Raft of Stars

by Andrew J. Graff

  “What’s that, Tiff?” Burt Akinson stood on the sidewalk beside her. His big red truck was parked a few spots away, with one tire up on the curb.

  “Oh, hey, Burt.”

  “Dropped your coffee there, Tiff?”

  “Burt, you seen a dog?” Tiffany paced as she spoke, peeked down the gravel alley by the coffee shop, looked down Main Street toward the fields.

  “You looking for a dog, Tiff?”

  She bit her lip. “That’s what I said, Burt.”

  “You dropped your coffee there.”

  “Forget the coffee, Burt!”

  “Say, come inside and I’ll buy you another so your face don’t scrunch like that.”

  Tiffany ignored him now, and Burt didn’t know what to do with that. Normally he’d say something about her sour face, or her dyed hair, and she’d question the status of his driver’s license, and then they’d drink coffee together if Burt had time. Sometimes he’d grow serious and fatherly and ask her why she didn’t have a man yet. He said she needed one. Told her she was too pretty and smart to be running around without a man, unless of course she was one of them new women he’d seen on the talk shows who don’t want men in their lives.

  “I seen a dog,” he said, sensing she was in no mood to banter, “running just out of town, back that way.”

  She stopped in her tracks, turned, and grabbed Burt by the shoulders. “What’d it look like?”

  “How should I know,” he said. “I’m half blind.”

  “Burt, I’m begging you.”

  “Looked smallish, I guess, cattle dog maybe? Had something dangling from its mouth, caught a tabby cat or something.”

  Tiffany squeezed his shoulders and kissed his cheek. She grabbed the bag of dog food and bowls and ran back toward her car where it was parked in front of Briar’s. Burt blushed, rubbed the lenses of his glasses on his shirt.

  “See you, Tiff,” he called out.

  Gravel spun into the wheel wells as Tiffany sped down the road between the marsh and the cornfields. Her eyes were narrowed, scouring the shoulders and ditch grass for any sign of Jacks. Once or twice she thought she saw the dog in the plowed field, but it turned out to be a clod of dirt.

  “Think think think,” she said, drumming the wheel with her thumb. She’d screwed it up. Here was her chance to really know the sheriff, to get a dinner out of it, a firing range date—she could care less what it was—and she’d lost his dog within four hours. “Where are you, Jacks?” Tiffany bit her lip, made a decision, and then punched the accelerator. It was her only real hope, she thought, as she turned down a side road and headed for the driveway of the Branson farm. Cal said he’d spent the early hours at Teddy Branson’s before he dropped the dog off. The dog tried to bolt. And where did it want to go? It wanted to go back to Teddy’s place, to find Cal.

  “Jacks?” she hollered out of the window as she pulled in beneath a maple tree. “Jacks?”

  The Branson farm was a nice place with old but clean barns. The paint was fresh. The hay bales were neatly stacked. The order was amazing when she thought about it—the old man and his little grandson running the place by themselves. Whenever Tiffany saw a house with a well-kept lawn or a tidy garden, it gave her a pang of guilt. She’d missed out on college when she thought she’d done the right thing by staying in town with her abandoned mother. Five cool years passed, and then her mom remarried and moved to Tulsa, not a word about inviting Tiffany to join them. Tiffany tried to convince herself that she remained in Claypot so that her mother had a place to return to when her new marriage inevitably failed. It was a noble thought that bore much doubt, but the phone call never came. Once, a few months after her mom left, an envelope arrived from Tulsa with twenty-five dollars in it and no letter. After that—and it was three years now—silence. Except from the bank that held her mother’s outstanding mortgage. Tiffany regularly received dunning letters until the day she had to pack her car with a camp stove and tent and embark on her hungry summer. So here she remained, with no boyfriend and purple hair, working at a gas station, renting a house without a garden and waiting for pig trailers to flip. She couldn’t even keep her cupboards filled with staples. She often ran out of bathroom tissue. When you gonna get a man? Burt would ask, and it would stab her like a pin. Who would want her? Desirable women don’t become homeless and sleep in the ditches of cornfields, or live off stolen eggs, or bathe in creeks at night, or shiver themselves to sleep beneath unwashed blankets. Not even the dog wanted to be with her.

  She stepped from the car and walked toward the barn. The sheriff’s truck was parked between the barn and the stable, as was Teddy’s. A small sedan Tiffany didn’t recognize was parked in the driveway near the house. There was no sign of the dog. A cow looked at her from the stable, as if waiting for her to do something interesting, and then it scratched its forehead on a fence post.

