by Taylor Brown
3
Altamaha River, Day 1
The brothers round a bend and the Rayonier pulp mill rises smoking on the bank, a towering industrial fortress of silos and catwalks and smokestacks whose upper rims blink all hours to warn away low-flying aircraft. Long convoys of logging trucks deliver forty-ton quivers of slash pine day and night, the arrow-straight trees chipped and fed into steel digesters the size of space rockets. The mill produces bleached cellulose fibers used in cigarette filters and diapers. Bark and sawdust are burned for power, the smokestacks launching endless fleets of yellow-edged clouds. The plant’s wastewater rumbles into the river just downstream, the current foaming cauldronlike where the discharge pipes empty out, a mysterious black effluent that stains the river for miles on. People say the river used to be green, the bars white as flour.
Lawton’s nose twitches in the red profusion of his beard.
“Smell never gets no better.”
It smells like rotten eggs, or cabbage. An odor common in this part of the state, emitted by the pulp and paper mills sprung like mean little cities from the pines.
Hunter spits. “You just ain’t used to it no more. Been sniffing officers’ asses too long. I can’t even hardly smell it.”
Lawton arches an eyebrow. “The hell you can’t.”
They pass the rusted wreck of an old paddle-wheeler downstream of the mill. The Gulfmist. It’s wedged against the far bank, half-submerged, a relic of the 1950s that once ran lumber to feed the mills. As boys, they scrambled across the slanted, rust-eaten decks, staring into the gaping holes they found, the iron-enclosed ponds accrued in the hull’s interior. Who knew what creatures were hiding under the scum? They touched the big paddle gear that stood from the water like an iron wagon-wheel and looked into the glassless windows from which river pilots once commanded these dark waters. Upstream, anglers floated their skiffs over a twenty-five-foot eddy hole, storied for sixty-pound catfish.
Lawton sees Hunter looking at the wreck.
“Nope. Waste of time we don’t got.”
Hunter spits. “You really got the trains running on time these days, huh?”
Lawton shrugs.
The wreck slips past them, and soon the trees are all there is. A kingdom of cypress and tupelo, of water oak and river birch and black willow from which moccasins might hang like scaled question marks. Roads will cross the river only twice, and ancient swamps and sloughs and oxbows insulate its snaking path from the high ground of men, harboring beds and roosts of the rare and endangered.
The Little Amazon.
Their father was born on this river, in one of the shantyboats that float on the water like flood-borne houses. The place is downriver from here, a day’s long paddle, and they plan to reach the house by dusk. They will overnight there, then push on for four more days, delivering their father’s ashes to the river’s mouth, a long last ride down the waters that birthed him.
They themselves were raised in Darien, the port town perched at the end of the river, but their father kept the old floathouse in the family, using it as a retreat from the ocean he had come to hate. River-raised, he worked at sea. A shrimper. A failed one, really, by most definitions of success. Probably the old man was biased, though. A childhood of river cat and gar, of long days on smooth water that reflected the sky—those were days of glory. And later, dredging up empty nets for weeks on end, that was anything but.
When they were boys he would bring them upriver for weekends away from the world they knew. He allowed them nothing from civilization, no juice boxes or Pop-Tarts or G.I. Joes. They ate only what they caught on their trotlines. Hunter remembered the man sitting on the porch, staring at the river, smoking a cigarette through his mustache while his boys ate fried fish balls with their hands.
“The ocean, you cain’t trust it. It’s got nothing to contain it. No direction nor purpose, not like a river’s got.” He pointed his cigarette at them. “Don’t neither of you take to the sea for a life. Ain’t nothing in it for you but what you can see. No riches nor treasures to bring up from the deep. Just water, the kind you cain’t even drink, flat boring or big-swelled enough to make you sick.”
He nodded, telling these things to himself as much as to them.
“This river’d always feed you if you needed. People been living on its banks since always. Altamaha himself, he was a river king, and there was tribes long before him, hunting deer and alligator with arrows made from fish teeth. They say there was forts down here, Spanish and French, more’n half a century before all that Mayflower shit up north.” Here he pulled a six-pack of Michelobs from the water on a length of string, cracking one in a white lump of foam. “You ever in trouble, this is the place you come.”
