Unquiet Dreams (2 page)

"Git som'more water, boy, don't stand there gawpin'," and then the long-expected cuff came, and the Man thrust the bottles into his still slippery hands and the boy turned with some reluctance to trudge back down to the water's edge. Surreptitiously he turned just before their nook was out of sight and saw the Man staring into the depths of the pot. Just staring, and doing nothing. The boy kept on his way to the bayou, unaccustomed thoughts fighting for predominance in his head. He scooped the greenish water with gratitude, silently thanking Mother for the gift of this momentous day and wistfully hoping that there was more to the mystery than just making money for the Man. As if to soothe his troubled brow the waters gurgled a familiar tune and he smiled, trusting to Mother's wisdom. She would show him the way.

He carried the water-weighted bottles back to their home and found the Man still staring, and now squatting beside the pot. The boy said nothing, but the Man coughed energetically to cover his uncertainty, and motioned for the boy to fill the pot with a surly economy of jerking movements. The thing in the pot seemed to welcome the additional fluids and swam eddies around the inky rim. The boy and the Man both stared, and the boy felt his neck want to follow the floating circles, like his eyes already did. It was as if a part of himself wanted to rise right out of his skin and hover up high. From nowhere it struck him that maybe this was what the Man and other others felt, loaded up on hooch, rambling, incoherent. They would sway like the lazy circles of the treasure in its pit, moving to music no one could hear, feeling the earth move. The boy shied away from the lure of the hooch, for he saw the vomiting and the shakes and the blood, but he understood now the magic, the lifting, the hope.

The Man was cogitating again. The boy could tell because he was rubbing his grubby hands up and down his greasy coat, humming a tuneless song. There was something close to a smile on his face, as grim an expression as any other in his repertoire. The boy let his eye drift back to the depths of the cooking pot and the treasure that floated within it, but kept alert to cues from the Man. All this cogitating would result in some chore, likely unpleasant, usually tiring. It was all he knew. That and the bayou from the seven pillars to the prison: her smell, her lazy pace, her swelling floods, her green waters, these were the boundaries of his existence and they had begun to weigh upon his shoulders ever since the treasure had come to him that day. He got ambition, just as the Man had always warned.

"Boy!" The Man's cogitating was through and he had a plan. "Go get Rusty, and Lefty and Jimbo. Tell 'em we got som'thin' they just gotta see fer theirselves." The boy nodded and hastened to the command, but he puzzled at the Man's vision. Those three—they were the oldest of the lot. They had survived most of the calamities their rough life afforded: punks with knives, cold snaps, hurricanes, floods, cars, drunkenness, starvation, and their own mutually destructive tendencies. Come night fall, like as not there'd be a fight betwixt this one and that. These old codgers, not usually at the center of it, but they had that stray dog kind of logic to know the winning side and help tip the balance toward the natural order of things. But they weren't the kind of folk you might make money off of—no sir, they were as shifty and suspicious as the Man himself, ready to take a chunk out of you as soon as not, just on principle. Maybe the Man wanted them to go in with him, but that didn't seem likely. He barely allowed the boy to have any share of his glories. The boy chewed the thoughts without resolution as he sought out the trio of grizzled prospectors.

He found Lefty and Jimbo all right, but Rusty was nowhere to be seen. The boy looked for the shock of white hair—had it ever been red?—but did not see it in his usual haunts, up by the big wheel or by the government building, where he gathered up his evidence. He was lucky to find Lefty and Jimbo together, slumped over a picnic table by the University where they growled at the passers-by with impotent menace and shared a warm bottle of hooch. The boy liked to look up at the University, where students called to one another on the patio high above the bayou in that other world they lived within, weighed down by the knowledge in their enormous satchels, but free to come and go, to get into cars and buses and travel to places far from the fetid land under the overpass. Jimbo and Lefty went there just to spit and snarl, enjoying the small surge of power they had to frighten the kids and perhaps to stand as proud harbingers of what might yet be.

