The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  “I came to see what all the fuss is about.”

  “Fuss is you ain’t paying me enough for this shit. Like I told Handsome Charlie, that girl’s a loss. I got overhead.”

  Through a placid smile, Cotton said, “I’ll see her now.”

  She hmphed, then made a gesture with her bright nails. He followed her out the front door and along the length of the trailer. The woman walked barefoot in the grass, a series of purple bruises running up and down her left calf. She took him out back, to an old Bounder motor home parked beneath the boughs of a Texas live oak, tires flat, roof littered with years of shed leaves. Behind it the Red River, a great muddy snake.

  The woman opened the door with a key, then stepped aside and gestured for Cotton to go in. She shut the door behind him.

  Inside, all sunlight was extinguished.

  Cotton let his eyes adjust.

  A girl lay on her stomach on a bed at the rear, legs bent up behind her in a slant of sunlight. She wore a T-shirt and a pair of dark jeans. At the sound of the door, she rolled over and moved to the edge of the bed, one foot turned inward, bare toes grabbing at the carpet. A book in hand, thick, without pictures. Her thumb marking her place.

  “Who’s that?” she called into the gloom.

  The preacher felt a sudden eruption of sweat beneath his armpits. Her voice was small, delicate. Nigh twelve years she had been here, seven since he last saw her. How many times had he longed to come here? To confess the horrible things he had done to her mother?

  I sent you here to break her. I tore you from her, and in so doing tore the first great hole in her heart.

  Cotton moved through the musty coach, noted the clean sink and stovetop, the dining nook immaculate, a package of crackers and peanut butter on the table, nothing else.

  I promised her they would do terrible things to you, then paid them not to do them. In the end, I tore enough holes in that heart to sink it, to drown it forever.

  He stood in the narrow doorway to the bedroom, hat in hand.

  The girl sat in the dim light, little more than a silhouette. “Ma’am let you in?” she said.

  “She did.”

  Hesitation. “You here for business?”

  “Business?” he said, his tone sharp. “They got you working?”

  She did not answer.

  Gentler: “I’m here to look after you’s all.”

  “I don’t know you, mister.”

  “No, but I knew you when you were little. Used to come here and read you stories.” He took a step toward her.

  “Don’t come any closer,” the girl said. She set her book aside and reached from beneath a pillow a pair of men’s tube socks. She quickly pulled one sock over each hand and up her arms, brightly colored rings at her elbows. “Ma’am said, ain’t no one to touch me no more. Said it ain’t worth the grief.”

  “What’s been happening to you, child?”

  The girl looked down at her socked hands in her lap. Spread her fingers inside the fabric so the cotton stretched like webs between her hands. “Ma’am says it’s just dreams. But they ain’t dreams.”

  “They’re visions,” Cotton said.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “My wife, she saw things, too. She always said it was her gift from God.”

  The girl shifted on the bed, set her book aside. “I sure never thought of it like that.”

  “What do you see, when you touch people?”

  “Bad things, mostly.”

  Cotton took another two steps toward her.

  “Are you here to help me?” the girl said.

  “I’d like to,” he said.

  “Some of the ladies, they came to me, asking me to touch them. Like I was some fortune-teller. But I didn’t want to, so they held me down. Grabbed whatever they could grab. It wasn’t good. What they saw, it scared em so bad two of em just up and left in the night. Ma’am was plenty mad. All the rest is spooked. She says I’m all-around bad for business now.”

  Cotton’s throat constricted, an odd prickling over his skin. “Show yourself to me, child,” he said.

  The girl hesitated, then reached out with a socked hand and switched on a lamp, and Cotton’s breath caught at the sight of her. Her head was crudely shaved, a few plugs of hair like brush fires here and there. The girl regarded him with large, frank eyes, both enveloped by dark, storm-cloud bruises. Her lip was split.

  “Who did this to you?” he said.

  The girl did not answer.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  She shrugged.

