“What’s this got to do with Cheep?”
“I’m coming to that. But when the cause really takes the knight—in your case prison—I feel cheated. Like it’s not for me anymore. Things come apart. I want to start over, get a new knight. But I couldn’t do that with you because of Cheep. Just a bird, I know, but he made me feel tied to you. Other things wouldn’t do it, the cause, the love we shared, but the bird was a living reminder. He wouldn’t fly away. Depended on me completely. And I couldn’t just leave him. He wouldn’t have lasted any time in the wild, and in fact would have suffered. But I didn’t want to start life anew with him. He reminded me I was a failure at things. Relationships, what have you.
“So I filled the bathtub with water and took Cheep and held him under till he drowned. It didn’t take long. He didn’t suffer. But I still think about it. I carry that goddamn bird’s ghost on my soul like a weight.
“But when I did it I felt good. Not that Cheep was dead, but that I had made a strong decision without anyone’s help, or without me leading someone else into doing what I wanted. It should have been a turning point. But I didn’t really understand why I did what I did at the time. I knew I wanted to be free of something, but I wasn’t sure what. You were my first major love, but on a smaller scale, with boys in high school, couple in college, I had already established a kind of pattern. Building someone up so they could be special, and since they were special, and they loved me, it made me special. Against all odds, we two … that sort of thing. You see, killing Cheep was killing a symbol.”
“Cheep might disagree.”
“But the sense of freedom didn’t last. I fell back into my old ways. I found a new knight and let him lead, and when he led away from me, I went knight hunting again, and again. I understand all that now. What I’m saying, Hap, is that I’m ready to kill a bird again. This time, the bird is the old me. I’m going to drown that bird and be a new person. Someone who believes in herself. In idealism for its sake. Not as a symbol of worth, or love. I want to be a woman who doesn’t need a man to put out front and pretend he’s leading and suffering for me, his fair-haired damsel. Don’t have to say, ‘Look at my man go.’ I can go. Come hook or crook, I can see things through.”
“Jesus Christ, Trudy. You been doing some major rationalizing here is what you been doing. You’re not learning to be independent. You’re realizing how selfish you’ve always been is all, and you’re justifying it with some bullshit self-analysis, like Chub would do.”
“Think what you want.”
We were silent for a time.
“This thing you’re going to see through,” I said. “It sounds serious.”
“Let’s say I’m serious. I’d like to have you with us, but I don’t need you the way I used to need you. I don’t need Howard either.”
“Don’t need us, how come you got us?”
“I want your help. But I don’t have to have it. Not the old way, as my knight. All I want is to believe in something so strong, that belief and my own inner conviction carry me. Like those monks who set fire to themselves to protest the Vietnam War. I want to have that kind of dedication.”
“They had dedication, all right. But they also got burned up.”
“It’s all gone bad out there, Hap. Worse than the sixties, because now no one cares. Someone’s got to do something, even if what they do is nothing more than stirring the soup. We could start people thinking. They’re all so apathetic. So what if the ozone layer is being eaten away by pollutants in aerosol cans? So what if people are starving on our city streets? Why have government funding for AIDS? It’s a disease for queers, right? People don’t even vote anymore, because they know it’s all a lie, Hap.”
“Don’t forget the destruction of the seals.” I said. “The whales? The sparrows like Cheep?”
“I did what I had to do, Hap. It was a terrible thing, but sometimes you have to do terrible things so you can make progress. Sometimes you do something terrible so some good will come of it.”
“Trudy, you got to grow up sometime. You can’t take the world in to raise. No one can.”
“I feel sorry for you, Hap. You got nothing left inside to hold the dark away.”
When we got to Tyler, Trudy turned around and we started back.
I said, “You seem to be avoiding telling me exactly what it is you have planned.”
“I thought I’d tell you tonight, Hap. But I’ve decided not to. You might try and mess it up out of spite.”
“I may disagree with you, but I’m not spiteful.”
“You might be. You’ve changed. Could be I don’t know you good as I thought. I wanted you with us, but I think now you should do your job and take things as they come to you.”
We didn’t cuddle and kiss anymore. We didn’t even talk. Trudy turned on the radio. It was an all-sixties station. Percy Sledge sang “When A Man Loves A Woman,” followed by the Turtles singing “She Only Wants To Be With Me.” Good stuff, wrong moment. It was depressing.
We got back to the Sixties Nest, and I was about to get out when she reached across and put her hand on my thigh.
“You couldn’t have changed that much, Hap. You were so … noble.”
I put my hand on hers, suddenly wondered if this hand was the one that had held Cheep under. I wondered what else this hand was capable of. I took hold of it and put it on the seat between us.
“Watch it, that’s knight talk.… You’ve changed too, Trudy. You may have the willpower and dedication you always wanted, but I think maybe you lost something in the process.”
“I see it as a gain.”
