Three Long Blasts Below the Bluff

Three long ones

I pulled.

If you have never heard a towboat horn, it is not a car horn.

It is a deep sound, low enough that you feel it in your breastbone, and it rolls out across the water and hits the bluffs and comes back to you a second later.

I held the first one long, five or six seconds. It went out across the river and hit the Iowa bluff and boomed back, and then it hit the Wisconsin hills across the water and came back again, smaller.

That one was for the first Saturday. For the toast eaten at the window and the text at noon.

I let go and waited for the echo to die, and I pulled again.

That one was for the second Saturday. For the sandwich on the steps and the phone that rang through to nothing.

Down on the deck the crew started waving, all of them at once, arms high. Augie took off his hard hat and swung it over his head in big circles. The cook was waving her dish towel.

Up on the bluff, people were coming out. I could see them even without the binoculars now. Somebody from the house next door.

Two people at the end of the bluff road. A woman in a lawn chair who stood right up out of it.

That was Pearl, my mother’s neighbor. She is 84 and has lived on that bluff road since before I was born.

Mom had told only her, and Pearl had told everybody on the road by ten.

I pulled the third time and held it the longest.

That one was for the third Saturday. For the red hoodie zipped up from eight in the morning until the sun went down. For a little boy who turned down his grandma’s offer because he believed in his dad.

The sound went out across the whole valley, and the bluffs threw it back, and for a second it seemed like the river itself was answering.

When it finally died away, it was very quiet. You could hear the engines, and the water along the hull, and nothing else.