By Brad Tice

Lee Garvis remembered the exact mile marker of the weigh station and rest stop, its trucks lined up like cigarette cartons behind a low concrete building — and he remembered the trails in the woods behind the place where men wandered into underbrush and found each other. What he had not remembered, forgot in fact, was to use a condom. He had recalled the half-dollar Trojan in the folds of his wallet as he was leaving, the woods around him loud with bird calls, the trails wet from a rain the night before — his footprints rising up from the spongy mud underfoot like a rising memory of his passing through. He had cussed himself. Kicked at the wild Indian Pink growing next to his parked truck. Not smart, he said to himself, as he pulled his weight into the cab of his Chevy.

He leaned out the truck window and caught the breeze from the river on his face, inhaled its suggestion of pinesap and river mud, noting how little the area had changed since last he’d seen it. The sight of his great aunt Helen’s garden freshly tilled, the boathouse and dock, and the wide view of the Tennessee River were still familiar. The thick air of the place worked on the body like quick-drying amber, arresting momentum until you were encased in the gold of it, the Tennessee not seeming to budge an inch through the Alabama landscape.

As he rounded the corner of his great-aunt and uncle’s house, which bedded itself into the rise of land overlooking the river, the wind beleaguered a rain of needles from the trees above. He parked his truck next to Helen’s sculpture garden and, stepping out into sunlight and the redolence of evergreens, arched his back to loosen the muscles that had tensed in the drive. Beside him twisted flutes of driftwood — cast as though the river had tried to mold their rigid natures into a state closer to its own — rose at odd angles. He ran a thumb along the grooves Helen had painstakingly chiseled and remembered watching her, years ago, as the wood chipped under a screwdriver’s edge, becoming the delicate wrist of a young girl, a tendon at the back of a knee. The names for each came easily to him — Samson and Delilah, Lot’s Wife, Jason and the Dragon, Behemoth. Lee scratched at the stubble on his face and put his weight against the trunk of Goliath, the wood up-ended and standing a good six inches above his head.

He told himself it would be fine. That he was okay. After all, he had been the man. The one on top. He remembered the guy — a ponytail pulled through the back of his cap, scar across his navel. The stranger hadn’t demanded any protection. Now that it was over — done with again — Lee couldn’t even recall the slightest tug of desire. He tried to put the matter out of his mind.

Lee spotted Troy and Helen a few yards from the dock sitting next to the prickly pear beds along the bank. Across the river, the flash of skeets against the blue sky was followed by the report of a rifle. The orange discs shattered before dropping into the river. Helen and Troy’s neighbor, Curtis Rayfield, hollered from the opposite bank — his Labradors barking alongside him.

As Lee descended the slope, Helen shouted a greeting. “Boy, what the hell are you doing here? Troy said you weren’t coming down for another week.” Troy looked up from his labor on the trotlines.

Helen was seated upright in a hammock strung between two pines, swinging it with her feet. She was frail, but the kind of woman who could hide it, dressed in a yellow blouse that dipped at the neckline exposing an archipelago of liver spots. Her hair was wild and unkempt and her pale-gray eyes caught the light off the river in a way that made them look distracted, yet oddly arresting.

“I decided to come down early. Get settled in,” he said.

“Can’t wait to start nettling me, sure as the world. Well, come here.”

Lee embraced his great-aunt and allowed her to plant a red stain of lipstick on his cheek.

“Nettle, my ass. I’m here for the sport and the women.” Lee fingered the dry wisps of his aunt’s hair, the tight curls of her perm having loosened and gone limp. “Speaking of which, where’s the gorgeous lady I remember?”

Helen pulled away, swatting at his hands. “You’re too young to remember any gorgeous lady that inhabited this body. And if you’re here for women, you picked the wrong county. Nothing but whores and Bible-thumpers this end of the river. You catch the clap or you catch the spirit. Take your pick.”

“I’m too slick for that.” Lee turned to face his great-uncle. “Troy. How’s the fishing?”

“Can’t complain. Putting food on the table.”

Troy was also getting on in years, but you could hardly tell by the looks of him. His hair, bone-white from decades in the sun, contrasted sharply with his skin. He was dressed for work in a faded denim shirt with the sleeves ripped out at the shoulders, exposing hard sinewy muscles. The picnic table was covered with the wooden racks and line Troy used for his fishing. Troy was stringing his trotlines with dead honeybees. Troy was the kind of man quick to point out a slack, untidy line. Lee remembered the first time he had ever heard about the rest stop on Highway 72, driving to Iron City with Troy when he was twelve. Troy had pointed to the thicket of sycamores and red oaks to the right of the roadway. “See those woods there? They’re inhabited by a strange species of bird. Faggot-grouse. See there’s one now.” Lee had followed his uncle’s finger toward a man in green flannel and ripped jeans, his head intent on the ground in front of him. For some reason, this memory comforted him, as if it excluded him from that place.

“If I’d known you were coming, I would’ve had something cooked,” Helen said. “I’ll go get something started. Hope you like catfish and okra, because that’s all we got.”

“Like it? Hell, you raised me on it.”

Helen turned to ascend the rise toward the house and Lee noticed how she measured her steps on the climb, unsure of gravity. He considered asking if she needed help. More likely than not he’d be cussed for his concern. During the recession of the eighties, when Lee’s father was laid off of three jobs in two years and his mother worked third shift in Corinth on the machines at the Frito Lay factory, Lee spent his summers with Helen. He was eight the first year. At the time, his mother claimed it was to get him out of her hair, but Lee now knew there were other reasons. Those years, defeat hung loose on his father like a hand-me-down coat, and his mother had wanted to spare him such things.

Helen had been in her early fifties at the time. The smoke from her Salem curled into her hair, which still had veins of black coal amidst the gray. “Here’s the rules,” she had said. “No crying or complaining, or we lock you in the well house. No swearing unless you know what the fuck the words mean. Otherwise, you’re on your own. You can swim in the river, but watch out for moccasins and leeches. I don’t know which are worse.” She had taken one look at the expression on his face and laughed. Her teeth were neat rows of dulled pearls. “We’re going to have to find you a sense of humor.” That was Helen, the tight pull of her humor getting mixed up with Lee’s memories of fishing at the Shoal, following Troy out to the dams, combing the banks with his aunt for driftwood and other valuables washed ashore. He felt he owed this place something, and that was perhaps why he was here.

Lee watched his aunt’s slow progress. Once she was out of earshot, he turned to Troy. “How is she?”

Troy pulled a handful of honeybees from the paper bag in his lap. “Comes and goes,” Troy replied. “Some days, she’s fine. Others, she has trouble remembering. Forgets names real easy. Doctor thinks it’s advancing, but it’s hard to tell how quickly.”

Lee sat in the vacated hammock and rocked himself on the balls of his feet. The wind off the river turned cool and whined through the treetops. Troy speared the bees with the hooks aligned along the racks, running the metal down through the length of their bodies so it emerged at the tails. It was Troy who had taught him how to clean the fish they caught. “Lip to asshole is how you cut them. Careful of the spines and whiskers. They’ll stick you if you don’t watch.” Lee’s eyes lingered on the yard where Helen’s wooden figures sat marooned.

He watched his great-uncle go down the line, stringing bait with a speed and deftness almost superhuman. Suddenly, Troy swore and pulled back his hand. A pinprick of blood beaded at the tip of Troy’s ring finger, the last finger on his right hand — his pinkie left in the rice paddies of Korea. Several of Troy’s fingers were capped with blackened Band-Aids. He reached into his pocket and pulled out another bandage. He let the paper fall to the ground where it caught in the spines of the prickly pears.

“What happened to your fingers, Troy?”

“Hooks.”

“You’re slipping.”

Troy grunted in response. They sat in silence as light sifted through the trees and set the river aflame. The afternoon was crowded with rifle reports and the buzz of speedboats. Troy finished with the Band-Aid and picked up where he left off, his palms dusted with pollen and the loose foil of insect wings. “How you holding up?” Lee asked, softer than he intended.

“Fine.”

“That’s good.” Lee rubbed at his thighs. “Well, I guess I better get up there and see if Helen needs any help. That’s what I’m here for, right?” He paused, but then tipped his feet forward and rose. As he walked away, Troy called out to him.

“Yeah?” Lee answered.

Troy reached up and scratched his nose. Lee noticed the skin around the Band-Aids was moist and white as fish bellies. He looked at the racks of exposed hooks beside his uncle and shivered. All those barbs turned outwards and seemingly waiting for something, like deadly question marks.

“Thanks for coming,” Troy said, returning to his lines.

*   *   *

Lee piddled around the kitchen trying to help his aunt with supper, picking up vegetables from the counter and then laying them down again. He willed himself to put the events of earlier that day out of his head. It didn’t matter, he told himself. Finally, he grabbed a beer from the fridge, settled on a barstool and began spinning lances of okra between his fingers. He watched Helen take a tub of Crisco and ladle hunks of white grease into a skillet.

