So Brave, Young, and Handsome (7 page)

In this way I crossed over. In this way I slid apart from all that was easy and comfortable and lawful; and so tired was my bandit friend that I took the oars myself and rowed facing forward. You just see better, standing up, and I enjoyed the feel and sound of the sweeps, and not until we were miles upriver did I remember my clothes and grip, back at Royal Davies’s house, and my unfinished letter to Susannah, abandoned on his dock.

He slept several hours while I rowed upstream—my hands and forearms were aching when he woke and sat up in the johnboat.

“We’re short of food,” he stated.

I’d been wondering about that. Swing heavy oars all night, and you are likely to want breakfast in the morning.

He said, “I haven’t much: corn biscuits, salt, a water jar. About two mouthfuls of whiskey. We need to replenish.”

“Couldn’t we catch a fish?”

“I’ve got no hook and line,” he said. “We’ll try to find that too. Meantime, let me know if you see any turtles. A turtle is first rate.”

“This business doesn’t pay too well, does it?”

He gave a worn laugh, sighed, adjusted himself on the boat’s soggy floor, and pondered his dubious origins.

“I don’t even recall how I started,” he said. “I was a poor learner in most ways but you know what, I made a quick little bandit. It come to me like speech. I’d walk to town and back home to discover things in my pockets. Pulleys, bolts. Shiny stuff.”

“Like a crow,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose. I’d haunt the docks or the Odd Fellows Lodge. Or the doctor’s office—oh, but he had bright tools, scissors, tiny round mirrors for peering down your mysteries.” He laughed softly. “I had a fine collection of sparkly bits.”

“What about your parents? Didn’t they see what you were doing?”

“They missed quite a bit, for we were never acquainted,” he replied,
which made me forget the oars until we lost headway and began a slow arc backward.

“Who raised you, Glendon?”

“A number of people. I remember most of their names. There was a hardheaded churchgoing couple who could see down the road and tried to iron me out, and a schoolteacher, never mind her, and there was a stumpy old duff who made toast and jam every day of the week, but by then it was late in the game. I was adept at slipping off.”

It took some time to absorb—this revealed black crow of a child. It cut from me the stubborn assumption that we all start alike, and made a larger achievement of Glendon’s everyday goodwill and decorum.

I pushed us upstream while the moon fell and was buried in the southwest horizon. When dawn touched the river I saw a large fish swimming beside the boat, a broad-backed fish with a pointy tail fin. In the chalky light that fish accompanied us upstream just beyond the radius of the oar; its knobby spine against the current made a creamy nimbus of foam.

“Glendon,” I said, “what made that waiter Franco recognize you, after so much time had passed?”

He didn’t answer. When I looked round, his head was laid back against the transom and his mouth had fallen open. He was still the boy adept at slipping off.

I woke to the ruthless sun—it pierced my eyelids, it smoked against my face. My back and shoulders were a rigored snarl, but my hands were the worst of it. Those oars! Their paint was worn off a thousand years ago; the grips were cracked and splintered. Though I never thought my hands were soft a horde of blisters had arisen and these boys were fat and toadlike.

I got to my knees. Glendon stood on the riverbank skipping stones across the water. He called, “Good morning, Becket, how do you fare?”

I held up my hands with a croak. Immediately his face darkened. He trotted to the boat, which we’d pulled up into tall weeds, and emerged with a wood bucket and a flat brown bottle. Overturning the bucket on a level patch, he told me to sit down.

“Let me see your hands.”

I held them out. They were half-open and immobile. Placing his own hands underneath mine, Glendon with sudden force squeezed them shut. Blisters split, water ran down my wrists. “Hold them out again,” he ordered—I’d jerked them to my solar plexus.

“What’s in the bottle?”

“Whiskey.”

“No thanks,” I replied, even as he uncorked the bottle with his teeth. Grasping my flayed left he doused it with the whiskey, then did the same to the right while I hissed a few rough syllables questioning his method.

He said, “I got feet like this once in Oaxaca. They went septic
and bloated like death, everything purple right up to my knees. Would you like that?”

While the sting evaporated from my hands, Glendon dug out his half jar of clean water and his corn biscuits. The biscuits were old and collapsing but smelled so good I soon forgave him the whiskey. We ate them quickly without talking, listening to a persistent cow bellow upwind goodness knew how far away. Tossing the last crumbs in his mouth Glendon looked at the sky, then put his palm to my forehead.

