John Hawkes: The Beetle Leg

“Did you hear that?” whispered the Finn.

“I heard,” said Bohn. His eyes were white, he continued to stand despite the pain in his legs. “Keep quiet,” he told the Sheriff. And then more softly to the Finn: “You figure they’re heading the same way as me?”

He listened for sounds of the three men crouched in the boat, his lips moved as he repeated and memorized a poor stroke of the oars, a word or two that could be recalled and fanned when they returned. “Another fifteen minutes,” without looking at the Finn, “and I’m going after them.”

“There,” whispered the Finn, “is he crazy?”

“ I heard,” Bohn said again. He watched as if he could see the suddenly phosphorous wake of the rowboat shrinking about its passengers. “I’ll burn it,” he said.

“Listen,” the Finn began to dance on rickety legs, muttered, about to throw himself in the water, “listen!”

The squeak of oarlocks drifted out of the darkness. With every moment Bohn felt the uncertainty of things afloat. The pain in his back, his sore knees, the rubbing wings in his breath flashed sudden signals as he stood still. On the side of his neck a blood vessel began to tick, he abruptly extended his elbow for the Finn to steady. Gradually — and there was no sound, not a tremor except from beyond in the boat — he discovered something which, at his age and no longer able to wait, he could not bear.

“They start up,” prodding the Finn, “then stop.”

The rowboat turned. “I’ll put my foot through it!” Again out of reach they idled and Bohn heard the oars drawn up.

“Over there,” whispered the Finn.

Bohn towered on the shore. His legs shook first. Still trying to listen above the sounds of his own body, his hands shook, his arms, shoulders and head wagged as the boat pulled away. He rose in the darkness with rage enough to carry it home on his back.

“What’s the matter,” the Finn hung to him, “what are they up to, Bohn?”

His mouth opened, a small and lipless zero. With a few short gasps he inhaled and then: “Watch out, Lampson,” he cried, “watch out for him!”

The capsized shell of an insect moved bluntly to the pull of oars, resisted the water like an oil drum pushed by pole. From time to time Camper scraped quickly with the can. Crouched on his knees he splashed and twisted his head sternward to catch the speckled fish when it jumped. He jerked fitfully the green thread which lay untouched on the surface.

“I have to reel in again,” he said, dropping the can. Furiously he wound the spool.

The little boat clove to the rock side of the dam, for long minutes becalmed in the darkness surrounding the base of the earth, sinking, while the three men sat in it, balanced on the palm of a sodden log. Luke shook himself, lay in the oars. He felt with his eyes into the darkness, searched the rocks, and the ratcheting of the reel stopped.

“There. Don’t call to her, she’ll scare.” Luke pointed. They watched until high above them the close wrapped figure with olive branch took two heavy strides, called, “Mulge,” and disappeared. The patched dinghy again trolled its circular way on the vulture’s birdbath.

“That’s not a rock!” cried Camper when they hit the housetop, and clutched the swaying rod to his chest. “My line’ll tangle.”

“Perched up here awhile won’t hurt you none.”

They lay on the flat of the roof. “There’s one to the right,” Luke swallowed the match flame, the sides of the skull glowed as he cupped his hands. “One out there in the gulch, and another beyond that.” He did not look toward the sunken barns. The hummers, the anxious insects, returned jumping across the water to the house. A broken feather curled along the brim at the back of his head. The small haunches had grown tough, dug into a sandy hillside while his pony slept below.

Cap Leech swept the endless gloss of water, then quickly again to the little man in thong and dust, twisted with a human crick between the fanning oars. He could see nothing of the cowboy’s face, only the large oval of the hat like a Quaker’s crown.

“He died,” said Luke, “and she died and I ain’t too keen to remember.”

Cap Leech had lost the thermometer. He felt in his pockets, nothing, not a gelatin pill; and he was cold, seated in the bow of a leaky rowboat. Below him lay the empty house with windows uselessly slammed shut at the first warning of the cannon. From one tight sash there floated a wisp of curtain. Inside, a mattress hung in suspension a few inches from the second floor. Behind the house the orchard’s tree — transplanted it had never bloomed — remained preserved in the backyard of the lake and waved dimly in its branches the staves and wire of a corselet, the stock of a buffalo gun, a lidless cradle; all tied into the tree for safety, inconceivable that the water could climb that high.

“I been alone since then,” said Luke.

Cap Leech stared at the unfamiliar back of the young man drawn up comfortably atop the drowned farm. And he, who by the spoonful or on his handkerchief had shared the opiate slipped to his patients, felt a sudden unpleasant clearness of the head, faced with the foundling plainsman. The first man had died in Eden, they pronounced him dead. And now, with brightening eye, he found himself sitting in the middle of the washed-out garden’s open hearth.

“Boy.” Suddenly he leaned close.

He stared at the tufted head that never turned, at the nape of a soft formed skull the seams of which were not yet grown together, at the lump of ending nerves that was his neck. Man, boy, shard, Cap Leech thought of his eye dilating by its own design, a mean spring opening with surprise, thought of the red rash that would creep along his arms at night from now forward. Within the brainless cord of spinal fluid there was a murky solid, a floating clot of cheerless recognition.

Cap Leech took off his spectacles, wiped, then bent them. He cocked his head, favoring the swelled side of his temple, and in the darkness began to grin through sixty years of accumulated teeth, cut to the gums. Slowly and with the faintest whispering, Cap Leech laughed, his tongue by slight movements pushed and licked each sound, a grim airless ripple so soft as to be hardly heard.

“Watch out, Lampson,” hallooing across the water, “watch out for him!”

The boat bubbled at the sides, tipped and sank twenty feet from shore in front of the bystanders, with keel curled and disintegrated, left the men to step out of it under water. They waded to the landing. In single file all stooped and climbed to the top of the hill through the gray ash, the lagging Cap Leech walking with hands clasped behind his back.

“If you had kept quiet,” said Camper shortly, “I would have caught one.”

luke said: “We got a wagon already. A trough, a rick, and that ranch house there.” He nodded at the upright shadows slanting on One Hundred Acres Grassland and at the Mandan sitting with outstretched legs on the potato bag steps. “The team,” listening for a winded snort, “runs free at night.” And to the Indian: “Have you seen anybody, Maverick? Been any prowlers on my land?” The door hung open against the wooden, vermiculated wall.

Cap Leech heard the answering harsh sounds of a raven. He climbed down from his little red wagon, stood watching her. Those were abscesses beneath her cheeks, cysts in the Indian pap, which he saw above the hunching of her shoulders and the loose legs brown on top and on the undersides a frog-like white.

“She’s been here since a child,” said Luke.

Cap Leech walked once around his wagon, brushing the roman nose, and again looked at the Mandan through spectacles hammered tightly under his eyes. He turned, rattled the padlock, and slipped inside, a small old man accused of carrying about the countryside a circus of skin suckers. He was a medical tinker and no longer wore his half face in the fishbowl light of an amphitheater. He put his hands to the hot stove. If there was one last operation to perform, he thought, what would it be, since he had spread anatomy across a table like a net and crumpled with disgust a pair of deflated lungs into a ball. There was none he knew. If a single body could bear all marks of his blade and if it carried only the organs of his dissection, his life work would seesaw across the floor under tresses of arms and ventricles hung from the shoulders, would turn the other emasculated cheek. Slowly he rolled his sleeves and reaching around the stove dropped celluloid cuffs on the bunk tumbled with newspapers and a khaki blanket.