by James Wade
“Anyway, poor Momma, she showed up back at that little river shack. Daddy wasn’t home. So she went on inside, pushed out a screaming baby boy, then proceeded to die right there on the dirt floor. Who knows how she died. Maybe she bled out. Maybe I was scratching and clawing at her, caught something important. I’ve heard that’s been known to happen. Maybe she overdosed, some last, little bastion of freedom. Maybe my daddy found her there and killed her, rather than explain anything to anybody. As I was fresh into the wide world at the time, I honestly can’t say. I don’t know how long I was there, but it couldn’t have been long. They guessed as I’d only been alive a day or two when I was dropped at the hospital. Hospital to the state, state to the foster system, foster system until there was nothing left.
“And that, Mr. Klein, is what I was born into. I had no choices, no decisions to make, save whether to die or survive. I chose the latter. Been choosing it ever since. That one choice, that first choice, is the only one I’ve ever made. Every single action I’ve ever taken has been in service of that first choice. Do you understand now?”
“I’m sorry,” the bank man cried. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“You don’t need to be sorry about all that. You just need to tell me where my money is.”
“What?”
“My money, Mr. Klein, where is it?”
“I don’t—it’s in the bank.”
“Not that money. I gave you ten thousand dollars to buy me a stake in that timber plot before it caught fire and the whole thing went belly up. Now I want my investment back.”
“But, Mr. Curtis, you just said yourself, that project is bankrupt. That money is gone.”
“That may be true for everybody else you’re in business with, but that ain’t how it works with my money.”
The big man in the doorway pulled from his waistband an eight-inch blade with a deer antler handle.
“Mr. Curtis, I don’t—I can talk to the insurance, see what can be done. I can maybe get you back five thousand dollars.”
Cade advanced.
The bank man trembled. His suit pant darkened the length of his thigh.
“You’d kill a man over ten thousand dollars?”
“Twenty thousand,” John Curtis told him.
“But . . . you only put in ten.”
“I want a return on my investment.”
“Mr. Curtis, please, I can’t—I don’t know what you want me to do. Please. Whatever it is, just tell me and I’ll do it.”
The bank man’s knees hit the floor and he pulled at John Curtis’s hands and arms, and the room filled up with the smell of urine.
John Curtis knelt and touched the man’s cheek.
“You still think you can talk me out of what has to happen,” he said. “Even after everything I’ve said, you still think there’s a choice to be made.”
John Curtis twisted away from the bank man’s grasping. He nodded at Cade.
“It’s a lovely home you have here, Mr. Klein,” he called over his shoulder. “Very well appointed.”
2
The sun set and the world died another small death, and those upon it the same, and all growing closer to what ends may be met. The boy watched the darkness spread as the hills before him turned from shadow to black and the red-hued colors of the horizoned sky took a last smoldering gasp and disappeared into the stale gray of dusk. The crickets and cicadas started up almost in unison, as if being urged on by the invisible hand of some almighty conductor. The boy sat cross-legged atop the trailer’s roof and closed his eyes and listened to the insects and the night and the humming of the window unit in his father’s bedroom.
The big doe came again. The day had fallen into the west, and he could scarcely make her shape but he knew it was her. She’d come each night in the spring, and the boy had studied her and her swelling belly and he had taken to putting out corn against his father’s wishes. He would watch her eat and each night he’d creep closer, and always she was wary of him. He could never get more than a few yards from the trailer before she would perk her ears and stare at him for a time, undecided, then bound back into the tract of loblolly and sweetgum, turning again from the safety of such cover to look at the boy as he looked at her.
She had not returned in several days, or maybe weeks, and the corn was eaten by squirrels, and the boy thought about shooting one of them to cook with dumplings to surprise his father. But he had no gun of his own and would have to ask his father’s permission to borrow one, and then the surprise would be expected and really no surprise at all. Still, the boy scattered the corn each afternoon after his father left, then drug the old picnic table with its rotted wood and rusted frame up against the trailer and stood on it and reached up and, careful not to grab the gutter, pulled himself onto the roof and sat.
Now she appeared once more, and he saw her step out from the darkened tree line and move slowly toward the corn. She smelled it, put her head down to eat then raised it up again and glanced over her shoulder. A fawn emerged from the woods and took awkward, spilling steps toward its mother. The big doe looked past the young deer and back to the food and began to eat, and the fawn waited and hoped for milk, and the boy watched them both with great interest.
The back of the trailer pushed up against a grove of cypress and oak which guarded the Neches river. It sat clumsy and diagonal, and faced the small clearing, looking out at the world as if someone had left it there and never returned, and whether the abandonment was accident or circumstance made no matter to the rust and the rot. The corrugated siding had been overwhelmed by watermarks and a copper color still spreading with each rain, and the door hovered three feet from the ground where years ago there had been steps and maybe a porch. There was mold and flood damage and a waterline from when the river spilled its banks and flooded the bottomlands. Markings of things past and things that perhaps would be again.
