The Beetle Leg

the last time Luke Lampson fished the bottleneck his brim hung down with rain and, amidst lonely flotage, he had felt the water dragging at his feet. It was a rain of sickness that drove the rest away, that filled the bottoms of a few cattle lofts with alcohol. A rotted poncho wrapped the sentry who, for an hour, was left alone in the floating countryside. The beady cigarette smoldered in the damp mouth, and his eyes looked to the right and left at the grass rising above water, at the sunken clouds. He would never again be dry. Some vast spider lay on its back with a shellful of warm fluid, sleeping through the rain of an afternoon. A pool began to whirl, then disappeared; distance had never been so great nor so flatly ruinous as when the twigs rolled by on the lagging current. He moved only once to shake the water from his hands. Otherwise he merely listened, watching the end of the bamboo pole. A small frog rose from a ripple, blinked its head, clung for a moment to his boot. His wide misshapen brim dripped in a steady circle. Across the western body of water not a fire burned.

The white line tugged the bending pole and he began to draw it in, a long cord from the whale’s belly. He felt no pleasure as he squinted to find the hook breaking that low water run beyond its course, only a drenched habitual motion waiting for the surface of stripped branches. Minnows beat more slowly in the basket over his shoulder. The slant of the line reached his feet, the end of it still carried under by the catch, dragging, slow to rise. He lifted the huckleberry pole and there, biting the hook, swung the heavy body of a baby that had been dropped, searched for, and lost in the flood. The eyes slept on either side of the fish line and a point of the barb protruded near the nose stopped with silt. It turned slowly around and around on the end of the wet string that cut in half its forehead. It had been tumbled under exposed roots and with creatures too dumb to swim, long days through the swell, neither sunk nor floating. The white stomach hung full with all it had swallowed.

God’s naked child lay under Luke’s fingers on the spread poncho, as on his knees and up to his thighs in the river, he loosed the hook, forcing his hand to touch the half-made face. His hook cracked through the membrane of the palate; he touched cold scales on the neck. One of the newborn sucked inside a gentle wave to the bottom of a stunted water black tree, its body rolled on the slippery poncho while the crouching figure of a young man shut his eyes, wet his lips.

In both hands he picked it up, circling the softened chest inside of which lay the formless lungs, and stooped again to the water. As his feet moved it thickly eddied, splashed. He held the body closer to the surface, water touched the back of his knuckles, and letting go, he gently pushed it off as if it would turn over and quickly swim away to the center of the bankless stream.

Luke again huddled into the poncho, casting a pinched eye across the grayness of the flood.

The water lay above the roof tops. It stretched thinly for many miles away from the great missing forks country.

“Wade, stay in the car,” and without another word, they kicked through the silent sands in a broken, faceless line to the water’s edge. Not a gull circled their heads, there were no rushes from which the crane could jump and fly with its ill-concealed legs and gawky call. The last drippings of the river lay eighteen feet deep, currentless and pure as rain water, backed without roe or salamander into the shallows. They stood on the low banks like men come upon the severed cathead of a ship or the small prints of wandering herds. All but one stooped to search for his own footfall. In the darkness, a few dunes broke surface, still wet, lean as rocks which before had been merely slopes in a rolling earth.

But even when trying to stand still in the face of the watery discus and stare, if for only a moment, without comment or restless sound, the sands gave way under their feet and they fell to an erect wrestling, laughed suddenly at a hat kicked a few yards along the shore until it landed crown down and out of reach in the water. There was no bean can or grappling pine — the shotguns lay in the truck — but still enough darkness and promise of a wild sunrise to excite them to paw and stumble, a few to expose rashly their seedy chests.

“We all got wounds,” beating the Finn to his knees, “all of us got a share of dickie bird heads desquamated on the river banks,” and the overbearing shadows purled at the moist edge of a hundred and forty miles of milky water. The last of the brooding wranglers laughed for the first time that night and Bohn, now out of their way or batting in their midst and at the cowboy’s side, felt something graze the soft mealy sock of his trouser front.

