His grandparents had gotten drunk on Saphire highballs with friends around the fire the night before, and the way they had started acting strangely—grinning and cackling through the evening, their faces gone somehow wicked and distant in the fire’s orange brightness and the shadows that leapt from it like ribbons, all serpentine and wild—had made him feel alone. Close to midnight, he had slipped off to his tent where he lay quietly sobbing in his bedroll until he woke later with the broadcast of rain battering the tent and had raised a hand through the darkness to run his fingers across the cool canvas of the tent’s interior walls and had felt the rain against his fingertips as if each drop of it were itself a fingertip upon his pushing back.
With dawn the rain abated, and as the boy unzipped and peeled back the tent’s door panel to survey the campsite, half expecting to see the corpses of his grandparents and their friends strewn about the ground, he saw among the rain-filled tumblers and the crushed and dented cans of beer the night’s fire left dead and smoldering, a single curl of white smoke from it rising through the burgeoning light of the viscid morning air and drifting meaninglessly upward in a winding milky cord toward the heavy dripping canopy of the pines that stood brooding above, naked and unafraid in the ancient silence of their knowing.
The boy set out down the sodden path toward the river. The muddied puddles in which he stepped reorganized in his wake and gathered again to return in liquescent shards the yet gray sky unto itself. The snoring of the sleeping old man diminished in the boy’s steady progress through the trees until it was gone, concealed, if not replaced at length, by the dizzy static clatter of the cicadas crying in the waking underbrush about.
They would not register his absence from camp until breakfast, more likely not until the sun above the pines had risen, which was just as well, for about his aged wardens now he felt uneasy, suspicious of the forms they had assumed round the fire last night when they conspired in whatever sorcery and secret rites that had been.
The boy came to the little graying pier which jutted out into the river like a knife’s handle of blade bereft. He walked along the weathered planks that groaned and creaked toward the river and stopped to stand at the head of the pier where he looked down to the lower platform to where a canoe lay moored, bobbling softly on the water, tethered to a fraying rope the sandy yellow of sun-bleached corn silk tied loosely round the old wood cleat fixed to the edging of the lower platform. The boy took off his shoes and his socks and set them side by side on the deck of the pier and climbed down the splintered ladder to the platform to study the canoe. He ran a hand along the cracked and pealing mantle of what once must have been navy blue. The aluminum hull was softly dented here and there and felt cool to touch. A single, much-weathered oar, its handle worn smooth, lay slantwise against the stern, and in the floor of the canoe, a dark ovular swath of rainwater, dotted in places by floating leaves of yellow and green, rippled with the skittering of tiny insects about the surface. The boy spat into the water in the canoe and watched the bubbles of his spittle float and collapse.
The boy lowered himself into the canoe and balanced in it standing upright by splaying his legs to either side of the hull and planting his bare heals into the corners where the sides of it met the floor. He bent over the water toward the pier to loosen the tether from the cleat, and as he pushed off and slid out from the pier and into the stream, he felt immeasurably better, much relieved within himself and generally all over, by the separation realized in this transference from that which was solid to that which was fluid, as if he had crossed a barrier between the unreal and the real, or perhaps, the other way around.
The boy drew the oar from the stern and set it to his side lengthwise in the hull, then he crouched and lay down on his back. He straightened his legs and folded his hands over his chest, and as the current took the canoe and bore it slowly downstream, he looked up and watched as the canopy passed above him, the cottonwoods up there, dangling their leaves like serrated spades polished to a vibrant, glistening green by the rain that had fallen overnight.
To any watcher on the banks, the little canoe, as it slipped bobbling and bumping on the water, would have looked like some errant bark without captain, some fugitive enterprise. Yet, the migration it followed through the water, drifting now toward the dead middle of the stream, gave the impression of a definite, predetermined destination, as though there were an agency involved other than that of the current.
After a short while, the boy set his hands upon the gunnels, lifted himself to a sitting position, and looked about. A faint movement in the trees, and above them the ashen clouds began to dissolve; sunlight merging through the vegetation along the banks now began to warm the air, which hung heavy and wet with all the birdsong bristling in the leaves of the willows among which a pair of cardinals ignited, flashed then disappeared. Farther downstream the lonesome ghost of a bone-white egret fished the shallows in a garrison of silence.
