Deep in the Heart of Me (44 page)

Boss drives along the road that floods easy. It's just called Low-Hang Trail around here. Or the road that intersects Highway Three near the lake if you're looking on a map.

It runs through the creek that rises when the river does. The bridge was rebuilt by the CCC a few months ago, but it spends a few weeks every year submerged. It's under water now and here's what's bad. You have to know this road.

When the bridge is covered, a heavy length of the road is too.

If you're going to drive into the creek, you'll do it at the point of the bridge. It has no sides or markings to indicate you are on it. And you can't see the road to stay your course because the part that starts to rise dry is around a bend. So you have to go straight as an arrow even if the current has other ideas. That's how you take this road.

There are stories about it. Dramatic ones. Every three, four years they say someone who ends in the creek doesn't get saved. One whole family has never been found, and they are the ones who haunt this place, them and others dumped here with less fanfare. There are those stories too. Ulie won't take this road if he has to drive ten miles out of his way because we've argued it before.

And one look around, even the sun doesn't make it through with pure light. The trees are twisted, some of them dead, mourners who've lost every green sprout around them. They are bald with grief, gray as the sky here.

If the water is high enough, it can stall your engine. Some say only a fool tempts God and drives through Low-Hang in the spring.

Is Boss that fool?

What about me? I never started this journey because I'm smart. Smart has nothing to do with it.

His car reaches the water first, and I am behind, not enough that he won't see me, but enough that he won't care. He is stopped before that water trying to figure if he should go on or turn around. If he turns around, I am sitting center of the road, and I'm not moving.

But I already know what he's going to do. He may be a coward, but he thinks he's God.

He pulls forward.

Boss is going slow, cutting through the rush of water. He doesn't realize how deep it's going to get. Already it's slapping his bumper.

I roll Benny's truck closer.

I can see the big man is unsure, his brake lights flashing on and off, but he keeps inching forward. He knows it's tricky to go back, but he can't see how much further ahead before he's clear. He's wondering if he's about to drive off the road. He feels that water. It's a serious beast pushing and shoving.

I've pulled up enough I'm twenty feet away from the water. If he looks in his mirror, he can use my truck to mark the road.

Maybe I don't want that. I don't have time to think on it.

I'm waiting for something to happen.

It's a slow crawl then he stops right where the bridge should be. The water is over his license plate. The current is breaking against his car, doing its best to sweep him off that bridge. All the times I thought of it…how he did Ulie to get to me. All those times…and now him like this and God letting me see it, the waters parted by that black car, Boss inside.

There are things in your life, you go through, and they are so bad…you hear it about someone else, and you say, that ever happened to me I’d do something. Why didn’t they do something? But when it happens, when it comes, you don’t do shit. You tell yourself it never happened at all because it’s so far off and so bad, you swallow it down, and you don’t go back to it. You don’t have a thing to do with it while it grows inside, whispering your name.

All those times when my baseball hit that wall at the station and hit my glove and toughened my hand and I threw it again, and I caught it hard, and I thought about him, all that time, pulling up the Black boy, lookie that, pulling his pants around his knees, Ulie's hands spread on the table, sweat pouring off his nose while he waited. "Don't you move," they told him and they whipped him naked like that.

I said I'd kill him, and Ulie said if I ever told he'd deny and he'd hate me so we never talked about it. I didn't dwell. I just went cold inside, and we counted our days, and when I got out, I didn't think on it. Sometimes…we talked of going there. But we never did.

I grip the sticky wheel, and a sound comes out of me like an animal might make.

Boss tries to back up that car and his taillights come on and he starts to back, and I'm here if he wants to stay straight.

I'm here, but if he makes it out, he has to face me.

But he can't hold it straight, and the current takes it, and his backend is swept to the side, and it lingers there, and he tries to go forward, but he's not straight.

The backend is swept even more to the side. He must have one tire off.

Then two.

Once the back end is over, the current grabs hold and yanks the front off too. The creek takes it then. It moves quickly down the angry water.

I'm out of my truck before I can think. I walk along toward that water. I'm watching Boss's black car get taken in the flood.

It's on its side. The water shoves it a hundred feet, spins and slams it into a pile of brush where the creek bends. It's holding on there.

