The Beetle Leg: Novel

by Hawkes, John

  “We all got wounds,” beating the Finn to his knees, “all of us got a share of dickie bird heads desquamated on the river banks,” and the overbearing shadows purled at the moist edge of a hundred and forty miles of milky water. The last of the brooding wranglers laughed for the first time that night and Bohn, now out of their way or batting in their midst and at the cowboy’s side, felt something graze the soft mealy sock of his trouser front.

  “Go on, tell about him,” nudging with a familiar elbow, “go on,” said Bohn and began to cough so that both the top and bottom lip of the small mouth—sometimes he dreamed that he could yawn— paled and trembled more thin than ever, pursed by the bitter doctor’s fingers. Luke thought of that slim and vertical mouth as carrying a hook, barbs lodged in the roof years before.

  “He was a big baby but a little man. Ma said Hattie told her.” And when they laughed: “She used to keep him covered out of shame for his size.” The rat toothed Lampson, last of the brothers, spilled to them an image of a load too big to move, described, with shoulder sucked into Bohn’s armpit, a man too frail to be crushed. “ ‘I’m in love with a fence post,’ Ma said before he went.”

  “His first mistake was just sitting there.”

  “He isn’t going to hear…”

  “Well then,” above the scuffling, “he’s not so mighty. In the house or out he was the same, like he was petting something inside his shirt.”

  “He didn’t love animals, I could see that.”

  “He didn’t love anything if he didn’t build, not an ark or bridge or landing. All I need is a sandbag and some warning…”

  “You ain’t going to be buried, Finn, you hear? You’re going to drown. That ain’t a warning either.”

  “But Ma tells how Hattie used to speak of holding him, used to rock him behind the house. She could hardly talk, trying to show her head around the baby propped against her shoulder. He stared back across the prairie all day long.”

  Once out of earshot of women, they baited the ghost. Only a quarter mile west of Mistletoe with its kerosene shades and dotted pokes, the six men suddenly became true to the whips inside their arms, shook the fat on weathered legs. Had they a jug they would have drunk then sloshed playfully, horses prancing after water. The sand slid from under their feet and to the bottom of the lake; and to that corner of the grassland field there fell now a knee, now a hand. Their clothes rustled with the sound of dry rattles stuck by insect mucilage to the bare skin of their calfs.

  Bohn took off his vest covered with ashes, then his shirt. “Come on,” he said, looking at all of them, wiping his weak chest and flexing a tattooed tombstone on a strong arm. But the Finn jiggled out of his way.

  The laughter stopped.

  “Who’s he?”

  “You don’t hear everything all the time, Mr. Bohn.”

  “He never crossed my town before.”

  “Come over to Clare more often,” said the Sheriff, “and you ain’t going to be in the dark so much.”

  “Bugle belly,” said Bohn, “I don’t want to see you.”

  Luke Lampson stepped apart, close to the man who, short as himself, had interrupted without a sound. Moonlight hit the stranger. He stood poorly in the sand with flashing spectacles, bare head. It was a waning moon, brilliant for a moment on the same warts, the same long lips and the little scowl shrunk from the sun. Luke could see, having never before touched bone of his own, the stains of contagion that spotted the face and hands like shadow, representing the white worlds through which he had passed. And in his pride, filled with the traveling surgeon’s shriveled broadcloth and his shiny temple, Luke looked quickly into the butternut eye and down.

  “Pa,” he said.

  They walked to the water’s edge.

  The small boat was like the hollowed body of a bird. Its keel was a breastbone hung over with dry calking, waving splinters, one not sunk under the mud when the great forks disappeared.

  “Keep out of that boat!” Bohn fastened his dirty cuffs and peered at the hull as if it lay snapping in the sand. Luke picked up the iron stove top that was its anchor and dropped it in the bow. In the darkness he pried the bending oars from under the seats.

  “The fact is,” catching Luke by the arm, “you’re just going to stay on dry land.”

  Luke pushed gently and it slid from the firm beach into the water, continued its downward slope ready, with one more foot, to swamp, then righted itself and sat low in the moonlight.

  “Get in,” said Luke.

