Daren Dean

Mercury in Retrograde 2

Theron

The water crashed down the muddy falls dashing against the yellowed creek rocks, subsiding downstream into the bracken. Theron Beecher listened to the water gurgling most of his life back there down in the trough running behind the house his grandfather built. Over the radio the weatherman reported the rain falling up north accumulating upstream determined to buck against the dikes and the levies erected by the Army Corps of Engineers during the Great Depression. Beecher's hands ached, even before hearing the forecast, sharply whether from prescience or second sight, or an old man's insensible body protesting each new season.

The stream progressively swept the land clean of forty years of refuse. Beecher divided the debris into two categories: either he could use it or he could not. One morning two passable tractor tires were in his creek embraced by the arms of a weeping willow. It gave him the idea of setting up a fishing net mostly across the stream in an effort to survey the treasures bobbing their way downstream. There were empty drums and once even a propane tank with the name of a small Iowa town stenciled in white lettering on the side. Every kind of dead animal carcass he could think of made its way diverted from the Osage River.

Explorers named this stream Hungry Mother Creek long ago, longer than even he cared to remember. His body changed slightly, just like a riverbed over time, aches and odd epochs of jabbing pain in his joints, under his arms, in his groin, and just when the notion of getting the cancer crossed his mind the pain would stop for awhile. Hungry Mother was doublewide, and the only physical feature of the landscape not beginning to assume a new shape belonged to a pair of beavers. The dam widened as the water level crept up until, over a period of days, the beavers finally abandoned their home swimming in tandem toward the far shore. The sleek creatures receded, dodging foaming river bilge water and jagged tree trunks.

He took out a bamboo fishing pole and produced a foul smelling lure from an old mayonnaise bottle which he clumped on the hook. Tossing the line with a practiced flick of his wrist, he did not care if he caught anything right now. He didn't use a bobber, he liked to fish by feel. If he got serious about it he would find some of the shady pockets near the banks and shove his hands into the mouth of a blue channel catfish or a flathead, or he would if the current weren't so lively from flooding. A man down at the bait shop told him a funny story about the old boy who fished like that naked and ended up with a fish hanging off his other bait.

"I bet when he got all swolled up," Beecher said. "It weren't easy to explain to his wife."

There was a trap upstream near Clark's field where he hoped he might catch a mole. He heard if you caught a mole and smothered it to death with your bare hands it would give you healing power like a seventh son of a seventh son.

The footbridges of flat stone he jury rigged, now bottle green with coats of moss and lichen, yesterday disappeared under the floodwaters. The clement weather a diversion for the forecasted disaster. An aggregation of likely treasure foundered against his nets. Regular employment no longer held any reward for him, although he took pleasure in remembering the time of his life when working by the hour at the shoe factory to come home to his pretty wife. She wore candy-apple red lipstick for him when he could get it for her. When they married she wasn't much more than a girl. He took away her veil and her embarrassed down-turned eyes as he helped her off with the wedding dress her mother made. And,

afterwards, she lay on the cool white sheets of the hotel room in Jeff City on the banks of the river where they had managed to avoid their chivaree. Their life together, nearly lasted seven years, had been idyllic and become mythologized in his mind as the best time of his life. She died in the hospital having their baby, Mary Josephine. He could not talk about it, any of it. He sang the song she liked, but he didn't remember all the words too well:

 Don't sit under the apple tree

 With anyone else but me

 Anyone else but me

 Anyone else but me  

 No no no . . . 'til I come marching home.

Beecher's mother died from tuberculosis in a sanitarium in the Rocky Mountains. The doctor who diagnosed her illness, his breath stank of corn liquor, called her a lunger as if she were an animal and ignoring the fact that she was still alive and contained everything he knew, held valuable in the world. Her face still haunted him. When she passed, Beecher and his sister were in a Denver orphanage, separated from her. Their father disappeared. He saw her for the first time in three months in a casket of pearl-lined silk in the funeral home. He could not remember the funeral service itself.