There upon the water the boy felt light and airy; he allowed the river to take him, him and the little boat, and it bore the pair together uncomplainingly. After a while the boy reached for the oar, took hold of the handle with both hands, maneuvered the oar out of the canoe, dipped the blade into the water and turned the it flat against the water causing the bow of the canoe to veer starboard toward the bank opposite that from which they had begun. The boy switched and paddled portside until he had landed the canoe in the mud at the foot of the bank.
His toes sank into the cool silty bottom as he stepped out of the canoe, reminding him he had left behind his shoes at the pier. He leaned over the canoe and pushed it toward the bank, then he stepped up the bank and turned back to the canoe and drew it toward him so that the bow and half the hull was out of the water. He looked at the canoe and considered its mooring, then he thought about it again. Between a tangle of roots showing through the mud of the bank he fixed the oar lengthwise and tied around its handle a knot with the rope attached to the painter on the bow. He tested the integrity of the oar’s anchoring with several jerking tugs, then he cinched tighter the knot around the oar and stood and looked at it.
The boy mounted the bank and stepped up into the grass that was wet and slick beneath his feet. Above him an airplane crawled noiselessly through the clouds. Into the meadow, which spread out a hundred or so yards before him toward a distant tree line dominated by the tall, darkened turrets of cypress trees, he walked with the energy of one setting forth on a mission. He walked through the meadow and came to the line of trees where he stood before a cypress and petted its feathery, unmoving leaves from which emanated a resiny woodiness in the moisture they transferred to his palm. He raised his hand to his face, delivered his palm toward his nose with fingers spread out wide and inhaled deeply the crisp, immaculate texture of the leaves. He wiped his hand across his cheek and over his brow, his skin tingled with the smell of petrichor.
Before he stepped into the tree line, before disappearing within the vegetation of the wood beyond, he looked back toward the river and across the meadow to where crested, through the tall grasses, a flashed multitude of tiny bright splatters, scarlet and blue—the sunny morning flowers abloom about the green meadow in its awakening. And through the meadow, right down its middle, the lone evidence of the boy’s presence there—the weakest procession of flattened blades of grass he had left behind him as he walked.
For a long time, the boy walked through the dense growth of the wood, treading carefully with his bare feet the uneven ground, the soaked undergrowth over-covered with dead leaves and fallen branches. In time he came to a circular glade, and into the center of the glade he entered, and he stood for a moment listening to the faint wind in the trees. He sat down upon the leaves, legs crisscross. All still. He then lay down upon the leaves, closed his eyes and listened to the trees and to the sky above and even to the sun in its rising, and soon he fell asleep.
In his dream the boy stood on the bank of a river and looked out across the water that ran slowly and serenely. There came a rumbling from upriver and the water began to swell and soon it began to rush and to surge. O’er the water tumbled the shattered limbs, the leaves, the gnarled pods of varied moss. The boy stepped back from the bank as the water continued to rise and yet he did not take his eyes off the river. A small vessel, what appeared to be his own commandeered canoe, appeared bouncing and lurching wildly on the mounting roll of whitewater. It passed the boy and vanished as quickly as it had appeared. And the water of the river, now brown and muddied and opaque, went suddenly quiet all again. And the debris in the water all but cleared from the surface that now before him flowed all soupy and thick. In the distance up the river where the trees were darkly dense, a mottled mass in places white and brown came bobbing faintly and partly submerged, and from it sprouted four white sticks, four bone white batons scuzzy with scraps of fur all soaked and muddied, which shot upward toward the trees. These drew steadily closer toward him until he saw that beneath them the mass that bore them was the body of a drowned beast, the corpse of a cow floating upside down in the water. Beneath the water’s surface the boy could discern the head of the cow as it gathered clearer into form, and beneath the head he saw the two black eyes, open and dead. As it came nearer, the corpse began to wriggle and twist, and as if it were reanimating, it took on a new movement. From the water slowly rose the head of the cow and it tilted toward the boy and the boy saw not the face of the cow but the face of a man, furless and pale and smooth with eyes blinking and the hair on its head now streaming through the water in grayish network. The face pulled out of the water fully