The Thanatos Syndrome

human hand. It must be the river, high now and ripping through the batture.
    I break out into a junkyard of rusty steel hawsers with caches of trapped driftwood cemented by dried whitened mud, chunks of Styrofoam, tires, Clorox bottles. A rusting hulk of a barge fitted with a crane conveyor is toppled and half sunk. This must have been a transfer facility, no doubt a soybean depot.
    The river is on the boom. It’s been dry here. They must have had late summer rains in the Dakotas or the Midwest. This stretch is the Raccourci Chute, which goes ripping past Angola even at low water. But now it’s up in the willows and a mile wide, roaring and sucking and jerking the willows and blowing a cool, foul breath. A felon might imagine that if he could get over the levee and into the willows he could make it, but no. He’d get caught in the sucks and boils. There’s nothing out there but roiled, racing, sulphur-colored water flecked by dirty foam from Dakota farms, Illinois toilets, and ten million boxes of Tide. Angola could just as well be Alcatraz. Looking across toward Raccourci Island, I could swear the river swells, curved up like a watchglass by the boil of a giant spring.
    Old Tunica Landing is nothing but a rotten piece of wharf. The raised walk of creosoted planks is solid enough and high enough to clear the rising water in the batture. There’s nobody here and the gravel road from Tunica is grown up in weeds. I pick out a dry piling I can sit against and from which I can see up the road without being seen. The landing was used first by the Tunica Indians and then to service the indigo plantations. I came here once to see the Tunica Treasure, a graveyard which somebody dug up and then found, not gold, but glass beads which the English, my ancestors, had given them for their land two hundred years ago. It is nine-thirty.
    A little upriver and a ways out is Fancy Point Towhead, an island of willows almost submerged but long enough and angled out enough to deflect the main current and make a backwater. Foam drifts under me upstream. There’s another noise above the racket of the current in the batture downstream. It’s a towboat pushing fifteen or twenty rafted-up barges upstream. There’s not enough room inside the island for him to use the dead water. He has to buck straight up the Chute and he’s having a time of it. The current is maybe eight knots, and with his diesels flat out he’s maybe making twelve. He sounds like five freight engines going upgrade, drive wheels spinning.
    I watch him. There is so much noise that I don’t hear Vergil Bon until the plank moves under me. He’s carrying a pirogue by its gunwale in one hand, two paddles in the other. The uncle is right behind him, face narrow and dark under his hunting cap. He’s carrying his old double-barrel 12-gauge Purdy in the crook of his arm and ambling along in his sprung splayed walk as if he were on his way to a duck blind. They both seem serious but not displeased.
    â€œHow you doing, Vergil, Uncle Hugh Bob?” The towboat is noisy.
    â€œFine.”
    â€œFine.”
    We shake hands. They gaze around, not at me, equably. They are Louisianians, at ease out-of-doors. The uncle nods and pops his fingers. We could be meeting here every day.
    â€œDid you bust out of there?” asks the uncle companionably, flanking me.
    â€œI have permission. Don’t worry about it.”
    We watch the towboat make the bend, creep past the concrete of the Hog Point revetment, which looks like a gray quilt dropped on the far levee.
    â€œUncle Hugh Bob, what are you doing with that shotgun?”
    â€œYou asked him about that little Woodsman.” He nods toward Vergil as if he didn’t know him well. “We brought it. But I didn’t know what kind of trouble you’re in.” He’s jealous because I asked Vergil.
    â€œWe’re not going to have any trouble—beyond maybe a mean dog or a snake.”
    â€œI’m not going to shoot no dog with a .22. This won’t kill him.” He pats the shotgun. “What we going to do?”
    â€œWe’re going to drop down to Belle Ame and pick up Claude. After that you and Claude can take the pirogue on down to Pantherburn. My car is at Belle Ame. I’ll bring Vergil back up here to get the truck. We’ll see.”
    That seems to satisfy him. “I brought along my spinning tackle, right here.” He pats his game