On the River Styx (17 page)

Alice squirmed past and rushed into the bathroom, which had a hook lock, a pink plastic tub, and a wide gap under the door. When she emerged, poking her hair, the funny hat and the white paste were gone. “You’re getting a nice tan,” he said, to cheer her. Acting pleased, she raised her fingertips to her fiery brow, and touched by her gallantry, he said by way of apology, “I guess I thought there would be other people here, someone to talk to.”

She nodded brightly, and he went into the bathroom, still fuzzy from the rum at noon. How sick he was of drinking rum from thin bathroom glasses, in the long evenings confined to this damn cabin! They couldn’t even sit outside because of all the holes in their porch screen, and nowhere else in town did they feel welcome.

Poor old Fisher Woman, he thought, with a rush of affection. We’ll make love.

She was sitting on the bed edge, the lunch basket in her
lap, as if trying to remember something. She ignored his fingertips on her neck. “Dickie forgot to bring the rum,” she said. “It’s not in the basket.” Her voice had an edge, but she shrugged off his inquiry.

“Hell, I’ll go get it,” he said, bothered, too.

“Be careful,” she murmured unaccountably, following him out onto the porch, and he made a pantomime of fighting off giant mosquitoes, which did not amuse her. “I mean, don’t get him in trouble,” she called after him. He stopped.

“Why not?” he said. He told her his new opinion of the guide, how much he disliked this sullen ungrateful man. Wasn’t it patronizing and hypocritical, wasn’t it reverse racism, to indulge a shifty-eyed sonofabitch like that just because he was black?

He expected her to defend Dickie but she said quietly, “I don’t like him either. He’s sneaky and he’s aggressive. I’ve watched how he sucks up to Whidden and how he bullies that nice Johnny, and the old lady who cleans up. The man’s a fascist, or at least a shit.” When her husband laughed, she said, “But maybe we encouraged him or something, okay? So don’t get him in trouble.”

He went down to check the boat, certain now that the search would be in vain. When he climbed back up onto the dock, a thin local man in a worn felt hat and white long-sleeved Sunday shirt buttoned at the neck was standing there under the banyan, hands in hip pockets. His flat gaze warned the stranger that he had his eye on him. Burkett almost explained what he was doing in the boat. Instead he said sharply, “Can I help you?”

The man bared his upper teeth, to suck them. He watched Burkett go.

Up the street, laughing and frowning simultaneously, Johnny agreed that it was a nice evening. He said he was waiting for his ride, that he did not know where Dickie was. His gaze darted up and down the street.

It was near twilight, the mosquitoes were convening, and by the time Burkett reached the bar door of the café, he was running. He jumped through the screen door and yanked it shut.

Without taking their eyes off Burkett, two men on the point of leaving moved back among the tables in the rear, feeling behind them for their chairs. They sank down slowly, watched him with the others, not with hostility or curiosity, but in the same relentless way they had watched the plastic colors of the TV screen over the bar.

The front end of the bar was strewn with a litter of candy and cigarettes and peanuts, and the shot bottles were lined up on a shelf behind. A dark outline marked the former location of a mirror. On three unattached stools at the far end perched three old men in stained straw hats. They were drinking beer with an old woman who sat on a fourth stool behind the bar. Because the stranger appeared to be looking for somebody, she did not come forward, and Dickie, who was wiping off an empty table, refused to let Burkett catch his eye. Their eyes met for a single moment as, gathering up abandoned glasses, he drank one off defiantly between bar and kitchen. Then the door swung to behind him.

Cocking his head to observe the stranger, one of the old men pushed his hat back. “Lemme have one of them beers,” he muttered. The old woman reached back into the cooler without turning around and fished him out a bottle, which he opened carefully with a knife. “I reckon this here is number eight.” The old man looked at the bottle with surprise, turning it slowly in his hand.

The woman nodded. “Close onto it, anyways,” she grunted.

Dickie did not reappear, and Burkett shifted from one foot to the other, intent on the old advertising cards for plug tobaccos.

“I guess you know it ain’t me is gonna pay for it.” The old man worked the wet label from the bottle with his thumb, looking belligerent.

“Judge Jim don’t give a good goddamn who pays. You talk to Jim.”

