River, Sing Out

by James Wade

  “It’s alright, go on and tell me about it. I promise I’ve heard it all before, and worse.”

  “All I see is . . . a beautiful woman.”

  The man raised his glass and swirled it and downed the contents just as the bartender arrived with the bottle.

  “Fine, I’ll let you off the hook. This time. What do you think about all this rain?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Some people say it’s climate change. Some people say it’s god.”

  “What do you say?” he asked.

  “I say what they pay me to say.”

  “Ah. Perhaps like a prostitute.”

  “Well, aren’t you a charmer.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think you are. In fact, I’d say you’re an actor. Maybe on one of those Mexican soap operas. What are they called?”

  “Telenovela.”

  “That’s it.”

  The man smiled.

  “It is a creative guess.”

  “What are you really?”

  “Just a man.”

  “Just a man, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Just a man with thousand-dollar boots, a gold watch, and a ring that could pay for a house in some places.”

  “Not any place someone would want to live.”

  “Still. You’re somebody,” she said.

  “We’re all somebody. Until we’re not.”

  “Games. Games. You are a charmer. I’m Jennifer.”

  “Hola, Jennifer.”

  “And you? Tu nombre?”

  “Raul.”

  “Hola, Raul.”

  They sat in silence for a short time until the woman laughed and touched the thin man’s shoulder.

  “You’re really not gonna tell me are you?” she asked.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Who you are. What it is you do.”

  “Do you believe this to be the same, who a man is and what he does?”

  “Depends, I guess.”

  “On what?”

  “On,” she laughed again, “on who you are and what you do.”

  “I am a man of consequence. Do you believe in consequence?”

  “Sure, I do.”

  “If you drink too much, you might feel unwell the next day. If you do not pay your electricity bill, you may have your lights shut off. These are consequences.”

  “Okay.”

  “That is me. I am the unwell feeling. I am the darkness.”

  The girl smiled.

  “Sounds pretty scary.”

  “And yet you are not afraid. This is very American of you. Your whole country is unafraid of consequences, because it has so rarely faced any. You play loosely about the world, impacting forever the history of others, but never facing your own.”

  “Oh god, are we really gonna talk politics? What are you, some kind of a diplomat?”

  “No. What brings me to your country is not diplomacy. As I said, I am only a consequence. Nothing more.”

  34

  Night had fallen. Mounted on metal posts and lining the sidewalk outside the townhouses were dozens of timed lights which had come on. There was a low electric hum from each of them and winged insects of every kind were drawn into their glow. The rain was hours gone, but the world still felt wet. The boy’s shoes sunk in the grass along the roadway.

  “Why’d we go to that place?” the boy asked.

  “I had to ask my friend about something.”

  “About what?”

  “About a bunch of stuff. Anyway, she said there’s somebody else who might be interested.”

  “Who?”

  “Guy named Wild Bill. Lives right across the street from the old church on Lawrence Street. Used to work for John Curtis.”

  “The man you’re hiding from?”

  “One of them, yeah. But Bill and him had a falling out. They don’t have nothing to do with each other no more.”

  The boy twisted his lips together.

  “What? You got some people you know who wanna buy twenty-five grand worth of ice?”

  He shook his head.

  “Alright then, let’s go. It’s only a couple miles from here.”

  They cut through the downtown corridor, the street lights at play on the wet black pavement, casting upturned simulations of the untenanted shopfronts. The buildings sat in straight rows, one and two stories, and the streets made perfect crosses. There was a tile shop, a police department, and a hair salon. There was a feed store which also served coffee, and a post office open half the day. There was a volunteer fire station, a pharmacy doubling as a diner, and a low-ceilinged brick building that was used as a courthouse, city hall, and holding jail, all in one.

  There had been a time when this town, and many like it, were a part of the world’s progression, but such a time had long passed and those who could leave had done so and those who remained had little choice else.

  They walked, the two of them, and they did not speak, and the only sound was the occasional passing of an eighteen-wheeler in the distance—beginning and ending in some other place. A bell rang above a shop door and they both turned to look and saw an old woman locking an antique store called Tammy’s Treasures. When she felt their presence, the old woman put her head down and hurried to her car. They continued on.

  The humidity hung thick, a heavy heat independent of the sun, and the boy felt sweat on the back of his legs. It was a moonless, starless night, a black portiere draped overtop the world as if to signal the end of some stage play, with the heavens and the earth left guessing at which side of the curtain they might be on.

  A truck turned onto the road behind them, and they were framed for a moment in its headlights. The truck crept alongside them, and they both looked up but could see nothing through the dark tinted windows. The girl stopped walking and turned to face the side of the truck. Likewise the boy. There they stood in some silent defiance as the truck’s exhaust throttled in metered sequence familiar to such a place. Then, without cause, the truck’s engine revved and it lurched forward and sped away before them.

