Music of the Swamp (14 page)

“Get up,” my father was saying, harshly. “We're going hunting.”

I rubbed my eyes and sat up against my pillows.

My mother said, “But will you be careful? You will be careful, won't you? Sugar, please be careful, listen to your father. Gilbert, teach him about safety. I'd just, I mean if anything happened to him, I'd just, just. . . .”

My mother and father had had a fight. It could have been about anything. This was his punishment of her.

My father took the canvas coat and cap from my closet and tossed them onto the bed beside me. He said, “Dress up like a hunter. Let's have a look at Mama's little hunter.”

My mother wrung her hands and then picked at the frayed sleeve of her robe. She said, “Teach him safety, Gilbert. Please? Teach him all about safety.”

He said, “You're the one wants him to go hunting.”

To me he said, “Bring along that fine gun-cleaning kit too. You might need to clean your gun, you don't know. You never can tell when you might need a gun-cleaning kit along with you.”

M
Y FATHER
was wearing no hunting clothes, and he had no gun. He was wearing a pair of slick polyester pants, shiny as a
lizard, and he had on a heavy corduroy coat and a pair of yellow plastic shoes, loafers of an unbelievable strangeness, that somebody had told him were the latest thing, and for which he had paid five dollars. It was difficult, in the presence of those plastic shoes, to keep on believing that I was a person who would ever resemble the men in
Field and Stream
who stirred fragrant pots of wild stew over campfires in the wilderness.

We left the house with my mother still wringing her hands and saying, in as cheerful a voice as she could invent from her despair, “Now you boys be careful, just be real extra careful, and, uh, and have yourselves a, uh, you know, good time.” As we pulled away in the car, she called out, “Teach him firearm safety, Gilbert!”

A
S
I'
VE SAID
, this was not the first time my father had set out with me to go hunting. The other time was a few days after Christmas, before the first of the year. Then he had said, “Hole up just a minute, Sugar, I'm thinking I might stop off at the Delta Cafe for a minute.”

He was stopping to drink, of course. “You stay out in the car,” he said. “I'm not going to be but one minute.”

I stayed in the car for an hour. And then I took off my canvas jacket and hat and walked to the big plate-glass window and looked through the sign painted on it—I peered through the big hole in the D of Delta—and saw my father sitting on a stool at the counter with many other men. One of the men had
a wicker basket full of newly born puppies. He must have been trying to give them away, to find homes for them.

Then I saw my father take one of the pups from the wicker basket and rub its little head with his forefinger. He held the pup up to his face and seemed to be talking to it, sweetly I thought, and then he talked to the man with the basket in his lap. My father drank a shot of whiskey and made his face, like oh yes! and then took a sip of beer behind the whiskey. Then he did the most remarkable thing I had ever seen anyone do.

He turned the puppy around and took the dog's tail in his mouth, between his teeth, and bit the dog's tail off, clean off, and spat it onto the linoleum floor, under a table where a couple was eating catfish. I could hear no sound, but the puppy was obviously squealing with surprise and pain.

There was blood all over the front of my father's shirt and on his chin. He was grinning proudly, as if he had done something fine. When the dog's owner had recovered himself—it took only a second or two—he took the pup from my father and looked at the other astonished faces sitting behind beers at the counter and said not a word. The expression of complete disgust for my father was sufficient. No words were necessary. He wrapped the puppy's tail in a napkin and picked up the rest of the pups, in the basket, and turned to leave the café. I wanted to run, but I stayed there and watched the man come out the door.

As the door opened I could hear my father's voice. He said, “Put a little salt on that nubbin to help it heal!”

S
O IT IS
miraculous that for even one second I had been deceived by the romance of this possibility of a hunting trip.

Mr. Shanker was the pharmacist. This time my father and I were not stopping at the Delta Cafe for shots and beers. We were stopping at the drug store for opium. My father said paregoric was good for a hangover if you didn't mind the constipation. And to be helpful he sometimes gave Mr. Shanker an injection of morphine to help him sleep. Mr. Shanker was the only man in town to whom my father seemed sober in comparison.

