by Brad Barkley
“Leo’s place, what do you think I mean?”
“He’s standing right there, probably giving himself a massage.” Bosco smiles, wiping his shirtfront. He is so thin now, wasting away inside his clothes.
“Bet he’s planning how to spend his money,” Ray says. He cuts his eyes at Bosco, then looks at the slice of road lit by his headlights.
“He don’t spend it, that’s the damn waste of the whole thing. If that was me, I would … I don’t know, find something to spend it on. I’d buy stuff.” He sniffs, scratches at his tooth with a fingernail. Ray hits the gas and watches in the rearview as the yellow light recedes. They ride in silence, slowly killing the bottle.
“You were right on what you said,” Bosco finally says. It is fully dark now, Ray cannot see his face.
“Right on what?”
“On not being able to do Leo the way we said. You were one hundred percent on that one. Just not in me to pull that trigger.”
Ray takes a long swallow, warmth and relief mixing inside him. Tomorrow is for oysters, he thinks. A few dollars in their pockets.
Near the river bridge they see the lights from downtown reflected, the fluorescent glow off the Methodist church spire, the faint glow of their trotline jugs. The barge is farther down, hidden in shadow. Later, they sit on the couch at the edge of the barge, drinking down toward the end of the bottle, chasing it with beer, drinking for hours. It is the way it was before Bosco’s cancer, when Ray visited only on weekends. They talk of going into the Barbary Coast, trying to lure some women back to the barge. Bosco is happy, talking about game shows, asking Ray to name the top five things you buy at the grocery store. When the mosquitoes get bad, Bosco hauls out a quart jar of citronella oil and they wipe their arms and faces with it. The river washes around them. Their antifreeze jugs bob in the dark.
“You’re a different story,” Bosco says, out of the dark. He smokes, the orange of his cigarette moving.
“What are you talking about, Bosco?”
“I mean, you could do it. To Leo. You’re the one.”
Ray tightens his hands on his beer bottle.
“You’re drunk as hell, Bosco.” His own drunkenness threatens to push him through the floor of the barge, down into the river bottom.
“Yeah, but I know you, Ray. You told me what you did today because you know me, and now I’m telling you because I know you just the same. You could kill Leo.”
Ray’s hands shake. “Don’t talk about this shit anymore, Bosco. We’re done with it.”
“After we finished, you know what? I bet you’d say it was the easiest thing you’d ever done,” Bosco says. For a moment, Ray thinks of shinnying across to his truck, starting it, leaving all this behind. But without Ray, Bosco would not be capable even of diving in the river for oysters, of catching carp. He would be lost. Ray picks up the .38, hefting it, letting his fingers curl around it. He clicks the safety off and on and off and on.
Bosco coughs and winces, rubs his shoulder. The gas lantern hisses at his feet. “I bet you already made plans for your half. Of course you oughta get more than half, you pull the trigger. I mean, that’s only f—”
“Shut your goddamn mouth, Bosco.” Rays raises the .38 to Bosco’s head, clicks the safety off, pulls back the hammer.
Bosco smiles, looks at him. “Right now? You’re just proving my point.” Ray lets the hammer down and eases the safety back on. For a minute, neither of them speak.
“And you better listen,” Bosco says, whispering above the sound of the water. “Without that money, Ray, I’ll die. You ever stop and think about that?” He flicks his cigarette into the river, then pulls the diamond from his pants pocket and taps it nervously on the wooden arm of the couch. Ray looks at him, his face lit faintly by the light of early dawn, the grayness of disease on him like a second skin.
“You’re talking about a man’s life,” Ray says. Already the town is waking up, cars moving across the bridge.
“You’re goddamn right we are,” he says. Bosco wipes his mouth with his fingers, his hand shaking. The diamond glistens dully in his fingers.
Ray shakes his head. “We’re done with it, Bosco.”
“No we ain’t,” Bosco says. “You won’t let me die, Ray. You won’t.”
Rays pushes himself up, stretches. “We should get this heater in the water.” He has not slept, is still full of tequila and beer. He feels heavy, weighted down. He thinks of the cancer, thinks of it growing, cell by cell, in Bosco’s shoulder.
