by Taylor Brown
“You know he was into something.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Mama wrote me last year, right after he got that new Gheenoe boat. She said she didn’t know where he got the money for it. That he was all funny about it. She was afraid he was into something.”
“Like drugs?”
“You know the shrimpers used to bring it in. Airdrops. Square grouper and all that. People say that’s what happened to his first boat. It was that Great Sapelo Bust.”
“Well, she never said nothing to me.”
Lawton sniffs. “Maybe she was just trying to protect you.”
Hunter feels a cruel urge rise up in him then. He wants to throw his meal in his brother’s face, to coat his beard and eyebrows with a red explosion of kidney beans and meat. He wants to bloody him. He turns and hurls the can far off into the creek.
Lawton looks at him. “The hell you do that for?”
“Everybody else does.”
Lawton grunts. That’s about the last reason he’d do anything.
* * *
Hunter wakes in the night. He is standing on an island, alone, in the middle of a great dark river that rumbles like storm. It is the river he knows but wider, darker, with trees set like giants along its banks. Before him stands a pillar of gray wood, straight-struck as a ship’s mast into a leaden sky. He finds in his hands a heavy felling ax, double-bit, and on his back a quiver of springboards such as the old-time axmen once used to elevate themselves over the splayed feet of old-growth timber, cutting the softer wood higher up.
He feels something tickle his feet and looks down to see that water is tumbling over them. Around him the little island gleams like a giant river stone, the current racing across its surface, swirling and tripping and rolling as it goes. It pulls hard at his ankles, rising every second, carrying away brush and fallen branches and loose debris, crushed cans and old bottles and dead leaves, whole anthills wisped away like smoke.
He must climb.
He chokes up on the hickory handle, like the boys taught him at practice, and begins slinging the ax into the tree at belly height, hard, whipping his body like a ballplayer. He torques his wrist to free the blade after each strike. He lets the ax fall from the cut, wheeling down past his feet and up again in a big arc, hovering a moment motionless behind him before he hurls it again into the hardwood. He cuts a deep wound in the tree, a pocket of white flesh.
The water is tearing at his shins.
He sinks the ax into the trunk above his head and jams the metal shoe of one of the boards he carries into the notch. He leaps onto the narrow plank, the wood groaning beneath his feet, bending, as if it might pop free of the tree. He unsticks the ax and starts again, cutting a second pocket three feet above the first. The river is rising beneath him, the plank shuddering with every strike. The current breaks around the tree’s base, bubbling, whirling downriver in long snakes and folds.
It takes him six strikes to make the second pocket. He jams home a new board and climbs onto it, then begins chopping again. He ascends in a maddened spiral of planks, the tree crazy-limbed with his progress. His arms are swollen, filled with acid, his lungs throbbing like an engine. His mouth is wet, his body floating high over the water on these sprouted limbs. He stands finally upon the sawn top of the tree, balanced as upon the mast of a sinking ship, and the river swirls beneath him, ripping away the lower boards, and he sees he is not alone. There is a creature in the river, circling, slow-moving in the surety of its dominion. The hide is treaded like a truck tire, the tail long, and Hunter remembers sketches he has seen by the early explorers, rumored to have a fort on the river. In one drawing, six naked Indians ram a spear the size of a tree down the throat of an enormous toothed reptile come out of the river, like an alligator but with the beaklike face of a dinosaur, though they couldn’t have known about those then.
Hunter looks at the ax in his hands, twin-bladed like a weapon, and he wonders how long until the monster reaches him.
14
Darien, Georgia, 1982
Annabelle waits on her porch, the moon hidden from sight, the night dark and starless as an enormous cave. She is waiting for him to slink again from the water like the very first man, the way he always does on such nights. Shirtless, as he was the first time, and sweat-slick like she likes him, his body badged with ink, his mission secret as a commando’s. He will come. They will do it wherever they can. In the boat shed or against the side of the house. On the creek bank or bald-bodied in the yard, her husband dead to the world with drink.