The road in was grass and soft dirt and often mud, and for days at a time it would be impassable. The boy would look toward it and fix his eyes between the sentry pines on either side and study the space therein until the path bent up out of the bottoms, bending and disappearing toward where the path turned to gravel then blacktop—which was as far as the school bus would come. Then, further on, the highway, where mothers and fathers drove to pick up their children from school and baseball practice. Where they wrapped them in their arms and told them things. Nice things, the boy would imagine, as he stared at the road.
The fireflies parried about in the gloam of the coming night. The deer flicked their tails. The boy sat with his chin in his hands and watched the evening unfold.
Beyond the trees, somewhere in the darkness, the river outstretched in winding sequence. The boy wished he could feed it. Wished he could empty bags of corn and oats into its swarthy gullet and watch it grow and rise, and the world in full descending beneath this new ocean of retribution. He imagined it spilling out across the bottoms, each tributary and shallow waterway flooding until all were linked and one and uninterrupted. And he imagined himself swimming atop the sunken soul of all that was, peering down through the brown water and watching everything fall away.
Below him the window unit shuddered and let loose a mechanical cry then sputtered to a stop. The deer looked up, frozen, eyeing the dim lights of the trailer, then turned and retreated into the forest and left the boy to tend to human matters and broken things.
The boy stood in front of the air conditioner and frowned. He turned the knob from On to Off then back On again. It sputtered and choked and died out. He walked into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a toolbox and a wire brush and took them both back to his father’s bedroom. He got down to his knees then set the box on the floor and opened it carefully and looked at the screws on the air conditioner brackets and picked out the screwdriver he thought was the best match.
He loosened the screws
with a flathead screwdriver and took them out and sat each one on the carpet next to the brush. He pulled the brackets off and laid them alongside the screws, then he grabbed hold of the coil panel and swung it outward from the rest of the unit, making sure not to damage the rusted freon lines. He looked at the inside of the panel and ran a finger along the buildup of dirt and grime. He wiped his finger on his shorts and rose to his feet and went back to the kitchen. He found an old dish rag and brought it into the room and spread it out underneath the window unit.
He picked up the wire brush and went to work, scrubbing the panels as best he could. When he finished, he sneezed, then looked at the panel and frowned again. It had been improved, but there was still all manner of dirt lodged around the coils. He closed the panel and replaced the brackets and screws, then tried the knob again. The unit kicked on, and the boy felt cool air on his face but he could hear the congestion from within. He turned it off and went into the kitchen and found a flashlight. He climbed down from the trailer and turned on the light and used it to spot the westward trail. He followed it for near a mile before the old man’s porch light came into view.
The cabin roof was visible through the trees, two levels of rusted tin, the first sloping in sheets across the main structure, then another, less angled, coming down over the porch. The wood was primarily pine, but there was some oak and hickory too. Some of it going back seventy years. Some of it going back much further.
The porch might have been three feet off the ground, and there were rotted steps on the end closest to the road. A more suitable set was placed in the middle of the porch, lining up with the door to the cabin. In the back was a row of small sheds, some more used than others. Weeds grew up through bent chicken wire wrapped around an old coop. The grass was overgrown, and the shrubbery had taken over most of the yard, save for a half-trimmed path to the outhouse. Smoke rose from the piped chimney, even in June.
A half-dozen cats lounged in various positions between the porch and the dock. None of them paid the boy any mind as he approached.
“Who’s out there shining a light?” the old man called as the boy came closer.
“Jonah Hargrove, Mr. Carson.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s me, Mr. Carson, Jonah Hargrove,” the boy said, louder.
“Jonah Hargrove,” the old man repeated. “What are you doing coming into camp in the middle of the damn night?”
“Was wondering if you had a can of coil cleaner.”
“A can of what?”
“Coil cleaner.”
“Coil cleaner?”
“Yessir.”
The boy was in plain view of the porch now, the old man sitting barefoot in a wooden rocking chair, a pair of denim overalls with nothing underneath, and a black and gold ballcap telling of his service in Korea.
“Well, I’d asked you what you want with coil cleaner, but I reckon that’d be an ignorant inquiry.”
“I guess.”
“Come on up, come on up and set for a minute.”
The boy looked back the way he’d come.
“Your coils can wait,” the old man said. “Come set.”
The boy clicked off the flashlight and put it in his pocket and walked up the steps to the porch and sat down in the rocker next to Mr. Carson.
“Ought not be out in the woods after dark,” the old man said.
“How come?”
“Well, lots of reasons.”
“Alright.”
“When I was growing up, our parents would tell us a lion was gonna drag us off and eat us. If we was running around after dark, that is.”
“There aren’t any lions left though.”
“No, not in a good many years.”
“I dreamed there was a panther in the bottoms. A black one.”
“Well. A good place to keep things alive, I suppose. In dreams.”
