Boy's Life (16 page)

     “Grandpap’s cryin’, Momma,” the little boy said.

     “I know he is, Gavin. Daddy, I’ve brought some help.” Nila Castile set the lamp down on a tabletop. “Can you hear me, Daddy?”

     “Ohhhhh,” the old man groaned. “Hurtin’ mighty bad this time.”

     “We’re gonna help you stand up. Gonna get you out of here.”

     “No, honey.” He shook his head. “Old legs… gone.”

     “What’re we gonna
do?
” Nila looked at my mother, and I saw the bright tears in her eyes.

     The river was shoving its way in. Thunder spoke outside and the lightning flared. If this had been a television show, it would’ve been time for a commercial.

     But real life takes no pauses. “Wheelbarrow,” my mother said. “Have you got one?”

     Nila said no, but that they’d borrowed a neighbor’s wheelbarrow before and she thought it might be up on their back porch. Mom said to me, “You stay here,” and she gave me the oil lamp. Now I was going to have to be courageous, whether I liked it or not. Mom and Nila left with the flashlight, and I stood in the flooding front room with the little boy and the old man.

     “I’m Gavin Castile,” the little boy said.

     “I’m Cory Mackenson,” I told him.

     Hard to be sociable when you’re hip-deep in brown water and the flickering light doesn’t fill up the room.

     “This here’s my grandpap, Mr. Booker Thornberry,” Gavin went on, his hand locked with the old man’s. “He ain’t feelin’ good.”

     “How come you didn’t get out when everybody else did?”

     “Because,” Mr. Thornberry said, rousing himself, “this is my
home
, boy. My home. I ain’t scared of no damned river.”

     “Everybody else is,” I said.
Everybody with sense
, is what I meant.

     “Then everybody else can go on and run.” Mr. Thornberry, whom I was beginning to realize shared a stubborn streak with Granddaddy Jaybird, winced as a fresh pain hit him. He blinked slowly, his dark eyes staring at me from a bony face. “My Rubynelle passed on in this house. Right here. I ain’t gonna die in no white man’s hospital.”

     “Do you
want
to die?” I asked him.

     He seemed to think about this. “Gonna die in my own home,” he answered.

     “Water’s gettin’ deep,” I said. “Everybody might get drowned.”

     The old man scowled. Then he turned his head and looked at the small black hand he was clutching.

     “My grandpap took me to the movies!” Gavin said, attached to the thin dark arm as the water rose toward his throat. “We seen a Looney Tune!”

     “Bugs Bunny,” the old man said. “We seen ol’ Bugs Bunny and that stutterin’ fella looks like a pig. Didn’t we, boy?”

     “Yes sir!” Gavin answered, and he grinned. “We gone go see another one real soon, ain’t we, Grandpap?”

     Mr. Thornberry didn’t answer. Gavin didn’t let go.

     I understood then what courage is all about. It is loving someone else more than you love yourself.

     My mother and Nila Castile returned, lugging a wheelbarrow. “Gonna put you in this, Daddy,” Nila told him. “We can push you to where Miz Rebecca says they’re pickin’ up people in trucks.”

     Mr. Thornberry took a long, deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and then let it go. “Damn,” he whispered. “Damn old heart in a damn old fool.” His voice cracked a little bit on that last word.

     “Let us help you up,” Mom offered.

     He nodded. “All right,” he said. “It’s time to go, ain’t it?”

     They got him in the wheelbarrow, but real soon Mom and Nila realized that even though Mr. Thornberry was a skinny thing, they were both going to have a struggle pushing him and keeping his head above water. I saw the predicament: out beyond the house on the underwater street, Gavin’s head would be submerged. A current might whisk him away like a cornhusk. Who was going to hold him up?

     “We’ll have to come back for the boys,” Mom decided. “Cory, you take the lamp and you and Gavin stand up on that table.” The tabletop was awash, but it would keep us above the flood. I did as Mom told me, and Gavin pulled himself up, too. We stood together, me holding the lamp, a small pinewood island beneath our feet. “All right,” Mom said. “Cory, don’t move from there. If you move, I’ll give you a whippin’ you’ll remember for the rest of your life. Understand?”

