Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

“Who are you?”

“Let me check.” Nat’s eyes dip back into his head, white with fine strands of blood.

Ruth pokes Nat in the chest.

“Tirzah. Kateri Tekakwitha. Yaaa-deee!” He lifts up to his knees, a man begging his wife for one more chance. “Ruthie. Ruthie. Ru. The mangled and the mauled.” And a whisper, “Starlight. Star bright. First pair of shoes we’ve seen tonight. Ha.”

Nat’s head sways. His eyes are glazed. There are the sounds of the house. Then, “Kateri.” Then, “Claustrophobia. A little slice can feel so nice.” The room is charged with a fresh dampness. Nat wheezes, air passing through the stretched lips of a balloon. “Sorry, Ruth.” The voice is an old record in a deep well. “Oh, Ruth. Oh, Ruth.”

“Nat?”

The voice grows softer, kittenish. “She wish she may, I wish I might, get those lungs back, bitch, tonight.”

“My lungs?”

“Uh-huh. And heart.”

“Nat?”

“No. Not Nat.”

“Mom?”

“Yeah.”

“Go to hell.”

“It’s lovely down here.”

When it’s over, he reaches for Ruth’s hand, squeezing her fingertips separately, like release valves. “That was her?” she asks.

But it’s not Nat who answers. Another voice, positioned behind Ruth’s head, cuts in. “Bravo. Bravo. Good style, young ones.”

Ruth screams.

A hand swiftly covers her mouth and nose.

“Shh. Shh. Shh. Quiet there, girl. I beg you.” His words are so close, they move her hair.

“Who’s that?” Nat asks as Nat again.

“Hold your tongue. Tranquility.”

They know his way of speaking. Mr. Bell draws the rest of himself up behind her. “Remember me?”

She nods yes.

“Can I uncover your mouth?”

Yes, again.

He releases her. He fumbles in his pocket for a match, a needle to prick the iris. She looks away from the light, sees his pants, his knees. He squats on the coal bin floor beside them.

“Very well done.”

“What are you doing here?” Nat stands.

“Forgive my intrusion. I’m a traveler, trying to earn a living best I can, and you see this month I’ve come up a hair short. These are not the dwellings I’m accustomed to, but, we, I, make do.”

Nat and Ruth wait for a further explanation.

“An opportunity presented itself. You folks have this large basement, and I needed a place to sleep. I’ll ask you please not to reveal my pallet to your father. In the morning I will be gone.”

“He’s not our father.”

“Forgive me. I misunderstood the nature of your relationship. Is there a mother? I haven’t seen a mother.”

“You snuck down here?”

“Sneaked. Yes. A mother?”

“Hiding?” Nat wants to know.

“Only to secure a night’s rest. The air outside had a chill, and the good city of Troy impounded my chariot until she’s made more homogenously legal.”

The match burns out. Ruth hears him breathe. “What?”

“Car got towed.” He lights another match and extends it into the back of the coal bin. The tight space resembles a coffin. His sleeping bag is a sack of orange nylon. Cowboys and Indians whoop across its flannel lining. “I was asleep until you two scared the fleas off me.”

One good scream would wake someone overhead. “What’s in that case? What do you sell?” Nat asks.

The man rubs his hands together. “I’d like to tell you, I would, but I’m wondering who you were talking to five minutes back.” He stops the hand rub, chuckling as if he’s got Nat trapped.

He doesn’t have Nat. “Dead people. What’s in your case?”

“Ah, the dead. Just as I thought, but you’re doing it wrong. Too much gibberish. People like their supernatural to make a little more sense.”

“What do you know?”

“Some things. I know some things about talking to the dead. And one of the things I know is that if you’re going to con people, a little gibberish goes a long, long way.”

“He’s not conning anyone.”

“Beg pardon?”

“He can really talk to the dead.”

Mr. Bell draws his chin back. “Then he’s even more clever than I thought.”

“What’s in the case?” Nat asks.

“What’s in the case.” The match goes out. “I’ll show you and perhaps you’ll allow me to teach you something about talking to dead people. Tomorrow? I haven’t got the case here with me. Trapped in my transport. But tomorrow. You know Van Schaick Island, in the river? A place between, yes? Start of the Erie Canal. Or its end. Meet me there? Follow Park Avenue along the shores of the Mohawk. Sometime after four. Yes?”

Ruth doesn’t wait for Nat’s answer. “Yes.”

She wakes before dawn. Their bedroom is a narrow closet at the top of the stairs, where the house’s heart would be if it had one. They have one yellow blanket and a door that’s so old, so glommed up with paint, it sticks in the summer and makes Ruth wonder about all those painters, about the people who were here before her. There’s a stubby pencil on the bedside table sharpened so the letters embossed on the side now spell MERICAN. Ruth hasn’t slept much. All night she imagined Mr. Bell in the basement, a strange person in an ordinary sleeping bag. Though probably he’d fled after being discovered.

Nat’s still asleep. Their hips touch. Ruth turns to Nat’s feet, acrid pale fishes. A few hairs sprout from his insteps. “Sleep is to ready us for death,” the Father says, but that doesn’t seem true of the way she sleeps with Nat.

A door slams down the hall. The Mother taking a predawn shower. Soon the house will wake but not yet. Ruth can lie with Nat under their yellow blanket, stewing and melting together.

Morning comes on slowly through the transom. “It’s real, right?”

He stretches, his toes reaching past her head, pressing flat feet against the wall. Nat jumps out of bed and stretches again. He rattles off a dry report of farts, neither answer nor confirmation.

Ruth and Nat walk to Van Schaick. It’s not easy to get there. Industry has kept access to the Hudson restricted, Homeland Security. The banks are often lined with trash. There are fuel tanks where Haymakers Field, a major league baseball diamond, used to be. The cars on the bridges overhead zoom like spaceships lifting off. Rushes growing by the river sound like snakes when the wind is in them. Ruth is wary of snakes. Fourteen or fifteen snow geese have landed on the bank. She calculates the omens. Spaceships plus snakes minus snow geese. She moves forward. “It’s real, right?” she asks again.

Nat spits to one side.

In a forgotten part of the floodplain, between the Mohawk and the Hudson Rivers, Mr. Bell sits on his case still wearing his burgundy suit. Yellow weeds are flattened and dried by the tides. He’s tossing rocks into the river. “Amigos.” He stands to greet them. “A powerful confluence here.” He jerks his chin out to the water. “Though the power isn’t necessarily visible to the naked eye, this land looks forgotten, but I assure you, we’re standing at a most important place. You know the history of this great canal?”

Ruth shakes her head no.

“This is where north and south meet east and west. From here”—he points one way—“New York City and the Atlantic. And there”—his finger follows the curve of the river up—“the rest of the country. A passage through antiquity: Utica, Rome, and Syracuse. Tonawanda by way of Crescent, Tribes Hill, Canajoharie, May’s Point, Lyons, Palmyra, Macedon, to Buffalo. Each lock is a miracle of engineering built with nary an engineer. The excavated dirt formed a towpath beside the canal beaten flat by the mules who built New York State. These days, though, the canal doesn’t get much use.”

Ruth, Nat, and Mr. Bell stare down the Mohawk. “‘Low bridge,’” Mr. Bell sings out, but he is met with blank looks. He has to explain. “That’s where you sing, ‘Everybody down.’ Don’t you know that song?”