This River Awakens Read online

  Crack!

  ‘You gotta watch out for Old Man Fisk sometimes,’ Lynk said, raspy voice falling deeper, seeking a tone to match a real, adult threat. ‘He’s nuts. Once he threw rocks at me, big fuckin’ rocks. I was crossing his field, just like we did today. Getting dark, and out he comes, tearing down the porch and screaming at me. Something about the bloody mud – that’s what he was screaming. “The bloody mud!” Fuckin’ nutso, man.’

  Lynk whapped at a branch, then continued, ‘I called him a shithead. That’s when he started throwing rocks.’

  ‘Fuckin’ nutso,’ Carl said.

  I scowled. ‘What are you, a parrot?’

  Carl shut up. Breath loud as he stumbled through the brush, trying to keep up, not catch up. Unwelcome in the front line. Small and weak. His teeth were yellow, his words thick like he talked through a wall of spit. Lots of Carls in the world, a life in the shadows, at least one in every classroom. What did they become? Where did they go?

  On that fine, treacherous path I walked, the New Kid path I’d walked a half-dozen times before – already a wise, cautious veteran – Carl had his place. I despised him, openly, a statement to Lynk – to every Lynk I’d met in every school, every new neighbourhood. An old hand, I was convinced that there were no mysteries left – not in this fragmented sliver of the world. The niche I needed to carve depended on Carl staying what he was.

  And yet, a mystery remained: the source of the powerful silence that seemed to tolerate Lynk as a patron would a devious whelp. A silence generous enough to encompass Carl in its benign wake. Open to me without challenge, without even a question. Roland strode ahead. Big for a boy of twelve, with wide shoulders and flat hands that made me envious of farm life and hard work. When he broke his silences, the words came out slow and thoughtful. Even Lynk shut up and listened. We all did. We didn’t feel there was any choice, and we didn’t want one in any case.

  We travelled through the woods, each on our own paths, ranging like wolves. But for all our tracks of independence, Roland led the way. My gaze returned to him again and again.

  * * *

  Crack! Lynk whirled to face me. ‘Could you believe that fuckin’ cow?’

  Grinning, I shook my head.

  Lynk laughed harshly, turned away. ‘It was nothing, man. Happens all the time. You don’t know a fuckin’ thing, man.’

  I held my grin. Never reveal when a point’s scored.

  Lynk gave me an odd look, a second too long – showing me his doubt – before whirling a swing at the closest tree.

  We were all unbalanced. But I was more unbalanced than the others. This was their world, not yet mine. My weakness, a temporary condition I did my best to disguise – an easy, casual stride, bored expression, trying to see this new world with old eyes. A tightrope, the oblivion of a misstep was a place I’d lived in before – no, living wasn’t the word – a child’s hell. If my family’s stumbling moves held anything positive for me – anything at all – it was the chance to start again, scarred but wiser.

  Emerging from the forest we came to the first borderline. The outer lands belonged to Fisk and men like him – distant, aloof, dangerous – farmland broken by ragged windrows and the winding river. The inner land before us was marked by a loop of residential properties.

  An asphalt road came down from the highway, dipping then flattening out and coming around to return to the highway, making a ‘U’ shape with the bottom running parallel to the river. All of the lots on the inside of the ‘U’ had gardens in their large back yards, one kept distinct from the other by thin walkways of grass or raspberry-bush hedgerows. Sheds stood like the bastions of forts, woodpiles like ramparts. The men who owned those houses worked in the city. Grey- and blue-suited, they drove in their Furies and Customs, a daily march to the weekends, when the suits were shed and old polyester pants and t-shirts were donned. All through their weekends they manned their forts and ramparts; a peaceful détente of friendly competition. Hoes borrowed, rakes loaned.

  Many of these families had children, but they were mostly younger than us. A few were older, too. Both groups seemed ghostly to me.

  There were the four of us. Only the four of us, at least at first.

  In the summer, I learned from Lynk, those gardens became our no-man’s-land. Like shadows we would move down the rows of plunder – the raspberries, Nansing cherries, apples and crab-apples. We’d raid, moving silent through the heavy acrid smoke of refuse heaps.

