story post #4

Haint’s Story

All this happened the summer I spent running with that girl I took for a Russian the first time I saw her. Whole town fills up with them same time every year. Russians, that is. They come over to work the summer jobs, the ones the local kids won’t fool with, no matter how good they pay. They’re college kids mostly, these Russians. They come all that way and, somehow—even with the cost of travel, room and board—they still make enough to clear a profit. They run the kiddie rides up and down the strip, bus tables at the diners, the pancake houses, the all-you-can-eat buffets; they clerk the souvenir shops. Stuff like that.

My little nephew Rodney, who was ten at the time, had been bugging me a solid week to take him to town. I broke down and drove him on in, once I’d baled the last of the orchard grass. We went a couple times every summer—had been since he’d turned old enough to drive the go-karts, ever since his cowlick stood up over the red line on the “You must be this tall to ride!” sign.

The kid couldn’t get enough of it.

Me, I never much cared for the crowds, the heat, all that noise. In fact, the smell of the place was enough to do me in—a weird mix: asphalt, funnel cakes, and pony shit. I can smell it to this day. But into town we went. A promise is a promise, as they say. Pony shit or no.

Memorial Day had come and gone and the crowds were about as thick as I could recall ever seeing them. Earlier that morning, on the ride in, Rodney all but chewed my ear off talking about the bumper boats. Said, come noon—when the heat was really bearing down—we’d ride the bumper boats over and over till the money gave out. “Sounds like a plan,” I said, grinning, keeping my eyes straight ahead. It was a treat seeing him get all worked up the way he did. I knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d be too busy chasing poontang to give a damn about bumper boats and the like.

The money gave out on our fourth bumper boat ride. It was close to two o’clock by then. We were blistered red and broke.

“Well, Kemosabe,” I said to him, “looks like that’s the end of the line.”
We doubled back, making our way to the pay lot where I’d parked the truck that morning.

About a block down from the place where folks pay to pan for gold and precious gems, there’s this kiddie park—the only one on the strip set up just for little kids. They got a calliope, a mini ferris wheel, an arcade full of games a monkey could win, and a little train that runs laps around the whole park.

She was running the train that day.

I spotted her from the sidewalk. I reached down into the pocket of my jeans, fished around a little, and pulled out a twenty. I turned to Rodney, holding the bill up in the air clamped between two fingers.

“Hey, Biggun’,” I said. “Looks like we’re in business after all.”

He looked up at me.

“Thought you said the money gave out.”

You couldn’t get much by him anymore.

“That was your money,” I said. “Never said nothing about mine.”

“You wanna go back to the bumper boats?”

“Nah. Too far to walk back now.”

“They got that new go-kart track.”

“Let’s stop here.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No. You could ride that train they got.”

“That ride’s gay.”

“How ya figure?”

“It’s a baby park.”

“Come on. Look, you ride the train—one ride—and I’ll let you drive the truck.”

“Drive it where?”

“Where you wanna drive it?”

“I wanna drive the main road.”

“Alright.”

“Alright for real?”

“Alright for real.”


Rodney rode the kiddie train and I made small talk with Anna, though I didn’t know that was her name yet. I asked her what part of Russia she was from. She told me, “Romania.” That’s how the whole thing started.

:


“Just so long as it ain’t another catfish story. Heard about all of them I can gut.”
Showalter had been drinking long before we’d got there and was greased up pretty good. He took a long pull off his beer then reared back in his seat, his eyes puffy, reduced to slits. The sun had all but sank into the lake.

The bar was a waterfront affair. They called it Sharky’s. Big sprawling decks, umbrellas and inflatable Corona bottles flapping in the breeze, and more Buffett on the speakers than was healthy for a man to hear.

We’d been going there pretty regular, me and Anna. A friend of hers from the kiddie park was dating a fellow who’d grown up on the lake. He was head of this search and rescue SCUBA team. They had some kind of contract with the state police. Anytime a boater came up missing or some fool jumped the bridge, they’d be the ones to get the call. Sharky’s was more or less their hangout. If they weren’t over at somebody’s house, it was a sure bet you’d find them all at the bar, telling the same lies night after night.

