by Jacob White
He’d picked them up at a boat show, both retired from the circuit. The hulls needed some patching, and in both bilges the engine hoses hung loose—doubtlessly ripped out by the high-flying flurries of catastrophe one sees readily on ESPN. I just stood there, saying real quiet, “Mercy, Reg.” It wasn’t the first time Reg’d initiated me into some terrifying new level of living, but, shit, a look at these things and you knew they weren’t for amateurs.
We hoisted them onto heavy-beamed horses in the garage. That night we turned up the stereo Reg bought so loud I swear to god you would see shock waves blur across the cove below, and we each sat in a boat, cold sixers in our laps, yelling over Steve Miller about faraway matters like TV football and girls seen down at the River Rat, while secretly pretending we were racing.
It was a long fall and winter getting those water rockets rebuilt, but we did it ourselves. We amassed a library of tattered and grease-smudged manuals on high-performance boat engines. By March Reg had his cranked; took me till late April. When the day came to slide them in the water, Penny stood on the dock and humored a sense of ceremony by not laughing once.
When we set them in, water came all the way up to the gunwales and we were sure they’d sink. They beveled right into the surface, smooth chips of white. The boats clearly weren’t meant for men of our dimensions: I almost sunk mine trying to scrabble at the cockpit. Reg slipped off his and fell laughing into the water. Penny set down her margarita, plucked two bottles of Miller from the cooler, and smashed them across our bows.
Snug in the cockpit, I pressed the ignition, and with a thump that fat engine woke right to growling. Its heaviness throbbed through the boat, fiberglass rattling around me. I smelled that white-gold lightening-test fuel and tried to still my hands on the little steering wheel. My legs splayed below water level, I had to force myself to breathe.
You hit one-ninety on the water, you’re born into something new. Every few days we’d explode from our cove: rounding into the channel we’d discern through our blurred windshields a vague geese-like panic as pleasure crafts fled for the shallows. To feel such a mass as our own flung into this kind of velocity made us insane. We’d look over and both be screaming, our gold chains flapping high up on our necks. The boats just never stopped accelerating. We blew all thresholds of wind and logic and would’ve left our earth’s curvature altogether were it not for Hank’s Hot-dog Boat, anchored at a sandbar amid a crowd of other boats, and at which Reg and me were obliged to pit-stop and, to fine applause, eat ten chilidogs each before racing the leg back.
As we headed back up the channel, a police boat shaped like a miniature tug would angle into our path, blue lights going, but then putter helplessly out of the way as we blew by, rebel-yelling, exhausts spewing flames of unburned nitromethane, the police boat lost in a white tsunami. At Buster Boyd we would see as always the work trucks crossing over in an endless procession of dust and rumble from North Carolina, and Reg would peel off and run alongside that bridge a few times until he’d thoroughly blasted all those trucks with his rooster tail.
Reg would catch up to me, and that last mile was the most furious. When you’re going that fast, no matter if you got your blood brother pushing along next to you, you are all alone. Ripples bite at the hull, and scared as you are, it becomes easier to go faster than slow down.
But the lake could slow us down when we needed. Those evenings the water went flat and buttery, Penny picked us up in the old Ski Nautique, asked us to give her a pull like when we were kids. We’d head up the lake and stop inside a cove as she squeaked this wetsuit up over her naked brown body. She dove in, and we threw out an old yellow kneeboard and a ski rope. Once me or Reg got her going, she spun around on the kneeboard so she was on her butt with her knees drawn and her toes together at the tip. With one hand she gave the up thumb—faster—and that’s when whichever of us was driving dropped the throttle all the way. We heard the four barrels open, and the wake flattened into a hard, spiny ridge. Water exploded around Penny as she set her heels in. Her eyes closed, her teeth clenched. The kneeboard clattered under her thighs as her weight lifted, and then it was gone, and Penny rose, opening her eyes, flying barefoot across the water. You would love her too.
Out on our dock one day, Reg wondered if the lake wasn’t getting tired. For years we’d watched neighborhoods leapfrog up the lake. All around Little Allison Creek now, Duke Power was thinning out shoreline forest for surveys, giving our neck of the lake a sick, wintry look. “Nuclear exposure,” Reg joked (he’d been healthy as an ox since his own exposure: we crossed our fingers). Some old-timers who fished our cove hollered how Duke Power was buying up family acreage along Youngblood Road. A new golf community was going in two coves up, one that aimed to make that River Heights down the lake look like a trailer court. The old-timers thought it fair to tell us, too, how they’d seen boys with surveying gear walking through Tree Geese Landing. They were quiet before asking had we signed.
