Everyday Psychokillers Page 10

  Chief rode his horse along the canal down Griffin Road, past orange stands with bright striped awnings and groves spotted with wooden crates piled with fruit, and then he rode his horse past a parking lot that held a line of stores, like a pizza place and an ice cream place and a hardware store and a place to buy stuff for your pool. Later they rode through a stretch of reservation billboards, drive-through no-tax cigarette huts, pawn shops, a flower stand in front of a trailer surrounded by chain-link with four giant whirligigs on the chain-link and a gun shop in the back, and roadside zoos with life-sized wooden cutouts of Indian women in patchwork skirts pointing the way, like Obi-Wan from Star Wars. If you go back there you can see a panther in a cage. You can see seven macaws in a cage together. You can see an alligator in a puddle.

  They rode past parking lots marked with stacks of tires painted fluorescent orange and green, totem poles and cigar Indians guarding the doors of high-stakes bingo huts or halls, trailers filled with postcards and plastic beaded earrings, and photographs for sale of the Osceola boys wrestling alligators, and one of their father standing waist-deep in the ocean, holding the carcass of a great white shark over his head, more trailers filled with cigarettes, more whirligigs, palm fronds flung over fences like deerskins drying, and palm fronds flung along the roadside like carcasses, and a fenced yard loaded with cement lawn animals piled, tangled, and broken in a heap in a corner of the lot, and next to that pile of animals, animals laid out for customers in cement rows and rows and rows, and past a house trailer with seven palm trees in a line leaning against it, their rootballs half torn from the earth and a man with a lawnmower, mowing around and around a cactus the shape of a human hand as big as a truck, knobby red flower-pods bulging from it like wounds.

  Someone in front of a gas station waved at Chief but he didn’t notice. He rode past vacant lots so heaped with scrubby brush and vines that there could be a barn within them somewhere. There could be a whole village of animals, buried, like Atlantis, or Pompeii.

  He clapped his legs against the horse and they went alongside the traffic, trotting through the richer neighborhoods and whole complexes of fancy show-stables with solid five-acre grids of pasture and good post and rail fencing, past cattle farms, past enormous cranes mining sand.

  You remember how hot it must have been, and how hard it must have been to ride through that heat, drinking from a bottle of whiskey, and how hard it must have been for Chief’s horse, in the dirt by the canal and on the pavement along with all those cars.

  It was hours later. It was afternoon. Chief would have been in pain, the insides of his legs blistered and his face sunburned because he’d forgotten his hat, except he was fuzzy with the whiskey, so the pain was intellectual, it was a distant relative, a little fact or a minor bug. At the end of the pavement, where the traffic headed sharply up and to the highway and Griffin Road turned to dirt but continued forward, Chief let his horse stop in a patch of shade to drink from the widening canal, and he thought about getting down, he was so thirsty himself. But as soon as the horse stopped moving, he noticed how drunk he was. The horse lowered his head to the water and shifted his weight, letting one front foot rest.

  Chief balanced on the horse’s back. The horse’s head was gone. It felt like sitting on a bare hill, like straddling an enormous brown egg.

  Chief felt so thirsty. He thought about sliding off his horse and kneeling to drink, but a stench rose from the water, and as soon as he imagined drinking from it, kneeling there, sinking slightly as if on a giant sponge, he imagined an alligator shoving out of the reeds at him and he knew he was too drunk for it. The thought of the water and the algae and the speed of an alligator turned his insides belly-up. So he let his horse drink, and he didn’t let him drink enough to cramp, and then he clapped his horse’s sides and headed out again, walking, the road growing narrower through a tunnel of brush and palms but never ceasing to go straight, the footing shifting from limestone pebbles to sand until he reached the Everglades. The land opened up and the sky opened above the water and the reeds.

  Griffin Road was no longer a road with a name. It was a white band like a low bridge through sawgrass, and his boy was like a tiny motion on the horizon, like a thin ribbon flapping in the beak of a bird that was flying into the sun.