Showalter was just a regular diver, but he liked to act like he ran the whole damn outfit. I’d wanted to punch him in the mouth since I first laid eyes on him, but Anna said that would just make trouble for her friend. So Showalter ended up keeping his teeth and I just kept mine clamped down on my tongue whenever I was around him.
“Well?” Showalter said, all drawn out like. He was eyeballing Tommy Thompson—the one who’d said he had a story to tell—waiting for him to get on with it, like the rest of us sitting around the table.

But Tommy wasn’t saying nothing. He just sort of sat there, fiddling with a salt shaker. He looked up and saw everybody was waiting for him to start. But he just grinned instead and dumped some salt out in a little pile on the table. He ran a finger through the salt and half-whispered, “Never mind. It’s a catfish story.”
We all snickered when he said that—all but Showalter. He hee-hawed, guffawed, and cackled like a jungle bird. A big production.

“Goddamn, Tommy!!” he howled, slapping the table. “We need another catfish story like we need a spare asshole!”

True enough, I thought. Showalter was enough asshole for everybody out there on the deck.

He kept on with it, though. “Let me guess,” he said. “Sumbitch was as big as a man! Four foot whiskers. Mouth on him looked like the grill on a goddamn Mack truck.” The jokes were stale and nobody was laughing.

Just then, Ursula—Anna’s friend from the kiddie park—spoke up. “I’d like to hear it. The story, I mean.”

Showalter rubbed his face and motioned to the waitress for another beer. “Lord, God no,” he said. “Anything but that. I’m begging you.”

Tommy was blushing like a school girl.

“Maybe some other time,” he said. “I’ll tell it then.”

The waitress came over with Showalter’s beer.

“Y’all good?” she asked, drawing a circle in the air with the tip of her finger, so we’d know she meant all of us. I ordered a fresh round for everybody. That excluded Showalter and, though it was childish, I halfway did it for that very reason.

But Showalter was oblivious. He downed another mouthful of beer then said to no one in particular, “Hell, we gonna tell stories, I think old Haint oughtta indulge us.”

All the SCUBA boys laughed at that one, but the rest of us were lost. He meant Hank, but he said “Haint.” It was no accident. That much I could tell. I could tell too that he’d struck a nerve.

Hank stiffened. He wasn’t too keen on being the butt of Showalter’s joke. He took it in stride, though, and forced a smile. He nodded and lifted his bottle in Showalter’s direction as if to say, “Bang. You got me. Now let’s move on.”

But Showalter aimed to grind this one into the ground. Same as always.

“Yes sir,” he said. “Old Haint’ll give you the chicken skin with the one he’s got to tell.”

“Really?”

“By Gawd! Have you plugging in the nightlight. Ain’t that right?”

He was looking straight at Hank, but Hank was looking over his shoulder, watching the water, the last glint of daylight flickering on its surface.

“Hell, Old Haint’s a regular goddamn Vincent Price. Give old Steve King a run for his—

“Hey, how bout you shut the fuck up.”

Hank wasn’t looking at the water anymore. He hadn’t raised his voice when he spoke, but the whole table knew he was serious—past serious.

Showalter raised his hands, shocked through and through.

“I’m just sayin’,” he said. “Forget I brought it up, man.”

A second or two went by and, when he thought Hank wasn’t looking, Showalter looked over at one of the girls. He twiddled his fingers in the air and made a low moaning sound in the back of his throat.

Right about that time, Hank turned and saw him. He shoved his chair back and was on his feet in a single motion. I figured he was fixing to come across the table. But he just pulled his wallet instead, got a couple bills out, and dropped them in the middle of the table. He glanced around the bar, looking over everybody’s head. He scratched his jaw and exhaled heavily.

“Screw this,” he said, and walked off.

Showalter called out to him.

“Come on, Haint!” he bellowed. “I was just making sport is all!”

Hank didn’t bother to turn around. He casually raised a middle finger above his head then disappeared out the door.

:

Couple-three weeks later, me and Hank met up to do a little night fishing. The thing with the Russian—the girl I took to be Russian—had died a quick death, so my evenings were my own again, which wasn’t altogether a bad thing.