  Sweat beading beneath his scalp, running down his cheek, Cotton looked past the bruises and the grotesque head and the socked arms. In her face, he saw his wife, the small ears, small nose, eyes that turned down at the corners, forever sad. He saw nothing of himself, though, was helpless to wonder, even in the midst of the child’s suffering: whose bed had Lena warmed, even as her own lay cold? Cotton was trembling. He gripped the brim of his hat with both hands.

  “Would you touch my hand?” he asked.

  The girl recoiled slowly, drawing her legs away from the edge of the bed. She folded her arms across her chest, shook her head.

  Like a snake striking, Cotton shot toward her and snatched her arm.

  The girl screamed, jerked away. Shoved back against the pine paneling.

  He grabbed her left arm, yanked the sock away. Was dumbfounded by what he saw: little white scars up and down the length of her flesh, some fresh and raw. And in the crook of her right elbow, where the sock there had slipped, half a dozen pinprick scabs. She snatched her arms away, corkscrewed past him for the door. Cotton seized her bare foot with both hands.

  The vision came like a swift blow to his breast, at first darkness, then pain, deep down, infected cells coursing through red streams, the dank smell of roots, cold stone, blood pattering, a razor—

  The girl jammed her other heel into Cotton’s chin and scrambled across the linoleum to the narrow bathroom and locked herself in.

  Cotton sat back on the bed, gasping. The pain subsiding.

  “Go away!” the girl sobbed.

  Outside, the preacher staggered into sunlight.

  The woman who had shown him to the motor home stood nearby, chain-smoking. She tossed her butt into the grass. “Well?” she said, stalking over.

  “You put poison in her?”

  “Only way I could turn a goddamned dollar on that creepy little slut—”

  Cotton struck her, hard, felt the snap of something in the woman’s face beneath his knuckles. She went down in the grass, a slice of bare leg exposed in the sun, all veins and tendons and loose flesh. “I PAY YOU!” he roared. “I pay you and you don’t touch her. That was the deal.”

  “Fuck you,” the woman spat. “You ain’t ever here, you or Charlie fucking Riddle—”

  Cotton seized her throat. “You’ve signed your own death warrant, whore.”

  Her eyes bulged, red bursting. Face going purple.

  Cotton heard a thunder of footsteps, looked up, and saw the big man who had opened the door rushing him. The man hit him like a freight train. He seized the preacher around his throat and dragged him around the trailer and threw him in the front yard, where the ground knocked everything out of him, made him bite his tongue. He sprawled in the dirt, mouth filling with blood. He pushed up and staggered in a circle. The big man put him down with a single punch.

  When Cotton woke he was stuffed behind the wheel of his Caddy. Through the cracked, dusty windshield, he saw the trailers, and in his half-coherent mind, he marked them for his wrath. She was there, Lee, at the end. She was with us in that cold, black place. She will be there. His mind fixed to this thought.

  All the way back to Sabbath House, hot air blasting through the Caddy’s window, keeping him conscious when the pain in his head wanted to send him right off the road, into oblivion, Cotton thought: I was wrong to send her away, Lee.

  She is a lost dove. She is ours.

&nb
sp; OURS.

  * * *

  On it drew him, into the bayou, far ahead Iskra’s island and the coming dawn. The lure of blood, the selfsame blood that drew his dreams at night to the witch’s clearing, to the girl’s waiting hand, blood channeled by the will of some force greater than its bearer, a creature old and powerful and unknown to Billy Cotton, whose chest wept red to show the way. The bayou narrowed, the trees wound together, and beneath the harsh nightsong teeming and the sound of his own voice singing out, the old preacher never heard the true world whispering, reshaping itself in the dark, making ready to receive him.

  THE MEN WHO KILLED COOK

  Beneath the lee of the railroad trestle, the Alumacraft settled with a damp sigh against the bank. Miranda climbed out and moved quietly beneath the bridge and over the granite riprap and up the concrete escarpment. As the grade steepened, she dropped to the balls of her hands and feet, climbing until she was nested in the abutment. Avery came up on her right and lay belly-down beside her.

