King of Daring
A Story
by GUY NUNN
IT WAS during a flat period in the depression, when for months things moved neither up nor down, became neither better nor worse, that some of the children of the gulleyside community fell into the custom of making the long, adventurous trip up the river bed to where the water was deep. There were times, of course, when the river was deep from its beginnings, far up in the distant mountains, all the way down through the city. But this happened only once or twice a year, when the rain slid off the smooth hide of the mountains, converged in long ravines, and then funneled into the unsuspecting bed of the Los Angeles. Then the water was high and rushed in muddy anger through the city, cutting fresh banks here, washing out a wooden shack there, finally to spew fresh mud from the Sierra Madres into the astonished sea. It was a brief phenomenon, but violent. It was terrifying, while it lasted, but quickly forgotten.
Now the wide bed of the river was bleached with months of rainless exposure to the sun. Only a thin and meandering line down its center betrayed it as a still active river. Vagrants clambered down its rocky banks at night to sleep beneath bushes in the sand at its edges. In the early morning they could be seen cooking unconcernedly over small fires among the rocks of the river bottom, or rinsing shirts in the slow trickle of water which continued despite the hottest summer suns.
Clem White’s boy Sam had discovered the deep place three miles up the river. Sam was twelve, or thought he was. (His father reckoned he was ten, but was not too sure, having left such things to the boy’s mother, who was long dead.) Sam usually had little else to do than to adventure. The father and his son were the only Negroes left now in the gulley. The other family had gone away one Sunday, leaving no word as to their destination and possibly not knowing themselves.
Because Clem was so much in the city, working or looking for work or talking with cronies about why there was so little work to be looked for, Sam had reached his ten or twelve years as a very independent boy. He was a little older than Pepe or Miguel, but seemed to them at least ten years advanced in sophistication and knowledge of the world. When he dropped in on the Alfierro family one morning to announce his discovery of the deep place in the river, the two Mexican boys imagined that he had penetrated far into some strange land. “How far you got to go to get there?” asked Pepe.
“Ain’ far ‘tall,” said Sam. “Reckon I git up theah an’ back in two, thee howahs. Cose, I ain’ shoht in the laigs like you-all. But you-all’d be scaired to go.”
“No we wouldn’t! You show us the way?” Pepe would have preferred not to include Miguel, but feared that if he cut him out, the younger brother would protest the whole scheme to their mother.
“Reckon I could, but you-all gotta keep up with me. Cain’ be waitin’ all day fo’ no shoht-laigged fohks.” An invitation to take them to the deep place was precisely what Sam had been waiting for, but it wouldn’t do to seem too willing to hand out favors to kids who weren’t even ten years old.
It took less than two hours to reach the spot. They followed the bed of the river, under the bridge, up along the base of the steep mountain which became Elysian Park at its top, and which was the farthest point to which the younger boys had ever ventured, under another bridge, which Pepe and Miguel had never seen. They did not dawdle, as they usually did when walking the river bed, looking behind every large rock for lizards or snakes. They walked rapidly — Sam anxious to demonstrate the superiority of his long legs, the two Mexican boys anxious not to be left behind.
They came finally upon a place where the trough of the river deepened and widened. Up on the hillside to the northwest they could see many large houses, their tiled roofs bright and beautiful in the morning sun. Straight ahead, Sam pointed, was the place where the water was deep. There the banks were artificially dug out in places. The marks of the teeth of steam shovels still streaked the dark adobe slopes. Some kind of excavation had been made here. Around the place rose a few concrete pilings of different heights. Two pilings, one low and one high, were set on opposite sides of a small pool.
Around the edges of the pool were abandoned concrete walls, some with the form planks removed, some still in wooden jackets. The construction had been abandoned abruptly. From the pilings and the walls protruded long pieces of metal, twisted and pointing out desolately at diverse angles. The water in the pool was a deep black, even with the sun upon it. Over much of the surface rested a frothy scum of algae. Through the center of the pool there was a scarcely visible current, spilling over a thick wall stained many shades of yellow and green, and moving on in the worm-like river channel.
For a moment the three boys gazed at the surface of the pool thoughtfully. Pepe and Miguel were impressed.
“Looks deep,” said Pepe.
“Man,” said Sam, “nobody don’ know how deep that water is. That’s a well, that is. That’s deeper’n any water I ever swum in.”
