by Taylor Brown
Lawton lowers the roach closer to the man’s mouth.
“It’s a big pill to swallow, Dill. Maybe it’ll help your attitude some.”
“Goddammit, I told you what I know.”
“Not all of it.”
“Uncle King, he’s the man you need to talk to. Crazy fucker knows every bend of this river. Every fathom. Knows it like the veins run down his own arms. Anybody knows what’s going on, it’s him. What’s going on and where. Talk to him and you’ll see.”
“How do we find him?”
“I don’t know. I swear I’d tell you if I did. No one does.”
“Too bad.” Lawton clamps shut the man’s nose. Soon, he’ll have to open his mouth to breathe. “Time to take your medicine.”
34
Darien, Georgia, 1993
Hiram Loggins stands on the Darien River bridge, his hands gripping the rough surface of the concrete guardrail, his body whipped and moaning like an empty bottle in the hurricane wind. He wears a beard of vomit and his skin is burning, branded by the signs that swathe him, and he can’t hardly breathe.
His boat is gone.
The riverfront docks are half a century old and they don’t float. They’ve been swallowed up in the risen tide, and the shrimp boats heave dangerously in the water, foundering on their lines, a fleet being dragged under as if by jealous tentacles. Others are simply gone, empty spaces in the docks, busted mooring lines swirling in the current. Some of them ax-cut, surely. Boats given up to the storm, bad seasons traded for insurance checks. His had been tied abreast of two others, down past the Thompson’s Seafood shack that is now just a tin-roof island. All three of them are gone. In the trees downstream he sees the upturned hull of a boat being thrust again and again into the scrub pine like an insult, leaving parts of itself high in the branches. It isn’t his.
His money. All his money was in the boat.
Sixty thousand dollars.
His future.
“Why?” he croaks.
He looks at the town, the riverfront buildings standing from streets of windblown surge, their window glass rattling like teeth. Then he looks out, seaward, to the risen mountains of swell, his boat surely smashed against those granitelike faces, swallowed in the hungry valleys they make.
He should have known it would come to this. Goddammit, he should have known. A decade of working other men’s decks, back bent, bowing under the hard lash of their words. Taking so much shit he could taste it in his mouth at the end of every day, all those things he wanted to say and didn’t, his pride rotting inside him like a disease. For nothing. His boat lost. His dream of the future pulled under.
His Annabelle.
“Why?” He is speaking to the waters, he realizes. To the ghost-memories roaming the deep. “Why the fuck won’t you let me up?”
He looks down at his hands, white-knuckling the railing as if to keep him from going over. Below that the churning waters, white-whipped, cold as slate. His skin is on fire now, his breast bubbling with spite, and he feels like a weapon against the world below his feet. He will leap in, an anchor of superheated hate, and the depths will erupt from him, sizzling and boiling, the waters destroyed in the heat of his rage.
Just then a touch, a tug. He looks down to find his two boys beside him, holding to his shirttail, their faces uglied with concentration. His eldest, six, is red-haired like Annabelle, as if from sheer ambition of his seed. Hiram raises a hand to pat him on the head, this boy, like a good father would. Like he wants to.
His fist falls like a hammer into the freckled face. The boy crumples at his feet. The younger boy falls over him, crying, then looks up, his face twisted with hate. The six-year-old pushes himself from the ground and stands as before, bloody-faced now, holding his little brother’s hand. In that moment Hiram loves the two of them so much he cannot speak.
35
Fort Caroline, March 1565
Le Moyne bolts upright in bed. His chest is thundering, his face burning like a shield in the sun. He is slick with sweat, slimy as a newt, and his bedcovers lie coiled at his waist. He blinks. He was there again, high over the field of battle, watching the disassembly of bodies, the limbless torsos riven in pools of blood. He has been there again and again. In the dream he is the sun, floating in power over the land, and the feast of death is his. Trophies of limb and scalp are raised for his scrutiny. Arrows are thrust into the anuses of the dead to honor his rays. And in the dream he is well pleased at this, at the land gleaming bloodred beneath the fire of his gaze.
