Ava's Man (29 page)

Y
ou had to sneak off to do it, but you did it. You had to be able to swim the river, or the other boys would make fun of you. It was not so much that you had to do it to be a man, you had to do it to be a boy. So boys of eleven and twelve tugged on a pair of cutoff blue jeans, lied to their mommas and went to the widest place, or the narrowest, and waded in up to their waist. They would stand there, arms, face and neck burned red or brown, and let that river run through fingers as if they were divining its intent. And then they would push hard off the sandy bottom and grab a double armload of water, and beat and kick at it like a bad dream till a finger or toe scraped bottom on the other side. The ones who did not make it, who got pulled too far downstream by the current and got too tired to fight it anymore, got their picture in the newspaper.

The dams made a different river. The dams made a river so wide, so deep, that a boy just stood on the man-made banks and hoped he didn’t fall in.

The big dam, built in the winter of 1939, made a whole new world. Men used big, three-pronged snatch hooks to drag out monstrous catfish, almost as long as a man, and fishermen told stories of cats that lay like submarines at the base of those dams, giants lolling in the currents, too fat to move. Even accounting for how much a fisherman will lie, those were damn large fish. Charlie caught one cat about three quarters as long as he was, and was so astounded he took it home and had his picture made.

To Charlie, a river was supposed to run narrow and wild, and was supposed to change in size and speed and character when it rained, or in drought, and should never, ever be so wide a man could not cross it on a footlog—a tree that had fallen in a storm, creating a natural bridge. But though he never liked what the dams had done to the landscape, a big fish is still a big fish, and as that water pooled he prowled its banks, hunting.

It seemed like the fish just swam right up and jumped in a man’s arms there. The fish were too big for a conventional rod and reel, so he used an old pool cue and fixed a strong snatch hook to his line, which was about as thick as nylon cord.

They called it snagging. As the giant cats, buffalo, jack salmon and other fish drifted past near the dam, he dropped his hook right down on them.

He didn’t do it for sport, for there was precious little sport in it. He did it for the meat—that’s what they called it, the meat—and it is doubtful that he ever wasted a fish.

He was a social man and liked company, but this was a bloody and methodical process, so he either fished with Hootie or fished alone. One spring day, he threw his pool cue in the backseat of his Dodge and told Ava he’d be back, d’rectly. The Dodge had a faulty starter, but it fired right up and he took that as a good sign. Fishing, despite what some men will tell you, is about luck, and Charlie believed in it.

He wanted Hootie to go but no one could find him, so he rolled
his window down and stuck his big ol’ knobby elbow out, like he always did, and left them in a swirl of dust.

Guntersville, Alabama, is one of the prettiest places on earth, as you approach it from the riverside. The water is not sluggish, not brown, but clean-looking like the ocean or the Gulf, and flocks of big white birds, hundreds, maybe thousands, swirled over the lake.

Charlie found a spot to park right near the water, and took his tackle over to a place near some granite rocks, and peered over into the water, waiting for the big ones to coast by.

Later, as the sky started to darken, he noticed how high the river seemed to be running, so much higher than before. He was always intrigued at how the light-bill barons always seemed to be saving up their water or letting it go, based on everything but nature, and it had been that way since the damn thing was built.

He also noticed that it was clouding up something terrible, and that the sky was changing from blue to a deep and angry purple, like it was bruised. Then the rain came at him like a waterfall.

He ran to his car through the mud, and noticed that he couldn’t tell anymore where the bank ended and the river began. He jumped in and tried the starter, and the thing whined and groaned but wouldn’t catch. Starters do that when you need them not to.

He tried it and tried it, the rain pounding and pounding at the roof, and the starter got weaker, fainter, and the water just got higher, higher …

In the vernacular of the time and place, the words “I’ll be back, d’rectly” mean the absolute opposite of how they sound.

There is nothing direct about it. It means that a person will be home for supper, unless they stop off for a swaller, or drop by kin-folks’ houses, or the fishing is particularly good. But Charlie didn’t have any fancy ice chest to store his catch, so he always came home no later than the morning after.

When he didn’t come home the next morning, Ava and the girls were not particularly worried, but as the day wore on and he didn’t pull into the driveway, they started to wonder what was keeping him.

