by Larry Brown
After a while he stopped seeing the words he had so painfully scrawled on the cheap pulp paper and folded the letter back up, stuck it inside the envelope, and put it where it had been.
He went through the drawers in Virgil’s dresser quickly, flipping through socks and underwear, a meager assortment of near-threadbare things. Not much of a place to hide anything to begin with. There were no sheaves of money in there. He turned away from the dresser and looked at the room again, saw a cardboard box of old magazines, the bed, a tall wastebasket that held umbrellas and canes. He went to the bed and lifted the mattress from one side, ran his hand under it and looked, repeated the search from the other side. Nothing. He was reluctant to go through his mother’s things, but he did. The pockets of her dresses, the drawers of her dresser, becoming more irritated and feeling more desperate at what he was doing. He felt in the pockets of her coat. Got down on his knees and looked into the toes of her shoes for bills wadded and crammed. He searched every possible hiding place in the closet and it yielded him nothing except a bite on the end of one finger from a large brown spider that was up in the toe of one shoe.
“Son of a bitch!” he said, then shook the spider out and smashed it with the shoe.
He looked at the room again. A small bedside table was filled with pictures that he rummaged through, pausing to look at them, Virgil and fish, his mother in a blue dress, Theron on a horse, Puppy on a bicycle, infants sprawled on blankets. There were younger versions of his parents sitting on the hood of a shiny car holding hands. There was no money in those images of times gone by. He shut the drawer and stood up, almost in a panic. He walked quickly from the room and went into the kitchen and started going through the cabinets. Behind the third door he tried he found a white teapot with a lid and he pulled it from its resting place and removed the top. U.S. currency was hiding in there, folded crisp twenty-dollar bills packed in a wad.
“All right,” he said quietly, then set the teapot on the table and went to the front door and looked out. The road was deserted. Virgil wasn’t walking into the yard. The puppy was lying on the porch. It lifted its head at his step and began to get up wearily to greet him but he turned away and hurried back to the kitchen. The whiskey was still in his pocket and he pulled it out and sat down in the chair and got another drink of it. He was hurrying now, anxious to be away and done with it. Out of here and no trace of his coming and going left for the old man to find. And maybe he didn’t even know how much was in there. He reached in and pulled the wad out and straightened the bills and counted them, sliding them quickly through his fingers and flattening each bill on the table. There was six hundred and forty dollars in the little teapot and he kept a hundred and put the rest back, took another drink of the whiskey and left it on the table where it had been. Then he was up the hall and out the door and into the car, going down the road glancing up at the rearview mirror until he could get to the turnoff and the woods that would hide him. Once he got there he relaxed, lit a cigarette, feeling the weight of the money in his pocket not as a tangible thing like ounces or pounds but with a steady reassurance that the day was looking a lot better.
He turned up the radio and drove leisurely, riding in and out of the sunshine where the machines were busy mauling the forest and where trucks stood waiting to be loaded by knucklebooms that lifted handfuls of logs in their giant claws and dropped them splintering each other into the waiting uprights of the trucks that swayed and shook with the weight. There might be a job and probably a bad one, running a chain saw all day long dropping trees. But he had money in his pocket now. He wasn’t going to worry about a job for a while.
He drove on past the loading sites and turned down a sand road about a mile past there. He was in the national forest once he drove past a brown sign made of wood and yellow letters proclaiming it so. The hand of man had not touched these woods. None of it was posted or could be. He and Jewel had parked in this refuge a lot of times early on and he drove down through the sandy lane, a little breeze blowing through the trees that lined the road, by giant leaning pines that were the last of their kind, limbless for sixty or seventy feet and then bushed heavily with branches and cones. Hollows of old hardwoods where the sunlight broke into shafts of white intensity and the floor of the forest was clean of scrub stuff and smooth with its carpet of dead leaves, eighty and ninety years of them lying packed and dense upon the ground so that you could see a deer moving a quarter mile away between the gray trunks if your eyes were good. A curve in the road where there were minerals in the ground and the deer had pawed and licked out a hollow two feet deep and sometimes when you rounded that curve at night you might see ten or a dozen of them grouped there, bucks, does, fawns. He drove by a little creek that fed into a lake of forty acres. They had parked there, too, summer nights on the backseat with the radio playing and the car pointed toward the road so that if anybody came up he could turn on the headlights and blind the driver until they could get their clothes on, but nobody ever came up. How many times with the stars bright above as he caressed her body on a quilt in the woods with the moon showing through the limbs overhead? Uncounted the times she had moved over him and swung her heavy breasts to an unheard rhythm that she carried in her head and her womb. Long nights of lovemaking with her dark hair in a tangle and the tiny freckles on her shoulders visible in the pale light that shone down on them from above. He eyed the woods he drove through and almost wished it could be that way again. Wondered how long it had been going on between them, what they’d done, if they did it in her bed, if they took his son on picnics, and if he knew who his father was.
