The River of Kings: A Novel

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The River of Kings: A Novel Page 3

by Taylor Brown


  But Interstate 95 is newly completed, crossing the county like a long white bridge in the west, sleek and clean, and soon this place will shrivel yet smaller on the map, a point forgotten at the edge of everything green. The Sheriff saw it coming. He reckoned if the shrimp boats couldn’t fill the bellies of Yankee tourists, they could fill the lungs of the long-hairs now running the country.

  Hiram agreed. There was never enough of anything since he’d come home from the war: money, food, time. Shrimp, especially, which might have provided all that. Meanwhile the price of diesel kept climbing, Jimmy Carter no match for those sheikhs sitting atop their oceans of black gold, and the Russians just itching to hit the big red button that would sprout mile-high mushrooms across the globe.

  He pulls back the throttles, the diesels burbling down. The rendezvous point is coming up, a nameless point covered in scrubby pines and high brush. He sees the boxy shape of the offload truck hidden in the trees. His men are already in the bow, ready with throw-ropes. The bank nears. He can almost feel the river bottom rising beneath his keel, heavy with his ocean haul, and something else: a stillness in the trees, like a held breath, even the wind afraid to speak. The symbols on his skin turn to fire, like they always did before Charlie opened up.

  Too late, Hiram’s man throws the rope.

  Shadows flood through the trees, converging at the truck, and the night shatters with light, a staccato cracking of small-arms fire, the bushes pulsing like thunderclouds. Among all this, voices screaming:

  “DEA!”

  “Jackers!”

  “Sheriff’s Department!”

  “Shit,” says Hiram.

  He leaves the wheelhouse and goes to the rail. Men are locked together on the ground, rolling in the dirt, some in uniform, others with long beards and gold badges on chains around their necks. DEA and sheriffs, duking it out.

  Situation Normal, he thinks. All Fucked Up.

  There is nowhere to go. Hiram runs to the far rail and jumps.

  5

  Altamaha River, Day 1

  At Knee Buckle Island, the river winds back on itself, nearly reversing direction, and Lawton points them through Dick’s Swift, the channel that shortcuts the loop. Soon the first of the old navigational dikes appears, a row of hundred-year wood pilings that jut from the water like broken teeth. They are a stony gray, as if petrified. Once they held a bulwark of brush and rocks and mud intended to control the river’s flow. The Corps of Engineers tried to tame the river here, to force a deeper, straighter channel for streamers and timber rafts, but the spring freshets tore through the man-made jaws unchecked.

  Lawton points his boat between two of the old pilings. They are objects of lore. For more than a century, flatwoods loggers assembled their harvest of longleaf pine into sharpshooters, two-hundred-ton rafts with fifty-foot oars, the bows pointed for shooting the river’s snags and bars. Rafthands black and white floated the pinewood colossi some hundred miles downriver to the port of Darien, a trip of two weeks. They broke up the timber at the docks and spent the night reeling through the portside taverns and whorehouses, stumbling at dawn beneath the forest of shipmasts that sailed heavy bellies of pine lumber to shipyards in Maine and Boston and Belfast. Darien boomed until the timber ran out, a whole state of old-growth pine cut to stumps.

  Lawton watches the teeth pass by.

  “I figure them old raftsmen had it pretty good, out on the river for maybe weeks at a time. What you think?”

  “I think they didn’t do the trip but twice a year, during the freshets and snowmelts. They had to spend the rest of the year cutting timber by hand.”

  Lawton shrugs. “Seems like a pretty good life to me. Simple.”

  “You ever really took down a big tree with saw and ax?”

  Their boats are nearly parallel now. Lawton eyes him.

  “What, they got you doing a lot of timber-cutting in college?”

  They do, actually. Georgia Southern has a timber sports team, and Hunter has been going to practices. It seems a good balance to what he is learning indoors, the piles of history books with their flat-printed words piled layer on layer like the blandest cake. They practice the springboard and the stock saw, the underhand chop and the single buck and the standing block chop, severing all that white pine with gleaming saw-teeth and ax-bits. On the first day, they sent him off into the woods with a five-pound felling ax, telling him to take down a hardwood at least one foot in diameter and bring back a twelve-inch block of it as evidence. He threw up twice in the process but emerged from the woods in under an hour to the surprise of the boys sitting on the tailgates of their trucks, drinking canned beer and talking about their race-saws. No one had ever done it that fast the first time.

