by James Wade
When he returned he held a pocket knife and his cereal bowl. He wedged the bowl into his side of the hole, letting it rest against the bag on the shed-side. He opened the knife and cut a gash into the bottom of the sack and the corn began to pour out and into the bowl. When it was full he took the bowl and walked back to the tree line and scattered the corn and stood with his hands on his hips. He filled the bowl twice more and when things were completed to his satisfaction he shoved the dirt back into the hole at the back of the shed and hoisted himself into the trailer.
The discolored wallpaper above the bathroom sink took the shape of an almost perfect rectangle, holding dear the memory of the mirror that had once hung. There was no shower curtain and pushed against the outside of the cracked tub were several old and molding towels. The boy took off his boxers and stepped over the towels and into the tub. He turned the hot water knob and the clanking of pipes ensued, and when the water came spilling out it was brown and oily. He turned the cold water on as well but nothing changed.
He stepped out of the tub and over the towels and walked naked into the kitchen and turned the faucet on and watched it drip and saw the same grimy water emerge. He walked through the kitchen and living room and down the short, carpeted hallway and went into his own bedroom and stood above a small pile of clothes. He reached into the pile and sifted until he found the swim trunks he’d been given the summer before. They belonged to the son of a woman his father had been seeing. She was a nice woman, with red hair that curled and a face full of freckles. The boy liked her. He’d told the woman she looked like a spotted fawn. His father had slapped him.
He smelled the trunks and put them on and left the trailer and went into the woods past the shed and down the bank and into the river.
He walked until the brackish waters were at his waist. He reached out with both hands and touched the surface and watched it move and felt it as it tugged at him, counseling him with its current, some long-known warning of stagnation and survival and the rivalry between the two.
He let the river and the world flow around him.
The boy didn’t know where the river started, only that it was somewhere north and whether it was Dallas or Denver he couldn’t say. He knew at the mouth the estuary spilled into the gulf and the gulf into the ocean and all things connected in the end, but still the beginning remained a mystery. He knew the river’s course held tributaries and watersheds and he imagined many creeks and coves, and in his mind he saw the river laid upon the land as a vein which carried the earth’s blood, and such blood was muddy and brown and from it sprang a song of nature, persistent and tholing.
The river flowed and the world turned, cutting paths both new and old, overwhelming those things which came before but could not adapt to the constant movement, the everlasting change. The river and the world together, and both giving life and both swallowing it whole, and neither caring which, and neither having a say in the matter. The boy watched both passing by, his choice and his path each belonging to some current long set in motion.
He scrubbed the dirt from his hands and knees and stomach and the water was not too cold and there was no one and nothing around. The current was nonthreatening, and the boy walked further into the Neches and felt along the bottom with his toes. As the water passed his chest he tilted backward and spread wide his arms and there floated with his eyes closed and his ears half submerged as if he was listening to the world both above and below the surface.
A male wood duck passed overhead and the boy opened his eyes as it landed in the shallow water on the far side of the river. He watched the bird, its green crested head and intricate plumage, its chestnut breast rising and falling as it glided along against the water’s easy flow. It was more stunted than a mallard, with a thin neck, boxed face, and short wings. His father liked to shoot mallards.
The boy floated and splashed and made sure not to veer too far up or down the river and then there was at once a rumble both in the sky and in his stomach. He swam to shore and walked from the river and stood in the clearing in front of the trailer and let himself drip dry as the dark clouds crept in and the coming storm gathered around him.
The drawer was overflowing with used envelopes, paper clips, and all manner of trinkets and forgotten possessions, and the boy pulled from it one of several lighters and lit the grease mantled stovetop and set about scrambling himself an egg. He could have eaten three or even four, but there were only half a dozen left and he did not know when his father might return or what he might bring when he did. The boy stirred the egg meticulously, first in a clockwise motion to the count of fifty, then counterclockwise for the same period, as if an imbalance in the procedure might render the product inedible. He slid the spatula along the sides of the pan and shook loose the edges of his creation then dumped the contents onto a paper plate.
The wind raced into the bottomlands and met there the ancient trees which bent and swayed but held their ground until the gusts broke through into the clearing and shook the trailer and the boy inside. Whatever magic the antenna drew upon had been blocked and the television darkened as did the world around him. The boy ate his food slowly, in small bites and chewing until there was nothing left and finally swallowing, and after, taking a long pull from his soda can. When he was finished he licked the plate and took the half-empty can with him to the bedroom and crawled atop his creaking mattress and lay on it perpendicular and on his stomach with his chin in his hands and the soda resting on the ledge where the bed met the window. He watched the road and the rain and the dancing trees and soon he was asleep and dreaming of a river full of mallards and wood ducks and he floated among them and called each one by name.