A cardinal flew by, his acerbic gaze directing his attention to a dark circular splotch on the water upstream. His vision tended to blur on him as if things were moving around in his eye socket which resulted in a dizzy, uneasy feeling if he focused on an object afar too quickly. In the fetid, hot early afternoon air white spores drifted like snowflakes. A prism danced above the water's surface in an unlikely circular pattern. Dark thunderheads were pushing toward him from the west--an ominous flying anvil. He squatted down on his haunches to wash the dirt off his hands in the shallows above the neap mud. Seeing the clouds and what was obviously a little rowboat approaching with, to all appearances, no one piloting it, made his lips turn downward in an expression equal parts frustration and disgust.

"I come down here," he said aloud gazing heavenward. "I like to fish during the day and stay down here of a night. Besides, the farrier's coming too."

Lightning appeared and snaked down from the sky from above the anvil and Beecher counted to three before he heard the thunder.

Beecher yanked his line out of the water. He threw his favorite bamboo fishing pole up further on the bank into the weeds. The water was still cool as he stepped out into the current, he wasn't too worried since he wore his thigh high waders. Times like these a body just had to do what was right, even if it sickened him to do so. He felt his ankle turn on a creek rock but he kept his feet in the grainy sediment. Soon his toes would be too numb to feel anything, although he knew he would pay for it later. Whippoorwills cried out as the rowboat loomed to meet him and a jagged fear went through him from head to foot like a spike through a rail and he knew it was a warning--bad luck on the lamb.

The rowboat would fetch a decent price or could be traded for a good hunting dog or firearm if the owner did not turn up, but then that rarely happened during highwater times like these. Approaching the boat the wood planks were coarse as if it had set on the banks unattended for a time. The red and white paint which had adorned it was slowly becoming a memory. Florid green polyps of moss clung in pockets above the waterline. In places sloppy clumps of pitch were applied to the hull. Even the boards buckled and it was a wonder the little craft kept out the creek water.

When Beecher's hand fell on the port side he heard a mewling sound come from somewhere above, but the noise was refracted and diffused through the air by the water so that he spun around, swimming in place, in an attempt to locate with his eyes where his ears had failed.

From the banks the cattails stood and beyond a fallow field of straggling Indian corn carelessly mowed down close to the ground. Beyond the field, a row of evergreens with a rust tint to them and squat pine trees and even further away his low-slung house growing out of the rich silt earth. His place had a low roof with grass growing on it made entirely from wood without one nail. A sidewalk of mulch went around the house which he replenished each year. Behind the house was a little garden where he tried to grow most of his necessities which he would can himself and store down in the root cellar. A root cellar which had come with the old Clark home, crumbled inward from the poor foundation some seventy-five years ago. Then Pap built their house, it still stood a hundred yards away with its fancy pillars and a gallery overlooking the east garden gone to weeds. The house itself was half-burnt, choked with ivy, and a home for bats, sparrows, raccoons, possums, garter snakes, and every other creature under the sun. Beecher couldn't go near it in the summer for all the mud-daubers. He couldn't bring himself to tear it down.

The bleating sounded again. He turned back to the boat and put both hands on one side and did a chin-up to see down inside the boat: a baby wrapped in a coarse yellow blanket was sitting in a little red laundry basket.

Beecher's arms could not hold him up, but not bad for an old man. He pulled himself up again and yes, there was a baby, in a blue jumper with no teeth and it saw him but this time it's face went blank-startled and then puckered like an old man eating on a lemon wedge. His biceps stung as he held himself up looking down on the squalling child. He let himself back down in the cool water and that side of the boat bobbed up again. The child wailed now and he wished to God he had never seen the rowboat to begin with. Now he'd have to play nursemaid to it or find someone take care of it, or anyway call the high sheriff which he was loathe to do.

"They'll blame me somehow," he raised up again to see the baby and as it turned around he noticed a red knot growing out of its head like a radish. "I be damned."

It took him almost plumb out of the water to do it, but he grabbed on to the lip of the boat and kicked at the water until he made his way into the shallows where he could stand. He heaved and pulled straining his leg muscles as he imagined the baby dense as a tiny lead ball. Reaching in to grab up the baby, but then thought better of it. Every year as a boy his father gathered up kittens from the barn in a croker sack and tossed them into the creek.

