by Alex Taylor
Beam didn’t say anything. He’d stowed an Igloo cooler beside the cabin for his shift and he opened it and took out a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade and drank from it and then put it away again and closed the cooler.
“They say it’s so deep that it just don’t have any bottom in some spots.” The man turned and put his back to the railings so that he stared at Beam. “You believe that?”
Beam shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Somebody told that the Army Corp of Engineers is going to come down here one day with sonar equipment and find the bottom,” he said. “But I don’t think they’ll find it even then because I just don’t think there’s any bottom to find down there. What do you think about that?”
“I think there has to be a bottom,” said Beam. “Somewhere. Things just can’t sink forever.”
“Maybe so.” The man looked out over the water. “They say a man that jumps off the highest mountain has ten minutes to fall before he hits the ground.”
“No.”
“That’s what they say. But what I want to know is who’s the dumb sonuvabitch they got to jump off that mountain?”
“Maybe he didn’t jump. Maybe he was throwed.”
“Could be.” The man shrugged and folded his arms. “Either way, he sure had a spell to think about what it was going to be like once that rocky ground slammed against his head.”
The man suddenly went quiet as if weighing the subject at hand with cautious attention, his eyes squenched into the look of one at grave counsel with himself.
“Believe I’d try and jack off,” he said, finally.
Beam stared at the man. “I don’t think I could do that,” he said.
“Ten minutes not long enough for you, huh? Well, I never had that problem. Every circle jerk I ever was in I finished first and third.”
Beam expected the man to end such a thought with a laugh and when he didn’t, his lips set grimly under the red bristles of his mustache with a look of definite affirmation, Beam shook his head and looked away into the night.
“Oh, well.” The man shrugged. “It’s some folks out there would pay to jump off a mountain. All you’d have to do is tell ‘em there was pussy and birthday cake waiting at the bottom and they’d dole out a hundred dollars and just be tearing to get over the edge.”
The man turned back to the railings. He lifted one shoe to rest it on the bottom rung. Beam saw the outline of the wallet in the back pocket of his jeans and wondered suddenly how much cash a dirty stranger like this might carry and if there was a way to take it from him. And the canvas duffel slouched in a corner of the deck? Who could say what a traveler might be bearing through the foggy dark?
“You smoke?” the man asked over his shoulder. He turned and produced a pack of Kenyon cigarettes from his jeans and took one out and then offered the pack to Beam.
Though he wasn’t a smoker, Beam slid a cigarette out and lit it with the man’s proffered matches. The tobacco crackled as it burned and a thick bower of smoke grew about them, singeing Beam’s lungs until he coughed and spat.
“Smoke,” said the man, grinning. “But not too much, huh?”
Beam threw the cigarette overboard and it hissed in the river.
“Who is your mama and daddy?” the man asked.
“Clem and Derna,” Beam said.
The man repeated the names and then shook his head. “I don’t believe I know them.” He drew on his cigarette. “What’s your mama look like?”
Beam put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He tried to think of his mother. He wondered what she would be doing at this hour and then knew she would be asleep, and then he tried to think what a woman like her, roughed and filed down by years, would dream of, or if she even dreamed at all anymore.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s older.”
The man flicked the ash from his cigarette. “How old?”
“She’s up in her forties.”
“That’s older?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. Her hair is getting gray.”
“I bet she’s a real good woman,” the man said.
Beam’s hands grew cold and numb in his pockets. A breeze swept in off the river and rattled against his jacket and the sweat cooled on his cheeks and then he remembered his mother again, and what he’d heard said about her, even as a boy when what was said was spoken by other boys who didn’t know truly what it meant to say things such as that. And the smell of the locust blooms, ghosting white and flurried over the black wind-folded river, lifted hot and sweet to him again, and he heard the branches shaking, the leaves a-shiver like rain in the dark.
“I bet she’s just about the best woman a man could ever hope to mama him,” said the stranger. “What’d you say her name was before she married?”
“I didn’t say.”
The man drew on his cigarette and then tossed it into the river. “Well, what was it?”
“Kurkendayll.”
“Kurkendayll?”
“Yes. That’s what I said.”
The man put his head down, the smoke running out of his nostrils and blowing away in the wind.
“You don’t know her,” Beam said.
The man looked up. His eyes were red with whisky and appeared beleaguered and mournful in the lights of the ferry. “I don’t know her,” he said. “I don’t know anything, bud. You just got to ignore most of what I say.”
Beam felt a sudden weariness descend on him. For a moment, he thought one of his sleeping spells might be about to overtake him and he braced himself against the aluminum wall of the tug cabin and squeezed his eyes shut until the blood boomed in his head. He pressed his cheek to the cold metal and it stung him and roused him further. When he opened his eyes, the stranger was looking at him.
“You sick or something?” he asked.
Beam dragged a hand over his eyes. “Just a little,” he said. He lifted his head and drew a long full breath and then exhaled.
The man had walked just out of the ferry lights now and stood in the dark shadows, his body outlined by the moon.