I pitch my smoke and run around the back of Benny's truck and hop over the gate. I root some. He has that tow rope. I get that free from under the clutter and coil it fresh and finally get it on my shoulder. I'm looking at the car stuck there while I jump out of the bed, and I take off running.

It's a tough go along that bank which is just muddy bottom, just the deep matter between the trees that don't lie. This place is a grave.

I get close, but I'm opposite side from the car. I drop that heavy coil and keep an end to tie around my waist. My hands are strong, I make it good. I get that other end and tie it around a tree that looks like it's been here long enough to have seen many a man be desperate.

I wade in then, and I'm knocked down right off, and I try to swim, and it's pretty hopeless. There's so much debris. It's just seconds, and the current takes me, and I like to never get out, and I wouldn't have but for the rope.

I'm beat to shit and huffing and puffing. That water is full of so much shit. There's a cut over my eye and lots of blood.

I pull my knife and cut that rope and give up on that. I go up creek by the road and get in there and let the water take me to the middle. I have one chance to latch onto that car, and I kick out and grab onto the part of the bumper that shows.

I can't fight that current and this car moves a little so I work my way around it, to the underside and Boss has the window down and he's lifting himself out.

"Where in hell did you come from?" he says as he tries to get out, and he thrusts too much, and the car takes off. I nearly go with it, and I scramble madly as the debris pile gives way under me, so I keep clawing through it toward the bank, and it keeps falling apart just as quickly, and I hear Boss cry out, and I finally get on a limb that is wedged into the mud and muck enough that it holds, I think it's rooted there.

"Help me," I hear him call and I can finally turn enough to see he's hanging onto the last of that pile, and his eyes are wild and the fear….

He reaches his hand toward me, and I'll have to stretch hard to get him, and just as I do, my eyes fixed on that hand, the pile gives way, and he yells out, and he's whipped away by the current.

I see his head for a minute, and he's swept around the bend, and I can't see him anymore but that yell, that sound…a man out of chances.

I hear that still.

I'm exhausted by the time I crawl out of the water. I flop onto my back and lie in the mud long enough to catch my breath. I open my eyes and the bleached sky hovers like smoke while I touch the pack of wet Camels in my shirt pocket. A raindrop hits me between the eyes.

I roll onto my knees and get on my feet. Caw, caw overhead and a hot wind.

I walk down the creek far enough to find a place I can cross. All along I'm looking for Boss. I call out, but I don't see him or the car, just the angry churning water, a dead dog, a couple of trees, half a boat rotten, broken.

"Hey-o," I call, hands around my mouth.

But there is nothing and more of nothing. Maybe I'm the only one alive. It feels that way. I'm on point all along that flooded line. That's all.

I haven't gone far when I see him. There's a shoulder and a dead pool where some of the debris gets moved off so it can swirl there and drop. Comes drought time that water will pull away from a pyramid of shit.

He's in that dead pool. I get closer, and he's face down, arms out, swirling. Swear on a Bible a crow comes out of nowhere and lands on the back of his neck and takes a slow ride.

It was anyone else I would go in and fish him out of that slow sludge.

It was anyone else. But I’ve already gone in for one lawman, Bossman. No way in hell I’ll go in for another.

A couple hours later I reach Benny's truck, and I'm wet and muddy as a pig. I'm tired as shit I can tell you. Tired as I've ever been.

When I get in that truck I sit there, I don't know how long, engine running, me staring forward, looking at the water…maybe.

I remember then, to move the gun off the seat. I stick it underneath on the floor.

I think of Ulie. Long about now he'll be at Regina's pretending to be there for Bartholomew. He'll eat supper there, and he'll help around the place and sit in their living room and maybe listen to the radio. He'll give her looks, and he'll touch her when her dad isn't looking.

And in the morning, he'll go to the church, and they will let him have a part up front, and he'll be wearing that brown suit he keeps covered all week in the backroom.

Later, I'm nothing but glad he's not at the station.

"What the hell happened to you?" Benny says while I'm stepping out of my ruined uniform and into my regular clothes. I have some bruises I see. Some cuts. I tend that one over my eye.

"Nothing," I say combing my hair back smooth.

Benny follows me around. He keeps up with me on that leg. I go out and clean the shit out of the back of his truck.

I load in Jack. He doesn't fight it much. I think he's ready to leave Kinsey. He likes the hard soil of home.

But Benny is full of words and warnings. Those boys came by a couple of times, and he had a pipe in his hand. Yes, Sir they thought it was a shotgun….

