by James Wade
“You think they’ll know it was a setup?” Cade asked.
He and John Curtis sat on the porch, back at the hill, and listened to the twilight chorus of crickets and cicadas and somewhere, to the west, a lone coyote calling out.
“They’d be damn fools not to,” John Curtis said.
“How’s Miss Rose doing?”
“She’s just fine. Claude come and picked her up. You should’ve seen him fawning all over her.”
“Lord, I can’t imagine.”
“You know I think that ole boy might be part dog hisself.”
“Wouldn’t even raise my eyebrow at it,” Cade said.
John Curtis produced a flask from his boot.
“You want a nip?”
The big man didn’t answer but reached across and took the flask and pulled from it and passed it back.
In an hour’s time they were half drunk and both had determined that dogs were as near a perfect animal as could be.
“If animals could conceive of god, what do you think they’d come up with?” John Curtis asked.
“How do you mean?”
“If a cat were given the ability to describe to you, or even draw for you, what god looked like, what would they draw?”
“I imagine they’d draw some sort of cat,” Cade said.
“Exactly. Just as we think of god in our own image, so too would animals.”
“But not dogs.”
“No. Not dogs. Ask a dog to describe god, and it would describe its owner.”
“I could see that.”
“A trained dog is nothing more than a religious extremist, willing to do anything and everything for its god,” John Curtis said.
“A true believer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How come that is, I wonder.”
“Guilt. Shame. These are things that dogs have and other creatures don’t. It’s what makes them like men. It’s why we can manipulate them.”
“What about apes? Ain’t they like men?” Cade asked.
“They’re too much like us. Too aware. They can’t be controlled as easily. You try telling a monkey to fight his brother, he’s liable to turn on you. Rip your arm off.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’d do.”
John Curtis studied the big man, then nodded.
“I know it.”
25
The stunted cliffsides rose up from the river in uneven lines of red and pink. The water sat brown and so nearly still but for the sticks and needles bestrewn upon its surface, being pulled onward, signaling to those ashore that the calm river was not as stagnant as it appeared. The boy led and the girl followed and together they slid down a short ravine, and in its gullet there was water still standing from the last rain and they slogged through it. The ferns and horsetails, the hornworts and mosses, all of them growing thick near the water.
Along the Neches the horizons were few, with great shade trees and always another bend in the river, and in this way the bottomlands did mirror the futility of progression for those who were left to dwell there all these years since.
The path of the river narrowed and widened, a muddy lung for the green earth, stretching and constricting, breathing life into the pine forests and tangled underbrush that grew out from the river’s bank. Breeding, as it went, this shadowed world of branch and thorn, a canopy where fed those plants and living things born to the darkness of the bottoms, reaching up from the wet ground like a scourge upon the earth.
The buzzards circled the air around some dying thing, like ghastly morticians awaiting their charge. The breeze played against the treetops.
“Shut your eyes,” the girl told him, closing her own. The boy watched her as she tilted her head back and brought her arms outstretched on either side.
“Are they shut?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Alright, now listen to the noise the leaves make when the wind blows them.”
The boy stood with his eyes closed. He listened.
A breath of wind rose above him, the sound of the trees growing like static, then falling away as the gust faded.
“Do you hear it?”
“I guess.”
“It’s like the ocean,” she said.
“I’ve never been to the ocean.”
“Me neither.”
“How do you know what it sounds like?” he asked, opening his eyes.
“You’re ruining it.”
“Sorry.”
The boy closed his eyes again and this time he imagined the sea. The swells building and crashing and dying out. He listened.
“I hear it,” he said. “The waves.”
“See.”
He opened his eyes, and the girl was standing in front of him. She bent and kissed his cheek.
“We’ll go there, one day, to the ocean,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
So many times over the years the boy had waited to hear that very sound. He’d prayed for it. But now the truck’s exhaust and the clatter that followed as it rumbled down the river road filled the boy with dread.
“Wait by the water,” he told the girl. “Let me talk to him.”
“That’s a bad idea. He’ll turn me in.”
“He doesn’t know those men.”
“Everybody knows them. Everybody’s scared of them.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“Fine. But if you don’t come back in ten minutes, I’m gone.”
“Okay.”
The headlights topped the last ridge and their beams cut the darkness and exposed the bottoms of the trees in a great sweeping arch as the truck turned toward the trailer. The engine took a last gasp as it cut, and the lights were gone and the boy’s father stepped into the darkness.
“The hell you doing out here this late?” Dwayne scowled.
“Nothing.”
“Well. C’mon. I got a grocery or two.”
They climbed into the trailer. The boy’s father carried two plastic bags into the kitchen and crouched and began unloading them into the cupboard under the microwave.
“You were gone a long time,” the boy said.
