by James Wade
He noticed the girl watching. He smiled.
“Like taking his little ole pants off, ain’t it?”
River frowned.
“I’m Bud,” he said, dropping the frog and reaching out his hand.
The girl looked at the hand, covered in guts and blood.
“Oh, got some toad juice left over,” Bud said, grinning.
She swallowed and walked toward Jonah and the other man.
The four of them sat the fire and the men were both large-nosed and large-bellied and they drank heavily from a bottle with no label.
“Where you kids from?” Waylon asked, turning the frog legs in the pan.
“I’m from down the river,” the boy said. “She’s from Louisiana.”
“Whereabouts downriver?”
“Just near Hog Creek.” The boy hesitated. “My daddy’s Dwayne Hargrove.”
“Christ Almighty.”
“You know him?”
“Yeah, I know that no-good rascal. Used to try and get me to loan him money at the Indian casino.”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“So, what then? You run off?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, hell, I don’t blame you. I reckon running off and living like outlaws is just about a rite of passage around here.”
“You know,” Bud said, “I’m part Injun.”
“Shut up, Bud.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Hell, everybody says that. We can’t all be part Indian.”
“Why not? They was here before everybody else.”
“I don’t know. I just mean, you always hear how so-and-so’s aunt done tracked the family back to George Washington or Pocahontas or the Mayflower or something.”
“Naw, it ain’t like that. My great-great-granddaddy was a Caddo Chief.”
“My ass.”
“I swear to god.”
“Y’all don’t listen to him. He lies like a cheap watch.”
“Fine. Y’all don’t want to hear the damn story, that’s just fine.”
“Naw, go on tell it, Chief Bud.”
“Keep laughing.”
“Hell, I’m sorry, son, I’m just messin’ with you.”
“Keep on.”
“Alright, alright, I’m done. Go on and tell your story.”
“It’s done ruined.”
“Aw, now, don’t sull up. Tell it.”
“Fine. But not a word from you.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Alright. Well. All this land here used to be part of the Caddo Nation. They weren’t like the warring tribes you hear about from out on the plains or nothing like that. Sure, they got in a scrape or two, but for the most part, they were a peaceful bunch. Well, one day, back before there was ever such a thing as a white man, the chief’s wife gave birth to four boys; only, they weren’t like normal babies. They had four arms and four legs each, and they grew double their own size every night. The rest of the people begged the chief and his wife to kill the creatures, but they wouldn’t do it. So everyone watched as these things got bigger and bigger and started terrorizing the village. One night, the four brothers stood with their backs all to one another and by morning they’d grown together into one four-headed monster. Their arms reached out for miles and they would scoop people up and eat them, bones and all.
“Finally, a powerful medicine man snuck deep into the woods and had a secret meeting with the Great Turtle. The Great Turtle told the man in order to kill this monster, the whole world must be sacrificed. But the Turtle also said for the medicine man not to worry, because in time it would be reborn. The man thought about this and he agreed it must be done. So Turtle told him, when you see the giant reed begin to grow, take your wife and climb inside.
“Some days later, with all the earth being tortured by the four brothers who became one, the medicine man saw a reed growing larger than all the others. He took his wife and they hid inside of it as it grew. And as soon as they were inside the skies darkened and began to rain and the rain lasted until all of the world was covered in water. The monster drowned and when it did the rain stopped and water receded and the man and his wife came out from the reed. But the earth was barren and dead and the wife asked her husband, What will we do? The husband told her of Great Turtle’s promise and so they went to sleep in the mud and when they awoke there were green plants all around them. They slept a second time and when they opened their eyes there were animals eating the plants. And so the earth returned to them, but with one big difference. The monster had been washed away out to sea somewhere, but when it first sunk, all them arms and legs and everything had made a bunch of ruts in the ground. The water filled ’em all up, and—”
“And that became the very river we’re on this evening.”
“Goddamnit, Waylon.”
“What? Hell, it’s all horseshit. Why didn’t they just shoot about a thousand arrows into the big sumbitch? It don’t make no sense.”
“It’s a story, it ain’t got to make sense.”
“The Shawnee got a different story. I like theirs better. Something about a water panther.”
“You don’t even know the story.”
“I know it’s better’n yours.”
“I liked the story,” the boy said.
“See there, a man who knows a good tale when he hears it. You young’uns want some frog legs?”
They looked at one another, the boy and girl, and both declined.
“Kids these days. They don’t know fine cuisine when it’s right under their nose.”
“I gotta pee,” the girl whispered and rose from the fire and walked into the woods.
Bud stood and walked the opposite direction and began to rap the pan against a tree.
“What’ll you take for the girl?” Waylon asked the boy, leaning forward toward the fire.
“Take for her?”
“You know, for me and my partner yonder to give her a spin.”
“I wouldn’t take nothing. She’s not like that.”
