Thad crouched behind a pile of riprap near the edge of the woods and studied a man who was kneeling beside a small boy. He figured they were father and son, and he watched the man run a worm onto the hook at the end of the boy’s fishing line.
The father led his son to the water’s edge and seemed to be giving instructions that Thad couldn’t make out from that distance, the words just a muffled voice in the late-morning air. The man stood behind the child and leaned down to place his arms on the boy’s, and they swung at once together to cast the line into the water. The boy failed to release the button on the Zebco and the plastic bobber smacked against clay-covered rocks just a few feet in front of them. He looked up at his father, who only smiled and helped his son reel up the slack to try again.
The child was bare-chested with a pair of acid-washed jeans that were too small on him. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. Even from where Thad was hiding he could see that the boy’s breakfast was smeared around his mouth, but Thad paid little attention to the kid. He focused on the father, and more important, on the shirt the man wore.
A red T-shirt had the word FIRE in big white letters across the back. Budgets raised by boot drives and hot-dog suppers meant that the Little Canada Volunteer Fire Department wasn’t exactly handing shirts out. Of course the shirt could have been from another department in the county, maybe even from Balsam Grove, which wasn’t but a few miles down the road. It wasn’t like Thad could make out the tiny letters circling the Maltese cross on the breast pocket. But the chance that the shirt the man wore was from Little Canada meant there was a chance that he’d know Thad Broom. If he was from Little Canada, he certainly would, and that’s why Thad hadn’t moved.
From where he was hiding, he could not be certain if he knew the man or not. A ball cap pulled down on the man’s head and dark hair ducktailing over his ears and neck made him difficult to discern. His face was scruffy and he had a thick mustache that seemed to completely cover his lips. He didn’t look familiar, but then again Thad hadn’t seen anyone in some time. Two years he’d been back, but aside from running into somebody he knew at Walmart or the ABC store when him and Aiden went to Sylva, folks in Little Canada mostly kept to themselves and they certainly never came looking for fuckups like Aiden and Thad. Thad could see the man’s pickup, an old black Toyota with paint dulled by the sun, a tall antenna waving from the hood as a breeze pushed off the water. An old ’80s-model Toyota with a dog box in the back could have belonged to half of Jackson County. There just wasn’t any telling.
The boy still stood but his father had sat down Indian style on the rocks and smoked a cigarette. Thad watched the bobber tap at the water’s surface, but he was too far away to tell if it was a fish biting or just undulations of water. All of a sudden the bobber disappeared and the boy whipped his whole body to the side to set the hook. The man jumped to his feet, dusted sand from the seat of his pants, and yelled encouragement. There was a fish on and they were paying no attention, so Thad moved quickly and was behind them before either saw a thing.
The father and son knelt with a saucer-sized bluegill flopping on the clay between them. The fish flipped its body from one side to the other and finally tired, with its navy-colored flanks speckled gray by mud and sand, a crescent of red showing briefly each time its gills opened for breath. Thad stepped closer and his shadow spread over the ground where the fish lay, his boots crunching loose rock at the same time, and the father and son turned in unison, their eyes squinted in the sunlight to try and see who was there. The man stood and the boy stayed crouched by his catch, and as the man spoke Thad realized he didn’t know him at all.
“Can I help you, mister?”
“Maybe,” Thad said. “I was going to see if you might give me a ride to Charleys Creek.”
“Charleys Creek?” the man questioned. He looked Thad up and down, ran his eyes over the muddied clothes Thad wore, but seemed to focus most of his attention on the shotgun Thad held by his side. “We ain’t headed that way.”
“Well, you got a cell phone I could use to call somebody?”
The man stood there for a second thinking it over, then, “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a cell phone in the truck if it’ll get service out here.”
“That’d be awfully kind,” Thad said.
“Run up there to the truck and get my cell phone.”
The boy looked down at the fish, then up to Thad and over to his father before looking back down at the fish. He seemed like he didn’t quite know what to do, but then his father’s words settled and he tore off in a sprint for the truck.
The man watched the boy go and when his son was inside the pickup and out of earshot he looked at Thad skeptically and asked, “Now, where was it you said you come from?”
“I ain’t said, but I was down there in the gorge. There came a rain and I got all turned around and before I knew it I couldn’t find my ass from my elbow.”
