Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

His light played on the wet mudbanks among roots and stumps, a sheaf of brown honeysuckle hanging down and trailing in the water like hair. His boots made sucking sounds as he waded against the slight current, walked softly the silted floor of the creek. He could hear a car on top of the mountain coming down, the exhaust rattling and the tires sounding on the switchbacks. He came to the bridge and waded to the spit of loam filled in against the concrete wall. Throwing his light to the set he could see the trap with the jaws cocked and the pan, all brown-looking under the water and wrinkling in the small ebb and lap of it. He put the flashlight in his pocket and squatted on the sand among tracks of feet and tails, wiggling his numb toes, huddling down in his mackinaw and breathing slowly into his cupped hands, listening in the darkness to the water curling past his feet with small muted water-sounds, to his cough echoing hollow and blankly among the beams overhead.

The tires sounded again, closer, and then the motor revving between engagements of the clutch and the explosive sound of the shift to high gear as the car came out of the last turn at the base of the mountain. He followed with his muscles the downward thrust of the lever, locked the shift home arm and shoulder. The car was on the straight stretch approaching the creek and he could feel the vibrations of it, waiting for it to pass overhead. It did not. He heard the motor building speed and then there was a sudden explosion, a doglike yelp, followed by a suspension of all sound, a momentary eclipse of animation even to the water and his own breathing.

The trees at his left leaped, wild with light, went out again. There came an eruption of limbs cracking, splitting, of wrenched metal screaming like slate, a heavy and final concussion like a steel drum bursting. Silence again through which filtered a thin and diminishing rain of glass. By the pulsing wash of water at his feet he knew that it was in the creek and he tugged his flashlight free and poked the beam out along the bridge, the bank of the creek where broken saplings and peeled trunks stood out whitely all about like markers and finally to the sleek black flank of the car, upturned in the creek with the hood tilted into the water and the off-wheel still spinning idly. The side window-glass was laced with myriad cracks, shining in the beam like dewed spiderwebbing, and he could not see inside. The waterline angled across it, from cowl to centerpost, giving it an inverted look of anger.

By then he was already in the creek again, scrambling low under the beamed flooring of the bridge and dipping water into his boots with gentle sluicing sounds where he floundered in over the tops, squatting down too far under the canopy of sumacs broken over the bank, and the water on his backside icy as alcohol. He was thinking: I’ll have to pull up on the doorhandle. Then he was at the car, stepping and threading the brush it had pulled into the creek with it, reached for the doorhandle, crammed it upward, and jerked back on it with his full weight.

It catapulted outward as if something inside had been galvanized into violent effort, shot open and pitched him backward through a tangle of down saplings and into the creek. In the darkness the water closed over him thickly as running oil, choking off his breath, filling his nose. He floundered to his feet streaming and numb, coughing up creek water. Wiping water from his eyes he looked about and saw the flashlight, still lit, scuttling downstream over the bed of the creek like some incandescent water-creature bent on escape. He waded after it, tearing recklessly about in the freezing water with the boots leaden and rolling about his shins, reached for it, his hand like a bat’s shadow poised over the dome of light, and then it was gone, sucked down through the silt and mire inexplicably, and he was left balancing on one foot in the darkness with his arm and shoulder deep in the water. He groped about and finally came up with the flashlight and shook it. The metal cylinder sloshed softly water among the batteries. He stuck it in his pocket and surged noisily back upstream to the car.

He was aware for the first time now of a sickly-sweet odor, faintly putrescent, and by the time he reached the car again it was thick in the air and he knew it was whiskey without having ever smelled it. Then he could see the man taking shape out of the gloom, sprawled on the upturned headliner and half out through the open door, one arm hanging into the water. The sour smell of the whiskey, the mustiness of the old car upholstery, and what he perceived to be blood on the man’s face — these burned such an image of death into his brain that he made for the bank, panicky, clawing wildly at the brush, up to the field where light in fragile shellpink reefs broke on an unreal world.

But the man wasn’t dead. The boy was already on the bank, catching his breath and teetering with the dry rollings of his breakfastless stomach, when he heard a voice out of the void, hollow and half lost among the chatterings of the creek.

Hey, the call came.

He turned, hanging to a jagged sapling, saw in the shade below him a movement among the wreckage, a pale face against the dark interior of the car, the man propped up on his hands looking at him. Hey you, he said.

He hung there looking at him. A sweep of lights tracked the shadows of the mountain and a car hammered the bridge, echoing the noise of its passage in the creek. Finally he said: What do you want?

The man groaned. There was a moment of silence and then he said, Goddamn, man; how about giving me a hand.

Okay, he said. He wasn’t afraid any more, just cold, sliding down the mud and into the creek again and then squatting in the water facing the man, wondering what he should say. He could see him quite clearly now, there was a dark smear of blood down the side of his face. The man looked at him, a suggestion of a grin breaking painfully on his face. Played hell, didn’t I? he said.

You hurt? His own words rattled like bb’s through a clatter of teeth. He started to say something else but a further chill rendered him inarticulate, his palsied jaw jerking like an idiot’s.

I don’t rightly know, the man was saying. Yes. Here … he reached out one hand and the boy steadied it on his shoulder while the man drew up one knee and stepped out into the water. Then he pulled the other leg out, his face wrinkling with pain, and so was standing in the creek, his hand still on the boy’s shoulder in an attitude of fatherly counsel. When he started for the bank the hand withdrew for a moment, one faltering half-step, and then flew back and clamped there like a predatory bird striking. Whew, the man said. I must of busted the shit out of my leg.

It took them some time to get up the bank, the boy trying to push him up and him pulling himself along by trees, roots, handfuls of dead grass, holding the leg out behind him. Then they sat in the weeds at the edge of the field breathing white plumes into the cold morning air. In the quarter-darkness the fields looked like water, flat and gray. The boy was wet and cold; everything was wet and very cold. The man ran his hand along his leg trying to tell whether it was broken or not. His trousers were clammy against his skin. The boy sat in front of him hugging his shoulders and shivering, his toes lifeless, squishing in his boots when he wiggled them and sand and grit rasping in his socks. He said: Your head’s bleeding.

The man ran his hand along the side of his face. Other side.

He reached across and his hand came away sticky with blood and he wiped it on his trouser leg and turned to the boy. You want to do something for me?

Sure, the boy said.

Go down and get them keys then, and let’s get the hell out of here.

The boy disappeared over the cut of the bank; the man could hear him in the water. Presently he came back and handed the keys over.