“You found you a job yet? Your mother was telling me you graduated at the top of your class.”

“No, ma’am. Still looking.”

“Well, you’re not going to find work down here looking after my forgetful ass.”

“I’m holding out for management.”

“Management, shit. You found you a girl yet?”

“No, ma’am. Still looking.”

“I was sorry to hear about you and Donna. You need you a good woman. Light a fire under you.”

“One thing at a time.” Four months ago in December, Lee finished a degree in drafting at a trade school in Hohenwald and came back to his hometown in search of a job. After two months of hunting, Lee learned the job market in Minor Hill had long dried up.

Then Lee got the phone call from Troy down in Alabama. Helen had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s after losing her way in a local Rite Aid. She was found by a stock boy in the cosmetics isle painting her fingernails with lipstick. She couldn’t tell anyone her name or who her people were. Her doctor had prescribed meds, but they only delayed the inevitable. Troy and Helen didn’t have much money saved up; certainly not enough for Troy to stop working his trotlines or to hire a nurse, and when he was out on the river, there was nobody to look after Helen. Troy didn’t fancy the idea of a male nurse taking care of his wife, had told Lee as much when he called, even if they were blood, but Lee was the only one in the family with time on his hands. “Lord, I wish Helen had adopted kids,” Lee’s mother said before he left. “It broke your aunt’s heart when the doctors told her she was barren. Bad news seems the only news this family gets.”

“I can’t get over you being here, Lee.” Helen scooted around the kitchen, removing dishes from cupboards. She poured flour into a mixing bowl and cracked an egg into another. “Of course, I wish it were under different circumstances. I told Troy I didn’t need any help. If I wander off and drown in the river it’s my own damn fault. Probably better than I deserve.”

“Troy had his reservations as I understand. Haven’t changed your minds?”

Helen hands fluttered about her. “I’m glad it’s you. I don’t like the idea of strangers in my house.”

Lee watched his aunt take fillets of catfish and dip them into the raw egg. As she worked, Helen hummed a song that seemed familiar to Lee, although he couldn’t place it.

“What the hell did I do with the salt? Troy must have run off with it.” Helen opened and slammed several cabinet doors before Lee pointed to the salt shaker beside the dish of butter on the counter.

“It’s right there, Helen. Where you put it.”

“Well, shit. If it had been a snake, it would have bit me.” She turned to him and smirked. “The question is, was that the Alzheimer’s or just plain forgetfulness?”

Lee scratched the back of his neck and said nothing.

Helen picked up the shaker and began waving it over the fillets. “Everyone around here has become so damn serious. Doctors especially, talking about brain tangles and plaques and neuro-transformers.”

Lee had to admit, the idea of coming to his aunt’s rescue made him feel heroic, although he knew it also had something to do with his need to get away from routine — going out everyday to look for a job that wasn’t there and getting drunk every night with old friends from high school. What he had expected to find down here was a wreck, but as far as Lee could tell, Helen was easily treading the waters of this thing. He was left wondering what was expected of him.

“Lee, will you get some ice out of the freezer?”

Lee pushed himself away from the bar. When he opened the ice box, amid the Ziploc bags of frozen vegetables and meat, he found an empty mayonnaise jar with its label peeled, and inside, a baby cottonmouth coiled and frozen.

“Helen! What the hell is this?” Lee asked, taking out the chilled jar and shaking it, the frozen snake ringing against the sides.

His aunt laughed. “That’s my pet, Aristophanes.”

“Do you treat all your pets this way?”

Helen turned and began dropping pieces of chopped okra into the flour. “I’ve hated snakes since I was sixteen. A couple mornings ago, I found Aristophanes poking around my azaleas. He was so tiny, I didn’t have the heart to kill him, but I can’t abide snakes near my home. So, I got him into the jar there and stuck him in the freezer.”

“You’re a strange old bird,” Lee replied.

“That’s what the doctors say. Say I’ll be getting stranger too. I doubt you’ll be able to tell a difference.” She smiled, a smudge of flour dotting the side of her nose. “It’s a Greek name, you know. Aristophanes. I thought it was appropriate seeing as mine and Troy’s names are such a coincidence.”

Lee’s brow furrowed and he opened his mouth to ask a question, but nothing surfaced. Seeing this, Helen continued. “Don’t they teach you anything in school anymore? Helen and Troy. Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.”

Lee shook his head. “I went to a trade school. Remember?”

Helen took a spatula and turned the fish, the oil in the pan sizzling and popping. “Daddy read me those stories when I was little,” she said.

Lee gave up trying to find something to do and went to look around the house. The front rooms, which included the kitchen and the sitting room, got most of the light. The rest of the house, built into the hillside, remained cavernous and dark. Lee had summered here every year until he was eighteen. Once he started school, his trips had become infrequent. Little had changed though. There were still the haphazard arrays of old soda bottles, arrowheads, mussel shells — all the rummage Helen collected from the river. In the corners of the living room stood more of the driftwood carvings. Helen had made quite a name for herself in Morgan County with her sculptures of religious scenes — Nativities, Gethsemanes, the fiery near-demise of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Moses stood in the corner with a length of snake held over his head. Lee had found the serpent years ago. Helen had sent him to the river’s edge and he brought back seven sticks before she agreed on one. She had carefully examined each, turning them over in her hands before rejecting and eventually accepting the one she wanted. “Now, this one,” she said, holding up the twisted wood that looked as if it had been wrung in the hands of a sinner. “This one’s a serpent.”

From the hallway leading to the back bedrooms came the purr of the aquarium, which rinsed the surrounding walls in a sickly luminescence. The thing needed cleaning. It smelled rank, the glass layered with a thin film of algae. Behind the green curtain vague shadows of fish darted about in unison. When his cousin, Sal, used to visit from North Carolina, where his father worked as an air force captain, the aquarium had been their favorite distraction. Sal, who was older than Lee by seven years, had sat tapping the glass with his younger cousin beside him. They watched the schools shoot like storms of silver through the plastic reefs. “Their brains aren’t much bigger than your dick,” his cousin had said. They sat in the hallway with their legs touching, the hair on Sal’s leg tickling his own, making Lee sweaty and nervous. Lee had known they were not supposed to stress the fish, that Helen would wear them out if she knew, but he had said nothing to his cousin.

Helen’s voice came to him from the kitchen. “It’s ready, Paris.”

“Lee.”

“What?”

“I’m not Paris, Aunt Helen. It’s me, Lee. Paris is a city in France.”

“I know who you are, boy. Now come in here and get your catfish before it remembers it’s supposed to be in the river.”

Part Two

Lee put his things in the guest bedroom, the same room he had occupied in his youth, and for the first couple of days he watched his aunt like a dark sky in summer. Coming down, he had half expected to find his aunt’s eyes milked of all recognition, but she remained the same aunt he remembered — somewhat forgetful, but nothing to write home about. He felt disappointed, having pictured the two of them sitting on the dock, him telling her stories, filling in the pocked corners of her mind. With him underfoot, Helen became frustrated. “For God’s sake, where do you think you are? The Smithsonian? I can’t turn around without you ogling me. Get out of here. I’ll call you if I need anything.”

Later that same night, Lee parked his pickup in behind the roadside public restrooms, out of sight of the highway. When he opened his truck door and jumped down, gravel crunched under the soles of his boots and he could hear the hum of the telephone wires. He looked around at the cars in the lot, some empty, some inhabited with men he avoided making eye contact with. He grabbed his back pocket, making certain of his wallet before heading into the adjacent woods.

He waited for his eyes to adjust and then followed some well-worn paths through the snarl of briars and sumac that grew all around. He could hear the pitch of frogs hidden in the trees, and somewhere off to his left a small creek babbled. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. He spotted them among the trees — vague, shadowy silhouettes. Some of the men hid what they were doing behind stands of brush, the clamor of what they were engaged in like the calls of strange beasts. Others were more flagrant, wanting him to watch. The trails made a circuit through the area, winding in and out of the trees. He was nearly down to the creek when he spotted the man.

The man was alone, leaned up against a sycamore, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Lee couldn’t see the man’s features, but he was tall, wearing a shirt that was open down the front, a camouflage hat with a fish hook glinting on the bill. Lee stared the man down as he passed, nodding his head slightly. He heard the man leave his spot by the tree and follow him off the path into the thick, concealing woods.

Lee found a small clearing littered with condom wrappers where ferns fingered the bottoms of his jeans. In the weak starlight, Lee was able to see that the man was older than he had thought. He had brassy bleached hair that emerged in tufts from under his cap. His hands, when he took them out of his pockets, were large and chapped.

“Hey,” the guy said.

“This work for you?” Lee indicated the small break in the trees where they were standing.

