Finn (11 page)

“Tramp, tramp, tramp,” he intones with a grim doomlike rhythm. “Tramp, tramp, tramp. Them’s the dead come to claim me. But I won’t go.”

The boy opens his mouth as if to reason with him and then claps it shut again.

“Their hands are cold. Take them off. Make them leave a poor devil alone.” Fiddling blindly with the knife, his fingers numb as sticks.

The boy sits without hope or alternative and waits for sleep to overwhelm the man at last, but it does not for he is altogether too furious to be overtaken. His mind has gone aboil and he cannot rest for its constant seething.

“You.” Narrowing his one panicky red eye.

The boy waits.

“You.” Again. Softly and a bit more coolly this time, as if he is leveling not a word but a shotgun.

The boy tenses.

“You’re the Angel of Death, ain’t you,” says the man, and with that assessment he pries open the clasp-knife and springs from the bed, hurling himself at the boy like a cannonball. “You can’t have me. Not yet.” Flailing madly with the knife.

The boy steps neatly to one side and the man hurtles past him but miraculously recovers.

“I reckon you can’t take me if I take you first.” Righting himself on his two bandy legs. “I’ll show you.”

He leaps upon the boy with all of his considerable unbalanced weight, nearly crushing the air out of him as he falls, and then rising up again upon his elbows to exhale a sour and choking miasma composed of cheap corn whiskey and persistent indigestion and rotten teeth.

“Pap.” With such breath as is left to him.

But the man is blinded by drink and darkness and either he scoffs at this doomed demon’s futile attempt at self-defense or he does not hear it to begin with. He has cut his own forefinger on the knife and the running blood makes him lose his grip for a moment but only for a moment. He fumbles with the slick handle, regains his grip by means of some automatic animal instinct, and presses the filthy point of the rusty blade against the tender underside of the boy’s pale chin. The boy quivers and squirms and cranes his neck up gasping and the man presses the knife upward taking pleasure in the fierce delicacy of it in assessing the soft precise pressure at the tip of this blade that at his touch has slit throats and bellies uncountable times previous as reliable as an old friend and perhaps his only. The boy scrabbles for purchase against the hard dirt floor feeling the pinpoint of the blade against his throat like a needy thing desirous of entry and possession and then risking whatever unforeseen results any such sudden movement might bring he holds his breath and drives one bony knee into the man’s crotch. Now it is the man gasping as the boy regains his feet. The man rises slow and ineluctable, but this time the boy takes the initiative and throws himself toward him before he can attack again, which initiates a brief scramble during which the man grabs for his shirt and the boy slips out of the tattered thing as if performing magic. The man slashes what remains of the garment in twain and believes that he has accomplished his goal of executing the Angel of Death and keeps right on believing it until he falls on his face and the knife clatters off under the bed and he sleeps at last. The boy gives up all hope of extracting the key from his father’s pocket and takes up the gun from the corner instead, trading the promise of escape for a small measure of security. He trains it upon the man’s still and shaggy head from over the back of a chair until he too nods off and abandons the remainder of the nighttime hours to the lonesome needy calls of owl and wolf.

“B
OY.”

No answer.

“Get up, boy.”

No answer.

“What were you doing with that gun?”

At which the boy comes yawning awake at last in the warm soft glow of daylight from the cabin door. The river is just beyond and he can see its dancing reflections aswarm upon the walls and hear its urgent movement within its banks and detect the buoyant morning rise of birdsong. “Somebody was trying to get in here last night,” he says. “I was laying for him.”

“Next time, you roust me out.” The man looks sick and sore. “You roust me out and I’ll see to him, you hear?”

“I will.”

The boy cooks a breakfast of flapjacks and bacon while the man sits blinking on the porch nursing a dipper of water and studying the river and attempting to recover his lost equilibrium. He remains pensive all the day long, suspicious of some connection that he senses but cannot quite puzzle out among the prowler and the misery in his head and the boy that he is bent on keeping safe from harm. The current is strong and the river is thickly laden with debris and it takes all of his strength to navigate the skiff along the trotlines when the time comes. He blames it on his age and he wonders what sad fate the future will hold for him if he cannot obtain the boy’s six thousand dollars as a bulwark against sure decline.

“Your grandpap is as rich as a king, I ever tell you that?”

“I know. How’d he get that way?”

“By never giving me a nickel,” which as far as he is concerned might as well be true.

“Is that so?”

“That man was so by-God stingy he wouldn’t give me a whipping.”

Huck laughs as only a boy can, illuminating the river valley with an arc of sound that bends across the water like a handful of thrown coins.

“I mean it. He wouldn’t so much as lay a hand on me. What kind of father is that?”

The boy must confess that he does not know.

“When I done wrong he’d cook up some other sort of punishment he reckoned would suit the crime.”

“Like?”

“Like extra chores maybe. I don’t know.”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not no more. Not too good.” Scratching his aching head and marveling at how much of his experience has vanished into nothing.

“Too bad.”

“I suppose.”

They take note of a broken-up raft just drifting into sight in the shallows around the upstream bend and light out after it in the skiff.

“Might be eight or ten good logs to that one by the look of it.”

“I reckon.”

“Be worth catching.”