  Ringing the ‘U’ were older lots, with their tall houses hidden by giant oaks and elms. The newer homes – the flat bungalows with the Furies and the Customs parked in the driveways – marked the loop’s inside. No trees blocked these homes from sight for those walking the road. Nothing but grass, cropped once a week barring rain.

  A playground ran outside the first line of the ‘U’. It began at the bend and ended where the road started its steep climb to the highway level. Separating the hill and the playground was Louper’s lot.

  From the forest we entered the playground, appearing along its south edge. At the far end, we could see Mrs Louper standing beneath one of her crab-apple trees. The sound of barking dogs came from beyond her.

  Lynk pointed in that direction with a slight jut of his chin. ‘Old Lady Louper’s got the best fuckin’ crab-apples around. When we raid those we got to be real careful, ’cause of the dogs. We can’t get at her garden. The fuckin’ dogs would get us for sure.’

  It was the end of our journey. Lynk and Carl moved on up the road on their way home. Their fathers worked in the city. Roland’s farm was on the other side of the highway. He nodded to me before jumping the ditch and making his way across the playground. The dogs at the Loupers’ set off wild barking from somewhere behind the house.

  I walked a short distance along the bottom road of the loop, then turned into a shadowed driveway that wound between tall elms. It was dinner-time, and I was home, and this was the last border.

  V

  Sten Louper’s hand groped under the bed for the bottle, but it had rolled too far. The thought amused him. As a child he’d believed that monsters lived under his bed. Something he would grow out of, his father had said. Amusement. Here he was, fifty-three, and monsters still prowled in that thick darkness beneath him.

  Father’s bed. Sten had inherited it, along with the house, and the trees and the grass and this orgasmic come-on with booze, this love/hate thing he loved to hate, this gift of genetic susceptibility – or so went the latest theory. A beauty, a fucking beauty. Don’t blame me, fellas, it’s right here in these genes, my Levi’s chromosomes excusing my weakness, isn’t that sweet.

  Never mind the monsters down there. They knew him well. They shared his taste for rye. They stole from his bottle sometimes, when he and it had rolled too far.

  His father had lied. Sten knew he should have recognised the look in the old man’s ravaged face. He’d had his own monsters, the same ones, the ones that never went away, the ones that dragged him into death – dead liver, by God, let him go quietly. No genetic weakness back then. No, just a simple moral failing. Self-pity right into the pit and that’s all she wrote.

  Sten knew all this. Flowing through the dizzy currents in his head was a river of vomit, piss and rye and secretly delicious awareness. He contemplated getting up, but all his will had drained away – thank bugger God. Drunk, hating himself with sweet vengeance, hating his surrendering of control, loving those sour notes in his double-helix of mercy.

  Nope, can’t get up.

  But he could think, his brain weaving through Scientific American, National Geographic, Popular Science, Psychology Today, weaving random pages and notes and details into lovely excuses. Thought never took much energy, never taxed his lead limbs, never revealed his loss of control. It came easy. So easy. Came, conjured, then left. But really going nowhere. He never tired of the travail. All so easy, a whirling spiral, follow it up and down, down and up, no end and no beginning.

  A man’s brain shouldn’
t leave him helpless. Nosiree. Shouldn’t. Nope.

  A game he played. A battle between sobriety and surrender, the outcome always the same. Posture, strut, fall flat on his face. It’d been three months without a drop. Desire stayed under the sheets, at night, a soft hand on his cock. For a time (part of the game) he’d filled himself with long days of hard work. Stoke the furnace of his brain – read, read, read – keeping the cold fear at bay. Hammer and nails to keep the hands busy. Clean living. Living cleanly, mimicking health.

  A talent for acting: could fool even himself sometimes. Posturing like his own king, strutting like his own lover, falling flat on his face – like his own clown.

  I’m only human, he whispered to himself. I don’t like pain. Who does? Reasons – okay, excuses. I’m only human. He giggled, sending creaks through the bed, a coded message for the monsters, can’t be cracked, no point trying.

