Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [44]
Evidently, she heard another rustle on the far beach because she swung one hundred and eighty degrees and spewed another four feet of flame out the barrel. This one didn’t so much go airborne as it just disintegrated, leaving a red stain on the beach. The woman nodded and spat. She broke the receiver, ejecting the shell, and thumbed in a third round, hanging the gun back across her right arm. She sniffed the air then turned back to Abbie. “You need help with him?”
Abbie shook her head, “No…I got it.” She waved me off. “He’s a pansy beneath all that sweat and muscle.”
The woman waded over next to me and tilted my hat back, exposing my eyes. “Look right tough to me.” She touched my right temple with a calloused thumb, corkscrewing it slightly. “If the bomb goes off, I might come calling.”
Abbie choked down a laugh. “Oh please do. I will sleep so much better knowing he’s not shacked up with one of my best friends.”
The woman nodded and walked back through the water to the bank. There was a hole in the rear of her overalls exposing the fact that she wasn’t wearing underwear and that her butt hung like her cheeks. Abbie covered her mouth and stifled another laugh. When the woman reached the bank, she waved her barrel across the trees and then turned to Abbie. The smile had faded, bulldogging her wrinkles. She sucked through her teeth. “In some places, this here river is wide. Other places, it’s deep. In others, the trees all fall across it, making one ‘mell of a hess.’ Still others, it snakes around its elbow to get to its thumb. But it pours out long distances. And nothing never stops it. You can’t dam it. You can try but it’ll run around. It’ll make a way. That’s what she do. She always makes a way.” She spat and pointed the broken barrel in my general direction. “I reckon it’s a lot like him.” She walked to a wooden box on the beach and pulled out a bottle. It was old and its surface was dim with scratches. She bit the cork, pulled it out, then swigged from the bottle. She swirled it around her mouth, sort of gargling with its contents, and nodded. She rammed the cork back in and handed me the bottle. “Last year’s. Jis’ ’bout right.”
I pointed at the vines above me. “You make it?”
She nodded. “I did. My recipe. Round here, we call it scuppernong, southern fox wine, joy juice and”—she shook her hips in a dance move I hope to never see again—“dance lubricant.”
Abbie looked at me and raised both eyebrows. “Oh my.”
The old woman folded the shotgun back across her arms. “You two go easy.” A rustle and scurry in the leaves on her left brought the shotgun up and cocked the hammer all in one motion. She aimed and held it, her eyes growing wide. Satisfied, she uncocked the hammer and returned the shotgun to the cradle in her arms. When I turned, a water snake was swallowing a still-shaking rat. The only thing sticking out of its mouth was the tail.
I pulled my hat down, stepped into the harness and began walking.
That’s the river. Beneath all this, beneath the worst she can dish out, she will rise up, ugly and disgusting, hideous enough to gag a maggot, and yet if you dive in, crack the surface, and swim where others won’t, she will surprise you, amaze you and remind you.
13
It’d been two days since the Christmas party. A single bulb lit the canvas before me and it was now near midnight. I sat on a bar stool in the loft, a paint-tipped brush bit between my teeth. Eyes narrowed, head tilted like a dog, I was trying to make sense out of a shadow. On the canvas in front of me was her face, seen from close behind her right ear, down along her cheek line, over the angle of her lips and the lines of her nose, which pointed to Fort Sumter and separated the Ashley from the Cooper. Her face covered nearly half the canvas. Wisps of hair in the top left corner, her ear just below and right of that, which led down her face to the fort, which floated in the water in the bottom right-hand corner. The piece led your eye from the top left corner, downward to the bottom right-hand corner and the fort,