Something Rich and Strange

by Ron Rash

  “Lead him over here. There’s no way we can lift him up the bank.”

  “You gonna try to gill that thing?” Creech asked incredulously.

  Rudisell shook his head.

  “I ain’t gonna gill it, I’m going to stab this hay hook in so deep it’ll have to drag me back into that pool as well to get away.”

  The reel handle turned quicker now, and soon the sturgeon came out of the depths, emerging like a submarine. Campbell moved farther down the bank, only three or four yards from the sandbar. Creech got up and stood beside Campbell. The fish came straight toward them, face first as if led on a leash. They could see the head clearly now, the cone-shaped snout, barbels hanging beneath the snout like whiskers. As it came closer Rudisell creakily kneeled down on the sandbar’s edge. As he swung the hay hook the sturgeon made a last surge toward deeper water. The bright metal raked across the scaly back but did not penetrate.

  “Damn,” Rudisell swore.

  “You got to beach it,” Creech shouted at Campbell, who began reeling again, not pausing until the immense head was half out of the water, snout touching the sandbar. The sturgeon’s wide mouth opened, revealing an array of rusting hooks and lures that hung from the lips like medals.

  “Gaff it now,” Creech shouted.

  “Hurry,” Campbell huffed, the rod in his hands doubled like a bow. “I’m herniating myself.”

  But Rudisell appeared not to hear them. He stared intently at the fish, the hay hook held overhead as if it were a torch allowing him to see the sturgeon more clearly. Rudisell’s blue eyes brightened for a moment, and an enigmatic smile creased his face. The hay hook’s sharpened point flashed, aimed not at the fish but the monofilament. A loud twang like a broken guitar string sounded across the water. The rod whipped back and Campbell stumbled backwards but Creech caught him before he fell. The sturgeon was motionless for a few moments, then slowly curved back toward the pool’s heart. As it disappeared, Rudisell remained kneeling on the sandbar, his eyes gazing into the pool. Campbell and Creech staggered over to the bank and sat down.

  “They’ll never believe us,” Creech said, “not in a million years, especially that smart-ass game warden.”

  “We had it good as caught,” Campbell muttered. “We had it caught.”

  None of them spoke further for a long while, each exhausted by the battle. But their silence had more to do with each man’s self-reflection on what he had just witnessed than weariness. A yellow mayfly rose like a watery spark in the tailrace, hung in the air a few moments before it fell and was swept away by the current. As time passed crickets announced their presence on the bank, and downriver a whippoorwill called. More mayflies rose in the tailrace. The air became chilly as the sheltering trees closed more tightly around them, absorbed the waning sun’s light, a preamble to another overdue darkness.

  “It’s OK,” Campbell finally said.

  Creech looked at Rudisell, who was still on the sandbar.

  “You done the right thing. I didn’t see that at first, but I see it now.”

  Rudisell finally stood up, wiped the wet sand from the knees of his pants. As he stepped into the shallows he saw something in the water. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

  “Find you a fleck of gold?” Campbell asked.

  “Better than gold,” Rudisell replied and joined his comrades on the bank.

  They could hardly see their own feet as they walked up the path to the bridge. As they emerged they found the green fish and wildlife truck parked at the trail end. The passenger window was down and Meekins’ smug face looked out at them.

  “So you old boys haven’t drowned after all. Folks saw the empty chairs and figured you’d fallen in.”

  Meekins nodded at the fishing equipment in Campbell’s hands and smiled.

  “Have any luck catching your monster?”

  “Caught it and let it go,” Campbell said.

  “That’s mighty convenient,” Meekins said. “I don’t suppose anyone else actually saw this giant fish, or that you have a photograph.”

  “No,” Creech said serenely. “But it’s way bigger than you are.”

  Meekins shook his head. He no longer smiled. “Must be nice to have nothing better to do than make up stories, but this is getting old real quick.”

