Daren Dean

Mercury in Retrograde 6

Walker

Walker drove the back roads with a six pack of PBR on the seat next to him. He drove with one hand on the wheel, moribund and lonesome, as he recalled the way Claire made him breakfast; their wedding night and her round-eyed surprise at just the right moment; and the birth of his son Merle. Merle was a hard worker, but his grandson Troy was an enigma. The boy was morose and angry all the time. How had it all gone wrong? Claire passed. He started drinking. Troy raised himself, but was it so different or terrible than anyone else's childhood?

Driving in the afternoons, the gravel roads snaked between farms and hollows where trees created a great cathedral of green sheaves overarching the places of his youth and wondering what use it had all been anyway. Derelict ranch houses, houses his friends grew up in, sat with broken windows and the wind stirring through their guts. Weeds overtaking the yards, white picket fences and outbuildings sagging in various states of disrepair. It ain't right, he thought. He didn't have the gumption or proclivity to follow up his own grand schemes anymore. The sunlight dappled through the trees and blinded him for a moment.

A young man was fishing off the bridge. A sign before the oxidized and blood-red bridge read, "1 TON LIMIT." Walker looked down at his watch to realize it had stopped running at 11:37 a.m. and how had he not noticed until now? The young man displayed a heavily muscled back, shirtless and tan he stood with a pole looking down into the river water with a stoop-shouldered slump. Walker pulled onto the wooden planks of the bridge and stopped for the boy. He hugged the car's steering wheel in one arm like a captain gone slightly off course and he leaned out toward the passenger window, the sun glinting through the youth's hair like a corona. The young man turned to reveal a face, not quite retarded, but the slack-faced expression indicative of a hard life. In that moment he wanted to help the boy, save him from the world, but he could not remember who his people were. He knew his memory was fading but he tried to focus on the face, the brown eyes and straight brown hair unkempt and uncombed almost like a badly made wig.

"Hey," Walker said. "Lesley, right? Your name is Lesley. Catch anything?"

"F-f-folks c-c-call me, Les." He held up a blue catfish by the gill slots and dropped it back into the bucket. "You want to fish?"

"I didn't bring a pole," Walker said.

"G-g-got an extra, right here."

"Let me park," Walker said.

He backed to the head of the bridge and pulled onto the shoulder. He got out of the car. Les was just ahead. There was something about the youth Walker could not explain, his face glowed with a secret knowledge madmen and children always seem to possess. The bridge played hell with country people around here and it seemed odd anyone would use it for recreational purposes with all the stories of lovers supposed to have leapt from it, cars that went sideways on it in the winter, and ghosts teenagers said haunted it during their Friday night beer parties in the backwoods.

The boy handed him a cheap pole without so much as a reel. Lesley stood there looking half-deferential, without a trace of arrogance, and Walker swore he recognized him from somewhere. He wanted to ask the boy who his daddy was, but that was no way to talk unless he was in trouble. Besides, that kind of talk was for the old and that was no way to make friends. Sweat slid down the heavily muscled arm, a rivulet he watched progress from the rounded top of Les's shoulder down to his elbow.

"Do you take Communion?" Walker asked, holding up a flask. Les shook his head wearily, as if he regretted not taking a drink but was recovering from an extended illness or was simply too pure to indulge, but not the hold-it-over a fella pureness but an open-handedness - the result of an alcoholic mother perhaps. Walker took a nip and his free hand flew up and made a fist as his face seized up like a man who had just been shot. "Got beer in the truck, lukewarm but it's still beer-flavored."

Les shook his head and baited the bamboo pole for him and Walker dropped the hook into the water over the side. Walker grinned at Les. He remembered when he was a boy he had skinny-dipped in this place with three girls, but his best friend was too puritanical so he sat in the Chevy coupe with a weary look. The boy was a Baptist minister now, but the expression on his face that night was Cain killing Able. Those girls had been beautiful too, their skin milky white in the moonlight and any one of their daddys could have driven by over the bridge and seen them too. One girl in particular with auburn hair down to her shoulders and perhaps the largest breasts he had ever seen, but she was his buddy's girl. Ain't it always the way, he thought.

"I like fishing," Les said.

The trees began to move their branches, shaking their leaves. The sound was like a waterfall in the air. Walker looked up at the sound as if it had interrupted something important. The water roiled below, gurgling over stones, Les jerked his pole up as a fish splashed out of the water. A crappie hung from the line, but it was small so he gripped its body, unhooked it, and tossed it back down into the branch water.

A car was coming toward the bridge. It fishtailed as it came around the curve a quarter mile back in front of Frank Wetherill's old place. Music was blaring out of the windows. The woods, birds, and even the fish in the bucket froze and disappeared for a moment as if they had never really existed at all as the city music approached - sounds of concrete and steel, sex and death. The Charger slid to a stop at the far end of the bridge and somebody cut the music off. The front windshield was reflecting the trees so Walker and the boy couldn't see who was in the car. The car began to roll slowly, and abruptly the wheels began to turn as the driver stepped on the brake, trying to burn rubber on the wood boards.

