Southern Cross the Dog (21 page)

Robert flew deep into the swamp. The forest pressed in around him. He fumbled blindly through its walls of hooked and thorny foliage, which snagged his clothes and tore his skin. A fresh bright sting bloomed on his cheek and neck. He lifted up his hands to protect his face, pushing against the dense netting of weeds and vines. Something filtered down from above him. Dry and moldy. He pushed through, felt the ground slope down beneath him.

Here, the moon could not break through the trees. He could not see. He took a step and the ground was soft and yielding. His feet slid apart beneath him, and he stumbled forward trying to catch himself. On his way down something hit him hard across the chest. A rock. A tree root. He tried to stand but he couldn't. His right leg was deadweight under him. His mind flashed to the carcass at the water. He clasped the devil around his neck. His lungs were on fire. This last time, see me through.

He sat there, panting, the blood damming in his temples.

Without moonlight, he could not tell the foreground from the back. The night lay draped like a wet sheet around his face. Dark stretched for miles in every direction. His ankle was throbbing. He worked off his boot and pressed his fingers into the swollen tissue. He sniffled softly. Was this what it was like? To be under the earth. No sight. The dim
whoosh
of blood draining in his ears. A lozenge of light hummed inches from his eyes, flaring then dying away. Now another. And another, this time farther out. Slowly he rose, easing his weight onto his good leg.

Lightning bugs filled the space like stars. They pulsed in time, floating up on one side, and drifting down the other, churning slow through the air like a waterwheel. Carefully, he followed their yellow-green burn through the ether, feeling out the space in front of him. He came to where the path narrowed, hemming in against an earthen wall. He put his hand against its face. It was cool and soft, napped with roots. Here the air was ancient, yolky, rotted through with water. He'd been traveling along a dry bed gully.

He squeezed through the narrow and after a few yards, there was sky again. He found a place where the walls were shallow and climbed out. The swamp opened to a large uneven clearing. Ahead of him was a kettle pond, marked off in a square by yellow caution tape. Behind the tape, he saw something catch the light, an eye. He moved toward it. There it was, standing on its mount, a surveyor's transit. One of the crews had forgotten to take it back to the equipment depot. He reached for it, this alien thing, and touched the cool brass casing.

He looked again. It was not a pond at all, but a large crater. The edges had been dynamited out and support structures installed along the base. The beginnings of the Panther Reservoir.

Something crackled and all at once he felt himself being wrestled down. The ground came hard against his head and he became confused. The night crashed like a wave above him. He wriggled against the earth as blows rained down on his skull and spine and kidneys. His arms popped from their sockets. He cried out. He felt himself being turned over. Something thin and cold slid against his neck.

Voom'urie-eh-ci.

Robert looked up and found those cold hard eyes inches from his face. It was Roan.

You gon' be very still now.

The knife crawled thinly across his throat.

Is it now?,
he asked himself. Here was as good as anywhere, just feet from the reservoir—their new shining South. Robert tried to ready himself. It had come. It had finally come. But he couldn't quiet the panic in his flesh. His eyes could not focus. The blood raged inside him. He could not keep his arms from jumping nor his teeth from chattering. That was the worst of it—to leave with that
clatter-clack
in his skull. The warmth was on his neck. The knife was gone. Roan too. The universe hurtled away from him. From the corner of his eye, he saw the Dog. Its hind legs lay tucked under its muscular body, foam gathered thick on its muzzle. Robert watched it, his heavy mind slow to turn. He saw it in the moonlight: the svelte sheen of its fur. Every furrow and wrinkle of its coal-black hide. A thick sappy filament unspooled from its chops.

It hurt to breathe, to sift the air through his still-raw throat.
I am soul and brain sick and there is no dog.
He shut his eyes, and it was true. He was not well. Had not been for a long time. There was too much time that'd passed, too many miles spent in lonesome country. I'm ready, he said. But then she was above him. Frankie. Her hands were crushed against his throat. Her mouth was moving, shaping words. He did not hear them.

T
he missing Negro had not slowed work at the swamp. When no family came forward, the Yazoo County Sheriff's Department filed Chatham, Robert Lee, among the other transients of the county. George Burke went every day for two weeks to see what, if anything, the police had found.

The deputy moved the piles of blue and pink forms across his desk. They stacked over three feet high. Too many to keep a count of, the deputy told him. The top button of his shirt was undone and his tie was set crooked. He assured Burke that they were doing everything they could. Burke thanked him and went out into the street, a cold wind threatening to blow off his hat.

He tried to put Chatham out of his mind. Within a week, a new man was hired to fill the vacancy on his crew. Late summer brought fair blue weather, and the crew worked long days, moving tons of yielding earth.

He'd seen men die before in blowouts and explosions. In his career, he'd personally pulled the mangled bodies of six of his crewmen from under fallen rubble. He remembered each and every one—the soft cast of their faces, still and chalky white save for the deep slow rose of blood incarcerated beneath the skin. There were sacrifices. Burke understood that. That at times, the world called for more than was fair or was right. But he'd never met a man who so vigorously sought out those sacrifices, who wanted to make that offering in his own blood and body.

The other members of the crew underestimated Robert Chatham. Chatham was quiet and didn't socialize with the other men. During lunch, he'd sit alone under a tree, outside the rough noise of cussing and dirty jokes at the chow tables. Every day it was the same meal—a ham sandwich with a single slice of cheese—and he'd chew slow and methodical, staring out from under the shade.

But Burke recalled when the crew was on demolition and after a blast how Chatham would walk across the craters. He remembered the beaver dam, the emptiness of his face as he stared back at him from across the desk. No shame or fear or surprise. And on the day of the blowout, he was inches away. Could almost touch him. His body broke through the river, his vulture form diving into the foam.