  Rudisell stepped up to the truck’s window, only inches away from Meekins’ face when he raised his hand. A single diamond-shaped object was wedged between Rudisell’s gnarled index finger and thumb. Though tinted brown, it appeared to be translucent. He held it eye-level in front of Meekins’ face as if it were a silty monocle they both might peer through.

  “Acipenser fulvescens,” Rudisell said, the Latin uttered slowly as if an incantation. He put the scute back in his pocket, and without further acknowledgement of Meekins stepped around the truck and onto the hardtop. Campbell followed with the fishing equipment and Creech came last with the book. It was a slow, dignified procession. They walked westward toward the store, the late-afternoon sun burnishing their cracked and wasted faces. Coming out of the shadows, they blinked their eyes as if dazzled, much in the manner of old-world saints who have witnessed the brilliance of the one true vision.

  FALLING STAR

  She don’t understand what it’s like for me when she walks out the door on Monday and Wednesday nights. She don’t know how I sit in the dark watching the TV but all the while I’m listening for her car. Or understand I’m not ever certain till I hear the Chevy coming up the drive that she’s coming home. How each time a little less of her comes back, because after she checks on Janie she spreads the books open on the kitchen table, and she may as well still be at that college for her mind is so far inside what she’s studying. I rub the back of her neck. I say maybe we could go to bed a little early tonight. I tell her there’s lots better things to do than study some old book. She knows my meaning.

  “I’ve got to finish this chapter,” Lynn says, “maybe after that.”

  But that “maybe” doesn’t happen. I go to bed alone. Pouring concrete is a young man’s job and I ain’t so young anymore. I need what sleep I can get to keep up.

  “You’re getting long in the tooth, Bobby,” a young buck told me one afternoon I huffed and puffed to keep up. “You best get you one of them sit-down jobs, maybe test rocking chairs.”

  They all got a good laugh out of that. Mr. Winchester, the boss man, laughed right along with them.

  “Ole Bobby’s still got some life in him yet, ain’t you,” Mr. Winchester said.

  He smiled when he said it, but there was some serious in his words.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I ain’t even got my second wind yet.”

  Mr. Winchester laughed again, but I knew he’d had his eye on me. It won’t trouble him much to fire me when I can’t pull my weight anymore.

  The nights Lynn stays up I don’t ever go right off to sleep, though I’m about nine ways whipped from work. I lay there in the dark and think about something she said a while back when she first took the notion to go back to school. You ought to be proud of me for wanting to make something of myself, she’d said. Maybe it ain’t the way she means it to sound, but I can’t help thinking she was also saying, “Bobby, just because you’ve never made anything of yourself don’t mean I have to do the same.”

  I think about something else she once told me. It was Christmas our senior year in high school. Lynn’s folks and brothers had finally gone to bed and me and her was on the couch. The lights was all off but for the tree lights glowing and flicking like little stars. I’d already unwrapped the box that had me a sweater in it. I took the ring out of my front pocket and gave it to her. I tried to act all casual but I could feel my hand trembling. We’d talked some about getting married but it had always been in the far-away, after I got a good job, after she’d got some more schooling. But I hadn’t wanted to wait that long. She’d put the ring on and though it was just a quarter-carat she made no notice of that.

  “It’s so pretty,” Lynn had s
aid.

  “So will you?” I’d asked.

  “Of course,” she’d told me. “It’s what I’ve wanted, more than anything in the world.”

  So I lay in the bedroom nights remembering things and though I’m not more than ten feet away it’s like there’s a big glass door between me and the kitchen table, and it’s locked on Lynn’s side. We just as well might be living in different counties for all the closeness I feel. A diamond can cut through glass, I’ve heard, but I ain’t so sure anymore.

  One night I dream I’m falling. There are tree branches all around me but I can’t grab hold of one. I just keep falling and falling for forever. I wake up all sweaty and gasping for breath. My heart pounds like it’s some kind of animal trying to tear out my chest. Lynn’s got her back to me, sleeping like she ain’t got a care in the world. I look at the clock and see I have thirty minutes before the alarm goes off. I’ll sleep no more anyway so I pull on my work clothes and stumble into the kitchen to make some coffee.