“Can you swim?” Miguel had never known anyone who could swim.
“Kin I swim! I wuz bohn swimmin’. My daddy thowed me in the river whin I wuzzn’ no bigger’n ‘at stone over yonder. He said, ‘Boy, git to swimmin’ or I gonna whale the whey outta you.’ So I swum. Reckon they ain’ prackly nobody kin swim good as me.”
“Could you swim across this water?” There was wonderment in Pepe’s voice, as if he were inquiring into the possibility of a miracle. Pepe had never known anyone who could swim, either.
“Easy as nothin’.” It was for this that Sam had maneuvered the expedition. He stripped off his tattered shirt and trousers and plunged into the black water with a flat splash. Sam could swim, all right. With a few flailing strokes he reached the wall opposite and grasped a thin bar of metal which stuck out from the wall a foot above the water’s surface. His wet black hair glistened in the sun and his face broke into a proud grin.
“I kin dog-paddle, too. Watch.” He pushed off with his feet, slid to the center of the pool, and there remained stationary, his hands and feet moving in slow rotations beneath the surface.
“I kin stay up ‘thout han’s, too. Watch.” He held both hands above his head, only the motion of his legs sustaining him. Pepe and Miguel watched in round-eyed envy.
“C’mon in,” Sam yelled. “I’ll save you iff’n you gonna drownd.”
2
AT the mere suggestion, Miguel backed away from the edge of the pool. Pepe was no less afraid, but he was even more in fear of being lorded over by Sam later. He pulled off his shirt and trousers. Naked, he stooped to feel the forbidding water with his hand. He stood up again, hesitated, then noticed a protruding bar just beneath the surface of the pool. Grasping the bar with both hands, he lowered himself grudgingly into the water. The goose-pimples of fear rose over the brown skin of his entire body. For a few seconds he panted heavily, as though the water around his chest were a great vise, about to crush him. The fear and the tenseness left him. The lightness of his body was reassuring.
Sam shouldered his way through the water to his side. “Now, jes’ leggo that bar and move yo’ ahms an’ laigs slow, like this.” Pepe dropped one arm and copied the motion. He would not drop the other until Sam came behind him, grasped him under the arms, and jerked him forcibly downward. Pepe’s head went under. He came up thrashing desperately, wild with fear, grasping blindly for the bar. It was several seconds before he found it, and by the time he did, his furious flailing had driven the fear from him. He could even smile a little at Sam’s encouragement. “Theah, man, you-all was doin’ it! You-all was swimmin’, man! Jes’ like I done whin my daddy thowed me in ‘at river. Man, you was really swimmin’!”
Miguel would not come in the water that day or the next. But on the third trip, watching Pepe’s progress and emboldened by it, he dropped himself shiveringly into the pool from the protruding bar. He was longer in learning to swim than Pepe. Miguel suffered no shame in being afraid, felt no humiliation in acknowledging that both his brother and Sam were bolder than he was. He took his time about risking the center of the pool. It was several days, in fact, before he would take both hands from the bar at the same time, dog-tread for a few seconds, then grasp the bar again. If either of the other boys approached him to pull him free of it, he would kick at them with frenzied screams and scramble up on the concrete wall. As the unquestioned youngest of the three, Miguel could afford the luxury of being uninhibitedly afraid.
After the first few visits to the pool, Sam had exacted a promise from the two brothers that they would not tell the other boys in the gulley community about their spot. “Jes’ spoil evvythin’ iff’n evvybody knows ‘bout it. We jes’ say nothin’ an’ keep it fo’ us.”Pepe had agreed readily enough to keeping the location secret, but as his confidence grew and he could float as easily as Sam and swim nearly as well, he suffered from a great temptation to tell others, that he might amaze them as Sam had him. John Arzemanian, for example. He would like to watch John Arzemanian’s face while he, Pepe Alfierro, only nine years old, tread water with both hands above his head, as easy as anything. John might be going on fourteen and know lots of songs in foreign languages and tell lots of stories about Turks with long knives, but he, Pepe Alfierro, only nine years old, could tread water with both hands above his head. Well, he wouldn’t invite John to the pool just now, but pretty soon he’d take it up with Sam. Sam shouldn’t hold him too hard to a promise made before he could even tread water without both hands above his head.
