B000FC0U8A EBOK (22 page)

Two more days without food and he is taken to a hospital—they carry him like his skin is a bag inside which his bones knock together. He can remember only the dull pain of knuckles on his sternum. He wakes in a room, propped on a bed, with tubes plugged into his arms.

In half-dreams he sees terrible visions: the limbless bodies of men materialized on the bureau or the corner chair; the floor lined with corpses in the unnatural poses of death, flies on their eyes, dried blood in their ears. Sometimes when he wakes he sees the man he has killed kneeling on
the foot of the bed, his blue beret in his lap, his arms still tied behind his back. The wound in his forehead is fresh, a drill hole rimmed in black, his eyes open. “I have never even
been
in an airplane,” he says. Any minute now a nurse will come into the room and see the dead man kneeling on the foot of the bed and that will be it. Finally, Joseph thinks, I must pay for it.

There are other visitors: Mrs. Twyman in the corner chair, her thin arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes are on his; purple stains like bruises throb beneath her eye sockets. “What?” she screams. “What?” And Belle comes, or what might have been Belle—Joseph wakes and remembers her sliding open the window, pointing at gulls on the Dumpsters. But he does not know if he dreamed it, if she is on her way to Argentina, if she even thinks of him. His window is closed, the curtains drawn. When the nurse opens it he can see there are no Dumpsters, just lawn, a parking lot.

Another week or so and a lawyer comes, a clean-shaven pink man with acne around his collar. He reads to Joseph from a newspaper article that says Liberia has held democratic elections; Charles Taylor is the new president, the war is over, refugees are flooding back. “You are to be deported, Mr. Saleeby,” he says. “It’s very very good for you. The tools you stole and the trespassing— the court will drop these things. Negligence and the accusations of abuse are dropped too. You’re absolved, Mr. Saleeby. Free.”

Joseph leans back in his bed and realizes that he does not care.

A nurse announces a visitor. She has to help him from the bed and when he stands black spots fill his vision. She folds him into a wheelchair and carts him down the hall and out a side door into a small fenced courtyard.

It is so bright Joseph feels as if his head might crack open. She wheels him to a picnic table in the center of the lawn, fringed by a fence, with cars parked in a lot behind it, and returns the way she came. Joseph strains his eyes toward the sky; it is dazzling, a seething bowl of clouds. A bank of trees beyond the lot tosses in the wind—half the leaves are down and the branches swing together. It is autumn, he realizes. He imagines the blackened,
withered roots of his garden, the shriveled tomatoes and wrinkled leaves, a frost paralyzing everything. He wonders if this is where they’ll leave him, finally, to die. The nurse will return in a few days, empty him from the chair and bury what’s left, the leather of his skin pulling back, the black seed of his heart giving way, the bones settling into the earth.

A door opens into the courtyard and from the doorway steps Belle. She has her knapsack over her shoulders and she walks toward Joseph with a shy smile and seats herself at the picnic table. Beneath the collar of her windbreaker he can see the strap of her shirt, a pale collarbone, a trio of freckles above it. The wind lifts strands of her hair and sets them back down.

He holds his head in his hands and studies her and she studies him. She makes the sign for how are you and Joseph tries to make it back. They smile and sit. Sun winks off the cars in the lot. “Is this real?” Joseph asks. Belle cocks her head. “Are you real? Am I awake?” She squints and nods as if to say, of course. She points over her shoulder, at the parking lot. I drove here, she signs. Joseph says nothing but smiles and props his head in his hands because his neck will not hold it up.

Then she seems to remember why she has come and takes the knapsack from her shoulder and produces two melons, which she sets on the table between them. Joseph looks at her with his eyes wide. “Are those . . . ?” he asks. She nods. He takes one of the melons in his hands. It is heavy and cool; he raps his knuckles against it.

Belle takes a penknife from the pocket of her windbreaker and stabs the other melon, cutting in an arc across its diameter, and when, with a tiny sound of yielding, the melon splits into two hemispheres, a sweet smell washes up. In the wet, stringy cup within are dozens of seeds.

