River, Sing Out

by James Wade

  The girl looked off.

  “What about you,” she asked. “What’s your old man like?”

  “I don’t know. He’s not here a lot.”

  “Shit, I wish my mom had stayed away more. She used to whip the shit out of me. I deserved it about half the time, but still.”

  “Did you really?”

  “No. Nobody really deserves that.”

  She looked at him.

  “Your daddy beats on you, too, huh?”

  The boy was quiet and when he spoke again he asked the girl about her own father.

  “Why wasn’t he at the donuts days?” he said.

  “Don’t know him. Don’t even know who he is. What about your mom?”

  “I know her. Or I did. She left when I was little.”

  “You still remember her?”

  “I remember she was picking me up. We were walking somewhere and I think I must have got tired or something, so she picked me up. Carried me. I don’t even know if it’s real. It may be a dream. I’m not sure I care, though. I just like thinking about it. I guess we got to carry ourselves, now.”

  The girl nodded and the boy looked off and into the past and for a while she watched him and when he returned to her there were tears in his eyes and she reached out and took his hand and he let her.

  “You know, it’s crazy to me,” she said, “there’s kids—kids who aren’t kids anymore—they grew up their whole entire lives and never found out the truth.”

  “What’s the truth?”

  “That their parents are stupid pieces of shit.”

  “Maybe they aren’t.”

  “They are.”

  “You think all parents are bad?”

  “I think all people are bad.”

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “Shit, I’m worse than most.”

  “Not worse than them hunting you, though?”

  “No. Not that bad.” The girl sighed. “God, I’m an idiot.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Well, then I’ve been acting real convincingly like I am,” she said. “When I left home, I headed west. It always seemed like the thing to do, at least in the songs. I thought maybe I’d go to California or something, but I didn’t get very far.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ran out of money. What little I had. Ended up at a casino in Livingston, had to turn a couple of tricks just to—”

  The boy’s face had changed.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You don’t need to hear all that. Cade took me in. Took care of me. Made me feel safe.”

  “And made you take drugs.”

  “No. He didn’t make me. I wanted to.”

  The boy looked upset.

  “Hey, you asked.”

  “I know.”

  “Well.”

  The boy moved his hand away. The girl looked out at the rain.

  “I’m from Louisiana,” she said, and the boy wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or herself. “Place called Leesville. Military base there. Plenty of customers. We lived at Sun Inn for a time. I remember Momma would stick me and my sister in the bathtub and tell us to shut up, don’t make a sound.”

  “You have a sister?”

  “Sadie.” The girl tried to smile, but she couldn’t. “Younger than me by a couple years. Prettiest blond hair and blue eyes. We used to have a lemonade stand, the way little kids do. We set it up in the motel parking lot. The way we figured it, our daddy might still be in Leesville, and if he was, he might get thirsty at some point, come by our stand. We had it all planned out in our heads. He would come by and get some lemonade, he’d see us and immediately fall in love and take us to live with him in a nice house somewhere. I don’t know why we thought he’d know who we were. I don’t even know that we have the same daddy in the first place. I guess it didn’t matter, in our little kid minds.

  “We did move away from the motel, but it was with Momma. Got us a trailer on the south side of town. Me and Sadie shared a room. She’d lock us in there when she had a customer. We didn’t mind all that much. It was better than a bathtub. I left when I was fifteen.”

  “You ran away?”

  The girl nodded.

  “I was about your age when she realized I’d fetch a higher price. I think it made her mad at first, you know? Like jealous or something. She used to put makeup on me, real thick and everything. Then she’d tell me I was nothing but an ugly whore. That never made sense to me. She was the one who’d done the makeup. She would slap me until I cried and the mascara ran down my face. She said I wasn’t any better than her, and I better not think that I was. ‘I don’t think that, Momma,’ I’d tell her. Then she’d say, ‘Good. They only want you because your snatch is still tight.’

  “But the money and the meth came in faster than it had before, and that kept her happy enough. She’d still slap me around, if somebody complained about me crying or something like that. ‘I’ll give you a reason to cry,’ she used to say. But I already had too many reasons to count.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you sorry? You didn’t do anything.”

  “I’m sorry those things happened to you.”

  The girl shook her head, disapproving.

  “You can’t think like that. If you start being sorry for everyone else, for every little thing in the whole damn world, it’ll cripple you. You won’t be able to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward.”

  “Okay. But I’m still sorry.”

  The girl shook her head again. This time she fought tears.

  “I left her there. Just left her.”

  “Your sister?” the boy asked.

  “I knew what was gonna happen and I left her anyway.”

  She cried. The boy patted her back.

  “Maybe she ran away, too,” he said.

  The girl shook her head.

  “I had Cade send a letter a little while back. Asking after her. It was my Momma who wrote back. Said Sadie”—the girl began to sob into her hands—“said she killed herself two months after I left. One of the soldiers had brought a gun with him. He wasn’t looking or paying attention or something, and she got a hold of it. Put it right up to her head. That was it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop with your fucking sorries. I don’t deserve it. I’m the one that killed her.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Like hell. I abandoned her.”

