Chapter 28

I think for just a second about asking Lee to shut off the motor while I tie up—figuring he’d grab that live plug like old Henry does at least once a week and shock the shit out of himself—but I decide against that too. I’m deciding against things right and left, it looks like. Because for one thing I’m thinking more and more that there is some kind of truly big strain on the kid. He’s quit talking and is looking around at the place. His eyes are kind of glassy. And there’s a silence stretched between us like barbed wire. But for all of that I feel pretty good. He did come back; by god he did come back. I cough and spit in the water and look out to where the sun’s tumbling toward the bay like a big dusty red rose. In the fall when they burn the stubble off the fields the sun gets this dusty hazy color, and the mare’s-tail clouds whipping along near Wakonda Head look like goldenrod bent over by the wind. It’s always real pretty. You can almost hear it ring in the sky. “Look yonder,” I say, pointing at the sunset. He turns slow, batting his eyes like he’s in a daze. “What?” he says. “There. Look there. There where the sun is.” “There what?” WATCH OUT. “Where?” I start to tell him but I see he just can’t see it, it’s clear he can’t. No more than a color-blind man can see color. Something is really haywire with him. So I say, “Nothing, nothing. A salmon jumped is all. You missed it.” “Oh yeah?” Lee keeps his gaze turned from his brother, but is alert to his every move: WATCH OUT NOW . . . I keep telling myself to go shake his hand and tell him how glad I am that he’s come, but I know it’s something I can’t pull off. I couldn’t do that no more than I could kiss the old man’s whiskery chin and tell him how bad I feel about him getting busted up. Or no more than the old man could pat my back and tell me what a goddamn good job I been doing since he got busted up and I been handling the work of two. It just ain’t our style. So the kid and me just kind of stand there sucking on our teeth until the whole crew of hounds wakes up to the fact that there’s folks about and all come loping out to see if maybe we can’t use their wonderful assistance in some way or other. They grin and grovel and wag their worthless tails and put on just about the finest display of whining and yowling and carrying on that I’ve seen since the last time somebody got out of a boat a whole hour ago. “Christ, look at ’em. One of these days I’ll drown the whole smelly lot of ’em. Ain’t they a mess?” A couple jump up on my bare leg while I’m trying to pull my pants back on and they’re just so unbearable happy to see me that nothing’ll do but to rake my leg clean to the bone. I go to whipping at them with my pants. “Get back, you sonsabitches! Get the hell down from me! You got to jump on somebody, jump up on Leland Stanford here; he’s got pants on. Go welcome him, you got to welcome somebody.” Lee reaches out his hand: But watch it; be careful . . . And for the first time in his brainless life one of the fools minds what somebody tells him. One old deaf, half-blind red-bone with mange on his rump, he gets down from me and limps over and licks at Lee’s hand. Lee stands there a second... the colors about Lee and his half-brother strike against the ringing air; sky-blue, cloud-white, ringing, and that sparkling patch of yellow. Lee watches. Where is this place? ...and then the kid puts his jacket on the boathouse and squats down, and you’d think that damned dog hadn’t had anybody to scratch his ear in a century, the way he responds. I finish pulling my pants on and pick up my sweat shirt and stand and wait for Lee to finish. He stands up and the dog rears up and puts both paws on his chest. I start to holler him down but Lee says no, wait a minute: Wait; wait, please. ...“Hank ...is this Plover? Is this old Plover? I mean, Plover was old even when I was a kid...Could he still—” “Why, by god, that is old Plover, Lee. How did you know? Is he that old? Lord, I guess he must be if he was around when you was. By god, look there; he acts like he recollects who you are!” Lee grins at me, then pulls the dog’s muzzle right up next to his face. “Plover? Hi, Plover, hi . . .” he keeps saying over and over. “. . . hi there old Plover, hi . . .” he says. . . . blue and white and yellow, and red, where that flag swings in the breeze. The trees shimmer behind an invisible veil of lupine smoke. The old house rears soundless and gigantic against the distant mountains and leans down over the dock: What house is this? I stand there watching the kid and that old hound, shaking my head. “Boy and his dog,” I say, “And don’t that beat the band: just look at the old buzzard carry on; I believe he does remember who you are, bub. Look at him. He’s tickled to have you back, you know that?” I shake my head again, then pick up my boots and walk on up the planks toward the house, leaving Lee back there overcome with the hello he was getting from that old deaf hound, determined to do what I could to help straighten that kid out, thinking I’m gonna have to shape him up