Chapter Twenty-One

I grew up among wise men and found that there is nothing better for men than silence

—Krio Proverb

The next morning, Hunter drove to Caitlin’s houseboat. He paused in the gravel parking lot of the Cottonport Lounge, which had closed after the last flood. The bar’s whitewashed concrete block walls were now a dingy gray with a high-water mark about two feet up, smeared with a line of trash and dirt stuck to its surface. The same rusty chairs and rickety tables were stacked on the back patio, and the patio’s wall was lined by two church pews, bought or borrowed or taken and brought to this new congregation. This confrontation with the forces of the unseen startled him, and images of Wednesday nights augured themselves into his brain like an old video documentary. He communed with ghosts of parties past, with people he knew no longer, his mind filling with the strains of paean and scolion never to be sung here again.

For over two years he had played here at the Cottonport, and for one of those years he had also used a bass and violin player. They had a good sound, and their relationship had been a good one, but the two other musicians had gone their separate ways with their own ghosts and stories and Hunter returned to playing solo.

He followed the stunted crape myrtle trees and azalea bushes that bordered the patio, his hand brushing brittle summer leaves. He had first met Caitlin here. She had walked down to the bar from her boat and sat alone in front of him as he played. He looked at the spot of ground where he had knelt like a thrall next to her chair, thinking of that moment when he had gained the image for the first poem he wrote her, a poem he still needed to set to music. Maybe someday. After the bar closed that night, they had necked in his truck, whispering shameless things like lovers sometimes do. Hunter believed that Caitlin must think of these things as well, every time she saw this bar. Every time.

The memories brought a smile and twinges of pain.

A hanging basket near the door held a fern—neglected, forgotten, but surviving. A ceiling fan drooped from the Sheetrock ceiling and the blades spun listless and slow, as if tapped by indiscernible fingers of a breeze. A life preserver and broken paddle hung on the wall, untouched and unused, but worn from weather and years. A stack of tiki lights stacked in the corner, the cane poles discolored and splitting. One table sat close to the river and scattered on the ground about it were fish scales and rotting fish heads.

Hunter faced the river, and his eyes darted to a deserted pink condominium, the highest point in Monroe. It sat on top of a decaying brown building that had once been a fine hotel, but was now the haven of bums, bats, and birds. The elevator had long quit working, but the adventurous could still venture up the stairs. He himself had trespassed once and remembered the stairwell marked by the DANGER: CONDEMNED BUILDING sign.

From the pink, mysterious landmark, his eyes drifted down to the I-20 bridge, then to the railroad trestle, rusted, but solid. Hunter remembered the strange cry of the freight train as it approached the Cottonport Lounge and how the sound of rattling iron filled the air. As soon as he heard the train’s horn, he would launch into Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” until the train drowned his music, and then he would lay his guitar aside until the graffiti-covered cars passed. Sometimes the train was long, and they all listened for several minutes while the rhythmic cacophony of the train’s passing transported each to secret memories.

The trestle rested on huge concrete columns, and the trestle had suffered the ravages of time and the elements. Vines as thick as barge cables draped their leafy beards down the sides of the pillars. Like many people Hunter knew, the vines clung stubbornly to the thin soil of their existence in a place where one shouldn’t be able to exist at all. The trestle’s decorative veneer of bricks was now colorless, and many bricks were absent, lost to the river’s voracious chewing. Occasionally, a pigeon emerged from its roost under the bridge and flew toward deserted buildings lining the Monroe side of the levee.

Growing on the edge of the river and rising above the Cottonport stood a willow, whose trunk split into five sections, each beam a foot thick. Its branches twisted high into the air. Killdeers and curlews, chimney sweeps and gulls, dived into the water and rested on the bank, and Hunter listened to their plaintive cries that questioned, called, and conversed with the ears of unknown recipients. The tin roof of a party barge just downstream creaked as it rocked, and he could hear the wake paddle the bottom boat’s barrels like they were drums. The river’s waves lapped the shore like a lover’s kiss before the river stilled again, and then the sound of the waves was replaced by the sound of locusts.

