This River Awakens (2 page)

Four boys, nothing more. But it was our world and our time, when the earth loosed its secrets, staining our hands, our knees. The river birthed our cruel laughter, as it did our pensive silences. It carried pieces of the city half submerged past us, a barbaric pageant, a legion burdened with loot. Dead dogs and tree branches, tricycles frozen in bobbing ice, a water-filled wooden boat with pieces of dock still trailing from nylon ropes, a television casing – showing endless scenes of flooding – and small, bedraggled clumps of feather. The booty of a strange war.

The scene remains vivid in my mind. Four boys, aged twelve one and all. What lay before us was the river, remorseless like thought itself, in its season of madness, burdened with chunks of brown ice and cryptic messengers. The air that rose from it was cold, wet and overripe.

There was a Sunday school teacher in the city, a tall, beaked and pinched woman with sad, hopeful eyes. She’d once told me that the soul is like a bird, flying from your body when you pass on. I spent that day and many others imagining those birds, shining and white-winged and full of music. The spring, she’d said, was a time for rebirth, the final proof of proper things under God’s Heaven.

But as I stood there on the bank of the swollen river, I thought about the crows riding the bloated cow. Middlecross wasn’t the city. It was something else. A place where the bird souls linger, picking at what hasn’t
passed on.
Wings not white, but black and greasy. Not music, but dark laughter.

Crows. They were my rivals. This place was the rotting underside of the world, decay a slow revelation of truths. My rivals, because I’d screamed
Fly!

*   *   *

Crack!
Lynk had found a stick, attacking trees as we walked. ‘Just wait till summer,’ he said.
Crack!
The sound shivered in the air – Lynk beating his demons into submission. Summer was everything, it was All. A future time to be unleashed into, like a dog with a snapped chain. Bounding into the unfolding world of heat, lightning storms, games of war. Lynk wasn’t alive yet, but he would be come summer, his season of bright, painful light.

Maybe his trees had faces.
Crack!
Frowning faces impeding his impatient nature. He’d made his march relentless, but his words gave him away. ‘Just wait till summer.’ A thin, reedy call to distant power. A birth-cry of someone not yet alive, not yet here in the world. His carnivore grin was a pup’s, incomplete but still a warning worth noticing. Lynk was coming alive, soon, only a matter of time.

Flush with the river’s pageant glory we’d left the bank, pushing inland through the bracken. Lynk’s stick spoke for all of us in one way or another. Grim and determined like soldiers looking for an enemy, we were marauders, hunters, giants. Fearless, on the edge of calculated rage.

A game, I told myself. The forest wrapped us tight, hid all signs of civilisation. It played along, sharpening the sounds of twigs snapping underfoot, filling our moments of silence with significance. The dusk caressed us as it filled the forest, seeming to call to us, to urge us towards an unseen and unknown goal. We would sweep aside armies and kings, we would level mountains, we would topple gods.

Like Lynk, I dreamed of summer. Unlike him, I didn’t know what to expect, nor did I much care. The day that school was over, my last tie to the city went under the knife. Cut loose, withdrawing from the crowded streets, the steamy buses – what I anticipated was clear in my mind. What came afterwards was left to Lynk, or so it seemed, since the eagerness I felt came from him alone. He carried the stick, and ahead waited the throne of summer. He was full of ascendant visions, and neither Roland nor Carl seemed mindful of opposing him.

Such were my initial readings of these three friends, which I still held on to, despite what my careful eyes caught, were catching even now. Lynk talked, he filled the air with his claim to dominance – but it was all for me, a challenge and a warning. He was telling me where I stood, as subtly as if he’d jammed his boot on my throat. Lynk talked, but the power, I had come to realise, was in the silence.

‘Old Man Fisk,’ Lynk said. ‘Piles up all the mink guts and burns them. He lets us watch. Me and Roland and Carl. Might let you, too.’

Small and wiry, Lynk was like one of Fisk’s cages bent and twisted into human form. His blue eyes shone with an eerie, hungered look, cold, hard eyes pinning a narrow, long nose. Greasy brown hair hung to his shoulders. His teeth curved inward. He moved furtively, making me think of escaped animals, promising a wildness that made me fear his freedom.

