OCR Text |
Show RFVER turned a corner onto the much-brighter main street, where the bones of the old buildings were trimmed with neon and plastic. It was a Saturday afternoon and the street was filled with farmers, and farm wives mixed with teenagers, winos, workers, and assorted other Americans. I bought a sandwich from a street vendor and went looking for the post office. Cairo had its quota of gas stations, burger parlors, supermarkets, churches, and liquor stores, but its police station would have made Cheops jealous. It was four stories tall, windowless, and so square that it seemed to be hewn from one massive block of yellow stone. The wide lawn that surrounded it on three sides was littered with cannons left over from the last four or five wars. On the street side there was an enormous flagpole. The building looked large enough to contain the entire able-bodied population of Cairo with room left over for any geriatrics that might get out of hand. Behind all this awesome law and order, dwarfed into insignificance, was the post office. It was closed, but I climbed the steps and looked out west over row upon row of ancient black row houses, ugly tenements that must have been slums even before they had sagged beneath the weight of fifty summers and generations of hard-pressed humanity. Even in the weak light of the late winter sun, Cairo sweated ugliness. Police were everywhere. I was accustomed to living in the woods where I never saw police and they made me nervous. Uneasiness hung over Cairo like a cloud of swamp gas and I felt like I was breathing it in. I went back to my boat and rowed out onto the last mile of the Ohio River. I had the Army Corps of Engineers' charts for the lower Mississippi that showed a park at the confluence of the rivers. Between the river wall and the park the waterfront was filled with activity. Across the river a mass of barges six -13- |