by James Wade
Cade walked to the front of the porch and leaned against a cedar post, his back to John Curtis.
“I guess it don’t matter now,” he said.
John Curtis nodded.
“You want I should take care of it myself?”
Cade turned and looked at him. He sighed. “Yeah, you’d better.”
“Alright then. It’s done.”
“Gotta find the little bitch first,” Cade reminded him.
“Don’t worry about all that. I’m about to head into town and take care of it.”
15
The day passed unnoticed, the girl in the fetal position, sleeping or crying, the boy moving about the trailer like some nervous handmaiden, and all the while the afternoon rain grew harsher and stayed longer. The river began to rise.
The boy chased a snake from the weeds beneath the trailer and picked through the items collected there. A push mower he’d never seen in operation, old tin pans with rust and rot, ropes and chew toys belonging to a dog he remembered as a toddler, tarps with much of the lining eaten away, and several broken plastic planting pots made to look as if they were clay.
The boy drug from the pile an old folding chair and set it in the yard. He took the least damaged plastic pot and filled it with water from the river then added soap. He wet a wash rag in the pot and wiped down the chair, scrubbing the grime from the joints, then dried it with a towel and took it inside.
He set the chair near his mattress and took the box fan from the bathroom and propped it up in the chair and turned it on. The blades groaned but complied and the boy watched as the girl turned toward the breeze with wet matted hair and beads of sweat across her forehead.
“That’s better, huh?” the boy asked, and the girl moaned quietly, and he took that as a yes.
“I’ll make you an egg if you get hungry,” he told her.
The girl did get hungry. She would wake, wild-eyed, and ask for food, and he’d scramble an egg and put pepper on top and bring it to her on a paper plate. Then he’d count the eggs and the plates and try to determine how long either would last. His father had taken the pickles and cheese, and the boy was worried they would soon run out of food.
“These eggs taste like shit,” the girl would say, or, “Who’s so poor they don’t have ramen?”
Once she apologized and thanked the boy. He asked her name and she said not to worry about it, but he worried anyway.
The girl cried often. She would scream and the boy would come in the room and find her on the floor next to the mattress, sobbing.
“Go away,” she’d sometimes tell him, then she would add a hesitant “please,” as if remembering some lone manner she’d once been taught. Other times she wouldn’t say anything, but would motion for him to join her on the floor and there they would sit together, and she would lay her head on his shoulder until she stopped crying and fell asleep.
The only thing she did more than cry was sleep. Sometimes she would wake and profess her starvation as if she were moments away from perish, but when the boy would bring her a scrambled egg she would have already fallen back asleep.
“No more eggs,” the girl said, but she ate them anyway and then fell back onto the bed and slept again. The boy watched her and when she began to shiver he added blankets and when she began to sweat he took them away. He kept the plastic cup full of Coke.
He studied her as she lay there, as if she were some unknown specimen—which in many ways she was. He looked at the sharp bones near her collar and shoulders. He stared at the outline of her hips and at her bare legs, and he felt guilty but he didn’t look away.
He poured milk onto a rag and washed the girl’s feet while she shivered and moaned. Her feet were raw and cut up, as bad as the boy had ever seen. He dug through the old seasonings in the cupboard until he found a tin shaker of turmeric with a best by date from the first Bush presidency. The powder was clumped together and hard, so the boy shook it and separated what he could and took a handful back to the bedroom. He pressed the turmeric into the girl’s wounds. She winced but said nothing.
The next day he chopped a quarter of an old onion and mixed it with a jar of honey and used his finger to apply the paste to each cut and blister on the girl’s feet.
“What the hell are you doing?” the girl protested.
“Fixing you up.”
“Why’s it all sticky?”
“It’s honey.”
“You ain’t gonna lick it off my toes or something, are you?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Ugh. It smells weird.”
“It’s the onions. Or it may be your feet, from the turmeric.”
The girl snatched her feet away and tucked them under the blankets.
“It ain’t my feet.”
“Okay,” the boy said.
The girl started to cry.
“It’s not your feet,” the boy said.
“I don’t care what it is. I don’t care about anything. I just want some water. I need water, okay? Please.”
The boy’s face twisted up with concern.
“Okay,” he said after some time. “I’ll go fetch water. I know a man who might have some to spare.”
It was in the waking from those fevered dreams where the girl first found things familiar within herself. A simple feeling, like the comfort of closing her eyes for just a while longer, knowing she was taken care of, knowing she was doing something right and good and worthwhile. Guilt had kept her awake for what seemed months at a time. Guilt and drugs, and now she would work to rid herself of both.
But such solace in those first days was rarely more than a whisper, fading so quickly and completely, the girl was left to question whether it had been there at all.
The withdrawals seemed the one constant. And the boy. He was there when she opened her eyes, and there when she closed them again. He pulled her away from the dreams with Coke and over-peppered eggs. He covered her when she was cold, without her ever speaking, as if she’d somehow thought him into existence. Maybe she had. Maybe he was only an apparition, a cool spring in a desert of meth-fueled psychosis.