“Jesus Christ, are you gonna start whining right off the bat?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. I want some peace and quiet until I go back to the pipeline. Then you can run around and cry about anything you want.”
“Yes, sir.”
The boy stood staring at his father’s back. The man could feel the eyes on him. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder.
“What?” he asked.
“Well, I was wondering. I have a friend. And I was wondering, hoping, you would let her stay with us. Just for a little while.”
The man stood and put his hands on his hips.
“A friend?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A girlfriend? You know, I half figured you for a faggot.”
“Well, she’s older than me.”
His father’s brow raised.
“An older girl.”
“Yes, sir. She’s seventeen. She needs a place to stay for a little while.”
“Why can’t she stay at her own place? She hiding from the law or something?” The boy’s father laughed as he opened the fridge.
The boy didn’t answer. He watched his father. The man straightened and turned.
“This wouldn’t happen to be the girl run off from Splithorn Hill?”
The boy froze. His every output betraying him.
“You stupid little sonofabitch,” his father said. “She’s been staying here already, hasn’t she?”
“Yes, sir.”
The man’s head swung around on a swivel, and him wide-eyed a
nd arched up like a surprised cat.
“Where is she? Is she in here?”
Dwayne slung the door to the trailer open and called into the darkness.
“Do you know the likes of who’s hunting her?” He turned back to the boy. “Do you know what you done? They’ll be after us now. After me.”
“Nobody knows she was here.”
“I’ve heard stories, about what they do to folks,” the man said, ignoring the boy. “Stories it’s hard to even believe.”
“They’re true,” the girl said, walking up out of the darkness. “But Jonah’s right, nobody knows I’m here.”
She made the furthest stretch of ground lit by the porch light and stood.
The boy looked to her and then to his father and they were silent the three of them and each waiting on the other to make some discernment.
“You,” Dwayne said. And the boy watched as something strange and familiar passed between the girl and his father. But there was no time to assess, as his father was on the ground and moving toward River at a hurried pace.
“You trying to drag me and my son into whatever jackpot you’re caught up in?”
“No,” she said, without giving an inch. “The boy just gave me some water.”
“You’d better get the hell outta here and not say a damn word to anybody about this place or my son.”
“I was just leaving,” she said, calm. “I’ve got a car parked a few miles upriver.”
She looked at the boy.
“I don’t give a good goddamn what you got or where,” Dwayne said. “Just get out from here and don’t come back.”
The girl turned and disappeared down the trail, and when she was out of sight the man climbed back into the trailer and slammed the door.
“We could’ve help—” the boy started, but the man backhanded him and sent him sprawling onto the ground.
“I’ve got to get out from here, too,” his father said to no one. “Go down to the reservation and hide out.”
“At the casino?” the boy asked, pushing himself up on his elbows.
“What?”
“That’s where the casino is, right? At the reservation.”
“Yeah, that’s where the casino is. But that ain’t why I’m going. I’m going because you just put my name at the top of the most-wanted list belonging to a pack of savage sumbitches. So now I gotta get out.”
The boy stood, chest out, fists balled. “But I guess you don’t want me to go with you. I guess you’re not worried about me.”
“You’re just a kid. They ain’t gonna do nothing to you. It’s me they’ll really put a hurtin’ on. That’s why I’d better make Livingston before daybreak.”
The man threw a change of clothes in a duffel.
The boy stared at him, his chest rising and falling, his teeth grinding.
“What’d you bring me?”
“Huh?”
“For my birthday. You said you’d bring me back a present. What did you bring?”
The man lit a cigarette, then waved the smoke out of his eyes.
“I had you a good present, but there ain’t no way you’re getting it now, after the shit you just pulled.”
“You’re a liar.”
“What’d you just call me?”
“You’re a liar, and you’re going to gamble away all our money, and you don’t care anything about me.”
“Our money? You got a job you ain’t told me about? What’s this ‘our money’ shit?”
“I’m your son. You’re supposed to take care of me.”
“You’re a goddamned pain in my ass, is what you are. You got in your head you love that little tweaker bitch, huh?”
“Don’t call her that.”
“I’ll call her what she is.”
“She ain’t that.”
“You stupid little bastard. You gone and got cuntstruck by a goddamn meth head.”
“I said don’t call her that.”
“Or what, boy?”
The boy charged at his father and the man easily threw him to the side and jumped on top of him. The boy squirmed and fought to no avail, and the man laughed and slapped him once and then again, and the boy’s ears set to ringing and he could see two of everything.
“I hate you,” the boy screamed.
The man continued to laugh.
“You made her leave! You made Momma leave and now you’re making River leave and I fucking hate you!”
The man let the boy up and the two of them stood there, the boy crying and the man breathing heavy.