  Bringing him around, like always, to Kaja and her sons. His dogs, pure-bred German shepherds. His obsession, a thin veil hiding his deeper obsession – the one with violence, but save that for later. He could see Kaja’s face, brown eyes accusing – it had to be accusing. Sten’s fault. The new kennel unfinished, the run’s side door unlocked, the stray dog crossing the playground.

  Kaja and her three sons, now two. Max – the youngest – was in a green garbage bag three feet under ground, body crushed and twisted, lips drawn back in a frozen snarl.

  The road killed dogs all the time. The tyres grabbed them, chewed them up, spat them out. Children cried, the faces of men grew dark and stern, women spoke of fate and became older and sadder.

  It’s the way of things, he told himself. The way. Roads and tyres and garbage bags – that’s all there was in the end.

  He struggled against a roar of laughter. That manly grief was a killer. Hollow words pretending wisdom, sod-cropper backwoods tic-below-the-eye bullshit.

  He wiped wet streaks from his cheeks and pressed his knuckles against his eyelids. Swirls of colour spun, blushing outward and fading into blackness. He thought about going mad.

  It shocked him, cleared his head. Madness, the monsters’ cipher, his father’s double-recessive crap-shoot.

  No, not this time. Sten rolled on the bed and reached under it as far as he could until his fingers closed on the bottle’s cold glass. Not this time. He rolled back, holding the bottle against his chest, his sight fixing on the ceiling.

  ‘Look at all those cracks,’ he mumbled. They radiated outward from the corner above him. Cracks, stained yellow as if by thinned blood. Or rye. His father’s house, right? The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all reeked of that insane bastard. Wood and plaster playing the old game – swallowing histories, whole lives. Listen to the echo of the old man’s screams, the smashing dishes and crashing furniture. And the smell, of course, the smell. Booze and blood, piss and tears. Bile and canine fear. And faintly, so very faintly, the sweet, bruised-flower smell of his mother.

  He barely remembered her face. The pictures had gone into the attic years back. But he remembered skin that had been innocent, almost translucent; he remembered arms holding him tightly, smotheringly, shielding him from the violence. He remembered her bouts of crying, and, once, the crack of her ribs and the gasp torn from her lungs.

  Stupid woman. Should’ve run, taken him and run.

  His father’s house. The angry, maddened god. And dogs, always dogs, filling the house, cowering and licking the old man’s hands. Dogs who stared at his father’s back with eyes hot with murder, the glare of starved wolves.

  Young Sten had found a way to hide from it all. He’d built his own house, inside his head, where he lived and kept all the doors barred. Safe, and alone. And even now, twenty-eight years after the old bastard turned yellow and died, the house inside Sten’s head remained. But it had changed, almost imperceptibly.

  He told himself that he knew every inch of it, every corner, every hidden room. All the while fumbling for door handles, falling down stairs, running into walls. His house – and this was the most cherished secret he kept from himself – his house had become a stranger’s house. Monsters under the bed, in the closets, in all the rooms where ruled the shadows. A wonderful secret, wonderfully bitter, like Psychology Today’s secession of free will.

  ‘So,’ he slurred to the cracks in the ceiling, ‘is this all there is?’ But the house in his head had no answer. He was alone, the furnace a bed of cold ashes, cold fear everywhere. Nothing to do but wait for the monsters to come clambering into the light, talons bared. He knew all their faces – easy to know – they were all the same. Guffaw.

  He shivered in his father’s bed, the bed now his own. Clutched the bottle, frowning as a sickly-sweet stench filled his nostrils. A stench that didn’t come from the air around him, but from inside his head. That house he’d built, the secret fortress he’d called his own, now came to him with a smell that made his heart pound. The monsters edged closer, their breath washing over him – the breath of his house. Booze and blood. Piss and bile.

  VI

  Elouise Louper worked in her garden. Behind her the window to the bedroom was open and she could hear her husband crying. The sound filled her ears as she overturned the muddy earth and broke it up with her trowel.

