River, Sing Out

by James Wade

  Cade nodded.

  “And what if word gets back to the Alanzo family? What do you think their reaction will be if they find out we’re talking to another cartel?”

  “You heard ’em. We’re small fish. Made their point loud and clear. They want to disrespect me, fine. Mexico’s full of Mexicans. It’s time they learned they ain’t the only swinging dicks can move any weight. Besides, if they want a war, they’d better send the devil himself up here to do the job.”

  10

  The thin man rose before the first light of day and set about the composition of the morning: Café. Baño. Huevos rancheros. Mas café.

  It was in these early mornings that the thin man was himself, for in the coming hours the children would wake, as would his spouse, and despite the often enjoyable nature of his interactions as a father and husband, only the darkness allowed him the freedom of the man he had always been. Would always be.

  The mountains were more brown and jagged than their majestic blue counterparts to the north. The thin man liked it this way. It was, he believed, somehow more honest.

  The first band of orange light traced the horizon. The cold wind came in off the desert and moved west, as if it were running from the sun; and with it was brought the smell of creosote and sage, and soon the night lizards would see their shadows cast long in the calm awakening of the world.

  The thin man stood in the dirt and drank his coffee. The early light fell across his face and he turned away from it, toward the western ranges, and in a moment within this moment he was for a short time half light and half darkness. Then he walked up the steps of the porch and let the light pass him by.

  He watched the dawn, and he was of the belief that no single sunrise was less than a miracle. Not because of a deeply held appreciation for life, nor due to any religious suggestion. But rather, the thin man had seen the whole of the world’s offerings, and had long measured every outcome of his own species and found none to his liking; and so through such a prism he viewed his own existence and the existence of those around him—with no exemptions for even his own family—as a great plague upon the earth. And with each passing morning he gave his apology, in hopes that some future dawn would fall away in silence, leaving the world in the very darkness it deserved.

  11

  The boy woke before the sun but stayed in his room and listened to his father making coffee and watching television. When he finally came out, his father was smoking a cigarette and wouldn’t look him in the eyes.

  The boy went to the pantry and took an open sleeve of crackers and stood in the kitchen eating. His father came and stood, unsteady, next to him.

  “I’m sorry, Jonah. Alright? I’m so sorry, buddy.”

  The boy was silent save his chewing.

  “I love you so much. You know that, right? What I said last night, what I did, that’s not me. It’s not. And it’ll never happen again. I promise you. I can promise you that, son. That was the last time. Okay?”

  His father looked around.

  “I asked for god’s forgiveness, son, and guess what? He forgave me. But that’s not enough. I don’t care if it’s blasphemous, I’m saying it. I need more than god’s forgiveness. I need yours, too. C’mon, buddy. Give me another shot. Alright?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Alright,” the man said. “That’s my boy.”

  The man ruffled the boy’s hair and opened the fridge and drank milk from the plastic carton and the milk ran down into his goatee and dripped onto the linoleum. He wiped at it with the sleeve of his shirt and set the milk back and grabbed a beer.

  An hour later the boy’s father had a productive buzz and the words of the early morning had spirited away with the dawn.

  “I’ll be at Shawna’s for a while,” the man said.

  They sat, the two of them, on the worn sofa, dark green with torn fabric and stains new and old and mysterious. The boy stared at the rabbit ears atop the television and wondered how far away they went to retrieve the blurred images on the screen. His father watched the man on television, and the man told his father the country was collapsing and the only thing to be was angry. Maybe it was the man, or maybe it was everything else, but the boy’s father was angry.

  “You hear me?” he asked the boy. “I’m talking to you.”

  “How long?” the boy asked.

  His father threw his hands into the air.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A while.”

  “Can I come?” the boy asked, still fixated on the antenna.

  “No, you can’t come. I gotta talk to Shawna about grown-up things. I can’t have some little kid running around making it weird.”

  “I’ll be thirteen on Tuesday.”

  The man paused.

  “Tuesday, like tomorrow?”

  The boy nodded.

  “No shit? Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll see about bringing you back a present. How’s that?”

  The boy nodded.

  His father touched the boy’s knee and rose from the couch and groaned and flipped up a cigarette from his pack. The boy looked down at his knee where his father had touched him.

  “Well, alright then,” his father said and put on his pinched-crease cowboy hat and nodded and opened the door and hopped down and cussed when he landed. The boy turned toward him and saw only his torso and head and his face buried under the hat, and the man closed the door without looking back.

  The boy stood and gathered what few dishes there were and picked up his father’s ashtray and took everything to the sink. The water dripped and sputtered and banged through the pipes. When it came out it was brown and roily. He used just enough to rinse a bowl and a spoon and he set them both out to dry on the counter. He emptied the ashtray and rinsed it as well and took the old broom and opened the door and swept the dirt and dead bugs into the yard and looked toward the road and tried to hear the last of his father’s truck as it rumbled away, but he could not.

