The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  “She’ll take her to the witch,” Cotton finally said. “Mayhap she has already.”

  The stool creaked beneath Riddle’s weight. He kneaded the center of his forehead. “She gets into them bottoms, we’ll never see her again.”

  “Have a little faith, Charlie. She’ll keep her appointment with you tonight.”

  Riddle grunted.

  Out of the bright day, into the bar, walked a girl, young and rail-thin. She wore tight jeans and a blouse tied above her navel, platform wedges. She had dark hair, small breasts. A collarbone that stood out like a root in the ground. Riddle knew her. Goddamn it, she had no business here. He’d told her, like he told the others. Per Cotton’s shithouse-rat instructions, just that morning Riddle had sent them gals at the Pink Motel packing, had given each a bus ticket and said get. Yet here was what’s-her-name, Tulip, Petal, Rosalee, something like it, taking a bar stool big as Billy-be-frigged. Sidling up to Marvin Gamble, who’d run Gamble’s Garage till it collapsed in rot and ruin. Gamble wore coveralls and a cap with a machinery logo printed above the bill, nursed his second beer of the morning. The girl leaned in close and whispered in his ear.

  “Settled everything else like I asked?” Cotton said. “Saw the ladies off?”

  Riddle’s gaze wandered to Robert Alvin, who sat in a booth by a murky window, drinking hot coffee and skimming the funny pages. “Just about,” he said.

  “What do you hear from your new friends?”

  “They say the dope we brung em’s good. Say they want the little man, like I figured they would.”

  “And you said?”

  “Said a deal’s a deal. If that bitch don’t screw us.”

  At the bar, Tulip or Petal or Rosalee slipped her hand in Gamble’s back pocket, while her other hand was in his crotch, her lips in his ear. Out came the wallet.

  “Bitches,” Riddle said, “got a way of doing that.”

  “She had a for-sure look in her eyes this morning,” Cotton said. “She won’t be happy tucking tail. She’ll fashion some scheme of her own.” A smile in the old preacher’s voice. “To outthink you.”

  At the bar, Gamble cast a glance over his shoulder at Robert Alvin. When he saw Riddle, he straightened from his stool and left. The front door opened. The front door closed. Tulip or Petal or Rosalee saw Riddle and waved. She picked up Gamble’s unfinished beer and downed it. Then started thumbing through the contents of his wallet.

  Riddle pictured Miranda Crabtree, on her knees before him, tangled in the sun-withered kudzu along the river’s edge. In his right hand, Riddle held the arrow that had split his headlight. In his left, a handful of long, dark hair.

  “Say it all goes to plan,” he said to Cotton. “What you gone do, after? Light out?”

  Cotton made a noise in his throat, something Riddle had never heard before. A kind of settling, like wood groaning in the cold of night. The line went dead.

  Riddle hung up.

  The girl took a five from Gamble’s wallet, signaled Shifty for another beer.

  Shifty, pudgy old dollop of a hemorrhoid, slapped a towel over his shoulder. Said something too low for Riddle to hear.

  The girl’s face darkened.

  “Shit,” Riddle breathed. He saw it all play out before it did.

  “Hey, Shifty,” Tulip or Petal or Rosalee said, and she flipped Gamble’s bottle in her hand and smashed it on the edge of the bar.

  Robert Alvin jumped in his booth, spilling hot coffee in his lap.

  Shifty growled and spat and now the whore was screaming, “What was that, motherfucker! What you say?”

  Robert Alvin sat looking for all the world like he had no blessed clue.

  The constable sighed and rolled off the stool, its legs cracking as though they might splinter and burst like tree branches beneath the weight of winter ice.

  * * *

  Later, the girl—Daisy was her name—lay naked on her belly atop the sheet. Snoring.

  Riddle sat in pants and a yellowed undershirt on the edge of the bed, prodigious bulk sinking the mattress as if it were a crippled boat going down at the stern. The afternoon light came streaming through the murky glass. Skull-splitting light, an old familiar ache behind his eye.

  He reached for the whiskey bottle in a heap of clothes on the floor. His feet were bare and dry and cracked, his ankles swollen and starred with burst veins, his toenails thick and uncut. He had the sudden urge to pull them all out with pliers.

