voice. “Uh uh. They might put an arrow through me.”
“Goddamn it,” said B. J., “come on and help me get out of these fucking woods.”
“All right, preacher,” said Mr. Hall in a shocked voice and began draping clothes over B. J.’s outstretched arm. Norman had already started off, close in the wake of Uncle Putt and the four dogs, his light veering neither to the right nor left.
B. J. and Mr. Hall caught up within fifty yards, branches and vines slashing at their bare chest and legs like switches as they ran, but they didn’t feel a thing. When they reached the top of the ridge paralleling the creek, they could hear sounds of splashing and yelling behind them as the war party waded across after the whiskey. They didn’t look back.
Lord, prayed B. J. as he stumbled after the men and dogs in front of him, his arms dead from the weight of the clothes and guns he was carrying, you got to forgive me for taking your name in vain, but there was a whole host of devils all around me. Just get me home. Out loud he called to the naked cat hunters fleeing ahead of him:
“You got to let me tell you about Christian Guard Dogs, Incorporated. It’s just this kind of thing they’re a real use for.” Nobody slowed, and nobody answered him all the way through the moonless thickets back to the burned-over clearing and the Nomad camper parked in the middle of it. The only sound was that of Elvis in the low bushes, moving in a steady jive.
The Angler’s Paradise Fish-Cabin Dance of Love
Bobby Shepard smelled bad. He could tell it himself as he leaned over to push the head of the mop up under the table in the kitchen area of the fishing cabin. It was the third time he had gone back over the linoleum on the floor with a mixture of water and ammonia, and from what he could tell, not only did the dun-colored covering still look as stained and nasty as it did when he had started cleaning four hours ago, it also seemed to be dissolving at various points into small fragments from the power of the ammonia. Everything looked a whole lot more damp now, though, and he figured that was an advance.
The one-room structure did smell different, too, from the large amounts of cleaner and disinfectant and insect repellent Bobby had sloshed around, so much so that a steady stream of tears had been dripping down his cheeks for more than an hour. He paused in his mopping to rub a worn-out T-shirt across his face again, wincing as the cloth irritated his inflamed nose through which he had given up trying to breathe soon after he had started the ammonia treatment of all exposed surfaces in the house.
Despite having switched to puffing in air through his mouth, Bobby could still detect the powerful funk being thrown off in all directions from his body, and he made a mental note to pay extra special attention to deodorizing himself all over in every crease and cavity when he finished with cleaning the fish cabin and turned to the problem of personal hygiene. Bobby remembered from his youth how funny older people smelled to teenagers, anyway, even in a cleanly condition, and he was determined not to offend on the olfactory level. A good hard scrub with a mild bar soap, say Ivory, and a shampoo with a moisturing balsam-based hair product, followed by a heavy spraying of scent-free men’s deodorant—Mitchum, maybe, certainly not one of those heavy types with a musk odor—should give him good protection and make his physical aura as inoffensive as it could be, given his age location in the middle years.
No way you could hide the evidence of time’s passage, completely, of course, from the sense of smell. Bobby knew that and had to live with it. Standing in line, say, at a checkout counter in a grocery store, he might find himself waiting behind an older woman with another one with a cart behind him, pushing at him with the front end of it so she could start stacking her stuff on the conveyor belt well before it was her turn. The woman in front of him wasn’t even finished yet, and here he was with his pile of canned goods and egg plant and onions and what-have-you not even being processed yet by the checkout girl with Edna or Barb or Debbi on her nametag, and the old biddy behind was already nudging away at his butt and the small of his back with the steel edge of her carrier.
And then he would yield finally to the steady pressure of the wire shopping cart chewing away at him from the rear and take a step forward, moving despite himself into the smell-field of the woman ahead with her eyes fixed on the numbers Edna or Barb or Debbi was ringing up, as though she were watching for a signal from God about how many days she had left to live on this earth. Standing there paralyzed and rooted to the floor, that smell rising off of her saying old, old, old, no matter how much Secret or Mum or other old-lady deodorant she was using to try to mask it. All those gray years swarming and seething and working beneath the chemicals.
So smell, that was the first thing he knew he had to tackle and try to defeat when he had decided to do what he was going to do with the fishing cabin on Smith’s Point, the last one still standing on that bend of the Gulf of Mexico in the group of eight that had once been the destination of people from Port Arthur and Winnie and Orange and Port Acres and wherever else weekend fishermen used to live in the Golden Triangle of Texas.
It had been a long time ago when Arden Hooks’s Angler’s Paradise was a going concern, however. It had reached its heyday in the late fifties back before everybody from the level of apprentice oiler in a refinery on up to foreman came to own his personal boat and a pickup truck to pull it around with. As soon as the price of enough horsepower in an outboard motor to push a boat got down to where a man could buy him a rig in installments, the Angler’s Paradise on Smith’s Point was doomed. These days, you could hardly even find what was left of the old road to it anymore, especially considering what Hurricane Audrey had done to that section of the coast back in the sixties.
Bobby himself hadn’t thought of the fish camp in years, in fact, though for a while back there he had spent probably every other weekend in one of Arden Hooks’s little cabins, drinking Ancient Times bourbon at night and waiting for enough daylight to come so he could get out on the water in one of Arden’s little green boats with a twenty-five horsepower Johnson churning behind.
That experience was gone and had been gone, and it wasn’t until he had that dream that the scene of the fishing cabins clustered at the edge of the Gulf rose up before him again. But when the vision came, it arrived as though he had opened a door and discovered himself staring directly into the molten center of the sun. And it had settled into his mind like Portland cement hardening into stone. There for the centuries, no matter how high the tide rose or the wind drove or the rain beat down.
In the dream, Bobby Shepard was sitting in his BarcaLounger, the chair magically transported from his living room in Port Arthur where it always rested before the Sony Tru-Image to a new location in the center of a one-room cabin in Arden Hooks’s collection at Smith’s Point. The back of the lounger was tilted partway into the reclining option, but not so far back that Bobby was at full repose. He was relaxed, certainly, the muscles of his neck and back not needing to maintain any flex to support himself, but not kicked back so far that he was in danger of feeling the urge to drift into slumber. At ease, but alert was the way he remembered his posture as being in the opening sequence of his dream, when he went over it later in his mind and when he jotted down notes on paper so he could keep the events intact and whole against the onslaught of living in reality in the everyday world.
Music was playing at a low decibel level as the scene opened up, much like it does at the beginning of a movie after the credits have rolled by and before the real action kicks off. The performer was Jimi Hendrix, Bobby recognized immediately, but his guitar was not wailing and he was not screaming directly into the ears of his listeners as he always seemed to be doing in the clips from the music festival appearances Bobby had seen over the years on television. Instead, he was stating over and over again in a soft, deep syrupy tone, “I won’t do you no harm, I won’t do you no harm, I won’t do you no harm.”
Before
