Fiery Rivers

by Daefyd Williams

  “A run?”

  “Deliver some grass.”

  “Oh. Idden that dangerous?”

  “Not if ya don’t git caught.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too. I’ll only be gone about a week. You gonna be here when I git back?”

  “Of course, silly.”

  He was just outside Normal, Illinois, driving northeast on Interstate 55 at night when he looked into the rearview mirror and saw the flashing blue light. “Shit!” he swore. He pulled the Volkswagen bus off the freeway and onto the shoulder. The highway patrolman remained in his cruiser for several minutes before walking up to Travis. Travis rolled down his window. “Evenin’, officer.”

  The officer shined a bright flashlight into his face and then down at the floorboard and onto the passenger seat. “License and registration, please,” he stated in a flat voice.

  Travis reached for his wallet in his back pocket, and the officer kept the flashlight trained on his arm. “Slowly, please,” he ordered.

  Travis opened his wallet and took his driver’s license out and handed it to the officer. He looked at it in the light of the flashlight, and then questioned, his voice slightly rising, “Registration?” Travis leaned over to open the glove compartment and the beam of the flashlight followed his arm. He found the registration and handed it to the officer. He looked at it with the flashlight and then asked, “Why does the registration say this vehicle belongs to Carl Young?”

  “Carl is my friend in Tombstone. I’m drivin’ this van up to his brother in Chicago for him. I’m gonna take the train back.”

  “You live in Tombstone?”

  “Yeah, I been there about a year.”

  “Why do you still have an Ohio license?”

  “Ah, ya know, I keep meanin’ to git an Arizona license, but I never seem to have the time. I’ll git it when I git back.”

  “Ya know why I stopped you?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “You got a taillight out on the right side.”

  “Really? I didden know that. I’ll git that fixed soon’s I git back to Tombstone.”

  “I thought you said you were takin’ the train back.”

  “Oh, fuck!” Travis thought. “Oh, yeah. I forgot.”

  “Step outa the car, please,” the officer commanded.

  “Um, I’m in sort of a hurry. I’m s’pose to have the car there tonight by midnight.”

  “STEP OUTA THE CAR!” the officer shouted.

  Travis got out of the car, and the officer asked him to put his hands behind his back and handcuffed him. He led him to the cruiser and put him into the back seat.

  “Oh, God! Oh, God! I’m fucked! I’m fucked!” Travis screamed inside his head. He watched the officer walk back to the bus, climb inside, and shine the flashlight into the back, where fifty pounds of marijuana lay on the floor in black garbage bags.

  The officer walked back to the cruiser and called for assistance over the radio. When the message was acknowledged, he turned to Travis. “You’re a drug runner, ain’tchou? You must have a hundred pounds o’ dope in those bags.”

  “I doeknow nothin’ ‘bout them bags. I’m just deliverin’ the bus for my friend.”

  “Of course, you don’t,” the officer smiled.

  Travis was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for transporting a Schedule I drug across state lines. He never saw Lynn again.

  Lurlene was putting the final touches of pink nail polish on fifteen-year-old Dollie’s left thumb. They were sitting on Dollie’s bed in their bedroom. Dollie looked at Lurlene’s face. “If I told ya somethin’, you woulden tell Mom or Dad, wouldjou?”

  “No, o’ course not, silly.”

  “I haven’t had my period for two months.”

  Lurlene stopped the nail brush in midair. “Oh, my God, Dollie! Have you an’ Ryan been doin’ it?”

  “Yeah,” Dollie admitted sheepishly.

  “How many times? Where?”

  “Six times. In the back of his car at the drive-in.”

  Lurlene put the nail brush back into the bottle. “What’re you gonna do?”

  “We’re gonna run away to Kentucky an’ git married.”

  “When?”

  “We’re talkin’ maybe next week, or the week after.”

  “What was it like?” Lurlene asked, who was still a virgin at seventeen, her eyes widening with excitement.