  The bottles were empty and, half-hearted, he threw them into the river-within-the-marsh, and the bottles went plunk, plunk, like a couple of frogs, and sank under the Pond lettuce. The evening created a minor breeze and Chief’s horse felt a rush, and raised his head, surveying the endless wet field. He felt filled with a sudden gushing energy, and when the Chief said to do it, he went: he ran.

  How straight the road was, a long, immense bone. Already they were completely wet, because there was such a sameness; the earth was almost water and the air was almost water and all of it was the same wet temperature, the temperature of a bath. They wore layers of sweat, and wet air, and now watery marsh.

  They moved fast down the sand road, stippled with grit and chains of green seeds. At first they could feel how fast they were moving, but as soon as Chief’s horse fell into a rhythm, moving felt, for both of them, like one long vibration, and it stopped feeling like they were moving forward at all. They were merely covering ground, as if on a treadmill. They were moving so fast, but then if you looked back and looked forward it was exactly the same: bone-white road cutting through wet grass under a great, dense, gray sky. It was like being the glass of a mirror.

  Brown stinging flies began biting Chief’s horse as soon as they started down the bone road, but soon the sensation of being bitten merged with the main vibration, the echo of the shock of his hooves through his muscles and the jangling below his ears. Soon his ears swung with every stride because he couldn’t hold them up or back anymore. Then being bitten by the flies and then also mosquitoes began to merge with the clouds of sound he moved through. Some clouds of humming frogs rose from the grass and some clouds of humming crickets rose from the grass. Chief’s horse couldn’t hear over his own noise but he could feel the shifting complexities of the vibrations. He wasn’t flinching or switching at the biting flies anymore.

  When Chief’s horse felt a flutter of fear in his heart that maybe his legs were no longer his own, that they might tumble from under him or slide away, Chief settled upright into his seat and Chief’s horse halted and stood for a moment, shuddering and breathing. Foam from his mouth speckled his shoulders and even his flanks. Then Chiefs mind had a thought or two, he made an inarticulable decision, and then he turned his horse ninety degrees, hollered, and they dove off the road into the dense muck and the knee-deep water. They shoved through cattails that rose like the high walls of a maze and if you stood on the road, almost instantly they’d have disappeared for you. The struggle was enormous down there, and they grunted and heaved to move. Sand and black soil clung to them and water sloshed and their skin was slashed by the grasses. They shoved by bushes of pond apples that plunked fruits into the marsh, like falling bullets.

  If you were standing there on the white road in the Everglades, you wouldn’t be able to see anything happen. You’d hear a litany of animals, their litany of sounds. You’d see a gang of small black birds with red shoulders rise from one distant place and shiver to an island of cypress and settle in there, invisible again. You’d see a great blue heron pretending crucifixion, utterly still until already in the air, and with three great strokes of its wings it’s almost farther than you can see, and has sunk back below the surface of the reeds.

  They’d been splashing through a stream within the marsh when Chief’s horse stopped, heaving, and Chief said, “Move on. I mean it. Move on.” Then he could feel the horse give. He flung his leg over the horse’s withers and dismounted like slipping off a dock into a lake, and he sloshed around, ankle deep, until he found a stable mound of earth to stand on.

  The chestnut horse went to his knees in front and then he eased himself onto his side. He kicked once or twice but then he let himself stretch ou
t. If you looked at him from above, you could pretend the water was sky, and that the horse was still upright, and still running. Chief let himself imagine that for a while, until there was no way not to notice that the horse was immobile, and sinking. The memory of the noise of running subsided, and Chief began to hear the pulsing sounds of the frogs and the insects of the marsh. He heard it and felt it from all sides, pressure like going deep under water, deep into the ocean, that full surrounding weight. This is what he felt as he stood watching the horse go down. The density of the humming, the layering of sounds from multitudes of individuals, in waves and spasms so quick they smoothed into one undulating noise. He closed his eyes. He thought, It does, it’s true, it sounds like drums. Then he remembered, for a moment, that before it was drums it was animals. He opened his eyes and, having heard the sounds clearly in the dark, he was able to hear them with his eyes open, in the gray light, which began to get rosy as the sun began to grow apparent, low enough to be seen.

