Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  “About all I know is you’re a kid, Bosco,” Ray says. “A thirty-five-year-old goddamn kid.” Bosco shrugs and drinks, his shirtless chest bony and sunken.

  They stand on the deck of Bosco’s houseboat, which once served as a repair barge and welding deck for BG Ironworks until it ran on a shoal in the middle of the White River, fifty yards downstream of the railroad trestle outside Clarendon. Permanent as an island now, the boat holds as the river washes around it. Red-winged blackbirds balance on the rope that connects the barge to shore, the same rope that Ray and Bosco shinny across for groceries, liquor, and generator fuel. When Bosco finds women from town they shinny across with him, legs scissoring, skirts gaping, Ray shining his flashlight on the whites of their thighs. The women squeal and curse Bosco for where he lives, curse the light and the oily rope, drunk and laughing while Ray holds his breath, waiting for them to slip and disappear forever beneath the deep, slow motion of the river.

  Bosco lifts another beer from the plastic bag hanging in the current. The white scar from his surgery looks fresh still, lines stitched across his shoulder where the Jonesboro doctors removed the cancer. The indentations there form notches in the line of his shoulder, the flesh gouged and ridged. Ray looks at it, winces. After the surgery was when he began to spend all his time on the barge—not just Saturday nights—helping Bosco tie his shoes, cook his food, and, for a time, button his pants.

  Bosco takes the gun, his mouth hanging open as he scans the water. They will shoot until the sheriffs deputy drives down to the riverbank and hollers for them to call it a day.

  “We better quit soon,” Ray says.

  “How much you think them diamonds are worth?” Bosco asks. “How easy would it be to walk in there, off the sonofabitch, and get out?” He drinks his beer and elbows Ray, starts humming the Jeopardy theme. Riffing off game shows is a stage in Bosco’s drunkenness, lodged somewhere between vomiting and blacking out. After they have caught a day’s haul of oysters, he will watch the shows on his little five-inch black-and-white, the cord for the TV running off the generator inside the cramped cabin of the barge, where he keeps his mattress, refrigerator, and the old issues of National Geographic he finds on the library free table and uses for kindling. Nights they sit at the edge of the barge, occupying an old couch Bosco found on the roadside and floated across, left in the sun to dry. Bosco watches game shows and comedies, shouts at the screen, while Ray watches the river and thinks about the water flowing past them, all the bits of sediment carried to the ocean. They sit until the generator runs out of gas, then fire up lamps to shoot carp in the shallows, run trotlines for catfish.

  “Just let the idea go, Bosco,” Ray tells him.

  “You don’t think I’d do it?”

  “Well, let’s see. Last month, panning for gold was gonna make us rich and before that crystal meth and before that parting out cars. Now it’s hauling oysters that’s not making us dime one, so you’re going to kill Leo Myer and take a bunch of diamonds that might or might not even be there. Bullshit, Bosco.”

  Bosco takes back the gun, racks it, and fires beneath the water. Bits of gravel clink against the side of the rusted water heater that floats beside them, chained to the barge.

  “One big difference this time, Ray,” Bosco says. “I need the goddamn money.” He blinks and looks away, tips up his beer can to hide his eyes.

  The first time the doctor found the cancer in Bosco’s shoulder was an accident, an X-ray done after some bar-fight soreness wouldn’t work itself out. With no money or insurance, Bosco had worked out a payment plan that would see him through to old age, and if he skipped even one payment, Ray knew, the collection agency would be along to take his barge, his beaten-down truck, his little TV, his refrigerator, and his last pair of socks. Now he complains of new soreness in his shoulder, tiredness in his days, but his joke is that he can’t buy any more sickness until the last one is paid for. He has stopped smiling when he says it.

  Bosco tosses his beer can into the river and fires at it. He racks and fires again, at the willow tree that tethers the shinny rope. Ray grabs the gun by the barrel and twists it from Bosco’s fingers. He spits into the water and watches it float away, then ejects the empty shell.

  “We won’t ever be rich, Bosco, not in this life.”

