by Lewis Nordan
He saw Solon wake up in the front seat of the truck spitting blood. He saw him struggle to sit up, to get his bearings, clear his head. He saw him leave the truck, limping in the rain with the heavy pistol in his hand, a bullet in his left arm, teeth missing. Bobo watched him check the body in the grass, Bobo’s own dead body, the body seeing its own murderer from a demon and immortal eye.
He saw him turn away, enter the truck, drive away again, careless across the spillway waters, which foamed up white against the wheels of the little truck, and the running board and the door with one bullet hole in the glass and two more in the metal, those heavy, tuneful, humorous waters that tugged at the little truck and tried to tip it into the stream and did not succeed, though for fractions of a second the truck rose up from the dam on dark liquidity and was supported only by swamp, the second time today Solon had walked on water.
Through the demon eye he saw Solon, tense behind the steering wheel, holding the truck on its true course until he reached the safety of the other side, rain still falling like pennies from heaven, dirty copper, the headlights, demon eyes themselves, laying beams like gangplanks on a pirate ship.
He saw Solon, a few miles further down the road, switch off the lights and ease the little truck into a farmyard, across a cattle-gap and through a fence, taking a chance on getting stuck in the mud out by the barn. Solon was stealing a weight, a gin fan, and a length of barbed wire to tie the fan to Bobo’s neck, to sink the body in the stream.
Oh, there was music in the swamp, the irrigation pumps in the rice paddies, the long whine and complaint, the wheezy, breathy asthma of the compress, the suck and bump and clatter like great lungs as the air was squashed out and the cotton was wrapped in burlap and bound with steel bands into six-hundred-pound bales, the barking of a collie-rat, a swamp-elf singing in a cabbage patch, an old man clogging on a bridge, geese arriving from Canada, a parrot ringing like a cash register, mosquitoes like violins, the wump-wump-wump-wump-wump of cropdusters, mourning doves in the walnut trees.
Solon let down the tailgate of the El Camino. He knew just where to find the gin fan, back in the tool area of the barn. It was a big, greasy, rusted fan, out of the Quito gin. It was going to be heavy, a hundred pounds or more, he was glad he had the El Camino. He’d hate to have to put that big motherfucker in the trunk of Poindexter’s Cadillac, especially with a bullet in one arm and a serious dental problem. If he was in the Cadillac, he’d just have to call the whole thing off.
Solon had seen the fan when he was stealing refund gas from the farmer’s tank a year or more ago. If he had had good sense he would have waited to kill Bobo until after they had this fan in the truck. Bobo could have done the heavy lifting, big boy like he was. Or they could have picked it up together, anyhow. It wont logical for a man Solon’s age to be lifting a hundred pounds of steel when there was a strapping young man like Bobo nearby.
Bobo, dead, back at the spillway in the rain, where he waited for Solon, could see all this through the demon eye upon his cheek, without fear or anger, or even a sense of injustice, but only with an appreciation of the dark and magical and evil world in which he had been killed.
The gin fan was both the weight to hide Bobo’s body and an object of Bobo’s love. In death, his hands reached across the Delta flatscape and touched the fan, where Solon struggled in the rain. Across the distance, Bobo helped buoy it and ease its weight as Solon lifted it into the bed of the pickup.
In death, Bobo saw the gin where the fan had come from, in the little community of Quito, where it had sucked raw cotton, Egyptian or Sea Island fibers, from the trailers and into the dryers, or maybe where it blew seeds off the comb, or de-seeded lint into the wagons headed towards the compress, to be crushed into bales. Quito was a community of mystics, a thousand green snakes on a hoodoo woman’s table, Great Danes with blank eyes, walking through walls.
He saw all this, and chocolate milk and cinnamon toast and cold sweet potatoes on Auntee’s sideboard, and tupelo gums and cypress and chinaberry and weeping willow and mimosa and a beautiful creature of some kind, a mermaid, maybe, as she rose up from the water, her breasts bare, and combing her long hair with a comb the color of bone, and holding in the other hand a mirror as dark and fathomless as the mirror-surface of Roebuck Lake, and Bobo knew that this mermaid was himself.
