Mr. Tall (17 page)

“Sail, Boat, Sail! Sail, Boat, Sail!”

The cloud had moved almost directly above their heads, thinning the light around them into near darkness. A roaring curtain of rain dropped from the sky and slid toward them across the field. From inside the deluge the baying of the hounds approached hysteria and clamored into a frenetic yipping.

The closing riders shouted in vicious paraphrase,
“Tom Dooley! Tom Dooley! Your head! Hang it down!”

The boat trembled beneath Jack. “SAIL, BOAT, SAIL!” he screamed.

“Tom Dooley!”
taunted the lawmen.
“Guess what you're bound to do!”

“Go, go, go,” Tom Dooley prayed. “Go, go, go.”

As the taproot rent from the ground the vessel shuddered into the air a ripping inch at a time. Most of the rotted planking in the bottom of the hull peeled away as the boat rose. Jack and Tom Dooley grabbed hold of the bench and lifted their feet. When the root broke free with a final snap the boat floated into the sky as lightly as dandelion down. It rose as high as a house, a barn, a tree, a standard-sized giant, a two-headed giant, a three-headed giant, two trees. They rose as high as a mountain, as two mountains. At three mountains high the boat banked gracefully toward the woods; its bow tipped urgently forward as it shot away from the swirling maw of the cloud, its roots swimming aft like tentacles, leaving a silver contrail of leaves spinning in its wake. Within moments it crossed the boundary of the forest, sailing for far shores. The leading line of lawmen pulled up at the crater that remained where the tree had stood and gazed after the boat, their faces pallid beneath the wide brims of their dripping black hats. The hounds cast about the trampled wheat in confusion, as if they had made some mistake in their trailing. Jack looked for the black dog but did not see him in the rain. Not one of the watching lawmen thought to shoot at the boat as it grew smaller in the distance. Looking back, Jack glimpsed the full magnitude of the peace officers come to lay Tom Dooley in his grave. A slick of riders and dogs blackened the field as far as he could see. Millions.

“We're flying, Jack!” Tom Dooley yelled. “We're flying!”

Jack's joy at once again sailing through the air in his boat was tempered in almost equal part by his wish that the boat were still intact. He wasn't afraid of heights—he was a jim-dandy beantree climber, after all—but found that flying at great speed in a boat without a bottom, while exhilarating, made for a vexatious voyage. He gripped the gunnel so tightly that when his Saturday hat blew off he didn't even try to grab it. At last he allowed himself to look down past his dangling shoes and through the writhe of roots. A topography of trees blurred beneath them. As he watched the forest passing he realized that the posse wouldn't be able to follow them through such verdant woods on horseback. The lawmen would have to dismount and send for lumberjacks and that would take time. He had gotten away! He was
still
Jack, that, by God, Jack! He let go of the gunnel first with his left hand, then the right, and placed his hands on his knees. He couldn't see forward because of the tree trunk (and didn't think to look aft, where the storm still avidly pursued them), but he reckoned that, for now, seeing where he was going didn't matter as much as the fact that he was gone. He was once again flying in a magic boat. The whole world and its riches lay ahead of him. He thrust his arms into the air. “Woo-hoo!” he hollered. “Woo-hoo!”

He wrapped his arm around Tom Dooley's shoulder and gave him a shake. “Where to, Daddy?” he asked. “Where do you want to go?”

“Why, I don't know, Jack.”

“How about we pick up a couple of maidens, you and me, get a bite to eat, see the sights?” He had forgotten, for the moment, his recent maiden-related resolutions. “How about we get you a girl up here in my flying boat?”

“Better not,” Tom Dooley said. “I'd just wind up sticking a knife in her chest and burying her in the woods.”

When Jack removed his arm from Tom Dooley's shoulders, he drew back a long string of blue sparks along with it. He felt as if the air around him were being inhaled. His blowing hair cackled with static.

Tom Dooley turned to him and said, “Jack?” just as the sky blew up.

A white scald of light blinded Jack; a cannon shot of sound deafened him; the rivets on his overalls branded him, and fire shot from the nails of his boots. For a heartbeat he gazed at a blank page in a book and wondered what happened next. Then he smelled wood smoke and opened his eyes. He found he was clinging to the starboard gunnel with both arms, his legs waving beneath him. The boat rotated slowly—first this way, then that—as it slipped from the sky. The tree's trunk was split and scorched and smoking all the way down to its base; its canopy unraveled in a corkscrew of blackened leaf scrap as it fell. Tom Dooley was fighting to keep hold of the snarl of roots beneath the boat.

