Where the River Ends (14 page)

17

F
or the record, I did ask his permission. The key there is
ask.
His schedule was always tight. It was tough getting an audience with him—even for five minutes. He was seldom alone. It was Thanksgiving weekend. He’d come home to cut the turkey. Abbie had been working all over. She’d been gone weeks at a time. I’d graduated and was working two jobs: For rent money, I was guiding fishermen off the flats for redfish. I could make a couple hundred bucks a day when the fish were biting. When they weren’t, I painted.

Rosalia’s portrait hung in Abbie’s parents’ house in the foyer. When asked about it, they would credit a “local artist” which infuriated Abbie, but the fact that it was one of the first things you saw when you walked in suggested that even they couldn’t deny the power of the image. Whenever Abbie was home, she’d eavesdrop on the dinnertable conversation, waiting for just the right moment to circumvent her parents. She’d pop her head around the doorjamb, say hello to their guests then point nonchalantly. “I know the artist if you’d like him to consider you. He’s very busy, only takes a select few clients a year, but”—she’d smile and raise her eyebrows—“I can get his attention.”

Over her parents’ objections, Abbie arranged meetings with prospective clients. We’d arrive at their house, I’d agree to paint his or her portrait, then talk about specifics and schedule the first of a couple sittings. In my first consultation, the husband, an oil executive, asked, “What do you charge?”

I was about to say a thousand dollars when Abbie said, “Normally, he charges ten, but because of me, he’s agreed to lower his fee to seventy-five hundred.” The man nodded as if she’d just taken his order at a fast food restaurant and given him his total at the register.

My jaw nearly hit the floor.

In nine months, I had paid off my school debts and bought my first car. But, in truth, I’d have done it for free, because for the first time in my professional life, I felt valued. Valued because that person in front of me, that “subject,” was trusting me with one of the most valuable things they owned—their reflection.

I could not have been happier.

Conversely, her parents could not have been more unimpressed. Her stepmother was the more vocal of the two. Thanksgiving morning, I walked up onto the back porch and was two inches away from knocking on the door when I heard, “You two are running a racket and when people find out, Doss will never paint in this city again.” I pulled my hand away and sat on the bench next to Rosalia, who was shelling peas.

“Mother…”

“Don’t ‘Mother’ me.”

“Have you seen any of his work other than Rosalia?”

A reluctant pause. “Yes.”

“And?”

Katherine picked up the paper and turned to the obits. “I suppose, it’s…fair.”

“Fair?”

She set down the paper. “I don’t like you seeing that boy.”

“You don’t say.”

“Abbie, he grew up in a trailer.”

“And your point is?”

“He’s not your type.”

“You mean, ‘my kind.’”

“He’ll never be one of us.”

“Mother, he’s not trying to be one of us.”

“My point exactly.”

“Sort of refreshing, don’t you think?”

Abbie climbed upstairs, and I heard the shower cut on. Rosalia leaned against me, pressing her fleshy shoulder to mine. She looked at me out of the tops of her eyes, patted me on the thigh and nodded me onward. I kissed her on the forehead, knocked lightly on the screen door and pushed it open. “Good morning, Mrs. Coleman.”

“Oh, hi, Doss. Do come in. You look hungry. Can I get you some breakfast?”

Painting portraits has taught me something about people. All my clients have two faces. The one they live with and the one they want me to paint. Mrs. Coleman was no different.

Thanksgiving night, after the house emptied, Senator Coleman was holed up in his office. I knocked on the door. He looked up, expressionless. “Hello, Doss. You lose Abbie?”

“No, sir, I wanted to speak with you.”

He leaned back in his chair. “About?”

“Well, sir, about Abbie.” He rocked slightly, leaning on a pencil that was pressed into his chin. “Well, then, I’ll just get to it.” I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands so I finally just shoved them in my pants pockets. “Senator Coleman, I’d like to ask your permission to marry your daughter.” He quit rocking and put the pencil down. There was an empty chair across from him but he made no mention of it. In the span of a few seconds, a lifetime passed. Finally, he shook his head and simply said, “No.”

I didn’t know what to say. Just where do I go with that? “Any chance I can talk you out of that position?”

A practiced smile. “No.”

There was a lot I wanted to say at that moment, but wasn’t sure how to get it out and even less sure that it would do any good. In his mind, I was an impetuous, twenty-one-year-old starving artist. He’d made up his mind long before I walked in that door. “Yes sir.” I turned, walked out and pulled the door closed quietly behind me.

While I was hurt, Abbie was livid. I’d never seen her so mad. After an hour she had yet to cool off. We stood down by the water. Actually, I stood and she paced. “Just who does he think he is?”

