Skeeter Burkett had been coming to this spot in the Rolling Fork River to fish since he was ten years old. Him and Buford. They hadn’t been friends that first time, when they both showed up with cane poles and plastic corks ready to wet a hook in the same spot that summer afternoon. Skeeter was a native, Buford was from Away from Here, his parents having moved to Nowhere County from Beaufort County when his granny died and left them a little piece of bottom land in Dragonroot Hollow.
Skeeter didn’t take to strangers. Nobody did. And some strange kid showing up at his spot in the river to fish was more’n anybody’d ought to have to stand. He told Buford if he valued his hide, he’d hightail it outta there and not look back.
Buford asked real sarcastic-like if Skeeter owned the river.
“I own this here piece of it.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. I been fishing here every day, every summer for the past ten summers.” Which wasn’t technically true but it was close enough. “Where was you fishing last week?” Before Buford could answer, he put in, “I’ll warrant wasn’t here or you’d a been sitting in my lap and I recon I’d remember a thing like that.”
The two of them had dropped their poles on the shore and were doing the little-kid dance, chest out, trying to look big like a rooster with its feathers ruffled. Skeeter didn’t remember who shoved first. They’d been arguing that point for going on fifty years now and wouldn’t neither one of them give an inch.
Buford said Skeeter shoved him. Skeeter maintained it was t’other way around.
The kids they’d been wasn’t all that different from the old men they grew up to be and even now wouldn’t neither one of them give an inch. After that first shove they was rolling around in the dirt, throwing wild punches that didn’t land solid anywhere, rolling over and over …
Buford always told the story that it was Skeeter rolled the two of them off into the river. Skeeter, of course, knew it’d been Buford that’d done it.
And then they was friends. Just like that. They’d both done what they had to do, stood up for themselves as would make their daddies proud. They’d give as good as they’d got and wasn’t neither one a winner or a loser.
So they’d climbed out of the river, sat down dripping on the bank, picked up their poles and tossed their worm-encrusted hooks into the water, like they’d been friends for years.
Skeeter found that he was smiling at the memory. When he couldn’t keep his gaze from straying to the empty spot on the riverbank beside him, the smile drained off his face like water out of a pail with a hole rusted in the bottom.
Buford had been in Cincinnati visiting his daughter on J-Day. They’d gone fishing the day before, though. Sat quiet side-by-side on the riverbank, in that way of men who’d known each other for so long wasn’t no need to mess up communication with talk. Skeeter’d caught enough fish for supper, had ridden Buford hard that he was gonna go home hungry.
Now, he sat on the riverbank thinking about the exchange — “How can a man sit here all afternoon and not get a single nibble? You done lost your mojo.” Mojo was a word they laughed over, one of them words the young ones used that the two old men’d snatched for themselves because it was a right handy word to use in the right circumstance.
Hadn’t been but two weeks, of course, this Jabberwock thing. It could roll back out of here any time now. Any time.
It wouldn’t, though. Skeeter didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. That woman who’d got all up in Viola Tackett’s face at that meeting said folks was vanishing and he knew that to be true, too. Folks was disappearing, and it’d keep happening ‘til wasn’t nobody left.
And would that be such a bad thing? No sense sitting out here by himself for the rest of his life. He’d rather disappear and be done with it.
He reached up and wiped tears off his cheeks — the glare off the water’d made his eyes water, that’s all. He seen it then. Something had washed downriver from Ironwood Mountain and got hung up in the reeds about fifty yards upstream. A big something.
He approached it, but wouldn’t let himself know what it was, even when he knew for almost certain, until he’d got right up on it and there wasn’t no denying the truth of it. It was a body. A woman drowned. Wasn’t no way to tell who she was, though, ‘cause wasn’t no face left on the front of the head. Skeeter turned his head aside and lost his breakfast soon’s he seen that part. Then he took out running best as he could across the field to the neighbors, the Reynolds. Them boys was gonna have to help him get that dead woman out of the river ‘cause she was fat as a boar hog.