Where the River Ends (16 page)

Abbie finished repeating her vow and there it was again,
keep only unto him, as long as you both shall live.

Judge Fletcher motioned to me. “I, Doss, take you, Abbie, to be my wife. I promise to stand beside you and with you always, in times of celebration and in times of sorrow. In sickness and in health, I will live with you and love you, as long as we both shall live.”

While my lips moved and my vocal cords made the sounds, my heart pushed a question to the surface. I don’t know why, it just did.
How does she know I mean this until I’ve done it. I mean, how does she know?

Abbie held my hands in hers. “I, Abbie, take you, Doss…” Her upper lip was sweating, a vein throbbed on her right temple, a tear was cascading down her face and her right hand was trembling. That told me two things: a migraine headache had just come out of nowhere and that, by itself, told me everything I needed to know. Abbie was all in. She was betting her life.

Judge Fletcher cleared his throat. “From earliest time, the ring has been a symbol of wedded love. It is a perfect circle to symbolize the unending love you promise.” He poked me in the shoulder. “Son, have you got the rings?” Palm up, I held them out. “Good. Slide hers halfway on her finger and repeat after me.” I slid the ring over her first knuckle and noticed that Abbie was absolutely glowing. That’s when it hit me. She didn’t need white. She deserved it, yes, but she didn’t need it.

“This ring I give you, in token and in pledge”—I slid it over her knuckle and pressed it gently against the back of her finger—“of my constant faith and abiding love.” Whoever owned that ring in the past had simply borrowed it for a time, because it fit like it had been made for her all along.

Abbie slid my ring over my first knuckle and began repeating after the judge. As she spoke, her eyes lit. Despite her public persona and the fact that she’d pretty much conquered the world at an early age, her private, emotional side was more guarded. But there beneath that arbor, she stepped out from behind the shell she had barricaded around herself.

The judge folded the printout and sighed. His nose hairs were long, curly and made a little whistle sound on the inhale. He looked at the two of us, shook his head and frowned. “And now, by the power of the authority vested in me and having heard you make these…pledges of affection, I pronounce you husband and wife.” He raised his eyebrows. “Congratulations. You may kiss the bride.”

D
ESPITE OUR BEST ATTEMPTS
at stealth, word spread quickly. We had yet to step foot out of the courthouse when Abbie’s cell phone started ringing. When she didn’t answer, mine rang.

She leaned against me. “Where can you take me where no one will find us?”

“I only know of one place and it’s not too glamorous.”

“I’ve had glamour.”

So I took her to the only place I knew anything about. The river.

It’s been fourteen years. My slave market ring is scratched, dull and worn thin around the edges. I don’t know who wrote those vows, but they must have been married a long time because we have shared our joys and sorrows and we have known some health and much sickness.

And every time I look back on that day, I find myself wanting to change it.

20

JUNE 3, EVENING

S
tokes Bridge is an almost attractive single-lane concrete structure that rises above the rotting stub remnants of old pilings now broken in two and poking up through the water’s surface below. Rolling, bleached-white beaches span either side dotted with poplar, sprawling live oaks, dogwood and longleaf pine. Vacant during most of the week, that changes come Friday night. We rounded a bend, the bridge came into view and we could smell the campfires and hear the laughter. The beach was lit with a half-dozen campfires, the flash of aluminum cans and brown glass bottles and the sporadic red glow of cigarettes. Two dozen trucks with tires larger than the hood of a Buick lined the beach, their beds stacked with coolers brimming with beer. Evidently, everyone was tuned to the same XM satellite station. We passed underneath the bridge as a Kenny Chesney tune followed an old Hank Jr. song. Fifty or so shirtless good ol’ boys and their scantily-clad girlfriends dotted the beach in circles around the fires. A few were swimming and off in the shadows a couple others were skinny-dipping. Three long-haired hippy types stood on the railing of the bridge, some ten feet above the water. They were howling at the moon and at the count of three, launched a Mountain Dew commercial plunge into the pool below. On the far bank, a guy and a girl were trying to hang on to a rope swing, while beneath the bridge a dejected-looking loner was halfway through a gallon-sized bottle of Jack Daniel’s. We paddled through in the shadows, opposite the beach. One rotund fellow wearing a Georgia Bulldogs cap stood next to a grill, flipping burgers, dogs and what looked like sausage. Swinging her legs off the tailgate next to him sat a rather large bikini-clad biker chick who was nursing a coolie-wrapped longneck.

I waved but tried not to make eye contact. The guy at the grill hollered across the water, “Hey, ya’ll hungry?” I shook my head, waved him off and hugged the far bank. He stepped back from his grill, out of the smoke, and tipped his hat. “You been paddling long?”

