Where the River Ends (10 page)

She interrupted me with a smile. “And if you found Him?”

“I was going to grab Him around the neck and choke Him until He answered me.”

“Did He?”

“If He did, I never heard Him. ’Course, it’s hard to hear when you’re hurting.” I shrugged. “I turned fifteen, swam to the surface and convinced enough folks in the trailer park to forge enough papers to help me finish school. Mom would have wanted that. At least that’s what I told myself. Besides, the school couldn’t argue with what I could do with a brush. It was somewhere in there I first remember hearing the term
realist.
I didn’t even really know what that was. I used to tell them, ‘’Course it’s real. I painted it.’”

“While technically my work was good, it was also devoid of emotion. Hollow. Even I could see that. That river summer had changed me. I had learned how to hold my breath. To live half alive because it kept the pain away.”

“Pain of what?”

“The present. Beyond all the coughing, sputtering and hacking, in between the moments when the light around the edges of my eyes narrowed and the tunnel closed in, I have held on to the inkling that I was made to breathe. That my lungs actually serve a purpose other than suffocating me. All they need is a reason.

“My mom helped me see beauty when I thought there was none. She’d steal me away to the river and then dip me in the sunlight as it dripped through a weeping willow. Then she’d set me in front of the canvas, hold my hand in hers, tell me to close my eyes and then rub my fingertips across the texture of the canvas. ‘Doss,’ she’d say, ‘God is in the details.’ I told her, ‘Momma, that may be but’—I’d touch her temple or point to the bruises on her neck—‘he ain’t no place else.’”

“I’d like to have met her.”

“I can take you to her grave.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.” A minute passed.

“And your dad?”

I shrugged. “Word around the trailer was that my mom was ‘easy,’ so I’m not quite sure if the guy who lived with us was my dad. I haven’t seen him since before the funeral.”

She stared at me, letting the sound of the wake from the yacht roll across the top of the river and spill across the rocks. “So when you paint, you’re painting for your mom?”

Between her father’s power and her own success, everybody wanted something from Abbie. Given this, she was guarded. Not unkind, not insincere, but careful. It didn’t take a genius to see there was more behind her question.

I shook my head. “I grew up in…in pieces. Mom saw this and it hurt her. Oil and canvas were her gifts to me. And sometimes, even if for the briefest of moments, they were the glue that put me back together. I can’t explain that. It just did.”

“An aspirin for your anger?” Another question.

“Anger?”

“I watched you fight a man twice your size.”

I nodded. “Yes, sometimes I come angry. But then there are moments when I lose track of time and when I look up and the canvas is staring back at me.”

My tone softened. “It’s a welling-up. I can’t
not
do it.” I tapped the side of my head. “When God wired my brain to my mouth, I think he might have crossed a wire. What’s supposed to go to my tongue, runs out my fingers. I think and my fingers move. So I paint.” I stared at my hands, trying to poke fun at myself. “If you want to know what I think, talk to the hands.” She rolled her eyes. “I came here, art school, thinking they knew more than I. That they could teach me more than some battered woman along the river.” I shook my head. “They’re just painting by numbers.” She said nothing. “But…I’m also a realist and I’d like to graduate, so I’m keeping my mouth shut.” I put my hand on her shoulder, then realized I had and pulled it back. “It felt good to sell that piece to that lady. The thought that she might hang it where it can be seen fills my need.” I picked a pebble off the wall and tried to skip it across the water.

After a moment she asked, “What’s the need?”

I shrugged. “Take a deep breath.”

She frowned.

“Go ahead. Take as deep a breath as your lungs will allow.”

She inhaled deeply.

“Now hold it.”

Thirty seconds passed.

“Keep holding it.”

Her face began to turn red. At a minute she let it out and sucked in a long breath.

I nodded. “That’s the need.”

10

JUNE 1, EVENING

W
e slid onto the beach around dark. I checked the GPS. “Distance traveled” read 9.6 miles. Not good. I needed to rethink how we did this. I could travel half again as fast with only one canoe. Problem was, we needed that second one to make it to the ocean. I would just have to walk and paddle faster, which was going to be difficult given that I was out of practice and out of shape.

I spread a bed on the beach for Abbie, propped her up and then started searching for wood. I built a small fire to warm us and fend off the mosquitoes and gnats. Night on the river can be tricky. It’s Africa-hot during the day, but mountain-cool at night beneath the trees.