“You think your momma left because of me? Is that it?”
The boy didn’t answer.
“You think I run her off? Well, guess what? It was you she left, not me. Your momma, the selfish bitch that she is, couldn’t stand taking care of your whiny little ass. Didn’t have it in her to put anyone before her own self.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Believe what you want. But I’m the one that’s here. I’m the one that stayed. Made sure you had clothes, food, a place to sleep. You ungrateful fucking brat.”
The boy wiped his eyes.
“And I’ll tell you something else. You ever raise a hand to me again, I’ll put your ass out on the street. Let you see how good you really got it.”
The boy wept.
The man was breathing heavy. His hands on his hips. He sat in the recliner and opened a beer and turned up the volume on the television.
“I’m too tired to drive to Livingston tonight. I’ll go at daybreak. Now get the fuck out of here and go to your room. I don’t wanna hear jack shit from you the rest of the night.”
At 4:00 a.m. the boy had estimated the man was deep into a drunken sleep. He’d been listening to the snoring for an hour. He came out from his room and passed by the sleeping man in the recliner.
The boy opened the cabinet under the microwave and scanned the meager selection within. There were six cans of Vienna sausages, a package of saltine crackers, two cans of refried beans, a four-pack of peach cups, and a bag of off-brand potato chips.
He looked over his shoulder at his father and then emptied the cabinet into his bag, all save the potato chips which he left not out of kindness, but because he feared the bag would make too much noise in transit. He also opened the refrigerator and took from it the jug of water and two cans of RC Cola.
With his backpack full, the jug in one hand and his flashlight in the other, the boy stood at the door of the trailer and tried to steady his breath. He watched his father sleeping, mouth open and body slunked down in the recliner as if he were some ballooned puppet whose air had been let out. The boy thought about what his father had told him and decided it was a lie. It had to be a lie.
He opened the door and eased himself down to the ground. He looked up at his father, then slowly brought the door to its frame. He readied himself, then gave the door a strong push so that it would shut completely, and as soon as it did the boy was off and running across the yard and down the trail. He ran without looking back until he reached the river where the bank trail intersected his own. He turned northwest and followed along the bank, the water sloshing in the jug and the beam from his flashlight erratic across ground and sky alike, jerking as he ran.
Miles later, the boy reached the ravine and shined his light down and tracked the creekbed up the ridge and across. He spotted the car as the last hour of darkness was waning and the pale light breaking beyond the trees.
To the east, the dawn was hard at work pushing a sanguine sky overtop the vestiges of the falling black, and when at last the glowing corona of the sun did emerge, it looked as if the earth were sacrificing its very heart to some ancient luminary. As if the sunrise was not but an extraction of the world’s soul, or the thing most liken to a soul, and it was being uprooted from the horizon and trawled thr
ough the great firmament what separates the waters below from the waters above.
The boy made the car and whispered the girl’s name and peered inside and his heart sank with her absence.
“Jonah,” she hissed from the underbrush.
“It’s me,” he replied.
She stood from her crouch and walked forward and he dropped the light and ran to meet her. They stood in front of one another and what sentiment or inclination held within their eyes would not be spoken, and the girl looked at his bag and at his face and she knew the truth of things and what he’d done for her, and what he might yet do.
She put her arms around the boy and kissed his cheek.
“I’m so sorry, Jonah,” she told him. Soft. “So so sorry.”
She loosened the black cord she wore as a necklace and put it over his head.
“What’s that for?”
“I don’t know. For you.”
26
The morning sun didn’t hold, and soon the rain fell and gathered on the ground and in the trees, and the leaves weighed down and dripping, and the branches and plants sloped over like some great melting of the world. The squirrels looked out from their hiding holes, and the birds shook their wet feathers, and the deer moved silent toward higher ground. They moved in groups of threes and fours, like untrusting survivors of the apocalypse, stopping to lift their heads skyward and blow, trying their best to discern the true measure of their own safety in the storm.
John Curtis stood atop Splithorn Hill and pissed off the porch and looked west, the road to the cabin winding and falling away into a sea of green trees and gray mist, the fresh tire tracks deepening the ruts like mud-carved trenches from some studied war. Far to the south, some twenty miles, the highway ran hidden by the foliage, and to the north and east there was nothing save river and wilderness and, eventually, Redtown.
“You know,” he said. “I do believe I’m a hungover son of a gun.”
Cade stood on the far side of the porch, watching the steam from his coffee rise and swirl in no particular pattern, as if it wasn’t sure of its own place in the world.
“I ain’t too far behind you myself,” he said.
“I think the last time I drunk that much rot gut was right after we put an end to them Hitler-worshipping cocksuckers. Well, I guess I should say, after you put an end to ’em.”