Loganthinks

I am tucked beneath two sweatshirts and my new rain jacket, the second jacket given to me in as many Christmases by my parents. A few feet ahead, framed through the open hole of my tightly-drawn hood, my father is picking his way unsteadily through the snow. Our dog is wading happily ahead of him, a black brushstroke of motion darting between tree trunks and hedgerows. It is snowing in New Orleans on Christmas day for the first time in 150 years, and the landscape of cracked streets and brittle houses is painted in a muted grayscale that trickles from the eaves and collects in the gutters like freezing dirty bathwater. There are no cars out. Beyond the soft hush of snow settling around us, only the bellowing of barges along the Mississippi interrupts the sounds of our labored breath.

My father stops under the dark harbor of an ancient Live Oak, in front of a two-story house with rotting wooden shingles and a walk-in garage. He knocks on the garage door and we watch the windows expectantly, but five cold minutes pass with only the quiet tap-tapping of snow against our jackets. A woman pushing a shopping cart rattles across the alley up the street, and I begin to feel the slush at my feet soaking through my tennis shoes. As we are turning to leave, the garage door swings open and Jay Martin peeks out.

“Merry Christmas, Oliver,” he says to my father, “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got her laid out here in the basement, but this is probably the last chance you’ll get to see her, considering how long she’s been dead.”

Jay Martin is a beekeeper. He lives alone in a collapsing split-level, devoid of any furniture and cluttered with piles of tools and books. Most of the year he is without electricity or gas. He sleeps in a canoe lying across the floor of the upstairs foyer, where the light from the porch windows filters through the heavy oak canopy that seems to blend organically with the framework of his house.

As we step into his basement, we make our way past huge coils of chicken wire and duck beneath a hanging arsenal of tools until we come to a clearing lit by a gas lantern. In front of us, a miniature, twisted form lies on a table. It is a small, white owl. The owl is stretched awkwardly with its neck at an angle and its wings spread limply so that the tips drift over the edge of the table. A yellow cloth has been spread beneath it, the corners tucked lovingly across a black wound running up the inside of its left leg.

Even while stuck in death’s unnatural pose, the owl is stunning. Wreathed in gentle gas-light, its downy underbelly glistens with the plush suggestion that at any moment it might suddenly wake up, adjust its neck, and leap from the darkened basement into the wet, freezing world outside. My father whistles through his front teeth and we stand dripping in the dank basement for a long time before Jay finally speaks.

“She’s a Barn Owl,” he says to my father, who nods and whistles again. The dog is sniffing at the bench.

“How long have you had her down here?” my father asks.

Feeling suddenly uninvolved in an intimate moment, I reach down and pull the dog away from the bench, running my hands through its wet black fur

“I’ve had her a week, if you can believe it,” Jay says with a grin, “the cold has preserved her pretty well down here. I found her last Sunday on the side of I-10 out in Gentilly, a few miles this side of South Point.”

“What are you going to do with her?” I ask.

“They’re endangered, so it’s not legal to get her stuffed or anything like that. I would have cooked her, but I think she’s been gone a little too long for it to be worth the effort.”

I exchange looks with my father and another empty moment slips by in the cold orange light. Jay shakes his head and dims the gas lantern.

“It is a shame to have to bury something so beautiful,” he says in the dark.

We cross River Road onto the levee at Burthe Street, just past the bend where traffic usually makes such a crossing treacherous. The levee is a winding, gentle slope of grass that peaks 20 feet high and parallels the Mississippi River on both banks. Along the crest of the levee runs a trail that follows the river for hundreds of miles in either direction, providing a jogging path for locals, and a spot to watch the massive tankers struggle against angry, muddy waters. We pick our way across the train tracks and up the hill, the dog sliding ahead as the snow thickens the air.

The rooftops and church towers of uptown are ghosts amidst the clouds that tumble downward in slow motion. The river is layered in mist, and beyond the shadows of tugs and barges creeping by, the far bank has disappeared so that the water seems to extend past its boundaries into some uncharted, swirling sea. All around us I feel that we can see the edge of the artists’ page, beyond the pencil-drawing landscape of our immediate existence, past the soft suggestions of the eraser marks, to some oblivion that has eaten up the outside world and trapped us here in this freezing, silent spotlight.

“Merry Christmas,” my father laughs, cupping his hands to his face. I nod and look down the slope of the levee towards the river, where the floodplain lies hidden beneath a tangled thicket of scrub trees, vines, and flotsam. The dog is sniffing along the edge of the trees, wading through icy puddles and shaking the snow from her fur. She smells something that has caught her interest.

