by James Wade
That last summer the boy was here, we got as much rain as I could remember. There was some folks believed it was the end times, and I guess I can make some sense of that. In the classics, they say water represents salvation. Into the water we carry our sins so that they might be washed away, so that we might be cleansed. And in the Bible the Lord God did submerge the Earth so that it might be remade, and the Caddo People were saved from a four-headed monster when a great flood came. And in our myths and stories the rain comes always to purify, and in such manner we seek out the water as our redemption. We look upon it and see ourselves reflected and the things around us and in such images there is prophecy of a time when all must return to the sea.
Still. I don’t care much for lore and religion. Some might say I got a grudge against god. Maybe I do. Maybe that would be better than not believing at all. In the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter. When the black water rises, and the last breath of the world is drawn, what difference does it make who sent the flood.
But sometimes I’d sit a johnboat in the middle of the river and watch the fog come off the still water and the morning sun drying away the night. Near the shore, a reflection of every plant and tree and piece of sky spooled out across the surface, as if ahead of me were two mirrored worlds and either one I chose would allow me my shortcomings, would keep me as its own.
Then the birdsongs would start up, and it’s hard not to think there’s something greater. Something we likely wouldn’t understand even if it was laid out piece by piece right in front of us—which, I believe, it probably is.
4
Splithorn Hill was the second highest peak in Neches County. It rose up from the western banks of the river, out of place and in great contrast to the lowlands that surrounded it. Pines grew from the slopes of the hill, and some grew up straight and others grew out sideways as if they belonged to some counterworld with different rules than our own. Deer shaped intersecting game trails along those same slopes, but rarely did they venture up toward the ridgeline as it was there that lions had once roamed. And though the great cats were long since faded from the bottomlands and the country entirely, their prey were still weary, as if the deer were governed by the ghosts of their ancestors who dictated to each of them the protocol of survival. As if the spirits of the lions themselves might lay in wait, stalking the ridgeline in some eternal quest for death.
The Caddo people called it Hahtinu, Red Hill, because of its clay loams, and they believed the hill to be the burial mound of a long-forgotten god, driven to ground by the great sky father Kadhi hayuh. Like the animals, they too dared not disturb the sanctity of such a place, lest the discarded deity arise from its slumber and lay waste to the earth and all upon it. Only the xinesi, or high priest, was permissioned to approach the hill where he would perform rituals to keep locked whatever evil existed within.
But these fears appealed not to the settlers, who worshipped their own god and wrote a history different from the Caddo and from the animals and different even from nature itself. And their god of blood and greed drove away the Indians and the lions, and they conquered the hill and named it as their own.
Parts of the cabin had stood for near one hundred years. Some of the same boards John Curtis was thought to have been born on still remained, stained with his supposed mother’s blood. But John Curtis had brought the cabin into the new times. He’d made sure the county ran electric lines up the more gentle western slope of the hill, and he’d built a road, put in a septic tank, and upgraded the old, handmade water catchments. He also added on new rooms and a porch, essentially building an entirely new structure around the old one. Splithorn Hill, once known by locals as the seedy congregating point for druggies, burnouts, and low-level criminals, had become something far more sinister.
They stood in the darkness on the slope of the hill, smoking, the two of them looking down into the hole where the light from a headlamp played off the dirt. Frank tapped on the butt of his cigarette.
“You keep on with the digging, you ain’t gonna be able to climb outta that hole.”
“Don’t be jealous,” Lonnie said. “Just ’cause I’m gonna climb outta here a rich man.”
“It starts raining here after a while, that sucker’s gonna fill up and you’ll be a drowned man.”
A shadow moved across the light from the porch. The girl stood and looked out.
“Hey, girl. You come to watch Lonnie dig his way to China?” Scooter called to her.
She stood for a moment more, then turned and went back inside without speaking.
“Well, fuck you, too,” Scooter muttered. He licked his lips over and again.
“Don’t let the big man hear you say that,” Frank warned.
“Shit, I’m not as stupid as you look,” Scooter said. “I will say though, I think it’s a mistake having her around.”
“I always knew you put peckers over pussy.”
“You go ahead and laugh, but that girl ain’t as harmless as she puts on. I seen how she makes eyes at John Curtis every time Cade ain’t around. Now tell me that wouldn’t be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.”
“Like I said, you just keep your mouth shut and don’t worry about anybody’s business but your own.”
“I’m just saying. Besides, you can’t trust nobody from Louisiana. Bunch of backwoods coonasses.”
“Aren’t you from DeQuincy?” Frank asked, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s how come me to know.”
Lonnie stopped digging and leaned his shovel in the dirt and picked up the detector and swung it in either direction in front of him and it chirped and calculated and made all manner of mechanical suggestion.
“You boys hear that? That’s the sound of my fortune calling to me.”
Scooter shook his head.
“Ain’t no fortune buried that far under the damn ground.”
