I Am the River Read online

  Didn’t matter anyway. I was holding on to lies and promises and half-remembered dreams. I was too southern for the north and then too northern for the south. Too backwater for one, too in the books for the other. I didn’t fit in anywhere anymore, so I enlisted. Second worst mistake of my goddamn life. The first was leaving the bayou. Allowing myself to be taken, then recast on the wheel. Mud to clay to brittle boy cooling from the oven. Lies or no, it was the last time I felt safe and alive. I can live a lie if I know I’m living. Being dead with truth means you just lost, fair and square.

  But this thing in the corner is neither and it’s both. It’s dead and alive, and it wants to take me to where it dwells, somewhere between the two or maybe somewhere outside all of that mess. It wants to take me there and have its way with me. I’d live a lie if it meant staying away from that place, that thing, living with me where I can see it fully with all of my eyes. If I die, it’ll take me there, or find me there. It will be with me, mostly dead but also alive enough to feel every bit of it for as long as time has left. I’ve got to stay alive. Stay here or stay there but sure as shit stay. Harder still, I’ve got to stay awake, because the mind drifts close to death every time the body sleeps. I’ve become expert to this fact.

  The door opens and the doctor stands in the doorway. I get up from the chair, and it makes no sound as I do. My hands don’t shake here, now, back then, but everything inside me does.

  The man is a woman and is wearing a uniform, similar to mine but different in all those subtle ways that matter. No white coat, although I’m not sure if I expected that or not. I’ve never seen a psychiatrist outside of the funny papers, and funny papers didn’t matter for shit outside of the living room, away from the safety of threadbare rugs and bowls of melted ice cream saved for Saturday mornings because the local market sold it cheap to the early birds who got off the overnight shift. Everything I thought I knew about the outside turned out to be wrong the day I walked into the hospital and never saw my living room again.

  The doctor is wearing glasses that reflect the light from the hallway, making it impossible to see her eyes behind the lenses. I wonder what those eyes have seen and how they’ve been altered since arriving in this dragon-scale land that beat back the bully by sheer force of chin, losing every fight but winning the war. Those round circles of glass could be hiding eyes just like mine, afraid to stay open but more afraid to close because of what happens when they do.

  I walk past the woman without any eyes and enter the office. The door closes behind us and I wonder what’s still left in that hallway, waiting.

  2. Up Country

  The aquarium maneuvered slowly through an ocean, bumping along a sea floor of dark sand and green coral caverns deep enough to swallow a house. Shapes moved in the gray water, living things that remained unknown and unknowable to those forces that would catalog them, cage them, and open up their insides, studying something that needed no discovery by weak minds that couldn’t understand them anyway. An aquarium inside an ocean, a stage play trundling along in the shadow of the real thing.

  Broussard watched from inside the metal and glass enclosure, wondering how long the lashed tarpaulin would hold back a trillion tons of angry water, jealous of every bit of dry land stolen from it by the never-ending creation game of plate tectonics.

  On either side, kelp forests danced and bowed as they passed, not out of respect, but in a long-forgotten comedy that left them giggling as the two bony creatures bounced on by, sucking in air through lungs that could be filled and popped like year-old balloons left out in a summer sun. And still the water came, roaring and greedy, furious in a way that only eons of frustration can properly grow.

  Broussard closed his eyes, feeling the weight of water waiting above him, wondering what it would feel like to be pulverized into mash by something normally so soft and harmless when it lacked organized marching orders.

  “You ever seen rain like this?”

  The driver’s voice was carried on a cloud of cigarette smoke, and ripped Broussard from the bottom of the ocean and placed him squarely inside a stinking U.S. Army-issue jeep on little more than a game trail in an unnamed hillside in Quang Tri Province. He turned back to the window, and now saw everything differently. Just mud, just jungle.

  “Yeah, I have,” Broussard said, because he had in Louisiana and eight other places down south, and because not saying anything would only lead to more questions.

  “Well, I ain’t. Not even here.”

  Broussard wondered why anyone felt the need to ruin an illusion to say something so stupid, so pointless. The back of the man’s head looked like a giant thumb with the nail pulled out at the neck.

  “Something weird in the air,” the driver said.

  Yeah, bullets, Broussard thought, but didn’t say it aloud because he wasn’t like this guy at all.

  Up ahead, only partially visible through the wheezing windshield wipers and the torrent of rainwater that was once an ocean, three Muong women with woven baskets strapped high on their backs led an elephant out of the bush and crossed the road. The huge beast progressed across the muddy track with such delicate grace that it looked as if it moved in slow motion. Sitting on top of the elephant was a man in a low, crow-beaked turban, a World War II-era German MP submachine gun resting in the crook of his arm. He watched the idling American vehicle through the rain as the elephant passed and melted into the green wall of jungle. Neither jeep nor man wanted to know if the other were the enemy. That would save for another day. A drier one, perhaps.

  “Goddamn gook tanks,” the driver muttered. “We should shoot ’em on sight.”