He looked at them, but they had their heads down, intent on their food.
“Hey. You listening to me?”
They both looked up. Lawton was closest.
“You listening?”
Lawton nodded.
Their father struck the plate from his hands. It shattered on the pine planks.
Lawton lifted his chin, swallowed his food.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
In the end, it was the river that killed him, or something from it. They found his boat first. A couple of fishermen did. A thirteen-foot Gheenoe, narrow-hulled with a tiller throttle and poling deck. It was tangled up in a sedge at a kink in the river. He wasn’t in it. Two days later, his body washed up on a mudflat just downriver of the old coastal highway.
Hunter was at the ramp when the sheriffs brought him in. They let him unzip the bag. The old man was shirtless, his skin white as something from a horror film. Hunter hadn’t realized how much age and time had damaged the old man’s tattoos. Muddled them. They covered him like old bruises.
There was the old River Assault tattoo from his time in the brown-water navy, a devil’s head with downturned trident. Mark of the Delta Devils, Terror of the Mekong. The insignia lay bleary now upon his shoulder, made as if by a bully’s fist. On his left chest the inscription SAT CONG—Death to Communists—tattooed as tribute to the Biet Hai sea commandos who wore it there, a death sentence if they were captured. There were the swooping swallows, one on each shoulder, to carry him to heaven if he died at sea, and the North Star to help him find his way home, its points dulled over his heart. All these signs and wonders inked upon his skin, symbols of power and luck, and a new one among them they couldn’t stop. Square in his chest was a depression, a sunken wound the size of a man’s fist, the color of storm. Burst veins fractured it, jagged and red. Hunter touched two fingers to the place, his father’s heart softer now than it had ever been.
Broken.
Sturgeon strike, they said. It was September, and the sturgeon had jumped all summer.
No one knew why they did it, these remainders of prehistory. They inhabited the deepest holes of the river, the lightless benthic regions, each clad in a bronzelike armor of bony plates. Brother to the dinosaur, they’d survived cataclysm, extinction, coming upriver for eons in spring to spawn. In summer they rested in their dark places, watery caverns protected from the river’s pull. In the fall they returned to the sea. Near the interstate bridge lay a ninety-foot hole where the real leviathans were rumored to gather, armored and silent, like a fleet of submarines. Fishes a century old, some weighing seven hundred pounds.
In June, without fail, they started jumping.
God help the man running thirty knots when one of the beasts torqued itself from the water, its bone-shield bright and deadly in the sunlight.
Artillery. That’s what the old-timers called it.
Some said they did it for joy. Others, reasons darker. They said it was a defense mechanism, an evolutionary protection against humans, against their boats and dams, their wastewater discharge and industrial runoff. The only weapon for a fish with no teeth.
Some wanted them eradicated. Finish what the world-killing meteor couldn’t, what the caviar craze of the late 1800s almost di
d. No more prehistoric beasts. No more broken limbs, shattered faces, collapsed lungs. Kill them off. Convenience, revenge.
Legend had the great monster of the river living among them. The Altamaha-ha. A survivor of the Mesozoic era, a cryptid of the first order. At least twenty feet in length, and black, with the toothed snout of a crocodile, the bony plate-armor of a sturgeon or gar. A creature trapped here, perhaps, when the prehistoric seas receded. Probably just a line of sturgeon surfacing—only that—but their father believed it something more. He believed the stories of the old-time timbermen, who described a thing darker, more sinister.
“Ridge-backed,” he said, his broke-knuckled hand cruising before their boyhood eyes. “Got a head like a Tyrannosaur, teeth like one, too. Flippers the size of ship’s oars. Swims like a dolphin, up and down. Got a body round and strong as them cypress trunks they sent streaming down the canals.”
Hunter looks at the trees along the riverbanks. There is hardly any of that old-growth timber left now, a few ancient survivors that pose for photographs, a centuries-old myth trolling the waters they once guarded.
