Too Far Gone

41

The name his mother gave him was Elvis Cash Orbison Brown, but nobody had called him that since he was a kid, and so he thought of himself, as everybody else did, as Grub. He wasn’t sure how old he was, but he reckoned it at nineteen or twenty years, give or take. He knew his birthday was in the winter, and since it could be Thanksgiving, he had decided on that day. Someone asked him for the exact day he was born, because they said Thanksgiving was always on the third Thursday in November. Grub was still trying to figure out why they’d laughed at him, though he believed it had something to do with him having his birthday on a big holiday.

By the time his mother passed-dying from a cottonmouth bite that she got while walking home along the bayou late one night from the Big Time Tavern-Grub had already been working odd jobs around Moody’s Bait amp; Gas a good while, to earn the pocket change that his mother had taken from him as soon as he got home. Well, she stopped that when she died. He wasn’t glad she died, because he’d liked the way she cooked for him and stuff, but it was the first opportunity he’d had to keep what he earned.

Once she had told him that she’d give him a dollar if he could jump over his own shadow, and when the men in the store had laughed at him about the Thanksgiving birth date, he had told them that very thing. It silenced them and they didn’t laugh at him for a while. And Grub wondered if any of the men at the store could jump over their own shadows, because he had tried and tried till he was winded, but it was too hard. He could only jump all around it, so he’d given up.

He hadn’t gone to school long because of how the other children held their noses and laughed at him and the teachers decided he wasn’t able to learn the stupid crap they wanted to teach him. Even though they’d acted like they liked him, he’d known the teachers didn’t. His mama didn’t care one way or the other, but the few times she’d read the notes they’d sent home pinned to his clothes, she’d gone to the school drunk and raised almighty hell with them. After the last visit, they stopped talking to him, much less pinning notes on his shirt. His mama was most happy walking back and forth from the bar along Bayou Berant where she’d spent her time.

Although he wasn’t book smart, Grub knew enough to hide when he saw Leland Ticholet pulling up to the dock. Leland didn’t just get mad at you and forget it later. Leland had never given Grub any money, because he didn’t look for help from anybody, and you didn’t want to talk to him unless he talked to you first. Grub had broken that rule that morning trying to be friendly and make conversation, but it had gone wrong because Leland was a mean shit-head and he had given Grub offense. Leland didn’t want any friends and, the way he acted, he wasn’t about to get any either.

Grub knew what Mr. Moody had told the game wardens a few days back was a big lie. He’d told them that he didn’t know if Leland sold alligators, and nobody with good sense wanted to know bad enough to go near Leland’s camp. Mr. Moody told them nobody he was aware of bought alligator meat or skins, but Grub knew Moody bought them-not only from Leland, but off of lots of other people, too, only not at the store. He did that at a shack he used for alligator business.

Leland stole things, and people didn’t like it. In these parts a man with more smarts than a tire tool didn’t go near another man’s traps-nets, crab traps, the floating jugs that marked trotlines, or muskrat or nutria traps. Stealing from the residents out in the swamps was suicidal, unless you were Leland Ticholet. If people knew Leland stole from them, they didn’t say it to him.

Grub wondered if the wardens knew what sort of crazy bastard they were messing around with asking after Leland. Grub didn’t like Leland, but he didn’t like the wardens even more.

Leland didn’t have friends, but a week earlier, when he’d come over for some gas, which the new boat used a great deal of, he’d had with him a little soft-handed stranger who was wearing a shirt with the collar turned up like it was cold and a big straw hat with a wide brim and he’d had on sunglasses. Moody wondered if he was a fisherman Leland was guiding, which was what Leland claimed, but Grub didn’t see any fishing pole rigs or bait either. The man acted like he might be a movie star trying not to be recognized. One time they had filmed part of a movie around the dock, and Grub heard that some of the actors were famous, but he didn’t know much about movies or the people that were in them. They all wore odd hats and sunglasses and talked funny. Grub didn’t watch television or go to movies because he couldn’t sit still long unless there was a lot of shooting and chasing, and he tended to lose track of what they were all about.

Grub lived in a surplus school bus that Mr. Moody parked in the trees near the bait and gas store, for free so long as he did chores for his keep. Grub got to eat the sandwiches that Mrs. Moody made that didn’t get sold. People in the boats sometimes gave him money for helping load and unload their boats. He also cleaned fish for a dime each. He kept all his money in coffee jars that he hid in really good places so nobody could steal them.

That new boat was a puzzle that nobody could figure out. Nobody knew where Leland got the boat from, and nobody dared to ask him anything they could help not to, because he might get crazy and growl in your face, throw you in the water, or break something. Mr. Moody said it was likely he stole it, because there wasn’t any way he’d scraped up enough in one piece to get it, and nobody in their right mind would finance a maniac like Leland Ticholet even if God Himself cosigned the loan. Mr. Moody allowed as how God had better sense than to do something so stupid as that.

That morning, Grub watched Leland come racing in, pull up to the pier, tie the boat, jump up, get the pump handle, pull it to the gas tanks, and squat down while the tanks filled up. When Leland was done, he put the pump handle back, ran in, and paid Mr. Moody by signing his book for it, which went against what Mr. Moody owed him for the gator hides he didn’t actually buy-just traded goods for them.

Grub waited until Leland was inside the store before he ran up the dock to the boat and looked inside it. There was something big wrapped up in a bedsheet. Grub figured it was a person, on account of the shoes sticking out at one end. It appeared to Grub that the sheet was moving, that whoever it was wrapped up in there was alive. If he’d had time he would have poked the bundle with something to see if it moved, but if Leland was to catch him poking at his sheet deal, he might get crazy.

Grub had quickly jumped up onto the graveled lot above the dock, scampered back to the store, and hidden behind the live-bait well. Leland came back out with a loaf of white bread under his arm and a cola in his hand, and pretty soon he was eating a handful of bread, and was hauling ass away from the dock at full speed, no matter the signs said NO WAKE. Leland wasn’t big on minding signs-if he could even read them, which Grub doubted he could.

Grub figured that the little movie star with the sunglasses and the straw hat was likely who was rolled up in the sheet. Grub considered mentioning the man in the sheet to Moody, but the store owner didn’t care about what people did as long as they didn’t do things that could make trouble for him. Plus, if Leland was to find out that Grub was telling his business, like wrapping up people in things and driving them around the swamps, it might end up being him that was rolled up and lying in the bottom of that fancy new boat.

Grub couldn’t swim, and didn’t want to have to learn all the sudden either.