Nowhere Else To Go (Excerpt)
“I’m going down to the Delta,” she announced as they drove through the tree-shaded streets of the college district. She needed that stream-fed place because it was no-place, merely a bit of land between bridges that connected the suburbs to the rest of the town. But it was home.
“Now?” Ben raised his eyebrows.
“I’ve been promising Ken I’d take him to sail his boat.” The company of their ten-year-old son sounded more than good—an essential relief. “And I haven’t checked on Dad in too long.” Family time, their usual summer occupation, had been all but absent this year. “And I need a Delta fix,” she finished.
“Okay.” He shrugged and turned into their drive. He’d never understood what she saw in that backwater—except that she’d grown up there. She didn’t know either, but she had to go to reorient before she opened the doors of that school tomorrow morning. A half-hour later she’d changed into jeans and sneakers, rounded up her ten-year-old and his model sailboat and headed for the backwater between the bridges. At the little green and white clapboard bungalow that was her childhood home, she picked up her father and together they headed for one of the many ponds that laced the lowland. “Black Suds Pond” to the children. With father and grandson settled comfortably into each other’s company, she was left to find out why everything seemed so wrong.
She tramped the edge of the pond, letting the muck soak into her sneakers, and the first crispness of Midwestern autumn lighten the weight on her shoulders. This is what she needed. This piece of land had once been an island formed by a fork of the Blackwater where it flowed into the Red River. Then Josiah Norton had dredged the main channel so his barges could bring timber from the north, and the island became a marshy no-man’s-land. As she walked, Cassie felt the vise on her neck release its grip.
She looked down at her muddy feet, then up and across the marsh where the Delta had gradually joined itself to the junkyards and factory chimneys of The Flats. She supposed it was ugly, though she’d never thought of it as anything but part of her world. A part the school board had now joined to Red River Junior High. Memory came back of the tight faces of subdivision parents last spring when the board had announced the redistricting. Their rumblings were easy enough to read. Bad enough that the skuzzy bunch from Delta Elementary flowed across the bridge that was supposed to barricade them, now the board had opened the floodgates to the blacks of The Flats. She turned in irritation and stomped upstream.
Then she froze. Her foot had broken through to water. She stood, knowing it hadn’t been just a pile of driftwood that had collapsed, and watched the water pour over her sneaker out of someone’s carefully constructed still-water pond.