Reg and me looked at each other and our lives began to take shape. I saw his eyes sharpen with the cold pull of purpose. What fire in us this put out, Reg would make up for, beginning with that row of house frames that picketed the mouth of our cove. I was only half surprised the night I woke to find the whole cove glowing red. A police cruiser or two crept down our drive, but they didn’t press too hard, knowing full well they’d soon lose this jurisdiction to rent-a-cops. We got some neighborly mail encouraging us to keep at it.
But it was all Reg. There’d be these quiet mornings where I wouldn’t hear him in the house—and neither of us went unheard in that house, between the clinking free weights, groaning floor planks, or just us breathing heavily. He’d stay in his room for hours. One morning, finally, he walked into the kitchen, pinching the ridge between his eyes and holding a paper slashed by the same scrawl our fifth-grade teacher Ms. Spurriur had refused to accept as the product of hours of concentration. At the top was written: Our Homeland: You Will Miss It When It’s Gone.
Penny typed and Xeroxed the page, then stuffed mailboxes all up and down Youngblood Road. She canoed down the coves and creeks, drifting up to bass boats and holding out the flyer without even scaring the fish.
Another night I saw Reg try to slink out the kitchen door in a suit and tie, which I hadn’t seen him in since Homecoming. He’d cut his hair (we’d both gone wild-haired and bearded) back how we used to wear it in high school, bristle-short. I muted the big-screen and stood from the couch, licking barbeque from my fingers. “What’s up, cupcake?” Town meeting, he said—a euphemism for the vigilante-like crowd he’d rustled into the old chapel up on the McKinney farm. I listened to him drive off to three or four of these meetings before I got the nerve to follow. He never once invited me. In the McKinney pasture pickups and four-wheelers crowded around the little old chapel, which looked fine all lit up. I waited for everyone to mosey inside and shut the doors, then lurked by a window.
I saw Reg grab hold of the pulpit and lay his voice across those people with the soft heaviness of a husband’s arm in sleep. Penny stood behind, tending charts and maps. He had come there tonight, he said, to talk of the heart. He spoke poetically of red clay and serried pines. He talked to these people of things he never shared with me, his eyes a cold, sharp blue. The old wavy-glassed panes made it look like he was under water, or I was, one.
One day when it was choppy out, my boat lifted skyward, then flipped back so that I was for a great long while flying upside down and backwards. This was not unpleasant. All I remember is hearing Reg yell his rebel yell from his boat, like a man delivered.
Two coves up, Regal Cay had its grand opening. Prospective buyers gathered at the new marina, and a raised air horn scattered them into a shotgun bidding tour of homes. All 158 lots sold in one afternoon. But the first heavy rain caused the sewage tanks to overflow into the lake, which we smelled from our cove, but which no one farther down toward the bridge learned about until parents began finding
little brown leeches under children’s bathing suits and called DHEC, who in turn issued an advisory against swimming in the lake for a three-year period.
From the lake, Regal Cay looked a treeless compound of blinding white stucco. Since their marina opened, nearby coves had been abuzz with young skiers and retirees cocktailing under bimini tops. Sometimes the kids found their way into Little Allison, and at least once a weekend Reg and I had to wade out and push them off the mud—send them back safe to their moms and dads. We didn’t mind. It was the jet skiers we could not abide, little wasps. We made a potato cannon with PVC, but both felt awful when from a hundred and fifty yards I hit this teenage girl in the ankle, surely breaking it, and she sped off crying.
One night I woke to a gut-ripping clatter echoing in from the lake, my mind half-remembering the shrill whine that led up to it—or maybe just remembering the whines one hears all night living by the water. I knew right off what it was.
Reg was in the garage before me, grabbing life vests and spotlights. He eased the houseboat from the cove as I stood at the bow sweeping the million candle watt slow across the water. Just outside the cove, we heard the voices. My light found a white cutty-cabin cruiser nosed into the water, five or six kids gathered at the stern. One girl bloody-faced and yelling how her nose was broke. This guy kept saying, “Dude!” In the water around them I saw the crumpled shreds of an aluminum hull—all that was left of the small fishing boat. Floating in front of me was half of an old man’s head. Those old-timers, ones fished our cove.
