Three Men In A Boat On The Neponset River - Pt 2

 A June day in Eastern Massachusetts in the early morning on the water as cars gleam in the far distance and airplanes fly overhead and insects buzz on the shore and the water splashed and.... all was right with the world.

"I think one of my earliest memories was going to some amusement park with my parents and my sister and I were in little boats going round in a circle, I was about four or five years old," Johnny said as they paddled along, "I put my hand in the water and wondered if there were any fish that could bite me."  

"Afraid of fish in a barrel?" Dan remarked as struck a match to like a smoke.  He looked at the matchbook cover. "Raynham Dog Race Track, just picture that, dogs running, lots of barking, unable to bet on a bay" 

Dan looked up ahead at a small copse of trees on the bank, "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep... but...." The words trailed off as we splashed in the water. 

Daniel was a reader of books, he had almost been graduated from Boston Latin School, but quit in his senior year in a fight with his father.  For some reason.  All that Latin and Greek.... for an electrician.  Carpe Diem! The book Dan had read was from Hemingway, "Across the River and Into The Trees."

As the boat crossed the shadows of trees across the river Dan said, "I've had to much to drink and been tired and worn out, but, I didn't do what Papa Hemingway did and write a book about it.  A thin soup." 

Daniel said, "The Nobel Prize in Literature went to a foot-lose international traveler Elias Canetti' who wrote a three volume work.... about himself"  

Dan asked, "Does anyone have a book?"

Johnny said, "I have a notebook and a felt pen and a pencil and a few crayons."

Daniel replied, "I have a beat up paperback copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye' that I always keep in my backpack." He shrugged, "in case something happens."  

"Didn't that nut who shot President Reagan have a copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye?" asked Dan. "And the person who killed John Lennon in New York?"

Johnny was in the rear and acting as rudder with his paddle in the water.  "What a laugh, a bunch of funny magazine article strung together by a graduate of elite private schools who thinks the world has been unfair and put up a false front.... imagine that."  

"I'm outraged," shouted Dan.

"Aren't we all," whispered Daniel from the front.  "The river looks like cold tea, clear, a little brown, old leaves along the bottom..." 

"Look!" Johnny shouted, "the sign post up ahead, Mattapan Square.  I think they closed the Pappa Gino's restaurant in that old stone building next to the trolley station.  Too many robberies."

"Does the river have pirates?" asked Daniel.

"They are land based, and they see themselves as 'privateers' fighting some kind of 'get even' populist war against.... I know not who," mused Johnny, who often went off on lyrical nonsense with a kernel of damned truth.  

"There used to be two different toy model stores in Mattapan Square.  I remember looking through the window at about eleven years old and seeing plastic models of the American Civil War navy ships the Monitor and the Merrimack with a little Confederate Flag decal on one ship, a friend told me that someone was going to make the rebel flag illegal like the Nazi flag," Johnny related.  

The three men in the boat could see the bright orange trolleys moving in and out of Mattapan Station right next to the river.  

Johnny continued his personal history lesson.  "When I was in high school, senior year, Steve Keenan a friend and classmate at Boston Tech was down near the river drinking beer with friends.  The police came, the teens scattered, Steve Keenan ran onto the trolley tracks and was hit by a trolley and died.  At seventeen he got a full page picture and memorial at the back of the yearbook.  I remember a story of Steve standing on top of a snow bank plowed onto a sidewalk in Mattapan Square and reading from Coleridge's 'Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.'  Steve Keenan was a 'theater of the Absurd' performer when none of us had ever heard the word.  But, Steve's vaguely anarchistic performances in life came to an end on the edge of the Neponset River.   Requiescat in pace et in amore."  

Dan and Daniel raised their beer cans in solemn salute to one who fell in Mattapan.  

"Steve Keenan's bones are buried in The New Calvary Cemetery close to Walk Hill Street," Johnny sighed.  "And, we are left with lines of a poem about a men who killed a bird.... 

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.