Catfish in the Cradle

by Wile E Young

  It was true that a majority of it flew right over my head, but the man’s lack of respect was already grating at my temper and I was fighting back the rage I felt twisting around my bones.

  “Yeah, I got it doc. When can I take the boy?”

  Riggs looked taken aback. Probably wasn’t used to someone disregarding his authority so easily, and when he spoke again his voice was lower.

  “Well uh, I think we can discharge him today. Judge Dowd already signed custody over to you in lieu of a will as his closest living relative.”

  I licked my lips. “What about the DNA test I want?”

  Riggs shook his head. “Chief Wiley is running that one… you’ll have to talk to him.”’

  After that it was a questionnaire about proper child care, like I hadn’t changed hundreds of diapers before. But eventually I was released out into a waiting room while the nurses prepped Lincoln for his first journey into the outside world.

  A nurse with red hair that I would have flirted with as a younger man brought him out. She cooed over him, smiling at me as she handed the boy over. “He’s strong, sir!’

  She was chipper, and I did my best to return the smile as I firmly cradled the boy close to the chest. Those big round black eyes stared up at me and a little hand grasped at the air, webbed fingers causing my insides to turn flips in revulsion as I carried him out of the waiting room and into the world.

  ****

  We stopped and bought a car seat. Strapping the boy tightly in the back seat, Otis’ eyes had widened when he had seen Lincoln’s condition, but he chose not to comment. Maybe he should have since the ride back to Uncertain was filled with a quiet tension that I was unused to around my friend.

  I broke the silence. “They said that skin grafts were an option but I don’t have that kind of money…”

  Otis didn’t let his eyes leave the road. “He’s in for a hard road. You know how kids are.”

  I sure did. Back in my little one room schoolhouse with a class of twenty there had always been someone to pick on. I could already see my grandson’s destiny written large across the cypress moss and small-town prejudice.

  Freak.

  “It’ll toughen him up. We came through it okay, right?” Otis said.

  I chuckled. “It’s been a long time since I had any hint of schooling, Otis. Back then you had to be tough if you just wanted to survive recess.”

  The Sheriff smiled, his eyes traveling back to distant memories that only he knew. “Yeah. I hear you. Back in my day if you shot out another kid’s eye with a pellet gun you had to give him a free pack of BBs to make up for it.”

  We both smiled at the shared nostalgia. Hell, compared to today, our childhoods were practically barbaric. But it had also seemed more innocent… no iPods, cellphones, or weird toys that had no useful purpose.

  That was the time I had met Renee, hair shining bright on the jungle gym as she hung upside down, staring hard at the sun. I had turned to old Delton Robby, long since passed away, and said, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry…”

  I was a man of my word through and through.

  Lincoln’s braying brought me out of my memory and I twisted around in my seat to look at him. “It’s alright kid, your Pop is gonna take good care of you… not going to let anything hurt you.”

  Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better had we left him on the side of the road that day.

  Chapter Five

  I took the ride home slow; Lincoln had calmed down as soon as I had set him on the passenger seat of my boat, his caterwauling dwindling away to a pleased coo and eventually sleep.

  I barely kept the motor running, making sure that the sounds of the engine were a light puttering instead of a mighty roar, going even slower when a boat full of tourists thundered past. The 175 bobbed over each wake. I didn’t want to risk waking the boy by jumping the waves, and even with the calm rocking I was afraid that Lincoln would wake up and begin his screaming again.

  He kept right on sleeping, oblivious to the roiling river.

  I took the turn off the main river and into the back channels leading to Carter’s Lake. The noise died away except for the sound of the engine sputtering and the secret world enshrouded by the cypress trees. I heard a distant hiss and a fearful bleating as an alligator made lunch out of a wild goat or deer that had wandered too close to the water; I wondered if it was the same one that I had been contracted to remove…

  I glanced at Lincoln; a job that was going to get infinitely harder now that I had a young’un to look after.

