by Alex Taylor
“See, you can’t even hardly walk right,” he said. “You just need to sit here and rest a spell.”
Beam looked off through the trees and his head swam. “Maybe you’re right,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, I am,” said Alton. “You wait right here and I’ll go down and get you some water and bring it up to you, okay?”
“All right. That’d be fine.”
“Now don’t move. Just stay put right there.”
Alton walked out of the cemetery, through the sunlight and on into the shady trees until the sound of his footsteps was covered by the quake and jostle of the heat.
Beam braced himself against the gravestone. It crumbled some in his hands and he wiped his fingers against his jeans and then closed his eyes and leaned his head back. The blood throttled through him. His tongue had gone dry and brittle and felt swollen, but when he opened his eyes, he saw the trash heap where Alton had hidden the bottle.
A blue jay screamed somewhere in the pines.
Beam woke to full night, not knowing where he was. The ground under him felt soft and damp with moss. He rolled onto his back and then lifted himself onto his elbows, his head wobbling loose and ugly. The drink gurgled back into his throat and he spat raw bile and then wiped his mouth and remembered.
At one corner of the cemetery burned a low campfire. Two men were seated before it on feed buckets. They smoked cigarettes and shared a bottle. Each wore a patchy beard and cradled a rifle in his lap. Far off in the darkness, a pair of foxhounds bayed. When Beam staggered into the hem of firelight, the men looked up at him.
“Where’s the homecoming?” Beam asked.
“You mean the Sheetmire homecoming?” the larger of the two men said.
Beam nodded.
The man who’d spoken scratched at his black whiskers and lit a cigarette. “You’re a mite late if that’s what you come here for.”
Beam wiped the dirt from his arms and then pressed his palms against his eyes. “I must have fell asleep.”
The larger man grunted and adjusted himself atop his feed bucket. He wore a tan hunting jacket and stone-washed blue jeans, his great belly propped on his lap, and his eyes glinted lucent and tiny like bits of feldspar. The other man seated beside him wore faded Carhartt coveralls the color of grocer’s paper. He picked up a stick of kindling and began poking at the coals in the fire.
“Are you a Sheetmire?” he asked.
Beam stroked the back of his neck. Looking through the night at the paling of trees faintly illuminated in the firelight before they faded into blank darkness, he recalled the line of faces at the potluck stretched in a cambered row beside the tables like a procession funereal and gaunt.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m a Sheetmire.”
“Which one?”
“I’m Beam Sheetmire. Clem and Derna’s boy.”
Both men nodded at this. The large one threw his cigarette into the fire and leaned over and lifted a bottle of Old Grandad out of the dust and uncapped it and took two short pulls before screwing the cap on and settling the bottle in the dust again.
“I believe I know them,” he said, a bit breathless from the whisky. “There’s a lot of Sheetmires around and it’s hard to keep track of all the different bunches. I don’t even mess with keeping up no more. Now, it used to be a lot of the older folks was good at that kind of thing. Kept it all written down in the front of their Bibles. Didn’t just write it down, though. They studied on it. Got it down like an oath they had to say. My Uncle Esker could talk the name of ever half-aunt and cousin on back to when they first left England. Shit. Ought to heard him talk in the night by the fire. It was like hearing the roll get called up yonder. I never could do that. Course I never tried awful hard. Just couldn’t see the point, I guess. All those folks were dead and gone long before I ever come to be.”
“There was a spot where even the old folks lost track though, wasn’t there?” said the smaller man.
“There was. Even Uncle Esker couldn’t recollect much past two hundred years. That’s nothing. A drop is all. And I’m not sure I’d want to go on past that even if I could.”
“I might,” said the other man. “I might like to know past what them old folks knew and could tell.”
“Well, I don’t see any kind of good it’d do you or them.”
The smaller man rested his chin against his chest and watched the fire. “Well, maybe not,” he said. “I still might like to know it anyway.”
