The River Queen Read Free Page B

asked.
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as she wants, I guess.”
    â€œCould she go to Dubuque?”
    He gazed down the river.
    â€œI don’t know why not.” Smokey shrugged. “Never been there.”
    â€œWell, what about Hannibal?”
    Smokey considered this as he lit another cigarette, which he gripped in his yellowed hands, then puffed between his yellowed teeth. “Never been there either.”
    â€œWell, do you ever rent your boat to anyone? Would you ever think of that?”
    Smokey smiled through stained and ragged teeth. “Don’t know why not, if the price is right.”
    While Larry stared at me, dumbfounded, I handed Smokey a slip of paper and he wrote down three or four phone numbers: where he worked, where he tended to sleep, where he was supposed to live, and who might know where to find him.
    As we walked back to the hotel, Larry said to me, “You aren’t seriously thinking about traveling with that guy?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. And under my breath, “Maybe I am.”
    Six months later I started calling Smokey. For a while, as I planned this journey, I had my heart set on renting his boat. I talked to him a few times. First he had an accident on his Harley and was out of commission. Then he left the ammo plant where he worked the graveyard shift. After that I kept calling and calling the numbers he gave me, but, much to my husband’s relief, I never reached him again.
    *   *   *
    When I made my decision to do this trip, I asked Matt to put up signs at the local marinas: WRITER SEEKS RIVER PILOT WITH HOUSEBOAT TO GO DOWNSTREAM . No one answered my ad. So I flew to La Crosse and Matt and I hung out at the Pettibone Marina on a sweltering July afternoon long enough for the harbormaster to tell us to go talk to Tom Hafner. Tom, he said, lives on a houseboat called the Samantha Jean on the other side of French Island. “I don’t have his number,” the harbormaster said, “but just go over there.”
    As we drove on to French Island toward Tom’s place, Matt pointed to a derelict house where a man kept his dead mother in the freezer for four years. “It wasn’t murder,” Matt assured me. “He just wanted to collect her Social Security.” We both gazed at the ramshackle house with its weedy front yard and collapsed Venetian blinds.
    â€œI guess nobody wants to live there now. But otherwise,” he said, with a sigh that did not inspire confidence, “La Crosse is safe. Just don’t go to La Plume Island at night. That’s where the bodies tend to wash up. It’s not that people are murdered at the marinas, but for some reason, maybe it’s the current, they wash up there.”
    We found the Samantha Jean moored in a grove of dark trees at the bottom of a slope and I sent Matt ahead on the wobbly dock and called out politely, “Tom? Is Tom Hafner here?”
    The boat rattled and water sloshed and soon a huge, forty-something man with a graying beard, bulging biceps, and considerable girth emerged. He seemed to favor one eye, or perhaps it was one ear, more than the other, but the slant of his face gave him a vaguely ominous look. “Howdy,” Tom said, crushing my fingers in his. We sat down and the boat rocked again, then seemed to sink. Small waves hit the sides.
    A mosquito bit my ankle as Tom offered us a can of diet Mountain Dew, which we declined. He popped one open as I explained that I wanted to go down the Mississippi River in a houseboat and I was looking for someone to teach me how to pilot. “After I learn how to pilot, I was thinking about renting the boat and doing the trip on my own,” I said.
    Guffawing laughter poured out of Tom and shook the boat. “First, you can’t do it on your own. Oh you could putter around a little here and there, but you can’t go through the locks and dams on your own,