Although I have only agreed to take this walk in order to get out of the house we’ve been

trapped in since the bad weather began, I am keenly aware that my father – like the dog - is

plotting to extend this hike as far and long as he is able to. My father is not an indoors man.

With each passing year he finds more time to escape his office, to pack the dog into the child’s

seat of his ancient bicycle, and to ride up to the levee to explore the scrub woods, eat

sandwiches, and watch the boats pass. He drinks beer with the bums who sit by the power lines

and fish the eddy behind the water intake pier. He takes the dog for walks up to the stilt houses

which are tucked away in the woods along the river’s edge, sometimes to talk to the guy he buys

canoes from, and sometimes just to insert himself into the alien world that hides so well on that

secret side of the levee. I’ve asked him before why he prefers the woods along the floodplain to

the well-maintained parks and forests around the city, and he always shakes his head at me like

I am missing the point by asking such a question. Since I have grown up and left home, my

father has found himself a haven in this tangled wilderness of trash that populates the woods

along the river’s edge, and now that we are here and looking down into his refuge, its tree limbs

caked in snow and washed-up shopping bags, I am aware without need for conversation that we

will not go back home until we follow the dog’s lead down through the thicket and into the trees.

“So I think she wants to explore a little,” dad says, and I laugh loudly so that my nose leaks and my eyes water against the bitter air.

My brother is three years my senior and while growing up, he took both the punishment and the rewards of being the first-born. On Sundays he’d be sequestered in the basement with my father, working on some project while I retained the freedom to have massive military confrontations with my G.I. Joes.

When I was six our family traveled west to Montana, where they took home-videos on our Super-8 of my brother shooting a bow and arrow and falling off of the barrel suspended on bungee cords that simulated a bull ride. My father would teach him how to tie a cinch knot so that the fly would stay on the fishing line longer, and behind the camera, holding tight to mother’s knees, I would watch the knowledge of a man who was born in the wrong century impart itself to the curious, clumsy hands of my brother. In the car, they both would coo at the splendor of the sun-lit mountain faces. I would bounce along in the back, imagining bomb explosions, missile attacks, and the television-script chaos that colored my interior world.

Over dinner parties, my father still tells the story of a layover we were forced to take in Texas after a long camping trip, where the airline placed us in a hotel for a flight the following morning. One entire wall of our room was a window, and when my mother opened the shades, we looked out upon a sea of chemical lights and noise, like a landscape of circuitry glowing electric and unreal. I pressed my nose against the glass, overwhelmed by the input all around me, and said “Isn’t it beautiful, Dad?” At that moment in the story, you can still hear my father’s heart break as he tells the dinner guests how he and my mother exchanged glances, and then pulled the curtain back and told me yes honey, you’re so right.

I am worried about Dad’s shoulder as he is ducking beneath the collapsed branches of dead trees. He recently had surgery to replace his rotator cuff with a titanium ball that was supposed to allow the cartilage and joint tissue to re-attach, but his 66-year old body is not as adept to healing itself as it once was. His ghost is still twenty years old, often pushing the aging carcass it inhabits past what can be reasonably expected. Still, with what he was sacrificed in deference to his injury, no one would consider telling him not to do what he is doing at this very moment, straddling a rotten tree trunk awkwardly as he slips across a frozen mud puddle. He lands safely, and I follow, chatting about nonsense and watching our breath warm our dripping noses. Ahead of us, the dog tastes and smells its way along trails broken in by homeless drifters, river workers, and obstinate fishermen.

Our family dog is, for the most part, very well behaved. Her moments of noncompliance are few and relatively specific, and even these are usually tempered somewhat if my father is around to scold her. Her primary problem is with the mail, which, if given the chance, she utterly destroys in a repetitive effort to show the mailman how he and his baggage are not welcome at our house. Her second, and far more disagreeable bad habit, is to find and roll around in dead things. My mother has come to terms with the fact that most of the walks the dog takes to the levee will require a bath to remove the stink of road kill or dead fish, and for his part, my father usually lets the dog off the leash on these walks, thus having very little say in what the dog ultimately decides to frolic in. Since the dog is so often out of reach, we each take the liberty of avoiding hard questions or upsetting topics of conversation by interrupting each other to call her back close to us. It is just as I am doing this that I see her black tail, swinging happily back and forth, perched in front of a blue tarp slung low across a rope between two sagging cottonwoods. There is a pile of trash surrounding the tarp, along with a cooking pot and a collection of PVC pipes, all lightly frosted with snow. Before she can roll in anything, my father yells sharply to the dog, and we stand still in the dark shade as she reluctantly makes her way back to our feet.

“The trail I like to follow takes us this way down past the barges,” my father says to me, pointing upstream and away from the tarp, “there’s a sculpture some guy made in a clearing with a great view of the river.”