Across the room, La Caille rolls up on his elbow.
“Qu’est-ce qui est faux?”
“Nothing, my friend. A nightmare.”
“Again? La bataille?”
“Oui.”
Dawn is beginning to seep under the door, between the planks, like a liquid that glows.
“You should draw it.”
Le Moyne thrusts off his covers and sets his feet on the earthen floor. His bones grind like stone pestles in their sockets. He is so thin.
“I have not the strength to draw, La Caille. I will eat my paper.”
La Caille laughs, the hard scrape of the cynic in his throat.
“Careful, Le Moyne. It is possible that your paper will be all that is left of us one day.” He lies back down. “After all, Christ himself lives in a book.”
Le Moyne thinks of the archer he shot, the man clawing at his chest.
“And in the hearts of men.”
“Yes,” says La Caille, repositioning his covers. “And there.”
They gained but little from their victory in the west. King Utina would not follow them down into the village to burn the council house and huts, nor would his warriors pursue the fleeing enemy. They cared only to return triumphant to their people, to feast their victory. He who struck first and hardest, who was fiercest of spirit on the day of battle—he was victor in the savage mind. For the accumulation of territory they cared nothing. This, Le Moyne realized, could spell their doom.
He slips on his tunic and boots and walks out into the dawn. In former days, the fort would be alive at this hour. There would be pots bubbling over cookfires, the hiss of fat, the bang and scrape of hammers and saws. Progress would sound through the place.
Few now welcome the sun. Those awake shuffle slack-faced about the fort like ruminants, hands dark-stained from grubbing in the woods for roots and berries to eat. Some are heading for the great cypresses just beyond the walls. They ascend them by rote, their handholds worn smooth by other dawns, and perch in the uppermost branches, rocking as upon topmasts at sea, watching the horizon.
The ships will come, says their commander. Any day now.
Le Moyne walks the other way, climbing a ladder to stand above the sharp teeth of the palisade, a long cadre of trees ax-hewn to vicious points. Below him the river wears a white shroud of mist, a ghostly dress that swirls. Many of the trees are still out of leaf, bony and gnarled as he and his comrades have become. Heartless and scarred. Atrocities have been committed, native homes burned, as if this might impel the victims to feed them. Now it is said you can walk three miles in any direction without glimpsing the dark face of the savage, retreated as he has from the clanging armor of the fort, the guns and torches and white cheeks caved with want. Saturiwa, king of the coast, who helped to feed them and build their walls, is but a rumor now, rarely seen or heard.
Le Moyne stares down on the river, willing his eyes to see beyond the mist, to glimpse the mysteries curling through the night-dark of the bottoms. He is looking for his creature, which not even the sun-god can see cruising through the depths. He sets his hands upon the teeth of the palisade and leans forward, the sharpened points pressing into his palms. He believes it will rise again, his monster, revealed to him like the dark flesh of a lover come in the night. It will be the greatest sight he has captured, an image that speaks to all of the mystery and savagery of this new land. His hands will unearth it from darkness. They will scrawl it like the rivers that sl
ither from the mountains, creatures rumored to carry in their bellies such power and gold. A discovery of such magnitude will make his journey righteous. It will consecrate the blood he has spilled. It will be the sign of God to him, risen like a word from darkness.
His palms are screaming now, the bones quivering like chords under the pressure, and the tongue stone is heavy in his pocket. Blood rushes to the doors that might open in his hands, red rivers yearning to be freed. A little harder now and he will be released, delivered into the long belly of night that flows into the sea.
Just then: shouts from the treetops. Cries and yelps. He scans the river, panicked, not seeing anything. Is he missing a glimpse of his creature? His hands come away from the palisade, red-cored, and the words turn him seaward.
“Des voiles!” he hears. “Des voiles!” Like the cries of a hawk.
Sails.
36
Altamaha River, Day 3
“Poachers,” says Lawton. “I don’t like it.”
They are standing beneath the houseboat, Lawton slipping on his fins.
