THE MAN OF THE RIVER

 

The Man of the River

© 2024 By Gerard Thornton

 

               Some days I question my own memory of that one night, so many years back.  I was never prone to flights of fancy, but what I had witnessed bore no semblance of logic or reason.  Not on this earth, anyway.  As the days passed, I tried to forget the whole thing, but I couldn’t.  After a few too many pints at the pub, I would sometimes tell the story to whoever would listen.  I was usually met with either blank faces or heads shaking in disbelief.   No, they all told me.  Impossible, they told me. It wasn’t long before I just kept the tale to myself. 

It was November of 1933.  I was working as a barge captain aboard a decrepit wooden scow that hauled coal in the harbor. The barge was just named Number 13 and belonged to the Burns Bros. Coal Company.  It had no power and had to be towed from place to place.   As part of my duties aboard the barge, I helped the tugboat crews secure the hawsers when they came to make up the tow.  I kept a log of all cargoes loaded and discharged and recorded the times of all activity to report back to the owners.  When the barge was being discharged, I swept and shoveled any of the spilled cargo from the side decks back into the hopper.  I had to make sure the barge was kept in good repair at all times.  The wooden scow tended to leak, especially when loaded, so I was also tasked with pumping the bilge compartment using the old gas-powered trash pump.  It could be hard work, but I was younger then, and hard work never bothered me and besides, any work back in those days was good work.

               I remember the morning was very cold.  We were tied up at the old power plant on the Hackensack River and were waiting for the crane operator to begin discharging the coal.  I stamped down the deck to get the feeling back into my numbed toes, and I put some more slack in the bow line.  The tide was ebbing, and I could hear the lines beginning to strain.  I watched the current moving small rafts of rubbish out towards the harbor.   One never knew what would be floating by on any given day.  Here was a child’s ball; there was the battered head of a doll, its sightless eyes staring up at the sky.  Sometimes you’d find something of use.  I once fished a wooden crutch out of the river.  Another time, I saw a yellow slicker jacket swirling by, air trapped in the hood prevented it from sinking out of sight.  The jacket was in good shape, and I used it often when the weather turned sour, and it swung from the hook in the barge cabin for many years.

Anyway, on that day, after I was satisfied with the condition of all the mooring lines, I entered the little deckhouse back aft on the barge.  The chill was beginning to creep into the cabin, so I opened the little stove and stoked the coals.  Sparks popped afresh behind the stove grating.

               I settled down in the chair beside the stove and started on the crossword puzzle in the newspaper.  Just then I heard the clamshell bucket coming down from overhead. The discharge had begun.  The crane dropped the clamshell into the pile of coal on the barge, its steel teeth gnawing away at the cargo, hoisting it up and depositing it into the hopper bin that led into the boiler room of the plant.  The bucket bumped and banged with each grab, but soon I no longer paid attention to the commotion, and returned to finish my puzzle.  By sundown, the barge was empty, and the clamshell was hoisted aloft one last time and stowed out of sight under the crane’s boom.  I picked up a flashlight and a broom to give the barge a quick sweep-down.

               By the time I had finished cleaning the decks of the barge, it was fully dark.  I stowed the shovel and broom in the deck locker. Looking at my watch, I saw it was almost 7 PM.  The tug would probably be back in an hour or so.  There was no breeze, and I decided I’d have a pipe before retiring.  The riverfront was completely still.  The only sound was the hum of the power plant.  A few wisps of steam rose straight up from the stacks of the main building.

               I packed a pipe bowl, lit up, and sat on the water keg next to the deckhouse.  The river was a glossy streak in the darkness.  It was then that I heard the sound of a disturbance on the water’s surface along the bulkhead.  I thought perhaps it was a big heron or swan paddling its way downstream, although the birds rarely were very active after nightfall.   I stood and walked to the rail.  Looking down,

I could see a trail of bubbles stretching about 15 feet away from the stern of the barge.  I walked back towards the stern bitts to see what had caused the commotion.  I saw something sitting on the river bank, just past the end of the bulkhead, where the shoreline banked steeply up from the water’s edge.  The dock lights gave just enough illumination to reveal a hunched animal perched next to a stand of tall reeds.  It took me a moment to realize exactly what I was looking at.  I suddenly felt a chill streak up my left side and up toward the back of my neck.  The hairs on my neck prickled. The figure I saw on the river bank was definitely a man. Although he was seated in an awkward crouched position, I could tell he was tall and lanky, with stringy wet hair.  Despite the chill of the evening, the man was clad only in dark, old-fashioned swim trunks.  He was fussing with something in his hands.  To my horror, I realized he was worrying the carcass of a small animal with his clenched teeth.  I think the animal was a water rat.  He had the thing clutched in both fists and lowered his head to commence gnawing on the dead thing.   He suddenly looked up, appearing to sense my presence, and his eyes locked with mine.  Grey fur and clots of gore fell away from his mouth.  I felt cold dread worming its way through my guts.  The man’s skin was a sickly, greenish grey, and his body, from head to foot, was devoid of any hair, as though the poisoned, filthy river had caused every last follicle to fall out.  His eyes were the worst, though.  The worst by far.  They were the color of quicksilver, and reflected the dock lights as if they were mirrors.

               A commotion caught my attention and brought me out of my frozen state.  I saw the bulk of a black tugboat sidling up to the barge.  The running lights blazed out of the darkness, casting colored reflections on the river.  There was some shouting as the deckhands busied themselves with the heavy deck lines as they secured the tug alongside of the barge.  Never was I more glad to see that old tug than I was that night.

