River, Sing Out

by James Wade

  The trailer was locked and the boy’s father was gone. He sat down at the picnic table and rested his head in his arms. He fell into an exhausted sleep.

  He woke to the sound of a pattering rain. He closed his eyes and slept again. The sleep was so deep, so total, and he dreamed of the girl and of his mother. But the boy remembered none of it, and when he awoke even the feeling of dream had not lingered, and it was as if nothing had happened at all.

  The sun set below the tree line, being called home to some other world, as if the light given to the earth was contracted to expire and the country would soon go about its existing under the cover of a deep and permanent darkness. The boy wondered about those first men, whether or not they figured out the sun—at least to some degree, at least to the point they quit the fear of it leaving and never coming back. And yet it had left, blocked by ash, the world frozen over. What did men, if there were any, think then?

  He watched the sky through the trees as it was set afire with an orange-and-purple glow, the trees themselves as black against the horizon as the coming night. The flood waters had almost reached the picnic table. It was like the world was drowning, and the boy along with it. He imagined, not for the first time, some apocalyptic happening.

  A pied-billed grebe swooped down, materializing somehow from the sky, and landed in the standing water near the edge of the sunken yard.

  “You’d be a king,” the boy told it.

  He watched the duck for a while as it splashed in the muddy pools. It grew too dark to see much of anything, but still the boy sat. He thought of the girl and the things she’d said to him. He didn’t believe her, but he understood why she needed to say them. She was not the same as everyone else, he told himself. She didn’t mean those things.

  He remembered her laughing at him, not unkind, and the feel of her arms around him and the way she’d kissed him. He could see the small of her back and the indentation of her skin near her ribs. He tried to remember her smell but he couldn’t and it left him momentarily panicked and he felt the tears welling again. He crossed his arms atop the table and buried his face in them and soon he was asleep again and dreaming of rising waters and people with gills and a floating graveyard wherein pieces of driftwood served as headstones, and each one was tethered to a lifeless body floating six feet below the surface.

  46

  The truck lurched onto the highway and headed south. John Curtis drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand in his pocket. He mumbled to himself in different voices, grinning and laughing, and the girl thought him mad.

  She tried to keep quiet, as if he might forget she were there. She looked out the window at the rain. The water was standing for miles along the highway’s edge. Soggy fields stretched out on either side of the pavement, crops flooded under. Rain barrels were full, gutters weighted down and threatening to come loose, and the sound of dripping water belonged to every acre of forest as if it had always been there, some forever leaking network of moisture releasing from the trees. Yet the sun still appeared each morning and the people of this world seemed not to notice.

  The boy had noticed, she thought, and the thought of him sent her weeping, and John Curtis spoke to her at last.

  “You’re not crying for Cade are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “You have the meth,” she said. “Please let me go.”

  He looked at her, and she thought he looked hurt.

  “Let you go? What is it you think is happening here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, sniffling. “Just let me go.”

  “You’ve got something that belongs to me.”

  “What?”

  He reached over and grabbed her by the hair, yanking her down into the middle seat.

  “Now is not the time to play dumb, darling. You think anything happens on this river that I don’t know about?”

  “It’s not yours,” she said, but her voice betrayed the lie and John Curtis laughed.

  “I know the big man wasn’t much of a talker, so maybe he never told you how it happened. But I was there that day. I drug him out of that pile of shit and loaded him onto the evac. I know what it cost him. And I know for a fact that his line ended that day in the desert.”

  “That don’t mean it’s yours.”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s my baby inside of you, and you’re going to stay right here with me until it’s out.”

  “Then what?” she whispered.

  John Curtis again seemed hurt by the question.

  “Then I’m going to raise my child. See that they never want for anything. Give them the love and protection I never had.”

  “I won’t let you near my baby.”

  “Ask yourself: If you leave here, where will you go? What will you do? How will you afford to have a child, much less provide for it once it’s born? You know how hard it is to grow up with nothing. So do I. But with me, none of that will be a problem.”

  “Because of your drug money.”

  “Wake up, girl. Look at what just happened. I made a deal. I’m done with all that. I gave the law a trailer full of dead pushers. I cut ties with the Mexicans. I’m retired.”

  He looked over at her.

  “So, now me and you are going home to the Hill to take care of a few things. In a day or two, we’ll head up to Montana or wherever and find us a little ranch to raise our family.”

  “I don’t love you.”

  He laughed.

  “I don’t care. Not one goddamn bit. I don’t need your love, just your obedience.”

  “And if I say no?”

  John Curtis shrugged.

  “I’ll wait until the baby is born, then I’ll rip it right out of your arms and slit your throat.”

  The girl began to cry again.

  “Seems like an easy choice to me,” John Curtis told her.

