Chapter 18: Coffeeville to Three Rivers Lake

 

 

The morning fog is saturated cotton wadding, drops condensing on every exterior surface, obscuring the view from the windows, muffling the sky in the cold, sunless dawn. Typical for here at this time of year; if the weather stays true to pattern it will begin to lift after 9 a.m., reluctantly pulling away in upward-flying tendrils that spiral off the river, the dancing Indian ghosts of frontier legend whirling off the surface of the sparkling Tombigbee.

Robin wakes at dawn. “Hailey, you’re drooling.”

I pick my head up off my chest. There’s a pool of spittle on the front of my sweatshirt. “Gross.” When I stand up the dog bite reasserts itself. “Ow!”

“Nice pants,” says Robin, eyeing my scrubs. She moves stiffly off the couch into the galley, starting the coffee like it’s any other day. Apparently we’re striving for normal. I don’t know if I can go with that program.

I wipe the fog-sweat off the window and look out across the river. Nothing seen. “Where did it go?” I wonder aloud.

“Where did what go?” she says.

“Are you OK? I don’t see how you can be OK.”

“I’m definitely not. But will be once we get out of this shithole,” she says, measuring grounds into the basket. “We are out of here as soon as the fog lifts.”

“Don’t you think we should stay? You need to see a doctor. We need to report this. He has to be caught and put away somewhere where he can’t...”

She turns, eyes blazing, shutting down my self-righteous monologue. “Zip it, please. I’m not saying dick about shit. We’re leaving. End of story.”

“He could have killed you. He’ll do it again.”

“Not talking about this. Let your karma-thing get him.” She flips the generator on, pushes the brew button, heads down the steps. “I’m gonna waste some of our water on a shower.”

Washing away the evidence.

My mother is a rape and domestic abuse counselor. I’m a domestically abused Information Specialist as familiar with the cycle of grief, denial and anger as I am with the sorries that follow the beatings that lead to more beatings and more apologies. I just make it outside, every surface wet to the touch as I lean over the railing and puke yellow bile into the brown water. The current swirls it downriver before it can sink.

As soon as I lift my head, wiping my mouth on my sweatshirt sleeve, I see Kendra’s skipper watching me from the stern of his boat.

“Rough night, hey?” he laughs uneasily, sipping from his Captain mug. He looks a little embarrassed for me, even sympathetic; maybe I’ll be spared the spreading of tales about the drunken brawd on Blackdog. That would be better than the truth, anyway.

“Yeah, I guess I had a little too much.” Heh heh.

“You locking through today?”

“Yep. As soon as the fog lifts.”

***

Robin comes up freshly dressed from her shower. Trish is on her knees with a magnifying mirror behind me, scrub pants pulled down as she examines the bite. “Hoo-eee, those are some colorful bruises,” she remarks as she tentatively prods around the puncture marks. “But no red streaks, that’s a good sign.”

I gulp my coffee. “I’ll live. It aches like crazy, like I have a pounding headache in my upper thigh.”

“Of course it does,” Trishie says. “But it’s healing well with no weeping or discoloration. We do need to find that dog and check his tags. Rabies ain’t no joke.”

“Betty June says he has his shots,” I protest.

“Yeah, but she says that isn’t the dog that bit you. We need to be sure.”

“Well hurry up about it,” says Robin. “I plan on a spot in the first group through the lock this morning.” She pours herself a mug of java then carefully crouches, trying not to jostle any sore places, to rummage through a lower cupboard. “Here. Go find that fuckin’ dog.” Hands me a can of wasp spray after shaking it hard. “It shoots from 30 feet away. Give him something to remember you by.”

“Bloody Buddy.” I shiver. “Trish, will you come with?”

“Hell to the yes,” she says. “Just let me grab the boat hook. Gonna whack his ass. And that other dirty dog, too, if he’s still around.”

“I popped his cock a good one,” I announce. “He’s feeling that this morning. Bent it backward.”

The rapid descent into violent profanity is discomfiting, but it’s working for us. I actually feel better. Robin is grinning and nodding.

“Then the Roomba got him.” She laughs hysterically. We all do. We need to. It washes us cleaner than tears.

We are not in the mood to take abuse. I feel sorry for anyone who dares to confront Blackdog’s crew today.

“Anticlimax,” Trish announces after we march down the dock to the ramp. The lights are on in other boats now, generators grumbling as coffee smells distill and dilute in the moving mist. Low murmurs flow and ebb, early-morning conversation controlled by every crackle and burst of static from a baker’s dozen of marine radios turned on to listen for the Coffeeville Lock announcement.

“I need to borrow your phone,” I say.

I walk up the hill, wasp spray at the ready, stopping when I get a few bars on the cell. Praying the signal is strong enough. That I’m strong enough.

