Authors: Tom Franklin
I follow him in, the water so deep I go under, so cold I come up gasping. I yell, begin to swim, following his distant explosions.
I get a quick taste of fear on my lips but the water between my toes and fingers holds me high, and in minutes I’m swimming alongside Bruce. He nods at the bank.
The bank, ten million years of limestone layers compacted against one another, is tall and hollowed, a bowl upside down, a cave whose rim rises five feet out of the water and spans forty feet. We move toward it, our strokes slowing as we near its mouth. We draw ourselves close enough to the cave to see the strange film of green algae that clings to the sunlit interior walls. Higher on the walls, where the sun doesn’t reach, there’s only rock. In a courageous spell, I move to go inside, to follow the dark, wide tunnel whose end you can’t see, but Bruce grabs my shoulder and leads me away from the bank. We tread water with our arms and legs, and wait. Behind us the sun disappears beyond the treetops, darkness rolling as oil might across the lake’s surface toward our heads that stick out of the water like rocks. I stretch my toes down, find nothing except deeper water, and suddenly I grow frightened, bobbing uselessly here in the middle of a lake, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere.
“They’re coming,” Bruce says.
There will be a time
.
It will be after Jan has left and come back, left and come back. It may be years from now.
I’ll be living in a shithole apartment and working graveyards at the chemical plant again and drinking too much. Some nights deserting my post and jogging the plant’s perimeter, avoiding the security patrols and cameras, taking to the woods, scaring up deer and setting off quail.
Bruce will come back.
He’ll be waiting on my steps early one morning as I’m getting home from work. He’ll crack jokes about punching a time clock. He’ll tell me he sold the Triumph in Tempe, Arizona, and moved in with a Navajo woman for too many months, then stole her Trans Am and drove to California to live with his friend Laura, an actress. That he got a bit part in a Robert De Niro gangster film and somebody recognized him and the FBI found him and he did time. That when he was released after two years, he rode the bus east across the country. He watched the states pass him by, buttes and deserts and oil wells and famous rivers and markers of historical events. Outside El Paso they passed a huddle of Mexicans standing in their yard watching their house burn down. In another bus he crossed Louisiana during the dark early morning hours with a plastic flask in his pocket, watching his cigarette tip glow in the window, reading the names of places and trying to remember if he knew anybody from there.
His ticket took him as far as Jackson, Mississippi, and he hitched the rest of the way back.
We’ll sit in front of the TV and pop the tabs of Bud Lights and I’ll give him the lowdown at the plant, tell him he can maybe get his old job back. But he’ll laugh and say, “No fucking way.”
He’ll say he’s going to Alaska or someplace, to see the northern lights.
“What I need,” he’ll say, “is a ride.”
I’ll decide I can’t see Jan that night. I’ll call and cancel dinner, will listen to her voice on the phone for a long time, knowing she’s telling the truth, but then somehow hang softly up.
Maybe Bruce and I will go by and steal her old Toyota and head out of town, drive north on back roads, through the country.
We’ll notice things: three hawks in the same dead tree. A flat-bed truck hauling a steeple. A child’s wheelchair in front of a
trailer. We’ll drink beer and stop to piss along the road between the towns, Creola, Axis, Bucks, Sunflower, Mount Vernon, Calvert, McIntosh. Wagerville, Leroy, Jackson, Grove Hill. Fulton.
Then, just north of Thomasville, heading for Selma, there’ll be something big glinting at us through the trees at the top of a hill. An old fire tower, abandoned, a metal skeleton covered with kudzu.
I’ll leave the road and nose the car into the woods, forget to close my door as I get out and race Bruce up the hill to the tower. Against the sky, the tree trunks are a deep somber gray. Bruce will stand under the tower pissing again and looking up where the sky is rushing past the cabin. A few early dim stars move in and out of the clouds. I imagine a park ranger climbing the tower with a pair of binoculars and a thermos of coffee, maybe a book, spending his hours looking across the distance, seeing for miles, dreading and hoping to spot a dark arm of smoke reaching up out of the woods. The
CLIMB AT YOUR OWN RISK
sign is faded and overrun with kudzu, which shimmers on the tower like lace and has taken the hill like an army.
