Three Long Blasts Below the Bluff

Why I did not call him

People have asked me since why I did not just call Shane that night and lay into him, or call a lawyer, or make him sign something.

The honest answer is that I had already done the calling. I had done it for three years.

One more phone fight was not going to put my son by the river. It was only going to put another promise in his ear.

A lawyer could maybe make Shane show up on paper. No lawyer can make a man want to come.

And I did not want my boy’s Saturdays decided in an office. I wanted him to have one Saturday that showed up.

I stood at the stern rail that night after the call and listened to the engines and thought about that red hoodie on the porch steps from eight in the morning until the sun went down.

And somewhere in there I remembered that our tow was coming downriver that week loaded with grain, and that the channel below the village of Clayton runs close under the Iowa side, right beneath my mother’s fence.

Captain Dutch

Our captain is Dutch Vanlandingham. He is 61 years old, and he started on this river as a deckhand when he was 19, so there is not one job on that boat he has not done himself with his own two hands.

He is a big quiet man with a gray mustache and forearms like fence posts. He does not raise his voice, and he does not have to. When Dutch says something on the radio, the whole crew listens.

That night I finished my watch at midnight and climbed the stairs to the pilothouse instead of going to eat.

Dutch was not on watch, but he was up there anyway with a cup of coffee, the way he usually is.

The pilot had the sticks. He gave me a nod and went back to watching the head of the tow, a quarter mile out in front of us.

“Captain,” I said. “Can I ask you for something that’s not in the book?”

Dutch looked at me over his coffee. “You can ask.”

So I told him. I told him about Jory, and the lock, and the three Saturdays, and the red hoodie on the porch steps. I told him my mother’s house sat on the bluff above Clayton.