The Cage Keeper

by Andre Dubus III

  The road dipped down and moved closer to the river. Billy Wayne slowed the truck just before the turn that would bring them to Red’s place and sat up straight, ran his red-splotched hand through the rough of his flattop. Reilly smiled at Billy’s shyness, looked over at this man twice his age who talked to Reilly like he’d known him twenty years instead of three summers, who called him Cap for Captain (who had told Reilly once, “Before you think on anything else serious in life, Cap, get yourself a good woman”), who had just been left toothless by pretty Jude, who never talked about his rich brother in Texas or his father who Reilly knew had died on a barstool in New Orleans, and who openly declared himself the second best loggerhead turtle catcher in Grant Parish. (“Hell, that old man, he can feel them turtles move a mile away, Cap,” Billy had said. “That Red Willie, why shit, he’s the king.”)

  Reilly looked out the window through the trees and saw the sparkle of the sun on the river, Red’s shack. Billy Wayne pulled the truck into Red’s yard, stopped short of running over a rusted set of bedsprings. He turned off the motor and they got out, walked around the side of the shack to the back porch, a small rickety structure that faced the river. Reilly hadn’t seen Red since he dropped off that crankshaft from his grandfather’s tractor last August, before he had taken a Greyhound back east, and now, looking over the dirt hill Red lived on, Reilly could hardly believe his eyes; empty Falstaff and Budweiser cans, that’s all there was, scattered from the porch right down the hill to the trees hanging over the river, Reilly couldn’t see the ground. “Billy Wayne,” Reilly whispered. “He do all this by himself?”

  “I b’lieve your gran’daddy has hepped him now and again.” Billy Wayne winked at Reilly as they shuffled and kicked their way through them to the porch.

  “What in the hell?”

  Reilly stepped back as the old man’s Winchester poked through the tattered mosquito netting hanging over the door.

  “Whoa there now, Mr. Red, we’s family now!” Billy Wayne shouted, his hands over his head.

  The old man came out from behind the netting, stuck the barrel snug up against Billy’s Adam’s apple. “One of these days, William, I’m going to give you a second mouth.”

  Billy didn’t say anything. Reilly tried to force a laugh, but it got caught in his throat. He looked at the old man’s eyes, glassy blue and set deep in his face. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes and his faded overalls were held up over one shoulder by a rusty diaper pin with a broken pink clasp.

  Billy Wayne let out a nervous laugh that started somewhere in his nose. Then Red snapped his rifle back quick, set it against the wall.

  “You ornry old sonuvabitch.”

  “Convict.”

  “Fuck you, Red.”

  Reilly could hear the hurt in Billy Wayne’s voice.

  “Now”—Red put his hand on Billy’s shoulder—“correct me if I’m wrong, Billy Wayne, but word has it you done time for sellin’ your own wife’s rented furniture. That right?”

  Reilly looked at how straight Billy was standing, thought of Billy’s father, the last minutes of his life spent looking at the world cross-eyed, his stomach queasy, chest tight.

  “It was ugly shit, Red.”

  The old man’s face exploded with laughter; he slapped Billy Wayne hard on the shoulder, bent over, and held his stomach with one hand. “Hoowee! Ole BW has returned!”

  “You ain’t just a woofin’ it there, boy,” Billy Wayne said, laughing with him.

  Red straightened up, looked over at Reilly, still laughing, his eyes shiny. “Hey yank.”

  “How’re you, Red?”

  Red Willie nodded then looked back at Billy Wayne. “What’re y’all drinkin’ this evenin’.”

  “Whatever in the hell you got.”

  The old man turned and went back through the netting into the shack. “I got Bud, Bud, and Bud.”

  REILLY SAT WITH HIS BACK against the cab of the truck, his legs stretched out in front of him. He drank from his beer and looked straight ahead at the narrow gray asphalt moving away from him, rolling out from under the truck like a hard carpet Billy Wayne’s Ford was laying. He let his head roll back against the glass and heard Billy Wayne inside, the loud wet-mouthed chatter that came from him whenever he was drunk around Red Willie, drunk and thinking about loggerhead turtles.