     “Yes ma’am.”

     “Gavin, we’ll be back directly,” Nila Castile said. “We’ve got to get Grandpap to where people can help him. Hear?”

     “Yes ma’am,” Gavin answered.

     “You boys mind your mothers.” Mr. Thornberry spoke up, his voice raspy with pain. “I’ll whip both your butts if you don’t.”

     “Yes sir,” we both said. I figured Mr. Thornberry had decided he wanted to live.

     Mom and Nila Castile began the labor of pushing Mr. Thornberry in the wheelbarrow against the brown water, each supporting one handle and Mom holding the light. They tilted the wheelbarrow up as high as they could, and Mr. Thornberry lifted his head up, the veins standing out in his scrawny neck. I heard my mother grunt with the effort. But the wheelbarrow was moving, and they pushed it through the water that was swirling around the open doorway and across the flooded porch. At the foot of the two cinderblock steps, the water came up to Mr. Thornberry’s neck and splashed into his face. They moved away, the current at their backs helping them push the wheelbarrow. I had never thought of my mother as being physically strong before. I guess you never know what a person can do until that person has to do it.

     “Cory?” Gavin said after a minute or so.

     “Yeah, Gavin?”

     “I cain’t swim,” he said.

     He was pressed up against my side. He was starting to shiver now that he didn’t have to be so brave for his grandpap. “That’s okay,” I told him. “You won’t have to.”

     I hoped.

     We waited. Surely they’d be back soon. The water was lapping up over our soggy shoes. I asked Gavin if he knew any songs, and he said he knew “On Top of Old Smoky,” which he began to sing in a high, quavering yet not unpleasant voice.

     His singing—more of a yodel, actually—attracted something that suddenly came paddling through the doorway, and I caught my breath at the noise and swung the light onto it.

     It was a brown dog, matted with mud. Its eyes gleamed wildly in the light, its breathing harsh as it swam across the room toward us, through the flotsam of papers and other trash. “Come on, boy!” I said. Whether it was a boy or girl was incidental; the dog looked like it needed a perch. “Come on!” I gave Gavin the lamp, and the dog whimpered and yelped as a slow wave slipped through the door and lifted the animal up and down again. Water smacked the walls.

     “Come on, boy!” I leaned down to get the struggling dog. I grasped its front paws. It looked up into my face, its pink tongue hanging out in the dank yellow light, as a born-again Christian might appeal to the Savior.

     I was lifting the dog out by its paws, and I felt it shudder.

     Something went
crunch
.

     As fast as that.

     And then its head and shoulders were coming out of the dark water and suddenly there was no more of the dog beyond the middle of its back, no hindquarters, no tail, no hind legs, nothing but a gaping hole that started spilling a torrent of black blood and steaming guts.

     The dog made a little whining sound. That’s all. But its paws twitched and its eyes were on me, and the agony I saw in them will last in my mind forever.

     I cried out—and what I said I will never know—and dropped the mess that had once been a dog. It splashed in, went under, came back up, and the paws were still trying to paddle. I heard Gavin shout something;
wannawaterMars?
it sounded like. And then the water thrashed around the half of a carcass, the entrails streaming behind it like a hideous tail, and I saw the skin of something break the surface.

     It was covered with diamond-shaped scales the colors of autumn leaves: pale brown, shimmering purple, deep gold, and tawny russet. All the shades of the river were there, too, from swirls of muddy ocher to moonlight pink. I saw a forest of mussels leeched to its flesh, gray canyons of scars and fishhooks scarlet with rust. I saw a body as thick as an ancient oak twist slowly around in the water, taking its own sweet time. I was transfixed by the spectacle, even as Gavin wailed with terror. I knew what I was looking at, and though my heart pounded and I could hardly draw a breath, I thought it was as beautiful as anything in God’s creation.

     Then I recalled the jagged fang driven like a blade into the chunk of wood at Mr. Sculley’s. Beautiful or not, Old Moses had just torn a dog in half.