  We were almost back when the woods went quiet. A lifetime in the outdoors had taught me that when the world fell silent you had best be ready to fight for your life.

  I killed the engine and let the current take us down the channel while I unclasped the panel that opened into the hull. I pulled a small lock box that contained my Model 29 revolver, a small case of .44 magnum cartridges sitting beside it. I quickly loaded the weapon and began scanning the water.

  It was rare that an alligator would attack a boat, especially one the size of mine. But I had been wrong before. The scratches and teeth marks in the boat’s paint from a sixteen-foot monster were still unrepaired to this day. Fisherman told tales of bigger ones, and in this part of the lake I wouldn’t have doubted that one would have found a home.

  The water was eerily still, the current disappearing and leaving Lincoln and I drifting on dead water. This area was more swamp than river, a narrow channel and shallow water flooded with green lily pads and cloistering trees drowning the place in shadows. Predators lurked here. I had once seen a cougar prowling the shore… the lack of human activity let the animals pursue their instincts without fear.

  I heard a thump behind me and the boat turned to the left. I stumbled and instinctively reached out to grab the car seat.

  That feeling of being watched that I had experienced the previous evening returned, and I glanced around the marshy bog, eyes traveling over every nook and branch looking for a camouflaged hunter or a boat hidden by logs… anything indicating a human presence.

  Maybe it was the fact that the birds had gone quiet, or maybe it was because it sounded unnatural. Either way I heard a sound that I couldn’t immediately identify, but then a lifetime of stepping out of a shower or bathtub reminded me that I had heard that noise all too often.

  It was the sound of dripping water.

  You wouldn’t think that the sound of water would be out of place in a swamp, but when you were dealing with mostly dead water in a bog the sound was alien. It was echoing from a dense cluster of cypress trees that huddled close. Even in the bright sun I couldn’t make out if anything was there.

  “Whoever’s back there you better come on out now unless you want a hole in your gut.”

  Nothing moved.

  That sound of dripping water was starting to die away but I could still barely hear it. Whoever was standing in that grove of trees must have been wearing the best camouflage in the world…

  Obscured by trees or not, a man can’t hide from fear.

  I pointed the pistol a little ways off towards a lily pad and pulled the trigger. The lily pad exploded as the calm day was split by the resounding crack and smell of gunpowder. Birds took off in panic from the trees, but nothing moved in that small grove of cypress.

  The sound was gone.

  Lincoln had woken with the gunshot and his squalling had begun anew. I carefully unloaded the gun before leaning down and rocking the car seat, shushing him. “It’s okay, my boy, it’s okay. Just a gator trying to get a meal…” Even the words rang hollow on my tongue as I glanced back at the cypress trees in the middle of the bog.

  With my grandson awake I didn’t bother trying to putter around. I clambered back into the driver’s seat and kicked on the engine. The machine roared to life and I gunned the throttle, rocketing away from the bog.

  ****

  Otis had apparently called everyone to let them know I was bringing Lincoln home. Too m
any cars were waiting in the driveway to my liking, and a small crowd was gathered on the grass slope that led up to my house. They began clapping when they saw my boat round the corner into the small bayou, Scott Carter and Davis Trucker among them.

  Truth be told I was uncomfortable with the attention. Probably why I preferred the solitude of the sticks versus a pretty house in town.

  Scott and Davis helped me tied up the boat while Vicky whisked Lincoln out of the passenger seat. The boy was still mewling, and I was secretly grateful that I didn’t have him right beside my ear, crying at full blast for the time being.

  The two Game Wardens, Larry Knowles and Desmond Miles, stood just behind them.

  “Congratulations, old man!” Larry hollered.

  I smiled in return, trying not to recall all of the tickets they had given me over the years. Larry Knowles was a man in his early thirties, one of those who had peaked early in his career and was now stuck in his job until he retired with a beer gut and years worth of stories. At the moment he had managed to keep himself in fairly good shape, though his five o’clock shadow had turned into a seven o’clock beard.