“Go on, tell about him,” nudging with a familiar elbow, “go on,” said Bohn and began to cough so that both the top and bottom lip of the small mouth — sometimes he dreamed that he could yawn— paled and trembled more thin than ever, pursed by the bitter doctor’s fingers. Luke thought of that slim and vertical mouth as carrying a hook, barbs lodged in the roof years before.

“He was a big baby but a little man. Ma said Hattie told her.” And when they laughed: “She used to keep him covered out of shame for his size.” The rat toothed Lampson, last of the brothers, spilled to them an image of a load too big to move, described, with shoulder sucked into Bohn’s armpit, a man too frail to be crushed. “ ‘I’m in love with a fence post,’ Ma said before he went.”

“His first mistake was just sitting there.”

“He isn’t going to hear…”

“Well then,” above the scuffling, “he’s not so mighty. In the house or out he was the same, like he was petting something inside his shirt.”

“He didn’t love animals, I could see that.”

“He didn’t love anything if he didn’t build, not an ark or bridge or landing. All I need is a sandbag and some warning…”

“You ain’t going to be buried, Finn, you hear? You’re going to drown. That ain’t a warning either.”

“But Ma tells how Hattie used to speak of holding him, used to rock him behind the house. She could hardly talk, trying to show her head around the baby propped against her shoulder. He stared back across the prairie all day long.”

Once out of earshot of women, they baited the ghost. Only a quarter mile west of Mistletoe with its kerosene shades and dotted pokes, the six men suddenly became true to the whips inside their arms, shook the fat on weathered legs. Had they a jug they would have drunk then sloshed playfully, horses prancing after water. The sand slid from under their feet and to the bottom of the lake; and to that corner of the grassland field there fell now a knee, now a hand. Their clothes rustled with the sound of dry rattles stuck by insect mucilage to the bare skin of their calfs.

Bohn took off his vest covered with ashes, then his shirt. “Come on,” he said, looking at all of them, wiping his weak chest and flexing a tattooed tombstone on a strong arm. But the Finn jiggled out of his way.

The laughter stopped.

“Who’s he?”

“You don’t hear everything all the time, Mr. Bohn.”

“He never crossed my town before.”

“Come over to Clare more often,” said the Sheriff, “and you ain’t going to be in the dark so much.”

“Bugle belly,” said Bohn, “I don’t want to see you.”

Luke Lampson stepped apart, close to the man who, short as himself, had interrupted without a sound. Moonlight hit the stranger. He stood poorly in the sand with flashing spectacles, bare head. It was a waning moon, brilliant for a moment on the same warts, the same long lips and the little scowl shrunk from the sun. Luke could see, having never before touched bone of his own, the stains of contagion that spotted the face and hands like shadow, representing the white worlds through which he had passed. And in his pride, filled with the traveling surgeon’s shriveled broadcloth and his shiny temple, Luke looked quickly into the butternut eye and down.

“Pa,” he said.

They walked to the water’s edge.

The small boat was like the hollowed body of a bird. Its keel was a breastbone hung over with dry calking, waving splinters, one not sunk under the mud when the great forks disappeared.

“Keep out of that boat!” Bohn fastened his dirty cuffs and peered at the hull as if it lay snapping in the sand. Luke picked up the iron stove top that was its anchor and dropped it in the bow. In the darkness he pried the bending oars from under the seats.

“The fact is,” catching Luke by the arm, “you’re just going to stay on dry land.”

Luke pushed gently and it slid from the firm beach into the water, continued its downward slope ready, with one more foot, to swamp, then righted itself and sat low in the moonlight.

“Get in,” said Luke.

Camper had no chance to settle in the stern but, hunched and muttering, began immediately and with short bruised strokes to bail, to keep himself afloat.

“I promised him,” Luke said to Bohn. He held the floundering rowboat by its limp rope.

“Cast it off,” whispering, “let him go plumb to the bottom.”

