by James Wade
One night the old man was sleeping, and I was sitting in them chairs like they have for family and loved ones. They didn’t have no television set in the room, at least not in his room, and I was sitting there thinking about Delores when in she walked. She’d brought Tommy with her. Daddy was out of it, couldn’t barely lift his head up, much less talk, so the three of us just stood there. I couldn’t find the right words, assuming there was such.
I asked Tommy about school. He didn’t answer until Delores told him to. She was always good to me in that way, even though I didn’t deserve it.
“Fine,” the boy said. “Is Pa gonna die?”
“I think so,” I told him.
“I wish it was you, instead,” he said, and then he walked out of the room.
Delores stayed.
She asked if I was still sober. I said that I was, and she knew I was lying.
“What can I do,” I asked, “for y’all to come back?”
“You know what,” she told me, and she wasn’t even mean about it.
I hung my head.
“I’m so sorry, Eddie,” she said, and she put her hand on my arm, just for a second, maybe not even that. Then she was gone, too. They were dead within the half hour.
The officer said they couldn’t quite tell what happened. Maybe Delores had swerved, maybe it was the other driver. Might have been something in the road. A deer, maybe. They met head-on near the center stripe and nobody survived. The officer said it was a tragedy, and that it was nobody’s fault. But I knew better. It was my fault, and had been for some time.
We all come to appreciate those things lost to us. The sweetest breath of the day not realized until the night. Such is our reckoning as men. And how do you keep going, when something so meaningful is taken from you? How do you move forward? How do you move at all?
43
They awoke from an uneasy sleep to the trembling of the earth beneath them. In the too-dark of dawn the girl thought herself still dreaming some dream wherein the world was at war again, always, and now her faceless assailants had surely called forth some unholy beast of the Armageddon. She shrieked, and the boy scrambled to his feet and looked wide-eyed toward the black forest.
The air itself seemed to groan and the crashing of limb and trunk surrounded them.
“It’s the trees,” the boy said. “They’re falling.”
“The wind’s barely blowing.”
“The ground’s too soft. They’re coming up from the roots.”
“Is that even possible?”
“We need to get back on the water.”
The girl rolled their bags and the boy drug the canoe through the flooded swamp until the bottom was clear of the mud. He went back to the camp and took their gear and packed it to the canoe and the girl sloshed behind him. They climbed in and set out at the first light of the day. In that copper glow they saw the fallen trees. Some flat across the ground, half buried in the mud. Others had knocked into stronger trees and were left leaning against their comrades like wounded soldiers.
The sunlight was short-lived. The sky darkened an hour into the day. The storms were coming earlier. Once they were on the river, the boy paddled and the girl held the tarp over their heads. The canoe cut against the current in angled encounter, bisecting the water at its bow as if it were fast at work on some great unzipping of the river.
He brought the canoe to the bank that afternoon; the rain had let up but the sky was still gray.
“There’s a gully, maybe a mile upriver, and it smacks into what looks like just another little draw, but it’s not. The draw turns into the creek running down from the highway. Runs right through Redtown.”
The girl nodded.
“I’m gonna tell you something, Jonah. I’m gonna tell you, and you can’t ever forget it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
The boy looked concerned.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“You,” the girl put her hands on his face, “you are a beautiful person. You are the smartest fucking kid I’ve ever met. The kindest. Do not let your daddy take that away from you. Don’t let anybody take it away. You hear me?”
The boy nodded, his cheeks trapped between her hands. She stroked his face, then hugged him.
“I do believe in god,” she said.
“What about all that stuff you said? About the ten dollars?”
“I believe that too.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Me neither. But it’s the truth. It’s something in me that I can’t shut off. Maybe I’m brainwashed. Maybe I’m just scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dying?”
“Maybe. Or living. Living in a such a shit world and knowing none of it has any purpose. Like, maybe the reason so many folks can accept their lot in life, miserable as it may be, is because they got the promise of heaven waiting on them.”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t know. I just know everybody needs to cling to something. To have some fucking hope. And I guess, despite the shit I see right in front of me, my hope is that god is real, and he does give a shit, and maybe things will be better. In this life or the next. I just . . . I need to believe that.”
“You’re gonna have a baby.”
“Who told you that?” the girl asked, stepping back.
“Nobody. But you are.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“That’s why you need to believe.”
“That’s why.”
“Is he the father? The big man, I mean.”
The girl turned her head away.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No, it’s okay,” the girl ran her hands through her hair, holding it back from her face. “I was gonna get an abortion, you know. That’s what I told myself. I know they closed all the clinics, but I was gonna figure out a way to get a bus ticket or something, get enough money to have it all go away. Act like it never happened.”
“But not anymore.”