“Whatever. I think for you and me, there’s been too much blood under the bridge.”
I got out of the Volvo and went in ahead of her, went to the back porch and took off my coat, socks and shoes, rolled up in my bedding.
I heard Trudy come in and go through the hall door, then I didn’t hear her anymore.
I lay there listening to Leonard snore and tried to force myself to sleep for a few hours, but I’d go in and out, and when I came out I would remember bad dreams.
Dreams that ought to have been funny, but weren’t. Like this soft, feminine hand holding me by the throat, pushing me down into a tub of water. My mouth was open and I had a beak instead of lips and I was blowing bubbles.
Then I was floating face down in the water, my back covered with feathers, the water in the tub red as blood.
16
Next morning I waited in my sleeping bag until Trudy and Howard were off to work. I didn’t want to look either of them in the eye. Didn’t want to see the look of disappointment she would give me, the look of pain Howard would have. He probably woke up in the middle of the night, found her gone, and thought we were out banging one another silly until the wee hours of the morning.
I think Trudy would have wanted him to think that. I wish that was what had happened. I wish I had never learned the truth about Cheep.
Someone had bought a few groceries the day before, so Leonard pan-toasted a couple slices of bread and we spread them with butter and had some bad leftover coffee the texture of syrup.
Outside the day was cold, but still clear. We drove to the bottoms and began our game plan.
What we did was simple. We drove down the main bottom road until we saw a cutoff we thought the car could handle, and we took it.
Sometimes the cutoffs circled back to the main road, or met up with another little road.
When a road dead-ended at the woods or river, or was just too muddy to drive, we got out of the car and walked awhile, hoping I’d see something familiar that would lead to a tributary or creek or some little outflow of water that might be the home of the Iron Bridge.
Mostly we walked and Leonard cussed the brush and rotten logs we stepped over. I think he did it to irritate me. I’d never known the woods to bother him before. I think he wanted to remind me he thought this whole thing was stupid and he was humoring me.
I tried to ignore him and listen to the
cries of the birds and the splashing sounds coming from the river. Those sounds made me think of great fishing days and channel cats, the catfish they called the trout of the Sabine. Gunmetal grey, lean and graceful with pointed heads and wide, forked tails. And there were the bigger cats that swam along the bottom of the river or laid up between the huge roots of water-based trees. Some called them bottom cats and others called them flatheads. They were big, brownish rascals, sometimes fifteen feet long, weighing up to a hundred pounds, narrow-tailed, with a wide head and a mouth big enough to suck up a child. And there were stories that they had.
Certainly there were gars in there that had bitten children and pulled swimming dogs under for their afternoon meals. They didn’t call the big ones alligator gar for nothing. Six feet long, lean and vicious, they were the barracudas of fresh water, beasts with angry racial memories of lost prehistoric seas.
And now and then, there was the real McCoy, the alligator. I had never known them to be plentiful along this stretch of the Sabine, and growing up I had seen only one in the river, and that one from a distance. Another I had seen big and complete, lying dead in the back of a fisherman’s pickup out front of Coogen’s Feed Store.
To the best of my knowledge, they were hibernating. Hoped so. Rare or not, it only took one to punch your ticket. They weren’t the sort of critters minded eating a man in a dry suit, oxygen tanks and all.
Definitely the cottonmouth water moccasins, the meanest snakes in the United States, were hibernating, and that was a relief. Winter, even one bad as this one, was not without its charms.
We scouted around like this until noon, then drove into town, bought some bread, sandwich meat and beers, drove back and found a little road that terminated at the river bank, sat on the hood of the car and had lunch.
We didn’t talk much. We watched the brown water roll by and spread out in a dirty foam where the river widened down to our left. “In the spring it would be great to come here and fish,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said.
Another half hour went by.
“Guess we ought to get back at it,” I said, totaling a beer. “Yeah.”
We walked along the edge of the bank and the wind picked up and brought a damp chill off the water; the sky had gone grey as a cinder block.
We went until the bank became nothing more than mud and gravel and was hard to keep our footing on. We were about to turn back when I saw a great tree split wide from lightning, its blackened halves lying one on the bank, the other partially in the water.
I studied it.
“That used to be a big tree,” I said.
“Good, Kemosabe. Pale Face no miss fucking thing. Him know big trees from small trees. Pale Face one smart sumbitch.”
“It used to have an old tire swing hung from a chain. The swing was over the river.”
“You’re saying you remember something?”
“We’d bail out of it into the water, then climb up and do it again.”
“We’re near the Iron Bridge?”
“No, I just remember the tree and the swing.”
“But it’s a landmark to help you find the bridge?”
“Probably not. I remember the tree, but can’t put it into relationship with the Iron Bridge. I know we used to come here is all. The Iron Bridge is on the side of the river we’re on, though. Bridge goes partway over a creek that shoots off the river on this side. The tree helped me remember that.”
