The Past Is Never

by Tiffany Quay Tyson

  I felt sick, thinking how I’d failed. I’d discovered nothing new about my father and now I was a mess of bug bites and sunburn and I was lost in a place where I might never be found. I hated myself. My brother was starting a family and a new life without me. I hadn’t considered my own future. I was too busy chasing the past, chasing the ghosts of Daddy and Pansy.

  It was dusk and clouds rolled in to obscure any sunset. Everything seemed gray and wet and filthy. Miserable and full of self-pity, I listened to the buzzing insects and the lapping water and the call of the birds. My T-shirt scraped against my raw skin, the cotton gone crunchy from saltwater and sweat. My palms oozed with blisters. I stank of chemical bug juice and rank body odor. The thought of clean, fresh bathwater filled with sweet-smelling soap nearly made me weep. I was desperate to eat something other than sugary granola bars and too-salty beef jerky. I wanted a beer or a Coke, anything with carbonation. I dreamed of these things when I managed to sleep. It was lovely, and in my dream I knew it wasn’t real. Whatever you do, don’t wake up.

  At the first creep of dawn something rustled in the mud below the chickee hut. The scampering sound of small animals, a cackle that rang out like laughter, a vicious hiss; I hoped it was nothing more than a dream. I pulled myself from sleep and rolled out from under the tarp. It was still dark, nothing but soft gray light in the sky. The noise came from the direction of my kayak. I climbed down to investigate. A pair of glowing orange eyes met mine. I crept forward, hoping my movement would be enough to scare the creature away. That’s when I saw the second set of eyes. And the third. Raccoons were feasting on my meager stash of food. I clapped my hands and charged forward, shouting. They scampered into the nearby trees, and I surveyed the damage.

  One of the raccoons continued to lurk nearby. It staggered sideways a few steps, but kept its eyes on me. The creature seemed odd. It was a small raccoon, nothing like the ones in Mississippi, which could grow large as a dog. This one was no bigger than a small house cat, but even so, I wanted it to go away. I hissed at it, and waved my hands. Instead of leaving, it moved toward me. It lurched toward me. It had the gait and mannerisms of a man gone knee-walking drunk. There were rumors of moonshine stills on the islands and barrels of rum left behind from the days of prohibition. Maybe this raccoon had gotten into a stash of liquor. It made an odd noise, a high-pitched bark. It was not a noise I associated with raccoons. I backed away, hoping to keep some distance between us. Mercifully, a cloud moved and exposed the waning moon, giving me more light.

  Here I was, in the land of crocodiles and alligators, sharks and stingrays, black bears and panthers, and my biggest threat was a barking drunk raccoon. It would be funny if I weren’t lost and exhausted.

  I made myself as big and noisy as possible, but this was no ordinary raccoon. Instead of running away, the raccoon charged at me in a flat-out sprint. I screamed and headed toward the chickee platform. The beast latched onto my leg and sank its sharp teeth into the flesh of my calf. I felt and heard something rip below my knee. I fell. I kicked at the creature with my free leg and twisted around to grasp at it with my hands. It sank its teeth and claws deeper into my flesh and hot pain seared through my entire body. I grabbed the creature with both hands, and pulled. It tore from my leg in a snarling fit, thrashing. I flung the devil away from me.

  My injured leg squirted blood and I couldn’t look at the jagged hole without feeling an urge to vomit. I scooted toward my kayak, keeping the raccoon in sight. It gathered itself to charge again. I reached behind me and grabbed the only weapon I had. When the raccoon ran at me, I swatted it with the flat of my paddle. It flew through the air and landed with a sick thump on the edge of the water. Still, it wasn’t done. It came at me with its rodent paws held high. I raised the paddle and slammed it on the creature’s small head. It barked and scrambled to escape, but I was too furious to let it go. It took a dozen blows to do the job, but by the time I finished, the raccoon was split nearly in two. Bloody entrails and gray fur stuck to the blade of my paddle.

  I crouched in the fading moonlight, covered in mud and blood and sweat, panting and terrified and confused. I’d killed something in a fit of rage, and I had no remorse. I’d kill it again if I could. I’d spend the rest of my life killing that raccoon and not feel I’d wasted a moment. My heart seemed to beat through my whole body, a thrilling, pulsing rage.

