by Jon Pineda
* * *
Fritter sits up and rubs his eyes. His face is still soft with sleep. He’s that boy wanting to tell someone about the dream he just had. The fog is all around us, and I just keep talking to Dox. I go on about the blue cat swimming in the dark. In my mind I’m thinking how that fish has also vanished into the darkness Fritter won’t stop painting, and I say, “Dox, that would make a good song, wouldn’t it?” Fritter, stunned now, says, “Dox, is that you?” His eyes pop open. Before I can stop him, he makes like he’s about to roll out of bed. The raft dips down on his end, and like that, Fritter slides into the blur of the river and is gone.
SOME OF THE FOG GOES into the water with him. The river gulps it down. I freeze. I keep saying Fritter’s name under my breath, as if that will help, but it doesn’t help.
* * *
Fritter surfaces like a submarine spearing a sheet of ice. He gasps. He keeps screaming my name like he’s lost me, me his entire life. I’m his daughter now and he’s my father, but away from, farther from the idea of who he is. My father is no longer in the hospital connected to machines because he, like my mother, doesn’t exist anymore.
* * *
He throws his chest onto the raft, and the raft lifts like a drawbridge. I almost roll off. Fritter squirms back on. The raft crashes down and levels out. Fritter breathes heavily, shivering each time he exhales.
“Sorry. It was meant to be a joke. I didn’t think you were going to go in the water.”
“Yeah.”
“We should get over to the bank. I’ll start us a fire.”
He doesn’t answer.
He holds his chest. We drift.
“Fritter?”
“Yeah.”
“You mad at me?”
“No, I’m not mad.”
“Angry?”
“That’s the same thing.”
“It’s not.”
“I’m not mad or angry.”
“Disappointed?” It’s what my father would say.
“Not disappointed at all,” Fritter says.
“What then?”
“Nothing. I’m nothing.”
I TAKE THE TARP AND roll an end around one of the two-by-fours, like I’m rolling up part of a flag. I pull the knife out of the canvas tool bag and make three-inch cuts near the hem of the opposite end of the tarp. If I were writing in my journal, my father would call these marks virgules, those grammatical slashes placed between words for meaning “either this or that.” Or both, fusing like a stitch. Whenever I see a virgule wedged between two words, I think of it as being between two worlds, separating one side from the other.
* * *
The river is a virgule.
* * *
Fritter doesn’t ask me what I’m doing. He just watches and waits. I take another two-by-four. I weave it over and under all the quick cuts I’ve made with the knife, until this second two-by-four is threaded nearly half the length of the tarp. Now we have a rudder. Fritter still hasn’t said a word. He shivers.
AT FIRST, THERE IS THE wheeze of brush and then the percussive snaps of the driest branches. The fire builds in increments. It goes from grass to twigs to branches to a scooped half of a fallen trunk the size of a human head. I pull more chunks apart like bread. I’ve made a larger fire than I’d intended, but Fritter doesn’t complain.
His shirt is off and he holds his hands palms out, and the fire rounds and domes like a massive snow globe. I think this could be a nice moment if we weren’t heading where we were heading, and if I hadn’t felt the need to play a trick. Maybe I’ve been around the flies too long.
* * *
Fritter isn’t shivering anymore, his shirt hanging in a nearby tree. Though I’ve seen him shirtless before, all the generous folds of him on display, the shadows cast by the fire do something to his body. Maybe it’s where I’m sitting now. On his left side, just under his arm, I see for the first time are peppered clumps of scar tissue. They’re braided pink and gray in the flickering light. It looks like he slept on a shell collection.
I DREAM ABOUT THE FLIES. If there’s a line of trees in my dream, the trees will shatter into a trillion punctuation marks and form again. They become part of the land that Fritter and I walk. They swirl underfoot to a bridge spanning a body of water rushing underneath. Fritter and I stand near the edge, and the flies, the shadows broken off into boys, goad one of them to slip a thin line around his ankles and climb onto the railing to launch out and plunge downward, the entire descent his skin shivering into bits of flies, until the bungee cord stretches taut and the boy springs back up and over, his friends stomping and punching one another, their idiocy palpable as they wait with grabby hands for him to drift safely into their collective grasp.
