by Taylor Brown
“I want a low-angle here.” He points to the base of the tree. “Show its enormity. I want close-ups of these spike-things. Good B-roll footage there. We’ll add some menacing music.”
One of the others hitches beneath the weight of his camera and scratches his unshaved neck.
“It won’t look that impressive without a man in front to show its size.”
The red-faced man turns and looks up at the tree. Sweat shames the seat of his pants.
“Well, I don’t know just where our man is at the moment, now do I?”
At this, Lawton hooks his thumbs in his vest and strides into the clearing, chest-high like a banty rooster, his elbows flapping at his sides.
“You boys making a movie or what?”
The camera crew whirls, panning their lenses on him.
Lawton squints into the twin little shapes of himself, warped round.
“Don’t you know it ain’t polite to point a camera at a body ain’t given you his permission?” His accent pours gravy-thick from his mouth. He cocks his head, his blue eyes bright as weapon-scopes. “I’d point them things somewhere else, I was you.”
They do, lowering their cameras, and Hunter sees the producer man turn redder. He raises one finger and props up the brim of his floppy hat, then points the same finger at the ground, jabbing. “This is a shooting location, son. We’re filming. I’m sure you’d like to see yourself on TV, but it isn’t going to happen. It doesn’t work like that.”
Lawton ignores him. He sticks out his bottom lip and walks about, examining the scene with a large, theatrical eye. He looks over cameras, sound booms, shoes, leaning like a pecking chicken. He walks toward the tree, elbows flapping, and the man turns on his heel to glare at him.
“I’d appreciate it if you two’d clear out,” he says.
“I bet you would,” says Lawton. “But this ain’t your property, now is it?”
He reaches out and touches the tree with the flat of his hand, then squints up at its heights. Hunter does, too. The topmost limbs catch their own winds, swaying like something at the bottom of the sea. What men have stood where he now stands, marveling? Men with spears or bows or muskets, drawn beneath the shadow of this crown. What beasts, giant themselves, have circled in times of flood?
Lawton looks at him. “How old you think she is, little brother?”
Hunter thumbs the shark’s tooth at his neck. “Hard to say. They say there’s ones a thousand years old out here, older, but I never seen one like this. Could be twice that.”
“Old as Christ,” says Lawton. “God damn.” He looks at the camera crew. “Say, you them boys hunting the Altamaha-ha?”
The red-faced man straightens.
“Is there a problem with that?”
Lawton pats his vest, the wrappers crackling.
“Long’s you don’t trash the river, there ain’t.”
The producer man, holding his gaze, digs two fingers into his chest pocket and extracts a red jawbreaker in a cellophane wrapper. He pops the candy into his mouth, crinkling the plastic in hand.
“That mill upstream? They say it discharges fifty million gallons of wastewater a day. That’s trash, son.”
“I ain’t asked for a definition, did I?”
The man sucks on the jawbreaker. “What is it you want?”
Lawton watches him. “I want to know whether you really think it exists, the creature you’re hunting.”
The man crosses his arms, candy bulging his cheek.
“I think it doesn’t matter if it does or not.”
“Because you can fill your show with a bunch of splashes and near misses, shit like that?”
“No. Because men believe it exists, and that’s what’s interesting.”
“Men like your man that’s missing?”
“Perhaps.”
“His name Uncle, by any chance?”
“Perhaps,” says the man. This time through his teeth.
“Seems a little off his rocker, that one. He know you’re making some kind of a mockumentary out of him?”
The man smiles. His face is savage, blooded. “Documentary. The proper paperwork has been filed, son, I assure you.”
“Oh, the paperwork. Thank God.”
“It isn’t really any of your business, now is it? Why don’t you take your little brother here and get the hell out of my shooting location. I’m tired of hearing your banjos, son.”
“Son,” says Lawton.
“What?”
“Son. You keep calling me that.” Lawton sucks his teeth. “Thing is, I had a daddy who called me that. He’s ash now—bless him—but he wouldn’t of liked some pompous little fly-tipper playing like he fucked my mother.”