  Broussard exhaled as he sat back and closed his eyes. Just minutes ago, before the cloud of smoke and the human thumb’s meaningless words, before the crash and recede of the ocean into rain and jungle, Broussard would have seen a sperm whale escorted by three dark haired mermaids and a triumphant Poseidon, trident resting easily across his lap. Elephants were impressive, but whales and mermaids and water gods always took the prize.

  “Lord fucking help us if we get stuck out here,” the man said, lighting up another cigarette. “Don’t let them maps fool ya. This is dink fucking central.” His eyes squinted into the jungle on either side of the vehicle. “They’re everywhere, even when they’re not. Know what I mean, champ?”

  The jeep continued up the rough track, packed hard as concrete by five thousand years of bare feet and unshod hooves. No one was getting stuck here unless the jungle commanded it. So far, it hadn’t wanted their jeep, or these two fish inside of it. Like the people and the animals born of this land, the jungle wanted them to pass on through and leave everything alone. But like a jilted suitor, the United States military just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  Back inside his body again, every bone ached from the six-hour trip out from Quang Tri Combat Base to meet up with his new posting at Con Thien Fire Base, which was the westernmost outpost of American influence in the province. Broussard still had no idea why he was being driven this far out away from his platoon that was getting resupplied at Camp Carroll. No one would tell him anything other than he was being transferred away from his company. Broussard had expected this, after what had happened at Hill 407. He also expected to be sent home for a reckoning after sitting in a cell for three days, ignored and barely fed. But he was released without ceremony and sent back into the bush on verbal orders. Nothing in writing. This had made him nervous, but seemed a better alternative than a military trial, so he shut his mouth and headed out into the jungle again, hoping for shit duty hauling sand or driving trucks and a quiet end to his unspectacular service in Vietnam.

  Broussard wasn’t cut out for any of this. Even after the shrieked indoctrination of boot camp, which he managed to weather without incident nor much distinction, he felt the violation of this country by his own. By him. Something didn’t click about the American mission here, but he did what he was told. What other choice did he have? Swallowed by dead
ends and ignoring the nightly news and the voices in the streets, he’d voluntarily placed his fate into the hands of the U.S. Army, and he’d do what he had to do to see this relationship through ‘til the end. He wished he was stronger, but knew that he wasn’t. He feared death. Feared killing even worse. They were the twin horrors. Monstrous and final, and totally unknown in their outcome. The M-16 by his side, the .45 in his holster, seemed like strangers to him, even though he was trained to see them as lovers, saviors. They just felt like cold metal, pieces of something forced and unnatural. He shouldn’t be out here. He shouldn’t be here at all. Hill 407 had made that all too clear. Sooner or later, he’d either get someone else or himself killed. Worse, he’d kill somebody, paying off all that training, with bloody interest. Broussard wasn’t sure if he’d be able to handle that, and his uncertainty at his reaction terrified him. What would he do? What was he capable of doing?

  The rain slackened, then completely shut off, leaving the inside of the jeep deafeningly quiet. The driver leaned forward against the wheel and looked up through the windshield. The world turned green again, the sky a mash of angry smoke.

  “God must’ve pissed himself out,” he said.

  “God don’t live out here,” Broussard said, more to himself.

  “You best hope he does, champ, or else we’re all going to hell.”

  3. Black Shuck

  I brought a dog back from the jungle. A great big hound, five foot at the shoulder, shaggy black fur, built like a German shepherd but the size of a grizzly bear. Jaws always dripping wet, working those teeth, holding back the tongue. Yellow eyes sitting high on a skull the size of a bull heifer’s. I’ve never seen the dog, not face to face, because I can’t open my eyes when it comes near, but I know it looks like this because my mind tells me that it does, when my brain is the only thing free and my body is wrapped tight with chains. The antennae curled up inside my head sketch out the shape, and the details are filled in by the weight of its paws. It sits on my chest at night and does a downbeat match to the rhythm of my breathing, in for out and out for in. The dog breathes corruption into my face, pushing out all the rot it has inside it, everything it’s eaten, and then sucks away all of the good, clean air in the room, leaving me with nothing when it’s my turn to breathe. It’s heavy, this beast, and my lungs can’t expand much at all, so they do double-time, triple, in tiny heaves and grabs, looking for just a little bit of air to keep me from drowning in the River that has taken my bed, underneath the weight of that dog sitting on my chest, pushing me down into the water. That burning River, surface littered with flame.

  Black Shuck is its name. It didn’t tell me this, because I can’t get enough air to make a sound when it’s sitting on my chest. Someone else told me this name a long time ago, a swamp witch named Arceneaux with wide-set eyes and hair that looked like fireworks frozen in mud. I didn’t believe that Black Shuck was real, because everyone knew that the swamp witch told lies to scare all the good Christians and get coins from the devil for each bit of badness she let loose into the world. But I believe her now. Black Shuck is real and he comes to see me at night and he’s sitting on my chest right now.

  I brought a dog back from the jungle, and that dog wasn’t Death but something older, meaner. And right this very second, this old mean thing is trying to kill me.

