”
“Fuck!” Frag yells, beside himself. “Li’l popgun!”
The father’s soft voice is a plea. “Easy, mister, please, what’s up wit’ you? That boy can’t help hisself.”
He sees their fear of what they take to be his naked craziness.
At the train whistle, the black men look relieved. Frag jabs his finger, furious and scared. He keeps staring at the gun, he will not back off.
“Toss the man them pants now, Junius.”
The train is coming down the track toward the city, loud as a riveting machine, as a machine gun.
“Train comin, man.”
But he makes no move to hide himself. He steps farther out onto the tracks. What the engineer must see is a naked white man surrounded and beset by a gang of blacks.
The train blows three shrill whistles, lu
rches, and begins to slow.
“Junius? Trouble, boy! You got enough!”
“Shit!” the boy snarls. “Ain’t us done nothin!”
He slings the pants. The older man grabs him from behind, spins him away. The boy curses in a vicious stream, angling out across the tracks toward the woods on the river slope behind the train, ready to run if anyone on the train starts to descend. He yells, “You ain’t done with Frag yet, shithead! Honky mothafuck!”
The train eases to a stop. A hiss of steam. High cirrus clouds come out over the trees, over the river.
“Put them pants on, mister! Folks is lookin at you!”
“Back up,” he says, lifting the gun. And right now, remembering that both shells in the gun have been expended, he feels a sharp tingle at the temples.
A voice from the train calls, “You all right?” He waves his hand, then lays the gun down and begins to dress.
Sullen and sad, the black men shake their heads. They mutter, but they do not speak, they will not meet the stares from the train windows. They watch him dress, watch him take his wallet from the crevice in the wall. When he straps on the empty shoulder holster, they groan and retreat farther.
The train departs. He starts away, walking upriver.
He wonders now if they meant him any harm, but he takes no chances. Every little while he turns to be sure he is not followed.
The figures stand in silhouette. Three wave and point as the fourth raises the wild duck, bill pointed against the city. They seem to entreat him, but it is too late. What are they calling?
The hurled duck arches on the sky, falls fast, and bounces, coming to rest in the junk along the river.
When he goes back for it, they scatter, abandoning their fish. He puts the gun down, raises both his arms. “Wait a minute!” he calls. “Listen!”
“Get outta here!” they holler back. “Jus’ you get outta here!”
AT HIS BLIND he retrieves his equipment, leaving the three decoys to the river. With his burlap sack, he starts across the tracks toward the woods. Near the mouth of the old brook, he spins, recoiling from a clip of wind right past his ear.
A purple hood sinks back behind the auto body in the swamp. He circles the auto, crouching and running, but the rock-thrower has vanished, and the woods are silent.
He hunts quickly through the woods, chasing scared footfalls, then retreats half backward, swinging the gun. Moving slowly so that Frag can tail him without difficulty, he climbs the steep lawn below his father’s house. Someone is shouting.
Inside, the cottage seems to enclose him. He listens to the clock tick. The house creaks. He pours himself a whiskey.
No one answers at the real-estate office. To the answering machine he whispers, “This is Henry Harkness. I have a wild duck here, and some wild rice and good wine. I was hoping you and …” He doesn’t want to say “your wife,” but he cannot recall the round-eyed woman’s name. He puts the phone down. Somewhere his life took a turn without his knowledge.
The duck drips blood and water from its bill onto the white enamel of the kitchen table.
He slips out the back door and through the trees to the autumn garden. From here he can spot the purple hood coming up along the woods. The running, the game of it, the ambush are exhilarating, but the excitement dies quickly with the whiskey flush and does not return.
He settles down to wait behind the wall.
The light has gone wrong in some way. The sky is darkening in the noon sun, the dusk is waiting in the trees, and nowhere is there any shelter.
The African will come, perhaps at dark. Even now that face is peering from the trees. Neighbors will come to pay respects once it is over.
A police car comes and goes, lights flashing slowly, humping around the drive on its fat tires. The caretaker rides in the front seat.
