The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

“I said on the ground, motherfucker!”

  Lawton brings the butt of the pistol down hard on a man’s face. He falls to the ground, blood springing from his nose.

  Hunter stares.

  There are two of them, rough men in tan overalls blotched with oil or blood. They lie facedown, asses clenched, fingers laced behind their heads. The windows are papered over, discolored shafts of light slanting down on the prone men, churning with angry mobs of dust. The rest of the place is jumbled in darkness, a mystery until their eyes can adjust. Lawton glances at Hunter. His blue eyes are bold in the dark.

  “I’ll deal with you later.” His voice is calm. Angerless. He turns back to the men, stepping among their bodies. “Now which of you motherfuckers is gonna tell me what happened to Hiram Loggins?”

  The nearest man turns his head to the side, one eye round as a fish’s.

  “We don’t know this man.”

  The words are clumsy in his mouth. Accented.

  Lawton kneels and pushes the pistol into the base of the man’s skull.

  “The fuck you don’t.”

  59

  McIntosh County, 2001

  Annabelle Mackintosh sits on her porch smoking another cigarette. It is moonless tonight, and the crumpled pack sits nearly empty on the side table, like smashed origami. He isn’t going to come, she thinks. Hiram. She blows the smoke through her teeth. It isn’t him that maddens her on nights like these. It’s her own self. That here she sits in her crumbling tower, a single story barely afloat of the muck, waiting for a man that isn’t hers. That never will be.

  She sees his wife sometimes in the grocery in town. She turns her cart down the aisle and there the woman stands, steel-haired and strong-jawed, examining cans of soup or beans. Her boys trail behind her, sprinkled with acne, shoving and making faces when she isn’t looking. The older one has red hair, the sight of which burns like fire in her chest. Annabelle wheels her cart from the scene, as if she’s turned down the wrong aisle, before any of them can see the hot flare of shame on her face.

  She lights her last cigarette from the burning nubbin of her old one. There are cool blue veins on the backs of her hands now, like streams pouring from the hills of her knuckles, and her hair is beginning to lose its flame. She will have to start dyeing it soon. She holds the smoke a long time in her chest before letting it out, surveying her realm. There is the uncut grass, the imploding boat shed, the muscle car dying slowly in the yard. The tires are dry-rotted and nearly flat, the red paint bubbling along the fender wells. Her husband is north of three hundred pounds now, bloated on Popeye’s and bourbon-Cokes, an oily mass that jiggles and farts when it moves. The doctor says his heart won’t take much more abuse. He tried putting it in terms Barlow would understand:

  “It’s like trying to run a tractor trailer on a little Honda engine. Something is going to go boom.”

  “Doc, you ain’t just compared my heart to some Jap-built piece of shit, did you?”

  She has tried making him boiled chicken, skinless, and steamed vegetables like the doctor prescribed. Salads with translucent dressing and bowls of nutty brown rice. He won’t eat it. When she put the FryDaddy in the attic, he called her a good-for-nothing bitch. When she said she wasn’t going to make any more of the food that was killing him, he said good thing the trash out by the interstate would. Her long hate of him—of what he had made of himself and the life he promised her—has turned somehow to pity, even compassion.

  Hate was so much easier.

  Her cigarette is nearly out. She sucks it right down to the filter, feeling the heat build in her lungs. She tries not to think of what might be keeping Hiram tonight. Of that good woman at home, those two boys growing up straight and strong. She stubs the cigarette into the ashtray and slips out of the bloodred high heels he likes, not wanting to wake up Barlow when she stilts back into the house. She stands, trying not to look at the blue veins running down the tops of her feet.

  “Pssst.”

  She jumps.

  There’s Hiram at the corner of the porch, a big shit-eating grin on his face.

  “Thought I wasn’t coming, huh?”

  Annabelle bites down on the corners of her mouth, trying to fetter her smile. She leans back, allegedly yawning, letting her body express itself against the dress.

  “Oh Hiram,” she says. “You’re too late. I’m so tired.”

  He grins wider, coming around to the door.

  “Bull-fucking-shit,” he says. “You ain’t been tired of me a day in your life.”

