The Cage Keeper (18 page)

I can walk.

I can talk.

My dick still gets hard.

I can work.

I can still see the kids.

I have good friends.

I could have gotten five years, but I only got two and will only do one.

And thank you, oh thank you, there were no kids in the car.

And no women.

No teenage lovers.

Just an old guy who must have seen my bike, must have. Who didn’t want to miss it really. Who wanted it to be over fast before it was over slow.

Thank you, God. Thanks for everything.

I won’t let you down.

When he finished loading the food and aluminum pot into the pack, Rory took the canteen to the stream and dipped it in. He watched the air bubbling out of it as it filled. The water felt colder than ever but the air was warmer and the sky was cloudless. When the canteen was full Rory pulled off his belt. His Puma fell to the rocks but he ignored it and worked the leather through the two metal rings, then secured the buckle and hung the canteen over his leather-jacketed shoulder and across his bare chest. He pulled the knife from its sheath, walked to the tent, and cut the canteen strap from where it held the five tent poles together at the top. He burped twice as he rolled up the canvas and aluminum poles, as he tied them into the top section of the pack’s frame.

He knew he had to hurry. He had seen how fast those kids could move over the trail like fine young mountain animals. They were gonna be real thirsty. Especially April, with her leftover flu. Rory zipped his jacket up three or four inches so the leather wouldn’t flap against his belly on the walk. He squatted in front of the pack and worked his right arm through the strap, then his left. When he stood the frame pushed against the canteen which pinched his skin at the waist. He arched his back and moved his shoulders until the weight of everything settled in the way it was going to. He looked the camp over once to make sure it was like they’d found it. Except for the ashes and the matted spot where they’d set up the tent, everything looked fine. There was a breeze going now, and the green buds of the birches wavered in it. He turned and started for the trail when white caught his eye from the ground. Trash. Nope, the steaks. Damn. He didn’t want to take the time to pack them; there was no time to take. April could get seriously sick today walking hard without water and that’s not the legacy I’m leaving behind, he thought. Forget it. He knelt, almost fell forward, grabbed the steaks and dropped them into the barrel.

He was thirsty again. The beer had made it worse, but as he headed into the shade of the birch trail, the pack’s straps pulling into his shoulders and the full canteen knocking against his hip, he told himself he wouldn’t touch a drop until the kids drank first. Not one.

The air was cooler here and he lengthened his stride. His belt was rubbing against his bare chest and he remembered his T-shirt and Puma knife sheath still by the stream. He glanced to his right through the stand of birch trees, but could only see some scattered spruce at the base of Crawford Notch on the other side. He could still hear the water though. And as he moved farther away from it, listening to its steady gush, Rory wished he’d unwrapped the steaks and tossed them into the current. All three had felt soft and warm. Tomorrow, they would start to stink.

LAST DANCE

In Memory of Elmer Lamar Lowe

Reilly stuck his arm out the truck window and let the hot wind catch in his palm and push at his arm. He looked out at the thin pines and cracked red clay moving by, listened to Billy Wayne humming along with the radio; he thought of how bad Billy looked, saw the waxy yellow look of his skin, the gray under his eyes, tried to imagine him down in the parish jail near Leesville with nothing to drink and nobody to mess with.

“How ’bout another ’Staff, Cap?” Billy Wayne said from behind the wheel.

Reilly reached into the brown paper bag and pulled another Falstaff out, handed it to Billy Wayne.

“Thank you, Cap.”

Merle Haggard came on the radio, his voice sad and whiskey deep. Billy turned him up and looked over at Reilly.

“Son, that man can
sing.
”

“What happened to your teeth, BW?”

Billy Wayne scrunched up his face like somebody had just pinched him. “Jude, that bitch.”

Reilly remembered her: dark hair and eyes, her fierce little body chain-smoking Raleighs, making coffee in Billy Wayne’s kitchen, in the old house he won in a game of draw down at Le Mae’s. She was as old as his mother but he felt something happen whenever she looked his way, when she would smile at one of his jokes about Billy Wayne.

“Cap, what you’re lookin’ at is the by-product of a hot iron skillet full of corn bread. The bitch even suckered me with it.”

“Jesus.”

Billy turned to Reilly and pulled his upper lip to his nose. “See for yourself.”

Reilly looked at his yellow-pink gums, saw that some of the parts looked full with the roots of the teeth still in them, others were sagging and empty where the teeth had been completely torn out, and there was one place in the middle that still had a jagged piece of tooth hanging out of the gum, a broken gray stalactite in Billy Wayne’s mouth. “Shit,” Reilly said.

Billy Wayne turned his head back to the road and drank from his beer.

They turned off I-65 just past Mister Ed’s barbecue and drove down a narrow two-lane road with no center dividing line.

Reilly drained his beer and popped open another.

“How much daylight you figure we got left?”

“Couple hours.”

“You check it this morning?”

“Son, I’ve checked that net three times today.”

Reilly watched Billy Wayne finish his beer in one quick drop and rise of his Adam’s apple then toss the can out the window.

“And I’ll tell ya somethin’ right now, Cap, we’re gonna get her tonight, I can feel it.” Billy Wayne put his hand out to Reilly, his eyes still on the road.

“We’re out.”

Billy looked over at him, his eyes opening wide with the panic Reilly could feel, like he’d just been told to swim the width of Dry Patch Lake underwater. “Then you’re going to have to share that one with me ’til we get to Red Willie’s.”

Reilly shuddered with the thought. “Here,” he said, “you can finish it.”

Red Willie’s place sat on a small hill by the river, an unpainted one-room shack with wide cracks between its weathered boards, with knotholes rotten all the way through, so that at night the naked light bulb Red drank to lit up the outside as well, shone on the beer cans and rusted metal of his dirt yard. Reilly knew Billy hadn’t seen Red since he got out, and as the truck swayed with the ruts in the road, he hoped Red was home.

Billy Wayne turned off the radio and they drove the last quarter mile in silence. The road was made of gravel and was so narrow that the driver of an oncoming car or truck had to pull over against the bush and trees to let the other by. Reilly reached his hand out at a thin branch, thought of growing up in Ayer’s Village, Massachusetts, where you put your life in somebody else’s hands at intersections (“They’ve all got a death wish,” his step-father had said). Where people’s faces looked stony and blanched from working inside factories, smoking a lot of cigarettes, and eating too much food out of a can. People who would never stop first on this kind of road, Reilly thought, would keep a tire iron under their seat if they had to drive along it at all.

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.