Lit Riffs (18 page)

arthur bradford

W
illiam “Swampthroat” Simpson was my idol. He was a heavyset, lumbering oaf of a guy who wandered around our town with his head down and long, stringy hair covering his eyes. When he was seventeen, years before I met him, a chain saw slipped from his hands and bounced up into his neck. He lost four pints of blood that day, but they saved him at the hospital. To cover up the damage, the doctors placed a series of skin graphs on his neck, leaving his throat scarred and covered in patches of different colors. It was difficult for him to shave properly after that and there were often stray whiskers, long and curly, sprouting from his neck. This was why we all called him Swampthroat. He wasn’t fond of the name and always introduced himself as William, but he allowed us to call him Swampthroat all the same.

I first met Swampthroat when he started dating my older sister, Robin. He was twenty-four years old then and I was sixteen. Robin had sort of a wild streak and it was considered an unusual thing to do, to go out with a guy like Swampthroat. I was sitting on the couch when Robin first brought him home. He clomped inside wearing big leather boots, tracking dirt onto the floor.

“Next time take your boots off,” Robin said to him.

“Sorry,” said Swampthroat. He had a deep, scratchy voice. It was sort of timid and quieter than what you’d expect. Maybe his vocal chords were damaged, too. He saw me sitting there and walked toward me, still tracking dirt behind him.

“My name’s William,” he said, extending his hand.

“Hi,” I said. His hand was fat and meaty. It was dirty, too.

“You can call him Swampthroat,” said Robin. “Everyone else does.”

Swampthroat nodded in agreement and we shook hands.

Robin led him upstairs and they went into her bedroom. Robin liked to listen to loud rock music. Swampthroat enjoyed this kind of music as well, and together they would listen to it for hours. Robin wasn’t bad looking or unpopular and I wondered at first why she would want to be associated with a guy like Swampthroat. But, as I came to see later, it was his reckless side that made him attractive.

Later on that day, after he and Robin had left the house, our mother came home and said, “What’s that smell?”

I said, “Swampthroat was here.”

That winter Swampthroat drove his van off a bridge. He’d been going fast, hit some ice, and went into a skid. He and his van landed in the shallow river below the bridge and he nearly drowned because the impact knocked him out. They found him lying facedown in the cold water. No one was sure how long he’d been lying like that, but it was determined that because the water was so cold, it had slowed his heart down and allowed him to survive without oxygen for an unusually long time.

“You’re a lucky man, William,” the doctor said.

Without his van Swampthroat had no way to get to work, so Robin let him use her car, a little hatchback, which had once belonged to our father. Swampthroat crashed that car, too. He hit a deer one night and then plowed into a pile of rocks. The car could still drive though and Swampthroat chased down the deer, which had been limping by the side of the road. He then killed it with one of the large rocks from the pile he’d run into.

“It was suffering,” he explained.

Swampthroat stood at our doorway with blood on his hands, telling us the story. Outside, in front of our house, sat Robin’s beat-up hatchback. Tied to its roof was the dead deer.

“You idiot,” said Robin.

“I didn’t want it to go to waste,” he said.

Robin broke up with him then. She’d had enough. Before he left, Swampthroat took me out behind the house and showed me how to clean and dress the deer for eating. He did it all with a small hunting knife and some rope. It was sort of like cleaning a fish, except messier, and with more fur. He presented the venison to Robin and my mother as a gift, to help offset the damage he’d done to the car. It was a lot of meat and my mother looked at it perplexed.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” she said, once he had left.

I inherited Robin’s hatchback after that because I was just then learning to drive. The car worked all right even though its front end was wrinkled up and the windshield was cracked. I had to wash the deer blood off it, too. I didn’t have an official license, just a learner’s permit, which allowed me to drive with another, older person in the car. But I often took the car out anyway, by myself, just to have the feeling of being away on my own.

One time I was driving along the State Road and I saw Swampthroat standing by a billboard with his thumb out, hitchhiking. I was surprised to see him there and passed him by. I went a mile or so down the road and then realized he had probably recognized the car. I figured I had better turn around and pick him up. It was doubtful that anyone else would stop for him.

When I pulled up next to him, Swampthroat seemed relieved to see that it wasn’t Robin at the wheel. He got inside and immediately the car filled with his damp, grungy smell, the odor of Swampthroat.

“So, you got yourself some wheels,” he said to me.

“That’s right, thanks to you.”

“Did you eat that deer?”

“Not yet. I don’t think so.”

“Tell your mom to cook it up,” he said. “Make a stew. That’s good meat.”

“Okay.”

We drove for a while down the State Road before Swampthroat asked me where I was going.

“I’m just driving,” I told him.

“Oh, right.” He thought for a minute, peering ahead at the open road. “Maybe you could take me to see a friend?”

“How far is it?”

“About an hour.”

“You have money for gas?” I asked him.

“Sure.”

This was a concern because although the hatchback was small, it didn’t get good mileage. I was going broke driving it around. We stopped at a gas station and Swampthroat used his last six dollars to put gas in the tank. It turned out he’d lost his job on account of not having a car. I noticed, too, once we got going again, that his knuckles were scabbed up and swollen.

“I got in a tussle,” he explained.

We drove forty miles down the State Road and then he told me to slow down. He leaned forward and scanned the side of the road.

“Up there,” he said. “See that sign?”

There was a hand-painted wooden sign a little ways ahead of us. It marked the entrance to a small dirt road.

“Turn there,” he said to me.

When we got up close, I was able to read the words on the sign. Painted in drippy black letters, it said, “Highway to Hell.”

