The Thanatos Syndrome

rain and him fighting the current, he couldn’t see bee-idly. It was taking him all night. Then he noticed the water was getting low. He began scraping over sandbars. He’d run aground. And he’d cuss. He didn’t know the river had already made the cut across the neck and he was stranded. And he’d back off and head upriver and he’d run aground again. And he cussed. He couldn’t get out. He cussed the river, the boat, the captain. He swore an oath. He swore: ‘I swear by Jesus Christ I hope this son-of-a-bitching boat never gets out of this goddamn river.’ And he never did. What he didn’t know was that he was sealed off—the river had already come busting down the Chute. He couldn’t get out. But the thing is, they couldn’t find the boat. So they thought it had sunk in the storm. They never did find that boat. But I’m here to tell you that there’s people, people I know, who have seen that boat in the old river on a foggy night during the June rise.”
    â€œHave you seen it, Mr. Hugh?” Vergil asks him.
    â€œI’ve heard it!” the uncle shouts. “And so has many another. Vergil, his daddy, and I heard it! We was camping out right over there across the slough by Moon Lake and the Old River and you could hear that sapsucker beating up the river through the fog, that old stern-wheel slapping the water like whang whang whang. Vergil Senior claimed he could even hear the pilot cursing. But we heard it!”
    â€œI’ve heard that story,” says Vergil behind him and talking to me past him. “It’s part of the folklore of the river. You can hear the same story up and down the river wherever there’s been a cutoff. In fact, I’ve heard the same story from Mr. Clemens.”
    Don’t argue, Vergil.
    â€œWhat I’m telling you is, I heard it,” says the uncle, still talking to me. They argue through me. I half listen. Here’s a switch. Here’s Vergil, the scientist, skeptic, the new logical positivist, and here’s the uncle, defender of old legends, ghost ships, specters.
    Let it alone, Vergil.
    â€œThe thing is,” says Vergil, “either that steamboat is there or it isn’t. If it is there, then how come nobody has seen it in daylight or seen the wreck? If it was there and it sank, there would be some sign of it—the Old River is no more than twenty feet deep anywhere. The pilot house would be sticking out. It all reminds me a little bit of modern UFO sightings.”
    â€œI’m here to tell you I heard that sucker,” cries the uncle.
    â€œOkay. Let me ask you both something.” I’m not interested in hearing them try to upstage each other and don’t like Vergil patronizing the uncle by talking about Mr. Clemens. To get them off it, I ask them where New Roads is, knowing it is off to the west and that we all have relatives there.
    â€œYou see right over there, over that cypress,” says Vergil, his paddle coming out of the water. “That’s False River and just past it is New Roads and over there is Chevron Parlange Number One, the most famous gas well in history, twenty thousand feet, the discovery well of the whole Tuscaloosa Trend, came in August of ’77, a hundred and forty thousand cubic feet per second, that’s a million dollars a day. So big, in fact, it blew out.”
    â€œYou talking about Miss Lucy Parlange’s place,” says the uncle. “And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer lady.”
    â€œMy auntee lives there too,” says Vergil. “She still lives in the same little house on False River. But she had a piece of land over by Parlange when they hit that big well. My auntee leased her place for a hundred thousand.”
    â€œThat old Parlange house been in the same family for two hundred and fifty years,” says the uncle. “Through thick and thin. They never gave up.”
    â€œMy auntee neither,” says Vergil.
    They tell stories about the big oil strike at False River, who got rich, how money ruined some.
    â€œBlood will tell ever’ time,” says the uncle. “You take the Parlanges. They were aristocrats when they didn’t have it, and when they got it, it made no difference.”
    â€œMy auntee too,” says Vergil. “She raised my daddy when his mamma got consumption and had to go to Greenwell Spring.”
    â€œHow far is it?” I ask