  I screamed into the sky, shouting with a fury that rose from my gut and rushed through my veins. I was angry with myself and with everyone who’d led me to that watery wilderness on the edge of the world. I was furious with my parents for their carelessness and their absence. Furious with my mother for the way she gave up on living. Furious with my sister for being born only to be lost. Furious with my brother, who should have watched us better. Furious with the woman from Pittsburgh for her dire and accurate predictions. Furious with Granny Clem for all the secrets and lies, and for playing God with the babies she birthed and sold. Furious with Bubba and his stupid aliens and his sad, pathetic life. Furious with Cheryl for getting pregnant. Furious with the dark water of the quarry and the dark water of the Gulf, and furious with the creature in the haunted woods and the beastly raccoon. I gave all my anger to the night sky, screaming until my voice was no more than a whimper. Some wild creature howled back at me, as if we were having a conversation.

  Spent, I perched on the edge of the kayak and poured fresh water onto the gaping gash created by the raccoon’s teeth and claws. It burned. The morning sky grew light and my terror and fury faded into pain. My food was gone and I had less than a half-gallon of fresh water left. No one knew where I was or had any idea how to search for me. I took off my T-shirt and tied it around the wound on my leg. The loss of blood and the ebb of adrenaline left me weak and shaking.

  I pulled the kayak to the water’s edge, falling to my knees several times. Pain shot through my body when I put any weight on my wounded leg. I left the tarp and bug juice behind. I couldn’t stand the thought of climbing up the chickee platform to retrieve them. It didn’t matter. I would either make it home that day or not at all. I pushed the kayak into the water and climbed aboard. Dense fog crept over the water, making it impossible to guess what lay ahead. The slightest breeze made me shiver. My teeth slammed together so hard my jaw ached. I paddled blindly, consulting the compass to keep heading east. If God existed, he was surely laughing at me now. What a mess I’d made of everything. Morning sun rose and burned off the fog across the water, but the ability to see didn’t clarify my path. The mangroves were a maze.

  I’d gone searching for a dead man and I felt near death myself. Fever overtook me. The chills left me shivering under the hot sun. The exposed skin of my back and shoulders burned and stretched tight. When I dipped my paddle into the water, I feared something would snatch it from my hands. My head ached and my arms felt heavy. I had no idea which direction I traveled. My kayak seemed to spin in circles.

  The delusions started midday. Dreams of people I never knew came to me like bedtime stories. The smell of rotting fish filled my nose and I wondered if the waters beneath me were poisoned or if, like the water from the quarry, they were cursed. Maybe the waters weren’t cursed at all. Maybe the curse traveled with me. I closed my eyes against the searing sun and waited to die.

  I found myself back at the quarry, back at the waters where my sister disappeared. I dreamed of soldiers and slaves, of wealthy men and powerless women, of blues music on a dark night. I dreamed of the Choctaw chief who’d signed over the land where the quarry stood. I dreamed of dark-skinned men, driven by a whip and threatened with guns, digging the quarry with crude tools under sunlight and moonlight. The men dug a thousand pounds of gray rock from the spring bed, which branched out from nearby rivers. The rivers carved rocks from mountains five hundred miles away. The mountains rose up from prehistoric seas. The seas formed from ancient glaciers. By the time the water-washed and ice-smoothed rocks were deposited in the flat land near the woods, they were the size of a man’s palm and
gray as death. I dreamed of the things they pulled from the rocky earth: fossilized pottery, hard slabs of petrified wood, shards of bone, a fragment of human skull, blood-stained flesh.

  I smelled the rotten stink of sulfur and the warm salt-scent of blood. I smelled my mother’s cigarettes and buttery lemon cake and the grape aroma of hyacinths in bloom. And I felt my mother’s hands, cracked and dry, against my face. I felt Bubba’s warm breath against my ear. I felt the warm plop of raindrops on my belly. I felt the rope swing between my fists, my palms blistered and oozing. And I heard my mother’s rattling cough. I heard a terrible sad song. I heard men chanting and women screaming and children running for their lives. I heard the Devil whisper and I heard a baby cry. I heard the screech of metal against stone.