  Camper had no chance to settle in the stern but, hunched and muttering, began immediately and with short bruised strokes to bail, to keep himself afloat.

  “I promised him,” Luke said to Bohn. He held the floundering rowboat by its limp rope.

  “Cast it off,” whispering, “let him go plumb to the bottom.”

  “I’ll call Wade,” the Sheriff tried to lean between the old man and the cowboy, “it’ll cost you fifteen dollars for a personal fine.”

  “Sheriff,” with a quick glance, “you ain’t spoke well of my brother tonight. You ain’t got no say in the matter.”

  Ten years before, the skiff had been dragged and carried overland, pulled by running men from where it was stuck and abandoned in the river gone dry, upwards on the slippery south face of the dam and faster down the northern slope. They had struggled with it a few hundred yards into the basin, panted, wiped their foreheads, climbed in, and waited for the water. The boat finally rose with the lake. For two days, until a shivering in the current brought them again to shore, the men, who had forgotten to provide oars and who had no sail, waved to the crowds gathered to witness the covering of ranch houses and the land.

  Camper scraped its insides with a tin can. In its best days on the river the chubby boat had been splattered with fish oil and moored at night to a barnacle covered pile; now it loosed its seams and sank slowly under Camper’s hand.

  “Pa sits in the bow,” said Luke.

  “It won’t float the three of you.” Bohn turned away and darkly chewed, refused to look at it.

  “What’s that you got there?” asked the Sheriff.

  “It’s what we use to hold the oars. I’ll row.”

  “Oars!” Bohn spat into the white sand. Then: “I’ll tell you, Lampson, we’ll send the Finn out in it, you stay with us.”

  The white cane shot through the air, landed point down like a small harpoon. The Finn swung his bolstered legs to retrieve it. He snatched it up and propped himself belligerently some distance off. Then, seeing the signal of the oars drop with finality into place, he hobbled slowly back toward Bohn.

  “You,” Cap Leech suddenly spoke as they slipped away, “you’ve come to no good.”

  The Sheriff, Harry Bohn, the Finn, waited as close to the water as they dared until in half an hour or an hour the boat should return. There was silence on the shore. Once the Sheriff beat the cob bowl in his palm, once the Finn started to point with his cane, stopped. Behind them, silhouetted on the hill, lay the black truck and smoking wagon. The moon was gone.

  Bohn listened. His head unerringly followed something across the peaceful water.

  “Did you hear that?” whispered the Finn.

  “I heard,” said Bohn. His eyes were white, he continued to stand despite the pain in his legs. “Keep quiet,” he told the Sheriff. And then more softly to the Finn: “You figure they’re heading the same way as me?”

  He listened for sounds of the three men crouched in the boat, his lips moved as he repeated and memorized a poor stroke of the oars, a word or two that could be recalled and fanned when they returned. “Another fifteen minutes,” without looking at the Finn, “and I’m going after them.”

  “There,” whispered the Finn, “is he crazy?”

  “I heard,” Bohn said again. He watched as if he could see the suddenly phosphorous wake of the rowboat shrinking about its passengers. “I’ll burn it,” he said.

  “Listen,” the Finn began to dance on rickety legs, muttered,
about to throw himself in the water, “listen!”

  The squeak of oarlocks drifted out of the darkness. With every moment Bohn felt the uncertainty of things afloat. The pain in his back, his sore knees, the rubbing wings in his breath flashed sudden signals as he stood still. On the side of his neck a blood vessel began to tick, he abruptly extended his elbow for the Finn to steady. Gradually—and there was no sound, not a tremor except from beyond in the boat—he discovered something which, at his age and no longer able to wait, he could not bear.

  “They start up,” prodding the Finn, “then stop.”

  The rowboat turned. “I’ll put my foot through it!” Again out of reach they idled and Bohn heard the oars drawn up.

  “Over there,” whispered the Finn.

  Bohn towered on the shore. His legs shook first. Still trying to listen above the sounds of his own body, his hands shook, his arms, shoulders and head wagged as the boat pulled away. He rose in the darkness with rage enough to carry it home on his back.

  “What’s the matter,” the Finn hung to him, “what are they up to, Bohn?”

