The houseboat, p.7
The Houseboat, page 7
WITNESS #7
Hell, I might a told him about it for all I know. Heard him blabbin on bout a lady named DeWitt. Said it in his sleep. I was in there with him. Yeh jest hear things is all. Jailhouse in a county like that ain’t big. Hear all kind a things. Anyways, says it in his sleep one night. I said to him the next day, said, Say partner, I know who DeWitt is. Lila DeWitt. I said, Who she to you? Could tell by the look on his face it was his mama. Anyways, told him my brother was neighbors with her down in Cedar Rapids. Except now she wasn’t a DeWitt. She was a Hobson. Told him, Partner I got bad news. So what I tell him is his mama married and had two other kids. Told him, she’s dead. Moren fifteen years back. Went on to say they made a big stink bout it in the papers. Real tragedy. Her car went off a bridge, two babies in the back seat. That last part, the babies part, that seemed to upset him. Don’t know if he was cryin or snarlin.
24
The full moon had crested the canopy of trees and flooded the graveyard in an aluminum light. Each headstone threw a spectral shadow over the wet grass. Many were coated in lichen. Some of the nicer ones, carved in marble, were polished and stood gleaming in the night, catching the light of the moon and winking it back so brightly that when Rigby closed his eyes he saw hundreds of moons burned into his eyelids. The crickets out there quit at his coming and commenced again behind him. At one point he climbed atop a headstone and turned back and saw his footprints in the dew vanish like a ghost returning to the grave. He felt like a phantom and to anyone caring to listen said, Boo.
The day before he had hitched to Cedar Rapids. A trucker with a mean dog kicked him out about an hour north of the city. Sellers asked him if he liked to put peanut butter on his genitals and let the dog lick it off. Not the first time Rigby had had a gun pulled on him.
He found the cemetery in the late afternoon. He walked among the headstones, trying to read the names. The grounds were well tended to and over some of the graves flowers lay on the grass. The cemetery was nearly empty, only a single couple with a small child at the far end, the boy racing to catch grasshoppers.
Then there it was. Thirty years, almost an incantation. A name only rumored over. Four syllables murmured in his dreams. A name that made him think of flowers. He knelt to make sure. He ran his bony fingertip over the stone. Traced out each letter, but did not say her name. An epitaph read:
LILA HOBSON.
LOVING WIFE, MOTHER, DAUGHTER.
The names of her new children, Jacob and Patrick, written below.
At sunset a groundskeeper shooed him away, and standing on the pavement just without, Rigby watched the big steel gates swing closed, the young groundskeeper eyeing him oddly as he snapped shut the lock, turning once to look back at this strange visitor before he got in his truck and drove off.
Sellers waited for a long time. Hiding in the bushes outside of the cemetery, he lounged like an emaciated climber in a tent waiting for better weather. He’d brought some tins of sardines, and he ate them slowly, savoring one at a time. He was giddy. He had broken into the toolshed well after the moon had come up and taken a spade that he now lay beside with the kind of pride a soldier might his rifle.
The spade sank easily into the dirt. The grass was soft from watering and the dew. He worked himself into a lather and stripped out of his clothes so that he was digging in only a pair of soiled drawers. It was a ridiculous sight. His thin arms and ribcage flashing under the skin, he looked like some kind of wobbling stork flailing about in the dirt. But he was singing, or something like it, quietly as he went about this quixotic task. Lower and lower. First to his knees, and then his waist disappearing, his shoulders, till finally he was only a head clucking just above the ground.
At two in the morning the spade struck something hollow. Rigby’s heart jumped. He stabbed down again, as if he didn’t believe it. This time the point of the spade stabbed into the wood and stuck there. He dislodged the shovel and began to scrape the coffin but, quickly losing his patience and falling to his knees, tore at the clods of dirt with his hands. The coffin was dark with dirt and stain, but where his spade had pierced the surface the wood was like the meat of an apple.