“You don’t look like any Sheetmire,” he said. His voice sounded thick and slurred, and Beam felt it slide through him. He closed his eyes and steadied himself against the cabin and in a sudden gust all the faces from the Sheetmire homecoming arose from the blank river, but when he opened his eyes only the night was there, black and swirling with cold wind.
“What are you talking about?” Beam asked the stranger.
“I’m saying how you don’t look like any Sheetmire I ever seen.” The man hooked his elbows around the boat railing and licked his teeth. “Wasn’t there a Kurkendayll girl from over around Leachville that married a Sheetmire?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Beam answered.
“Well, is your mama’s family from over around Leachville?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“You don’t know if your mama’s folks are from over around Leachville?”
“No.” Beam felt his head begin to ache and pressed his palms against his eyes. “I don’t know any of my mama’s family.”
“You never met your mama’s folks?”
“No.”
“Well, you don’t really know what you are then, do you? You could be an eighth nigger or three quarters sonuvabitch and not have any clue.”
Beam took his hands from his eyes and stared at the man. He looked pale and sickly with the moonlight at his back, his frail arms bowed over the boat railings. Beam wondered suddenly what it would sound like to hear a man drown. To hear it and know you had done it.
“You look like somebody done pissed in your Cheerios, bud,” said the man. He laughed a little and then stopped. “I’m just goofing on you. You ain’t got to act all hard. I never met no Kurkendayll’s or Sheetmire’s in my life.”
The wind cut off the river and Beam shook inside his jacket. What he’d told the man was true. He didn’t know his mother’s family, had never met a single one of them.
She claimed they were all long dead, but now Beam wondered why she never traveled to any of the cemeteries to place flowers on their graves or to at least show him where his ancestors were buried. She never spoke of them at all. It were as if they didn’t exist, and Beam knew it was only bad trouble in someone’s past that made them not want to talk about it. Good times and happy days were recounted so often the stories became dried out and useless. But bad times were left untold about, as if to speak of them would call down all the old despairs once more.
“Ain’t you ever had nobody goof with you, bud?” the man asked.
Beam stared at the man a moment, then nodded to the tug.
“I got a bottle in there,” he said.
The man snorted. “That’s the spirit, bud,” he said. “Get us a drink and we’ll swallow down any hard feelings.”
Beam moved into the unlit cabin. He leaned over the throttle lever, looking out the port at the sky spilled with stars. He fumbled in his pocket and found the bottle of caffeine pills his doctor had prescribed and ate three of them hurriedly, washing them down with water from a cup on the control console. His head felt cold and empty.
“Hurry up there, bud,” the man called from outside. “I need to get a drink before I step off this jollyboat.”
Beam leaned down and searched through a hickory wood tool box that held a tire iron, a pipe wrench, an assortment of claw hammers. When he brought his hand back up, it stank of rust, and cobwebs drifted from his fingertips like puppeteer strings. He looked at himself in the port glass. His cheeks narrow and clean and one eye like a burned hole. His hair smoothed and sculpted by the wind. His lips twisty and wormish. He reached into the toolbox again and found the pipe wrench and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans.
“Come in here,” he grunted. “I need a light.”
The man shuffled into the small cabin. Beam put his back against a tin wall and pointed below the console. “It’s down there somewhere,” he said. “Light a match and see if you can find it.”
“Ain’t you got a flashlight?”
“Batteries went dead on me.”
“Lord help,” the man said, striking a match. “I just don’t see how somebody like you ever gets by without somebody else. You’re just about like an old goat, ain’t you? Don’t care if your ass is in the sun so long as your head’s in the shade. That right?”
The man was stooping now, guiding the match under the console, throwing light into the webby shadows. His neck was bare above the collar of his shirt. The hairless knuckles of his spine showed a peeling sunburn.
“You don’t know me,” Beam said. “You don’t know who I am.”
The man went on rummaging through the boxes, the match lighting a small corona in the dark.
“Forget it, okay bud?” he said. “I told you I was only goofing.”
“No. You act like you know me, but you don’t.”
The man turned on his haunches and looked up at Beam. The match flame halved his face, the fire splitting the cheeks into red and black, and his eyes were two glass bells to hold the flame.
“You’re right,” he said, finally. “I don’t know you.”
The match went out. “There ain’t no bottle down here,” the man said.
Beam backed toward the cabin door. He put his hand behind him and felt the wrench in his back pocket, then took his hand away and leaned against the cabin wall.
“My old man must’ve finished it off,” he said.
The man stood up slowly, his form silhouetted by the moonlit window at his back. In the dark, he seemed much larger than he had in the lights of the ferry, and his breath rustled loud and grating in his chest.
“I see you got a till here,” he said. He gestured toward the Tupperware bowl that sat on the control panel, then turned back to Beam. His lips cut into a dim smile. “How much it got in there?”
Beam put his hand into his back pocket and gripped the handle of the wrench again. “I don’t believe that’s any of your business,” he said.
For a moment, the man didn’t move. Then he took the till from the console and held it under his arm.
“How’d it be if I just took this?”
“You’re not going to take it,” Beam said.
