Read Online Just North of Nowhere by Lawrence Santoro - Free Book Online

the bar.
    Ivan smiled.
    Herb thought the music was fine. They like it, he said to himself. Not to his taste but he knew what people liked.
    Herb slipped out the back door onto the rear deck overlooking the river.
    Summer waited in the air, rose from the cliffs across the way. The year was still cool and late afternoon covered the town. The shadows of the bluffs crawled across the water toward Herb standing above old muck and dead fish.
    He loved it all, this town, the people he’d met in the bar. Maybe he would not, finally. Maybe they would disappoint and he would not end the road trip here in Bluffton but Bluffton had offered a deal to remember.
    The jukebox nattered on, inside. A touch of its warmth carried to the porch. If people liked it – and so far they had – they'd like him. He loved being liked. He did. Being liked was rare. Rare, he guessed, for everyone anywhere.
    He looked upstream and down. On both sides of the Wagon Wheel, buildings overhung the riverbank. The bar, the laundromat, all the buildings all the way, both ways, stood on steel props.
    “Hmmmmm,” Herb put his gut to the railing and leaned over. Dark water rippled near the pillar. Over the plinky-tink from inside, he heard the river nibbling, felt its rush and thrum against his gutline. When rains came heavy and long, when the river flowed rich in anger and the dam upstream could not contain it all and it poured forth. . .
    Herb felt forward, backward, found a time when the stream raged and bowed the pillars of the porch, when the valley’s funneled wind torqued the deck, the Wagon Wheel with it. In that time, imagined, Herb felt the porch heave like a ship, heard the building’s long groans as wood strained against wood. Chairs, tables, brooms, juke box, shuffleboard, patrons leaned, rolled, or fell with the Wagon Wheel’s cant. In his mind, he crossed the floor, planks alive with wind and the river’s licks, felt their dance in his tiny feet. Then he let it go. The wind abated, the river sagged, recumbent. The Wagon Wheel eased, creaked to the vertical, floor boards settled, antlered heads found their plumb, bottles and brooms righted.
    “Hmmmm,” Herb said again.
    “It’s alive,” Bunch said at Herb's shoulder. He blew a breath of beer and smoke into the sag of Herb’s face. “The river, there; alive. Wriggles like a worm. See there…” He pointed upstream where the flow curved from the woods and houses. “They put in a dam up there, hundred years ago, maybe.”
    Herb nodded.
    Bunch stuck his smoke into the corner of his mouth. “They snapped her, pulled her, dredged and filled her. They dammed her up and spilled her over. Figured her for straight and civil!”
    Herb tasted the tobacco-suffused scent of Bunch. It was good, his weedy exhalation. He couldn't understand those who could not, would not abide a smoke. He didn't, himself, of course. No, but he surely loved to breathe it when others did so for him.
    Bunch squeezed one eye shut against the rising smoke and peeled the soaked paper from his lip. “Dam didn't work worth shit,” he said, “Rolling River wouldn't be tamed by dammin'.
    The water was dark now. The river – ninety-three feet wide here, Herb estimated to within an inch or so, wider some places, narrower at others – licked quietly at the long edge of the town.
    “I see,” Herb said.
    Bunch leaned over the rail. “They stuck dynamos on her to suck the electric out of the water. Tried to tame it that way.” Bunch wrinkled his face under Herb’s nose. “Didn't work, neither.” Bunch leaned on the rail. “Now they let her go. The Rolling’s still wrapping itself around the town, eating it up.” Bunch sucked the last from his smoke and flicked the brown butt sizzling into the stream. “Which ain't going to happen though. Nope. I live on this river. Up Slaughterhouse, out County H, down by Papoose Crick, there,” he pointed. “Under the bridge. I watch the town. Take care of her. River and me’s got