"I bet you're trouble, kid," Beecher picked up the child and swung it in the air and its tears turned into gleeful squawks. Snot dried to its cheeks. The radish repulsed him but saddened him too. It was as if the child's brains were so ambitious they had begun to grow on the outside of his skull. He spun in a circle with the baby and stopped wondering why he did so. Babies make old folks do funny things, he thought.

"I'll name you Einstein," Beecher said. "Because you've got all them brains coming out your head. Yes sir, you're an idea man."

"Put him down, you crazy old man," a young woman's muffled voice declared. "And his name is Ray."

A corner of the tarp flopped over creating a triangle to reveal a rat's nest of auburn hair and the pale moon of a face beneath. Beecher's adam's apple gulped melodramatically as he looked at the girl dumbfounded for a moment. Then he laughed nervously, a high nasal snort but she looked at him grimly with her gunmetal gray eyes and her shoulders hunched up and down with her ragged breath.

"You all right?" he asked.

"I'm alive, now ain't I?"

"You look for all the world like you're about to claw my eyes out for some reason," Beecher tried for a casual tone of voice which would sound innocuous.

"I know how you all do."

"Who do?"

"Men," she said. "I know how you all, men, do. Well, I got a baby and I ain't putting up with it. Got it? Get it. Good."

"Shitfire."

"Don't talk like that in front of Ray," she said. "He's just a baby, you know?"

"Where'd you all come from? Um, I mean, how long you been in this here boat?"

She pushed more of the oily tarp off her body, "Help us out of this thing. We don't want to get wet." Beecher splashed toward where she stood in the boat. "No, dummy, take the baby first."

He grabbed up the laundry basket by its handles and carried it over to the grass, well away from the creek bank. The girl had her arms out and he picked her up, his hands under her armpits, she was so thin he could have carried her on one arm like the strong man he had seen at the Kingdom County carnival. When her bare feet hit the ground she turned on him like a feral dog baring its yellowed teeth.

"Take a picture," she said. "It'll last you longer."

"Was I staring?" Beecher took off his straw hat. "Ain't had no company in quite a spell, I expect I'm out of practice is all."

"While you're practicing, you got anything to eat? Me and Ray is hungry."

"I got something up to the house."

The barefoot girl began to tramp up to the house leaving the baby for him to carry he assumed. When she lifted her feet the soles were black with dirt. She wore a man's v-neck t-shirt and a pair of cutoff shorts. The baby grabbed at his thumb and tried to gum it. The girl fell down at the strawberry patch and began pinching the mostly unripe berries off the green.

"Them's still green," Beecher warned. "You'll get a bellyache eating them that way."

"I don't care," the girl said.

"What's your name?" he asked. "You all get flooded out of somewheres?"

"Why? You writing a book?"

"Nome," Beecher laughed. The more obnoxious the girl's tone became the more it began to tickle him. She look like a river rat and smelled like one too but the girl had nerve--he had to give her that. "Is this here your baby?"

"Duh," she said. "No, he's my baby brother. You can put that down in your book too."

"What's your name?"

"Puddinandtame," the girl said. "Ask me again and I'll tell you the same."

"Shit."

"The baby," she hissed. "I thought you were going to fix us something to eat."

"I'll fix you something," Beecher said. "If you leave that sassy attitude out here . . . and . . ."

"And what?"

"And, if you tell me your name."

The girl flicked her hair out of her eyes and slid her fingertips into the pockets of her shorts. A bruise flowered high on her cheekbone, but she returned his gaze defiantly but then she visibly relaxed. She was not a fetching sight, but there was something more inevitable about her than pretty. She took the baby out of the laundry basket, "Ain't nobody hunting me, if that's your worry. My name's Alisha, Alisha Scofield. Ray Ray and me is from up in. Everyone thinks we died in the flood I expect."

"You trying to tell me you floated down from Audrain county?"

"Yes," she said.

"The hell you did."

"You calling me a liar?" she pushed a strand of hair out of her face.

"You heard me," Beecher said. "The river don't run thataway, missy."