before he comes clean apart. Poor kid. Tears in his eyes like a damned girl. Am I ever gonna have to shape him up. But not right now. Later. Leave him be right now. So I walked on in the house, determined and diplomatic (besides I didn’t want to be around in case my little brother, who had a college education and could add a dozen sums in his head by the time he was six, got to remembering that old Plover had been at the very least ten or eleven and a lame old yard dog to boot when Lee’d left. And that was twelve years ago. Which would put the dog pretty far along, pretty old. I can’t come up with the exact figure right off, but, I mean, I may not be a college graduate but I know that there’s times that you’re better off being a little dense in things like arithmetic). What land is this? Lee continued to ask himself. What am I doing here? A breeze ruffled the inverted world on the gently rocking water beside the dock, shattering the clouds and sky and mountains into a bright mosaic. The breeze died. The mosaic cleared, and again the world throbbed upside down in a wobbling, eerie flux. Lee turned his eyes from the reflection, gave the dog’s bony gray head a last rub, then stood up to look after his brother. Hank was walking barefoot up the dock, carrying his sweat shirt over a freckled shoulder and his boots clamped between thumb and finger of that maimed hand. Lee marveled at the scamper of small muscles across the narrow white back, at the swing of the arms and the lift of the neck. Did it take that much muscle just to walk, or was Hank showing off his manly development? Every movement constituted open aggression against the very air through which Hank passed. He doesn’t just breathe, Lee decided, listening to Hank’s broken-nosed puffing, he gobbles the oxygen. He doesn’t just walk; he consumes distance step by carnivorous step. Open aggression is what it is all right, he concluded. Yet couldn’t help but notice the way those shoulders seemed to savor the swing of the arms, or the way those feet relished the feel of the dock. These people...am I one of these people? The wood that led along the dock was so perforated by years of calk boots, soaked by rain, dried and perforated and soaked again, that it had attained the quality of a rich, firm silver-gray carpet of finely woven wool. The planks sprang beneath the step, slapping the river. The pilings along which the dock moved up and down with the rise and fall of the river were worn flat with rubbing next to the dock and draped with shaggy mollusks the rest of the way around; three feet above the surface of the river these barnacles and mussels sizzled and clicked in the sun, talking of tides past and tides to come. At the end of the dock a hinged plank incline with one railing ran up the embankment to the hedge bordering the yard; in high water, when the floating dock rose, this walkway inclined to a gradual slope, in low water it slanted down so steeply that time and again in wet weather spikeless-shoed climbers would slip and zoom like otters out into the river. Hank mounted this incline at a run and when the hounds heard the hollow thudding they swung as a pack and dashed after him, whooping their confidence: anyone heading in the direction of the house was headed in the direction of the rows of coffee cans nailed along the edge of the steps, the dogs reasoned, and any time is suppertime. The dogs left Lee standing alone. Even the old redbone, gimping and whining at the rear of the pack, forsook him for the possibility of a meal. Lee stood for a moment watching the old dog strain up the incline, then took his jacket from the tar-paper roof of the boathouse and started after him. From the power lines swooping across the water a kingfisher dived at his shadow: What are these creatures? Where is this land? At one place on the dock the backwash of the explosion had swept water across the planks; beyond this puddle the dogs had tracked a polka-dot pattern on the ruglike surface of the dock as they chased after Hank’s larger tracks. “But for his heel-print,” Lee observed out loud looking down at the tracks, “the whole pack of prints might be made by the same species.” His voice sounded stark and strange, and not at all wry as he had hoped. He noticed another set of prints as he walked along: dim, phantasmal sketches faded almost dry. Probably the tracks of the woman he’d seen, Hank’s mate. He looked more closely. He had been right; brother Hank’s wildwoods flower had been barefooty, just as he’d predicted. But as he traced the tracks up the incline he noted also how incredibly narrow and high the instep was, how precise and light the placing—as though this set of prints had been made not by slapping feet, like Hank’s or the dogs’, but with the touch of a curved feather. Barefooty, all right, but he decided he might not be as correct about her size and weight. He topped the rise and paused to look about him at the house and land. Beside the riverstone chimney a great pyramid of split firewood was stacked against the sunshine like ingots of some bright metal.