Fishing the Sloe-Black River (6 page)

I looked around the room for a moment while he hunched down with the cat, his back to me. I was hoping to find something, a diary, a picture, a drawing, a badge, anything that would tell me a little more about him. Looking over my shoulder I reached across to the gas heater, picked up the twenty-pound note and stuffed it in my sock, then pulled my trousers down over it. I sat at the wooden table, my hands shaking. After a while Osobe turned and came over toward me with the cat in his arms, stroking it with the same harsh motion as before. With his right hand he reached into his overalls and gave me a hundred pounds in ten new notes. “For you school.” I could feel the other twenty-pound note riding up in my sock, and as I backed out the door a sick feeling rose in my stomach.

“You did very good job,” he said. “Come back for visit.”

It was only afterward that I realized I never got the cup of tea he offered.

That night, full of cider, I stumbled away from the bridge and walked down along the row of houses where Osobe lived. I climbed around the back of the house, through the hedge, along by some flowerpots, rattling an old wheelbarrow as I moved up to the window. He was there, slapping paste on the wall in gentle arcs. I counted five separate sheets, and the wall must have come a good quarter of an inch closer to him. I wanted him to be sloppy this time, not to smooth the sheets out, to wield the knife in a slipshod way, but he did the job as always, precise and fluid. The whole time he was humming and I stood, drunk, rattling the change from the twenty-pound note in my pocket.

*   *   *

Years later, when I was acquiring an English accent in the East End of London, I got a letter from my father. Business was still slow and a new wave of emigration had left its famous scars. Old Mrs. Hynes still hadn't kicked the bucket. Five of the council houses were empty now, and even the Gorman house had been sold once more. The American in his Cadillac had never arrived with his five blond daughters. The hurling team had lost all its matches again this year. There was a bumper crop of hay.

On the last page of the letter he told me that Osobe had died. The body was not discovered for three days, until my Aunt Moira called around with a basket of fruit for him. My father said that when he went into the house, the stench was so bad that he almost vomited. Children gathered at the front door with their hands held to their noses. But there was a whipround made in Gaffney's pub that extended out to the streets. People threw generous amounts of money in a big brown hat that the owner of the chipper carried from door to door. My aunt chose him a fine coffin, although someone said that he might have been offended by it, that he should have been sent back to Japan to be cremated. She scoffed at the suggestion and made a bouquet of flowers for him.

There was a party held the night of the funeral, and rumors were flung around according to the depths of the whiskey bottle—but more or less everyone was sure now that he had been a victim of Hiroshima. All the young boys who had worked for him in the summer months had heard vivid details of that frightening August morning. He had run from the city in a pair of wooden sandals. All his family had been killed. They had been vaporized. He was a man in flight. By the early, sober hours of the morning, my father added, the talk was that Osobe was a decent sort, no matter what his history was. Over the years he had employed many young men to work with him, treated them fairly, paid them handsomely, and confided in them about his life. They laughed at how strange his accent had become at the end of it all—when he went to the shop to buy cigarettes he would lean over the counter and whisper for
pack of fags, prease.
The sight of him carrying that big ladder on his bicycle would be sorely missed around town.

But the strangest thing of all, my father said, was that when he had gone into the house to recover the body, the room had seemed very small to him. It was customary to burn the bedsheets and scrape the paper from the walls when someone had been dead that long. But he took a knife to the paper and discovered it was a couple of feet thick, though it didn't seem so at first glance. Layers and layers of wallpaper. It looked as if Osobe had been gathering the walls into himself, probably some sort of psychological effect brought on by the bomb. Because the wallpaper had been so dense, the town council had decided simply to knock down the house, burying everything Osobe owned in the rubble. There had been no clues there, no letters, no medical papers, nothing to indicate that he had come from that most horrific of moments.