and swiveled, its mouth opening and closing as if to construct a word, the water pouring out as it worked for voice or for breath. The boy felt himself move back from the bank, conveyed that way by some alien agent, and now he could see that the face which he saw was that of the old man, his grandfather. Within it, the same blue irises glistened through the sclera. Around the eyes the face sagged and seemed to peel apart and away. As the corpse began to roll and to turn, the upturned legs collapsed and folded into the water, and now the face emerged fully and watched the boy with a distant focus as the corpse moved toward the boy on the bank. It moved closer until it came to the mud of the bank and stopped briefly as if to gather strength, then it heaved itself out of the water, and with its forelegs up on the bank, it began to rise from the river. The grandfather’s face looked down to the hooves in the mud, then looked back up the bank to the boy with eyes like two marbles struck towards the antipodes, and now it rose from the water completely, hindlegs floundering in the mud before finding purchase whereupon it began to climb farther up the bank in a slow, deliberate march until it came near enough to the boy that the reeking exudation of its putrefaction, the sodden decomposition of the skin, loose and sagging, hung about its frame all wilted and flagged in the manner of a smoker’s lung, consumed all the air, consumed all the trees, consumed all the birds and the reptiles and the insects and all that was life within them, and stole it away from the boy to capture it all and make its own.
When he woke and opened his eyes, nothing much had changed. The sky above was still mostly gray and the trees that circled the glade stirred not at all. He must not have slept for long. Rising from the ground, the boy brushed off the leaves that clung to the back of his legs and stuck to the terrycloth of his shorts. It had only been a dream; but he could not shake off the feeling of someone watching, some secret witness of both the dream and of his waking from it. A tight black bloom of miniscule gnats hovered about the boy’s face. He palmed the cloud away, shook his head, and looked about the glade and to the trees and could not remember from which place among them he had emerged. The boy rose to his feet and began to walk in one direction, then he thought again and turned and walked another way. He walked and walked through the trees. Before long, he accepted he was lost for sure in the woods, which had taken a denser aspect above him, and now beneath the canopy all was dark and invariable within. He could not tell what time it was, but by the thin shafts of light that plunged through the breaches among the leaves now and then, he reckoned it to be well past breakfast. They would be up and about by now, and his grandmother and grandfather, each beginning to panic somewhat about his absence from camp. Surely, they would be looking for him. He saw them conferring with one another by the camper, saw them opening the door of his tent and peering inside to find nothing save the bedroll. Or perhaps they had not yet noticed. He saw his grandfather standing at the counter by the stove inside the camper, scrambling eggs so heavily peppered they were nearly black. In a plastic lawn chair at the table beside the camper his grandmother poured the steaming coffee from the percolator. Suddenly his stomach gnawed and groused, and when he swallowed his throat was rough and dry. From somewhere distant he heard the cry of his name; but if he had heard it, he distrusted that he had, and so stood still to listen for it again. And he listened until it did not come again.
The trees were waking gradually in the warming of the sun, and to it they moaned mournfully through slouching boughs as the boy walked beneath them. The tee shirt the boy wore clung to his chest like a flimsy plaster, and on his back droplets of sweat formed and dribbled down. In places about his arms and lower thighs scores of stinging slits showed scarlet, put there by the needly thorns of the underbrush in the boy’s directionless progress through the woods.
When he came to the trail, which was little more than a thin scrape of mud that dragged off to the left and right of him, the sensation that came to him, which made his shoulders rise, was not unlike the relief he felt earlier when he had set off down the river in the canoe. The sole distinction being that, rather than feeling relief from having quit his grandparents and the strange transformations they had undergone in the night, he now felt reassured that he would soon be returning to them. He chose to take the trail to the left. Eastward, he figured and took to the trail with a renewed haste. In a short while, he came to a trail marker, just a small wooden cube that lay to the side of the trail which was partially obscured by vines. Etched and filled in with black paint into the slanting top of the cube was the numeral 2. He kept down the trail until he came to another marker, this one bearing the numeral 1.
