The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

Altamaha River, Day 4

  They leave Altamaha Park at dawn. The old trestles crouch above the mist, the graffiti on the swing span barely visible. There are the names of lovers and boys’ clubs, a cross-eyed smiley face, an RIP for this person and that. The location itself is an honor, like a highway overpass. The risk and trouble involved.

  The water has a new urge to it, grumbling against the stone piers of the bridge. A new force. It is ridged like bark. They let it carry them on, the stamp of civilization soon swallowed in the trees behind them. The RVs disappear, the tents and trucks. No mark of man, nothing to tell them they are above the river’s power. The mist glows white-gold as the sun strikes it, prettiest as it burns away. Lawton has his sunglasses on.

  “You really think it was Uncle King you heard the other night?”

  “I do.”

  “You just knew it was him, huh? Sure you weren’t dreaming?”

  “What if I was? Paddling upstream won’t get us real far.”

  Lawton squints, tugging on his beard.

  “That time we went to Disney World, didn’t you have some dream the week before?”

  Hunter draws his paddle from the water.

  “All I remember is Cinderella’s Castle all covered in snow, like a giant iceberg.”

  “Then that white hurricane come through, took Daddy’s boat.”

  Hunter nods.

  “Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know, probably just a coincidence.”

  Lawton is quiet a moment. His face looks soft, young. He hooks a finger in his beard, opens his mouth twice before any words come out.

  “Tell me something. You feel anything when he died? Like before you knew?”

  Hunter dips his paddle back in the water, the current curling around the blade.

  “Daddy? Not that I remember. Why, did you?”

  Lawton shakes his head.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe. We’d been operating up near the Pakistani border, going after an HVT—High Value Target—this Taliban bigwig liked to carve people up. Real piece of shit. We spent three days watching the hut of this widow he liked to bend over the well. Well, he never showed, so we footed it out to the extraction point. On the bird, everybody was nodding off. We hadn’t hardly slept for seventy-two hours.” Lawton’s cheek bulges. He toys with the tobacco pouched under his gum. “Out of nowhere I got this burning in my arm, like from the ink, like that frog was gonna leap from my skin, and I had this sudden feeling I’d been hit. Like a cold arrow right through my chest.” He palms his heart, as if to show the entry wound. “I turned around, checked to make sure a stray round hadn’t come through the fuselage, some goatherder’s AK. My heart was going a million miles an hour, right up in my throat. I couldn’t hardly breathe. Thought I was having a heart attack or something. The guys saw me pawing myself like a crazy person. I told ’em it was a cramp, too much heavy benching the week before. Told myself the same. The next week, I got back from another long-range patrol to find out Daddy had been killed. I looked back at the operational records. It was the same day I’d had that … attack.”

  “They say it’s sometimes like that.”

  “They say a lot of shit. Still, it kinda makes me think of that Shakespeare quote you said. ‘There’s more in the world’ and all that.”

  “You think you were close enough to the old man to feel him go?”

  “I don’t know, brother.” Lawton looks at his boat. “If fucking somebody makes you close to them, what does beating them do?”

  Hunter thinks of the big knuckles of his father’s hands. His eyes sting.

  “This Taliban piece of shit, you ever get him?”

  Lawton inhales, his chest swelling with pressure.

  “We got him. Too late we did. Somebody had found our tracks near that widow’s hut. He thought she’d dropped the dime on him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “The red tulip.”

  “Which is what?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it, brother. Suffice to say she saw a lot of her own meat, her own insides, before she died.”

  “That’s some evil shit, man.”

  “That’s just some.”

  Hunter shakes his head.

  “I don’t care what they say, there’s people that deserve a bullet.”

  Lawton picks up his paddle.

  “Easy to say,” he says. “Harder to do.”

  The river is nearly straight here, broad and strong. The mist is gone; the surface burns like hammered tin. Hunter thinks of Uncle King out there, seeking something people have glimpsed a thousand years and never caught. The river winds and Lawton points to a creek mouth on the right bank.