It didn’t take long to uncover the lid of the coffin, but all of his excitement and all of his anxiety were halted by a sharp grip of fear. His own shadow under the moon was supine over the lid and for a minute, however briefly, it was he in the coffin and not his mother.
Why’d yeh leave me? he asked plainly.
With more than a little effort he heaved the heavy lid from the box and what he found sent him reeling on his heels to collapse in the dirt alongside the coffin.
His mother was almost a skeleton. A little hair, which never goes away, on her head. She was dressed in a formal outfit with a dress reaching her ankles and the sleeves running to her wrists. Nearly bone as she was, the dress looked like shed snake skin. What horrified him most was not the macabre image of his mother, but the bones of two children she held in her arms in an eternal embrace.
One must have been no more than three years old. The other just an infant. The infant was in a baptismal gown and the bigger one in knickers and tiny saddle shoes. Both of their heads were turned so they were gazing eyeless at each other, with their cheeks resting against their mother’s bosom. Death or not, the sight was one of compassion and love, and that his mother, who had abandoned him so long ago, could have the agency to love these boys as she had not loved him, sent him into a rage.
He ripped each child from her arms and cast them from the grave. With nothing holding them intact save their frail clothing, the bones separated and the pieces were scattered. There was venom in his breath. He cursed the tiny bones to hell. Who knows how long it went on for. When it was over he crumpled atop his mother and wept over the ribs where there had once been a heart.
The houseboat was dark when he arrived home the following day. He came in with a rucksack on his shoulder. Mary Belle and Suzy Lee were seated at the table. In the bent moonlight struggling through the greasy panes, the dolls could almost be seen. Nothing moved. No sound and no movement anywhere. Not a whisper of wind and even the houseboat seemed to be held in place as if by some giant hand. Rigby crossed the room and lit the oil lamp. The details of the dolls’ gaudy faces grew with the light. The bowls of whatever slop he had fixed them gone cold and hard.
He set the pack on the warped floor and went to the sink and poured a long drink of some burning astringent into a chipped mug. Drank that and poured another. Then he went back to the pack in the floor and lugged it to the table. He opened the top carefully, pulling a single piece of rope. He tilted it for the dolls to see.
I want yeh to meet yer mothernlaw, he said.
Heaped in a pile were the bones of Lila Hobson. The skull with its grotesque strands of hair was staring upward into the condemned light.
Don’t worry girls, he said, yer nuttin like her.
That night after he had laid the dolls in his bed he pulled up the plywood floor and dumped in his mother’s remains. In the malarial light of the oil lamp, he spent the next several hours piecing together the bones, arranging them into a picture of tranquil repose. When they looked the way he thought they should, he stood over her for a moment and realized he had no memory of her and that this was to be the indelible image of a woman he knew nothing about. Without a word, he stepped from the shallow bilge, looked at his mother a final time, and then hammered back into place the rotten plywood floor that had become her crypt.
25
One day he found a baby doll floating near the main stream of the river after running his lines. The doll was floating face up, its small plastic fingers reaching from the water. Its eyes were the kind that closed when the doll was laid on its back but the doll was old and appeared to have been in the river for quite some time. The lids were stuck open by river grime and any color that might have personalized the doll was gone so that it stared blankly through black glass eyes.
He rowed over and took it by the hand and lifted it gently from the water, setting it in the floor of the skiff alongside a string of bass. He floated for a few minutes with the oars shipped as he stared into the dark eyes. He smiled finally, and reached down and with a hooked finger tickled the doll’s belly. Waggled the little toe of one of the little feet. Then he took a bandana from his pocket and dipped it in the water and wiped the scum that browned its legs, its chest. He folded the bandana again and dabbed at the scum ring that haloed the thing’s face. One of the bass kicked its tail and the slimy fin slapped the baby’s neck. Rigby lashed out at the fish with his knife and then hurled it, stringer and all, into the water. The boat still, he removed his shirt and wadded it beneath the doll so it might serve as a bed.