The man leans into Lawton’s face. “This daddy of yours, too bad he didn’t teach you some fucking manners.” He opens his hand; the candy wrapper flutters down. “Son.”
Lawton cuffs him in the face with an open palm. The man stumbles backward and trips, falling flat on his butt. He looks up, his face red-swelled like it might burst, tears silvering his eyes. The jawbreaker lies in the dirt, spit-gleamed, like a miniature of his face. Hunter leaps across the clearing and takes Lawton by the elbow, but his brother won’t be moved. He is hard-cast in place, immovable as bronze. He leans over the man, pointing him down with a single rigid finger.
“Didn’t he?”
Finally he yields, and Hunter tugs him from the clearing, away from the crew with their open mouths and forgotten cameras.
“The fuck you do that for?”
Lawton sniffs. “Talk shit, get hit.”
“That ain’t how it works, Lawton.”
“That’s funny, Hunter. It just did.”
20
Fort Caroline, November 1564
Le Moyne hears the high-pitched shouts, like fearful dogs, of men upon the walls. He runs to the palisade, climbing one of the crude ladders. Two broad-shouldered deserters are raising sail in the river, stealing one of the newly built barques. Laudonnière rages atop the wall, having no way to give chase. The first barque disappeared just days ago, when the emerald charms of the Caribbean proved too strong. A dozen deserters stole it from the roadstead at the river’s mouth, sailing away to make their fortunes.
These two new deserters are Flemish carpenters—Flamands—and they appear unhurried, floating beyond cannon range of the fort. They have cut the lines of the Breton’s small-boat, letting it twirl downriver on the falling tide. The 120-ton Breton itself, the fort’s lone remaining vessel, could never be made ready in time to give chase. All along the wall, curses and shouts:
“Seed-swillers!”
“Sons of Satan!”
“A pox on your mothers’ cunts!”
Le Moyne climbs down from the wall to find La Caille leaning on a barrel keg. He is facing the interior of the fort, arms crossed, as if oblivious to the spectacle without.
“The hopes of the men were in those barques, Le Moyne.”
Le Moyne looks around at the men of the fort, red-burned under the alien sun. Their cheeks so sunken now, as if whatever once swelled them has dwindled. The curses are growing less frequent.
“Ass-thumbers!”
“Cock-swallowers!”
“Hie thee to Satan’s door!”
The Flamands cannot even hear them. A hush falls over the fort.
“Other boats can be built,” says Le Moyne.
La Caille stands from the keg.
“So I fear.”
* * *
That afternoon Le Moyne sits upon a small bluff that overlooks the river. His sketch paper is blank, his stylus dangling idly between his fingers. He is watching for something to leap onto his page, the monster that might rise dreamlike to the surface, big as a ship that cruises through the long night of the river’s depths. That he could seize it within the edges of his page, a prize to rival the greatest gifts of the Apalatci. A creature terrible and humbling, which might unite the men of the fort in awe of the God that shaped it.
&nb
sp; This is what he seeks.
It does not rise this day, the river cold and quiet as slate between the browning trees of autumn. He walks home under the gray towers of cypress, the branches raftering the sky, the earth crackling firelike beneath his boots. It seems strange to him that so much in this new land is of such size, placed by God as if for a species of man or beast so much larger than any he knows. For a race of giants. He rubs the tongue stone in his tunic pocket, stepping over roots and crossing creeks. These woodland trails he knows as well as anyone now, exploring them daily with sketchbook and arquebus in tow. He flushes coveys of dove and other fowl from grassy thickets, their wings whistling to flight. Snakes scurry before him in riotous scrawls; fattened squirrels cling rigid to tree trunks, their tails snapping in furry plumes. Birds cross overhead on great sails of wing, like fleets aloft.
