Riverrat

The only real, independent & genuine gentlemen in the world go quietly up and down the Mississippi river, asking no homage of any one, seeking no popularity, no notoriety, & not caring a damn whether school keeps or not.

-Mark Twain in a letter to Will Bowen, 8/25/1866

The other side of the levee.  The land the law forgot, or perhaps felt just wasn’t worth noticing.  Thousands of acres of subtropical forest and rich ebony soil, filling the gap between the Great River and the Depression-era levee protecting us from it.  Stretching from the bluffs of Memphis to the gates of Vicksburg, the other side is fit only to sustain the likes of reptiles, insects, and riverrats.  Once inhabited by Choctaws, glorified by Finn, mystified by Johnson, always plagued with the likes of Rafer Haydock.

The 80’s model Ford pickup rattled to a halt under the camouflage of a water oak enveloped in a cloud of kudzu, and all was still.  Heat like he remembered in ‘Nam.  Crickets. Blue smoke curled its way back into the open window of the cab.  Always made him dizzy.  Rafer put in a dip to steady himself, the stray grains swirling past his molars and sliding down his throat as the rush of new salvia welcomed the tobacco.  Fresh Cope always satisfies.  The truck door painfully creaked as it was opened, piercing the humidity that is a Mississippi Delta July.  He lifted it slightly in closing, resting the door on the frame of the truck after he stealthily slid out.  The required slam would have blown his cover.  Other riverrats are always about.

            Rafer walked to his crop, again taking a different path as to not trample the same johnson grass.  Daytime mosquitoes buzzed around his head.  He spat.  The juice ran down into his beard, mixing with black grime that ringed his neck like the stump of a cut tree.  Or a coon.

            It would be a good crop this year if the goddamn armadillos would quit cutting through the root bases digging their goddamn tunnels, he thought.  The recent rains and the natural greenhouse of the thick forest had put the plants above his head.  Rafer snapped off the top of a stalk and inhaled deeply.  Its sticky sweet incense gloriously filled his hairy gray nostrils.  He sucked on the stem for a moment, and spat again.  With the fluidity and coordination that only a sharecropper’s son can have, his hands quickly plucked the largest and most richly colored leaves from the dozen or so plants and stuffed them in his threadbare overalls. The green ends poked out like money.  Another padded path on his return.  He took the picked pieces from his pockets and fanned them out in the bottom of the ever-present Johnson boat in the bed of the truck, the already scorching aluminum surface a natural oven to dry the leaves.  They could be touched but not touching.  These deliveries alone will make $50.  Money to pay back his wife.  Or money to go to Tunica.  Definitely Tunica.  Hell, it was more fun than her anyway.  The billboards say they have the loosest slots around.

            A plane roared low overhead.  Shit.  He instinctively disappeared into the kudzu cloud, a spotlighted coyote dashing after the first rifle shot.  There weren’t cropdusters this side of the levee, and a mosquito sprayer would be a waste of time.  Maybe this one didn’t have the technology on board.  Maybe it did not see the heat of his farm.  Or the heat of him.  Maybe he didn’t care any more.

            The drone died, and Rafer cast his cane pole for awhile.  Just on the edge of the bank, the sweet gumbo mud warm between his toes.  Pants rolled up knee-high.  Watching the orange jig bounce in the coffee-colored water, his mind wandered to the farm his father left him in Washington County.  Maybe he should build a shack out there.  On stilts in case the Bogue Philia flooded.  Yeah, with a wrap around porch.  He could swap some carp for some of that tin that old field black Roosevelt had. Call it the Love Shack.  He jerked his line up, and skillfully tossed it over in a bubbling section where the something was spawning.  Pulled up one, two, three, four.  He was running out of bologna.  Maybe check the nets in the Blue Hole later.  Keep the spoonbill.  Throw out the gar and the soft shell turtles.  Those don’t sell well at Po’Monkeys. 

As the sun died down and the woods got louder, Rafter went back to the boat to gather his harvest although it was still not dry.  He stuffed equal amounts in envelopes, addressed them to the special houses on his route, and the truck coughed to life on the third try.  Rising from the steam of the fragrant swamplands, the pickup ambled its way along the gravel path to the top of the levee.  Take a right to run the route in Rosedale.  He put his left arm on the windowsill, which was of course much tanner than the right, and placed the yellow blinking light on the hood of the vehicle.  Strapping on his navy hat and stuffing his newly-made letters into the mail bag riding shotgun, he drove on to his day job, the Delta sun blurring his vision as it radiated up from the road.