John Hawkes - The Beetle Leg

But even when trying to stand still in the face of the watery discus and stare, if for only a moment, without comment or restless sound, the sands gave way under their feet and they fell to an erect wrestling, laughed suddenly at a hat kicked a few yards along the shore until it landed crown down and out of reach in the water. There was no bean can or grappling pine — the shotguns lay in the truck — but still enough darkness and promise of a wild sunrise to excite them to paw and stumble, a few to expose rashly their seedy chests.

“We all got wounds,” beating the Finn to his knees, “all of us got a share of dickie bird heads desquamated on the river banks,” and the overbearing shadows purled at the moist edge of a hundred and forty miles of milky water. The last of the brooding wranglers laughed for the first time that night and Bohn, now out of their way or batting in their midst and at the cowboy’s side, felt something graze the soft mealy sock of his trouser front.

“Go on, tell about him,” nudging with a familiar elbow, “go on,” said Bohn and began to cough so that both the top and bottom lip of the small mouth — sometimes he dreamed that he could yawn— paled and trembled more thin than ever, pursed by the bitter doctor’s fingers. Luke thought of that slim and vertical mouth as carrying a hook, barbs lodged in the roof years before.

“He was a big baby but a little man. Ma said Hattie told her.” And when they laughed: “She used to keep him covered out of shame for his size.” The rat toothed Lampson, last of the brothers, spilled to them an image of a load too big to move, described, with shoulder sucked into Bohn’s armpit, a man too frail to be crushed. “ ‘I’m in love with a fence post,’ Ma said before he went.”

“His first mistake was just sitting there.”

“He isn’t going to hear…”

“Well then,” above the scuffling, “he’s not so mighty. In the house or out he was the same, like he was petting something inside his shirt.”

“He didn’t love animals, I could see that.”

“He didn’t love anything if he didn’t build, not an ark or bridge or landing. All I need is a sandbag and some warning…”

“You ain’t going to be buried, Finn, you hear? You’re going to drown. That ain’t a warning either.”

“But Ma tells how Hattie used to speak of holding him, used to rock him behind the house. She could hardly talk, trying to show her head around the baby propped against her shoulder. He stared back across the prairie all day long.”

Once out of earshot of women, they baited the ghost. Only a quarter mile west of Mistletoe with its kerosene shades and dotted pokes, the six men suddenly became true to the whips inside their arms, shook the fat on weathered legs. Had they a jug they would have drunk then sloshed playfully, horses prancing after water. The sand slid from under their feet and to the bottom of the lake; and to that corner of the grassland field there fell now a knee, now a hand. Their clothes rustled with the sound of dry rattles stuck by insect mucilage to the bare skin of their calfs.

Bohn took off his vest covered with ashes, then his shirt. “Come on,” he said, looking at all of them, wiping his weak chest and flexing a tattooed tombstone on a strong arm. But the Finn jiggled out of his way.

The laughter stopped.

“Who’s he?”

“You don’t hear everything all the time, Mr. Bohn.”

“He never crossed my town before.”

“Come over to Clare more often,” said the Sheriff, “and you ain’t going to be in the dark so much.”

“Bugle belly,” said Bohn, “I don’t want to see you.”

Luke Lampson stepped apart, close to the man who, short as himself, had interrupted without a sound. Moonlight hit the stranger. He stood poorly in the sand with flashing spectacles, bare head. It was a waning moon, brilliant for a moment on the same warts, the same long lips and the little scowl shrunk from the sun. Luke could see, having never before touched bone of his own, the stains of contagion that spotted the face and hands like shadow, representing the white worlds through which he had passed. And in his pride, filled with the traveling surgeon’s shriveled broadcloth and his shiny temple, Luke looked quickly into the butternut eye and down.

“Pa,” he said.

They walked to the water’s edge.

The small boat was like the hollowed body of a bird. Its keel was a breastbone hung over with dry calking, waving splinters, one not sunk under the mud when the great forks disappeared.

“Keep out of that boat!” Bohn fastened his dirty cuffs and peered at the hull as if it lay snapping in the sand. Luke picked up the iron stove top that was its anchor and dropped it in the bow. In the darkness he pried the bending oars from under the seats.

“The fact is,” catching Luke by the arm, “you’re just going to stay on dry land.”

Luke pushed gently and it slid from the firm beach into the water, continued its downward slope ready, with one more foot, to swamp, then righted itself and sat low in the moonlight.

“Get in,” said Luke.

Camper had no chance to settle in the stern but, hunched and muttering, began immediately and with short bruised strokes to bail, to keep himself afloat.

“I promised him,” Luke said to Bohn. He held the floundering rowboat by its limp rope.

“Cast it off,” whispering, “let him go plumb to the bottom.”

“I’ll call Wade,” the Sheriff tried to lean between the old man and the cowboy, “it’ll cost you fifteen dollars for a personal fine.”

“Sheriff,” with a quick glance, “you ain’t spoke well of my brother tonight. You ain’t got no say in the matter.”

Ten years before, the skiff had been dragged and carried overland, pulled by running men from where it was stuck and abandoned in the river gone dry, upwards on the slippery south face of the dam and faster down the northern slope. They had struggled with it a few hundred yards into the basin, panted, wiped their foreheads, climbed in, and waited for the water. The boat finally rose with the lake. For two days, until a shivering in the current brought them again to shore, the men, who had forgotten to provide oars and who had no sail, waved to the crowds gathered to witness the covering of ranch houses and the land.

Camper scraped its insides with a tin can. In its best days on the river the chubby boat had been splattered with fish oil and moored at night to a barnacle covered pile; now it loosed its seams and sank slowly under Camper’s hand.

“Pa sits in the bow,” said Luke.

“It won’t float the three of you.” Bohn turned away and darkly chewed, refused to look at it.

“What’s that you got there?” asked the Sheriff.

“It’s what we use to hold the oars. I’ll row.”

“Oars!” Bohn spat into the white sand. Then: “I’ll tell you, Lampson, we’ll send the Finn out in it, you stay with us.”

The white cane shot through the air, landed point down like a small harpoon. The Finn swung his bolstered legs to retrieve it. He snatched it up and propped himself belligerently some distance off. Then, seeing the signal of the oars drop with finality into place, he hobbled slowly back toward Bohn.

“You,” Cap Leech suddenly spoke as they slipped away, “you’ve come to no good.”

The Sheriff, Harry Bohn, the Finn, waited as close to the water as they dared until in half an hour or an hour the boat should return. There was silence on the shore. Once the Sheriff beat the cob bowl in his palm, once the Finn started to point with his cane, stopped. Behind them, silhouetted on the hill, lay the black truck and smoking wagon. The moon was gone.

Bohn listened. His head unerringly followed something across the peaceful water.