Immediately now I received a clear picture of how the two of us looked, my father and I. We were clowns. He was wearing yellow plastic shoes and lizardly pants, and I was wearing stiff new canvas clothing several sizes too large for me, and the new leather of my unoiled boots was almost as yellow as my father's. My feet hurt like torture.

I was paralyzed by shame for the two of us. I was my father's son, there was no doubt in my mind, and it was impossible for me to tell which of us was more worthy of loathing and disdain. In addition to my preposterous outfit, I was carrying a shotgun and a metal box with the words
Gun Cleaning Kit
stenciled on the front. “Don't forget your hunting equipment,”
my father insisted in his ironic way when I tried to leave the gun and kit behind in the car.

I followed my father through the front door of the drug store and breathed in the strange chemical fragrance that hung forever in its unholy air.

There was no one in the drug store.

My father called out, “Shank!”

There was no answer. Mr. Shanker was rarely conscious.

Again, he said, “Shank, where are you, boy?” He said this in his ironic voice, and then looked at me and gave me a sharp wink.

I felt loaded down with clothing and the shotgun and the gun-cleaning kit. There was a long soda fountain with a marble top, and a long mirror behind the counter.

In the reflection I could see clearly the shelves of things behind me, the tonics and patent medicines and mustard plasters and bunion pads and suppositories and boxes of Kotex, all the bright primary colors of their bottles and boxes and packaging. I could see a glass counter where Mr. Shanker had placed costume jewelry for sale, large gold-looking earrings and necklaces, impressive large bottles of perfume with French words in the name and glass stoppers as big as the bottles themselves, bud vases and ceramic masks and even chocolates in gold foil, stale for a decade.

But I could not see myself. I could not bear to look. I could not permit reality to swamp the invention and romance of
Field and Stream
. I looked in the mirror and saw the drug store, but I could not, would not see myself.

Mr. Shanker was in the back room, my father told me.

Still carrying the .410 and the gun-cleaning kit and with a loose box of shells click-clacking in my jacket pocket, I followed my father through the large silent old barn of a pharmacy, with its perpetual chemistry and perpetual twilight and antique soda bar.

Mr. Shanker was in the back room all right. He was not dead yet, but he soon would be. He was filthy and soaked in his own urine and lying on an army cot beneath a wool army blanket. He was shivering so hard I thought he would fall right off the cot and onto the floor. The room was narrow and high-ceilinged and cramped and black-dark, and everything I needed to know of it I could smell or hear, the piss and the rattling of the cot against the floor, the rattling of something else, something inside Mr. Shanker, some clatter in his chest.

My father groped around above his head in the darkness and finally laid a hand on a string hanging from the ceiling. An enormous light bulb flashed on and filled the cavelike room with harsh light.

Mr. Shanker's eyes looked like a busted-out windshield. His face was an incredible orange color in the glare of the electric bulb. He was literally bouncing on the cot, his shivering was so extreme. The smell of his urine was strong.

Even so, Mr. Shanker made the last joke of his life. He said,
“Gilbert, they wont no need for the boy to shoot me. Those yaller shoes of yours'll do the trick by theyself.” When he finished saying this, he opened his mouth and his enormous blue tongue rolled out like a snake. There was no sound, but I understood this to be laughter.

My father said, “Look like you bout to need a pick-me-up.”

Mr. Shanker finished his weird tongue-laughter and motioned with his eyes to the syringe and morphine in a small black leather case on a low table nearby. The tongue sucked back into Mr. Shanker's mouth like a blue runner into a hole.

I said, “Daddy, he's dying.”

My father said, “Lemme see that kit.” He meant the gun-cleaning kit I was holding in my arms like a baby.

Mr. Shanker had swallowed his tongue and was choking to death.

I was rigid with fear.

My father said, “Gimme that goddamn kit, Sugar, you want to kill Mr. Shanker or what!”

I shoved the metal box toward my father and he took it in his hands. He set it on the low table and snapped open the latches. He said, “Now ain't that just the way the Lord his mighty works doth perform?” He was saying what a fortunate thing we had this gun-cleaning kit along with us, just at a time when Mr. Shanker was swallowing his tongue. My father was in a spiritual mood.