  Another rainstorm, and the boy soaking wet and mud on his shoes.

  The old man sat rocking and watching the rain and watching the water come off the roof. He looked up at the boy and felt at once a great sadness, such a pitiful sight as he was.

  “Missed you yesterday.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Had to eat all that deer sausage on my own.”

  “Sorry. My dad came home.”

  Carson stared at him.

  “He the one split that lip?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Well. He ought not do that.”

  “I don’t think he likes me,” the boy said.

  “He’s your father. He loves you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What does what mean?”

  “Do fathers have to love their sons?”

  The old man took pause.

  “No,” he said. “No, I suppose they don’t. But fathers make mistakes. We build them up, you know, to be something they ain’t. They’re just men. And men are flawed.”

  They sat for a while on the porch, but when the rain ended, the day grew hot and humid and the old man motioned for the boy to follow him inside. There they sat again, on wooden bench seats on either side of an old red-and-white table from a bygone decade. Along the wall were rusted nails from which a half-dozen medals hung. The old man turned the knob on a window unit at the end of the table where it met the wall. The air conditioner sputtered to life and the boy and the old man each put their faces in front of it and let the cool air blow against the sweat on their foreheads. The medals swung slightly, bumping into each other with a series of soft “tinks.”

  The old man pulled strips of bacon come from a feral hog he’d trapped and laid them to cook in a cast-iron skillet set over a single burner propane cooktop. The boy ground roasted beans in a tin grinder and soon the small cabin was cooled down and smelli
ng of bacon grease and fresh coffee.

  They ate the bacon and drank the coffee and played two games of chess on an old pine board with the pieces carved from basswood. The boy lost both games, but the old man said he was getting better.

  “You aren’t taking it easy on me, are you?” the boy asked.

  “Wouldn’t even know how to go about it,” the old man replied.

  He rose and walked outside and flung the dregs from his cup into the grass. The boy did the same.

  “I baited my trotline this morning,” the old man told him. “What do you say we go check and see if there’s a cat or two waiting to come up?”

  “Is it far?” the boy asked.

  “Just down about half a mile from my dock.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. Carson. I should be getting back.”

  “You just got here,” the old man protested, though the boy knew it was not true.

  The boy frowned.

  “You been here your whole life, Mr. Carson?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah, most of it. Left a time or two, always came back. My home.”

  “You like living here?”

  “Well, I got everything I need. Not as much as some. More than some others. Yeah, I guess I like it. I can’t see myself living any place away from the river. Last place left where a man can find any sort of peace. Maybe on some mountain somewhere, but even then. Gets cold. No, I imagine I’ll die right here. Right here on the river.”

  “Did it used to be different?”

  “Different?”

  “When you were growing up, I mean. Were things different than they are now?”

  “Yeah, son, I suppose they were.”

  “How?”

  “I can’t say exactly. Lots of ways. The people, for one. It was just a different breed of folk. It’s like, things were more savage and more civilized at the same time. For all the damn sense that makes. I guess, maybe, it was just less. Less people, less money, less choices. Things get all twisted up when there’s choices. Too many of us making the wrong ones.”

  The old man watched a memory as it bobbed atop the surface of the river then disappeared.

  “It’s all backward now, from how it used to be,” he said, turning back to the boy. “Soon as they found that first drop of oil, everything changed. The people changed, the river changed. Even the deer ain’t the same. Smaller, if you ask me. These boys go off to the pipelines and come back addicted to meth or money, and most times both. Spending it as fast as they make it, and on what? Nobody cares about the old ways. The river ways.”

  “What were the old ways?”

  “Well, to hear the old timers tell it, the river was all there was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything revolved around it, everything depended on it. Up near the headwaters, the river was too shallow for the steamboats, so the farmers would have to load up their wares and take them by cart and mule all the way to Bunn’s Bluff.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Down south of Evadale.”

  “That’s a long way.”

  “Oh, my, yes. They’d be gone weeks at a time. Much to the chagrin of them left behind. It was said a man could have himself quite a time at them old trading posts.”

  “You ever go?”

  “How old do you think I am, son? No, I never went. Them days were long gone ’fore I was ever thought about. The railroads came in, became the preferred method of transporting goods. If folks couldn’t trade along the river, they’d have to find some other way to live. So they turned to timber.

  “They started sawing logs all up and down the basin, mills sprung up along the banks, a dozen of them overnight is what my daddy used to say. Down in the flood plains they started working the wetlands for rice. Food and timber, that’s what the river gave us. Then it all went to shit, if the old waddies is to be believed.”

  “Are they?”

  “What?”

  “To be believed.”

  The old man considered the question.

  “I’d imagine they are. At least on the more severe matters. My daddy used to say that first drop of oil was the end of everything. Looking back on it, I don’t know if he could’ve pieced together how it would all turn out. But he was right anyway. They choked the life out of this place. Zinc, lead, phenol, just about every chemical you could think up coming from the plants and refineries. They dug out the bottom of the river where it meets the sea, salt water started flowing into its mouth. And all of it on top of the goddamned lakes and neighborhoods and everything else.