  John Curtis walked the tree line at Splithorn Hill and gathered fallen branches from the day’s storm. The girl had fallen into an exhausted sleep, but he’d locked her in the bedroom just in case. He looked down the hill and thought the river might have been as high as he’d ever seen it. He stood there, his arms full up with wood, then he turned and went inside the cabin.

  He crouched down and opened the side hatch on the iron stove and it groaned up at him. He hadn’t had a fire in near three months. He stuffed the wood in piece by piece, then threaded the gaps with strips of an old newspaper, and he lit the paper and watched it burn and blew on the flames until the wet branches finally took. He closed the door and stood up and stepped back and stood with his arms folded while the room grew hot around him.

  He unstrung the leather pouch from his belt and set it on the table and turned a chair around and sat in it backward with his arms crossed over the back of it.

  “I want to tell you something, Mac. Something that’s been weighing me down as of late. Back when I was a kid—somewhere between Mr. Quarles forcing me to fondle his balls and Ms. Cook putting cigarettes out on me in the name of Jesus—they herded us into an after-school program at the public library. I read every book I could get my hands on. And when I was finished, I started back at the beginning and read them all again. I liked the stories, true and fiction, about people who were bigger than their circumstances. Because that was going to be me, you understand? I was going to rise above, to overcome.”

  John Curtis laughed.

  “As I got a little older, I started reading more about philosophy, chemistry, psychology, and the like. I wanted to know what makes people tick, find their weakness and exploit it. I wasn’t gonna let the world shit on me one second longer than I had to. But that ain’t what I wanted to talk to you about. See, it was in one of them books, and I can’t rightly recall which, I read a line from some old shrink who said a man is, in one way or the other, solely a product of his father.

  “
Solely. A product of his father. I don’t know how I felt about it back then. Probably not too good. But for whatever reason it’s come back to me all these years later. I couldn’t tell you why. Not to a certainty. But I’ll tell you what I think. I think maybe I’ve finally become the man I was meant to be. The man you never could be. And I don’t want you to think you had a goddamn thing to do with it.

  “Whatever claim you may have to my success, or even my failure, I’m cutting you loose from it. I thought I’d ended things with this same blade once before. I’ve been carrying you around like a goddamn trophy and the whole time it weren’t but a last thread holding us together. No more. No fucking more.”

  John Curtis untied the strings around the leather pouch and opened it. He pulled from it a tuft of thin black hair clinging to what remained of a gnarled, calloused scalp. He took it to the stove and with his empty hand he picked up a rag and opened the hatch. The heat rushed out and the flames used the new air to climb higher. John Curtis looked at the shriveled scalp.

  “Just know, that if there is a hell, and you’re down there right now, I’ll be coming for you again. I’ll be coming for you until the end of time.”

  He flung the last of his father into the fire.

  47

  The thin man drank his coffee. He held the Styrofoam cup under his nose before bringing it to his lips. He closed his eyes and sniffed at the contents like a man tasked with identifying some rare aroma from his own childhood. A mystery only he could unlock.

  He sat the cup on the small table and crossed one leg over the other and used two fingers to pull back the window curtain. The trees stood in shadowed dissent to the growing light. The thin man could see the headlights passing on the highway in each direction like warring orbs in the early morning. He let the curtain fall back into place. He drained the rest of his coffee and stood and walked to the dispenser and refilled his cup and returned to the table and sat it on the edge nearest the window, the steam rising to fog the glass.

  He opened his sketchbook and took the pencil from behind his ear and began to draw.

  The heavyset man behind the desk was looking at him. The thin man raised his head and smiled and nodded, and the man spoke as if this was a permission given to do so.

  “You after the worm, friend?” the man asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Early bird gets the worm. Figured you might be after it this morning.”

  The thin man smiled again.

  “I see.”

  “You here on business?”

  “Indeed.”

  “If I’m bothering you, feel free to just tell me to ‘shut up, Wes.’”

  The thin man nodded and returned to his sketchbook.

  “’Cause some folks say I’m a little too friendly,” the man continued. “But I don’t think there’s such a thing. I just really enjoy visiting with folks. How come me to open this little ole place.”

  The man came from around the desk and stood leaning back against it.

  “My grandma died and left me some money. Everybody said I should put it into the stock market. You know, invest it and whatnot. But I just told them, ‘Nope, I’m gonna buy the old motel out near the county bridge.’ And then of course they said, ‘Wes, you are one crazy SOB.’ And I said, ‘Nope, just friendly.’ I mean, why not make it my job to meet new people?”

  “Can you help me?” the thin man asked, at last looking up from his book.

  “Well, I’ll sure try to, friend.”

  “Do you know this place?”

  The thin man pointed to the map.

  “Sure, that’s Splithorn Hill.”