“You don’t know they’re poachers,” says Hunter.
“What else are they?”
Hunter looks at the cinderblocks pillared beside him. One good shoulder blow, like he would throw an undersized cornerback, and the whole place would come crashing down on top of them. “I don’t know. They could be shad fishers.”
In the spring, the shad run upstream to spawn, whole clouds of them silvering under the river’s skin. Lawton stamps his fins into place. “That ain’t exactly a year-round occupation, now is it?”
They hear a retch above them, and a wet comet splats on the bank, flecking their shins with bile. The pool, yellowish in the moonlight, steams. Lawton looks up at the hull of the houseboat, his teeth showing.
“Goddammit, Dillard. Don’t you got a toilet for that?”
“Fuck you, Loggins, you sick son of a bitch.” Another retch, strings of ropy saliva. “I’ll kill you for this.”
Lawton grins, speaking to the hull.
“It’ll take more than that Red Ryder, you sorry fuck.”
“Fuck me,” says Dillard. “I can still feel it squirming in my mouth.”
“Now quit your bellyaching. Them’s a delicacy some places.”
“Did it come out?”
Lawton steps out slightly to look at the puddle of vomit.
“Yeah.” He cocks his head. “Still squirming.”
Dillard exhales in triumph. A thump as he sinks to the floor.
Lawton looks out at the slough, the bridge hulking across the water like a monument.
“Uncle King.” He squints, as if he might see the old man out there on the water. “Wish we would of known to ask the first time we come across him.”
“I think he’s gone somewhere downriver.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I think I heard him go past that night we spent on the island.”
Lawton turns.
“Heard? How’d you know it was him?”
“I don’t know,” says Hunter. “I just did.”
Above them another thump, a creak of hinges. Lawton raises his eyebrows. “Time to bug out.” He produces a coil of parachute cord from somewhere on his person—his vest seems to harbor an endless supply of such tackle. “Should of done this before, put us on a umbilical.”
Hunter looks at the cord. “Umbilical? We’re just swimming back to the bridge.”
“I ain’t telling Mama I lost you out here.”
“Lost me? Where the fuck am I gonna go?”
Lawton is already threading the cord through the D-ring on Hunter’s vest. He looks up at the houseboat again. “We got to head out, Dill. I’m sure you’ll be Wild again by morning, old buddy.”
The old gunfighter groans.
“Kill ’em all,” he croaks.
They waddle down to the water. Above them the bug-lights flicker, a galaxy hastily wired, the stars winking in and out.
“Wait,” says Hunter, tugging the cord to stay them.
“What?”
He looks down at the spew of vomit at his feet. The roach is struggling amid chunks of dinner, legs chewing air, guts seeping yellow. A seed of agony. A peach pit. Hunter’s feet are bare. He clenches his teeth and steps on the insect, pressing it under the hard ball of his foot until it crackles, bursts, squirts like a ketchup packet beneath his big toe. He chokes down a wad of vomit.
Lawton looks down at Hunter’s foot, his teeth showing in his beard. He looks into Hunter’s face. Starts to say something, then doesn’t.
“Huh,” he says. “I know some bad mothers wouldn’t done that.”
Bile wells in Hunter’s throat, his shark’s tooth sharp as a dagger.
“I ain’t asked your fucking opinion about it, now did I?”
Lawton lifts his hands, holdup-like, his eyes wide.
37
Fort Caroline, March 1565
The ship that appears in the river’s mouth is a caravel, light and fast, lateen-rigged with triangular sails such as the Spanish prefer. A vessel not laden with the salvation they hope for—bread and wine and salt pork, countrymen and tidings from France. A ship such as this can be delivering only one cargo: death.
“Les Espagnols!”
Panic within the fort. Men slip and fall in the mud, diving for their weapons, and others come streaming from their huts wearing nothing but armor, their skinny white legs struggling to keep them upright beneath the weight of shields and helmets and breastplates. They scramble to the walls, red-faced and blowing like overworked horses, their guns bristling along the river.
