Frank stopped when he was only feet from the best friends he had ever had, his head cocking to the side as he took in their fear. Their bodies instantly relaxed as he touched their minds with his insight. He inhaled their dread, sucking it into his lungs.
Images from his past stirred in his mind as he stared into their eyes.
Fourteen-year-old Jimmy, laughing like a madman as he rode his bicycle over a homemade five-foot ramp and into the pond. Lukas smiling as he pulled a massive bass from the Hiawasee. Jimmy passing him a joint as they got wasted in the local cemetery, the light from the full moon giving the tombstones a bluish cast. Lukas doing an outrageously bad Karaoke version of "House of the Rising Sun" while he and Jimmy fell to the floor in overwhelming laughter. Jimmy shaking his hand when he left for the city, then pulling him into a quick and awkward embrace.
One by one, he took the memories in, relishing in the feelings that they inspired. And in exchange, what he gave to them was a part of himself, the insight of what he had become.
Frank held his hairy arms towards his friends, almost in the pose of a crucifixion, beckoning to them with his chin.
Jimmy and Lukas stepped into the embrace, the Bigfoot's powerful arms stretching around their merely human frames. Frank gripped them fiercely, feeling their shaky forms shivering beneath his long, clawed fingers. The love he felt for them was breathtaking. Their friendship was something he would always treasure.
There was nothing in the world like the friends you grew up with.
When he let them go, they nearly fell to the floor, tears running down cheeks. Frank nodded languidly and gestured to the door.
Jimmy and Lukas opened it and fled, vanishing into the thickness of the kudzu night.
Frank turned to face the congregation, his congregation, their prayers already healing his sadness. He spoke, his voice a primordial YAWP. They stood up to embrace the newly resurrected messiah their faces stained with tears of happiness.
Brother Cletus was smiling so widely his cheekbones threatened to burst through his cheeks.
"Amen," he said, nodding softly.
Chapter 12:
Friends Til The Bitter End...The Acid of God...Skipping Stones...Darwin Awards...Dust in the Wind
Jimmy and Lukas watched the sun rise over the now calm waters of the Hiawasee. While they had been in the church, the run-off from the storm had disappeared. Now the water was like it always was: tantalizing, teasing. They had collapsed at the shore of the creek hours before, their bodies too tired to continue.
"I'm going to miss him, Lukas," Jimmy said, shaking his head. "You know, I still can't believe this happened."
"He's happy, Jimmy," Lukas said, tossing a rock into the water. "Didn't you feel him in your mind? I don't know how it's possible, but I felt him in mine. And I didn't just feel him, either. It was like Frank had become some sort of carrier of souls. I don't think I ever felt so connected in my life. I can't say it was a connection with God, but it sure felt spiritual. Frank was sad because he was losin' everythin', but he was happy too." He tossed another rock into the water, this one skipping three times. "I don't think he was ever more content in his whole life. Jimmy, when he came over to us, I saw everythin' we ever did together. It wasn't normal at all. I don't know if he's some kind of God, but I'm pretty damn certain he found Him."
Jimmy joined his friend at the bank of the Hiawasee. He reached down and grabbed a handful of stones and began to hurl them across the water, his body leaning sideways.
"I felt it too. I still don't know how to describe it. Like droppin' holy acid, or somethin'. When he looked at me, I saw everything we ever did together. Is that even possible?" Jimmy sighed, his breath coming out of his mouth in a long tired wheeze. "I still can't believe this happened. Poor Frank. I hope to God he's happy, man."
Lukas put his hand on his friend's arm. He was smiling. "You think he is, too, though. Don't you?"
Jimmy returned the smile, feeling the first of the morning sun warming up his face with its orange glow. "Yeah, I do. Frank found somethin' when he drank that stuff. Frank always did feel like a lost soul, didn't he? I don't think he was ever able to find whatever he was lookin' for. It haunted him, man. I think that's why he left us in the first place. At least he has that other Bigfoot with him now."