  What was left of the horse above water was like the map of a gathering of islands. A bright green cape of algae gathered around the horse’s body, as nubby and kind as a girl’s sweater. Half a mile away, an alligator rose, glazed like a cupcake with ebony muck. Above, a white bird moved through the sky like a blinking light.

  Then all that was left was one flank or one forearm, you couldn’t tell. He watched the horse disappearing at his feet, below the vacant and increasingly invisible horizon. He must have run through his memory, and watched himself arrive, a drunk Indian on horseback, as if shuttled there by malignant wind. The last island of horse left was the shape of the entire peninsula. Chief lifted his boot to the slab and pushed it under.

  I worry about innocence. I worry every time I find myself imagining someone as innocent, or as ever having been innocent. No one mentions innocence unless they mean to point out how something isn’t anymore. To point to something and call it innocent is to suggest that it won’t be for long, or that it’s so stupid nothing will ever get through, no matter how awful. No one says innocent unless they mean doomed.

  The Palm of His Hand

  Later, the old men flapped, rose from their buckets one by one, and squawked away, bent and hobbling. Joe’s wife called from the house and he lumbered indoors to eat. I put my books away and watched Scott finishing the last stall. I looked in, holding the bars as if I were inside looking out. “Jailbird,” Scott said, “or jailbait?” and scratched his chin as if he had a beard. It was almost completely dark in the barn, but outside it still glowed. My mother was out there somewhere, riding someone’s horse.

  “Well, I’m done, or that’s all I’m doing,” Scott said, and rolled the stall door open, gave the pony that lived there a little nudge and stepped into the aisle with his pitchfork and applepicker. He rolled the door shut again and then took his shirt off, dropped it on the ground and ran out of the barn toward the pond. Scott knew I wouldn’t go into that water, but for a second, I felt abandoned, or at least uninvited. I resisted an impulse to pick up his shirt and fold it. I thought about looking for my mother, and maybe watching her until she was done and ready to go, but then I changed my mind.

  The tree by that pond was as big as a ship, an ancient ficus, practically prehistoric, one of those trees that drops limbs from its limbs, and those limbs push into the earth and turn into roots. It gets wider and wider by accumulation like that, these limbs as thin as my arm, as thin as a child’s arm, some as thin as strings, as veins, dropping one after another into the ground. The limbs are branches and they’re roots, and they’re the treetrunk, and also they’re a forest so dense you can’t walk through it, but it’s a trunk that has no center that you can see, and it defies climbing. You can only get so close. You can walk under the canopy a little, you can be in the shade of the tree, standing next to one of those strands, those cords, and you can pull on a cord and it’ll feel as solid as rod iron, but one more step and you can’t get through them anymore, they’re so dense and tangled. Somewhere there’s a central trunk of some sort, the original trunk, but there’s no way you will ever see it.

  Sometimes, in the story about when Evil Set locked Good Osiris into the beautiful coffin, they say how it wobbled down the Nile and into The Great Green Sea, and after a while, waves tossed it into the branches of a tamarisk tree that balanced there on the line between earth and water, and, at the same time, the tree flung out its branches and pulled him in, so it was a cooperative act. Then the tree grew new coiling branches and wrapped him up in them, and soon the branches had wrapped together so tightly that the exquisite coffin was like the hollow center of the tree’s trunk, and good-as-dead Osiris was like the heart of the tree. And you know when the Ancient Egyptians took out the organs in order to mummify each other, they left the heart in the heart of the mummy, because the heart held Intelligence.

