River, Sing Out

by James Wade

  “You see things how they are, I think. Like when you said god shouldn’t forgive people. Or when you were little and thought sending money made more sense than just praying. Everybody talks about forgiveness, you know. But it seems to me that’s just the best way for them to go on making the same mistakes. My daddy, he’d say sorry all the time. And I’d believe him. Believe that he was. And I think that made it worse. If I could have seen him for what he was, I think it would of eased things somehow. Not the beatings, maybe, but how I looked at it all.”

  “You’re a smart kid, you know that?”

  “I don’t think so. Other people think I’m weird.”

  “Yeah, well, other people are morons. And if the morons think you’re weird, that means you’re doing something right.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Trust me.”

  “I do.”

  “Come here.”

  The boy moved closer and the girl put her arms around him and there they slept in one another’s embrace.

  39

  The office was on the top floor of the only four-story building in Neches County. The receptionist did not make eye contact with John Curtis but turned to watch him walk through the dark mahogany doors.

  Inside were hung the busts of wild game, antelope, moose, and bear, and shaggy-haired sheep with great curved horns. Each of them positioned by the taxidermist to look as if they were by some troubling feat of necromancy half alive, immobile but aware. There were tall green plants of all species in the corners of the room and along the back wall of glass, and the floor was a dark tile made to look wood.

  Behind the desk at the far side of the room a man in his late fifties with slicked gray hair poured two glasses of scotch and his eyes nearly closed completely when he smiled.

  “Mr. Curtis. Come have a seat.”

  John Curtis stood in front of the bear and looked up at it.

  “You like that? Big fucker. Took him from two hundred yards. Up in Canada, somewhere along the Yukon River.”

  “These bears used to be right here in Neches,” John Curtis said. “Gone, like so many other things.”

  “Well, you know what hasn’t ever been here? Elephants. Headed to Botswana next month to bag one of those bastards. Biggest game you can take in the entire world.” The lawyer then frowned, as if he’d just thought of something disheartening. “I don’t know where I’m gonna put the fucking thing. Anyway, what brings you in?”

  John Curtis turned to the man.

  “I’d like to turn myself in.”

  The man waited for more.

  “Talk to the feds. Tell them I’ll give them everything they could ever want.”

  “On the cartels?”

  “On the cartels, the local law enforcement, the corrupt officials, the DA. All of it.”

  “Well. Am I out of my mind here to ask why?”

  “I want protection.”

  “From what?”

  “Anything.”

  “What, like witness protection?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I’m sure it distresses you, but you’ll have to find another special client to fund all”—John Curtis looked around the room and the covenant of stuffed corpses—“this.”

  The lawyer nodded.

  “I’ll do all I can for you. You know that. But if I’m in some kind of jackpot here, I need to know about it.”

  “We’ll give the feds their trophies, then you can go kill your elephants and never hear from me again.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening. Is somebody threatening you? Does this have to do with that local boy who got knifed at the ballgame?”

  “You’ve always been a good lawyer. One who knows when to ask questions and when to stay quiet. Talk to the feds. I’ll get my affairs in order.”

  “Well. Alright then, if you say so.”

  “I do.”

  John Curtis knocked back the scotch and set the glass carefully back onto the table.

  “Whatever arrangements are made,” he said, “make sure they’re for two people.”

  40

  The boy woke and watched the fire, the wind harassing it, the flames twisting and drawing down, diminished with each gust and then rising back in full and stronger than they were before. The breeze would give out, then collect itself and be back nipping at the fire, two elements at play in some game never won.

  After the rain, there seemed that night more stars than any one sky could properly accommodate, and the moon thinned itself in the presence of such celestial arrangements, and the boy stared up at the heavens and wondered about them, and wondered about other things, and in such ruminations he found himself, as he often did, thinking of his mother. Of all mothers.

  “You think there’s aliens up there somewhere?” the girl asked, stirring from her sleep. Her voice was soft and warm and so close by. For a time the boy sat in silence in the question’s wake and was happy to feel the girl beside him.

  “Maybe,” he said at last. “Do you?”

  “Shit. Who knows.”

  “If there are, I hope we don’t ever find them.”

  “Me too. Poor fuckers.”

  The fire faded. The powerful flames giving birth to a short-lived empire, enveloping all they touched, eating themselves from the inside out until there was nothing left to consume. Until the once bright promise of progress collapsed into ash and ember, and there burned out like the billions of stars watching over it.

  When the boy’s eyes finally rested, there came a haunting sleep wherein he was carried by giant hawks into the night sky. The great birds of prey flew beyond the known galaxy, navigating between the light of the furthest stars. The boy’s arms outstretched toward the glow of such ethereal orbs, but each time he came close to touching their truth, the light before him would flicker and die, and soon the universe held within it an infinite darkness. He felt the hawks release their grip and the boy was falling through an eternal emptiness, and it was from this terror he did awake to the sound of distant thunder.