"I don't think it's even hit us yet, losing Frank like this. I think when he connected to us like that, it was his way of tellin' us that everything was gonna be okay. He was in a better place. Even though he was a Bigfoot, it was almost like he had evolved, or somethin'. I think we'll be talkin' about what happened out here for the rest of our lives. I don't think we'll ever be the same again. We're different too. I feel twenty years older. I feel twenty years younger. Weird." A stone skipped seven times and he smiled. "I still feel like I'm gonna break down and cry again any second now."
"Me too. Hell, just the thought that I ain't never gonna be able to tease him again hits me right in the gut. I loved him. We both loved him."
"The three of us together had magic. We've known that for almost thirty years."
"What the hell are we gonna tell the police?" asked Jimmy, changing the subject.
"I guess we're just gonna have to say he must have drowned in the Hiawasee. It's not a crime to be drunk and stupid, is it? I know in my heart that Frank would not want us to tell what really happened. The police and newspaper people will be all over that church in hours if we say one goddamned word. And who knows what they'll do to Frank."
"This from the guy who wanted to make a million from the sale of a dead Bigfoot?"
"Yeah. Well. That was then, this is now. We'll just sort of tell the truth. We got blasted on Budweiser and tried to ride the bass boat with no fuckin' paddles down river right after a big fuckin' storm. Frank didn't make it." He turned to Jimmy and grinned. "There is one thing that we can do, you know. Yep, I guess Frank's gonna be on that Darwin list he was talkin' about after all. Ha! It's almost funny when you think about it."
Jimmy nodded. "Frank would appreciate that after all this shit." He snickered. "Winnin' a Darwin award. We could accept it on his behalf and pretend to be a couple of redneck idiots." He paused and stared hard at the languid water. "You believe in God now, Lukas?"
Lukas stared into his friend's eyes and placed a hand upon his shoulder. "I always did, my friend. I always did."
Frank watched his friends from the far shore, the Bitch-Be-Quick Stick clutched in his leathery grasp. The rays of the sun warmed his back. The wind tickled his fur. Seventeen monarch butterflies rested on his outstretched arm, understanding that he could do them no harm.
A fox darted through his trunk-sized legs, hard on the trail of a rabbit, now long gone. A crow flew by and Frank understood the impertinent caw.
His life was different now. He was connected to the universe in a way he'd never imagined. The strains of an old song mixed with a happy memory. No longer was he "Dust in the Wind".
He had become the wind.
Pitfighter Serenade
An old Greek once said that anybody can become angry, but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, is not within everybody's power and is not easy. It takes a rare determination to demonstrate anger perfectly, and Dicky Sims had that quality of determination.
Dicky Sims was angry
What he'd done was not easy. His anger had cost him everything. Absolutely everything.
His job had been lost when he'd used the energetic explanations of his nail gun to punctuate the end of an argument he'd had with his site foreman.
His marriage had been lost when, after three weeks of not bothering to speak to his wife for even the most mundane matter, she'd determined he was an Uncaring Bastard, packed up the kids and moved to her mother's.
His house had been lost as he sat in the front yard after a seventy-two hour binge, his lawn chair resting unevenly upon a mound of empty beer cans. When the fire trucks arrived, he wa
s eating Ballpark Franks, their taste slightly noxious from the taint of melting carpet and furniture.
His wife never realized that by ignoring her, he'd saved her. She didn't know the true shallowness of his self control. Each breath, each itch of the skin enraged him to the point he wanted to lash out...
...to hurt.
...to maim.
...to kill.
His silence had been the truest love. His silence had kept her alive. She would have argued. She wouldn't have understood. How could he have explained to her that he loved another? Not in the way he loved her with fluttering heart and sweaty palms, but a different kind of love. The love of a man for a man. The love one friend has for another that no wife could ever match.
How could he explain to her that he was going on a journey of redemption and that she wasn't invited?
Squatting in the green mire of the trough he wolfed down the corn and burnt chicken gristle as if it were his last meal, for truly, any day could be his last. A large sow butted him twice, squealing her outrage at his selfishness. He spun and growled, his file-sharpened teeth promising another scar, a lost ear or a gutting from loin to jowl. The old bitch just didn't understand. He was king of the holding pen. He got first feed.