"Well, big whoop," she said. "You think you got to know all about us?"

"Come on in then," he motioned to the squat door. "Been flooded out a time or two myself."

A horn honked from the gravel road. A familiar green Ford truck flew down the road spraying a white dust cloud of exhaust like jet fuel into the air. Jimmy Beam, the farrier, was coming to shoe horses. Jimmy turned the steering wheel and parked in front. Watching the young man work was better than watching the television. He told the girl to stay in but after she had eaten a lunch of his leftover breakfast of eggs, sausage links, and grits with several cups of black chicory she had her big wanting face pressed up against the window as if she were on display at the hardware store downtown.

"Who's that girl?"

"Trouble, I think," Beecher said.

Beecher threw open the barn door and opened up the stalls. A radio hung from a leather strap on a peg near the tackroom, he turned it on, and it played both kinds of music: country and western. With an old Folgers can he scooped up enough feed to lure the two horses, Miss Billie and Dynamite. Miss Billie's big belly hung abnormally large as if she might have twins. Under the best circumstances Miss Billie was a biter. Dynamite was a roan-colored seventeen hands high saddle-bred. He did not like being shoed.

"Guess who's here to see you?" Beecher slipped a red halter over Dynamite.

"Better belly-tie him."

"You wouldn't believe the number of ropes he's gone through," Beecher grunted as he slung the leather straps over the horse's back and tied the short rope at his chest instead of at his halter. "Dumb sumbuck."

"That's right," Jimmy said. "Don't give him no slack."

"Just snaps his head and pops the rope in two."

"Probably learned it by accident," Jimmy ran his hand through his hair. He made passes over the horse's back with a brush and made soothing noises in his chest. The smell of hay and manure coalesced as a ray of yellow sunlight made its way down the center through the open doors where dust motes spun like drunken dancers two-stepping at a honky tonk.

The horse's eye scrutinized the farrier. Wide and round like a fish's eye watches as the fishermen dislodges the hook. He grumbled in his chest, the men could feel the vibrations from the horse conducted into the ground and up through their workboots. Jimmy brushed down toward the belly and had to shew away an overly friendly calico that kept trying to walk under the gelding's hooves.

Beecher sat down near the entrance to the tackroom on a bench. He reached into his breast pocket and hauled out a half-rolled pack of Red Man. The barn permeated with a minty odor, Beechnut, for a moment almost overwhelming the noxious manure smell. The old man took great pride in an opportunity to demonstrate his good breeding by opening the mouth of his package wide, proffering the tobacco with a wordless gesture although the farrier declined. Between three fingers and a thumb Beecher selected a clump of chew, jamming an overly generous pinch into his mouth creating a lump at his cheek.

Alisha appeared at the barn door with her baby draped over her like a spangled dress, trying to get a look at the farrier.

"Go get me a beer," Beecher yelled at her. Much to his surprise she turned away and obediently began to walk back up to the house.

"Aw now," Jimmy said over his shoulder. "You don't got to talk to her like that, do you?"

"Remember what I'm saying right now. That girl's trouble with a capital T. I know by saying it, it'll make her irresistible to you but I found her and that baby in a boat in my crick trap yonder. She says he's her brother, but I know that ain't so."

"Where she from? Who been hitting on her?"

"She says," Beecher spit, "up around Audrain County. Got to take everything a girl like that says with a pound of salt. The tongue on that girl, probably provoked her old man into hitting her."

Dynamite's eye rolled and he began to side step a bit as the farrier got near his hooves, "HAW! HAW! HAW!" he cried at the horse his face up near the eye, not out of any real anger but for his own good. Jimmy turned away from the gelding's head, pulled up a socked foreleg, and began to work on the hoof with a heavy file.

"It plumb tickles me to death to watch you do that."

"Wait 'til you get the bill," Jimmy worked the file over the hoof making a scraping sound. Dynamite turned to look at the farrier grimacing, exposing his teeth with an eye on his shoulder. Beecher had to get up and pull his head away by the halter. "What is that thing on the baby's head? It looks like a devil head growing there."

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March 2, 2010