Her blood is up, her toes splayed flat against the porch planks, kneading them. Here he is. The bow of her husband’s old johnboat, painted camouflage now, slides through the reeds at the edge of the creek. She stands and straightens the dress she wears, belted tight around her narrow waist, and slips on her white heels. Then she sits and lights a cigarette, letting one shoe dangle idly from her big toe. She looks away, opposite his direction, as if there is something more important in the pines and oaks.
“Pssst.”
He’s at the door. Slowly, she looks his way.
“I thought you weren’t coming.”
He looks her up, down.
“The fuck you did.”
He lights a cigarette, still on the stoop, then turns and looks over his shoulder at her husband’s old Chevelle in the yard. He steps off the stoop and walks toward it. He toes one of the tires with his white rubber boot, then bends to run his hand along the body just back of the front wheel well.
“Ain’t keeping it up like he used to. Rust’s gonna chew up them rockers.”
He looks over his shoulder at her, enjoying himself. She knows what he’s doing.
She stands, clicking across the porch, the door groaning wide before her. She kicks off her heels at the bottom of the stoop, throws down her cigarette. She shoves him down hard on the hood her husband likes to rub so much, like it was a woman’s thigh. There are two black racing stripes. She positions Hiram between them and climbs up on the bumper. She unbuckles and unzips him and yanks down his pants. Once freed, he pops up like one of those blow-up punching bags they sell at the dollar store.
“I thought so,” she says.
Afterward she stays on him, and his fingers find the slick groove of sweat down her back, sliding up and down. She knows what he will say.
“Leave him,” he says. “Come with me.”
She rises up on one elbow and tries to get the hair out of her face, the red curls pasted across her nose and forehead.
“Jesus Christ,” she says. “I got hair in my mouth even.”
“It could be this good all the time.”
She sets both palms flat on the hood and looks down at him.
“It wouldn’t,” she says. “Before long it wouldn’t be any different than with him.” She cocks her head toward the house.
His face darkens. “What you want is a big white house with fancy columns, ain’t it? Decorated by some queer you brung in, with furniture you can stand around and talk about like it’s accomplished something besides being old as Sherman’s horseshit. Maybe get you some seersuckered dentist to bankroll it all, some poor son of a bitch you can make shave every night before bed so his whiskers won’t scratch your precious pussy. Take you to nice dinners down at the country club, shopping trips to Atlanta. And all the while you’ll be fucking me every night that’s moonless, or wanting to.”
She starts to push off from him but he grips the back of her neck, firmly, holding her close. “That’s what you want, ain’t it?”
She twists her head away, but he pulls her closer, still inside her.
“Say it ain’t.” He is almost pleading. “Say it.”
She looks him dead in the eye. She doesn’t say anything.
15
Fort Caroline, August 1564
Le Moyne swirls his daily ration of wine in his wooden cup. It is dusk. The fireflies are out, tiny stars winking in the gray. His countrymen sit on stumps an
d logs, heads gathered close over their wine. Their voices hiss: Apalatci, Apalatci. Gold. Like a glow in the west. A yellow sickness. Le Moyne sighs and looks at La Caille, the translator, now his bunkmate.
“That I could multiply this cup, man, a flood of wine to sate our brothers.”
La Caille pulls on the point of his beard, black as jet, and the white blade of his smile pricks the dark.
“That you were Christ, you mean.”
“I would not dare such blasphemy, La Caille.”
La Caille’s smile widens, good-natured.
“No, my friend, you would not. But wine is poor stuff to sate a man. It fills only his head and sneaks between his legs at dawn.”
“And gold?”
“Gold heavies a man’s pockets, man, and sometimes his cock as well. Who would not choose it over your flood of wine, be it the very blood of Christ?”
Le Moyne only grunts. La Caille leans toward him, elbows on his knees.
“Why do you think these men left the world they knew? To be rich. Surely you did not cross the ocean only for the sake of art?”
Le Moyne swirls the wine, a purple eddy in his cup. He shakes his head.
“No, I cannot say that.”
