River, Sing Out

by James Wade

  Cade slurped his coffee and said nothing.

  “You know, you killed that old boy, what’s his name?” John Curtis said.

  “Donaldson.”

  “Yeah, that old boy, Donaldson. And then that was it. That ended the whole damn thing.”

  The big man shrugged.

  “He was their boss,” Cade said. “Or grand wizard or führer or whatever the hell.”

  John Curtis laughed.

  “He was. He sure was. But there was something else about it. Reminded me of how folks talked about dropping the bomb on Japan. Something that savage, that inhumane—just seeing it, breaks a man.”

  The big man shifted his weight and sighed.

  “Alright, fine,” John Curtis said. “I know you don’t like talking about it. But you saved lives that day.”

  “Ole Donaldson might see it different.”

  “I don’t believe he sees anything but hellfire and brimstone these days.” John Curtis laughed and shook his head. “I never have understood that,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Cade asked.

  “How come they want to dress up like Germans and worship some dumb sumbitch who got his ass kicked by the USA.”

  “I don’t understand it neither.”

  “Well, I’d expect you not to understand it, you’re from the North.”

  The big man frowned.

  “Dakota ain’t the north, it’s just the cold South.”

  John Curtis was about to laugh again when something caught his eye.

  “Look there,” he said, motioning with his head toward the tree line, where the land sloped sharp from under them.

  Below, the deer were fleeing to higher ground, leaping as they went, over the fallen fences and scattered debris from long abandoned hovels, and they moved with the ease of a morning.

  The two men watched as the herd climbed up at an angle.

  “Graceful,” John Curtis said, “like a flock of birds on the clear sky. Fish in open water.”

  “Old man used to call ’em timber ghosts,” Cade said.

  “I like that. Of course, they aren’t ghosts. They’re as alive as you and me, and fighting just as hard to survive. Harder, I’d say. The river rises and up they come, leading the fawns to the safety of a higher ground they’ve never before set eyes on. It’s a pretty picture, wouldn’t you say? Good parenting, at least.”

  John Curtis reached inside the doorway and brought forth a 30.06 rifle and leveled it against his shoulder and Cade plugged his ears.

  “Good parenting,” John Curtis repeated as he pulled the trigger.

  The men walked together to retrieve the kill, the rest of the deer scattering at the sound of the gunshot. They tucked their jeans into the top of their boots and Cade carried a rope and John Curtis the rifle.

  “I hate this fucking weather,” Cade mumbled.

  “Can’t say man and nature aren’t connected to each other, somehow. Like when the skies go gray and can’t stop raining, makes folks like you sull up and get ornery. It’s a funny thing, if you ask me. But I wonder, if you was in a house without no windows, but the outside world was coming a proper flood, would you still feel ill-tempered about things?”

  “I imagine I would.”

  “’Cause of how we’re impacted by the weather?”

  “No, because I’m in a house with no goddamn windows.”

  This made John Curtis laugh too hard to walk, and Cade spit and wiped the rain from his eyes and water fell from his hat brim as he stood and waited for his companion to continue on.

  “You are one surly son of a bitch, you know that?” John Curtis said.

  “Heard it a time or two.”

  The big man seldom slept. When he did, he dreamed the story of his life, played out under an always dark sky. The war. The oilfields in Dakota. The drugs. The girl.

  But long before any of that, he was a child. There was a blue ball resting on the hardwood floor of a cabin somewhere deep in the Black Hills near the Wyoming state line. His mother was in the kitchen, he could see her through the doorway of the den. She stood over the sink, working at the dishes with a torn and tattered rag.

  She sang a song so sad it hurt. It filled him up with pain and sorrow and he was too young, far too young, to understand. The smell of rich, burning pine escaped the stove pipe and mixed with the sadness and it was all too beautiful, too overwhelming. He didn’t know what to do, what sounds to make to make it all stop. He looked at the blue ball and reached for it, out of some instinct, and grabbed it and sent it bouncing into the kitchen and against the back of his mother’s foot.

  She looked down, then wiped her hands on the rag and laid it to rest on her shoulder. She knelt, delicate, and retrieved the ball. She smiled at him, and he knew he’d done well. He knew he’d fixed things somehow.

  His brother, Rory, was born the following year. His father was laid off from the factory in Great Falls. His mother’s songs grew sad again.

  His father was a proud man. Proud of what, Cade did not know. His abuse was unpredictable. The slightest, often strangest thing would set him off. The whole world seemed crudely balanced on an uneven plain.

  And so it went, his life for a dozen years, until his brother whispered to him, “We gotta stop that sonofabitch.”

  “You’re dead if you try,” Cade told him.

  He did try. And he was dead. And Cade’s father in prison. And Cade’s mother never spoke again.

  When he was sixteen he hit a second growth spurt. He wasn’t small to begin with, but by his seventeenth birthday he’d gone from five ten to six six. And it wasn’t just his height. His arms filled out, his chest barreled, and his thighs grew so fast he had to buy jeans three sizes too large and cinch them at the waist with his belt.