My father stripped the shortest section of the ramrod loose from the velvet-lined box and jammed it between the choking man's teeth and pried open Mr. Shanker's mouth. He said, “Hand me that box of swipes.” He meant the package of cleaning swabs that normally fit at the end of the ramrod to clean gunpowder residue from a barrel.

Now he had Mr. Shanker's mouth open, with one section of the ramrod cracking the enamel off Mr. Shanker's teeth and his fingers down Mr. Shanker's gullet groping around for his tongue. The cleaning swab between my father's fingers gave him a good grip on the slick tongue, and so it was not long before he had grabbed hold of it and pulled it up to the surface like a fish. Mr. Shanker was actually breathing again.

My father was competent and calm and in control of the situation. For a moment I felt almost good about my life, I felt less lonely and more hopeful than I had for a long time. Mr. Shanker's tongue was as big as a bullfrog, and while it was no longer hopping, it did seem to have a life of its own, and to breathe in a healthy, regular rhythm, unlike Mr. Shanker's own real breathing.

My father said, “Hole on to this thang for a minute, Sugar.”

He meant the tongue. He meant Mr. Shanker's unbelievable reptilian tongue.

I said, “I cain't do it, Daddy.”

He said, “Shore now. Jess put down your mighty weapon there and grab holt of it.”

Mr. Shanker's eyes were popped out and throbbing with blood and jaundice.

I leaned the .410 against the wretched army cot and moved into position behind my father. He set the gun-cleaning kit carefully on the cot beside the shotgun.

He said, “Use that-air swipe. You can get a better grip.”

I said, “I don't think I can do it, Daddy.” I took a cleaning swab between my fingers and reached around for Mr. Shanker's tongue.

My father said, “Have you got it?”

I was holding the tongue on one side and my father still had a grip on the end of it.

He said, “Okay, I'm letting go.”

I said, “You're letting it go? You're letting it go right now?”

He said, “Have you got a-holt of it? Are you ready?”

I said, “I got it. I think I've got it.”

He said, “All right then, I'm doing it, I'm letting go.”

My father let go, and I held on like a bulldog. I had Mr. Shanker's tongue by the balls. This tongue was going nowhere. We had passed the baton.

My father said, “Good, good. Good work, Sugar-man.”

I stood there holding the tongue while my father prepared the shot of morphine. Mr. Shanker's tongue was as passive as a fed cat.

It was almost like hunting. It was almost like
Field and
Stream
. The great strange electrical bulb swinging from a cord above us was the blazing Mississippi sun, it was corn fields and sorghum and sugar cane, it was a campfire in the woodlands, it was a lantern to skin squirrels by, it was the harvest moon to sleep beneath, it was the Milky Way and all the stars above, it was electrical socks and a brier pipe and chocolatey tobacco, it was father and son together in a place so primitive that age and old hatred and all of history made no difference, it was love and bright water and dark wood.

My father filled the syringe and found an uncollapsed vein in Mr. Shanker's skeletal arm, and swabbed the vein with cleaning solvent, and tied a tourniquet from the small coil of soft cotton rope.

He said, “Keep a hold on that tongue,” and I tightened my grip so hard that I pinched a blood blister into it with my fingers.

T
HERE IS
not much way to tell the next part except just to go on and tell it.

My father inserted the needle in the vein of Mr. Shanker's bruised and filthy arm, and pumped the little handle of the syringe, and filled Mr. Shanker's blood with morphine, and killed him dead.

There was a brief seizure and a few seconds of jerkiness, and maybe even a little vomit, but not much. It was a sudden
death, if you look at it the right way. Mr. Shanker was dead of an overdose of morphine that my father administered thirty seconds after saving his life from suffocation by tongue.

My father said, “Some days I swear to God it don't pay to get out of the damn bed.”

W
HAT HAPPENED
next is a strange and marvelous thing.

There was nothing to be done for Mr. Shanker. He was dead. I don't know what I expected my father to do, or say. I had never seen a dead person before, though I suppose my father had.