by Jacob White
Rollsy was quiet a while. “Too late.”
Leston nodded. He hung his head and let the pain in his shoulder tear him apart.
It was night now for real. Rollsy could smell the dew coming in. Around him, each scrape and twitter sounded cut loose, circling through the dark like bats.
They’d been crawling a good hour, though Rollsy would’ve said four. He thought of his grandma coming home—from Bridge, probably—and finding just that one shoe. He aimed to put all the blame on his papaw.
Rollsy began to lag. His papaw moved ahead with a steady vigor. Every so often Rollsy would whimper or concoct some sort of grunt, but the old man never slowed.
Leston knew he had far to go yet, and he wondered if he had the grit. Whether he crawled toward it, or it toward him, either way the progress was too slow. Turtle slow. The Tortoise of Mortis. He didn’t care where he fell, long as could feel himself rightly taken in by the earth and stomped to mulch. Some dank cavity of stone, or red-throated fox den—or one of those tombs of river mud eroded from the roots of waterside oaks. Maybe shush his way into some kudzu, become one of those curious lumps in the deep-pooled vine, shaded by the canyon walls it made across tall, dead trees. Kudzu, it rode south on a train just like Leston, seeds trickling out and taking over whole counties. It gives up nothing.
Each forearm came down hard before the other.
“You going to die soon?”
“Kind of thing is that to say?” A necrologist Leston didn’t need.
“I want to go home, Papaw.” He stopped, sat up on his knees.
“I know.”
“I want my . . .”—the boy actually said he wanted his daddy. His daddy.
“This ain’t no goddamn hootenanny, boy.” Leston turned, fixed him with a look. Just a trickle, he thought, and the vine spread like holy fire. “We stop, boy, when this skull falls a gavel to the gravel.” He’d shoulder-rolled from that train, and trickled nothing but sand ever since. He laid a weighty stare. “I got to die.”
Rollsy sat on his knees. He started crying.
“What—lord . . .”
The old man rolled on his back and rested his sore neck, waiting his grandson out. When the boy didn’t let up—lord, he could wail on like his daddy—Leston reached up, clapped a dirty hand to his shoulder. “All right, now. All right. I guess you need an explorer name.”
Rollsy, crying still, looked down at him. He nodded.
“Okay, okay. Well mine’s Swamp Fox, so you got to pick something else.”
“But I—”
“You not want an explorer name?”
Rollsy wiped his eyes, sobered. “Crawdad.”
“Crawdad, huh. There’s your daddy’s ambition, reckon. But Crawdad it is. Creek-hoppin Crawdaddy.”
That got Rollsy.
“I told you so, Swamp Fox! I told you!” They had reached the end of the trees. “It’s just more dang golf course.”
His papaw squinted ahead. He pointed toward the far end of the fairway. “See those trees? That there’s bonafide woodland. Runs clear out to York.” He turned a wicked eye at Rollsy. “That’s the maw of no return.”
The moon was out; dew silvered the fairway. Rollsy looked at the wide black trees down past the yellow flag, then back at his papaw. “I ain’t going in there.”
But when his papaw lurched on, Rollsy followed.
Once on the sod, the moving was easy. The bristle was wet and firm, and as they squeaked across, flecks of it sparked up around their forearms, sticking all over. They half tobogganed down the steep tee-off mound, and Rollsy thought it was so fun, he got to his feet, ran back up, and came at it with more speed this time, shooting down the hill on his belly and skidding past his papaw like an otter. He could’ve done that all day long.
The grass was cool, and the moon held them like a flashlight. They bellied down the fairway, leaving dark trails in the glisten.
“Yes, sir. The maw of no return beckons with a slick and joyous tongue.”
Leston clawed divots into the turf with sneaky joy. Tomorrow it would look as if some large, hoofed creature had stolen through.
Cresting the green, he looked back. His grandson’s round head emerged from a sand bunker. Green sod-fleck enwhiskered Rollsy like a hobo. Leston was fairly hurtling the boy into manhood.
“I got to go.” Not twenty feet into the maw of no return, the fear was on Rollsy.
“Huh?”
“I got to pee.”
“Now?”
“I can’t hel—”
“Lord, boy, I don’t care. Just go off a ways.”