“JAAACK!” Tom Dooley yelled.

Jack swung a leg up and clambered back into the boat. He was considerably singed, but nothing seemed to be burned off.

“JAAACK! HELP!”

“Sail, Boat, Sail, Sail, Boat, Sail, Sail, Boat, Sail,” Jack begged.

Nothing. The boat began to pendulum as it stalled toward the woods far below. The wind rushing past Jack's ears roared with fervor.

“The boat's not working, Tom Dooley!” Jack called. “Hang on! We're going down!”

Tom Dooley managed to claw his way up into a root snarl near the base of the trunk. “Tell the tree to say a sestina or something! He's the one sucked up all the magic!”

“The tree's dead, Tom Dooley! It took a direct hit. There's sap all over the place.”

“Not dead,” the tree rasped, “but cleaved.”

“You're alive!” Jack cried.

“Charcoal, Jack. I'll be briquettes soon enough.”

“No! Wait wait wait wait wait wait! Listen. We're in a bad way here. We're going down. We're going to crash. Tell us what to do. Tree! Hang on long enough to tell us what to do!”

“Taproot,” it rasped. “The magic's leaking from my taproot.”

“I see it!” Tom Dooley yelled. “Law, law, Jack. The damn thing's shitting rubies!”

“
Bleeding
rubies,” the tree said.

“Rubies?”
Jack asked.

“Magic in its solid form. Ordinarily it's a gas.”

“Magic rubies,” Tom Dooley wondered out loud. “Damn, Jack, this here is some more kind of story.”

“Can you stop the leak?” Jack asked him.

“I think so!” Tom Dooley said.

He hung upside down trapeze-style and jammed his finger into the hole.

“Ow!” the tree yelped. “Take it easy down there!”

“Sorry!” Tom Dooley called.

The oak's rocking slowed and stilled. The bow tipped up and settled. The boat came to a full stop and floated becalmed in the air.

“It worked, Tom Dooley!” Jack shouted. “By God, it worked! We're not falling anymore!”

“Huzzah!” Tom Dooley shouted anachronistically.

It was not long, however, until their deliverance from death began to strike them as more plight than providence. Although the boat hovered easily, it proved incapable of progress. When Jack commanded it to “Sail Over Here!” it did not respond; when he ordered it to “Sail Over There!” it remained anchored in place. The cloud slid blackly by mere yards above their heads and tried to beat them from the sky with head-knocking hailstones and icy cataracts of rain. It lit up on the inside as if some haint with a lantern were seeking them through its dark passageways, opening doors and peering inside rooms in which they might be hiding. The earth below them had disappeared beneath the deluge. Jack shielded his noggin with his forearms and shivered mightily; he had never been so cold—or so frightened—in all his many travels. The tree could offer neither comfort nor counsel as its condition worsened; scores of leaves leapt into the rain as its consciousness wavered. When the end came only a few lifeless stragglers flapped from its boughs, ragged flags among the rigging of a ghost ship.

“I think that I shall never see,” the tree whispered, then spoke no more.

After the tree died Tom Dooley grew broody and silent. “Jack?” he finally said. “I'm getting a cramp in my finger, and all the blood's run to my head.”

“I reckon that would be the case, given your predicament.”

“And you know what I just realized? I'm hanging from a white oak tree, just like I say I'm gonna be doing tomorrow, in the first-person part of my song.”

“I hadn't thought about it, but I guess that's right,” Jack said. “Spirit of the ballad, anyway, if not exactly the letter.”

“I never been in a tomorrow before, and when I finally get to one I wind up hanging from a daggum white oak tree. It's been interesting, though—the talking dog and the talking tree and the flying boat and getting struck by lightning and the magic rubies leaking out. To tell you the truth, I've always envied you living inside a story instead of a song. Not knowing what happens on the next page, all that setting out, going on down the road, seeing what happens the other side of the mountain.”

“I've had some good times, I guess,” Jack said. “You don't like living in your song?”

