“But she was mean.”
“You walk a mile in her shoes, then you can judge. You got to see it from her side.”
I didn’t understand that at all.
“She was mean,” I said again.
“She’s got her burden,” Mama said.
She pulled the car back onto the street. It was a long time before she spoke. When we got to Hell’s Half Mile, Mama said, “When I was a girl my mama made me some lemonade, put it in a big pitcher, put it on a table out under a tree. She said I should sit there and enjoy it, listen to the birds. So I did. I sat there in a chair in front of the little table and drank my lemonade. I drank it fast. It was sweet. It had so much sugar in it, you had to stir it between glasses, ’cause you didn’t, it all settled to the bottom of the pitcher, like sand under water. I drank that pitcher of lemonade so fast because it was so sweet and so good, and then when I got up to go in the house, I was dizzy. It was drinking all that lemonade so fast and it being so sweet. I got real dizzy. I fell when I got to the porch and hit my head on the steps. I still got the scar, just under my hairline. It knocked me out.
“When I come to, Mama had me in the house, stretched out on the couch, and she had bandaged my head. I sat up on the couch when I felt I could, and Mama came in, said, ‘You got to learn to take your pleasures slowly, girl. Enjoy them, ’cause there’s a lot that isn’t pleasurable. And if something is good, and then things go wrong, don’t blame the good part if you didn’t spend the right kind of time enjoying it.”
She stopped talking. I thought that was an odd story, considering what had happened that night. As we drove across the Sabine bridge, into Marvel Creek, Mama said, “You see, son, life has got its good and its bad. It’s got its lemonade, and it’s got blood. Tonight, we had a bit of both. And you can’t let the good we did, the lemonade, get outweighed by something that went bad. You got to think slowly on the good, not get caught up in the bad. Got to see the whole picture.”
I wasn’t sure back then what she was talking about, and by the time we arrived at the house, I had fallen asleep against the car door and had to be shook awake.
8.
In the River of the Dead
As we crossed the long Sabine River bridge going out of Marvel Creek, we both turned our heads toward the river, the left side of the bridge. Even from that side we could see the river way out and winding.
I heard Leonard sigh.
I knew what he was remembering. We couldn’t drive over the bridge without thinking about it. It was of our first moments together that wasn’t just threatening and dangerous, it was deadly.
“That was something,” Leonard said, not even bothering to explain what he meant.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s when we were really getting to know each other,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You did something for me that was damn foolish.”
“I did, and I wouldn’t do it again.”
“Yes, you would. I still have it.”
“I know that. By the way, I think it makes a lousy key fob.”
“It reminds me of a lot of things, not all of them good,” he said. “Sometimes you got to remember the ugly, look it in the eye.”
We were across the bridge and out of there, but my memory of what happened wasn’t gone, and we sat in silence for a while, both of us remembering it our own way, I guess.
We were seventeen when this happened, out fishing on the Sabine River.
What we learned was if we went fishing, sat in a boat and dragged some lines in the water, we might catch dinner for our night camp, but mostly we found out about each other. That’s how I learned about Leonard’s family, his feelings about being black and gay, and he learned about my family and me.
We drifted all day, had our camping supplies in the boat, and the plan was we would find a place to stop before nightfall. The boat was pretty good sized, an open boat. The outboard motor wasn’t strong on horse power, but it puttered us along as fast as we needed to go.
The river smelled sour because the day was warm. After we motored down a ways, we killed the engine and let the boat drift beneath the shade of the overhanging trees in the narrow part of the river. It was cooler there. The wind finally picked up, which was nice, because it blew the stink and the mosquitoes away from us.
It wasn’t quite dark when Leonard snagged his line. Where we were, the Sabine was surprisingly clear. The water ran fast enough we had to drop anchor to keep from floating away. The deep water was so clear, that when Leonard looked to see what his line was snagged on, he saw all the way to the bottom.
“Take a look,” he said.
I learned over the side and looked. There was a boat on the bottom.
It wasn’t a boat with an outboard. It was one those boats with a top and front and side glasses in the cabin, and it had a real engine. Except for being on the bottom of the river, it looked like a nice boat. Leonard’s line had caught up in a side rail, and we could see it clearly. Leonard pulled at the line, but it wouldn’t come loose.
“I could swim down there and get it,” he said.
“That’s deeper than it looks,” I said.
“I can swim good,” he said. “I’m like fucking Aquaman.”
“Just cut the line and go on. Re-rig your tackle.”
“I want that sinker,” he said.
“A goddamn lead sinker, that’s your worry? Shit, I got lead sinkers in my tackle box. Help yourself, and when we get back to shore I’ll buy you some more, maybe get you an anvil to tie on your line.”
“My uncle gave it to me,” he said. “It’s made out of lead. It’s a little figurine, an old black mammy from some kind of advertisement.”
I hadn’t noticed he had it. I said, “And you want that?”
“You might not understand it, Hap, but it belongs to my uncle, or did. He gave it to me. It’s what we call a keep-sake.”