  “Well, the first time it hurt an’ he came too fast, but it’s gittin’ better since then.”

  “How do ya do it?”

  “Lurlene!” Dollie said exasperatedly, rolling her eyes. “You know how you do it! You open your legs an’ the boy puts his thingy in.”

  “I know that, silly! I mean how do you do it in a car? In the front seat or the back?”

  “Oh. We do it in the back. Sometimes I lay down on the back seat an’ sometimes I sit on him.”

  “Sit on him?”

  “Yeah. Actually, I like that way the best ‘cause I can control how fast or slow we go.”

  “Have you done anything else?”

  “You mean like suck him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. We’re savin’ that for our honeymoon. That’ll make it special.”

  Lurlene shook her head. “That makes sense.”

  Dollie and Ryan drove to Kentucky the following week and got married. Ryan was only seventeen. Their son, Tom, was born seven months later. They both dropped out of high school. Five years after their marriage, they got divorced. Ryan was unprepared to be a father and a husband. He had decided that he wanted his freedom back and began seeing other girls a year after he married Dollie.

  Dollie had set a precedent. Lurlene dropped out of high school and got married to a twenty-two-year-old man, Matt, in her senior year at Vandalia Butler High School. She later discovered that he was an alcoholic diabetic. He drank himself to death. And just as Dollie and Lurlene had done, Rig dropped out of high school in his sophomore year. He worked as a gas station attendant and mechanic for seven years until his youngest brother, Peter, graduated from high school, the only child of Rufus and Uma to graduate. After he graduated, he and Rig opened their own business, a used car lot on Needmore Road in Dayton.

  Rufus could not sleep for the fifth night in a row. He looked at the clock on the nightstand softly illuminating his side of the room. Two thirty. He sighed. “I doeknow how I’m gonna do it,” he reiterated for the ten thousandth time to himself. “How’m I gonna git outa this? I don’t see no way out. I don’t see no way out.” He had put three thousand dollars on his credit card to stay on the air at WPFB, where he had a fifteen-minute religious program every Sunday morning from nine a.m. to nine fifteen, preaching God’s word and trying to bring souls to the Lord. At the end of every show, he would plead with his listeners to send in whatever they could afford to keep him on the air. He would get one or two envelopes per week containing a five- or ten-dollar bill, but nothing more, and in no greater volume. The radio show cost two hundred fifty dollars a week. “How does Bill Amberton do it? How does he do it?” Bill Amberton was on the same radio station. He also owned his own furniture store. Rufus had hoped for the same success.

  He sat up on the side of the bed with a heavy weight pressing down on his internal organs. He walked into the kitchen, turned on the light, and eased himself into a chair at the table. He put his head in his hands and wept silently. He thought of his brother, Dwayne, and how he had tried to escape from his burden of eating graham crackers and milk for years. “Maybe that’s the way. Yeah, maybe.” He pulled out the cutlery drawer and took out a butcher knife with a ten-inch blade.

  He opened the kitchen door and carried the knife out to the garage. He went through the side door and turned on the light. He stood in the middle of the garage floor and looked at the knife. “Could it be so simple?” he thought. He pointed the blade a few inches above his navel and plunged it into his body with both hands. Warm blood spurted out over his ha
nds and arms and onto the floor. “Oh, my God! What have I done!? What have I done!? Forgive me, Jesus!” He withdrew the knife and dropped it to the floor. He covered the wound with both hands to try to stanch the flow of blood. He staggered out of the garage to the bedroom window and pounded with his left hand. “Mother! Mother! Help me! Help me! I killed myself!” He fainted.

  When he was brought home from the hospital, a different man was sitting in the wheelchair. He had failed everyone—his family, his radio listeners, God, himself. There was no longer a reason to draw a breath. He stopped eating. Uma was lucky to get him to drink a can or two of Ensure each day. He plummeted into a deep depression.