“It sucked the soul out of me a long time ago. It's always the same. Even when I close my eyes I can hear that refrain a-comin'. I got to where I looked forward to somebody screwing up the lyrics just for a change, but they're so damn simple hardly anybody ever did. Today's the most improvisation I ever been involved in.”

“I'm sorry about that,” Jack said. “The limitations of the lyric. At least you're out now.”

“I don't know about that, Jack. I just realized my head's hanging down, just like it says in the chorus.”

Jack sat up straighter. “Hey now,” he said. “That's just happenstance. It's the only way you could stop the rubies leaking and the boat from crashing.”

“It's not happenstance, neither, Jack. It's prescient, is what it is. Even after all I been through since yesterday I'm still locked up in the song. Head hanging down. Hanging from a white oak tree. The whole pokeful. It's the damnedest thing. Narrative inevitability.”

Jack glared down at the bottoms of Tom Dooley's shoes. “You ain't locked up in shit,” he said. “Ain't nothing inevitable. That ain't how a story works. You get to a hard spot you make a decision and you set out from there. You go on down the road and you see what happens next. Then you make another decision. You got
agency.
”

“But I ain't got agency. It's all an illusion. Face facts.”

“Them ain't my facts.”

“I come this far, Jack, I might as well go on back to my ballad. I know it ain't much of a song, but if I'm bound to die I'd just as soon do it on the home ground. If my words get all the way forgot, well, then that's all right. You seen all them lawmen riding after me through the wheat field. I been sung about more than most.”

“That's chickenshit rationalization, Tom Dooley. If that's the way you think, I don't know why you even bothered running from that dog.”

Tom Dooley bent forward and moved a tangle of roots out of the way and blinked up at Jack through the rain. “Why, Jack,” he said. “Ain't nobody likes getting bit by a dog.”

“Tom Dooley, if you pull your finger out of that hole, we can't go back. We'll both die and I flat don't care to. I ain't never been killed before, in all these many stories, and I don't aim to start now.”

“Well, I'm
bound
to die, Jack. I don't know about you.” And with that he pulled his finger out of the hole and shook out his arm.

Jack saw a ruby bob out from beneath the tree and hover in the air. Magic. The boat shivered ever so slightly.

“Why, you son of a bitch,” he said.

“Hey, Jack,” Tom Dooley said, glaring up, his murderer's eyes blackening with glee. “Come this time tomorrow, reckon where
you'll
be?” Then he laughed, somersaulted backward, and vanished into the rain.

Before Jack finished wondering if Tom Dooley had hit the ground, the taproot belched out a clot of rubies and the boat dropped far enough to yank a holler out of Jack. Without thinking he leapt feet first through the bottom of the boat and on through the root-jumble, hooked his legs on the trapeze root, and jammed his finger into the ruby hole. Although the boat now floated steadily in the squall, he found himself pondering the same predicament that had stymied him while Tom Dooley was the one who stanched the ruby-bleeding: namely, how to get down from the sky. As he hung upside down his head pounded and his feet numbed and his finger throbbed and he shook in the downpour, and when a rogue hailstone caught him in the testy parts, he let loose a malediction of blasphemous execrations worthy of the most degenerate giant. At least the cloud had stopped shooting lightning at him. Just as the idea of ending his own tale with what he now thought of as the Dooley solution flickered in the far darkness of his considering, it occurred to him that he might lower the boat by letting a few rubies at a time drip from the tree. The plan worked well enough but he couldn't grow used to the lurching in his gut each time the boat jerked, even though he knew it was coming. After a while he began to worry that the tree would run out of rubies before the boat lit on the ground, and that he would be squashed into Jack jelly when the tree landed on top of him. Lost as he was in the deluge, unable to gauge or guess at his altitude, he also worried that even if the tree
didn't
run out of rubies he would still be mashed into mush if he didn't see the ground coming up in time. The rubies themselves proved irksome. They didn't fall once squeezed from the tree, but instead floated around Jack's head like a swarm of glittering gnats worth, in his estimation, upward of a bazillion dollars. He tried cramming a handful into the bib pocket of his overalls, so as to sell them later, but had to let them go when he almost floated away. Thus the greatest treasure hunter in the history of the high country was reduced to waving away from his face the greatest gob of gemstones he had ever laid eyes on. If only he could have gotten his feet on the ground with a couple of pocketsful he would have been able to set himself up in the biggest king's castle in the countryside!