I nodded and kept dipping my paddle in the water. Another two hundred yards and we could disappear into the shadows. “A while.”

He smiled and waved his beer at me. “Well, pull up and set awhile. What’s your hurry?”

I shook my head with more finality. “Thanks, we’re just passing.” The moon was full and climbing high. “Thought we’d take advantage of the light while we had it.”

The smoke from his grill wafted across the river, tugged on my nose and my brain started pumping out signals to my stomach. At that moment, a truck with more lights than an airport runway stopped in the middle of the bridge and turned up the volume on “Sweet Home Alabama” to a decibel I’d never heard rise out of an automobile. It sounded like a rock concert.

Without exception, every man on the beach or in the water stood, took off his hat, crossed his heart and hollered at the top of his lungs while many of the girls reached into their pockets, thumbed their lighters and swayed the single flames silently above their heads. I forgot to mention that, around here, this is known as the Redneck Riviera, that song is the redneck anthem and they were showing respect.

Some work the grocery store checkout counter, stock shelves at the auto parts store, sling feed bags at the local hardware, work for the forestry department or a master welder, shoe horses, deliver rural mail or sell cattle, real estate or, more than likely, pine trees. They talk slower, often stretching two syllables into five, use phrases that make little sense on the surface, dip Cophenhagen and drink beer simultaneously, and have no desire to understand a New York minute. Admittedly, college degrees are not the norm, Ph.D.’s are few, and while outsiders drive across the bridge and see little more than a bunch of drunk rednecks, they’d do well to never confuse cultural difference with ignorance or stupidity. Beneath the twangy exterior, they value common sense, make do with less, laugh easily and will give you the shirt off their backs—they are the salt of the earth. When you’re not in a hurry, pull up a chair and you will find your stomach full and that laughter has creased your face with wrinkles.

Abbie poked her head up. “You better stop this boat.”

“Honey…”

“Don’t ‘honey’ me. You stop this boat or I’m dancing with Chef Boyardee over there.”

I beached the canoe just down from the sparks of the bonfires and lifted Abbie to her feet. She swayed as the dizziness eased. She hung her arms around my neck while nearly a hundred people danced in unison across the beach or in the water. She smiled. “I’ll walk on the tops. You dance on the bottoms.”

“Deal.”

We danced along with everyone else through “Freebird,” then Waylon and Willie’s “Good Hearted Woman,” ending with Don Williams’s “Lord I Hope This Day Is Good” and AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” By the end, Abbie was laughing, singing along and hanging on me. I lifted her and we finished the dance carrying her along the beach. I hadn’t eaten all day so when the airport truck finally cleared off the bridge, I laid her on the sand and collapsed next to her. Chef Boyardee appeared over my shoulder, stuck his hand out and said, “Name’s Michael, but everyone around here cause me Link.” He handed me a paper plate holding two of the largest, drippiest and best-smelling cheeseburgers I’d ever seen. He said, “Eat up. And welcome.” He pointed at a cooler on the back of his truck. “Got sodas, beer, water, you name it. Make yourself comfortable.” He took two steps away and then turned back. “Something wrong with your face?” Abbie laughed. I nodded. “Yeah, mosquitoes.”

“Dang! That hurt?” I heard Abbie laughing behind me.

“A bit.”

“You ’ont some medicine?”

“Yeah.”

He slung open the diamond-plated toolbox atop his truck and pulled out a first aid kit. “Ought to be something in there.”

I dug around and found two Benadryl. “Thanks.”

Abbie eyed the box, her right eyebrow pulling up the edge of her lip. “You didn’t happen to find a cure for cancer in there, did you?”

“No, fresh out, but maybe we could pick one up at the next Wal-Mart.”

She leaned back and kicked her feet up. “That’d be nice. Let’s do that.”

I
N THE NEXT THIRTY MINUTES,
I downed four burgers and tried to get as much fluid into Abbie as she could stomach.

We kept to the shadows, watching the circus perform around us. Eventually, I asked Link, “You all do this every Friday night?”

He laughed, crushed a beer can single-handedly and quickly popped the tab on another. “Ain’t you been watching the weather?” I shook my head. He pointed his beer toward the sky in a general southwesterly direction. “Hurricane Annie. She was stalled over the Gulf but it’s looking like she’s coming northeast and ought to be here in a couple of days. Thought we’d have us a welcoming party, seeing as how we got us a bull’s-eye printed on our forehead.”

He was quiet a minute. Chewing a bite of sausage, he said, “We heard of you.”

