The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “All that college pussy making you slow or what?”

  “Tell me you didn’t just scalp my fucking T-shirt.”

  “Hell, boy, it ain’t but some cotton. What about your life?” Lawton shakes his fist, the shirttail with it. “What about … your destiny?” He’s grinning, his teeth stacked and clenched like the grill of a semi truck.

  “I don’t figure tying my shirttail to a willow tree is gonna alter my destiny much.”

  “I’m just looking out for you is all. Didn’t figure you’d treat the point yourself.” Lawton looks down at Hunter’s crotch. “Now, you gonna put that piece of tackle away or keep me looking at it?”

  Hunter looks down, feeling the sting of all that pressure wanting out.

  “Actually, big boy, I ain’t done just yet.”

  Lawton’s eyes bulb out. He leaps as Hunter shoots a stream at his feet. He lands and runs whooping through the woods, trophy aloft, while Hunter pursues him, shooting piss in his wake.

  * * *

  They leave the trees rag-tied behind them, and soon they’re floating out into the river, paddling downstream of the falling sun. In less than a mile, the river will begin to widen, the Narrows spilling into a broader flow. Here where the river fattens, the banks were once lined with shantyboats of every kind: shacks hand-built on scows or pontoons, floathouses raised on airtight drums, old houseboats covered in green scum. A whole floating city, the river like a giant flooded street.

  People started coming out here during the Depression, families in flight from the dry world with its towns and taxes, its debts and warrants. They became river rats. To hear it told, they lived on the very edges of the law, eating only what they killed or caught, sleeping with whatever warm bodies were nearest in the night. Living however they would. There were stories of grand drunkenness on the river, men whose wives forced them into life jackets the instant they opened the second jelly jar of shine, so many times had they fallen overboard. More than one man had been found miles downstream at dawn, fished from the river before he even woke from his whiskey-stupor. There were stories of cross-river duels between rival fishermen, each firing at the other from the comfort of a lawn chair or La-Z-Boy dragged to the porch, the river too wide for an accurate pistol shot. And rumors of drug-running, too, and murder-for-hire, and floating brothels that didn’t care your age.

  In the early nineties the state government outlawed floathouses on the river, citing their lack of marine toilets, their menace to navigation, but many of the owners simply towed their homes up into the creeks and sloughs exempt from the law. Their father’s house had always been on such a hidden backwater, Snakebelly Creek.

  They follow the bank closely and still they almost miss it. Willows drape the entrance like camouflage netting. They pass in file through the trees, and soon the narrow creek swells like a rat in the belly of a snake. Here are the shanties, dark-windowed, most of them, sinking slowly back into the waters that float them. The creek is nearly stagnant, littered with the hulls of beer cans and cigarette cartons, coupon vouchers and spent shot shells, condoms tied off into little sacs. Hunter passes a toilet paper roll trailing a ten-foot tail of tissue like a giant tapeworm.

  “I don’t remember it this bad,” he says.

  “Me neither, brother.”

  “You’d need an army of pool boys with skimmers to clean this shit up.”

  Lawton points with his paddle. “There’s your problem.”

  They come upon a floundered shanty, sunk to the porch, the trash of the place vomited forth into the creek. It takes them a moment to realize it’s their father’s.

  12

  Fort Caroline, August 1564

  Le Moyne sits on a cypress stump watching the barques being built. There are two of them, ribbed like the beached carcasses of whales. These vessels are to carry them upriver, to the storied riches of the Apalatci mountains, from which all good things come. There is an energy in the shipbuilding work, the men swarming over the frames like white ants, working with a shirtless vigor not seen in the planting of crops or setting of traps or baits.

  Beyond the barques stands a palisade of sharpened timber—one wall of the triangular fort—and beyond that is the dark bend of river from which the river monster rose at dusk those weeks ago. The sturgeon are no longer jumping, not like they did in June and July. Le Moyne has tried to arrest them in his mind’s eye, the way they gleam silver in the sun, shuddering with fleck-shot power, their bodies ridged like the gate-rams of a sieging army. Somehow, he cannot translate the image to paper. He has burned wad after wad in the fire.