“No. Not anymore. I saw that bag sitting there, and I thought, there it is. There’s the money I could use to get out of here and get everything taken care of. But what then? Even if I got away clean, how long before I make the same mistakes? Like I said, people don’t change. I’m no different.”
“But you did change.”
“No. I use people, because I’m scared to be alone. I’m using this baby to try and be a better person. That’s me being selfish, just like I’ve always been.”
“You aren’t selfish.”
“Yes, Jonah, I am. Don’t you see? I used you too. And I’m so so sorry. Coming off the drugs like that had me pretty messed up. But I get it now.”
“What are you saying?”
“These people who are looking for me, they’re bad. Real bad. I don’t know for a fact they’d hurt a kid, but I don’t know they wouldn’t. You understand?”
“I don’t care. I’m not afraid of them.”
“But I am. And I’m afraid for you. So you gotta go home.”
“I’m not gonna leave you.”
“You have to. I’m not asking. Don’t make me be an asshole about it. You could’ve died, twice, and I just didn’t have the guts to let you go. I couldn’t save my sister, but I can save you. Just please, go home.”
“But you need me.”
“I don’t,” she said, and the boy looked at her and it broke her heart to have to break his. “I don’t need some kid following me around, making me worry about him, too.”
“But, I . . . I love you.”
“You don’t even know what that means.”
“I do.”
“Jonah, please. I don’t want you here. You’re a good kid, but it’s not like we’re gonna get married or something.
You’re thirteen. You gotta grow up.”
It was a familiar pain, a roaring pain, an invitation of sorrow into the boy’s stomach. He felt it there, and other places. It caught in his throat and pressed under his chin, his forearms flexed, and his knees weakened and tensed, and all of it a torrent of suffering. The measure of which could only be felt by those with the misfortune of the knowledge, those afflicted beings who in the face of ignorance were unable to accept the bliss brought forth as a companion, but rather sought the desolated state what comes with truth.
“Don’t you see?” the boy cried. “Don’t you see any of it?”
The words choked him and his breathing was fast. He screamed, primal and desperate and broken, the result of some long line of advancing nature now finally advanced too far.
“I’m sorry, Jonah,” the girl said, and she turned to leave him.
“River, wait.”
“Jonah—”
“Here,” the boy said, and he pressed the arrowhead into her palm. He’d tied the black cord around the carved divots and it hung like a necklace charm.
“Mr. Carson says it’s good protection.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
The girl laughed and wiped her tears.
“Thank you, Jonah. For everything.”
The boy nodded.
“My name’s Samantha,” she told him, shrugging. “Just so you know.”
Jonah shook his head.
“Be careful, River.”
44
The girl wiped tears from her dirt-stained face. She was spackled with mud, her feet blistered and aching. She thought any passerby would surely fear her, some golem come from beneath the ground to wander the bottoms in search of blood.
The trail was washed out with every dip of the earth, and she waded through the sludge until the land pitched upward and she found herself back on broken white rock. She clutched the backpack tight. She was so close to the freedom she desired, and the thought of such a thing was terrifying. She looked at the path behind her no less than a dozen times, checking to make sure the boy wasn’t following. A great part of her wished he was.
The trail gave out and there was a once-white paper plate tacked to a pine tree, and from beside it she could see another twenty yards away. She followed the markers to the edge of a tree line and saw there the backside of the Redtown trailer park. She spotted the powder-blue double-wide and followed the chain-link fence to the gate, but no one was there. She fished the cell phone from the backpack and called the last number. No one answered. She called again, and listened. She could hear the phone ringing somewhere inside the trailer. Then someone answered.
“Been waiting for you,” he said, and she dropped the phone and turned to run.
Scooter and Ryan were behind her and they laughed as she screamed and tried to fight them off.
They drug her through the gate and the backyard and into the trailer, and there she saw all that had played out, all that had been set in motion since the beginning of the world.
Inside the trailer it was an ancient carnage, a ritualistic bloodletting wherein all manner of demons are called forth unto the same purpose and such purpose can only be a great slaughtering, a war won without variance, a cleansing of some long languishing foe. Through the histories of men, always the world written into existence by battlefield butchers, the blood still wet upon their blades.
In the kitchen, a man with a shaved head was slumped down in the corner near the fridge, his throat more than slit, almost sawed, his head teetering to the side as if it might come off. There was red blood on the white handle of the fridge where he had reached for something, anything. Black blood pooled beneath him.
The men ushered her through and into the living room where another skinhead lay sprawled in a recliner. He was naked save his white boxers and a knife was shoved into his forehead all the way up to the hilt. His mouth gaped, his eyes stared blankly forward.
The girl was pushed down the hallway and into the back bedroom. She screamed and gagged and covered her mouth. A woman, dead on the floor, stabbed through with what appeared to be a dozen wounds, and next to her a child, a girl no older than five, still and forever unmoving, the fire of her life snuffed out, stolen.