At each of the embrasures, the canonniers work to range the vessel beneath the bronze barrels of their eight-pounders, shifting the guns on their wheeled carriages. Le Moyne thinks of running for his arquebus but can’t bring himself to leave the wall. The caravel is coming fast. He imagines the river erupting in white mountains of spray, the vessel passing untouched through a hail of cannon fire to spill its load of Spanish pikemen on the beach. He and his countrymen will have time to loose but one volley into the invaders, perhaps two, and then the fighting will be hand to hand on the walls and in the mud.
“Shall we fire?” they ask.
Laudonnière stands at the parapet now, taller than the rest. He lifts his arm.
Men wipe their brows with the backs of their hands, awaiting his signal. The fort hisses with the sound of lighted tapers and fuses. Any second, their leader’s hand will fall and the fort will explode in fire.
“Wait!”
The cry comes from the corner farthest downriver. It is Lord d’Ottigni. Le Moyne recognizes the plume of his helmet, the gleaming wreck of his face.
“Wait! They speak!”
Shouts from the boat travel weakly across the water.
“Nous sommes français!” they call. “Nous sommes français!”
We are French.
The ship is Spanish, or was, crewed now by men who are no strangers to the fort: the mutineers. Inside the walls, the men of La Caroline curse and spit. Their mutineers have returned home, it seems, wasted with famine and treasureless aboard a stolen ship. They anchor themselves just beyond cannon range of the fort, hoping for mercy.
Laudonnière is shouting orders, red-faced, calling for a raiding party to be formed.
La Caille watches the flurry of guns and armor. His hands are behind his back, his necklace of boar tusks draped over his chest. He leans toward his commander.
“Sir,” he says, “what is to keep them from pulling anchor and fleeing the moment our boarding party pushes from shore?”
Le Moyne, standing nearby, watches Laudonnière chew the side of his mouth. His ruff collar has yellowed like a dying carnation.
“Have you a better idea, La Caille?”
La Caille has pulled his dagger from its sheath. He digs the point under one of his nails and winks at Le Moyne.
“Bien sûr,” he says.
Of course.
&nbs
p; * * *
Le Moyne sits huddled beneath the canvas of the pinnace, the small-boat of the Breton. Around him sit twenty-four others, hunched in darkness, their arquebuses propped between their knees. The timbers of the vessel creak beneath them. The seats of their breeches are soiled with leak-water. The canvas covering, used to hold down supplies, swells enough to allow glimpses of river between the tie-downs. The mist curls from its surface in slow flames, cool and white. It is just before dawn, a day after the caravel appeared in the river, and they are headed for where it sits anchored before the fort.
La Caille is visible in the bow, along with two others. A committee that will not alarm. With the ship nearing, he whistles, and a burning taper begins being passed hand to hand. They try not to cough from the smoke. Before long the air is crackling, men’s faces lumped strangely in the smoky glow, their matchlocks a finger’s touch from going off. The smoke, they hope, will be lost in the mist.
They feel the boat slow. In glimpses they see the dark-wet timbers of the caravel, like a fortress wall. Outside, voices they can hardly decipher, the clatter of boots. Then a second whistle from La Caille. The canvas tarpaulin is thrown off, skirling away like a sail, and they rise in unison, a bristling of iron like a pipe organ, each weapon aimed to kill. Half of the party boards the caravel, as prescribed, while the rest provide cover. The mutineers have failed to ready their own weapons. Le Moyne, landing on the deck, watches them fall to their knees, stick-arms raised like supplicants’, bony angles paling through their faces. A ship of half-ghosts floating in the dawn, men emptied by hunger, their dreams fallowed at sea.
Le Moyne wonders how little different he and his comrades must look.
* * *
Fourneaux, leader of the mutiny, is a thin man now, surely for the first time in his life. His natural pear shape has been cut by the blade of want, whittled down to a skeletal core. His breeches have been shortened for comfort, his knees knobbed like those of a shorebird, his calves and thighs wasted to bony stilts. His face is that of death, his skull pushing through the skein of life that conceals it. The feathers are missing from his hat.