He wished now that he’d brought the whiskey with him. He could have sipped it, driving this lane of timber, his lane of memories, listening to the radio. There seemed to be no answers. She’d always talked about love but she didn’t know what she was talking about. She didn’t know what kind of trouble love could get you in. It could ruin everything and turn into hate. He didn’t want love. He only wanted things to be easier somehow, for his life to not be so wrong. It had been a long time since it hadn’t been that way and he didn’t think it had just started with Theron. Something had always been wrong at his house, way back when he didn’t understand what his father drank that made him fall in the house or the yard and cry the way he did, say the strange things he said. Why they fought and why his mother wept alone in her bed at night. So many things he didn’t understand back then, the long absences of his father, the cars towed into the yard burned or smashed beyond repair, the bandages he wore on his face sometimes and the whiskey always sitting on the kitchen table as it had been today. Once in a while in a rational moment he would ask himself why he drank after he’d seen what it did to his father, to his whole family. But there was no answer for that either.
The woods were lush and deep green and the limbs were alive with birds. A banded woodpecker rapped hard and staccato on a standing dead tree near the road and then flew, a bright dart weaving through the leaves. He drove slowly, guiding the car around the curves and over the hills, cool winds wafting through the opened windows of the car. At a three-way intersection he slowed and downshifted and turned right, then gaining speed, moving it up into third, his arm resting on the sill of the window. After a few more miles he came to a stop sign and halted at the edge of the highway. He waited on one car and then a dump truck topped the hill behind it and he had to wait on it too. But he wasn’t in any hurry now. It came by dropping gravel that bounced in the road. He swung out behind it and trailed it for a few miles, until it turned off. He kept going, driving south now, the tires slapping at the highway. It was hot again now that he was out of the woods. When the news came on he knew it was noon. He kept driving, looking for the sign. Maybe it wasn’t even there anymore. In three years things could change. Some things could. On a long straightaway a car came up behind him rapidly and shot around, cutting back in close. He held up his middle finger but the car went on up the road very fast. Then he saw the old sign. He put his blinker on and s
lowed, turned to the right with a lazy spin of the steering wheel. The road was rough with patched asphalt and potholes and the worn shocks on the car didn’t do much for the ride. He drove up the hill and put on his blinker again even though there was nobody behind him. It was a dirt road he turned into, washboarded and rutted and grass standing up in places. It looked as if it hadn’t been used for a long time. The road got narrower and rougher and there was a half-filled mud hole he had to ease through carefully, the bottom of the car dragging until he goosed it and splashed on through.
A treacherous bridge of old timbers and planks spanned a ditch of black stagnant water and he rattled over it quickly, a trifle uneasy at the nail heads sticking up. Somebody had dropped a car through it once, some drunk who had to be winched out with a dozer. He turned right where the road forked and went beside a cotton patch and a wooden pen that sat listing to one side, made of small logs, the spaces chinked with mud and raw cotton and almost covered with briars and honeysuckle vines. Behind it loomed the big levee of the lake, a mile long, high with weeds, straight as a plumb line across the line of his vision. It was very green in the sun and he turned to the right, following the trail through the tall grass, easing along now because he couldn’t see what holes there might be. The grade was gradual and it had gravel on it and the car climbed it easily. At the top where it leveled off he was in timber again and he drove through it and looked out over the water, the clean black expanse of it, tiny waves riffling over the surface and the far side dotted with cypress trees that towered into the sky, their spiky limbs furred a deep green, and beyond that small clouds that hung unmoving in a pale blue void. The house came into view and he pulled up in the yard and parked beside a new Ford pickup sitting there. A man more than twice his age was on the front porch cooking split chickens on a grill. There was a bottle of beer beside his foot and Glen got out and shut the door, walked over toward the porch.
“Well look here,” the man said, and got up and came down the steps. Glen grinned and went up with his hand out and took the one that was offered. He squeezed hard but not as hard as the hand that shook his.
“Looks like I got here just in time,” he said. “How you doing, Brother Roy?”
“I’m doing all right. You hungry? I got some chicken on here. You want a beer?”
They climbed the steps together and Glen looked at the grill. The chickens were slathered with a red sauce and little droplets of reddish water ran from the holes that had been pierced in their skins.
“Hell yeah,” he said.
“Well just grab you a seat. I’ll go in here and get you one.”
“All right.”
He sat down in a kitchen chair and turned it sideways. He looked out over the lake. There were bluffs of hardwood timber above the east side and the trees stood mirrored in a small cove where the land came out and formed a spot protected from the wind. He could see two boats tied up on the far bank. Just looking at the lake made him feel better. Roy didn’t own it; he just took care of it for a rich man who rarely visited. There were five hundred acres to hunt on. In pens at the back lived Llewelyn setters and Roy was free to run them on birds, which were in abundance in the fields below the levee. He killed three or four deer every year and there were wild hogs in the woods. The lake was heavily stocked with crappie, bass, catfish.
Roy came back out with a dripping Budweiser bottle and handed it to him already opened.
“Thanks a lot, Roy. I just thought I’d come up here and see if you’s home.”
His friend sat back down and took up his long-handled fork and his own beer again. Smoke was rising up to the porch rafters, where it flattened and rolled out from under the edge of the roof.
“Well I’m glad you did. I heard you was gettin out. Thought you might come by. I won’t ask you how it was.”