“You’d just better hear me, Ray,” Bosco says, slipping the diamond back in his pocket, “because I ain’t finished. I ain’t gonna finish.”
Ray pretends to ignore him. He grabs the water heater and struggles with it alone until Bosco finally helps. They muscle it up, then stop to rest, breathing together, Bosco holding his chest with one hand.
“Everything is easy, Ray,” Bosco says. “I’ll load the gun and talk us inside. I swear I will. Hell, I’ll drive if you want me to. Ray…you know you will.”
Ray steadies the heater, leveling it on the water. “Nice big bubble for us,” he says without thinking. He can feel Bosco staring at him. They release the heater, then wait to make sure their bubble does not escape and rise to the surface.
“We’re good,” Rays says. They silently pass the bag of weights, filling their pockets, stringing their belts. Ray uncurls the clothesline to tether them together.
They stand at the edge of the barge. Bosco grins. “Last time we’ll have to—” he starts to say, before Ray leaps into the river, sinking fast, moved by the current. He feels the rope tighten, Bosco pulled in behind him. He settles in the gravel and mud. The water is clearer than usual, a light, murky gold. He walks until the heater looms up in his vision, white and blurry. He gives the two quick tugs on the rope and Bosco soon finds him. They work out from the heater in their long spokes. It is slow today, only a few oysters under their rakes. When it is time they lift the heater and Bosco strains, holding it while Ray slips underneath. The darkness of it always startles him, like instant blindness. He hears himself pant for breath, runs his fingers around the mossy sides. He holds his head in his hands, squeezes, breathes.
Ray taps the side of the heater and Bosco lifts it to let him out. Ray takes it from him to allow Bosco inside. Just before he slips under, Bosco holds up the diamond and gives Ray a thumbs-up. His face is drawn, desperate, searching Ray’s eyes. He slips down and in. Without the money he will die, and without Ray he will not have the money. He believes in everything that Ray is to him, just as he believes that bullshit and stupid jokes are equal to cancer, that killing is some easy thing. He pulls his faith from TV shows. They are moving toward the things he believes in now, he is pulling Ray toward them, toward the explosion of brain and hair and blood, toward the shining box of diamonds. In the dark water and the throbbing of his lungs the scene repeats itself like memory. Bosco taps the side of the heater. He will reemerge, his eyes panicked and full of death. The taps on the heater grow louder—sharper and more distinct—and Ray realizes that Bosco is tapping with the diamond. The clicks resonate like gunshots through some distant wall, mixed in the noise of his pulse in his ears, of the slow push of water. He shakes his head, his lungs aching already, too soon, way before his time in the heater. His chest burns, the taps coming in sharp ripples of sound as his fingers work at the knotted rope around his waist, at the belt of weights holding him down. He unties them and rises slightly, Bosco’s voice shouting from a thousand miles away as Ray twists the hot water valve atop the heater, letting in the water, the bubbles rising fat and bright, moving upward as the taps of the diamond quicken and then slow, as Ray gives himself to the current, following the bubbles, his lungs strained to bursting, his eyes held by a patch of greasy light above him. He rises, flailing through moments, as if all he could know of what would come next and next were held above him always, just beyond reach, in a layer of thin white air.
About the Author
BRAD BARKLEY, a
native of North Carolina, is the author of two novels, Alison’s Automotive Repair Manual, which was a Book Sense 76 choice, and Money, Love, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a Book Sense 76 choice. Money, Love was named one of the best books of 2000 by the Washington Post and Library Journal. Book magazine named Barkley as one of their Newcomers of 2002: Breakthrough Writers You Need to Know. His short fiction has appeared in over two dozen publications, including USA Today, the Raleigh News & Observer, the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, the Oxford American, the Greensboro Review, Glimmer Train, Book magazine, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, which has twice awarded him the Emily Balch Prize for Best Fiction. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, once earning Special Mention, and was short-listed in Best American Short Stories, 1997, and again in 2002. His work is anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2002. He has won four Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Brad Barkley teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University. He lives in western Maryland with his wife, Mary, and two children.
The Dzanc Books eBook Club
Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1st of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints, Other Voices Books, Black Lawrence Press, Keyhole, Disquiet, and Starcherone. For more information, including how to join today, please visit http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/.