  She lifted the binoculars she had taken from Hiram’s toolbox and glassed the barge and boat ramp some sixty or seventy yards upriver. At the top of the ramp, four men were clustered in a halo of blue light. Two were the men she had met the previous night, the giant and his sharp-toothed partner, their white Bronco parked at the edge of the trees. Beside the truck were two Shovelhead bikes gleaming chrome and black in the bloodless light, their riders tall and bearded and slack-faced, clad in leather from boots to waist. They stood in a ring, each looking out on the water. The giant and one of the riders smoked. They did not move, save to ash their cigarettes in the grass. The two men she had never seen before wore sidearms in shoulder holsters, six-shot pistols, tattoos inked in their necks and bare arms like dragon scale. The man with the teeth held a pig-knuckle shotgun at his side. The giant had no firearm Miranda could see, just a long, curved knife in a scabbard that dangled from his hip, lashed there by a length of steel chain around his waist.

  She passed Avery the glasses.

  “These are the men who killed Cook?” he said.

  Miranda slid backward on her belly beneath the I-beams of the bridge. She and Avery perched in the deeper darkness there, listening to the predawn shuffle of bats among the iron. She thought: So. The word like the plop of a stone in water, unremarkable. And that was all her life would be, should she lose it in the next few minutes: one more small thing the river had claimed. She thought of her mother’s grave beneath the gum tree. Her father. She thought of Littlefish and Iskra, the lives they had made on the bayou. The life they had given her, in turn.

  “These are the men,” she said.

  She slid silently down the concrete and over the rocks, back to the Alumacraft.

  Avery followed.

  SAFE

  Littlefish came out of the trees and saw Iskra’s island across the bayou in the warming violet light, the top of his pine tree along the ridge shrouded in mist. It should have given him some comfort, the sight of home, but over the last few hours, as he and the girl had backtrailed through the bottoms, a slow, nameless dread had been rising in his heart like water filling a boat. Now he saw his little bark on the opposite bank, run ashore among the trees, and knew that Sister had used it to cross in the night. He felt alone, abandoned. Where was she? Would he find her just over the hill, back at Baba’s cabin? He didn’t think so. Across the way, he saw the narrow, root-threaded path that wound up like stairs into the gloom of the pines. Remembered his dream: smoke and fire and everything burning, and suddenly their crossing seemed urgent, as if the sun itself were the fire he had dreamed, rising higher and higher behind the trees.

  He made gestures to ask if the girl could swim, and she understood right away and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  By her overlong sleeves, he drew her hands up and around his shoulders. She understood and linked them behind his neck. He corkscrewed within her grasp and bent forward and she clambered onto him in the reeds and mud, and like a funny, shambling creature, they went into the water.

  They went slowly until the boy’s feet left the bottom.

  He kicked once, and they were swimming.

  Webs between hands and feet expanding and contracting with every thrust, his body streamlined itself, and were it not for his ragged jeans and the girl on his back, pushing her neck above water, the boy would have seemed wholly at home in the bayou.

  They had covered less than half the distance between shores when the current yanked at the girl and she panicked. Closing her hands around his throat, her forearms locking beneath his chin. A sudden surge of color at her touch, the world refracted through a diamond: dawn sky blazing, treetops gleaming amber, sunlight glittering gold. Water went up his nose. She struggled. He thrashed. She slipped. Littlefish felt her weight leave his back, and when he looked sideways he saw her, crying out, flailing in the sun-dappled bayou. He surged after her, his form a sleek missile. He caught her by the waist, lifting her, as best he could, above the water. Struggling to hold her, one arm locked around her chest.

  Through a stand of reeds and onto the pine-needled bank, they fell in a heap together, choking and sputtering, the boy’s lungs burning. The girl’s coonskin cap lost to the bayou. A spasm rolled up from her gut and she coughed brown water onto the bank.

  Littlefish rolled over, gasping at the morning sky.

  The girl sat beside him.

  He touched the back of her hand, to ask if she was okay. She started.