“Yeah.” The guy came closer, letting his shirt drop to the ground. “You got any rubbers?”

“No,” he said.

“That’s okay. Just don’t come inside me.”

The man unbuckled the front of his jeans and dropped them to the ground, his legs two thin matchsticks. He turned his back to Lee and bent over, grabbing the trunk of a small tree in front of him. Lee undid his own pants and spit into his palm.

Once Lee was inside him, the man began breathing sharp and fast. Lee ran his hands along the other’s spine, noting each hard knob of bone. Lee pushed harder and the guy began to moan, the white space of the guy’s thin back like a canvas he could fill with design. The man’s sweat was on his arm and Lee rubbed it against his shirt, not liking the feel of it.

Afterwards, he left without saying anything, only looking back once to see the man struggling with his jeans while swatting at the ferns in search of his shirt. He left feeling hollowed out. Around him the night was huge and alien, and he thought for a moment about what it would be like to be alone in the world—so alone as to half expect to meet your own image on some road, looking right at you in expectation. It was always like this afterwards. The need in him slacked and everything he knew pushed back. He liked the sensation of numbness, the calm. It was a moment in which he could almost convince himself that he would never come back, never need this again. But he knew that thing inside him was already picking up the scent of his escape, loping after him in the dark.

When he came in, Helen and Troy were curled on the couch watching Leno. “You have fun tonight?” Helen asked. Lee nodded and collapsed into a wicker chair in front of the TV. Troy had his arm slung over the back of the couch, his hand lightly touching Helen’s shoulder.

“Where’d you go?”

“The Slough.”

Troy looked over at Lee. “You see Curtis’s girl there? She’s waitressing now. ”

“I don’t think so.”

Lee watched the two of them — Helen fitted into Troy’s side as if they were two pieces of the same machine. Sixty-eight years they had been together — impossible to imagine, he thought. Outside in the distance, he could hear the approach of thunder — the low rumble seeming to slide over the house. He felt strangely tense. Equipped. The glass in the windows rattled. He heard the rain come over, heavy and loud, as he knew it would.

*   *   *

Weeks passed without event. The summer lost its initial luster, the green going dull around the edges. Lee sat on the docks and watched skims of pollen drift by, which were the only signs that the river moved at all. By the middle of June, he had yet to notice any condition in his aunt other than arthritis. She went to the doctor regularly and tried to convince everyone she was fine by telling long stories about the past. Throughout all of this, Aristophanes sat in the freezer. Lee thought eventually the serpent would become unremarkable, like so many things in life, but every time he went for ice or chicken liver to fish with, there he sat in his frost-patterned glass, coiled into a tangle that was almost archaic, like some design from a coat-of-arms or family crest.

“Helen, why the hell don’t you get rid of this thing?” Lee took the jar and shook it in his aunt’s direction.

“I like having him around.” Helen was seated at the CB table in the den, turning the dials through static in search of Troy out on the water.

Lee put the snake back in the freezer and shut it. He imagined the interior going dark. “That thing gives me the willies.”

Helen continued to ride channels on the CB, so Lee poured himself a cup of coffee. “This is Sitting Duck calling Worthless-Piece-of-Ass. Come in Piece-of-Ass.”

Lee took a seat across from Helen. Outside, the shadow of the cedar shielded the sitting room from the day’s heat, but beyond its reach the yard parched in the Alabama sunlight. Not a good day for fishing, Lee thought, searching his brain for some alternative. He thought about the rest stop and that old desire stiffened inside him. Lee tried to ignore it.

“This is Piece-of-Ass.”

Helen’s lips stretched into a smirk. “Troy. How’s the fishing going?”

“It’s going. What do you want?”

Helen’s smirk drooped for a moment. “Can’t a wife check in on her husband every once in a while?” The CB crackled and whined. Helen’s head cocked to one side, her eyes searching for Troy in the distance. “What do you want for lunch, Troy?”

“Hell, I don’t know.”

“Fish it is then. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

“Will do.”

After Troy clicked off, Helen laid down the mic. On the river, a paddling of mallards bobbed around the dock, their heads going under periodically in search of rations. The only male, his feathers like greased metal, kept nipping at the females. Growing up, Lee had wondered why it was the males who were most colorful — iridescent almost. Helen said it was so they could show their asses, a trait common to men irregardless of species.

“Lee, you little shit, do you remember the time you chucked a rock at that duck and killed it?”

“I didn’t kill it.”

“Might as well have. It was paralyzed on its right side. All it did for the next five hours was flap around in a circle. Pitiful sight.” Helen propped her chin on her hand, the skin of her wrist waxy in the light from outside. “Snapping turtles got it. Once it wore itself out, they came up from the bottom and drug it under.”

Lee smiled into his coffee. “Troy wore me out for that one. I don’t think I’ve picked up a rock since.”

“You deserved it.”

“You should talk. Or do I need to drag your pet out of the freezer again?”

“I’ll have you know, in my younger days I was a saint among animals. Hell, I was a goddamn snake charmer.”

“I didn’t think you liked snakes.”

“I don’t.” With her fingernail Helen scratched at the tablecloth. “I never told you much about your great grand-daddy. He was a schoolmaster in this area in the 30s. The Depression had everyone over a barrel. For a week one time, we ate nothing but greens Mama picked wild. Gave your grandmother and me the shits. Daddy taught everything, all grades, in a one-room school house. He loved literature. Especially the epic stories. Heroes, maidens, vengeful gods. He was a religious man, crazy religious, but it wasn’t the message he cared for. He loved…” Here Helen paused, searching for the word she wanted. “The bigness of the thing — the spirit that fills you, as you’ve probably heard people say. Thought it made him a bigger man. Every Sunday, he took us down to that church off Bumpass Creek. You know which one I’m talking about?”

“Yeah, in the hollow there. Aren’t they serpent handlers?”

“Yes, sir. They were. Not anymore. But I remember the first time Daddy put a serpent into my arms. Led me to the front of the church before God and everybody. Then Daddy bent down and pulled a copperhead from this box, as careless as if it were yarn, and held it out to me. I don’t think I was much older than fourteen.”

“What did you do?”

“I took it. Mama nearly died when she saw me, but she never went against Daddy. Snakes never bothered me. Many in the congregation, including my Daddy, were bit. One person even died. But I just held them. They’d wrap around my wrist, nose through my sleeves, but they never struck. They’re warm, you know.”

“What?”

“The snakes. They’re warm to the touch. That was a surprise. I had expected them to be cold.” Helen pushed back her seat. “Anyway, I need to get lunch started. Can’t sit here yammering all day. Would you go out back and get a tomato from the garden?” She shuffled into the kitchen, her movements slow, and Lee could hear the banging of pans. He tried to picture Helen as a young girl, her hair in braids, socks falling down around her ankles, all elbows and knees. He tried to put a serpent into the hand of that girl, just like Moses wielding the living staff, but he couldn’t.

“So what happened to your Daddy?” Lee yelled.

“He left eventually. Just up and disappeared. I’m sure he had big ideas. Thought that since he could turn the head of some loose woman, he was some kinda man…Mama nearly died. Who knows what happened to him. All these years I’ve thought that one day I’d turn over a stone and there he’d be.”

“I doubt you’d recognize him now.”

“Some things you don’t forget.”

*   *   *

Toward the end of August, Lee was awakened in the middle of the night by Troy. He rose from sleep as if he were coming up out of deep water, his weariness wetting him and weighing him down. He tried to focus on the outline of his uncle’s face.

“Troy, what’s wrong?”

“Helen’s gone.” Troy said, a hint of desperation creeping into his voice. “I woke up and she wasn’t in bed and she’s not in the house. We have to find her before she hurts herself. Hurry!”

Troy darted out of the room. Feeling around on the floor for his shoes, Lee felt lopsided, his head tilting, and twice he had to use the floor as leverage. Troy returned with a set of flashlights and handed one to Lee. He flipped the switch to make sure it worked and then followed Troy outside.

“Helen!” Troy yelled. He clutched Lee’s arm, getting his attention.

“You head down the bank to the left and I’ll take the right.” Before Lee could respond, Troy was off. Lee moved to the left yelling Helen’s name, trying to navigate the landscape.

Helen had taken a turn for the worse in July after a spell of bladder infections. Some days she was sharp as tackle, recalling childhood transgressions even Lee couldn’t remember committing. Other days her eyes were tar pits in which most things remained stuck. However, nothing like this had happened before. Lee had slowly begun to take over the duties of the house — charring the dinners and keeping an eye on Helen as she began to slip in and out of her states. A nurse at Stoneybrook had given him tips: make sure she eats, poor nutrition would make her listless and agitated; secure the throw rugs in the bathroom to prevent spills; give her encouragement and support, but be firm about boundaries. On mornings when she woke confused, following after Troy like a child as he prepared to leave, Lee stepped in and brushed her hair, made her take her pills, covered her when she was careless with the robe, and laid out clothes for her. He made her open her mouth so he could put in her teeth, the false pearls slipping over her naked gums. He told Helen what he was doing at each step. Troy left of a morning with his head down, careful to shut the blinds as he left.