  Le Moyne sets aside his sketch and removes the tongue stone from the pocket of his tunic. It is half the size of his palm, iron gray with a black root. The point is sharp enough to cut, to kill, and the edges have tiny serrations. He is running his thumbnail along the edge, as if to saw a groove, when he hears shouts from the landward side of the fort. He turns to see men climbing parapet ladders and knotting at the gate, a bristling forest of spades and halberds and guns. He hurries toward that side of the fort, hearing the name Saturiwa whispered again and again.

  King of the coast.

  “How many are they?”

  “Hundreds! Armed!”

  Laudonnière appears at the gate. He is straight-backed, ordering men left and right with bladed hand, jutted chin.

  “The chief wishes to enter,” says the interpreter atop the gate.

  “Tell him I will admit but him and twenty of his men.”

  The interpreter speaks over the far side of the gate, gesturing with his hands.

  Le Moyne stands well away as they slide the oak beams from the gate locks. He can see what reception their commander has ordered. The gate groans and in walks Saturiwa, striding prideful atop his burled legs, each thigh vented with power. His shoulders hang wide over his narrow waist. The dark planes of his chest are adorned with mazes of hammered ink, and he wears from his buttocks the striped tail of some unknown beast, as if to show himself its killer or kin. Upon his head is a spiked crown of palm fronds, freshly cut and weaved.

  He is flanked by twenty of his most powerful warriors, their spines straight as the spears they carry in hand. Laudonnière waits to receive them, smiling. The gate has only just closed behind the native retinue when Laudonnière opens his arms, as if in welcome.

  His signal.

  Trumpets blare and cannon boom, drums thunder in might, the fort barking its full power to the wilds. The Indians drop low to the ground, tensed in battle crouches, eyes darting for the danger sure to come. Meanwhile, Laudonnière stands open-armed, unmoved, beaming godlike while powder smoke tumbles over his boots.

  Seeing him, Saturiwa rises, flipping his hand for his men to do the same. They do, white-eyed like spooked beasts, spears pale-knuckled in their hands. Saturiwa strides forward, chin high, as if unwounded by the display. Here is a man of no small spirit, thinks Le Moyne, who can withstand such alien thunder—heathen though he is.

  The talk is of war. Saturiwa has gathered his warriors to strike Utina, his enemy in the west, and he has come for the Frenchmen and guns promised him. Laudonnière put off his emissaries some days ago. Now the chief has come in person.

  “Tell him my barques are not ready.” Laudonnière points to the ribbed keels upon their cradles. “Tell him it will take two months for them to be ready.”

  “He wants to know what happened to our other ships, the ones that brought us here.”

  “Tell him they departed last week for France, to resupply. I told his emissaries this already. Tell him we must build others to take upriver, and these take much time to build. Tell him I would like to assist him, but I have not the means at this moment.”

  “He says his vassal chiefs have assembled already, his foodstuffs are in order, he must strike at once. He says all has been ordered on the strength of your promise.”

  “Tell him to wait two months,” says Laudonnière. “Then I will consider our agreement.”

  Saturiwa looks abou
t the fort, seeing perhaps the thatch-roofed barracks his men helped to raise, the storehouse and guardhouse, the commander’s court lined with covered galleries. The scant cookfires here or there, the heavy armor and hook-shaped guns that require such strength to carry.

  “He says he does not see much cultivation within the fort or without,” says the interpreter. “He wonders what a lot of corn it must take to feed such strong men once the season grows cold, the woods empty of game.”

  “Tell him not to worry,” says Laudonnière. “Tell him we will be fine.”