  When he even refused to drink the Ensure, he was placed into a nursing home and fed intravenously. He became thinner and thinner, his skin almost transparent. When he passed away, he was a mere yellow smudge of himself recumbent against the white bed sheets.

  The sun shone brightly on Gloryann’s upturned face. It was an almost cloudless day in August and she was walking up Castlehill Drive in front of her house. “This is wonderful,” she thought. “I haven’t felt this good in years.” She had just spent six months recuperating from her second open heart surgery, and this was her first walk after the surgery.

  She had had her first surgery at twenty-five. A pig’s valve had been used to replace the mitral valve that had been damaged from the rheumatic fever she had suffered as a child. It had lasted only a disappointing five years. This new valve was made of Teflon, and she was very pleased with the results. “I hope this one lasts forever,” she mused.

  After that first surgery, she determined to live her life as fully as she could, since she knew she probably would have a short tenure on earth because of her condition. Fortunately, she worked for Procter and Gamble and was able to travel around the world teaching its subsidiaries how to integrate the software program SAP into their operations. She had climbed to the caldera of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, ziplined through the rain forest in Costa Rica, walked across centuries-old bridges in Belgium, and listened to a classical symphony in the Sydney Opera House. Life was a sweet fruit from which she wanted to extract every ounce of its honeyed goodness.

  Her hope that the Teflon valve would last for the rest of her life proved unfounded, however, and she endured her third open heart surgery ten years after the second valve replacement. Never again would she feel as healthy as she did after that second surgery.

  After her fourth open heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Miller approached Del and Marie, who had been sitting in the waiting room during the operation, wiping sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. “She came through fine,” he announced. “She’s in ICU, but I’m afraid this will be the last replacement valve we can put in. There’s too much scar tissue for us to do anything else.”

  “So she’ll have to live with this one the rest of her life?” queried Del.

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid so.”

  Three years after this last surgery, she began to decline dramatically. She lost weight and slept most of the day. Her kidneys started to fail because of the daily regimen of Coumadin to thin her blood, and she commenced dialysis. She made the decision to have a celebration of life party, “A wake before I’m dead,” as she put it, but she was wheelchair-bound and barely able to talk during it. In desperation, she put herself on the heart-lung transplant lists of all the hospitals within a two-hundred-mile radius of her home, but no one called. She continued her decline for two more years and died three months before her fifty-fifth birthday.

  She had clung tenaciously to life for the sake of her only child, Steffi, whom she had had against the advice of her physicians. They had told her that having a baby would put too great a strain on her heart. She got pregnant anyway; she had always had a defiant attitude towards authority, probably stemming from the sudden change in behavior she had experienced with her father.

  She had always been “Daddy’s little girl,” and he would cuddle her and nestle her in his lap and hold her hand everywhere they went. Then he withdrew suddenly and became aloof and cold towards her. She was bewildered and felt betrayed and did not understand why he had changed. Adam could not have explained it himself, but he knew that looking at her slender legs and having wicked thoughts were temptations of the devil. The only way he knew to subvert those thoughts was to keep his daughter at arm’s length. His transformation had happened immediately before she fell ill with rheumatic fever.

  Dear Del,

  I know this is going to upset you, but I don’t know how I could ever tell you this in person. Both of us are going to graduate from high school in two weeks, and I know that you expect us to get married, since we have been dating since we were freshmen.

  I can’t marry you. My parents have told me, and I agree with them, that I can find someone more appropriate who will be a better provider. I know that you have risen to assistant manager at Westward Ho! from being a dishwasher and I am proud of you, but my parents believe that I should go to college where I can find someone who will be a better provider than you will probably end up being. And I believe them.

  I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the good times we shared, and for taking me to the junior and senior proms. I will always have good memories of you and me together.

  I will always love you, but I can no longer see you.

  Good luck.