  “I’ll tell ya somethin’, Red, you coulda saddled up that damn loggerhead and used her to get groceries. That bitch weighed close to ninety pounds on my scale. I ain’t a shittin’ ya either.”

  Reilly couldn’t hear Red’s response. He looked up at the narrow strip of sky between the moving pine tops, saw the pale blue and gray, the sun’s colors gone, and he imagined them wading through the muddy creek with flashlights; he would point his at the place under the trees where the water had moved away the sand, had left bare roots for cottonmouths to rest behind, small wood- and dirt-lined caves that Reilly had had nightmares about when he was a boy.

  He drained his beer and got another out of Red’s burlap sack; they were still cold, sweating in the bag, and as he opened one he took a deep breath and was suddenly aware of the electric beer current running through his head, felt its gentle liquid massage working on his brain, making the rough parts smooth so that the truck’s motion, the fast backward movement of the darkening woods, the side-to-side roll of Red’s eight-foot gaff, the way the beer foamed down cold over Reilly’s knuckles were all things seen from a softer place, a place Reilly had been in all summer with Billy Wayne.

  Red Willie put his hand out the window and yelled to Reilly to pass him two more beers. Reilly did, then stood up facing the cab and held on to its roof, let the wind blow against his face. They turned off onto a gravel road and Reilly held on tighter. He thought of Mimi, pictured her standing on the side of the road ahead of him, alone, watching the truck as it sped by, not knowing it was him until it was too late, until he was past her already, his hair blown back away from his sunburned face, holding on to the roof of the car with one hand, an open beer in the other; he wouldn’t even look at her, would just leave her in the sprayed gravel behind him, leave her watching what wasn’t hers anymore disappear around a curve in the road.

  Reilly ducked a pine branch as it came at him and remembered the six or seven other turtle hunts he had been on with Billy Wayne, remembered all of his talk of close to hundred-pound turtles, sixty-five, seventy years old with a beak that could break a broomstick in half, put a nasty hole in your leg, the kind of turtle a man could live on for a couple of months, Billy had said. Billy Wayne had shown him what to look for, to find the deepest part of the creek first, to look for air bubbles “because more ’n likely them sonsabitches lead straight down to a hunerd pounder holdin’ her breath in the mud.” He had shown Reilly how to string the net line across the creek, to wade across the shallow part then tie it, leaving it just barely touching the water’s surface with a baseball-sized cork hooked in at the middle, being pulled by the creek’s current two or three inches but no more. They would finish setting it then drink, and sometimes, if it was dark, Billy Wayne would build a fire to keep the mosquitoes away, something to look into.

  Last summer Jude had come along once too. Reilly had liked watching Billy Wayne around her then, liked how he didn’t spit or fart or kneel at the creek’s edge and say, “C’mon you big ugly motherfucker, walk into that net.” He called her Sugar Baby and held her hand when she got close to the water, had said “There’s been snakes lately, hon.” Reilly had laughed when Jude jumped into Billy Wayne and said, “Oh, Billy!,” had almost knocked them both into the water. She had brought pot roast sandwiches and a thermos of hot coffee, had set a cloth on the hood of the truck and laid everything out. Billy Wayne and Reilly built a fire and they had eaten around it, had looked into it and listened to the crackling sound of burning wood, Billy’s smacking. After, Billy had poured Jim Beam into his coffee and walked down to the creek while Reilly helped Jude clean up. She was wearing khaki shorts and had one of Billy Wayne’s
shirts tied in a knot at her waist. Reilly had held the bag open for her while she tossed in the paper plates, dirty napkins, and meat-greased aluminum foil.

  “This sure is a big deal for him, isn’t it Reilly?”

  “Seems to be, ma’am,” he had said, noticing her legs, pale and thin, and he had looked right between them at the tight khaki crease in the middle and thought of how hot he had heard cool women are supposed to get.