The big man sat on the bed. He slid his knife back and again on the block, passing the blade just above his knee, the rhythm of the practice as pure as the bells on Sunday, a measure of time and trade and a marking of the space between realization and action; an accommodation of sorts, for the girl to take in the scene, to understand what had happened, to weigh the choices left to her.
He quit the motion, lifted his head. Her time was up.
He stared at her. His eyes a black, raging death.
“Been looking for you,” his voice hard scattered gravel. “Finally poked your head up.”
“Stay away from me, Cade,” the girl warned.
He grabbed her by the throat.
“You steal from me. Run out on me,” he said, squeezing. “Humiliate me.”
“You’re a goddamn murderer,” she said, choking.
The big man let her go. He shook his head.
“Naw. This here blood’s on your hands.”
“Fuck you.”
“Didn’t have to be like this. But you done what you done,” he said. “I might can be persuaded to forgive you though. If you say sorry real nice like.”
The girl spit at him.
“I hate you.”
“Yeah, I figured as much.”
He motioned and the two men pushed her forward and he grabbed her beneath his giant arm and put his face just in front of her own. She winced and closed her eyes.
“You embarrassed me, girl. Made me look weak. Now you’ll get a lesson.”
He raised the knife up to the side of her face and dug into her skin with the tip of the blade. She cried and screamed as he slowly brought it scraping down across her cheek.”
“Enough,” John Curtis said, stepping into the room.
The scene stilled.
Scooter and Ryan looked confused.
The big man frowned.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” Cade said.
“I wanted to ensure everything that was mine was returned to me.”
“Crystal’s in the backpack,” one of the men said, tossing it to him.
John Curtis caught the bag and set it aside without opening it.
“That’s good to hear. But there’s something else here that belongs to me. I need to guarantee its safety. So, gentlemen, for that I do apologize.”
John Curtis leveled his pistol and fired two shots and the two men crumpled to the floor with the woman and her daughter.
Cade shoved the girl away from him and stood staring at John Curtis who was pointing the gun directly at his heart.
“You better kill me with the first shot,” Cade told him.
John Curtis smiled, then lowered the pistol. He grabbed the girl around the waist and pulled her to him.
“In here, boys,” he called over his shoulder and four deputies pushed past him and into the room.
“Come on,” he told her, and they walked back down the hallway and past the lifeless bodies and they heard the struggle in the bedroom and heard the gunshots. Outside, the red and blue lights washed over the girl’s face and she heard the static of radios and a voice confirmed “suspect down.”
John Curtis held her gently and they moved past law enforcement of all kinds and no one stopped him or even looked their way. He put her into his truck. She was slack-jawed and shaking. They drove away from the scene and pulled onto the highway headed south, and out of the passenger window she could see the sun sinking behind the trees, and she believed in her heart it would be the last sunset she would ever see, and she wished the boy were with her. She put
her hands over her stomach and wept.
45
The boy launched the canoe and climbed in and lay crying in its bottom. It drifted south and from the banks it appeared as some unmanned ghost craft, floating through a dimension not its own.
At midday the boy raised up and found the river was still, as if it were saving its strength for some provocation yet to be determined. As if some great dispute was forthcoming, and with it all the troubles of the world, and all the difference between good and evil, and such difference that might be made by the river’s choosing. The sun overhead was white hot, its bright light overpowering the brown and blue hues of the water and turning all the surface into a blinding reflection where sat a glistering blanket of diamond.
The boy watched as the sun was passed over by a cloud and its crawling shadow laid waste to the shimmering river and revealed once more its murky constitution. The boy liked it better this way. The mud-brown channels like a truth uncloaked. Too much of the world was adorned in a saintly sheen and the boy knew enough of life to know this was not the way of things.
“It’s just mud,” he said to no one.
The rain came again, and the boy had lost count of the days and none of it mattered anyway. He could feel the drag of the spillway nearly one hundred yards before he reached it. He veered toward the shore and pulled the canoe from the water and drug it down the embankment west of the spillway and drug it another fifty yards or so before putting it back in the river and setting the course for Old Man Carson’s keep.
The return journey was much quicker and the boy only spent one night on the river, pulling the canoe ashore near Mr. Carson’s dock just after noon the next day. It had rained all night and all morning and the top of the dock was barely visible as the high water had swallowed it almost entirely.
The current lapped over the highest boards, as the boy drug the canoe further up the bank. The old man wasn’t on the porch and the boy thought he might be napping after lunch. He considered knocking, but decided against it. Instead he trudged through the woods until he hit the river road and followed it to his own driveway and walked through the high side of the yard to avoid the rising water.