A Dredging in Swann

by Tim Garvin

  The water-tower flytraps had produced a mighty haul, four full pillowcases. And he had only thinned the pods, leaving enough to reseed for next year, in case he was still in the business. Which he wouldn’t be, he hoped. He would have a nest egg by then and be able to have an achievement. He could have a restaurant, or he could buy a small piece of land and have a paintball course. Or he could start a nursery, with the paintball course in back, a combination thing, which was a smart idea that he would have to remember, but then it was gone, and he couldn’t get it back, except to feel that it was some good inspiration for the future, now vanished in the marijuana mind-dance. He should have a notebook to capture achievement ideas, which often came when he was stoned, and which he needed since he couldn’t get a decent job because of his prison stint.

  He toked again, and Keisha floated up with her happy pixie face. His attention was currently centered on Keisha as a promising life companion. And it was a combination nursery–paintball course! Keisha could help, sell tickets and water plants. He considered writing nursery and paintball in the sand to remind himself tomorrow morning, but the storm was coming, he could see it closing now, and rain would wash the words away, and it was dark, and fuck, and he had to put the tent up.

  He popped up from his sand chair and dragged the tent back to the flat place, and what a complicated motherfucker, and which part was the floor, and then it was up. Some irresistible intelligence in him had risen and mastered it. His mind was in sections, yes, but now and then a good section prevailed, or also it was luck. He tossed in the flytrap pillowcases, got his sleeping bag from the boat, and his pack with the energy bars, flashlight, water bottle, and book, and tossed them in.

  He stuffed another pipe, then went back to his sand chair to wait for the storm, remembering that he had forgotten some important idea, something about plans for the future, which he had thought of writing in the sand, and should have, since it was gone.

  Big Dog

  Leo Sackler woke that morning and felt the free-from-prison gladness come again, waking him with its ordinary kindness. He was drifting on gladness, is how he thought about it. It was like a hungry man, a starving man, and now he’s in a food-everywhere place, and the food is not tricky. You turn and there it always is—at your fingertips, at your elbow, right up on you everywhere—only it’s freedom instead of food, the gladness of freedom, deeply better than food—to be free every morning and anything whatsoever to do. First go out on the porch, urinate off the porch into the morning trees and sun, then cross the big room into the big kitchen, fry a plate of eggs, eat them all or not, have toast, a pot of coffee, then out to the well, free to work or not to work. But definitely work.

  He had been out seventeen days, but he hadn’t found the letter until the second week, so he had only been digging out the old well for five days. But he was already down more than fifteen feet. She didn’t say how deep the well was back in the day, but if it was thirty feet and the digging went soupy and he had to hire help, he would hire help and just be the video man.

  He learned he had a knack for the new things, even after forty-eight years absent from the world. He had heard about the iPhone but had never seen one, and when he left the phone store with his daughter, Virginia, and they sat in his truck and she explained and taught, he focused hard through the gladness and found it all simple to see. He was going to be able to live in this new world.

  Now it was getting toward noon. He had made a dozen trips up and down the ladder, made another foot at least, might make another before the rain came. When the rain came, he would stop working. It came to him he could get naked and walk around in it, leave on his tennis shoes and do a rain scamper like a child. That’s just what he would do. It would be foolishness, because it would not be enough, not even to wash him. But it would be partway enough, and he would most definitely do it.

  He felt the shadows deepen, then felt a patter of clods on his hair and neck. He stuck the shovel hard in with his boot and looked up to see another little clod rain coming. It scattered on his forehead and eyelids. He was ten feet below the man on the surface, a tall man with the morning sun behind him, a shadow man in jeans and a baseball cap.

  The man said, “What the fuck you doing down there?”

  Leo said, “Don’t be throwing clods down on me, please, sir. You want my attention just call down. What I’m doing is just what it look like. I’m digging my well. How can I help you?”

  “I come to see you. I went through your house, saw all your stuff. I could have had my way with your goods. You’re Leo Sackler?”

  “Yes, sir. How can I help you?”

