John Hawkes: The Beetle Leg

“Is she gassed up, Wade?”

With weak step, still sick, the Sheriff returned from the jail weapons chest and carried under his arm the hunting shotguns. Sighing, clutching the truck door, he stacked them, blue bored canes, behind the feather and sawdust seat. He climbed in and wiped a clear spot on the windshield.

“You better come with us in the truck here,” called the Sheriff.

“I’ll follow,” answered Cap Leech, “you can’t drive faster than the wagon.”

Wade brought the cannisters of shotgun shells, sank behind the wheel. And Cap Leech flew in his wagon, pointed the horse in chase, running neither in trot nor canter after the red back light of the truck which, without splashboard and no vehicle to lust, sped toward Mistletoe.

He kept no hold on the mad horse but gripped the edge of the springing seat, spoke to the deviled ears now and then, a rootless spectator to the burning of the twenty miles. The horse, having never flattened himself along this course before, was guided by the Sheriff’s lamp; Cap Leech, having stumbled upon the rotting stones and stories of his family grave, rode willing to take one look, no more. The deodorizer of the homestead watched for the first sign of blackened wood and a narrow door cut with an air hole of a quarter moon. Ahead he saw the young cow hold her bush up uselessly for love or rain.

As if they had been lying on their stomachs in the flat sand, four muffled men jumped from the side of the road, ran hobbling and with yells to wait toward the slowing truck, climbed on, pulled up the last, and crowded the cat backed calf against the planks. The men clung to the red neck.

“Ain’t room for us and her too,” Harry Bohn boomed into the wind, “I better come up front!”

“Stay where you are,” answered the Sheriff. Seven skirted Mistletoe, raced for the lake.

In the wagon Cap Leech trailed behind the suspicious travelers, hearing their wordless clutter in the darkness. He had the power to put them all to sleep, to look at their women if he wished, to mark their children. Tie strings streaming, eyelids fluttering in the wind, he pulled from his vest pocket a roll of powdered lifesavers, began to chew.

In the truck Luke tied the whipping hat cords under his chin. Camper cowed before the patched white head of the calf and the near naked Finn hung his stiff legs over the speeding track. Chicken grit was caked on the accelerator.

In the wagon a lone occupant rode the bow of fire and with a tarnished frozen thermometer pinned to his breast brought something of clear vision and bitter pills to the fields of broken axles. A tin can fell backward and landed at his horse’s front hoofs, sprigs of straw whirled out of the air ahead to stick crookedly in his ears. They threw a dirty glove in his path.

In the truck Harry Bohn caught Camper around the ribs. For the first time that night he allowed the fisherman to stare at his humming-bird lipless mouth. “You,” he shouted, “untie that rope!”

In the wagon Cap Leech watched its body float down upon him, larger and larger. Horizontal, feet out straight, Pegasus of a branded species, he expected to catch it flattening in his lap. The calf lay on her side in the air, about to crash, pink spots spun on the red hide and a gentle whistling loomed over the wagon. She disappeared. Then Leech looked down and there on her back in the road she sprawled with milk rolled jaws, albino eyes in wrinkled pads, and a clean crack splitting the amorphous skull that struck; nothing more ugly than the placid mask — its mouth roared wide enough to eat meat — of a shocked cow twisting upwards in the moonlight.

And in the truck, “Sheriff,” Bohn knelt at the windowless hole in the back of the cab, “I’ll owe you for your cow.”

“Don’t stop,” the Sheriff kept Wade’s hand from the brake, “we’ll catch her on the trip home. If those devils don’t come upon her first.”

the last time Luke Lampson fished the bottleneck his brim hung down with rain and, amidst lonely flotage, he had felt the water dragging at his feet. It was a rain of sickness that drove the rest away, that filled the bottoms of a few cattle lofts with alcohol. A rotted poncho wrapped the sentry who, for an hour, was left alone in the floating countryside. The beady cigarette smoldered in the damp mouth, and his eyes looked to the right and left at the grass rising above water, at the sunken clouds. He would never again be dry. Some vast spider lay on its back with a shellful of warm fluid, sleeping through the rain of an afternoon. A pool began to whirl, then disappeared; distance had never been so great nor so flatly ruinous as when the twigs rolled by on the lagging current. He moved only once to shake the water from his hands. Otherwise he merely listened, watching the end of the bamboo pole. A small frog rose from a ripple, blinked its head, clung for a moment to his boot. His wide misshapen brim dripped in a steady circle. Across the western body of water not a fire burned.

The white line tugged the bending pole and he began to draw it in, a long cord from the whale’s belly. He felt no pleasure as he squinted to find the hook breaking that low water run beyond its course, only a drenched habitual motion waiting for the surface of stripped branches. Minnows beat more slowly in the basket over his shoulder. The slant of the line reached his feet, the end of it still carried under by the catch, dragging, slow to rise. He lifted the huckleberry pole and there, biting the hook, swung the heavy body of a baby that had been dropped, searched for, and lost in the flood. The eyes slept on either side of the fish line and a point of the barb protruded near the nose stopped with silt. It turned slowly around and around on the end of the wet string that cut in half its forehead. It had been tumbled under exposed roots and with creatures too dumb to swim, long days through the swell, neither sunk nor floating. The white stomach hung full with all it had swallowed.

God’s naked child lay under Luke’s fingers on the spread poncho, as on his knees and up to his thighs in the river, he loosed the hook, forcing his hand to touch the half-made face. His hook cracked through the membrane of the palate; he touched cold scales on the neck. One of the newborn sucked inside a gentle wave to the bottom of a stunted water black tree, its body rolled on the slippery poncho while the crouching figure of a young man shut his eyes, wet his lips.

In both hands he picked it up, circling the softened chest inside of which lay the formless lungs, and stooped again to the water. As his feet moved it thickly eddied, splashed. He held the body closer to the surface, water touched the back of his knuckles, and letting go, he gently pushed it off as if it would turn over and quickly swim away to the center of the bankless stream.

Luke again huddled into the poncho, casting a pinched eye across the grayness of the flood.

The water lay above the roof tops. It stretched thinly for many miles away from the great missing forks country.

“Wade, stay in the car,” and without another word, they kicked through the silent sands in a broken, faceless line to the water’s edge. Not a gull circled their heads, there were no rushes from which the crane could jump and fly with its ill-concealed legs and gawky call. The last drippings of the river lay eighteen feet deep, currentless and pure as rain water, backed without roe or salamander into the shallows. They stood on the low banks like men come upon the severed cathead of a ship or the small prints of wandering herds. All but one stooped to search for his own footfall. In the darkness, a few dunes broke surface, still wet, lean as rocks which before had been merely slopes in a rolling earth.