This River Awakens (6 page)

‘No,’ Roland said behind me.

He knelt at the top of the steps, his broad face – half in shadow – staring down at me. I hesitated, then laughed and moved off Carl.

Carl scrambled to his feet, pushed past Roland and rushed to the starboard rail. He disappeared over the edge.

Roland said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

I studied his face, the steady gaze, the heavy frown.

‘You shouldn’t have said anything about his dad,’ Roland admonished in his quiet, measured voice.

I straightened my shirt, then looked away.

Lynk was at the rail. ‘Aw, fuck,’ he muttered. ‘He’s run off into the brush.’ He turned and exchanged a look with Roland. Whatever it was that passed between them made me feel empty inside.

My voice cracked when I said, ‘He’s run off?’

Lynk shrugged, a loose jumping of his narrow shoulders. ‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’

I rose. ‘Well,’ I said quietly, ‘let’s go find him, then.’

Roland rubbed the back of his neck, a slow, strained gesture. Then he nodded.

*   *   *

In silence we pushed our way through the brush. Every now and then the river appeared in patches through the trees off to our right, its islands of ice keeping pace.

This was my first time downriver from the Yacht Club. The forest was deeper here, wilder. At times we skirted its edge; muddy fields stretched away on our left, broken only by section roads and narrow windrows. We had passed beyond the influences of the city. Here, the flat country was motionless, as if waiting for something.

Roland led us, sure and confident, as if he knew where Carl had fled. I thought to ask him but I couldn’t break the silence. My thoughts ran in a jumble, pieces and fragments caught in a swirling current.

From the forest’s edge we entered a trail leading back to the river. Thin, clawed branches wove a net four feet above the path. Hunched over, we broke into a loping jog – half human, half something else, I imagined as I focused on Lynk’s back a few feet in front of me.

Carl sat on a log at the river’s edge, his back to us, a muddy stick in his hands with its end reaching down into the red-brown water. The log under him was gnawed blunt at one end; the other end disappeared under a mound of intertwined branches and dead saplings. It was a moment before I recognised the hump of sticks: a beaver lodge.

Roland slowly strode forward, stepping over the log and sitting down beside Carl. He began speaking to him in a low tone. I made a move to join them but Lynk gripped my arm and pulled me back. I twisted his hand from my arm and swung to study the beaver lodge. Most of it was under water, but the flood had been higher; tangled swamp-grass and mud hung in clumps from the highest sticks in the mound. I wondered if beavers could drown.

I moved closer and tried to pull a branch from the knotted pile. After a moment I stopped. ‘Any beavers left here?’ I asked Lynk, who’d followed behind me.

He shrugged. ‘Sure. Probably hibernating or something.’

There was no wind. The air smelled faintly of smoke, reminding me of bus exhaust. Looking down on the lodge, I wondered at the sudden reverence I felt for it, and for the animals inside. Still asleep, while the world melted around them, thick-furred and curled up and lying in the warm darkness, huddled together beneath the season that buried their home in snow. Waiting, easily waiting.

‘Everything’s waiting,’ I said.

‘What?’

I gazed at Lynk, met eyes that might have been a mirror of mine when I had baited Carl. I scowled against a sudden chill in the pit of my stomach.
We’re all waiting.

After a few moments, Lynk turned away. He crouched down and scooped up a handful of mud. He rolled it into a ball.

Roland and Carl were standing now, looking out over the river. On the far bank squatted a factory of some kind. Towering smokestacks bled greasy smoke that drifted down over the river.

‘What kind of place is that?’

Lynk said, ‘Oil refinery.’

The smoke I’d smelled earlier had come from there – the bus exhaust that for me was the city. Finding it out here was disappointing. The factory was an intruder, crouching there in its own foul breath.

Carl had left his stick standing upright in the mud at the water’s edge. Its dull-grey shaft threw a worm-like shadow up the bank; already the current had wrapped swamp-grass around it. Slowly, the stick toppled.

‘What’re we waiting for?’ I asked, the words coming out harsh.

The look I turned on Roland must have been a glare, but he only ran one of his thick hands through his straw-coloured hair. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

I nodded sharply, his answer striking me as profound.

Lynk threw his mud ball into the river. ‘Wait till summer,’ he grinned. ‘I’ll bring my pellet rifle out here and we’ll shoot beavers. Hah! Fuckin’ drill them!’