Still looking up, I step on something and turn my ankle, reach down into the kudzu. It’s the front leg of a deer, sawed off below the knee: delicate, light brown fur, sharp black two-toed hoof, white tip of hair halfway up. It weighs nothing, like the batons that track teams pass. I roll it in my palm, feel the speed in my grip, hand it to Bruce. When we kick around in the kudzu we find dozens of the legs, front and back, scattered over the ground. Fanning out, we find the bleached skulls of deer, hides stiff as pieces of wood, antlers. We’re standing in carnage. You can smell a trace of death in the air, it comes at you on the wind.
Bruce motions at the tower. “Poachers shoot ’em from up there.”
I leave him examining one of the legs and start up the tower. The bottom flight of steps is missing, to discourage climbers, but I put my beer in my pocket and scale the girders, finding foot-holds on rivets and splayed lips of metal. The upper flights are intact and easy to climb, the trunks of pine trees thinning with altitude, and with a lightening in the pit of my stomach I climb past the treetops and the sky swells around me. Now I’m moving upward through kudzu and girder and air. I slip through the trapdoor into the tiny cabin, Bruce right behind me, his arms through. His head. When he’s in we stand and look out.
There are windows on all sides. The glass is broken and the wind is cool and fast. The tower sways in the breeze. I can see farther and wider than I’ve ever seen, the sky to the west churning up in red gusts out of the distant blue trees. Across the horizon you can see the flit of lights from radio towers and smokestacks. The treetops spread below seem solid enough to walk across. It would be easy to forget what you know of the life beneath, to think of it like the bottom of the sea, a place where dark shapes move through columns of light, where schools of things drift like clouds.
Blackbirds rise from the trees and climb the sky. Bats hurtle past. Turning, I can see the sun disappearing into the treetops, the western landscape rimming with red, a stain spreading up, out, like blood, the sky darkening into pinholes of light.
“This reminds me,” Bruce says, and he tells about a night he spent in Vietnam. They were south of the DMZ, a listening post, he and a buddy shoulder to shoulder in a foxhole they’d dug. Nothing happening. So dark, not even stars that night. Whispering. Bruce telling his friend what he’d be doing if he were at home. What? the friend said. Be at the drive-in with my girl
friend, Bruce said. Would you have popcorn? the friend asked, and Bruce said, Hell yes, buttered, and beer we smuggled in; we’d be drinking and watching the movie. What movie? the friend wanted to know. A western, Bruce said. John Wayne. I’d have my arm around her, Bruce said. And he felt his friend’s arm go around him in the dark. And he put his arm around his friend, in the dark. And they talked some more, they talked all night, telling things they would do if they were home, and for a while it seemed as if they were at home, that the things they were talking about were real things, real girls and beer and cowboy movies.
After that Bruce is quiet. He looks out over the sky, he’s watching the stars. He takes two of the deer legs from his pockets and holds one in each hand. He drums lightly on the windowsill with the hooves, and a metallic rhythm fills the sky, like something running, and he drums harder and faster, the walls and floor humming, pieces of glass rattling in the windows, flat echoes returning from somewhere. Noiseless flurries appear in the window and disappear: bats, lured by the vibration, brought down from the sky, drawn like deer to a baited field, like people to whatever they’re drawn to.
