The Tilted World (24 page)

“Take me to Greenville. I’ll pay you.”

“Girl, you ain’t got a thing left in this world. Me neither, ’cepting this whiskey. But it don’t matter. I’ll take you. Maybe you can make it worth my while,” he said, and raised his eyebrows and grinned, and let go of the trunk with one hand to reach up to her.

When Dixie Clay pressed off the limb, smear of blood on the bark, her arms like punctured tires, they heard a rushing moan. A boiling new current swung itself from the north and shot an oak past them, its branches nipping the nose of Marvin’s boat. “Damn it all,” he yelled as he was spun around the trunk. “Damn it all to hell.” She saw his pipe fly from his surprised mouth and he was torn from the tree and grabbed his shoulder as his boat went shooting away. She couldn’t see him but heard a metal thunking, and when she next spotted his boat, it had passed beyond the canopy of her tree and was bucking, turned sideways in the current, and he was paddling hard with the shovel first on the right side then on the left. He was only forty yards off but already the scrim of rain turned him blue and featureless.

The boat swung around and he was facing her and she yelled to warn him of the next tree, but it was too late and he was knocked to the floor.

“Marvin!” she yelled—she could see only the smear of his back—“Marvin!”

“I lost my goddamn shovel!” he yelled. “But I’ll come back for you!”

“Wait, please, don’t leave me!”

“I’ll come back. Or send someone else.”

“Marvin, please—”

“I’ll come back! I always was sweet on you, Dixie Clay!”

There was a giant crack and a tree fifty yards away groaned terribly and toppled. Dixie Clay clung to her shaking branch and turned her face from the spray and when she turned back, she was alone.

S
he was tired now. A few more planes had passed, and she didn’t even wave. Part of her wanted to sleep, but to sleep, she knew, meant death. She picked her head up every few minutes, hoping that a raft or boat would come floating by that she could drop into and paddle to Willy.

Sometime that afternoon the rain stopped, the sun nothing but a lighter gray circle in dark gray sky, and she saw something detach itself from a tree. She squinted in the rain to see if it was a doghouse or a garden shed. Maybe it was a steel drum, and if it was, maybe she should forsake the tree and swim to it, use it as ballast. It came closer. It was a boat.

She was screaming now and grasping the branch with one arm to wave with the other, the boat moving slowly and dodging obstacles; if it had or hadn’t seen her she couldn’t tell. She thought she saw a man in the boat. She reached behind her and untied her sodden apron and lifted a hip to slip it free and then began waving it, thwacking it overhead on the branches, all while screaming and screaming, until her body started to list on the branch and suddenly she’d swung beneath it and she dropped the apron to grasp with both hands. She turned her head and glimpsed for a second the boat and the figure was maybe waving but then she lost it. She held on but it hurt. She couldn’t see the boat and felt the bark shredding her forearms and realized they were letting go and she clung tighter and pressed her face to the limb. Finally the tree’s wide canopy, which made a cave on the water, trapped the chugging of a motor.

“Dixie Clay!” Ingersoll. A flash of his red shirt over her shoulder. The boat was below her.

“I’ve got you,” he yelled, and he held out his arms, and she let go.

F
ive hours later, an hour after dark, Ingersoll pulled the boat over to a conical Indian mound rising fifteen feet out of the water. It had a grassy platform top and Ingersoll dragged the boat up, scattering snakes and a hatchling alligator about a foot long who bellied into the river. They’d already fought upstream along the Gawiwatchee, shooting rapids in phalanges of spray, Dixie Clay grasping the bench seat with one hand and Ingersoll’s belt with the other and feeling her body fly up and then the jolt of pain in her hips and ribs as her rump smacked the bench. They’d found the bed of the Mississippi and had fought a good ways toward Greenville.

There was no Hobnob to head to. Dixie Clay kept asking, incredulous. “The diner?”

Ingersoll said, “Gone.”

“The library?”

“Gone.”

Dixie Clay had checked out a book of Lincoln’s speeches, also gone. “The beauty shop? Hobnob Grammar?”

“Gone, too, I think,” Ingersoll said.

Thank God they’d closed the school a few weeks back, all the children sent home. Home to houses that were now underwater. But maybe they’d evacuated. “The store—Amity’s store?”

“I’m sorry, Dixie Clay.”

“But surely Amity—” She turned in the boat and when she saw his grim face, she asked no further.