Lee had seen this night coming, yet he still felt unprepared for it. As he stumbled among the trees, every shadow took on a human shape. Once his eyes acclimated to the dark he noticed something moving across the muddy banks of the river. Lee headed toward the figure, and as he drew near he recognized his aunt. He aimed the flashlight in her direction and saw her go rigid.

“Helen, are you all right? Are you hur ”

Lee’s words were thrown from his face by the slap Helen’s hand delivered to his cheek. Lee was sent wheeling and Helen drew back in the mud like a bog cat.

“Cocksucker!” she spat.

“Helen?”

“You stay away from me. I told Mama I wasn’t letting you back in, and I meant it.” The flashlight, which was sent spinning by the blow to Lee’s head, embedded itself in the mud with the light’s beam angled up so that it caught the underside of Helen’s face. Her hands shook, and her voice hissed through her throat.

“Helen, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s me, Lee.” Lee held up his palms as a show of defenselessness. Helen backed further into the river, wetting her nightgown so that it clung to her. Lee noticed how small she was, her legs nothing more than dried cane. The mud sucking at her feet threatened to topple her.

“How dare you come back now?” Helen screamed. Lee could no longer see his aunt’s face. He turned his head and yelled.

“Troy! She’s over here!”

Troy had already heard the racket and came crashing through the trees. Breathless and relieved, he took Helen in his arms. She fell into them crying. “Troy! Troy, where did you go? I couldn’t find you.” Troy made soft shushing sounds, and started leading her back toward the house.

Lee tried to follow, but Helen rounded on him. “No! Don’t let him come, Troy. Fucker’s not getting into my house. He left me and my sisters to starve.” Helen’s nightgown, torn and wet at the hem, hung from her bones, and the skin of her legs was striped with scratches and cuts. When she stepped into the light, he noticed she was barefoot and her footsteps left traces of blood in the muck, bright and ludicrous. But her eyes, Lee thought, rabid and cruel, were the worst of all.

“Helen, it’s me. It’s Lee.”

Helen turned her back to him. Lee looked to Troy for help, unable even to speak, but Troy simply motioned for him to hang back and turned Helen toward the house. As they disappeared into the trees, Lee was left alone on the river, standing in a puddle of light surrounded by the dark. He could hear motion — the slap of water, wind, the screech of an owl downstream — and he felt a quiver run down his spine. The owl’s cry was like a woman grieving, the loneliest sound he had ever heard. He looked around, trying to discern some landmark or familiar sight, but he didn’t recognize a thing.

*   *   *

Lee was pointed home toward Minor Hill, away from the river, when he turned into the rest stop. He searched the lot for Highway Patrol offices, but seeing none, pulled his truck into the gravel. igh There were only a handful of vehicles — mostly semis, a few trucks. The afternoon had been a scorcher, and as evening approached, the day’s heat was just now beginning to lift itself off the earth. Lee cut the engine and sat in the sudden quiet. Under the hood the engine ticked. The edge of the woods throbbed with the sound of locusts, and the late afternoon light angling through the treetops cast long, twisted shadows into the wood. Lee looked around. Several of the semis’ interior lights flashed on and off—a signal that the trucks’ occupants were willing for a friend. Lee watched as their silhouettes focused—the need in them flaring briefly before sputtering back out.

He ignored them.

The day had been too hot. Lee knew the woods would be deserted. So when Lee eased open the truck door and jumped out, he headed toward the concrete restrooms in back of the rest stop, their entrances guarded by the dull hum of Coke machines. The fluorescent lamps attached above the doors had switched on, already attracting life — swarms of gnats seemingly born from the glass tubes’ heat. A luna moth, large as Lee’s fist, beat itself against the wedge of lighted concrete. He stopped and listened to the ping of the moth’s body against the frosted glass, the interiors of the truck cabs continuing to light on and off like fireflies.

For a moment he thought of turning around, getting back into his truck and leaving. He even shifted the weight of his feet in that direction. Then he remembered the house, and imagined pulling up outside as the windows winked on low to the ground — making the place look like a bunker built against something horrible that could happen. He pictured Helen and Troy inside — not living, but used up. Nothing more than mannequins someone placed in the spots where life used to take place.

Lee reached for the handle of the rest room door. Inside, the smell of piss and disinfectant were strong. The only sound was the noise of a broken urinal continuously cycling. The floor around the drains was wet and streaked with mud from outside. Lee made a walk through, checking each stall, but they were empty. Nothing there but the memory of requests — graffiti penned or carved into the lime green wood.

The silence of the place bothered him. He recalled the first time he had been to the rest stop. It had been September, the leaves still clinging to the trees. He was seventeen then, and he had driven down from Minor Hill petrified. Shaking like a girl the entire way. He remembered the close smell of the concrete, the room’s dim fixtures filled with the shadows of dead bugs. He remembered the man in the stall, the way the man looked at him, motioning him inside.

The man had spit on his cock before sticking it in him, and the pain of it had made Lee’s eyes water. But then, afterwards, there had been what Lee could only describe as release. That feeling stayed with him for a while. But only for a while. That was the first and last time he had ever taken it from a man. He preferred to stand.

Lee heard someone approaching from outside and turned in time to see a young man about his age enter the bathroom. The young man nodded when he saw Lee. “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Not much.” Lee spoke into his shoulder, barely above a mumble.

The young man was not attractive. He had bad posture and his face seemed prone to oily eruptions of acne, but he walked with a kind of entitlement. He came further into the room, then paused and seemed to squint. “Hey, is your name Lee?”

Lee’s heart took a dive for his bowels. He shook his head and tried to walk past the guy, but the young man grabbed the sleeve of his shirt.

“Yeah, you’re Lee Garvis. You remember me? Caleb Warren. We went to high school together. Yeah, you were on the football team. Dated that girl. What’s-her-name? Donna.”

“Excuse me.” Lee tried to push past, but Caleb stepped in front of him so that he was between Lee and the door. He did remember Caleb — a redneck from Deerfield whose laughter had always been a little too hysterical. The whole Warren clan had a reputation of bad blood — their eyes seeming to carry the genetic precursors to their later, fated incarcerations.

“Hold on. No need to bolt. I ain’t going to tell anybody you were here. You are here, right?”

Lee shook his head, even though he knew that did nothing to save him.

“Well, I’d ask what you’ve been up to, but I guess I already know.” Caleb’s shoulders jerked spastically, the skin of his face clinching at the flinty chips of his eyes. He moved his hand from Lee’s arm to his chest, and Lee was sure Caleb would hear the knocking going on inside.

“You’re in my way,” he said.

Caleb’s hand darted to the front of Lee’s jeans causing Lee to jerk back, startled, his jeans unbuttoned in the process. Caleb stood at arm’s length as Lee glared at him, the light from the partially closed door casting Caleb’s face in shadow, making it hard to see the expression on his face. “Last I heard you were practically married. Couldn’t get it up with her, I bet. Why don’t you let me give it a try?”

Caleb stepped forward and grabbed Lee’s crotch, his knees already bending. Lee shoved and Caleb collapsed onto the slick floor as Lee shot out of the bathroom. He raced toward his truck with his head down, forgetting to button his jeans until he was nearly halfway across the lot. He heard Caleb yelling from the restroom. “Hey, man. What’s your problem?” But he didn’t look back. Didn’t even turn his head to see if the men in the trucks were watching. His tires screeched as he pulled onto the highway. Ahead of him was nothing but darkness. He remembered to switch on the truck’s lights and their beams pushed back against what was ahead of him.

Part Three

After Helen’s flight, several shards of glass were removed from her feet, and while they were bound, she laid in bed and read magazines — McCall’s and Southern Living. Once she was able to hobble about, Helen took to sitting at the CB table during the day, framed in squares of mid-morning light, conversing on the citizens’ band. It was Helen’s new obsession of late, and she spent hours on the radio, chatting with truckers, boaters, anyone who would listen. She even had a new handle: Wanderer. A bit of her old humor Lee recognized but didn’t really appreciate. What struck Lee was how she was a different person every time she turned it on, at times flirting with some junior cop, at others, openly cringing at the raw banter of the truckers on Highway 72.

That night on the river had changed all of them. Although he had not mentioned it, Lee felt Troy should have defended him somehow. But he had turned and walked off with Helen, leaving Lee stranded, wondering if it were safe to return. In Lee’s mind, Troy had abandoned him, and for Troy’s part, he seemed to always look sideways at Lee now. Taking stock and measurement of the young man, but for what, Lee couldn’t say. It was as if Helen’s sickness had become contagious, and they were losing each other — the madness spilling over to wet each of them in its turn. Helen even pulled Lee aside one night. “You know, Troy told me about what happened that night on the river. What I said to you. I’m sorry for that. Disease or no, that was wrong.” Helen paused, her hands nestled under her ribs. “I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

“Don’t worry about it. You were out of your head.”