  The man stepped sideways out of the sun, and the hole brightened, showing Leo’s brown face, polite, irritated, and fear-suppressed. The man moved again, and the hole redarkened. The man said, “I like your truck. That’s a honey. How much you pay for that? I know they ain’t cheap.”

  “How can I help you?”

  As Leo put his foot on the ladder’s bottom rung and started to climb, the man kicked the top rung, and the ladder jumped halfway across the well before it clattered back on the brick wellhead. One of the rungs collided with Leo’s forehead. He dabbed his skin for blood, but it was dry.

  The man said, “They say you a millionaire today.”

  Leo unstuck the shovel and dropped it across his shoulder. The spade could be a shield, if it came to that. He said, “Speak your piece.”

  The man said, “I’m going to start you at a thousand dollars a month. That’s no more than a mosquito for a man like you. I’m the big dog in the neighborhood, and no man is safe but through me. From burglars or arsonists or snipers neither. That’s my pronouncement to you. Best advice, do not get squirrelly. What’s your answer?”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “You call me son, I’m the one looking down? A thousand a month for peace. What’s your answer?”

  “Let me think on it.”

  “You already thought on it. What’s your answer?”

  “All right, then.”

  “You got my thousand to start?”

  “No, sir. I must go to the bank.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow. Don’t get squirrelly.”

  The hole brightened again as the man vanished. Leo swung the shovel down, folded his hands on the handle top, laid his forehead across them. He had been thinking of the lovely rain. Now he thought of a gun, thought of the bank, thought of the young deputy that had been coming around. He craved to sit, but the buckets were already full of mud and couldn’t be inverted. He leaned against the well wall and let his head fall onto his chest, deeper and deeper.

  Alley Fight

  Peener stopped, and Seb said again, “Did you hurt that bartender?”

  Peener said, “No, I didn’t. I did borrow three twenties from him, since I needed gas money. The motherfucker gave my credit card to the cops. I bet you got it.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m with the sheriff.” Seb reached behind him and slipped the handcuffs from his belt. He said, “Get on the wall, Carl. I got to hook you up.”

  Peener said, “I’m not going with you.”

  “Yes, you are. You stabbed a guy.”

  “I was defending myself.”

  “Get on the wall, Carl.”

  Peener smiled and shrugged. “Let me see your gun.”

  Seb said, “If I see yours, you’ll see mine.”

  “I don’t carry one. Being a felon.”

  Seb nodded, then said, “I locked mine in the trunk.” He added, a between-men comment: “Where I can’t get to it.”

  Peener made an appreciative laugh. “Well, damn, son, we got to tussle.” He came forward in a boxer’s shuffle, fists up.

  Seb retreated past the hood of his car, put the Honda between him and Peener. He scanned the gravel for a weapon. He was back in Anbar now. He had put on the battle jacket. He would think later, he wo
uld think honestly: it felt good, it was also home.

  Peener said, “C’mon, chickenshit.” He came around the Honda.

  Seb ran to the rear of the van, tried the door, a tire iron, anything. It was locked. He moved between the van and the bar. Peener circled the Honda, then crossed between the vehicles, went into his stance again. He said, “C’mon, dawg, let’s fight it out.”

  Seb walked forward, the handcuffs in his right hand. He feinted with his left, flinching Peener’s concentration, then whipped the handcuffs hard across the broad face. Peener shouted with pain, lurched back, and as he straightened, Seb kicked him perfectly between his thick thighs. Peener said, “Fuck,” and hunched. Seb spun him and pushed him hard toward the wall. The rear door swung open—heavy metal rear door, Handley the bartender coming to see—and Peener went face-first into the edge with a bad sound. He was down and out.

  The incident took forty-five minutes to clear. Kate was back for the scene, and since Seb was a participant, she took the investigation too, Seb making sure she got clear and detailed testimony from Handley that he had opened the rear door himself, just at an unfortunate moment for Peener. The EMS guys had taken Peener to the hospital, a skull-deep gash on his forehead and seeing double, and already complaining about police brutality.

