Another Perfect Catastrophe (20 page)

Wake up in black sky, fire licking in tongues. Cables snap, river water moaning. Fire throw out around the bridge, knit up the sky, make a hum. Saint Jimmy say, You quit that now and be quiet, say, We never should a lost that bottle. He put his hands on me, fire sucked up like a straw. Everything steel but his hands. Cables hit and make sparks that fall to river cold. Saint Jimmy say, Smell that, say, That put a cough in me sure as I'm living. He shake and rub his teeth. Bridge flash red, make us red. Saint Jimmy say, Look that old bitch winking at us, won't open her legs. Cough rip him, pull him down like it got its foot in his neck. He sit up, rub dark oil in his hands, say, We need a bottle. Iron boat sit, a hole in the black. Wind shoot from the hole and find us. Saint Jimmy say, Jesus we'll die, chatter broken teeth. Cables push a fire that hitch the wind right through. Saint Jimmy glow like coals, cough scars inside. His middle all burning him out. He say, If we had a woman.

Saint Jimmy got his arms in the sun, stand on the rail. He breathe blue. He drink and throw me a half-gone bottle. Go in me cool fire, paper in my clothes make me big. Saint Jimmy dance the rail, wind grab his pants. Cough bend him and he drink and move. Saint Jimmy say, No hands, say, This rail don't own me. Say, What I need's a new suit. Sheet boat tip over, water shake around, rail bend with his shoes. Saint Jimmy cough and the bottle come out red. He say, Get the wire in the water. Steel wire haul up empty. Saint Jimmy say, Give them a stomach, they eat their own kind. Fish all gone, cart empty. Saint Jimmy say, Croakers is like money, got to have it to get it. Rail make a sound and Saint Jimmy on the cement, say, I know all about falling. Drink and cough. Drink. Wind falling asleep and the cables make a song, whisper. Saint Jimmy say, We got to eat or the cold eat us. Pull through the cart, plastic and paper, throw-away razors and tin. Legs go to sleep without him. Saint Jimmy say, Where's that knife? Pull it from me and my hand get cold. Saint Jimmy peel off his skin, dripping red. Bottle red. Say, Look like a worm, don't it, say, Don't lose that, I got to eat that. Haul up croaker on a wire. Throw K-l on the Sterno and cut it up. Wrap his hand in a paper. Saint Jimmy smile broken teeth, say, Hush up that noise, it'll grow back. Saint Jimmy say, What you do without me?

Night getting fast. Bridge wink and split her legs. Bad penny building eat its suns. Nobody live there. River a long black hole, grow iron buildings and bury up the moon. Trucks on the bridge throw yellow and green. Saint Jimmy lower the bottle in a net, say, Don't get thirsty yet. Hone the knife on my shoe. Throw out a stomach, haul up croaker on a wire. Saint Jimmy say, Put it in the bank. Throw in the cart flapping blood. Bridge groan its last closing. Wind come up big, pull water off the river and hit us, raining backward. Saint Jimmy wrap me in plastic from the cart, say, We got to keep you fresh, case you die. Say, Damn, I done spent that dollar. Saint Jimmy wrap himself in plastic, throw paper on the Sterno. Say, Go to sleep. My eyes won't listen.

River, bridge, building, pier. Me. Saint Jimmy. Night, night, everything a quilt on tar, bubbling up. Tar drip down black. Hot put a boil in the river, black noise. Pull up on the cart, hot melt my hands to it. Drunk wind falling down everywhere and moaning. Lay down with it in plastic, still moaning. Saint Jimmy in plastic, oil leak out of him. Fire show his bones right through. Bridge make us red, trucks draw a line yellow and green. Crosses taller than everything, a thousand feet high and signs warning away. Electrified and humming. Cables twist like eels. River moaning and wind moaning afraid. Saint Jimmy in plastic and the cough right through him. Say his name. Touch Saint Jimmy and I hear him break, fire put out and liquid smoke. Skin gone hard and the moaning won't quit. Moaning. Wind peel blue fire off the cables, yellow sparks like sunflowers. Fire seeds carry. Blue lightning off the crosses arc the sky, hit the bridge a wet burning and drip off in the river. Black water full of sparks. Moaning. Glow the water, lights in a fog. Sky melt in smoke and rain, bounce fire off our pier. Pop and make a smell. Fire in Saint Jimmy run through him to dark. Everything broken and I tell I need him back. River die and a million pink fish float up. Bridge go limp and trucks tumble in, make a ripple on the dead water. Waves on oil. Hold Saint Jimmy and the hard wind catch my plastic. Plastic float up away from me like ash.