With each trip, Sam felt his supremacy a whisper more threatened by Pepe, who was beginning to talk almost as an equal. “ Bet we can swim better’n any them kids on the road, can’t we, Sam? Bet we could even swim the ocean, if we could get there, couldn’t we, Sam?”
“Yeah, reckon we could, all right,” Sam would say, but the luster of unchallenged excellence was slightly tarnished. He didn’t exactly resent Pepe’s implied assumption of equality. That was a tribute, in a way, to his tutelage; but still, he was Sam White, the lonely adventurer, the pathfinder, the king of the gulleyside in daring. He was Sam White, and twelve years old, even if his daddy did say he was only ten. He was not ready for a partnership in prowess with anybody only nine years old.
Sitting in black nakedness on the edge of the pool, Sam watched Pepe turn a somersault in the water. “Lookee here,” Pepe yelled as he surfaced. “I can go round twice without takin’ a breath. Watch.” He did two rolls and came up gasping.
Sam jumped to his feet. It was not for him to imitate a mere pupil. He would put this nine-yearold in his proper place. He would do a deed before which even a grown man would quail, even Jack Johnson, maybe, the bravest man that ever was. “I gonna show you sump’n that really sump’n, man. You jes’ git outta that water an’ watch. I gonna really show you-all sump’n.”
He went to the taller of the two pilings and pulled his way to its top on the extending bars. Pepe and Miguel watched in amazement. It had never occurred to either of them to climb to the top of the piling. It just looked impossible. The thing stood three times the height of any of them above the water. But Sam did it. He went from one reinforcement bar to another as though he’d done it a hundred times, up and up. The last pull was a hard one, but he grasped the edge of the top and pulled his body right up until his waist was level with it, then got one knee over the edge, and the next thing they knew he was standing there looking down on them from an incredible height.
“Man, I kin really see things fom up heah.” He cupped his hands to his mouth as he yelled down at them, a cunning gesture to make the distance between him and them seem greater.
“What can you see?” Pepe yelled back.
“Mos’ evvythin’. They’s a cop over there and millions a cars. Millions a cars. They stretched out so long I cain’ see the en’ of ‘em. I kin see some hohses, too, with people on ‘em. Pity you cain’ see them hohses. They real pretty. Cose, you-all got to be able to climb up heah ‘fo’ you kin see nothin’. I’ll tell you-all later ‘bout what I kin see up heah. Pity you-all cain’ climb up like I done.”
He was turning the screw deftly. This had been a real inspiration. There wouldn’t be any more “we” talk from Pepe Alfierro from now on. He was a nice boy, Pepe, but just a shade presumptuous for a nine-year-old. Sam looked down into the two brown faces staring up at him in frank wonder and admiration. Now he would cap the climax. Now he would seal the fame of Sam White. This deed would echo down the gulleyside into the streets below. Even on Central Avenue, kids would know of what Sam White had done. Sam White, king of daring. Little kids would follow him in the street and whisper and point. “That’s Sam White. He’s the one who done it. He’s the only one who ever — ”
The dive was clean. His black body cut the black water almost noiselessly. As it disappeared, there was a hollow “thunk.” The water closed in on the hole he left and there was a vertical spurt three feet above the surface where his feet went under. Around the point of entrance the water surged up and back, then quieted into a series of rapidly expanding circular ripples.
3
THE brothers watched the ripples die. The surface of the pool heaved slightly at the edges, up and down, up and down, then was still.
Miguel stopped holding his breath first. The sound of it broke in the thick silence like a roar in Pepe’s ears. He stood up. His eyes played over the pool from one corner to another. The feather-light fingers of a strange fear were beginning to thrum somewhere in his chest. With an effort he thought the sensation away. He made himself say something, to make the thought more persuasive.
“Bet he’s gonna pop up and try to scare us,” he said. His voice came out so weak and wavery that it startled him. There was a dryness, a contraction, in his throat. Unconsciously he ran his hand over it as if to rub it away. He looked at Miguel, to find the smaller boy staring into his face, waiting for a cue on what attitude to take. He got it. The fear ran back and forth between them, growing stronger with each passage, becoming a current. Pepe felt himself becoming hysterical. His legs were weak beneath him.