  It was going to be the third complaint against Seb this year, and the State Bureau of Investigation would open a case, since that was the promise the new sheriff had made when he got elected. That was why he got elected. He had beaten an old boy incumbent of twenty-four years, some of whose deputies had been terrorizing the citizenry, white and black and poor, and had finally shot a good old boy in a trailer-park tussle for a Taser, supposedly. One deputy was fired and two quit, but all without charges, so it wasn’t enough to settle the outrage, and the new sheriff vowed to bring in the SBI to investigate deputy misconduct. Swann County was way off I-95, the notorious Iron Pipeline for drug transport, so corruption wasn’t the issue, at least for that election, though it might be soon, with heroin use and overdose death spiking. No, what was on the county’s mind, and on the Raleigh paper’s mind, and on the nation’s mind, was police brutality.

  There were two main bad parts for Seb in the incident. One was that the new sheriff was his former Marine Corps boss, the provost marshal of Camp Henderson when Seb had been a CID detective. So if the sheriff didn’t hammer his old sergeant, the press could sniff favoritism.

  The other bad part, the worse bad part, was that a month ago bartender Handley had testified to internal affairs that Queeny Barker, a black male transvestite, had indeed fallen to her knees in front of Seb as he entered the bar to arrest her for soliciting, seized his buttocks, and shouted, “I’m gonna suck my Sebby’s dick.” It wasn’t the dick-sucking shout that mattered, it was the buttocks seizing, since Queeny claimed to the booking sergeant that she was a victim of police corruption and injustice, having paid Seb one hundred dollars and still been arrested, just look in his back pocket, which Seb did, removing the bill and handing it over for evidence. Queeny, who was bipolar and bad with her antivirals, had gone from HIV to AIDS a year ago and was still locked up, having been refused bail for her soliciting charge in order to protect the public. So now it was the same bartender backing him twice, first with Queeny, now with Peener. Plus, two months earlier, a dealer selling near a middle school swore that Seb had squeezed his testicles to make him reveal the location of his stash. In that case, Seb had only seized the testicles, a squeeze being unnecessary. Peener would be Seb’s third complaint in less than a year and trigger an SBI investigation. The press would love it. The sheriff would hate it. The public would frown.

  Back in his Honda, he had to decide: go see the girl or brood. So go see the girl. It wasn’t ten yet, and he knew she sometimes worked late, who knows, even on a Saturday night, and he could breathe on the way. Definitely the fight had been a joy—except poor Peener, with his concussed brain and split forehead, which Seb didn’t yet but might later, maybe, feel something about—so don’t hide the joy, but put it on the shelf with the other wrong joys, where he could see it and watch it and take its measure, everything being measured now and for the last several years against the joy he had felt in Iraq when he had died for six minutes.

  And there she was, lights on in the studio, bent over her potter’s wheel, raising a slender cylinder. She looked up, puffed back a lock of hair, and gave him a bland oh-it’s-you expression. Two weeks earlier, in his initial interview with her about the burglary, he’d mentioned that he and Charlene were no longer together. The conversation then had gone from professional to friendly to interested, which was not professional, so then back to professional but with a memory of interested. He had watched her knowing smile come and go and had gotten a wise feeling from her.

  Now she sat up straight, waiting. After a short no-progress report concerning the burglary, he made his eight o’clock coffee offer.

  She said, “Oh.”

  He said, “If you can make it.”

  The kind wise smile came. She said, “No Charlene?”

  “No, no. We’re friends, but …”

  She said, “Okay.”

  He felt a joy burst and gripped it back. It would be an upwind challenge. She was a halfway famous artist and might be an I-don’t-date-cops type besides. But he had gotten his yes.

  He extended his hand to shake, smiling away her muddy-handed shrug. They shook, and he wrung his hands together to dry the clay, holding his face sober, not gathering her appreciation with a look. He had gotten his yes, a great valuable main thing.