"Man wants to talk," the boy stuttered out, barely heard, barely acknowledged. Nevertheless, Jimbo corked the bottle with a few practiced spins and the three shuffled off to the overpass like the condemned men they were. The Man greeted them with a crafty look and a puffed up air of magnanimity. But all he said was "See what I got here?" He practically bowed before them, swinging his arm out in an arc that took in the whole of their cavern as if it were a palace. There was no mistaking, however, the aim of his gesture, for his hungry eyes sought it out and grew hooded, as if he regretting sharing the prize so soon. Lefty and Jimbo squinted in the murky dimness, caught sight of the white thing floating in the black pot and beheld its luminosity.

And they stared.

So far, so good; the Man knew what he was doing. The two old reprobates leaned in, drawn by its mesmerizing self-sufficiency, and the boy felt proud, like he had something to do with it—other than finding it in the Mother's arms.

Lefty cocked one eye up at the Man. There was doubt in his words but wonderment in his face. It was funny, the boy thought, how a face that old and begrimed, a face that had sunk a thousand rafts of garbage, could still look little more than a child's when confronted with a miracle like this. "Whatchoo do there, Roy? Where th'hell you get sumpthin' like that?"

The Man shrugged like it was nothing at all. "Boy found it."

"It's a brain," Jimbo cut in urgently. "Cow brain maybe. Maybe pig."

"Ain't no brain," Lefty countered with scorn. "Brains're grey, not white."

"Even when washed by the bayou?" Jimbo said, but you could tell he had lost enthusiasm for his theory. "Damn strange, anyway." They all shook their heads in accord. The boy grinned to himself, proud of the Mother, and her child. Jimbo reached out, like to poke the thing, but the Man growled a warning—don't touch the merchandise. Yet it was hard to resist. The bunched white lobes of it seemed so portentous; slick, swollen, it floated with a regal air, smug and complacent, the boy thought, as if it was just humoring them all for now, but soon it would have more important things to do. The thought made him shiver again. Mother had secrets, secrets this treasure shared.

Jimbo dinged the side of the pot and the low echo of its resounding tone swooshed the water ever so slightly, so that the pale shape turned lazily circling deosil now, against the sun as if turning the other side to the warming rays—rays that could not reach here under the overpass. The old men muttered and stroked their rat-haired beards, cogitating one and all. The boy had an idea growing in his belly. He could not yet articulate it in simple words, but it had a lightness, a brightness that lifted his spirits yet again.

The clang of the lid woke them all from their stupor. The Man had put the plan in action. No more freebies. Jimbo and Lefty took his measure, but found him fixed. They went quietly, though, to the boy's surprise. The Man glowered, like he had already given them too much—and regretted it. But as they shuffled off exchanging low words, the shifty grin peeled across his grimy countenance, a look of triumph and smug self-satisfaction. The fortune was already made, the boy could see. They would be rich.

It took no time at all. That night men started to come, to gaze into the pot and marvel at the shape of the thing as it floated in the black waters. They paid. Some a little. Some a little more. Within days, those who had little could no longer pay enough to see it. Stories flew up and down the bayou, but the boy knew why they could never agree, why they always came back. It wasn't what it was, but what it could be. The mystery of the thing drew them—that small piece of the Mother—like flies to a dogs' carcass; hopeful, hovering, they gathered at night and offered their thoughts, their opinions. No answers, no sureness. They all sighed—even the Savers—and came back, again, and poked at it with their words and with their thoughts. Never with their hands; the Man kept them all from touching it, naturally. He had to protect his investment.

"It's a dog's stomach…"

"Nah, it's a brain, I tole you—"

"Cow brain, yeah, I think that's—"

"Hell, no! Ain't nuthin' but some little hunk of papier maché."

"Oh, right, Mac. That's why you been back here every night this week, uh huh."

"Shut up! You ignorant. It's a man's liver, bleached in the sun."

"Oh man, you such a liar. Ain't never no liver. No matter how long in the sun. Look at it!" And look they did, puzzling, tapping the sides of the pot, watching it circle lazily in its bath. Violence always threatened. These men were accustomed to settling their arguments with quick jabs and low kicks. Fear kept them in line, though, here under the hum of the overpass. Old Snowy had drawn blood one night, arguing with some young one-armed guy over just what the treasure was. Opinions were the only capital one held in this world. The veracity of opinions could rank one highly, while the dubious sort left you at the back of the line, last one to get the drift, last to check out the trash barrels. Old Snowy was used to respect, used to his place in the wrangling chaos. But he drew blood, endangered the uneasy truce. The Man didn't let him come back yet. No one else would risk banishment from the single wonder of their world, so the peace wore on, threatened at times, but holding, like a dam not quite ready to burst.