Nothing fazes my mom. Or at least that’s how she comes off. Whether she’s serving her signature chili at a church supper or driving a vanful of drunks to an AA meeting, everyone feels like they can talk to her. Except for her kids. My entire life she’s been so busy counseling others that it never felt like she had time for me. This time it works in my favor. She kicks into bra-burning militant mode when I tell her Robin has been raped and won’t go to the police.

“Of course she won’t. You’re in Alabama.” She says it like there’s shit in her mouth. “Only an idiot trusts the Good Old Boys.”

Not what I expected to hear. “We fought to get police departments stocked with rape kits,” my mother says. “But tens of thousands of rape victims across the nation go untested every year. No follow-through.”

She tells me to let Robin do whatever she needs to do. To be OK with uncharacteristic behavior. To listen to her. “But don’t try to make her talk.”

“Jeez Mom, I know that much.”

She ignores the jab. “Watch her. But don’t be obvious. Don’t bring up counseling again unless she does.”

“I’d like to meet her,” she says. “And you do whatever it is you need to do, too.”

“I’m fine, Mom. Just a couple more days to the Gulf.”

“I’m not stupid. How’s Derek?”

“I can’t go into it right now, Mom.”

“Come home. We’ll get the process started.” Here we go. The spiel about breaking the cycle of abuse, blahdey, bla, bla, blah. “I can’t do this right now, Mom. This is not about me. I’m fine.”

“Talk about avoidance.”

“I’ve got to go Mom.”

“I know you think you do,” she says. “I love you. Will you call me back when you can?”

“Love you too.”

This lock is one of the smoothest running anywhere on the rivers. The lockmaster patiently announces the fog delay, predicts when the lock will open, calls out for and records every boat name and registration number and assigns vessels to the starboard and port walls in successive order beginning at the front bollards and proceeding to the back of the steel-and-wood lock gates where herons and egrets perch to eat the fish caught in the rise and fall. I hope Blackdog gets the sunny side to port, nearest the lock control office. We could all use a little sun, including KC, who seems afraid to leave the boat. She promptly peed and pooped five steps away from the dock ramp and obligingly climbed back aboard, curling up on the couch.

I wish she could tell us what she saw last night. As people do, I attribute human characteristics to her animal existence. She’s scared, confused and I believe chagrined that she could not stop the base violation of her mistress. KC doesn’t appear to be physically damaged in any way; her gait was normal when Trish walked her. KC and Trish have the only normal gaits on the boat. Robin and I have what my mom terms “hitches in our gitalongs.”

Did somebody spread the word to hide the dogs? There isn’t one in sight. I’ve lost my buzz for shooting wasp spray into Bloody Buddy’s eyes. I think I did hear tags tinkle on his collar. Then I think I made that up to reassure myself. Trish and I leave a note on the restaurant door.

From her ever-present purse she pulls a cash-register slip from last night’s meal at Bobby’s and writes with a clicky pen from Mermaid Marina as I dictate:

Dear Mister Bobby,

I was bitten by your dog on your property yesterday. Please text, e-mail or call us with Bloody Buddy’s dog-tag numbers and date of distemper shots. If I have to undergo rabies shots I will be sending the bill to you in care of this address.

Sincerely,

Nora Jones

Trish reads it over. “Where on God’s green earth do you suggest we check e-mail?” She grabs the pen and crosses that part off before folding the note into thirds and sticking it into the center of the screen door’s metal scrolling.

When we turn around, the white dog is lying there on the road, dead center, staring at us.

He barks.

“Hey, Buddy, cut that out,” says Bobby. “Don’t worry, ladies. He talks a lot, but his bark is worse than his bite.”

The denizen of the Fish Camp looks the same as always, in his denim jacket and sneakers, wise face and knowing eyes shadowed by a ball cap. He’s medium-sized but he talks like a six-foot man, an honest straight shooter.

“He bit me,” I say, turning my back to him and pointing to the bite. “That is a mean dog.”

“First I heard of that,” he says. “Buddy doesn’t bite, as a rule.”

“Does he have all his shots? Rabies and everything?”

“C’mon over here,” he orders Bloody Buddy, who complies completely. “Roll over.” He’s like a different dog. I hear the tags tinkle.

There are men of honor and chivalry on the river. We have to try to remember that.

We could not escape rape; but we have been spared rabies.