Here, deep in the woods with the smell of decay heavy on all sides, small patches of snow persisted, crusty and stroked with black dirt. As we pushed deeper into the wood the air grew cooler. On all sides shadows reached down through the tangled branches like swords. The colours drifted into grey, making the world flat, compressed under our feet. Past floods had reached this far, I realised as I stepped over the weathered planks of a broken dock. Booty tossed aside, here to rot into the earth, here to become part of our world.

‘Burning mink guts,’ Lynk said breathlessly.

Walking behind me, Carl added, ‘Burns all night!’

‘Must stink like shit,’ I said to Lynk, ignoring Carl as he stumbled in my wake.

Lynk shrugged,
a tough world for city kids, huh?,
then said, ‘He soaks the pile in kerosene. Massive clouds of black smoke.’

I’d never smelled burning kerosene. I’d never even used the word, though I knew about it from school. But I nodded. It was harder thinking about mink guts, trying to picture them. Pale and pink like balloons, maybe, or yellow lumpy ropes. Soaked in kerosene. Black clouds all through the night. I wasn’t even sure what a mink looked like.

Carl started talking behind me. His face floated into my mind, spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. ‘He piles on other stuff, Old Man Fisk. Bone and stuff. You can see the sparks for miles around, Owen. Fuckin’ right, Lynk?’

‘Fuckin’ right.’

An unexpected confirmation from Lynk, making me curious. Lynk with his stick, talking, talking. Me keeping my mouth shut most of the time, just like that powerful, other silence. Lynk felt a need for allies. Carl wasn’t much, but he was the only choice, already under Lynk’s eager heel.

Crack!

‘You gotta watch out for Old Man Fisk sometimes,’ Lynk said, raspy voice falling deeper, seeking a tone to match a real, adult threat. ‘He’s nuts. Once he threw rocks at me, big fuckin’ rocks. I was crossing his field, just like we did today. Getting dark, and out he comes, tearing down the porch and screaming at me. Something about the bloody mud – that’s what he was screaming. “The bloody mud!” Fuckin’ nutso, man.’

Lynk whapped at a branch, then continued, ‘I called him a shithead. That’s when he started throwing rocks.’

‘Fuckin’ nutso,’ Carl said.

I scowled. ‘What are you, a parrot?’

Carl shut up. Breath loud as he stumbled through the brush, trying to keep up, not catch up. Unwelcome in the front line. Small and weak. His teeth were yellow, his words thick like he talked through a wall of spit. Lots of Carls in the world, a life in the shadows, at least one in every classroom. What did they become? Where did they go?

On that fine, treacherous path I walked, the New Kid path I’d walked a half-dozen times before – already a wise, cautious veteran – Carl had his place. I despised him, openly, a statement to Lynk – to every Lynk I’d met in every school, every new neighbourhood. An old hand, I was convinced that there were no mysteries left – not in this fragmented sliver of the world. The niche I needed to carve depended on Carl staying what he was.

And yet, a mystery remained: the source of the powerful silence that seemed to tolerate Lynk as a patron would a devious whelp. A silence generous enough to encompass Carl in its benign wake. Open to me without challenge, without even a question. Roland strode ahead. Big for a boy of twelve, with wide shoulders and flat hands that made me envious of farm life and hard work. When he broke his silences, the words came out slow and thoughtful. Even Lynk shut up and listened. We all did. We didn’t feel there was any choice, and we didn’t want one in any case.

We travelled through the woods, each on our own paths, ranging like wolves. But for all our tracks of independence, Roland led the way. My gaze returned to him again and again.

*   *   *

Crack!
Lynk whirled to face me. ‘Could you believe that fuckin’ cow?’

Grinning, I shook my head.

Lynk laughed harshly, turned away. ‘It was nothing, man. Happens all the time. You don’t know a fuckin’ thing, man.’

I held my grin. Never reveal when a point’s scored.

Lynk gave me an odd look, a second too long – showing me his doubt – before whirling a swing at the closest tree.

We were all unbalanced. But I was more unbalanced than the others. This was their world, not yet mine. My weakness, a temporary condition I did my best to disguise – an easy, casual stride, bored expression, trying to see this new world with old eyes. A tightrope, the oblivion of a misstep was a place I’d lived in before – no, living wasn’t the word – a child’s hell. If my family’s stumbling moves held anything positive for me – anything at all – it was the chance to start again, scarred but wiser.

