The Dealer Who Made It Right

The Reunion in Dubuque

Every year, the third weekend in September, the men I used to run the river with meet at the VFW hall in Dubuque for a fish fry and a night of lying to each other about how easy the job used to be. Thirty some of us, all retired now, all Army Corps of Engineers, all of us having spent our working lives standing in a control house above a set of steel gates, watching barges the length of three football fields ease into a lock chamber with six inches of clearance on either side. It is not a job you explain well at a barbecue. It is a job you can only really talk about with the other men who did it.

I almost did not go this year. My knees have been giving me trouble, and the drive from Keokuk up to Dubuque is the better part of four hours along the river road, through towns I have watched empty out my whole life. But my oldest friend from the lock, a man I worked beside for twenty two years, had died that spring, and this was the first reunion since. I felt like I owed him the trip.

So I called my son. Clarence lives twelve minutes from me, on the other side of town, past the feed store and the ballfield where he used to play third base. I asked him to swing by the house twice a day, feed my cat, and keep an eye on things while I was gone.

“No problem, Dad,” he said. “Go have a good time. You’ve earned it.”

I remember that phrase sitting a little wrong with me even then, though I could not have told you why. You’ve earned it. Like he was granting me permission for something.

I packed a bag, backed my truck out of the driveway, and drove north with the windows down, the river running alongside the highway the whole way, brown and wide and patient, the way it has been my whole life. I did not look back at the garage where my motor home was parked, washed and fueled, ready for a trip I had been building toward for three years.

I had no reason to. It had never once occurred to me that I needed to.