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Show RTVER river I'd gotten to know so well. The pilots talked to other tows coming up river, negotiating how they'd pass the other boats before they were even in sight. The pilots all knew each other and they'd shoot the breeze and trade insults. Through the day we visibly rolled deeper into springtime, down past Natchez on its high proud bluff and into the flat, lush jungle of the delta. I still felt weird as hell, both stunned and enlightened, my very skin electric, but mostly I felt good, awed, joyous, the way I felt the day after I lost my virginity. I also seemed to be hornier than I'd ever been in my life. I couldn't keep my mind off women and when my mind was on women it was like that electric skin had caught fire. Lord it was strange. Maybe it was a natural reaction to coming so close to death, but whatever it was, it was very powerful. I felt terrible about Thor, dragging him across country to meet a watery grave under about the lousiest possible conditions. Thor was a damn good dog and I betrayed him. There'd been no sign of him in the river and I hated to think about what could and probably did happen to him. The only thing Thor would know under all that hideous steel was that it was horrible. I talked to a deckhand who said he thought Thor might have made it. He'd seen deer swimming the river get run over by towboats and come out all right. I hoped, but knowing Thor, he probably never figured out what had hit him. The day rolled away up in the pilot house and Olinda Chotin churned into the lower river where the current slowed as it approached the sea. We passed into a new and different climate now. The banks had already exploded into the full bloom of spring and the air was beginning to settle into the liquid southern heat of summer. In the evening there were all the T-bone steaks you could eat (I ate a few) and with the last fading of the thick twilight we rounded the wild and -217- |