  And I knew we were all the same—the people of the Delta and the people of the Everglades, the people of the rivers and of the cold, burbling springs and of the warm Gulf waters and of the swamps and of the oceans, the people who lived a hundred years ago and the ones who weren’t yet born. My ancestors slept beneath the water, slept beneath the rocks, slept beneath the shell mounds and the mangroves and the cypress strands, slept beneath hardwoods and soft cedar, slept beneath sugarcane and cotton. But Daddy wasn’t sleeping. I felt him with me on the surface of the water. There were so many things I wanted to tell him, so many questions to ask.

  The rumble of approaching death sounded suspiciously like a boat motor. I opened my eyes. Ghosts and dreams receded. A small skiff towed my kayak through the water.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  The man in the skiff didn’t hear me, or didn’t acknowledge me. We circled the islands. Water sprayed gently across my body. My throat burned. I tried to shout again, but couldn’t. The man turned back to me and nodded. He wore a long beard and a fisherman’s hat. His skin was the color of leather and his smile was so familiar.

  Stop, I thought. Stop and let me see you.

  But the man kept going. We seemed to be heading out to sea. My leg pulsed with pain. My mouth went dry. I felt around for the bottle of fresh water, but it was gone. The man shifted his boat to just above an idle as we drew near a sandy shore. He tethered his skiff and pulled me toward him, hand-over-hand across the towline. At shore, he lifted me from the kayak and carried me across a narrow path. We came to a wooden structure, not a chickee with an open roof or a loosely woven thatch, but a two-room cabin with a propane stove and a cistern of fresh rainwater.

  He placed me on a bed, a single mattress on a stack of wooden crates. He unwrapped my leg, poured something cold and stinging across the wound. Sweat pooled on my exposed belly, yet I shivered. The man covered me with a soft quilt. He placed a copper mug with fresh water against my lips and held my head so I could drink. Cold water slipped across my tongue and chased away the nightmare visions. The man wrapped my leg in clean strips of cloth. He placed his rough palm against my forehead. He slipped a pill into my mouth and brought the water to my lips again. I resisted, because I didn’t know what he gave me, until he ran his thumb across my throat and I swallowed without thinking. He told me a story I wouldn’t remember, except sometimes in my dreams.

  My vision blurred and my eyes grew heavy. I dozed, though I fought to stay awake. I knew this man. He was the creature from the woods, the one I’d seen in the flash of lightning on the day we lost Pansy. He’d found me or I’d found him. And I knew for sure what I’d always suspected, but couldn’t admit. The creature from the woods wasn’t a monster and he wasn’t an apparition either. He wasn’t a figment of my dark imagination. He was my father.

  SHE LOOKED STRONG. THE muscles of her arms and legs were ropy and thick. Her hair, sun-streaked and tangled, hung past her shoulders. She had a pretty face; not the sort of pretty that would turn any heads, but the kind of face you’d be glad to see over a plate of eggs every morning.

  Earl tended her wound and covered her sunburnt skin with one of his shirts. He gave her fresh water. If a wild animal had caused her injury, he knew he didn’t have much time. She needed more than a couple of aspirin. It was a shame. He’d like to talk to her for a while. It seemed like years since he had a real conversation with anyone but his sister, and even those visits were rare. Becoming a new person was like printing money. You needed to let the ink dry before circulating. His ink was still wet.

  In a large zippered pocket of her cargo shorts he found a plastic bag with a gray stone, the newspaper article about his tours, one of his sister’s carvings, a letter in a handwriting he recognized, and a photo he hadn’t seen in three decades. He slid the photo inside a book at his bedside. He held the stone in his fist. It was colder than the water of the quarry on the day when he dove and dove and failed to save his sister’s baby, failed to save Ora. He tossed the rock as far as he could into the Gulf and hoped the waters would carry it away. He tucked the rest of her treasures back into the plastic bag and added the notebook he’d been writing in for so long. The stories belonged to her as much as they belonged to him. Maybe they would bring her some peace.

  On her wrist, she wore a battered silver bracelet. He inspected the charms, looking for information about who she’d become. She’d become an adventurer, he decided. She’d become curious and brave. The hourglass charm had broken and spread its contents on the island. Next year, he’d have Mississippi wildflowers sprouting in the Florida sand.