‘Leave them alone,’ I said.

His grin got wider.

‘We’ll shoot at the yachts,’ I continued, ‘unless you’re chicken shit, Lynk.’

Another jump of Lynk’s shoulders was his only immediate reply.

‘We’d get in trouble,’ Roland said, frowning at me.

‘Hey,’ I laughed. ‘What’re they going to do, beach their yachts and chase us on foot? Forget it.’

‘Fuckin’ right I’ll shoot the pricks,’ Lynk said, clearing his throat and spitting.

We swung away from the river and made our way inland once again. ‘Let’s head over to the school,’ Roland said. ‘You ain’t seen it yet close up, right, Owen?’

Lynk laughed. ‘I know why you want to go there, Roland.’ He turned to me. ‘Jennifer and her friends usually hang out there, smoking cigarettes.’ He raised his hands as if cupping breasts. ‘Sandy’ll be there, right, Roland?’

The farmboy just smiled and pushed ahead of us on the trail.

‘Who’s Sandy?’ I asked.

Lynk nodded at Roland’s back. ‘He’s in love with her.’

Roland drawled, ‘In the bag, Lynk.’

‘Hah!’

‘Up your ass.’

Lynk and I shared a grin, even though inside I struggled against a surge of envy. For a brief moment I hated Roland. For his height, his looks. Then the feeling faded, leaving me with nothing but a fierce, desperate yearning.

Carl walked behind us. He hadn’t said a word since we’d left the river. I ignored him, though the scene in the boat cycled through my mind, shifting from comical to macabre then back again as I replayed it in detail – the rage on Carl’s face, the spinning thread of spit, the large, thick yellow teeth bared by lips pulled back. It was as if Carl had cast off a mask, revealed his true self. A creature springing from its corner, lashing out with weakly thrown fists and blunt fangs.

We came to the boat yards once again, passing between two hangars and then crossing the rail tracks. Grey smoke rose from Gribbs’s soot-stained aluminium chimney and the curtains had been pulled back. As we passed in front of the small house, I tried to look through the dusty, cracked glass. But all I saw was my own reflection: an intense face beneath tangled brown hair, eyes the colour of deep ice, an expression drawn and serious. It was a face I barely recognised, as if a sudden strangeness had come to it. I quickly looked away.

In the air hung the smell of woodsmoke and burnt garbage. The afternoon sun was losing its heat, and the shadows seemed confused and uncertain, as if with the fleeing warmth all meaning, all sense of purpose, had fled as well.

The small winding driveway took us away from the Yacht Club and brought us to the lower right-hand corner of the ‘U’ road. We walked up the narrow asphalt street, stepping around the puddled potholes. The road climbed the hill; from the summit we could see, and hear, the highway. Beyond it was the school.

‘Jennifer’s got big tits,’ Lynk said to me. ‘Maybe she’ll show them to us.’

‘You wish,’ I said.

‘How the fuck would you know, Owen?’ Lynk demanded. ‘You don’t know Jennifer. You don’t know anybody.’

I thought of the face looking back at me in the window pane, and for some reason I thought of the animals sleeping inside their mound of sticks. ‘Soon,’ I said to Lynk.

IV

The cellar, long, dark and low, smelled of madness. Fisk hesitated at the top of the stairs, staring down at his own shadow running the length of the worn steps – it ended at the shoulders, the shadow of his head lost in the cellar’s own gloom.

His hands twisted around the cattle prod’s shaft. He sucked a breath in between his teeth, then reached up and flicked on the light. Skittering sounds – claws and metal – came from below.
A dance? A dance for me?
‘I’m coming, don’t be impatient now.’ His words felt thick in his mouth.

He’d bought the cattle prod years ago, for no special reason. It was too messy for killing mink, and besides, its electrical charge burned the fur. Sometimes he carried it around like a baton. Sometimes he called it his own, special maypole.

But now, with the selection of his four pets, the prod had found a new function, one more suited to its original purpose – excitement tightened his throat at the thought. He paused at the foot of the stairs and let his gaze travel down the cellar’s length. To the right ran a long workbench, cluttered with mason jars and rusting garden tools. Along the left wall, on a second workbench, waited four cages. He’d named his new friends: Moon, Rat, Gold and Bruise.

‘Hello, kids,’ Fisk said as he stepped forward. At his words the panicked skittering from the cages stopped. The only sound left was Fisk’s own raspy breath, which began to quicken. ‘Yeah, it’s me. Just me.’