From the sheriff's department, Burke started walking. He was a large man and he made himself look small by stooping and shoving his hands into his pockets. He followed the trail of grit in the gutters, crossing one street then another. Cars churned dust in his direction as they drove past. He squinted and kept walking. He arrived at Chatham's boardinghouse, unsure if it was an accident or if he'd been guided.

The landlady was an old colored woman. She let the door open just a few inches so that the space could frame her mouth.

Yes?

Ma'am. Good afternoon.

Afternoon, she said carefully.

I'm a friend of one of your boarders. Former boarder. Robert Chatham.

Robert didn't have no friends, she said.

We worked together. Don't mean to put you out but I'd like to see his room if you'd allow me.

The woman squinted hard at him and furrowed her lip.

Let me go talk to my husband, she said.

She closed the door. When it opened again later, she had a ring of keys in her hand.

This way, she said.

They went up a long narrow staircase and came to the door at the top of the stairs. Burke reached for the knob, but the landlady stopped him.

You know, he owes for the month, your friend. I'm out a whole month on account of him.

Burke reached into his wallet. He found some bills and pushed them into her hand.

Inside, the apartment was bare. The windows were open, letting in the cold. On the floor where the bed had been, there were marks where the posts used to stand. An empty footlocker sat pushed against the wall. The landlady flipped the lid down and sat on it like a bench.

This is it?, Burke said. This is where he lived?

If the landlady had heard him, she made no sign. Her leg was propped across her lap and she was massaging the veins of her ankles.

Burke walked to the window and rested his hands on the sill. He tried to imagine Chatham's hands there, looking out the same window. There was nothing out there. Flat, empty, nothing.

It true he took his own life?, the woman asked.

I don't know, Burke said. Where are his things?

Sold them. Didn't figure they'd do him any good now. Anything I couldn't get rid of is in that closet there.

Burke pulled back the closet door.

You can take anything you like, but you won't get nothing for it.

There were some clothes, worn through and moth-eaten. A hat that had lost its shape. On the high shelf he found a small box. He brought it down, the contents rustling within. He looked at the landlady and she shrugged. Burke blew the dust from the lid. Inside was a layer of fine white sand. He took some in his fist and let it run down his palms.

Is that . . . ?

He brought his nose to the lip of the box. It didn't smell of anything.

He brought the grains to his thumb and tasted it.

Well?, the landlady asked. What is it?

Burke worked his tongue against his cheek. He wiped his hands on the side of his pants and returned the box to the shelf.

Table salt, he said.

AS THE CREWS LEFT FOR
home, Burke stayed in his trailer and decided to get drunk. The sun was sinking low and the sticky air seemed to sit in his lungs like a tar. He reached into his drawer and found the bottle of whiskey his brother-in-law had given him last Christmas. He wiped the dust from the neck and pulled the cork with his teeth. Outside, the last of the men were boarding the bus back into town. He went to the door and stood in its frame. The bottle hung at his side. He let its weight sway on the hook of his fingers, tapping against his leg. The sun always seemed at its most brilliant going down. To the west, he could see the start of towers rising from the swamp. Skeletons. He tugged from the bottle, saluting them. The plow trucks and drill cranes bowed their clawed heads.

The clamor of construction work faded, overtaken by the chorus of crickets and toads, the low pulse of swamp sounds. The sky surged bright gold, then pale, into a poisoned gloom. Soon it was full dark and Burke could no longer see in front of him.

They put us in a wilderness,
he thought. But this was their job. To be in this wild and to force it back, to bury it under concrete and stone.

It was time to check that the equipment sheds were locked. He got to his feet and groped for his coat and boots. Then he tested a flashlight against the flat of his hand. Outside, the gate lamps were burning. He followed the fence line west, toward the supply depot, shining his light through the spokes. There was no wind, just his cold white breath dissolving in front of him.

Outside, the light threw a long arc on the floor. It was a cloudless, moonless night and above him spanned a deep and pervading black with no stars to relieve it. At the edge of the light, something moved swiftly away.

He swung the light to a narrow gap between two trailers.

It was a cat, sleek and black with yellow eyes.

He laughed at himself and knelt down in front of it.

Come here, he whispered. He reached into the gap, clucking his tongue, but the cat retreated. He felt in his coat and found his pipe and tobacco. His hands were trembling from the cold, and he spilled the leaves onto his lap. He lit and drew deeply from the bit. Well, he said to the cat. Her muscular rump was raised high. She rubbed against Burke awhile, flicking her tail at his chin. When she realized that he had no food, she stalked away to sulk beneath the floorboards of the trailer.

He stumbled on through a field of diggers, cranes, drill trucks whose forms stuck up from the ground like sepulchers. He thought he heard a noise. The crackle of frost. Clothes swishing. He brought the light over his head and steadied it. There was the noise again. The small hairs of his neck stood on end.

He panned the flashlight across the ground, the light sluicing along the short blades of shrub grass. It caught on some small piece of wire in the distance. It winked at him. He moved unsteadily toward it and came to a large gate. The lock had been broken and the gate swung open easily with his touch. He passed through the portal and walked on. As he went, he felt the earth climbing, the ground beneath him becoming steeper and steeper till at last he found himself on his hands and knees, forcing his weight upward. When he came to the top, he was atop a large earth embankment. Below him, the darkness plunged for miles. He shone the light into the pit, but it was no use. There was no bottom. Soon the bulb flickered, waned, and died and he threw it down into the pit. The future lay sprawled in front of him—no shape, no form—the low white drone of water in the distance.