It is dusk by the time he reaches the fort. The men are huddled at their fires, smoking the plant they call tabac from long pipes, as the Indians have taught them. The pipes are fashioned from long shoots of cut cane, a small bowl affixed at one end. The dried cuttings of the plant are rolled into a ball and ignited with a burning reed, the smoke drawn cooling through the pipe into the man’s chest and held there like a breath, expelled finally through the nose or mouth like a spirit going out. Some of the men claim the smoke carries away their hearts’ burdens, light as air. Others say it satisfies hunger, sometimes for hours, an esteemed power in light of the tighter rations on bread and wine imposed with each passing week. The Indians inhale the smoke before going to war, marching long distances without meat or drink, though Le Moyne worries the smoke is more trickery than sustenance; as the weeks wear on, the men keep punching new holes in their tunic belts.
He sits on an empty stump, huddling before the fire of some noblemen he would avoid were he not in need of warmth against the autumn chill. They are Fourneaux and La Croix, grandees both of them, who sit beneath feathered hats and filigreed doublets. They swell excitedly at his arrival, like old hens at sight of the feeding pail.
“Le Moyne, my boy! L’artiste du nouveau monde! What say you?”
Le Moyne palms his eye a moment, squinting one-eyed into the fire.
“A long day, and I am tempted to damn the city of Flanders whole.”
The noblemen lean forward.
“Truly,” says one. “But can you blame them for wanting to escape le pouce de Laudonnière?”
“Perhaps not,” says Le Moyne. “But it was our king who put the power in our commander’s thumb, and we beneath it.”
Fourneaux regards his own plump specimen.
“A thumb so fat, and yet our commander cannot keep even two barques beneath it.”
“Perhaps our commander is too busy placing it elsewhere,” says La Croix. His eyes gleam over the fire, and he tilts his head toward Laudonnière’s residence, where he lives with his handmaiden. “Indecent places, Le Moyne, which make their owner squeal in the night.”
Le Moyne shifts uneasily on his stump, blood tingling in parts of him he would rather it didn’t. He has heard the sounds, like a woman dying, as he lay in bed.
Fourneaux leans forward, almost into the fire, opening his hands like a gift.
“Our king has much invested in this expedition, Le Moyne. If our leader is unfit, are we not duty-bound as our king’s servants to make it a success ourselves?”
Le Moyne looks not at him but into the red heart of the fire.
“And how do you define success?”
The nobleman sits back from the fire, lacing his hands across his ample midsection.
“How does anyone, my boy? Profit.”
21
Altamaha River, Day 2
“You didn’t have to hit the son of a bitch.”
A fresh dip lumps Lawton’s bottom lip. He turns his head and spits.
“Hit him? I slapped him is all. Wasn’t even no blood. You don’t think he was asking for it?”
“You don’t always have to give what’s asked.”
“No, little brother. But sometimes you do.” The blades of Lawton’s paddle skim the surface as he stows the can of Kodiak in his vest. “Anyhow, I got what I wanted.”
“Which was what?”
“Make sure them boys was who they said they were.”
“Who the hell else would they be?”
Lawton takes up his paddle again. He doesn’t say.
They pass an island on their right, a forty-acre patch of high ground that splits the river like a wedge. Somewhere in the trees is the black carcass of an old house, burned before either of them was born.
“Rozier’s Island,” says Lawton.
“Not anymore. State’s taking it from them.”
“Taking it?”
“They can’t produce a crown grant from the King of England.”
“King of England? Jesus Christ. Don’t they know we whipped the redcoats out of this country more than two hundred damn years ago?”
“I guess that doesn’t matter in this case.”
“Hell, I always heard they had some of the best hog-hunting on the river out there.”
Hunter squints into the trees along the island’s bank, looking for the army of barrel-like hulks that might be running the place, rooting through the understory and tusking the trees. Feral hogs are in season year-round, a scourge descended from the fugitive swine of conquistadors. Within a single generation, a barnyard pig loosed into the wild will grow a larger skull and sharper snout, its coat bristling like a mad dog’s.
“You hear about Hogzilla?” he asks.