  He carried her to his boat, leaving the kayak on the island. He would think about her whenever he took it out. He delivered her to a spot where he knew someone would find her quickly. He waited off the shore and watched. It took only a few minutes before a man spotted her and called for help. He turned his boat south as the wail of the ambulance filled the air.

  He disappeared into the mangroves and checked on the bundles of cash he’d stashed away years earlier. He’d thought dying would put an end to any search for him, but he was wrong. He’d escaped the law. It was tougher to escape your own family. The cash was right where he’d left it. Most of it was real. If he had to, he could start over somewhere else. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  She’d called him Daddy.

  “Your father is dead,” he’d told her. And it was true. The man she’d known was gone.

  EIGHTEEN

  I WOKE TO SUCH whiteness I thought I was in heaven, but it was a hospital room, cold and sterile and bright. My eyes ached and my throat was sore. Someone took my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back, still unable to see anything beyond the white lights and white ceiling tiles.

  Willet spoke. “Bert? Jesus, Bert, are you with us?”

  I tried to speak, but couldn’t.

  A woman came in, a nurse. She slipped a straw in my mouth and told me to sip, not gulp. The lukewarm water dribbled across my chin, but I managed to swallow. I coughed. My eyes focused and I saw the nurse’s face, round and doughy and sweet. Her hair was as white as the ceiling. She smiled at me, closed-lipped but kind. “You gave your brother quite a fright.”

  “I’m sorry,” I managed to say.

  “I expect he’ll forgive you.” She moved around the room, writing notes on a clipboard and filling the cup at my bedside with fresh water. She ticked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she worked, making a wet, clicking noise. “I’ll be back,” she said. “Rest.”

  When she left the room, Willet appeared in my field of vision. “Goddamn, Bert,” he said. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “How did I get here?” I asked.

  Willet said a man found me on a picnic table near the harbor. I was sunburnt and mosquito-chewed. I wore a man’s denim work shirt with a note pinned to it. The note displayed one word scrawled in all-caps in a shaky hand: RABIES?

  The hospital started me on a round of vaccinations. I’d already received the first shot, Willet told me. I’d get the next one in a few days. The doctor said we were lucky they had a supply of the vaccine on-site. I suffered from dehydration and sunburn. A bag of fluid dripped into my veins. The burn would fade. My mosquito-bitten arms and
legs, pink and crusty with calamine lotion, would heal.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  Willet promised to bring me a basket of hush puppies and fried grouper. I could see how worried he’d been when he thought he might lose me. I was ashamed about how I’d behaved when I found out about Cheryl’s pregnancy and I tried to tell him so, but he waved his hand like none of it mattered. I told him about the man on the water, the one who’d cleaned my wound and given me his shirt. I tried to tell him about our father, but Cheryl showed up and fussed over me.

  She told me not to talk so much. “You should try to sleep,” she said. Already she was becoming maternal.

  Cheryl and Willet left me at the hospital. They promised to return with supper and icebox pie. Alone, I sorted through my possessions. The clothes I’d been wearing were gone, replaced by a clean hospital gown, but my plastic sack of treasures lay on a shelf across the room. I asked the nurse to bring the bag to me. The quarry rock was missing as was the photo of Daddy and Chester and the girl, but in their place was a small thick notebook, its pages warped from water damage. The cover was softer than skin and when I opened it there was a note scrawled on the inside of the front cover. For you, it said. The writing was smeared in places, but legible. I read the first pages about the birth of the quarry and wondered if it were fact or fable and if it mattered. I wondered which parts of my own adventure were real and which parts were nothing but a dream. I drifted in and out of sleep for the rest of the day, waking briefly when the nurse came to check my vital signs and when someone dropped a tray in the hallway. At one point, Iggy was there. He sat on the hard plastic chair next to my bed and cried.

  “It’s okay,” I told him.

  “I knew you were up to something foolish,” he said.

  The bedside phone rang in the late afternoon. Granny Clem told me she was mighty glad to hear my voice. “Willet said you got yourself into a big mess,” she said. “Was it worth it?”