Edge of Dark Water

5

We pushed our boat off the barge-or what I call a raft-back into the river, and paddled it to land. After we got on ground, we pulled the boat up under a tree and found some dried brush to lean on it. It wasn’t much of a hideaway, but it’s what we had.

Before we left out of there, we sat down under a tree and got out the map and turned it ever which way trying to figure out what it meant. It might as well have been written in Greek. We could make out what must have been May Lynn’s house and the river drawn on it in a squiggly line, and above it a rise in the land that was familiar. Finally there was a couple of thick lines with little lines drawn between them. We figured that had to be railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks, there were some humps, and there was a line written out that said MALCOLM CUZINS. Neither the humps or the name meant anything to us.

We walked away from the river and the bottomland, made our way back to where May Lynn’s house stood. We went wide of it toward the woods.

The woods were thick and it took us a while to thread through them and climb up a big hill. We finally got on the trail that went out of the bottoms, ending us up on a field where cane grew. It was highland cane and it wasn’t as good as bottom cane, but it was still good enough. It was a big patch that covered a lot of acres, and the stalks were thick and tall. The cane had turned slightly purple, and I knew once it was stripped the sugar inside of it would be sweet.

I had a pocketknife, and I cut down a stalk next to where the field started, then cut it into three pieces. It took some work, but we all got our pieces frayed and that gave us the pulp to chew on. It was sugary, and it was something to keep us happy and busy while we walked. I figure when you got right down to it, we weren’t fresh thieves after all, but had had plenty of practice in the cane fields and watermelon patches. Heck, I had started my life of crime sometime back, but had just then realized it. The natural move forward would be to take stolen bank money and spend it on a trip to Hollywood with a dead girl burnt up in a jar.

We followed the map and came to a low cut of pines, and on the other side of the pines was the train tracks. On the far side of the tracks was more trees. Most of them was pecan and hickory nut and might have once been part of an orchard, but were now wild and unpruned. There was a nice breeze blowing, and we could smell the scent of the trees on the wind, and there were birds in the trees, mostly red-winged blackbirds; they were as thick there as leaves.

There was a rumble and the train rails began to vibrate. We stepped back in the pines, in the shadow, and waited. A train came chugging by, screeching on top of the rails. I thought maybe that ought to be the way we should get out of there, by hopping a train. But it was traveling fast as it went by, and none of the boxcar doors was open; it was an idea that passed from my mind quickly. I figured if I grabbed at the train my arms would get jerked off.

Still, it was mighty pleasant watching the train go by, all those boxcars clacking along, and while it rolled I thought of May Lynn. I guess it was the train moving away from us, heading anywhere but where we was, that made me think of her. That and our plans, of course.

I remember once sitting in her house on her mattress on the floor, and she had been talking about the movies and her plans to star in them, and then she said something to me that dove out of the air like a rock and felt like it hit me in the back of the head.

“Sue Ellen,” she said, “what is it you want to do with your life?”

Until she asked that, I didn’t even know I had the chance to think about anything different than what I was doing at the moment, but with her telling me all her plans, and then asking me that question, certain feelings I had started rising up to the surface like a dead carp. I knew then I wanted out of what I was in, and I wanted something else other than what I had, but the miserable thing was, I didn’t know where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do.

We laughed and talked about this and that, about some boys we knew, none of them particularly interesting, and May Lynn said she sure thought Terry was cute, but there was that whole sissy problem. We combed each other’s hair, and her mama, a few months short of her dip in the river and moving like she was some kind of animal dying slowly, cooked us some grits, and we had them with no butter and no milk. I remember thinking then that May Lynn was the most wonderful person in the world, and certainly the most beautiful. But what made me feel really good while eating grits with no butter and no milk was that she had spoken to me like I could have plans and ought to have plans, and that my life could be better. Right then and there I believed it myself a little. Not so much you could write a song about it, but some. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew it would be something. I can’t say that stealing money and going by raft down the dirty Sabine with May Lynn’s ashes in a jar had been any part of those plans, but I knew then that I wasn’t going to be settled with life as I knew it; wasn’t going to end up like Mama, drinking cure-all and taking a whacking from her husband and thinking it was as natural as the course of the river.

I looked up from thinking about all this, and saw the train moving on down the line and out of sight. We stood there looking where it had gone, and then we looked at the map again and determined that we at least knew where the tracks were. Beyond that it was all mighty confusing. The little humps-and there was bunches of them in several rows on the paper-and the name Malcolm Cuzins didn’t make no sense whatsoever.

As we crossed the tracks and went under the trees, the red-winged blackbirds took flight. They looked bloodied as they rose in a whoosh, and they filled the sky like a cloud, then they was gone.

“Well,” Terry said, looking at the map. “I fail to make sense of it. I can’t determine what these humps mean. And the name written on the map is a mystery to me.”

Jinx and I were equally baffled, and we kept looking at the map like it would all come to us eventually, but it didn’t. Fact was, I was getting a bit of a headache.

“There’s nothing out here but a few trees,” I said. “I think there’s an old graveyard over there, and beyond that there’s a road.”