But I’m remembering the time before, the race through the woods, the lake. Imagining what’s happening there now, in those woods, the water, the cave, in that other part of the world. How it builds from inside the limestone, the tiny drumming of air and bodies that you feel on your skin rather than hear. They erupt at once from every inch of the cave. They fill the sky and blacken the water with their reflections. They pour out in a continuous stream, keep pouring out, like blood pumped from a heart. They brush your face and you sink in the water so only your eyes remain above the surface. It’s like a storm, thousands and thousands of
bats in the air together. Before now you didn’t know there could be this much of anything at the same time, and you forget to be afraid, forget whoever’s with you and where, why, who you are, forget everything except now and how the sky and the air are alive enough to touch, if only you didn’t need your arms to stay afloat.
Earl rose early
and made coffee. He stood over the stove, sipping and staring out the window, where it was still dark. He could make out the dim lines of Evelyn’s car, and of his truck beside the gate, and he knew Mace would be sleeping in the cab, drunk. Somebody had dropped him off last night: Earl had heard the dogs barking, the truck door slam. Shivering, he finished his coffee and rinsed the cup, left it hanging on its peg by the knife rack and went to put on his boots.
He locked the door behind him and zipped his jacket to his neck. His breath curled away in the wind as he went down the porch steps with his hands jammed in his pockets and hurried across the yard to his truck. The windshield was frosted, and when he opened the door a cowboy hat rolled out. Smell of beer. Mumbling, Earl picked up the hat and shook it off and looked at Mace in his big sheepskin coat, the heavy collar hiding all but the long black hair, his knees nothing but frayed white holes.
“Wake up, you bum,” Earl said, swatting him with the hat.
Mace coughed.
Earl reached in and moved his friend’s feet, the boot leather icy, then climbed in and ground the starter until the truck kicked to life.
Mace sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Time is it?”
“About five.”
Mace took the cowboy hat and squared it on his head. He leaned and turned the rearview mirror and looked at himself, then turned it back, nowhere near where it was. “God almighty,” he said.
Earl adjusted the mirror.
“I ain’t drunk,” Mace said. He took the hat off. “Okay, a little, maybe. Who can blame me?”
“How come you didn’t come on in the house?”
“I seen Evelyn’s car.”
Earl shrugged. “You coulda came on in.”
“Y’all make up?”
“You might say.”
“Get you any?”
Earl looked at him.
“Whoa ho,” Mace sang, “this boy’s done got his tree trimmed.”
“Where’d you go last night?” Earl asked.
“Judge’s. Me and Hobart and them. Played a little pool, drunk a little beer, did some dancing. Won me this hat playing quarters.”
By now Earl could see through the windshield and he rattled the gear and they eased past the mailbox into the road.
“Think you might pull over, get me some coffee?” Mace asked.
They stopped at the store and with the truck idling hurried across the concrete slab past the diesel tanks where a Peterbilt sat humming, its lights off. They went inside and got coffee. Earl paid, then held the door for Mace and they came out sipping at their steaming cups.
In the truck, Mace put the cowboy hat on his knee and fiddled with the heater knobs. “We getting Jimmyboy?”
“Got to. He’s got the gun.”
There was little traffic on the causeway and Earl drove in silence. He shook a cigarette from his pack and offered the pack to Mace. Mace got one with shaky fingers and lit it with the truck’s lighter, then lit Earl’s. They smoked and looked out their windows at the gas stations just opening for the day and at the bait shops that never closed. A few blacks were already fishing along the rails of the bridges, coat hoods up and bursts of breath appearing like Morse code. In the distance the smokestacks from the paper mill and chemical plants blinked warnings against low-flying aircraft.
After a while Mace cleared his throat. “She gonna stay this time?”
“Don’t know.”
“She say when she’s leaving?”
Earl shook his head.
“How come Mike can’t get his own damn pistol?” Mace asked.
“If he can’t even drive a car anymore,” Earl said, “you think they’d let him have a gun?”
They crossed the bridge with the river underneath and the mill to their right and rode down the hill into Mobile. There were condemned buildings, and paralleling the highway were railroad tracks with strings of empty boxcars. The ones with closed doors would have transients sleeping in them. Earl turned left and crossed the tracks.