  They cook and eat carp into the afternoon, putting off that day’s haul of oysters, work which renders their only cash until the end of the month when Ray collects for his weekend motor route. He drives the same camper truck he sleeps in when he’s not on the barge, muscling it down bumpy washouts in the dead of night, listening to radio baseball and talk shows, shoving the Clarendon Gazette into the green plastic tubes mounted at the side of the road. All day, while they eat and drink, while the river washes around them, Bosco talks of Leo’s diamonds, how they are there for the taking, how that woman he met at the bar has seen them herself. He talks nonstop, nodding and jabbering, rubbing his ruined shoulder.

  By early evening Ray lets himself be talked into a visit to Leo’s place. Bosco says he wants to case it out, words he’s lifted from some TV show. Ray agrees, wanting Bosco to stand there in Leo’s apartment, work it through his brain, see the impossibility of it. They drive out County Road 10 toward Berryville, drinking beer, swatting mosquitoes. They come to the brick building that once held Sunshine Dairy, where Leo runs his business from a single room on the second floor. Out beside the road is Leo’s handpainted sign advertising palm reading, tarot cards, and Shiatsu massages, ten dollars each. The front windows are webbed by strips of masking tape and yellowed, curling posters for the Shriner’s Bar-B-Q and the Marv-L Circus. Inside, the old cream separators and capping machines sit rusting, covered in dust.

  “So if Leo’s rich, how come he lives in this hole?” Ray asks.

  “You’ve heard the story,” Bosco says.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard it,” Ray says. “That one and about a thousand others.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll see, then, won’t we?”

  The story seeps into the bars in the way of all rumor, through spilled beer and bullshit and games of eight ball and last call, places where Bosco has picked up the story and made it his own. The word is that Leo Myer once worked as a diamond wholesaler in Atlanta, that one afternoon he pocketed five pounds of rough stones off the plane from Barrons, that he picked Clarendon, Arkansas, off a road atlas and settled in to hide himself. Leo speaks with a New York accent, wears flowing caftans to the IGA in town, silver rings and ear hoops, tiny braids woven in his longish hair.

  “That’s right, Bosco,” Ray says. “We’ll see, and then you can drop this shit.”

  “Just keep his ass busy,” Bosco says.

  After a steep climb to the second floor, they ring the buzzer. The door opens with a tinkling of chimes and Leo yawns at them from behind his graying beard. Behind him, the TV plays a commercial for dog food.

  “Visitors,” he says. The room is thick with incense and yellow light, the walls pale green, hung with feathers and beads. “What can I do for you boys?” He is without his caftan and earrings, and wears instead sweatpants and a gray T-shirt.

  “My buddy here would like his palm read,” Bosco says.

  “Is that a fact? Just what problem are you working through?”

  Ray shrugs. “Whatever.”

  Leo smiles at them. “Why don’t you fellows save your money. Go buy a few rounds at the Barbary Coast.”

  “No, we really want to know the future,” Bosco says. “We can pay.” He cuts his eyes at Ray as he unfolds a crumpled ten from his jeans and hands it to Leo.

  Leo shrugs, opens the door to let them in. They sit down at a pocked wooden table in the kitchen while Bosco heads toward the sink.

  “Mind if I get some water?” Bosco asks. Leo waves the back of his hand and slips on a pair of dime store reading glasses. He uses the remote control to click off the TV.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking,” Leo says to Ray. “That’s our usual start.”
>
  “I was thinking how much this dump looks like a whorehouse,” Ray says. He watches Bosco drink from a jelly jar.

  “This anger toward me interests me,” Leo says. He looks up, smiles, touches his beard. “Is that what you paid for? To come here and vent?”

  “Ray’s just nervous,” Bosco says from behind Leo. “His first time.”

  Leo holds out his fingertips as if he’s asking Ray for a dance. Bosco nods, and Ray offers his hand. Leo’s fingers are warm and damp. He bends Ray’s hand toward the light, caressing the palm. Bosco walks slowly around the room touching the strings of colored beads, the macramé wall decorations, the feathers hung from threads. Ray doesn’t like a man touching him. He drinks with his left hand, downing his beer.

  “Anger is bad for your heart, as bad as cigarettes,” Leo says. “The Chinese call anger a weary bird with no place to roost.”