Solon was already running a fever by the time he got back to Bobo. Or he seemed to be, his hands were so warm on the child’s dead-cold ankles, which he grabbed to pull Bobo out of the field where he died and to the El Camino on the road. Bobo’s body slid along, over the saw grass, through the Johnson grass, his head bump-bumping against irregular places in the earth. Bobo lay in the gravel at the rear end of the truck, free of pain and fear.
Solon was clumsy getting the body into the bed of the truck, up beside the gin fan. He heaved and strained. He dropped the body several times. He was making a lot of noise. He said, “Goddamn.” He changed positions. The arm with the bullet in it was almost useless to him. Finally he lifted Bobo up by the waist and flung the top half of his body over the tail of the truck. It stayed put. Solon was breathing very hard. The rain was pouring down on his head.
When he had rested for a few minutes, he lifted Bobo’s feet from where they hung down out of the truck’s bed, and swung them around to the side and up into the truck, blam. The body was in, now, a little precariously perched, but in the bed. So that was good.
Solon slammed shut the tailgate and hooked it, so Bobo wouldn’t spill out when he moved the truck. This job was worth a lot more than a thousand dollars, even if he hadn’t thrown the money away. Solon had forgotten all about his big plans to end his family’s misery, he was too durn tired and wounded to think about anything, much.
He picked up the length of barbed wire that he had stolen from the barn when he took the fan. Bobo watched Solon pull one end of the wire between parts of the fan and then twist and twist the wire until that end was secure. By now Solon’s hands were bleeding. Solon hated Bobo. He might have been unclear on this point before, but now he was not. He knew that Bobo’s eye was looking at him. He said, “Whut yew lookin at?” Bobo said nothing in return, of course. Then Solon did the same thing with the remaining end of the wire that he had done with the first, but this end he wrapped around Bobo’s neck. He twisted and twisted until it was secure. The barbs dug into Bobo’s dead flesh and Adam’s apple.
For the third time that night, Solon pulled the El Camino onto the spillway, its swift waters beneath the wheels. Bobo’s body jolted in the back. It felt the truck lift up from the dam and then settle back down and ease outwards towards the middle of the spillway, white water surging around it.
The demon eye, hanging from its socket down Bobo’s cheek, saw a young schoolteacher. She was walking home from school, her heart filled with sadness. In this woman’s heart Bobo saw the pain of hopeless love, he saw Solon’s child disfigured in his bed, he saw the Spanish moss in the trees outside a Mexican mansion. He saw Alice Conroy see his own dead body in a raindrop. He saw a crystal ball, lost in the depths of Swami Don’s Elegant Junk, light up with blue light and an image of things to come. He saw a mojo waving good-bye, one tiny black finger at a time, good-bye, dear Bobo, we’ll never forget you, you’ll live forever in our hearts.
And then he was in the water. First the fan, splash, rolling, rolling, rolling with the strong current along the swamp floor, and then himself, pulled behind, twisting and twisting on his barbed-wire tether, in the swift spillway waters of Roebuck Lake. Solon had somehow gathered the strength to throw him in.
Sliding past him, beneath the black water, he saw an ancient tangle of briers and cypress knees and gum stumps. He saw a billion strings of vegetation and tiny root systems. He saw fish—bright bluegills and silvery crappie, long-snouted gar, and lead-bellied cat with ropy whiskers. He saw turtles and mussels and the earth of plantations sifted there from other states, another age, through a million ditches and on the feet of turkey vultures and blue herons and
kingfishers. He saw schools of minnows and a trace of slave death from a century before. He saw baptizings and drownings. He saw the transparent wings of snake doctors, he saw lost fish stringers and submerged logs, a submerged boat, and the ghosts of lovers.
After a long time, the big fan stopped rolling. It came to a halt, far out in the lake in deep water, and Bobo’s body floated decently alongside it, attached by the neck by a length of barbed wire.
Already two weeks had passed. Already the rain, that had so recently insisted it would never stop, was finished, forgotten. The sun shone. Children had attended school for ten days. Already blues singers avoided Red’s big front porch. Already Bobo’s mother’s heart was broken with fear. Already his uncle and auntee’s lives were changed forever. Bobo’s flesh grew soft in the running water. It lost its rich color. Turtles and fish nibbled at rags of meat. Already the barbed wire tether had slipped and lengthened, and Bobo’s feet stuck up out of the water, above the surface of the lake.