Helen rubbed her eyes. “Out of my head,” she repeated. “That’s a way to put it.”

On her good days, when she grew tired of the CB, Helen continued her sculpting in the yard, and the sound of her chisel tapping and splitting the wood would draw Lee, and Troy when he was home, out into the yard to keep an eye on her. They pulled up lawn chairs and watched as shapes began to form under Helen’s hand. Troy had taken Helen’s chip knives, but she made do with the adzes and chisels she had left, her hands guiding the tools. Wood chips rained into her hair and onto her bandaged feet. She balanced the adze and mallet in her fists, searching for the form under the weather-rubbed wood. She was working on a new piece: Ganymede: The Waterbearer.

“My sign, of course,” she told them.

“The face looks kinda fruity if you ask me,” Troy said. He took a sip of his Coors and then spit it into the grass. “Beer’s hot.”

“Ganymede was the most beautiful boy in Greece. So beautiful, the gods themselves took him up into heaven and made him immortal.”

“Still sounds kinda faggoty,” Lee said, and he smiled to hear Troy laugh beside him.

“What do you all know about it? Nothing about nothing.”

Helen was working on the neck, at the spot just below the Adam’s apple where the skin dipped into the collar. She took her time on the thin bones and curves, often stopping and stepping back with the handle of her chisel resting on her lips. The day was cooler than most, but still warm. They were weeks away from autumn when the river shrank like an earthworm in the sun. To Lee’s right, tiny jeweled hummingbirds flitted back and forth between Helen’s feeder and the branches of the cedar. He could hear the vibration of their wings distinctly from where he sat.

“You been anywhere recently, Lee?” Troy looked over at Lee and took a swig of his beer, grimacing as the lukewarm liquid hit his throat.

“Say what?”

“Where you been going? I noticed you was out a few nights this week.”

“Oh, nowhere really. Just driving around. To the Slough a few nights.”

“I hear you,” Troy said. He unbuttoned the top three buttons on his sleeve-less shirt and scratched at his chest. He leaned across the arm of his chair toward Lee and lowered his voice. “I’d appreciate it though if you told me when you were going out. So I know to keep an extra eye open.”

Lee glanced at Helen, who was hammering at the wood in order to make a plain for the chest.

“Sure. You’re right. That was stupid of me.”

Troy nodded and returned to his beer. After a few minutes, Helen cocked her head at the work she had done and grunted. “I’m having trouble seeing this thing,” she said.

Helen looked around as if trying to get her bearings. She turned slowly toward the river, swatting at the deerflies that buzzed at her ears. She stood gazing at the water as if it were going to bring something to her. Then she turned toward Lee and Troy and began to snap her fingers, pointing her arm at them.

“Lee, come over here and be my model.”

“What?”

“I need a model. I can’t find the shape to this piece of shit.” She took a swing at the wood with her hammer and the sound it made was dull and hollow.

“What do you want me to do?” Lee asked.

“Stand over there next to the cedar.” Helen pointed where she wanted him. Lee walked over and stood with his hands in his pockets, feeling self-conscious under Helen’s scrutiny. “Turn about a hair to your left,” Helen said.

“How long am I going to have to stand here?”

“Hush up. It won’t kill you. This is for art.”

“For art, huh?”

“Just do it, Lee,” Troy said with a finality Lee had not heard since he was a child. The sunlight Lee was now standing in made his back begin to sweat.

“Take your shirt off,” Helen said.

“What? I’m not taking my shirt off. I’ll blister.”

“I can’t use you as a model if you’re all covered up. Take it off.” Lee reached up and pulled his shirt over his head, his stomach pimpling in the breeze. Helen began to work, and as Lee felt the sunburn rise up along his spine, the rough lines of a torso began to rise from under the surface of the wood, like a drowned man slowly rising from deep water. Lee had always been astonished by the way such detail could come from such blunt instruments.

“Keep still,” Helen said.

“It’s a good thing I’m so beholden to you,” Lee said, swabbing at his slick back with his shirt. Lee shifted under the scrutiny of his aunt’s gaze, the way she ran her eyes up and down his body, searching out the grain and curve of his chest. It unnerved him in a way — her seeming to know him right down to the story of his skin. He was afraid of what she might read there, on his flesh — those nights in the dark, the touch of men, the anger that welled in him deep as the river. But if she could decipher any of this, she made no sign.

Troy sat still as a stump just watching them — so still a dragonfly alighted on the nub of his index finger, its wings going up and down in a mechanized rhythm. Helen continued to gouge at the half-made boy, occasionally raising her eyes toward Lee. This went on for fifteen or twenty minutes, until suddenly Helen set down her tools and walked over to where Lee was standing. She reached out and placed her hands on either side of his chest, causing Lee to jump and pull back. “Hold on,” she said, her voice throaty and strange. “I have to place you.”

She began to shift Lee’s body — forcing his right shoulder back with the pressure of her palm, arranging the position of his arms and the tilt of his head. She even loosened the stress in his shoulders with the ball of her fist. She worked her way around Lee, and Lee stood as still as he could. Even when Helen’s movements seemed to change intent, he did not move. Her hands became lighter on his skin, running over it with a patience and care. She ran the tips of her fingers around the slant of his chest, tracing the nipples, foraging into the patch of hair above his sternum.

“What are you doing, Helen?” Lee asked.

“Finding your shape.” The sides of Helen’s lips quivered and her eyes were wet and glassy. Then Helen’s finger lifted somewhat, so that it was only her nail that was touching him, and she moved her finger downward along his stomach, following the thin line of hair to his navel. The muscles in his stomach clench; his shoulders jerked. He stepped back.

“I think that’s enough art for one day.” Helen turned toward Troy, who was now standing, his beer poised in midair. Lee snatched his shirt from the grass and put it on, trying hard not to look at anyone. Troy hesitated, confusion running into his face. “Helen, come inside. Leave the boy alone.” Troy took a few steps forward and extended his hand. Helen recoiled from it, backing away until Lee had to retreat further into the yard. His arm fell to his side and a look crossed Troy’s face that Lee had never seen before.

“Helen?” Troy said. When she didn’t answer, Troy walked over to her side and took her arm. He pulled her gently toward the house. For a moment, it seemed like she would break from him, but then she began to move.

She moved slowly, looking down at herself as if she were marveling at the ingenuity of her own creation. Helen dusted her shirt with her free hand, wood shavings spinning off of her. She began singing a nursery rhyme, her voice low-pitched, but oddly tuneful. Leaves are falling. The leaves are falling down. All over Paris and all over town.

Lee was left in the yard, no longer wanting to follow. He took a deep breath. He had not realized that he was trembling. The face of Helen’s sculpture was turned away from him, and he went over to it so that it stared back at him. It was not his face, but the frame was his — the broad, declining shoulders and tapered waist. It discomforted him the way the statue twinned him — his body measured and meted out. It was as if she had created him again, and Lee couldn’t help thinking of the way Helen’s slap on the riverbank had seemed to unmake him — sent him spinning out of himself.

Later that same day, Troy pulled Lee aside after dinner. He motioned for Lee to follow him. “Come on. We need to do something.” Troy took Lee to the front door of the house and pulled a brown paper bag from his pocket. “Been meaning to do this.” He dumped the contents of the bag on the table next to the door. Lee looked down at the screws and sliding locks that lay there. As they worked they talked in whispers. Helen was in the living room watching daytime talk shows, their work lauded by the raucous sound of laughter or jeering. After the lock had been screwed into the frame, Lee nudged the bolt at the end of the chain into its groove. “You know,” Lee said. “She’s going to be able to open this.”

“I know. I’m hoping when she’s in a state she’ll have trouble with it. The noise should wake one of us.”

Lee nodded. “Might work.”

“Listen, I need you to be careful around your aunt,” Troy said. “She can be difficult in the best of times. You understand me?”

“Yeah, I understand.”

“It’s probably not a good idea for you to be too familiar around her either.” Lee caught Troy’s eye briefly before Troy looked away. “Just be careful. Helen’s not always going to know you as you.”

“Hell, I know that feeling.” Lee laughed, but the sound seemed rheumatic. Troy nodded and then moved off. Lee watched him go, Troy’s steps short and slow, his boots barely lifting from the floor, as if he was unsure of what he was walking toward — the landscape before him indefinable in line or perspective.