Hank, who was part of the lake crowd and kept track of such things, said the bass would be on the bite on account of the moon. It may have been straight bullshit, but to hear him tell it, it sounded reasonable enough.

“Fishin’, man…” he’d told me on the phone the night before, “people like to make a big fuss over baits and lures and technique and all. Truth is—when you get right down to it—it’s science. Water temperature, ph, phases of the moon. You pay attention to that stuff, you’ll tie into some fish.”

“And you say tomorrow night’s the night?” I asked him.

“Way I figure, it is.”

“Well, alright” I said. “Hope you’re right. Hope them fish been reading up on their science.”

Hank laughed.

:


The next night we met over at the marina, ate a late supper, had a few beers, and shoved off long about nine. It was the middle of the week and the lake was all but empty. All but ours.

Hank sat in back of the boat steering. From where I was sitting, everything looked the same. Water. Trees. The occasional lights of a house or houseboat. If it had been me back there manning the outboard, we’d probably just have puttered around till the gas gave out. But Hank navigated with a confidence that put me at ease and, after a while, I just quit paying attention to things, just sort of floated the waters of my mind, as they say.

Couple of times I found myself thinking about the Russian, but I turned loose of those thoughts fast as I’d stumble up on them. Too much thinking about women will spoil any fishing trip. I think I read that in a science book somewhere.

Hank’s voice broke the silence.

“Thar she blows,” he said.

Hank would slip into this corny-ass pirate persona, after he’d been on the water a while. It just about drove me nuts, but I never said much. I figured everybody’s got their quirks. Plus, it was Hank’s boat, so he could talk pig-Latin all damn night, if the spirit so moved him.

Hank eased us into this little cove and killed the motor. I unlashed the trolling motor, got it in the water, and started working the foot-peddle. Hank told me where to put us and, once we made it there, he dropped anchor. We shuffled around for the next ten minutes or so, getting our tackle and the rest of our gear in order, taking care not to thump the gunwales. We set out a couple rods with bottom bouncing rigs for cats. I strung up my open-face spinning rod and tied on a silver Rattle Trap. Hank got out his bait-caster and rifled through my tackle box, finally settling on a black Jitterbug.

Once we had everything in place, we started working our lures across the water. The boat rocked gently, its bow facing the shoreline. We doused our lanterns, casting blindly for a moment. Later, when our eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, little details started coming into view. The moon stayed busy, dappling the water, winking silver off every ripple. I heard a bird cry out from somewhere back in the woods, and the steady lapping sound of the water meeting the shore was all around us.
After we’d hauled a few in the boat, it was me who broke the silence.

“Got any chew?” I asked.

Hank grunted, still popping the Jitterbug closer to the boat. He finished his retrieve then reached down into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Catch,” he half-whispered and lobbed the can of snuff to me.

I reached down for a pinch and stopped short.

“Hawken?” I laughed.

“Don’t start with me,” he said. “The shit was good in third grade; it’s good now.”

I packed my jaw, made the worst cast of the night, and watched the water explode. It was a bass. I could feel him head-jerking.

“Yessir,” I said out loud. “You done alright. This here’s a fine spot.”

“You believe?” Hank asked rhetorically.

“How’d you come to find it?” I asked.

There were hundreds of little coves like this one, so it was hard keeping track of the ones that would produce.

“You ever meet Lou Hupp?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“Well, before he moved off to Knoxville, Lou showed me this spot. He was working on his certification, and we were on our way back from a dive. He made Showalter stop and show me this spot.”

“Showalter?”

“Yeah. It was the three of us that day. But I wouldn’t worry, if I was you. Showalter don’t fish.”

“Too damn sorry,” I grumbled.

Hank chuckled, but he didn’t say any more.

“Hey, that reminds me,” I said. “I been meaning to ask you something. The other day, when we were all out at Sharky’s, Showalter was really giving you down the road. What was that all about? All that talk about storytelling.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about anything Showalter says, if I was you.”