Fritter and I just watch, but soon the same boy and the line flatten out, fusing, and stretch into one long cord that coils around Fritter’s ankles, and he, without so much as a sigh, says, “I guess I’m next,” and he hops onto the railing. I’m suddenly mad, telling him to get back down this instant, but he just shrugs, like he doesn’t have a choice, and when I finally scream, nothing comes out and it’s that silence that tips him over, I know it, and Fritter plunges downward, his massive body hurtling as the line of flies stretches until it’s pulled taut, a popping sound, but Fritter doesn’t stop—instead the soles of his feet are attached to the dangling line, but the rest of his body continues to fall with increasing velocity.
And why can’t I imagine jet fire pouring out of the ends of each amputation, that the ends of his ankles are suddenly the exhaust of rocket engines, instead of blood that whisks into flies? Everything about him vanishes and breaks apart before impact, like a satellite finding its way back to earth, except there’s no satellite, it’s a body made of flies, and there’s no river below because there’s no earth to hold it in place, what was once earth vanishes at impact, and—Poof! Ta-da!—everything is flies.
WHEN I OPEN MY EYES, the fog has lifted. It’s getting light out. The fire has grown smaller. Fritter yanks his shirt down from the branches and puts it back on.
“How long was I gone?” I say.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t watching you.”
“I want to get there right now.”
“We will. We’re not far from the bridge. When we see it, we’ll know we’re there.”
“I feel like I was gone a long time.”
“Funny how that is.”
“Did you feed it?” I point at the fire with my chin.
“I fed it.”
The fire warbles above the embers.
* * *
I grab the fly rod from the raft and wade out into the river. Fritter stands on the shore and watches me. I try to remember what he did, how he was able to make the line move smoothly from one point in front of him to one point behind him. I move the line around, but the fly swings back and catches on the front of my shorts. I yell, laughing at the same time. I unhook myself and throw the line on the water.
“That was embarrassing,” I say.
“No, you did good. Just next time, catch a fish.”
* * *
Fritter stands across from me like he’s my mirror image. His left foot is forward and his right foot is back, and he’s holding his right arm off to the side and cocked at an angle above his waist. I get the line out in front of me and hold my right arm in the same way and with my left hand hold the excess line closest to the reel, the reel that is still as bright as I remember it from the first time I saw it in Main Boy’s father’s study. Fritter sees me look up again, and he nods as if to start, and like that, in sync, we sway.
I mimic the way he pulls his arm back and stops, watching the line spring from the river and unroll out behind me. He moves forward, I move forward. He moves back, I move back. Our false casts perfectly timed like some Olympic event, and here’s the sad part, if it can even be called such a thing: never before have I felt more connected to anyone in my life. Not to my father or mother, not even during the times I spent in Main Boy
’s bed wrapped in cool sheets, or with him in his shower, when he was forcing himself inside me, when he was saying, “You fucking love this, don’t you?” and it couldn’t be the furthest thing from the truth.
But with Fritter guiding me, and my hands his hands and my arms his arms, if he were to ask me this same question, in even the same grunting way that Main Boy had, I would scream, “Yes, I love this, I do!”
* * *
Is it pathetic that I start to cry?
* * *
“Stop it,” Fritter says, and drops his arms. “He’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
* * *
I reel in the line. The sun burns away the rest of the mist. We can see the breadth of the river and even a nearby field of more Silver Queen. I look over at Fritter. His body is layers of other bodies, other versions of himself. His dreadlocks are frozen paths of fireworks. His head is torn cordage that’s unraveled. I can’t stop myself from wanting him to be something more. I keep reeling in the line that has dipped under the surface. For a moment, it seems hooked to Fritter and pulls with it even the field behind him.
