by William Gay
At length he stood beneath the source of the sound. Four legs of structural steel rose high into the air. A tiny house set atop them, what he judged was sixty or seventy feet up. He didn’t know what it was. An abandoned fire lookout station perhaps, or maybe something that had been built by the mining company so long ago its very purpose was lost.
He hunkered for a moment against the trunk of a tree and stared upward at the house. A steel ladder began a few feet off the ground and ascended to heights that made his head swim. The metal sign that said CLIMB AT YOUR OWN RISK was rusted and pocked by ancient rifle fire. As he watched a steel door slammed against the wall, the wind whipped the sound away. The higher he’d climbed the thinner the timber had gotten and here the wind came whipping down out of the north and howled through the steel tower like a banshee’s warning.
He knew he should have been out of the Harrikin by now and across the county line into what passed in these provinces for civilization but he was not. Somehow the snow had turned him around, and he was someplace he’d never been. His hands ached but he was more worried about his feet for he couldn’t feel them anymore and he was afraid they might be frozen. He thought of hot breathless July nights, dryflies crying from a velvet wall of sweet mimosa. The bottled matches in his coat pocket, steel walls impervious to the winds. He rose and kicking through the snow began to gather dead branches and break them and stuff them into the pockets of the overcoat. When he had all he could carry he went over to the ladder and stood looking at it for a time. He took off his belt. He put it back on over the coat and shoved the rifle under it and worked the rifle around to his back and tightened the belt a notch. It was snowing harder. He took a deep breath and began to climb the ladder.
BEASLEY DREAMED brokenly but when he woke the dream was lost to him no matter how hard he tried to call it back. All he could remember was that Doneita was in it.
He guessed the cold had wakened him but then he heard someone yelling. Beasley, Beasley, the voice called.
Company out here in the middle of the goddamned woods, he thought. Where do you have to go to get a little privacy around here?
When he stepped onto the platform and looked down and saw Harris staring up at him down the barrel of a rifle. Beasley wasn’t even surprised. He just felt strange, as if everything had been imbued with inevitability—everything had been taken from his hands, events had become steel balls rolling unfrictioned down grooved boards and there was no stopping anything.
See you don’t fall, Harris called. It’s so goddamned cold you’d break like a china cup. But the first thing you need to do is throw that rifle over the side.
Beasley guessed the clanging door had drawn Harris up out of the woods and he wished he’d tied it back somehow. He turned and leaned the Winchester against the wall of the tower.
I don’t want this busted, he called down. My son-in-law give it to me.
I been lost all night, Harris said. How the hell do you get out of here?
You don’t, Beasley said.
What’s that supposed to mean?
This is the end of the road.
You crazy son of a bitch.
What? Step up close, I can’t hear you.
Harris approached the steel legs of the tower. He had his mouth open to say something when Beasley abruptly pulled his coat aside and unzipped his trousers and hauled himself out to urinate over the edge of the platform. Harris backpedaled frantically away from the arc of urine and fell with his feet crumpled beneath him. He immediately slapped the stock of his rifle into his shoulder and Beasley felt in the pit of his stomach the muzzle lock onto him.
You know what that was, Harris? he called. That was contempt of court.
I’m going to blow your sorry ass off there.
Your balls are too small, Beasley said. I expect you’ll have to come up and get me.
We’ll just see if I can’t manage to knock you down here.
Beasley stared down the gun barrel for what seemed an interminable time. It looked like a hole into nothingness, or a tunnel that might wind its way out of these woods.
After a time Harris lowered the gun. He approached the ladder and stared at it as if it were something he couldn’t make up his mind about. Beasley judged he was envisioning himself halfway up and Beasley suddenly blowing him off the ladder with the Winchester. After a time he began to climb anyway. He was ascending the ladder left-handedly, the rifle clutched in his right.