Rollsy kicked his way through knotted bramble, cursing boldly—tripping over log rot and falling into saplings. Nothing like that other pretend forest. Worse even than the piney swamps at home. This place was a tangled and toothy mess. And black.
After offending a broad ashen oak, Rollsy tore his way back to the spot where he’d left his papaw, and what he saw there was not lost by the moonlight. His papaw was on his side. He lay there in the shape of a question mark, pants half down.
Rollsy was ready to call the whole thing off right there. The old man was senseless after all. He was crazy, and Rollsy’d let him crawl way out into the wild where he was certain to die, or get gnawed into like carrion. The flaccid haunches sagged down the bones like flour dough.
“Swamp Fox!”
“Go on, son. I’ll catch up.”
“But. I—I don’t know where, uh—”
“Git, goddammit!”
Gravel shot sent Rollsy a ways into the forest, where he fell to crawling, not knowing where he was going, and feeling like he might cry again.
“I came from the quarries, boy.” The boy was sniffling when Leston caught up. “From the black rock of New York State. Bet not even your pappy Mary knows that.” He wanted to make up to the boy, as well as show he was still a man.
“Those hills was full of dead Indians. We’d dynamite out their burials. It’s where I found my treasure. My fortune.” They were shoulder-to-shoulder. “I found this gun, Rollsy, this old-time musket. Bet your daddy don’t know that neither.” But the boy repaid Leston’s earlier stoicism, hanging his acorn head and ignoring the bait of dead Indians and dynamite.
“I was sixteen the day I found that artifact—or it me. The boys working the charges had corked the whole north wall with glycerin. We hunkered backside a ridge a ways off and plugged our ears as the fella dropped the pump.” He put his fingers in his ears and smiled fiercely. Rollsy stared hard at the ground. Leston sighed. “A mountain thumps like that, it’ll knock your damn brain loose.”
The ground was sloping down. The walls of a wide ravine began to rise on either side of them. The boy held close.
“Came a long rumble as the wall slavered down. We stood behind that ridge, listening, till a wide cloud of dust ramped off the ridge top and hung over us like a wave about to break. We stared up at it. Then pebbles began to rain, and we had to hold our hats and crouch.”
He wiped his brow, left cool grit from his forearm. Sweat stung his eyes.
“The dust cloud finally did come down and settled thick. We all just stood there, calling to each other and laughing. After about ten minutes, when it began to clear, this boy Meeks hollered, ‘Les, what’s that?’—pointing next to me. I looked over, and there’s a rifle, stuck barrel first in the ground. I grabbed it up by the hilt, easy as if I’s the one stuck it there. ‘Shit,’ the other fellas said, and walked over.” Leston was quiet a minute, seeing their faces—men’s faces, he’d thought then. “A woman’s rifle, we thought. The barrel was three feet or so, shriveled with some corrosion, but the maple stock was still smooth as its maker’s caress. Then I saw the wrist plate. Engraved in a fine cursive was, ‘For Leland Jacomiah Gander, Jr., from his Father.’ Now anybody from upstate knows who Colonel Leland Gan—”
His papaw shut up mid-sentence. A tree trunk lay before them, each end stuck in the side of the ravine—caught in the craw of no return. The trunk bowed up off the ground, too high to crawl over, too low to slide beneath. They stopped.
“Let’s see here . . .”
Rollsy heard him slap a hand to the smooth damp wood, then the other.
“The road to finality is—fraught”—he pulled himself up, groaned—“with the . . . ”—he sank back, tried again, growling—“with . . .”
His papaw’s white hair trembled in the dark. Rollsy looked on wide-eyed, picking his nose.
“. . . the . . . GRRRR . . . dammit”—he exhaled explosively and swung forward, hanging over the trunk by his hips. “Boy, get over here.” The old man draped limp as a tree snake. “Hop to, now. Unhook me.”
Rollsy got up and stood before the raised seat of his papaw. All he could think about was that dirty, sunken, moonlit matter.
“Unhook me, now.”
Rollsy stepped back and kicked the old man’s seat hard.
“Ho-mercy!”
