he said finally.
“I’m right here.”
“You still owe.”
“I know. I’m good for it.”
“You ain’t workin’ no more.”
“I’m still good for it.”
The tall man looked at him and squinted and studied him a moment.
The kid smoked and looked away. “How much?” he asked.
“He owes thirty,” the man said.
The kid put the smoke in the ashtray and dug in his pocket for the cash the old man had given him. He counted out forty dollars and handed them to the man, who looked at the bills as though they were foreign things.
“Change?” he asked.
“How much for the hooch?”
“You can have it for the ten.”
“He wants to eat,” his father said.
“All’s we got left is the chicken and some beans.”
“Put it on my tab.”
“I don’t know, Eldon.”
“Hey, I made up what I owed.”
“Yeah.”
“Well?”
The man set the tray down and folded the money and tucked it in his pocket. He looked at the kid, who finished his smoke, ground it out on the deck, and stashed the butt in his chest pocket. “You want a drink with that?”
“Coffee,” the kid said.
“And you?”
“I ate,” his father said.
He nodded and walked back across the deck and the kid turned and looked at his father, who sat with his chin in one hand. “Your treat, huh?”
The kid smirked and put his feet up on the chair across from him. His father opened the bottle and raised it and took a couple of heavy swallows and set the bottle down and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. The plume from the stack downriver was like a ghostly geyser and the lights of the mill all orange and hazed like a carnival lot. On the far shore the town disappeared into the shadows thrown by the dim run of lights along the thin streets. The line of mountain was a black seam above it all.
The man returned with his coffee. The kid drank and waited, feeling angry and impatient. His father was silent. For a while there was only the garrulous talk of the men in the background, the high arch of a fiddle on the juke, and the swish of the river beneath them. The coffee was bitter and hot and he cradled the cup in his palms and watched his father.
“So how come they call you Twinkles?” he asked.
“It’s bullshit.”
“What?”
“Starlight. Twinkle, twinkle. You get it.”
“Yeah, but you ain’t exactly the twinkly sort.”
“What am I then?”
“How in hell would I know? Cloudy, I guess.”
His father shook his head and took another drink, smaller, more deliberate. “How I feel, I suppose.”
“You fixin’ to die?”
“Jesus. How’d you get so hard-assed?”
“Just asking a question.”
The man brought the chicken and beans and a tortilla, and the kid dug into them and ate hungrily while his father watched him and nursed the bottle along. It was good chicken and he slopped up the beans with the tortilla and washed them down with the coffee. He sat back in his chair. His father stared at him with flat eyes and for a moment the kid thought he was stone drunk. They sat wordlessly and looked at the river.
“She cuts right through past the mill. Picks up speed and rolls out into the valley thirty miles or so downstream. You know it. Same valley leads to the old man’s. You come up that way?” his father said and pointed at the line of mountain.
“I know it. I hunted that whole territory,” the kid said.
“She’s a good river. I been on her most of my life one way or another. Used to be in the old days we’d float log booms down from the falls. Mile long, some of them booms. Me and a pike pole walkin’ the length of them, keepin’ them movin’ right down to here. Then after a couple days we’d head back up and do ’er all over again. Right to freeze-up. But that was years ago.”
“You lumberjack?”
“Some. I liked it better on the water but you had to cut and fall in order to get out there. Got to be a boomer if you worked out well enough.” He shook his head sadly. “Nowadays they use trucks. Takes the heart out of it.”
“When was this?”
“Hell, I was young. Your age. I went to work when I was fourteen.”
“So I guess you called me here to tell me that?”
His father sipped from the bottle. “You get right to it, don’t you?”
“Got to. Winter’s coming. Stuff needs doing.”
“I got to ask you a favour.”
“Seems to me you’re the one who owes.”
“I do. I know that. Sometimes though, you got to give to get.”
“I already give forty.”
“I ain’t talking about money. Money’s no use in this particular thing.”
“What then?”
“I want you to head into the backcountry with me.”
“You must be drunker than I thought.”
“I want you to take me out into that territory you come through. The one you hunted all your life. There’s a ridge back forty mile. Sits above a narrow valley with a high range behind it, facing east.”
“I know it.”
“I want you to take me there.”
“Why would you want to go out there in your condition?”
“Because I need you to bury me there.”
The kid sat with the coffee cup half raised to his mouth and he felt the urge to laugh and stand up and walk out and head back to the old farm. But his father looked at him earnestly and he could see pain in his eyes and something leaner, sorrow maybe, regret, or some ragged woe tattered