  Sometimes he feels bad hacking into all that timber, down into the hard white flesh of it, and it seems he might loose a jet of the wildest red as he strikes into the heartwood. But this is nothing, he knows, compared to what Lawton has seen and done. So he keeps his mouth shut. He says nothing to his brother of his place on the timber sports team, the only underclassman with a chance at first string, beating out ham-fed country boys who outweigh him by sixty pounds.

  “You might be surprised what they got me doing.”

  They are just past the first dike when the sound of an outboard rises behind them. They look back to see an olive johnboat turn the bend. It blasts past them at full throttle, a blur of pale faces over the streak of hull, the bow cutting a white arrow through the river. The wake comes sliding toward them, dark and ominous as a tail, and they nearly capsize, their boats rolling on the swell. Hunter reaches back to keep the ashes from breaking loose as the second wave hits, the third, the shark’s tooth flopping at his neck.

  “Son of a bitch!” Lawton rams his paddle into the river like a staff, fighting to stay upright on the swells.

  The boat rounds out of sight, the river slowly settling, the white wrapper of a candy bar left like a postcard. Lawton fishes it in with his paddle, crinkling the plastic in his hand. He is looking downriver, as if he can reel in the boat with his eyes. A vein throbs in his neck like a fork.

  “People. No fucking respect.”

  Hunter grins. “I know what your spirit animal is.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Curmudgeon. You need one of those hats with a warship on it, goldleaf on the bill.”

  “River didn’t used to have all these sons of bitches on it, Hunter.”

  “It had Daddy.”

  “Hey now, you know what I mean.”

  “I know every generation thinks they got the record share of assholes.”

  Lawton growls. “I don’t know, brother. Shit I been seeing, home and away, we got a real strong team right about now.”

  The sun is climbing, the day warming. A wind comes up, scaling the surface of the water. The river slides black through the trees, like something birthed from the mill upstream, great strings of the blind roaming its belly. Hunter watches the current bend before them, revealing a pale bluff on the left bank, the site of a Confederate gun battery that once defended the railroad bridge upstream. During the Second World War, a detachment of state defense forces was stationed there to prevent German U-boats from sneaking upriver like giant sturgeon, sabotaging bridges or spilling black-faced commandos into the backyards of sawhands and cotton farmers. The submarines cruised the coastal waters instead, once sinking two oil tankers in the span of an hour. Rumors abounded. Nazis submariners were coming ashore to buy bread and cigarettes, to meet spies, to watch the picture shows.

  Below the bluff, Hunter sees a steel research boat outfitted with a bow-boom, two men in uniforms and sunglasses working the waters with long-poled nets. They’re with the Department of Natural Resources. Lawton steers his boat in their direction.

  “Let’s go see what they’re up to,” he says.

  “What happened to all your shit about no time to stop?”

  Lawton shrugs. “You sped up, like you said you would.”

  He soun
ds surprised. Hunter wishes he was close enough to hit him with his paddle.

  Around the DNR boat, the river is speckled with floating catfish, bodies mottled olive and brown and black, like camouflage. Some are upturned, showing yellow-white bellies. Their heads are hammered flat between the eyes, their mouths wide and underbit, their whiskers hanging down like the Fu Manchus of old Chinamen. Flatheads, people call them, or Appaloosas or shovel cats. They’re an invasive species, introduced illegally in the 1970s as a sport fish.

  The DNR men straighten as the brothers paddle up. One of the officers is big, with a stout belly that could take body blows like a heavy bag. The other is smaller, strung with tendons and sinew. They say their hellos, and Lawton lays his paddle flat.

  “Electro-fishing?”

  The big officer nods. “Flathead populations been exploding. Decimating the redbreast and bullhead populations. They got us out mopping up.”

  Hunter looks at the electroshock contraption. The boom at the front of the boat holds a silver ball just below the surface. It sends an electric pulse through the water, stunning the fish to the surface, where they can be netted and counted and killed.

  “How many y’all getting a hour?” asks Lawton.

  His accent seems thicker to Hunter, dialed up.