A quarter mile farther up the trail, a brightness in the distance. Encouraged, the boy walked along, following the trail until in time he came to its terminus, a vacant campsite long unused and not maintained, nor otherwise serviced in what had probably been a half dozen years. Within the camp site lay a fire pit ringed by a loop of gray stones cauterized black about their fringes. Save the cushiony stratum of compacted wet ash lining its floor and the small carbon remnants of long-spent segments of logs in a mound within its center, the fire pit was all but empty. He stood before the stones circumscribing the pit and touched one of them with his toe. As he did this, a mosquito landed on the dorsum of his foot, instantly inserted its proboscis into the skin and went to work on the boy’s blood, its tiny black body pumping rapaciously. The boy bent toward his foot and swatted the leeching insect, which exploded in a mess of black wires and blood. With an epithet he had known only his grandfather to have used with a permissible veteran mastery most often reserved for ill-behaved felines rummaging through the garden back home, the boy whispered, You little sonofabitch.
He brushed away the spindly appendages and blood from his foot and rose again to survey the camp site. Other than the fire pit, there were two other objects within the site’s perimeter. A metal box the size and shape of a church hymnal lay somewhat sunk into the ground at the farthest edge and beside the box a much rusted, lidded bbq grill sat perched atop a likewise rusted metal post protruding somewhat obliquely from its base in the dirt. He looked more closely at the box on the ground and saw the face of it to be a thin sheet of metal hanging by a hinge which creaked as he lifted it. He crouched beside the box to look inside. A water faucet swathed in the filmy white tresses of spider silk jutted up from the ground. He gripped the handle and turned it with his fingers. Nothing came from the tap. He twisted the handle back tight then turned it the opposite way. He ran his finger under the tap for moisture. Nothing. And in that moment, with the increasing dryness in his throat and the nagging emptiness he felt in his belly, it was as if some omnipotent god, the one who watched over all things and was looking down upon him now, had actioned a single tremendous strike upon some colossal drum of the heavens. And as he looked up to the sky, then back to the ground, then to his feet and back to the ungiving faucet, he understood as if through an altogether separate soul doubled to his own, that he was perfectly alone.
Yet this clear understanding, this unmistakable comprehension as to his present state of aloneness, was not new to the boy. Standing solemnly beside his quietly weeping mother, his hand clutching the silken fabric of her dress in the vicious heat of that confusing and baleful day in July, he had been amazed by the agonizing duration of the interment. The casket in which lay his father’s lifeless body seemed to descend into the grave by mere fractions of millimeters at a time. Forever framed within the still-forming memory of his ten-year old mind, like a photograph faded and yellowed at the corners but with the lines and contours of the portrait within still vividly defined, he could see his mother’s face, an errant tress of her auburn hair whipping in the Texas summer wind from beneath the shear widow’s veil she wore, as the pastor spoke the Commendation:
Into your hands, O Lord,
We commend the soul of your servant.
Receive him into your presence and grant him eternal rest.
May he find peace and joy in your eternal kingdom.
After the burial, the boy sat in the back seat of his grandfather’s idling sedan, the cool conditioned air within smelling pungently of stale cigarette smoke and lilac vegetal, and he watched through the window as his grandmother embraced her daughter and his grandfather, with an enormous hand subtle as a dump truck parked upon his daughter’s shoulder, mouthed words to his daughter with head bowed consolingly. And when his mother turned to the sedan and attempted the kindness of a smile as she waved to him curtly with crumpled tissue in her hand, he knew, then, that he would not see her again any time soon.
After the friends and family of the deceased had left his grandparent’s home, he lay in the new bed of an unfamiliar room and did not sleep but watched through the blue darkness of the night, until dawn, the slow whirling of the ceiling fan that hummed softly above him.