“YOU HUNGRY?”
That’s always the question.
“I could eat,” I say.
That’s always the answer.
We both laugh.
Fritter says his ankles feel a little better. We leave the embers going and walk into the corn. He points forward, stabbing to where the silk glistens from first light. I can’t help thinking of Main Boy again.
* * *
I think we’re going to pull down as many ears of corn as we can carry, but Fritter keeps going. He pushes through the tall stalks. We slip deeper into the field. At one point, I stop and break off an ear and strip it back to look at the white corn. It’s rows of baby teeth.
“Too young,” I say, but Fritter keeps going. “Hey, did you hear me?”
“I heard you.” He slows his pace.
The stalks close in behind me.
He holds up a fist. I stop and stand still.
The sun warms us even more.
* * *
Fritter starts singing quietly. We could be back at the boathouse, goofing with Dox on his cigar-box guitar while my father sits on the pier and slaps his leg on the offbeat. Just then, Fritter punches into the corn. His fist disappears. When he pulls back his arm, he’s holding up a snake.
It forms a wriggling coil around his arm. It burns bright and alive. Fritter squeezes below its jaws. The snake opens its mouth. It’s going to give us a piece of its mind.
FRITTER COULD BE OPENING a bottle of orange Crush. He pops off the head. The snake doesn’t care that its head is gone. Its body, fizzing, keeps moving in the coil it created along his arm. I can feel its energy charging the air between us.
* * *
Fritter turns it upside down and gives it a few jolts. He fishes his fingers into the wound he’s made and finds the skin, clamping on to it. I can only think of my father now, his pulling the double barrel from its leather case. The image fuses with Fritter stripping the snake’s muscular body from its skin. The skin is a crisp, wet sock he discards in the stalks.
We walk back to our little fire. The embers lay hidden under the ash. All it takes is a stirring from a branch. The glowing red insides do their best ta-da. I throw on more wood. Flames bring their teeth and nibble and spin around the branches like corn. Fritter drops wrapped ears right on them. On the unshucked leaves goes the snake, but then Fritter immediately reaches back into the fire and grabs the body.
“Look here.” He squeezes an opening near the tail, and out pop three small globes chained together with goo. Fritter grins and calls them “pearls,” but I know they’re eggs. I get the knife and stab its blade a few times into the fire to cook off whatever is on the rust. Fritter dribbles the pearls onto the blade and they fry up in two shakes.
The eggs taste like a memory of eggs.
We wait for the meat to go opaque.
* * *
Not long ago we had lots of chickens. If I wanted breakfast, I would wake and creep through the stacks of pallets out back to peer into the open washing machines. I was searching for eggs, but the chickens never left them on the straw bedding of the coop where I could find them. Dox said all chickens were a nervous bunch.
They often got loose and dropped their eggs all over the yard. They hid them from us like it was a game. Eggs that weren’t rotten I’d boil and pick them clean for the others, leaving them in a bowl next to a splash of salt packets. For mine, I’d take our sharpest knife and make the thinnest slices possible, the kind where you can almost see through the white of the egg, and once I was done, I’d set the knife down and eat a slice and wait, eat a slice and wait, until I my plate was empty.
* * *
Fritter bites into one of the ears of corn. “Tastes like snake.”
I grin. We make short work of it all.
We scrape dirt over the embers. We’re hiding the fire in the ground.
* * *
“We should get a move on,” Fritter says, and I’m already freeing the two-by-fours from the tarp. We use them to push the raft back into the current. It’s still early morning, but the sun doesn’t know it yet. When we get into a wide-open section of the river, I have to shield my eyes it’s so bright out.
* * *
We drift past newly built docks that meander through pampas grass and cattails. They settle near trim, bright green lawns looking shellacked with light. Downriver is the big bridge. When you’re right up on it, it emerges from the water sleek and polished white, but from here, head-on, the bridge looks less alien, more like a giant piece of scrimshaw.
