“Why don't you tell me what you're thinking,” Leo says to Ray. “That's our usual start.”
“I was thinking how much this dump looks like a whorehouse,” Ray says. He watches Bosco drink from a jelly jar.
“This anger toward me interests me,” Leo says. He looks up, smiles, touches his beard. “Is that what you paid for? To come here and vent?”
“Ray's just nervous,” Bosco says from behind Leo. “His first time.”
Leo holds out his fingertips as if he's asking Ray for a dance. Bosco nods, and Ray offers his hand. Leo's fingers are warm and damp. He bends Ray's hand toward the light, caressing the palm. Bosco walks slowly around the room touching the strings of colored beads, the macramé wall decorations, the feathers hung from threads. Ray doesn't like a man touching him. He drinks with his left hand, downing his beer.
“Anger is bad for your heart, as bad as cigarettes,” Leo says. “The Chinese call anger a weary bird with no place to roost.”
Bosco slips to the back of the room and eases open a drawer on a rolltop desk. Ray imagines he hears it squeak. He watches Bosco riffle through papers with his thumb, then pull a wooden cigar box from the back of the drawer. Leo moves as if to look over his shoulder.
“That's me exactly,” Ray says quickly. “All pissed off and no place to go.”
“I see that in your lines, most of them broken, irregular. Our work then is to trace it back to its source, chase the riders back to the crimson palace.”
Bosco frowns and mouths the word “shit,” then tilts the cigar box for Ray to see the strings of cheap, plastic beads. He replaces the box and eases the drawer closed. In the corner of the room, a painted screen partially hides an iron bed and a chest of drawers. Bosco steps over and leans his hands against the chest of drawers. His shadow dips and angles against the opposite wall.
“Chase the riders? What the fuck are you talking about, Leo?” Ray says.
Leo lifts his hand to gesture, his rings flashing. “The riders are stray emotions, wants, unfulfilled dreams. They are sent out by the crimson palaceâyour heart.” He smiles. “We're speaking metaphorically, friend.”
Ray nods as if this makes some sense to him, and Bosco ducks behind the screen. Ray watches him in the mirror. Bosco slides open the top drawer.
Leo leans across the table, sending up wafts of cologne. His eyes are slate colored, bloodshot. He is no longer studying Ray's hand, only holding it. “What are yours?” he asks.
Ray draws back, tethered by his own hand. “What are my what?”
Bosco slowly lifts something out of the second drawer and sets it on top of the dresser. He looks back over his shoulder, catching Ray's eye.
“Your unfulfilled dreams, the empty areas of your existence,” Leo says. He smiles like a cop, like he knows something. Ray closes his eyes, wanting this whole thing over with, wanting to be back on the barge, watching the water.
“Go on, Ray,” Bosco says. Ray opens his eyes and Bosco is standing beside the screen, hands behind his back. Leo does not turn to look at him. Bosco grins. “Go ahead and tell old Leo about your so-called dream.”
Ray feels the heat in his face.
“Yes, Ray,” Leo says, “what is your so-called dream, as your friend puts it?”
Ray shakes his head. This is something he does not talk about. He only ever told Bosco because of a night of too many tequila shots and no moon, the river and the barge wrapped in nightfall, the generator out of gas, only the quiet and the drunken surges inside and his feet in the warm water, words spilling out into the darkness. And for the reason of their silent work together in the river hauling oysters out of the mud, thirty feet down, roped to each other, feeling their way through the murk of the river. Thinking of all that, loose and drunk, he let slip and knew right off how hollow it sounded, his dream of diving in the ocean, swimming through currents with tanks on his back, a kid wish he'd kept with him like some lucky penny left in a pocket and tarnished with age. But still he keeps it, fingering the notion, imagining it when he is driving his route and rain comes. Stuck on some back road, wipers burned out, waiting for the storm to pass, water washing sideways in ripples across his windshield, he will press his face to the glass and think of sharks and eels, of bright fish and coral reefs. He has never seen these things except on TV, which he knows is next to not seeing them at all, worse maybe, for how TV makes everything small and flat.
“Well, goddamn, Ray,” Bosco had said that night. “Your trucks right there. Right
there
. Get in it and head south for twelve hours. You'll hit the damn ocean. Hell, if we could get the barge unstuck, we'd be there by breakfast.”