They pole to it and make fast while it’s still well upstream and then they proceed cautiously back using the current to their advantage as best they can but nonetheless struggling against the stubborn willful weight of the thing.

“My pap used to tell me I had it good.”

“Did you?”

“It don’t seem so.”

“You weren’t hungry,” says the boy.

The man flashes him a boiling look and heaves on his pole as if he is driving the boy himself into the soft muddy bottom. “Are
you
hungry, boy?”

“No sir.”

“All right.” The pole sticks and he strains to haul it loose and loses ground in the freeing of it. “Be grateful for what you’ve got.”

“I am.”

“My pap said I had it good on account of we didn’t have to live among no niggers.”

“Who helped out?”

“We had a man.”

“A white man?”

“A white man, Petersen. His wife too.”

“Slaves?” The boy has never heard of such a thing.

“They was hired.” They draw near the shore and the man jumps out into water hip-deep. “More’n once when I misbehaved Pap said he’d just as soon let the neighbor’s nigger have a go at me.” Straining with skiff and raft against the current. “Just so I knew how good I had it.”

The boy jumps out now himself and ties the skiff fast to a tree.

“Said I’d get more than a whipping. Said I could count on being buggered up the ass if it come to that. Buggered up the ass by a filthy good-for-nothing nigger.”

The boy has a pained look.

“You know what I mean by that, boy?”

“Yes sir. I know it.”

“My pap told me that damn one-eyed nigger would bugger me up the ass if I didn’t watch out.” Tramping up into the mud, wringing out his trousers. “You think he was just talking?”

“No sir.”

“Damn right.” He makes to enter the cabin for an early glass of whiskey, since the ten clean logs of this raft are sure to make for a handsome windfall. “Damn right,” he says again, leveling his eyes at the boy. “That’s how good I had it.”

R
ATHER THAN WAIT
for fish or game or some other added bounty that he might bring upstream and sell in St. Petersburg he unfastens the broken raft from the skiff and poles off on it alone, making certain to lock the boy in before he goes. He reflects on how this valuable cache of lumber has passed this very way unnoticed once before, and when he reaches the St. Petersburg landing and strikes a bargain to shed himself of it he congratulates himself that merely by the exercise of his sharp riverman’s eye and his main strength he has captured it and brought it back and sold it for enough money to purchase a gallon of forty-rod with change left over if he’s careful. Thus does the wise and wary man turn all things to his advantage, as the river turns all things to her will. He rises up from the riverside and moves toward the village proper like some slow revenant, his feet dragging but his heart light with the idea of pleasures to come. Up an alley he goes past the rear of the Liberty Hotel wishing he had a catfish or two that he could trade with Cooper who’s generous with his whiskey as long as it’s not Monday which he does not believe it is.

“You that James?” To the man behind the bar.

“I am.”

He spills coin onto the hardwood and brings the jug down beside it. “Whiskey.”

“This is a decent place.”

“I don’t mind.”

“We sell by the drink or we don’t sell at all.”

“Cooper gives me a fair trade for provisions.”

“What Cooper does is Cooper’s business.” Turning away to adjust a bottle in a grand array behind the bar. From beneath his eyebrows he keeps an eye on Finn’s reflection in the mirror.

“He’s always been fair with me.”

“Then go see him.” His hands are busy with the bottles for no reason.

“You saying my money’s no good?”

“It’s plenty good by the drink.” He turns to assess the jug and then raises his eyes to the man’s face. “But you don’t look to me like a by-the-drink kind of individual.”

“Not here I ain’t,” says Finn, taking the jug in the crook of his arm and scooping up the coins. “There’s friendlier places in this town.”

“Suit yourself.”

Finn can tell when he’s been bested and he knows when to leave off beating a dead horse and he has no time or patience to spare for any individual who would thwart his desires, so he puts the lobby of the Liberty Hotel behind him, walking through the double doors and out onto the broad sunny front porch all set about with white-painted rocking chairs. In one of these, her back to him and her expectant face to the street, sits the widow Douglas waiting on some lunchtime companion for this is the third Sunday of the month and such is her usual routine. She ceases rocking at the scent of him and turns. “What have you done with that boy?” Without any preliminary, as if he neither requires such nor deserves it.

“Took him where he belongs.” He tongues a tooth and gives her only a portion of the attention that she surely believes is her due, for he is busy scanning the street and deciding where he might most profitably continue upon his errand.

“I must warn you, Mr. Finn.”

“Is that so?” He fixes her with his gaze and speaks the words by way of returning threat unto threat, for now she has his attention in full.

“I must warn you,” she goes on oblivious, for as a dignified and refined lady of the old school she is unaccustomed to the need for fear or even for cautious restraint in her dealings, “I must warn you that Judge Thatcher and I are taking steps to recover him.”

“Is that so?” he says, more slowly this time but the same, for what else is there.

“Legal steps.”

He commences to tap tap tapping the empty jug against his haunch with a slow tolling rhythm as insistent and long-suffering as any heartbeat. “Now what am I supposed to think about that.”

“Think whatever you like.” For rectitude and certainty and recent proximity to the judge have contrived to make her bold.

“The boy belongs to me.”

“He deserves better.”

“Don’t we all.”

He turns his back upon her and steps down off the porch into the street where his boots raise dust and leave a cross-marked trail.