“How long was you down in there?”
“Two days,” Thad said.
“And what was it you was doing down in there to start with?” The man had his attention focused back on the gun that ran the length of Thad’s leg.
“I was down in there checking on some ginseng patches,” Thad said. He noticed how the man kept eyeing the shotgun and he shook the gun by his leg as if to try and snap the man out of his trance. “Snakey country down in there.”
“That’s federal land,” the man said. He took the ball cap off and then pulled the hat onto his head with one hand clenching the bill and the other guiding the back down. “You can’t dig ’seng out of there.”
Before Thad could answer, the boy skittered to a stop with the phone outstretched in his hand. “Here you go.”
The father took the cell phone from his son and eyed Thad like he wanted an answer, but he didn’t ask for one. He just held the phone toward him, and Thad took it and thanked him.
Thad pretended to tap a number onto the screen and then held the phone up to his ear. After a good thirty seconds, he raised the phone in front of his face, looked at the screen, and pressed it once like he was ending a call. “Ain’t picking up,” he said. “Any chance I could text him?”
“Yeah,” the man said, and nodded for Thad to go ahead.
Thad fiddled with the screen, opened the messages, and immediately found the contact he was hoping for, a feed of messages between the man and his wife. Thad tapped the cursor onto a new line, turned the phone on its side, and thumbed in two quick lines: “Truck broke down. Need you to come get us.” He hit SEND and the second the word DELIVERED showed under the speech bubble, Thad reared back and threw the phone as far out into the lake as he could.
The boy turned, shocked, toward the water and the man looked completely confused for a split second, but didn’t wait for an answer to come to his mind. He bent over hurriedly and fumbled with the bottom of his pants leg, his hands getting tangled in the canvas, and by the time he had his hand on the grips and was trying to draw the boot gun from his ankle holster, Thad had come forward and had the shotgun pressed straight into the top of his head.
“You just as well set that on the ground, mister,” Thad said. “Now stand on up and kick that gun past me.”
The man did just that.
Thad backed away and swiped the snub-nosed revolver from the ground, slid it down the back of his pants till the handle caught on the waistline of his jeans. He yanked his shirt up at the base of his back and let it fall over the wooden grips, completely concealing the revolver.
The boy stood beside his father and held tight to the man’s leg. The man settled his hand on the back of his son’s neck and said, “You’re more than welcome to anything I’ve got, but there ain’t no reason to have my son watching. He ain’t got nothing to do with this.”
“I know he don’t,” Thad said. “I ain’t going to hurt that boy. I ain’t aiming to hurt either one of you.”
They all just stood there for a second or two looking at one another, the father and son staring at Thad, and Thad keeping focused on the man’s eyes. The man looked confused, like he wanted to say something, but didn’t know the words.
“Your wife know y’all was coming fishing? I mean did she know where y’all was headed?”
The man nodded.
“Well, that’s good,” Thad said. “That’s good because I texted her a message telling her to come get you, and I imagine she’ll be headed this way directly. Any chance I can get one of them cigarettes off you?”
The man slid the pack from his pocket and offered them toward Thad.
“You can just toss them on the ground right there will be fine,” Thad said. “And I thank you.”
The man tossed the pack of cigarettes onto the ground, and Thad knelt and took one from the pack. He grabbed his lighter from his pocket, lit the smoke, and left the rest of the pack lying where he’d found it. Crouched there with the shotgun across his knees, he took a long drag and blew the smoke into the sky. When he finished exhaling, he stood. “I’m going to need your keys now,” he said.
The man immediately took his keys from the side pocket of his carpenter pants and tossed them onto the ground just the same as he had the cigarettes.
Thad grabbed the keys and kind of cocked his head to the side as he spoke. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, seeming to speak more to the child than the man. “I really am.” But neither the father nor son said a word.
• • •
THAD ROUNDED A HAIRPIN CURVE between Tanasee Lake and Wolf on tires so big that they whined as he drove. In the road, a high-shouldered buzzard ducked its featherless head and took air with three onerous flaps of its wings. The buzzard lit on a post along the guardrail and Thad craned his neck to get a better look of the bird perched there through the passenger-side window as he passed. The buzzard’s red face and mottled feathers were almost turkey-like, except for its beak, the sharp white hook bloodstained and menacing. Thad glanced into the rearview as he hit the gas down a short straightaway. The buzzard hopped back into the road and continued its meal, a roast of bright red flesh center lane on the pavement, in no hurry at all.