  * * *

  Saturiwa cannot delay, such are his preparations, and so he departs grimly through the gates, assembling his warriors on the riverbanks upstream of the fort. Le Moyne and a party of officers go to watch the native army prepare for battle. The natives bear longbows, sinew-strung with arrows of fire-hardened cane, each tipped with buckhorn or fish-teeth. Others carry war clubs of various shapes, fat-headed or double-edged, and many of them have spears not so different from French spades, yet darted with fishbone or flint. They wear the plumes of various animals, the hooked blades of talons or claws through their ears. The French officers have brought along their arquebuses, the heavy barrels resting on their shoulders, the curved stocks cupped in their palms. They know not how indiscriminately these savages might make war.

  Saturiwa stands before a bonfire. His army encircles him, a ring of blazing flesh. He lashes his arms this way and that, screaming and cursing, as if angry spirits might burst free from his throat. He hops here and there, his eyes bulged with hate, his mouth wet, his striped tail whipping about his legs. In response to certain screams, his warriors thump their weapons against their thighs, a war-drum of pummeled flesh. Saturiwa holds a bowl of water high above his head, speaking to the sun, asking for some blessing, it seems, and then he casts the water upon the heads and shoulders of his warriors.

  “What’s he saying?” someone asks.

  Their interpreter is bent forward, listening.

  “He is comparing the water to blood, I think. That they may spill it like water. ‘Do, do as I have done, with the blood of your enemies.’”

  Finished, Saturiwa dumps water on the fire. It explodes in steam, curdling the air at his feet, and the warriors march upstream to make blood of the water that covers them.

  13

  Altamaha River, Day 1

  It’s an eighteen-foot houseboat built from a set of plans mail-ordered from Popular Mechanics in 1950. Their father’s childhood home. The rafters are sawed from hard pine, the roof covered in tar-papered tongue-and-groove, the house sheeted in one-by-eight shiplap. There’s a ten-gallon tank on the roof, fresh water hand-pumped from a shallow well dug ten feet up the creek bank, and the windows are screened instead of glassed. The doors have round glass portholes in them, glazier-cut, the only indulgence. There are double bunks; the children slept above the parents in the same room. There’s a chemical toilet on the rear porch. The house floats on a wooden scow, caulked with oakum and tar, the waterproofing no longer perfect. The place lists like a doomed ship, one corner of the porch submerged, water slipping under the door.

  “It didn’t get this bad overnight,” says Hunter.

  “Not in a year either.”

  “I don’t believe this is his trash.”

  “Squatters, likely.” Lawton shakes his head, looking at the litter. “I don’t believe the old man wore a rubber once in his life.”

  They tie their boats to the porch railing. Hunter steps aboard first, slowly, as if onto some new shore. The once-familiar planks are strange beneath his feet, slanted and water-warped. Lawton follows, the deck shifting under his weight. More water swells across its surface, running up around Hunter’s ankles. He starts to step inside but Lawton stays him, going first. He pushes open the door with one hand, his opposite thumb hooked high on his vest, not far from his knife. He steps inside and stops.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Hunter steps into the cavelike darkness, and in the dim light he thinks for a moment that he is looking upon his risen father sitting Indian-style on the bed, his hair grown long and wild in the months since the miracle that raised him. But no, he sees, this cannot be his father, for the man bears unfamiliar symbols on his skin, tattoos of crosses and serpents and scrolled words, the canvas of his torso weathered like shed snakeskin.

  “Bless ye,” says the old man. “Bless ye.”

  He is giving them the sign of the cross with a flat hand, like a karate chop.

  “Get your ass off that bed,” says Lawton.

  When the man doesn’t move, Lawton grabs him by the elbow and drags him up. Hunter grimaces at the treatment. Lawton produces a flashlight from the vast recesses of his vest and shines it here and there, this corner and that, in precise jabs of light. The floor is trash, the walls covered in mold and animal skins, the sink piled with dishes and small bones. Lawton stabs the light into the old man’s face. His beard burns white in the beam; his yellow teeth are polished clean. Over his heart, there is the tattoo of a slim foot, womanly almost, crushing the neck of a serpent. Below this, an inscription: The dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

  “Who are you?” asks Lawton.

  “A friend. I am a friend.”

  Lawton spits a bullet of tobacco juice into the nearby sink. The dishes clink.