The boy rose from the ground and looked at the bbq grill. He moved toward it and stopped and studied it. When he gripped the handle on the lid, the rusting coils wound across it like a relaxed spring felt cool and damp in his hand. He hesitated before lifting the lid, conjuring the improbably optimistic potential of their being beefsteaks on the grill grates sizzling over the orange-red embers of coal briquettes. He drew up the handle no more than an inch, and from the darkened crack between the lid and the pit of the grill burst forth a chaotically wriggling clutch of hundreds of harvestmen, all grossly entangled brown and gray, their long spindly legs intertwined and vibrating frenetically as they fell together in a twisting intrication from the gap, like a curtain formed of countless, spiked mace heads in miniature. The creatures fell to the ground and instantly disbanded and dispersed, dozens of them climbing over the boy’s feet and up his ankles. The boy gasped and reared back as the grill lid slammed shut. He fell backward and landed on his hands in the dirt. Eyes full and wide with astonishment, he froze and could do nothing but watch as the tiny dots of pulsing thoraces vaulted and flickered up his legs. From vents bored into the sides of the base of the grill the insects kept coming, emerging manically like Blitzkrieg soldiers mobilizing in the onslaught of an attack. They clambered up the boy’s legs and along his hands and arms, sparking silently on his skin like dulled pyrotechnics seen from such a long way away.
The boy jumped up quickly and stamped the ground, shook his arms of the soldiery and slapped them away with his hands. The ground before and about him had now become a thinly drawn carpet of quivering animation, a multitude of miniscule lives, each without consequence except in service as a part to its whole. Only the minutes, the seconds of which all one’s time is comprised, could hold a gravity parallel.
Out of the abandoned camp site and away from the throng, back on the trail, the boy ran through the woods. At some point he veered from the trail and ran thrashing through the trees, and when he broke through the trees and found before him the meadow expanse, he fell to his knees and looked out across it to where he could make out the trees that ran along the river beyond. With the sun so fully birthed above that shadows fell no more from the trees, the boy panted, his heart hammering in his chest. After a while, he rose and walked back through the grass of the meadow away from the cypresses and loped toward the river with a thick haze in his head.
When he came to the bank of the river, he followed it upstream, searching for the place where he had earlier that morning moored the canoe. He knew he had found it when he saw the oar still lodged into the roots that tangled out the bank. But the cord he had tied around the oar lay flat in the mud, and when he stepped down the bank, he saw the canoe was no longer there. Its tether had been cut, cleanly as though by a knife. No trace of the canoe, save a subtle smoothness at the foot of the bank by the water where he had earlier pushed it up into the mud. The boy’s heart sank, and his shoulders dropped. And yet he realized at once that, even had he found the canoe, he had not figured his return to the pier upstream correctly. For though the current was mild, weak, and slow, the notion he could have rowed the craft against it with that solitary oar was an impossible one. He had not thought this through.
The boy sat in the mud by the river and with his hands formed into an ovular bowl scooped its cool water into his parched mouth. He splashed the water over his face and hair and over the back of his neck. The blue slender bodies of two dragonflies darted back and forth in swift synchronization, their shimmering wings humming steadily above the water.
His grandfather was standing on the pier, cigarette dangling from his lips, his hands on the rails of the pier as he looked out into the river. As the boy approached on the opposite bank, his grandfather watched him. He tossed his cigarette into the water. The boy walked down the bank and lowered himself into the water and stepped gingerly through the knee-high water on the stones that wiggled and slipped beneath his toes until the water got deep and he started to swim. When he came to the bank, his grandfather walked down the pier and over toward the water. He stood on the bank and watched as the boy came out of the water and planting his feet into the mud of the bank, attempted to stand. His grandfather leaned down the bank and extended his hand toward the boy who took his hand and let himself be borne up the bank by it.
His grandfather steadied the boy, holding his shoulders in his hands. He looked the boy over, looked at the boy’s feet and the scratches on his legs and his arms. He ran his hand over the boy’s head and pushed back the dripping hair from his eyes. His grandfather nodded toward the pier. The boy walked over to it and walked up the pier to where he had left his shoes and socks. He sat on the pier, wiped off the mud from his feet, put his socks on and laced up his shoes. He rose and stood on the pier as his grandfather walked up to join him. The boy looked down at the wooden slats of the pier between his shoes.
His grandfather sighed.
Go on back to camp, he said. Go on up and lay down in the camper. I’ll be there shortly.
Photo by Josh Duke on Unsplash