“Then for what?”
“Glory.”
“Ah, my friend, and what is the color of glory but gold?”
“I fear this gold will brick our path to hell.”
La Caille shrugs, raises his cup. “Perhaps, my friend. And whether it is paradise we have found here or hell, who might say?”
The words ring in Le Moyne’s ears. He drains his cup and stands.
“So little wine, and already I have to go.”
He walks along the duckboard paths, making for a latrine at the edge of the woods. It is not gold that fills his mind these nights. On his mattress of corn husks, he thinks often of the dark-skinned maidens striding through the forest, the wives of Saturiwa. The ampleness of their bodies, how savage they might be in the exercise of their desires. He has known women, certainly. Cousins first, those bumbling explorations in dark closets on Sunday afternoons, with the rest of the house asleep. And court trysts after that, skirts lifted breathless to the white thighs, the black-furred pockets of sin. The dark vault of guilt always to follow, the prayers for forgiveness. But the native women seem so free in their flesh, as if to desire them is no sin.
He empties his bladder in the latrine, looking to the woods beyond. They beckon him. Finished, he steps across the pit and into the trees. The world is cooler beneath them, darker, full of places he might hide from the eyes that watch him. Man’s, God’s. He finds a bare spot and kneels on the earth, his head against a tree, and frees himself from his pants, spitting in the palm of his hand.
This terrible ritual in the wilds.
When he rises his breath is ragged. The golden light of the west has turned; the sun runs red over the western cloudbanks, like spilt wine. He thinks of the Indian king beseeching the sun for victory a day ago. The upheld bowl, the wish to spill the enemy’s blood like so much water. He wonders whether the chief’s prayers have been answered, and by whom, and he wonders will his own prayers be heard. Will glory crown him or blood?
* * *
The following day he stands with La Caille above a cleared field in the heart of Saturiwa’s country. They’ve been sent to record the chief’s victory rites. In the field stand seven tall trunks of sharpened pine, each bearing high the trophies of battle: the scalps of the enemy, with long twists of hair and white patches of skull, and a coterie of severed limbs, red-stumped arms and legs that dangle like gruesome pennants from their stakes. The August sun is high already and angry and the flesh is turning, the smell of death curling under the Frenchmen’s noses. Le Moyne is breathing through his mouth so as not to retch.
“They cut around the bone with cane knives,” says La Caille. “Then sever the joints with wooden cleavers. They march home with the prizes impaled on their spears, careful not to let them touch the ground.”
Before the stakes, a priest dances low to the ground, back hunched, knees to chest, creeping here and there like a spider in the grass. He mutters and curses in the savage fashion, spewing incantations. Three men kneel before him. One of them holds a club, which he slams both-handed upon a flat stone, as if to give thunder to certain of the sorcerer’s words, while the other two men shake gourds of pebbles or broken shells, a sound like the rattling of snakes.
Saturiwa’s people sit in a circle before the stakes. The warriors have removed their war-plumes and paint, their earrings of talon and claw. They have set aside their bows, their bloodied clubs and spears, and they sit solemn-faced before the spectacle, as if in church. Le Moyne watches the priest leap and tremble, speaking thunder, the people bobbing their heads before him.
“What do they believe of life after death?” he asks.
La Caille’s hands are clasped behind him. He thumbs the handle of the dagger strapped across the small of his back.
“The widows of the battle-fallen leave their husbands’ weapons upon their graves, those used to war and to hunt, and they leave the shells from which they were accustomed to drink.”
“As if the men might use these in a world that comes?”
La Caille nods.
Le Moyne finds a fallen log and sits, bent forward, eyes squinted, as if he might interpret the foreign sounds quaking from the holy man’s throat. They are brutal words, he knows, words of blood and triumph, of the will of the white-hot god to award victory, and they are curses, too. Death, it seems, is insufficient for their enemies. Their bodies must be hexed and mutilated, their relics thrown down, the bones of their ancestors scattered and smashed underfoot. Here is the difference, he thinks, watching as if from on high.
