by Jon Clinch
“I will.”
MORNING FINDS HIS SKIFF overburdened and alive with thrashing fish, as if some god has smiled down upon him and arranged for the richest of his bounty to surface hook after laden hook and fairly leap into his boat. He guts them and cuts reeds and binds them up damp for safekeeping, and he takes a few of them up the steps into Dixon’s place.
“The world has conspired against me.” He intones the words with a forlorn look as he drops his bundle on the bar and unwraps it to reveal two or three decent bluegills and a couple of fat sunfish.
“They ain’t so bad.”
“I don’t reckon.”
“You had me fooled.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Got more in the boat? I’ll come on down.”
“Don’t bother.”
“It ain’t no bother.”
“This here’s the lot.”
Dixon gives him a look both incredulous and sympathetic.
“I know.”
“This ain’t going to make much of a dent.”
“I know it. Do what you can.”
“Better luck tomorrow.”
Finn sorrowfully dons his broken slouch hat and descends the steps and unties his skiff. Before he poles away he removes his long coat and flings it wide and uses it to cover up his catch, or at least as much of it as he can, in case Dixon should happen to glance over the side and spy him as he heads downriver.
South of the village on the left descending bank, just a mile or two above St. Petersburg, he comes to a trading post. He hates coming all the way down here but he reckons that since he could give everything he has to Dixon and still be in the hole he ought to take the greater part of his bounty where it can be turned to profit free and clear. The proprietor of the trading post is a choleric old swindler named Smith, a gigantic slug of a man who gasps for air when he walks and coughs up yellow phlegm into a tin cup and hates Finn all the way down to the ground, but no more than he despises the rest of mankind. On his first day in business he painted his name in black on a bleached piling and hung a sign on the door reading CLOSED. He has neither improved nor altered either one of these indicators over the intervening years.
Finn ties up the skiff and selects some of the catfish and enters through the door marked CLOSED as he has done so many times previous. He takes off his hat and jams it underneath his arm and lays the bundle of reeds and fish upon the counter.
“What’d you do to your head?” says Smith from the shadows.
Finn has not forgotten his year in the penitentiary but he has let himself forget that his skull yet bears the evidence. He runs a hand over the stubble. “They done it to me at Alton.”
“What’d you do?”
“I let them. Didn’t have no choice.”
“I mean to get sent.”
“Killed a man wouldn’t buy my catfish.”
Smith laughs his gasping laugh. “I won’t make that mistake.” But Finn can see that he does not entirely mean it.
“So how much you think?”
“Is this the lot?” Eyeing them greedily but doing his best not to let it show.
“This ain’t but the beginning.”
“Somebody’s had a good day.”
“Don’t you dare ruin it.”
“I hate to.”
“You won’t.” Finn takes Smith by the sleeve and pulls him from behind the counter and sets him on his breathless path to the door. From there they look over the side of his pier to the spot where the skiff is tied up below bearing its bounty of succulent cats barely concealed and cooled by their wet wrapping of reeds.
“Why, most of them’s just fiddlers.”
Listening to Smith breathe. “Folks like them better small.”
“I know what folks like.”
“They’re sweeter.”
“Don’t tell me my trade.” He hawks and spits into the river and turns to make his way back inside. “Them little fiddlers don’t hardly weigh enough to charge for.”
“You’d charge a man to breathe your air.” Hollering after him through the open door.
“If I could.”
“Them little ones are just as much trouble to catch.”
“Not for me they ain’t.”
Back at the counter Smith names a price by the pound and says that although it pains him to do so he’ll take the whole lot of them.
“That’ll make my life easy now, won’t it?” says Finn.
“I reckon.”
Finn makes as if to begin looking around the trading post for his necessaries. “I’ll wait here while you go on fetch them up.”
“You will not.” The mere walk to the pier and back has left his face ablaze and his bald head running with sweat. He collapses upon his stool and begins mopping at his brow with a muddy handkerchief.
“Suit yourself,” says Finn. “But I might have to charge for cartage.” And he returns to his skiff and sorts through the fish, leaving out most of the small ones and wrapping up the rest and bringing them up to Smith.
“I thought you had more.”
“You were mistaken.”
“They’s not so many young ones as I thought.” Calculating his loss by the pound.
“It’s your lucky day.”
“I reckon.” Not knowing whether he has been bested or not, yet unable to walk out on the pier again and see what quantity of fish his visitor may or may not have left in his boat for more profitable sale elsewhere.
Finn takes Smith’s money and spends some of it on things that Mary has requested and puts them in the skiff. He denies himself a bottle of whiskey this once because he has plans to take some of his earnings around to the old blind bootlegger and get a jug of poorer-quality stuff as a means of sacrificing on behalf of his dependents. Then as the sun burns heavily overhead and the river sulks nearly to a stop in the shallows he boards his boat and poles northward to a place where he knows he can get full value for the remainder of his catch.
