Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [85]
Patsy Ruth wanted to help me pull stuff out of the river but hated getting mud on herself. She stayed up on the exposed roots of the trees and rarely retrieved anything worth the trouble. Still, she was the one who saw the hooks—two of them, linked together with a rusted chain, big four-pronged things still dragging little shreds of rope.
“Lookit the shine!” she yelled, almost sliding down in the mud. “Lookit there. It’s something, I bet you. Something.”
I climbed out on one of the roots until I could reach down to the curved metal edge that was showing through the brown water. It was hard to untangle the hooks from the muddy trash. By the time I worked them free, I’d slid down and had one leg thigh-deep in the mud.
“You get your ass down here and help me,” I yelled at Patsy Ruth, but she had no intention of risking the river. Instead she ran back to find Grey and Garvey.
“My sweet Jesus, look at the size of them.” Grey pulled the hooks out of my hands even before I got them up the bank. “That sucker’s longer than my arm.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a hook, a set of hooks.”
“Any fool can see that. What’s it for?” Garvey had come up too, and was just as eager to get his hands on the hooks as Grey was. He was always fighting with his brother, always challenging anything Grey said.
“Mountain climbing, it’s for mountain climbing,” Grey told us.
I didn’t believe that any more than Garvey, but Grey was so insistent we kept quiet while we ran our fingers along the rusty points of the hooks.
“Look at the edge on them points. They’d sink into rock with no trouble at all.”
“You don’t need nothing like that to climb the mountains around here.” Garvey pulled at the chain dangling down. “You don’t need nothing.”
“Oh hell, probably some Yankee brought them down, didn’t know what our mountains were like.” Grey was adamant. Nothing would serve but that we agree that the hooks were for climbing, no matter how silly it was to imagine Yankees coming down to climb our mountains with those hooks. But Garvey wasn’t going to give in so easily.
“You an’t got the sense you was born with,” he spat. “Even Yankees an’t that dumb.”
“You calling me stupid?”
“Aw, for Jesus’ sake.”
I grabbed the hooks then, before somebody got himself stabbed with one. They were heavy, but not so heavy that I couldn’t swing one around and throw it if I had to. Grey was right about one thing. Those barbs were sharp under the rust, and not only at the points but all along the edges that curled back on themselves. Gray-green algae hid most of the metal shine, but it came off easy with a little scraping. The rust was harder, but it too came off when I ran my pocket knife up and down the prongs. In the center of each hook where the four points came together, there was a packed mass of gluey river mud, weeds, and fish pieces. I set to scraping it all clean and got the boys interested enough to stop fighting for a while. They used a tire iron to pop the chain and separate the two hooks, each taking one as if they intended to keep them.
“Once we get them cleaned up, I’ll show you how mountain climbers use them.” Grey was still determined to convince us that he knew what the hooks were all about.
Garvey laughed at him. “You try throwing that son of a bitch up in a tree and you gonna put somebody’s eye out when the chain catches on a branch.”
“I an’t gonna throw it up no tree.” Grey looked disgusted. “I’m gonna use it to pull myself right up the side of the house. I’m gonna wave at you from the roof, and then you can tell me I’m crazy.”
He did it too, tied a good long rope to the chain dangling off his hook and swung it around and around until he got it high