I nod without looking at his face, and as we begin to walk onward, I stop abruptly and loosen the cinched laces of my hood. “Dad, I don’t suppose you think anyone was in that tent, huh?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s snowing. Worse yet, I think it’s sleeting now. Most of the bums I meet up here only sleep in these woods temporarily. There’s this one guy who lives out by the Airport in a trailer who hides here for weeks from his wife, so as to drink in peace. He goes home eventually, though.”

“But still…”

“And you know that shirtless guy who built the tree-stand down by the power lines? The one who does that dance and builds the bonfires? He tells me that he has two houses that he can run to whenever the river comes up.”

“Somehow I don’t think these guys all have houses,” I say. I can feel the frustrated adolescent deep inside me getting angry because I know he’s not really talking to me as much as he is trying to push me past this scene. I suddenly think of the long drives our family used to take up to New England, one in particular, where driving through Virginia I’d needed to pee, forcing us to pull over at a break in the trees along the highway. Dad had exited the car with me, and we both climbed across the ditch and into the woods, I deeper than he because at the time I was terrified of the idea that passing motorists could see me urinating. Standing behind a hedge of undergrowth, I had just finished when I noticed a group of black garbage bags, all piled into a rut at the base of a tall birch tree. I still remember the pieces of white bark, peeled off in places, resting noticeably, almost obscenely on the black bags. The bags were large and oblong, and as I walked closer, the skin on my neck and forearms began to burn and my stomach twisted. I called to my dad, who stumbled through the brush to my side.

“Dad, those bags look big,” I managed.

“People just dump their garbage wherever is most convenient,” my father replied cheerily, taking my shoulders and pulling me slowly back towards the road.

“Dad, they don’t look like garbage,” I said. He moved in front of me and retraced my steps past the piss-mark to a distance where he could almost touch the bags. He held his hand up to his nose and mouth, and looked around. I was tensing every tiny muscle, expecting something terrible to suddenly sweep out of the woods and chase me screaming back to the car. My father walked back to me, picked me up violently over his shoulders, and walked briskly away without stopping. I tried to talk to him but he was silent.

“Dad, are we going to call the police?”

“What?” my mother called from the inside of the car, and in a moment I was safely sealed behind upholstery and steel, the windows rolled up and smeared with my desperate, rapid breath.

We take turns calling out to the dog, who, confused, circles us in the icy underbrush. I tell Dad it’s Christmas a number of times, and eventually he shakes his head and gingerly steps towards the blue tarp, whistling loudly.

“Hey-OH,” he calls, “Is any one in there?”

“Ask if they’re okay,” I whisper to him, and he calls out again. The gurgling of the river and the snapping of branches greet our numbed ears, and after a moment Dad returns through the bare, skeletal bushes and looks upriver.

“No people, no bodies,” he says.

“I just wanted to be sure. What were you so afraid of by taking a look?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Dad.”

“Maybe I was a little afraid,” he says, “People can be tricky. I’d prefer my woods without people if it were possible – they are the only things you’d ever need to ever worry about out here.”

“I just thought that someone might need some help,” I say.

He looks back at me and smiles. “Surprise a man in his home and you’re more than likely to be on the losing end of things.”

The dog has lost interest in us and has moved upriver. After a moment, we follow.

Half an hour passes, and while we are not yet too cold to continue, water has seeped and drained and squeezed through seams and zippers so that our rain jackets are doing nothing more than trapping our damp body heat and sagging off our limbs like wet plastic. We find the statue that Dad wanted to see, but much of its lower half has been washed away by high water. What remains is the torso of a mannequin, streaked with faded paint and caked in mud and weeds, resting gorily with arms twisted against the sloping Y of a tree-trunk. He tells me that a bunch of local artists had thrown a party in the woods and built a Madonna statue, positioning her on a bed of concrete so that her legs were spread wide open and facing a second dummy riding on a motorcycle. The rusted frame of the motorcycle is covered in silt and snow a few feet away at the river’s edge, giving the impression of a fatal crash buried by time and now exhumed by the restless waters of the Mississippi. From our tiny clearing, we can see out across the river, its raging swells somehow placated by the soft touch of sleet prickling its chilly skin. Tree trunks drift past in the flow, and we stop to watch the shapes move by and drink the thermos of tea dad has carried in his jacket. When we rise to head out, we notice first that the dog is missing.

The bright chilly sky has begun to fade and darken, and beneath the snowy tree limbs we scramble from one chunk of dry land to another, calling out to the dog. I feel like there is a tinge of panic in my father’s voice as he yells her name over and over, but it is likely that my own fears are finding a home in the timbre of his voice. My father is rarely panicked.