*****

Outside Helen’s window, a drizzle beaded the glass, and a blue, somber light reflected from the varnished surfaces of the cherry-wood furniture, Helen’s wedding gift from Troy’s people. The room smelled like the river, a mixture of mold, earth, and decay. Helen was seated on the lip of the bed with the bureau mirror behind her and to her left. She sat so still, it was difficult to tell if she were real, like a wax figure in a House of Horrors. She looked nothing like the aunt Lee remembered, the disease having stripped from her the most innocuous traces of her face. Her eyes had lost all vestige of humor or intent; the skin of her cheeks slack. Even her posture seemed curled and withdrawn, as if, having lost all sense of who she was, Helen was pulling in what was left.

Over the last few months, Lee had learned to recognize the different kinds of silence — the hush of stilled activity, the silence of nothing to say, and that other kind of quiet that settles on something gone wrong. It was the latter he had to listen for, and it was this kind of silence that brought him to the door of his aunt’s bedroom, peering in on her like she was a child up to no good. Despite the dimness of her bedroom, Lee could still discern Helen’s features, and he could tell by Helen’s expression that something was amiss. The room revealed nothing. The bed, centered against the far wall, was tiered with pillows, one on top of another, the fronts embroidered with designs of flowers and birds. Lee entered the room warily, crossing the threshold as if on a dare, but Helen didn’t acknowledge his presence. The quilt on which she sat was one Lee recalled his grandmother making. The pattern — Drunkard’s Path.

“What you up to?” Lee’s voice sounded large in the room. Helen’s shoulders hunched and her knees were pulled up under her chin. She didn’t answer at first but then she pointed toward the floor and said, “I finally caught them.”

Lee shifted his attention to where an overturned Kay King shoebox rested. He approached the bed and lowered himself onto the quilt, the springs creaking under him. Helen ran her hand back and forth over the quilt in a slow rhythm, but her eyes never left the box. He thought of the texture of his life of late — the way the air of this place pressed close about him. Growing up, he had felt this same compression in church on Sundays, his throat hung up around the bones of the preacher’s words — the bloodied wages of sin, the salt stains on the deserts outside of Gomorrah. In the winters, his mother jerked beside him in the pew, sweaty and exalted. In the summers, Helen sat rigid and calm, as if she believed one must hold down firmly on salvation and devotion. Any movement and it could be lost. He could not recall her ever being that still — except now, years later in this darkened room. He felt like he was drowning, suffocating in that same thick air.

“Helen?” Lee said.

She turned her head at the sound of her name. At first, nothing registered. Her eyes were the shallowest slicks of water on a paved highway. Then something took.

“Lee. Lee, look.” She again extended her arm in the direction of the shoebox. “I caught the niggers.”

Lee thought he misheard. “Excuse me?”

“They’re tiny, but persistent. They’re only yay big.” She indicated a length with her fingers. “They came in while I was dressing. I asked them to leave, but they wouldn’t.” Lee put his hand on his aunt’s arm. Her muscles felt like water underneath her skin. Helen’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“They even tried to climb up my leg. They’re fresh.”

Lee looked back at the box. He almost expected it to move. “You shouldn’t use that word, Helen.” Her brow furrowed. “Nevermind. Helen, there’s nothing under there.”

“Mama always said, ‘Be polite,’ but those boys tax a girl’s patience.”

Lee got up and approached the box. He reached for it, but Helen was up in an instant. She seized his arm. From under her breath came a sound Lee could only describe as a whimper. He shook her off, her nails leaving hatch marks on his skin.

“You crazy?” Helen asked. “Don’t let them out. Just leave them under there.”

“Why?”

“You’ll have to get rid of them,” Helen said. “Take them out back. Use the hammer. That seems most humane.” Lee nodded. He pulled her to her feet and turned her away from the box.

“Whatever you say, Helen.”

“Where’s Troy?”

“He’s out on the river. Why don’t you go into the kitchen and see if you can get him on the CB?”

Helen rubbed the tip of her nose.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Lee said, “and you can tell me one of your stories about how much of a rat bastard I was as a child.”

Helen stared at him, her face vacant. He wanted nothing more than to shout his name, to see if sheer volume alone could make something stick. He wanted to sit and tell her story after story of his youth, their history, but he knew somehow the stories wouldn’t be his life.

“You were a rat bastard.” Helen grinned, her gums naked and toothless. Lee blinked and then laughed, the sound rushing out of him. He wondered where her teeth had run off to.

“I have to piss,” Helen announced, reaching up to stroke Lee’s hair. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen, Paris.”

“My name’s Lee.”

She turned without answer and headed down the hallway, her bare feet slapping the stone floor. Lee stood still until he heard the whine of the CB start up. There was a click as Helen pressed the speaker button, and Lee heard her voice as it touched the snarls of frequency. “This is Wanderer coming out of…my place, I suppose. What’s the handle on that end?” What came were many names — Little Worm, Bear Cub, Roger Dodger — and Helen picked from them. “Little Worm? I hope that isn’t descriptive.” Helen chortled and then coughed.

“No ma’am. It’s ironic.”

Lee turned and caught sight of himself in Helen’s bureau mirror. Over the back was slung the length of a slip. The mirror was an antique, so old it had dulled. In its reflection, Lee thought he hardly looked real. He didn’t appear the kind of person who could scrub trails of diarrhea from the carpet, or grow used to the sight of his aunt naked — her skin slack, skin tags gathered like a crop of mushrooms at the small of her back. Lee tipped his head toward the silhouette in the glass, and the stranger in front of him nodded back. He took a step forward and as he did so his foot struck the box on the floor. He kicked and it flipped in the air, coming down several feet away. On the rug where the box had rested was a pair of black high heel shoes. The long heels scuffed, the buckles tarnished. Lee bent, picked them up, and then couldn’t think what to do with them. He retrieved the box and laid the pair inside.

In the kitchen, Helen sat in front of the CB, the tiny box picking voices out of the roiling November skies. Outside the window, the remaining leaves dropped into the river, making battalions of tiny ships. The dam upriver had curtailed the waters in recent months and the river had pulled back from its banks until the dock walked out into nothing but mud, trash, and the skeletons of wrecked trees.

Helen gripped each knob of the CB between thumb and forefinger, often confusing the radio dial for the volume dial — the voices behind the noise often raging for a moment and then lying still. “Hello, is anyone there?” Lee watched her from across the table. Shadows from the window mottled her face, transforming her expression. Lee looked at the clock on the wall. It was 3:30. Troy would be home in a matter of hours, he thought.

“I’m here.” It was a woman’s voice.

Helen’s face beamed. “Hey, honey. What’s your name?”

There was a pause. Then the voice came again. “Promise not to laugh. Right now it’s Lady Peddler.”

“Oh, girl. That’s lovely.”

“It’s alright. This is my first time on. I work for Mary Kay cosmetics. My husband got me the radio for company. The crowd on here’s kind of rough, but most of the guys are sweet underneath.” From the sound of her voice, Lee pictured a woman in her late forties. She would be portly, he thought, with a broad face and bright cheeks that made her look friendly, like someone you could count on in a crisis. But ultimately she would be unimportant. Powerless before the juggernaut of time, and she knew this. It gave her voice a kind of desperate hilarity.

“It’s a funny thing these radios,” Helen said. “They’re like those meetings people have. What do you call them? Séances. Have you ever been to a séance?” Helen pulled the microphone toward her, enclosing her body around it.

“No, Ma’am. I’m a Christian.”

“I was one of those once.”

Lee sat watching his aunt, wondering how a word like séance got through the murk, but his name got mixed up with foreign cities. It angered him sometimes. Made him speak too curt, or jerk her up from chairs. But this wasn’t often. He thought about what it meant to care for someone — what that demanded.

Lee was eighteen when Helen found him in the boathouse with a rope around his neck. He had looped the thing over the rafters and stood perched on a two-by-four between two sawhorses. He had left no note. He had stood there, the blue and white fibers scratchy against his neck, his blood hot in his hands. He had counted the change in his pocket — thirty-two cents. He had told his God that he was fucking off, and then he had asked Him to push.

When Helen found him, she climbed up and took the rope away. She pulled him off the now harmless edge and led him to the house. He did not resist. He did not speak. She took him to his bed where he stayed, her beside him stroking his neck, her fingers cool where the rope had been. He wouldn’t answer her questions. “Whatever it is,” she had said. “You just have to hold it.” They never spoke of the incident after that.

On the CB the woman laughed. “Careful, ma’am. My husband says whatever you say on these things is said forever. It’s radio waves. They go on and on.” The women’s voice was distorted for a moment by the whine and crackle of interference. When her voice returned, it was muted, as if coming from a great distance. “…maybe they’ll find you.”

Helen leaned forward and tried to steady the signal. She nudged the dial to the right and static rushed in. She turned the dial the other way. Lee watched his aunt, her face childlike and hooded, like a doll’s whose eyes lift as you lift them. He stood and pulled her toward him, his arms encircling her roughly, the CB left on a station of interference. He heard her gasp, a sound like steam escaping metal, and he knew that she had loved him like a son.