  The books are on the kitchen table, big thick books. I open up the least one, a book called Astronomy Today. I read some and it makes no sense. Even the words I know seem to lead nowhere. They just as likely be ants scurrying around the page. But I know Lynn understands them. She has to since she makes all As on her tests.

  I touch the cigarette lighter in my pocket and think a book is so easy a thing to burn. I think how in five minutes they’d be nothing but ashes, ashes nobody could read. I get up before I dwell on such a thing too long. I check on Janie and she’s managed to kick the covers off the bed. It’s been a month since she started second grade but it seems more like a month since we brought her home from the hospital. Things change faster than a person can sometimes stand, Daddy used to say, and I’m learning the truth of that. Each morning it’s like Janie’s sprouted another inch.

  “I’m a big girl now,” she tells her grandma and that always gets a good laugh. I took her the first day of school this year and it wasn’t like first grade when she was tearing up when me and Lynn left her there. Janie was excited this time, wanting to see her friends. I held her hand when we walked into the classroom. There was other parents milling around, the kids searching for the desk that had their name on it. I looked the room over. A hornets’ nest was stuck on a wall and a fish tank bubbled at the back, beside it a big blue globe like I’d had in my second-grade room. WELCOME BACK was written in big green letters on the door.

  “You need to leave,” Janie said, letting go of my hand.

  It wasn’t till then I noticed the rest of the parents already had, the kids but for Janie in their desks. That night in bed I’d told Lynn I thought we ought to have another kid.

  “We barely can clothe and feed the one we got,” she’d said, then turned her back to me and went to sleep.

  It’s not something I gnaw on a few weeks and then decide to do. I don’t give myself time to figure out it’s a bad idea. Instead, as soon as Lynn pulls out of the drive I round up Janie’s gown and toothbrush.

  “You’re spending the night with Grandma,” I tell her.

  “What about school?” Janie says.

  “I’ll come by and get you come morning. I’ll bring you some school clothes.”

  “Do I have to?” Janie says. “Grandma snores.”

  “We ain’t arguing about this,” I tell her. “Get you some shoes on and let’s go.”

  I say it kind of cross, which is a sorry way to act since it ain’t Janie that’s got me so out of sorts.

  When we get to Momma’s I apologize for not calling first but she says there’s no bother.

  “There ain’t no trouble between you and Lynn?” she asks.

  “No ma’am,” I say.

  I drive the five miles to the community college. I find Lynn’s car and park close by. I reckon the classes have all got started because there’s not any students in the parking lot. There ain’t a security guard around and it’s looking to be an easy thing to get done. I take my barlow knife out of the dash and stick it in my pocket. I keep to the shadows and come close to the nearest building. There’s big windows and five different classrooms.

  It takes me a minute to find her, right up on the front row, writing down every word the teacher is saying. I’m next to a hedge so it keeps me mostly hid, which is a good thing for the moon and stars are out. The teacher ain’t some old guy with glasses and a gray beard, like what I figured him to be. He’s got no beard, probably can’t even grow one.

  He all of a sudden stops his talking and steps out the door and soon enough he’s coming out of the building and I’m thinking he must have seen me. I hunker in the bushes and get ready to make a run for the truck. I’m thinking if I have to knock him down to get there I’ve got no problem with that.

  But he don’t come near the bushes where I am. He heads straight to a white Toyota parked between Lynn’s Chevy and my truck. He roots around the backseat a minute before taking out some books and papers.

  He comes back, close enough I can smell whatever it is he splashed on his face that morning. I wonder why he needs to smell so good, who he thinks might like a man who smells like flowers. Back in the classroom he passes the books around. Lynn turns the books’ pages slow and careful, like they would break if she wasn’t prissy with them.

  I figure I best go ahead and do what I come to do. I walk across the asphalt to the Chevy. I kneel beside the back left tire, the barlow knife in my fist. I slash it deep and don’t stop cutting till I hear a hiss. I stand up and look around.