When the boy’s eyes opened the rain had passed. An afternoon storm blown in from the west in a fit of fury and gone just as quickly toward the swamps of Louisiana. It was the nineteenth day of rain in a row.
He looked out the window to the road and then left his bedroom and called for his father. There was no one else in the trailer and when he hopped down from the door there was no truck parked in the yard. He felt the wet earth on his feet. The spores of sweet-smelling bacteria growing in the ground had been kicked up and into the air and the world was left humid and green and perfumed. The boy walked to the tree line and looked to see that the corn had not been washed away but if some of it had he did not notice or thought it not enough to bother with. He went back inside the trailer and looked at the clock and added the hour that had not been changed when the rest of the country sprang forward. He dressed in blue jean shorts, hole-riddled socks, and off-brand tennis shoes. He pulled on an oversized T-shirt of a band he had never seen and went outside and drug to its right spot the picnic table and climbed atop the roof.
For a time he lay on his back and closed his eyes and listened for the sound of the truck. When that time passed he sat up and looked to the road and the tree line and both were quiet and still. He watched the sky change above him, growing cold and blue gray in the east while the sinking sun layered the western heavens in an ombre of red and orange.
His father did not return, but the big doe did. The last of the day was slipping from the horizon when she stepped out into the clearing. The fawn followed. The boy perked up and sat still as the animals walked gingerly amongst the corn. Fireflies in quick glowing bursts of light appeared as though they were the last of a shower of falling stars, burning out just as they reached the earth’s surface.
He thought about his father and about god and forgiveness and all of it. If god could talk to his father, maybe he could talk to the boy as well.
Give me a sign, he thought. If you’re real. If you can control everything. Let me touch that deer.
The boy moved slowly, sliding from the rooftop onto the table and then freezing. The doe’s head was up. He didn’t move until it went down again. He eased his way off the table and took small, measured steps into the clearing. Both heads came up and the boy stopped, motionle
ss, but the deer were not looking at him. Their heads looked past him, past the end of the trailer and toward the river and the big doe flicked her tail. Then, like the afternoon rain they were gone, vanished back into the wooded ether from which they seemed to materialize. The boy looked after them, though in the settling darkness there was little and less to see.
When at last he turned back to the trailer she was standing there in the flickering of the porch light and her silhouette came and went with each spasm of the bulb and he thought her some specter, a ghost or haint from times forgotten come to take his soul or perhaps just haunt him to madness and he thought it more certain as she reached out her hand toward him. He readied a scream but it stuck in his throat and he took a step back and she forward, still reaching, and then she collapsed onto the wet ground before him and her hair strewn about her in streaks of blond and purple and the boy stood, watching, as her back rose and fell with heavy breathing.
He walked slowly to her and bent down and studied her. She was barefoot and wore blue jeans and a camo tank top, and the boy could see her red bra straps. He reached out and touched the bare skin on her shoulder, and she jerked and cried and tried to get up but couldn’t.
“Are you hurt, Miss?” the boy asked.
The girl looked up at him wild-eyed. She opened her mouth but didn’t speak. She stared past him, like the deer, looking at something he couldn’t see.
“Are you friends with my daddy? Do you know Shawna?”
The boy straightened up and looked around as if the answer might lay in wait.
“Water,” the girl said at last.
“We don’t got no water.”
“Water.”
“We don’t—alright, you just stay here.”
The boy left and returned with a cola, and the girl drank and coughed and spit and drank some more. She made it up to her hands and knees and then vomited. She began to shiver.
“Are you cold? You can come inside.”
She looked at the trailer and then at the boy. Her eyes were full up with fear.
“It ain’t nobody here but me,” the boy said.
She nodded.
The boy squatted down and wedged himself under her arm and the two of them stood together and moved slowly toward the door. She crawled into the entryway and the boy pushed her legs and got her inside the door, then climbed up after her. The girl was writhing in pain on the den carpet.
“Do you have a cell phone?” the boy asked. “I can call an ambulance for you. There’s a spot about a mile up the road that gets service. I can run up there.”
“No,” the girl shook her head weakly. “No ambulance. Bed.”
The boy looked toward his father’s door.
“You can sleep in my bed,” he said, and again positioned himself as a crutch as they trudged down the hall.
“Um, my room is messy, so, I’m sorry,” the boy said. “But there’s nothing on the bed, and you can sleep there.”
The girl collapsed onto the bare mattress and the boy lifted her head and slid a pillow under it and covered her with his one sheet and then brought a blanket from the couch and covered her with that as well.
“I have CDs,” the boy said. “I like to listen to music sometimes when I’m in bed. I don’t know what kind of music you like, though.”
He wanted to say the right thing. His heart was pounding.
The girl didn’t answer, and the boy watched her breathing, and her tank top bunched above the small of her back and there was a half-finished tattoo of a butterfly. On her left shoulder blade flew three blackbirds, and the name “Cade” was spelled out in script across her left wrist.
