The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  She fell asleep.

  * * *

  First, she was four, and the shovel was too big for her, and Hiram, wearing a black suit, lifted her out of the grave, which was not a grave but a Radio Flyer. Inside, the last of the old men in dark suits were drawn to the woodstove like iron filings. Air strong with the sweet stink of chewing tobacco as their spit sizzled. Wives huddled in clumps and whispers. Hiram carried Miranda to the stairwell at the back of the room and sat her on the steps, touched her nose, and went back to the old men. One of them rose to give Hiram his seat. This was Billy Cotton, the preacher from Sabbath House. He wore a black suit and black bolo tie and had a head of sweeping chestnut hair. Square jaw, sharp eyes. He did not belong here, in this memory. An interloper. Beside him: his wife, a small, pretty woman with sad eyes.

  The dream—

  memory

  —shifted, and now Miranda was eleven, twelve, thirteen and tromping upstairs in mud-soaked clothes, face streaked orange from digging Hiram’s false grave, and she walked into the living room and there, again, was the preacher, tall as the ceiling, a pillar of black. Beside him the dwarf, John Avery, whom she did not yet know.

  The preacher was older, his face lined, his hair gray. The living room curtains billowed behind them, the dwarf standing at the preacher’s side in jeans and a child’s plaid shirt tucked in, big wide hands clasped at his waist as if in prayer, and it was night outside, her mother’s lamps glowing warmly in their globes.

  The preacher’s eyes were large and brown and solemn. He wanted something.

  He needed something.

  Work, she thought. They are going to offer you work. And you will take it. Because you need it. Because the boy is growing and he will need things you can’t get from selling crickets and minnows to old men.

  “Your door was open, child,” the preacher said.

  IN THE LAND OF SPAIN

  In the hour before midnight, Miranda dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and jeans, opened the hall closet, and shouldered a leather quiver of cedar shafts fixed with target points. On the zebra-wood rack mounted above the couch in the living room, three bows hung, unstrung: the Remington she had taken hunting with Littlefish that day, Hiram’s black maple Bear, and a Root recurve she had bought from a Sears catalogue when she was thirteen. She chose the Root, slipped on a leather arm guard and shooting glove, and went out onto the rear deck and climbed down to the floating dock. Standing in the shine from the naked porch bulb, she held each end of the Root and swept it over her head and all the way down to the small of her back, then back to the front of her thighs. Up, over, down. Up, over, down. She did this ten, fifteen, twenty times, and the muscles and tendons in her shoulders and chest came awake. Next, she looped a bowstring around the recurve’s lower limb, slipped her foot across it, and pulled the string up and over the fiberglass until it snapped taut at the tip. Legs apart, as with Cook’s pistol, she nocked an arrow from her quiver, brought the weapon up, and drew right-handed, aiming for a pillowcase stuffed with straw. It shone in the moonlight where it hung from a maple tree far back beyond the honeysuckle, in a fescue field across the river. From tip to target, at least seventy yards. She held full-draw for the space of three breaths, as Hiram had taught her, long ago, and in those three breaths she felt the light kiss of the fletching against the corner of her mouth. The arrow went out of focus at the edge of her sight and the target came into focus. The dock rocked gently beneath her. She upped her pull, back tightening. Felt the heat of the draw, the tension running all through her, the burn beneath her breast.

  Her arrow struck the pillowcase dead center.

  Miranda shot twice more in the next twelve seconds, and each time her arrow found its mark, above and below the first.

  In the kitchen, the clock read eleven-thirty.

  She put the target arrows away in the hall closet and set the Root back in its cradle above the couch. From the fridge, she took two sausage patties she had cooked a few nights back. She unwrapped them from tinfoil and ate them in three bites.

  Downstairs, she pulled the broken door shut and pushed it open again, working the splintered frame. A hammer and a few boards would fix it short-term, so she started off the porch for the work shed that stood between the mercantile and the boat ramp. On the ramp, in a circle of blue fluorescent light, less than an arm’s length from the water’s edge, the mud-speckled crane stood like a piece of statuary, its long white wings tipped in black. It watched her, tracked her progress from store to shed, its head a white question mark. She kept walking, though it slowed her pace, this curious bird. Holding her gaze with its bright-coin eyes.

