The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  His eyes begin the long trek up the trunk, seeking its heights, when he hears a rustling in the palmettos on the far side of the tree. The fronds are batting one another, gossiping. He steps in their direction.

  “Lawton?”

  A feral hog shoulders from the thicket and freezes, balanced atop a set of tiny hooves. It is black-bristled and round as a barrel keg, the yellow-white tusks bent upward from its jaws like the wickedest grin. The beast twitches and lowers its head, its spine razored in hackles, and Hunter shoots out his hand, palm-first, like a crossing guard. The animal seems to gather into itself, bunched like a giant black knot, and Hunter roars from the floor of his gut, as if that might stop what’s coming. A bolt of light slashes across his vision, called up as if by his own voice, and there is a liquid crack, like from a beer can opening. The boar rolls onto its side, screaming, a long wooden pole shuddering upright from its shoulder, the iron point buried deep in the mountain of flesh. The stubby legs kick and kick, the animal turning a circle in the dirt, unable to right itself, its tufted tail slapping the ground as it screams.

  A heavy rope falls down the tree, bouncing and straightening, and a shirtless man comes climbing down. His narrow back is burled and knotted with muscle, his great shock of hair nearly white. He turns from the tree and Hunter sees it is Uncle King himself, lean as a blade, like some creature that only hardens with age. He nods to Hunter, then pulls a long pig-sticker from a sheath on his belt, holding the blade low to one side as he approaches the dying boar. It has slowed its thrashing, its hooves casting drunkenly at the air, the panic spent in red gushes from its heart. The haft of the harpoon ticks gently now, in time to its breath or heart. Uncle King walks behind the animal. It can hardly lift its head to watch, a small black pig’s eye following the wink of blade. Uncle King kneels and draws the knife across its throat with an underhand cut. The blood comes bubbling out, foaming in the gathering dark.

  The old man looks at Hunter.

  “Firewood,” he says.

  Only then does Hunter realize his ax is in his hand, white-knuckled, the edge-muzzle cast off. He looks a long moment at the weapon he holds, then up.

  “Thank you.”

  The old man doesn’t seem to hear him.

  * * *

  When he returns with an armload of shed limbs and kindling, Uncle King has the animal hung from a low branch, its ankle tendons pierced by a crude iron gambrel. He has already skinned it, the pale muscles glowing in the near-dark, a ghostly twin of the black creature it was. Nearby sits a large white ice chest, scraped and stained, that he must have dragged from a nearby creek. A four-pound box of Morton Salt sits on top.

  Hunter says nothing. He’s covered in mud and the temperature is dropping with dark. He bends himself to the fire, building his teepee of kindling. The old man hands him an ancient Zippo without asking if he’s brought a lighter himself.

  He hasn’t.

  Soon the fire is going strong, an arrowpoint of flame bouncing against the dark. They wait for it to burn down to coals. The creature hangs legless now, gutted, a long dark vent in the belly. The organs have been cast into the woods, the hunks of meat salted and set in the cooler. The old man cuts the loin into medallions and pierces them on a long whittled stick, balancing the spit across a pair of Y-shaped branches driven on either side of the pit.

  Hunter sits on the ground, rubbing and scratching at his shins. Already the skin is rising in red little hills that itch. The old man looks at him, his eyes very open. They look stunned or dazed, like the eyes of men huddled under bridges or cardboard boxes.

  “Chiggers,” says the old man.

  Hunter nods. “Yes, sir. Hopefully they aren’t the real ambitious kind. Boy Scout camp once, I got them way up where you don’t want them, if you know what I mean.”

  “Aye.” The old man nods deeply, discussing a weighty matter indeed. “A devilment of the tallywacker, rival to the child-pox. I know it well.”

  Hunter sculpts his shins from the knees down, as if he could keep the bites from climbing any higher. He thinks back to his red-welted organ, meanly colonized by the chiggers of Camp Tolochee. Camp Torture-Me, they called the place.

  “It was a devilment, all right.”

  Uncle King squats on his heels before the fire, turning the crude rotisserie. Fat drips into the coals, hissing, and Hunter’s mouth waters.