  “Somebody you know?” the boy asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Think it was them who’s hunting you?”

  “No. If it was them, we’d know it.”

  “You reckon them to snatch you off the street?”

  “I’d reckon them to drag me out of the middle of a Sunday service if that’s where they found me.”

  “Well.”

  “Let’s just get up to Bill’s and unload this shit.”

  “Then we leave for good?”

  The boy looked worried. She smiled at him.

  “You got it, kid,” she said. “I can smell the ocean now.”

  “What’s it smell like?”

  “Different than here, and that’s all that matters.”

  35

  Dustin squirmed in his seat. A worm on a hook, dangling at the end of the line. Drowning. His hands were shaking. The loudspeaker startled him each time the booming voice came across. It was already the sixth inning and he was worried. No one was there. No one had met him.

  He was in the highest section. The furthest away from the game, the crowd, the world of the living. T-shirt cannons launched souvenirs into the stands below him. He checked his seat number again. How many times had he checked it? A dozen? More. There was something wrong. The crack of the bat. He flinched. Cheering.

  Breathe.

  He could smell the beer and popcorn and the meat cooking.

  He looked at his veins, followed them up his wrist, his forearm, his bicep. Bruises. He looked up at the sky. He was so close to it. Could he reach for it? Could he touch it?

  There’s nothing wrong. Stop thinking it. What am
I supposed to say? “John Curtis sent me. He said he looks forward to a productive partnership. A productive partnership. He said he looks forward to a productive partnership.”

  He needed to piss. He’d needed to piss since the game started. He was afraid to leave his seat. What if he left and the Mexican came and he wasn’t there and everything went to shit. He could have already pissed by now. Could’ve pissed and been back and pissed again. Stay fucking still. Breathe.

  A man. How long has he been sitting there? Is he real? Sometimes they aren’t real. Like the voices.

  “You are the messenger,” the man said without looking at him. The man wore sunglasses and a ballcap, his face all but covered. He smoked a thin cigar with a plastic filter.

  “Yes. John Curtis sent me. He said he looks forward to a, to a, a—”

  The words were catching. Something’s not right. This isn’t right.

  “Save it,” the man said. “You have something for me.”

  Dustin nodded. He pushed the envelope toward the man who took it and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  “You are the messenger,” the man repeated. “So I will send with you a message.”

  “I don’t do so good at remembering. C-can you write it down? I have a pen.”

  “That will not be necessary.”

  The blade went in six inches, then came out.

  Dustin didn’t see the man pull anything from his pocket. He didn’t even see him move.

  Warm in my ribs. Warm inside. Is this what the sky feels like? Like floating. Like pissing.

  36

  They made Lawrence Street and stood motionless in what had once been the church parking lot. Weeds sprung up through the cracks in the concrete and some grew horizontal and the boy thought they looked like earthen arms coming out from some underworld buried alive by the pavement. Coming out to claim vengeance and all else.

  The church was limestone and mortar and most all of it stained in some way by the century of weather and the decade or so of disrepair. The front steps were full of fissures and breaks and a faded yellow tape hung from the arched wood doors.

  The boy’s eyes tracked up from the doors and there he saw a stained glass Christ dressed as a shepherd with robe and staff. Behind him a white sun hovered above a green-hilled horizon, and the boy could not discern if the sun was rising or setting. The Christ figure’s unstaffed hand was raised and pointing to the hills, and his face was turned opposite to look at his flock. Whether it was men or sheep, the boy also could not discern, as sometime in the past a vandalous rock had found its mark, and now the shepherd led only some broken mix of darkness and glass.

  Higher still, each side of the church roof pitched upward and there met and gave way to a thick wooden cross erect with iron bolts and a metal plating at its base.

  “It’s a nice church,” the girl said, as if only just remembering. She too was staring up at the cross. The two of them, heads back as if in preparation for some great happening in the skies.

  The girl navigated the broken steps and tried the doors. They did not open. She put a foot up against the left door and used the leverage to pull at the right.

  “Well, shit,” she said, when the door remained closed. “I would’ve liked to see the inside.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling I couldn’t shake. Like, trying to find something you know ain’t there; but looking anyway, hoping it might turn up in the last place you remembered seeing it.”

  The girl descended the steps.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Cars and trucks were lined up and down the street’s edge, half in the roadway, half in the ditch alongside it, as if the vehicles themselves were somehow undecided as to which surface presented the better path forward.

  The boy spotted the truck they’d seen previously and he nudged the girl and pointed. She nodded, and they went on past the cars in the driveway and passed by the front door on their way to a side gate leading into the backyard. The boy heard the last fiddle note of a country song he didn’t recognize, then the opening bass of a hip-hop track and the accompanying roar of approval from the partygoers.