  Do we hunt them?

  A memory: she was small, in a life jacket on the center plank as the johnboat drifted through a columned maze of cypress. The sky above purpling with a coming storm. Hiram paddling, bending down so his face was close to hers and pointing over her shoulder, up, into the trees, where all around them the cranes were roosting, huge and white against the day. The rain began to patter among the trees. His voice a whisper: “Watch, how they spread their wings.”

  She, just a child, but knowing, somehow, that this was important. A moment by which others would later be measured.

  “Do we hunt them?”

  “We do.”

  “Why?”

  “There is a place in the land of Spain,” Hiram said, “where parents hang their children’s food in trees, and the children cannot eat until they sever the strings that hold their food. They sever them,” he said, “with arrows shot from bows. Do you understand?”

  In the shed, she picked up two boards from a pile of scrap, along with a handful of nails and a hammer, and went back to the mercantile to fix the door.

  Down at the ramp, the crane was gone.

  III

  Second Run

  IN HIS TREE, LITTLEFISH DREAMING

  Littlefish hid beneath Baba’s stilted porch and watched the grassy clearing far below the kudzu, where, just beyond the fence, in the moonglow, a girl stood. He had never seen a girl like this. She was not much older than he. She wore a white gown, was pale like the underside of a green leaf turned in the wind. Littlefish stood at the edge of the kudzu and watched as the man in the black suit and broad-brimmed hat slashed his way out of the forest with his blade and went at her. She was unmoving, rigid, as if planted in the ground with a stake at her back. The man in the hat swung his blade at the girl’s head and Littlefish woke, mouth open in a silent scream, the only kind he knew.

  The boy reached into the knothole above his head and took out a black pencil. On the boards of his platform, by moonlight, he began to draw, pressing grooves into grain.

  Bad dreams are just bits of stories, Sister had said yesterday, as they dressed the deer beneath the oak. She took his knife, cut slits in the animal’s forelegs and hind legs. Just pieces, all scattered. When the pieces get mixed up, the stories don’t make sense. When stories don’t make sense, they scare us. She pushed the hind hooves through the slits in the forelegs, interlocking them. You have to fit the pieces together, make sense of it all. Shouldering the deer like a pack, she stood, and together they walked out of the meadow and into the dusky woods, back to Baba’s cabin. A boy and a woman and on the woman’s back the deer he had killed.

  He looked at what he’d drawn on the boards: a crude stick figure of the girl in his dream.

  Who was she? Where did she fit into his story?

  Littlefish bit his tongue. Pressed hard into the wood. The lead broke.

  Beyond his lookout, the moon was a silver sickle slicing the sky.

  THE TRADE TONIGHT

  Avery did not greet Miranda as she tied off the Alumacraft. He wrestled the blue Igloo to the edge of the dock and into her arms, jars inside clinking. She wedged the chest in the center of the boat, her shirt riding up, and Avery saw the pistol snugged in the waist of her jeans. He ran a hand through his unkempt mane, fingers tangling. He took a joint from his shirt pocket, lit up, and sat down hard on the edge of
the dock, where he let his feet dangle. He spoke two words, like nails punched through tin: “Things change.”

  Miranda gave him a sharp, questioning look, and he flapped his shirttail.

  She put a hand to the small of her back and drew her shirt down.

  The dwarf took a hit on his joint, his eyes already far off. He coughed, deep and rattling.

  “You smoke too much of that shit,” Miranda said. She had cast off her line, was bending to start the motor.

  “Hey,” Avery croaked.

  She glared at him.

  “Riddle, earlier tonight, he didn’t, I mean—are you…?”

  She cranked the boat, drowned him out.

  The motor faded, and Avery stood alone, smoking.

  A mournful whistle broke the deep silence. Up the lane, beneath the reaching boughs of the oaks, a tall, gangling Cotton went wandering, bending every now and then to pick up rocks, inspecting each. Some he threw away. Others he pushed into the toe of a black wing tip he carried beneath his arm. His right foot was bare.

  Eventually he disappeared into the deep shadows behind the manse, though Avery could hear him still, whistling.