  “You got to get ye-self accustomed to such. Flood-times is nigh, all the world shall be again as ye see here.” His hand swings in a half-circle, as if pushing open a door. “What scarce land remains made swampy and tidal, stomped soft underfoot, a savage ark of everything doomed.”

  “Flood-times?”

  “Aye. Already the hellfire of our long making melts the great ice upon the poles. The waters are rising, and with them the beasts that ruled in the times before. They shall rise in unison, survivors freed of their lochs and inland seas, given to procreate in the black bellies of the earth, the eternal depths. We shall be fed upon by old evils, a hell of our own making.”

  Hunter looks at his hands, the nails dark-grimed like those of a mechanic. When he pushes his fingers into the dirt, he can almost feel the cold of the river.

  “Sounds a little out there, if you ask me. No disrespect.”

  The old man holds his hand open before the fire.

  “Has God not given us ample time to prove ourselves worthy of dominion? Of the image in which we are made? What god, I ask you, would find us not lacking? A creation with which he was well pleased?”

  “I don’t know,” says Hunter. “Guess I hadn’t really thought of it that way.”

  The old man keeps working the rotisserie, the tattoos crawling over his skin.

  “Maybe you ought, son. Maybe you ought.”

  Hunter eyes the tattoo over the man’s heart, the serpent trampled by a woman’s foot.

  THE DRAGON SHALT THOU TRAMPLE UNDER FEET.

  “So you believe you been set here to kill the beast? Keep it down?”

  Uncle King stops turning the meat.

  “Why else were my children took down?”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss, sir. I remember it from when I was little.”

  The man’s eyes go wider yet, gazing beyond the firelight.

  “Don’t be sorry, son. It gave me my faith.”

  “I thought you were a priest before.”

  The old man shakes his head.

  “Nay, I was a quoter of words. A mindless servant. Will-less. Now I understand that new creatures, more worthy than us, will be given rise. Chosen. And I intend to stop them.” He looks at Hunter. “I am at war with God.”

  Hunter scratches his chin.

  “That doesn’t sound like the smartest fight to pick.”

  “Would you not be tired of the rote-believers, the deniers and hypocrites? The dismal forms of these your children? Perhaps he wants someone to fight him, to challenge his will.”

  “I don’t remember anything about that in Sunday school.”

  The old man leans toward him, the fire throbbing in his eyes.

  “There are future testaments to be written. They are being made even as we speak.”

  Hunter looks away. The medallions, thick-cut like giant marshmallows, hang over the coals. He is feeding words into this fire, sure as tinder, but he can’t seem to help himself.

  “My—our—daddy, he always did believe in it, the Altamaha-ha.”

  “And you, do you believe?”

  Hunter looks into the fire, hands cupped over his knees.

  “I don’t know.” He bites the side of his mouth, narrows his eyes. “Most I could say is, I’d like to. I’d like to believe my father was right for once. That something such as that could exist.”

  The old man sits straighter on his heels.

  “An honest man,” he says. “Tell me, what was your father’s name?”

  Just then Lawton steps from the woods, crashing through a palmetto thicket. His arms are latticed with scratches and cuts; twigs and le
aves dangle from his beard. A headlamp glares from his forehead like the eye of a cyclops. He takes in the scene, the pork roasting over the fire, and grins.

  “Y’all sons of bitches feasting without me or what?” He claps a hand to his mouth. “Oh, sorry, Father.”

  Uncle King brushes away the offense.

  “Come,” he says, “join this party of sinners.”

  “You don’t got to ask me twice,” says Lawton. He sits down heavily next to Hunter, clapping a hand on his shoulder. He squeezes once—in apology, perhaps—then rubs his hands together.

  “So who killed the fucker?”

  * * *

  After dinner they follow Uncle King up the tree. The rope is knotted for grip, and they climb some twenty-five feet from the ground, reaching a plywood landing built over a heavy limb. Here they find a rope ladder, and up they climb, like men scaling a castle tower. It is dark, the moon skeltering strangely through the canopy, and the ladder twists and strains. Hunter’s arms feel willowy, too light to hold him aloft, and yet they’ve never been so strong. He is next after the old man, Lawton below.