  Tiffany was losing steam. “You seen a dog?” she asked the cow in a quiet voice. The cow licked the post where it had scratched its head and stepped away toward its feed.

  Tiffany began to cry. The wind out here in the farm fields felt cooler than it should have. It stripped the sunlight from her body. She folded her arms around herself as she walked to the house. Maybe she’d sit on the porch awhile, wait for the dog to show up, or for the sheriff to come back so she could tell him she failed. The sheriff would probably be nice about it, which would be the worst part, because she knew he’d never trust her again, and their relationship would forever be reduced to thirty-second conversations about the price of gas and empty coffee carafes. Tiffany’s eyes blurred as she pulled herself up the front porch. She felt her throat tighten. She just couldn’t hold it in.

  As she turned to sit, the front door swung open. Tiffany stood and took a startled step backward. A tall woman with dark hair and reddened eyes stood in the doorway. She was holding a balled-up Kleenex in one hand and the box in the other.

  “Who are you?” asked the woman. There was confusion in her eyes, as if she’d been woken from sleep, or hadn’t slept at all. There was something familiar about those eyes too, their fierce competence, the way they were set in her face over that slim nose.

  “My name’s Tiffany,” she said, wiping a tear from her face with the heel of her hand. She didn’t like for strangers to see her cry. She didn’t like for anyone to see her cry. The woman handed her a Kleenex. As Tiffany reached forward and begrudgingly took it, she realized who the woman must be.

  “You’re Teddy Branson’s daughter, aren’t you?” asked Tiffany, pressing the Kleenex against her cheekbones.

  The woman nodded.

  “I’m so sorry to—” Tiffany paused. She could hardly describe to herself what she was doing here. “I came out here looking for a dog, the sheriff’s dog.” Tiffany waved her crumpled Kleenex out at the fields and her eyes blurred over with tears again. “And I thought he liked me, and I bought his dog a stupid cat, and now he’s not going to talk to me again.” She felt miserable gushing like this, but it didn’t matter. Not much did. All seemed lost in that bright morning light, those brown empty fields. “And you,” she went on, feeling even lower, “you’re here to find your boy.” Tiffany’s voice broke completely as she said it, guilt upon guilt, waves of it.

  The woman stepped onto the porch and gave Tiffany another Kleenex. She looked out at the fields and the forest behind them. She looked at the young woman with purple hair crying on her dad’s porch.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  Tiffany let herself sob, feeling both pathetic and grateful.

  “My name’s Miranda,” said the woman. “And I don’t mind company.”

  Seven

  “STILL TOO SHORT,” SAID FISH. “WE NEED LONGER ONES.”

  Bread’s shoulders dropped. He held in his hands a bouquet of spruce roots not much longer than flower stems. He dropped them on the moss, wiped his hands, and trudged back to the small grove of spruce trees to try again. “Longer roots, longer roots,” he mumbled. “I can’t
find no longer roots.”

  Fish thought better of responding. After his grandpa and the sheriff crossed the river, the boys moved about a mile downstream, until they found a clearing in the cedars. Foot trails no longer existed, and they often had to force their way through brambles and tangles of pine. The woods left little sign of their passage. The wall of thorns and sap closed behind them, and they got to work on their raft.

  Fish looked up at the sun. It was high in the sky now, well past noon. He’d busied himself for most of the morning trying to cut down a cedar tree with his grandfather’s barlow knife. The cedar had soft wood, but it made for painstaking knife work. He was unsure if such labor was tenacious or just plain dumb. The tree was about a foot thick at its base, and Fish had to slice it away, strip by strip. He was thankful he remembered to bring the whetstone. After slicing for about ten minutes, the edge of the blade stopped biting, and he’d have to slice the whetstone for a while. It was a welcome break. The work made his hands cramp, and he couldn’t get comfortable standing or kneeling. Fish stepped back to gauge his work. The progress was slow, but it was progress. He’d sliced away nearly one quarter of the tree’s diameter. A pile of shavings covered the ground. If a beaver could do it with his front teeth, Fish told himself, he could do it with a barlow. They needed about ten or fifteen more trees for their raft. If this is what it took, he thought, then this is what he’d do.

  Bread trudged back. “Maybe we could switch awhile,” he said. “The roots keep breaking, and I’m getting sick and tired of it.”

  “Can’t you just dig ’em out?”

  “I got nothing to dig with.”