I rode my bicycle around London that night. I plowed along to no particular place, furious in the pedals, blood thumping, sweat pouring from my brow. The chain squeaked. A road in Ireland rose up in front of me—a road of grass grown ochre in the summer heat, a thin figure in a brown hat along the river, a cat the color of the going sun, a wall brought closer in slow movements, a road that wound forever through dry fields toward a gray beach, a road long gone. I found myself down by the Thames in the early morning. I dropped a single twenty-pound note into the water and watched it as it spun away, very slowly, very simply, with the current, down toward some final sea to fete the dead, their death, and their dying too.

THROUGH THE FIELD

See, the thing about it is that klein grass was about going out to head. It was hot out there—like Kevin says, it was hotter than a three-peckered goat—and I was keen on getting the whole job done as soon as possible, before we got ourselves a rain and lost all the nutrient to seed. I never seen a field look so good, a big sweep of grass almost four foot tall, running down to the creekbed where Natalie found that rattler one time. When the sun fell on it right and the wind blew from up along the creek, the field looked like someone had given it a real good haircut.

I wished I owned it, but we were renting it from Cunningham. It was going to take about three days, what with all the cutting, crimping, and swathing. We'd have ourselves about forty, fifty round bales and we were going to make a nice little profit, I could tell. Kevin figured on maybe buying some wallpaper for Natalie's bedroom—she's gone outgrown that pink kind—or maybe just him and Delicia having a little easier living, put their feet up some for a day or two. I was wanting to get a valve job done on my pickup.

We were only able to work the field at the weekend, Kevin and me, seeing as how we were at the State School during the week. That Friday evening Kevin was hollering to fill the tractor with gas so we could get a start. He's a hard worker, Kevin is, with big ropy arms. He's always itching to get going. You watch him, even at lunchtime, and his foot's tapping. I was ready too. I had my new boots that Ellie bought me at Reid's. We wanted to cut as much as we could, up until it got dark. We were filling the tractor right enough, but then we started getting into all that stuff about Stephen Youngblood, the kid that murdered that guy over near Nacogdoches. Kevin, he got the chills when I told him what that boy had said. He started shivering, Kevin did, and he went on home to gather up mine and his family. That night we hardly got nothing done.

*   *   *

I been doing the grounds maintenance at the State School for the best part of three years now, and in all that time I never seen a man want to know something so bad. Ferlinghetti, he come down from the University of Texas, like they sometimes do, for his work study. He got assigned the juvenile capital offenders. He wasn't young like the rest of the students. He was about my age. He was kind of fat, and once I heard one of the boys say that he was nothing but ten pounds of shit wrapped in a five pound bag. Which made me laugh. But he wasn't
that
fat, and he had these blue eyes, blue as the blue you get on a winter's morning. And, boy, could he get those kids to talk.

Truth be told, most of the staff at the State School don't like the social work students much. They come in on their work placement, thinking they can save the world. There's nobody can save the world except maybe Jesus, but even Jesus must have had an off day when He made most of the kids at the State School. And maybe when He made the place itself, because it don't much look like a prison. It's like a complex with a fence around it and cottages where the kids live. But it's big and open, with grass and trees and flowers, which I guess is good because it gives me and Kevin a job. There ain't no uniforms on the kids neither. The thing that shocks people the most is that the place doesn't shock them. It just looks ordinary. The kids out there, walking in double-file groups along the sidewalk, with the security guards going around in vans and station wagons. And no guns, not a one.

Most of those kids—even the ones in there for murder—look like the sort you see hanging out down by Sonic or skateboarding outside the 7-Eleven. I thought Stephen Youngblood was just another one that got caught up in a mess and couldn't get out. But Ferlinghetti, he thought he was onto something big for him and his head-shrinking business.

Stephen was small and blond and wiry with acne all over. You could drown him just by spitting on him. He had eyeglasses, but kept them hid in his back pocket. Embarrassed, I guess. He always walked with his head down, like he's hiding something. You wouldn't believe that he'd done what he done. Most days him and Ferlinghetti would be outside, on the bench under the oak tree. Ferlinghetti'd be talking to him, staring right into his face, hands on his belly, nodding his head up and down. He looked like a buzzard on a branch, searching for some dead meat.