Early morning
,
and Clarendon starts like a wind-up toy—cotton and rice farmers machining the Delta soil, jackhammers breaking the streets downtown. Bosco is talking, too much and too loud, finding no difference between nighttime talk and daytime, between drunk and sober. Along the shore, the streetlights blink out all at once. For the second time that morning, Bosco talks about killing Leo Myer.

“We could, Ray,” he says, sober a moment. “You know we could.”

Ray feels something shift when the words are said, feels that slow, familiar movement toward trouble.

“Always running off at the goddamn mouth, Bosco,” Ray says, laughs it off. “Ought to wrap it with duct tape instead of this.”

Ray waves his twelve gauge, its stock covered in greasy tape, then shoves the barrel under the river s surface and pulls the trigger. The muffled
whomp
boils downward, jarring his bones, the water exploding upward in a rain of mud and algae. Bubbles rise with the blood and mangled remains of a carp. Ray nets it from the water, tosses it in the cooler. Later, he will grill it over hardware cloth with potatoes wrapped in tinfoil, and they will pick out like bones from the flesh the tiny lead pellets, spitting them into the currents.

“You say that ‘cause you know I'm right,” Bosco says, his smile cutting thin, framed by the mustache that edges his mouth. They have been up all night, drinking beer and shooting carp. Ray switches off the lamps that float in the shallows. The carp move in shadows across the pebbly bottom. Bosco finishes his chocolate milk, drops the carton and stomps it, making Ray jump.

“About all I know is you're a kid, Bosco,” Ray says. “A thirty-five-year-old goddamn kid.” Bosco shrugs and drinks, his shirtless chest bony and sunken.

They stand on the deck of Bosco's houseboat, which once served as a repair barge and welding deck for BG Ironworks until it ran on a shoal in the middle of the White River, fifty yards downstream of the railroad trestle outside Clarendon. Permanent as an island now, the boat holds as the river washes around it. Red-winged blackbirds balance on the rope that connects the barge to shore, the same rope that Ray and Bosco shinny across for groceries, liquor, and generator fuel. When Bosco finds women from town they shinny across with him, legs scissoring, skirts gaping, Ray shining his flashlight on the whites of their thighs. The women squeal and curse Bosco for where he lives, curse the light and the oily rope, drunk and laughing while Ray holds his breath, waiting for them to slip and disappear forever beneath the deep, slow motion of the river.

Bosco lifts another beer from the plastic bag hanging in the current. The white scar from his surgery looks fresh still, lines stitched across his shoulder where the Jonesboro doctors removed the cancer. The indentations there form notches in the line of his shoulder, the flesh gouged and ridged. Ray looks at it, winces. After the surgery was when he began to spend all his time on the barge—not just Saturday nights—helping Bosco tie his shoes, cook his food, and, for a time, button his pants.

Bosco takes the gun, his mouth hanging open as he scans the water. They will shoot until the sheriffs deputy drives down to the riverbank and hollers for them to call it a day.

“We better quit soon,” Ray says.

“How much you think them diamonds are worth?” Bosco asks. “How easy would it be to walk in there, off the sonofabitch, and get out?” He drinks his beer and elbows Ray, starts humming the
Jeopardy
theme. Riffing off game shows is a stage in Bosco's drunkenness, lodged somewhere between vomiting and blacking out. After they have caught a day's haul of oysters, he will watch the shows on his little five-inch black-and-white, the cord for the TV running off the generator inside the cramped cabin of the barge, where he keeps his mattress, refrigerator, and the old issues of
National Geographic
he finds on the library free table and uses for kindling. Nights they sit at the edge of the barge, occupying an old couch Bosco found on the roadside and floated across, left in the sun to dry. Bosco watches game shows and comedies, shouts at the screen, while Ray watches the river and thinks about the water flowing past them, all the bits of sediment carried to the ocean. They sit until the generator runs out of gas, then fire up lamps to shoot carp in the shallows, run trotlines for catfish.

“Just let the idea go, Bosco,” Ray tells him.

“You don't think I'd do it?”

“Well, let's see. Last month, panning for gold was gonna make us rich and before that crystal meth and before that parting out cars. Now it's hauling oysters that's not making us dime one, so you're going to kill Leo Myer and take a bunch of diamonds that might or might not even be there. Bullshit, Bosco.”