  “Alligator Congress. Good place to look.”

  Hunter feels a prick of fear in his belly, like a tiny knife, but paddles on. They enter the mouth of the creek, and soon the narrow banks widen into a backwater lagoon, an expanse of shallows and mudflats and half-submerged trees. Their father took them here once when they were little, just before dawn. He shined a flashlight across the flats, igniting a whole universe of red eyes, floating like planets before a man-made sun.

  “Indians used to hunt gators here,” he told them. “With nothing but spears and clubs and balls that drug the ground like Santa sacks.”

  “Nuh uh.”

  “Yes huh,” said their father. “Why you think they wore them loincloths? Them Indian balls wouldn’t fit in no tighty-whities, I can tell you that.”

  Boy-Lawton stared at the red galaxy of eyes, silent. Entranced. In his mind, Hunter knew, he was clad only in animal skins, plunging the cold stone of a spear into an alligator’s heart. Not a one of those eyes deigned to blink or look away, and now it was the old man who seemed rapt by their gaze.

  “Confident fuckers,” he said. “Cain’t blame them, though. They been here longer’n us. Any luck, we won’t take them with us when we go.”

  “We’re going away?”

  The old man spat.

  “Sure. What don’t? Hell, this river used to be lined with trees twice this tall, stalked by dinosaurs the size of school buses. Some say that’s what the Altamaha-ha is. A dinosaur slipped through the cracks of time.”

  “Will we slip through the cracks?”

  Hunter remembers his father looking a long time at them, searching their eyes for signs.

  “You two might. Me, I’m pretty sure I’m fucked.”

  The water here is shallow. Hunter poles his paddle to the bottom, testing the depth. In the big river you know alligators might be down there, many leagues below. Here they are likely just a few feet below the surface, lying still as old cypress logs, some as big as your boat. Lawton points them around a grove of cypress and tupelo, and the mudflats shine before them like something polished, an ancient nation presenting itself to the morning sun. On them lie a few reptiles, heavy-bellied and somnolent, positioned like a museum exhibit. Just the right amount of randomness, of specimens large and small facing this way and that. These remnants of what once ruled the earth. Hunter imagines his own species after some similar fate, tiny pink pygmies made to live at the mercy of saurian gods.

  Lawton sets his paddle across his lap and leans on it, elbows out. He squints at the biggest gator on the bank, staring it down. The big reptile’s mouth is open, as if smiling.

  “You’re a ugly fucker, ain’t you?”

  The alligator is motionless, flies jeweling its back. It might be molded from rubber like the ones from the tourist shops.

  “If you’re looking for a fight,” says Hunter, “that one’s too big.”

  “I ain’t looking to wrestle him, brother. I just wanted to see what was in those eyes.”

  “What do you see?”

  Lawton straightens, relaxing his stare.

  “Nothing, brother. A stone killer, like the rest.”

  The alligators watch them pass, their eyes so like alien worlds. Their teeth are visible outside their jaws, like they’re grinning every second.

  “Lazy mother
s,” says Hunter.

  “It warms up, they’ll go to work,” says Lawton. He looks around, scanning the flats and shallows. “I figure old Altie must be a loner. But if he’s got any friends, these would be them.”

  “He’s not feeling social today, I guess.”

  “Nope, his hunter neither.”

  “Maybe we ought to just find your film crew buddies again, see if they might know where he’s at.”

  “Shit, them fuckers couldn’t find their assholes with a garden hose.”

  They paddle out of the lagoon and back into the big river, brown and swollen under the climbing sun. Hunter looks back. The alligators are still fixed in place, heads up, worshiping the sun. He looks at Lawton.

  “How you think old Dill hauled that boat of his up out of the slough?”

  “I was wondering the same myself. I figure he must of built the pilings first, then floated it in during the spring flood. Either that or he brought a crane in there on a barge, but I don’t see how they’d get it under the bridge.”