“I remember that ole graveyard,” Jinx said. She nodded at me. “We was up here once, when we was little kids. We seen some of them graves then.”

“I barely remember,” I said.

“I told you there was haints there and that they’d grab you up and pull you down in the ground,” Jinx said. “I thought you was gonna pee your pants.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” I said.

“That’s what made it funny,” she said.

We looked around for a while, then gave up and went back down to the cane field and cut us another piece of cane.

As we ate the pulp from the cane and walked, I said, “I think our Hollywood plans would be on the too-early side without that money. So I think we don’t burn May Lynn up and put her in a jar and head out just yet. My guess is we might make Gladewater, but beyond that we’d be hard-pressed to go on.”

No one said anything for a long while, but I’m pretty sure, like me, they could hear our plans crackling away like dry paper on fire.

By the time we worked our way back to the boat, the sun was starting to drop out of sight behind the trees, and the shadows were long and dark across the ground and on the water. Frogs was getting louder and so were the crickets. We paddled our way across the water current, and by the time we got to the other side, the water was high in the leaky boat, in spite of me and Jinx taking turns bailing.

As we got out of the boat, pulled it on shore, and pushed it under some trees, Jinx said, “One thing we gonna have to say for sure. This boat ain’t no damn good. We go downriver, we’ll have to take the barge, otherwise we’ll be tuckered out in a couple hours. The boat will fill up and sink to the bottom of the river. Catfish will be living in our skulls before a week passes.”

This statement went uncontested. Everything we talked about seemed like so much wind now. Talk is cheap and exciting, but when you get right down to doing something, money is usually needed. Planning is often better than going through with the actual plan. Expectations, I once heard an old man say, were a little like fat birds: you might as well kill them before they fly away.

We split up and headed our own ways. As I walked, the shadows stretched. I realized it would be dead dark long before I got home. Even though I had grown up in the bottoms, there was lots of tales about things down in them that gave me a case of the nerves. Mostly they was stories about things that came out at night and was angry and hungry and carried you off and sucked the centers out of your bones. Ever hoot of an owl or crack of a limb or the scratching of brush moved by the wind made me jump a little. To top things off nicely, it began to lightning in the east, stitching up the pit-black sky like a drunk seamstress with bright yellow thread. The wind rose and made the trees sigh and whip even more, and before long, drops of rain were falling on me. By the time I got near enough to our house to see a light in the window, the rain was coming down hard as tossed gravel, and the wind was whipping the willows along the riverbank like a teacher smacking a rowdy student’s butt with a switch.

In the yard, I was startled by one of the free-ranging hogs that came around the side of the house and grunted at me, perhaps hoping I had an apple or something. It was the big black-and-white one. I started to reach out and pet it, but since it was gonna be eaten in the fall, I hesitated. It never set well with me to get friendly with something I planned to have on a plate with a side of new potatoes and collard greens. I felt it was proper to have a solid understanding between person and hog that no friendship was involved, though if the hog had known the true nature of its arrangement, I’m sure it would have found reason to depart for parts unknown, maybe taking the other hog and chickens with him. Besides, petting a wet hog, be it friend or supper, is stinky business.

Daddy was home. I could see his banged-up pickup parked in the yard. I walked up on the porch and it creaked, and that made me nervous. It wasn’t that Daddy cared when I came in, and much of the time he might not know I was gone. But to wake him could set him in a bad temper, and then the razor strop would come out. I wasn’t up for dodging his blows, or, for that matter, dodging his grabbing hands.

On the porch there was a stack of firewood piled close to the house. I picked me up a good stout piece that fit my clenched fist, opened the door, and stepped inside. Our house wasn’t no kind of showplace, but it was big. It had been built long before the river changed course. Daddy had it handed down to him when his father died-who, according to word I had heard, was no better a person than he was. But Daddy’s grandfather was a solid gentleman with money he had brought down from the North back in the eighteen hundreds. Word was he had earned it in shipping somehow, and then decided he’d had enough and had gone down south. He had built a sturdy house and barn and sheds that his son, and now grandson, had let go to ruin by neglect.

Some years back the river changed and it had taken away a lot of the outbuildings. I had heard about the flood of 1900, and how it had killed families, and how back then our house sat high on a hill. Then the river rampaged through like a pack of wild Indians. It stole the soil and carried it off, and the water had climbed up to where there was once high ground. Where solid earth had stood, there was a bend in the river now, rising high on the bank, maybe a hundred feet from our two-story house. I liked to imagine that the water that had carried those outbuildings away had put them back together at the bottom of the river with the help of the catfish, and that the barn I had never seen had mermaids living in it; and that the outhouse was being used by water monsters with lots of long, sticky legs and whiplike tongues that was forked at the tips.

It was a shame, really, what Daddy and his daddy had let happen to the place. Now the big house squeaked when you went upstairs, and you had to watch your step where it had rotten spots. In the main room, which was large, it was too cold to be there in winter. The fireplace leaned away from the wall, and outside it was held up by a big stick that looked ready to break at any moment. Around the cracks in the bricks the wind came through like a burglar, and in the summer, so did the snakes and frogs and all manner of vermin.