  “Careful you don’t fall,” says Lawton. “I don’t wanna die with your ass in my face.”

  “Careful I don’t pinch one off on your head.”

  But when Hunter holds his breath, he can hear even Lawton breathing hard, fear or something like it pumping from his lungs. The fire coals are a red dot far below. He looks up and sees the pale soles of the old man’s feet, surprisingly clean despite all that time on the ground. Above him floats a darkness, faintly geometric, like an alien craft hovering over the trees. Then the man disappears, leaving a square of moonlight glowing in the belly of the shape. Hunter keeps climbing, and soon he is through the portal, emerging onto a wooden platform set high over the forest like a widow’s watch.

  He crawls to the edge, and the canopy of lesser forest swirls beneath them, a sea of branches and leaves that murmurs in the wind. Here or there other old-growth survivors tower over the forest like points of overwatch. In the distance, cell towers blink their ruby lights against the horizon, and he can see the flare of this town or that over the far pine barrens, like treasures hidden in the trees. Lawton climbs up through the hole in the floor and rolls onto his back, his chest lumping like a boated fish’s.

  “Christ,” he says.

  Hunter rolls onto his back beside his brother. Above them the wash of stars, so close. Hunter watches them. He knows this space map is eons out of date, twinkling with the ghosts of suns long dead, their light still shooting the endless years through space. He knows new stars have been born, and he wonders what manner of creature will look upon them ages hence, huddled atop a world flooded blue as a marble or rimed white with ice. Will they have the slit pupils of serpents, as the old man believes, or will the earth stare blindly back, an orb of lifeless ocean and stone, storm-ridden, as before the coming of God or light?

  Lawton rolls his head toward the old man, who is sitting cross-legged on an unfurled bedroll at the other end of the platform. Around him are his necessities, food cans and jugged water and coils of rope.

  “You build this?”

  The old man shakes his head.

  “Not me,” he says. “Tree-climbers. They come from all over the world for trees like this.” He reaches out and pats one of the crown limbs that cradles the platform.

  “I don’t doubt it,” says Lawton. Hunter is enjoying him there, shoulder to shoulder, the two of them breathing hard. But Lawton sits up and slaps his hands on his knees. “Okay, what you know about Hiram Loggins?”

  52

  Altamaha River, 2001

  Hiram cuts the motor of the johnboat in the shadow of the railroad bridge. The sun is melting across the western horizon, pouring a milky red light onto the river, and the great skeleton trestles, quiet now, stand hulking and backlit against the sky like a word. Something that means not only sadness, but the surviving of it. A structure stubborn, unbroken, like the kind of old man Hiram hopes to one day be. He reaches under the aft thwart and hefts his snag-hook and coil of rope. It is a Sunday evening, his hour of keeping the promise he made to his once-brother before a deputy kicked them to the ground.

  Find them.

  He slings the hook over the river, the rope uncoiling like a tail. It crashes into the current and he waits as the iron prongs sink their way to the bottom, drawing out line. He thinks of this bridge in the long ago. More and more the memories of his boyhood rise unbidden. The spring day he and Uncle King—both eleven years old—completed their log-raft, built in the tradition of the sharpshooters of the timber days. Theirs was much smaller, of course, constructed in secret in the woods above Snakebelly Creek. They hewed pine saplings roughly square with a stolen broadax and laid the timbers out shoulder to shoulder, fastening them with cross-binders, ashwood poles spiked across the pines. Two shoot logs formed a pointed bow that would glance off the river’s bars and bights, and they had two ammo boxes for dry storage and a cast-iron pot filled with sand to serve as their firebox.

  This boy-made vessel would deliver them from the worlds they knew, the shouting voices and hard fists that filled both of their homes, the shrieks of pain that pierced the thin shantyboat walls. They launched their raft without ceremony, their provisions stolen from cupboards and drawers and tied down with careful knots. Their only companion was a feisty terrier mix named Fight, a dog they both owned, having found him barking on the roof of a swamped houseboat floating downriver two summers before. They had long poles, such as the rafthands once preferred, and paddles, too, taken from neighbors’ canoes left vine-covered in the woods.