Riding in the canoe had worn her down. A lot. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still. Around nine, she said, “You need to eat something.” Her mouth was cottony dry and her breath had a weird metallic smell.

The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. “I’m not too hungry.” I held a mug to her lips and she sipped.

“You just pulled two canoes and me ten miles down this river.” I straddled a log, pulled the lid on a can of peaches and ate slowly. She opened one eye. “That’s not going to cut it.”

I finished the peaches, zipped open the tent and lifted her slowly off the beach. I laid her inside, then boiled water in the Jetboil. While it cooled, I zipped us inside, then slowly slid off her clothes. She whispered, “You’re getting good at this.”

“Practice.” Her fentanyl patch needed changing so I peeled off the old, swabbed the skin on her arm, dried it and applied a new one. I slowly wiped down her arms and legs, toweled her off, slipped her head and arms through a T-shirt and zipped her inside a single-layered fleece bag. In the last several months, she’d quit sleeping in anything that placed pressure on her skin—said it felt like it was cutting into her. I tied the scarf loosely around her head and pointed. “I’ll be outside.” She squeezed my hand and turned on her side.

I stoked the fire, dragged a dead limb from behind some palmetto bushes, laid it across the fire and then sat on a log, swatting mosquitoes and counting what few stars I could see through the canopy. An hour later, I heard a stick crack. Having spent enough time in the woods, I could hear the difference between a small twig under the foot of a squirrel and something larger, broken under the weight of a larger foot. This far out in the boonies, it wasn’t uncommon to bump into feral hogs, deer, armadillos, raccoons, wild dogs, even a bear, so I slung the shotgun and scanned the bushes with the flashlight. When I saw nothing, no two eyes staring back at me, I worked the slide action on the shotgun—loading the number 8 birdshot into the chamber—thinking the sound alone might deter something looking for a meal. I had loaded the first round birdshot, the second two as buckshot and the last two as rifled slugs. My thought process was deter, stop and kill. Number 8 would kill most anything in these woods, if close enough, as would the buckshot. The slugs were insurance because they’d pass through most anything—like an engine block. Nothing moved so I clicked the safety back on and set the shotgun beside me.

I grew up in or around the woods so I’d grown accustomed to the sights, smells and sounds. Especially the sounds, since my nose has never been that reliable. While it may get quiet at night, it is seldom silent. Birds, crickets, frogs, gators, dogs, you name it. And often they will feed off each other. Little sounds here and there that create some sort of animal-chain reaction. If one chirps or croaks, often the others will assume it’s okay to do the same. The reverse is true as well. If one goes silent, the others will fall silent long enough to figure out why. I sat back down on that log and noticed how deathly quiet the woods had become.

I started thinking about old movies. Especially those scenes in which some character named Festus, Stumpy or Lefty scratches the back of his neck and says, “I can’t see them, but I got a notion we’re being watched.” Usually, he’s right. Because the next scene we see is filled with Indians wearing war paint.

I can’t explain it, but I had that feeling. I went over it in my mind: I heard a stick crack. Under weight. Probably more than a squirrel or raccoon. Also, the sound appeared muffled. Deer and hog feet don’t do that ’cause they’re hard. But people feet and bear paws do. To be honest, I wasn’t too concerned about bears. Black bears are more curious than dangerous. But it’s that other possibility that had the hair up on my neck.

I unzipped the tent, lifted Abbie—still in her sleeping bag—off her mat and pressed my finger to her lips. “Shhh.” She hung her arms around my neck. I looped my arm through the Pelican case lanyard and then the sling of the shotgun and slipped down the bank out of the fire’s reflection. I crossed the river—ankle-deep—and walked up a sandy beach on the Florida side. Abbie whispered, “What’s wrong?”

I scanned the river, listening. “Not sure.”

I set her down on the bank beneath a few overhanging trees. Twenty minutes passed. While we waited, I found myself plotting tomorrow’s path in my mind, thinking about where we could lunch and where we might take on more water. Where we might encounter people, where we could hide. While the river was cleaner than most, and you could drink it if you had to, I tried not to given the runoff. Too many pesticides I couldn’t see and too much manure I didn’t want to risk tasting. Artesian wells fitted with hand pumps dotted the riverbanks if you knew where to look.