  “You had to leave.”

  “I could’ve took her with me. I told myself that if I left, maybe Momma would appreciate what she had. Be nicer to Sadie than she’d been to me. But that was bullshit, and I knew it. I just didn’t want to have to take care of her, look out for her. Didn’t want her slowing me down.”

  “You were just a kid.”

  “I was older than you are now. What would you have done?”

  The boy was quiet.

  “That’s what I thought. Anyway, I’ve been waiting for my reckoning ever since.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I get. Like, there’s a man, or something like a man, and he’s out there in the world, and he knows about me. He knows about everyone. But, but he really knows about me.”

  “Is he gonna kill you?”

  “Not kill me. Just be there, out in the world, and me knowing he’s there. Me feeling him, almost like he’s watching, following. Just waiting.”

  “What’s he waiting for?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it is, I think I’m waiting on it, too.”

  “I’ll wait with you,” the boy said and he put his arm around her as the rain weakened.

  The sunlight fought through the
branches above them and sent scattering its rays and the forest floor appeared as a never-ending stage covered in rogue spotlights, and they looked out across it and held onto the other, both thinking of things far away and out of reach.

  22

  The two of them sat the porch and watched as lightning danced and parried upon the hill, appearing in frozen flashes against the gray sky and expiring into such a sky as if being called to some accounting by each thunderclap come after it.

  The big man was coming down from an eight-hour high and he hated the rain. He loaded a half-can of Skoal between his pinched fingers and lodged it into the dugout space inside his lower lip. A gust of wind blew a misting of rain onto the porch and onto Cade’s boots and he spit tobacco juice out into the storm in what might have been retaliation. He rose and drug his chair backward and sat again.

  “Some raggedy crew of Mexicans been working out at the mill in Corrigan County,” he said. “Joe T says they been bothering him since they got there about setting up a show.”

  “He figure them to be proper dogmen?” John Curtis asked.

  “He didn’t say. But I surely do doubt it. I know one of the old boys from work overtop the Eagle Ford. He’s was too dumb to be a proper rig hand, let alone a dog handler.”

  “Illegals?”

  “Can’t say that neither. Good chance.”

  John Curtis nodded.

  “Well. Alright then. Set it up.”

  “You gotta purse in mind?”

  “What are they asking for?”

  “Five thousand a side.”

  John Curtis looked up.

  “Don’t sound so raggedy.”

  The big man shrugged and spit again.

  John Curtis waved his hand.

  “Fine,” he said.

  Cade nodded.

  “Any weight qualifiers?” Cade asked.

  “No. Let’s just see what happens. I’ve been wanting to put Rose in the box, see what kind of game she has in her.”

  Cade’s face upturned.

  “Something don’t set well with you?” John Curtis asked him.

  “Rose ain’t even two yet. Not to mention she’s on the small side. Don’t seem smart to put her in a show without qualifiers. They’re liable to bring a dog weighs fifty or sixty pounds.”

  “Good. Then we’ll learn how she does when she’s outmatched. Hell, everybody can win when they’re supposed to. What is it with you big, soft types?”

  “Claude ain’t gonna be too happy. He ends up falling in love with every one of them bitches we send out there.”

  John Curtis cocked his head.

  “I know it.”

  “I can’t figure out why he still does it. Throws a fit every time we go to pick one up. Seems like he’d just quit training ’em.”

  “They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. Plus, that old cajun needs the money.”

  “Well. He sure is good at it.”

  John Curtis nodded.

  “Still,” Cade said, “he ain’t gonna be too happy.”

  “I’ll ride out there first thing in the morning. You wanna come?”

  “Naw. I’m crashing hard. Need to sleep it off.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  That night Cade dreamt of the girl and in his dream she sat atop a horse like the one he’d ridden as a child at the state fair. A man in a straw hat led the horse at a walk and the horse went in circles and each time it passed by Cade the girl laughed at him.

  John Curtis drove his truck out of the bloodred sunrise and across the county line into Lansdale. He turned off the highway and onto a gravel road and followed it eight miles and turned again and navigated down an old logging road where at the end sat the makeshift kennel. The main house was itself not much more than a lean-to and it was surrounded by all manner of chain-link fence and wooden walls. The yard was scattered with what looked to be a series of junk steel and discarded machine parts, but most every item had some purpose known only to the kennel master who hurried himself through the morning to meet John Curtis.

  “What do you say, Claude?”

  “Mr. John Curtis,” the man said, with an accent caught somewhere between French and fried frog. “How is you dis mo’ning?”

  “Oh, I’m doing just fine. Better question is, how’s my dog?”

  “Come own see fuh yo’self.”

  Behind the house, the dog was on a homemade treadmill, pieced together with welded brackets and precision cuts of wood. Her brindled skin was pulled taut over her muscles and each striation flexed as she moved.