There was only three of us in the house, and Daddy and Mama mostly avoided one another. They had little to say except simple stuff about chickens and hogs, and as of late, there was less of that. Daddy spent a lot of his time somewhere else, and Mama didn’t care. She took to bed often, lay propped against cotton-stuffed pillows drinking cheap cure-all she bought from a man that traveled the country in a dusty black car. He always wore a big black hat and had black clothes and boots, and his shirt was the color of flour paste. He had been around for years and looked the same. Some said for twenty years, but others said a son had taken over the father’s position. There were even those who said he was the devil. I had seen him, a tall, whip-lean man in a black hat and a smooth black suit. His face looked like it had been cut out of wood, and his chin was long and pointed.

“Devil don’t need no car that runs on gas,” Jinx had said. “So he ain’t no devil. And there ain’t no devils or angels anyhow.”

Jinx was certain on the matter. Me, it depended on if it was Tuesday or not. I had a tendency to believe all manner of things on a Tuesday. I know this: what the salesman sold to Mama was certainly devilish. It was a mixture of alcohol and most likely laudanum. It went for a quarter, and may have cost him a dime. It was money we couldn’t afford, but she bought the stuff by the box and sucked it like a baby will suck a bottle.

Daddy had his whiskey. Mama had her cure-all. It made her deep dream, she said, and the dreams were fine and bright and there was no river near the door. In those deep-down dreams, she said, me and her lived in a good way in a clean white house on high, dry land. Daddy was shaved and dirt-free and upright, wasn’t missing so many teeth, and lived the way he should. When she woke, she said, it was like she was in a nightmare, and everything that mattered was stepped on and messed with or mistreated, but a few long swigs of the cure-all took her back to where she liked to live. It hurt to think I was losing Mama to twenty-five cents a bottle and a lying dream.

The light in the house was a lantern burning on a nightstand near the window. Mama had lit it and left it for me. I was glad for the light, but thought it was damn dangerous to let it burn like that, being near the curtains. Then again, Mama’s judgment was missing a step these days. I blew out the lantern and looked out the window. The rain had gone away as swift as it had come, and the clouds had parted, and the apple-slice moon was giving out shiny light that looked greasy through the glass; it made the yard shimmer like a wet nickel.

I started upstairs with my stove wood, feeling my way along the rail by experience. Daddy didn’t leap out on me. I watched the bad boards, and made it to the top of the stairs without one of the steps breaking and dropping me through like a gallows. Upstairs, it was musty where the old carpet had rotted. Rain came through a hole at the end of the hall, and sometimes so did pigeons. Daddy was always planning to fix it, but when it came time to buy boards, he bought whiskey instead.

The thing I did like was having a room of my own with a lock on the door. Most river people didn’t have such a thing, and even Terry, who had come from better circumstances, slept on a pallet in their living room, along with four other kids, who had come as a package with his mama’s new husband.

I started to go in my room, but stopped and went down the hall, where Mama stayed. The door was cracked. When I looked in, I could see her shape on the bed, and I was surprised to see another. Even in the dark, I could tell it was Daddy. The moonlight, though thin, lay on his face and made it look as if he was wearing a mask. He was halfway under the covers and had his head turned toward me.

Mama had had far too much laudanum, and that was a fact. Otherwise she would never have let him in to sleep with her, even if it was only to lie at the foot of the bed as a foot warmer.

As I stood there looking, Daddy opened his eyes and saw me. He didn’t move. He just kept looking at me. After a while, he smiled, and the few teeth he had held the moonlight.

I frowned, smacked the stove wood against my open hand until his smile went away, and then I closed the door and walked off.

I dug in my overalls for my key, unlocked my door, pushed it shut, and locked it. I took off my clothes, pulled on my nightgown, shoved back the covers, and crawled in bed with the stove wood beside me. I lay there with the moonlight poking through the thin curtains over my window. I patted the stove wood like it was a bark-covered cat. I thought about Mama and Daddy together, something that ought to have been right, but wasn’t. They had been as distant from one another in recent months as the moon is from the earth, and now this.

I came to the conclusion that on this night, in Mama’s laudanum dreams, he may have been a white knight on a white charger, and she had, so to speak, opened the castle doors and let him in. Bless her heart, the laudanum lied. Yet who was I to judge? Even a root hog has its needs, and I suspect even a root hog has its dreams.

The bed was soft and I was tired. I lay there half awake, half in dream. I dreamed of me and Jinx and Terry, sailing down the Sabine River until we came to Hollywood, sailing right out of darkness and into light, gliding down a wide, wet street of water. On either side of us, standing on golden bricks, were handsome men and beautiful women, all movie stars, people we had seen in films. They waved at us as we drifted by and we waved back, sailing along on our stolen raft with a big white bag of stolen money with a black dollar sign on it. Next to the bag was May Lynn’s ashes in a golden urn.

Along the street, on either side, all the people-knowing who May Lynn was and what she might have been, knowing all the movies she didn’t make, the life she didn’t live-stopped waving and started to cry. We sailed quietly down the street, out of their sight, into shadows black as crows.