Beasley looked out across the world. Everything was snow and trees, an unmapped landscape black and white. Everything looked reduced to its essence, all that was left at the end of time. He thought inexplicably of Doneita, endearments that she had said, sweet nights that were as lost as anything that ever was. Above the treeline a hawk hung motionless against the frozen void.
When Harris was almost three-quarters of the way up the ladder, Beasley stepped off the platform. The landscape reeled away and upward. Snowflakes drifted heavenward. It seem to take forever for him to tilt and slam against the ice-locked earth.
Standing by Peaceful Waters
IN BENDER’S DREAM the Stag came full tilt out of a thin stand of scrub blackjack and leapt the chain-link fence. Its hooves barely cleared the top strand of wire. There was yet a thin skift of snow on the ground melted and refrozen and when the stag’s hooves struck they slid and it went momentarily to its knees. It was up instantly but the wolf was already there, morphing yellow-eyed and immediate out of the tall broom sedge and moving close and swift along the ground like winter smoke. Muscles bunched to bolt the stag quartered but the wolf was there before it. The stag’s eyes were huge and its breath steamed bluely in the cold moonlight.
The moon cleared the raft of clouds it had shuttled before it and everything in Bender’s vision went varying shades of black and silver. The stag lowered its head as the wolf bore in as if it would disembowel it with its antlers but the wolf feinted sidewise and leapt and opened a gash in the stag’s side and coiled back on itself to leap again and when the stag quartered this time its hooves splayed out on the ice and out of balance it took the full weight of the leaping wolf with its chest. When the wolf’s snout burrowed into the stag’s throat the spray of blood was black in the moonlight and was as stark on the snow as bas-relief shadows.
Feeding the wolf looked up at the moon. Its face and ruff were dark with blood and the moon was no moon Bender was familiar with, so close he could have tiptoed and touched it, as if whatever laws governing the distance it kept no longer applied so that it was settling slowly toward the surface of the earth.
BENDER HAD BEGUN to think he lived in a countryside so beleaguered and desolate even the dead were fleeing it. The last truck went out at dusk and he was there by the fence to see it go, hands in his hip pockets and no expression at all on his face. The flatbed truck pulled a lowboy carrying a backhoe secured by chains and the backhoe shifted in its moorings when the truck started down the grade toward the main road, the dead or whatever dust remained of them hidden decorously under tarpaulins lashed to the truck through eyelets in the canvas, and under the taut canvas oblong shapes like archetypes out of some primal memory.
There were men holding shovels and picks squatted about the lowboy and some studied Bender as they went out but one or two raised their hands in greeting or dismissal and one young man with shoulder-length blond hair beneath a yellow hardhat grinned and gave him a thumbs-up signal. Bender raised an arm in an oddly formal gesture and watched them go.
He stood by the fence the length of time it took him to smoke a cigarette and by the time he was finished with it he could hear the truck far off on the highway, gearing down for the hills ringing the town.
It was scarcely a foot from Bender’s garden fence to the government’s chain-link fence and contrasted with it Bender’s looked like a child’s mock-up of a fence, something Jesse might have built. Chain-link wire was stretched taut on steel posts and the sign affixed to it had an authoritative look and seemed to have been positioned for B
ender’s eyes alone, KEEP OUT, the sign said. PROPERTY OF THE US GOVERNMENT. TRESPASSING IS PROHIBITED AND VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Bender climbed the woven-wire fence and stepped onto a locust post and grasped the top of the government s fence and swung one leg over it. The other. He balanced momentarily then dropped onto the other side.
He felt the sensation he always felt when he crossed the property line, as if he had swung from one dimension to another. Here the earth lay in ruins. Scraped raw and bloody by the blades of bulldozers, trees dozed into long curving windrows and burned. They burned for days, for weeks, and smoke still rose in columns like council fires and hot ash drifted in the unwinded twilight.