Coffeeville Lock is 600 feet long by 100 feet wide, large enough to fit eight standard-size barges. There are five “ballards” on each side. We ease in with the last of the flotilla arriving from Bobby’s along with a few stragglers from a couple of nearby anchorages tucked just inside Turkey and Okatuppa creeks, part of the Choctaw National Wildlife Refuge, a 4,000-acre wilderness that borders the river along the stretch before Bobby’s. At Trishie’s excited direction we’d scanned in vain at mile 120.4 for a sign of the last Choctaw Native American Indian possession east of the Tombigbee River. “There was a village around here,” she said, scanning yet another guidebook. “They kept thousands of turkeys, and ancestors of the flock are living in the refuge.”

“So far the only turkeys I’ve seen downriver are the humans on some of these boats,” Robin observes. Wry on toast. How can we help her when she won’t talk about it?

There are 10 boats locking down. The Newfie Bullet is secured; Jack is playing “Amazing Grace” on his accordion. “I thought that song was for funerals,” says Trish. “I’d plug my ears but I don’t want to be rude.”

“I’m wondering why the lockmaster allows it,” I say.

There’d be an even dozen boats in Coffeeville Lock if Spirit of Whitby and Menou were joining us, but both couples opted to stay at Bobby’s and let the crowd thin out before proceeding downstream.

“Tally Ho!” called the Whitby Brits, waving cheerily as we pulled away, an unevenly spaced line of floating homes motoring toward the lock.

“Again with the full house,” notes Trish. “I’m just glad the lockmaster assigned rafting partners so it’s not a free-for-all. Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo that!”

“Oh brother,” says Robin. Ever since Trish heard the Avalon crew laboriously spelling out “Alpha Victor Alpha Lima Oscar November” over the marine radio, she’s been fascinated. And wouldn’t you know it, the captain just happened to have a spare copy of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet that he passed along to her.

“Cool your Juliet Echo Tango Sierra, Robin,” says Trish. “I’m only gonna use it for swear words.”

It’s a little disconcerting to be lashed to the Kendra, since her skipper is the gentleman who witnessed my early-morning stomach eruption. Clearly he’s mentioned this unsavory sighting to his well-groomed, exquisitely polite wife. After I compliment her on the boat’s sparkling white decks and ask her how they keep their bumpers so clean, she thaws slightly and explains how the boat was named.

“I’m Audra and he’s Ken. Put two-and-two together,” she says, before she abruptly stiffens to attention, pivoting her head toward the lock wall.

“Hey there. What do you think you’re doing?”

Derek.

Above us.

Coming for me.

He swings down the ladder next to our bollard in the lock like an enraged gorilla cross-bred with a maladjusted chimpanzee. He looks like he wants to bite somebody. I’ve never seen him this angry. But I’m weary with anger; there’s been so much of it that I just want to go to sleep under a soft blanket far away from nasty, unpredictable people and dogs. I feel blank.

He doesn’t say a word, just barrels down the muck-slimed rungs.

“Sir? Sir! You can’t come down here,” Audra instructs firmly in a schoolmarmish tone. “Ken! Call the lockmaster.”

“What’s this happy horse poop?” Trish raises her sunglasses, peers out for a better view of my fast-approaching husband. Derek looms over the foredecks of the rafted yachts, staring down at us with hate. His pasty forehead is shiny with sweat. His ponytail is frizzy and his clothes bear a variety of engine oil, varnish and food stains.

I’m dead in his sights. Trapped on deck. I resist the urge to bolt. Surrender the notion that running away will save me. Locking myself in the cabin or curling up in a ball in the bathroom will only cause damage to the boat if he decides to come after me. Besides, I’m tired of making myself small so that he can be big. That’s why I left him in the first place. But I don’t know what to say. So I don’t say anything. I take a really deep breath in. The dog bite throbs.

“Fuck me,” Robin says, deadpan, then barks, “Derek.”

He stops his descent at his name in a stranger’s mouth. I breathe out.

“I know about you,” Robin continues in her husband-voice. “You’re a lowdown dirty dog who hits women. You do not have permission to board this boat. I’d go right back where I came from if I was you. I will personally fuck you up if you come any closer.”

“You’re not getting on our boat, either,” says Audra, hands on her hips.

Derek looks down on us, his favorite position, narrowed piggy eyes crafty, mean, sweeping the decks to spot an advantage. Trish talks to the lockmaster on the radio. I can’t hear what she’s saying. Attendants in dark blue uniforms putt toward us in their government-issued golf cart.

The river doesn’t care and the white birds don’t care. But there are witnesses who do. I am safe. For the first time I’m safe with my choice. It’s like the lock doors opening into a new pool. This world is opening like a gate unlocked.

“Hi. Bye.” I wave at Derek, copy-catting those teens who waved me off so breezily from the Hammond breakwater. Remembering Robin and I on the river, waving at everyone, cracking ourselves up. We three River Queens with our disco call in the locks. “Oooh Oooh.” I try it solo, looking straight into his ugly face. My battle cry bounces off the lockwalls. It doesn’t disturb the white birds perched on the chamber doors. Robin laughs. “One more time!” Trish joins in.