* * *
On one of the docks we pass are young boys, probably ten and younger. They’re throwing rigs that spin like mobiles hanging over cribs. Dangling from the hooks are chunks of cut bait. Everywhere we look there is laughter.
The boys are trying to heave their rigs close to us. I don’t have to squint to make out their thrilled faces. The rigs drop far away from where we are, some ten yards, if not more, but with each plunk the boys howl louder. Anyone would think they had hit us for sure.
* * *
“If we didn’t have somewhere to be, I’d swim over there and teach those little bastards a lesson,” Fritter growls.
NOT LONG AFTER WE CAME to live with Dox and Fritter, my father and I were walking the perimeter of the property. He wanted to get the lay of the land. I kept trying to picture my mother here. My father, on the other hand, wore a felt hat cocked low like some kind of gentleman farmer. He would lazily swing a branch he’d fashioned into a walking stick and launch into a sermon on what he called “the ecology of our recent situation.” He didn’t think I had seen him earlier, when he had happened upon a moldy encyclopedia stacked in one of the closets upstairs.
* * *
“Take a look at this, Pearl.” My father bent to pick up the husk of an insect.
“What is it?”
“Belostomatidae.”
“Do what?”
“That’s its name.”
“That’s its name?”
“Well, actually, its family. Kingdom Animalia, phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta, order Hemiptera, family…”
“Belostomatidae.”
“Correct.”
“But why not just toe-biter?”
“Okay, toe-biter, yes. But which one is more precise?”
“I know I should say the first one.”
“Yes?”
“But I’m going with the second one.”
“Have it your way, Pearl.”
* * *
Before we circled back, my father asked me if I knew the males were the ones that carried the eggs on their backs. He gestured to the journal I clutched like a purse. “Make sure you write that in there, that the males carry the eggs. You hear me?”
“I heard you. The males are these amazing caregivers. The males can do no wrong. Anything else I should know?”
“I think that covers it for now. C
lass dismissed.”
IT TAKES US ALMOST ANOTHER hour of drifting to get to the bridge, and when we finally do, Fritter and I can only stare up at the trusses. Giant rivets and bolts hold together the intricate steelwork underneath. It’s strange to be here with a view of something so enormous and rigid, to gaze behind the scenes of such a monstrosity.
* * *
Tents cover half of the park where my mother and I had once let Marianne Moore run free. Overhead, gulls spin. I’m hoping my eyes are deceiving me, but it’s real. We’ve arrived at the start of a Civil War reenactment. The park is awash in a sea of wool uniforms and muskets. Some of the soldiers parade around Confederate flags. In between cheers, we hear bluegrass music.
* * *
Catty-cornered from the park is the hospital. Sunlight brushes some of the windows. I construct the makeshift rudder and get the raft to pull portside this time. I’m trying to hurry.
“What do you think they’re celebrating?” I say.
“You don’t want me to answer that.”
* * *
Fritter takes off his shirt and slips into the river. Half-submerged, he suddenly looks weightless, floating behind the raft. He starts singing. His dreadlocks drown in the water, and his huge chest stretches smooth of any folds. His voice is sharp as a knife. I get in with him and let the water cover me up. We get the raft in a shallow stretch and drag it up onto the bank.
He grabs his shirt and I grab the fly rod, the creel, and the canvas tool bag. We’re drenched and reek of the river. It’s not long before we merge into a throng of grown men with muttonchops and other versions of unruly facial hair. They’re dressed in dark blue wool uniforms. Some have shiny epaulets perched on their shoulders, their golden tentacles sprawling.
Other soldiers start checking their phones. We march alongside them and then branch off to the start of the open field where more uniformed men in blue stand opposite a line of other men dressed in gray. The lines of men are mirror images. They have the same facial hair, the same sunburnt faces. I wonder which ones are the flies’ fathers. They all look the same.