  The thunder came before the rain, rumbling above the earth like a loaded cart passing along an uneven road, jostling the ground and those things set upon it as if the whole world was not but a china cabinet made to rattle.

  They paddled through the rain and the boy’s arms were tired and so too the girl’s and neither complained. At the spillway the two portaged the canoe and the boy took from his backpack the bag of jerky and they squatted on the high bank and ate and watched the water as it fell and crashed from the upper level to the lower.

  “Sure is something,” the girl said.

  “It used to scare me, when I was little.”

  “It don’t no more?”

  “No.”

  “How come? It still looks scary to me.”

  “Too many worse things, I guess.”

  They drug the canoe through the mud and mosquito ferns, through pale stands of river birch what grew above the gamma grass, water clovers, and big-footed burheads with their heavy, nodding leaves.

  The rain fell heavy and knocked balls of moss and sweet gums from the trees. The boy hacked at a dwarf palmetto and pulled it from the ground and held it over her head as the water poured off its sides.

  She laughed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nature’s umbrella.”

  “Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes.

  They strung up the tarp between two short laurel trees and slept beneath it to keep off the rain while they slept.

  In his dream, the boy followed the panther down a trail covered with leaves and the leaves were dead and turned to ash beneath his feet. For most of the dream they walked, the panther stopping at times to look behind him, ensuring the boy was still there. He was. They followed the path until it r
eached the river and there they turned along the bank and followed the water’s flowing. Night fell in the dream, and the boy lay down to sleep, and he saw himself sleeping in the dream, and with such came a panicked confusion, and for a moment he thought he might wake—either in the dream or from it, and who could tell which. But the panther lowered his head and nudged the boy and the boy felt the wet of its nose, its short fur, the warmth of its breath. The boy rose in the dream and followed on in the twilight. The dream stars were in all ways magnified. They were legion across the sky and burning with an intensity found only in the unreality of the world.

  They came at last to the head of a great waterfall and the mist of the pounding water rising like smoke, like the remnants of some steaming geyser wherein lay the path to the hollow earth beneath our own—a hell-like landscape of molten renderings and crouched, half-human creatures, blind in the darkness with elongated limbs and clicking tongues. The dreaming boy could see them, but the boy in the dream did not. Instead, he followed the panther to the water’s edge and looked down into the mist and quickly wiped at his own eyes.

  At the bottom of the falls where should have been some tranquil pool, the boy saw the entire world inverted. The water fell straight down until it reached the mirror image of itself, a stream falling upward from a ledge even further below. Another bank and shore and starlit sky. And another boy, the same boy, staring up.

  In the dream the boy held up his hand and the boy from below likewise in a perfect synchronizing. They remained there, upon their mirrored ledges, staring at one another, at themselves. The overbright stars falling from each sky in tandem. The boy below abruptly jerked his head away from the upturned waterfall and looked behind him. The dreaming boy could feel his fear.

  He awoke sweating in the darkness. He shook the girl awake.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Something’s coming.”

  It moved through the underbrush with loud announcement and the boy put himself between the girl and the coming danger and they were still and quiet in their watching. There were five of them that emerged, snorting and grunting, with black matted hair and great humped backs. They each tore at the ground, rooting for food, two with curved tusks, yellow bone caught in the low light of the moon beams.

  “Hogs,” the boy whispered.

  The smallest among them caught scent of the backpack and trotted toward it, squealing.

  “Hey,” the girl shouted and stepped from behind the cover of the oak. The boy tried to pull her back but she wrenched free.

  “Shoo,” she said, and the young pig squealed again, and the rest of the passel raised their heads and commenced to growling.

  “Get. Go on,” the girl continued.

  The largest boar lumbered forward and stamped at the mud. The girl was broadside, worrying at the smaller hog. The big beast made his charge and the girl didn’t see until it was too late and her eyes doubled in size at the sight of his approach. She raised her arms and turned away from the attack, but it never came. Instead, two gunshots and the dead boar skidded the last few yards and lay at her feet.

  The boy held the pistol with both hands, the barrel smoking. His chest rose and fell in rapid succession. The other hogs went crashing through the woods from whence they’d come, the small one squealing after them.

  The boy looked at the gun in his hands as if it had acted of its own agency, as if he were merely the instrument.

  “Holy shit,” the girl said, then she began laughing until she was breathless. “You just saved my life. Again.”

  “Is it dead?” the boy asked, still unmoved from his firing stance.

  “He’s dead, alright. Good shooting.”

  The boy nodded.

  “You want to cut off a tusk or anything?” the girl asked.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. For, like, a trophy or something.”

  “No. Let’s just get out of here. The sun will be up soon.”

  “Hey, you don’t feel bad about this do you? That thing would’ve killed me.”