“She’s gone,” Helen said. “I don’t think I can get her back.”

Part Four

“Why the fuck weren’t you watching her?”

Troy and Lee stood in the rain. Troy was bellowing. It was late January and the rain came down mixed with ice. Pellets covered the yellow grass like spilled sugar. In the pines, crows cowered under the cold and wind, invisible in the trees, their voices the only evidence of their attendance. Lee felt the tiny pellets strike the back of his neck. He shivered. Troy was standing in front of him, staring at him as if he would like nothing more than to gut him and jettison his remains on the river.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t notice her standing there. I had turned the stove eye on to start dinner and the next thing I knew she was screaming. You’re right, I should have been paying more attention.”

“That’s right. What the hell were you fucking thinking?”

From the window, Helen watched them, her right hand holding a wet dishrag against her forearm where the eye of the stove had left a seared half-moon burn. Lee again felt that sick, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The same feeling he had when he realized what he had done — shoved his aunt’s hands away from him, harder than he had meant. She had stumbled back, caught herself on the stove, the stove eye as red as he imagined hell would be. Troy had come in from the river to find Helen wailing uncontrollably, unable to speak. He had been yelling ever since, lowering his voice to ask Helen what happened, but then flying back into a rage when it became obvious that Helen had regressed beyond answering.

“How many times can I say I’m sorry?” Lee heard his voice crack, but he gripped that part of himself, forcing his feelings back down as if he meant to smother them. “I don’t know how it happened.”

If anyone had asked Lee what went through his head when he shoved Helen, he would have said, “Nothing,” and it would have been the truth. There had been no emotion in the act. Just reaction. Instinct.

“I don’t give a shit about your sorrys.” Troy was so close to him now Lee couldn’t make his eyes focus.

“What do you want me to say? I didn’t do anything.” Now Lee was screaming.

“You were supposed to be watching her. Always watching. Is that so hard to understand?” Troy’s voice was becoming tight and hoarse. Lee could feel him shaking he was so close.

“Hey, back the fuck up.” Lee pointed a finger toward Troy’s chest, but Troy knocked it away, stepping closer.

“No, you listen, cocksucker—”

Lee was the first to throw a punch. It connected weakly with the side of Troy’s neck, but he stumbled back. Troy stood stunned for half a second before he lunged at his nephew. Lee turned, his side taking the better part of Troy’s weight, but his feet lost traction and they both went down. Lee’s forehead struck one of the serrated scales of Helen’s Behemoth, and he felt the blood run down his forehead. Lee began swinging upward, blindly, unconscious and uncaring of what he hit. Troy pressed Lee into the mud, his hands fumbling as Lee swung with every ounce of his strength. He tried to communicate pain with each swing, to deliver it, but Lee felt his chest readying to give, crack, and out would spill all of it — the cuss, the guilt, the frenzy, the knot of snakes wrenched and wrung around his vital organs.

Troy, failing to stop the assault, spun and collapsed wheezing into the mud. Lee continued to swing, his arms shadow-boxing the cold face of the sky. Then he let them fall and he curled his fingers into the wet mud. Wet and choking, the blood pounded in his neck and face — hot salt ran into his ears. He felt Troy take him by the shoulder and pull him into a sitting position. Lee struggled, but Troy’s arms were iron, and he held Lee against him.

“Stop.” Troy said. “Stop!”

As if given permission, Lee went limp in every muscle. Through the blur of blood and tears, Lee saw Helen over Troy’s shoulder, still at the window. The rain was coming down harder now, and colder. She was staring at the two of them, wetted and nameless, and he stared back until she turned and disappeared. When Troy’s grip relaxed, Lee jumped up, his feet seeming to move of their own volition, sprinting across the yard to his truck. His tires squealed as he pulled onto the highway, Troy like a marionette in the rearview.

He was able to stop the bleeding with a wad of napkins he found in the glove box, but the gash running up into his hairline was ugly and crusted. The mud on his coat became dried in the heat of the cab. By the time he reached the rest station it had stopped sleeting. To the east, a blue ribbon of sky slithered under gray cloudbanks. He wandered into the woods like a half-formed man, the clay still wet, running. He saw no one, but he knew they were there, the men brought out even in this weather, sweating in thick camouflage, their coats heavy and wet, all of them unable to bridge the winter without some form of warmth. They were always there. He took a spot among the trees.

From where Lee stood, he could see brief flashes of color. The woods beside the highway had lost its close intimacy. Without the green to shade them, men clawed for attention amidst the brittle wires of briars and cockleburs. Lee caught glimpses of them. Above him, the trees groaned as they scraped at the steel of the sky, while crows, like uniformed officers of the law, made racket as if to alert the world to what was happening here. He pressed his back against a tree, its trunk so twisted by poison ivy vines that it looked as if it were being strangled.

Lee waited for over an hour for someone to approach. Occasionally, men in Day-Glo orange and camouflage would amble by and meet his gaze, each one trying to keep the attitude of nonchalance, as if they were Sunday strollers out to get their morning constitution. No one approached him. He couldn’t blame them — mud-spattered, blood oozing from the gash in his head. In this place, there was a tendency to avoid obvious signs of violence and disuse, and he was too frayed. Worn to the last thread. Lee fingered the hairy rope of the poison ivy. The image of his aunt’s face wilting after the accident was still in his thoughts, and he tried to force down his throat the hard stone of that memory. Sometimes he envied his aunt her illness — the loss of demons, old bones, guilt and shame as if she had loaded all that cargo into a boat, sailed them to the river’s deepest point and dumped it all in. He thought of that day in the boathouse — the rope looped up toward heaven and gravity wanting him down. Did she even remember?

Lee pulled at the vine under his hand and the thin cables attaching it to the tree trunk gave with a succession of snaps. Even if Lee had not built up immunity to the vine’s poison long ago, pulling them off trees with Troy when he was younger, he knew their venom had long since dried in the winter air. They were lifeless now, as harmless as they were ever going to be.

Lee noticed someone approaching from the highway and he stood up straight, squaring his shoulders. He couldn’t see the man’s face, which was hidden in the hood of the sweatshirt he was wearing. As he approached, Lee slid his hands down to the crook of his legs and rubbed himself through his jeans. It wasn’t until the man was nearly upon him that he raised his head. Lee saw too late that it was Caleb.

“Well, swivel shits. You just can’t get enough of these woods.” Caleb grinned.

Lee turned his head and looked off down the trail. He watched a contingent of cedar waxwings fighting over a juniper as Caleb walked up and took a place at his shoulder.

“You look awful by the way. You go mudding without your truck? Last time I saw you, you had your tail tucked behind your ass. Why’d you’d run off?”

Lee shifted his weight away from Caleb. The young man tapped lightly at Lee’s boot with the toe of his sneaker. He chuckled under his breath. “You don’t like me very much, do you? That’s okay. You know I lied just now. That wasn’t the last time I saw you. The last time was at Stoneybrook. I work as an RN there. You were there with some old woman.” Lee jumped when he felt Caleb’s hand on his thigh. He saw it knead the muscle of his leg. “She acted kinda soft-headed. Yelled a lot. She your kin or something? Or you working your way into an inheritance?”

Lee knocked Caleb’s hand away and tried to move off down the trail, but Caleb reached out and caught the back of his jeans. “Hey now,” Caleb said. “No need to be rude.” He felt Caleb press himself against him, Caleb’s other arm reaching around to grab at his cock. His breath was hot against Lee’s neck. Lee spun and shoved with both arms sending Caleb staggering back.

“Get the fuck away from me.”

“Calm down.” Caleb raised his hands. “Don’t get all huffy.”

Lee stood in the trail breathing hard. He could feel the winter air burn in his chest. “We ain’t friends,” he said.

“Friends?” Caleb’s eyes glittered like dirty gems. “Nobody’s ever met a friend here. I just want to suck your dick.” Caleb stepped forward, the smell of chemicals strong around him, and Lee balled his hands into fists.

“Fuck off.”

Caleb reached out and jerked at the front of Lee’s jeans. Lee shoved back, but this time Caleb had a firmer grip. Lee jabbed at Caleb’s side. The wind went out of him with a grunt as Caleb snaked an arm around Lee’s neck and they began to grapple, hugging each other until their limbs popped. Lee struggled to free himself, continuing to jab at Caleb. He felt his fists connect with Caleb’s side and arms, cringing at the meaty sound of their contact. They fell to the ground. Lee became a flurry of blows as Caleb scratched at his neck, yanking at the zipper of Lee’s jeans. Caleb spoke into his ear.

“Is this what you want? We can do this too.”

