Pernicious

                          
Pernicious
    

                  
Copyright
©
2010
 
By James Edward Henderson
             
                 

                          
Prologue
 

         
“Would you please get into the boat!”

         
Willie wanted to say, “Damn that and damn you! I’m not doing it! I told you I didn’t want to go!”

         
Instead he got into the boat, shaking, terrified.

         
“Get the paddle,” she ordered, “and push us off!”

         
“I can’t see it,” not making an attempt to search.

         
He heard her grinding her teeth; she was getting pissed, as before, when he declined her offer to go fishing at night.

         
“Let’s go fishing,” she’d said, casual, an impromptu inclination.

         
“When?”

         
“Now.”

         
“Now! In the dark! At night?”

         
“Yes, at night. A guy told me the catfish were biting exceptionally well at night. He said he caught a thirty-pound catfish. Can you imagine…a thirty-pound catfish!”

         
Willie could not imagine, nor did he care, even if the catfish were weighing a hundred pounds and handing out fifty-dollar bills.

         
“Hell no! I’m not going! I’ll stay here, get the grease good and hot before you come back.”

         
“Get ready!”

         
He couldn’t swim, and she knew it.

         
He’d told her several times he feared water, that his lifelong phobia was drowning, as a small boy he didn’t even jump in puddles.

         
And how could she forget their first disastrous fishing expedition. That day the sun was shining hot and bright and the fish were biting.

         
Willie Davis didn’t catch one of the fifty or so perch caught; he was too busy holding onto either side of the flat-bottom aluminum boat, in morbid fear of it toppling over.
         
He’d held on so tightly and so long that when she finally paddled back to the bank, his hands were locked in an arthritic grip. She’d yelled and cursed, calling him everything in the book, an asshole to a zero.

         
Now he was back in the very same boat he’d promised himself he would never get back into again.

         
“Would you please get the paddle,” Perry said.

         
“Serious, baby, I don’t see it.”

         
“Willie,” voice soft and pleasant, “could you feel around and find the paddle?” Shouting: “If you don’t fucking mind!”

         
Searching for it he stuck his finger on a fishhook.
      
“Oww!”

         
“What’s the matter now?”

         
“I stuck myself.”

         
He sounded like a small boy, which he’d intended, thinking it might make her angrier and she’d say, “To shit with this!” and they would go home, with her cursing all the while.

         
She didn’t; she just groaned.

         
Willie wondered why he put up with her. It was her way or the highway.
It
was also her cars, her house, her furniture, her everything.

         
The only contribution he’d presented in their four-month-old relationship was himself.

         
Yet she’d insisted they marry, despite his penury, his drug addiction, and his social affliction, an STD, which he hadn’t gotten around to discussing but knew she had to have known.

         
Willie finally found the paddle and handed it to her. She snatched it and threw it at him.

         
“Ow! Why you do that?”

         
“Paddle with it! What you giving it to me for?”

         
“I’m scared, Perry.” He didn’t mean to say it quite like that, though it was true.

         
“I’m scared, Perry!” she mocked. “I’m scared! What you wanna do, huh? Run home to your damn mammy, suck her wrinkled titty? Let me tell you something, Mr. Davis, it’s high time you started acting like a man, a
real
man! Now paddle!”

         
He did, wondering what fishing at night had to do with manhood, wondering if his mother was right: “She’s trouble, son. Nothing but trouble! I can see it in her eyes.”

         
He couldn’t see those eyes now, nor could he clearly distinguish his surroundings. A gray haze enfolded them, mingled with a miasma of putrid fish. Above was a bridge, Interstate 440, some fifty feet high, cars and trucks whizzing by, people heading to and from Little Rock.

         
Willie felt cold, though the temperature bottomed at sixty degrees.

         
A bug droned close, a cicada. Willie envisioned a water moccasin, a large water moccasin.

         
What if, he thought, it slithered into the boat?

         
Then what? Dive into the water…or manhandle a giant water moccasin?
He shuddered at the thought.

         
It occurred to him that no one knew they’d come out here in the middle of night to catch a funky fish. He could die out here and no one would ever know.

         
Perry stood up, and immediately he stopped paddling and grabbed either side of the boat.

         
“This oughta be a good spot,” she said. “Bait your hook.”

         
Willie didn’t budge, just waited anxiously for her to sit down.
Why is she standing? Why
can’t she sit down like I’m doing?

         
Bait my hook? I can’t even see the pole, much less a stupid hook. What if the boat flips? Would she really save me like she said she would?

         
What the hell am I doing out here?

         
“Perry, would you please sit down!”

         
The boat rocked. “Is this worrying you, Willie?” He held on tighter. “Willie the worrier.”

         
Her voice sounded different, the tone unfamiliar.
        
Something’s seriously wrong!

         
“Willie the worrier with the witty-bitty worm!”

         
Willie tried to make out her face, wanting to see her expression, hoping to get a better idea of her mindset…he saw only a silhouette, backlit by the half moon behind her,
 
arms akimbo.

         
“Feeling seasick, are you?” the silhouette asked, rocking the boat yet again, almost sending him over.

         
“The hell wrong with you?”
 

         
The boat tilted right…left…right…

         
“Hold on, Willie!”

         
The paddle rested on his feet; he could grab it, whack her upside the head and then paddle back to the bank…To do that he would have to let go.

         
“Perry, please!” The boat rocked sharply to his left, and he counterbalanced his weight right…The backswing caught him leaning…He screamed, and before he knew it he was in the water.

         
The dark, black abyss, his most dreaded fear.

         
He attacked it, wildly, desperately, not realizing he was in three feet of water.

         
“Mama!” he screamed, arms and legs flailing. “Mama! Mama, help me! Mama!…”

         
Behind him the silhouette, standing, the water a little more than knee high, walked then ran toward the bank.

         
“Ma-ma!…Ma-ma!…M-m-ma-ma!…” His voice an eerie gurgle.

         
The boat, bottom side up, floated no more than a few feet away from the commotion. Closer, an arm’s length away, a cypress tree stump rooted deep and solid, the bark carved with Seiridium cankers into footholds.
   

         
“Ma-ma!…Ma-maaaaa!” He went under, and somehow managed to resurface. “M-m-maaaaa!”

         
He went under again…This time he did not reappear. Bubbles percolated on the surface…and then nothing.