  He’s right.

  She comes to the door. He won’t touch it. Never would. It is always her who must open the door to their sin. He stands a little below her on the stoop, shirtless, sheened in sweat, and she sees that angry new burns rope his forearms. His fingers are covered in white tape, tattered with blood, and blood vessels have burst beneath his eyes, like doubled shiners. She opens the door.

  “Jesus, Hiram. You get jumped by a she-gator on the way here?”

  “Don’t go getting jealous on me, woman.” He winks and takes her hand. “Come on now, I got something I want to show you.”

  She resists.

  “I’m getting old, Hiram. You know I like a little foreplay first.”

  “Not that, girl. Something else.” He tugs gently on her hand. Once, twice. He’s smiling big, like he rarely does. Like a little boy.

  “Come on, come on.”

  She gives, letting him pull her across the yard, the ground soggy between her toes. They leave the triangular flood of the porch light, stepping into the outer night. The marsh lies spiked against the sky, whispering. He leads her down to the little mudbank where he always shores his boat. All but the pilot’s seat has been covered in a gray wool blanket, rumpled and creased like a tiny range of mountains in the night. Like the Appalachians, far over the horizon.

  “You better not have a damn body under there, Hiram.”

  “Faith, woman.” He winks, whipping free the blanket with a flourish, like a magician wielding his cape. She looks at the thing.

  “What is it?”

  “Our future.”

  “It’s a big dead fish, Hiram. It ain’t the Altamaha-ha.”

  “No, it’s better.” He pulls a hookbill knife from his back pocket and makes a long cut down the belly, prying open the cavity with both hands. Annabelle peers into the great fish he’s gutted, and Hiram slides his chin over her shoulder. His words tickle her ear.

  “Black gold.”

  She steps back and looks at him.

  “Is it legal?”

  “Legal.” He squints one eye. “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  “It used to be.”

  “Used to be? So did wife-beating, Hiram. And lynching people.”

  “This ain’t the same.”

  “It ain’t straight.”

  “Straight? The world’s a crooked fucking place, honey. Crooked as the river I pulled this from. There ain’t a straight line in all of creation, except what we put there. And what have them lines ever pointed to but money, honey. Every last one. I thought I was pulling something evil from that river, something I never had the strength to bring up. And it’s given me this. It’s a sign is what it is. See?”

  “I see a big gutted fish, Hiram, that never hurt nobody. I see a man used to talk like those waters were something holy, something we ain’t completely fucked up.”

  His eyes narrow. He is no longer the boy of a minute before.

  “No, people been fucking up this river for ages. Cutting the trees, building their plants and mills. Sucking the tit of the river and shitting on its back. I loved it my whole goddamn life, treated it right. It’s time it loved me back. Anybody deserves to pull something good from them waters, it’s me. I paid in full, like you don’t know. And this? I got just the men to help. It ain’t straight, honey. It’s full circle.”

  Annabelle steps back.

  “I don’t like it, Hiram. Whatever money you make from this, you think
it’s gonna win me somehow, but it ain’t. It’s too late. What we have is what it is and it’s only ever gonna be that. You ought to know that by now. This? I don’t like it at all.”

  His face hardened as she spoke. She could almost see her words glancing off his cheeks and forehead, the stubborn shield of his face.

  “You think you don’t like it, but you will.”

  “I won’t, Hiram.”

  “All them fancies you grown up with gonna be eating out my hand. You watch.”

  “I won’t like it.”

  “You will.”

  His eyes are far off, seeing the day she would.

  “I won’t, Hiram. Ever.”

  His eyes come racing back, so fast she feels struck. He points in her face, his ravaged finger trembling.

  “You will, god damn you.”

  He settles the blanket back over his prize, tucking the corners down good. There is a gentleness to his movements, a care. He might be tucking in one of his boys, if that is something he does. She doesn’t even know. He steps knee-deep into the water.

  “Hiram. Don’t go.”

  He says nothing, sliding the boat down the bank.

  “I should of left him a long time ago,” she says. “Barlow. When I could.”

  Now he looks at her, his teeth glowing in something like disgust.