  Love, Linda

  Del felt as though someone had just punched him in the stomach. He slumped against the lockers, where he had found Linda’s letter lying atop his civics book, and reread it. She had dropped the letter through the ventilation openings at the top of the locker. It still said the same thing it had said the first time he read it. “Oh, no!” he thought. “How could she just gimme a letter and not tell me in person? How could she? How could she?” Tears filling his eyes, he stumbled out of school and somehow found his way to his car in the parking lot. He laid his arms across the top of the steering wheel and pressed his forehead against his arms and sobbed.

  When he got home, before he went to work at the cafeteria, he called her number, hoping to get a better explanation from her than what she had said in the letter.

  Her mother answered the telephone, “Hello.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Franzen, this is Del. Can I speak to Linda?”

  “I’m sorry, Del, but she doesn’t want to speak to you.”

  “Mrs. Franzen, why is she doin’ this? Why are you doin’ this to me? We’ve known each other for four years. We’ve played Scrabble and Monopoly together. She can’t just end it like this. You know me.”

  “I’m sorry, Del, but we have to do what we think is best for our daughter. And we think that her going to college will open up more opportunities for her. Please do not call here again. We wish you well. Good-bye.” Click.

  Del put the receiver down and walked numbly to work. He had trouble all night concentrating on his job. He kept repeating in his head, “I can’t believe she broke up with me in a letter. I can’t believe she broke up with me in a letter. I can’t believe she broke up with me in a letter.” The visceral pain he was feeling he had never experienced. He just wanted to run away, to escape somehow. At the end of his shift, he had decided that the best way to escape the pain was to join one of the armed forces and leave Ohio forever.

  Three months after he graduated from high school, he was on a military bus headed to Columbus to catch an Air Force plane which would take him to boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. The longer he was on the bus, the more pain he felt. “I screwed up,” he thought. “This was stupid. I screwed up.” But there was no turning back; he had signed his life away for the next four years. He turned his head toward the window and pretended to look at the cornfields and cow pastures as they zipped past so no one on the bus would see the tears in his eyes. He knew he had made a decision that would irrevocably change his relationship with his family. He knew he would miss Mom and Dad and the kids, but he would es
pecially miss Dev, his best friend and the person to whom he felt the closest, except Linda. And Linda was as good as dead to him.

  Somehow, he survived the grueling eight and a half weeks of basic training. Then he was given a month’s leave and returned to Dayton prior to flying to his first post, Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. In that month, he drove past Linda’s house late every night, hoping to see her sitting on the porch swing where they had spent so many hours planning their lives together. This just added more weight to his already heavy heart, which was still grieving six months after receiving her letter. He never saw her, but his heart would palpitate as he drove slowly past her house, wondering if she was dating anyone and where she was going to college. He never saw her again.

  He transformed his love of coin collecting that Uncle Caryl had inspired in him into a vocation and opened his own coin store in Montana.

  “Rasp. Rasp. Rasp.” Devon opened his eyes and saw the face of his father looming above his, intensely concentrating on the top of Devon’s forehead, from which he knew the rasping sound was coming. He looked up towards the top of his head and saw that his father was holding a hacksaw, his right hand gripping the handle and his left guiding the saw atop the frame. “He’s sawing through my skull,” Devon thought impassively. He was immobile, unable to move or talk. He seemed to be lying on an operating table and covered by a sheet, his naked feet and ankles projecting beyond the table. His father continued sawing until he had made a deep incision around the entire circumference of Devon’s skull. Then he pried off the top of the skull with his fingers and placed it into a metallic container behind Devon’s head. He heard it clink as Adam released it. Devon felt his father’s fingers ooze down on both sides of his head above his ears and slowly lift his brain from the cranium. There was a soft sucking sound as the brain severed from the medulla oblongata. Adam placed the brain in a white washbowl atop a stool next to the table and commenced to wash the brain with water in the bowl, cupping his hands and allowing the water to dribble over the surface, washing away the blood adhering to it.