The kids were supposed to get about twenty-five minutes of counseling a week, but Ferlinghetti, damnit, he must have talked Stephen's ear off for a couple of hours each time.

I was out there the first time they talked, working on a flower bed near the bench, and Stephen was giving him the normal kind of stuff the kids give new counselors. “I took the life of William Harris on December ninth two years ago. I got a thirty-year determinate sentence.” They learn to say it that way in the Capital Offenders Group. After a while they just say it, not a hint of emotion, because they said it hundreds of times.

Stephen was flicking his blond hair away from his eyes, gazing straight ahead, when Ferlinghetti just, boom, changed the subject. Now, most of them counselors they get all serious and sad-like, then say: “Would you like to talk about it, Stephen?” And Stephen'd say, “Yeah, s'pose so,” just because he knows he'd be up the creek without a goddamn paddle if he says no. Then the counselor would say: “Well, Stephen, how do you
feel
about it?” And Stephen, he'd say: “Bad.” And on and on, until the counselor goes off to write up his CF 114.

But not Ferlinghetti. He just looks at Stephen and nods. Then he starts talking about baseball, football, and heavy metal. I damn near shit myself laughing, kneeling down there with the trowel in my hand. I stayed down there in the flower bed and listened as they talked about some drummer from England who got his arm chopped off in a car accident. Then Ferlinghetti said bye, walking off, his big ass waddling like a duck. And Stephen, he looked like he'd been slapped with a stick.

After that they started meeting all the time. And always on the concrete bench under the oak tree. Most of the other counselors, they like to get one of the offices or something for privacy, but not Ferlinghetti. Out in the open, that was him. And, man, did he get that boy to talk up a storm.

Me and Stephen, we worked together sometimes too. The kids get to do some of the flowers and the weed-eating, depending on their level. Stephen was doing pretty good—he was a senior—and he got to work with me. There's about three hundred kids, maybe twenty capital offenders, and you hear it all. There's some in there did nothing more than piss on their momma's toothbrush. But there's one who hung babies up by Christmas ribbons when a drug deal went wrong. Another who just blew his friend away for a vial of crack. One girl knifed her old man forty times.

Kevin, he's different from me. He's been working there twelve years, and he doesn't like to hear the stories no more. He says after a while you don't want to hear anything. You walk around with your head down and you mow the lawn with the noisiest goddamn lawnmower you can find, so that your ears get to ringing and you can't even hear the bell sounding for lunch. Even when Delicia comes along to pick him up at the front gate every day, he gets in the front of the station wagon, she asks him what's going on, and he just says, same ol', same ol', darling.

*   *   *

Me and Kevin planted the field in spring. Cunningham lent us the tractor and the other equipment, we plowed the field in late March, then sowed the klein grass the next day. That night, when we finished the sowing, we took ourselves a bottle and sat down at the edge of the creek and had ourselves a good time.

We took care of that field, Kevin and me, even though we didn't own it. Lord knows why we wanted to do it. One night we was just sitting around, shooting the shit, and both of us got to talking about ranching. See, last year there was a drought and some of the ranchers were low on hay for the cattle. We just wanted to start off with something small. Next year we're going to plant ourselves a proper crop. But Kevin has a friend works in the feed store on Polk Street who said he could get us some free grass seed, and we said okay. The field was five miles down the road and it was lying idle. We called old man Cunningham and he laughed at first. Said he didn't have time for fooling around. But we got it, in the end, pretty darn cheap too.

At night we'd come home from the State School and get a few beers and sit down and watch the thing grow. Klein grass has a broad leaf and a narrow stem. It gets up to near four foot.

It was mighty nice out there. We'd sit on the back of my pickup and watch the stars. Sometimes, when the sky was clear, Kevin would point out the satellites moving on through the stars. Every now and then you'd hear a coyote howl. I wanted to shoot those critters—used to be you could get some money for killing them—but Kevin said they never done anyone any harm. I suppose he's right. There's enough killing without having to start on the coyotes. When Kevin began in the State School twelve years ago there was hardly any kids who had done murder. Now they're all over the place. It gets you to wondering.