I was about two seconds from carrying Abbie back to the tent when the first man appeared in the river. He was tall, skinny, barefooted, wore cutoff jeans and a T-shirt with no sleeves. He had stepped out from behind some trees, dipped his feet into the river and walked slowly to the canoes. He picked his feet up slowly, and then slipped them back in the water without a sound. Deer walk the same way when they don’t want to be noticed. A second man appeared behind him and walked directly to the tent with a third man close on his heels. The first man picked through the canoes while the second and third tore the tent apart. I could only hear snippets. They whispered in harsh tones.

The two at the tent got in a shoving match and then threw the whole mess—tent, my sleeping bag, our clothes and everything else I had stowed—into the fire. The flame-retardant tent smothered the fire, filling the campsite with smoke, causing more shoving and all three to cough. Finally, the heat won. The flames caught, climbed chest-high and lit the riverbank.

By the time the smoke cleared, the quiet man picking through the canoes had packed most everything we had into one canoe and began pulling it back upriver. A hundred yards or so later, he pulled it up the riverbank and slid it into the trees. For several minutes I could hear him sliding it through the woods. The fire roared and crackled, showering the bank in heat and light. The two that remained were getting more aggravated. Their faces glowed golden. I saw enough to know I didn’t like them but not enough to pick them out of a lineup.

We edged back under the trees. I placed my finger on Abbie’s lips again and lay down beside her, staring through the grass toward our campsite. Growing angrier, the two that remained gathered up everything they didn’t want and threw it in the campfire turned bonfire. The flames were now fifteen feet high and licking the underside of the tree limbs. They slung whatever else remained over their shoulders and began carrying it back across the river, following the lone man who’d just stolen our canoe. That left one canoe and little else.

I placed my hand on the shotgun. Abbie put her hand on mine and said, “Everything over there is replaceable. You’re not.”

11

W
ith her parents’ party still in high gear, Abbie hopped off the concrete wall, tucked her arm inside mine and said, “How much do you know about Charleston?”

“I know how to get to work, school and a few places where the fish occasionally bite.”

She raised both eyebrows and shook her head. “That won’t do. Won’t do at all.”

The roads in Charleston are wide—designed that way in 1680 to avoid the congestion typical of London’s narrow streets. So we walked up East Bay, along Rainbow Row, took a left on Elliott to Church and down Cabbage Row. She pointed up and down the street. “You ever seen
Porgy and Bess
?” I shook my head. “Well, when you do,
this
is Catfish Row.”

We crossed over to the Dock Street Theater. “This is where I learned to stand in front of a bunch of strangers.” She smiled. “And like it.” She led me a few doors down to the Pirates house built out of blue granite quarried in Bermuda. “Rumor has it,” she said, pointing at her feet, “there are secret tunnels leading from beneath the house all the way to the wharf.”

“You believe the rumors?”

She nodded.

“How come?”

She looked left, then right and leaned in closer. “’Cause I’ve been in the tunnels.”

We U-turned and then righted on Chalmers—Charleston’s longest remaining cobblestone street. British ships in the East India Trade Company used England’s cobblestones as ballast in their transatlantic voyage. Landing here and filling her stores with cotton, rice or lumber meant she left us her rocks. Frugal colonists used them to pave the streets, filling in the cracks with crushed oyster shell that, due to its high lime content, naturally filtered the runoff. Turning left on Meeting, we passed under the Four Corners of Law—so named after the four buildings that line each corner: the federal courthouse and post office, the county courthouse, City Hall and St. Michael’s Episcopal Church. After another right on Broad, she steered left on King—culminating our walk through and around the visual library of architecture that is Charleston. Abbie explained, “Charleston has the largest number of original eighteenth-and nineteenth-century homes in the country. In the renaissance that resulted after Hurricane Hugo, a fever spread. Everybody wanted a piece, sending home prices skyrocketing to nearly a thousand dollars a square foot. Rarely does someone post a for-sale sign in the front yard. They aren’t needed. The owner merely mentions to a friend or realtor that they are thinking about selling and before day’s end they’d have answered eight or ten calls. Bidding wars are not uncommon. Most homes around here are what they call the Charleston single house. One room wide, with its narrow end bordering the street. The porches—or piazzas—often run the length of the house, and face south or southwest to catch the prevailing sea breeze. Colonists learned long ago it’s better to plan for the long, oppressively hot summers than the brief winters.” Abbie knew more about Charleston in five minutes than I knew at all. She ducked in one alley to show me a bricked herringbone driveway. At another, an original Philip Simmons ironwork, or a garden growing something unique: “That Wisteria is thought to be a hundred and fifty years old.” I’d studied art most of my life, but Abbie’s eye was as developed, if not more so, than mine. She saw beauty in the smallest of details. At another gate, she leaned over and pointed up. “That’s called Kiss Me at the Gate or Breath of Spring.” It slid through her fingers. “It’ll grow six to eight feet, and its blossoms dangle, but mostly its known for its fragrance.”

