River, Sing Out

by James Wade

  The old man touched the tips of all his fingers together, moving them back and forth like a spider on a mirror.

  “He’s a good boy,” he said. “You’re right, I do care about him. And we both know this ain’t what’s best for him.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you? Jonah is a good boy. He loves you, I think.”

  “He’s too young to understand all that.”

  “Is he? In your estimation, who loves more pure, a child or some sour old bastard like me? You think love is more understood with age? Hell, you think love is something to be understood at all? No matter, girl. You know the right thing to do. It’ll hurt him, but it’ll be best in the long run.”

  “He ain’t gonna listen.”

  “He will, if you say what needs to be said.”

  37

  John Curtis stood contrary his reflection in the bathroom mirror, his skin vibrating in the sanguine glow of the red bulbs above, his eyes dilated to total darkness, like sabled spheres inked out of a great black lake. He stared at the glass and the figure within and he saw there some antipode of his own existence, an obversion of himself come forward from this walled-off counterworld to take measure of the calamity without.

  He took a breath in and held it. He opened his mouth and flexed his jaw muscles and leaned closer to the mirror and looked doubtful, as if he were unsure which iteration of himself was the mimic and which was the truly begotten. He breathed out.

  He crushed the crystal between the counter and the blunt end of his knife handle and snorted it and felt in his pocket for the tuft of hair.

  “How is it, Mac, that one donkey-fucking cartel can chop the heads off another, then turn around and decide I’m the enemy. As if my seeking out a business partnership has broken some sacred rule of the Virgin. He was a good boy. A nervous boy, but good. I sent him off to his death. To be slaughtered by the bean eaters as my proxy. Send me a fucking message. Fine. Message fucking received. But now, Mac, they’ll get to see what horrors I might unleash. Were that you were here to tell them, eh? Were that you were fucking here.”

  He moved the powder closer together with his blade and snorted the rest.

  “And the feds,” he banged the counter with his fist, “dissatisfied with my gift. They want dogmen, I give them dogmen, but they ask for more. No.” He shook his head. “They don’t ask. They demand more. They come after me and my operation. My dogs. Poor Claude. They overstep their bounds at every turn. I could burn their government to the ground if I so chose. But I don’t, Mac. I choose something else altogether.

  “Mexicans on one front, feds on the other. Two wars. And in between it all, the girl. And the girl has become my only concern.”

  John Curtis and Cade stood over the kitchen table and both staring at the flickering candle like generals of some long-entrenched war, hoping for a mystic sign in whatever portents lay before them.

  “The boys know about Dustin?”

  Cade nodded.

  “They read about it in the paper.”

  “Since when do they take the fucking paper?”

  “Copy laying out on the counter at the pawn shop.”

  “You get the guns?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Boys to shoot ’em?”

  “Working on it.”

  “Work faster. Send word to the oilfields. I’ll double their pay.”

  “You expecting that much trouble?”

  “The Mexicans won’t come up here and get their hands dirty. They can’t afford it. Start coming this far into the country and leaving bodies, every deal they’ve ever made with the feds will be worthless. One of two things will happen. They’ll either start a proxy war, maybe partner up with somebody else looking to take us out.”

  “Redtown?”

  “That’d be my bet.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “They’ll just kill me and get it over with.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “Can’t say. It took some balls to do that to Dustin. Leave him to be found by a fucking janitor like that. It gives me pause.”

  “You ought to hole up on the Hill for a while. Let me and the boys handle things on the ground.”

  “You’re a good man, Cade. Or a good soldier, at least. But there’s something more important than all of this.”

  “The girl?”

  “Word gets out that I let that much product disappear, nobody south of the border will want to have anything to do with us.”

  “Maybe that ain’t such a bad thing.”

  John Curtis spit.

  “You know how ancient kings would stop rebellions?”

  Cade was quiet.

  “They’d never let ’em start,” John Curtis said. “They’d always have some of their own people infiltrate whatever groups they thought might be a threat.”

  “Spies?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Alright.”

  “You know Jim Haskins?”

  “One of the new players out in Redtown, ain’t he?”

  “That’s right.” John Curtis grinned.

  “He’s ours?”

  “Been keeping an eye on things for me. Had a little news he figured we’d be interested in. Said the crew he runs with is setting up for a big buy in a couple days.”

  “Is it her?”

  John Curtis nodded.

  “You get the troops together, we’ll go up there and preempt the Mexicans, get our meth back, and make a quick twenty thousand in the process.”

  “They’ll be a good bit of blood,” the big man said. “Would’ve been nice to have the dogs with us.”

  John Curtis nodded again.

  “You know what they do with the dogs in raids like that?”

  Cade shook his head.

  “They kill ’em. Just put them all down. Threat to the public or something, they say.”