“That’s something,” Leonard said. “You remember that much, means we can spend all our time looking on this bank.”
“It’s not real close to the river, as I recall. It’s down this creek I’m thinking about, and quite a ways.”
“Meaning the creek you can’t find?”
“That’s the one.”
“So, Dan’l, what do we do now?”
“Any more beers?”
“Nope.”
“Guess we keep looking.”
17
Back to work we went, driving those back roads and excuses for roads, and it was late afternoon, maybe two hours before dark, when we drove around this curve and I happened to look out and see this rusty metal pole, and, bam, there was an explosion in my memory centers. At first I couldn’t place what had exploded, but around the curve we went, and the debris from the explosion rose to the top of my memory and began to tumble into something identifiable and I said more calmly than I felt, “Stop the car.”
“You’re smiling,” Leonard said. “You got something, right?”
“Turn around.”
He had to drive a ways before we could find a wide enough place to get the car turned, and when we got back to the curve and the pole, I had him pull over. We got out, and I took a look. My smile got bigger.
“When we used to come down here this pole had a metal sign on it,” I said. “Probably rusted off the bolts and’s under all these leaves and pine needles, a few years of dirt. Sign said something about this piece of land belonging to some oil company or another. I don’t remember exactly. But by the time we started going here, there were bullet holes in the sign and it was no longer valid. The oil company had long since lost its lease on the place, and it had reverted back to the county, or the State of Texas, or whoever owns it. But the little road for trucks and equipment was still here, worn down and grown up some, but still usable.”
“It’s not here now,” Leonard said.
I looked where I remembered the little road being. The trees were scanty there, relatively young. In spots there were patches of dirt mixed with old hauled-in gravel, and neither trees nor weeds had found support there. If you studied hard enough, you could see where the little narrow road had wound itself down into the woods toward the water.
“I think this was the road Softboy and his boys took after robbing the bank,” I said. “They made all these pretty good plans, but the dumb suckers saw water and assumed they put their boat next to the Sabine.”
“But it was the broad part of the creek that flows under the Iron Bridge?”
“Yep.”
We pushed limbs aside, stepped through the browning winter grass, and then followed the faint curves of the old road. When we came to water, we were at a spot as wide and deep as the Sabine at its best. It was easy to see how someone who didn’t know the river could mistake this for it.
“If they had a car down here and ran it off in the water,” Leonard said, “reckon Softboy would have done it right here, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but it might not be there now. Over the years, the floods and swellings, even something the size and weight of a car could move, if only an inch or a foot at a time.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wizard.”
We went walking along the bank. The undergrowth turned thick and grew out to the water. There was little room for footing. Sometimes we hung on to limbs and roots and dangled out over the creek, pulled ourselves along the steep bank like that until we found ground again. It was tough work, and even cold as it was, we worked up a lather.
The creek eventually turned narrow, just wide enough and deep enough for a boat to go on. I recalled it widened again at the bridge, then, not far beyond that, narrowed enough to jump across, and went like that a long ways.
We got past all the undergrowth and came to the second widening of the creek. There was plenty of bank to stand on now. The water was dark and spotted with stumps and lily pads. Great trees leaned out from the shoreline and spread branches over the water thick as macramé, dripped vines and moss. Past all that, where the water was less dark and less riddled with stumps, was the Iron Bridge.
Half a bridge, really—what was built before the money played out. It sagged, and was covered with vines and moss. The metal, where it was visible, had gone red-brown with rust.
“Why would they build here?” Leonard said. “Back a ways they could have thrown a bridge across in an afternoon.”
“They were going to widen all this, entire Sabine and its tributaries, I think. Make one gigan
tic river out of it. They had, as the Baptist preachers say, grandiose plans. Thought they’d be getting so much oil they’d be using river barges. Tools and machinery coming from the northern end of the river, oil in barrels heading South. But it played out before they got started good. There’re abandoned wells all through these woods.”
“You know,” Leonard said, “I’m a wee bit excited. If there’s a car down there, just might be a boat with money in it. Finding the car would be a way of checking. We got an hour before dark. What do you think?”
“Now’s as good a time as any,” I said.
We went back to the car and opened the trunk. The tanks were well packed in foam rubber so they wouldn’t bang together and blow us to hell. And they could. They were highly explosive.
Leonard got in the backseat first and took off his clothes. He had this tube of grease for bonding the dry suit to the flesh, and he rubbed the grease all over his body and pulled on the suit. He got out of the car and put on the tanks and mask.
Then it was my turn.
I hated the grease part.
We put our clothes in the trunk, got a fifty foot coil of thin rope out of there, and went down to the water carrying our flippers.
Leonard fastened the rope to his belt and went in first, and I fed the rope out to him, keeping just enough slack in it.
After a few minutes, he came out of the water and shook. He took the regulator out of his mouth and pulled his mask up. His face looked gray.