by William Gay
Sandy had once been beaten terribly, but studying her closely Dennis could see no sign of this now. Perhaps the slightest suggestion of aberration about the nose, a hesitant air that she was probably not even aware of. But her skin was clear and brown, the complex and delicate latticework of bones intact beneath it.
Nobody was flirting with us, she said, smiling up at Wesley.
If they did you flashed them a little something, Wesley said.
If I couldn’t get flirted with without flashing them a little something I’d just stay at the house, Christy said. She was giggling again. The big one said his name was Lester, she told Wesley. But don’t worry, he was ugly and baldheaded.
Lester? What the hell kind of redneck name is Lester? Was he chewing Red Man? Did he have on overalls?
You know, Wesley’s not the most sophisticated name I ever heard, Christy said. Nobody’s named Wesley, nobody. Do you know one movie star named Wesley?
It occurred to Dennis that Christy might be doing a little flirting herself, although Wesley had been married to Sandy for almost two years and he supposed that he was going to marry Christy himself, someday sooner or later.
I don’t know any movie stars named anything at all, Wesley said. I’ll make him think goddamn Lester. I’ll Lester him.
Wesley wore cutoff jeans and lowcut running shoes with the laces removed. He was bare to the waist and burnt redblack from the sun so he looked like a sinister statuary you’d chopped out of a block of mahogany with a doublebitted axe. He’s been in the water, and his jeans were wet, and his hair lay in wet black ringlets.
Nobody was flirting with anybody, Sandy said carefully. She enunciated each word clearly, and Dennis figured this as well was because she had been deaf so long. Now she had an expensive hearing aid smaller than the nail of her little finger, and she could hear as well as anyone, but this had not always been so.
Are you all going to get the boats and stuff? Christy asked.
Let’s get everything down from the camp, Dennis said. We can pick the girls up there.
Then let’s go, college man, Wesley said.
They followed a black path that wound through wild cane, brambles, blackberry briars. It led to a clearing where they’d spent the night. On the riverbank were sleeping bags and a red plastic ice chest. Dennis began to roll up the sleeping bag he’d slept in with Christy. Sometime far into the night he had awoken, some noise, a nightbird, an owl. Some wild cry that morphed into Sandy’s quickened breathing as Wesley made love to her. He wondered if Wesley still beat her. He looped a string round the sleeping bag and lashed it tight. When the breathing had reached some frenzied peak and then slowly subsided to normal, he had turned over, being careful not to wake Christy, and gone back to sleep. He turned now and tossed the sleeping bag into one of the two aluminum canoes tied to a hackberry depending out over the river.
When the canoes rounded the bend through the trailing willow fronds, Dennis saw that a red four-wheel-drive Dodge truck had backed a boat trailer down the sloping bank to the shallows. On it were two aluminum canoes that might have been clones of the ones Dennis and Wesley were rowing. Two men were in the bed of the pickup, two men on the ground. The man unbooming the boats did indeed have on overalls. He was enormous, thicker and heavier than Wesley. He wore the overalls with no shirt, and his head was shaved. The top of his head was starkly white against the sunburned skin of his face, as if he’d just this minute finished shaving it.
Son of a bitch, Wesley said.
This is by God crazy, Dennis said, but Wesley had already drifted the canoe parallel with the shore and was wading out. Don’t let this canoe drift into the current, he said over his shoulder. He went up the bank looking at Sandy and Christy. Sandy’s face was as blank as a slate you’d erased, but a sort of constrained glee in Christy’s told him what he wanted to know. He turned to the men grouped about the red truck.
Lester, I heard you were trying to hit on my wife, he said.
The bald man was turned away, but there were so close Wesley could smell the sweat on him, see the glycerinous drops seeping out of the dark skin of his back. The man had a malignant looking mole the size of a fingertip between his shoulders, where the galluses crossed. The man fitted a key into a lock clasped through two links of chain securing the canoes. The lock popped open, and he freed the chain and locked the hasp through another link and picketed the key. He turned. He looked up at the two men in the back of the truck and grinned. At last he glanced at Wesley.