Emerging from the forest we came to the first borderline. The outer lands belonged to Fisk and men like him – distant, aloof, dangerous – farmland broken by ragged windrows and the winding river. The inner land before us was marked by a loop of residential properties.

An asphalt road came down from the highway, dipping then flattening out and coming around to return to the highway, making a ‘U’ shape with the bottom running parallel to the river. All of the lots on the inside of the ‘U’ had gardens in their large back yards, one kept distinct from the other by thin walkways of grass or raspberry-bush hedgerows. Sheds stood like the bastions of forts, woodpiles like ramparts. The men who owned those houses worked in the city. Grey- and blue-suited, they drove in their Furies and Customs, a daily march to the weekends, when the suits were shed and old polyester pants and t-shirts were donned. All through their weekends they manned their forts and ramparts; a peaceful détente of friendly competition. Hoes borrowed, rakes loaned.

Many of these families had children, but they were mostly younger than us. A few were older, too. Both groups seemed ghostly to me.

There were the four of us. Only the four of us, at least at first.

In the summer, I learned from Lynk, those gardens became our no-man’s-land. Like shadows we would move down the rows of plunder – the raspberries, Nansing cherries, apples and crab-apples. We’d raid, moving silent through the heavy acrid smoke of refuse heaps.

Ringing the ‘U’ were older lots, with their tall houses hidden by giant oaks and elms. The newer homes – the flat bungalows with the Furies and the Customs parked in the driveways – marked the loop’s inside. No trees blocked these homes from sight for those walking the road. Nothing but grass, cropped once a week barring rain.

A playground ran outside the first line of the ‘U’. It began at the bend and ended where the road started its steep climb to the highway level. Separating the hill and the playground was Louper’s lot.

From the forest we entered the playground, appearing along its south edge. At the far end, we could see Mrs Louper standing beneath one of her crab-apple trees. The sound of barking dogs came from beyond her.

Lynk pointed in that direction with a slight jut of his chin. ‘Old Lady Louper’s got the best fuckin’ crab-apples around. When we raid those we got to be real careful, ’cause of the dogs. We can’t get at her garden. The fuckin’ dogs would get us for sure.’

It was the end of our journey. Lynk and Carl moved on up the road on their way home. Their fathers worked in the city. Roland’s farm was on the other side of the highway. He nodded to me before jumping the ditch and making his way across the playground. The dogs at the Loupers’ set off wild barking from somewhere behind the house.

I walked a short distance along the bottom road of the loop, then turned into a shadowed driveway that wound between tall elms. It was dinner-time, and I was home, and this was the last border.

V

Sten Louper’s hand groped under the bed for the bottle, but it had rolled too far. The thought amused him. As a child he’d believed that monsters lived under his bed. Something he would grow out of, his father had said. Amusement. Here he was, fifty-three, and monsters still prowled in that thick darkness beneath him.

Father’s bed. Sten had inherited it, along with the house, and the trees and the grass and this orgasmic come-on with booze, this love/hate thing he loved to hate, this gift of genetic susceptibility – or so went the latest theory.
A beauty, a fucking beauty. Don’t blame me, fellas, it’s right here in these genes, my Levi’s chromosomes excusing my weakness, isn’t that sweet.

Never mind the monsters down there. They knew him well. They shared his taste for rye. They stole from his bottle sometimes, when he and it had rolled too far.

His father had lied. Sten knew he should have recognised the look in the old man’s ravaged face. He’d had his own monsters, the same ones, the ones that never went away, the ones that dragged him into death –
dead liver, by God, let him go quietly.
No genetic weakness back then. No, just a simple moral failing. Self-pity right into the pit and that’s all she wrote.

Sten knew all this. Flowing through the dizzy currents in his head was a river of vomit, piss and rye and secretly delicious awareness. He contemplated getting up, but all his will had drained away – thank bugger God. Drunk, hating himself with sweet vengeance, hating his surrendering of control, loving those sour notes in his double-helix of mercy.

Nope, can’t get up.

But he could think, his brain weaving through
Scientific American, National Geographic, Popular Science, Psychology Today,
weaving random pages and notes and details into lovely excuses. Thought never took much energy, never taxed his lead limbs, never revealed his loss of control. It came easy. So easy. Came, conjured, then left. But really going nowhere. He never tired of the travail. All so easy, a whirling spiral, follow it up and down, down and up, no end and no beginning.