  As his body grew, so too did his rage. The things long suppressed from his childhood began to surface. He found that violence came natural, and that most everyone was afraid of him. He relished that. Thinking of his own fear of his father, and how he’d left Rory to confront him alone, Cade promised himself he would never back down from anyone again.

  He fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, not out of some patriotic calling, but because he wanted to get as far away as possible. And also he imagined the army was the best place to unleash the rage that had swelled inside him.

  After the explosion, he never lost consciousness. He remembered every second of turning silently through the air, seeing what was left of the Humvee below him. The sand seemed far away, then closer, then he was laying on it, watching the fighting unfold sideways, as if the soldiers were running up the brown edges of some anti-earth.

  “C’mon, you big sumbitch,” a man said, and Cade felt himself being dragged across the desert.

  The man grunted and strained and cussed.

  “I hate to tell you this, bud, but there ain’t a purple heart in the world gonna make up for what they done to you.”

  “Hey,” Cade said in a sleepy voice. “Hey.”

  The man let go of Cade’s shoulders and pulled his handgun and fired it twice. The two men running toward them both crumpled to the ground like puppets with cut strings, limbs bending and sprawling in ways unnatural, as if they were tied to one another and tied to death.

  The man bent down again and grabbed Cade under his arms and tried to keep pulling.

  “I can walk,” Cade whispered.

  The man helped him to his feet and they staggered a few yards before the big man collapsed again.

  “Might just be me and you, brother,” the man said. “Your boys look to have been cleaned out. They’ll send in the big guns here pretty soon. You just stay with me.”

  The man managed to drag Cade some forty yards and into a sand bunker and there stood guard over him for four hours until a medical evac came. As he was loaded into the copter, Cade looked over at the man and his d
ark eyes and boyish face. Then, finally, he closed his eyes and slept.

  When the military was done with him, the oilfields came calling. Money and drugs. A reckless life. A distraction from those things buried deep. The things lived and the things lost.

  He started out taking pills to stay awake during his shifts. Then he started using on his off days. Pills to powder to crystal. He was a quick study. He followed the gas leaks and the drug trade from the Bakken formation up north to the Eagle Ford in Texas. When he hit the barracks in the Lone Star State, he whispered to the nearest hand about the availability of the drug.

  “Hey, y’all,” the old boy called out to any and everyone within earshot. “The new guy wants to know if anybody’s got that Tina.”

  Dozens of hands rose slowly, then the entire room filled with laughter.

  Slam sessions weren’t exactly secrets in the Dakotas, but they hadn’t been broadcast over the same frequencies he found in Texas. Then again, Texans were like that, he learned. Loud, brash, unapologetic. He liked it. They would laugh in the face of company officials—“the suits,” they called them—when they’d hold press conferences and announce zero-tolerance policies on meth and the like.

  Every time some kid would get his head stoved in or split in half by a motorized cable spool, they’d talk about making a big push on drugs. Ten percent of the workers tested positive for meth, but they laughed at that number, too. The drug only stayed in your system for a few days, and most everybody had a heads-up about the piss man coming around. Even then, they usually just picked the boys they figured would be clean anyway.

  The truth of it was, the state was getting rich and nothing was gonna get in the way of that. Nothing covers up cronyism, corruption, and failed economic policies like a never-ending flow of taxes from oil and gas revenue. A mainline injection into the state coffers. Cade took his share and would’ve kept on doing it if his past hadn’t come back to find him.

  Cade dreamed about him, the man who’d saved him in Iraq. Out there in the desert, the wind blowing cold, and he saw the man’s face, looked into his eyes.

  When he woke up the man was staring at him. The same boyish face and crooked teeth and the same black eyes. Dark and wild.

  “Hello, Cade,” he said. “You about ready to quit working for a living?”

  In the hours to come, John Curtis never asked what Cade had been doing in the years since Iraq, he never offered up his own past, or even told Cade how he’d come to find him in the first place. Instead, he laid out grand plans for a meth empire in East Texas that sounded too wild and farfetched to be real.

  “Be my general. My right hand. My brother,” he’d said, and Cade accepted.

  And, in time, all the crazy things John Curtis said had come true. They controlled everything. The land, the people, the law. He could walk into the courthouse, a known murderer, and no one would touch him. John Curtis was right, they were gods.

  Still, there was something missing, and he didn’t know what it was until he found the girl. She didn’t love him. He knew that. But it didn’t matter. She was scared and alone and he became her protector and it made him feel wanted, desired. She didn’t flinch when she touched it, and she didn’t care when he said he’d never be able to have a family. She never asked what happened and he never told her. Instead, she curled up into his arms every night and there they would sleep. Together. Until she ran out on him. Left him humiliated. Probably shacked up with somebody else. She said she didn’t mind, but he’d also wondered if she was lying. Of course she was, he thought. She’s only human.

  27

  In the years before he died, my father would complain about a great many things. Politicians, union busters, atheists, immigrants, gays, the heat, the cold, and the antenna reception. But what he complained about more than anything was breakfast.