He failed to lift so much as stomp. His papaw was still hooked. Rollsy would have to put some shoulder into it. He stared at the sunken rear end and took a deep breath. He held out both hands, palms hovering over the dirty pants seat. He closed his eyes and pressed in.
“Dammit—”
The old man swatted back. Rollsy caught the marblely knuckles on his cheek and fell sideways to the ground.
“Fore you start crying, now, you get up and you get me off this tree.”
Rollsy lay there, the voice coming from far off, and he mistook it for his daddy’s and scrambled in a daze to his feet—“Sir?”—then leapt the trunk and took off running.
He found the boy curled under a bush and had to prod him out with a stick, herd him back into procession. Still hot from having to wrestle himself off the tree—he’d hit the ground with a whimper, then lain there trembling, tempted to thank God—he whipped insults at the fat white legs of his grandboy. The boy should’ve run off long sooner, never looked back upon this crawl of bane. But his gumption heartened Leston, who saw in him none of Marion’s bandy pusillanimity, nor the swampy sloe-eyes of the mama and brother. Maybe he’d bring hell sure enough. Leston sidled up to his grandson. “Know what happened to that gun?”
“I wish you’d on and die,” he coughed, a cry in his throat.
Leston started to shake his head, then dropped it in something like a nod. If only he still had the gun. He’d give it to the boy. But he didn’t have it. What all he did have, he had for not having that gun. If he had it, though, he’d give it to Rollsy.
Squeaky crying escaped the boy, and some drool. Leston cleared his throat.
“Meeks said I could get money for it. Sent me and the gun to this Civil War Commemorative museum up in Pike. $3,500 they gave me.”
The boy tried to move ahead, but Leston clamped one of the fat chugging legs. A sore moan rolled forth.
“I stayed drunk three days, then broke into the little museum and stole it back.”
“I’m tired, Papaw!”
Leston, his voice splitting into whispers, told then about what else he took from the museum, from the same display case. The glass picture plate was unclouded and revealed against firelight the yet-to-be Colonel Gander holding up his squirrel shooter while himself being held up by the man Leston guessed smithed and carved the gun, Leland Gander, Sr., one hundred and thirty years before the gun shot from an Indian grave, flew half a mile into the air, and stuck in the dirt by Leston’s feet. “We rounded that ridge and saw sky where once was rock, and me there spinning that gun like I was John Wayne—like it was my destiny that had clobbered that mountain. What a joke! ”
Rollsy tried to crawl away, but each time felt his leg snared by that root-cold grip..
Leston talked on—talked even as a gut sob spilled from his grandson, even as his own shoulder gave and he staggered against the boy. How’d he ever swung a quarry sledge, or a golf club for that matter? His arms quivered. When they gave, he’d be done.
They heard a creek ahead. Leston felt its coolness. He could smell it.
“And what’d I do then, boy?” He huffed a voiceless laugh. “I took my leave of the North and hopped a boxcar to Atlantic City, and there sold the gun and the picture to an Italian Civil War hound for near a million bucks.” The boy was crying hard.
He’d have given it to Rollsy. He’d show him how to pack the gunpowder. Let him set those backwoods around the old house whistling with musket. Mary and Bob diving for cover. The forest filling with smoke and ululation.
They lay on the bank a while, Rollsy gone quiet by the loud water. They watched moonlight ribbon down the creek.
“Weren’t for the moon, we’d just be voices,” his papaw said.
Leston felt water rope over his calves and arms as they crossed. His hands whitened beneath him. At the other side, he dropped onto the clay, shivering.
“Swamp Fox.” Rollsy pushed at his side. “Swamp Fox, get up.” His papaw lay on his belly, cheek to the mud, sliding slow back toward the water.
“Papaw—”
The old man clambered up quick and was on top of him, the hands wide and tight across Rollsy’s collarbones. His papaw snapped a curse into his face, teeth bared, nose whistling. Rollsy smelled the sour breath.
“Indians killed that boy! But I took my million magnarinis and dove at what I thought was Mexico.” The old man’s heart tapped through the soaked shirts. “I took that girl by a creek, my chin singing with pickle juice, and made her watch me bury a pickle jar full of Grover Clevelands. Not two miles from this fortune I hammered up a home fit for no one, lost one boy to fever, and treated the other like shit.”