  * * *

  The Alumacraft peeled away from Sabbath House and onto the river, and here Miranda throttled up and cruised for a while, the boat’s dark wake rolling in toward the banks. The great stitching clamor of the bottoms rose up like a tide and drowned the buzz of the twenty-horse Evinrude. She knew every bend and oxbow, the low points where the sandbars would ground her, the deadfalls and stumps and suckholes. She knew the nesting trees of great blue herons. As a girl, she’d stolen their feathers and fixed them to arrows shot from blinds into rabbits and deer. She was a hunter. She understood the prey she hunted. Where it lived, where it ate. What it wanted. How to get it. She took comfort in such order, such need.

  Things change.

  She glanced at the blue Igloo, wedged between the center and stern seats, packed with the second batch of Avery’s dope in mason jars. The chest was heavier this time. The batch bigger. She kept one hand on the tiller, reached behind her, felt Cook’s gun tucked in the waist of her jeans.

  Tonight, for the first time in seven years, she did not know what the river carried her to. She only felt an irrevocable sense of things in motion. The old witch’s words whispered in her ear: Something’s waking up out there.

  “Shake it off,” she told herself.

  The boat pushed on through the darkest hour of the night.

  * * *

  The moon had set by the time the boat ramp beyond the railroad trestle came into view. At the top of the ramp, two men eased out of a white Bronco. Miranda throttled back. She cut the motor alongside the barge and tied off. The men, who waited at the top of the hill, did not descend. She climbed onto the barge, watching them watch her. Two silhouettes against the vapor lamp bleeding blue over ground and trees. One was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, his face a dark cave. The other man was short and stocky and bald. Both stood very still.

  Miranda felt a bead of sweat drip from her hairline down the nape of her neck. It ran the length of her spine, around the cold knob of gunmetal in the small of her back. Pulse racing, she had no spit. She pulled the Igloo out of the boat and stepped into the dewy grass at the base of the ramp. Raised the cooler high above her head, a question.

  Crickets along the bank fell silent when the tall man boomed: “Thirty paces up the ramp, then you stop.”

  Arms shaking, she lowered the cooler to her waist and moved slowly, willing herself to stay calm, to hold at full draw until the tremors passed. Thirty paces and she stopped.

  The tall man came down, silver wallet chain shining. He was huge, a giant. He walked with an odd, careless grace in heavy engineer’s boots, thumbs hooked in the pockets of jeans. When he drew close, he pushed the hood from his head, and Miranda took an involuntary step back. His hair was shorn, his jaw square and set. The features of his face were obscured behind a mask of tattoos that rendered him a living death’s-head skull, teeth inked in his cheeks, nose a blackened, ragged triangle. Cracks beneath and above his eyes and fissuring out from the corners of his mouth. A pendant lay in the hollow of his collarbone, a crow’s foot on a length of rawhide.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. His voice was soft, almost warm.

  “Does it matter?”

  The giant smiled.

  Miranda set the Igloo down. The jars shifted inside.

  “Open it.”

  She squatted, conscious of the cold revolver against her skin. She opened the cooler. The giant held out a hand, and she saw that the flesh there, too, was tattooed. Thin bones along the backs of his fingers. Miranda passed one of the jars up. The giant turned it in the vague light. “Mexican dope,” he said, “is for shit. Too many pesticides. Handsome Charlie, he vouched for this. Said it was worth the trouble. That true?”

  “I don’t smoke it,” Miranda said. “I just bring it.”

  The giant put the jar back and carried the cooler up the ramp. At the top, he and his partner spoke, their voices low. The smaller man wore a white T-shirt tucked into jeans tucked into cowboy boots, over the T-shirt a leather jacket. Face pitted with acne. He took the Igloo from the giant to the Bronco, where he opened the rear hatch and slid the cooler inside, then drew out a Styrofoam chest from the bed, the kind Miranda sold minnows in at the mercantile. The small man walked it back, set the chest at Miranda’s feet. Clear packing tape, wrapped twice around, sealed the chest. Scrawled in black marker across the lid was one word: PREACHER.

  “This our trade?” Miranda asked.

  “Tell Preacher,” the small man said, his voice a rasp, “it’s in the mouth.” He grinned as he withdrew, every tooth filed sharp, a shark’s mouth.