  “Been averaging sixty-one.”

  Lawton whistles and squints at the stunned fish. He might be doing his own count.

  “Hell, I don’t doubt it. I seen the Wanted signs at the landing.”

  “People been getting sixty-pounders on bank hooks.”

  “Some say they’re the tastiest cats,” says Lawton.

  “Course, you’re eating cancer from the mill,” says Hunter.

  Everyone is silent a moment, thinking of their own cells multiplying like so many flatheads under the skin. Some of the stunned fish are beginning to wiggle, the shock wearing off.

  Lawton rubs his chin. “Say, how ’bout the sturgeon. They jumping overnormal last summer?”

  The big DNR officer tilts his net upright and leans his elbow on it like a shovel. “The population’s been hurting, near as we can tell. But a boater did get killed last year. September. Poor son of a bitch caught one square in the chest.”

  Lawton’s lips disappear inside his beard, sucked against his teeth.

  “Yeah. We heard about that. Ain’t September a little late for the sturgeon to be jumping?”

  “Not for this one, apparently.”

  “Must of been a big’un, all right.”

  “Big enough,” says the smaller officer. “We tell people to keep their speed down in summer. Don’t none of them listen. Guess somebody got what was coming.”

  Hunter watches his brother’s body react, the nations of strength beneath his vest contracting into a single ball-like mass, marshaled as before some burst of power. But the moment passes, his body relaxing into its old shape, his knuckles coloring again on his paddle.

  “I guess so.” He licks his lips. “Y’all seen anything else strange on the river of late?”

  The big officer’s head is stock-still, his eyes surely roaming their boats behind his sunglasses. “A couple researchers from the university went missing a few months back. Left the dock and never come back. They were studying the sturgeon population. Probably they got struck by one, too.” He pauses. “Course, people got other theories.”

  “What kind of theories?”

  “There’s been a camera crew hunting around. Say they’re looking for the Altamaha-ha.”

  “We told them they might as well be looking for Bigfoot,” says the smaller officer. He shrugs. “Said they already had.”

  The big officer sets the handle of his net before him, his hands gripping it one atop the other. “You boys sure ask a lot of questions. Where y’all headed, anyway?”

  Hunter speaks up. “To a creek—”

  “Downriver,” says Lawton, cutting him off.

  The big officer’s face hardens.

  “Downriver, huh?” He juts his chin toward Hunter’s boat. “Mind telling me what you got in the sack?”

  Lawton cocks his head; his teeth show.

  “Oh, that? That’s just our daddy’s ashes, Officer. Seems he was killed by a sturgeon strike last summer.”

  The DNR men seem to waver in place.

  “Oh, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Lawton ain’t been able to do the trip,” says Hunter. “Seeing as he was deployed.”

  Lawton cuts him a look.

  “They ain’t asked for my service history, brother. Or my name.” He looks back at the officers. “Or have you?”

  “No.” The big officer raises a hand to settle him. “No need for all that.”

  Lawton looks back at the stunned fish, bulbed like tumors on the river. He prods one with his paddle, like it might wake up. Everyone is watching him. When he raises his head, his face looks young, unlined.

  “You said this camera crew already went hunting Bigfoot?”

  “So they said.”

  “Say they found him?”

  The big officer shrugs.

  “Shadow and rumor, like what everybody finds.”

  6

  Fort Caroline, 1564

  They have found no secret trade-river to the Orient as yet, nor any cities of gold as the Spaniard Cortés discovered, sailing home heavy-hulled with his ingots of melted treasure. But they have found a wide bend of river to build their fortress. It is to be called La Caroline, Laudonnière announces, a triangular fort of three earthen walls, each a thousand king’s-feet in length. There will be a storehouse for grain and munitions, a set of thatch-roofed barracks built low to survive the coastal winds, and a gate that can withstand the natives, should they become unfriendly, or the Spanish, who already are. And it will have a house for him, their commander, in which he and his handmaiden will reside.

  This handmaiden, she is one of only four women in the colony, and already there is speculation that the woman is inordinate in her duties to him.

  One of the men leans on his mattock.

  “She is naught but a cock-scabbard, Le Moyne. Would that our commander was a sharing man, no?”