  “Save a dog, just to kill it on your own terms?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t make much sense.”

  “Never does.”

  38

  He stared out at the morning as if he’d been asked in that moment to take measure of the world and all that it held. As if one day god would wipe clean the earth’s surface and the boy alone might be tasked with putting everything back in its place.

  He’d heard the ice was melting at the North Pole. And that it was making the oceans rise, like a body in a bathtub. His science teacher had rigged up a demonstration at the school. He’d brought in an old soak tub and filled it with water, then he’d give each of the kids an ice cube. One by one they’d dropped the ice in the tub, but wasn’t hardly nothing happening. To really make a difference it takes something big, the teacher told them; and then he jumped in, clothes and all, and sent the water spilling over the sides. The kids got a kick out of it, making learning fun and all that.

  The boy thought about it. About how everybody had laughed, and about how the teacher dried off with a towel and had himself a change of clothes for after class. He also thought about all that water that had come over the side and onto the floor, and about how somebody had to come clean it up.

  The same teacher showed the class a video on the computer of a satellite image of the earth during each season, showed the green parts expand in the spring and summer, then shrink in the fall and winter. It was all sped up and digitized, but the boy could see what was happening. The world was breathing. In and out and in again, as if drawing to it a scarce strength, summoning from the frailty of the universe a life force from which we all might be fed or starved or, perhaps, divided—cleaved and quartered and partitioned by some arcane appraisal wherein one existence holds more value than another.

  He stood and walked toward a grove of trees, the dogwood flowers withered on
their branches, the white and pink petals giving way to green shade leaves in the summer. He looked upon the tree and all its mythos. The blossoms mirroring the same holy cross whereon Christ did meet his preordained death. And the cross itself constructed of the very wood from which the flowers grew.

  The boy ran his hand along the bark. He felt the girl behind him.

  “You alright?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “I like your haircut. Terrance did a good job.”

  The boy blushed.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “For our big river adventure? You bet.”

  He turned away from her. She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Hey. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of what might happen.”

  “I won’t let anything happen to you. And who knows, the way things are going, the flood might get us all anyway.”

  “That supposed to make me feel better?”

  “I don’t know. It might be nice to die with other people, instead of alone,” she said.

  “I think everyone dies alone, even if they’re with other people.”

  The rains had oversaturated the earth and the already green flora was turning a sickly, drowning yellow. The forest stank of a wet dying, mosquitos and gnats and water bugs swarmed entire acres. The algae was thick upriver and it seemed to hold position even as the water moved beneath it.

  The boy sat the rear, the girl up front. They paddled through the scum water, against the low current.

  “You ever wonder how it is fish came to be in the river?” the girl asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, how did the first fish get in this river? They don’t have channel cats in the ocean, so how’d they get here?”

  The boy considered the question, his mind full of reckonings, but none to his liking.

  “I guess I don’t know.”

  “Seems like we ought to have an answer for that one.”

  “Seems like.”

  “Maybe it’s god, after all.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You never answered.”

  “I did. I said I don’t know how they got here.”

  “Not that. You never told me if you believe in god,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Well?”

  “I think . . .” The boy’s mouth twisted. “I think it doesn’t make any sense for there to be a god. But it doesn’t make any sense for there to not be.”

  “That’s not much of an answer.”

  “I guess I’m still deciding.”

  “Fair enough. But if I die before you, I’m gonna come back and tell you the truth.”

  “You’d haunt me?”

  “Hell yeah. I’d haunt the shit out of you. Make sure you don’t turn into just another asshole.”

  “I’ll already be old by then,” the boy laughed. “By the time you die.”

  Further upriver the soil turned to deep sandy loams, then hard red clay, the elevation growing, the world rising up away from the sea. Far to the west, the earth stretched and the timber thinned and the prairie land was green and plenty, fed by the Brazos River Valley. Further still sat the Edwards Plateau, its mesquite-covered hills reaching hundreds of miles before giving way to the high desert of the Trans-Pecos. Toward the dawn the land stayed thick with pine, crossing all the way to the Sabine and into the low swamplands and deltas of Louisiana.

  The boy had seen neither expanse, east nor west, and the spillway marked the furthest upriver he’d ever traveled. The waters were calmer here and the forest somehow quieter as the pounding of the spillway faded into the once before.

  They docked the canoe along the bank near a grove of yaupon hollies sprung up in a sunlit clearing, and the girl sighed and bent forward to touch her toes and then stretched to either side. The boy watched her.

  “Quit staring,” she said, but she smiled and the boy blushed and walked from the clearing into the woods to check the area around them.

  He came first to a small stand of cottonwoods and slipped through the unmanicured vegetation below and emerged into a field of alamo switchgrass that had grown in time to reach the same height as the boy. He stepped out among it, wary of snakes, and walked until he reached the center of the clearing where rested a great stone altar, unmoved these last ten thousand years.

