The houseboat tugged gently at its ragged lines in the slough of the river. Braided rope moaning in the chocks. Floating nameless. It was a dilapidated thing constructed out of scrapwood and sheets of corrugated tin patched together. Stains of rust bleeding toward the sagging decks. Its ports rotten in their sashes. Threadbare sheets as drapes. The tarpaper roof, buckled and peeled, was left to wilt in the heat. A canvas tarpaulin here and there, nailed to the eave or weighted by castoff tires. The water swirling between the bank and the houseboat was brown with waste. Bits of trash would bob into sight, scum coated, half decayed, then fall below the surface again. Soiled condoms worming palely from the depths. Dead fish pirouetting in the stir, yellowed bellies bloated and skyward. A wooden skiff was tied to the transom.
The diminished noises of town just beyond the bend of the river grew up softly from over the trees. Save for that the only sound was the water against the hull. A bird or two in the woods.
In this quietude the door of the houseboat swung open in a fury and out stepped a small man of around thirty years old carrying a bag of trash. He was dressed in stained canvas trousers, repaired with patches of various fabrics, held up with a set of black leather suspenders. Wore a red union suit underneath and it was unbuttoned at the neck. The smell like humidity.
He was thin and almost hairless. The slats of his ribcage threatening to burst the skin. The hair on his head grew like strands of eelgrass. He had dark pebbly eyes that didn’t see well. Coke-bottle glasses that he probably found somewhere. A jutting brow and a bent nose, a patchy beard and an incomplete set of long jaundiced teeth. This unkempt man stumbled from the door and made his way around the deck toward the bank. Muttering something. In a clumsy motion flung the bag onto the bank where it exploded its contents, scaring up a vocal murder of crows beyond the brush. The trash slid toward the river, coming to rest alongside other such garbage snared in the dense bracken. The crows sat mocking him in the trees. Rigby Sellers.
He crossed the gangplank, stepping heavily onto dry land. Climbed the bank and made his way to a stand of oak where he dropped his patchwork trousers and squatted. Crows called in the trees. A rank smell grew into the muggy air and when he finished he wiped himself with a handful of leaves. He stood a moment contemplating some dull thought, his dark eyes gazing through those ridiculous glasses into the caged forest where strands of sunlight slanted like thread and he shifted his stare toward his stool where black flies already leaped in a viscid ballet. He took up a stick and poked at the shit. Flies scattered like black embers.
Back in the cool half-dark of his boat, he uncorked a jug and poured a generous amount of something fiery into a chipped mug. Tilted that back and then had another.
The houseboat was one-roomed. Cobbled together in a derelict’s dream. Roof leaked and brown stains had run toward the floor, boiling the green wallpaper. Plywood floors he rarely swept. Aluminum folding chairs. A supper table hauled from the dump. There was a bare twin mattress set on the floor in the corner of the room and because of the houseboat’s list he often dreamt he was on the high seas sinking. For a coffee table, he’d gathered a road sign and set it atop four cinder blocks. He bathed maybe weekly—riverwise in the summer, the bucket and sponge during colder times.
His one prize was a mannequin with long legs and wooden lips. He’d often talk to her. Sometimes try to feed her. He had bored holes in all the normal womanly places and sanded the edges smooth with a scrap of sandpaper. Painted in nipples and a triangle of pubic hair, the filigree of unkempt strands. He’d fixed her up so she came apart at the waist and he’d clean her out sometimes by flinging her into the river with a towline. He had a box of ladies’ garments of all kinds and he’d dress her up and comb his fingers through her abrasive hair and tell her how pretty she was. At night he’d talk to her like she was capable of answering.
Now, at the kitchen sink, he watched through the warped windowpane a heron hunting. The bird on one foot, Rigby attempting to mimic, only to come crashing onto the floor, spilling his whiskey and cursing the bird. He staggered to his feet, wiping the burning wet from his chest and arms, and refilled his mug. Eyed the heron again and held his hand in the shape of a pistol and aimed it.
Dead bird, he said.