Maybe I set a few fires, drove a bulldozer or two into the water. It was a good cause. But mostly it was Reg’s cause. I went out with him on some of these weekly missions—hoisting sixers, snickering and flushed like we were going cow-tipping. But Reg forsook the rotgut on these nights, and my part in the operation mostly involved being silent and soft-footed. Other days we ran wild like always. We tore up the channel in our boats at least twice a week—though I was more careful ever since my boat swept me into the sky like an angel. Reg, though, spent a lot of time suping his up, and he had it so hot that each time I had to just watch his rooster tail disappear down the lake like a comet.
I was chasing a rabbit one evening, wet still from being thrown from the dock, when I saw three men in our woods: one suit and two guys in jumpers with a tripod. “You hold off”—this suit, he pulls out a gun. “We know about you . . .”—he shook the pistol at me. I looked past him as my rabbit disappeared over a ridge. I said, “Mister . . .” I lost my train of thought a second. I did not do what I should have—tenderize those three against a tree, then haul them down to the bank to gurgle. No, I just said, “Mister, y’all killing us.” I half-spread my arms, then turned and walked back up the cove. Back at the cabin I told Reg dinner outrun us tonight. As if to shoulder some of my defeat, Reg nodded, then walked out to the garage freezer. We’d have to thaw something out.
No one was crossing the bridge at that hour, but some bass fishermen told how two fireballs of debris shot out the other side, skipping down the channel in long dying arcs for a good quarter mile. All this just before a twenty-foot section of bridge dropped.
The explosion woke everybody on the lake—everybody, it seemed, but me. The wood struts and pilings that had been encased in the bridge’s concrete burned for hours, the channel glowing a deep, grim red for miles in each direction.
Reg was credited with effectively severing the Carolinas for the year it took to demolish and rebuild Buster Boyd. Duke Power’s construction slowed near to a halt, because there wasn’t much getting around that lake short of having to drive through four counties. But they found a way. They never found Reg. He’d filled the boat with glycerin.
Then Penny disappeared. I found this hickory wreath on the dock morning after Reg turned to flame. I was alone.
I tried disappearing myself. Where I live now has a name that means nothing to you, or to me, and that is better. I’m sick, too. You don’t want to know what I got. It wasn’t that red-headed dummy who got exposed. Ha-ha. Man, I feel old. It’s true, you may not hear it when I fall—I may sink without a plunk, without a ripple. But when ones like us leave the world, there is a shudder, and if you haven’t felt it yet, you will. I think things will be different as you know it, and I think everyone will be pretty much on their own. But I guess all this is to remind you. Hicks ain’t dead yet.
It’s good advice not to live in the past, but be the one to walk up to me and say that. Those Saturdays Penny came over and we went to the River Rat, those days were the best. We got everyone in there laughing, and they wrestled us like we were giants. One night we were awful tight and asked Penny why she never took us down to the houseboat. When she stood and walked out, Reg and me looked at each other and followed. We found Penny standing on the top deck of our boat. She ordered us to swim her and that houseboat back up the lake, which we did, all three miles. Reg and me swam right next to each other, harnessed to twenty-foot ropes, sometimes bumping. Behind us the boat creaked and groaned. Penny laughing from the top deck. Laughing at how hard we swam—like it was a race either of us could ever win.
Acknowledgements
“Being Dead in South Carolina”: Third Coast
“My Father at the Mountainside”: Phoebe
“Bethel”: The Sewanee Review (as “Night Miles”)
“The Oldest City”: Passages North
“Unvanquished by the Dusk”: Meridian
“Maintenance”: BULL: Men’s Fiction
“Wolf Among Wolves”: Blueline
“Out With Father”: Quick Fiction
“The Days Down Here”: The Georgia Review
“The Hour of Revision”: New South
“San Sebastian”: Salt Hill
“Your Father Needs More Time”: The Literary Review
“Episode Before Putting on Pants”: Passages North
“Yardage”: New Orleans Review
“The Plantation”: The Greensboro Review
“Feather by Feather”: Quick Fiction
“You Will Miss Me”: New Letters
The Author
A South Carolina native, Jacob White studied creative writing at Binghamton University and the University of Houston, where he received the Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Fiction. His fiction has appeared in many journals, including The Georgia Review, New Letters, Salt Hill, and The Sewanee Review, from which he received the Andrew Lytle Prize. He has been an assistant professor of writing and literature at Johnson State College, and continues to co-edit Green Mountains Review. He currently lives in Ithaca, N.Y.