  Bread sat down heavily near his pack and pulled out a can of tuna. He wiped his dirty hands on his jeans, opened the top, scooped a bite into his mouth, and chewed without enthusiasm. Fish watched his friend looking out at the cool river sparkling through the gaps in the trees. The day had become hot, and mosquitoes rose from the ferns once the boys worked up a sweat. Bread swatted one.

  “And these bugs,” he said, his mouth full of tuna, “could drive a cow nuts.”

  Fish, too, was covered in welts and bites on his back and arms. Scratching them made it worse. Swatting them did nothing. Fish spat on the whetstone, scraped the blade along its length, and then folded the knife and sat down next to Bread in the musty cedar chaff. Bread handed him the tuna and scratched his arms. The boys looked at the small pile of failed roots, too short for rope. They silently stared at the chewed-up cedar tree.

  “We’re never gonna finish this raft,” said Bread.

  “We’re making progress,” said Fish.

  Bread snorted. Fish handed the tuna can back to him. It was dry without mayonnaise. Fish felt a deep hunger for good-tasting food, for salt and sugar. He thought about a peanut butter and jelly with potato chips and cold milk in his favorite blue cup, but resisted the impulse to dwell on it. He had to be strong. They had to train themselves to go without.

  “Behold the beaver,” said Fish, swallowing.

  “Behold what?” said Bread.

  “We’re in a new kind of life now, Bread. We’re on woods time now, woods food. We are strong and we are good, and it doesn’t matter if it takes ten years to build that raft.”

  “What’s that got to do with beaver?” said Bread.

  “What it’s got to do with beaver is that beavers don’t know about clocks. Or days or weeks. No bedtime. No lunchtime. No nothing.”

  Bread frowned and took another bite of the dry tuna.

  “This tuna is awful,” he said.

  “I know,” said Fish. “But what I’m saying is that no one can make us eat it, don’t you see? No one can make us do anything anymore.” Fish was thinking it through as he spoke, trying on the truthfulness of it.

  Bread tried it out. “Beavers ain’t got homework,” he said, tuna flakes on his lips.

  “They don’t have to finish supper,” said Fish.

  “They ain’t got to brush their teeth!”

  “They only got two teeth to brush!”

  “They ain’t got to dig no more dang roots!” Bread stood as he said it and spiked his can of tuna against the cedar tree. He turned toward the river and lifted his fists above his head. Tuna bits spewed from his mouth as he yelled, “I am the beaver!”

  “Behold the beaver!” yelled Fish.

  The boys sprinted through the trees. The shade beneath the cedars was muggy, and ahead of them the river shone like a bright white field of snow. They ducked beneath branches and laughed while they ran. The footing was soft with needles. The heady musk of bark and moss and ferns filled their lungs.

  Fish had his shirt off before he reached the water. He hopped on one foot to tear off his shoe, and when it was bare he hopped on the other. He bolted and leapt and splashed in feet-first. The water was clean and cold and amber-colored, steeped through the pines of its watershed like a glass of iced tea. Fish opened his eyes underwater, reached out, and felt along the cold gravel of the river bottom. Above him hung a ceiling of amber light. Fish arced upward and pushed off with his feet, the way he’d seen an otter do at the Milwaukee Zoo, blowing bubbles from his nose. This was right, he thought, this beaver freedom. They never did have to go back to the world, or answer to it. They were not of this world anymore. They could sleep until noon and howl until midnight. They could skip rocks and swim. They could live on fish and birds’ eggs and cattail roots. They didn’t even have to make fires. They could eat it all raw. Fish became aware of something that shocked him with its immensity. It was possible, he thought—he didn’t yet know exactly how, but knew he was close to knowing—for a person to never again be afraid of anything.

  Fish surfaced just in time to see Bread chuck himself off the riverbank. Bread lifted his knees into his chest, hugged them, and plunged beneath the water with a thump Fish felt in his neck. When Bread surfaced, he was smiling. He gave a hoot of satisfaction.

  Fish looked upstream. The current wasn’t very strong here. The river flowed through a series of oxbows and islands and sandbars. Some of the islands were thick with dogwood and picker bushes. The closest, about thirty yards across the river, was more open, with a canopy of cedars growing at its center. Fish started swimming for it.