Beam squatted in the dirt. His head felt warped from the liquor Alton had given him and now he felt a bit dizzy from sleep. He didn’t want to hear the talk of family names or bloodlines, and his guts churned a bit from the memory of all the families at the potluck gawking at him in mute surprise as if he were a guest unexpected and unwelcome.
He sat on his haunches and listened to the men talk of things distant and long forgotten. They seemed to speak with the pulse and rhythm of his own blood as it wandered lost and vagrant inside him and he recalled the faces of the Sheetmires at the potluck again, and heard the dogs hunting in the far wilds beyond the fire. He could see it: the long slick hounds flaming in the pines as they sought the red fox, the great billows of their lungs roaring, their hearts booming like the drum of the wind as it beat against the trees. He could see it all. The drop of paws in the dirt. The fox’s burnished eyes like fine tumble-shined stones flared with cold light. He could see it, and a rush of air surrounded him so that he felt he sat in the doorway of a tomb, the gust swifting in from the trees to chill him until he shivered and clutched at his knees.
“Get up closer to the fire here,” said the large man.
Beam scooted forward and the heat grazed his arms.
“Said you fell asleep?”
Beam nodded. “I guess I did.”
“How you plan on getting home?”
Beam picked at the dirt between his sneakers. He hadn’t considered this and now it dawned on him the way Alton had abandoned him in the cemetery. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “Walk I guess.”
“That’d be quite a hike.”
Beam picked a chunk of bark from the ground and tossed it into the fire. “Maybe y’all could give me a ride.”
The larger man stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hunting jacket. “I guess we might could,” he said, turning to the smaller man. “Let’s run this boy home and by the time we get back maybe the dogs will have come in.”
The other man bobbed his head in agreement. “That sounds good,” he said. He stood up from his bucket, holding his rifle in the crook of his arm. He smiled at Beam. “Truck’s down this way,” he said, and then moved out through the cemetery.
The larger man stood up and hoisted his rifle over his shoulder. “Come on. It ain’t no trouble for us to give you a ride.”
Beam stood and dusted himself off and then hitched at his jeans. The large man looked him up and down.
“This old boney ground here don’t make much of a bed, does it?” he said.
Beam shook his head. “No, sir.”
“I aim to have them throw a mattress down before I get in the grave. Maybe even a nice quilt or blanket.”
Beam looked at the man. He expected to see a grin, but the man was stern and serious, his lips a pale seam in his black whiskers.
“I wouldn’t want to think about it,” Beam said.
The man snorted and pulled at the rifle strap on his shoulder. “Reckon nobody does,” he said.
I
TUESDAY
Someone called to Beam from the far bank of the river through the darkness. He heard the man’s voice as it dropped to him dismal and slow.
“I won’t run you for less than five dollars,” Beam yelled in answer.
Spasms of moonlight fell through the rearing trees. The moon itself was mirrored in the river, a doppelganger moon trembling on the black water, and everywhere hung a stillness seemingly permanent, a quiet that gave form to the night’s own immensity.
Beam walked to th
e bow of the ferry. Moths whirred in the hull lights and he swatted them away. On the landing opposite stood the man who’d called to him, the moon dusting him with a weak and diffuse light.
“You got five dollars?” Beam hollered.
The man picked up a small duffel and hoisted the strap over one shoulder. He turned and began walking away from the river as if in disgust, rising up the landing until his form receded under the locust boughs with their elongate seedpods hung like dead lanterns in those grim and thorny trees. Beam watched him go.
Since sundown, he’d only given passage to a sulking farmer in a rattling tractor, and the want for company had settled on him a lonesomeness that shivered up through his hands as he gripped the flatboat’s railing. He was used to the feeling. It seemed to follow him wherever he went, though he rarely strayed much beyond the ferry and the surrounding bottom country. On nights his daddy let him off duty, Beam might drive Old Dog into the town of Drakesboro to shoot nine ball at The Doe Eyed Lady, a cramped diner that sold fountain drinks and burgers on Wonderbread, the meat so rare and bloody it turned the buns the color of velvet cake. He shot quarter games when money was tight, dollar high when he’d managed to come by extra dough. He had loose friends who joked and ogled the waitresses with him. But even in those times, when the swell of the diner’s clanging noise shrank down and all the billiards slowed and stilled, Beam yet felt a deep loneliness stagger through him, its footsteps heavy and ominous. He felt it again as he watched the man trek up the landing away from the river.
