Finn (26 page)

16

S
LICK AND GLISTENING
with bluegill scales the boy slides onto the couch alongside his mother there on the sunshot porch, and together they watch as his father poles upstream with the morning’s gutted catch. The boy is surprised to find her resting here at a moment when she is usually occupied, but not as surprised as he is to detect a kind of despair both in her posture and in the dispirited way she answers his greeting. And not half as surprised as he is to discover the bandage on her swollen and pale face when she turns to look upon him and admit him thereby into her shame and her fury.

“What happened?”

“It was an accident.” Which she means to make true, because it is her intention that a thing such as this shall not be permitted to happen again.

For his part Finn sells all his catch but a handful and invests most of the proceeds in a quantity of Bliss’s forty-rod. The remainder he spends begrudgingly on certain necessaries, and after he returns home and ties up and tells the boy to bring in the groceries
and you’ll be careful with them jugs if you know what’s good for you,
he takes the last few of the fish and bundles them freshly in wet reeds and wraps them in a clean cloth sack and starts uphill.

“I thought you could use some,” he says to his brother when he finds him.

“I don’t cook much.”

“I know it.”

“Perhaps I’ll have them fry them up over at the Adams. For lunch.”

“Beat the hell out of whatever’s on the menu.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.”

“Don’t know who they’re buying from these days.”

“Some lesser supplier, no doubt.” He sighs, flicking bits of dust from the gleaming top of his desk and sniffing the unwelcome odors of fresh bluegills and his own kin.

“I didn’t come here to talk about business,” says Finn.

“Or fish.”

“Neither one.”

“What then?”

“I come here to let you know he’s right.”

“The Judge.”

“Not all the way right, but.”

“But he has a point.”

“You could say.”

“He’s right about some things.”

“I reckon.”

“Nobody’s wrong all the time. Not even the Judge.” Will wrinkles his nose and points with one finger at the sack. “Let’s take those across the street right now, shall we?”

The sun is directly overhead, high as the smell of bluegills and brother as Will locks up and the two of them step down from the porch into the street. They enter the dim cool fastness of the hotel lobby through great swinging double doors, Will first and his brother behind by only a step or perhaps two yet nonetheless visibly subordinate. The lawyer gives the impression that he was born here. The riverman on the other hand looks as if he is hunting something or perhaps being hunted himself.

Beneath the arched doorway to the dining room Will whispers in the ear of the octoroon Lovett, who takes the bundle from him as if it is infected and strides with it toward the kitchen. Will waits to be shown to his table, where he takes up his usual post and lets his brother sit where he may. He raises one hand to dissuade the waitress from leaving menus and orders tea with lemon for himself. His brother orders whiskey but then thinks better of it and in the end orders nothing, not so much as a glass of water to wash down his own catch.

“So what’s the old man right about?” Leaning forward to create a space of confidentiality between them in the vast high-ceilinged room.

“My troubles.”

“That covers a good bit of ground.”

“The woman.”

“Oh.” He flutters his napkin loose and arranges it upon his lap. His brother tucks his own into his collar and smoothes it down. “I see.”

“I don’t believe she’s worth the trouble.”

“So you’re giving in.”

Finn goes ruddy above his white napkin. “It ain’t that simple.” But keeping his voice down, intimidated by the high room and the bustling staff and the lunchtime crowd just beginning to filter through the door, lifting their hands in restrained and respectful greetings to his brother one by one.

“It is to him. To the Judge it’s every bit that simple.”

“Still.”

“I suppose you’ve had some revelation.”

“I’ve had a few.”

Will leans back as the waitress brings their plates, the bluegills arrayed upon them delicate and fragrant in ways that Finn has never imagined much less witnessed. They have left his presence ordinary and returned transformed, and he barely recognizes them for his own nor dares disturb them with knife and fork.

“Eat up,” says his brother. He selects his cutlery with the intensity of a duelist. “So you’ve learned some lessons.”

“I have.”

“That will please the Judge to no end.”

“I know it.”

“Is that what you want?” His mouth full.

Finn thinks. “I reckon it may as well be.”

Will gives his head a rueful shake, not as if he disagrees with his brother but as if he is reflecting upon the tragic loss of him. “Times have changed.”

Before Finn can ask him to clarify his meaning a gentleman dressed all in white linen approaches from across the room, one hand outstretched. “Will, you old hound dog,” he calls, although by the appearance of him and the refinement of his voice he seems unlikely to have been much in the presence of hound dogs.

Will stands to greet him and while they shake hands the stranger takes the attorney’s right elbow in his own left hand as if the two of them are the dearest and most long separated of companions.

“Senator Farraday,” says Will. “Good to see you again. Do you know my brother?”