“Hunter.”
He looks up, seeing Lawton some ways ahead, his boat turned slightly sideways so he can look back over his shoulder.
“What?”
“What you doing back there?”
“Paddling.”
“Skylarking, more like it.” Lawton looks at his watch and the river and the sun, triangulating. “We got to make better time than this.”
“You just go as fast as you want, big boy. I’ll keep up.”
Lawton makes a noise in his chest and goes back to paddling. He is short but cruelly built, with yokelike shoulders and a barrel chest. His body rises V-shaped from the cockpit, a brutal form that makes his boat look almost delicate beneath him, the red shoe of a fairy or elf. In high school he was a fullback, a human wrecking ball that crashed through defensive formations, blasting holes for Hunter, the tailback, to dart through untouched. Lawton was too short for a career at a big state school, but his bruising style caught the eye of Annapolis scouts, always in need of fullbacks for the triple option. He was offered an appointment. He would attend the Naval Academy, the stone forge of midshipmen.
A dream.
Hunter harbored his own hopes back then. He was light and quick, his body roped in veins. He ran one of the fastest forties in the state. Tacklers crumpled before him as if spell-struck, their bearings lost. In the open field he couldn’t be caught. He started two seasons, playing behind Lawton until a middle linebacker’s helmet cannonballed his left knee, kinking it wrong-angled like a dog’s leg.
You saw it happen all the time on television, the tragedy of a blown knee. Feeling it was wholly different, the sudden-struck knowledge that you were not invincible. That the endless hours of up-downs and sprints and tackling drills couldn’t help you, the thousand mornings of ringing steel plates. Your dreams could be ruptured in an instant, your body wrecked. Your chance lost to face those armored boys alone, with no brother to pummel and daze them first.
When the whistle blew, Lawton knelt alongside him, looking at the ruined knee. He touched Hunter’s forehead, and Hunter could still remember the softness coming into his brother’s eyes, the watery light, and he reached up to stop Lawton too late. His brother had already bolted upright, ripping off his helmet.
“Who hit him?” His gold helmet swung from the end of his bowling-pin arm, the facemask hooked in two knuckles. “Who was the son of a bitch that hit him?”
The Brunswick High linebacker, still helmeted, stepped forward. They stood chest to chest. He was half a foot taller than Lawton, his arms long and white and lean.
“Me, motherfucker. What you gonna do?”
The referee was scurrying to part them when Lawton’s helmet came swinging on the end of his arm like a mace. He cracked the defenseman, helmet to helmet, then punched him straight under the facemask. A fury of blows followed, and Hunter could still remember the cage-eyed fear of the linebacker when they were pulled apart. Lawton’s bared face hungry for more, as if his own blood were only war paint. He was ejected from the game for using his equipment as a weapon. His appointment to play for the Midshipmen was withdrawn. He stood over Hunter’s hospital bed a week later, bright-eyed, tucking a smuggled issue of Playboy under the blanket.
“Yeah, but you seen the look on that big fucker’s face?”
He enlisted straight into the Navy after graduation, a mere seaman recruit, determined to be a frogman. He survived the hundreds of miles of beach runs and ocean swims, the surf torture and agony on the asphalt courtyard, the week of hell when candidates staggered weeping to ring the brass bell and lay down their helmets before the hardened sadists of the cadre, veteran operators who whispered endlessly to men gone witless and hypothermic of hot coffee and blankets and shit-for-brains why are you even here? Then combat diving and land warfare, jump school, and six months of tactical training before he earned his Trident. After that he was mostly overseas, in one place or another—often he couldn’t say where.
Hunter watches him. He is paddling in perfect cadence, his head on a swivel, a hard look on his face. It isn’t often that he comes back. It has to be something big enough, mean enough, to draw him home. The ashes seem too light, too little of the man who left them. Lawton’s eyes hunt the river, the banks.
There must be something else.
4
Sapelo Sound, March 1975
Hiram Loggins stands at the helm of his shrimp trawler, the Amelia-Jo. He has a sweetheart at home and two tons of marijuana belowdecks. He hasn’t been this awake since the Cua Lon River with the turret guns charged, waiting to scream hot tracer fire into the jungle. The moon is high tonight, full, the coast a dark animal crouched on the tin roof of the sea.