“She’s probably found something dead to play with,” Dad offers, taking the lead along the water’s edge, peering into the rapidly-darkening undergrowth. We step across huge, manhole-sized chain links holding the dark rusty barges close against the bank. The links plunge into the snow-covered sand, with the roots and stems of aggressive saplings winding through and over them, desperate to attach to something permanent. “There are also wild pigs out here,” he continues between breaths, “although I’d have to guess that they are around more in the summer. Man, she loves to chase those things, though.”

We reach a point where the soil beneath our feet rises noticeably up to a ridge that runs perpendicular into the river. Beyond the trees ahead of us, an open muddy field stretches out to the base of a gargantuan metal tower, the top of which is nearly lost in the snowy clouds. Running thinly through the gray sky, power cables disappear from the top of the tower into the oblivion on the far side of the river. To our left, the last of the parked barges sits chained to the mud, and to our right, the last corners of the floodplain woods stand grimly by. As we step into the foliage, I see a flash of movement and I jump ahead of my father, who is looking behind us and rubbing his wrinkled chin in a worried fashion. A few more steps and the river is lost to me, with wet branches scratching my face and my eyes adjusting to the spectrum of deep, shifting shadows. Then I stop, as ahead of me, nestled against a crooked sapling, and surrounded by a mock-fence of disfigured driftwood, sits a tent.

Dad appears at my side, and for a moment we each look in every direction but ahead of us, imagining with our hopeful hearts the sight of a little black dog trotting up to us from some other hidden spot. My father steps past me and shouts the dog’s name, this time louder than I have heard his voice echo since I was a child. There is alarm, purpose, fear, and aggression in his call, and he shouts again, loud enough to alert any living thing huddled in this frozen muddy darkness to our presence. A corner of the tent then moves, and my face and forearms are suddenly burning. The tent is a single-sleeper, and by the looks of it, relatively new. It is green, with a black rain fly strung handily between the tree limbs above it. There is no mess, no rotting garbage or food wrappers floating in the watery snow. Along the edge of the fabric by the doorway, which stands partially unzipped, something moves again, pushing the tent’s surface outward. My father speaks her name, and we hear the rattle of the dog’s collar as she pokes her snowy muzzle out into the twilight to greet us. I take a step forward in relief before realizing that behind her there rests a pair of boots.

The dog won’t come out of the tent, and in the now near-darkness, we can barely make out that she is eating something. My dad yells to her, but for what seems like endless, numbing minutes, the dog refuses to come out of the tent.

She’s trapped.

Something is holding her.

Or she is eating something.

Something with boots.

Black plastic bags, hidden in a woods where nobody goes. Put the body in a tent, make it look like a homeless guy taking a nap. The river will take it away with the next high water, the river is deep and keeps what she takes.

My father has circled around the outside of the driftwood lodged into the muddy snow, ducking past branches to get a closer look. I make several stuttered attempts towards the tent, but he now waves me back angrily with his hand. We are now only silhouettes against a deep heavy gray, our movement advertising our existence and our stillness cloaking it away again. Without warning, my father walks briskly across the clearing to the tent and reaches inside, and I stand paralyzed in the snow, with eyes wide and straining to absorb all the light the sudden motion will afford me. He pulls something up into his arms and suddenly there is a commotion inside the tent and someone is yelling fuck fuck FUCK and bitter spit is on my lips and choking my dry throat as it is me who is yelling as I am watching now some different movie where the dark woods come alive with the evil plots of some previously unnoticed, unimagined cinematic horror.

And there he is. It is a man, swaying unsteadily with a bottle in hand, bare feet plunged to the ankle in frozen mud. He is shorter than my father, who clutches the dog at his chest, but it is hard to make out what is happening in the shadows with the deafening orchestra of my imagination still screaming discordantly in my head.

The man holds the bottle out to my father, and then touches the dog. He pets the dog, and I begin to feel the cold at my fingers and toes creep back into my consciousness.

They are talking.

Someone is laughing.

From the river, a tug drifts past, close to shore, looking for docking space against the barges. My father shakes the man’s hand, gives him the thermos from his jacket, and steps gingerly past the driftwood to where I stand, fists still clenching and unclenching.

“Hey-OH” comes a call from the tug.

The dog licks my ear and Dad takes my shoulder gently.

“Hey-oh,” another voice echoes back from the barge dock.

We trudge quietly out through the remaining underbrush and up the near face of the levee. At the peak now shimmering with melting snow, we are greeted by the dim night-overlook of uptown, lit in the winking, early-evening glow of windows and streetlamps.

"I can't believe the poor guys on that tug are working on Christmas," dad says to me.

Above us, the sleet has turned to a cold, steady rain.