  Sweat dripped beneath her arms, down her back. She felt her shirttail ride up over the pistol as she bent to pick up the chest. Whatever was inside was large and heavy and packed in old ice, half-melted chunks shifting. Standing, she let her shirttail drop naturally and started for the bottom of the ramp, hoping the gun wasn’t a lump beneath her shirt.

  “Wait,” the giant called.

  She froze.

  A dome light lit the Bronco’s cab as the small man tugged at some unseen cargo in the front seat. When he kicked the door shut, his arms were full of a sleeping child, a girl, wrapped in a serape. The tops of the girl’s bare feet stuck out of the blanket, jouncing with every step as the two men came down the ramp.

  Miranda felt something inside her list. “What is this?” she said.

  Ignoring her, the giant drew a hypodermic needle from his sweatshirt pocket, the barrel filled with clear liquid.

  Miranda set the Styrofoam chest down hard, its contents sloshing.

  “What is this?” she said again, louder, fear giving way to fury.

  The giant clamped his teeth around the plastic cap of the needle and pulled it free with his mouth. He reached into the serape and drew out the girl’s arm, rolled up the sleeve of her cotton pajamas, which were patterned with little pink pigs with wings. Her flesh was etched with thin white scars. In the hollow of her elbow, a nest of punctures.

  Miranda yanked the .38 from the small of her back and brought it up and thumbed back the hammer. “Stop,” she said, but she heard the weakness in her voice, more plea than command, and knew instantly—as she often knew at the moment of release that her arrow would spin off wildly, drop low or high—she had misjudged.

  The giant spat the syringe cap into his hand, capped the needle.

  He took three slow steps down the ramp toward Miranda.

  How easy it should have been, to pull the trigger. Such a small space between her target and the barrel, but this was a man, a human being, no deer, no rabbit, no beer bottle in the dirt. Her finger frozen. The gun a hunk of metal, not a part of her, not a thing she could feel, and the weakness spread quickly to her center, a kind of quivering sick. Exposed, caught out. No arrow handy. She had felt the same once
when she was ten, had chanced upon a boar deep in the bottoms. Huge and shaggy and fly-swarmed, possessed of curving tusks like scythes. Only Hiram’s arrow, flying out of the trees, had saved her from evisceration.

  The giant reached out and took the gun.

  “I don’t need to tell you what you’ve just done wrong, do I,” he said.

  He seized her wrist and wrenched her around, wrapped his tree-trunk arm around her throat, and his breath was warm in her ear and smelled of wintergreen gum and she clawed at his arm as he said, “I’m betting from the way you took a shooter’s stance just now you know how to handle yourself. But to pull a gun is to pull a trigger, and you didn’t pull it, Does-It-Matter.” He tightened his arm around her throat.

  Miranda felt her windpipe closing.

  He spoke, red tongue flapping in the hole of a skull’s mouth. “That girl, she’s nobody. Every soul we burned to get her, they were nobodies, too. Good dope for her. That’s the trade tonight. Tomorrow night, maybe we’ll trade something else. In the meantime, you think about this: what’s the worst thing a man ever did to you?”

  The world was sliding away, purple spots firing behind her eyes.

  “You think we’ll be nicer?”

  She sagged in the big man’s grip. He let her go and tossed the gun in the grass.

  Miranda dropped to her knees, sucking air.

  The needle slid into the girl’s arm, hit the vein in the hollow of her elbow, and the giant depressed the plunger. When the liquid was pushed into her, the girl rolled her head against the small man’s chest, as if she had been rocked asleep. He carried the child past Miranda, down the ramp, and lay the girl in the bottom of the Alumacraft. He arranged the serape over her.

  Miranda had not even caught her breath by the time they cranked the Bronco, and when they were gone, she fell on her back and lay staring up at the sky, dawn’s faint glow to the east. She picked up Cook’s gun from the grass and set it atop the chest, all but falling into the boat with the sleeping child. With a shaking hand, she closed the gun in Hiram’s tackle box and sat on the stern seat, the girl a lump in the bottom of the boat. Miranda sat trembling, staring at nothing, until the crickets resumed their song in the reeds along the bank.