The fireman’s handheld radio lay on the passenger seat of the pickup and Thad was thankful it hadn’t been clipped to the man’s belt. He hadn’t thought to check him for a radio and knew it was sheer luck that the man left it in the truck. Something that simple could have ruined it all. A click of a button and that man could have cued dispatch and had the law barreling up Highway 281 to cut Thad off before he was halfway back to Charleys Creek.
The truck thumped couplets as Thad drove over the sectioned concrete of Wolf Lake dam. He geared down in the middle of the dam and the sound beneath him slowed as he braked to a stop. There was an unopened pack of cigarettes on the sun-cracked dash. Thad packed the box of smokes against his hand, ripped the cellophane off, lit one, and slid the revolver from the back of his jeans. He tossed the snub-nosed .38 onto the passenger seat and pressed hard into the place where his back hurt. He took a drag from the cigarette and rested the hand that held it onto the steering wheel as he leaned forward and tried to press deeper. But it did no good at all.
The lake was calm and bluebird skies didn’t cast a single thing across the surface, just the sun pushing toward noonday, flicking sparks on what little movement the water had. The reflections of mountains and trees wrapped the edges of the lake, and, turning his head back, Thad could see the cliff some sixty feet high where boys, looking to impress girls, dared each other to jump. There was no one there now, but Thad remembered a time when he and Aiden skipped high school and drove to the lake to watch the college kids climb the rock face and chuck themselves off over the water.
On the day Thad was thinking about, he and Aiden had taken a bag of weed and gone down to the water to try and get in with the girls who lay on beach towels and watched the boys. They lied and said they were older, but it was obvious they didn’t fit in and the college kids just seemed to mock them as they rolled joint after joint until the bag was gone. Thad and Aiden were so stoned they could barely keep their eyes open as they watched the boys lead one of the girls onto the cliff. The older boys had been making fun of the girls for being scared all afternoon, and finally this girl figured she’d shut them up by answering the dare. Thad and Aiden didn’t say a word about it, though Thad figured they both thought the same thing. She stood there for a long time bent-legged on a tiny ledge, probably second-guessing having gone that far, but there was no way to climb back down. She had to jump.
The boys shouted directions for her to jump as far out as she could to clear the rocks beneath her and finally they counted her down, and while she didn’t jump on their go, she did just a few seconds after. She was into the air and her arms flailed and her hair waved from her head. She tightened her legs together into a toothpick and pinched at her nose with one hand, her head tilting back when she did, and all it took was that one movement to throw her off center. Her body started to shift and she leaned farther and farther back and it was too late to correct the mistake. She slapped down out of the sky onto the backs of her legs and sank like a stone just as soon as she hit water.
The girls on the shore screamed. One of the boys on the cliff rushed to the ledge and hurled off after her. Thad and Aiden didn’t move for a second or two, a mixture of smoke and shock holding them captive, but when they realized that none of the other boys were moving from the cliff, they dived into the water and swam to help. Thad could still remember how the water seemed so cold against his sunburned skin and how hard it had been for the three boys to tread water with her body. She wasn’t dead but her legs were useless and her arms did nothing more than clutch at the boy’s shoulders as she cried. By the time they got her to shore, her legs were completely black. Everyone crowded around her gasping and in awe, and after a long time they carried her out.
On the ride home that afternoon, Aiden and Thad joked that if those were the types of things learned in universities, then they weren’t missing anything. Most of those college kids looked down their noses at folks like them, but every year there was one or two who jumped off that cliff and sank to the bottom. There were two types of lives, and he and Aiden had been born into one where ASVABs made more sense than SATs. But, looking back now, Thad couldn’t seem to draw that separation. Whether a man was born one way or another, he wound up doing things that haunted him the rest of his life. People made mistakes that couldn’t be fixed, and in the middle of the dam staring out over Wolf Lake, Thad could see everything he’d ever done. When it all boiled down to it, the only difference between one person and another was whether there was someone to jump in and keep you from drowning.