A cry broke from his throat, a shrill, sobbing cry: “Sam! Sam! Come up!” He threw himself, face down, on the ground at the edge of the pool and tried to force his eyes to see through the opaque skin of the water. “Sam!” The anguished echo of his voice made him ashamed. He was calling upon Sam to help him because he was afraid, but it was Sam who was beneath the black water. The shame drove some of the fear from him. He got to his feet and hurriedly slipped on his shirt and trousers.
“Miguel. You stay and watch. I will find someone to help.”
Miguel followed him with his eyes as he raced up the steep bank. He did not want to stay behind with his own fear and the black water which had swallowed up Sam, but Pepe had told him to stay and he would stay.
By the time he reached the top of the bank, Pepe’s lungs were hurting him. Each panting inhalation pulled air across the raw surface of something inside his chest, like sandpaper being drawn across tender flesh. Across an open field and beyond a wide boulevard he saw people. He ran toward them as fast as he could force his legs to move over the soft, weedcovered earth. The people seemed like tiny specks against a distant horizon. He would never reach them in time, his mind kept drumming; he would never reach them in time. A feeling of desperate helplessness clung to him as he ran. He wanted to throw himself headlong on the ground and weep out his impotence and terror, but something kept him running.
Opposite the point where he reached the boulevard was a large riding academy, approached from the sidewalk by a wide, curving gravel path. A woman in a riding habit had just reached the sidewalk from the path and turned west toward a line of parked cars when Pepe slid through a thick current of traffic and stopped on the sidewalk a few feet before her. The woman was walking rapidly, eyes down, searching in her purse for car keys. She did not notice him. To avoid being stepped on, Pepe began walking backward before her, panting so heavily he could not speak. His gasps finally caught her attention. She looked up from her purse, still walking. At last the boy could talk.
“Ma’m,” he sobbed, “Sam White—he’s in the water. He didn’t come up. He’s down there.” Pepe pointed off to the right toward the river and would have burst into tears but could not.
The woman hesitated, distracted. A look of confusion and annoyance came over her face. With a brief, mechanical gesture she lifted her left wrist and glanced at her watch. Her mind did not note the time. The gesture came because she had been in a hurry. Time had been on her mind. She hesitated, looked more confused, stopped walking. Behind her, from the intersection, she heard a traffic policeman’s brief whistle. The sound composed her.
“Look, sonny, run and tell the policeman there. He’ll help you.” She watched him run past her in the direction of the intersection, looked at her watch again, shrugged inwardly as though to shake off an uncomfortable thought, and went on to her car. All the way home a sly sense of guilt crept over her. “Well,” she thought, “what could I do? After all, it was probably nothing serious. I could have gone with him to the policeman, but that wouldn’t have helped anything. Besides, it is such a long way out to Pasadena and I couldn’t be late for Helen Trumbull’s cocktail party. Cute little things, though, those Mexican kids. Pity their parents wouldn’t put decent clothes on them.”
“Mr. Cop!” Pepe almost yelled as he approached the policeman in the center of the intersection. A car swerved sharply to avoid hitting him, and the driver swore at him out of the window. “Mr. Cop! Sam White is down there. He didn’t come up!”
The big policeman was tired. His relief was already fifteen minutes overdue. For hours the sun had been beating against his eyes. The sweat rolled secretly down his thighs and into his heavy shoes. His uniform was damp against him, and uncomfortable. And he didn’t like being called “Mr. Cop” by a ragged little Mexican brat.
“Who’s Sam White?” he asked gruffly, turning to change the direction of the traffic with a shriek of his whistle and a disgusted flick of his wrist.
“He’s our friend. He’s the black boy. He dove in and didn’t come up.” Pepe walked quickly around to be in front of the policeman. He looked up into the man’s moist face with desperate pleading.
“Dove in where?” The policeman asked the question without looking down. His eyes were fixed in bored abstraction on a billboard against the hill.
“In the water, in the deep place, and he didn’t come up.” Pepe began to sob.
The policeman’s slow mind was coming to grips with the situation. “He did, did he? Don’t you monkeys know you ain’t allowed to swim in the river? It’s against the law. You shouldn’t come on this side of town anyhow.”
The whistle went to his mouth again. The policeman turned, hand upraised, and changed the flow of traffic. Behind him there was a frantic squeal of brakes and a sudden crash. A roadster had piled into the rear of a large sedan. Even before the policeman could turn, the two drivers had jumped from their cars and commenced a furious argument. Slowly the policeman sauntered toward them, twirling the chain of his whistle around his index finger.