We drove down this road, hardly a highway, for several miles. I’d never been this way before. Grass was growing up between the tire tracks, and several times the underside of the hatchback scraped loudly against the earth below, especially on Swampthroat’s side where the car rode lower.

Finally we reached a sad-looking shack tucked into a nook in the woods. A small yard had been cleared away out front, and rows of blue plastic barrels were scattered about within a maze of chicken-wire fencing. Swampthroat explained that chickens of various rare breeds were living inside those barrels. The proprietor of the shack, a woman named Tilly, raised them and sold them to collectors.

“She’s famous for her hens,” he said, “known around the world.”

A wobbly old hound shimmied it’s way out from under the shack and began barking at us.

“I better go inside,” said Swampthroat.

He made no mention of me going with him and I was just as happy to wait there in the car. Swampthroat walked past the growling hound and knocked on the door. It opened up and he went inside.

The hound lay down on the grass and ignored me. I watched the blue barrels for signs of the famous hens inside. I figured they must have been sleeping because I saw nothing, though I did hear an occasional cluck. Eventually Swampthroat emerged from the house carrying a small paper sack and walking more quickly than usual. He opened up the car door and threw his big body inside.

“Let’s go,” he said.

I started up the car, began to turn it around. An older woman wrapped up in a camouflage army coat stepped out of the house and stood there glaring at us. Her long gray hair was done up in an untidy bun with the loose strands flying about her head.

“Is that Tilly?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Swampthroat. “Let’s go.”

A younger, potbellied man came walking out from behind the house. He was holding some kind of wooden device with a short rope attached to it.

“Let’s go,” said Swampthroat again.

The potbellied man stopped walking toward us and raised the wooden device up to his shoulder. It was a crossbow, a homemade job constructed of two-by-fours and regular household rope. I pressed down on the gas and we lurched forward down the bumpy dirt road, not moving very fast. A loud metallic thud rang out as something smacked hard into the back of the car. In the rearview mirror I saw the potbellied man stooped over, reloading his crossbow. We plowed ahead, barreling down that “Highway to Hell” as fast as I dared to drive, and that man didn’t get a chance to fire his weapon at us again.

Once we got out to the State Road, I pulled over and we took a look at the back of the car. A metal arrow, about a foot long, was stuck firmly in the back door. It had pierced right through the car’s body.

“Motherfucker,” said Swampthroat.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“That’s Lionel. He’s Tilly’s son.”

We got back in the car and sped toward home with the engine roaring so loudly we couldn’t hear each other speak. I was pushing it, fearing further attacks from Lionel, though Swampthroat assured me that was doubtful.

“He never leaves that house,” he said.

The paper sack that Swampthroat had brought out of Tilly’s shack contained several handfuls of dried-up mushrooms. They were of the hallucinatory variety. Apparently Lionel cultivated them in boxes that he stored under the house. Swampthroat planned to sell the mushrooms and return to the shack with payment at a later date, but I guess he hadn’t worked out the terms to Lionel’s satisfaction before he left.

After about twenty miles of high-speed progress we ran out of gas on the State Road. Swampthroat pointed out correctly that he was less likely to elicit sympathy from strangers, so I had to hitchhike to the gas station and hassle people for spare change to buy more fuel. Each time I approached a car for money, I was scared I would find Tilly and Lionel inside ready for retribution. But that didn’t happen and eventually we made it back to town, where I dropped off Swampthroat and he wandered away into the night.

I didn’t see Swampthroat for a few weeks after that. I asked Robin if she knew what he was up to, but she said no and added that I shouldn’t be interested in his antics anyway.

“That man is trouble,” she said.

“When are we going to eat that deer meat?” I asked my mother.

“Never,” she said.

When I finally did see Swampthroat again, he was passed out, lying on someone’s front lawn. At first I thought he was napping there, but then I examined him more closely, and I saw that he was passed out from drinking. I touched him with the tip of my foot to wake him up.

He opened his eyes and I asked, “What’s up?”

Swampthroat sat up and looked around him.

“Did you pay Lionel back yet?” I asked.

“Lionel?”

“For the mushrooms?”

“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t.”

“You should do that.”

“I don’t have the money.”

“Oh.” I didn’t have much money myself. If I did, I probably wouldn’t have given it to him though. I wasn’t sure how much a bag of mushrooms was worth anyway.

Swampthroat got up and dusted himself off. He stumbled around, squinting in the daylight and straightening out his clothing. He wiped his eyes and surveyed the surroundings, confused, it seemed, as to how he’d ended up there. I admired him at that moment, the way he took things in stride and carelessly allowed himself to wander so far off course.

“How’s Robin?” he asked.

“She’s good.”

“What about the venison? Did your mom make a stew?”

“No. She doesn’t want it.”

“Oh.”

We walked together into town, where Swampthroat bought himself a large can of beer, a “tallboy.” He drank it out in the open and said he would have offered me a sip, but I was underaged.

“You still have that car,” he asked, “the hatchback?”

“Yes.”

“I need another ride, back to Tilly’s place.”

“I don’t know.” There was a small, rusted hole in the back of the hatchback where Lionel’s arrow had once been. People had asked me if it was a bullet hole, and I had told them truthfully that it was not.

“We’ll stop by your house first,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”

Swampthroat’s plan was to load my car up with the unused deer meat from our freezer. We’d take it out to Tilly’s place and Swampthroat would present it to them as payment for Lionel’s mushrooms. He seemed to think this would more than satisfy them.