Already it was the morning that his body would be found, Sunday in September. Because he was magic now, Bobo saw the two white boys who would find him.
First he saw Sweet Austin, in a johnboat, running trot-lines. Freckle-faced, skinny little white boy. He saw Sweet scull the boat with a Feather paddle. He felt the good sun on Sweet’s shoulders. He saw him ease the boat along the trotline, lifting first one hook and then the next, eyeing the hooks critically, replacing the bait if it had been eaten away, as his own flesh had been eaten and changed. He watched Sweet Austin find the body.
Bobo even saw Sugar Mecklin, the housepainter’s boy, in his home, as he slept this bright morning in the dreamy belief that today would turn out to be a special day, unlike any other in his life.
Bobo entered Sugar’s dream. In it Sugar stood at the end of a short pier, and Bobo became a mermaid, a bare-breasted creature combing her hair with a comb the color of bone. The white boy woke up, he leaped from his bed and dressed hurriedly and ran down to the real-life pier on the lake bank and stood and scanned the waters with this innocent hope in his heart.
Bobo called out from his death to Sugar, I am the mermaid that you will love.
Bobo saw Sweet Austin arrive, the other white boy, who had already spotted Bobo’s own decayed feet sticking up from the water.
He saw Sweet come up behind Sugar on the pier. He saw them speak, frightened children.
Sweet said, “Hey, Sugar Mecklin.”
Sugar said, “Hey, Sweet Austin.”
Sweet Austin said, “I’ve got to show you something. Something bad.”
From his rotted throat Bobo sang along with a choir on the far side of the lake. It was a baptizing. The choir had a friend in Jesus. God’s grace was amazing, they said, and sweet. There was a church in the wild wood, they said. There’ll be no sadness, the choir promised, no trouble, no trouble I see. Bobo’s voice was as sweet as the voice of an angel, which is what a mermaid is, in water not air.
His song—it must have been the magical music of his voice—drew the two white boys together down the lake bank for a few yards to Sweet’s boat, which was pulled up into the weeds in a clear spot between the cypress knees.
Sweet Austin stuck the paddle into the gummy leafmoldy bottom of the lake and used it like a raft pole to shove the boat away from the bank, and Bobo’s song, like a magic carpet, eased them away from the shore and out into the deeper water.
The white boys spotted the bare feet and legs sticking up out of the water, where Bobo was snagged in the brush.
Beneath the water, far into his death, Bobo sang, I am the mermaid, I am the lake angel, I am the darkness you have been looking for all your sad lives.
Bobo knew that these two boys heard his song and believed it was only the voice of the spillway, its rushing water over concrete and cypress. White cranes stood in small gossipy groups along the shallow water. Turkey vultures sailed like hopeful prayers above them in the wide blue sky and then settled into the empty branches of white-trunked, leafless trees.
Deep in the water fish swam everywhere, invisible to all but Bobo, bream and perch and bass, silver and gold and blue, all their familiar coloration and feathery gills and lidless eyes, deep comfort to the murdered child who was now their friend and their food.
It would be a while before this body was properly identified. At first, somebody said it was probably a certain old colored man who had been missing for a day or two, and after another day the old man turned up at his son’s house in Moorehead.
In death, Bobo was patient. He had no care for quick identification. Soon enough, they would see the weight, they would see the wire, the bullet holes, the magic eye.
From his death Bobo loved the two boys in the boat above him. Most of all he loved Sweet Austin, who found him. Bobo saw Sweet’s mama working late behind the bar at the American Legion Hut tonight. She turned on the switch that caused the Miller High Life sign to revolve. She borrowed herself a little handful of nickels from the cash drawer and dropped them, one-two-three, in the one-armed bandit next to the piano, and every time it come up lemons, and she said, “Shoot.” She reached into the cooler for long-necked beers in dark bottles, maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon, or Falstaff, or Jax, or even Pearl, and cracked them open with a church key, and brushed ice shavings off one of them for herself, and said to Al the boogie-woogie piano player, “You buying, ain’t you, amigo?”