Beam unhitched the keeper chains from the jetty cleats and piled them on the flatboat, then crossed the stern and stepped into the tug. He goosed the throttle and the engine gurgled up and a froth of water boiled from the prop as the ferry crept slowly into the current, and the pulleys screaked along their cables. Driftwood bobbled on the river and the soured reek of mud and locust blossoms rose sharp and hot above the charred stink of diesel. When he was close, Beam cut the engine and let the ferry coast into the landing, the aluminum hull grating on the concrete, and then he fastened the chains to the bollards.
“Five dollars is good money if all you got to do to earn it is run across this river here,” said the man with the duffel. He’d walked back down the landing and now stood just out of the hem of the ferry lights.
“You got a boat to row yourself across with?” Beam asked.
“No,” the man said.
“Then I guess you ain’t got room to complain about the fare.”
The stranger made no reply. He was a broad man and his scalp showed under a thin crew cut. He wore a pale blue collared shirt creased with filth and the corduroy trousers withered against his legs were also dirty and too small for him so that his bare ankles shone white and boney below the cuffs, and when he stepped aboard the ferry Beam saw the broken tennis shoes he wore were caked with cow manure. A red mustache seeped out of his nose and curled around his lips.
Beam looked him over once and then returned to the tug. As he worked the throttle, the man stuck his head into the cabin and said, “I ain’t got five dollars.”
Beam cut the engine. “What’d you say?”
“Said I ain’t got five dollars.” The man’s breath smelled of whisky. “I ain’t got no money at all to give you.”
Beam left the cabin so that he and the stranger stood together on the deck of the ferry. The boat drifted a bit in the current and then steadied as the cables tightened and caught in their iron grommets.
“I ain’t got nothing at all but this here duffel bag.” The man nodded to his luggage slouched in a corner of the deck. “Ain’t nothing in there but extra clothes.”
“You might want to think about changing into them then,” Beam sneered. “Less maybe those in that duffel are worse off than the grimy shit you’re wearing now.”
The man smiled thinly, his eyes cinching into a squint. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Old enough to take this boat back to the side you come from and not give your sorry ass a ride nowhere.”
“I can walk to a bridge.”
Beam threw his hands up and returned to the cabin. He started the engine and began moving back toward the eastern landing. He had no patience for this sort of dawdling. Clem had told him that folks would likely try to bull him over on the ferry on account of his youth and that he couldn’t tolerate such behavior, and so he didn’t, but in truth he hated the gruffness it took to get by in this world, the brute and angry scowling at life that gave a man the upper hand.
The man stuck his head back into the cabin and leaned against the metal door frame. “Hey, man. I was just shitting you. I got five dollars.”
Beam cut the throttle and turned to him. “Let’s see it.”
“Sure, man. Here.” The man dug a wallet of cracked brown leather from his back pocket and produced a wad of singles and handed them to Beam, who counted and then folded them into the plastic Tupperware till sitting on the control panel. Then he ground the starter to life and reversed the prop so the ferry scooted along toward the western landing on the other side of the river.
“I hope that little joke didn’t hurt your feelings none,” the man said. He still hung in the cabin door, his face pale and slick in the feeble light.
Beam steadied the engine and stepped back on deck. The man moved aside to let him pass. For a time, they studied one another in the glum shadows.
“Are you a Sheetmire?” the man asked.
Beam nodded. “Yeah, I am,” he said. The man didn’t look familiar, but plenty knew which family ran the ferry and there rested no surprise in a stranger saying his name.