“A humiliating little statue made of lead that’s a black mammy, and you won’t be able to sleep nights if you don’t get it? You’re jerking my dick?”
“He took it off a man once. A man tried to fight him, made fun of him, and waved that thing under his nose.”
“Some guy was carrying it around in his pocket?” I said.
“Story is, my uncle whipped his ass and took that thing and made it his own. Then he gave it to me.”
“Try shaking it loose again.”
“I’ve tried,” Leonard said. “The hook is under the railing somehow. I’m going to swim down and get it.”
“I’ll be right here,” I said.
Leonard pulled his shirt over his head, slipped off his shoes and pants until he was in his boxer shorts.
Leonard, who had probably seen the same episodes of Sea Hunt I had, sat on the edge of the boat and back-flipped into the water. I moved from where I sat and took his former spot, and looked down.
Leonard swam with hard strokes. My guess was right, it was deeper than it looked. I saw him reach the deck and land on it and pull himself along the railing to where his hook was hung, and I saw his head turn toward the open back door of the boat’s cabin. Leonard froze there. He stood there on the deck underwater for a few seconds, and then he forgot the sinker, let go of the railing, and came swimming up hard. I watched him surface like a porpoise and grab the side of the boat. I helped him inside the boat.
“What the fuck?” I said. “You forgot the sinker.”
For a black guy he looked a little pale.
“There are bodies down there. Naked bodies.”
“What?”
“Bodies.”
“What do you mean, bodies?”
“What the fuck do you think I mean, a squirrel and a moose? Fucking bodies. People. I saw a woman and a man floating in there, and they ain’t testing the temperature of the water.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah, Jesus.”
“What do you think happened?”
“They fucking dr
owned, I guess. God, Hap. I don’t know.”
I thought about it for a moment, stripped off my clothes, and went over the side. The water was cold. When I swam to the deck, I looked through the open door and saw what Leonard had seen. Two bodies. I looked in there, and when I did a child’s corpse brushed up against me, made me shoot up to our boat and clamor over the side, almost tipping it.
“There’s a child too,” I said.
“Shit,” Leonard said.
“Yeah. I panicked.”
“Me too,” Leonard said. “Maybe we should learn not to panic.”
“I guess the boat sank fast and they drowned, but damn, couldn’t they swim up from that depth? It’s deep, but it’s not that deep, and the mother or the father could have brought the child up.”
“Not if it was so quick they were down there and full of water before they knew it.”
“It would have to have had a real blow out to sink that fast,” I said. “I didn’t see any rips, so it has to be a hole in the cabin.”
“We ought to get someone down here to get them out,” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “We got to do that. Look, I’m going down one more time to get your sinker.”
“Oh, the hell with it,” he said.
“It was everything a few minutes ago, and now it’s to hell with it?”
“I hadn’t found three dead bodies in a boat then.”
I didn’t say anything. I was still in my shorts, so I got my pocket knife out of my jeans, opened the knife, and went over the side and swam down. I cut the fishing line loose and got the little lead statue Leonard was using for a sinker and clutched it in my fist. The water was starting to stir and grow dirty, and the sun was going down, laying a strange rust-colored sheen over the water.
I made myself go into the cabin again. It was creepy to see them floating in there, and there was blood too, but it was in odd little strings that floated in the water inside the cabin like odd party confetti.
That kid must have been about four or five years old, and that was a hard thing to see, because when he rolled in the water, which was becoming agitated, I could see there was a hole in his head right over his ear, and when he rolled over, I could see the other side, and there was a larger hole there, one that pretty much replaced that side of his head.
The man and woman were young, and I could see there were burns on their body, and something was stuck up their asses and broken off. Liquor bottles, I thought. There were dark bruises on their necks, and the man’s penis had been split down the middle like a banana, and the woman’s breasts had burn marks on them. River mud stirred by something washed in and everything turned dark. I panicked and lost my pocket knife and swam up with the lead statue in my fist.
When I topped out of the water darkness had fallen on the river like a curtain, and it was raining. You couldn’t see very far down the river, but you could see a line of rain crossing it and coming in our direction, a rain more fierce than the current one. It was coming in waves and the next wave was going to be rough. The moon wasn’t up yet and the stars weren’t visible, and with the rain like that, and the clouds, you might not be able to see them anyway.
Leonard pulled me into the boat, and then he got a flashlight and turned it on me. I held out my hand with the statue in it.
“You didn’t need to do that, Hap.”
“Hell, I know that. Those people, they’ve been murdered. It’s not just a boat drowning.”
I told him what I saw.
“Jesus. Well, one thing’s for sure. They didn’t come out here and do that to themselves, drown their kid and stick bottles up their asses and break them off.”
“What I’m saying.”
Leonard had already slipped into his clothes, and now I slipped back into mine. They were damp from the rain.
I went to crank the motor, and it wouldn’t crank.
Leonard said, “Let me give that a pull.”
Any other time I would have turned that line into a joke, but right then I didn’t feel too humorous.