He walked up to the first cage, where Bruise crouched against the back wall. Fisk peered inside. ‘Well, you’ve stopped dancing. Shame. Your friends look up to you, you know.’ He ran one hand down the length of the cattle prod until he found the switch. ‘The least you can do is sing for me.’ He set the switch, pushed the prod through the wire, taking care not to touch it with the charged tip. ‘Here we go, Bruise.’ Fisk stabbed the prod into the mink, pinning it against the wall.

The animal’s scream was shrill. In the dim light Fisk saw Bruise’s mouth stretch wide open. Then it leapt high, rebounding off the cage’s ceiling. It stilled, lying huddled along one wall – stilled, he saw, except for the twitching, the jumping limbs, the snapping jaws.

The convulsions lasted for a few minutes, after which Bruise crawled away from the piss and shit it had spilled.

Fisk let out a long breath. ‘Not dead. Good.’ He withdrew the cattle prod. ‘Now you know, don’t you, Bruise. No one mocks me. Tell that to your friends.’

He climbed the steps; at the top he turned off the light and strode into the hallway.
A dead garden, pressed between the leaves
 … He shut the door behind him.

As the sounds of Fisk trailed away, the mink in the third cage scampered forward and resumed gnawing at the wires of the latch. Its mouth was bloody. More blood stained the wires. The animal worked frenetically, unceasingly.

*   *   *

The living room had gone grey. Fisk checked the lamps to make sure that no bulbs had blown. Frowning, he shook his head, walked over to the sofa and lay down.

He felt hot and itchy. The beat of his heart was loud in his head. ‘Christ,’ he muttered. He had an erection. He’d felt its beginnings down in the cellar, though at first he couldn’t believe it was happening. After all, it’d been eleven years.

But there it was, a pressure both familiar and alien. In his mind Fisk resurrected the image of Dorry’s face, decades stripped from it, eyes bright and young, soft lips slightly parted, her halo of blonde hair touched by the sun.

The erection died. ‘Goddamn,’ Fisk moaned, rolling over on to his stomach. He stared down at the carpet: dingy green, worn down to the stiff weave in places. Slowly, almost lazily, his eyes travelled up the leg of the low, long table, and came to rest on the cattle prod.

Replaying the events of the cellar in his mind, he felt once again the mounting pressure in his loins. With it came a savage excitement, fraught with perversion and sin, which only seemed to make it more pleasurable, more visceral.

‘Bloody goddamn,’ he whispered.

V

Jennifer lit a cigarette once her mother had cleared the dinner dishes from the table. She felt her father’s bleary eyes on her as she flicked ash into the ashtray. She took a deep drag, slowly exhaled, then swung a sweet smile on her father.

Sten said nothing. His hands were wrapped tightly around a coffee cup; his blotchy face held an unreadable expression. She smelled the alcohol exuding from him, and wondered at the cold absence of feeling within her. Of course, he’d been drinking for years. Even disgust goes numb sooner or later. She remembered once, when she’d been seven, seeing her father come stumbling into the house, reeling against the wall before making his way into the kitchen. He re-emerged, holding a slice of white bread, then disappeared into the basement. It was her first memory of seeing him drunk.

She never understood what had happened, what had caused it all. Questions like that weren’t asked. He’d been injured on the job,
an industrial accident,
they called it, so he didn’t have to work, ever again. But she didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t limp, wasn’t blind, had both his hands.
Injured, industrial accident. Who the fuck cares any more? He drank before the accident; he drank more after it, was probably drunk when it happened and that’s why it happened.

There wasn’t any point thinking about it any more.
Better if he’d died.

She blew smoke rings across the table, watched them whirl up then dissipate.

Her mother returned from the kitchen with the coffee pot. ‘More coffee, Sten?’ she asked quietly.

He nodded without looking up, pushed his cup to the centre of the table.

Elouise refilled it, then sat down. Sighing, she placed the pot down then rubbed her eyes. ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, Jennifer,’ she said wearily.

‘Do what?’

‘Smoke.’

‘I do what I want,’ Jennifer snapped. ‘Nobody can stop me.’

‘I know,’ her mother replied.

‘Right. Daddy smokes, doesn’t he.’

Sten looked up at the sarcastic
Daddy,
then shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t take after me,’ he said, his gaze falling to his hands and staying there.