4
PEPE took a hesitant step after him, then fell prone upon the hot surface of the boulevard and gave way to his hopelessness, pounding his fists and forehead against the pavement in an agony of helpless frustration. He hoped that he would die, that this torture would kill him and then leave him.
A car stopped beside him. The driver stepped out and bent over him. “What’s the matter, kid? a voice asked. “Are you hurt?”
It was a moment before the boy could control his sobs to answer. “No, it’s Sam White. He’s dead under the water.”
“You mean in the river?” The voice was kind. Pepe raised his head and looked around at the man. “Yes, down there.” He pointed. The man reached down and lifted him to his feet.
“Let’s get in the car,” he said.
Rubbing his eyes, Pepe got in. The man drove across the intersection and turned off the boulevard into the field toward the river. Pepe looked up at him. He was a tall man with thick brown hair and a round, full face. He looked very strong, wrestling the wheel as the car swerved and slipped in the soft earth. Pepe felt better. The terrible burden was beginning to leave him.
The man stopped the car near the edge of the river-bank. Together they went to the edge. Pepe looked down. Miguel was not there. “My brother is gone,” he said. “I told him to wait.” The chill burden was coming back. He felt weak and worn-out.
“Was — is Sam your brother?” They were stumbling down the steep incline.
“No, Sam was my friend. Miguel is my brother. I told him to wait, but he is gone.” They reached the edge of the pool.
“Are you sure Sam is under the water?” The voice was gentle.
“He dove in from up there and didn’t come up.”
“How long ago did he dive in?”
Pepe was confused. How long ago was it? It seemed an age ago, but was it?
In the still ravine, standing beside the black water, he tried to remember how long ago it had been, but could not. Perhaps it had been only a dream, a sudden hope suggested. Perhaps it had not happened at all. Miguel was not there to confirm it, and the terror which his mind had been through had left him uncertain of anything. Perhaps —
The man noted his hesitation and said, “Maybe he came up all right and went home with your brother.”
Pepe grasped at the thought in ferocious joy. That was it! That was what had happened. Sam had come up all right and gone home with Miguel. His heart felt as though it were about to burst with the sudden welling of relief. A glad laugh bubbled out of his throat. Without a word he bounded off, down the curving bed of the river. He would catch up with them. He would catch up with them and throw sand down Sam’s neck — and then think of some good way to punish Miguel for not waiting. Some day, maybe, he would dive off the piling himself.
Now and again, as he ran with delirious lightness over the bleached sand of the river bed, his toughsoled feet crushed an imprint left by the feet of Miguel. If his eyes saw the single line of his brother’s fresh footprints, his mind took no heed. His mind had leaped far ahead, to Sam — to Sam White, who had stayed under to scare him and then come up all right; to Sam White, the king of daring.
5
AFTER that the two Alfierro boys never went back to the place where the water was deep. But Clem White went. He knew the spot well when Pepe first described it. Clem had worked there once, two years before. Used to build a fire every morning beneath a steam shovel to get the circulation moving in the monster; used to tend it; used to do everything the operator told him to do; even reckoned, once, he could handle the big-jawed beast himself if he had half a chance. That was two years ago.
The afternoon Pepe told him what had happened to Sam, Clem went to the deep place alone. He stood beside the pool until dark, looking at the black water. Then he walked home.
For several days Clem didn’t even try to look for work. Mornings he sat in his little house, doing nothing. Just sat there in a hard chair and let time spill over him like rain over a smooth rock. Then in the afternoon he walked up the river to the deep spot and stood looking into the pool until it was dark.
People on the gulleyside began to think Clem a little queer. Nobody had expected him to act like that. He never had paid much attention to Sam before — always let him do whatever he wanted. He seemed a little queer now even to Pepe and Miguel. Clem didn’t talk any more. Before, he used to talk quite a lot, and sing. If he came home a little drunk, before, he’d stop in at the Alfierros and sing for maybe an hour. He could sing even better, Pepe thought, than John Arzemanian could tell stories. But the song was gone from him now.
Something else was gone, too. He all but stopped eating. Pepe’s mother, Josefina, took things over to him, and once or twice John Arzemanian coaxed him into coming to his house for a bowl of the soup his father made. But what Josefina left for him went untouched as often as not, and what John could make him eat was pitifully little. Clem had just become queer, everybody guessed.