He followed the roadway back the way the truck had come. The road steadily descended and as far as he could see the world was laid to waste. To his left hand lay the Indian mounds the archaeologists from Knoxville had disinterred and on his right he could see the concrete pylons of the dam rising out of the earth and he judged it near completion. Time was getting away from him and he suspected that the government’s patience was wellnigh exhausted.
All day the trucks hauled stone for the riprap and all day the earthmovers took on earth here and disgorged it there and packers wore the earth hard as stone. Enormous armies of machinery toiled over the earth like insects and somewhere out there in the mauve dusk the river, not yet tamed, its course not yet altered, rolled on toward the sea the way it had always done.
Here Bender stood. His grandfather had long ago deeded this land to the church but it did not belong to the church now. The cemetery lay on a rise not yet leveled and his feet remembered the path and he walked a path not even here anymore, that had been hauled away for backfill. He wandered this vacant cemetery like a visitor come to call and there’s no one home.
Crude oblong holes dug deeply into the earth. Rectangles of dark leaking upward from some ultimate dark. Bits of wormscored wood, shards of bones, nameless dross. The stones still stood amidst the savaged sassafras trunks, leaning weather-thinned tablets and carved marble angels with folded wings and graven names and dates. Some of the names said Bender.
He sat there for a time smoking while the dusk deepened and nightbirds began to call to him out of the purple dusk. When he rose he looked instinctively to where the church had stood as if to see if it had been miraculously restored but of course there was no church nor anything at all that he recognized anymore.
I EXPECT WE NEED TO TALK, Lynn told him.
I expect we do, Bender said. He’d been watching her and he always knew when she thought they needed to talk.
Did you know old man Liverett took their offer?
No.
I guess you’re the last one left now.
I’ve always been the last one left, Bender said.
They ate supper in silence and Bender gathered up the dishes and washed them while Lynn played with Jesse. He washed the dishes as if this simple act might placate her, might be so far-reaching as to placate the very government that was stirring itself to move against him.
They sat on the porch in the swing awhile. The weathered wood seemed somehow to draw out what coolness the dusk held. Everything about the house was wood from the sills to the shingles, cypress and chestnut Bender’s grandfather had cut and hauled to the sawmill in a mule-drawn wagon. He had built the house himself and time had settled it and silvered the wood until the house seemed something organic that had just grown out of the earth, something that had always been there and that man had had nothing to do with. Honeysuckle grew all around the house and its vines climbed nigh to the roof itself. Full dark was falling and was intensifying the scent of the blossoms until the air felt drugged, some sweet narcotic that had sung in Bender’s blood all his days.
His three-year-old son Jesse was dozing on his lap with his blond curls against Bender’s chest and Bender’s arms loosely clasped about his waist. The boy was a wonder to Bender. Even the small things about him, the way his face looked subtly different when the light falling on it altered, as if here was an entirely different Jesse. Bender loved him so it scared him sometimes, and not because Jesse was some scaled-down and newly minted edition of Bender but a new and separate individual, innocent and unmarked as yet by the world.
He must have tightened his grip more than he thought for the child awoke and slid down Bender’s legs to the porch floor. Go shoot some wolves, he said sleepily.
Well all right, Bender said. Let’s waste some of them suckers. He figured the game would last awhile, perhaps even until Lynn was asleep, postponing the need to talk.
He did not even suspect where Jesse had come up with the game but it might have been from something he had seen on television or something he had heard someone say. They had been playing it two or three months and lately it had become every night’s ritual.
All the game required was two black plastic popguns and Bender and his son crouched peering through the sliding glass door into the backyard. Past the flagstone patio and where the porch light tended away into darkness the woods began and this was where the wolves came from. Jesse would point one out and Bender would pretend to see it and shoot it and then Jesse would kill one. There, he’d say, raising the rifle and sighting down its barrel: bang. Sometimes they would kill wolves for upwards of half an hour before Jesse wearied of the game, sometimes only one or two each would suffice. One of the rules seemed to be that they both had to kill the same number of wolves.