  “Last one there gets a leech in his wiener,” howled Bread, diving forward into his stroke. Bread was an incredible swimmer. Fish was always surprised by his speed. It was as if the water carried him along, parted for him, pulled and pushed him, his arms reaching, feet churning. Fish stretched out his body in his best stroke, an elongated dog paddle, and kicked with all his might as Bread pulled steadily away. When Fish finally felt the island under his hands and lifted himself to wade in, Bread was already standing on dry ground, grinning and shivering in his underpants. The interior of the island loomed behind him. Fish panted. Bread seemed hardly winded. He looked happy, river water dripping from his chin and nose. The sight of Bread so joyful confirmed the hope that maybe they were real woodsmen. Acquiescence was a word Fish learned in school. It meant to give in, to go along with, to accept things the way they were. That seemed to fit what he was trying to think through in his mind—a way to leap.

  Fish reached down into the river, looking for mud. He found two fistfuls of silt.

  “What are you doing?” asked Bread.

  “I’m going all beaver,” said Fish.

  Fish smeared a handful of river mud across his chest, and now worked on his neck and face, like a warrior would. As Bread joined him, the boys thought of new names for themselves, names like Eagle Claw, Bear Claw, Coyote Fang, Beaver Tooth. Fully painted, Fish walked up the riverbank, looked at his friend. “Let us explore this new land,” he proclaimed.

  Bread nodded solemnly. He reached down for a final clod of mulch, smeared it under his eyes, and pulled two cattail canes from the water. He gave one to Fish.

  “Spears,” said Bread.

  Fish grunted, and the two boys crept toward the island’s interior, careful to not snap the twigs they felt beneath
their bare feet, moving like river water, like woodsmoke, hunters.

  AS SOON AS CAL CROSSED THE RIVER ON HIS HORSE—WHICH WAS awful in itself for the way the frigid water soaked his jeans and filled his boots—the forest began closing in on him. The trails disappeared just like Teddy said they would, and they spent the day traversing cedar swamps and poplar stands on the far side of the river. The day grew hot and buggy, and Cal soon itched with sweat and fatigue. His legs burned. His back ached. He had no idea that merely sitting on a horse could be this tiring. He’d ridden a pony once as a kid, at a park in Wichita Falls, but that was a small horse tethered in a stable. This had been a full day’s ride on an absurdly tall horse, picking its way over moss-covered stones and through cattail marshes, ducking between cedar and hemlock trees without concern for the rider dragging in the branches. At one point, while moving up the steep bank of a dry creek bed, Cal tried to urge his horse through a thick tangle of briars. The horse stood up on its hind legs, turned, and slid down the hill. With the horse on two legs, Cal got a good look at the creek bed, about fifteen feet below. Cal felt like he was falling from a ladder. He grabbed two fistfuls of the horse’s mane and held on for his life. He hated ladders. He hated horses. When the horse found its footing again near the creek bed, Cal leapt off and jogged to a tree, shaking the adrenaline from his fingertips. He looked at the ground and spat in the leaves, wiped horsehair from his hands.

  “You all right?” Teddy yelled down from the ridge above the creek bed.

  “Yeah, I’m all right. Mr. Ed here ain’t all right, though. He’s trying to kill me!”

  “For the fifth time, your horse is a mare. And don’t push her into the brush like that and she won’t stand up on you.”

  Cal stared at the ground. The morning had been filled with these little lessons. Don’t force the reins. Let the horse find its own way through the trees. Don’t ride so far forward. Don’t call the mare “Mr.” Cal stood and paced for a moment to try to wake his numb legs. He took his hat off, wiped his brow, and looked around at the forest. They were in hardwoods now, a bit more open than some pines they’d pushed through. Though they’d been riding since daybreak, it felt to Cal as if they hadn’t moved more than twenty feet. The trees turned from thick to thicker, from green to gray and back again. There were no signs, no trails, nothing to distinguish one direction from another. The sheriff had been following Teddy’s lead, trying to keep up. Teddy rode effortlessly and high in the saddle, ducking branches, eating on the go. The general strategy seemed to be to crisscross the opposing shoreline, ride a sort of grid across the land, look for any sign that the boys had been that way. At first they spent some time calling out to the boys, but then thought they might have a better chance of coming upon them if they stayed quiet. The boys were scared. The men didn’t want to make them hide. Every now and then during their survey, the river would come back into sight, and that open sunlight called to Cal through the trees. He wanted so badly to be out of the woods. But he had to keep up, had to push through, just follow Ted through the forest. It made him feel like a child, this tagging along, which angered him. He was the sheriff, in charge of this search. Already his confidence in Teddy’s approach was nearly exhausted. His comfort zone was in his truck, with his dog and his radio, on highways and freeways. That’s where he felt he knew what to do. Out here, there was too much he couldn’t control, his horse chief among them.