“O, ye of little faith. That’s why I won’t be sharing. A pious man, no matter the obstacle, continues about his labors. Leave the doubters to their . . . doubting.”
“I’ve always said it, Scooter, some folks just can’t handle drugs. Got them two sketchers in yonder, can’t make sense of a word they’re saying, and here’s ole Lonnie ready to live with the mole people.”
“Hey, don’t you lump me in with them crazy sumbucks inside.”
“I’m not sure you get to make that sort of demand, bud. What with you looking like a reverse Andy Dufresne.”
“If I wasn’t in this hole, I’d whip your ass.”
“I can wait ’til you’re done digging, if that helps. But I imagine you’ll be double disappointed when you wake up with a busted jaw and still as broke as a politician’s promise.”
“Y’all knock that shit off. John Curtis wants us ready when he gets back. Says there might be trouble with the Mexicans.”
“Well, there’s something should come as no surprise,” Lonnie said. “We should’ve never been running their dope to begin with.”
“That’s your measure of it, huh?”
“It is, indeed.”
“Alright, go on and tell John Curtis to his face, then. Mind you, you might as well stay down there in that hole, since he’ll be putting you right back in it.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll unearth this here buried treasure, then tell John Curtis he should have never went into business with them bean-eating bastards.”
“You eat beans too, you dumb shit,” Scooter said.
Frank scowled.
“I can’t set here and listen to y’all no more. I’m gonna try to catch some rest. I’d advise you to do the same.”
“Rest is for the weak,” Lonnie hollered up at him. “Fortune comes not to those who dally.”
Frank drew in the last of his cigarette and shook his head.
“Out of pure curiosity, have you tried that detector without having them steel-toed boots on?”<
br />
He flicked the butt into the hole, and it spirited through the black air with a flaming tail and landed among the curses of Lonnie’s revelation.
He and Scooter turned toward the cabin and there they caught a glimpse of a figure moving through the darkness beyond the flood light.
“Hey,” Frank called. “Where you headed with that satchel?”
5
The boy moved beneath the canopy of trees, a visitant of men long past. He thought of such men. Men with black hair, long and braided, their ears and necks adorned with feathers, beads, and shells from an ancient sea where people once lived with gills and fins and gray, foggy eyes.
The thick trellis of branches parried with the sun and cast upon the earth a quiltwork of shadow and light. The boy looked at the pattern on the ground before him and each section aglow as if all the fallen stars had returned from their banishment and sought new residence on the forest floor, shimmering in the dirt with each gust of wind, waiting on nightfall so they might look to the sky and see some long ago reflection of themselves.
He looked to the river and could feel there all the souls who’d passed by and passed on, each blending into the other and existing vague and veiled, as if the spirit of this place was a forgotten dream come calling. And the boy was awash with such emotion, yet none of it named or reasoned, and when he looked down at the brown water he saw only a quivering mirror of himself, leaking into the surface as if he too were destined to join the parade of phantoms trapped beneath the wickerwork canopy what hung above the river.
His toes dug into the muddy bottom. He felt something hard and smooth touch his foot, and he bent to pick it up. The ghosts of the Caddo nation slipped through the thin membrane of time, taking to the woods of their once-home, and the boy could see them in his mind. The boy ran his finger along the edge of the arrowhead and wondered if it had been used, if it held within it the murdered soul of some man or woman or wild animal. Or had it simply been created to wait, fashioned and forgotten, burying itself in the ground until the complexities of this strange new world collapsed violently inward and the ancient ways were restored. The boy closed his fist around the crude blade and squeezed until he felt the warmth of his own blood.
The river road twisted and squirmed up from the lowlands, a nondeliberate mix of gravel and sand and spots of always mud. The kids would come in their trucks after a good rain and tear it to shit. Jonah would hear the custom mufflers, the country music, the hoots and hollers from the older boys and the delighted squeals from the girls.
Others, closer to the boy’s age, came with their dogs and their fishing poles, and two boys carried a cooler and a girl smoked cigarettes and left lipstick stains on the filters. Jonah watched them from his tract of sand. They were at ease with one another. Laughing and teasing and existing as a collective. An old cur dog with his tongue lolling came trotting through the underbrush and stood panting in front of the boy. The dog was a mutt if ever there was one, with wire scrub hair and a bobbed tail. The boy leaned forward to touch the dog’s head, and it darted to the side and barked and sunk its front shoulders in a play bow, then leapt back in front of the boy and barked again.
“She botherin’ you?” a girl asked, appearing in front of him.
“No.”
“Good.”
“She’s nice,” the boy said.
“She’s a bitch.”
“Oh.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Nothing, I guess,” the boy replied, looking around as if there may be an answer he’d not yet seen.
“Well, I mean, you gotta be doing something.”
The boy shrugged.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
He looked down at his right hand, then switched the arrowhead to his left and wiped the blood on his shorts.
“Cool arrowhead. Is that what you’re doing?”
