"Trudy, you got to grow up sometime. You can't take the world in to raise. No one can."
"I feel sorry for you, Hap. You got nothing left inside to hold the dark away."
When we got to Tyler, Trudy turned around and we started back.
I said, "You seem to be avoiding telling me exactly what it is you have planned."
"I thought I'd tell you tonight, Hap. But I've decided not to. You might try and mess it up out of spite."
"I may disagree with you, but I'm not spiteful."
"You might be. You've changed. Could be I don't know you good as I thought. I wanted you with us, but I think now you should do your job and take things as they come to you."
We didn't cuddle and kiss anymore. We didn't even talk. Trudy turned on the radio. It was an all-sixties station. Percy Sledge sang "When a Man Loves a Woman," followed by the Turtles singing "She Only Wants to Be With Me." Good stuff, wrong moment. It was depressing.
We got back to the Sixties Nest, and I was about to get out when she reached across and put her hand on my thigh.
"You couldn't have changed that much, Hap. You were so… noble."
I put my hand on hers, suddenly wondered if this hand was the one that had held Cheep under. I wondered what else that hand was capable of. I took hold of it and put it on the seat between us.
"Watch it, that's knight talk… You've changed too, Trudy. You may have the willpower and dedication you always wanted, but I think maybe you lost something in the process."
"I see it as a gain."
"Whatever. I think for you and me, there's been too much blood under the bridge."
I got out of the Volvo and went in ahead of her, went to the back porch and took off my coat, socks and shoes, rolled up in my bedding.
I heard Trudy come in and go through the hall door, then I didn't hear her anymore.
I lay there listening to Leonard snore and tried to force myself to sleep for a few hours, but I'd go in and out, and when I came out I would remember bad dreams.
Dreams that ought to have been funny, but weren't. Like this soft, feminine hand holding me by the throat, pushing me down into a tub of water. My mouth was open and I had a beak instead of lips and I was blowing bubbles.
Then I was floating face down in the water, my back covered with feathers, the water in the tub red as blood.
Chapter 16
Next morning I waited in my sleeping bag until Trudy and Howard were off to work. I didn't want to look either of them in the eye. Didn't want to see the look of disappointment she would give me, the look of pain Howard would have. He probably woke up in the middle of the night, found her gone, and thought we were out banging one another silly until the wee hours of the morning.
I think Trudy would have wanted him to think that. I wish that was what had happened. I wish I had never learned the truth about Cheep.
Someone had bought a few groceries the day before, so Leonard pan-toasted a couple slices of bread and we spread them with butter and had some bad leftover coffee the texture of syrup.
Outside the day was cold, but still clear. We drove to the bottoms and began our game plan.
What we did was simple. We drove down the main bottom road until we saw a cutoff we thought the car could handle, and we took it.
Sometimes the cutoffs circled back to the main road, or met up with another little road.
When a road dead-ended at the woods or river, or was just too muddy to drive, we got out of the car and walked awhile, hoping I'd see something familiar that would lead to a tributary or creek or some little outflow of water that might be the home of the Iron Bridge.
Mostly we walked and Leonard cussed the brush and rotten logs we stepped over. I think he did it to irritate me. I'd never known the woods to bother him before. I think he wanted to remind me he thought this whole thing was stupid and he was humoring me.
I tried to ignore him and listen to the cries of the birds and the splashing sounds coming from the river. Those sounds made me think of great fishing days and channel cats, catfish they called the trout of the Sabine. Gunmetal gray, lean and graceful with pointed heads and wide, forked tails. And there were the bigger cats that swam along the bottom of the river or laid up between the huge roots of water-based trees. Some called them bottom cats and others called them flatheads. They were big, brownish rascals, sometimes fifteen feet long, weighing up to a hundred pounds, narrow-tailed, with a wide head and a mouth big enough to suck up a child. And there were stories that they had.
Certainly there were gars in there that had bitten children and pulled swimming dogs under for their afternoon meals. They didn't call the big ones alligator gar for nothing. Six feet long, lean and vicious, they were the barracudas of fresh water, beasts with an angry racial memories of lost prehistoric seas.
And now and then, there was the real McCoy, the alligator. I had never known them to be plentiful along this stretch of the Sabine, and growing up I had seen only one in the river, and that one from a distance. Another I had seen big and complete, lying dead in the back of a fisherman's pickup out front of Coogen's Feed Store.
To the best of my knowledge, they were hibernating. Hoped so. Rare or not, it only took one to punch your ticket. They weren't the sort of critters minded eating a man in a dry suit, oxygen tanks and all.
Definitely the cottonmouth water moccasins, the meanest snakes in the United States, were hibernating, and that was a relief. Winter, even one bad as this one, was not without its charms.
We scouted around like this until noon, then drove into town, bought some bread, sandwich meat and beers, drove back and found a little road that terminated at the riverbank, sat on the hood of the car and had lunch.
We didn't talk much. We watched the brown water roll by and spread out in a dirty foam where the river widened down to our left. "In the spring it would be great to come here and fish," I said.
"Yeah," Leonard said.
Another half hour went by.
"Guess we ought to get back at it," I said, totaling a beer.
"Yeah."
We walked along the edge of the bank and the wind picked up and brought a damp chill off the water; the sky had gone gray as a cinder block.
We went until the bank became nothing more than mud and gravel and was hard to keep our footing on. We were about to turn back when I saw a great tree split wide from lightning, its blackened halves lying one on the bank, the other partially in the water.
I studied it.
"That used to be a big tree," I said.
"Good, Kemosabe. Pale Face no miss fucking thing. Him know big trees from small trees. Pale Face one smart sumbitch."
"It used to have an old tire swing hung from a chain. The swing was over the river."
"You're saying you remember something?"
"We'd bail out of it into the water, then climb up and do it again."
"We're near the Iron Bridge?"
"No, I just remember the tree and the swing."
"But it's a landmark to help you find the bridge?"
"Probably not. I remember the tree, but can't put it into relationship with the Iron Bridge. I know we used to come here is all. The Iron Bridge is on the side of the river we're on, though. Bridge goes partway over a creek that shoots off the river on this side. The tree helped me remember that."
"That's something," Leonard said. "You remember that much, means we can spend all our time looking on this bank."
"It's not real close to the river, as I recall. It's down this creek I'm thinking about, and quite a ways."
"Meaning the creek you can't find?"
"That's the one."
"So, Dan'l, what do we do now?"
"Anymore beers?"
"Nope."
"Guess we keep looking."
Chapter 17
Back to work we went, driving those back roads and excuses for roads, and it was late afternoon, maybe two hours before dark, when we drove around this curve and I happened to look out and see this rusty metal pole, and, bam, there was an explosion in my memory centers. At first I couldn't place what had exploded, but around the curve we went, and the debris from the explosion rose to the top of my memory and began to tumble into something identifiable and I said more calmly than I felt, "Stop the car."