  The boy nodded.

  “I know,” he said. “But he was trying to protect the little one. He was being a good dad.”

  “Jonah. You didn’t have a choice. You did a good thing. You saved me.”

  The boy was tearing up. The girl came to him.

  “Hey,” she said, taking his face in her hands, “look at me. You saved me. You saved me.”

  She kissed him on either cheek.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The boy nodded and took a deep breath and tucked the gun back into his pants.

  The hog lay lifeless, tongue lolling, soaking in the mud and the blood and the coming dawn. Buzzards began to circle.

  They continued up the river and were all day paddling and into the dusk. The rain was on and off and on again, and at night the North Star was the only thing in the sky save thin gray clouds. The boy watched it and each time he stared at it straight on, the star seemed to dim, as if it were shy or scared or had some other notion that kept it from wanting to be seen true.

  They drug the canoe onto the bank and owls called a warning to them or other living things and the frog song came up heavy from the river in trilling tones. The night was alive and the boy knew such nights and was not afraid. The girl startled at each new sound, and the boy would name the sound to her and tell her it was alright, and soon she had taken his hand and huddled close to him. He held thorn branches back for her to pass and told her to watch her head when limbs hung low in their path. From time to time the boy would pause and look toward the river and look toward the night sky and then continue on and the girl never questioning.

  The ground before them began to slope into an oft-flooded creek bed, and the boy stopped near the top of the ridge and walked in a short circle and said they’d make camp here. He laid a blanket and told the girl to wait while he gathered wood for a fire.

  She had to cut him loose, but she couldn’t. He was her lifeline in so many ways. And he was kind to her. More kind than any human had ever been. How could she send him away? How could she say goodbye to something she’d always wanted?

  The spotlight from the johnboat came forward to cut the dark and the eyes of frogs shining back at it like spectators to their own executioning. The trolling motor cut and hummed to a stop and the boat veered toward the bank and a shadowed figure crouched over the bow as if adorning one of the great warships of old.

  “What are they doing?” River asked.

  “Frog giggin’,” the boy said.

  The boat glided to the bank and the front of the vessel ran ashore and in the light they saw the long pole with three prongs affixed to the end and on the prongs a bleeding bullfrog. The man with the pole swung it around and extended it toward the boat’s driver who grabbed the frog and pulled it free then proceeded to twice smash the creature against the side of the boat before tossing its body in a blood-stained bucket.

  “That’s sad.”

  “Shit. They’re getting out.”

  The two men climbed from the boat and pulled it half ashore and tied it to a thick cypress root.

  “I’ll get us a fire going,” one said to the other. “You start working on skinning them legs.”

  “How come it is I’m always the one getting my hands covered in blood and frog shit?”

  “Well, there’s probably a lifetime of answers to that question, Bud, but the short of it is that we’re in my boat.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’m the captain and you’re the first mate. You do what I say, and I say get to work on them legs.”

  “Fine.”

  “How about an ‘Aye aye, Captain’?”

  “How about go fuck yourself.”

  The man laughed at his companion and turned on a flashlight and began walking toward where the boy and girl knelt hiding.


  “Shit,” the girl whispered. “He’s gonna see us.”

  She turned to the boy but he was already rising and walking into the man’s light.

  “Y’all out giggin’ frogs?” the boy asked and the man shouted something indiscernible and clutched at his own chest.

  “Who the hell’s out there?”

  “Two of us,” the boy said. “Me and my friend. She’s a girl.”

  The man turned and looked into the darkness as if it might offer him some further explanation. When it did not, he turned back to the boy.

  “Well, what in the hell are you doing?”

  “Camping.”

  “Camping?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You’re a lying little shit. You ain’t camping.”

  “How come?”

  “How come you’re lying?”

  “How come you to say we ain’t camping?”

  “Son, I been running this river for going on fifty years. There’s campgrounds aplenty, but not anywhere close to here.” The man shone his light at the girl who held her arm up over her eyes. “Plus, you got one backpack and a gunny sack between the two of you; no tent, no bedrolls, and you look like you ain’t had a proper meal in your whole life. That, and your friend there is hiding in the goddamn bushes.”

  “Well.”

  “I don’t need to know. Just c’mon and help me build a fire and y’all can at least eat a bite with me and Bud.”

  “You sure that’s alright?”

  “I said it was, didn’t I?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’m Waylon,” the man said, sticking his hand out.

  “Jonah.”

  “Alright, Jonah, let’s get us a cookfire going.”

  The girl watched with morbid curiosity as the man called Bud knelt to dress the bullfrogs. He took a paring knife and cut off the feet, then sliced around the belly. He wiped the blade on his pants leg and set it aside. He picked up a pair of pliers and grabbed hold of the cut skin with the nose of the tool, then he set about ripping the skin from the tissue, steadying the carcass with his free hand.