When he got home he dallied the line at the deck and crawled out of the boat, then leaned in and lifted the baby in his arms as if he’d just returned home from the hospital. He walked proudly into the house with the baby wrapped in his shirt, said, Mary Belle, looky what I found fer yeh.
He set the baby on the table and then made Mary Belle’s arms into a cradle. Lifted it into her arms. He stepped back and for a moment he felt very moved, and nearly crying, said, Yeh’ll be a good mama. Then he said, Don’t worry yerself there Suzy Lee, I’ll find yeh one too.
Again, he thought of his mother. Nagging him like a toothache.
26
He looked for it to rain. The clouds had that look. Cotton balls dipped in black ink and laid across the sky. He leaned from the deck to look up at them. Thought he heard the long roll of distant thunder but perhaps that was only in his mind. The day grew hot and windless. The trees across the slough stood bearded in haze. He watched a couple of mallards kick in the current and he laughed at them as they stepped out of the tea-colored water and shook their tail curls.
A little after noon he heard voices. Stood suddenly with his hand cupped at his ear. Rigby looked at the woods downriver as though they authored the noise. Soon the bow of a metal canoe speared around the bend oared by a teenage couple. He dashed from the deck into a thicket of catbrier along the bank where he gripped the thorny branches, parting a spyhole. The couple was talking excitedly about whatever but the voices fell away as the canoe neared the houseboat. The boy in the aft dug in his paddle and the canoe swung as far opposite as the slough would allow. Rigby watched warily through the tangle of vine as both boy and girl turned to regard the floating bit of waste they skirted. Eyes like dinner plates and their paddles scooping as quietly as they could. Rigby spied camping gear stowed between them. A Styrofoam cooler. Fishing poles. The boy craned his neck a final time as the houseboat receded back into the pall. Out of view Rigby heard the girl laugh as a defense against fear and he cursed them, gibbering like some simian thing stooped there in the brush.
27
Stalking through the warm nightwoods the campfire came into view like another kind of sun. They’d pitched their tent in a small opening of elm trees the color of bone. The fire was built against the opening of a limestone combe and the smoke blackened the rock. Rigby had expected a scene of repose; what he saw instead drove him headlong to hunker in the scrub and clasp his hand over his mouth. On a blanket near the fire the girl rode atop the boy with naked hips. She was bronzed in the firelight and her small gilded breasts hardly moved. The echoing sounds Rigby heard were a kind of litany. He watched her clever hips and felt a rousing. The boy held tightly onto the girl’s thighs and with their eyes closed both were lost to the world.
Rigby laid his shotgun by and unfastened his trousers. He watched from that elevated vantage like God down upon Eden. She said the name Billy. She said it again, and in a whisper Rigby said, Now say mine. He knelt there watching them until it was over.
She’d hung her clothes on a tree limb and for the next hour went about her jobs just as God had made her. Cooking supper and cleaning the dishes. Her nipples gold with firelight, a little hair between her legs. She tempted the boy with a swim and dove hands first into the slough. The moon broke all over the surface like pouring embers, and Rigby watched the sparkle of all that dim light on the water. She came rearing from the surface, her hair slick and the stars panned over her skin. She swam about for a while, calling Billy’s name.
Rigby lay out till the fire was nearly gone, a dull pulse of ember. Confident now of the snores he heard, he gathered up the gun and crawled to the edge of the camp. He tiptoed over the sand. Next to the Styrofoam cooler he crouched with the gun cradled in his lap and stared a long time at the zippered flap of the tent. Cicadas started up in the trees like small sirens. A mosquito gnashed in his ear. He stood and found the girl’s bikini limp on a tree branch and sniffed it. Stuffed that into his trousers. He turned and eyed the tent again. What little light offered by the glowing embers painted the tent with his shadow and that shadow grew as he came up on it.