  Such a prospect disgusts Le Moyne, who sings his Psalms in the afternoons, who tries so hard in the nights not to take his own sprouted flesh in hand, loosing his seed into this foreign ground. Le Moyne, whose very name means “the Monk.” In the mornings he works among the tradesmen and soldiers, the heat thick and wet as bath steam. They cut trees, planing them for use as framing timbers and rafters, and they dig endless ditches for latrines, moats. The spoil they use for earthworks. The backs of the men have taken on a hard brown luster, like burnished wood. Their teeth seem whiter in the sun. There is already talk of baking bricks for a bread oven. Le Moyne allows himself to take direction. He has no patience with the soft-palmed noblemen in the colony, men who puff their tunics with cotton bombast and spend their days hunting winemaking grapes in the forest, never deigning to dirty their hands in labor.

  His father is a royal embroiderer, a man who earned his position instead of inheriting it, and this commission is his way of expelling his son from France. Le Moyne is le brebis galeuse, after all. The mangy sheep. The sole Lutheran in a family that serves the Catholic crown. In France, there are riots in the streets, massacres, open combat between the factions, these sects that profess faith in the same God. His father claims the voyage will save his son from more bloodshed sure to come, though Le Moyne suspects the old man has other hopes. Perhaps his son’s exploits in the New World will repair the family name, rid him of the mange of Luther and Calvin. No matter, Le Moyne was exhausted by the insufferable nuance of court life, the sectarian gossip. He thirsted for adventure, purpose. A new world, heavy with promise, lay beyond the gray swell of the sea.

  In the evenings he often accompanies the hunting parties, honing his skill with the arquebus—the hook-gun that fires a shot the size of a grape. They take deer and rodents rooting through the wilds, the occasional feral pig fugitive
from Spanish pens. They even try shooting the great toothed reptiles that lie still as gargoyles along the riverbanks. Here is the beast the Spanish call el lagarto—the lizard. Its back is a map of power, risen in armored ridges that can thwart arrows and shot. Sometimes the lizards bellow over the water, a sound like stones being rolled across a cobbled street. Others join in, a chorus that brings the river to a thunder, and Le Moyne watches the dark-moving current for the giant sea monster to rise again. This monster that haunts his dreams, perhaps they call it forth. Their king. It does not rise, though sometimes great bony fishes leap from the river in arcs of spray, their bodies gleaming as if bronzed.

  Des esturgeons.

  One evening Le Moyne and his hunting companions discover a throng of deer poised motionless in the wood. Only when the animals rise manlike upon their hind legs do they realize these are not deer but men cloaked in the gutted and dried carcasses of deer, crowned in the antlered heads of stags. Le Moyne cannot but recall The Transformation of Actaeon, the etching by his countryman Jean Mignon, which depicts the fate of the mortal hunter Actaeon, who stumbles upon Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt, as she bathes naked with her nymph maids in some woodland spring. The goddess, embarrassed, splashes water on the mortal’s chest, the streams beamed arrow-straight from the tips of her fingers, and poor Actaeon’s head is transformed into that of a stag, a beastly prison that robs him of human speech. In the background of the etching, Actaeon’s fate: his own pack of hounds, no longer recognizing him, chase him through the woods. They tear him to pieces.

  But these warriors have transformed of their own volition, moving among their prey without the slightest suspicion. They raise their hooves to the French in salutation, and Le Moyne feels like unto some beast of the earth, raising his own strange hand to echo theirs.

  Their king, Saturiwa, emerged from the forest during the first days of the fort’s construction, his subjects building for him a shelter of palms and saplings on a little bluff overlooking the scene. A party of pipers heralded his arrival that day, their cheeks puffed with effort, a shrill and wild discordance from the trees. He was accompanied by what looked a war party of some several hundred men, armed with clubs and bows and spears, their bodies adorned with feathers and pearls, strings of fish-teeth and shells that rattled upon their necks and wrists as they walked. The men of the fort were alarmed by this display until the chief ordered his warriors to assist in the labor, the raising of works and structures and thatching of roofs. Laudonnière and he proceeded to exchange more gifts, a ritual forging of alliance against the tribe’s enemies in the west. A hasty accord, thought Le Moyne, rash to make in an unknown land, but politics are not his duty.

 

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