“Well, see, I happen to know that she is. Whether you know it to be true or not, doesn’t make much count to me.”
“You stay good and far away from her,” the boy said. “And I won’t kill you.”
“Kill me?”
“I believe you heard me.”
“You little shit. I was trying to make a fair offer. And here we done offered you food and a fire. We could just gut your skinny ass and throw you in the river. Take her off with us when we leave.”
“You try something like that, you’ll find your life’s worth of blood on the ground, and a hole in your chest where it come out of.”
The boy raised the pistol.
If the man was worried, he didn’t show it. But he stayed crouched by the fire as the boy backed away into the woods.
“Let’s go,” he said to the girl. She’d just locked in the button on the jean shorts.
“What?”
“We’re getting back on the river.”
“Right now? What happened?”
“Just get in,” he said, already shoving the canoe into the water. “And tell me if anybody follows us.”
They navigated the unnatural inlet through mud and floating wood until the river opened up.
“Tell me what the hell is going on,” the girl said, once they’d made the middle.
“Those men were thinking they might do something bad to us.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we had to go. They would’ve stolen the backpack.”
“They didn’t even know what was in it.”
“They would’ve figured it out.”
The girl stared at him.
“Fine, don’t tell me. But I’m going to sleep, so don’t flip
us over.”
The boy watched as the girl laid her blanket in the bottom of the canoe. She took off her shirt and balled it up and put it under her head where she lay curled in the fetal position. The boy paddled slow for a long while and kept watch for movement or lights along the bank. They passed the occasional cabin with a night lamp strung up, but mostly the night was black and the world shapeless, as if they were adrift on the edge of a lost planet where light could never reach, where the shadows of other worlds had gathered and faded into one another, obscuring even themselves.
41
The morning was wet and cool for the season. Still, the old man was sweating by the time he’d pulled on his chest waders, fastening the straps over his shoulders. He backed the trailer end just past the lip of the water and loosed the johnboat from the trailer and dallied a rope over the dock post and pulled the truck forward until the trailer had risen from the river. He put on the parking brake, killed the engine, and climbed out. He walked a little ways into the water and steadied himself against the dock and swung one leg into the boat, caught his balance, and then swung the other. He untied the rope from the bow and left it to hang down from the dock post, then pushed off from the dock and started the trolling motor.
He was out of breath and cursing his knees, but he needed the fish.
He’d always loved the river best in the mornings. It was softer somehow, and that softness seeped out and touched those near to it. He remembered his father talking of the mornings in France, how sometimes, if the light caught a green field just right, or when a songbird mustered the strength of a serenade, a man could forget he was at war. Forget a great many things.
He always liked that. He’d never known such reprieves in Korea. Still, he liked the thought of his father, unafraid in the face of such horror, finding joy in the mornings.
He liked all his father’s stories. A great man. A hard time. Would that the world was as simple now, he thought. He’d sat at his father’s knee and listened to every word, soaking up the tales of hunting, fishing, war, and comradery. When his own son was born, he’d reveled in the thought of sharing with him all he’d learned, a passing down of wisdom and wont. But such times never came, his boy disinterested in the river and the way of life alongside it. Turned, perhaps, by his mother. Or perhaps not. Nevertheless, they’d gone. And not just his own family, but countless others. Generations of homesteads on the banks of the Neches were abandoned in mere hours. Those who remained were, like him, too old for the notion of a new beginning.
When the economy went dry, despots and criminals slinked into the bottoms, taking hold of the empty cabins and trailers. There was a time, the man recalled, when every boat that passed along the river offered a wave and even words of friendship or good fortune. Now the vessels crawled by with no acknowledgment, only the skulking stares of hard-faced men, more consumed with the worry of a witness than a commitment to community.
He guided the johnboat from the bow. The water was higher than he’d guessed, higher than he would have liked, but the empty bleach jugs marking his lines were still visible and bobbing.
The old man cut the trolling motor. He labored forward onto his knees and reached into the water and got hold of the nylon rope and pulled up. He worked his hands down the rope and the boat followed the path of the staging line and the old man ran each trot at the half drift and found the chunks of carp he’d baited with had been eaten away, yet no fish were on the line.
“Goddamn thieves,” he hollered out to the river, or to god, or to no one at all. Then he sunk backward in the boat and sat there, drifting.
For the old man, it was another sign of the times. A trotline was a sacred thing, and yet he’d heard tale of river rats spotting jugs and yanking up the fish for themselves, no matter who the line belonged to.
He considered baiting the line again, but decided against it. Instead, he gathered it up and circled the rope into the bottom of a five-gallon bucket and hung each hook along the bucket’s rim. He checked two more juglines, both picked over, likely by the same perpetrator. The thieves had not found his lone limb line and he saw the branch to which the rope was tied, bowed and bent toward the water’s surface.