They twisted in the dirt of the trail until Lee was able to grab Caleb’s hand and wrench it away from him. Lee twisted the arm he held and heard Caleb cry out, his back arching under him. Lee used his knees to brace himself, shoving Caleb’s face into the dirt. Lee stared down at him wanting to kill, to press Caleb until the earth swallowed them both, all memory of them erased. Caleb’s lips were grained with dirt. With his free hand, Lee pulled down Caleb’s sweatpants, exposing him.

Caleb didn’t struggle. “Come on. Do it,” he said.

When he finished, Lee lay on Caleb’s back. There was no noise. He sat up, but Caleb didn’t stir. Caleb’s teeth were still gritted. He breathed through his nose. Eyes shut. But Lee sensed the eyes of the other men. They were out there in the cold, watching. He felt elevated under their stares. Powerful. But this feeling too began to drain from him. He stood and buttoned himself. He nudged Caleb with the tip of his boot. “Don’t bother me no more,” Lee said, but it was as if he were speaking to the men around him rather than to Caleb. Lee turned without waiting for a response and headed down the path toward the highway. He didn’t bother looking back.

Part Five

Not until months later, while the spring smoldered in the hedges, would Lee begin to think he could piece it all together. He sat on the river, his feet dangling over the side of the dock. The sound of the wake against the supports soothed him. Through the boards he sat upon, light banded the water’s surface, and the shadows of fish moved like submarines. Along the banks, the roots of trees fingered the river and he watched as snakes and rock-backed turtles climbed up to sun themselves in the new spring weather. Lee sat shirtless under the sun, Aristophanes cradled in his lap — the jar so wet and beaded with condensation that the tiny serpent was little more than a dark suggestion behind the glass. Lee had found him earlier that day, while cleaning out the freezer. At first, he had been unable to place what it was he was holding, having forgotten Helen’s pet in the succession of time, and then the memory rushed in.

To his right on the bank, Helen and Troy lay together in the hammock. Troy held Helen in the crook of his arm and hummed softly as the net swayed, its cords grinding against the bark of the pines it was strung between. Inside the house, a thousand things waited to be done, and Lee wanted to put them off. In all honesty, he wanted to put them down, but he knew he wouldn’t. After the fight, after Lee had returned to the house, Troy had tried to explain. “Some fucking life,” he had said. Lee had nodded.

Lee looked over at his aunt and uncle, both of them lying facing one another as if they were trying to sew together a space that was only theirs. “What happened to your pinkie finger?” Helen asked. “It’s nearly gone.”

Troy held up his hand and splayed his fingers, the last finger on his right hand a nub. “You know what happened to it. I lost it in the war. Shot off. Didn’t even realize it had happened until the lieutenant pointed it out.”

Helen stared at the missing finger. “My Daddy lost his thumb. Sure enough. Cut it off when he got bit by the cottonmouth. Did you know that?”

“Yes, ma’am. You’ve told me many times.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“I imagine he’s long dead, although I can’t swear to it.”

“Good.”

Lee unscrewed the lid of the jar. Inside, Aristophanes lay coiled into a Gordian knot, his head tucked under a hardened fold of scale. Lee upended the jar onto his palm, and the intimate puzzle of those coils dropped into his hand. He rubbed at ice crystals that had formed on the pet, taking them off with the heat of his finger.

“Ida wants me to get her a dress at White’s. We can’t afford,” Helen said. “What’s say you help us out? A dress for a dress.” Helen pulled at the neck of her house coat but Troy stayed her hand.

“Well work something out.” Troy answered. He paused and in that moment Lee heard all the things that could have been said. “We always do.”

“Since Daddy left, it’s been real hard.” Helen ran the back of her fingers down the side of Troy’s chest. “Mamma planted thrift.”

“You know in a sick way,” Troy said, “I like this. It’s like getting to know you all over again. Not many men have those kinds of chances.”

Helen made no answer. Lee lay back and stretched himself on the warm boards. He placed Aristophanes on his chest — a weird and frightening comfort in the heat. He waited as the serpent warmed, as his great-aunt and uncle navigated uncharted waters in their marriage. The scar over his right eye had mended, but the stitched skin still itched. After their fight, Lee and Troy demanded nothing of each other. When Troy came in from the water in the afternoons, Lee asked about the fishing, and Troy inquired of Helen’s state, and that was all. There was just the quiet uneasiness of men terrified at how far they could be driven. Lee had not returned to the rest stop in all that time.

“It’s nice here,” Helen said. Lee heard a fish jump on the river and the cry of a hawk in the clean-swept sky. “We should get married here.”

“We should. I’d marry you today.”

“Oh, I don’t have a dress.” Helen ran her hand over the matted threads of the housecoat she was wearing and grimaced. “Besides, you still have a wife.”

“That I do.” There was a moment of quiet between them.

“You are going to leave her aren’t you? Paris?”

Troy pulled her toward him and kissed her forehead. “For you, anything.”

Helen smiled. “I have a lovely dress. It’s white with these tiny violet flowers.”

“I remember that dress. You were wearing it the day I met you. I remember thinking that dress could barely contain something so wild. That the world wanted you naked sitting there and that dress just wasn’t cut for such a tall order. Do you remember that day?”

Helen’s forehead lined with thought. “I take you,” she said, “to be my husband. To have and to hold from this day forward.”

“Amen,” Troy said.

Lee turned his head away. His eyes ran to the river which glistened like a skin of scales. It was impossible not to be drawn to it, its slow progress to a space infinitely broader. Lee cradled Aristophanes between his palms. The number of times he had cast line into the water here was more than he cared to count. He thought of all the things he had dragged from that river, all the life pulled gasping and breathless from below. Yet sometimes the lure went under and never surfaced, snagged on something that refused to be hauled up, refused to be caught.

“Don’t bother me no more,” he thought. That was the last thing he had said to Caleb. He said it now under his breath. But he knew that Caleb would always be bothering him. He had left the woods that day feeling big, but the mountain only peaks the once and then you have to walk yourself back down. Lee’s dream of life had ended as those dreams often do — the seed spent in the dirt. There’s a sermon here, he thought. In some ways he envied Caleb — wished with every ounce of himself that he could take who and what it was he yearned for. That he could bed down that animal greed.

On the far side of the river, a speedboat whipped its way out of an inlet, pushing waves toward either bank. From the stern of the diminishing boat, someone let out a whoop which echoed on the bluffs, living it up. The wake licked at Lee’s legs. He held up Aristophanes in his palm, the warmed scales gone loose and malleable. He unwounded the thing, tried to imagine those tiny muscles thrashing back to life. The mouth opening like a purse lined in white silk. The tiny fangs pumping poison into his wrist. Two pinpricks of blood and then the certainty of that thing.

He stood up on the dock and in his right hand he clutched the serpent. He saw Helen rise up on her elbow looking his way. They stared at each other for a moment and then Helen raised her hand and waved. Lee waved back, the limp serpent waving as well. Then, in a swift, clean motion, he dove into the river. The warm water enveloped him, air bubbles tickling his sides as he swam out and deeper, past the light from above into the shaded waters below. He saw silt drift before him, the length of Aristophanes oscillating in his fist. When he reached the bottom, there was nothing but mud which rose in thick clouds. He dug his hand into the bottom muck, pushing the tiny serpent deep into the belly of the river, and then let it go.

He floated there, his lungs beginning to ache. Above him, he could see the shafts of light piercing the skin of the river. He considered staying here, letting the river bed him down, his body touched by the fins of catfish, the world above fading like the light that couldn’t pierce deep enough. They’d never find him, he thought. They’d forget his name. His face. He wondered if she’d even care. If she could even move to save him as she had once done. They had never mentioned that day. Not once since. And why would they. There was nothing to be said, only something to be done.

He sat at the bottom of the river, currents confusing his hair, his lungs searing. He let his feet root themselves in the mud. He felt the cold earth sift and rise around him, blinded by the thick of all that debris and silt, what everything came to here. He knew this too could be a kind of doing. A kind of holding.

But he wouldn’t do that. Too much line tugged at him, demanded he ascend. He pushed himself upward with his arms — toward the air he ached for. He looked up and saw in that approaching surface the future and realized the future wasn’t all that hard to read. He saw before him the time when they would abandon Helen, the shell of her left to a bed that was not her own. State-paid nurses hovering about her like white flies. He saw the time when she would waste and starve, no longer remembering how to nourish herself, and he saw the ending of that. He saw Troy disappear onto the river, drifting. Heard the stories from kin who had seen him, but never recently. Saw them shake their heads. Look into their hands. Over the static, the conversations would continue whether he listened or not, and as for himself, he saw only the things he would have to put down. The serpent, the living wood stripped of its miracle and set to rest. He saw those woods and knew that he’d always been walking them, always would be, one way or another. He was already living in that tomorrow, and he saw the glinting and barbed look of it, but even that could be held if he were careful. Very careful. And it was into this world, this future that he surfaced.