  There were steps to follow, she reminded herself. There were patterns to repeat over the years, as certain as the seasons themselves. Soon she would plant the seeds and if she could keep the pests away, she’d have enough tomatoes and peas and wax beans to last through the winter. And with the raspberries and cherries she’d make jam.

  A gardener, she told herself, has to be patient.

  As she worked, she thought of her husband dying. She thought of their daughter leaving home. She thought of living on, and on, immortal in her garden as the rest of the world slowly sank beneath the horizon. Watching the years pull at Sten’s face and body made her aware of the days dying behind them.

  If she could drag her husband out of his bed. Away from his endless bottles. If she could pull him into the light of day. He’d see things differently, she was certain. It was when he was living the past that things went poorly; when he was feeling the weight of all those nights behind him – behind them – that look would come into his eyes. Skittish, like someone hunted.

  Trying to talk about it never helped. She’d given that up a long time ago. His drinking had become a subject the family walked around, skirting its treacherous edge, a pit to be avoided at all costs. Still, they all circled it like the planets circled the sun.

  Without words, she was left with what her eyes told her. Watchfulness had become an exhausting necessity.

  The promise had been there, though. She’d seen her husband fight off the alcohol, strive through the shaking hands and bouts of stomach cramps and vomiting. She’d watched him find his way through it all, come out cautiously on the other side. She’d been ready to take a step towards him, then.

  With promise comes hope. A small bud at first, then expanding like a blossom under the warm spring sun. Elouise had tied hope and love together, a long time ago, and together they seemed to wax and wane with fated rhythm.

  She should have known. Deep down, she believed in fate. It kept her from expecting too much, from hoping too greatly. Fate blunted the edge of disappointment. It made hope wry and tolerable like a child’s frail belief. And she could now smile at herself for a lesson never learned, and the pain and sadness could be taken as just punishment. Punishment for the crime of hope. After all, she should have known better.

  She heard Sten’s drunken words drift out from the bedroom. So, he said, is this all there is?

  Elouise’s face set like stone. She climbed stiffly to her feet and wiped her hands. Well, she said to herself, it’s time to check the crab-apple trees.

  Tomatoes, peas and wax beans. And jam, jam for the winter.

  She remembered breakfasts years ago. Mornings full of bright, clean sunlit air; of sizzling ham and fresh orange juice. Mornings without the sour smell of vomit and
alcohol, without the broken dishes of the night before littering the floor and crunching beneath their feet.

  It was a sickness, of course. Still, to see it, to smell it, to feel its fists. And the way it soured every remembrance, stained every memory of better times, these seemed dreadful prices to have to pay.

  Hands on her hips, Elouise surveyed the budding branches of the crab-apple trees. Last autumn’s cutting back had done its job, she saw. It always helped to see what was coming and plan ahead.

  VII

  The machine had appeared in our driveway one morning as if conjured from the earth itself. It was massive, fully six feet high and five feet wide, weighing perhaps three thousand pounds. A cowl of raw, rust-pitted metal covered most of its inner mechanisms, except for what I took to be the machine’s back end, where a giant geared wheel was mounted on the machine’s flank, and seized gear chains emerged from the insides to hang like clotted braids of hair.

  As I walked in from the road that day I saw that the cowl had been raised. A tarp lay on the driveway beside the machine and on it tools were scattered like discarded weapons. My father emerged from the garage with a mallet in his hands.

  I approached. The rust had turned Father’s blue coveralls dusty red. He dropped the mallet on to the tarp then turned his attention to a wrench he had locked on to a bolt. He grasped it with both hands and pulled down with all his weight and strength. Metal shrieked. I watched my father’s thin face redden, the vein on his temple throb beneath a few stray locks of iron-grey hair.

  ‘Looks a hundred years old,’ I said.

  Father grunted.

  I glanced about the yard. Changes had come to it since we’d arrived. Most of the puddles in front of the garage had disappeared. The few that remained were now slick with oil. Alongside the winding driveway metal junk studded the ground like otherworldly plants, glinting with sharp, dangerous edges. Most of the yard remained new and fresh. The trees lining the front of the lot blocked our view of the road. Our yard lay in shadows, like an underworld.