He knelt at the flap and with the barrel of the shotgun pulled the thin nylon back. His heart trembled and quaked, his hands like they’d taken a chill, as the shapes of their bodies accrued out of the darkness. He looked at the boy first, his back to him. Then he looked at the girl. Only a sheet covered her and he allowed his eyes to linger on the warm curve of her hip. Figured there must be more. So he reached to part the sheet from her breast thinking he might steal a glimpse. But at the first slip of the sheet the girl’s eyes snapped open and seeing this impish troll above her she screamed horribly. The sudden start threw Rigby backpedaling into the dirt where he lost his hold on the shotgun. Left him sprawled on his back on the ground. Heard the booming of the boy’s voice, the girl wailing. He scrambled, raking the dirt and twigs where the gun had fled. His scraping nails had just reached the wooden stock when a hand clamped around his ankle.
You son of a bitch, Rigby heard the boy say.
All too quick Rigby rolled and levered back the hammer and shot the boy through the chest. The shot pitched him back like he was a carnival target jerked on its string. The tent crumpled under the weight of him as he fell and he lay there bleeding out as the girl kicked and reeled from within. The report of the gunblast was incredibly loud against the limestone wall, and the ringing in Rigby’s ears drowned out the girl’s screams.
Rigby had gotten himself to his feet and stood shivering over the dying boy. The ragged opening was black and slick as oil. The boy sucked down air only for it to escape gurgling through his chest. There were words writ in those troubled young eyes but he spoke none of them and then he died. Rigby levered back the second hammer and leveled the barrel at the writhing girl within the tent. He could make out the shape of her head and he took aim. His finger pressured the trigger. But just as he was about to pull it he let the gun slip from his shoulder and trained the barrel toward the sky and fired at the stars. She gave out another burst of horror as Rigby raced into the woods.
28
John and Ruth Halverson were coming home from a church social that night. Just a little gathering and because the social was held in the church’s basement and because of the kind of people the Halversons were all they had had to drink that night was fruit punch.
It was a clear night and warm and the moon was full and the trees and the fields and the river were all silver under it. Out John’s window were the tall elms standing against the river and out Ruth’s were the fields. Out over the fields was a thin fog like lace and like tiny gunfire within the thin fog were hundreds of lightning bugs. It was late and Ruth commented on it: Been years since we’ve been out this late.
Goin a pay hell in the mornin, John said.
You watch your mouth, John Halverson, she said.
The old truck pittered down the dirt road. Ruth leaned to turn on the radio. Began fiddling with the knob. John leaned over the wheel and looked up at the sky.
Thought it might rain tonight, he said. Look at all them stars.
He rolled down his window and put his elbow there. The air was thick and sweet and smelled like moss and limestone and slow-moving water. The frogs were wailing down near the mud and the crickets were trying to keep up. Ruth was going back and forth across the bandwidth and John said: Cain’t yeh jest settle on somethin already?
I want to find something romantic, John. Maybe we could pull over and do some dancing under the stars.
He did not answer but he smiled and that settled it.
The road made a bend down the way at one of the sloughs and when they got there John slowed the truck and the headlights washed across the pale trunks of the trees and the green grass of the ditch and then back to the dirt road and before he could shift gears the naked girl came into view and John slammed on the brakes. Ruth was still looking down at the radio.
Ruth, he said.
From the radio came a Glenn Miller song. She looked up at him.
John, what are you doing?
Ruth.
Like his eyes were tethered to something out there, she followed his gaze.
Oh my God, she said.
The girl looked like a ghost standing in the road. Her skin was colorless in the headlights. Her hair was hanging down over her face and wet-looking. Her arms were folded up over her chest.
That’s one a them Dahl girls, John said. Ain’t it?
That’s Hannah, Ruth said.
John reached behind the seat and took up a blanket.
Here, he said. Go get her. She’ll know yer voice.
Ruth opened her door carefully as if to not scare away a wild animal. She called her name. The dome light lit up the cab and John held his hand like a visor. Ruth said the girl’s name again. Hannah turned, and like a deer, took off in the opposite direction. Ruth followed after her, calling her name, and with the passenger door still open John popped the clutch and killed the engine and said, Goddamnit!