I walk away. I can’t stand the sight of my husband. I take my spot at the bow. Gloves on. Boathook ready to shove Blackdog off the wall.

“They’re talking him up,” says Trish, smiling, as if Derek was a suicide risk being coaxed from the precipice of a tall building. You can feel the fed-upness of the other boaters. Muttering. Engines running. Patience running out. We all just want to lock through and move on. He’s holding us up. Boaters hate that.

“Hang it up, Derek,” Robin advises. Then to me “They all know you now. Happy?”

“Yeah, actually. I’m really good,” I tell her. “How are you?”

I don’t wait for an answer. Mom’s right. She’s not ready to talk. We’ll stumble and dance around it; if we love, the lines stay open. The uniformed men are losing patience. Derek is more firmly instructed to climb out of the chamber. He comes two more rungs down. "That’s my wife,” he pants, pointing. “She ran away. She just left. I had no idea where she was going.”

This is it.

“Get ready,” I tell Trish and include Audra, my voice loud enough for everyone to hear on the dark side of the chamber. Over on the east side, they’re fidgeting in the sun and wondering what the holdup is. We need daylight to get to the next anchorage. Derek is a speed bump.

“Keep the hook handy. He likes to choke, don’t let him get close enough.” Trish nods, eyes hard. I think she’s seen some things, sunny nature notwithstanding. Confrontations are in her lexicon.

But Audra’s got this. We’re in her wheelhouse. Before Trish can make a move, she whops Derek’s knees with her own boathook, adding a quick jab to the balls. “No!” she yells as loud as she can, then again, “No!”

“Nice job, Audra!” Trish calls. “Someone’s taken a self-defense class.” We laugh. Derek’s right foot slips on a greasy rung and he bangs his chin before clamping both hands back on the ladder. The bottom of his chin is bleeding. Judging by the motherfucker-cocksucker invective, he probably bit his tongue. God, I am so glad I’m not with him anymore.

Muttering, growling, he hovers between down and up as the courteous middle-aged dock attendants renew the urges to be sensible. “Come on up now, man, come on bud, you’re fine bro,” finessing him just as smoothly tow-barge drivers negotiating a two-whistle pass on a tight curve.

“Go away,” I tell Derek.

“You could have let me know, Hailey,” he yells at me, so Brando to my Stella. “You had no right to run off like that.”

“I am done blocking your view,” I say, snide and terrified.

“And there won’t be any more choking,” says Trish.

“Just leave me and my wide ass be.”

“Oh, is that how you want to play it? Fine. I’m filing for divorce.”

“Do what you want.”

“You won’t get support off me. Trust me on that,” says Derek, hawking a coffee-colored loogie that lands on the Kendra’s deck, Audra adroitly sidesteps the ugly splatter before raising her boathook. “Don’t tempt me, mister.”

“You always were a pig,” I say. “I was never supported.”

I’m weary. The biting and beating. The violence of last night and so many days and nights before.

“Just leave me alone. That’s all I want, ” I say. “Leave me alone.”

The men above never stop murmuring. Derek finally tunes in, blearily making his way up. I keep my eyes trained on his slow progress. I can feel the stares from the other boaters in the lock. They’ll have plenty to discuss at tonight’s cocktail hour.

“Blackdog is secured,” Robin announces businesslike over the radio. The other boats chime in. Clicks on the mike switch for applause. A few glad-it-all-worked-outs and a couple of Atta Girls. A formal thank you from the lockmaster “for your patience.”

The siren sounds and we drop toward tidal waters. Lord only knows what wild claims Derek is making up there. He was shuttled away in the golf cart; I did not see any police on scene. Will Trish, Robin and I be detained for questioning?

The gates open on a new vista. The mechanics of the hydraulics grant freedom. The open doors signal permission to proceed without exception, an enormous relief.

“How do you think he found you?” Robin asks.

“It had to be John,” says Trishie.

She’s right. “That’s got to be it,” I say. “John wanted someone to listen to him belly-ache about being tossed off the boat.”

The traveling pack bunched in the lock thins out as the faster vessels increase to cruising speed, leaving the sailboats and slow trawlers who want to save fuel behind. There are only two boats behind us when I spot a flashing blue light on a silver-hulled craft with a small pilothouse zipping toward Blackdog.

“Shit and shinola,” I mutter. I’d been thinking we got away too easy. The Alabama Marine Police are on our tail.

“Shit is right,” says Robin. “Take the wheel Trish, I gotta dump my beer and get my papers.”

“That’s Sierra Hotel India Tango, to you.”