  Texas where we live, nigga, Texas where we stay,

  Go on talk that weak shit, we Texas every day. Ay.

  The boy closed the gate and took in the scene. There were a dozen or so people gathered under a converted tin-roof carport. Red Solo cups were lifted high into the air as the all-white crowd twisted its collective body in rhythmic gyrations, screaming the lyrics and creating a low-hanging cloud of tobacco and marijuana smoke.

  Houston niggas put it on, Dallas that’s my shit,

  Corpus up to San Antone, Austin keep it lit.

  “Come on,” the girl said. “He’ll be on the back porch.”

  The boy watched a dark-haired girl dance in a tube top made to look like a rebel flag. She wore red-and-brown boots and a jean skirt and jewelry hung from her belly button. Three men closed the space around her, and she smiled, playing first to one and then another. The third man slapped her bottom and she squealed and laughed and put her body backward into his and continued to move to the beat.

  “Hey, let’s go,” River repeated.

  The boy nodded and followed her across the outskirt of the makeshift dance floor and onto a screened back porch.

  “Well, hello, darling,” Wild Bill said.

  The boy looked toward the voice and the only light was on the man’s jeans and brown ostrich quill boots. The rest of his body sat back in the shadow that fell across the outdoor sofa.

  “Bill,” the girl said.

  “Who’s this with you?”

  “A friend.”

  “I like friends,” the man said. “Are you here as a friend?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Do Cade and John Curtis know you’re here?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well. Hot damn. Did you finally come to give me a taste?”

  “Not that kind of taste.”

  “Oh, the plot thickens,” the man hissed.

  “I brought you something.”

  “A present?” The man feigned excitement, then leaned forward over a round patio table and ashed his cigarette in a plastic cup. The light shone on his face and he flashed a smile at the boy. His teeth were rotting, save the two top cuspids made of silver. His dark hair hung across the sides of his face, come down from under a stunted-looking top hat. He had the look of a vampire made homeless.

  The boy took a step back.

  “It’s not a present. It’s product,” the girl said.

  The man considered this. He brought his hands together as if in prayer, tapping his fingers against one another in procession.

  “Not interested,” he announced and leaned back on the couch.

  “You haven’t heard the proposal.”

  “Whatever it is, it isn’t worth getting strung up and gutted alive by Dakota Cade.”

  The man stood. He was average height, skinny for the most part, but carrying a sizeable stomach beneath his pearl snap shirt.

  “I heard what you did,” he said. “And I know the penalty for helping you.”

  The man laughed and shook his head.

  “What made you think you could steal damn near thirty grand worth of crystal and get away with it?”

  “I don’t have to tell you shit.”

  “Fair enough.” The man raised his hand in front of his face and stared at it as if it held something, then brought it slowly toward himself and with one finger began to tap at the point on his own chin.

  “A thought,” he said, and sank back into his seat, crossing his legs. “If the meth disappeared, and you along with it, my old friends on Splithorn Hill would just assume it was still with you. Then, if say, it were to be offloaded in Lake Charles, a m
an could make a pretty penny on that.”

  “He could,” the girl said.

  “Still,” the man frowned, “there’s a lot of risk involved.”

  “I expect that man would want a discount.”

  “I expect he would.”

  “I’ll give you everything for twenty, we’ll be gone before the sun comes up.”

  “No deal,” the man said, removing his hat and brushing at his hair with his cigarette hand.

  “You break that into eight balls and grams and you could make almost fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Ah, but I won’t be breaking it. I’d be looking to get rid of it quickly, just like you. I have a guy in Lake Charles who’d be willing, but he’d want the whole show, including distribution rights. So if I sell to him at cost, somewhere around twenty-six grand, then I’m only making six thousand dollars.”

  “Six thousand bucks for not doing a damn thing.”

  “Other than sticking my neck out so John Curtis can have his boys cut it off.”

  “What’s your price, Bill?”

  “Half.”

  “Half? That’s thirteen.”

  “That’s my price.”

  “Goddamnit.”

  The girl hung her head, and for a time all was quiet and still, and the boy watched the lights from the party below them as they danced across the back wall of the house. His heart began to pound. This could be it. They could get the money, even if it wasn’t enough, and they could go somewhere, anywhere.

  “Fine,” the girl said. “You got the money?”

  “I’ll go get it. I gotta make a call.”

  Bill stood and went inside.

  “You think there’s a bathroom in there?” the boy asked.

  “It’d be fucking weird if there wasn’t.”

  “Are you okay by yourself?”

  “I’ll survive,” she said. “Go on.”

  When Bill returned, he sat down in front of the girl and smiled. He took out a sack of weed trimmings and shook a clump onto the table and pulled a knife and a cigarillo from his pocket and set them next to the weed, all in a row.