by James Wade
“Who’s we?”
“America.”
“Bullshit. We’re a goddamn democracy.”
“You really don’t know anything about anything, do you?”
Lonnie sat up in the seat.
“You keep on being mean to me,” he said, “and I’m liable to come across this console and whip your ass.”
Frank slammed on the breaks and Lonnie flew forward into the dashboard, then crumpled down, ass-first, in the passenger-side floorboard.
Frank laughed. The first time he’d done so since he heard about what went down in Redtown and up at the Hill.
“Pull over,” Lonnie cried, his body folded up on itself. “I think I broke my goddamn nose.”
“Hang in there, bud,” Frank said, smiling. “Canada has a great healthcare system.”
53
The boy took the canoe and left the old man a note and headed south. He worked the canoe down river and found the terrain familiar, though the pace of the flowing water quickened every half-dozen miles. When the darkness and the river’s fast flow made navigation near impossible, the boy made for the flooded coves and there tied his vessel to cypress trunks along the shadowed shore.
On the third morning the river opened into a great lake and the lake into the gulf, and the sun rose gray behind clouds of smoke from the towering steel cylinders of the refineries. The rain had stopped. Everything stops, eventually, he thought.
The boy drifted near the shoreline and passed small fishing vessels and shrimp boats and crabbing nets and all of them dwarfed by the industry built up around them.
A man in a stained white tank top sat smoking on a short dock and the boy nodded to him and the man touched his cap and it was as if they knew, the both of them, what others were too afraid to understand.
The boy passed below the back of a ramshackled seafood diner with a wooden patio extending over the bay. The umbrellas shading the picnic tables began to bend and stretch as the winds commenced, and the boy continued on.
He passed through a shipping channel and under the last roadway and the river was long behind him and the ocean ahead, the enormity of which caught in the boy’s throat. The tears came, and the boy closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the waves surrounding him.
Epilogue
We broke about every rainfall record there was that summer. A bunch of flood damage, a bunch of money to clean everything up after it was all said and done. At the same time we were fighting the water, they had the worst ever heat wave on the other side of the world. Something like a million people died in India alone.
It was years later when the boy come back. He wasn’t a boy no more. Still skinny, but a man in full. He told me he caught on with a tugboat captain out of South Carolina. Some old man who didn’t mind that he wasn’t but thirteen. The boy followed him back to the East Coast and worked for him until the man died, then he worked the harbors for a bit, fishing boats, loading docks, you name it. Said he wanted to do everything he could to stay on the ocean. Said that’s where they had been gonna go, him and that girl.
He’d sent me a postcard from Gloucester. I still had it on my icebox. I showed it to him. I asked if he’d got my return letter telling him about his daddy. He said he hadn’t, but that he’d got word anyway. That’s why he was back, he told me, to see if there was anything worth saving from the trailer.
We sat the porch after dark and listened to the night bugs and I asked if he could tell me what all happened back then, but he said he couldn’t. Said sometimes he didn’t know if anything had happened at all. Or if it had, maybe it happened to somebody else. I told him I understood. And I did. I look at old pictures of myself and wonder what I must have been like when I was whoever I was back then. A hundred years was not something I expected to see.
I don’t know what all the boy had seen, but the way he sat there, staring, it occurred to me that he could have seen everything. Everything there was to see. He could have been born and reborn a thousand times over, his soul and the memory of his soul soaking up all the world’s struggles and delectations alike, then spiriting from one life to the next like some ethereal marauder.
You think they’re in hell? he asked me.
Who? I said.
Anybody.
I wish I could have told him one way or the other. I wish I could have given him just a small piece of certainty in such an uncertain existence. Instead, I said that if he wanted someone to be in hell, that’s where they’d be. And if he wanted them in heaven, they’d be there too. I said that the best I could figure, after all these years, is that we make of god what we want. We make him exist or not exist, make him good or evil or apathetic. It all comes down to us.
Well, he said. I’m not sure we’re right for the job. He told me that, the boy, and I nodded. I stayed up with him as long as I could, then I took his hand and patted it and went on to bed.
The boy sat the porch for a long while yet. The eastern stars began to dim. Soon the horizon would trace itself in shadow against the soft gray light of the coming dawn; the dayspring chorus from the pine warblers and brown thrashers giving proof of the night’s retreating. The boy would witness it all: the forest come alive, the river singing out, and the sun rising overtop an unchanged world. And there the story begins and ends and begins again, as each rhythm of the earth’s turning draws the water darker still. As each rhythm of the earth’s turning draws the water darker.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Josh Stanton, Rick Bleiweiss, and the Blackstone Publishing family. Thanks to Josie Woodbridge, Lauren Maturo, Megan Wahrenbrock, Jeffrey Yamaguchi, Greg Boguslawski, Mandy Earles, Anne Fonteneau, Bryan Green, Brad Simpson, Brandon Bobkowski, Chloe Cotter, Isabella Bedoya, Ananda Finwall, Kathryn English, Lysa Williams, and Hannah Ohlmann, for all of your tremendous efforts with this book.
Special thanks to Mark Gottlieb, my agent and earliest champion. I couldn’t do any of this without you.
Thank you to Clint Stone, who taught me everything I know about running the river.
Thank you to Natalie McBrayer, my dear friend and meditation coach.
Thank you, Albi Sabani, for your friendship and for reminding me to always look within.
To my friends and family, I love each of you far more than my actions might suggest.
To Jordan—my greatest love, my best friend, my always partner—I love you more than mountains. And Juniper, my tiny adventurer, Daddy loves you so much.
And, finally, to East Texas, and the pine trees that helped raise me.
About the Author
James Wade lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and daughter. His debut novel, All Things Left Wild, won the 2021 Spur Award for Historical Novel. James is also a winner of the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest and a finalist of the Tethered by Letters Short Fiction Contest. His fiction has appeared in various literary magazines, including the Bitter Oleander.