“You’re fevered and it’s getting hot. You need some shade.”

He returned to the johnboat, emptied it and dragged it to a sandy place. While I watched he leaned the boat up and over so its bottom faced the sun, propping it with a driftwood crutch.

“Crawl under,” he said. “There’s a farmstead somewhere close. I’m going for provisions,” and with that he climbed the shallow riverbank and was gone.

The shade failed to soothe, however. As the sun climbed all breeze vanished. The johnboat accrued heat instead of deflecting it. Also there were tiny holes in the packed sand—I dreaded insects, though none came out to pester me. Eventually I rolled out from under and gimped up the shore. It was all hot sand, mudwhorl and boulders; redwing blackbirds fought in clumps of dwarf willow. I was so thirsty the murky Kaw River looked clear. Abruptly faint, I sat in the lee of a tall rock and shut my eyes.

I dreamed Susannah was there and laughing. In the dream I’d made some appalling error and kept confessing and confessing, yet she refused to recriminate and would only laugh and suggest we go enjoy a nice picnic.

When I opened my eyes a massive snapping turtle lay relaxing not twenty feet away. Redstart would’ve been impressed—this brute was six times the size of our Cannon River painted turtles, with a ridged head and moss sprouting on his shell. He was also fearless to the point of disinterest. Recalling Glendon’s advocacy of turtles I found a decaying perch in the shallows and offered it to the snapper on a willow rod. He didn’t move. I flung the perch away and prodded the
turtle’s snout with the rod. Nothing, though his round eye was upon me, his patient and calculating gaze. I backed away—I had no experience catching snappers, plus my hands hurt. As I headed back to the johnboat my dream of Susannah returned and I ached with remorse and grief that I was not with her.

When Glendon strode in he had a calico bundle under his arm. He said, “Here we are then—go ahead, open her up,” and immediately set about making a driftwood fire.

The sack contained half a loaf of wheat bread, molasses, butter, a brick of castile soap in white paper, and a jar of turpentine. Two pale squash and a glossy orange also rolled out at my feet.

I said, “Someone was kind to you.”

He didn’t reply but tore off a chunk of bread and opened the tin of molasses. His demeanor was businesslike and I thought he must regret my presence, a concern that faded when he poured molasses on the bread and handed it to me. It’s a better meal than you might think. By the time we finished, the driftwood had caught into a hot low fire and Glendon set a skillet over the flames. He sliced in butter and shavings from the soap. Seeing my look he said, “Don’t fret, this ain’t dessert I’m making,” stirring until the castile melted into the butter. When the skillet smoked he moved it onto the mud and poured in a little turpentine, stirring this mess until it thickened and cooled.

“Now bring me those poor soldiers,” Glendon said, nodding at my hands. I wanted none of his reeking homebrew but what could I do? Dipping it up in his palm he spread that combustible on my weeping blisters.

“Hey,” I said. Despite being warm from the fire, its effect was cooling. I flexed my cautious fingers—a few blisters did split, but the ensuing pain was clean and a sort of icy reprieve. “Hey!”

“Yes, what about that,” he replied. He picked up the calico and tore it in strips and wound it smooth over my hands, leaving the fingertips free.

“We’ll leave now,” he said, “but look, we can fish on the way,” pulling a coil of braided line from his shirt pocket, then a folded paper containing two fishhooks.

“Wait, Glendon—there’s a turtle up the shore,” I said. “A big one. He was there an hour ago, anyway. I didn’t know how to bring him in.”

“Whereabouts?”

I motioned upriver. There was a boulder on the sand shaped like a knee and the turtle was just beyond it.

“Thank you, Becket, good spotting, a turtle would serve us well.” He stooped to his pack and found a small sheath knife and a whetting stone. Whisking the dark steel back and forth over the stone he said, “You know, I’d lost track of the years since I took a thing not mine. Even that johnboat I bought off a youngster, the shrewd little customer. But this supper of ours, that medicine, these fishhooks—I am a thief again today.”

“I’m sorry. It’s on my account.”

“No, it’s what I always was.” With a pained smile he added, “It just weighs more, this time around.”