It must have been a week after it happened when Pablo, Pepe’s father, pulled a newspaper from the trash can near the intersection at Sunset and Figueroa and read the notice about the discovery of a body in a pool of the river, the body of a Negro boy who had been approximately eleven years old. The body had been submerged for several days. There wasn’t much doubt about it, Pablo decided. It was Sam. But he didn’t say anything to Clem or to his sons. Clem couldn’t read and the Alfierro boys rarely read newspapers. Pablo worried about it quite a bit, but in the back of his mind was a fixed feeling of certainty that it was right not to say anything.
It was hard not to say something, watching Clem shamble off day after day to the deep place, and knowing that the body was gone, knowing that it was down in a place the paper called the “morgue”; yet Pablo could not bring himself to do it.
For Pepe and Miguel, the terror of the afternoon when Sam went under the water and did not come up was short-lived. It was a year or more before Pepe could see the winding white ribbon of the river bottom without thinking of Sam, but each reminder dulled the poignancy of the recollection of the terrible afternoon. The thing had been so abrupt and so complete, so clean, that there were few trailing remnants on which memory could feed. It was as though Sam had simply gone away suddenly. In their minds there was a picture only of his disappearance, not of his death. Any time now, he might reappear, might drop frbm a tree -and challenge them to follow him to the topmost branch. Maybe, Pepe fancied often, maybe he’d found a secret channel beneath the deep place, a passage leading to strange and wonderful places. Sam, after all, had disappeared before for a day or two, to come back suddenly with stories of exciting adventures. This might be merely a longer absence, with a richer and more amazing return. Sam White, after all, was the king of daring.
It was not long before the boys looked on the queerness of Clem as something having no connection at all with Sam or the black pool. Clem was just queer. It was an accepted and interesting fact of life on the gulleyside, like the kindness of Lola Martinez, the flightiness of Carlos, the lonely and undemonstrative regularity of Mr. Arzemanian.
No one ever knew the first name of John Arzemanian’s father, not even John. Clearly he was a kind man, for it was he who had brought the pastries for the wedding party of Lombardo and Mrs. Adams, but he wore a high celluloid collar, a shiny black coat, and such an impenetrable reserve that no one so much as thought of calling him anything but Mr. Arzemanian. John, of course, could have been persuaded to ask him his first name had it occurred to anyone to put him up to it, but no one did. John called him “Papa” and everyone else called him “Mr. Arzemanian.” Years later, remembering the man, this seemed to Pepe an unusual thing, the more unusual because it had never before occurred to him that Mr. Arzemanian should have a first name.
One evening Clem did not return from the deep place in the river. And in a few days the house where he lived was rented to another family. It was not long before Carlos Martinez had started a legend about Clem. Carlos was drunk when he started it, but when he heard his own invention while sober it appealed to him so deeply that he repeated it frequently as though it were an independent fact, reliably reported by competent witnesses. The legend was that Clem, the night he did not come back, had dropped noiselessly into the black water to join his son.
All but Pablo in the community grew to believe it. Pablo did not believe it because he had seen Clem, on more than one afternoon, plodding slowly up the river bed in the direction of the deep place. Off and on for more than two years he saw him, looking older and thinner each time, his graying hair a little whiter.
Then one summer a great relief project was put into operation in the river bed. Many men were set to work, lining with stone the raw banks gnawed out by the river, building concrete retaining walls at every curve. Pepe’s burly uncle, Lombardo, worked a few days on a bridge which was put across the deep place. He said the appearance of the spot was changed completely when the bridge went up. The black pool was gone. The pilings were there still, but hidden unrecognizably in new masonry. Beneath the bridge the silver string of the river ran, no deeper than a man’s ankles. If this was the river up which the Spaniards had once sailed galleons, a sad change indeed had come upon it, Lombardo said. One could not drown a cat in such a river, not even a kitten.
After the work on the bridge began, Pablo no longer saw Clem trudging toward the deep place. He never saw or heard of Clem after that. Gradually he accustomed himself to acceptance of the legend begun by Carlos Martinez. He had wanted to believe it, even before his eyes told him it was not true. It was a good legend, and as the years passed and he grew older, his mind became less discriminating about the veracity of facts long accomplished. His eyes, he told himself, could have deceived him. It could have been another black man with gray hair growing whiter, walking north on the river bed toward the spot where the water was deep.