“He’s your father.”

“That doesn’t make him God.”

“Not in his mind.” We stood there, deflated and angry. “Maybe if I made something of myself and came back in five years he’d change his mind, but I heard him the first time. No means no. Forever.”

She stared out across the water, shaking her head. I knew that anything less than total compliance was akin to a declaration of war—one more shot across Fort Sumter. I didn’t want that for Abbie and I had no desire to separate her from her family. I knew that what I was about to do would be painful for a long time to come, but I also knew it was best.

I needed to give her an out. I turned her toward me. “Please forgive me for what I am about to do.” She began slowly shaking her head. “Abigail, your father is right.” I took one step back. “I’m the product of a trailer park. You are Southern royalty. I’m a dreamer, a loner, and I seldom get what I think or feel out of my mouth. I’m more suited to work the parties at your parents’ house than attend them.” Tears filled her eyes. “You’re a national phenomenon who can talk with kings and queens or sweetgrass basket weavers.”

“Doss…”

“I’m good at one thing. Everything you touch turns to gold.”

She began to shout. “Don’t you dare do this to me. Not because of him.”

“Abigail, your mom was right. I’m not your kind.”

She placed her right index finger to my lips. “I’m a girl, in love with a boy.”

Somewhere a ship’s horn sounded. In the river, a boat planed and started skimming across the water. Beyond the Battery, a horse and carriage ambled down cobblestone. Overhead in the midnight darkness, seagulls were squawking, and in the park behind us, a girl threw a tennis ball for a slobbering chocolate lab beneath a streetlight. I took both her hands in mine. “Will you marry me?”

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, 1992.

She stamped her foot. “Doss Michaels! You just scared the crap out of me.”

“Abigail…will you marry me?”

She pounded me on the chest. “Not until you say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t really mean that.”

I knelt. “Abbie, I can’t give you the life your father has given you and your mother. I don’t know how I’ll make it in this world so I can’t promise you much of anything. Except this: I will give you all of me. No pretensions, no walls, no lies. There’s never been and will never be another man on the planet who will love you the way I do. When I’m not with you, it hurts. And when I’m with you, it still hurts ’cause I know somewhere in the next few hours I’ll be without you again. I’ve been hurting most of my life and I don’t want to hurt anymore. Please take me…and the islands inside me…and make me whole.”

She looked at me out of one corner of her eye. “You ever do this to me again and I’ll—”

“Abbie?”

She chewed on her lip. “I have a confession.” She half turned and pointed. “I have a mole on my butt.”

“Can’t wait to see it. It’ll be our little secret.”

She shook her head. “Doss. I’m not the woman on the magazines. No one is that woman. She’s a figment of—”

“I’m not in love with the woman at the checkout counter.”

“Yeah, but…I’m just the outline. They put me in a computer, erase the wrinkles, shrink the nose, pull in the chin, draw in the cheeks”—she cupped her hands beneath both breasts—“make my boobs bigger.”

I shook my head. “I’m in love with the Abbie that’s standing in front of me.”

She knelt, eye level with me. “And when I’m old and ugly, sagging in all the wrong places?”

“Abigail Coleman, I’m not marrying the idea of you. Or even the memory of you. I’m marrying you. So don’t worry about what you might become. I’ll love her, too. Even more. I’ll take the bad because that means I will have lived to know the good.”

She pressed her face to my chest, the sobs bubbling up quietly. When they grew too strong to hold back, she threw her arms around my neck, let out a cry that sounded like it started near her belly button and then pressed her tearstained and snotty face to mine. “Yes.”

18

JUNE 3

O
n the afternoon of the third day, we passed under the bridge at Highway 121. That meant we’d come twenty-three miles. Six more to Stokes Bridge—the quarterway mark.

This far up, the river isn’t used recreationally—as it is south of Trader’s Ferry. That meant the river would offer us cover up here, but further north, then east, it would open up and we’d start bumping into joyriders on Jet Skis, Bubbas in johnboats fishing the banks and federal wildlife officers patrolling in their twenty-two-foot Pathfinders mounted with FM radios, satellite phones and two-hundred-horse Yamaha four-stroke engines. Once spotted, you might duck and dodge your way around the engine, but not the radio.

The river narrowed again, the sandy bottom poking up through the water, making the river only a foot deep. A long expansive beach opened on our left. The sticky afternoon sun pressed down on my shoulders, making me sleepy, so I slid the canoe quietly beneath a tree, careful not to wake Abbie. Above us, on the Florida side, an enormous house was under construction. Its owners must have known what they were doing, because they’d bought the highest bluff on the river. The sheer topography of it placed them above any flood—except maybe Noah’s. Beyond us, the river turned hard right. I closed my eyes and saw every square inch of the riverbank. Within eyesight hung the stub of a rope swing where I learned to do a back flip. The rope was frayed, green and swayed slowly.