  Back in his Honda, he breathed and breathed. Don’t hope was important. But hope was important too.

  Simple True Guys

  Seb headed home to Swanntown on the Marine cut through the base. The expected storm had arrived. The thunder altered from booming to banging and occasional lightning jagged into the swamp, illuminating the asphalt and dashboard. Rain made a frenzy on the windshield, and his Honda rocked, but he knew the road and stayed at seventy a few seconds longer, past smart. He had been expressing himself with speed.

  Now he let up and coasted to fifty. He had done well, he thought. They would have coffee together, out on the inlet dock on the water. The storm would be through by then, and there would be the cool morning sun on her auburn hair. Then he thought, no, he had blown it with that wet-clay handwringing bullshit. Why not a smile there, at least a goofy shrug? Instead his sober soldier self, his squared-away, upstanding self. In some ways, with women every man was screwed from go, and not just emotion-hiding soldiers. Men fell in love with softness and beauty and slants of smile and teasing comments, which came from the other world, housed in that fairy body and face, which danced around you, seeing your exposure and dismay and considering both surrender and indifference.

  Maybe he wasn’t ready. But he longed. So he was. Anyway, she had agreed to coffee.

  The fight joy had subsided, though not enough yet to feel any Peener sympathy. Besides, who knows, the door opening might have saved Peener an even worse beating. Seb had put on the battle jacket.

  His first deployment had been during the invasion, and when he returned, desperate for an anchor, he married Glenda, his college girlfriend. Four years later he was redeployed into the Surge, where, for him, the killing began. First, he shot at some guys on a balcony, then at some guys in a street, then for certain killed a guy behind a propane tank, then for certain two guys on a stairwell. His last kill, just before his own death, had been a teenager, a boy crawling through the scrub with an RPG. Seb had picked him up from his post in an irrigation ditch, got him centered in his four-power, and just before he squeezed off saw the kid irritably slap a mosquito on his temple—then Seb put a bullet through the same spot. When they advanced, he steered past the body and force-fed himself a glance at the kid’s dead eyes—somebody’s kid, somebody’s brother, and under the battle hate his heart woke. The boy had been alive. He had slappe
d a mosquito.

  The next day Seb caught an RPG fragment through his armpit into his aortic arch. When they got him to the hospital his pulse was 180 and the pressure almost gone. Then he was gone, and he came up out of his body and saw the doctors and nurses working over him and then went down a tunnel of glorious light, and there was his dead father, who had killed himself, now benign and kindly—and he saw his whole life go by like shuffling cards. And he saw some others that shined, and then one of the shining ones came forward and said, you have more to do, and embraced him, and the love that went through him and around him showed Seb everything about life that he would ever know. Then he woke up in the hospital, and they sent him home.

  Glenda found him one night in their backyard, sobbing. She laid her hand on his shoulder and said, “Seb, maybe you should get some help.” He wanted her commiseration, but also, and more deeply, he felt her commiseration as pain. The love was gone, the angel love and her love too. Now it was the ordinary world of courtesy and chatter, which had no view into the world of blood and death. He blamed her and blamed himself for blaming. More oppressive yet, he had begun to sense the agonizing indifference of everyone to everyone.

  In war, where one moment you are speaking to a friend and the next he is a ragged corpse, where the missions come one after another, where entire families die at checkpoints and mortared markets, where he had killed a boy slapping a mosquito—in that finality something more brutal even than war was revealed, that through all life, and in all hearts, there existed a secret current of indifference, and when you returned from battle, filled with jitters, dreams, and flashbacks, and tried to reenter normal life, you felt the smooth walls of that indifference like a coffin. Normal life denied you readmittance, first with useless solicitude, then with silence. You could not emerge from the numbness that had protected you, and the military that had trained that numbness into you was incompetent to free you from it. Rage built, and helplessness, and despair. If you escaped booze, drugs, suicide, and jail, you redeployed fast because you needed the clarity of war, where your enemies were simple and true and over there, the guys shooting at you, and your friends were the simple true guys beside you shooting back.