  Suddenly, the green in the trees around them was aglow, purple wisteria uncoiling in bloom from the pine tops. Littlefish could hear the rush of life in the veins of the plants, and the morning sky blazed with the last of the night’s stars that blurred into lines and back into points, and the bayou where the rising sun struck was blinding, and the boy was filled with a shuddering delight.

  The girl, too, was luminous, her skin glowing as if from within, her eyes blazing out the purest blue. From a clump of wildflowers near the water’s edge a butterfly rose up, the size of a hawk, beating its great wings of orange and black fast enough to blow their damp hair back from their ears, the movement like the rapid shuttering of light through the trees when the boy’s bark was moving swiftly in a current. The girl laughed as it probed her face with its legs, then drifted away, leaving a sky overhead that was pink and gold and studded with clouds like stones across a clear blue stream.

  Was this the place Baba had told him about, when he was little? The land within the land? All I need do, Rybka, is draw back the veil of the air, and there it will be, the magic. And always after this, her laughter, dark and puzzling to the boy.

  Littlefish closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the world had taken on familiar shades and contours. In the wildflowers now, the butterfly fluttered small and fragile, and the world was simply the world again.

  “I like your world so much,” the girl said.

  Together, they went up the hill to the base of the boy’s tree, to the ladder there, the boy walking in a crooked line, dazed, the girl smiling. All urgency in their flight was gone in light of their glimpse of this green, mysterious world. It flickered across his mind that the vision he had seen might somehow be a trick, or a sort of lullaby, tearing him away from some pressing pursuit. Even now, he could not recall any sense of urgency, and anyway, if there was danger ahead, then surely his tree would be a safe place. He began to climb but did so carefully, lest he fall. Looking back, he saw the girl staring up at the eastern sky, where the sun had risen. Now she wore no smile, no dreamy, faraway look. Instead, she watched the sun rise and seemed afraid, as if it were not light spreading in the east over Baba’s cabin but a terrible darkness, welling out from a blackened sun.

  He beckoned her to follow.

  After a moment, she began to climb.

  TRESTLE AND FIRE AND WATER

  Miranda drank and offered the canteen to Avery. They sat on the bank beneath the trestle, beside the boat, letting the sky lighten. Beyond the bridge, a wall of honeysuckle
hid them from the ramp around the bend, where the men with guns waited in expectation of a girl, a boat, a dwarf. The morning was damp, heavy with mist that clung to the trees and water like netting. Might help with cover, Miranda thought. She slipped her arm guard and shooting glove on. The latter she drew carefully around the cut on her palm.

  “Current’s strong,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Avery said.

  She took another drink from the canteen. “You ain’t out when it lights—”

  “I’ll be out. You worry about you.” He drank the rest of the water when she passed the canteen back. He spilled some down Hiram’s shirt and brushed at it.

  “Ain’t we a pair,” she said. She offered the dwarf her gloved hand.

  Surprised, Avery took it. Held it.

  She got into the boat and took up one of the metal canisters from the stern, emptying gasoline over the seats and into the bottom of the boat. She tucked the can quietly near the bow. Avery climbed in by the stern and stood, waiting as Miranda slung her bow and quiver over her shoulder and took up the second fuel can. She stepped out of the boat and onto the bank and took her father’s wadded apron from her quiver. Next, she sat on a rock and drew three arrows and stuck them in the ground. She used Hiram’s knife to cut the apron in six long strips. She wrapped each of the three broadheads with two strips and cinched these around the shafts. Finally, she unscrewed the fuel canister’s lid and dipped each arrow into the canister.

  Avery’s eyes followed her hands from where he sat by the tiller.

  “Everything we do from here out tells how long we live,” she said.

  He gave a single nod.

  Miranda slid the arrows carefully home, one by one, and shouldered the quiver. She grabbed the Root bow from among the rocks and handed Avery the second fuel can. He splashed the rest of the gas into the Alumacraft and set the can softly in the bottom of the boat, between his feet, the fumes wafting up from the hull and swirling in his head and lungs.

  “Remember,” she said, lifting the boat off the rocks by its nose and easing it back into the water. “Wait in the trees until it’s safe. Then follow the bank to me.”