Below it sat the remnant of a bench.

I beached the canoe and shook Abbie. She raised an eyelid. “We there yet?”

I nodded. “Yeah, we’re here.”

She stood, weak-kneed and wobbly. “Good, ’cause I was thinking we had like another hundred miles to go or something.”

Concrete steps led from the riverbank, up the bluff and into the backyard of what looked like a ten-thousand-square-foot house. The high-pitched roofline came down over an expansive concrete back porch that would hold fifty rocking chairs and provide a spectacular vista of the river snaking below.

I carried Abbie up the steps and through the knee-high grass of the backyard. The house had been studded, the roof had been shingled and dried in and the brick had been laid but there were no windows, no Sheetrock and no interior finish work. It looked like they had just started working on the inside and only a few windows had been set in the front of the house. A Port-O-Let sat near the back porch, so I helped Abbie onto the seat and let her lean against me while her body emptied itself of more poison.

The doors were locked but I crawled through a window and brought her in. The vaulted ceilings in the den were nearly twenty feet high and a fireplace large enough to lay in grew out of the far wall. Cold ashes piled in the bottom. I checked the flume, which was open, rummaged through the lumber scrap pile and built a small fire. Abbie lay on the ground and turned toward it. I found some drop cloths in the laundry room along with a working sink. I brought Abbie a cup of water, then searched the remainder of the house. The second floor was no less small and when it came to views on the river, this might be about as good as it gets. The house was pretty clean, meaning there wasn’t much to be had. Back in the laundry room I discovered a Mr. Coffee and a half-full can of Maxwell House. I plugged the coffeemaker into an orange extension cord that ran in from the garage and the red light flashed on. While the Mr. Coffee sputtered, I pulled one of the aluminum foil–sided insulation boards out of the garage and laid it on the ground in front of the fire. It was the stuff they nail to the studs before they lay the brick. I covered it with a painting tarp and then we spread across it and listened to Mr. Coffee. Abbie put her head on my chest, twirled a chest hair and said, “You’ve been kind of quiet.”

“You feel like going for a walk?”

“You think there’s a wheelbarrow around here?”

“Might be.” I found one leaning against the house. It was one of those large plastic kind with two wheels in the front making it more stable. I hosed it clean and set Abbie in it, facing forward. “Your chariot, madam.” I handed her a bottle of water and said, “And drink this.” The more fluids I could get into her, the better she would feel. It’d keep her blood pressure up and help flush out the toxins caused by all the poisons we dumped into her.

She tucked the bottle between her legs and held on to the sides, making a whipping motion with her arm. “Mush!”

“Cute. Very cute.”

I rolled her along the rim of the bluff—the river flowing on our left, thigh-high grass waving on our right. I pushed her maybe a half a mile, stopping every few minutes for me to get a better grip. Sitting up and sipping seemed to do her good. It put color in her face.

We rounded the bend beneath the stub of the rope swing. Further to our right, some hundred yards into the woods, stood the first row of trailers. Long since abandoned, vines covered most every square inch like long, fraying strands of wet hair.

We pushed through, ferns brushing our shins, and walked out into the open. Before I was born, twelve ragged trailers had been arranged in a circle—tucked up against each other with all the order of derailed train cars. In the middle, out by the bonfire stain, everyone parked their cars, threw the trash, flicked cigarette butts and spun the bottle. Made for a rather unhealthy environment. At the time, the trailers were all owned by one man—a landlord of sorts—who believed in upkeep as much now as he did then. I pushed Abbie into the center and turned in a slow circle. It felt like someone was stepping on my chest.

The trees had grown and now towered over the park. Doing so had created a canopy of sorts with lots of shade and little direct sunlight, keeping everything relatively cool and damp. She sipped her water. “Which one was yours?”

I pointed. Huge vines of poison ivy climbed up every side. Three leaves, red stem, just touching it would make me blister and itch for two weeks. It formed an intricate web that closed itself somewhere on top. What wasn’t covered in vine was discolored due to mildew and black mold. All the glass had been broken, the front door was gone, the three steps that led up to it were nowhere to be found, and like most of the rest of them, it was riddled with shotgun pellet holes.

“Where was your room?”

I rolled her around the back side and stared at the window frame where my window air conditioner once hung. The gaping hole suggested that somebody had stolen it. “My air conditioner used to be right there. It didn’t cool too well, but it rattled a lot. I’d switch it to high to drown out the sound—inside and out.”