  “Can you take me there?”

  “Take you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Raining like it has been. You’ll likely need a boat to get anywhere near there.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “A boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, yeah, I gotta boat, but it ain’t for guest use. What do you need to get up there for?”

  “Where is it?” the thin man asked.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The boat. Where do you keep it? Where do you keep the keys?”

  “It’s out back by the dock, but like I said, it’s not for—”

  “The keys? Where are the keys?”

  The heavyset man looked toward the desk, then back at his customer.

  “Listen, friend, I don’t think you’re understanding.”

  There was more to say. More words he had planned. Like so many plans, they fell away into darkness.

  The thin man found the keys on a ring behind the desk. He stepped over the body and went out through the back door.

  He guided the boat upriver, passing through an unfamiliar world of swamp and mud.

  He passed under the highways, their bridges crossing over the water like some strange river all their own. Each one another pathway, held up and balanced by the pairs of T-topped pillars—set in a row and fastened to the bridge’s underbelly—the bottom of which disappeared somewhere below the water’s surface, as if they might go on forever, extending deeper than the river and deeper still through the earth’s crust and come to some speculated counterworld where they were at last attached to the reflection of the same bridge they’d descended from.

  48

  The boy woke with headlights on him. He shielded his eyes until the engine stopped and the lights disappeared, then he stood.

  His father walked toward him, then stopped. He looked at the gun.

  “The hell are you doing, boy?”

  “You know her.”

  “What? Know who?”

  “You met her before, at the casino. That’s how come you to say those things about her.”

  His father put his hands on his hips and looked away.

  “I ain’t said the first thing that wasn’t true.”

  “Did you pay for her?”

  The man didn’t answer.

  “Did you?”

  “What do you want me to say? I was trying to protect you, son. I love you.”

  “And the beatings? The name calling? You trying to protect me then?”

  “I’m trying,” the man said, in a rare moment of vulnerability. “I don’t know no better.”

  The boy lowered the gun.

  “You really believe that don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “I thought for the longest time that you were just a liar. That you hated me. But I see now. And it’s worse this way. You’ve convinced yourself it’s not your fault, that you’re doing the best you can, even though you’re a complete failure.”

  “You better watch what you say, boy.”

  The boy laughed. His laugh echoed across the clearing and into the woods.

  “No. I don’t think I will. What are you gonna do? I’ve took your beatings my whole life. I’m not afraid of you anymore. Maybe you really do love me, and if you do, that’s the saddest part. Because I’m gonna leave, and I’m never coming back. And if you love me, it might actually hurt you. But you’ll blame me in time. Or blame someone else. You’ve made yourself the world’s victim and you’ll do the same with this. It’s your only nature. I’m glad I won’t be here to see it. Because it’s pathetic. You’re pathetic.”

  The man’s face was flush.

  “I’ve had about enough of this. You ain’t gonna disrespect me and think I’ll just stand here and take it.”

  The man moved toward him, the way he had so many times before. The same look and posture and unmistakable intent.

  The boy raised the gun again.

  The man froze.

  “You wouldn’t fu—”

  The boy fired.

  His father collapsed sideways, as if someone had pulled a chair out from under him.

  T
he old man was standing on the porch with a shotgun when the boy emerged from the trail.

  “That shot come from your place?”

  “Yessir.”

  “They following you?” the old man asked, pumping the shotgun.

  “Who?” the boy looked behind him.

  Carson lowered the gun.

  “Whoever was doing the shooting.”

  “It was me,” the boy told him. “I shot my daddy.”

  The old man took the news as if it were nothing.

  “Kill him?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Just a kneecap.”

  Carson nodded.

  “Well. Alright. I thought maybe you was mixed up with all that what happened up in Redtown.”

  The boy’s eyes widened.

  “What happened in Redtown?”

  He’d read the newspaper report and listened to Carson tell some of the details he’d heard at the feed store. Now the old man was hustling after him, calling for him to stop.

  “She’s in trouble,” Jonah said. “I’ve got to help her.”

  “We don’t know what she’s in, but whatever it is, she put herself there.”

  “I’m not just gonna sit here and do nothing.”

  “You don’t even know that she’s up there.”

  The boy splashed across the flooded dock and untied the boat. The old man was trying to get down the slope.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Carson,” the boy called, and as he did the old man slipped and fell and rolled onto his stomach.

  The boy started to turn back but didn’t, instead pointing the boat upriver and taking off, leaving the old man lying on the bank behind him.

  49

  John Curtis was in the porch chair. His back was straight and his hands were placed one atop the other, as if he were attending a service for which he had the utmost reverence. Were it not for his eyes, the boy might have called out to him. Instead, he walked up the porch steps and crossed the wooden floor boards to where the body sat.