You Will Never See Any God: Stories (3 page)

“It’s nothing,” he repeated. “Gerber probably made it up, knowing it would frighten you.” He stroked his forehead. “If the rain
would only stop. Then Gerber would go back to his shack; that would be better at least.”

“I hope snakes don’t come up on the yard is all,” she was saying.

“Might help clean out the mice if they did. Anyway, there’s only one and he’s stuck out there somewhere, out in this goddamn rain.”

“Don’t get upset again, Ronald,” she said, coming to him, touching him with her hand dried on her apron. “Come eat dinner, Ronald. Gerber is gone; we can eat now.”

The rain fell yet two more days out of the ragged scuds of cloud that were like black cotton clumps ripped from their box. On the fifth day after it began, the rain slowed to a warm drizzle and the drizzle was patched with rising mist, and finally broken clouds let the sun through and the heat was intense suddenly where the sun was. The heat fell upon the land, sending up clouds of mist from the submerged flat lands of the river bottom. The water receded a little, leaving lines of cornstalk trash, foamed white lines like circles on bathtubs, ugly and vermin-ridden. In the fields the flood-driven branches of trees subsided in mud and the one true tree trunk settled in hip-deep water in the middle of Ronald Dahlman’s field.

When the farm lanes had dried a little, after two days of the muggy sunshine, Dahlman took the tractor out to survey the fields. He could not go far, for the water still rode high to the tractor axles down towards the river. He came back to the house, cursing.

“The levees will have to be dynamited to get the water out,” he told his wife. “I’ll have to spend the fall rebuilding them.” He swore. His wife clucked in commiseration. “And I can’t even make a break in the levee until the river is down again.”

And so he waited with rabid impatience. He put on his six-
buckle overshoes and strode about the muddy yards like one trapped, from the barn to the hog house, and out to the water’s edge fifty yards beyond that to look at the rotted tooth-edge of cornstalk litter there in the field, and back again he stormed, sweating in the magnified wet heat of the scalding sun.

But Gerber was pleased. The pipe-black face was lit with an anticipation, the eyes mere pinpoints of pupils in the leather tortoise folds that were his eyelids, were happy, and the toothless, lipless black mouth of the ancient man nearly smiled. He sharpened and pointed his three spears, each three-barbed and shiny at the tips, and he talked to the dog.

“Ah, we goin for carp, old dog. You like old Gerber then; you gonna come up and lick his hand when you smell carp cooking. I gonna feed you carp guts, dog, and I gonna eat carp. Ya, you like old Gerber then.” He spent a half day fingering the spear edges, sharpening the tips with a tiny sharpening stone, the stone as thick and as black as his second finger, and the wary and fearful dog lay six feet from him, the dog resting his head on his forepaws, his eyes steadily watching old Gerber. The dog had become as black and muddy as Gerber, the mud clotted in the hair of the animal so that great lumps swayed beneath his belly like black grotesque teats when he walked. The mud had flattened his hair and pulled his skin tight so that he appeared skinned and dirty and yet somehow alive.

Dahlman came by and stood off, so he could not smell the old man or the dog. “The top of your shanty is sticking out of the water again,” he said. “You’ll be able to go home one of these days, real soon.”

“Ya, my old house still there.” He looked up at Dahlman and wheezed a little, his eyes wicked and black and wise, blinking like bugs on his face, and then he choked and coughed and spat. “Been through seven floods, but she still stand.”

“It must be better built than it looks.”

“Your grandpa help me build it. He was a good man.” The faint enunciation of the “he” and the wheeze again. Old bastard, Dahlman thought, remembering how Gerber liked to reveal to him how much better the old man had been and the grandfather before him.

“Your grandpa and your pa used to eat carp with me. You want me to bring your missus a mess of carp?”

“No,” Dahlman said, thinking distastefully of the soft pulp-fleshed meat of the sluggish fish, thinking too he would not even eat it if it were the most superb of fish.