  “Friend to somebody, maybe. You ain’t friend to me.”

  “I mean ye no harm.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Uncle.”

  “Your name is Uncle?”

  The man nods. “Yea, a name fit for kings.”

  Lawton looks at Hunter, one eyebrow arched. Hunter shrugs: Hell if I know.

  “What is it you’re doing here?”

  “The waters are rising.”

  Lawton nods. “Springs rains will do that.”

  “No,” says the old man. “The seas, too. The ice caps are melting, the heat of hell unbound. A coming flood. Whosoever is unprepared shall be drownt.”

  “Oh.” Lawton cuts his eyes toward Hunter. “It’s like that, is it?”

  He starts leading the man toward the back door.

  “There is a beast in this river,” says the old man. “Such as what will rule in the days ahead, its kingdom risen again in tide.”

  Lawton stops. “Beast?”

  “Yea, a monster of old time.”

  “You meaning the Altamaha-ha?”

  “It has waited so long to rise,” says the old man. “I hunt it.”

  He steps onto the rear porch and points at a canoe tied between the bank and the house. It’s fitted with a small outboard motor, and a harpoon lies across the thwarts, long as a man laid flat. The wooden pole holds an iron shaft, the killing barb single-flued like a shark’s fin. In the bottom of the boat, a coil of rope.

  “How come you want to kill it?” asks Hunter.

  The man looks at them confusedly, as if he doesn’t understand the question.

  * * *

  They sit atop the slanted roof of the house, enclosed by the low railing that crowns the place, and eat their dinners from cans. It’s cooling with dark, and they have their sleeping bags zipped up to the chest. The trees are mostly bare above them, stars bounding through their clutches.

  “Whack-job. Hunting the Altamaha-ha with a spear.” Lawton jabs his fork in his can of pork and beans.

  “Like hunting it with something else is saner.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  They can hear the old man down there, some few feet below them, snoring. They’ve decided to leave him be, giving him the wide berth you give the touched.

  Hunter chews his dinner. “You think he’s the one trashed the place?”

  Lawton shakes his head. “I don’t know. He don’t seem like the packaged food and cigarettes type. I’m thinking people been squatting here for years. Daddy ain’t been up here in half a decade, I bet. Maybe longer.”

  “So where’s he been going?”

  “Good questi
on.”

  They sit chewing, their forks scraping. Hunter brought the bag of ashes up to their rooftop camp. Now it sits at the foot of their sleeping bags, the nylon slouched beneath the rolled and buckled top. He looks at it.

  “‘Cremains.’ Sounds like a bad pun or something, don’t it?”

  Lawton quits chewing. Hunter can see the food in his mouth.

  “What?”

  “It’s just a funny word is all. Cre-mains?”

  Lawton rearranges the food in his mouth.

  “Nothing funny about it, you ask me.” He juts his chin toward the bag. “You ask him, neither.”

  Hunter forks a sausage from his can.

  “He never could take a joke.”

  Lawton stiffens. He swallows and points his fork at Hunter.

  “He was a hard man, but me and you was lucky he was. He hadn’t been, who knows how we would of turned out.” He is jabbing his fork at Hunter now, the red bean stuff dripping onto Hunter’s sleeping bag. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if he hadn’t of hammered the right way of things into me.”

  Hammered, thinks Hunter. That’s the word. More than once, marveling at his brother’s brutal form, he has wondered if Lawton’s body simply hardened itself against the blows and lashes of their father. Evolved. The old man a powerful stimulus for adaptation: his belts and switches and paddles. His fists.

  They chew for a while. Finally Lawton sticks his fork in his can and looks up.

  “You really think it was a sturgeon done that to him?”

  Hunter shrugs. “That’s what they said.”

  “I can’t believe he’d let it happen.”

  Hunter swirls his fork in the can. “He didn’t have to let it. It just did.”

  Lawton’s mouth disappears inside his beard, his lips pressed tight against that statement, like he doesn’t want to breathe it in.