“Why, goddamnit to hell, my
boy
takes care of me! Makes more than he know how to spend! He told me, ‘Pap, go drink it up, and welcome!’ ”

She glanced at Burkett. “He’d tell you, ‘Pap, you shut up your fool mouth,’ if he was here.” She climbed off her stool and shuffled down the bar to Burkett, who realized that Dickie was not going to come back.

“Yessir. Coffee? Black or integrated?”

“Up north, them people like their coffee
in
tegrated,” one of the old men insisted when Burkett ignored the woman’s bait. “That’s what Judge Jim says.”

“I’d like a bottle of rum, if that’s all right.”

“All right by me, but we ain’t got none. Ain’t got but Seven Crown and John Begg, leastways in fifths.”

“Seven Crown is fine.”

The old woman raised her voice as a service to the customers. “What brand you folks use up there in Washington, D.C.?”

To encourage his conversation, she sat down on the bar and folded her arms across an old blue dress. In the silence, he could hear the hum of flies against the ceiling.

“I guess Mr. Whidden told you where we were from.”

“Judge tole me hisself yest’day morning. That’s my boy, you know. Run this café for him.”

“Well, well,” Burkett said. “So he’s a judge.”

“Yep. Judge enough fer us.” She looked at him closely. “We ain’t got no federal men round here. Don’t have much call fer ’em.”

He laughed. “I’m just a lawyer up there. Environmental lawyer.”

“Ain’t got much law around here, neither.” This time she cackled, and the chairs shifted. “Judge Jim pretty well takes care of what law they is.”

“I guess I’ll take that Seven Crown then, Mrs. Whidden.”

“Your money, mister.”

When she returned from the back room, the people watched Burkett take his change and the bottle of whiskey. “Don’t need no Seven-Up with your Seven Crown? We get a lot of call for Seven and Seven.”

He shook his head. “Goodnight,” he said.

“Come see us, hear?” She spoke over her shoulder.

“W
ELCOME TO GLORIOUS
Snook City!” To keep his spirits up, he gestured grandly through the skimpy curtains at the huge red sun in the black archipelago to westward and the long string of evening ibis, flapping and sailing down the sky. Opening the whiskey, he described his adventures to Alice, who was still distracted and did not laugh as he had hoped.

“You’d think,” she said, “they’d have a nice saloon, to attract snewk-ers.”

“They don’t
want
to attract snewk-ers, and guess why? Did you see Dickie’s face today when I pointed out that
so-called shrimp boat?” Burkett poured himself a darker drink than usual and drank it with a loud gasp of relief.

“Maybe that
was
just a shrimp boat. Maybe you should forget this whole drug business. What would they do to Dickie if they thought he told you?”

“Hell, they’re not hiding it. I told you about that old guy in the bar.” Feeling irritable again, he rattled the ice in his thin glass. “Anyway, I thought you didn’t like him.”

“I don’t,” she said, frowning at her drink. “But I’ve decided it’s societal conditioning. He’s been warped by heartless capitalist oppression.”

He refilled his drink and gazed out at the sunset, sighing.

“Stop stalling,” she said quietly, after a pause. “Did that Negro gentleman swipe our hootch, or didn’t he?”

“We have to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Okay. Because my tape recorder’s missing, too.”

“You must have left it in the boat.”

“You
looked
in the boat, remember?”

“He couldn’t be that crazy, Alice! In
this
town?”

“Maybe he didn’t steal it. He didn’t steal that sandwich, either. Maybe he just took it.”

“I’m just not going to accuse him, that’s all!”

“That’s the point right there. That’s what he knows.”

“He couldn’t count on that. He wouldn’t chance it.”

“A man might chance anything if he was angry enough. And drunk.”

“You
really
believe that?”

“I believe he took my tape deck, isn’t that enough? And you do, too.”

Burkett was silent. He thought about those people in the bar, and Dickie’s reckless rage, gulping that drink. He thought about the man in the white Sunday shirt, down by
the boat. He thought of the big man in his pearl-gray fedora and the big damp patches under his arms. He told her he could not report the black man to Judge Whidden, but neither could he disregard the theft.

“Why the hell not?” Alice said. In her outrage, she felt violated and seemed willing to do either one. “These rednecks like our money but they don’t like us, and boy, it’s mutual,” she said, voice rising. “I want to get out of this damned place!”

N
EXT MORNING
, he was itchy-eyed from lack of sleep and felt disorganized and indecisive. “I just don’t think we can go around accusing people,” he complained.