I was amazed. “How do you know all this?”

“I’m a Charleston girl.” She smiled. “We’re raised to know this stuff.”

It was after midnight and we had come full circle, just a few blocks from her house. She looked at me. “You tired?”

I shook my head. “No, I think the walk did me good. I don’t know what you people put in that lemonade but it ought to come with a warning.”

She laughed, grabbed my hand and we walk-jogged a few blocks back toward the water. Pulling me along she said, “They close at one, so we might get there in time.”

“Who closes at one?”

The streets were quiet, lit by the occasional passing car or gas streetlamp. A couple of cats fought over a Dumpster and somewhere in the distance a high-pitched dog bark was followed by a low-pitched response. We ran back out onto Rainbow Row and crossed over to a corner liquor store. She pushed open the door, where we found an elderly black gentleman wearing a crimson sweater-vest. He sat behind a counter, one long leg extending beyond the counter, a penguin wingtip tapping in rhythm to the jazz coming out of the solid-state radio above him. One eye was cloudy but his beard and mustache were trimmed and his pink shirt had been pressed and starched. Abbie crossed the floor and he stood, beaming. “Must be some party if they sent you shopping at this time of night.”

She pulled my hand. “Mr. Jake, this is my friend Doss Michaels.”

He looked at me through his one good eye, sizing me up. Abbie turned to me. “Mr. Jake used to work at the theater. He taught me how to dance.”

He laughed an easy laugh but never took his eyes off me. He was quiet a minute then extended his hand. “You that boy I heer’d about the other night that helped Miss Abbie?”

I nodded. “I am.”

He waved his hand across the store. “Then anything you want is yours.”

She stepped closer and wrapped an arm around his waist. “Mr. Jake, I wanted to show Doss the cellar.”

He walked around the corner, pulled on a recessed handle at the floor level and lifted a large door. She flicked a light switch and the three of us descended some old wooden steps into the basement.

It was cool, and some water dripped somewhere. From what I could tell, the basement had been made entirely of large, hand-cut bricks. Mr. Jake explained, “This here is one of the tunnels out of the original old city of Charleston.” He waved his hand across the room like a buzzing bee. “They runned the len’th of the city. During Hugo, they filled up with ocean water…that flushed out all the rats.” He laughed again, something he did a lot of. “Some have collapsed. Some remain. Few know about them.”

I ran my hand along the wall and listened. He continued, “When I was a kid, I used to come in through a city drainage pipe out near the wharf, walk a couple of blocks through these tunnels with a candle in my hand and pop up inside the theater. They wouldn’t let me in the front door, so I come up underneath. I’ve seen more shows there than…anyone living I s’pose.”

Abbie turned toward me. “Mr. Jake is being modest. He started his acting career at Dock Street, then took it to New York where he starred in more than one on and off Broadway show.”

He nodded, remembering. She grabbed his hand. “Mr. Jake, you still remember our first dance?” She kicked off her shoes and turned to me. “I was six. Dock Street needed a fillin and doing so involved a very complicated number with Mr. Jake.” I leaned back against the wall while Abbie led and Mr. Jake remembered. His heels scuffed the brick floor taking two steps while the man in his memory took one. His face told me everything I needed to know.

They finished, his breathing was heavy but his smile had grown. She stood on her toes, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Mr. Jake, you’re still the best.”

“Miss Abbie”—he pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, shook it loose and wiped his brow and neck—“you do an old man good.”

We climbed out of the basement and stepped out of the liquor store underneath a single streetlight. Returning home, she talked more about the homes we passed, their history and those who owned them. I listened, walked off the buzz and felt something strange. I had spent my life swimming between the islands inside myself but had never seen one from another. That night, I stared across the ocean in me and saw, for the first time, a distant shore.