The electronic age, he said, and laughed. I reckon it’s been all over the news already. He wiped the sweat off his head with a forearm and turned to inspect the women. They’d seated themselves on the bank above, and they were watching like spectators boxseated before some barbaric show.
Which one’d be your wife? Lester asked.
Faced with the prospect of describing his wife or pointing her out like a miscreant in a lineup, Wesley hesitated. Sandy raised her arm. That would be me, she said.
Did I hit on you? Say anything out of the way?
No. You didn’t.
The man looked Wesley in the eye. He shrugged. What can I say, he said.
Hey, loosen up, good buddy, one of the men in the truck called. He turned and opened an ice chest and began to remove cans of beer from it. He was bare to the waist, and he had straight, shoulderlength hair that swung with his movement when he turned from the cooler. He tossed a can to Dennis: Unprepared, he still caught it onehanded, shifted hands with it. One for the ladies, the man said, and tossed them gently, one, two. When he pitched a fourth to Wesley, Wesley caught it and pivoted and threw it as far as he could out over the river. It vanished without so much as a splash.
Lester looked up at the longhaired man and grinned. Not his brand, he said.
Don’t try to bullshit me, Wesley said.
I wouldn’t even attempt it, friend, Lester said. He turned to the boat, his back to Wesley, as if he’d simply frozen him out, as if Wesley didn’t exist anymore. He unlooped the chain and slid the canoes off the sloped bed into the water. The two men leapt from the bed of the truck and with the third began to load the boats with ice chests, oars, boxes of fishing tackle. They climbed into the canoes and headed them downstream into the current. Lester turned to the women. He doffed an imaginary hat. Ladies, he said.
Wesley seemed to be looking around for a rock to throw.
Let it go, Dennis said.
I could have handled them, Wesley said. All that fine help I had from you.
Dennis turned and spat into the river. Hellfire. You didn’t need any help. You made as big a fool of yourself alone as you could have with me helping.
I ain’t letting them shitkickers run over me, Wesley said. Hell I got a good Christian raising and a eight-grade education. I don’t have to put up with this shit from anybody.
But Wesley’s moods were mercurial, and he seemed to find what he had just said amusing. He repeated it to himself, then looked toward the girls. Let’s get organized, he said. As soon as Jeeter Lester and his family get gone we’ll start looking for that Civil War cave.
He waded out to the canoe containing the red cooler. But first let’s all have a little shot of that jet fuel, he said.
Dennis was watching Sandy, and a look like apprehension flickered across her face and was gone. No more than the sudden shadow of a passing cloud. Wesley had removed the lid from the cooler. He had somewhere come by an enormous quantity of tiny bottles of Hiram Walker. They were the kind of bottles served on airlines, and Wesley called them jet fuel. He was fumbling under sandwiches, dumping things out. Jet fuel, jet fuel, he was saying.
I’m sorry, Wesley, Sandy called. I left that bag setting on the kitchen table.
Wesley straightened. Well it’ll do a whole hell of a lot of good setting on a table fifty miles from where I am, he said. He sailed the lid out over the river like an enormous rectangular Frisbee.
I said I was sorry. I really am.
Regret is not jet f
uel, Wesley said. He hurled the cooler into the water. Everything went: cellophaned sandwiches, a sixpack of Coke, apples bobbing in the rapid current. A bottle of vin rose.
Shit, Dennis said.
Wesley came wading out of the river, Sandy and Christy were buckling on life jackets. Dennis glared sharply at Wesley’s face. He stood up and put his folded glasses into the pocket of the denim shirt.
I don’t think you’re supposed to be throwing crap in the river like that, Christy said.
Oh no, Wesley said. The river police will get me.
Dennis was staring out at the lighthammered water. Lester and his cohorts had drifted out of sight around the bend. Now where is this famous Civil War cave? He asked.
Supposed to be somewheres close, Wesley told him, relaxing visibly. He turned to the women. Can you all handle a canoe?