“You don’t like to have some, eh? The dog and me gonna have carp, eh dog?” He poked the spear at the dog, but the dog jerked away, collecting itself like some mudded skinned fish and springing back. “Yeh, he like carp guts. Gonna feed him good tonight.” Looking at Dahlman again, “Maybe I bring you some carp anyway, if I catch lots.”

Gerber drug on his hip boots, which were not his size, boots that were once Dahlman’s father’s, and which Gerber had stolen but insisted the father had given him, and were bagged and too long. He pulled himself up like some too heavy, too weighty thing of another era, and he trudged off, taking the three spears and the one gunny sack for the fish.

The dog slunk along behind.

In mid-afternoon the pacing Dahlman plunged once again out of the house, across the yard, through the muck of the cattle yard where the docile mud-splattered cattle lodged against the hot, mud-sided barn. Dahlman heard the dog whining at the edge of the water, and the dog itself was so flung with mud that it could not be seen except by its frantic movements. Dahlman thought in that moment that Gerber had teased the dog into the water or
had thrown it there, but the dog was scuttling back and forth like some half-drowned sewer rat and once or twice it waded into the water up to its knees before it retreated. There was nothing in the water but the trash and the floating, still cornstalks, and farther out the sodden black trees lodged in its length in the mud and water, the tree perhaps forty yards out from where the dog was.

The dog whined and touched the ground with its nose and pointed its muzzle excitedly over the water and walked back and forth, looking out beyond the tree.

“Where’s Gerber?” Dahlman asked no one. There was no movement anywhere.

And then he heard the sound, a slight splashing and a gargling out there in the mucky water, the water with its gray glitter like an oil slick where the sun reflected, and he saw the wooden tip of a spear floating in a slight arc and the head of the spear was beneath the water, heavier and weighted there. Twenty yards beyond the tree and well to the side the spear circled, and around it tiny ripples on the blinding water. Dahlman could see then too Gerber’s black and greasy coat riding gently on the water.

It came to him instantly that something had gone wrong, that Gerber had been cut down while plowing around in that soft mud and that he lay out there, dead, or drowning.

“Gerber,” he shouted, screeched really, for his voice was very strange. A quick, tense charge railed through him. Perhaps Gerber was indeed dead and what he had wished for several days before had come true, and that thought frightened and thrilled him. “Gerber,” he shouted again, more modulated, and then there was that gargling, snuffled sound of struggle out there beyond the trees.

“The old son of a bitch,” Dahlman said. “Goes out there and can’t make it and I have to go pull him out.” He waited as if suspended there, knowing then that he had made the decision and
he did not know why he made it, and he thought, well he would do it this once, just this one time, because . . . well . . . he was young and Gerber did not have long to live anyway. His heart was beating very fast. “Gerber,” he shouted. “Come out of there. Come out, you hear!”

He could see the slight motion, a swaying in the water near the sodden clump of oiled coat, and the ripples of light on that sheen of water. The dog beside Dahlman turned in frantic circles and whined and muzzled towards the water, but the older dread held him back.

Dahlman swore. He threw down the empty basket he carried and waded out. The slope of the land was very gradual, and he could see the stubs of cornstalks at intervals sticking through the water surface. The earth beneath was soft so that Dahlman sank to his ankles with each step. Gradually, as it deepened, he could feel the slide of water into his overshoes, about his feet and socks. It became a struggle to move as his overshoes filled.

“He wears the hip boots he stole from my father,” he muttered. “He wears hip boots and goes out spearing but I got to go pull him out.” He lifted his voice. “Gerber, get out of there! Get out, you hear me!” And more softly, “Probably nothing wrong with him anyway; probably down in the mud scraping around for gar.” And saying it he knew that there was within him a rare excitement as he had never felt before, sharp and good.

He could count the old corn ridges in the mudded water, each ridge with its rotting but still hard rows of stalks three feet and six inches from the next. He measured the distance that way for thirty rows. The water deepened around the drifted tree and he knew well the little dip the land took there and he thought it had been the best land and the tree was on it now and it would have to be pulled away, perhaps cut up first so the tractor could handle the parts to be dragged out.