     He was still hungry. This happened so fast, my mind hardly had time to see it: a pair of jaws opened, fangs glistened, and an old boot was in there impaled on one of them along with a flopping silver fish. The jaws sucked the remaining half of the dog’s carcass in with a snarling rush of water and then closed delicately, as one might savor a lemonhead candy at the Lyric theater. I caught a quick glimpse of a narrow, pale green cat’s-eye the size of a baseball, shielded with a gelatinous film. Then Gavin fell back off the table into the water, and the lamp he was holding hissed out.

     I didn’t think about being brave. I didn’t think about being scared.

    
I cain’t swim
.

     That’s what I thought about.

     I jumped off the table to where Gavin had gone in. The water was heavy with mud, and up to my shoulders, which meant Gavin was nostrils-deep. He was flailing and kicking, and when I grabbed him around the waist he must’ve thought it was Old Moses because he almost jerked my arms off. I shouted, “Gavin! Stop kickin’!” and I got his face up out of the water. “Humma hobba humma,” he was babbling, like a rain-soaked engine trying to fire its plugs.

     I heard a noise behind me, in that dark and soggy room. The noise of something rising from the water.

     I turned around. Gavin yelped and grabbed hold with both arms around my neck, all but throttling me.

     I saw the shape of Old Moses—huge, horrible, and breathtaking—coming up from the water like a living swamp log. Its head was flat and triangular, like a snake’s, but I think it was not just a snake because it seemed to have two small arms with spindly claws just below what would have been the neck. I heard what must have been its tail thwacking against a wall so hard the house shook. Its head bumped the ceiling. Gavin’s grip was making my face balloon with blood.

     I knew without seeing that Old Moses was looking at us, with eyes that could spot a catfish through murky water at midnight. I felt its appraisal of us, like a cold knife blade pressed against my forehead. I hoped we didn’t look much like dogs.

     Old Moses smelled like the river at noon: swampy, steaming, and pungent with life. To say I respected that awesome beast would be quite an understatement. But right at that moment I wished I was anywhere else on earth, even in school. But I didn’t have much time for thinking, because Old Moses’s snaky head began to descend toward us like the front end of a steam shovel and I heard the hiss of its jaws opening. I backed up, hollering at Gavin to let go, but he would not. If I’d been him, I wouldn’t have let go, either. The head came at us, but just then I backed out of the front room into a narrow corridor—which I certainly didn’t know was there—and Old Moses’s jaws slammed against the door frame on either side of us. This seemed to make him mad. He drew back and drove forward again, with the same result, except this time the door frame splintered. Gavin was crying, making a
whoop whoop whoop
sound, and a frothy wave from Old Moses’s agitations splashed into my face and over my head. Something jabbed my right shoulder, scaring a ripple up my spine. I reached for it, and found a broom floating in the debris.

     Old Moses made a noise like a locomotive about to blow its gaskets. I saw the awful shape of its head coming at the corridor’s entrance, and I thought of Gordon Scott’s Tarzan, spear in hand, fighting against a giant python. I picked up the broomstick, and when Old Moses hit the doorway again I jammed that broom right down its gaping, dog-swallowing throat.

     You know what happens when you touch your finger to the back of your throat, don’t you? Well, the same thing happens, evidently, to monsters. Old Moses made a gagging noise as loud as thunder in a barrel. The head drew back and the broom went with it, cornstraw bristles jammed in the gullet. Then, and this is the only way I can describe it, Old Moses puked. I mean it. I heard the rush of liquid and gruesome things flooding from its mouth. Fish, some still flopping and some long dead, went flying all around us along with stinking crayfish, turtle shells, mussels, slimy stones, mud, and bones. The smell was… well, you can imagine it. It was a hundred times worse than when the kid in school throws up his morning oatmeal on the desk in front of you. I dunked my head underwater to get away from it, and of course Gavin had to go, too, whether he liked it or not. Underneath there, I thought that Old Moses ought to be more particular about what he scooped off the Tecumseh’s bottom.