  Bosco slips to the back of the room and eases open a drawer on a rolltop desk. Ray imagines he hears it squeak. He watches Bosco riffle through papers with his thumb, then pull a wooden cigar box from the back of the drawer. Leo moves as if to look over his shoulder.

  “That’s me exactly,” Ray says quickly. “All pissed off and no place to go.”

  “I see that in your lines, most of them broken, irregular. Our work then is to trace it back to its source, chase the riders back to the crimson palace.”

  Bosco frowns and mouths the word “shit,” then tilts the cigar box for Ray to see the strings of cheap, plastic beads. He replaces the box and eases the drawer closed. In the corner of the room, a painted screen partially hides an iron bed and a chest of drawers. Bosco steps over and leans his hands against the chest of drawers. His shadow dips and angles against the opposite wall.

  “Chase the riders? What the fuck are you talking about, Leo?” Ray says.

  Leo lifts his hand to gesture, his rings flashing. “The riders are stray emotions, wants, unfulfilled dreams. They are sent out by the crimson palace—your heart.” He smiles. “We’re speaking metaphorically, friend.”

  Ray nods as if this makes some sense to him, and Bosco ducks behind the screen. Ray watches him in the mirror. Bosco slides open the top drawer.

  Leo leans across the table, sending up wafts of cologne. His eyes are slate colored, bloodshot. He is no longer studying Ray’s hand, only holding it. “What are yours?” he asks.

  Ray draws back, tethered by his own hand. “What are my what?”

  Bosco slowly lifts something out of the second drawer and sets it on top of the dresser. He looks back over his shoulder, catching Ray’s eye.

  “Your unfulfilled dreams, the empty areas of your existence,” Leo says. He smiles like a cop, like he knows something. Ray closes his eyes, wanting this whole thing over with, wanting to be back on the barge, watching the water.

  “Go on, Ray,” Bosco says. Ray opens his eyes and Bosco is standing beside the screen, hands behind his back. Leo does not turn to look at him. Bosco grins. “Go ahead and tell old Leo about your so-called dream.”

  Ray feels the heat in his face.

  “Yes, Ray,” Leo says, “what is your so-called dream, as your friend puts it?”

  Ray shakes his head. This is something he does not talk about. He only ever told Bosco because of a night of too many tequila shots and no moon, the river and the barge wrapped in nightfall, the generator out of gas, only the quiet and the drunken surges inside and his feet in the warm water, words spilling out into the darkness. And for the reason of their silent work together in the river hauling oysters out of the mud, thirty feet down, roped to each other, feeling their way through the murk of the river. Thinking of all that, loose and drunk, he let slip and knew right off how hollow it sounded, his dream of diving in the ocean, swimming through currents with tanks on his back, a kid wish he’d kept with him like some lucky penny left in a pocket and tarnished with age. But still he keeps it, fingering the notion, imagining it when he is driving his route and rain comes. Stuck on some back road, wipers burned out, waiting for the storm to pass, water washing sideways in ripples across his windshield, he will press his face to the glass and think of sharks and eels, of bright fish and coral reefs. He has never seen these things except on TV, which he knows is next to not seeing them at all, worse maybe, for how TV makes everything small and flat.

  “Well, goddamn, Ray,” Bosco had said that night. “Your trucks right there. Right there. Get in it and head south for twelve hours. You’ll hit the damn ocean. Hell, if we could get the barge unstuck, we’d be there by breakfast.”

  Ray shook his head and shrugged, his awkwardness invisible in the darkness. “It ain’t the ocean, really. The ocean is just a thing, like my head just picked it. I don’t know.”

  “So you’re all but dying to see the ocean but not really the ocean. Now we’re making sense.” Bosco threw a bottle out into the river.

  Ray wanted to say then how after so much time the ocean meant nothing more than some new thing, how he wore the boredom of his thirty-eight years like a sickness, how his life ran past like the water past the barge—giving him only the trick of movement. He felt he was done with living, or it with him, and that apart from what he’d already been through—a handful of shit jobs, a year of marriage, a week in the county jail—nothing much else was left to happen.

  “Give my word, Ray,” Bosco said. “We’ll get our asses on down to Biloxi as soon as oyster season’s up.”