“I don’t remember you,” the man said. He wiped at his mustache and squinted at Beam, as if trying to fix him in his mind amid a myriad of others. “You don’t look like any Sheetmire.”
A chill rushed in off the river and Beam zipped up the green nylon racing jacket he was wearing. “What do I look like?” he asked.
The man smiled. “Now there’s a dangerous question.” He leaned back against the boat railing and folded his arms across his chest and regarded Beam with a look of snide ridicule. “I hate to tell you this, but I don’t believe Hollywood’s gonna be calling you anytime soon.”
Beam eyed the man curiously. He stood close to the duffel and his entire form seemed to rise from the bag as if he were but some séance trick, a jester’s prank with his shaven head and mustache, the flesh of his face slick and daubed with harlequin light from the cabin and running bulbs of the ferry.
“Who are you?” Beam asked.
The man shook his head once. “You wouldn’t know me,” he said.
Beam spat over the railing into the water. The hull groaned against the current and the river drifted through its own blank darkness, and there came an utterance of depths against the underside of the ferry.
“Where are you going?” Beam asked.
The man looked downstream to where the moonlight rode jagged and broken on the river like mishandled glass.
“Just across,” he said.
“There ain’t much to go to on this side of the river,” said Beam, nodding to the shore as it slowly emerged out the dark. “Just dirt and corn mostly.”
“Way I like it,” said the man. “I like the open air where it ain’t crowded. A man can’t disappear in a city.” He waved a hand at the night and all its distance. “But out here, a fellow can just… be gone.”
The man turned and leaned over the railing like a drunk slouched against a bar. Beam went inside the cabin and cut the throttle back to let the ferry coast. When he reemerged onto the deck, the man was still watching the river tremble along below him.
“Where are you coming from?” Beam asked.
The man looked over his shoulder, his face utterly blank and calm. “Where I come from,” he said, “is a place a boy like you don’t never want to see.”
A fire of anger rushed through Beam and then blew out, a cold crater left in its absence. He didn’t like the way the man had called him a boy,
or the way his smile had wormed its way from his face to leave a look empty and unreadable. Beam did not consider himself a boy. He was nineteen, full of bull piss with his own portion of meanness lurking in him, the kind of youth who’d grit teeth at shop windows and bathroom mirrors, at stolen hubcaps and snatched silverware, anything fool enough to throw his own mug back at him. But this stranger had come out of the night teetering with drink to gibe and prod him, and he felt the bite of something old and fierce in his blood. Watching the stranger on the ferry deck, Beam had a sudden vision of throwing the man overboard. The river would take him. There would be a brief plunge, the water broken in a garland of dingy spray before it settled again. It’s what Beam’s father Clem might have done, in his early years. Lurching and cruel in his youth, a frequent thief, Clem had aged into a soft routine of diet soda and bran flakes. But he had been right, in his time. Flash lightning through his veins every Friday night, he slid through those early years on a highway of blood. Beam could barely believe the stories he’d heard, the ones told to him by old loose-mouthed men who rode the ferry, about how a man might wind up broke or broken if he rode the deck after taking too much drink. The years had left a few drift scraps of recollected violence in his memory—waking in the night to the sound of gunfire and then running down to the ferry to find his father bowed over a prone stranger on the deck, looking up at Beam on the landing to say, “No worries. He ain’t dead.” Because Clem had never been a killer. Gruff and lean, he’d been a drinker and a taker of easy money, a schemer at backroom poker games and a parking lot brawler, and the worst crime he’d dipped his hands into was yanking dollars off the drunks who rode the ferry at night. Caution was the word he preached to Beam now, slipping country wisdom into dinnertime conversation. “Don’t get dizzy when the fists go to flying,” he would say. “And don’t throw no punches unless it’s worth a good amount of dough. You don’t want to pull a jail term for short pay.”
“The Gasping is a deep river,” the stranger said, pulling Beam away from his thoughts. The man had turned back to regard the water, his arms folded over the metal railings.