  His mouth opened, a small and lipless zero. With a few short gasps he inhaled and then: “Watch out, Lampson,” he cried, “watch out for him!”

  The capsized shell of an insect moved bluntly to the pull of oars, resisted the water like an oil drum pushed by pole. From time to time Camper scraped quickly with the can. Crouched on his knees he splashed and twisted his head sternward to catch the speckled fish when it jumped. He jerked fitfully the green thread which lay untouched on the surface.

  “I have to reel in again,” he said, dropping the can. Furiously he wound the spool.

  The little boat clove to the rock side of the dam, for long minutes becalmed in the darkness surrounding the base of the earth, sinking, while the three men sat in it, balanced on the palm of a sodden log. Luke shook himself, lay in the oars. He felt with his eyes into the darkness, searched the rocks, and the ratcheting of the reel stopped.

  “There. Don’t call to her, she’ll scare.” Luke pointed. They watched until high above them the close wrapped figure with olive branch took two heavy strides, called, “Mulge,” and disappeared. The patched dinghy again trolled its circular way on the vulture’s birdbath.

  “That’s not a rock!” cried Camper when they hit the housetop, and clutched the swaying rod to his chest. “My line’ll tangle.”

  “Perched up here awhile won’t hurt you none.”

  They lay on the flat of the roof. “There’s one to the right,” Luke swallowed the match flame, the sides of the skull glowed as he cupped his hands. “One out there in the gulch, and another beyond that.” He did not look toward the sunken barns. The hummers, the anxious insects, returned jumping across the water to the house. A broken feather curled along the brim at the back of his head. The small haunches had grown tough, dug into a sandy hillside while his pony slept below.

  Cap Leech swept the endless gloss of water, then quickly again to the little man in thong and dust, twisted with a human crick between the fanning oars. He could see nothing of the cowboy’s face, only the large oval of the hat like a Quaker’s crown.

  “He died,” said Luke, “and she died and I ain’t too keen to remember.”

  Cap Leech had lost the thermometer. He felt in his pockets, nothing, not a gelatin pill; and he was cold, seated in the bow of a leaky rowboat. Below him lay the empty house with windows uselessly slammed shut at the first warning of the cannon. From one tight sash there floated a wisp of curtain. Inside, a mattress hung in suspension a few inches from the second floor. Behind the house the orchard’s tree—transplanted it had never bloomed—remained preserved in the backyard of the lake and waved dimly in its branches the staves and wire of a corselet, the stock of a buffalo gun, a lidless cradle; all tied into the tree for safety, inconceivable that the water could climb that high.

  “I been alone since then,” said Luke.

  Cap Leech stared at the unfamiliar back of the young man drawn up comfortably atop the drowned farm. And he, who by the spoonful or on his handkerchief had shared the opiate slipped to his patients, felt a sudden unpleasant clearness of the head, faced with the foundling plainsman. The first man had died in Eden, they pronounced him dead. And now, with brightening eye, he found himself sitting in the middle of the washed-out garden’s open hearth.

  “Boy.” Suddenly he leaned close.

  He stared at the tufted head that never turned, at the nape of a soft formed skull the seams of which were not yet grown together, at the lump of ending nerves that was his neck. Man, boy, shard, Cap Leech thought of his eye dilating by its own design, a mean spring opening with surprise, thought of the red rash that would creep along his arms at night from now forward. Within the brainless cord of spinal fluid there was a murky solid, a floating clot of cheerless recognition.

  Cap Leech took off his spectacles, wiped, then bent them. He cocked his head, favoring the swelled side of his temple, and in the darkness began to grin through sixty years of accumulated teeth, cut to the gums. Slowly and with the faintest whispering, Cap Leech laughed, his tongue by slight movements pushed and licked each sound, a grim airless ripple so soft as to be hardly heard.

  “Watch out, Lampson,” hallooing across the water, “watch out for him!”

  The boat bubbled at the sides, tipped and sank twenty feet from shore in front of the bystanders, with keel curled and disintegrated, left the men to step out of it under water. They waded to the landing. In single file all stooped and climbed to the top of the hill through the gray ash, the lagging Cap Leech walking with hands clasped behind his back.