Joseph scoops them out and spreads them over the wood of the table, each white and marbled with pulp and perfect. They shine in the sun. The girl saws a wedge from one of the halves. The flesh is wet and shining and Joseph cannot believe the color—it is
as if the melon carried light within it. They each lift a chunk of it to their lips and eat. It seems to him that he can taste the forest, the trees, the storms of the winter and the size of the whales, the stars and the wind. A tiny gob of melon slides down Belle’s chin. Her eyes are closed. When they open she sees him and her mouth splits into a smile.

They eat and eat and Joseph feels the wet pulp of the melon slipping down his throat. His hands and lips are sticky. Joy mounts in his chest; any moment his whole body could dissolve into light.

They eat the second melon too, again taking the seeds from the core and spreading them over the table to dry. When they are done they divide the seeds and the girl wraps each half in a piece of notebook paper and they put the damp packets of seeds in their pockets.

Joseph sits and feels the sun come down on his skin. His head feels weightless, as though it would float away if not for his neck. He thinks: If I had to do it over again, I’d bury the whole whales. I’d sow the ground with bucketfuls of seeds—not just tomatoes and melons, but pumpkins and beans and potatoes and broccoli and maize. I’d fill the beds of a hundred dumptrucks with seeds. Huge gardens would come up. I’d make a garden so huge and colorful everyone would see it; I’d let the weeds grow and the ivy, everything would grow, everything would get its chance.

Belle is crying. He takes her hands and holds her thin, articulate fingers against his own. He wonders if the dust has piled up against the walls of the house in the hills outside Monrovia. He wonders if hummingbirds still flit between the cups of the flowers, if by some miracle his mother could be there, kneeling in the soil, if they could work together cleaning away the dust, sweeping, brooming it up, carrying it out the door and pitching it into the yard, watching it unfurl in great rust-colored clouds, to be taken up by the wind and scattered somewhere else.

“Thank you,” he says, but cannot be sure if he says it aloud. The clouds split and the sky brims over with light—it pours onto
them, glazing the surface of the picnic table, the backs of their hands, the wet, carved bowls of the melon rinds. Everything feels very tenuous, just then, and terribly beautiful, as if he is straddling two worlds, the one he came from and the one he is going to. He wonders if this is what it was like for his mother, in the moments before she died, if she saw the same kind of light, if she felt like anything was possible.

Belle has reclaimed her hands and is pointing somewhere far off, somewhere over the horizon. Home, she signs. You are going home.

A T
ANGLE BY THE
R
APID
R
IVER

Mulligan gathers
his things: his fly rod, a coffee-browned thermos, Ziplocs plumped with potato sticks, deer jerky, ginger-snaps, extra socks in a knapsack. A fly box from the basement. Breakfast: sausage sizzled in oil, two slabs of pumpernickel slathered with margarine, coffee in a chipped mug. He chews in the worn door frame between the kitchen and bedroom and watches his wife sleep. Her bulk rounded under blankets. Her gray undergarments on the wooden chair. Ever since their first night she has slept like this, like an ox. Since that fine and giddy wedding night, when he held her long after she slept, and told her things and she did not wake up. He told her once that it was as if some huntsman with his hounds comes to drag her into the night and hold her until dawn. Some wraithy night huntsman with slaverous hounds on tethers. Mulligan says her name. She sleeps her hard vacant sleep. Before he leaves he stokes the fire.

In the lane, above the walnut trees, the moon floats halved and white, a cold-bleached fossil. Shreds of cloud scud out to sea. Overnight, it seems, autumn was ridden out of the trees, the branches stripped, the yard buried under leaves. Mulligan chews a stalk of brown grass, unlocks the frosty truck cab. This, he thinks, might as well be winter: stony skies, crows tearing apart old trees, the ravening questions of owls, the round faces of ponds filmed with ice. Soon the trout and salmon will retreat to deepest pools and hang over the pebbled bottoms, motionless, unblinking, while the river kinks in ice-bound channels and freezes above them. Mulligan will retreat too, putter in his basement, tie flies by lamplight.

