done so much bad in this world, but soon it started to happen again, about every day, and I got used to catching myself singing to him, accepted it as a human thing of mystery.
He was helpless, and I took to wondering if Uncle was still evil now that he’d become a helpless baby. Do babies learn evil in the run of their days, or bring it with them from the other side of all that you can see? He drooled and I held a rag to his lips, and wheeled him outside into the fresh air and bright light, shoved him along the driveway, to and fro, singing.
It was coming up on Halloween when I first caught my baby’s eyes following me across the room. Then it got to where every time I spun around quick, his eyes were on me, and not on my face, neither. Uncle was yet alive inside that big old baby, and his eyes was wanting what babies don’t even know about. When he raised a hand to swat a fly, I peed down my legs and ran around inside the house bumping every wall. Come morning I shoved him to the paved road and around to the hill and down to the bridge. The air hung gray and cool and I could see fish in the water, still in the flow with their noses pointed upstream. I wheeled Uncle to the far edge of the bridge, where a drunk in a truck had torn away the railing, and pushed him to the edge. I dabbed the slobber rag to his mouth, then looked into his eyes and saw how babies do change so fast. I tossed the slobber rag into the river and it made a small shadow over the fish before the current whisked it past. I’d been making him well; now I needed to make him right.
My baby ain’t meant for this world.
Twin Forks
Morrow wondered if he might soon die because of a beautiful girl from his teens he’d never had the nerve to approach. This thought preoccupied him as he collected fees from campers at dusk and watched shadows on the hillsides for odd patterns, shifty movements, studied parked cars he wasn’t sure he recognized, or looked into new faces for any intimation of treachery. He walked about quickly but fought the urge to assume a crouch when crossing open spaces. He was most concerned about ambush when he collected coins from the campground laundry and had his back to the door, or helped beach a canoe that arrived as the gloaming settled. Sometimes he made himself a target at twilight on the riverbank while looking downstream toward Spawt Mill, where in a single summery moment she became fixed in his desires as the perfection of skin and laughter he would always yearn for, but on that day overwhelmed his senses, left him wordless and ashamed.
The sheriff had said, “You probably should’ve shot him while you could do it legal and get it over with. He might be back for you, or you might not ever see him again, who knows with meth-heads. But you surely will want to be ready if ever he does come around for you, and that could be at any time from now on.” Morrow had two employees, and after five days the younger one, a man named Sky, quit, saying, “I got a bunch of kids, man—I can’t take the risk he’ll shoot me thinkin’ I’m you.”
“I understand. Thanks for staying with me as long as you have.”
December past, when Morrow was shown the property, the seller had been present on the grounds and having a meltdown. He wore a long, rough overcoat and walked to each campsite with a target pistol in hand, shouting lamentations as he fired farewell bullets at trees and picnic tables. He said, “I guess God don’t want me to have this place. I guess God’s got other plans for me. I guess…” The pop-pops of the pistol seemed small, muted by the forest and the river, but his words were loud and his confusion painful to hear. Morrow winced whenever the man spoke. The realtor, Nan Colvin, a young countrywoman with ruddled mud on her boots and a no-fuss hairstyle, said, “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t be seeing this.” She took Morrow’s arm and walked him away from the store, onto the one-lane bridge abutting the property. They stood near the center, leaning on the heavy iron railing to admire the river, a river fed by springs and running clear and cold, fifty-six degrees year-round. The seller had wandered farther, past the canoe racks and beyond sight, but was still shooting, shouting, possibly weeping. “He’s such a good churchgoing man, you know, that he wouldn’t sell beer, not at all. Not a can, not a bottle. Nor cigarettes. It’s a real principled stand to take, I guess, somethin’ folks ought to admire, but beer is about forty percent of sales on the river. He’s broke now.”
“Things happen for a reason.”
“You think?”
“I used to come here as a kid.”
“Is that so? Must’ve been extra wonderful back then, I bet, huh?”
Morrow was down from Nebraska, escaping fresh memories by chasing after old ones, looking for something that might spark his blood awake, make it hop lively in his veins again. Nan had read his e-mails with care and selected this property for him, and he liked everything about the place—the steep hillsides of forest stripped for winter, the dour gray rock bluffs crouched near the river, the lonesome mumble of the passing wind, and these untamed people who shot at things to so plainly announce their sorrow.
She said, “I know this seems kind of wild out here.”
“That’s what I always liked about it.”
“He’ll listen to any offer.”
Morrow made a lowball offer before supper that day, an offer that could seem insulting to both Nan and the seller, but a few weeks later the offer was accepted. He arrived at the Twin Forks Store and Campground in early March, driving a pickup truck with everything he expected to need stacked neatly in the bed. He intended to change his habits in new surroundings, give his system a shake, so he arrived without many of his once-favorite things: the antique liquor cabinet with the copper top his father had left to him, a box stacked with discs of music that had once made his feet move in ecstasy but that he didn’t expect to listen to again. He’d taken all of his golfing trophies down from shelves in the den and tossed them into a trash can at the curb, then returned to drop four pair of handmade shoes and his wristwatch on top of the trophies. That same night he drove to downtown Omaha and placed a set of customized golf clubs on a sidewalk near the bus station and drove away with a raised hand blocking the rearview mirror so he couldn’t look back. He did keep a stuffed buffalo head he’d bought on impulse at a garage sale in Lincoln, because the eyes seemed to know him, his pump shotgun for hunting game birds, one box of favorite books. Several pictures of his daughters were saved and brought along, but none of their mother.
By late May he had acquired a routine suited to this new version of himself: wake above the store before dawn, walk to the river, hang his robe on a low limb, plunge in and swim upstream until his arms balked, then float back to his robe as first light began to raise the sky. There would be coffee boiling over freshened campfires, bacon sizzling, trout split and dropped into the grease, and as he passed the earliest to rise he’d wave and they’d wave back. He’d open the store early, skin numbed by the river and feeling tightened ten years younger, the smell of the outdoors drying into his hair.
He hired two relatives of Nan’s to wrangle canoes and help out in general, a blood uncle named Royce, and Sky, who he took to be a ceremonial uncle of some sort, while he tended to the store. The locals who came in were often people of a kind he hadn’t truly believed still existed but found rewarding to meet: pioneer-lean old men who poached deer whenever hungry and wouldn’t pay taxes, their wives wearing gray braids and cowboy hats, clasp knives sheathed at their belts; men with the beards of prophets who read the Bible at a certain slant and could build anything, their women smelling of lavender, in gingham and work boots; folks living hidden in the hills and only reluctantly coming into contact with the conventional world for want of baby formula or headache powders. A few of these customers lingered to chat, but most said all they had to say with a slow nod hello and a jerk of the chin on the way out. There were some he didn’t want to linger, squint-faced men with cursive tattoos garbled in shades of blue, who cleaned his shelves of Sudafed and red matchsticks, then returned in a few days hoping to buy more of the same. Royce, who seemed slow in offering helpful advice to an outsider, finally said, “Mr. Morrow, them fellas is buyin’ all that so they can drive over the hill there and hide somewhere to cook up drugs. The red part from the matches and grains from them pills both help make the recipe.”
“There’s so much I don’t know.”
“That’s lesson one.”
Campers with children preferred the picnic tables that had been shot, because kids liked rubbing the holes, sticking their fingers inside while imagining exciting events that had led to gunfire erupting on this very spot. Not every table had been shot, and adults wanted to have rights to that exotic detail in any recounting of their vacations, also, and would wait for one to become unoccupied, then rush the family over to claim it, which