“They have not the mercy of Christ in them, La Caille.”
La Caille looks sideways at him, eyes clear over the sharp point of his beard.
“Et nous?”
* * *
Saturiwa’s village is housed within a spiraling wall of wooden palings, twice the height of a man, the entrance blind and narrow as that of a conch. His house is circular, timber-built with a roof of palm thatch, shaggy and yellowed like the hair of a squire boy. Before it is a covered piazza furnished with benches where men may lie shielded from the sun. Inside are shadowy lofts full of skins and cloaks, clubs and spears, the careless glimmer of trinkets and treasures scavenged from the shore wrecks. At the center is a giant hearth, a fire that always burns. Above this is a clay-rimmed hole in the thatch, blacked from smoke.
Saturiwa sits upon an oaken chair at the end of a long table, his once-flat stomach rounded with feast. Le Moyne stands by as La Caille speaks with the chief. The dark man keeps gesturing at them, wagging his finger and showing them his palm, and Le Moyne needs no interpreter to understand what he might be saying.
They have not upheld their end of the alliance.
They have not supported him in battle.
They have deceived him.
All around are the eyes of his warriors, hard as chipped stone.
The Frenchmen depart the village, hardly able to walk abreast through the blind corridor of palings. The eyes of the chief float yet in Le Moyne’s mind, bulbed with fury, as if they might burst along the red veins that fault them.
La Caille shakes his head. “I believe we are in a bad position, Le Moyne.”
“He wasn’t happy.”
“What do you expect? Our commander promised him men and guns against his enemies. I have traveled much of the known world, my friend. There is but one thing universally denounced: breaking one’s word.”
16
Altamaha River, Day 2
Dawn, a pale blade over the trees. They are already under way, sliding along the black glass in echelon, like warships on patrol. The sun breaks on the river, and there is mist. It curls slowly from the surface, rising skyward, as if in thrall to the light. Hunter puts out his hand to touch it, grasp it, but it eludes him, fugitive as spirit. He
looks up into the sun, closes his eyes, lets his thoughts drift away like so much paling smoke.
“Hunter.”
His eyes snap open. “What?”
“You going to sleep on me? We just woke up.”
“I’m meditating.”
“Meditating?” Lawton’s eyes buzz, amused. “How ’bout you meditate on how the fuck that old man disappeared like that?”
The old man was already gone when they rose that morning, the sun no more than a hint through the snarled branches of the trees. Not only that, they found the creek clean of the trash floating there the night before. It was a mirror of the overarching trees, untouched but for fallen leaves and sticks and the tiny indentions of jesus bugs skating along its surface. Hunter had to wipe his eyes to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.
“Tide flush it out, you think?”
Lawton shook his head. “Tide ain’t strong enough this far upriver.”
“What then, that old man?”
“Who else?”
A grin quivered along Hunter’s mouth.
“All that, and a bad mother like you didn’t miss a wink of sleep?”
Lawton stared at the creek, brow furrowed. He was tugging on his beard.
“Huh,” he said. “I ain’t the lightest sleeper, but still.”
* * *
They pass Penholoway Creek, banked with yet more floathouses towed up out of the main river. At the mouth of the creek is Sturgeon Hole, one of the coldwater refuges where sturgeon once congregated, maybe still do. In the old days, locals catching big sturgeon would ice them down, then ship them on the daily passenger train to New York, where they sold for fifty cents a pound—big money at the time. An RV park sits in the woods above the creek now, boxy homes painted with howling wolves and sunsets.
Soon the Narrows end, the river widens. The current is slower here, heavier, more like the river of Hunter’s dream. Bald cypress rise round and gray from the banks on roots splayed like the feet of elephants, their gnarled toes marked by dark lines of old flood. Their limbs spread horizontally, edged high over the water like rotors, each draped with long beards of moss. They are no more than two hundred years old, these trees, dwarfed by the towering ghosts of ancestors logged nearly to extinction. In one, a colony of great egrets has alighted, scattered white as spring blooms in the branches.
