Ray

LI

I SEE no pressing reason to get out of bed. The lights are off and it is raining and the covers are the cave I dreamed of when I was a child. I am pretending to be sick — a faker like some of my patients. I dream of monsters that cannot get me. Ha ha. The covers touch me like mother hands. The memories of war talk in the house when I was growing up jabber around, and I close my eyes and bury my face in the pillow like little Ray of three. Bill and Elizabeth told me what an unexpected event I was, and that’s how I feel to this day. Even I don’t expect me. If I could happen, anything could.

Sister is knocking on the door, with a cry as dismal as when I first saw her in her funny gown on the railroad tracks.

Charlie DeSoto is knocking there too. He says he’s got a new bow and arrow. My God, that interests me about as much as a traffic jam.

“You want to shoot some gar?” he says.

Westy was out of town. There was nothing else crazy to do. So we went. We went out Highway 82 to the swamps of the Sipsey River. And there the huge, rolling, scaly, comb-toothed, vicious-snouted gar were not waiting. We were over our shoes in mud, and it was drizzling dirty rain, getting chilly, and the water was as still as oil.

There was one woodpecker going at it in the high branches of a dead tree. It was the only sign of life, and we’d been there two hours.

Charlie looked up at the woodpecker. Then he loaded the bow.

“Aw, Charlie,” I said.

“If I don’t kill something, I’m going to kill my wife,” he said.

Says I, “Go ahead. You ain’t going to hit it, anyway.”

But he did. The arrow rose from the bow as dead-sure as a heat-seeker and skewered the lovely redheaded thing, went on up into the air with the bird still on it.