               I quickly glanced back to where the man or (as I was loath to call the feral-looking denizen a man) the thing was perched in the darkness along the riverbank.  He was standing now, and, I’ll swear to this as though a bible were thrust in front of me.  He rose to a height of what must have been seven feet.  He had dropped his meal and was shambling his way along the boulder rip rap, making his way towards the barge.  He trod cautiously at first as if trying to ascertain if I posed any kind of threat, but with each step, I could see he grew more bold and began to quicken his pace.  I had to wrench myself away from the spot, and hurried to the stern bitt, where two hands passed up the eye of a line from the stern of the tugboat.  I quickly dropped this over the iron post and watched as one of the deckhands landed a ladder alongside the barge and clambered aboard.  He gave me a half salute and made his way forward.

               I strode to the side of the barge that lay against the dock and scanned the blackness for that man-creature that had been lurking in the shadows.  At first, I feared he was lost from view, and opened my mouth, ready to warn the deckhand about the unwelcome intruder.  I was only able to utter the first syllable when I spotted him.  He was about thirty feet away and hidden mostly from view by the shadow cast by the empty barge, which, having been divested of its cargo, now stood high out of the water.  The deckhand turned towards me.

               “Eh, did you say something?”

               I was about to reply when a voice called out from the open wheelhouse window, drawing the man’s attention away from me. 

“Okay Otto,” Let her go when you’re ready.” 

               The deckhand gave the same half salute he had given me just moments before, and he stooped down to remove the line that was secured to the bow cleat.  Seeing this, I flipped the stern line off and made my way forward to the next cleat on the deck.  I was expecting the captain to begin shouting at me, for it was bad practice to remove any lines without being told to do so by the captain, especially if the tide was running as it was that evening.  Thankfully my toil went unnoticed, and the deckhand met me at the midship cleat.

               “Are we clear aft?” The man named Otto asked, his gloved hand gesturing to the stern.

               “Oh yeah, all gone,” I announced hastily.

               With this, the deckhand called to the unseen figure in the wheelhouse.

               “All gone cap!”

               I heard bells sound somewhere down in the tug’s engine room.  The captain was ringing for power.

               I broke away towards the stern again and gazed into the shadows, afraid of what I might see, but the man was gone.  I felt the knot in my throat suddenly release slightly, as I heard another set of bells ringing in the engine room.  It was the signal for half ahead.

               Thank Christ, I thought, as quick water jetted from behind the tug.  I saw the big wooden wheel spin away from the dock, as the tow moved out into the stream, helped by the force of the current.  The deckhand watched for a moment longer to make sure the barge would clear the dock without striking anything.  Satisfied, he nodded to me and worked his way back onto the tug.  I stood sentry at the rail, peering forward, then aft, to see if we were being followed.  That’s when I saw him again.  The man of the river was clutching onto the end of a rope I had foolishly left hanging over the side.  His greenish, sinewy arms strained as he made his way up the rope, towards the deck, and towards me.  I stood transfixed for mere seconds, but it seemed as though I had lost all resolve to move.  The thing worked its way up, hand over hand, the grime-streaked skin a sickly ochre color.  Its mouth fell open, and I saw a mouthful of large stumped teeth that looked as though they had been ground down to half their original height.  This sight brought me to action.  Just as the man clutched onto the rail, I turned to the deck locker and brought out one of the coal shovels.  I could hear the unwelcome visitor grunting with exertion as it prepared to make its way onto the deck. 

               I raised the shovel overhead, and the eyes of the creature seemed to recognize that he was going to meet with some resistance.  Those eyes, those horrid silver eyes flashed with silent fury, just as I brought the tool crashing down.  I wish I could say that I struck the beast, and that I killed him outright, or that perhaps I had maimed it badly enough that he would probably tire from trying to swim with a broken arm and sink to the bottom of the river.  But the blade of the shovel missed him, and he let go just as I was bringing the blade down.  A glimmer of orange sparks shot up from where the shovel struck an iron bolt, and alas, I watched him drop with an oily splash into the water.

               The tug was hooked up now, quickly moving out into the stream, rushing past the bulk of the other coal barges that remained secured to the dock, waiting to discharge their cargoes sometime the following morning.  The man of the river broke surface about twenty feet astern, regarded me for a moment, then rolled onto his side and started swimming towards the bank on the far side of the river.  I watched until I could no longer make him out, his hideous form thankfully concealed by the darkness. 

               The tow continued on downriver, past the imposing girders of the open drawbridge, south towards the lights of the harbor, and safety.  The next day I was half expecting to hear that another barge had been attacked by that lurking thing that rode the tide of filth by the power plant.  Perhaps another barge man would be reported missing, or worse, but I was somewhat surprised to find that there were no reports of any odd creatures in the days following my own encounter with the man of the river.  Bad news and rumors, or scuttle butt, as it’s called aboard ships, travels quickly in the harbor, but none of it made mention of that monster I had witnessed.  However, from that day forward, my right arm had developed a pronounced quiver or tremor, and I would often drop things from that hand.  The doctors later said that perhaps my arm had developed some sort of palsy, but I knew better.  My nerves were beginning to get the best of me.

               I retired from the job the following year, and I was thankful that I was never sent back to that powerplant again.