  Pretty sorry security, I’m thinking. I’ve done what I come for but I don’t close the knife. I kneel beside the white Toyota. I start slashing the tire and for a second it’s like I’m slashing that smooth young face of his. Soon enough that tire looks like it’s been run through a combine.

  I get in my truck and drive toward home. I’m shaking but don’t know what I’m afraid of. I turn on the TV when I get back but it’s just something to do while I wait for Lynn to call. Only she don’t. Thirty minutes after her class let out, I still ain’t heard a word. I get a picture in my mind of her out in that parking lot by herself but maybe not as by herself and safe as she thinks with the security guard snoring away in some office. I’m thinking Lynn might be in trouble, trouble I’d put her in. I get my truck keys and am halfway out the door when headlights freeze me.

  Lynn don’t wait for me to ask.

  “I’m late because some asshole slashed my tire,” she says.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I say.

  “The security guard said he’d put on the spare so I let him. That was easier than you driving five miles. Dr. Palmer had a tire slashed too.”

  “Who changed his tire?” I ask.

  Lynn looks at me.

  “He did.”

  “I wouldn’t have reckoned him to have the common sense to.”

  “Well, he did,” Lynn says. “Just because somebody’s book-smart doesn’t mean that person can’t do anything else.”

  “Where’s Janie?” Lynn asks when she sees the empty bed.

  “She took a notion to spend the night with Momma,” I say.

  “How’s she going to get to school come morning?” she asks.

  “I’ll get her there,” I say. Lynn sets down her books. They’re piled there in front of her like a big plate of food that’s making her stronger and stronger.

  “I don’t reckon they got an idea of who done it?” I ask, trying to sound all casual.

  Lynn gives a smile for the first time since she got out of the car.

  “They’ll soon enough have a real good idea. The dumb son of a bitch didn’t even realize they have security cameras. They’ve got it all on tape, even his license. The cops will have that guy in twenty-four hours. At least that’s what the security guard said.”

  It takes me about two heartbeats to take that in. I feel like somebody just sucker-punched me. I open my mouth, but it takes a while to push some words out.

  “I need to tell you something,” I s
ay, whispery as an old sick man.

  Lynn doesn’t look up. She’s already stuck herself deep in a book.

  “I got three chapters to read, Bobby. Can’t it wait?”

  I look at her. I know I’ve lost her, known it for a while. Me getting caught for slashing those tires won’t make it any worse, except maybe at the custody hearing.

  “It can wait,” I say.

  I go out to the deck. I smell the honeysuckle down by the creek. It’s a pretty kind of smell that any other time might ease my mind. A few bullfrogs grunt but the rest of the night is still as the bottom of a pond. So many stars are out that you can see how some seem strung together into shapes. Lynn knows what those shapes are, knows them by their names.

  Make a wish if you see a falling star, Momma would always say, but though I haven’t seen one fall I think about what I’d wish, and what comes is a memory of me and Lynn and Janie. Janie was a baby then and we’d gone out to the river for a picnic. It was April and the river was too high and cold to swim but that didn’t matter. The sun was out and the dogwoods starting to whiten up their branches and you knew warm weather was coming.

  After a while Janie got sleepy and Lynn put her in the stroller. She came back to the picnic table where I was and sat down beside me. She laid her head against my shoulder.

  “I hope things are always like this,” she said. “If there was a falling star that would be all I’d wish for.”

  Then she’d kissed me, a kiss that promised more that night after we put Janie to bed. But there wasn’t any falling star that afternoon and there ain’t one tonight. I suddenly wish Janie was here, because if she was I’d go inside and lay down beside her.

  I’d stay there all night just listening to her breathe.

  You best get used to it, a voice in my head says. There’s coming lots of nights you’ll not have her in the same place as you, maybe not even in the same town. I look up at the sky a last time but nothing falls. I close my eyes and smell the honeysuckle, make believe Janie’s asleep a few feet away, that Lynn will put away her books in a minute and we’ll go to bed. I’m making up a memory I’ll soon enough need.