  The boy ran his hand along the shale rock, formed by the deposition of mud and clay and born to an arcane planet whereon no one and nothing could foretell what violence would result from man’s inability to understand—understand one another, understand purpose, understand himself.

  The rock was made warm by the sun and by the ancient soul still within it, and the boy felt there the spirit of the place, the dark ritual more timeworn than even the rock itself. The sacrifice of blood and body to some long-forgotten god of war, the clashing of tribes, the ebb and flow of an eternal tide, pushing and pulling at the very existence of these cousined creatures, forcing evolution with the merciless hand of death.

  The boy withdrew his hand and shuddered and even in the absence of wind the top grass surrounding him began to move back and forth, and he could hear the drumbeat heavy and slow as it kept the march for some ghostly army of almost men, spectered soldiers making their way through a buried past.

  They made camp with no fire and the rain fell and the boy counted the days in his head and wondered if the world was stuck in some infinite loop, a scratched record, the needle wobbling back and forth inside a gash, playing the days over in cosmic repetition. Or. Perhaps. The earth readying itself for the next great cleansing.

  The boy imagined a future where gardens were grown on boats, houses built floating, and those left living cared for one another as if they were the last of their kind.

  He held the tarpaulin on one side and the girl held the other, the rain beating down upon the two of them and the world alike. At the onset of the storm the raindrops made circles in the tea-colored water, but when the winds rose and the sheets of rain fell in earnest there was created just above the surface a fine mist, and the river itself appeared dark and dimpled before them.

  The next morning they sat in some unlearned silence, and the sun missing from above, lost to the cover of clouds and the gathering storm. The wild rye and bluestem bowed to one another with each breath of wind, the blackgum and live oak leaves whispering across the bottomlands of things past and things still to come.

  “I’m gonna go see if I can find any wood that’s not completely drowned.”

  The girl nodded.

  The girl rose and walked to the water and sat as she had before with her feet half-submerged. She looked out at the river as the first of the rain began to fall, creating scattered ringlets across the surface. Each ripple representing a single drop, growing and spreading until it lost itself in the great body, coalescing with fate and circumstance to become something else altogether.

  The girl closed her eyes and smelled the rain and when she opened them again the skies opened as well and the rain fell in earnest and the only sound was static, a hushed accommodation between the storm and the trees. Then lightning from the west, a fracturing of the coruscated sky, and the girl gazed upward and caught the last gasp of purple and pink glow behind the clouds. The following thunder echoed through her, tensing her shoulders. She steadied herself. The rain soaked her face and hair, and she felt it and felt the strength therein. She stood and took first one step into the river and then another. The water reached her waist and she stopped and again closed her eyes. She rested both hands overtop her stomach, fingers interlocked in a powerful symmetry.

  The world around her flashed and rumbled, the life of the river swelling, the life within her coalescing with her own soul and in an instant she recognized the wealth of danger long-harbor
ed by the miracle of existence. The river ran faster. It pulled at her. She opened her eyes and saw the world anew and fled for the bank.

  Somewhere in the distance a single shot sounded and the girl froze and called for the boy. She heard the crashing of underbrush and the sound of the storm and she readied herself for the threat she knew was coming.

  The boy burst from the thicket dragging two large branches. The girl rushed to him and hugged him and kissed his face and the boy dropped the wood and embraced her tight.

  “You heard it?” he asked.

  “I thought you’d been shot.”

  “I thought the same about you. Probably just somebody using the storm as cover to kill a deer out of season. Doubt there’s many game wardens running around in this weather.”

  “I’m okay,” the girl said. She pulled away, as if she were embarrassed of something.

  “You’re soaking wet.”

  “Went for a dip.”

  “Well, if I’d known you were that crazy, I would’ve brung more wood.”

  “Always taking care of me,” the girl said, and there was a sad realization in her voice.

  “You don’t make it easy.”

  “I know,” she said, soft.

  They sat with their backs against a red oak and the girl made a small fire and the boy held the skillet overtop it and shook cornmeal from the bag and mixed it with water until it was a warm mush.

  The boy pinched a dollop between his fingers and blew on it and popped it into his mouth and chewed.

  “Could use some salt,” he said, “or syrup, one.”

  “At least it’s not eggs,” the girl said and stuck her hand into the pan.

  “You’re getting better at this whole roughin’ it thing,” he told her.

  “You’re a good teacher.”

  The boy blushed.

  “Why do you like me so much?” the girl asked him.

  “What?”

  “Is it just cause you’re a thirteen-year-old boy and I’m an older girl with tits?”

  “No. I mean, there’s more.”

  “What then?”

  The boy stopped eating and leaned back against the tree.