Gerber lay upon the water. His legs were clumped into the mud and his body was bent forward at the hips and his upper trunk floated easily. His coat spread out on the water like some scab on that vast dirty and putrid shining sore. Dahlman pulled himself out of the sucking mud step by step the last few yards to Gerber’s side.

“Come on up,” he said, pulling at the shoulders that moved like meal, wet and sticky from the old grease and new mud on the old man. Gerber slid down, out of Dahlman’s grasp, the water-filled boots bending and pulling him, and Dahlman struggled to hold him erect. Gerber still held the used polished spear at mid-shaft and the tip was dug into the mud beside his boots.

“Come up,” Dahlman said again, propping his legs beneath the old man’s belly. The face was slimed with mud, and beneath that mud was a grayness such as one sees on the skin of animal carcasses, but there was a froth of bubbles on the old man’s chin. Dahlman unwound Gerber’s fingers from around the spear shaft and he tried to hoist the carcass upon his shoulders but the water and mud were too heavy and all he could do was to prop one arm of Gerber’s around his own shoulders and drag him along.

“Come on, damn you,” he said. The water was hip deep and the mud was very soft and he sank to his ankles with each step, and it was heavy labor. His overshoes were filled with water and the weight of them alone was enough to stagger anyone plowing as he did through mud and stumbling over cornstalks, but to carry a man too was an agony. He felt the sweat claw down his cheeks and back and he was very hot and he said, “Come on, damn you, old man, come on.” He pulled the gray-faced, ancient creature, foul-smelling if Dahlman could have smelled then, but Dahlman’s mouth was gasping breath, he pulled the ugly lump through the ugly sun-bright water and his boots made heavy sodden squirching sounds. He stumbled near the tree and fell and the weight of
the old man and the water-soaked clothing all came down onto his back and he fell into the water and he had the taste of foulness and that mud-slime. He could not stand up and he struggled to his knees through an eternity of trying to lift his head and it was as if all the weight of the old man had fallen upon his neck. He reached forward clutching at the horizontal-laying trunk of the tree and fingernailed the roughness of the old and rotting bark and finally his head reached air against the old man’s weight. He snarled a curse but it was lost in the bubbles in the water as his head disappeared and reappeared again, rat-like, like Gerber’s ashen head, and he clawed his way up the back of the tree trunk trying to stand and finally he did stand. The mud was in his eyes and nose and ears and he could not really see or hear and he jerked angrily the ungiving weight of Gerber higher and the unbalance shoved him over. He clutched the tree for support again and he felt the cold and writhing foreign desperate aliveness, as if he had touched something always foul and evil, like the living, writhing guts of a sow, and there was a flash and the stab into his upper arm and the roiling angry cluster fighting him and the stab again lower down. His hand unclutched the snake and he heard the snapping whirr then, tiny, like a child’s toy, and the elongated flash like the snap of a rubber band or the cracking jump of a mousetrap, so quick and hitting him again. Every moment had stretched itself and time suspended as he watched with cold uncomprehension, and his first thought was, unbelievingly, the snake is so small. The snake, slender, less than two feet long, slid backward along the tree trunk top, coiling and retreating along the bark where it had been as long as it had found refuge there, the snake afraid and infuriated too at that violation, dreading the water and rolling with the floating tree trunk to the middle of the farmer’s field, there to be gripped by the hard mud hand. Dahlman was frozen there, his hand still stretched out and he looked at the snake in
unblinking concentration. It was a timber rattler, he thought clinically, detachedly, a snake which never grows big and which frequents the low and weedy spots of ground, a rattler a couple of years old, dark and mottled and mad with hatred and disturbance and vengeance. He watched the snake retreat up to the bark-bare broken stub of limb where it could retreat no farther, and it coiled, still trying to retreat but not able to.