  “If you had kept quiet,” said Camper shortly, “I would have caught one.”

  luke said: “We got a wagon already. A trough, a rick, and that ranch house there.” He nodded at the upright shadows slanting on One Hundred Acres Grassland and at the Mandan sitting with outstretched legs on the potato bag steps. “The team,” listening for a winded snort, “runs free at night.” And to the Indian: “Have you seen anybody, Maverick? Been any prowlers on my land?” The door hung open against the wooden, vermiculated wall.

  Cap Leech heard the answering harsh sounds of a raven. He climbed down from his little red wagon, stood watching her. Those were abscesses beneath her cheeks, cysts in the Indian pap, which he saw above the hunching of her shoulders and the loose legs brown on top and on the undersides a frog-like white.

  “She’s been here since a child,” said Luke.

  Cap Leech walked once around his wagon, brushing the roman nose, and again looked at the Mandan through spectacles hammered tightly under his eyes. He turned, rattled the padlock, and slipped inside, a small old man accused of carrying about the countryside a circus of skin suckers. He was a medical tinker and no longer wore his half face in the fishbowl light of an amphitheater. He put his hands to the hot stove. If there was one last operation to perform, he thought, what would it be, since he had spread anatomy across a table like a net and crumpled with disgust a pair of deflated lungs into a ball. There was none he knew. If a single body could bear all marks of his blade and if it carried only the organs of his dissection, his life work would seesaw across the floor under tresses of arms and ventricles hung from the shoulders, would turn the other emasculated cheek. Slowly he rolled his sleeves and reaching around the stove dropped celluloid cuffs on the bunk tumbled with newspapers and a khaki blanket.

  “Come up here,” peering from the wagon as through the lifted slats of a pawnshop, and the Indian’s dusty hand crept to her shoe. “Here,” he repeated, pointing at a spot on the soapy planks between his feet. His eyes blinked as if in a moment’s pause he had been defied by a dog which, turned on its back in the shade, shook loose paws over a row of ugly dugs exposed like buttons. Cap Leech merely twisted about and began, knees rustling, to prepare.

  He himself had never been hospitalized except in his own wagon and under his own wandering eye. No one had ever, behind a film-like screen, looked at the hairline
d features of a body fixed without back or front after the last rheumatic seizure, nor watched, prying at the insides of a virgin relic, the passage of a bismuth cud down ducts that were peculiarly looped and unlike the intestines of either bird or man. It was his pleasure never to bathe at the side of the road.

  He had reduced all medicine to a ringed wash basin and kept, for its good or harm, the tinkling world in a bundle under his rocking bed. In the stove he burned powders to kill disease; he lived in useless fumigation. He bled strangers in a room they could not stand in or laid them on his own iodoform dampened quilt. Treatment was his secret and while breathing into a bearded face he remembered the startling slant of a physician’s eye through a hole in a steel reflector.

  Once he had nearly died in the wagon, naked on a pile of clothing and an arm’s length from a bogus bottle of capsules lying on its side without cork or label. To die like a gypsy with a bit of pumice and mercury in a wicker basket—and the horse would have continued on the walk of its choice, craned its head for low apple branches across the road, dragged his body along the borders of unoccupied, lazy states. Not now, the horse stood still and Leech, despite one empty cavity in his abdomen, wiped his hands and with more vigor than ever mixed his scant tools with a hoot in the night.

  Out came the tin can. The big eyes of the Indian lay on the sill, she sniffed the heady gas. “This is a xyster,” said Cap Leech climbing again to his feet. He had kindled wood with it. For a moment he turned it over, then facing her quickly, “xyster,” he repeated and dropped it, the clank of a museum piece, into the enamel pan. “No bone drill,” speaking clearly and with a faraway cut to his spectacles, “that’s gone.”

  Back and forth went the can, its lid clapping with the niggardly puffs of a censer. Simultaneously, the Madan’s two hands rose a few inches from the arms of the chair, fat dark fingers spread into perfect, electrified starfish. And Cap Leech, with the sparsest gold in his teeth, slid along the wall, fixed the white sheet over the already bolted door.