“Who’s asking you to accuse anybody? Whose tape deck was it, anyway? Forget it!”

“Maybe it
was
my fault, getting him drunk. Maybe he set it down someplace, forgot about it.”

“Keep talking, pal. You know he took it, and you know you’re not going to report him, and he knows it, too. So let’s get out of here.”

“Alice, we just can’t pretend it never happened, that’s all!”

“Why not? Why the hell
not
?”

He was surprised by her set, cold expression. She rolled over in bed and would not look at him. He wanted to shout at her, something like “Because we’re
citizens
!,” but he was wary of her tongue, and did not dare. “Look,” he said, “we’ll face him with it, tell him how crazy he is to try something like this. We’ll talk to him out in the boat.”

“
You
talk to him. Talk to him man to man. Straight from the shoulder.” She shrugged him away when he reached down to her. “I’m staying here.”

G
IVING
D
ICKIE AS MUCH ROOM
as possible, he sat in the bow, and even from here he could smell the rum on him. He had only to look at the curled lip under the hat, the deep brow creases, the drinker’s simmering belligerence and crazed hauteur, to know that Dickie was awaiting him. The black man did not whistle, scarcely seemed to breathe, and his sculling oar probed so softly through the water that only the wan motions of the bottom life gave evidence of their gloomy voyage across the waste.

In his anger at Alice, he had forgotten the sunburn cream, and the bright windy morning sun punished his sore places, but for once the guide worked hard to find a snook. In hidden channels Burkett cast where the long finger pointed. No fish rose. Then Dickie, speaking for the first time that morning, whispered, “Dat place. Try’m again,” and Burkett dropped his lure in a brown eddy where the mangrove branches, dragged by currents, bowed and beckoned.

The earth responded with a hard thump on his line, which veered out sideways from the skiff, slitting the water, then shot back toward the channel. As Burkett hollered, a flashing brown-and-silver fish leapt from the tide, shaking sun-shined drops of water from its gills. It smacked the surface, bringing the water and green leaves to life.

Dickie was already turning toward it, moving skillfully and fast, before Burkett yelped at him to swing the boat. The fish was stripping too much of the light line, and he worked it carefully. Minutes later, when the lean, strong thing lay gasping on the boards between them, he reached down gently and touched it. “Snook,” he marveled. “How about that?
Snewk!
” He burst out laughing. “Fisher Woman! Wait till she sees
this
!”

Dickie produced a curdled smile of pride, and his eye held for the first time all day. When Burkett said, “Too bad we don’t have that rum along, to celebrate,” Dickie was ready.

“Yassuh, we’s got it, suh.” Dickie whisked the bottle out from beneath the seat and thrust it at Burkett in a kind of challenge. “Got lef’ dere yest’day,” Dickie said, although most of it was gone.

Burkett saw that Dickie knew that Burkett knew Dickie was lying. He grinned in exhilaration and relief, waiting for Dickie to produce the tape deck, too. Instead, Dickie offered a dirty plastic glass, and Burkett poured himself a drink, handing back the rum. The guide finished it with a loud gasp and hurled the bottle violently into the mangroves.

“Dickie, I wonder …” But the man’s head was already shaking, as if loose on a broken neck. “The tape deck,” Burkett finished quickly, to make the premature denial less preposterous. The man hid behind a wild-eyed darkie mask, and rolled his eyes.

“Nawsuh, nawsuh, ain’t seen nothin, nawsuh!”

Dickie veered out over the water on his pole, turning the skiff, feet twisting on the worn green paint, black veins ropy beneath dull black hide strangely silvered by sun-dried salt water.

“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Burkett said after a moment, striking match upon wet match and sucking foolishly on the damp cigarette. “I’d rather not report this to Mr. Whidden.”

Dickie’s head only shook more violently, as if trying to escape the cords in his straining neck. “Nawsuh, doan go jitterin Judge Jim!” He started to say something else, then stopped.

“You have to trust me,” Burkett said, awaiting him, but Dickie would not meet his eye. He muttered hopelessly, “Bes’ fish dat same spot, you gone get de next one.”

Burkett shook his head. “We’re going in,” he said, with as much menace as he could muster. Dark rain clouds off the Gulf shrouded the sun, which had burned him badly. He turned his back and laid his rod down in the boat.