  Ray shrugged, pushed his bottle under the surface and let it sink.

  Now Leo squeezes his hand and whispers. “You needn’t cling to sadness, son. Tell me your dream.”

  “Yeah, tell him,” Bosco says, and smirks. “Tell him about the ocean.”

  “The ocean?” Leo raises his eyebrows.

  Rays face flushes. “Just shut the fuck up, Bosco.”

  “You dream of leaving, of escape,” Leo says, nodding. “Water represents birth, renewal, baptism.”

  “Don’t talk about it,” Ray says. He jerks his hand from Leo’s grasp. “Bosco, keep your goddamn mouth closed.”

  Bosco shakes his head and smiles, then slowly withdraws his hands from behind his back and holds up to the light a large and imperfect diamond. He nods, grinning wildly.

  Leo raises his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “My young friend,” he says. “You show up here, you pay me ten dollars. What is it you want?”

  Bosco steps behind Leo, makes a gun with his thumb and finger, and points it at the back of Leo’s head. They are like that for a moment—Leo awaiting Ray’s answer, his hands still in the air, Bosco with his phantom gun. The seconds play out this pantomime of robbery, until the realization opens within Ray: They could do it. Bosco is right. They could.

  “This is a two-way street,” Leo says. “You come back when you decide how I can help you.” Ray does not speak, his mind still held by that brief flash in Bosco’s fingers. He looks again at Bosco, who hammers down his thumb trigger and mouths the word “pow.” Bosco grins again, tips his head toward the door.

  “I’ll do that,” Ray says, standing, shaking. “I will come back.”

  Early Friday morning, after his route, Ray drives out County Road 10 and pulls over beside Sunshine Dairy. The windows of the building reflect the dust-colored light of dawn. Ray thinks of Leo inside, sleeping, the strung feathers twisting slightly in the dark, the capping machines and cream separators below him, the diamonds shining and hidden, their value hoarded away. He sees it so clearly, Bosco yanking the .38 from his denim coat, jamming the steel against the back of Leo’s skull, the blood and flesh and hair exploding like carp out of the river bottom. Ray watches the gray windows of Leo’s apartment, his mind drawing the stillness of that death from out of this stillness, the one before him now, lit pale orange as the sun rises on the faint noise of radio static. As he watches, a light clicks on and the drapes part. A wedge of Leo’s face appears in the gap between the curtains. Ray pushes back into his seat, guns the engine, and spins out, his fingers shaking. By the time
he crosses into Clarendon, the town has started up again. Ray stops at the Quik-Mart for cigarettes and beer and donuts, two cartons of chocolate milk for Bosco. Today is for oystering, and Ray is relieved in this; beneath the river, there will be no talk of killing.

  The night before, after they left Leo’s, it was all Bosco could talk about, wound up like a kid on his way to the circus—breathless, bouncing in the seat of the truck.

  “Hey, look at this,” he said, drawing the stolen diamond from his pocket. The stone was milk white, irregularly shaped.

  “Real smart,” Ray said. “He’s probably calling the cops right now.”

  Bosco shook his head. “Never miss it. Had fifty of these if he had one. An old Parcheesi box.” He shook his head again. “Think I’d find a better hiding place for my stash.” Bosco nudged Ray. “I think I will.”

  “We don’t even know that’s a real diamond,” Ray said, though looking, he knew.

  Bosco gripped the stone and drew a long, thin scratch across the width of Ray’s windshield.

  “Now what do you say?” Bosco asked. “Could write the fucking Declaration of Independence if I wanted to.”

  Ray kept driving toward the river without speaking, as he drives now through the early morning. Traffic is heavy going the other way, the men in suits and ties headed into Berryville, the women putting on makeup in their rearview mirrors, coffee cups steaming their windshields. The scratch on his own windshield catches the morning sun, making tiny prisms, needles of colored light.

  In the river along the barge, two of their antifreeze jugs bounce, pulling under the surface and then popping up again. They haul up catfish thrashing onto the deck. Bosco tries to club them with the butt of his .38, missing each time, the metal deck of the barge clanging. He grabs a fish to hold it down, and the dorsal fin pierces the palm of his hand.