  He took a drink.

  The houseboat where Riddle lived was a short, ugly craft, moored along the riverbank ten or fifteen miles southeast of Mylan. Here, the river was wider and deeper and faster, and so, whenever he was home—sitting, sleeping, eating, shitting—a gentle, persistent rhythm worked at Charlie Riddle. It made his heart race, and so he rarely came here, taking most of his meals at Shifty’s or the truck stop near the interstate. The boat was sparsely furnished, a wide empty living space with only a ratty chair and a television on the floor and a pressboard cupboard in the galley, which was mostly bare. In truth, Riddle imagined he would very soon sink it all. Maybe after their dealings were done tomorrow, he would drop a lit stick of dynamite down the shitter and crack the old mildewed bitch in two. Watch her sink from the shore. Let Robert Alvin drive him far away to some cool, dry place, where Billy Cotton and Miranda Crabtree would soon be forgotten.

  The girl’s ass was small and bony, a pimple just east of the cleft.

  All the times he’d fucked whores out at the Pink, he’d never brought one here. This one, Daisy, came on a bus one night, six months back. Staggering off in a hard rain and asking that lecherous old night clerk for a room. No way to pay. The clerk called Riddle right quick, who set her up with her own permanent room. Riddle asked her age. “Old enough, Sheriff,” was all she said, folding herself down on the corner of the bed and grabbing at his buckle. No money ever changed hands, that time or anytime after. Riddle despised her, maybe more than the others, who had at least been capable of fear. Eight or nine whores out of the whole passel had come from Sabbath House itself, back in the early days, unwed mothers seeking God, finding something else in the ministry of Billy Cotton. They came to Lena and went forgiven to the Pink. She never knew. Not until it was too late, anyway. Babies taken care of—snip, snip, snip. The money was good. So good, they’d set up a second camp, a handful of trailers over the state line in Texarkana. A dozen years or more, and now the whole goddamned enterprise a smoking ruin, burned to the ground on Cotton’s orders, just to get that girl and, what, erase old sins, clear the soul’s slate? Money lost forever, that’s what Charlie Riddle thought. Money lost forever.

  “Out of his damn mind,” Riddle muttered. “A man does what he does don’t ask forgiveness. Just does it. Right. Wrong. Just goddamn do it.”

  He took another drink. He set the bottle aside and dug into his pocket for a prescription pill bottle, and out of this he tapped three white pills and swallowed them with another guzzle of whiskey. Outside, beyond the windows at the head of the bunk, all along the bow railing, the light was harsh. It hurt worse than his head. It made him stupid. It made him mean. He swiveled on the bed and traced the neck and lip of his bottle along the inside of the girl’s ribs, nudging the swell of her breast.

  Daisy stirred, raised her head, smiled at Riddle. It was a pleasant smile, though her teeth were snaggled and there were blackheads nesting above her nostrils.

  Riddle returned it.

  “You got any pot, Sheriff?” she asked.

  Riddle shook his head. He held up the bottle of rye. “Just this.”

  “That’ll do,” Daisy said and took it and drank, and the sheet fell away and one pale breast was bared. Beneath her arm: a thatch of hair like a charcoal smudge. She popped the bottle from her lips and wiped her chin and passed it back, and he drank, too. “I figured Old Shifty was gonna clock me for sure this time.”

  “Maybe he would of,” Riddle said. “You oughta learn to listen. I sent all you gals packing. You oughta gone lik
e the rest.”

  “I cain’t leave you all alone, baby,” she said. She lifted a leg from beneath the sheets and slid her foot into his crotch. “I ever tell you I used to know a fella with no nose? He wore a patch over it like your eye. Had this one eyebrow, too, met in the middle like a damn werewolf.”

  “That a fact.”

  “That’s a fact. He wasn’t sweet like you, though. See this?” The sheet had fallen away from her chest, and she sat upright in the bed and pointed at her left breast, where there was a ring of puckered pink scars.

  “I seen it before,” Riddle said.

  “How come you never asked about it?”