Bobo knew Sweet’s mama would not come home on this night when Sweet needed her most, not until after the white boy was already deep in his horrible sleep. Bobo knew that she would finally come in, though, and although she was drunk she would manage to turn the key in the front door lock for safety and put the key up on the mantlepiece and sniff around the space heater for gas, to see was it leaking again. She would stagger a little in the hallway, and then prop herself up against the wall and take off her shoes. She would go into the room where her son slept on a steel bunk bed and wake up Sweet Austin and tell him, “I’m home, sweetning, I ain’t drunk, ain’t even smoked no cigarettes,” and then she would crawl in right alongside Sweet Austin on the steel bunk and wake up with some kind of taste in her mouth like she been chewing tin foil out of a gum wrapper, and sore teeth, and no energy to apologize to her boy or anybody else, for all her regret.
Bobo sang, Don’t look, don’t look at me, preserve your innocence another moment longer.
Sweet Austin dragged the paddle in a sculling motion and turned the boat in the direction of a camp-landing a little farther on. He dipped the paddle deep into Roebuck and caused the boat beneath them to move steadily across the lake. Bobo watched them pull away.
He could have watched them dock at the fish camp, he could have seen Mr. Raney look for his glasses to make the call to the High Sheriff. He could have watched Hydro, Mr. Raney’s son, lick peach filling off the palms of his hands and say, “It’s probably the nigger Mr. Solon and Mr. Dexter done kilt.” He could have watched Big Boy Chisholm drive both boys away from the fish camp and stop the patrol car out by the iron fence in front of Sugar’s house and say, “I’m sorry y’all boys had to bear witness to that floater, I truly am sorry.”
There was much that Bobo still could have seen through the magical eye, but now Bobo had stopped seeing. This part was finished. Now Bobo was dead and gone.
And so this was the day two white boys found a tattered corpse in the spillway waters of Roebuck Lake in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi.
10
THE BOW that Roy Dale Conroy had fallen in love with was a six-foot, double-laminated, recurved number, forty-pound test, from the high school’s athletic locker. Coach Wily Heard let him bring it home at night and on weekends.
The bow wasn’t new, it had some cracks in the fiberglass, but it was fine, and the bow string was brand new, right out of the package, bright as a dollar.
Coach Heard was a one-legged man, lost one leg in Korea, shrapnel, and had a fiberglass replacement job that he wore on his stump to teach Civics.
In addition to that, he
owned an old-fashioned peg leg, tapered to the bottom, with a rubber-tipped flange on the end. He wore the peg to arrow-catching practice, it was a little more comfortable, gave him a sense of stability on the grass, he told people.
Coach Heard kept a half-pint nipper of Old Grand-Dad in his pocket at all times, even up at the schoolhouse. He didn’t care much about Civics. He filled up most of his class time talking about Korea. Coach Heard drank whiskey with Roy Dale’s daddy down at Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro. sometimes.
Roy Dale dearly and truly loved this bow and arrow, he’d been sleeping with it for two weeks. Coach Heard had taught him how to string it the right way.
Out on the practice field the first day, Coach Heard said, “Forty-pound test might be a little stout for you at first, but you’ll grow into it, and it’s all I got to offer right now.”
Roy Dale said, “I like it.”
Roy Dale watched Coach Heard set the peg-leg flange firmly in the earth. He watched Coach Heard bend the bow evenly between his good foot and the inside of his knee and then slip the loop of the bowstring into the nock, the notch at the end of the bow.
Coach Heard said, “Can you do that?”
Roy Dale said, “I own no.”
Coach Heard said, “Well, let’s see.”
He instructed Roy Dale in the beauty and danger of arrows, tip, shaft, and fletching, and the signal feather, its distinctive color, which always pointed outward from the bow, and how to nock the arrow, to fit it on the string, and how to lay the shaft upon the bow.
He showed him how to raise the bow while drawing the string, how to sight down the arrow, how to estimate and allow for distance and drop and wind, how to breathe, how to have all the work of pulling done before his right hand held and then released beside his right ear.
He called Roy Dale an archer, and when he did, a great wealth of good feeling burst out of Roy Dale’s eyes as tears. Coach Heard pretended not to notice the tears, and then he took Roy Dale back to his office and showed him, in a glass bowl on his desk, a swamp plant called Sagittara latifolia, with arrowhead-shaped leaves and white flowers.