  When I looked through the forest of branches, roots, cords, vines, I know I felt a god could be in there.

  You could hack through the limbs to a core trunk, but by then I expect the tree would be dead. Although, a dead snake’s head keeps striking at the air, and it can kill a person for a good hour after decapitation, and dead trees can keep spitting out some life for quite a while, years I think even, depending.

  I tried to take a picture of the ficus once, to send to my grandmother, who acted on the phone like she didn’t believe me about how big it was, and granted, it was my little Instamatic, but I found that if I backed far enough away to get the whole thing in the frame it was like taking a picture of a green blob that could be any size at all. Plus then of course you wouldn’t be able to see how crazy it was under the canopy, how you could walk in among the branch-roots and be surrounded by them, and hardly know which way was out, and how almost immediately the strands got so dense you couldn’t walk any further under there. There was no way to get close, to get to it at all, and at the same time there was nowhere to stand away from it to get any angle on the trunk. The ficus was uncontainable and unreachable. I couldn’t get enough of it.

  That whole pond scene, the whole tableau of it that I looked at so often, from the hayloft or from the barn aisle below, the palms and the various reeds or the seeds that made them, how ancient the whole scene seemed, like dinosaurs could emerge at any moment. High up, and probably long ago when it was a simpler tree with its few thick branches, someone hung a rope, and the giant ship of a tree had a tire swing. Scott ran into the dusk and leaped onto the swing and used his feet to shove off a nearby palm. He stood on the tire, holding the rope, in silhouette, and in silhouette he swung once or twice and then let himself arc and drop into the water.

  What a farmboy he was to me in all the moments he was silent and in the distance. If he spoke, if he made even a sound, I could hear how crushed he felt, how sad, torn, angry, but unless he did, he simply glowed, even as the dusk emptied into basic night. How pure and iconic, his body arcing through the air, the quiet splash the water made for his cannonball. I let myself sit on the cement floor of the barn aisle, under the hayloft, part of me realizing that he hadn’t not invited me, he was performing for me, showing me all the loveliest parts of himself, holding himself at an angle I could admire, and when he disappeared under the water, under the darkness, I closed my eyes, to add a little light down there and follow him.

  I watched him swim through the wiggling green shafts and underwater stilt roots, with black snakes looking clean, and moving like slow ribbons. His body curved and the snakes cruised through spaces his bending arms and legs left, and then he reached the sunken car, and moved among the rusty bones of it as if through a shipwreck. Everything seems clean underwater, at least it does in the imagination, and even dirty water merely dims.

  I thought—that very moment or sometime later, it’s not the kind of thing you remember—about how, when people imagined underwater, they put imaginary cities there, and fish-people to people them. They imagined underwater as if it wasn’t under water. They took the very thing that made it what it was and erased it. I though
t about outerspace, how as soon as people imagined it, they imagined peopling it, down to words, to personification, everything in human terms, terms in terms of people. In seventh grade you hear a lot about personification. Think of the Everglades, where there aren’t many flowers, but when there is one you think: that bloom is the size of a baby’s head.

  You know how sometime back in history the Calusas shifted the course of the flowing of the Everglades so they could navigate canoes better, and plus I think they had some crops. So then white people didn’t notice this. They really thought the place was wild when they stripped it and drained it into a grid like an enormous warm icecube tray. They couldn’t think of anything else to do. They wanted a way to step on it.

  When I was a kid there were cute bright lizards, green with rainbow tails. I kept trying to catch one to see if the tail stayed rainbow when it fell off. I occasionally saw a lizard without a tail, but I never saw a tail without a lizard, so I never knew. These days, I hear, there are hardly any little green ones. Little brown ones are taking over. They have an orange flap that flips down from their chins when they’re freaking out about something. They’re non-indigenous. Although no one has ever mentioned to me how far back you have to go in history to call something indigenous. It could be something about Christopher Columbus, or the printing press, or Africa drifting into the ocean, becoming its own continent.