ON THE EDGE of darktown is a long low shack as collapsed upon itself as its proprietor’s toothless visage. The building has a covered porch with a rusted tin roof that lets in the rain and a single rotted and sprung step that none of the regulars dares use anymore. Finn treads upon it and it nearly gives way beneath the weight of him and his tow sack full of catfish, and he vows to be more circumspect on the way out. Two men huddled over dominoes on the porch watch from under their bent brows and wonder exactly what business he might be here to conduct. He passes them without acknowledgment and enters the still and tomblike interior of the store.
“Mr. Finn.”
“Hey.”
“Don’t see you much.”
“I can’t hardly see you neither, you keep it so goddamn dark in here.” Waiting for his eyes to adjust.
“If I could afford another window, I’d open it.” The man is black as tar, squat of build, and powerful across the shoulders as a bull, and he approaches Finn with a gaiety and a toothless grin which together suggest that every human being on earth—even this unlikely one—is his boon companion. “What brings you here today?”
“Got cats. Them little ones.”
“My, my, my.” He calls to the men on the porch that they should come and see this if they know what’s good for them, so they begrudgingly lay aside their dominoes and sulk in through the open door.
Finn backs away as if they are contagious but keeps one hand on the sack. “Them’s good eating,” he says to no one in particular.
“I know it,” says the proprietor.
“How much?”
“This all you got?”
“All I got left.”
The proprietor names his price, which is less than Finn believes the fish are worth but more than he would have gotten from Smith.
“Done,” says Finn.
The proprietor makes a little shooing motion, just enough to let the domino players know that he and Finn might like to speak in confidence. The two black men are safely back out on the porch when he
resumes, yet he whispers nonetheless: “You plan to put some of that on the lady’s account?”
Finn tilts his head as if the man has begun addressing him in a foreign tongue.
“You know.”
But Finn does not know.
“The tab she been running. While you was down to Alton.”
“Alton’s my business.”
“I know it.” Understanding the man’s shame or secretiveness or whatever else it may be, but needing all the same to navigate past it if he is to begin recovering his losses. “And if I was too generous, then that’s my business. I know it. I’ll have to pay the price.”
“Too generous.”
“I just thought.”
“Generous how.”
“Some folk need more credit than the rest. Generally them as can’t be counted on to make it up. You know how it goes.”
Finn eyes the fish aglisten on the counter in the dark room. “I should have thrown them back.”
“Let’s just keep this between us gentlemen. I expect she wouldn’t want me asking.” The proprietor nods as he speaks, in time to his own slow and sleepy rhythm. “She said she’d be keeping up best she could, with the laundry and all.”
“I put a stop to that.”
“I didn’t know. I just thought I’d.”
“Go on, then.” Finn grinds his teeth and the muscles in his jaw bunch. “Go on and put it all on hers. Every bit.” The words come out of him as if he is deflating all at once.
“Yes sir.” The proprietor’s eyes brighten. “That’ll go some way.”
“I’ll not have her obliged.”
“That’s a fine policy.”
“I don’t require your say-so.”
“I need more customers think like you.”
“Good luck.”
Finn leaves with the same next to nothing in his pocket that he came in with and a freshly discovered debt on top of it. As he walks with his empty sack down the lane and back to his skiff he weighs in his mind the relative merits of the two courses open to him: to never visit this place again and thus remain beholden but aloof, or to come back straightaway and pay off the debt with all of the speed and dignity that he can muster. He has not yet decided between the two when he arrives at the skiff and casts off, and he has still not decided when he realizes that thanks to her he is now shy the money he had hoped to spend on whiskey.
BLISS’S SHACK LIES so deep in the woods as to be nearly past locating for those with ordinary sight. He labors in the open air down a path hidden behind that disreputable falling-down ruin with none but his fire and his boiler and his ranks of empty jugs for company, and he stores what he produces God knows not where. The surrounding forest serves as his guardian, for not so much as a rabbit can move among its dense overwhelming greenery without the old blind bootlegger taking note.
Finn has heard the way to this spot described as often and as erringly as one might hear tell of the path to glory, and from these thousand fragmentary and conflicting reports he has triangulated an idea of his own. He is not too far wrong, as it happens, and so after fighting his way through a mile of tangled underbrush and recovering from a few false turnings he detects from up ahead the unmistakable mingled aromas of fire and forty-rod.
Bliss when Finn spies him is hunched close by his works in a broad clearing burnt barren as a holy place, head tilted and sniffing the air, his right hand atwitch on the ivory handlepiece of a pistol.
“You Bliss.”
“Step no further.”
“I won’t.” Raising his hands and then seeing his mistake and dropping them again.
“Now go on back the way you come.”
“I can’t.”
“Git.” Bliss swivels his head in tiny increments, and when he has satisfactorily located Finn he raises his gun and points its barrel toward the unseen man’s unseen heart with a preternatural accuracy.
“I’m lost.” From where he stands Finn can see the man’s eyes, one of which points off in a direction that seems riverward but may be otherwise. The other one has a gray glaucous film over it, as thick and obscurant and mysteriously portentous as a caul.
“Lost, are you?” Bliss creaks out an appreciative laugh but refuses to unaim the gun. “I’ve heard that before.”