Ava figured he had found somebody with some homemade likker and was just waiting for his eyes to focus before heading home. By nightfall she was positive of it, and by dawn of the next day, after pacing the floor, she prayed to God it was that, only that.

He had been gone for two days, and had not sent word. Margaret, Juanita and Juanita’s boyfriend, the son of the sawmill owner and a good boy named Ed Fair, drove all around the back roads, thinking maybe his car had just broke down.

Juanita told James and Earl Woods—it was Earl and Hubert who had played the joke on Charlie that night they pretended to be a woman at the door—and James and Earl drove up to Guntersville.

The river was still in flood, but was starting to recede. It had swallowed Charlie’s car.

When James and Earl found it, it was still covered almost to the top of the roof with brown water.

James felt around inside, feeling for his daddy. But there was no body. Up the bank, caught in some bushes, they found his pool cue and his tackle.

It put a tremble in the people who loved him, and Ava, when they told her, began to cry. Then she just went and laid down, facing the wall.

Her brittle mind, a mind that had been chipped and flaked by so many worries over a lifetime, cracked a little then, and the fissure ran, longer and longer, every day he was missing.

Margaret, who was sixteen or so, went and sat by herself, numb.

It was worse than when she sat waiting for him in the hospital parking lot. It was worse than anything.

But the men who knew Charlie could not believe that a river had killed him, even a man-made river where the water piled up against a giant cement wall.

They searched the riverbanks, afraid of what they would find, but while there were dead chickens, dead cows and knots of snakes, there was no man on the mudbanks or sandbars or snagged in the dead trees.

They checked all the hospitals and the morgues, but no one who matched Charlie’s description had been brought in. Then, out of common sense, they started checking the jails. They enlisted the help of what these Alabama Bundrums called the Georgia people, the kin over there.

Together, they called or drove by every jail for a hundred miles on both sides of the line. Some places, the deputies just said, “Naw, we ain’t got him,” because they had had him before. Others ran down their lists of inmates. Nothing. The first week passed. His children were frantic.

In town, people asked Margaret: “Have they found your daddy yet?” And she would shake her head and cry.

Friends helped, and even people who barely knew him. They even called the Birmingham jail, though it is nowhere close to Guntersville and Charlie would have had no reason to be there. But everybody knew about Birmingham, about the jail there. A poor man, a man dressed raggedy or dirty, was swept off the street.

Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor didn’t want any white trash on his streets, and officers routinely swept the street and the bus station for vagrants. But when James called to ask them if they had his daddy, a bored clerk ran down the docket and said they had no one by that name in the jail.

Two weeks had gone by since he went missing. As a last resort, James drove to the jails and police stations to plead. He even went to
Birmingham. He asked again for a Charlie Bundrum, and a woman asked if James would spell it for her, and she traced her finger down a list.

“B-U-N-D-R-U-M,” she said, and then her finger stopped.

“We’ve got him,” she said. “‘Vagrancy.’”

James didn’t cry or act a fool. He knew his daddy had not drowned. Snapping turtles didn’t drown. Water moccasins didn’t drown. They could, but they just didn’t.

He asked the woman, politely:

“Can I have him back?”

They took him home, but the word had already reached the family. When they saw their daddy step from the car, they ran for him, but froze, just froze, at the fury on his face and the storm in his eyes.

When the car refused to start, and with the flood coming, he left it and walked in the rain to the bus station. The only way to get home was to buy a ticket to Birmingham, and then to Anniston or Gadsden.

He stepped off the bus in Birmingham with no baggage, in tattered overalls—he always wore his worst pair to fish—with fish blood, and worse, on them, and a work shirt worn through at the elbows.

He planned on having a cup of coffee. He was not drunk. He was not even drinking. He was just trying to go home.

He was sitting on a bench, near a group of other ragged men who had stepped off the bus in Birmingham, when two carloads of city police carrying billy clubs came moving fast down the sidewalk where he was waiting for the bus, and swept it clean. He was charged with vagrancy. He had a pocketful of hooks and a can of snuff and a
dollar or two, and had no way to make his bail. They didn’t give him a phone call. They just made him a guest of what would be, a few years later, the most famous jail in the country.

The calls to the jail were answered by someone who apparently had no idea how the name Bundrum looked when it was written down.