The boy got ambition. He had a name for the feeling that was rising in his chest: freedom. When he got his split of the money, he could…go…somewhere. He didn't exactly know, but some place else. He could leave, leave the Man, go out in the wide world. He could follow the Mother to her big broad belly, the gulf, her true home. It was out there, the Man said so. The boy remembered. He could recall the first time he heard the word. It was just an offhand remark for the Man, just a spit between his teeth. Where things washed away, why, all the way to the gulf, he had said. The boy had been little then, hanging on the Man's words as a mystery that might be solved, rather than one that must be endured, as he knew well now. But the word had filled him with a swell of excitement: all that water! All the floods that ever happened, going to this place, the gulf—how immense it must be. Water that big, he finally realized, water that big would provide a life for him. The small existence they poked out of the edges of the bayou would be nothing to the bounty of Mother's great belly where the many waters gathered. He could live in great ease, scrounging in the morning, then taking it comfortable, watching the flow of the water with a peaceful satisfaction. That was ambition, surely.

The Man paid him back for it. His impatience was to blame. If only he had waited, the Man might have swelled with enough magnanimity to toss him some coins, and he could have stolen away in the night, unnoticed, unmourned. But he asked for his money when the dreams grew too loud in his sleep, and the Man slapped him down with a harsh cuff and a guffaw. The few others there, gathered early for the nightly ritual, joined in the laughter and goaded the Man on. "Money?" he snapped as the boy cowered, holding his ear, waiting for the pain and ringing to subside. "This my money, boy. My rules, my world. You forget that, boy?"

"I found it," he grumbled proudly, if unwisely.

The Man laughed and the others with him. "Finders keepers, eh? Losers weepers!" They all laughed at this witticism. "Guess you the loser, boy." Even as their coughing hilarity buoyed him up and out of the circle, their eyes returned to the treasure, hungry, famished, for its sight.

He stumbled away from their laughter into the first graying shades of twilight. It had been dark all day, overcast and fishy. Night would be just a deepening hue. He went to Mother and plunged his hands in her cold waters to calm their shaking and his angry heart. This is what it came to, all of it. He had her soothing waters and he had the Man's rough regency. If it came down to that, he chose her. Better her mystery, her harsh floods and draughts than the brutal way of the Man. Her ways were uncompromising, but they were better than the capricious rule of the Man, who would always be stronger, smarter and more powerful, who would always tell him what to do and when, who changed his mind capriciously. Mother would not lead him, she would not offer easy answers; he'd have to think for himself and live within her harmonies. If you followed her flow, all was right—it was swimming upstream that brought trouble, and a failure to follow her signs. He made his choice then, he chose her, and not the joyless way of the Man.

He did not expect epiphanies, he knew he was not saved, but she sent him a gift anyway, just to show him the choice was right. He leaned closer to the waters and heard the story they sang to him. He lifted his head and looked west. Dark clouds had hung there all day, drifting slowly north. He puzzled at the sign. He had seen the clouds, knew they meant rain, knew too that they were passing far to the north. But the waters sang the tune of coming. He shook his head as if to clear his still-ringing ears. What was she telling him? Was he just too stupid to heed? He trailed his hand in the now-black waters, feeling for the truth, waiting for the secret to be revealed, hoping some trash-bloated carp wouldn't come along and bite his fingers for bait. His head inclined toward the Mother's song, eyes closed, heart almost still as he listened with his body and soul to her message.

He had almost drifted into a melancholic slumber when the revelation hit him, nearly knocking him over. When? Soon. How much? A lot! He should go, now. He didn't even realize he was smiling as he half-walked, half-climbed up the slope to the road. He looked back down at the Mother he loved so much. The bench on her banks where lovers sat on cool days, the trees still bent low, always listening to her speech, her songs, her warnings. He wondered if he should go higher, but he knew he had to stay, to see, to bear witness, to know that freedom would truly be his.