“I ain’t no liar.”
“’Course you are. No man ever found this place by accident.”
“I’ll grant you.”
“Not even me.”
“It ain’t easy.”
“Damn right.”
“I been lost since noon.”
“Bullshit.”
“I have.”
“I won’t hold it against you.”
“You mean happening on you like I done.”
“I mean lying about it.”
“I ain’t lying.”
“You are. But since you’re so intent on it I just might reconsider.” For there is something about Finn’s conviction that he admires.
“Either way,” concludes Finn. “It don’t matter to me.”
“How about a little taste of my corn?” Lowering the pistol. “Just to speed you on your way.”
The old man’s stuff is as clear as kerosene and nearly as poisonous, the kind that gives certain strains of bootleg whiskey the reputation for taking a strong man down at a distance of forty rods. Finn learns in a hurry that Bliss enjoys the taste and potency of it as much as anyone, perhaps more, and the riverman is wily enough to use such weakness to his advantage.
“So how’d you find me here?” the old man asks after he has mellowed some under the influence of his own drink.
“I got lost,” Finn confesses again.
“Tell the truth.”
“I got lost. But it weren’t for lack of trying.”
Bliss wheezes in a good-natured way. “Who told you?” He names three quarters of the barmen and trading post operators in the region, at places as low as Dixon’s and Smith’s and as elevated as the Liberty and Adams hotels. He names them in miraculous alphabetical order, a fact that Finn would not notice even if he could.
“Nobody told.”
“You can level with me,” says Bliss. “Whoever it was, I swear I’ll do no more than cut his balls off. Next time I see him.” As if to indicate the potency of this promise he tilts his head downward and his one dead filmy eye travels straight from Finn’s visage to his vulnerable crotch.
“There’s lots of rumors,” says Finn. “I ignored every one of them and ended up here.”
“But you do like your whiskey.”
“I do.” Helping himself to the jug and refilling Bliss’s portion too.
After a while they bank the fire and leave the clearing and walk together to micturate in the deep woods. Then they adjourn to a pair of rockers on the old man’s porch, all of which gives Finn the opportunity to make a study of the premises. The sun is well down toward the horizon before he brings up his name and his predicament and his inability to pay more than a few pennies for the whiskey he’s drunk.
“Judge Finn’s boy. So you’re the bad seed.”
“I reckon.”
Bliss puffs himself up and intones the father’s full name as if reading it from an engraved card for introduction before royalty. “James Manchester Finn.”
“You do know the sonofabitch.”
“Ever since I was born, or thereabouts.”
Finn gives a sly smile whose contribution to the tonality of his answer goes not unnoticed. “He never mentioned you.”
“The world ain’t a fair place.”
“So they say.”
“But I knew him. Since I was a boy.”
Finn sips whiskey. “The Judge weren’t never a boy.”
“Neither was I.”
“Maybe not.”
The two sit listening to the night come on. At the margin of the woods a flurry of brown bats drops one by one from their hidden haunts to pursue one another riverward, and thus Finn recalls the way home or at least the direction.
; “So you’re the one took up with that nigger woman.”
“I reckon I am.” He asks no question but Bliss can hear his curiosity in the silence as clearly as if he had given it voice.
“People talk, is all.”
“What people.”
“I ain’t saying.”
“What do they say.”
“You know.”
“I reckon I do.”
Bliss stops rocking and squares his odd gaze at Finn. “Me, I say what business is it of theirs.”
“Amen.”
Bliss lowers a fingertip into his jar to assess the level of whiskey in it, finds it satisfactory, and resumes rocking. “A person’s color don’t matter to me. I never gave a tinker’s damn for it one way or the other.”
“It matters.”
“You’re the one to talk, ain’t you.”
“You wouldn’t think.”
“You wouldn’t. But I reckon you’d know after all.”
Finn sits and rocks and speaks not.
“Now don’t take me wrong,” says Bliss, trusting in the defensive powers of his hospitality and his supply of forty-rod and even perhaps his long-dead connection to the Judge, come to that, “but I ain’t never had no nigger gal on me.”
“Your loss,” says Finn.
“Is that a fact.”
Finn nods in the dark.
“I had a feeling.”
“You was right.”
“Then it’s like they say.” Not wanting to go any farther along this path. Finn will be back to buy whiskey and keep him company, he can be certain of that. And there will be time then to discover each other’s secrets.
“I reckon it’s like they say,” says Finn. “It must be, for all the trouble.”
When they are both sufficiently drunk the bootlegger provides his visitor with instructions for finding his way home, instructions that can be followed reliably only in utter darkness or by a blind man fully undistracted. Finn does well enough with them because such dim light as he can make out from the sky overhead is more than offset by his inebriation, and thus he can proceed methodically and slowly with his attention undiluted by sight. When he reaches the river at last he seeks out his skiff, which he has missed by less distance than he had feared. The things he bought for the woman at Smith’s are gone, either stolen by men or eaten by scavenging animals, but this he does not notice until he ties up beneath the house and by then he does not care.