The senator runs the fingers of his left hand through the gray tangle that rides high upon his head like a storm at sea. He leans theatrically back to assess Finn from his great height, a stance yielding the impression that if he were wearing galluses he would be about to snap them. “Only by reputation,” he says. And then he plunges a hand toward Finn and smiles from under his mustaches as if their entire encounter is the purest of delights. “The pleasure is mine.”

Finn does not even have a chance to follow his brother’s lead and rise fully to his feet before the senator is through with him and gone, striding back to his table where he dampens a napkin and wipes his hands and calls for the waitress to bring ’round a replacement.

“He didn’t mean anything by that,” says Will.

“How do you know.”

“I just know.”

Finn turns his head to one side and the other, assessing his position in the room. “The way people look at me.” His voice low.

“
The way you look to them,
if you don’t mind my saying.”

“That ain’t it.” Reaching a filthy hand toward a mountain of hot biscuits piled under a gleaming napkin.

“It’s some of it.”

“I am what I am.”

“Leaving her won’t change that.”

“It might for the Judge.”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Look at you,” says Finn, pointing with a biscuit. “You fit in. You got a place in the world.”

“So do you.”

“It ain’t much. And half of it I owe to you. More’n half.”

“That’s nothing. And anyhow it’s not what I’m talking about. I mean you’ve found your own way. You’ve taken your own direction. With no help from the Judge.”

“Which is more’n you can say for yourself, I reckon.”

“I reckon,” says Will.

Finn sops up what remains on his plate with the biscuit and studies the filmy residual streaks of butter and grease as if hoping to divine some truth from them.

“Besides,” says his brother, “he won’t love you any better for abandoning that woman.”

“He might.”

“I suspect he’ll hate you more.”

“Why.”

“He’ll decide you’re weak. He’ll accuse you of vacillating.”

“He might.”

“He’ll dismiss you and your best intentions altogether.”

“I reckon he could.”

“You know the Judge.”

“I do.”

Will raises his hand for the check. “No matter what you do now, he’ll never forgive you for what you’ve already done. That’s his way. All you can do by struggling is make things worse.”

“I know it.” Like a fish on a line.

N
ONE BUT
B
LISS
has time or temperament for him.

He poles past Dixon’s in the lowering rainy dark, looking up from the river as Dixon’s wife lights the lamps and draws the threadbare curtains. Under circumstances such as these even so poor a place as this acquires an ethereal and inviting glow for those who are forbidden its delights, among which scattering of sad outcasts Finn must number himself on account of his continuing indenture to Connor for the woman’s debt. He’ll be damned if he’ll buy whiskey from that black bastard with the few cents he permits himself and he lacks enough to so much as get started at Dixon’s, and back home under his own roof confined with those two he feels as if he may as well be back at Alton. So these days he can be counted upon at nightfall to tie up to a branch and thread his way in the darkness to that secret spot in the woods where Bliss’s fire is constant and his whiskey is cheap and his hospitality is reliable if not quite freely given.

“I ain’t running no tavern hereabouts,” says the blind man as Finn emerges from the treeline.

“I know it.”

“You bring a jug?” Poking the fire.

“Damn. Left it in the skiff.”

“Ain’t you the great idiot.” In all the world there live only two sorts of men who speak with the luxurious immunity enjoyed by this blind bootlegger: those in positions of great power, and those locked safely behind prison bars. Bliss imagines himself to possess certain qualities of both, and about this he is correct.

“I reckon I’ll just have to drink it all at one go.”

“I reckon.”

The delight that Finn takes in Bliss’s whiskey begins at a level hardly describable as such and perhaps more accurately understood as its inverse. So it is with the bootlegger’s company. But over the passage of an evening’s time each one of these variables—whiskey and companionship alike—improves on a steady upward curve whose course proceeds through ascending parallel strata of pleasure and brotherhood. Still they both must peak eventually, and as the moon completes its circuit and Finn’s head begins to throb he usually begins to ruminate upon the course of his life and the various hurtful influences upon it and how they have conspired to bring him to such a sad destination as this. Drinking in the deep woods with a blind man who tolerates him for pay. Tomorrow night he will return, but he will like it no better.

T
HE WOMAN IS HUNGRY
and the boy is hungry and Finn is hungry too, but he of them all does not care much. He has eaten a little during the day, bits and scraps acquired by bargaining and stealth along his circuitous route, and so his stomach although empty is not quite so entirely void as theirs. She lacks sufficient flour to dredge the sunfish he has begrudged them for their supper, and the tobacco sack that she once concealed in the bottom of the sugar barrel now lies exposed like a bone unearthed in a hard land. The boy has thought to ask her about it on more than one occasion, but each time the shame attached to having opened the sugar barrel without permission has overcome his curiosity.