He pulled up the trot and a six-pound channel cat along with. He unhooked the fish and dropped it in the boat’s well and collected the rope and turned down river for home. Hours of work had resulted in a single fish. Still, he gave thanks to whatever vestige of god lingered on in his mind.
He took his meager bounty to clean on the stone under the rain barrel and was bent down at his work when John Curtis spoke to him.
“What do you say there, old timer.”
Carson turned, then stood. “Do I know ye?”
“Nossir, I don’t believe so.”
“Well. Thought I heard a truck pull up.”
“This ain’t Dwayne Hargrove’s place is it?”
The old man shook his head.
“It’s not. He lives yonder through the woods a piece.”
“With his boy?”
“What’s that?”
“He has a boy, don’t he? Does the boy live there with him?”
“There’s a boy, yeah.”
“You seen him around?” John Curtis asked.
“Who?”
“The boy.”
“Around here?”
“Around anywhere.”
“I seen him from time to time,” Carson said.
“You see the girl he’s with?”
The old man took a long breath.
“What’s all this about?”
“That girl stole from me. Run off with things that don’t belong to her. The boy’s been helping her. Some folks say you and him is like buddies. Figured you might know something about all that.”
“I don’t know nothing.”
“Don’t know where they’re headed?”
“Naw. Couldn’t say.”
“Well, that doesn’t much matter. I already know where they’re going. I guess what I really wanted to find out was if I was gonna have any trouble from you.”
“What trouble?”
“Folks say you was a war hero. I’m a military man myself.”
“You want a pat on the back? Thank you for your service,” Carson said.
“Yeah. You’re a tough old nut. I might should kill you right here.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“You know what’s gonna happen to that boy, don’t you?”
The old man spit and wiped the fish guts on his overalls.
“Same thing that happened to your son,” John Curtis said.
Carson nodded.
“My family was killed in an automobile crash.”
“Yeah, but they’re still dead, ain’t they?”
The old man turned the spigot on the barrel and rinsed his hands.
“If you aim to provoke me into fighting you right here, I won’t do it. But you hurt that boy, I’ll come for you.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“I’ll chase you through hell and back out the other side.”
“We’ll see.”
42
I knew about Splithorn Hill. About the man who lived there. About the types of people went up to that cabin, and what they were looking for when they got there. I knew Mac Stafford. Knew of him anyway. Enough to stay away. His old man, Herman, and me went to school together. There was something not altogether right about Herman, and I mostly heard the same about Mac. Then his body was found floating scalped in the river, and I didn’t hear any more about him after that.
I met John Curtis once, before he come out to my cabin. I don’t believe I ever told the boy. Seen him at the gas station up by the highway switch. He was coming out, I was headed in. He held the door open for me, called me “sir.” I don’t quite know what to make about that. About his purp
ose, about my own.
I spent too long in this world trying to puzzle out such a thing. There were times I thought maybe I’d come close to something that might pass for an answer, but I never really had.
That’s the hubris of man. Our endless quest for understanding. The sun and moon and the miracle of mountains, and man needing to know the full regard of each, as if the grasping of some other existence might lead us closer to the discernment of our own. And all the while clinging to the fanciful hope that we might be the first—the first in all the rotations of the earth—to solve the mystery of life’s impetus.
I think a wiser soul than mine might come early to the notion that the “why” doesn’t matter. Why we choose to act is not relevant to the action itself. The nail doesn’t care why we swing the hammer, it cares only about the impact of the blow.
I read about where this scientist got asked about does he believe in the afterlife, and he said we’re all energy, and we’ll always be energy, whether we’re living or not.
Sometimes that sounds quite nice to an old man. Other times, it terrifies me. No sense in lying or being brave. There are moments, days, months even, where I can’t fathom the possibility of not existing.
It happens all the time, of course. People stop being, but everything else keeps on.
It takes a mightier mind than my own to accept something like that without fighting back. Especially when there’s so many of us preaching the good book and telling you not to be afraid. How lovely does it sound to walk upon streets of gold in a heaven where lions lie down with lambs, to feel the love of an almighty creator wash over you as angels sing and all those folks you’ve been missing come out to surround you.
To see Daddy again? Just lovely.
He was a long time dying. Thomas Carson. He lingered, in and out of dreams, there but not. It was painful to witness. If that’s what was coming, I wanted no part of it. Rather a gun cleaning accident, if my meaning is understood.
I sat with him most evenings. I was at the paper mill in those days, working graveyard. I’d get to the hospital right as the sun was setting, stay until a quarter ’til midnight, then go on to work. I remember how cold it was that winter. I would near freeze every night, walking from the glass doors at St. Juniper’s out through the parking lot to my old truck. The heater wouldn’t get the cab warm until right as I pulled up to the gravel lot at the mill, and by then I’d have to go on and get back out in the cold. Seems like things just turn out that way.