A bass fisherman chugged upstream, his small outboard humming steadily. Then a jet-ski, then a speedboat, then another party barge. A girl on its deck waved. Another passenger shouted something unintelligible.

Hunter stood here and faced all the ghosts of the river, then walked through the gravel parking lot to the wooden dock with steps winding their way down to Caitlin’s houseboat. There was a jon boat tied to its side. As he came on board, he found Caitlin sitting cross-legged on the deck, in shorts and tank top, a sketchpad in her lap. She glanced up and saw him.

“Hello, Hunter,” she called out. “Take a seat.”

He sat down next to her and lit a cigarette and watched her draw.

“When are you going to lay those cigarettes down?” she asked. “You know I hate smoking.”

“Some habits are hard to shake. Like you for instance.”

“Habits. They eat up so much of our life that we don’t even enjoy them, maybe not even notice them till we try to give them up or are taken away.”

Tejan, clad only in a pair of Nike shorts, laid down his fishing rod and moved next to Caitlin, his eyes fixed on Hunter.

“It’s okay, Tejan,” Caitlin said. “Hunter’s a friend of mama’s. Tejan, would you get each of us a glass of iced tea?”

“Oui,” Tejan said.

After Tejan stepped inside the cabin, Hunter said, “That’s your son, I guess. He doesn’t seem to have much to say.”

“Yes, Tejan’s my son. He’s on the quiet side, but he’s so much better now.”

“What do you mean? Was he sick? He looks healthy enough to me.”

“Yes, he was very sick. He carried two tropical diseases. He had been shot at least three times at one time or another. But on the inside he was much worse. He was an orphan. One of the mission’s priests agreed to help me adopt Tejan because he had known Tejan for many years. When we learned the mission would be shut down, he was afraid that if Tejan were taken to one of the government rehabilitation camps, he would regress and return to being a soldier—only this time, in the government’s army.”

“Wouldn’t the legitimate government be the good guys? Nothing’s wrong with a military career.”

“Armies there are not like ours. There, armies are the tools of politics, and in Sierra Leone, atrocities were committed by rebels and government soldiers alike. Sometimes it was difficult to identify who was right, who was worse.

“Anyway, for some reason, I fell in love with Tejan. I had to get him away from Sierra Leone. After seeing what I saw in Africa, I feel there’s so much evil that I don’t know how the universe can hold together.”

“What holds you together?” Hunter asked.

“Love. My art. Memories. Tejan. What’s holding you together?”

Hunter paused, then shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure if anything in me is sticking to anything.”

“I know prison must have been hard on you. I’m sorry you had to go through that. What was it like?”

“Well, it wasn’t like being in a Mexican prison, but it was bad enough. The work kept me busy and kept my mind off things mostly. Picked up a lot of trash along the highways for Ouachita Parish. I took every work detail I could get that was outside. That kept me away from the lazy-butt trash inside who got into most of the trouble. No prison time is easy time. But in other ways, it made me more of a musician. I wrote a lot. You’d never guess who I wrote about.”

Caitlin blushed. “And Africa made me more of a painter.” She touched his chin, turned his face as if she studied his profile. “Still the same Hunter. Strong face. Sadder eyes. This art show tonight is important to me. I want you to come and see it.”

“It’s Sunday, so I think I can make it. I won’t be working.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve got something for you.” She went inside and returned with the bolon. “This is for you. It’s called a bolon.”

“It’s beautiful. Thank you. I wish I had brought you something.”

“Don’t worry about it. Seeing you again is gift enough.”

Hunter plucked on the bolon for a while, then they sat in a wordless silence, drinking tea, hearing and watching the killdeers as they soared and swirled over the river. When Caitlin took his hand, Hunter noticed how different her touch felt to him.