I open the truck's door and feel under the seat. I pull out his Luger and hand it back. He doesn't know it's not a gun that keeps those knuckleheads away, it's him. They call him Benny Coo-Coo. Whole town calls him that. No one wants to mess with him.

He doesn't want me to take his truck, but I give him five dollars, I remind him I'll be back next evening.

Pretty soon I'm back on the road.

It's a long, slow drive. I reach Mauman, and the sun has set. I stop there and check on the mule, then I go that last leg of it. I pull onto Clannan Lane well after dark. When I do, something eases in me. Something lets go, and I stop at the gate and let Jack out of the bed. I can feel it in him, see it in the way he steps. He's excited to be here.

I get in the truck, and I drive some. "Oh hell," I say. I think I'm crying, but there are no tears at all.

So I keep going. Dad is coming from the barn, walking across the yard in the moonlight. I park the truck and get out.

"Well now," he says. He wears a grin for me.

I don't want to touch his hand when he extends it. I can't. But he doesn't wait, he grabs me and hugs me. I slowly put my hands on him.

It gets loose then, and it rises and tries to leave through the top of my head. I am crying then, I lose my stance and fall on him. He jerks hard to keep us on our feet, but I can’t help. Ends up he takes me to the ground and he sits by and holds onto me while I let it out.

“Everyone alright?” he finally says. Guess he thinks someone died. I have to laugh some at that, but it brings more tears. I can’t be ashamed or anything cause they take over. It’s another kind…tears like this.

Dad pulls back. He looks at me, at the cut over my eye. "What's happened? You been in another fight?"

"No fight. Dad…?"

He moves back from me, a hand scraping over his mouth.

It’s calming down some. I think it is.

"C'mon," he says getting onto his feet, and I get on mine and follow him to the bunkhouse.

In there he has the business of starting a fire. I leave the chair for him, and I unroll my own bed and sit. I know I'm tired, but it's all right.

Once the fire is going, he pulls the chair and drops. "When we came over," he says, "I saw how it was here, more than the green rock we'd come from, that's for sure.

"We did what we had to. I did. They looked to me. They followed."

"You ran more than gas," I say.

"I used my wits to build the gas. I knew it was foolish not to plan a better way. Your mother…. she saved me, that blessed woman."

He leans forward so he can pound his finger on the table, "There are always men who will take what's yours. If you allow it."

"That's why I…," I mean the mule. "When they came on our land…."

The fire flares bright, and the warmth starts to penetrate, and we sit in that for a few minutes.

"Came to the school, all I could do was back off and pay. That's what I did."

"Thank you Dad…," I say.

"You're my son," he interrupts, Irish again.

"For Ulie," I say.

He laughs some. "Well…Lincoln said it was over. For them, too."

"He's…." I want to tell him what Ulie has meant. But it's hard to get out. He doesn’t know how it was. Ulie took it for me. They didn’t give him a choice.

"He reminds you of Joseph. Joseph has always given you a way to feel good. You're like me, boyo. You need someone around who reminds you when enough is enough." He smiles sadly at me.

"Who does that for you? Not Uncle John. Not Uncle Frank."

He laughs quick. "You, boyo. From the day, they told me to go in the room…your mother lay there more beautiful…Jesus that woman. There you were wrapped in that blanket she'd been knitting all those weeks. I bent over youse, and I had to move the cover a little, and you looked at me. You were never a baby…not like the others. I tried to believe I'd had a hand in this…miracle. My son."

He has to stop there, and I rub my cheek, and I'm pretty sure I have a shiner.

"She," he clears his throat, "she said to take you…pick you up. And I got my hands around you and lifted you in my arms. You kept looking at me. You were mad about being born. Your face was red, and you held your mouth like you were ready to cry. But I talked to you. I said, 'It's all right boyo. I'm here. And nothing is going to happen to you now. You're my son.’"

He starts to cry then, just one burst and his hand over his face and his shoulders shake. Finally, he says, "I failed you. I couldn't…." he doesn't finish. He's got his bandana, and he's crying into it.

I get up then and go to him. I kneel by his chair and hold onto his arm. But it's not enough. I put my arms around him, and my father cries against my neck. I didn't know, I had no idea, but inside me there is a man, and he loves. He loves deep.

Like my father loves me.