  “You want me to know, you’ll tell me.”

  “He did that to me. With his teeth.”

  “Sure he weren’t no werewolf?”

  “Not after I got through with him.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I handcuffed him to the bed and shaved that eyebrow while he slept,” Daisy said.

  “That a fact.”

  “You bet. While he was sleeping. I got me a razor and some cream and shaved that sumbitch right off. You know why he didn’t have no nose?”

  “Why?”

  “Cause I didn’t stop with that eyebrow.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I met up with him again. Couple years later in Lubbock, Texas. He was wearing that patch, black leather shaped like a nose. I tell you, I laughed. He didn’t like that. He came after me hard.” She stepped her fingers across her breast as if the bite marks were stones across a stream. “He didn’t catch me, though.”

  “Hell of a story, little sister.”

  “What happened to you?” she asked, tapping her eye.

  “I lost it for being sweet.”

  She laughed, a sputtering laugh, her tongue behind her teeth.

  “I used to be handsome,” he said. “I was even sweeter then.”

  Daisy sat up a little straighter and her eyes moved over Riddle’s bulk.

  “You was handsome?”

  “It’s true. They used to call me Handsome Charlie.”

  “No shit?”

  “The girls,” he said, “they’d smile when I’d walk by, they’d laugh when I tipped my hat. Back in high school they even passed me notes.”

  “I bet they did.”

  “This one gal,” he said, and his smile slipped away and his grip tightened around the bottle of whiskey. He took a drink. A long drink. “This one gal, I had it real bad for her.”

  “Tell me her name.”

  “Tell me yours.”

  She took the whiskey from him and drank and shook her head, passed the bottle back. “My name’s Daisy.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Ain’t no name real. Just some word got said over us when we was born. Names mean shit, baby.”

  “Well. Her name was Cora.”

  “She pass you notes?”

  “I asked her to a dance once. Slicked my hair, brought flowers. Black-eyed Susans. Picked em by the roadside. She turned me down. Looked at me like I was some kind of Frankenstein.”

  “You mean the monster,” the girl said. “Frankenstein is the man—”

  “There was this other old boy she liked,” Riddle said. His voice dropped low, and he was not looking at the girl. “Married him, eventually, after he came back from the war. She died of cancer.” He took another drink. And another. He was not looking at anything now. “Their kid, she grew up to look just like her momma. I tried being sweet to her, too. But she didn’t much want it. She was younger then than you are now.”

  “I’m pretty young,” Daisy said, digging her heel into Riddle’s crotch.

  “She put her thumb here”—Riddle lifted his right arm and extended his thumb and pressed it against his patch, and the girl’s eyes widened—“and pushed my eyeball right to the back of my head and half my world just popped out like a busted light.”

  Daisy drew the sheet over her breasts, tucked her leg back under. “Girl probably had her reasons,” she said. “We always do.”

  Riddle drank, and at the end of it, with the bottle empty, he gave out a great and terrible gasp.

  “Baby, you gone kill yourself, drinking like that.” Daisy leaned over the edge of the bed to reach a pack of cigarettes from the floor. “You ought to go on one of them diets where you eat cantaloupe and crackers,” she said, tapping out a cigarette as she hung over the lip of the mattress, “you know, the ones—”

  Riddle smashed the empty bottle across the back of Daisy’s head.

  She slumped.

  The houseboat moved, gently, in the current of the river.

  Riddle got up and went out of the bedroom and into the toilet, weaving in the doorway and steadying himself with one hand on the sink. He lifted the toilet lid, unzipped his fly, and pissed. He looked down, couldn’t see his own pecker. Glanced up at the moldy ceiling, a panel loosened a while back, where he’d tucked a few grand in cash away, all the earnings he’d stolen or extorted or just plain claimed from John Avery and Sabbath House. No one there strong enough to fight him for it. What would he spend it on, when it was all over, and the last of it collected tomorrow? A glass eye? Women? A house made to sit still, he thought.

  In the bedroom, barely conscious, the girl had put her hands flat on the floor and was trying, feebly, to crawl from the bed, hemorrhaging, as she did, from a wide laceration just below the crown of her head.