The truck moves sluggishly, the fuel thick, the high beams yellow and feeble. The highway is wet and shadowed. The long slow splashing and headlight glare and the wet severed trunks on the bed of a lumber truck grinding up the highway are the only things about, and a family of starlings, wing to wing on a split rail. One of them on one leg. Their eyes calm in the sweep of headlights.

At Weatherbee’s Convenience by four-thirty, Mulligan stands in the harlequin light amid stacked glossies, shelved candy, cigarette packs, lotto tickets in silver rolls, discount milk signs. Little bells ribboned to the door jingle. The slushee machine makes its slow pink churn. He fills his thermos with Weatherbee’s stale coffee, sets a newspaper and coins on the counter where Weatherbee sleeps on his elbows.

Weatherbee blinks, dry-eyed, coming back from a long way off.

You?

Mulligan nods.

Like a goddamn alarm clock.

When you get to be my age, Mulligan says, sleep is not so different from being awake. You just kind of shut your eyes and you’re there.

Weatherbee grinds his palms into his eyes. Fishing the Rapid again?

Thought I’d try.

You go up there every day. With a newspaper and a coffee.

Mulligan shrugs, his eyes already out the door. I don’t know. Most every day. I’m going today.

Weatherbee wipes the counter and yawns. I thought retirement was for sleeping, he says. The door levers shut behind Mulligan.

The post office is dark, the windows shut, one short light, a fragile filament cast across rows of brass mailboxes. A lumber truck splashes down the highway. Mulligan walks to a post box, unlocks it and peers inside. One letter. Thick paper, and smooth. He slips it into his shirt pocket. From a zippered pocket in his jacket he takes another letter, addressed with his own tiny printing. He sets this letter in the post box, closes it and goes out.

He points the truck into the hills, the flanks of naked tree slopes, the fallen leaves beginning their slow slide into the earth, a few stars fading behind ropes of cloud. The pocked and mudded logging roads—four unmarked turns, fording a stone-choked creek and the truck gurgling, warming, pressing over slick clay, beneath the clear-cut hillsides, stacks of limbless birch in bound rolls on the road flanks and hacked from the dim tangle of woods, savage mudferns and rust-stalked blackberry—end in a small clay clearing, where the noses of granite boulders peek from the earth, where fishermen park. His is the first truck.

He pulls on his waders, fits his rod and reel, and leans it against the truckcab. He stuffs his knapsack with the Ziplocked jerky, gingersnaps, potato sticks, extra socks, and the newspaper. He zips the fly box into his vest, pulls a wool cap over his head. Then he sits a moment, breathes, and his breath fogs the windshield. A cloud stretches over the moon.

His fingers find the letter in his shirt pocket, the thick paper, the smooth envelope. He puts on his reading glasses, opens the letter, finds a flattened flower. In the stale cablight, the ignition buzzing, he reads the round cursive:

Dearest Mulligan,

It could hardly be more confusing. You say you feel the same way as I, yet you glide along with your life, your fishing—and her—as if all was well and good and this were normal. But all is not well! This secrecy wears at me. These letters we trade in a post office box, the harried days when she thinks you are fishing, when half of you is at the river anyway, these are not enough, not nearly enough. I am addicted to you, I think. Maybe I am greedy, maybe wanting you all for myself is selfish. Isn’t love real, Mully, or was that a lie, too?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe I will wait forever, you do make me happy. You and your quiet shyness. Your thoughtfulness. I am feeling so poorly and there was only your letter that said you are really going to the river today and now I think I know what longing truly is. My body aches. It is time you made a choice.

P.S. If you married me and left to go fishing, would you really go fishing?

He folds the flower into the card and the card back into the envelope and slides the envelope into the newspaper inside his pack and locks the truck. He walks to the river then, plunging along the mazed and moss-bottomed trail through thickets, weeds, brambles, fungus-wrapped trunks, down a sodden ravine where the earth sucks at his boots and flings round drops of mud onto his wader legs. The carpet of the forest is clotted with leaves; more sail down as he steps. There is rhythm to it: the tip of his fly rod jouncing, his boots stepping, spent leaves drifting, the river’s whisper from the depths of the woods.