  You can’t get a proper breakfast nowadays, he’d insist. Powdered eggs, microwaved bacon, biscuits that come in a can. Metaphor for the times, you ask me. I know you didn’t. Still. Everybody wants things fast. Somewhere along the way folks mistook “fast” for “good.”

  I know it’s every new generation that’s said to be ushering in the end times. I know it to be true in the eyes of my father. And who could argue? Man lived through the Great War, the height of the Depression, only to see two sons die fighting the Nazis, a daughter lost to polio before she was six years on earth, and a wife taken by the grief of it all. What does Armageddon look like, if not the stealing away and destruction of all we have?

  Of course, we won the war, cured the diseases, even went and put a man on the moon. Straightforward tasks, straightforward thinking. I try not to allow myself to become the angry old man my father turned into. But I can’t figure how to go about approaching the things that’s out there nowadays. Can’t find a soul to tell me what a war on drugs even looks like.

  I heard the state representative for Neches County—man by the name of Chalmers—say that we needed to stop the drug supply at its source. Said it was corrupting our youth and whatnot, and we needed to pull it up by the roots.

  It was a pretty speech and all, but he didn’t never say what the source was. Raiding cook trailers and throwing folks in jail? Maybe. Marching into Mexico and going to war with the cartels? I kindly doubt it. And there’s something else old Chalmers didn’t account for, and that’s men like John Curtis. What’s the source of a man like that?

  What I do know is that we do terrible things to our children, then wonder why it all turns out like it does. There’s talk of evil in the world, as if it were a lone thing come into being by no other means than fate. As if it were something we were owed without having worked for.

  But I don’t believe I can abide by that prescribing of evil or anything else. What we name evil is in truth just consequence, the result of things long connected, spooled out over the histories of men in ways we’re like to never understand. But that doesn’t mean we get to wash our hands of the blame. When it comes to the way the world turns, we ought not be allowed to claim ignorance as an alibi.

  I read about a boy who killed his own sister. Called the police and told them he’d killed her. They asked him how come he done it, and he said he had to. Said he’d been a drug mule for one of the cartels, and some money went missing. His handlers told him if he couldn’t come up with money, they were going to kidnap his sister, do all sorts of things to her. I guess he knew them to be men of their word, ’cause he drove straight to that poor girl’s house and shot her in the head.

  When the police asked him how come he didn’t just give back the money, the boy said he didn’t have it. Said he wasn’t the one who’d took it.

  Wasn’t long after that, I quit reading the paper.

  I think maybe the country has the same problem I do. Half of it just wanting to believe everything’s fine, the other half knowing it’s not. I’ve studied on it a great deal. In the end, it’s my estimation that the psychology of man has more to do with the world than anything else. It’s not politics or policy, or what’s best for the rich or best for the poor. It’s the ongoing battle between hope and fear. And it’s not near as simple as some might think. Like everything else that gets whittled down to black and white, it’s neither. It’s gray and nuanced and delicately balanced. But there’s no place for such things anymore. Makes a poor headline, and an even worse campaign slogan.

  Sometimes, I think if this is all there is, all that we’re working toward as a species, then there’s a not-all-together insignificant part of me wishing we’d gone the way of the dinosaurs. What creatures, dinosaurs. Gets a man to thinking, or at least it should. I don’t know what about. But something. The dinosaurs ought to make a man think about something.

  28

  “You sure as shit don’t learn your lesson the first time, do you?” the girl asked.

  They were walking through the rain, holding palmetto leaves overtop their heads.

 
; “Mr. Carson’s not like that. He’s a good man.”

  “No such thing as a good man.”

  “What about me?”

  “You’re still young,” she said. “Give it time.”

  It was late afternoon when they spilled out of the woods on the northwest side of Carson’s keep. The old man was in his always overalls and fussing with his cats over some grievance he believed called for redress.

  “I swear on my daddy’s grave I’ll skin these little bastards and use ’em as bait,” he said to the two of them, without offering a greeting.

  “You ought to quit feeding them,” the boy said. “I mean, if you don’t want them around.”

  “Who’s this?” the old man asked, pushing his head forward and squinting down at the girl.

  “This is my friend, River. We need a place to stay. Just for a few days.”

  The old man rocked back in the chair and nodded.

  “Mmhm. And I’m guessing your own house ain’t an option?”

  “Nossir.”

  The old man nodded, again.

  “Well. C’mon in, get out of this rain. I’ll make us a pot.”

  The three of them sat around the table and a number of cats stood outside the screen door yeowing until the old man shooed them away. They scattered off the porch and by the time he was back in his chair they’d reformed by the door and there appeared to be more of them than had started out.

  “Your daddy know where you’re at?” Mr. Carson asked.

  “Nossir.”

  “But he knows you’re gone?”

  “I imagine he’ll figure it out after a while.”

  “What about you, young lady?”

  “What about me?” the girl said.

  “Your people know you run off?”

  “I don’t have any people.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s just for a few days,” the boy repeated.

  “And then what?” the old man asked.