That wasn’t good. “You did?”

He nodded and took another bite—mustard and pork grease were smeared across the corners of his mouth. “Yeah. Seems some folks back upriver seen you slipping through. Thought it a might strange that someone would be paddling this far up. Most folks don’t put in ’til St. George. Unless’n they know the river.” He stared at me. “Which, judging you by the looks and”—he chuckled—“that hat, you been here afore.”

I nodded. “Been down it a time or two.”

“Given the time you’re making, I’d say you’ve been down it more than just a time or two.”

This could go one of two ways. Folks down on the river were rather protective of themselves and their privacy. They lived with an inherent distrust of anyone resembling a politician, salesman or journalist. That meant they didn’t just invite everyone into their business, because they weren’t all that eager to share it. Remember what my mom said. Folks come to this river for a lot of reasons. Those that are hiding wish to keep it that way. Drawing attention to themselves wouldn’t help. Granted, we were an odd sight and to their way of thinking, we were intruding on what they thought was their private river, but I was hopeful that if we kept to ourselves and passed quietly through, when they spread word about us, they would do so in country-road whispers and not beauty-shop gossip.

I didn’t say anything. He continued, “How far you headed?”

I had a choice. Lie or tell him the truth. I had a feeling that lying wouldn’t get us any farther downriver while the truth might. “All the way if I can manage it.”

He was in mid-bite. “All the way to St. Marys?”

“Unless something stops us.”

He finished his sausage-dog and wiped his hands on his T-shirt. “You know if that hurricane dumps a bunch of rain on us that this river is going to change overnight.”

I nodded. “Yeah, she will.”

He pointed north toward Folkston. “I’s raised up yonder. Never been down the length of her. Always wanted to. I’d like to see Reed’s Bluff.”

“It’s worth seeing.”

He stared off into the river. “Maybe I will.” His eyes narrowed. “Folks say once you get up there that you can see where the river ends. That true?”

“Yes.”

“She perty?”

A nod and a quick glance at Abbie. “She’s…beautiful.” Abbie’s forehead was flush and the telltale blue vein had popped out on her left temple. I knelt down and she just moaned. I flipped open the Pelican case, discreetly cracked the cap on a dexamethasone syringe and pushed out the air. Then I slid it into Abbie’s thigh. Syringe empty, I capped it and closed the case.

A minute passed. Link swallowed loud enough for me to hear it. Eyes wide, he glanced at his truck. “Ya’ll…maybe need anything?” He said all this while rubbing his thigh.

I stared downriver. “Time and distance. And maybe a little more flow.”

He raised an eyebrow and his voice lowered. “Have I seen her afore?”

“Probably.”

“She famous? A model or something?”

“At one time.”

“She alright?”

How exactly should I answer that? “She’s been sick a long time. And…we needed some fresh air so I brought her where I knew she’d get it.”

“Well…” He chewed on his bottom lip a minute. “I hope you make it. Both of you.”

I spread a pallet on the beach beneath the low-lying limbs of an oak tree. They were thin, long and grew up out of the tree only to swoop down over the beach, brush the sand’s surface, then rise back up above the water where they hung thick with leaves. Other than Link, we kept to ourselves.

Link had jowls the size of a bulldog and his fingers were three times as fat as mine, but that had little negative effect on his ability to play a guitar, because after he’d fed the troops, he lifted a Gibson out of the back of his truck and lit the strings on fire. I’d never seen someone’s fingers move so fast across the strings of anything. I turned to Abbie. “Who is this guy? He ought to be on the
Grand Ole Opry.
”

A fellow next to us heard and nodded. “He has been. And he’s a regular at the Woodbine.”

Woodbine is the South Georgia version of the Opry. He pointed his longneck at Chef. “Link there plays by ear, and he ain’t never had no lessons.” He swallowed, the foam dripping off his chin. “Perty good, huh?”

“I’ll say.”

Link played twenty to thirty songs with seamless transition, well-disguised improvisation and no rest. His music soaked the air with something I can only describe as resonance. He said very little because his hands were saying enough and he took every request without looking at a single note. Here was a guy who looked like he ought to be driving a tractor or mucking manure out of stalls and yet he was by far the most talented musician I’d ever seen. He blazed through blue grass, country, Southern rock and classical. If there were limits to his repertoire, we never saw them.

Around ten, a bunch of folks waded into the water, girls climbed onto the guys’ shoulders and started a mixed-couples wrestling event. A king-of-the-river sort of thing. It was all fun and games until one girl ripped off another’s bikini top and then all Hades broke loose. They were scratching, clawing, smacking. It looked like a catfight.