Abbie nodded and said, “What about the bench?”

The path had grown tall with weeds, downed trees and palm-sized banana spiders—who’s six-foot webs stretched across the path. I picked up a long stick, pulled down the webs like I was making cotton candy and threw the stick aside. Abbie watched the spiders and pulled her legs in tight to her chest. We bulldozed through the grass and twice I had to lift her over a dead tree. While Abbie nervously ran a branch along the top rim of the wheelbarrow, I pushed her out into the clearing atop the sandy bluff.

Made out of an oak log, cut in half and resting on two pilings, the five-foot bench sat in the middle beneath the spindly arm of a live oak that reached out across the river. Wood rot had collapsed the pilings and worms had eaten through most of the bench seat. I rested my foot in the middle and it crumbled, too soft and soggy to crack.

I stood there staring at the anchor in my memory. Abbie climbed out of the wheelbarrow, wrapped her arms around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder, eyeing what was once the bench. She was about to say something when I heard it.

Around here it’s known as “the hatch.” It sounds like a car in the distance driving toward you with squeaking brakes. You know the high-pitched sound that makes your skin crawl? The hatch occurs regularly here because this is where the mosquitoes lay their eggs. Up here, where the water is slow-moving and the still pools are many, the larvae are safe. Then, whenever they’ve done whatever it is that they do, they hatch, sending tens of thousands of mosquitoes into the air at once where they swarm and make that high-pitched sound that only a mosquito makes. Normally, you can’t hear it until they’re buzzing around your ear, but fifty thousand is another thing entirely. You can hear that nearly forty yards off. The swarming is an indication that they are hungry, and mosquitoes really only eat one thing. Abbie heard it, too. “Are we near a highway?” I shook my head while considering our fastest escape. “Then, what’s that sound?”

About then, they reached us. Most of my skin and hair turned black. I grabbed Abbie, put her into the wheelbarrow and started running down the bluff. Every inhale brought bugs down my throat. Abbie was screaming and slapping herself, while the bugs flew into my nose, my ears, my eyes and bit me through my clothes or on bare skin. Within seconds, my skin and face were on fire. We barreled down the hill, up through the long grass, across the open area next to the house and into what would become the garage. Most of the mosquitoes had flown away by the time we reached the house, even fewer followed us in, but there was still a cloud in the house hovering around me. I lifted her out, climbed the steps into the house and when we reached the den, I set her down and rubbed and patted her legs while she slapped my shoulders and face. She slapped me six or eight times in the face, each slap growing harder each time. Abbie hated mosquitoes. She was about to slap me again when I grabbed her hand. “Honey…you’re not helping.” Blood was dripping out of the corner of my mouth where she’d hit me. “Oh…oops.” That’s when she started laughing. I brushed the few remaining bugs off her right leg and sat down. Since those guys on the river threw most everything we had into the fire, I didn’t have any antihistamine, which meant that I was in trouble if Abbie started to swell up. I searched her arms, legs, neck and face for any sign of rising welts, but found nothing. Not a single one. I, on the other hand, was swelling and starting to look like somebody had shoved an airhose up my nose and inflated my face. I took my shirt off and Abbie started to count the red bumps from my waist up. She quit when she got to a hundred. Finally, she sat back and chewed on a fingernail. “Oh, Doss. Does that hurt? It looks painful. Is that painful?”

Her adrenaline was pumping and she was talking fast. I closed my eyes and laid down on the concrete floor with enough bug juice flowing through my veins to kill a small animal. I sneezed, clearing my nose of the last of them. “No, honey…” My lips were growing numb and fat. “It feels good.”

“Well, I’ve always wanted to know what you looked like as a baby. Now I know.” She stared at her arms and legs, marveling at the absence of bites. “I guess mosquitoes can sense the difference.”

“Difference in what?”

“Between blood that has been poisoned…and blood that hasn’t.”

M
Y SWEET LITTLE REUNION
was over. My face was on fire and both my left ear and left eye were nearly swollen shut. The tops of my hands and fingers were so fat that the paddle felt twice as thick as it had an hour ago. If I could have come out of my skin, I would have. I packed up the canoe, shoved off and shook my head.

While the view downriver had changed, the framework had not. The trees—swaying with Spanish moss—had spiraled taller and leaned in further across the river, but the bend still swept right in a slow easy arc disappearing some four hundred yards into the distance where the horizon merged into one unbroken treeline. The broken bench passed high on my right. I didn’t look. Two more paddle strokes and I inhaled deeply, holding it. I scanned the view before me, closed my eyes and focused on the one thing that I couldn’t live without.

She held me there a long time. Maybe three minutes. When I exhaled, I didn’t feel a thing.