Bosco takes back the gun, racks it, and fires beneath the water. Bits of gravel clink against the side of the rusted water heater that floats beside them, chained to the barge.

“One big difference this time, Ray,” Bosco says. “I
need
the goddamn money.” He blinks and looks away, tips up his beer can to hide his eyes.

The first time the doctor found the cancer in Bosco's shoulder was an accident, an X-ray done after some bar-fight soreness wouldn't work itself out. With no money or insurance, Bosco had worked out a payment plan that would see him through to old age, and if he skipped even one payment, Ray knew, the collection agency would be along to take his barge, his beaten-down truck, his little TV, his refrigerator, and his last pair of socks. Now he complains of new soreness in his shoulder, tiredness in his days, but his joke is that he can't buy any more sickness until the last one is paid for. He has stopped smiling when he says it.

Bosco tosses his beer can into the river and fires at it. He racks and fires again, at the willow tree that tethers the shinny rope. Ray grabs the gun by the barrel and twists it from Bosco's fingers. He spits into the water and watches it float away, then ejects the empty shell.

“We won't ever be rich, Bosco, not in this life.”

They cook and eat carp into the afternoon, putting off that day's haul of oysters, work which renders their only cash until the end of the month when Ray collects for his weekend motor route. He drives the same camper truck he sleeps in when he's not on the barge, muscling it down bumpy washouts in the dead of night, listening to radio baseball and talk shows, shoving the
Clarendon Gazette
into the green plastic tubes mounted at the side of the road. All day, while they eat and drink, while the river washes around them, Bosco talks of Leo's diamonds, how they are there for the taking, how that woman he met at the bar has seen them herself. He talks nonstop, nodding and jabbering, rubbing his ruined shoulder.

By early evening Ray lets himself be talked into a visit to Leo's place. Bosco says he wants to case it out, words he's lifted from some TV show. Ray agrees, wanting Bosco to stand there in Leo's apartment, work it through his brain, see the impossibility of it. They drive out County Road 10 toward Berryville, drinking beer, swatting mosquitoes. They come to the brick building that once held Sunshine Dairy, where Leo runs his business from a single room on the second floor. Out beside the road is Leo's handpainted sign advertising palm reading, tarot cards, and Shiatsu massages, ten dollars each. The front windows are webbed by strips of masking tape and yellowed, curling posters for the Shriner's Bar-B-Q and the Marv-L Circus. Inside, the old cream separators and capping machines sit rusting, covered in dust.

“So if Leo's rich, how come he lives in this hole?” Ray asks.

“You've heard the story,” Bosco says.

“Yeah, I've heard it,” Ray says. “That one and about a thousand others.”

“Well, I guess we'll see, then, won't we?”

The story seeps into the bars in the way of all rumor, through spilled beer and bullshit and games of eight ball and last call, places where Bosco has picked up the story and made it his own. The word is that Leo Myer once worked as a diamond wholesaler in Atlanta, that one afternoon he pocketed five pounds of rough stones off the plane from Barrons, that he picked Clarendon, Arkansas, off a road atlas and settled in to hide himself. Leo speaks with a New York accent, wears flowing caftans to the IGA in town, silver rings and ear hoops, tiny braids woven in his longish hair.

“That's right, Bosco,” Ray says. “We'll see, and then you can drop this shit.”

“Just keep his ass busy,” Bosco says.

After a steep climb to the second floor, they ring the buzzer. The door opens with a tinkling of chimes and Leo yawns at them from behind his graying beard. Behind him, the TV plays a commercial for dog food.

“Visitors,” he says. The room is thick with incense and yellow light, the walls pale green, hung with feathers and beads. “What can I do for you boys?” He is without his caftan and earrings, and wears instead sweatpants and a gray T-shirt.

“My buddy here would like his palm read,” Bosco says.

“Is that a fact? Just what problem are you working through?”

Ray shrugs. “Whatever.”

Leo smiles at them. “Why don't you fellows save your money. Go buy a few rounds at the Barbary Coast.”

“No, we really want to know the future,” Bosco says. “We can pay.” He cuts his eyes at Ray as he unfolds a crumpled ten from his jeans and hands it to Leo.

Leo shrugs, opens the door to let them in. They sit down at a pocked wooden table in the kitchen while Bosco heads toward the sink.

“Mind if I get some water?” Bosco asks. Leo waves the back of his hand and slips on a pair of dime store reading glasses. He uses the remote control to click off the TV.