Tonight he was sleepy and grew bored with the game early. When he was asleep in his room and Lynn was undressing for bed she said:
What are we going to do?
Wait it out a few more days.
We can’t wait it out. We’ve gone as far as we can go. Something has got to be done.
Bender was standing by the window with an outspread palm on the frame and he was just looking out into the darkness. The EPA is going to shut the goddamned thing down and you know it.
I don’t know any such thing. Nothing is going to shut it down. Nothing. All this is going to be underwater and I don’t know why you can’t see that.
Bender watched the dark and thought about that awhile. He thought about the slow seep of water rising, first his shoe soles dampening and the summer dust going to mud and the water cascading over the lips of the barren graves and rising more until the mimosa fronds trailed in the deep like seaweed. The dam looked to be at least eighty feet in the air and Bender guessed the water would rise for days, for weeks, who knew.
That goddamned fish, Bender said.
What?
I was thinking about that goddamned fish.
Just come on to bed, David.
Bender got into bed with all his clothes on and then noticed his shoes and got back up and pulled off his shoes and socks and lay back down with his hands clasped behind his head. She touched his face, let her arm rest across his chest. David, she said, baby, I know what all this means to you, but—
Bender lay there not listening. Nobody knew what all this meant. He felt an enormous sorrow for the inadequacy of everything. For everything that was said, for everything that was done. There in the dark Lynn kissed his throat and tried to draw him to her. She was trying to comfort him in the only way she knew but dread lay in him heavy as a stone and Bender would not be comforted.
SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT Bender awoke and lay staring at the ceiling above him and thought about the fish. There for a while he had had high hopes for the fish.
He had first heard of it months ago. He had been keeping his eyes open and he had known something was up when he had seen a news crew from a Nashville television station interviewing folks wearing hardhats over by the main gate. Then a night or two later he had seen the fish itself on the evening news being discussed by an earnest-looking young man in a pith helmet. The fish was about as ugly a thing as Bender had ever seen, angular and goggle-eyed and atavistic as something which had simply decided not to evolve. It was called a snail darter and the interesting thing about it was that it see
med to thrive nowhere in the known universe save in the riverbed not three miles from Bender’s farm.
Bender was exultant. Salvation was at hand. It did not even strike him as ironic that all his efforts had been impotent but that a fish as ugly and apparently useless as the snail darter had a branch of the federal government working night and day to save its home. He was more than willing to just go along for the ride. The man in the pith helmet said that the snail darter was an endangered species. Endangered himself Bender felt more than a passing empathy with it.
AT MIDMORNING a sheriff’s department car from the town of Ackerman’s Field pulled up Bender’s driveway towing a wake of dust fine as talcum. Bender went out to see. He’d come to dread cop cars, mailmen, ringing telephones.
It was the sheriff himself. Bellwether stood smoothing the wrinkles out of his khaki trousers and adjusting the pistol on his hip.
We’re all peaceable here, Bender said. You won’t need that.
I was just driving out to see what was going on out here, Bellwether said. I ain’t been out in this neighborhood in no telling when.
You can hear what’s going on, Bender said. He realized that he’d lived with noise so long he’d become accustomed to it. It was like the low hum of a swarm of distant bees.
Bellwether stood in an attitude of listening. The dull drone of who knew how many kinds of heavy machinery; to the south they could see the dust they stirred hanging in a shifting cloud.
They do make a hell of a racket, don’t they? Busy as little beavers.
All day long.
I figured you to be gone. Thought I’d see.
Well. I’m not.
I see you ain’t. You hear about old man Liverett coming to terms with them?
Everybody keeps telling me about it.
The sheriff squatted in the earth yard. He tipped out a Camel and put it in his mouth and lit it and took a drag off it. He exhaled and took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it in mild surprise. He crushed the fire out under a polished shoe and tossed the butt away. I’m trying to quit, he said, but I keep doing that out of habit.