Dicky Sims shoved his head into the congealing mess once more, teeth concentrating on food as his gaze followed the sow. Not no, but fuck no. No way was she gonna keep him from feeding. He needed the energy. Everything he'd waited for and everything he'd begged for would occur tonight under the lights of The Pit and he was damned if he was going to let some fat, saggy momma-pig cheat him out of it.
The day had been one of those special days when the rhythms of the earth matched the rhythms of the man. By all accounts the day should have been ruined with the constant hazy drizzle, but for sure, it was a fisherman's dream. It had been the middle of August. Water moccasins were shedding their skins in sun-crazed undulations. Every rock along the river was a shrine to renewal as the vipers lay blind, waiting and ready to snap at a breeze.
The rain showed no signs of letting up—which was fine, because it would have taken an earthquake, a volcanic disaster and fires falling from the heavens to keep Dicky and Willy Pete from fishing. Of all the things in their Appalachian universe, fishing was the only thing that allowed them the purity of silence.
No screaming kids. No bitching wives. No bosses to hassle them. No inane television programming to drive them mad. Just the pure solace of a mixed pine forest and a lonely river meandering through Tennessee farm country.
Willy Pete had heard about the river from a bass man—that breed of fisherman who mysteriously appreciated the lazy strength of a fish even a ten-year old could catch, over the sinewy muscles of the hyperactive trout. As the story went, the river had been a mistake. Not the fact it existed, of course, but the fact that a drunken forestry worker had once dumped a truckload of trout there ten years before. Not normal hatchery trout either. Lunkers ranging from sixteen to thirty inches, each capable of fighting harder than a bass twice their size had suddenly found themselves part of the Jacob Mountain ecosystem.
The trout were a secret. The river, threading through high fields of tobacco and foul plots of pig farmers, was virtually unfished, the locals seeing trout as beneath them and not even worthy of drift netting. Their scoffing made Dicky smile. Transplanted from New Jersey, he had a definite understanding of the Southerner's circular family trees and their inability to grasp concepts that they couldn't actually grasp.
Concepts such as the true beauty of a shimmering trout as it leapt from the churning cold depths of a swift stream, snapping its long jaws upon a wayward mayfly.
Concepts such as the glory of the cruel crawl through thorns and slapping branches to the perfect hole, the only way to sneak up on intelligent trout.
Concepts such as the geometry necessary for the perfect cast, bow-bent and snapping an underhanded man-made delicacy beneath the eaves of a low-slung magnolia that dipped its broad green leaves into the rippling water.
No. Southerners were bass people, sadly content with the laziness of a brain-dead fish that satisfied its curiosity of the world by trying to eat it.
Dicky remembered watching a comedian one time on television. "You know how it is when you're walking up the stairs, and you get to the top, and you think there's one more step? I'm like that all the time." The remark was so simple, something he would have previously nodded at and forgotten. Simple, but it had become part of his life, now.
Elias was good, too good. Somehow, the old Vietnam medic had been able to saw Dicky's legs off below the knees and his arms below the elbows without much blood loss. Through the miracle of boiled pork fat, close knit stitches and sulfa, Dicky hadn't died. Still, the pain had been horrendous. His howls of agony and anguish made the answering cries of the animals penned nearby seem almost mute by comparison.
But his was a necessary transition—a metamorphosis that was at the crux of his agreement. It was only his concentration on retribution, his determined anger that had allowed him to pull through so that he could battle in The Pit in an attempt to kill the thing that had killed his best friend.
The Pit was six feet deep. Each twenty-foot-long side was bolstered by iron-hard logs, cured and tempered by the blood of hundreds. Above this, aluminum football bleachers provided space for the fans to watch. All of this was hidden beneath the old tin roof of a tobacco barn. The first time he'd seen the place he now called home, he'd been standing upon the top bench of the bleachers. He'd had legs then and The Pit had seemed so deep. Never again did he have that same vantage point, for not only had he been reduced to the perspective of a low man, but his domain had become the below, not the above.
