He ran to the cloakroom, wrenched the boots from the bewildered attendant, and presented them.
“Henry pulled me out the river! He got me out of a spot, he did! When he drowned, I took your boots off him. Here,” he said, “by rights they belong to you. He charged me with it. Was the last thing Henry asked me to do.”
Henry Gorby had done right: die on the river’s crest, at the height of your powers, and the drovers would sing songs about you. Not this long, malingering after. Sarsen would have given his all to trade places. Without shame, he told this to Ezekiel and Ezekiel’s wife. He had few memories of a black-haired man and his weeping family; none of Henry’s suggestion they betray GRC and give the river trash free rein; none of dead mules and muskellunge thrash; none of letting Henry drown, except the small, niggling realization of something not quite right in the telling. Sarsen’s present and his past collided like continental plates, buckling the layers of the old life, making something alarming and new, driving up mountains, faults, declivities. He was a poor geologist. He couldn’t map the past. He only wanted to be the Captain.
Ezekiel’s wife may have been bothered at being handed moldy leather across white linen, but Ezekiel took the boots with solemnity.
Sarsen feared the wife would ruin the moment, say something chirpy, like, “Them things should be in a museum!” or, “Our leather, sir, is much finer than that!” She did not, only murmuring of Henry Gorby, “What a good boy. I’ll tell his mother.” Sarsen loved her for it. The whole thing was like a book.
Ezekiel beckoned. He picked up the boots, and Sarsen followed. The wife stayed behind with a coffee and brandy. She warned Ezekiel not to catch cold, as you would a child.
A landing out back of the hotel overlooked the Ohio River in all its cloacal glory. A few tables, scattered chairs, too chilly out for anyone to dine there. Dead leaves pooled in the corners. Ezekiel pulled a small pistol from his jacket. He dropped the boots on a table.
Sarsen flinched. Oh God, he’s going to kill me.
“It weren’t my fault,” Sarsen said, raising his hands like a preacher.
Ezekiel swept his arm past him and aimed at the river. He took a potshot at a bobbing bottle in the current. It exploded. Then another. There was a tavern upriver, and drinkers flung their empties over the rail. So this was to be entertainment. Bottles kept coming. Ezekiel liked shooting because he could, ever so slightly, hear the reports, or at least feel them vibrate through his skull, or imagine he could. Since he’d gone deaf, people ascribed to him a vast inner depth and wisdom he did not have. Still flighty old Zeke, not a care in the world. He fished in his pocket for rounds.
Sarsen was rattled on being handed the pistol. He was never much for shooting. His long arm kept the gun sight too far from his eye, just a bitty thing out there you could hardly see, like a comma. He kept apologizing for waste. Ezekiel waved it off, reloading the cylinder for him with petite bullets. After a dozen tries, Sarsen chipped a bottle. It bubbled meekly under. Ezekiel smiled and took back the gun.
Sarsen said, “Your cousin was a good boy. Real good. He was the picture of a good, brave drover. Had a future ahead. He died in them things.”
If Ezekiel had any feelings about the long lost cousin, he didn’t share. Instead, he squeezed the muscle in Sarsen’s arm. It jolted Sarsen. Zeke was forever one of his boys. Ezekiel seemed to be saying, I had some good times in these boots. I earned me some money. I seen some world. I learnt it from you.
In truth, he hardly recalled Sarsen and that life so long ago. Hell, even a cousin met ten times.
“I know,” said Sarsen, “exactly how you feel.”
So it shook him when Ezekiel tossed the boots over the rail. They bobbed in the current. Ezekiel shot one, then the other. It made Sarsen shiver. The boots would rest among prehistoric fish, fill with mud and tannery sludge, be probed by the mute schools of gar with their speculum bills. Nothing left to touch and consider. Yet they weren’t his to keep. He took a bitter pleasure in having done right. He told Ezekiel — looking him full in the face in the nickel wash of moonlight, so his words could be understood — that he should have thrown the boots over himself, years ago. They stood for a heartbeat or two in companionable silence. The boots would drift on. There they were, filling with water.
So the deaf man was startled when Sarsen leapt over the rail after them.
In the darkening night, Ezekiel watched the faint splashing out there in the great wide river. The murky Ohio might take this fool. Then again, he thought, God seems to save those who least merit rescue. He wondered if Sarsen and this blurry cousin had one of those particular friendships you sometimes hear of. What else could explain it? He decided probably not, and reminded himself to buy more shells tomorrow, and laughed at his own lurid, postcard dream.
IN THE SECOND DISTRICT
BLACK SMUDGE ON BOULDERS WIND-SCOURED THE color of bone.
Through riflescopes, the two of us watched the bear cross the saddle. She — a sow black bear for sure — poured her body through the laurel with a loping, liquid gait. Then hounds in chase, driven on lean, pumping haunches. She picked up speed and split through the timberline, where the krummholz lifts in mangled postures. A bear’s ungainly way of moving is an illusion. You’d never outrun one. Far behind, hunters dragged themselves up the mountain. They tripped and slid over scree and snow. I counted seven, almost our entire party, a pair of them with an obvious lead. I couldn’t tell who they were. Three hundred yards? I’m not good at judging distance. I eased crosshairs onto the dogs, adjusted the parallax. Shades of hide flickered in and out of focus: Plotts and blueticks, redbones and Treeing Walkers. The sow made the rocky heights, a plateau hovering at four thousand feet.
The rifle was ice against my cheek. In town, the Union Bank clock said twelve degrees. I had no idea how cold it was up here on Dolly Sods. The wind brought tears to my eyes.
A lone birch sapling quivered, a wild clean miss. Someone was shooting. The sow charged through a deadfall. I heard it: limbs snapping against her. And bawling of dogs.
“That’s Shovel,” my stepbrother said. “He ends on an up note. You hear that?”
He — Conner — wanted a pup out of Shovel’s line.
“When will you get one?”
Conner said, “Oh, I don’t know. Andy’s real jealous of Shovel’s pups. Real jealous. Now Shovel come out of Banjo. Now that was a singing dog. That’s a redbone.”
Even in a moment like this, my stepbrother and I weren’t quite sure what to say to one another. We lived in a state of familiar embarrassment.
Another shot. I saw a Plott’s stout neck, the head square as a file. Nipping at the bear’s ears and ankles, hounds scurried around dolmens of limestone and dipped out of view behind truck-sized boulders. Treble cries clattered on the landscape. Each yelp and bay was distinct. Old men claim the cold does something to it, that singing sounds best come December. The bawling rose in pitch.
We sat in the snowy truck-bed, using the side as a rest. Really, it was the best day Conner and I ever had together, or so it seemed at the time.
Conner tried to hand me a beer, and I said no, thank you. He kept it for himself. It was nine in the morning. The wind had chewed his face red. “Sorry,” he said. “I forget.” I was probably the only one he knew between eighteen and eighty who didn’t drink. People assume you’re in AA. I sometimes say I have a stomach condition.