Sweet Talk Read Free Page A

that chunks of a vast continent had been won and lost within the confines of a fortress hardly bigger than Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland. Later, as we drove back along the river, my father said in his aphoristic way, “Sometimes the biggest battles are the smallest ones.”
    The week after we settled in our quarters, we made the obligatory trip to the Falls. It was a sultry day—Indian summer—and our eyes began to water as we neared the chemical factories that surrounded the city of Niagara Falls. We stopped for iced tea and my father explained how the glaciers had formed the escarpment through which the Falls had cut a deep gorge.
Escarpment
—that was the term he used, instead of
cliff
. It skidded along the roof of his mouth and entered the conversation with a soft explosion.
    We went to the Niagara Falls Museum and examined the containers people had used successfully to go over the Falls early in the twentieth century, when there was a thousand-dollar prize given to survivors. Two were wooden barrels strapped with metal bands. One was a giant rubber ball reinforced with a steel cage. A fourth was a long steel capsule. On the walls were photographs of each survivor and plaques explaining who had been injured and how. The steel capsule was used by a man who had broken every bone in his body. The plaque said that he was in the hospital for twenty-threeweeks and then took his capsule around the world on a speaking tour. One day when he was in New Zealand, he slipped on an orange peel, broke his leg, and died of complications.
    We went next to Goat Island and stood on the open bank to watch the leap and dive of the white water. My mother held her handbag close to her breasts. She had a habit of always holding things this way—a stack of dinner plates, the dish towel, some mail she had brought in from the porch; she hunched over slightly, so that her body seemed at once to be protective and protected. “I don’t like the river,” she said. “I think it wants to hypnotize you.” My father put his hands in his pockets to show how at ease he was, and my grandmother went off to buy an ice-cream cone.
    At the observation point, we stood at a metal fence and looked into the frothing water at the bottom of the gorge. We watched bits and pieces of rainbows appear and vanish in the sunlight that was refracted off the water through the mist. My father pointed to a black shape in the rapids above the Horseshoe Falls. “That’s a river barge,” he said. He lowered his voice so that he could be heard under the roar of the water. “A long time ago, there were two men standing on that barge waiting to see whether in the next moment of their lives they would go over.”
    He told us the story of the barge then—how it had broken loose from a tug near Buffalo and floateddownriver, gathering speed. The two men tore at the air, waved and shouted to people on shore, but the barge entered the rapids. They bumped around over the rocks, and the white water rose in the air. One man—“He was the thinking man,” said my father—thought they might be able to wedge the barge among the rocks if they allowed the hull to fill with water. They came closer to the Falls—four hundred yards, three hundred—before the barge jerked broadside and stopped. They were there all afternoon and night, listening to the sound of the water pounding into the boulders at the bottom of the gorge. The next morning they were rescued, and one of the men, the thinking man, told the newspapers that he had spent the night playing poker in his head. He played all the hands, and he bluffed himself. He drew to inside straights. If the barge had torn loose from the rocks in the night, he was going to go over the Falls saying, “Five-card draw, jacks or better to open.” The other man sat on the barge, his arms clasped around his knees, and watched the mist blow back from the edge of the Falls in the moonlight. He could not speak.
    “The scream of the