by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Been Down, So Long
Bob Tom had fallen asleep as soon as the sun disappeared. Joe couldn’t blame him. After all, they had been up early in the morning so Bob Tom could tow Joe the rest of the way to Albany. They had walked for miles to the train terminal, battled the bob n hobs, and made their way back to the river. After that, Bob Tom had flown for kilometers after they headed downstream before hitchhiking a ride on the salad barges.
Using the light of the moon, Joe studied the old man. The rough furrowed skin on the Bob Tom’s face reminded the boy of the naked faces of the Adirondacks Mountains themselves. The eyebrows, a frowze of white and gray hairs of all lengths, if enlarged a hundred times, could have been mistaken for one of the animals Bob Tom hunted. Joe smiled as he thought of those two trophies hanging on the bare wood walls of a cabin alongside a bear’s head and a pair of moose antlers. Looking at the riverman’s nose, a promontory of vein-blasted flesh, Joe didn’t doubt that that mighty organ could smell scents more mortal noses would miss as its owner claimed. As if it knew it was being considered, the nose quivered before making a sudden disturbance that resounded across the Hudson.
Joe scanned down Bob Tom’s tatterdemalion clothed, hull-like chest to where his hands lightly held the bottle the captain had sent back with him after their visit. As the night’s air was broken by a second racketing snore, the hands, whose slender fingers and large joints made them look like they were assembled from Tinker Toys©, tightened on the bottle’s neck. Joe reached over, slightly twisted the bottle until Bob Tom’s finger’s loosened, and removed it from his hands.
Joe held the bottle up to the silver moonlight and wasn’t surprised to see that more than half its contents were gone. Before finding a safe place to stash the liquor, Joe studied the bottle to see if he wanted to reconsider his decision to say no when Bob Tom had asked him if he wanted a celebratory drink. The boy twisted the cap off, but after smelling the bottle’s contents, he decided that he would keep the pledge he had made at the beginning of hockey season.
With the bottle wedged between two crates of spicy smelling mesclun, Joe came back to Bob Tom and lifted his legs so that his whole body was stretched out on the shelf they had made earlier by moving a half dozen crates around. As Joe velked the old man’s themkin tighter to keep out the night air, the old man’s mouth fell open in an unconscious yawn. The sight of that gawp acted on Joe like a nail in a tire. All the pressure within him began leaking out. He yawned, yawned again, struggled as he made himself a nest from a mound of coiled rope and within minutes of getting as himself comfortable as he guessed he could, despite all of the adventures of the day, was fast asleep.