  “One day, all this is gonna be gone. You watch. They’ll flood these bottoms and start building gated subdivisions all along the edge of the water. They act like this land ain’t worth nothing to nobody, but they get ’em another lake and you watch the money come in. They’ll push us out. You just watch.”

  The old man spit off the porch and shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we ought to be pushed out. Maybe a great purge is the only solution. Either way, I hope to hell I ain’t here to see it.”

  “How come you to stay this long?”

  “Like I said, for better or worse, this is my home. Besides, where else is there to go?”

  The boy looked out at the river and nodded his head in agreement.

  “I don’t know. Nowhere, I guess.”

  12

  It’s something folks nowadays don’t understand. Can’t understand. Some things just are how they are. They can’t be held accountable for nothing, ’cause weren’t no decision ever made.

  They say it’s a privilege, getting old. Maybe it is for some. But I feel only the continued burden of existence. Some cursed watchmen at his post, set about to oversee the desolation of a world I thought I understood. I never did, of course, never could—and it’s in these twilight years that I come to know such a truth.

  This world is not what we make it, as told to the children, some unmolested canvas upon which to create a future worth living. No. The portrait of our lives was begun in years too long ago to be numbered. It was etched and painted and painted over to some millionth degree, with colors overlapping or mixing or fading altogether into some forgotten story left forever untold.

  And these images created over time did evolve, and in their evolution we looked upon them and to each new discovery we gave praise, and so on, and growing old until the picture of the world was no longer one I recognized, as it no longer looked like me. And only then did I discern my own life never belonged to me, my own world never a creation meant to last. Yet here I am, bitter and full up with regret, an old man privileged to die alone on an ever-changing canvas to which he no longer holds a brush.

  In those olden times, as you lay dying beneath the roof of the selfsame shanty wherein your entire life had been rendered, you could hear there, outside your very window, the composition of your own passing, the spadework upon the earth and the saw blade passing along the boards.

  Some poor boy, maybe your grandson, maybe just a boy, working a crosscut back and forth on a piece of wood. Bent over and covered with sweat, bracing himself on the table horse, pulling the teeth of the tool across the pine, and you hearing every bit of the mechanism gone into your own coffin.

  It’ll always be like that for old men. There may not be some poor soul digging a plot in the yard, but I can still hear such fateful approaches. Oh, yes. I can hear the saw.

  And to awaken each day is to be reborn as an old man and to have a life lived over in the split second it takes to wipe away at half-hung eyes, and such eyes offering a bleak recanting of the world—a reminder of what waits outside of dreams. As if in some immeasurable flash, the brain must give an accounting of every breath ever taken, so as to bring to consciousness those memories lost each night.

  The sum of such recanting is less and less these days. Certain em
otions come up against, but no particular memories to pair them with. Some overwhelming chaplet of grief pulled down upon my head, and here I’m sent to bawling. Neurons firing, I’d guess. Wires being crossed as the system starts to shut down. We spend half our lives accumulating experiences, the other half forgetting them.

  I don’t know what else to say. Not because I forgot. That’s the other part of old age: All the things you thought you’d learn, you don’t. You don’t find out who you are. You don’t make some peace with the world or with god or even with yourself. You don’t end up wise and content and ready to die. No. The truth is, in these final hours, the world makes less sense than it ever did before. And death is still something to be feared.

  One of the few things I’ve learned is that believing in god is not something you try at. As soon as you start to feel unsure about things, that means you don’t believe, even if you’re too afraid to say it.

  13

  On Tuesday, the boy woke. He’d slept on the couch and his back hurt from where the cushions sagged in the middle. He’d left the television on and the picture cut in and out almost rhythmically and through the cascading lines of static he could see there were two women sitting in chairs on a stage and a man in between them. The volume was down but the boy watched as the women yelled at the man and at one another and then one of the women picked up her chair and threw it and other men rushed onto the stage to grab her. He stood and stretched and walked to the television and turned the knob to Off and opened the door and climbed carefully to the ground and stood there in his boxers and looked toward the tree line.

  There was no movement, so the boy walked barefoot across the clearing and searched the ground for uneaten corn, but there was none. He nodded and walked back through the clearing and behind the trailer and to the shaded tin shed which sat at a tilt beneath two large cypress trees. There was a lock on the door. The boy yanked at it until he was convinced it would not open. He moved to the backside of the shed and felt the dirt at the base of the tin with his toes. He dropped to his knees and dug and it did not take long to dig past the bottom of the tin and further still until he could lay on his stomach and fit his arm into the shed. He felt blindly with his hand until his fingers touched a corn sack and he pressed his shoulder further into the tin siding and stretched his arm far enough to grab the sack and pull it into the hole. The sack filled the hole and would not fit under the shed, so the boy pushed himself up from the dirt and brushed himself off and went back to the trailer.