  “Yeah. You should of.”

  “You leave now, like this, you best not come back.”

  He goes rigid, waist-deep in the water, and her heart sings.

  “Sorry, baby. I’m already gone.”

  He steps back, fading shadowlike against the greater dark, eyes twinkling like hard little coins. His boat slides from shore, whispering through the reeds, swallowed in the night. A little later, the cough of his outboard firing up. Annabelle’s legs give out. She sinks on the bank, wailing into the crook of her arm.

  60

  Altamaha River, Day 5

  Their eyes slowly make light of the place. There is a long metal trough running down one wall, irrigated by a garden hose, and a strange assortment of cutting blades dangling from a wire of hooks above. There are mini-fridges like students have in their dorms, three of them standing shoulder to shoulder against the back wall, and coils of rope and long nets strung along the walls. Bottled water and boxes of energy bars and noodles sit in pallets in one corner, and army-type cots line another wall, only two of them made. Two naked bulbs hang from the rafters, doused, and a braid of extension cords slithers along the floor and under the blanket draped over the back door. The place smells about like the gar in the woods.

  “It is fish camp.” The man’s eye twitches over Lawton’s pistol. “What it looks?”

  Blood bubbles from one nostril as he speaks. He has a stiff beard, wide and gray. He is huge and blocky beneath his overalls, but gentle somehow, like an old bear. Lawton leans closer, sniffs.

  “I can smell the shit on your breath, motherfucker.”

  “I tell you truth.”

  Lawton’s eyes come up, checking the room.

  “Where is it you’re from?”

  “Ukraine.”

  Lawton cocks his head toward the other man facedown in the dirt.

  “Him, too?”

  “My son.”

  “What y’all doing in this neck of the woods?”

  “Fish.”

  “Yeah,” says Lawton. “You keep saying that.”

  The boy on the floor shifts like he might rise. His father barks at him, the words foreign and harsh. The boy freezes.

  “That’s right,” says Lawton. “Daddy knows best.”

  The big man hardens at this. He has his hands laced behind his head, the fingers huge and squared-off, the nails framed in grime. He is missing the last two fingers of one hand. He looks up at Lawton, and there is blood in his teeth.

  “You think this is first time I have gun at me?”

  “It ain’t the first time that matters, big man. Only the last time counts.”

  “In Afghanistan I fought dukhi. More scary than you.”

  Lawton nods.

  “The dukhi,” he says. “The ghosts.”

  The man’s eyes go wide, and Lawton’s teeth show.

  “Me and my boys fought some of those mountain ghosts our own selves.” He leans close. “You’d be surprised how scary I am.”

  Hunter looks at the burlap that covers the back door. The wind tugs at the flap, winking light, and before he knows it he is moving that way, drawn.

  “Be right back,” he says. “Gonna check out back.”

  Lawton looks up.

  “The hell you are. There could be somebody out there.”

  “There’s only two cots made up.”

  “We can’t assume, Hunter. Like Daddy used to say: Assumption is the mother of—”

  Hunter is already through the flap. It’s like stepping from a cave. A cold wind sways the trees, the sky gray and low over their upstretched branches. He can hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, like a train coming, and the muted holler of his name. Lawton can’t leave two men sprawled on the floor, and Hunter can’t help himself. The shark’s tooth itches his neck. There is something he has to see.

  More boxes of supplies are stacked against the back wall of the shed, including two fifty-five-gallon drums with FLAMMABLE stenciled on the side. The power cords are zip-tied into a bundle that disappears into the mouth of a ribbed plastic sheath skating down a path into the woods. He follows it. It is trampled flatter than the path from the river, double-cut from the passage of an ATV or side-by-side. Twenty yards down the trail, the ribbed tube snakes into a little clearing where two gasoline generators sit under a fly of camouflage netting. They are Hondas, whisper-quiet and expensive, chugging loyally under the trees. Beside them a half-horsepower, shallow-well water pump sits atop a tubular storage tank.

  “Some fish camp.”