  Desmond Miles on the other hand didn’t speak much of his past, but from the rumors and hearsay around Uncertain it was quite the tale, one that no one exactly knew other than his pretty wife, Susannah, and she wasn’t talking either. Heard the Klan had tried to make him a victim and hadn’t walked out of the bayou alive to tell of it. Never found any bodies, but if I were a betting man they had graced some lucky alligator’s gullet.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said gruffly wishing Renee was there; she’d always been the people person.

  Earl Ray and his wife Sue had come up from down the road. A hard man with rippling muscles and a Bud Light clutched in his hand, Otis had handed him more DWIs than greetings over the years. Sue was a quiet woman in a blue sundress and looked like she had just hit thirty despite being a good decade older. Her blonde hair shimmered under the summer sun as her eyes fell over my grandson and she cooed reaching in to grab his tiny hand.

  Davis’ wife Maggie embraced me as I exited the boathouse “He’s going to be real handsome, like his grandpa.”

  “Hopefully his other one.” I replied gruffly.

  “They get any results on that DNA test?” Earl Ray asked as he wandered up, his grey goatee stained with tobacco juice.

  “Otis didn’t say anything about it other than he’d let me know when the city police got the results back.”

  That devolved into a long swirling argument about how the cops didn’t think too highly of the low-income backwoods folk like us that I half listened to. My thoughts were still with Sammie Jo.

  Maybe they could tell despite my attempts to hide my emotion, but I found Gideon Whyte shoving a beer into my hand and clicking the can “To Sammie Jo…”

  The cry was repeated by everyone who had a drink in hand as we bottomed up under the sun. My grandson’s homecoming had become a makeshift wake.

  No one got wasted on beer. That would have been bad taste at something like this… just sips and reminiscing on old times and speculating about Lincoln and his future.

  Likewise no one commented on the boy’s webbed hands and feet. Just like no one commented when a baby was born around here with a different skin color than the father, folks would much rather avoid the subject that point out the obvious.

  They say it takes a community, and my neighbors had obliged. Otis had given me the car seat, Vicky and Gideon had bought a mess of baby formula, Earl Ray and Sue some hand me down baby clothes, Davis and Maggie a few toys… All of it I was most grateful for since I hadn’t been planning on raising a child yesterday.

  They promised to stop by more often and help out if they could. They knew my job and they knew how much time it consumed along with the dangers that came with it. Lincoln wouldn’t be joining me in the hunt until he was much older.

  Vicki had the day off tomorrow, and she promised that she and Gideon would come over to watch Lincoln in the morning so I could hunt. I gave them my thanks and they left along with Earl Ray, Sue, and the Truckers.

  Only Scott Carter was left, though he looked like he would rather be anywhere else than on my property. I knew that it was something to do with Sammie Jo, but I didn’t want to voice it. Instead we shot the breeze about the current baseball season and if the Saints were going to go all the way this year, Lincoln oblivious in his car seat next to me, tired from the day’s events.

  Scott laughed from a joke I had made, but the merriment disappeared from his face and was replaced by a morose reluctance. “Grady, there’s uh… well… I started the autopsy and found some—” He paused, searching for the right words. “Some surprising facts that you might not want to hear about, especially when it comes to your daughter, but I—”

  I interrupted him. “Scott, no offense, but would you hurry the hell up and just tell me what you found?”

  Scott nodded and licked his lips. “Well, her uh… genitals were mutilated by the birth, but I found large traces of mercury in her blood…”

  I shook my head, lost to what my friend was saying. “You saying that she ate a thermometer or something?”

  Scott shook his head. “She would have had to eat a lot of thermometers. More likely someone poisoned her…”

  Murder… it had been murder…

  I knew it.

  “Hopefully the DNA test can reveal more, but this whole situation is looking less like an accident.”