“What?”
“Looking for arrowheads.”
“Sure.”
“Well. Do you want to come hang out? We have beer.”
“Um.”
“Do you live on the river?”
“Yea. Just through there.”
“Most of us do too. Over in Timms County, though. I’m Katie.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I seen you around, some. At the Pick-It-Up, different places.”
“You stalking me?”
“No.”
“Good. So you want to come over or not?”
“Katie! Get your ass back over here. Don’t leave me with these boys!” the cigarette-smoking girl called.
“I’m coming. I’m talking to . . .”
“Jonah,” the boy said, wiping the blood from his hand and reaching it out toward the girl.
She took it, then hollered back over her shoulder, “I’m talking to my friend Jonah. He lives on this side of the river.” To him, she said, “C’mon. It’ll be fun.”
The girl led him by the hand and they emerged from the thicket and onto the bank, and the other boys sized him up and dismissed him.
“I know you,” one boy said. “You’re Hargrove.”
Jonah nodded.
“Oh my god, Katie, you found a pussy. That’s great, now there’s three guys and three girls.”
“Shut up, Patrick,” the girl scolded. “Don’t mind him, Jonah. He’s just an asshole.”
“It’s okay.”
“Katie, come pee with me,” the other girl said, and the two of them disappeared giggling into the woods.
“Hey, man, I’m Trevor.”
“Hey.”
“Patrick really is an asshole, but he’s our asshole, you know?”
“Okay.”
“Yeah. Anyway, you having a fun summer?”
“I guess.”
“Anything beats school, right?”
“I don’t know. I kind of like school.”
“Jesus fuck, man. Are you like a smart kid?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”
“My old man says if I don’t go to school, he’ll beat the shit out of me. That’s the only reason I show up. ’Cause I know he means it. But as soon as I turn seventeen, I’m headed to the oilfields. Make some real money. You know?”
“That’s what my dad does.”
“No shit? That’s badass. I can’t wait, man. My cousin said he’d get me on, making like sixty grand right off the bat. I’m gonna buy the meanest fucking truck in the world.”
The boy called Patrick had dropped a line near a bed of tall grass, he flicked the rod a couple of times and laughed.
“If you want to drive the baddest truck in the world, you’ll have to ask me nicely,” he called.
“Maybe I’ll ask your mom after we’re finished,” Trevor replied, then turned back to Jonah. “Patrick’s just being a bitch because he’s homeschooled, so he can’t quit. His parents are some sort of weird Jesus people. Not like normal people who go to church, but like, the crazy kind.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Micah over there—he don’t talk much—he says he ain’t going back to school at the end of the summer. I think he’s full of it.”
“What about Katie?”
“Oh, Katie’s cool as shit. She’ll be in high school next year, over at Timms. I’ll be in eighth grade, me and Katy with a Y.”
“They’re both named Katie?”
“Yeah. They’re like best friends.”
Jonah nodded and watched the other boys. They were his age, but they all looked much older. They wore jeans and boots, even in the summer. They carried Skoal cans, drank beer, and called each other terrible things and then laughed.
The girls returned, stepping delicately around the thorn bushes and vines. They climbed atop a red moss boulder and unfurled towels.
&nb
sp; “Hell yeah, let’s see some titties,” Patrick hooted as the girls began to undress.
“You’re so gross,” Katy said.
Jonah watched Katie shimmy out of her shorts and reveal green bathing suit bottoms with ruching in the back. She left her tank top on, while the other girl took off her shirt but left on her shorts, as if the two had picked their best assets to show off, or perhaps chosen to cover their biggest insecurities.
Jonah had never seen a girl in a bathing suit. He’d seen a few of his father’s girlfriends, and once he’d seen his aunt Tracy, but none of that counted. Or if it did, it certainly didn’t compare to this. He found himself in no way prepared for what was before him.
Katie caught him staring. She smiled. He turned away.
“Can I have a beer?” he asked Trevor.
“Yeah, man, of course. Katie’s brother can get booze anytime, so we always have some.”
Micah reached into a red cooler with a white lid and tossed the boy a beer and nodded at him. The boy nodded back.
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, dude,” Patrick said, leaning his fishing pole against a tree. “You can’t just open it. You gotta shake it up first.”
“Shake it?”
“Yeah, dude. If you don’t shake it then it doesn’t taste good. It’s like Gatorade or a Yoo-hoo or something.”
“My dad doesn’t shake his beer.”
“What kind does he drink?”
“Pabst.”
“Well, see, there you go. These are Coors Light. They’re different. Look on the side where the mountains are.”
“Okay.”
“Are they blue?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then, that means you gotta shake it up.”
The boy began to shake the can.
“Yea, really shake it. That’s it.”
The boy opened the can and the beer sprayed onto his face and his shirt and he dropped the can and it sprayed onto his legs. The other boys laughed and clapped their hands.
“You fucking retard,” Patrick said.