“I don’t. It’s just he got you pretty riled up is all.”
Hank got quiet, but I pressed on.

“No, seriously. What was he drivin’ at? What’s the story?”

“I don’t know…,” Hank said, hedging.

“What’s the big deal?”

“I don’t want you runnin’ back to Showalter—

“Listen,” I said. “The next time I speak to Showalter, it’ll be to let him know he’s got an ass-whuppin coming his way.”

“What you got against him, anyhow?”

“What don’t I?”

“Yeah. He is about a sumbitch.”

Hank let out a sigh. He set down his rod and motioned at me with his hand.

“Gimme back that chew,” he said.

So I did.

Hank got a healthy pinch, dropped it in his lip. He spit out across the gunwale and looked me dead in the eye.

“And you ain’t going to Showalter?”

“Look, I told you. I wouldn’t piss down his throat if his guts was on fire.”
Hank picked his rod back up and started fishing again. But I could tell his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He was thinking about other things.

“There was this one time—a deep dive. I mean, I was helping this other fellow get his certification, and he needed to go deep. He was learning how to get his mixes straight. I mean—it’s complicated—but, if you get the wrong mix of gasses in your tank, you come up a dead man.

So, anyhow, we found this spot. The depth finder was showing a couple hundred feet. All it was was an old valley. You know they flooded everything back in ’68 to make this lake. So, down below, it looks pretty much like it does up above. I mean, you got full grown trees—whole stands of them—old barns and houses and stuff. Power lines. They just left all that stuff in place when they flooded. No sense hauling it out.

Well, anyhow. We toss out a couple marker buoys—the kind with the flashing light on top—and in we go. Visibility was good that night. Real good. We had a good strong moon. So it was perfect, far as conditions went.

We both had these big old battery powered lanterns we use, not just to see better, but so we can keep track of where the other one is. I mean, we’re sorta low budget, far as diving gear goes. We don’t use shitty stuff, but it’s pretty well banged up from what we put it through. My point is, we don’t have any fancy communication system. We can’t talk to one another. We strictly rely on hand signals…and good sense, of course.

Well, this fella I had down that night, he knew his hand signals alright, but he was lacking in the good sense department. I was keeping a close eye on him. It was his first deep dive, and I knew he wouldn’t be down long. This guy—I mean, he was an okay guy and all—but he was the biggest air hog I’d ever seen. By the time he’d sucked up a tank, I had like another fifteen minutes on mine. No lie. It happens. You take a diver that’s green like that, they get nervous and, next thing you know, their breathing gets all out of whack. They’ll suck a tank in no time flat.

So I give this guy the signal that he needs to make for the surface. I signal that I’m staying down a while. I mean, I’m out there. I figure I may as well make the most of my time. So, Numb-nuts heads back up the granny-line, and I keep on doing my thing.”

Hank stopped for a moment, so I turned around.

“Sorry,” he said. “Thought I had one.”

He made another cast and started back in on his story.

“You know, I done the other stuff—ocean diving. And it’s cool. No doubt. Seeing sharks and shit… that’s a real rush. But, still, I’ll take a lake dive any time. Specially a deep dive, like the kind we went on that night. When the water’s right—not too churned up—and the moon’s out, on a night like that, you look out and see the old flooded valleys all up under you, and if you think about it, if you sorta let yourself forget you’re underwater, it’s like flying. I don’t know if that makes any sense—

“I think I understand,” I said.

“I’m probably sounding like a real douche-bag.”

“No, man.”

“I don’t know…”

“Really. It’s cool. Go on. I wanna hear more. Tell it.”

“All I’m saying is it was my kind of dive and I wasn’t about to let some limp-dick greenie mess it up for me.”

“Can’t blame you there.”

“So, I stayed down. I just kept finning deeper and deeper, shooting that light out ahead of me. I get to this one spot, and I start seeing what looks like roof tops. I swim in a little closer and, sure enough, that’s what they are. There’s a big one and about three little ones close by. It was an old barnyard. You had the big barn and a couple outbuildings—tool sheds, smokehouses, whatever they were. Then there was this little white spot, maybe thirty yards back. I put the light on it but that didn’t seem to help much. I could see it better when the light wasn’t on it. That seemed odd.