"Hey, faggot," a teenage boy said to Les.

"A fishing faggot," said the driver.

Les turned around with his fishing pole limply held in his hands still. He had no response to the boys. His face sagged, unhappy and bereft of hope. Tears welled up in his eyes like a small child.

"Is this your boyfriend, faggot?" the passenger side one said.

"Why don't you all get out?" Walker said, throwing down his pole and balling up his fists.

"What you say, old timer?"

"I say," Walker said. "Why don't you all get out if you're so goddamn tough?"

"I'd knock you into next week," the driver said.

"Yeah!" Walker cried out in his nasal tone. "And on Wednesday, I'd kick your ass!"

The passenger door began to open and Walker kicked it shut again. The Charger pulled up a few feet, the two boys were having a heated discussion. The music cut on again and the car took off again. Hands shot out of either side of the car making obscene finger gestures. Walker rubbed his hands together as if he were going to use them to make fire. He cursed at the boys, despite the fact they weren't there to hear anymore. Walker scuffed his boot on the wooden bridge and a steady stream of profanity, creative and arcane spilled from his mouth. Finally, Les came over and put a hand on his arm.

"What?"

"It's okay," Les said. "It's okay." Even though the young man's eyes were teary yet. It didn't make sense to Walker when he came back to himself that Les would cry about being called names. He was big enough. His muscles were made right. Why didn't he kick ass? Although the young man's body was big, Les was young - around fourteen or fifteen.

At just that moment the hum of a boat could be heard heading upstream. Lesley turned from Walker as if the boys that just left were a childhood memory. As they drew closer one man stood near the door leading down into the small cabin of the boat, another moved to the fore with a flare gun hanging casually at his side, and the tertiary man with a shock of curly hair and jaundiced face leaned over a five-by-five foot area struggling to secure a tarp over something he obviously wanted no one to see. The tall man with the flare gun saluted Walker with a two finger salute up near his brow. Without facial expression, Walker took a silver case out of his pocket where he plucked out a pre-rolled cigarette.

The boat chugged by like the African Queen, low in the water up to its gunwales. As the mystery crew went under the bridge Walker lit his cigarette, but Lesley ran to the other side like a child to the display case in a candy store.

Walker wanted to call him back, but knew even raising his voice would hurt the young man's feelings and he was loathe to be the cause of that. Walker looked downstream, from the direction the men came as the wake slapped against the shore on either side. A thunking sounded from beneath the bridge made Walker imagine medieval ferrymen, and impending foresight of a future journey to an underworld both purgatorial and nightmarish. The sluicing water and hollow sound of wood clouting against the stanchion made him uneasy.

"Who was that?" Lesley asked in his incredulous child's voice.

Walker shrugged.

Lesley took the cigarette delicately from the old man and took a puff like a thirteen year old girl daring to smoke for the first time.

"Who was that?"

"I don't know," Walker said. Experience told him they should leave this place.

"What did 'em have in that boat?"

Walker retrieved the cigarette from the young man and stuck it back in the corner of his mouth where it bobbed like a baton. He chucked Lesley under the chin softly. The boy was so anxious to know the answer to the point his mind refused to accept anything else; he had even forgotten about fishing. Walker laughed and pulled the boy to him, his arm around his shoulders, and patted the boy's cheek with the other hand. Before even he realized what had come over he bent down and kissed the young man experimentally on the lips with his heart pounding in his chest. Lesley put a hand on his lips as if Walker had touched them with an iron. The bronze color disappeared from the young man's face.

"Let's get out of here," Walker said in an effort to salvage the situation. He had never done something like that before. He liked the boy. Lesley was a nice boy, a little slow, but still nice. He was neglected by his family, but Walker had always been attracted to misfits. It hadn't entered his mind to kiss or touch the young man before, but now that he had it didn't seem like such an earth-shattering event. He smoked the cigarette down more and watched the boy's face change like clouds moving casually in a natural breeze from East to West. "Come here, Les."

"No," Les said. Suddenly Lesley ran past him, down the steep bank and dove into the stream and swam across to the far side. He emerged from the other side, his hair matting down his face and looked up at him with a defiant leer turning up one corner of his mouth. "NO." He pointed at Walker and stalked into the undergrowth like a fabled woodland spirit.

"Shit," Walker said.

A lonely caterwaul interrupted dusk as if every feral creature cocked an ear to its brother.

He gathered up Lesley's fishing equipment and stowed it away in the back of his truck. A sulphurous light peaked through the trees of the gathering twilight. The mysteries of life deepened with each passing year. Luck meant more to him as a young man, he disbelieved in the power of fate as a middle-aged man but now it was beginning to come back to him as more essential than one's pathetic attempts at bootstrapping or drunken resolutions on New Year's Eve. It crossed his mind to go into town and bring a bottle to drink at the tavern. The hum of another boat making its way upstream caused him to get into his truck and drive off from the shrilling katydids as fireflies and bats overtook the fishing hole.

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March 8, 2010