  The panic of drowning detaches what’s left of my soul and I float above the situation, letting me size it up just one more time for posterity, because I know this is it. It has to be, because I can’t take any more.

  There I am down below, and there it is, all of its forms in one. I still can’t see its face but I don’t need to. The bulk of the thing is enough.

  It isn’t always a dog on the outside, I’ve noticed over time, but a dog is what it is. It was a woman once, my mind tells me. Probably Arceneaux but probably not, because the weight of it didn’t feel like that old weird swamp woman. It felt heavy, like every girl I ever wanted but couldn’t have, all sitting with the combined burden of desire unfulfilled and fear never fully dealt with. Face full of taunts, eyes lit by hate, clawing at my closed lids. Those yellow eyes staring down at me. But I knew this was just Black Shuck, hound born in the void, weaned on black cream and taught knowledge from the echoed psalms sung to dead stars. It’s not always a dog on the outside, but has a dog’s habit of following after a man until one of them dies.

  On the street, in the alleyways, in corner stores and a doctor’s waiting room, Black Shuck takes a shape to help it blend in, to not attract any attention while I remain at the forefront of its every observation. Or maybe I’m just one of many it hunts. I have no way of knowing, other than what my antennae tell me. It might be thousand things, chasing a thousand souls.

  But at night, with me, it’s the dog, a half-ton hound perched on top of me when my eyes are closed, sagging the bedsprings and stealing my breath, waiting for me to expire so it can consume me with that huge wet mouth and take me back to its warren to feed its litter, or cast me out into the Great Nothing like scat squeezed into a lake.

  I’m not sure how I feel about being eaten. Because I know it will happen eventually, I can’t decide if I just want it to be over with, or if I want to experience each and every agony of being chewed and ground and rent asunder, because I know that it will be the last thing I really feel before the eternity of pure nothing. I don’t know if pain is better or worse than wide-awake paralysis that persists until the end of everything.

  I don’t know because I’m a coward.

  Big tough coward. Biggest pussy in the world. The war taught me that. No, not taught—verified.

  Black Shuck knows this, what I didn’t do back in the jungles of Vietnam, and what I did do in that jungle in Laos. How I did finally rise up when I needed to, and then rose up too far when I shouldn’t have, when I could have just run with my bravery but instead killed with my cowardice. Its roiling consciousness tells me that it knows; its breath, carrying the stink of those bodies, and that one in particular. I can smell it. The coppery smell of muscle without skin gone bad for years.

  This thing wants to kill me. Wants me to kill me. Either way, it wants me dead and then have me all to itself.

  It’s getting close tonight, because I can’t breathe. I’m drowning in my bed, in the River that’s risen up over my mattress while my body is wrapped in concertina wire. The smallest move will slice my flesh but I can’t move.

  Here it comes. The black is coming to take me, and I’m too worn out to fight it anymore. Too tired to use the fear anymore. The River is rushing upward, louder and louder as I sink down deep. It’s wet and cold.

  Through the sound of the water, I hear a knock on a faraway door. It’s soft, the knocking, but it’s enough.

  Black Shuck is gone.

  A knock on a door saves me. It scares away Black Shuck in all its manifestations, which reform and retreat back into it as it slinks off into the shadows where the wall meets the ceiling, a raspy voice and a growl combining with many whispers trailing behind it as it goes.

  Maybe it’s a coward just like me, scared of the outside world, those who aren’t supposed to see it.

  Big tough coward. Biggest pussy in the void. One more thing we have in common.

  Another knocking, louder now. The door has come closer. It might be my own door, but it’s difficult to tell, with the sound of the water receding under my bed, the bladed wire falling off my body and retracting into the floor. I’m still not ready to move, but I know that I can if I need to. My body hurts, my brain is on fire.

  A third knock. I need to get up, and go pay tribute. Whoever or whatever it is saved my life. This time, anyway. The next time the hound comes and the River rises will be my last. It has to be. Neither of us can take any more.

  4. Birddog

  “Wake up, Broussard.”

  Broussard raised his chin off his chest and opened his eyes, staring up at the canvas roof of the hooch, where a pink grass moth slowly flexed its wings. It was a patient moveme
nt, deliberate, and they thrummed with the sound of a colossus, chopping the air above it outside. Many wings, descending. It was terrible. Broussard felt the fluids inside of him vibrate. He closed his eyes again, waiting for it.

  “Well I’ll be goddamned,” the voice said, thick Dixie accent bending the words just so. “I do believe you could sleep through the apocalypse.”

  Broussard sat up.

  Tim Darby grinned, shirtless and sweaty like he always was, cheap jailhouse tattoos cut by jungle rot scars quivering like broken earthworms dying on wet cement. He was cleaning his rifle again, the third time today, each piece set out in precise rows. He was a tidy sort, this filthy man. Hard to get a handle on, all busy hands keeping away from the devil’s business but probably planning something far worse inside his mind. Darby raised his eyebrows at Broussard, pointed two greasy fingers into the air, his smile growing as the sound increased, stirring up whatever was inside of him. It was a terrible thing to witness. “The angels of death have arrived!”