By the time I got word that there was a body in the Mississippi River, the sheriff had already deployed the county rescue boat to recover the corpse. Normally, I would dispatch a staff reporter to document this, but because my source sounded pretty sure the dead man was Buck Ferris, I know I have to go myself. Which presents difficulties. For me, water and death are inextricably entwined. I never go down to the river—or even drive across it on the high bridge—unless I have no other choice. That can make living in a river town pretty inconvenient.
Today I have no choice.
Before I leave the Watchman offices, I call Quinn Ferris, Buck’s wife. Quinn treated me like a son when I was at her house, which was often and for long periods. Despite my having been absent from Bienville for twenty-eight years (excepting the last five months), we’re close enough that I know she would rather get tragic news from me than from the police or the coroner. As I feared, word has already reached her—the curse of a small town. She’s running around her house, trying to find her keys so that she can get down to the river. Because she lives fifteen miles out in the county, Quinn desperately wants to start toward town, but I somehow persuade her to wait at home until I call with confirmation of what is still only a rumor.
My SUV is parked in the employee lot behind the newspaper building. We’re only four blocks from the bluff, where Front Street slices down the two-hundred-foot drop to the river at a forty-degree angle. Pulling out onto Buchanan Street, I go over what my source told me on the phone. About 8:40 a.m. a retired kayaker discovered a man he believed to be Buck Ferris wedged in the fork of a cottonwood snag in the Mississippi River, four hundred yards south of the Bienville landing. The kayaker didn’t know Buck well, but he’d attended a couple of his archaeological presentations at the Indian Village. Anyone who knows the Mississippi River recognizes this story as a miracle. If Buck hadn’t floated by chance into the fork of that tree, he might have drifted all the way to Baton Rouge or New Orleans before being discovered, if he was found at all. A lot of people drown in the Mississippi, and while most are eventually recovered, there are times when the river god refuses to give up his dead.
Dread settles in my stomach as I drive down the steep incline of Front Street to what locals call Lower’ville—short for Lower Bienville—but which the Chamber of Commerce calls the Riverfront. The Mississippi is already high, even for spring, and a brisk breeze is kicking up whitecaps on its broad, muddy surface. Pulling my eyes from the water, I focus on the cars parked along the timber guardrail blocking the precipitous drop to the river, but this does little to calm my anxiety. I’ve tried for more than thirty years to rid myself of what is surely a phobia about this river, but I’ve failed.
I’m going to have to gut it out.
Two narrow streets are all that remain of Lower’ville, the den of the demimonde who lived in the shadow of the Bienville bluff in the nineteenth century. Two hundred years ago, this infamous river landing offered flatboatmen and steamboat crews everything from gambling and fancy women to prime whiskey and rentable dueling pistols. Through Lower’ville moved a brisk trade in everything from long-staple cotton to African slaves, enriching the nabobs who lived in the glittering palaces atop the bluff and whose money flowed back into the district as payment for exclusive vices.
Today all that has changed. The relentless river has reduced Lower’ville to two parallel streets and the five short alleys that link them, most of which are lined with tourist bars and restaurants. The Sun King Gaming Company maintains a small office and transit bus stop here to serve its garish Louis Quatorze–themed casino, which stands a mile upriver. A local tour operator runs open-air buses from down here, and a whiskey distiller practices his craft in an old warehouse butted against the foot of the bluff. Everything else is overpriced shops. There are no whores, steamboat captains, knife-wielding flatboatmen, or pistol duels. The duels happen in Bucktown these days, the weapons of choice being the Glock and the AR-15. For gambling you have to shuttle upriver to the Sun King. I almost never visit this part of town, and on the rare occasion that I’m forced to meet someone in one of the river-facing restaurants, I sit with my back to the picture windows, so I don’t have to look at the big water.
Today I won’t have the luxury of avoiding my stressor. Parking my Ford Flex a few feet from the river’s edge, I spy the county rescue boat anchored in the current a quarter mile south of the landing, a hundred yards out in the river. A broken line of people stands watching the desultory action on the water. Three-quarters of a mile beyond the bobbing boat, the low shore of Louisiana hovers above the river. The sight from this angle brings on a wave of nausea, partly because of the river, but also because I’m starting to internalize the reality that Buck Ferris could have left the planet last night while I slept in my bed. I knew he might be in danger, yet wherever he went last night, he went alone.
Forcing myself to look away from the opposite shore, I walk downstream from the gawkers to get a clear line of sight to the boat. Without binoculars I can’t see much, but the two deputies on board appear to be trying to wrestle something out of the water on the far side of the boat.
There are three kinds of snags in the river, all of which could, and did, wreck many a steamboat back in the age of Mark Twain. The worst is the “planter,” which occurs when an entire tree uprooted by the river wedges itself into the bottom and becomes braced by accumulating silt. Often showing only a foot or two of wood above the water, these massive trees lever gently up and down in the current, waiting to rip deadly gashes in the hulls of boats steered by careless pilots. Given the deputies’ obvious difficulties, I figure they’re struggling to free the corpse from a half-submerged fork in a planter. Even after accomplishing this, they’ll have to deadlift his body over the gunwale of the rescue boat, which is no easy task. As I ponder their predicament, the obvious question runs through my mind: What are the odds that a man who fell into a mile-wide river would float into one of the few obstacles that could have stopped him from being washed toward the Gulf of Mexico?
While I watch the sweat-stained backs of the deputies, a whirring like a swarm of hornets passes over my head, pulling my attention from the boat. Looking up, I see a small quad-rotor drone—a DJI, I think—zoom out over the water at about a hundred feet of altitude, making for the sheriff’s department boat. The drone ascends rapidly as it approaches the craft; whoever is piloting it obviously hopes to avoid pissing off the deputies. Knowing the Tenisaw County Sheriff’s Department as I do, I doubt that pilot will have much luck.
One deputy has already noticed the drone. He waves angrily at the sky, then lifts binoculars to his face and starts panning the riverbank in search of the pilot. I follow his gaze, but all I see is a couple of city cops doing the same thing I am, scanning the line of rubberneckers for someone holding a joystick unit in their hands.