He came over and took the rope, and jerked real hard. The rope broke.
“Nice work,” I said. “We got to paddle back.”
“Tonight? It would take hours. With this rain we won’t even be able to see where we’re going, and we’ll spend all night bailing out the boat.”
“But those people,” I said.
“Listen, Hap. We got to get the boat on shore, maybe I can screw off the casing on the outboard and figure how to get it going without the rope, or maybe I can tie the rope back together and start it, but it will still be dark and wet as shit. We can dock the boat, spend the night with our camping gear, like we planned to do, and in the morning we can paddle the boat, provided it’s not raining like a son-of-a-bitch. And speaking of that.”
The rain really hit then. It was heavy and cold and it splattered into the boat and within instants water was starting to rise inside of it.
“So,” Leonard said. “A better idea?”
“Let’s paddle for shore.”
We took the paddles from the bottom of the boat and did just that.
On shore we pulled our supplies from the boat. Our stuff was wrapped in water proof material inside our packs, so we had that going for us. We placed the packs under a large willow tree that was grouped up with some smaller struggling willows. We tipped the boat to get what water was in it out, and then Leonard used a spare shirt from his pack to rub the boat as dry as he could while I stood over him with a ground cloth stretched over our heads. He didn’t completely get out the water, but it helped. I pulled the ground cloth over the top of the boat and tied it around the edges with some fishing line, running the line through gaps in the edges of the boat. The plan was we would sleep in the boat. The idea of sleeping on the ground with water moccasins was highly unappealing.
We needed to eat first, though. We had rain slickers, so we put those on and got up under the willow and used Leonard’s ground cloth to stretch above us and tie off to limbs to make a kind of rough canopy. Under that we sat against the tree and broke out a can opener and some canned Vienna sausages and Beanie Weenies and ate them with the utensils we had brought, a fork and knife a piece.
“What do you think happened?” I said.
“Well, someone was mad at them for something.”
“What could the child have done?”
“Not a thing, I’m sure.”
“Maybe the cops can figure it out,” I said.
“Maybe they can.”
We talked for a long while about it, and then about other things, and then about the boat again. We drank from our canteens. I had some apples in my pack, and got one for both of us. We sat under the tree eating the apples, the rain running off of the ground cloth we had rigged. It was hard to stay dry. It wasn’t really a cold night, but with the rain there was a chill, and I wished we had a fire, but the dead wood lying about would be wet, and we decided it wasn’t worth gathering it and decided to keep a cold camp.
Our plan was to get under the canopy in the boat, and with our flashlights, read. We had brought books for just that plan, but the truth was neither of us felt like reading or going to sleep. Every time we stopped talking, I saw in my head that poor child and those people, brutalized, down there in the water with fish swimming amongst them, not to mention snakes and what have you. It wasn’t a good image.
“What about our motor?” I said.
“In the morning. I can’t see shit in this rain.”
“Those poor people,” I said.
“They won’t get any deader,” Leonard said. “We’ll head back in the morning.”
“Sure,” I said.
“We ought to go to bed.”
“Yeah.”
But we didn’t.
“In the morning, we’ll find enough dry wood to make some coffee,” Leonard said.
“If you brought coffee. I got a pot we can cook it in, strain the grounds through something, but I don’t have any coffee.”
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“I thought you said you would bring the coffee?”
“No. I said we needed coffee.”
“You said that, I thought you meant you better get some.”
“Nope. I just wanted some. I thought you were going to bring it.”
“Perfect.”
That’s when we heard a motor on the river and saw a boat with a strong forward light coming up river. We sat silent and watched it slow down, then go by where we were. A little later we heard it turning back and saw the light again as the boat came back in our direction.
“I think they’re looking for the boat?” Leonard said.
“You think they know where it is?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“A guess.”
The boat passed our camp again, but didn’t go far before it turned around and they brought the boat alongside the bank and not far from the tree where we were. Leonard took out his pocket knife and opened it. I had lost my knife. I sat there with wishful thinking and no weapon.
The boat on the water was not too unlike the boat on the bottom of the river, and there were at least three men on it. I could hear them talking, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were still inside the cabin, but the door to the cabin was open, and their voices came out along with some light. In a little while they walked out on deck.
They had on hooded rain slickers. They were on the far side of their boat, away from shore, leaning over with their lights pointed at the water.
“Can’t see a damn thing,” one of the men said. He was the largest of the three.
“This is the place,” said another, who was a shorter version of the biggest man.
“You sure?” said the big man.
“Pretty sure.”
The third man, a thin guy, said, “You better be sure. That water is going to be cold, and it’s going to be you going in.”
The shorter stocky man at the side of the boat, leaning over the railing, stood up, said, “I’m not the only one going in, not in this dark water. I go, we all go, or we wait until morning.”
There was a silence on the boat, and then the biggest of the three, a fellow who seemed in charge, said, “Alright. We stay until morning, then we go in. Maybe the rain will be done.”