  The two men folded their arms and watched her run.

  “How’s her conditioning been?” John Curtis asked.

  “She onnuh slatmill three, four time a day. Done run her all down through the mud like how you ast. Watch here, now.”

  The old cajun stepped forward and pulled a lever on the machine and the track under the dog pitched backward, forcing her to work harder as if she were running uphill. But the dog took the change in stride and continued pumping forward with little to no panting.

  Claude laughed and smiled.

  “Conditionin’ won’t be no problem,” he said. “She a little undersized. I got some injections might fill her out a little mo’.”

  John Curtis shook his head.

  “No time. How’s her neck?”

  “Shit. I ‘magine she hang from dat sprangpole days atta time, if’n I let her.”

  “Good. Very good, Claude.” John Curtis clapped him on the back.

  “You want I should roll her with a mo’ seasoned bitch? See how she do?”

  “No, that’s alright. We’ll see what she’s got soon enough.”

  “She fighting?”

  John Curtis nodded.

  “Well, hold on now,” Claude protested. “I don’t know she’s ready fo’ all dat.”

  Now it was John Curtis who laughed.

  “The big man said you’d be that way.”

  Claude looked offended.

  “I ain’t being no way. Just think she could do with a little more time. Look bad on me if she get out there and lose.”

  “Oh, come on now, Claude. I know you better than all that. You’re worried about her getting hurt, not your damn pride. You had any pride, you wouldn’t live out here in such a shithole. You wouldn’t let me pay you such a low price to train these dogs, and you damn sure wouldn’t let me come take them from you whenever I want. You love these dogs, Claude. And that’s okay. I understand.”

  The man put his head down.

  John Curtis put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

  “As men, we are aware of our own mortality. Aware of it in a way no other creature can claim. We quarrel with finality because we are unwilling to accept such a painful existence, void of the promise of better things to come.

  “And in our foreboding we cast aside the discernible, ignoring our unique ability to employ adaptive reasoning; in short, we lie to ourselves, to our children, to each other. But there is no dishonesty in these dogs. They have too much nobility. A dog can’t soothe itself with stories of hope or redemption. It won’t call for mercy or curse its circumstance. Instead, a dog slowly and eventually succumbs to its fate—fate as decided not by the world or by god or by the dog itself. But a destiny of which the animal has no knowledge. Can never have. An existence, purposed or not, which is not confined to the limits of concept. There is honor in that. Honor in these dogs that we’ll never have, because we’ll never see things that simple, never be that pure. It’s okay that you love ’em. You ought to.”

  Claude looked up. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Whatchyou want me to do?” he asked.

  “Have her ready this evening, or I’ll end whatever lies you’ve been telling yourself about death.”

  23
r />   The boy and the girl mapped a search grid in the woods and when they ran out of push pins and thumbtacks they took to using rusted nails and torn magazine pages. And so they went, walking the forest and leaving their marks as if it were all part of some long-ago pagan rite.

  They found a rusted necklace made of fool’s silver, a cooler with the sides eaten away, and enough empty beer cans to build a sanctuary. They did not find the backpack.

  On the afternoon of the third day, they followed a deer trail through the swamp lilies and powdery thalia. The spiraled blooms of navasota tresses shuddered on their stalks at the thunder upcoming from the southwest. The boy looked in that direction. The sky had long been dark, but the storm clouds were darker still, relieved of their crawling shadow only through the pale violet bursts of lightning that gave shape to the clouds, the clouds in their backlit outline appearing as some great barrier, straining to hold back the galvanic wrath of a vengeful god.

  The boy, hands on his hips and arched forward, watched the sky in its bright fracturing. He’d insisted the girl continue to sleep in his room and he on the couch, its sagging playing havoc on his bony spine.

  “That’ll be twenty-two days in a row that its rained.”

  He turned toward the girl, and she had her back to him and her hands covering her face. When she pulled them away they were wet with tears.

  “I can’t do it,” she cried. “I’ve heard people talk about it. But I’ve never seen anyone do it. Hell, I don’t even know anyone that’s done it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Get clean. Stay that way. Not completely lose their shit.”

  “You’re going to do it.”

  “You don’t know shit.”

  “I’m gonna help you.”

  “I don’t want your fucking help,” she snapped, then softened. “I’m sorry, goddamnit, I just, I can’t control anything right now. I’m fucked up. Everything’s so fucked up.”

  The girl began to cry in earnest.

  “Why don’t you tell me all the bad things about it?” the boy asked.

  The girl rolled her eyes and put her head in her hands again.

  The boy waited, and they stood for a long time without a sound.

  “Meth chips away at a person,” she said finally. “Hollows them out. Body, soul, even the teeth. Until they’re not anything but a living ghost. Or maybe not a ghost. Maybe something worse. Ghosts at least keep something, you know? They keep some part of whoever they were when they were alive. Meth takes everything from you. Makes you something less than a ghost of your old self. Makes you something else altogether.”