She turned back and realized—Jacob’s grave. Jacob’s grave, gone.

They’d seen maybe a dozen other boats, all headed toward Greenville. Going was slow because the Mississippi was pouring through the crevasse in unpredictable rapids and causing other breaks along the way. Eventually, they could tell where the river had lain because a crest of levee poked through, first a stuttering archipelago of levee islands, each clustered with animals, and then later a strip of levee a few feet across on either side of them. Ingersoll steered the boat between these lines of land, knowing the channel was deepest in the middle, but even so they’d gotten stuck in a red mulberry tree, strange to look down into the canopy of heart-shaped leaves. The tree had nearly torn a hole in the boat, and Ingersoll had worked the rudder and finally jumped overboard and swam beneath the boat to free it. While he struggled, Dixie Clay leaned out to pick the bitter unripe berries, all they’d eat that day. Ingersoll told her that when he’d found the boat, it had been stocked, but on the way to her a current had swung it around and an uprooted tree had come shooting toward him. He ducked in time, but when it landed on the far side of the boat, a big paw of a wave swiped the supplies.

“How did you even know where I was? How did you find me without roads?”

“I ran across a rescue boat and there was an old man in it whose fingers were crushed. They were going to get him help somehow. He saw what direction I was headed. Said to rescue a girl named Dixie Clay and told me where to find your oak tree.”

They reached what had been the town of Flannery, the levee thicker here because it had supported the bridge, now swept clear away. At the crest was a boxcar and from it poked a waving white handkerchief and Dixie Clay didn’t want to stop and luckily they didn’t have to because a rescue boat was chugging toward the boxcar.

“Do you have any food, any gasoline?” Ingersoll called over the rescue boat’s high motor. The thought of boat fuel hadn’t occurred to Dixie Clay.

“None to spare,” yelled the captain. “We’re going in once the boat is full. Folks in this boxcar, and supposed to be six people in the upper story of an oil mill, have you seen ’em?”

“No,” said Ingersoll. “Good luck. We’ll press on.”

When dusk fell, Ingersoll said they needed to stop, but Dixie Clay begged, she wanted to keep heading toward Greenville where Jeannette had Willy. But then they’d gotten stuck again, this time on a barn roof. Ingersoll had to jump overboard and when he couldn’t dislodge the boat’s propeller from the gouged metal, he dove down to enter the barn and free it from beneath. He took a long, long time to reappear. She rocked in the listing boat and grew frightened. At last he shot up and threw his arms over the side and hung panting and with a great effort swung a leg over and hoisted his body in, wet red shirt outlining the bars of muscle in his back. He collapsed onto the boat’s bottom, which was sloshing with brackish water.

She bent over his face. His lips looked bluish and his eyes were closed. His chest was heaving. “Ingersoll? Are you all right?”

He opened his eyes. “We’re gonna die if we keep this up. We’re gonna capsize, Dixie Clay, and we’re gonna drown in the dark, and we’ll never get Willy back. Next place we can, we stop.”

She didn’t argue. And they’d seen the Indian mound around the next bend.

Now they sat side by side on the only landmass they could see, jutting itself up toward the heavens, like a stage, she thought. Or an operating table. Or an altar. The rain had stopped, and at first the mud was chilled beneath them but it felt good to be out of the boat, and their bodies untensed as the mud warmed. They listened to the river slashing by, tripled in speed.

Creaking, whinnying, the snapping of trees like artillery fire, other sounds unidentifiable and unworldly.

“Dixie Clay,” he said. “In the morning, I need to set your arm.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No, it’s not. It’s broke.”

He put his fingers on her wrist, his thumb closing the circle, and he began to slowly, slowly ease the circle of fingers-thumb along her blouse sleeve toward her swollen elbow. She gasped and his hand opened.

“That big lump just before your elbow, that’s the break. It’s clean, I think,” he said. “That’s good. In the morning, when I can see, we got to set it so it doesn’t start healing back crooked.”

“Set it?”

“Yeah. I’ve done it before. Set Ham’s once. Only difference is, he was drunk.”

“He got drunk to deaden the pain?”

“No, he got drunk because he’s Ham.”

“Was this in the war?”

“Nope, this was in a Chrysler. We were chasing a bootlegger in a cotton field in Alabama. I spun around the turnrow and Ham was thrown against the unlocked door and just kept going for a spell.”