“You talk like you got some say in it.”
“I do got a say in it.”
The man shook his head. “No,” he said. “You don’t.”
He made to move toward the door and when he did Beam pulled the wrench from his pocket and hit the man across the top of the head, opening a gash from the top of his brow to the bridge of his nose. The blood spilled down his face like a veil and the man stared at Beam a moment as if in shocked recognition before he fell forward onto the deck, the aluminum bonging hollowly beneath him.
All of time seemed to have fixed itself on this point so that Beam felt he could not move from where he stood on the deck. Before him lay the body of the stranger, a damp black pool spreading from his head. Somewhere, the chug of the diesel could be heard but dimly so it might have been only imagined. His hand throbbed from the blow he’d dealt the stranger.
So frozen was Beam he didn’t notice the ferry had reached the shore until it was too late and the prow crumpled against the concrete landing and sparks shot off the torn metal until the boat finally came to rest with half its hull beached on the muddy ramp. The impact knocked Beam to his knees. When he recovered, he quickly turned the engine off and leaned against the control console, sweat dribbling off his scalp into his eyes. He wiped them, then turned and saw the man had rolled onto his back on the ferry deck. Blood spilled out of his ear and covered his face. His eyes were drowsy and half closed. As the breath ran in and out of him it made small brushy sounds like a creature building a nest, readying itself to lie down and be still forever.
Beam found the pipe wrench again and picked it up and then squatted beside the man.
“What you got to say now, you sonuvabitch?” said Beam.
The man coughed and then managed to whisper the name “Loat” and then the breath left him.
Beam stood up. He dropped the wrench onto the deck, the metal droning out long and shivery. For a time he felt he would pass out. Then a breeze swam out of the locust trees and his breathing evened and he knew that he would not. Somewhere off in the night, a catfish rolled on the surface of the river and then the chiseling talk of crickets sounded in the dark.
Beam staggered from the ferry and then up the landing toward the house that soon rose before him dim and quiet beneath the smeary vexed moonlight.
He came and stood on the porch. Through the window, the vampish light of the television jerked eely blue and he knocked steadily on the blank unpainted door. As if this were not his home, as though he were but some traveler adrift in a country he did not know.
“Wrecked her pretty good, didn’t you?” Clem said. He kicked the torn prow of the ferry and the metal boomed hollow and empty. “Where’s the fella you hit?”
Beam nodded toward the body of the stranger. Clem hoisted himself aboard and then Beam followed, their boots clomping on the hull as it listed and swayed.
Clem turned on the wheat light he carried. The beam lit a pair of ragged tennis shoes and two pale calves going up into mired corduroy slacks. The light went higher. Up to the pink nostrils. The stubble on the man’s neck aglint like filings of metal. The blood drying on his face.
“Say he’s dead?” Clem asked.
“Yes,” said Beam. “I believe so.”
Clem went forward a step, then stopped. He turned back and walked to the duffel lying on the deck. Squatting, he tucked the light under his arm and moved the zipper down, his hands riffling through a bundle of clothes, old shirts and jeans. A tube of Crest toothpaste. A disposable razor. One canister of Barbasol shave foam. The remains of a tuna sandwich. Implements of hurried travel.
“Say he tried to steal the till?” Clem asked.
“He did,” said Beam. “He picked it up off the console and said he was taking it.�
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“What the hell was he doing in the cabin?”
Beam stammered and then wiped the sweat from his cheeks. “He just come in,” he said, finally.
“That so?”
“Yeah,” Beam nodded. “That’s what happened.”
Clem zipped the duffel closed and then stood and entered the cabin. His light washed up the interior wall. The he came back on deck and stooped over the man’s body, cupping a hand under his nose. Then he took his hand away and brushed it clean against his thigh. Then the light went out.
“He said a name,” Beam said. “He said the name Loat.”
“Did he?”
Beam nodded. “You think he meant Loat Duncan?”
Clem paced to the other end of the ferry where the man’s duffel sat and he looked down at it for a time, his huge chin resting on his chest. A slight rain had begun falling and thunder kettled in the west.
“That’s the only Loat I know,” he finally said.
Beam dragged his hands through his hair. “What are we going to do?” he asked. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”
Clem turned and looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “He’s dead.”
“What do we do?”
“Not exactly certain.” Clem cracked his knuckles. “Was there no other way to have done it?”
Beam moved closer to his father. In the darkness, he smelled the soured reek of the shirt Clem hadn’t changed since yesterday, and he heard Clem’s aged bent hands twisting together in the night.
“He just come at me,” Beam said. “He said he was taking the money and there was nothing I could do about it. I never meant to do him as bad as I done.”
Clem looked at the river. In the cast of the hull lights, tiny motes of dust blew around his face and turned in the glare. As if he were exhaling ash, as if some yet inextinguishable fire quarreled with his guts.
“Well, maybe he’s carrying a few dollars,” Clem said.
“Maybe.”
“Did you look?”
Beam shook his head.
“Well, why don’t you look and see. He paid his fare didn’t he?”
“You want me to get his wallet out?”