Ray shook his head and shrugged, his awkwardness invisible in the darkness. “It ain't the ocean, really. The ocean is just a thing, like my head just picked it. I don't know.”
“So you're all but dying to see the ocean but not really the ocean. Now we're making sense.” Bosco threw a bottle out into the river.
Ray wanted to say then how after so much time the ocean meant nothing more than some new thing, how he wore the boredom of his thirty-eight years like a sickness, how his life ran past like the water past the bargeâgiving him only the trick of movement. He felt he was done with living, or it with him, and that apart from what he'd already been throughâa handful of shit jobs, a year of marriage, a week in the county jailânothing much else was left to happen.
“Give my word, Ray,” Bosco said. “We'll get our asses on down to Biloxi as soon as oyster season's up.”
Ray shrugged, pushed his bottle under the surface and let it sink.
Now Leo squeezes his hand and whispers. “You needn't cling to sadness, son. Tell me your dream.”
“Yeah, tell him,” Bosco says, and smirks. “Tell him about the ocean.”
“The ocean?” Leo raises his eyebrows.
Rays face flushes. “Just shut the fuck up, Bosco.”
“You dream of leaving, of escape,” Leo says, nodding. “Water represents birth, renewal, baptism.”
“Don't talk about it,” Ray says. He jerks his hand from Leo's grasp. “Bosco, keep your goddamn mouth closed.”
Bosco shakes his head and smiles, then slowly withdraws his hands from behind his back and holds up to the light a large and imperfect diamond. He nods, grinning wildly.
Leo raises his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “My young friend,” he says. “You show up here, you pay me ten dollars. What is it you want?”
Bosco steps behind Leo, makes a gun with his thumb and finger, and points it at the back of Leo's head. They are like that for a momentâLeo awaiting Ray's answer, his hands still in the air, Bosco with his phantom gun. The seconds play out this pantomime of robbery, until the realization opens within Ray: They
could
do it. Bosco is right. They could.
“This is a two-way street,” Leo says. “You come back when you decide how I can help you.” Ray does not speak, his mind still held by that brief flash in Bosco's fingers. He looks again at Bosco, who hammers down his thumb trigger and mouths the word “pow.” Bosco grins again, tips his head toward the door.
“I'll do that,” Ray says, standing, shaking. “I will come back.”
Early Friday morning, after his route, Ray drives out County Road 10 and pulls over beside Sunshine Dairy. The windows of the building reflect the dust-colored light of dawn. Ray thinks of Leo inside, sleeping, the strung feathers twisting slightly in the dark, the capping machines and cream separators below him, the diamonds shining and hidden, their value hoarded away. He sees it so clearly, Bosco yanking the .38 from his denim coat, jamming the steel against the back of Leo's skull, the blood and flesh and hair exploding like carp out of the river bottom. Ray watches the gray windows of Leo's apartment, his mind drawing the stillness of that death from out of this stillness, the one before him now, lit pale orange as the sun rises on the faint noise of radio static. As he watches, a light clicks on and the drapes part. A wedge of Leo's face appears in the gap between the curtains. Ray pushes back into his seat, guns the engine, and spins out, his fingers shaking. By the time he crosses into Clarendon, the town has started up again. Ray stops at the Quik-Mart for cigarettes and beer and donuts, two cartons of chocolate milk for Bosco. Today is for oystering, and Ray is relieved in this; beneath the river, there will be no talk of killing.
The night before, after they left Leo's, it was all Bosco could talk about, wound up like a kid on his way to the circusâbreathless, bouncing in the seat of the truck.
“Hey, look at this,” he said, drawing the stolen diamond from his pocket. The stone was milk white, irregularly shaped.
“Real smart,” Ray said. “He's probably calling the cops right now.”
Bosco shook his head. “Never miss it. Had fifty of these if he had one. An old Parcheesi box.” He shook his head again. “Think I'd find a better hiding place for my stash.” Bosco nudged Ray. “I think I
will.”
“We don't even know that's a real diamond,” Ray said, though looking, he knew.
Bosco gripped the stone and drew a long, thin scratch across the width of Ray's windshield.
“Now what do you say?” Bosco asked. “Could write the fucking Declaration of Independence if I wanted to.”
Ray kept driving toward the river without speaking, as he drives now through the early morning. Traffic is heavy going the other way, the men in suits and ties headed into Berryville, the women putting on makeup in their rearview mirrors, coffee cups steaming their windshields. The scratch on his own windshield catches the morning sun, making tiny prisms, needles of colored light.