  I didn’t react or respond. No use letting Scott know that if I found the name of the philandering son of a bitch who had killed my baby girl I would put a bullet between his eyes.

  “I’m going to give Otis the results when I get back into town, looking more than likely this is criminal…”

  I nodded my head, eyes hard as I looked down at Lincoln. If they hadn’t already cleared him at the hospital I would have been running to my truck to take him back. But instead he was happy and healthy but for his condition.

  “I have to get going, but you take care now you hear?” I told Scott that I would, told him to watch for deer and went back into my house before the dust had settled.

  I was going to have to redo Sammie Jo’s room. We had only ever had one guest room and Renee wouldn’t have stood by and let me tear it apart so I could keep my shrine to our daughter intact.

  Her room wasn’t overly big:, a bed in the middle with brown sheets and a mess of decorative pillows on the headboard, objects with no point or purpose in my opinion. Her dresser was on the wall that ran along the edge of the house, under the window. The sunlight filtering through blinds washed over my baby girl’s bright and smiling face in a march of picture frames from when she was a child all the way to a grown woman.

  Renee and I hadn’t sent her to Karnack, preferring to let her get a proper education at the bigger school in Marshall. Sammie Jo had been full of life, participated in athletics, made the cheerleading squad, and had the guys chasing after her… a quality she must have gotten from her mother.

  I felt the tears welling in my eyes again as I began to take down the pictures, wracking sobs spiraled across my chest as I pulled cardboard boxes out of the attic and began unpacking her dresser, the clothes from her closet fitting tightly together. Memorabilia, toys, ancient knick knacks that she had acquired over her twenty-eight years of life disappeared into the depths of the cardboard, most likely to never see the light of day ever again.

  Not for the first time I regretted being unable to afford Sammie’s wish to go to college. It wasn’t like she had even wanted to go very far away. East Texas Baptist University was located right there in Marshall. We wouldn’t have had to pay for a dorm room since she could have lived at home. She had just wanted to learn… be better than what she was.

  Business wasn’t booming and I had always managed to just eke by rather than actually get ahead. So Renee and I extolled Sammie Jo that if she wanted to go to college, she would have to pay for it herself.

  She had
taken up work over at the River Bend restaurant, an eatery that wasn’t too far off the channel that led into the back lake. I had come in a few times while she was working. It had done me proud to see her working for what she wanted and that she was going to go much further in life than her old dad had gone.

  Then came the day that she had taken her mother’s car to work and I had never seen the car or her again… until yesterday.

  Yesterday…

  It already seemed like a lifetime had passed since my daughter’s brief return and death. Maybe the reality was finally starting to hit me… Renee wasn’t coming back and neither was Sammie Jo. I had my friends and neighbors sure, but it was up to me to raise this little boy and show him how to get by in the world.

  Maybe I’d do a better job than I had with my daughter.

  ****

  A storm blew in with the night; I had sat on the porch with Lincoln in my arms.

  The boy was asleep while my old eyes had stayed rooted on the clouds, watching as the slow-moving thunderheads rolled in. There were flashes of lightning followed by distant tolls of thunder. I rocked back and forth and Lincoln kept sleeping content as dark night became momentarily illuminated with the flashes of electrical arcs, like God himself had a vendetta against the world.

  “Maybe we’ll see some ball lightning, huh?” I whispered to my grandson who continued to sleep. It was that quiet right before the sky falls out that was always my favorite part of a late spring thunderstorm… the tension, your hair standing on end, then you smell the freshness of the clouds…

  Then it begins.

  The rain came down in a sprinkling hiss that developed into a full-fledged roar, the lightning and thunder accompanying in a crescendo of heavenly fury.

  I prayed there wouldn’t be a twister. There had been one a few years back that had torn through the pine and cypress forests around Uncertain. I had seen the devastation up close; the trees torn up by their roots and thrown around like they were kid’s toys. I wasn’t eager to see that kind of power up close.