She was skinny, like the boy. He looked at the veins straining against her skin. He thought she was very likely the most beautiful person he’d ever seen.
“Are you gonna be okay, Miss?” he asked, but the girl was fast asleep and the boy reasoned that if she was breathing she wasn’t dying, and so he sat up the rest of the night and watched her breathe.
14
John Curtis stood in the doorway and the sunlight behind him, a shadow framed with white. He stood in silence, the others looking to him as if he were some muted messenger of the last morning, a harbinger of the evil yet to come. He stood, unmoved and unspeaking, and drew from each of them the guilt of what had transpired. He stood until they could no longer take his standing and began to all of them beg for his forgiveness, his mercy, his understanding. They confessed their sins at his feet and he listened to all they had to say.
“So, then. You all let a little girl steal from me. Is that about right?”
They hung their heads like dogs.
“Any swinging dick here believe their life is more valuable than that satchel?”
Silence.
“Well, I guess that means killing you is out of the question. So, what now?”
The men looked up. They looked at one another.
“We find her,” Frank said.
John Curtis turned and walked onto the porch and looked out.
The hardwoods grew tall and spaced along the steep incline of Splithorn Hill’s eastern ridge. In the cold season when the branches were brought bare, a vantage of the river’s bend could be had from most all of the eastern ground leading up the stunted shelf-land. John Curtis stuck his hand in his pocket and mumbled and nodded and looked out with wild eyes at something only he could see.
“Alright then,” he said, turning back to the cabin door. “We find her.”
He moved from the doorway and made a sweeping gesture with his arms.
“Everybody out. Go on. Get.”
The men again mumbled their apologies as they passed by, eyes down.
“Not you, Cade.”
The big man nodded.
“Hold up a second, fellas,” John Curtis called.
He stood at the front of the porch and Cade beside him on the first step and the rest of the men below in the yard like some tattered army of miscreants, staggering and swaying with wide eyes and gray veins run along bone-tight skin.
John Curtis looked out at them.
“Now, for whichever of you fine men brings me the girl, I’ll have a special commission waiting.”
The men giggled and grinned through thin and rotting teeth. They looked to one another and nodded and rubbed their hands together. They bounced on the balls of their feet and clapped and cackled.
John Curtis waved his hand again and the men disbanded and their trucks cranked and rumbled one after the other down the hill toward the muddy river road and the highway beyond.
He turned back to the big man.
“I’m being tested,” he said. “By what, I don’t know.”
Cade spit off the porch, then nodded.
“By god, I imagine,” he said.
“God,” John Curtis scoffed. “I don’t get it. Call me an infidel, but I really just do not understand it.”
“Which part?”
“We don’t have that kind of time. The Trinity, the virgin birth, the words of god that were written by men. But I’d say my biggest issue is with myself.”
“How’s that?”
“If there’s a god up there, supposed to be looking out for everybody, then why am I still alive?”
Cade laughed. “Dumb luck, I reckon.”
“And I gotta say, if god exists, he sure ain’t much of a businessman. It’s a little insulting, really. I mean, ought not my everlasting soul be held in higher regard? A lifetime of misdeeds mitigated in mere moments. Speak the prayer. Ask forgiveness. Accept the Lord into your heart—and then, enter unto the kingdom of heaven forever and ever amen. I don’t know. Sounds like a raw deal for god. Either that or he don’t value my soul the way he should.”
“Thought you said we ain’t got time,” Cade replied, shifting his considerable weight from one foot to the
other.
“You know,” John Curtis continued, “I asked one of my foster mothers—once, on such occasion that I was feeling abnormally curious, or perhaps even mischievous—what Jesus might have done with Adolf Hitler, had he prayed in those final hours for absolution.”
“And?” Cade went along.
“If he was sincere, she told me, if his heart was open, then the Lord would forgive him. And he would go to Heaven. My mother told me it was not fairness or worth that determined one’s place in the afterlife. Mercy, she said, and grace, are the pillars of god’s love.” John Curtis slipped his fingers into the pouch around his waist and stroked the brittle hair within. “All who believe in him, shall have everlasting life.”
The big man leaned and spit, again.
“You ever think maybe we aren’t meant to understand the ways of god?” Cade asked. “Like maybe we just aren’t capable?”
“If gods are real, and we lack the agency of understanding them, then it’s because they made us as such, to toil away in the ignorance of our own existence,” John Curtis answered. “What are you, a preacher now?”
“I got as much chance at preaching as them peckerwoods do of finding your backpack.”
“About that. We’ll get the satchel back, and the girl carrying it.”
“Alright,” Cade said.
“And then what?” John Curtis asked him.
Cade shrugged.
“What do you mean, then what?”
“I mean what are we going to do about the girl?” John Curtis said. “Do you love her?”