How much do you know of snapping turtles? Redstart knew a lot. They might reach a hundred pounds and a hundred years old. Their beaks and their wills are adamant: Once clamped on something, such as your heel, not even death will pry them loose. Redstart’s friend Clive Hawkins once killed a snapper by removing its head with a crosscut saw, and it still walked away and made it nearly half a mile to the river before it stopped. Butchering that stubborn pilgrim they found a Chippewa arrowhead embedded in its shell—a scrawny Hawkins boy must’ve seemed like no adversary at all, at least until that saw blade appeared.

So I was impressed when Glendon staggered into our tatty camp with the snapper alive and profoundly offended. He had it upside down by the tail. The turtle bent its neck this way and that to get its bearings. I’m sure the brute weighed sixty pounds.

“I thought you were going to kill it,” I said, when he dropped the snapper on the sand by the johnboat.

“I was, but it’s hot,” he pointed out. “As soon as we kill it we have to eat it; otherwise it’ll turn.”

The turtle poked its head up, sighted the river, and made three or four inches of getaway before Glendon stepped on its tail. He said, “Where do you think you’re going, uncle?”

That’s how we ended up sharing our slight johnboat with a snapper as broad as a barrel. Glendon heaved him up front and barricaded him there with half a dozen melon-sized stones. The turtle slewed around and tried getting up the sides, finally backing his tail into the bow and watching us resentfully.

“I’ll row,” said Glendon.

It was good of him to spare my hands, but the new arrangement wasn’t comfortable. The snapper forward meant I had to share the stern of the boat with Glendon’s pack and bedroll. Also there was a small leak; I had to keep repositioning the gear to keep it dry. By moonrise I was sitting in an inch of brown water, despite dedicated bailing with a tin cup.

I said, “We are not getting quickly to Mexico this way.”

“I was thinking that,” Glendon replied.

“At the next town we might find a car,” I suggested.

“That’s enticing, but I don’t drive, Becket. I never learned.”

“Why, driving’s a pleasure,” I said. “Everyone should drive.” Susannah had taught herself; she had an instinctive feel for the shifting mechanism and loved to accelerate through gut-tickling lifts and hollows.

I said, “I could teach you in ten minutes—think how impressed Blue will be when we show up and there you are, behind the wheel of a car.”

“I don’t imagine that would impress Blue,” he replied. “No, I don’t imagine she’d be too much impressed if I landed a Curtiss airplane in her yard.”

It was hard to hear his voice so downcast. “How long were you with her, Glendon?”

“Two years, a little more.”

“You never told me why you left.”

“I wasn’t a very good citizen down in Mexico—not till I met Blue, at least. After we married I built her a swift dory. That girl loved water. Then a neighbor liked the boat and wanted one too, so I made another and traded him for a couple of cows. That’s how it went. Two happy years, Becket.”

He’d been sculling steadily along but now missed the water with his right sweep and stopped a moment to recover. He said, “One day a man rode up and looked at our little casita. He sat on his horse a long time, looking. Then he rode away. Next day he was back knocking on the door. I stayed in the hall. He told Blue he had a job for me, but she said I wasn’t home. When the man left, I told her he worked for
the provincial or even the central government and when he came back the conversation would not be about a job.”

“So you took off? You just left?”

He said, “I was afraid.”

“I bet she’d have gone with you.”

“Yes, she would’ve,” he agreed. “She wanted to go—we had quite a battle over it. Of course I couldn’t jeopardize her that way.”

“Didn’t you jeopardize her by leaving?”

“Either course was evil. I judged things would go easier for an abandoned wife than a complicit one.” Glendon picked up his pace with the oars. “I promised I’d send for her. She let me take her little dory, and I left in the middle of the night.”

“Was that the last time you saw her?”

He didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “Now you bring it up, Becket, it seems I am still in the jeopardizing business. Witness yourself, innocent as a tot, yet fleeing the law with me.”

He had a point, though I was somewhat affronted by his
tot
comparison. I was about to take issue when there came a forceful scraping sound. Glendon flailed and we heeled badly—my neck hit the transom and my feet were in the stars.

“Did we hit bottom?” I cried.

“No, it’s the turtle.” It had managed to crawl up over its rock fence and had tumbled into the midsection of the boat, where it scuffed about as if to bash the planks loose. “Where is he? I can’t see him!”