  They had dropped him off at his grandparents’ near midnight, his pants wet to the crotch, a five-pound snapper in his bag. Billy Wayne’s eyes were misted over with the bourbon when he said goodnight and he had swallowed all his burps on the way home, had talked careful and slow around Jude.

  Billy Wayne slowed down then pulled off the gravel and parked in a small clearing under the trees. Reilly jumped out fast and was relieving himself at the foot of a tall pine when Red Willie and Billy Wayne got out of the truck.

  “Boy Scout my ass,” Red Willie said. “How would you like that for supper, yank?”

  “Maybe it’ll get drunk off it,” Reilly said. He zipped up his pants and belched.

  “I knew an ole boy down in the jail who drank his own piss,” Billy Wayne said, grabbing the sack of beers and Red Willie’s gaff out of the truck.

  “That makes me want to spit,” Reilly said. “Why’d he do that?”

  “Wanted to prove a point.”

  “And what was that, stud?”

  “That there ain’t nothin’ as bad as it seems.” Billy Wayne paused for effect, his eyes wide open.

  “Bullshit,” Red said. “Let’s kill us a turtle.”

  Reilly took the gaff from Billy Wayne as Red Willie led the way down the trail. Its heaviness surprised him. He looked closer and saw it was an old eight-foot two-by-four with the edges planed off, a rusty porch-swing hook screwed tight into one end. He imagined Red sitting on his porch overlooking the river, his cheeks sunken, wood shavings all around his feet, working away with the two-handled blade, making a tool to kill food with.

  The woods were dark. Red flicked on his flashlight and shined it ahead of him.

  “What’s your test weight, BW?”

  “One hunerd and fifty pounds!”

  Reilly laughed. “You ever really catch anything over five pounds, Billy Wayne?”

  “Shit, you hear that, Red? I’ll tell ya somethin’ now, son, and I’ll tell ya true. There’s turtles in that water hole that you can’t even lift, by God!”

  Reilly stumbled on the trail then used the gaff to get his balance back. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Red, hey Red, tell this yankee son of a gun about them old turtles we killed.”

  “Which way’s your trap?”

  “I got it at the west fork, Red. Go on, Red, tell the kid here about how long it takes them sonsabitches to really die.”

  Reilly looked in front of him at Billy Wayne’s back and heard the tapping of the beer cans in the sack over his shoulder, listened to Billy’s heavy breathing over the flat trail.

  “Hey yank!” Red called over his shoulder.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think I pull five-pound turtles with that thing you’re carryin’? Do you?”

  “I wouldn’t think so, Red.”

  “There you go, yank, there you go.”

  “Hear that, Cap? Cut through that thicket, Red, it’s quicker.”

  They moved through briar bush that pulled against their legs and snapped under their feet. Reilly stepped high to keep from tripping and held the gaff in front of him with two hands. He liked the heavy balanced feel of it, something solid, a good thing to carry in night woods with a weight to bludgeon with and a hook to gouge. He took a deep breath and filled his chest with air, smelled the pine and dry brush, the wood rot of the creek; things were feeling different this time, more like a job to do, and he knew it was because of Red Willie.

  They came out onto the trail again and it widened into a pine-needle-covered clearing near the creek. Reilly heard Billy Wayne cough then spit onto the ground. “Let’s have the light, Red, I’ll show ya.”

  Reilly followed them down a short embankment to a small sandbar at the creek’s edge. His foot sank in and he pulled it out fast, steadied himself with the gaff. Billy Wayne shined the light out over the slow swirling surface of the water at the cork; it was half submerged in the creek, the water flowing over and around it. “That sonuvabitch is pulled back a foot or two.”

  “Let’s have the light,” Red said. He followed the length of the line from the cork over the bank to the tree trunk it was tied to, then he brought the light back down again and followed the line on the other side.

  “Ooo Jesus, look how tight them sonsabitches are!”

  “Where’s your bottom rope, Billy?”

  “Right behind us.”

  Red pointed the light at Reilly then behind him at the ground to a coil of nylon rope in the sand, one end leading then disappearing into the water. “Well son, you might see what that hook’s for right now.” Red handed the flashlight to Billy Wayne.