  Riddle looked down at the jagged neck of the bottle where he had dropped it on the floor. He picked it up, stood over the girl. “Yeah,” he said. “They used to call me handsome.”

  BATHHOUSE

  Littlefish sat on his knees and paddled his bark through the water with wide, webbed hands. He moved along his trotlines up and down the bank, each marked by a tethered plastic jug bobbing in the current: six perch, four breams, and a slippery mud cat to show for his efforts, each of these tossed in an orange cooler. When he had reset all the lines, he paddled back to shore and lay out in the sun on a bed of pine needles, letting the warm day dry him. He saw shapes and faces in the webwork patterns the trees made against the sky.

  Around midday he heard the gentle saw of a motor on the bayou.

  Sister, he thought, and pulled his boat fully onto the bank and ran, cooler in his arms, up into the trees and toward the top of the hill. Once, he tripped and spilled the fish. Ashamed at his own clumsiness, he brushed the fish clean and dropped them back into the cooler and ran on. He left the cooler on the rear doorstep of Iskra’s cabin and went around to the front porch, where he found Baba waiting there on the stoop, looking down the long slope of the yard, to where Sister had emerged from the birches, wearing her bow and quiver. She carried a green satchel in her right hand. Her left was closed around the long, hanging shirtsleeve of a—

  Girl.

  The boy shrank back to the lip of the hill, among the kudzu.

  “We have company,” Baba said, smoothing her apron. There was something in her voice, a note of caution, even fear.

  From where he crouched: What’s company?

  But Baba did not answer.

  Sister and the girl started up the hill, and Littlefish scuttled beneath the stilted porch and lay on his belly in the shadows in the cool dirt among the clucking chickens. Baba did not scold, only watched him, her face unreadable, and once he had hidden himself, she gave only the slightest of shrugs and turned back to the slope to wait, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand.

  Soon the girl’s head bobbed at the lip of the slope. Sister pulled her up and the girl stood clutching Sister’s hand through the shirtsleeve, which was too long for her arm. The girl opened and closed her eyes slowly, as if the sun were too bright. Beneath the shirt, she wore dirty pajamas. Littlefish inched forward on his belly for a better look. Baba and Sister spoke quietly. Sister unslung her bow and quiver and set them on the porch steps, then went off around the cabin with Baba and the girl. The boy crawled out from the shadows. From the corner of
the cabin he saw the three of them headed up the hill, past the vegetable garden and tattered scarecrow, past the outhouse and the pump, and into the bathhouse where they closed the door.

  The old cedar bathhouse stood on its bed of rock and timber and mud. Its black stovepipe curving skyward.

  Littlefish did not like the bathhouse. At night, sleeping just up the hill in his shed, he sometimes heard whispering in its walls. Menacing words in Baba’s tongue.

  But the sun was up now and the sun made such things silly, so he crept quietly to the door and peered through a narrow crack. He could not see Baba or Sister in the gloom, but he could see the girl, sitting on the slatted pine bench. She sat with her knees together, her toes just touching the round river stones set into the hard earth beneath the bench. Her hands were folded in her lap, hair short and bristly.

  Does she talk? Did someone teach her how, like Sister taught me?

  He heard footsteps and barely had time to leap back before the door flew open, Baba’s short, heavy shape filling the frame. “Bring wood,” she said.

  * * *

  Iskra piled kindling over logs inside the big stone oven that filled the far corner, a metal pipe running up the wall and through the roof to vent the smoke. Littlefish stood by, holding three lengths of hickory in his arms. He stared at the girl, who sat on the bench without expression, eyes fixed on the dirt floor.

  Miranda hung her duffel on a hook just inside the door.

  Iskra lit a pine knot with a match and with the knot lit the kindling in the oven.

  Miranda could see the boy had questions, but his arms were full of stovewood, so he could not ask. One by one, the old woman reached these from him and thrust them into the oven and poked up the fire with a pair of iron tongs, and when the flames were blazing, she gestured for the boy to take the three cedar buckets that hung from steel hooks on the wall and fill them at the pump. He fumbled a bucket and chased it across the floor, scooped it up with the other two, and was gone.