  “You ever seen that German movie with the steamship in the jungle?”

  “What do you think?”

  “This rubber baron—in Peru, I think—he wants to build an opera house in the Amazon.”

  Lawton grunts.

  “Well, he finds a parcel that’ll make him rich. Only problem is, it’s on a river that’s blocked by impassable rapids. But there’s a second river that flows parallel, and the two rivers get within a few hundred yards of each other at one point. So he goes out there to haul this three-hundred-ton, three-story steamer from one river to the next, over this big fucking hill in the jungle. Forty-degree grade. Crazy thing is, they really did it for the movie.”

  Lawton straightens. Now this is interesting.

  “Some portage. How they do it?”

  “They build capstans on terraces cut up and down the hill, manned by an army of natives, and just drag the motherfucker with all these hawsers. Plus they rig pulleys to the steamer’s paddle gears somehow.”

  “So this dude builds his opera house?”

  “Not exactly. Indian chief thinks they’ve angered the river gods, defying nature and that. He cuts the ship loose from its mooring while everybody’s asleep, and it goes running the rapids anyway, sliding sideways, smashing into walls and rocks. The ship survives, though, all battered and listing, and the baron makes enough to hire a traveling opera troupe to play on the deck.”

  “Made out better than Daddy, I guess.” Lawton sniffs and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “I guess we should of asked old Dill how he done it, there after he got so talkative.”

  Hunter shrugs, watching his paddle.

  “By that point, I think he would of told us he used a herd of woolly mammoths to haul it out.”

  Lawton frowns.

  “What, you think he was bullshitting us?”

  “I think he was trying to keep from eating a cockroach.”

  Lawton huffs, his muscles rumbling under his vest.

  “See how that helped him.”

  Hunter doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t want to fight. Instead he leans back in the cockpit, lifts his face to the sun. He lets it bore through his skin, warm his blood like one of the reptiles on the banks. A creature of old time. When he opens his eyes, Lawton has his head turned over his shoulder, and he’s grinning big. Past him a johnboat floats along the bank, full of men in khaki shirts wielding sound-booms and cameras like clumsy weapons.

  “Lookee-who,” says Lawton.

  41

  Altamaha River, 1996

  Hiram Loggins motors upstream in the battered johnboat lent him some decade and a half ago. Given him, more like, by Annabelle. Not the first of her gifts in the dark hours of that night, memories that ring inside him still. He is hollow but for that, her name banging around inside him like a pocket-gun left in the dryer. It bangs on his heart, his ribs, the floor of his gut. Sometimes it goes off. His fists shoot through the smoky bars, the riverfront docks, the midnight decks of other men’s ships. The county jail where he’s in and out.

  His boat is gone. It was never found, nor the two tied alongside it during the storm. The lockbox he kept hidden behind the bulkhead—lost too. His life savings sunk like a treasure in the coastal waters, unsalvageable. The paper surely sogged away into a kind of ash, bitten and spit out by wads of baitfish. When the floodwaters receded, he went down to the docks and found the mooring lines still tied to the cleats, the ropes clean-cut, as by knife or ax. He had insurance—the bank required it—but the payout was insufficient. He found himself hugely upside down because of the interest, with no cash to pay the balance.

  A month after the storm, he came across the owners of the two other lost boats in the cut-and-shoot bar off Highway 99. They were laughing together over puddles of spilled beer, temples of downturned shot glasses. He ignored them, went straight to the bar for a tallboy and shot of rye. Still he could hear them whispering behind him, snickering. They were big men, sun-spotted and scarred, with iron-gray beards and muddy tattoos. Men who hadn’t had his luck in seasons past. Who had been waiting for such a storm, perhaps, their insurance pumped up to snuff.

  “Hey, Loggins,” said one. “Sit for a drink.”

  Hiram didn’t turn around, leaning on his elbows as he waited for his drinks. He needed that streak of oaken fire, that frosty gold to put it out. He looked at them in the mirror over the bar.