Now the boy was gone. He said he was fetching water. Or maybe that had been a dream. Was it all a dream, and she was back in the cabin on Splithorn Hill? Had she never left Louisiana? She couldn’t remember, she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t remember how to breathe.
She’d seen this before, with Sadie. Sweet Sadie. She’d had panic attacks almost daily. Panic disorder. She screamed and cried and thought she was dying. Maybe she was. The girl would hold her and they’d rock back and forth on the couch, sharing a quilt, staring mindlessly at the blue light from whatever weightless sitcom was on the television. The girl would rub her back and sing to her.
You can be a sweetie pie,
You can be a sweetie guy,
You can be a candy cane la-dy,
You can be a frosted flake,
And still not have the sweet it takes,
To ever be as sweet as Sa-die
The girl repeated the song to herself, just as she’d done so many times with her sister. She cried and sang and cried again, and soon she was asleep.
In her dream she walked along the riverside and there was no rain and the sun was bright but it wasn’t hot and everything was green and splendor. Sadie ran ahead and looked back and laughed and ran faster still.
“Be careful,” the girl told her. “Stay where I can see you.”
But soon she’d disappeared from the trail and the girl called for her, but no one answered. The sky darkened and the rain and lightning spilled from the clouds. The girl yelled louder, but each time she opened her mouth the thunder came to steal her voice. She thought she heard a noise in the woods and she ran toward it, waving her hands in front of her face to ward off spiderwebs and thorn vines and low-hanging branches. At last she came to a cleari
ng and her sister stood facing away and she spoke in a soothing whisper to the infant cradled in her arms.
“Sadie,” the girl called, “what’s going on?”
“He’s beautiful,” her sister said, turning. “He’s so beautiful.”
The girl took a step back and covered her mouth.
The child was covered in scales, and the scales were bursting with blood and maggots, and the child’s head was two sizes too large and from each side grew black, spiraled horns.
“Put it down,” the girl cried.
Sadie stepped toward her.
“Hold him,” she said, smiling, as if she were fallen under the spell of some woods witch or hex.
The girl shook her head and took another step back.
“Sadie, please,” she said.
“Aw, hold him,” Sadie begged. “Hold him.”
Her sister froze and looked at the girl with black eyes.
“Hold him,” she said and her voice was a low growl. “Hold him. Hold him. Hold him.”
She began to sprint toward the girl, holding the crying creature out to her. The girl turned to run and Sadie was already there, her mouth opening beyond her face, beyond the realm of any reality save that of some demon world.
“No!” the girl screamed and threw the blankets off of her and onto the floor.
“Sorry to bother you,” the boy said, out of breath. He’d run the whole way.
“Ain’t no bother, son,” the old man told him. “C’mon up.”
“You think I could get some water off of you?”
“Water?”
“Yessir, if that’s alright.”
“Got some rain water, all them storms we been having. You’re welcome to it.”
“I’d be much obliged. I think there’s mud in the pipe water.”
“Pipe water,” the old man repeated softly, as if weighing the worth of the words.
“Yessir.”
“Well. I got plenty of water, all this rain,” the man said again. “C’mon in and get you a jug or two, and we’ll go fill up yonder at the barrel.”
“Thank you, sir. Like I said, I’m sorry to bother.”
The old man waved his hand at the boy’s apology, as if doing so might chase away the words. Inside, he bent over a sliver of space between the side of his refrigerator and the wall. He pulled out a plastic jug and popped the top and smelled the inside. He scrunched his face and turned away, then replaced the top and put the jug back where he’d found it. He emerged with two more jugs, each one passing the smell test, and they were on their way.
The barrel held fifty-five gallons and the old man judged it to be at capacity. It was mounted under the gutter and affixed to a flexible downspout diverter to capture the runoff.
“Ain’t nothing we haven’t seen,” the old man said as he held the jug up to the brass hose bib near the bottom of the barrel. “Claudette hit in ’78, or maybe ’79. You would’ve thought it was the second coming, the way folks acted. Set the world record, from what I understand, down in Alvin. Rained forty-three inches in a day. That’s something I doubt I’d even believe if I hadn’t seen it.”
The old man replaced the cap on the jug and handed it to the boy and took the empty one and began to fill it.
“Daddy used to talk about twenty-two inches that come down in two hours time. Of course, that was out west somewheres, near Uvalde. Still, floods come, droughts too. People always want to get stirred up about it, but I tend to go along as best I can.”
He turned the spigot off and capped the second jug and wiped his hands on his overalls. He held the jug up and eyeballed it and pursed his lips.
“You’ll wanna boil this ’fore you drink it. I got a screen in the barrel, but I think it might be about give out on me. Let’s get us a biscuit and a cup.”
“I ought to be getting back.”
“Aw, c’mon now. You done pillaged my water supply and you ain’t even gonna set with me for a bit?”
The boy bit his lip.
“Alright,” the boy said.
“That’s alright?”
“Yessir.”
