Ken Douglas - Ragged Man

“ Hey,” a young man complained. He was carrying a dive tank to the room across the hall. The corridor was littered with his things, scuba gear, a giant inner tube, a suitcase and the spilled cooler.

“ Sorry.” Storm pushed himself from the floor.

“ Why don’t you watch where you’re going? You spilled my beer and ruined the ice.” The boy had an athletic body and an attitude.

“ I said I was sorry,” Storm repeated.

“ Yeah, well sorry doesn’t quite cut it, does it?”

“ Here, let me help you with this stuff.” Storm picked up the beer and put it back in the cooler. Then he carried the cooler into the boy’s room.

“ I can do it!” the boy said.

“ No, I spilled the ice, the least I can do is help you load this stuff into your room and buy you another bag.” He went back to the hallway, picked up the wetsuit and weight belt, carried them into the boy’s room and dropped them on one of the sagging beds. The boy followed with the suitcase. Storm closed the door after him, picked up the scuba tank and brought it down on the boy’s head

There wasn’t any blood.

And now Storm had an inner tube, too.

He had just finished stuffing the tube into the back seat and was getting into the car when Morrow’s friend joined the group. Either I’m a fast killer, he thought, or that boy’s a slow shitter.

Morrow started the convertible and put a tape in the cassette player. Storm heard Bob Dylan, backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, belting out Positively Fourth Street and his blood ran hot. The son of a bitch was playing a bootleg cassette. The son of a bitch was going to die.

He followed them through the small town to a wooded campsite. He stayed behind as they entered the campground, entering only after they were parked and were unloading their car. He parked far enough away that he could watch without being noticed.

The park was full of college kids, waiting in line to jump into the water with their tubes. The slow current carried them down the river. Many of the kids had a smaller tube with a cooler full of beer tied on to the larger one they rode in. It was one giant party.

He saw two men with scuba gear slip into the river and he smiled, remembering the dead boy in the room across the hall. The snot nosed bastard had it coming. It wasn’t Storm’s fault. His attitude killed him.

“ Scuba diving?” Storm heard Danny Morrow say.

“ They go along the bottom and gather up beer cans,” his friend Ron said.

“ They get paid for that?”

“ No. Every summer guys into scuba go down the river and every now and then they pop up and scare the girls. They usually make one or two trips gathering up the cans.”

Storm hadn’t been under in years, but he still remembered how. It was like riding a bike.

He watched the group as they headed for the wooden landing and the river. Morrow’s friend dropped his tube into the water, then climbed down the ladder after it. The two women, younger, were more daring. They threw their tubes in and jumped after them, squealing as they hit the cold water. Morrow was the last in. He went down the ladder with his tube in hand. Storm watched as he slipped into the tube at the foot of the ladder-buttocks in the center, legs draped over one side of the giant donut and resting his back over the other without falling into the water.

“ Didn’t even get wet,” he said.

Storm watched them drift away with the current, then he followed Morrow’s example, climbing down the ladder one handed, with the tube in the other. At the last second he put the tube in the moving water and let go of the ladder aiming his buttocks for the tire’s center. He was a big man and he got wet as he splashed into his target and he enjoyed it.

He paddled against the current, so that the four young people slowly drifted away. Within a few minutes they floated around a bend up ahead and were out of sight. He had no desire to stay with them any longer. He only wanted to learn the way of the river.

Every other minute he was passed by a group of college kids, the smallest consisting of two people, a pair of young lovers, and the largest, a group of about fifteen boys and girls laughing and drinking beer. So early in the morning and so many people, he could imagine the zoo the river would become in an hour or so, when the sun burned off the early morning cloud cover.

He lay back in the tube and watched the clouds go by. Convinced there would be no opportunity to get at Danny Morrow on this trip, he decided to relax and enjoy and the ride.

He studied the backyards of the large shaded Southern homes that jutted up against the riverbank. Places where kids grew up sheltered from the violence of modern America. He watched children swinging from a tree rope into the river. Their laughter and squeals of delight stabbed at his heart and he cursed. There had been no happy home when he had been a child.

He spotted a small pool of still water where two men were fishing from a rubber raft. He paddled over to them.

“ Fishing any good?”

“ In the morning, but once the river fills up it’s slow going,” one of the fishermen said.

“ The water here always this still?”

“ Unless it rains. When the river is up, the current reaches the banks.”

Storm looked across the river and noticed that the man was right. The areas by the riverbank were relatively still.

“ Hey, mister, you going down the chute?” a young boy, about ten, floating by asked.

“ I guess so.”

“ You ever been down it before?”

“ No.” Storm waved to the fishermen and paddled back out into the current with the boy.

“ You’re gonna love it. You go real fast and your tube spins around and it shoots you into the river below the dam and you get all wet and everything.”

He wanted to reach out, grab the boy and shove him under the water till he turned blue, but he held himself in check.

“ Get ready,” the boy said.

Storm felt the current as it picked up speed. He looked ahead and saw that the river was dammed and that part of the running current was funneled down a man-made chute that appeared to be sucking in the shouting, yelling, happy tubers. They were having fun and so was he. He clutched onto his tube and followed the summer revelers into the chute.

The chute was a collaboration of man and nature, an unpredictable waterslide that whipped around the dam, depositing the tubers in a small lake below. The smooth flowing river, when compressed into the funnel, churned and foamed, spinning the tubes and spraying the riders. Children loved it. The college kids loved it. And Storm loved it.

He started paddling to shore the instant he shot out of the funnel. It had been years since he’d had this much fun. He reached the bank and trudged out of the water, carrying his tube behind. He spotted a lifeguard and asked. “How do I get back?”

“ The bus leaves from over there every fifteen minutes. It’s a free ride if you parked at the landing.”

Storm’s eyes followed the man’s pointing finger to a group of people in wet bathing suits stuffing their oversized tubes into the back of a blue painted school bus.

“ That thing still runs?”

“ Since 1963.”

He slung his tube onto his shoulder and walked over to the bus. He handed the tube to a tanned youth who stuffed it into the back, then he got into line behind a group of young people. By the time he got on board there was standing room only, but he was still able to search out and find Morrow and his friends seated toward the back of the bus, near the tubes that were piled to the ceiling. They were involved in a conversation that had them all laughing.

Their laughter stiffened his resolve.

Back at the landing, he watched as Morrow’s group headed back for another ride down the river. When they were out of sight, he carried his tube to the car. The hot West Texas sun had him dry by the time he got the tube in the back.