under the big black sun: a fable
To drive up 165 past dark, and know where he was going, was to need a huge, overwhelming current of air.
All of the windows are wide open.
Rain had fallen earlier, droplets from the windshield still whipping around the battered Fury, stinging his left forearm. The land is flat, soggy, lined with swamps. For a miles-long stretch beyond the city limits the four lane is unlit, then the remnants of a small town along the bayou appear: offices, daycares, a veterinarian, machine shops, and finally an anomalous brand new hospital in ghostly relief from blue ground lights.
There are streets of homes behind the wall of cypress trees, he knows this, and they are empty.
Past an abandoned pipe-fitting plant a small two-lane branches off. This is the old highway, with overhanging growth, used mainly by oil exploration companies and highschoolers on the way to Moon Lake.
Mac travels slowly, his distaste toward outlying regions nudging up his heart rate. For long periods the dim headlights are inadequate over the shoulderless asphalt; here, civilization's broken white centerline is a necessity. At the Moon Lake turnoff the Fury loses traction, sliding crosswise to a halt on the silty dirt road leading over the levee and into the trees. He waits a while, just watching. The headlights waver with the engine's jagged idle.
He drives on, ascending the levee slowly and descending even more slowly into the unilluminated river bottom. Whether it's good or bad to come across no other travelers out here Mac isn't certain.
At some unseen point, the day's showery heat ceases and cool pockets form in the overbranched tunnels of the road. River breezes push through intermittent grassy pastures. Headlights cross long runs of sagging barbed wire and a visibly disintegrating barn; everything here is going backwards. This road, older than even the old highway, leads eventually north to Arkansas, curving steeply, dangerous for the inattentive. Mac drives slowly enough.
Along Mac's left side—the west—are slivers of moon. He passes a gated turnoff, and begins to count. On down to the third possible detour, a dirt path indistinguishable from the others, but this is the right one. Rather, the necessary one. He grudgingly turns the Fury.
Across a second levee and all remnant light is formally extinguished. Vegetation grows denser, laden with earthsmells; before him the landscape provides only this unlit path and the patched wire fence alongside. A leafy canopy obliterates the overhead sky.
At last there is a break, a shallow field lined on both sides by oaks from a once-upon-a-time plan. Against a distant black backdrop sits the long desiccated main house. What remains most solidly is a gate of two brick columns. Behind is the river, unseen. That this is private land is known to Mac, and he treads lightly.
Once before he has been here, with his brother John. They parked John's first car here, a Ford Pinto, just beyond the gate and walked the impossibly rutted logging road for a prescribed distance into the woods, smelled the river, and turned left. After an argument over directions they became lost and arrived at their destination three hours late. Mac has not come here since.
He kills the engine and sits a while, grasping the steering wheel. The sound of everything seems grossly amplified, the ticking of the engine, a breeze in the trees, whatever animal footsteps. Inside a vision seldom given to metaphor there arrives the likeness, not comforting, to the one movie he has revisited often on Cooper's cable, a Vietnam story where the captain was sent miles and miles into a dense jungle to retrieve a guy left up in there years before.
The music: Boo-boom. Boo-boom.
Mac gets out of the car. Reluctantly. Being outside the shell is like shedding every piece of clothing he's ever worn at once. Jumping off a building would be more palatable at the moment. He sets out upon the footpath, each sound overloud and fraught with betrayal.
After a while it becomes easier for his eyes to perceive larger objects, and the smaller ones such as snakes are probably better left unremarked. He walks hands in pockets, and eventually begins to sense the river. Each successful step, each forward unit without mishap, leads him to feel marginally more capable.
This is the last thing to be done.
He makes the turn, the right one that John had not made when they were teenagers. Another trail lies there, now more of a hole through vines than a trodden path.
A fluttering of wings, and he freezes, trembling. Standing perfectly still, it is as if his eyes keep moving forward. In motion again, he passes a long disused cemetery, the toppling stones a little whiter than the gloom ought to allow.
Finally he is descending along the edge of a slight bluff. The overall terrain surrenders, down toward the course of the river. The earth falls beneath, the trees rise above.
Ultimately comes a small opening, then a clearing, and a small houseboat tethered to a drifting wooden dock on the river.
In his adolescence Mac's father was both never there and never actually gone. The three of them, the children, came to regard him as a fact, a curious visitor more or less, no ogre as the mother would have it, but no baseball pal either. At most there would be fresh fish, surplus from his river catch to be sold to the market on the west bank. For a while before the houseboat they heard he lived in a shack on old plantation land, where the heirs who now owned a computer company allowed him to keep watch in exchange for rights to squat. It may have been Connie who disliked his absence most; she would upon opportunity point out to her brothers "At least he never lies. Have you ever heard him to lie?" While their mother kept odd hours for a movie-ticket seller.
And now Mac is there, undetected, observing weak interior light through the grimy-paned window of the boat.
He walks around, pets the friendly hound, looks at the scrub garden. The john-boat used for fishing is pulled on the bank, motor lifted. Mac feels calmer, reverent, yet has no kinship with any of this.
There is one thing to do before he leaves.
At the window he does not knock, but looks in. A television set is on. The contents of the room are sparse, worn and necessary. The television is the source of the light. A dim intimation of hairy legs jutting out of overalls in the left of the window frame, perhaps a couch there.
Mac has seen what he came to see, and is about to step back when he perceives a dark box to the side of the television. He recognizes a VCR. He waits, looking for the first time at the images upon the screen. He notes the proceedings of pornographic videotapes and lingers no further. The hound begins to re-trail him in the direction of the path.
But he has forgotten the one thing, and returns quietly to the door. Because she had spoken less than abusively of her father at times, he leaves a clipped copy of his sister's obituary in the handle of the screen door.