  Reilly stepped out of the way as Red walked over and picked up the coil of rope then started up the embankment with it, dropping some slack behind him as he moved.

  “I’ve been usin’ this little hickory here for my pulley, Red.”

  “Let’s have the kid gaff her, Billy.”

  Reilly heard the wink in Red Willie’s voice.

  “You and me will do the pullin’ from over here.” Red threw the length of rope over a bare branch four or five feet above his head. Billy Wayne caught it.

  “Now Cap,” Billy shouted to Reilly, “soon as we get the net up even with the water I’ll jump down there and give ya some light.”

  “Yep. Okay.” Reilly had a sudden need to urinate and as he walked over the sand and stepped into the warm water, his legs felt too springy, his arms and hands too small.

  “Get ready, yank! We’re about to snag her!”

  Reilly spaced his feet apart in the water, one sinking ahead of him in the creek’s bottom, the other just barely in it behind him. He held the gaff well in front of him then turned it around once in his hands so that the hook’s point was facing down.

  “Pull!”

  Reilly took a deep breath and heard the whine of the rope over the branch, Red’s grunting, Billy Wayne’s breathing. The water dripped off it, moving high and to his right; he narrowed his eyes and could not see the current on the water’s surface but felt it against his feet and ankles, could hear it flowing over and around the cork out there ahead of him. He gripped the gaff tighter and thought of black snakes slithering through the water as his feet sank a little deeper; he curled up his toes inside his shoes then felt rooted there, a part of this place forever.

  “Hold it, Billy.” The rope stopped moving. Reilly heard Billy Wayne cough something up, heard it hit the water with a heaviness he knew it shouldn’t have.

  “She’s on the far right side of it. We gotta wait for her to go to the middle or she’ll flop out when it breaks water. Let her back down slow, Billy.”

  “Yessir.”

  Reilly pulled his feet out of the water still holding the hook in front of him. He turned and walked fast up the embankment, a chill spreading down his neck to the center of his back. He walked in the direction of the beer bag then dropped the gaff and sat cross-legged on the ground, waited for the light.

  “Just let her hang, BW.”

  “There enough slack?”

  “Hell yeah, she’s hit bottom already.”

  The light bounced in Reilly’s face as they came up toward him. “I thought you’d have us a full fire goin’ by now, yank.” Red Willie shined the light ahead of them while Billy Wayne and Reilly gathered dry sticks and brush from the woods. They came back and dropped an armful each into a pile. Red Willie squatted and struck a match to the brown pine needles beneath it, then struck three more and dropped them burning in the bottom of the brush. Reilly got down on his hands and knees and blew hard until the pine ne
edles glowed and the brush and small sticks began to catch fire. He stood up and Billy Wayne handed him a beer out of the burlap sack; Reilly passed it to Red Willie then reached in and got one for himself.

  “She’s a big one all right,” Red said, popping open his beer.

  “How can you tell?”

  “You pull on that rope and you can tell, Cap.”

  “Nope. I knew she was big as soon as we got to the creek. Yank, perk your nose up a bit, what do you smell?”

  Reilly sniffed. “Burning wood.”

  “Well that’s the difference between you and me, son.”

  “I smelled it, Red,” Billy Wayne said just before he raised the can of beer to his mouth and slurped loudly.

  “Dead fish, yank.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The stronger the smell the bigger the turtle, son.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These things eat fish and frogs mainly, but their gullet ain’t big enough to swallow ’em whole so they end up takin’ chunks out of things as they pass by. A man smells a lot of carcass in a water hole, he knows somethin’s feedin’.”

  “I don’t smell anything like that.”

  “That’s ’cause you ain’t got the nose for it, yank. Them fish float downstream but if you got a nose for things like me and BW here, well then you can still smell it in the air, see.”

  Reilly took a long swallow from his beer and imagined a turtle that took chunks out of things, its head popping out of its shell open-mouthed then chomping down and tearing free with a quick twist of its leathery neck. “Why doesn’t it just swim away from the net?”

  “Hell, you know why from the little ones we caught, Cap.”