“Well,” he said, and took a drink of his beer. It was very cold and slightly bitter. He felt all his nerves unwinding, something smoothing out within himself. He lit a cigarette and held the beer between his knees as he leaned forward. “You still got it made, looks like.”
Roy poked at the chicken and it sizzled on the grill.
“Aw yeah. Mr. Duvall came out about two weeks ago, stayed two days.”
“He have another one of those good-looking women with him?”
“Shoot. You ought to seen this one. Made Marilyn Monroe look like a milk cow. I don’t see how he stands it.”
“He’s pretty old, ain’t he?”
“Yep. It don’t slow him down none I don’t reckon though. He was happy with everything. Told me I’s doing a good job. I don’t do nothin. Set out here and fish and hunt and drink beer.”
Glen lifted his beer and took a long swallow. When he lowered it he said, “You ever get tired of it, tell him I want to put my application in.”
They both smiled at that. Roy turned the chicken over and set his beer back on the porch. “How’s your daddy?”
Glen paused for a moment, thinking about what he had in his pocket. Thought of his mother’s dresses. Those old pictures.
“He’s all right I guess. I’ve seen him a few times.”
Roy nodded and picked up a Pepsi bottle filled with water and sprinkled droplets over the flames that were climbing up through the wire rack the chicken was laid on. The flames hissed and receded.
“I ain’t seen him in a while. He still fish like he used to?”
“I guess. I guess he does. He always did.”
“He loves it about as good as anybody I’ve ever seen. You see him again, tell him I said hi, okay?”
“I’ll tell him.”
Roy sat there for a bit, looking at the birds. He lifted his eyes toward the lake and then turned back to Glen.
“I hate it about everything, Glen. I didn’t come to the jail to see you I know. Didn’t want to see you in there like that. I hope you understand about that.”
“I do. I’m glad you didn’t.”
Later Roy brought out some paper plates and forks and a bag of potato chips and they ate on the front porch, looking out over the water, marking where fish leaped and dimpled small pools. When the sun began to lower in the sky they loaded a cooler into the pickup and drove across the levee and put the rods and reels and the beer into one of the boats and sculled out along the edge of the hardwood bluff, under the trees that reached shadows out into the water. Glen took off his shirt and took a great joy in the wind and the sunlight on his skin. In the little cove they cast their lures beside a log that lay in the water and the water swirled around Glen’s lure and the rod bowed hard.
“Oh shit,” he said.
A green body flashed out there and the drag screamed as the fish peeled off line. It made one run toward the boat and the rod bent nearly double. Glen thought the line would surely break. But it held and the fish made hard circles deep in the water. Roy had put his rod down to watch. The fish pulled so hard that the little boat turned and moved.
“Damn, Glen. I knew they was some big ones in here.”
Glen didn’t say anything. He kept the rod tip up and the old familiar pleasure came back into him like those distant mornings on the river with his old man. He smiled now, feeling the fish weaken.
“Watch him, now, he’s liable to jump.”
He did jump. He leaped completely free of the water, an enormous chunk of shining living flesh, wet scales and wildly bowing body, rattling the plug in his head so hard they could hear the hooks shaking in their fasteners. He landed sideways with a big splash and water erupted and shot into the boat. Glen felt a drop land on his bottom lip. But he thought he had him now. The circles were smaller and he kept coming to the top but he never did jump again. Glen leaned forward and backward, taking in the line, and now he could see the fish and the plug in his mouth as he swam back and forth in front of the boat.
“Good God, what a fish, Glen.”
“You got a net?”
“It’s at the house. I didn’t think to bring it.”
“That’s all
right.”
Roy knelt in the boat and Glen towed the fish closer. Ten feet. Six feet. It was swimming slowly but he knew it could make another surge. Only when it turned on its side did he know that it was whipped. He lifted hard on the rod and Roy reached and caught it by the underjaw and pulled it dripping from the water and laid it gently in the bottom of the boat. It flopped around some at first but then it lay there heaving, the red gills exposed, the tail wider than Glen’s hand. He reached to it and took the plug from its jaw. One hook had held it. For a few moments they just looked at it.
“How much you think?” Glen said.
“God, I don’t know. Ten pounds maybe? I never seen one this big. We got to take it somewhere and try to weigh it.”
Glen looked up. He saw the trees above the water and the way the wind was moving through the branches. He looked at the dark water and the small ripples that lapped at the bank. He looked at a hawk soaring lazily by the cypresses on the other side of the lake, the beds of water lilies floating in their mats of stems.
“You know who’d get a kick out of this?”
“Who’s that, Glen?”
“My daddy. I lost one about this big when I was ten and he like to never got over it.”
“Well, shit, carry it home and show it to him. Let me find that stringer.”
Roy started to open his tackle box but Glen told him to hold it. Roy looked up at him. “What?”
“Let’s turn him loose.”
“Turn him loose? Hell, Glen, lot of people fish all their lives and don’t never catch a fish like this. You may have the state record here. You can’t turn him loose.”
The fish lay in the bottom of the boat, the gill plates rising and falling. His dark green color was starting to fade under the merciless sun.