“Did it turn out okay?”

“Yeah, we got the guy.”

“No, I mean Ham’s arm.”

“Sure. But ever since, Ham claims he can’t win a hand of Texas Hold’em.”

“Hmm. Were you drunk too?”

“I’d been driving.”

“That’s no answer.”

“Yeah, I was drunk. But not as bad as Ham.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll worry about it in the morning. For now, I’m just going to splint it.”

He crisscrossed the Indian mound, picking up and discarding sticks, finally deciding on two long enough, though they were damp. Then he sat beside her again and tried to roll her sleeve up but it got stuck and she gave a yelp.

“I’m just gonna tear it off, okay?”

She nodded, so Ingersoll leaned forward and lifted the shoulder seam to his teeth and, biting down, ripped the fabric, a strange loud cry among the other strange loud cries. Then he yanked his own shirt overhead with his right hand, and beneath it he wore an undershirt which he yanked off with his left. “Feels good to get that damp thing off,” he murmured as he tied the ends of her sleeve to his undershirt. He set the sling over her bowed head like a beauty queen’s sash and tucked a long stick on either side of her arm to splint it, saying, “This will keep it steady for now. In Greenville, we’ll get a plaster.”

“Thank you.”

He shrugged her thanks away, and they sat, facing the river. The rain had stopped and Ingersoll planted a Y-shaped stick in the ground and hung his shirt to dry. Dixie Clay wished she could do the same. In a few more moments it was too dark to see, clouds erasing the stories told by the constellations, just a few scattered points of light, below them the currents sometimes glinting where they knifed open the reflection of a star.

“Might as well stretch out,” said Ingersoll. She heard him settle back, and after a moment she lay back, too. She felt the hurt slip in part by part, starting with her head, first inside, then out, then her left arm, her right ribs, her stomach, her legs, her heart, her heart, her heart. Willy.

“Go to sleep, if you can,” said Ingersoll.

She shook her head, which he couldn’t see in the dark. So she said, “You sleep. It’s okay. I won’t be able to.”

“Me neither.” They listened to a sound they couldn’t place, metal on metal, something wrenched apart somewhere. Ingersoll continued after a pause. “Never been much of one for sleeping. Lost the habit, if I ever had it, keeping a musician’s hours.”

“And I lost the habit keeping a bootlegger’s.”

A silence grew, a cloister of silence surrounded by rushing water. It was so dark. Dark as a stack of black cats—that’s what Jesse would have said. How strange to know he could be dead, probably was, according to what Ingersoll had told her earlier, describing the shooting of the saboteur and how Jesse’d been on the levee moments prior lifting a sandbag into place. “So Jesse put the dynamite there,” she’d concluded, and Ingersoll hadn’t denied it.

“Where did the dynamite come from?” Dixie Clay had asked, and Ingersoll told her.

“An army camp,” she repeated. “Camp Beauregard?”

“How did you know?”

And she told him then about Uncle Mookey and his night janitor job.

“I’ll be damned,” he’d murmured. “Uncle Mookey.”

She probed the idea of Jesse’s death, waiting for sorrow to descend, but none did. She probed the idea of Ingersoll’s proximity, his smooth, deep voice just a few dark inches away, waiting for guilt to descend, but none did.

As the pain slipped back into her body, the thoughts did too, all she hadn’t been able to ponder on the river while she was yelling for Ingersoll to steer starboard to avoid a submerged automobile, or leeward to dodge the cottonmouth coiled on a branch. They’d already shouted to each other the facts, but they hadn’t had time to press the hurt spots.

“I keep wondering what happened to Jesse and Ham,” she said.

“Me too.”

“I’m scared,” she said. She felt Ingersoll’s hand grasp her own where it lay by her side.

“Me, too.” And then he let her hand go.

After a while, he said, “Wish I had me a cigar.”

After a while, she said, “Wish you had your mandolin.”

She listened to his stomach announce itself as empty.

Neither one said anything for a minute. Over the sluice of the currents, a cat’s scream, maybe a panther’s. Ingersoll’s hand had been large and warm. An anchor.

“Ingersoll?”

“Yes?”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to find Willy.”

“We are?”

“We are. We’re going to find Jeannette and get Willy back.”

“In Greenville, in the morning.”

“Yes, we’re going to Greenville, and if Jeannette’s already gone—”