His first opponent had been a possum, the white fur, pink nose and needle-sharp teeth so different from the roadside splat he was used to observing as he whizzed past in his pickup. Like a newborn foal, Dicky had stood, his weight resting on the flattened nubs of knees and elbows, each covered with a hard leather cap. Balance came and went, his face dodging the dirt every time he fell.
Through the pain and the confusion he'd heard the cheers of an audience rebounding off the metal of the roof. The air vibrated with their combined energy, each and every shout targeted at him, because of him. He shook with fear, the enormity of his decision finally realized. Blood, snot and tears had almost smothered his anger and quenched his drive, but after the possum latched onto the back of his thigh, tearing away painful chunks of flesh, defense became automatic. Darwin took hold and Dicky rolled using his superior weight to batter the animal into a stupor. The feeling he'd had when he'd finally gagged on the creature's blood, his teeth gnawing spastically upon the stringy arteries of the neck, was better than any sex.
Parting their way through the chest-high forest of unhewn tobacco, they finally found the river. Willy Pete's smile of anticipation was clear through his heavy mustache and beard. Dicky matched it and they shook hands. Willy headed North. Dicky went South. The river was a slow-moving slice through the land. Deep and in shadow from the oaks along the bank, pool after pool of murky water teased him with the possibility of lunker trout. The rain was a continuous splatter along the surface as the large summer drops hammered the water into submission.
Considering the weather, the added mud and vegetation running into the water from the banks filled with bugs and worms, Dicky chose a black rooster tail with a silver spinner. It was his favorite trout lure and only on rare occasions had it let him down. The lure simulated a treating minnow flashing its fear within the water and was a tantalizing treat for a trout. Alas, the murkiness of the disturbed river made the lure almost invisible. So, moving slowly along the bank, Dicky reconciled himself to enjoying the heavy musk of the wet foliage, the sweet tang of honeysuckle and the perfect solitude of a man conjoined with nature.
An hour later, soaked yet content, the first trout struck his line with a thunderous crash. His lightweight rig bent double. His feet slipped upon the rain-slick weeds and he fell to
his side. His breath steam-engined. His heart all but stopped. It was on his knees that Dicky reeled in the first of a dozen twenty-inch trout. Holding the long glistening fish in his hands, he laughed aloud feeling only as a Hemingway character could as a man who had faced nature and defeated it.
The first fish changes the momentum of everything. Filled with optimism, prayers and the knowledge of generations, the fisherman moves faster, becomes more efficient. Increasingly critical of each cast, he guides his line into the places of mythology.
All this and more swept through Dicky's mind as he crept along the bank reeling in fish after fish after fish. Oblivious to the effects of the summer storm, he was a conqueror, master of the world and Fish God to his victims.
Giggling, his creel full of miracle fish, Dicky returned to the truck and awaited the arrival of Willy Pete.
And waited...
And waited...
Elias was a fisherman of sorts. The man seemed to always be trolling. Maybe that's why there were so many fish and so few fishermen. Elias owned most of the businesses in Jacob. The general store, the gas station, the bait and tackle and a diner all boasted the man's name. Before they'd gone fishing, Dicky and Willy Pete had browsed the lures, gassed up their car and filled their thermoses with the diner's bitter black coffee. They hadn't known it, but Elias had been with them from the start. Dicky wouldn't have been surprised if it wasn't from Elias that Willy had learned of the trout.
Hooked from the very beginning and we didn't even fucking know it.
Within the silent pain of his life between fights, Dicky thought of this and more.
The Pit, for it to exist at all, denoted a spectacular culture of silence within the hollows of the Tennessee Hills. The locals surely knew. Each tourist, each hitchhiker, each travelling salesman was at risk. The hunger the locals had for their favorite sport, camouflaged as welcome grins and mountain bonhomie, was an ominous echo of barbarism. The glorious savagery of Southern-style football, the October stratagems of baseball and the year round circular roaring of the NASCAR driver were but children's games to the people who had invented The Pit.
Appalachian Galapagos Page 10