“I’ll call Wade,” the Sheriff tried to lean between the old man and the cowboy, “it’ll cost you fifteen dollars for a personal fine.”

“Sheriff,” with a quick glance, “you ain’t spoke well of my brother tonight. You ain’t got no say in the matter.”

Ten years before, the skiff had been dragged and carried overland, pulled by running men from where it was stuck and abandoned in the river gone dry, upwards on the slippery south face of the dam and faster down the northern slope. They had struggled with it a few hundred yards into the basin, panted, wiped their foreheads, climbed in, and waited for the water. The boat finally rose with the lake. For two days, until a shivering in the current brought them again to shore, the men, who had forgotten to provide oars and who had no sail, waved to the crowds gathered to witness the covering of ranch houses and the land.

Camper scraped its insides with a tin can. In its best days on the river the chubby boat had been splattered with fish oil and moored at night to a barnacle covered pile; now it loosed its seams and sank slowly under Camper’s hand.

“Pa sits in the bow,” said Luke.

“It won’t float the three of you.” Bohn turned away and darkly chewed, refused to look at it.

“What’s that you got there?” asked the Sheriff.

“It’s what we use to hold the oars. I’ll row.”

“Oars!” Bohn spat into the white sand. Then: “I’ll tell you, Lampson, we’ll send the Finn out in it, you stay with us.”

The white cane shot through the air, landed point down like a small harpoon. The Finn swung his bolstered legs to retrieve it. He snatched it up and propped himself belligerently some distance off. Then, seeing the signal of the oars drop with finality into place, he hobbled slowly back toward Bohn.

“You,” Cap Leech suddenly spoke as they slipped away, “you’ve come to no good.”

The Sheriff, Harry Bohn, the Finn, waited as close to the water as they dared until in half an hour or an hour the boat should return. There was silence on the shore. Once the Sheriff beat the cob bowl in his palm, once the Finn started to point with his cane, stopped. Behind them, silhouetted on the hill, lay the black truck and smoking wagon. The moon was gone.

Bohn listened. His head unerringly followed something across the peaceful water.

“Did you hear that?” whispered the Finn.

“I heard,” said Bohn. His eyes were white, he continued to stand despite the pain in his legs. “Keep quiet,” he told the Sheriff. And then more softly to the Finn: “You figure they’re heading the same way as me?”

He listened for sounds of the three men crouched in the boat, his lips moved as he repeated and memorized a poor stroke of the oars, a word or two that could be recalled and fanned when they returned. “Another fifteen minutes,” without looking at the Finn, “and I’m going after them.”

“There,” whispered the Finn, “is he crazy?”

“I heard,” Bohn said again. He watched as if he could see the suddenly phosphorous wake of the rowboat shrinking about its passengers. “I’ll burn it,” he said.

“Listen,” the Finn began to dance on rickety legs, muttered, about to throw himself in the water, “listen!”

The squeak of oarlocks drifted out of the darkness. With every moment Bohn felt the uncertainty of things afloat. The pain in his back, his sore knees, the rubbing wings in his breath flashed sudden signals as he stood still. On the side of his neck a blood vessel began to tick, he abruptly extended his elbow for the Finn to steady. Gradually — and there was no sound, not a tremor except from beyond in the boat — he discovered something which, at his age and no longer able to wait, he could not bear.

“They start up,” prodding the Finn, “then stop.”

The rowboat turned. “I’ll put my foot through it!” Again out of reach they idled and Bohn heard the oars drawn up.

“Over there,” whispered the Finn.

Bohn towered on the shore. His legs shook first. Still trying to listen above the sounds of his own body, his hands shook, his arms, shoulders and head wagged as the boat pulled away. He rose in the darkness with rage enough to carry it home on his back.

“What’s the matter,” the Finn hung to him, “what are they up to, Bohn?”

His mouth opened, a small and lipless zero. With a few short gasps he inhaled and then: “Watch out, Lampson,” he cried, “watch out for him!”