The creek ran loud over the small words.
“I’m not apologizing!” He shook Rollsy against the clay. “Goddamn Mexico, son!”
Tear them apart, Leston thought. Wipe ’em out, kid.
He let go the small shoulders. He was sliding off the boy, sliding down the bank, toward water.
Rollsy pulled hard at the soaked shirt. But still he felt the old heavy body slicking down the mud—felt, finally, how heavy that sorry body was. The other shoe bobbed white down the creek. Rollsy begged, choking on sobs. Pulling.
“I know, boy. Let go.”
“Please.”
“Let go, now.”
But Rollsy pulled, feet sliding.
“I said let go—I’m coming.” The old man rolled on his back, his face knuckled at the sky. “I can’t do this with you here.”
But the boy was gone—already across the creek and lost to its sound.
6. Wolf Among Wolves
My sister was living up the lake in a town called Trumansburg. It’s a good many uphill miles from Ithaca and I’ve always avoided driving there in winter because the road isn’t safe. It’s not so much the drive up as the drive back down, how even at the slowest speed, at the slightest coast, the car’s weight can shiver sideways and slip queasily loose. Last time I drove up there was February. Clare called saying she’d killed her husband Pete. I told her call an ambulance and pulled on a coat over my pajamas, not without some worry over the drive.
For as long as I knew him Pete played guitar for one of those old-time quartets Trumansburg is known for. In high school my friends and I’d motor up the hill to where some farmer kept a still in his cheese cellar and Clare always caught a ride up for the weekend barn dances, where Pete strummed for hours and where I guess she met him. Clare used to say he was famous but I saw little evidence of this. He was well known around Trumansburg, a local boy in a town where it seemed everyone was a musician, shiftless and unhappy, hippies gone grim from too many long winters. In the first years of their marriage Clare would get me up there occasional Saturdays to watch Pete’s group play in a café that never managed to get its liquor licens
e. Clare brought a paper bag full of strawberries for the shine that got passed around. I bounced their baby Micah on my lap and Pete hammered wild on the guitar all night, curled around it so his black hair brushed the strings. But in these old-time quartets the guitar seems to me the least pronounced; I could hardly hear him beneath the fiddle, banjo, and bass. Or maybe I could and I just don’t understand music. I never took Pete very seriously. I didn’t think he could be much of a father to their son. Micah is eight now and has already developed the endearing knobbiness of his father. The same crow wings of hair. Pete’s harder years left him more fifty than forty.
By the time Micah had started talking I was teaching math at Ithaca Junior High and visiting less. The drives up had begun to make less and less sense. I tried to go up Thanksgivings. They almost never came down the lake, not unless Pete had a gig at one of the college bars in town. That wasn’t ever my element though, so I didn’t go see him. Twice a year or so I’d call over to the elementary school and ask Doris to bring Micah an ice cream during lunch. Doris works in the cafeteria, and my father used to ask her to do the same when I was there.
The night Clare called it was below ten out. The street held so still as I scraped my windshield there seemed a kind of suction in the air, an echolessness, something like how I imagine space feels. The constellations held stiff as crystal. It was two a.m.
The road up was plowed and salted and I drove just a little faster than I should’ve, letting my mind go empty so that I could bear up against the scene at Clare’s. Our folks have been gone years, and it surprises me now to think how little my sister and I actually saw each other anymore. It still surprises me, some, that I was the one she’d called.
On the phone she said she’d swung his guitar at him and a piece had stuck in his head. This sounded ludicrous to me. As with all of her dramas, it was difficult to hear beyond the comical. “He had a gig over in Watkins Glen where he knows I hate the drive, but later I drive over anyway for some reason and when I look in the window it’s not him playing but some brick shithouse Louisiana fiddler with a oily ponytail, all these idiots clapping. He was at her house, Slim—I drove over. His truck there in her drive naked as June. I didn’t know what to do but to go home and wait in the den. It’s hours and he comes in sweet-smiling and I take his case from him and pull out his guitar. ‘Neck’s cold,’ I say, and it was, like ice from sitting in his truck all night. Must’ve been half froze when I swung it. There’s a lot of blood here, Slim, Jesus. Jesus, Jesus.”