I can row as good as you can, Christy told him. Maybe better.
You all check out one side of the river and me and this fine defender of southern womanhood’ll look on the other. Check out every bluff, look for anything that might be a cave. It’s supposed to be about halfway up. If you find a cave, sing out as loud as you can and we’ll be there.
OK?
OK.
And keep those life jackets on. If you have to take a leak or just whatever, do it with the jackets on.
I’m not sure I can do that, Christy said. She turned and gave Dennis a look so absolutely blank it cold have meant anything. It could have meant, You showed common sense staying out of that argument he had. Or it could have meant, Why the hell weren’t you backing him up?
Wesley was looking out across the river. Goddamn it’s hot, he said. Did anybody see where that beer hit?
They drifted with the current, and Dennis shipped the oars, only using one occasionally to steer clear of trees leaning into the water. Huge monoliths of black slate and pale limestone towered above them, ledges adorned with dwarf cedars twisted and windformed. The river moved under them, yellow and murmurous, flexing like the sleekridged skin of an enormous serpent.
Snipes, Wesley said suddenly.
Dennis thought he meant some kind of bird. He was scanning the willows and cane; he had a mental picture of some kind of long legged bird, one foot raised out of the water, a fish in its mouth.
Where? He asked.
Wesley by God Snipes, Wesley said. Ain’t he a movie star?
Yes, he is.
I’ll have to tell Christy about that when we catch up. They’re done out of sight around that shoal yonder.
After a while Wesley told him again the story of the Civil War cave.
The guy always called it that, the Civil War cave, as if the entire Civil War had been fought inside it. He said it was where Confederate soldiers hid out one time. You can’t even see it from the ridge; you have to find it from the river. He said there was all kinds of shit in there. Artifacts. Old guns, lead balls. And bones too, old belt buckles. He didn’t even care, can you feature that? Said the guns was all seized up with rust.
In the lifetime he had known Wesley, Dennis had heard this story perhaps a hundred times. He had his mind kicked out of fear, coasting along, listening to the river mumbling to itself. He thought of the look on Sandy’s face when Wesley had turned from hurling the cooler into the river, and he thought about gauges.
Once, long ago, on one of the few occasions when he had been blind, falling-down drunk, it had occurred to Dennis that life would be much simpler if everything had a gauge on it, the sort that on an automobile measure the temperature of the engine and so on. If the brain had a gauge you would know immediately how smart a certain decision was. You could start to act on it, keeping an eye on the needle all the time. You could proceed, pull back, try another approach. If the heart had one you’d know how in love you were with somebody. And if you could read their gauge…you could live your life with one eye on the needles and never make a foolish move.
Dennis had made several foolish movements in his life, but he had never wavered in the conviction that Wesley had a gauge in his heard. It measured how close he was to violence, and when from zero into uncharted deep red, and every moment of Wesley’s life the needle hovered, trembling, on the hairline of white that was all that stood between order and chaos.
Dennis had long ago quit going to bars with Wesley. At a certain point in his drinking, as if a thermostat had clicked on somewhere, Wesley would swivel his stool and survey the room with a smile of good-natured benevolence, studying its contents as if to ascertain were there inanimate objects worth breaking, folks worth putting in the hospital.
Six months after he married Sandy, he had eased into the bedroom of an apartment in the housing project and studied the sleeping faces of Sandy and a man named Bobby Joe Seales. He had slammed Seales full in the face with his fist, then turned his attention to Sandy. He had broken her arm and nose and jaw and shifted back to Seales. The room was a scene of carnage, folds said, blood on the floor, blood on the walls, blood on the ceiling. He had ripped the shade from a lamp and used the lamp base as a club, beating Seales viciously. Folks came screaming, cops. Dennis did not hear this story from Wesley, or from Sandy, but he had heard it plenty of other places, and Wesley stood trial for aggravated assault. The son of a bitch aggravated me, Wesley had said. So I assaulted him.