  He keeps on down the trail, the hand-ax held at the neck, the haft bobbing against the belly of his forearm. He knows he should not venture this far alone but cannot seem to stop himself. There is a scent curling through the trees, like the gar but stronger. The trail breaks from cover, running into the straight-cut canal of an old rice field, one of the many that grid the delta. Below the raised impoundment floats a steel-hulled skiff with a Yamaha outboard bolted to the transom, the cowling pulled off for maintenance. On the bank, a homebuilt trailer is hitched to a four-wheeler, the pair parked jackknife in a turnaround spot. To one side, he sees what he smelled: a giant pit of rot.

  Sturgeon. Fish endangered, protected since before he can remember. At least thirty of them lie strewn in the grave, as if machine-gunned, some the size of torpedoes. No meanness to them, these bottom-feeders, their toothless mouths gaped in death, their white whiskers—barbels—curved like cartoon mustaches. Their bodies clad in prehistoric armor, in long chains of hardened scutes, ridged like mountains of bone.

  A jerry can sits at the edge of the pit, a box of matches on top.

  These fish who swam among the dinosaurs. They will burn.

  He whirls to go, to tell his brother what he’s found, and a boy is standing on the path where it breaks from the trees. The boy from Stud Horse Creek. His jaw is covered in a blond beard nearly white, his green eyes buzzing serpentlike in his skulled face. He wears a pair of brown duck-bib overalls, like a starved version of the big man in the shed, his arms wiry and blue-veined where they sprout from his chest. In his hands he holds a carbine, a semiautomatic hunting rifle with a banana clip, and Hunter feels his world change in an instant, warping and righting as if struck. It is suddenly colder, more finely wrought. He sees a lone redbird chittering on a limb, bright as blood. He feels the whisper of grass against his shins.

  A smile rips the boy’s face.

  “This?” He nods toward the pit. “Very bad luck.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Da. You see once?” The boy sucks his teeth. “You see bolshe nichevo. Nothing else.”

  Hunter thinks of the two researcher
s gone missing, the cats flung over high-voltage line. He thinks of the fishes in their mass grave, gape-mouthed, and his father’s broken heart. Death smiling white-faced over it all, like the coldest sun. The shark tooth throbs.

  “I’m not a regular fish.”

  A blue vein webs the boy’s forehead.

  “Not yet.”

  The boy’s shoulder leaps against its skin, spidering with sinew, the gun swinging up, and Hunter springs into the space between them, ax in hand, the head sliding long from his arm like a tomahawk. The barrel shortens as it rises, turning into an evil little mouth, and Hunter has halved the distance when he realizes he isn’t going to make it in time. He hurls the ax. It cartwheels through the air, iron-wheeled, and the boy ducks. The butt clatters off the tree behind him as Hunter lowers his head into the boy’s chest, driving him against the tree.

  Now they both have hold of the gun, yanking and shoving like schoolboys, and Hunter pulls his arms and rams the point of his knee between the boy’s legs. His face greens but he doesn’t let go of the rifle. Instead he lowers his chin and too late Hunter sees the crest of the boy’s forehead driving for his face. His world explodes in light, blood searing through the channels of his nose, tears like acid down his cheeks. He wants to let go but doesn’t, holding to the weapon like some holy staff that will part seas and swallow serpents whole. To hold it is everything. He steps backward in the muddy earth, twisting to wrench it free, and his knee cuts screaming from under him. Now he is on his back in the mud, empty-handed, and the barrel is coming for him, pointing him into the earth. His heart feels enormous, leaping against the cage of his ribs, and his hand finds the ax. He will cut through the white tree of this boy, down to the bloody stump. He will cut through a whole forest of these boys to reach his brother. The barrel closes over him, and he raises the ax.

  A whip of flesh from the woods, flashing the space between them, and Hunter looks wide-eyed to see Uncle King crouched beside him like a fighter, a sea monster inked rampant on his shoulder blade. The boy wheels, aiming, and the old man slips to the outside of the barrel, his head tucked between his balled fists, and rises swiveling on his front foot, delivering a left hook to the point of the boy’s jaw. The boy spins and jams the barrel into the ground at a diagonal, hunched over the butt like a man skewered, and Uncle King yells at Hunter over his shoulder.