The capsized shell of an insect moved bluntly to the pull of oars, resisted the water like an oil drum pushed by pole. From time to time Camper scraped quickly with the can. Crouched on his knees he splashed and twisted his head sternward to catch the speckled fish when it jumped. He jerked fitfully the green thread which lay untouched on the surface.

“I have to reel in again,” he said, dropping the can. Furiously he wound the spool.

The little boat clove to the rock side of the dam, for long minutes becalmed in the darkness surrounding the base of the earth, sinking, while the three men sat in it, balanced on the palm of a sodden log. Luke shook himself, lay in the oars. He felt with his eyes into the darkness, searched the rocks, and the ratcheting of the reel stopped.

“There. Don’t call to her, she’ll scare.” Luke pointed. They watched until high above them the close wrapped figure with olive branch took two heavy strides, called, “Mulge,” and disappeared. The patched dinghy again trolled its circular way on the vulture’s birdbath.

“That’s not a rock!” cried Camper when they hit the housetop, and clutched the swaying rod to his chest. “My line’ll tangle.”

“Perched up here awhile won’t hurt you none.”

They lay on the flat of the roof. “There’s one to the right,” Luke swallowed the match flame, the sides of the skull glowed as he cupped his hands. “One out there in the gulch, and another beyond that.” He did not look toward the sunken barns. The hummers, the anxious insects, returned jumping across the water to the house. A broken feather curled along the brim at the back of his head. The small haunches had grown tough, dug into a sandy hillside while his pony slept below.

Cap Leech swept the endless gloss of water, then quickly again to the little man in thong and dust, twisted with a human crick between the fanning oars. He could see nothing of the cowboy’s face, only the large oval of the hat like a Quaker’s crown.

“He died,” said Luke, “and she died and I ain’t too keen to remember.”

Cap Leech had lost the thermometer. He felt in his pockets, nothing, not a gelatin pill; and he was cold, seated in the bow of a leaky rowboat. Below him lay the empty house with windows uselessly slammed shut at the first warning of the cannon. From one tight sash there floated a wisp of curtain. Inside, a mattress hung in suspension a few inches from the second floor. Behind the house the orchard’s tree — transplanted it had never bloomed — remained preserved in the backyard of the lake and waved dimly in its branches the staves and wire of a corselet, the stock of a buffalo gun, a lidless cradle; all tied into the tree for safety, inconceivable that the water could climb that high.

“I been alone since then,” said Luke.

Cap Leech stared at the unfamiliar back of the young man drawn up comfortably atop the drowned farm. And he, who by the spoonful or on his handkerchief had shared the opiate slipped to his patients, felt a sudden unpleasant clearness of the head, faced with the foundling plainsman. The first man had died in Eden, they pronounced him dead. And now, with brightening eye, he found himself sitting in the middle of the washed-out garden’s open hearth.

“Boy.” Suddenly he leaned close.

He stared at the tufted head that never turned, at the nape of a soft formed skull the seams of which were not yet grown together, at the lump of ending nerves that was his neck. Man, boy, shard, Cap Leech thought of his eye dilating by its own design, a mean spring opening with surprise, thought of the red rash that would creep along his arms at night from now forward. Within the brainless cord of spinal fluid there was a murky solid, a floating clot of cheerless recognition.

Cap Leech took off his spectacles, wiped, then bent them. He cocked his head, favoring the swelled side of his temple, and in the darkness began to grin through sixty years of accumulated teeth, cut to the gums. Slowly and with the faintest whispering, Cap Leech laughed, his tongue by slight movements pushed and licked each sound, a grim airless ripple so soft as to be hardly heard.

“Watch out, Lampson,” hallooing across the water, “watch out for him!”

The boat bubbled at the sides, tipped and sank twenty feet from shore in front of the bystanders, with keel curled and disintegrated, left the men to step out of it under water. They waded to the landing. In single file all stooped and climbed to the top of the hill through the gray ash, the lagging Cap Leech walking with hands clasped behind his back.

“If you had kept quiet,” said Camper shortly, “I would have caught one.”