Seals had been on the Critical List. Folds always spoke of it in capital letters as if it were a place. A place you didn’t want to go. Don’t fuck with Wesley Deavers, Folds said. He put Bobby Joe Scales on the Critical List. It looked like they’d been killing hogs in there.
Did you hear something?
Dennis listened. All he could hear was the river, crows spilling raucous cries from above them, doves mourning from some deep hollow he couldn’t see.
Something. Sounded like yelling.
Then he could hear voices, faint at first, sourceless, as if they were coming from thin air, or out of the depths of the yellow water. Then he heard, faint and faint: Dennis. Dennis.
They’ve found it. Wesley said. He took up his oars and turned the boat into the swift current. Let’s move it, he said. The voices had grown louder. If this is the right cave we’ll map it, Wesley said. Make us up some charts so we can find it again.
The river widened where it shoaled, then began narrowing into a bottleneck as the bend up. Dennis could feel the river quickening under him, the canoe gaining urgency as it rocked in the current.
Dennis. Dennis.
I wish she’d shut the hell up, Dennis said.
All right, all right, Wesley yelled. We’re coming.
That must be one hellacious cave.
But the cliffs had been tending away for some time now on this side of the river, and when they rounded the bend they saw that the bluffs had subsided to a steep, stony embankment where Christy and Sandy were huddled. Dennis couldn’t see their canoe. They were on their knees and still wearing life jackets, their hair plastered tightly to their skulls. Sandy was crying, and Christy was talking to her and had an arm about her shoulders.
Now what the fuck is this news, Wesley said, and Dennis felt a cold shudder of unease. He remembered something Dorothy Parker had purportedly said once when her doorbell rang: What fresh hell is this?
They tipped us over, Christy said. Now she began to cry as well. Goddamn them. They were waiting for us here and grabbed the boat. All four of them, two boatloads. They tried to get us into the boats with them and when we wouldn’t go they got rough, tried to drag us. I hit one with an oar, and that baldheaded fucker tipped us over. They took the boat.
Wesley seemed actually to pale. Dennis could see a cold pallor beneath the deep tan. It seemed to pulse in his face. Sandy, are you all right? Wesley asked.
She can’t hear, Christy said. When we went under it did something to her hearing aid, ruined it. Shorted it out or something. She can’t hear a thing. I mean not a goddamned thing.
Oh, Wesley cried. He seemed on the threshold of a seizure, some sort of rage induced attack. Eight hu
ndred fucking dollars, he said. Eight hundred dollars up a wild hog’s ass and gone. I’m going to kill them. I’m going to absolutely fucking kill them.
Wesley made twelve dollars an hour, and Dennis knew that he was mentally dividing twelve into eight hundred and arriving at the number of hours he had worked to pay for the hearing aid.
Where’s the other oars?
I don’t know. They floated off.
I’m gone. I’m going to kill them graveyard dead.
He turned the boat about to face the current.
Hey, Christy called. Wait.
Stay right here, Wesley said. And I mean right here. Do not move from that rock till we get back with the boat.
Let them keep the goddamned boat, Christy screamed, but Wesley didn’t reply. He heeled into the current and began to row. He did not speak for a long time. He rowed like a madman, like some sort of rowing machine kicked up on high. I’ll row when you get tired, Dennis said. Fuck that, Wesley told him. After a while he looked back and grinned. How dead am I going to kill them? He asked.
Graveyard dead, Dennis said.
Wesley hadn’t missed a stroke rowing. After a time he said, There will be some slow riding and sad singing.
Trees went by on the twin shorelines like a landscape unspooling endlessly from one reel to another. A flock of birds went down the metallic sky like a handful of hurled slate. Dennis guessed the Lester gang was long gone, into the tall timber, their canoes hidden in the brush, laughing and drinking beer, on their way back across the ridges to pick up their truck.
What were you going to do, back there, kick my ass?
Dennis was looking at the sliding yellow water. What?
Back there at the camp when my jet fuel was missing. You got up and folded your little glasses and shoved them in your pocket. You looked for all the world like a schoolteacher getting ready to straighten some folks out. You think you can kick my ass?