“You ever see one?”
“Several. Used to be they was all over.”
“What happened to them?”
“Same thing happens to all of us, I imagine.”
“You think there’s one might have come back?”
The old man shook his head slow, as if in some great sorrow. As if the fate of the animal’s existence was in some way tethered to his own.
“No,” he said. “Once something’s gone, it don’t ever come back.”
An ash-colored cat with a crooked head rose up from the corner of the porch and stretched its front legs out and raised its hindquarters and came trotting toward the chairs. The old man shooed it away, and the cat yowled and slunk over to the boy and arched its back and pressed up against his leg and purred. The boy reached his hand down and the cat clawed and bit at it as he jerked it back up.
“Don’t give her no attention,” the old man said. “She’s liable to jump in your lap and curl up just so she can get close enough to tear your eyes out.”
“Where’d these cats come from?”
“Hell if I know. Where does anything come from?”
“Do you feed them?”
“Sure. When they’re hungry.”
The boy stared at his feet.
“How’s life treating you, son? You doing good in school?”
“School’s out. Summer break.”
“Ah. Best time to be a youngster.”
“I guess.”
“What’s your daddy up to?”
“Work. He gets back tomorrow.”
“Hard living. Good money, I hear. But a hard living, no doubt.”
“Yessir.”
“I got some coffee in yonder, if you want.”
“No thank you.”
“A can whoop us up a biscuit or two.”
“That’s alright, I was just hoping to borrow that coil cleaner off of you.”
“One track mind, huh?”
“I guess.”
“Man on a mission. Well, alright then. I’ll get up and fetch it for you here in just a minute.”
The old man showed no sign of his intention to rise, but eventually he did just that, groaning at the process. He stood and looked down at the boy and paused, smiled, then went inside. He came out with an old spray can with rust around the rim.
“About half gone,” he said, and tossed it to the boy.
“I won’t use it all.”
“Use it all if you want. My air blower ain’t likely to give out before I do.”
“I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
“You can keep it. Come on back in the morning if you want though. I’ll cook us some breakfast. Got some deer meat I’ll get out of the deep freeze.”
The boy nodded. He switched the can for the flashlight in his pocket and started toward the trees.
“Hey, son,” the old man called after him. “That ain’t one of them cans where you can go sniffing at it in a paper sack. Just so you know.”
“Okay.”
The boy sat in front of the air conditioner and repeated the process. This time, with the panel swung open, he shook the can and sprayed the coils. He let the cleaner sit while he took the dish rag and shook it out over the trash bin. Then he wet the rag and went back into the bedroom. He scrubbed off the cleaner and the dirt with it. It still wasn’t as clean as the boy would have liked, but he was satisfied enough to close it up again and put away the tools. The unit sounded better in its running. He sat in front of it and listened to it hum. He closed his eyes against the cool air.
That night he dreamt the earth was water alone and he floated atop it and from the center of the endless sea rose enormous a single oak and upon its bark and branches clung thousands of gray and green tree frogs and none moving or trilling yet all somehow calling to him and the boy spoke in a voice they understood.
“Where am I?” he asked and the frogs did not answer and they stared at
him in legion from above.
“What is this place?”
On a low limb, inches from where the tree disappeared below the surface sat a three-toed box turtle. Its head speckled with orange and yellow spots. Its high, dome-like shell adorned in faded designs of brown and red and rust.
“This is the last,” the turtle said and his words were an echo across a wall-less world.
“The last what?”
“Place,” the turtle answered.
“Where is she?” the boy asked and the frogs began to sing and croak and trill and the noise grew so loud the boy covered his ears until the turtle bid them back into silence.
“Gone,” the turtle said.
“Where?”
“Where we all go,” the turtle answered and again the chorus of frogs began a rousing clatter and one by one they leapt from the tree and into the water and the boy watched them splash about him until the oak was barren and the turtle slipped slowly from his branch and into the sea.
“Wait,” the boy called but he felt himself being pulled under the dark surface and he could not swim or fight his way to the top and the pressure in his head grew and his breath gave way and as the water filled his nose and eyes and lungs, a hand reached down and grabbed his arm, pulling him up above the surface and the water and the world. Pulling him past the lone oak and into the clouds and the stars and the great energies of all that is guessed at. There was at once life and death and awareness and the boy felt his life slip and float and there in the ethereal darkness a warmth of light and color attached to his mind like leeches and bled dry the knowledge therein, and he watched his soul fall away to some realm unknown and what was left was empty and weightless and as he tried to take a breath the black water poured from his mouth and into his bed and he opened his eyes and coughed away all that had been seen.
3
The boy used to come around when his daddy was gone, which was a lot. I liked him coming around. We took to one another in some sort of way. Not like a father and son, I don’t believe. But like a pair of souls, adrift, nodding one at the other as if to verify the experience of our own existence. As if to make sure the world was still the world, and we were still of it.