In the river along the barge, two of their antifreeze jugs bounce, pulling under the surface and then popping up again. They haul up catfish thrashing onto the deck. Bosco tries to club them with the butt of his .38, missing each time, the metal deck of the barge clanging. He grabs a fish to hold it down, and the dorsal fin pierces the palm of his hand.
“Shit
damn”
Bosco shouts. He falls back onto the deck, kicking the fish back into the river, still hooked to its line. His gun skitters across the barge.
“Can you think of any other ways to kill yourself?” Ray asks. Bosco sucks on his palm while Ray takes the gun, hauls up the antifreeze jug, lifts the fish into the air, and shoots it through the head. He unhooks the limp fish and tosses it to Bosco.
“See if you can skin it and get it in the cooler without losing a limb. Then we'll get the heater in the water.”
Bosco grins, his mouth wet with his own blood. “Yessir, boss man.”
Ray retrieves from the cabin their plastic bucket of weights, most of them old iron window sash weights, along with scraps of steel they found on the barge. He fills the front and back pockets of his jeans, and with a length of rope makes a belt of sash weights to tie around his waist. The second belt he makes for Bosco, who is still struggling with the pliers, trying to skin the catfish. It will go bad before he finishes. Now fifty pounds heavier, Ray takes a pint of bourbon from the fridge and drinks. The bottom of the river is always cold, even in August. Ray walks out and ties the weight belt to Bosco, then stuffs his pockets full of iron while Bosco wipes off his hands. He holds up the bottle so Bosco can drink, spilling some down his shirt front. Finally, he uncurls fifty feet of clothesline and cinches either end to their waists.
Bosco drinks again. “Let us not forget our tithes and offerings, brothers,” he says. “When the Lord has delivered into our hands those goddamn diamonds, let us give back to Jesus.”
Ray stiffens at the mention of the diamonds. For the whole day Bosco has been planning how they will have the diamonds cut and sold in Little Rock, and how they will spend the moneyâfast cars and stereos and guns. He talks as if their lives are fairy tales, already written.
“So it's blasphemy now,” Ray says. “We're trying something new.”
“Listen, bud, if God was of a mind to strike me down, he'd of gotten me twenty fuckups ago.”
Ray unchains the water heater from the side of the barge and floats it around to the front. The river currents lift and push it, banging it against the barge. Ray thinks that if it hit hard enough, it could knock them off their shoal and into open water. They tie it off to one of the cleats on the barge, then grasp it on opposite sides, gripping it by its brass valves and pipe fittings. They draw deep breaths, readying themselves to strain against the weight of it. The old heater shell is lead-lined, industrial-size, nearly as heavy as a small car.
“All the way up,” Ray says. “Nice big bubble for us.” Words he repeats every time, a kind of incantation. They count three and lift the heater, the two of them grunting and spitting, until it is upright and flush against the surface of the water.
“Now,” Ray says through his teeth, and they drop it, careful not to let it tip. They wait until it slips beneath the surface, thick rope coiling in after it. No bubble rises after the rope stops, and they know it has landed upright in the mud.
“We're good,” Ray says. He draws five deep breaths, holds his clam rake tight to his chest, and jumps in, the weights in his clothes pulling him down. The rope around his waist tightens until he hears the muffled
sloosh
of Bosco jumping in after him. He has learned to keep his eyes open underwater, and watches overhead as the filtered light shifts from murky yellow to dull brown and then is gone almost completely. His feet settle on the bottom and he moves toward where he thinks the heater has landed, his boots sinking in, pulled downward. With his hands he finds the heater, and as his eyes adjust he can see it, faint white, slightly tilted. Ray gives two tugs on the rope and waits for Bosco to find him, hearing only the pounding of his heart in his ears. Three minutes he will last without a breath, the noise of his pulse like a clock reminding him. Bosco is there suddenly and they set to work, moving out from the heater like spokes from a hub, with or against the pull of the river. They rake the mud for oysters and clams, prying them out, saving them in burlap sacks tied to their belts. Later, sitting on the barge, they will sort them for size. Ray works quickly, his lungs feeling as though they, too, are weighted. His used-up air lets loose in quick, fat bursts as his muscles repeat their patternârake, dig, sackâlike some song his body sings within itself. After twenty steps he turns back, lungs throbbing, the pulse of blood in the muscles of his face.