  “No thanks, I feel like standing tonight.”

  “Ain’t you been standing all day? On what, old Mackey’s boat?”

  The other man sniggered.

  The bartender set down the tallboy, ice-cold, and began pouring the shot.

  “Two more,” Hiram told him.

  “Man’s got to insure his assets, this day and age,” one of the men started telling the other. “It don’t pay to do one of them high innerest deals.”

  Hiram took a long pull of his tallboy, then set it back on its napkin. He took the three shots of rye in the triangle of his hands, like pool balls before the break, and walked to the table where the two men were sitting.

  “What’s this?” said one.

  Hiram set the shots on the table.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” he said. “For everything you done for me.”

  The two men eyed one another. The neat little shooters quivered on the table, asking to be drunk.

  “Well now,” said one, licking his lips, “I can’t say we done much.”

  “More than you know,” said Hiram. “Listen, I want to make a toast.”

  He took up his whiskey and propped his elbow on the table, holding the shot glass in the setting of his fingers like an amber crystal. He watched the men’s hands crawl across the table, taking up the whiskeys despite themselves. He looked them in the eye, one after the next, serious as Sunday school.

  “To clean slates,” he said.

  The men clinked their glasses against his own.

  “Clean slates,” they said.

  They threw back their heads to shoot the rye. Hiram set down his own shooter, undrunk, and drove the glasses into their teeth with his fists. The men fell gagging from their chairs, rolling on the beery floor, wailing through broken mouths. He watched one of them spit up his front teeth like breakfast cereal, glopped in milky blood. He took up his shooter and threw it back, a long rail of fire down his throat.

  The Sheriff gave him three weeks in county for that. He didn’t make it official. Everybody knew what the insurance companies didn’t. Still, it didn’t help for long. Hiram was never a brittle man. His insides had always been good. But something went out of him with that boat. His dreams left him. He could no longer see his future. He thought a vision would come to him. A path. He hunted for it in evenings along the river, among the great old trees, the virgin cypress centuries old. He waited for his skin to burn, the signs that clad him. Nothing. He saw Annabelle on the moonless nights. He slunk across the marshes like the dirty thing he was, hating himself, only to grasp h
er cool white legs. It didn’t help. She would never be his. Nor did the whiskey help, the fights, the two little boys growing up loyal and strong.

  It has been three years now, and he is headed upstream. It’s Sunday morning. In the bottom of the boat sits a cement block, a pile of heavy anchor chain.

  All his life. All his life he has felt the blackness lapping at him, hungry. All his life he has been trying to rise, thrashing and tearing for light, for escape. He is so tired now. Below him lie the sunken boats and drowned dreams, the ghosts who walk the river’s bottom—one of which he helped to put there. Lately the memory comes rising unbidden, and he feels the fingers of that day sliding through his hair, twisting, forcing him down, down, down. Into blackness.

  He rounds a bend and there stands the railroad bridge at Everett City, a behemoth of iron and stone over which the great smokeless engines still cross like toys. The trusses shine under the morning sun, a skeleton-work of iron, and below them something he never expected: a maze of white pleasure boats anchored at every angle, silent, gathered like a flock of birds come down on the river. People are sitting on their bows, feet dangling in the water, looking up. Hiram looks, too: a white man stands on the bridge itself, high over the water, his cassock-draped arms held out like wings. A little coal-black child stands on either side of him, clinging to his vestments. His adopted children. His voice booms across the water:

  “‘I will say of the Lord, he is my refuge and my fortress. My God, in him will I trust.’”

  “Shit,” says Hiram. The boats stretch from one side of the river to the other.

  “‘He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust. His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.’”

  Hiram starts threading his way through the boats, maneuvering around anchor-ropes and silver pontoons. “Goddamned menace to navigation.” The people smile at him, whole families with eyes like dope-smokers and dressed for church. He frowns at them.

  “‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’”

  Before him a deckboat of people in their Sunday best, swaying like cattails in the wind.