Waiting.
The drop went off as planned, which worries him. Nothing ever goes right. They anchored off the three-mile buoy at midnight and waited until a hum rose from the southern horizon, a black cross climbing against the navy sky. They flashed their signal lights as arranged, two quick flashes and a long third. The aircraft flashed its landing lights in answer, the same pattern in reverse. It circled them once, a bomber-sized machine with twin radial engines. It looked too big and slow to fly, floating instead on its own engine thunder. Then the cargo door slid open and the bales began to fall out, big cubes splashing into the sea.
“Square grouper,” they call it, tongue in cheek. Marijuana wrapped in plastic and burlap, product of Colombia. It took them more than an hour to haul in the catch, Hiram chugging from one drop to the next on the shifting swells. The sea kept playing hide-and-seek with him, tucking the bales in its valleys. Pissing him off, like it usually does. He’s never been comfortable offshore. A world too unsteady under his rubber boots, nothing to hold to if you go overboard. He’s always ready to get back within swimming distance of land. He watches the deckhands retrieve the bales with long gaffs, stowing them in the hold. It’s the same crew as always, moonlighting for more pay than they might make in a month working the nets. His first mate scans the swells with a pair of starlight binoculars.
“Starboard bow, boss. Fifty yards.”
Hiram nods, spins the wheel to the right.
They enter the sound just north of Blackbeard Island, rumored to hide the pirate’s old treasure. Hiram went hunting buried chests as a boy, as did most of the other river people. A lot of them too old for such delusions, shuffling along with half-empty vodka bottles and pawnshop metal detectors. They found nothing save the brick ruin of an old crematory built to burn the bodies of the yellow fever victims once quarantined on the island.
Soon the creeks and inlets and rivers of the coast spread weblike before the bow, and Hiram feels his boat enveloped, protected, a white beast slipping into the marsh. Here is a world he knows inside and out, backward and frontward. It can hide outlaws like them. It has already, for centuries.
Sheriff Poppell will be there with his deputies to assist in the offload.
They call him the Last of the High Sheriffs, men who run their counties from end to end. He doesn’t mind getting the moon on his back to keep county business in the black, Hiram has to give him that. There are the clip joints and jukes to manage, the whorehouse at the S&S Truckstop, the liquor stills and drug-running fleet. All that couldn’t be overseen by a lazy man. Even if, thinks Hiram, the Sheriff wears his suit-britches too bright and belled out at the bottom, his collars too wide, a man spiffy-dressed and potbellied like a little king.
Hiram’s first mate comes in from the bow, binoculars draped around his neck.
“Looks clear.”
Hiram nods.
They enter the Sapelo River, the spiked banks narrowing around them. Up the coast is Harris Neck, the old WWII airbase where the Civil Air Patrol launched their antisubmarine flights. Its runways are all green-clumped and fissured, though rumor has low-fliers out of the south landing there now and again under cover of darkness. Down the coast is the town of Darien, set nearly at the mouth of the river that raised him. His cinderblock house is crouched down there, battling climbing vines and falling moss, families of dust-backed roaches, the green-boiling heat. Before him, in the distance, race the high-speed cars of the coastal highway, 17, shooting like tracers across the marsh. The Dixie Dieway, so called for the wrecks in dead of night. Too often Florida-bound vacationers, sleepy-eyed to make the state line, drift into the oncoming lane, semis full of citrus or pulpwood or fertilizer to greet them.
To keep the voting poor happy, the Sheriff calls them from their shanties to scavenge the highway wrecks for whatever they can gather up. You might see them juiced up on oranges for the next week, juggling them or rolling them in the dust like toys, sucking the rinds against their teeth like mouth guards, or all of them tromping around in squeaky white shoes meant for some hospital up north. The whole town might be eating Mars bars for a month, sugar-happy as Pooh Bear, boys black and white dangling yo-yos two from a hand like carnival men.