“Go on and set. I’ll be right out.”
The boy sat on the edge of the porch and his feet dangled above the ground. The old man made the stairs, slow and groaning, and drug the inside of his right foot across the floor boards with each hobbled step. The boy could hear him mumbling inside the cabin. When he emerged he handed the boy a blue tin cup with white speckles three-quarters full with lukewarm coffee and a cold biscuit wrapped in a paper towel.
“Got some mayhaw jelly in there.”
“That’s alright. Thank you.”
Mr. Carson sat back in his rocker and put both hands on his knees.
“Well. You been doing any fishing?”
“Little bit. I’m not allowed to use Daddy’s rod, but I got pretty good at grabbing with my hands and tossing them on the bank.”
“Noodling.”
“Huh?”
“Called noodling. Any river man worth his salt can catch a fish with his bare hands. Good for you, boy. Real good.”
The boy nodded and bit into the biscuit.
“Mr. Carson?” he asked, his mouth half full. “You ever been in love?”
The old man laughed.
“You’re too young for all that. Hold off on it. Hold off as long as you can.”
“But have you?”
“Yes, I suppose I have. I loved my wife very much. Delores. She was a beauty.”
“She died?”
“She did, but not here. She left me. They all leave. Nothing lasts,” the old man shook away the feeling and smiled at the boy. “Like I say, hold off. Save yourself that pain until you’re older, more able to deal with it. It’s one thing to be in love. Quite another to think you deserve it back.”
“Yessir.”
“You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yessir. I think so.”
“We go through life, every one of us, measuring our experience. For better or worse, we hold our own world up to the one next to us, or to the one somebody wrote about, or to the idea of some world that’s been stuck in our head for however long. Then, sometimes, somebody comes and helps us with bringing each of those worlds to account—puts the measuring into a different perspective. When that happens, it’s up to us to buy in and be a part of a new determination. Cause if we don’t, well, that’s how come some folks to stay together and others to not.
“Love—a lasting love, that is—is the reconciliation of two separate accountings of the world, and a promise to use like measurements going forward. That, and dancing.”
“I don’t know how to dance.”
The old man gave him a look of faux concern.
“You’d best learn.”
The boy tossed the dregs of his coffee into the yard and looked up at the gray sky. “I’d better get on, before it starts raining again.”
He put the paper towel inside the cup and handed it to Mr. Carson and thanked him again.
“I would’ve give you the water even if you hadn’t stayed,” the old man said.
“I know it.”
16
Dustin didn’t fit the narrative. John Curtis had told him that once.
“You don’t fit the narrative,” he’d said.
Dustin was born middle class and could’ve stayed that way. But he was a sweet kid, and sweet kids aren’t long without being broken. His parents fought and his old man scared him and he grew up skinny and shy and awkward around girls. A few were nice to him, but he took it wrong and things always ended badly. When he finally found one to run with, she was part of a more sinister world. But he thought he was in love, and such thoughts come pre-equipped with bad decisions. He tried methamphetamine on a cold day in early November. By Christmas he was a full-on addi
ct. To make matters worse, his girl found Jesus. Got clean. Said he wasn’t good enough for her.
Something like that ought to harden a man. Maybe it did. He dropped out of high school and started dealing. Small stuff at first, but John Curtis took a liking to him and it was a quick ascent from there.
“Half these boys are dragging chains of mental deficiency behind their every step,” he’d told Dustin. “You may be a pussy, but at least that means you’re scared. Takes a brain to be scared.”
It wasn’t unusual for John Curtis to call him out to the cabin just to shoot up and have him listen to wild philosophical theories about Native Americans, or how men might soon evolve into the superhuman. Dustin didn’t understand much of what was said during those times, but John Curtis seemed to think he did. Or maybe he just appreciated the company.
This day was different though. He felt it on the drive up. The truck sliding in the mud, the wet branches reaching out over the road like the arms of a thousand errant souls. He’d had panic attacks when he was younger. Now he couldn’t tell the difference between a panic attack and a withdrawal. When he could, he stayed high enough to keep both at bay.
“Dustin.”
John Curtis sat on the porch.
“Boss.”
“How you been, brother?”
“Okay. You?”
“Oh, I’m always alright. Here, come sit down and let’s watch the rain.”
“Okay.”
They sat on the porch in wooden chairs opposite one another and looked out, both of them, at the parcel of world in their frame. The storm clattering on the tinned porch roof sounded as though each raindrop were made of steel, such was the enormity of the noise. The rain fell in great droves and fell straight down until a gust of wind would pitch it sideways, and then it would work to right itself. The wall of falling water made saturated the green trees near the cabin, but muted the colors of those further off, the rows of pines going from blue green to gray to nothing at all.
Dustin shifted his eyes to look at the other man. John Curtis sat staring straight ahead with a blank expression that made Dustin more nervous than he’d started out. He turned away. Before him, the storm had created a gray curtain upon the land, as if this were some sacred convergence, a hallowed meeting place where one reality was veiled off from another.