  They spoke of what they would do in the port city of Darien, some thirty miles downstream at the river’s mouth. They would be deckhands on shrimp or crab boats, working the inland waters day and night. They would shell shrimp from coolers if they had to, or be errand boys at the mills, or sell peanuts and peaches at the roadside stands to Yankees chasing the sun. They knew they could live off of almost nothing, because they already had. But they would live fearless now, among men without the sire’s right to slap and beat them, to make their mamas spew blood and spittle, blubbering for mercy at day’s end. They would be free.

  The river was in flood, fast-moving from storms in the west, and they made good time through the many bights and rounds. They had left, as planned, on the day a new run of Old Man Gillis’s white whiskey spread along the river in hundreds of mismatched jugs and jars. It would be at least two days before they were missed. They spent the first night on the bluffs of Sansavilla Landing, sleeping under a tarp they’d strung between two trees, their raft tied off to a big water oak. They were on the river again by first light, floating through the ghost world of dawn, when a lumped shape appeared from the mist off their starboard bow. It was a man floating belly-up, his arms stretched out like a starfish’s, his torso covered in a rancid orange life jacket. His face was yellow, his eyes closed in death or sleep. A plastic jug of water or whiskey floated alongside him, attached to his wrist with a makeshift leash.

  They pulled the raft in close.

  “Mister?” said Hiram. “You alive?”

  No answer.

  Uncle was calm, his eyes hard.

  “See what Fight thinks,” he said.

  The bearded little terrier, triple their age in dog years, had shown himself a good judge of character in times past. He balanced on the outermost log and lowered his head to sniff. His body went suddenly rigid, scruff hackling, and before they could push away, the man’s eyes snapped open and he reached and grabbed hold of the raft. He nearly swamped it climbing aboard. Fight leapt back, planting his paws, barking murder, and the boys pushed their oars before them, holding the man at bay. He squatted at the far end of the raft with a lopsided grin, a sallow face. Riverwater streamed from a dozen places in his body, as if he’d been shot full of holes. He held out a hand, friendly-like, for the dog to sniff.

  “Come on, buddy-pup. Name’s Hallam. Skelt Hallam. I ain’t gonna h
urt ye.”

  Fight ventured one step closer, then two. He looked over his shoulder at them. Hiram nodded. The dog probed his nose toward the outstretched hand, one paw lifted, and Hiram saw what was coming too late: the man’s other hand swung in a roundhouse from the dog’s blindside, slapping it rolling and tumbling across the deck with a yelp.

  “Fight!”

  The dog hit the water on its back, bobbing up like a cork.

  The boys lunged at the man with their paddles, stopped dead at the barrel of the snub-nose revolver suddenly in his hand, drawn from somewhere beneath the life jacket.

  “Not so fast, you little fucks.”

  The hammer was already cocked. Behind the man Fight was churning water, trying to keep up. He barked, barked again, a high note of panic in his throat.

  “Please, mister,” said Hiram. “Let us get our dog.”

  The man reeled in his jug and popped off the top for a long, double-gulped swill. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then eyed the dog over his shoulder. It barked again. Hiram made for the edge of the raft.

  “That pistol ain’t gonna shoot,” he said. “The shells are too wet.”

  The man raised the pistol, quick, and fired twice. Fight screamed, his gut ripped open like a sack. A red mania of thrashing limbs, his yelps high and terrible, his snout bobbing for life. Then the staccato cough, his throat gargled with river or blood.

  Hiram lunged but Uncle grabbed his wrist.

  The wicked man smiled, tracking Hiram with the gun. There was grime creased in his yellow face.

  “Best keep you boyfriend there on a leash,” he said. “I can put ’em down all day.”

  Fight went under. Gone. A red eddy on the water, flecked with fur and meat.

  Hiram was trembling. He didn’t know whether to fight or cry. Uncle held him fast. A calmness had fallen over the boy. Uncle’s eyes were glassy, his hand strong. He licked his lips.