“I heard it was a hoax.”
“Nope. Gang of scientists in yellow hazard suits dug up the remains for DNA testing. Confirmed it was a boar-pig hybrid, eight hundred pounds, eight and a half feet long. Our biology professor had us read an article on it.”
“Fucking monster. Sounds like a cool professor, too.”
“I’ve had a couple.”
“That cypress was something itself.”
“For real.”
Lawton nods. “I seen some of the old-growth ones on Lewis Island, but nothing like that. Must of been forty feet around at the base.”
“At least.”
“You know they had one down in central Florida. Senator was his name. Pond cypress, biggest tree east of the Mississip’. Seminole used it as a landmark. Hundred sixty-five feet tall. Big as a water tower.”
“Fucking A.”
“Yup,” says Lawton, “then some meth-head lit it on fire, lighting his pipe. They said it burned inside out, like a chimney, the top lit up like a big torch over the county. More than three thousand years old when it burned.”
Hunter tries to picture a giant of that size, topping the forest like a king, crowned in a great ball of fire. He thinks of the cypress they left in the glade, a living tower from the age of sail and spear, improbable as a ghost in the woods. He looks out at the river that floats him on wind-cut shingles, hiding the world below.
“Makes me think of that old Shakespeare quote,” he says. “What is it? ‘There’s more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy.’” He shrugs. “Something like that.”
Lawton sniffs.
“Hamlet,” he says. “What a dick.”
* * *
They lunch at the powerline right-of-way above Sansavilla Bluff. The forest has been clear-cut in a channel perpendicular to the river, as for a railway. The lines are black-strung from metal tree to metal tree, five abreast like the strings of a guitar. Lawton constructs a teepee of twigs over a gray cloud of dryer lint he keeps in a pill bottle, then lights the structure with a weatherproof torch, blowing into the burning core. They sit their cans of pork ’n’ beans in the fire and squat, waiting. Above them the high-voltage lines rumble and hiss, racing their power across the state. From one line hangs a pair of dark forms, black and shredded. Old boots, perhaps.
“Talk about hog-hunting,” says Hunter. “You know what they found at a right-of-way outside Augusta?”
“What?”
“Two banks of Benelli shotguns mounted on remote aimers, hooked up to webcams, aimed to cross-fire under the powerlines. Utility contractor that found them thought they were a booby trap at first, like to protect a marijuana grow. They brought in Homeland Security.”
“You’d be surprised the kind of setups the dope-growers got now.”
“Turns out it was for hunting hogs. There was a food plot they were aimed at. This guy could sit at home and shoot them from the Internet as they came out into the cut. Hell, he could charge other people and let them shoot them.”
“Ha,” says Lawton. “Free enterprise for you.”
“Don’t seem real sporting, you ask me.”
“Maybe not, little brother. But there’s a few places I know could use a setup like that.”
Hunter wants to ask what places but knows better. He knows his brother doesn’t mean for hogs.
Lawton reaches his hand into the fire, turning his can.
“You still making them good grades?”
“Straight A’s three semesters straight.”
“Still majoring in history?”
“Yeah. And no, I don’t know what I’m gonna do with that yet.”
“Did I ask?”
“You were gonna.”
Lawton rocks back on his heels.
“So?”
“So what?”
“What are you gonna do with that?”
“Dick.” Hunter looks up at the powerlines that divide the sky, sighs. “I don’t know. Teach, maybe. Entrepreneurship doesn’t seem to run in the family.”
Lawton grunts, snagging his can from the fire. He eyes the bubbling goo.
“God bless him, but I don’t think Daddy could make four quarters from a dollar. Or at least couldn’t keep it, anyway.”
Hunter takes his own can from the flames, setting it between his legs to cool.
“You really think he was into something?”
Lawton polishes his fork on the torn tail of his shirt, eyeing the metal’s shine.
“What else? I never known a man’s luck to change that much.” He shrugs. “Could be his did, I guess, there toward the end.”