No one comes up from the woods, the glinting river. Still he waits there in the autumn garden, cooling his forehead on the night-blue metal, in the haunted sunlight, in the dread of home.
1988
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETER MATTHIESSEN was born in New York City in 1927 and had already begun his writing career by the time he graduated from Yale University in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of The Paris Review. Besides At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for the National Book Award, he has published four other novels, including Far Tortuga. Mr. Matthiessen’s unique career as a naturalist and explorer has resulted in numerous and widely acclaimed books of nonfiction, among them The Tree Where Man Was Born, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and The Snow Leopard, which won it. His other works of nonfiction include The Cloud Forest and Under the Mountain Wall (which together received an Award of Merit from the National Institute of Arts and Letters), The Wind Birds, Blue Meridian, Sand Rivers, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Indian Country, and, most recently, Men’s Lives. His new novel is Killing Mister Watson.
ALSO BY PETER MATTHIESSEN
THE PETER MATTHIESSEN READER
edited by McKay Jenkins
In this single-volume collection of the distinguished author’s nonfiction are essays and excerpts that highlight the spiritual, literary, and political daring so crucial to Matthiessen’s vision. Comprehensive and engrossing, The Peter Matthiessen Reader celebrates an American voice unequaled in its commitment to literature’s noblest aspiration: to challenge us to perceive our world—as well as ourselves—truthfully and clearly.
Nonfiction
LOST MAN’S RIVER
In Lost Man’s River Matthiessen returns to the primeval landscape of the Florida Everglades, the setting of his bestseller Killing Mister Watson. In 1910 a sugarcane planter named E. J. Watson was gunned down by a group of his neighbors, perhaps in cold blood, perhaps in self defense. Years later, E. J.’s son Lucius tries to discover the truth of his father’s life and death. And even as Lucius tries to redeem his half-lost life by gathering the testimony (and braving the threats) of poachers and renegades, he struggles for the future of the remote country in which they live.
Fiction/Literature
AFRICAN SILENCES
A powerful and sobering account of the cataclysmic depredation of the African landscape and its wildlife. Through Peter Matthiessen’s eyes we see elephants, white rhinos, gorillas, and other endangered creatures of the wild. We share the drama of the journeys themselves, including a hazardous crossing of the continent in a light plane. And along the way, we learn of the human lives oppressed by bankrupt political regimes and economies.
Current Events/Travel
AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD
In a malarial outpost in South America two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local comandante. Out of their struggle Peter Matthiessen has created a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual existence and the politics of cultural genocide.
Fiction/Literature
ON THE RIVER STYX And Other Stories
“Mr. Matthiessen proves himself here to be a connoisseur of coiled tensions, between men and women, between people of different social classes, and, repeatedly, between races.… There is something almost mysterious about his achievement … qualities for which one can think of only classical or old-fashioned words: gravitas, grandeur, beauty.”
—The New York Times
Fiction/Literature
KILLING MISTER WATSON
Killing Mister Watson is a fictional masterpiece, the first novel of the Watson trilogy, written at the peak of Peter Matthiessen’s powers as a novelist. Drawn from fragments of historical fact, it brilliantly depicts the fortunes and misfortunes of Edgar J. Watson, a real-life entrepreneur and outlaw who appeared in the lawless Florida Everglades around the turn of the century.
Fiction/Literature
MEN’S LIVES
“Matthiessen’s portrayal of a disappearing way of life has a biting eloquence no outside reporter could command. The fishermen’s voices—humorous, bitter, bewildered, resigned—are as clear as the technical procedures of their work and the threatened beauty of their once quiet shore.”
—Newsweek
Literature
FAR TORTUGA
“Far Tortuga is a singular experience, a series of moments captured whole and rendered with a clarity that quickens the blood.… From its opening moment … the reader senses that the narrative itself is the recapitulation of a cosmic process, as though the author had sought to link his storytelling with the eye of creation.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Literature
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Peter Matthiessen, On the River Styx: And Other Stories
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