I checked all my gages, and I was good on time. So, I worked my way over there. That’s when I first made out the shape of another building. I saw the roofline, the white clapboards. It was a house—an old farm house—and that white patch I’d been seeing was a window. It wasn’t boarded up. It wasn’t painted over. The white part was coming from inside. Thing of it was…, there was light coming from the room that window looked in on. I mean, I’m a good two hundred feet down, okay, staring straight at the window of an old flooded-out farm house, and—hand to God—there’s a light burning.”

Then he just quit. He didn’t say another word. No explanation. No elaboration. He just quit talking and started fishing in earnest.

I reeled in my Rattle Trap, snipped my line, and tied on a red and white Daredevil.

“So that’s it?” I asked. “That’s the story? That’s what Showalter made all that fuss over?”

“Yep.”

“What a gomer.”

“Yeah. Old Showalter. He’s something special alright. And as bad as that was, he’d worry the ass right off me, if he was to hear the rest.”

“The rest?”

“Yeah.”

He was sorry he’d brought it up. I could tell.

“Well?” I said.

“Look, man. This next part I ain’t told but to, like, two other people. You gotta swear—

“Hey. There ain’t a whole lot in this world I can do, but I can keep a secret.”

“Well, I’m counting on that.”

“You can.”

Hank cleared his throat and continued.

“You ever remembered something, but when you really start thinking about it, you can’t remember if it happened or if you just dreamed it happened?”

“I have.”

“I mean you can’t really say. No matter how hard you study on it.”

“Yeah. I’ve had it happen that way. A couple times.”

“Well, …. This next part? It’s like that. I mean, in my mind I know there’s no way it can be true. I’ve studied on it more than I like to admit—like one of those dreams you have that maybe wasn’t a dream after all—and, all I know is this: I saw what I saw. I saw what I saw.”

“Tell me,” I said.

You could hear the bass feeding out in the dark water but, by this point, neither one of us was fishing.

Hank started again.

“The next thing I did was cut off my light. Then I finned up to the house, real slow-like, and I peeped in that window.

I could see the kitchen on the other side, lit up bigger than hell. There was a little table up against one of the walls, a couple of chairs. I saw a broom leaned up in a corner. There was boxes and cans and shit all lined up on the countertops. And over next to the stove, was an old woman with her back to me.”

“Dead?’

“She was on her feet. But, like I said, she had her back to me. I never saw her face. Not once. She just stood there by the stove the whole time, moving stuff around. Like she was cooking or something. I watched her and watched her. The whole damn thing felt like slow motion.”

“Like a dream.”

“Like a dream,” Hank repeated. “Then, all of a sudden, I realized I wasn’t the only one watching her. I turned my head, maybe an inch to one side, and saw what had been out of the frame of my mask.

All I can figure is it was her old man—not her daddy, her husband—and he was just standing there off to the side watching her. He never took his eyes off of her. She kept working at the stove, he kept staring. It went on and on like that. And, when I think about it today, that’s all I see. Her standing by that stove, cooking, and him, standing off to the side, watching.”

“What do you think he was fixing to do?”

“I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s hard to say. But I don’t figure it was checkers he had in mind.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened was a little voice in my head told me to check my gage. When I did, there wasn’t nothing left to do but swim up out of there.”

We sat there a moment, not saying anything. The sound of the bass feeding must’ve jogged Hank back into reality. I heard him pick up his bait-caster. Then I heard the buzz of his reel.

“We know what’s good for us,” he said “we’d be getting in on this. These sumbitches have gone buck wild.”

The fishing was good, no doubt. Hank might have been onto something with that moon phase theory of his. For a solid hour the two of us sat there, wearing them out—bass, crappie, bluegill. We fished till our arms went heavy. I’d never caught so many in my life. It was a real thrill.

But, later that evening, when the little bell I’d tied to the end of my cat-fishing rod started to jingle, I was less than thrilled about reeling in whatever it was I’d hooked down there.


::


© 2009, Curt Alderson. All rights reserved in accordance with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.