April 21, 2008
EX CALCE LIBERATUS
| BERRIEN C. HENDERSON |
If he had cared to read instead of drinking, he might have felt better. But he had put in close to an honest day’s work (by the end of the day) and could’ve used some company (that’s what tomorrow night was for, wasn’t it?).
Still, it was careless of him to get drunk to the point he turned frustrated and violent. Who was there to vent upon? Just himself.
You got the land, after all that fighting. The farm’s yours, he thought in a short-lived moment of clarity. Maybe Morris was right.
A swig for estranged half-brothers.
Dead broke and damned can’t manage, college boy.
A swig for callous pawn brokers.
The Southern Comfort was 100 proof velvet on his tongue and throat. He studied the bottle and its sloshing vitality. He turned his attention to the double-barreled shotgun well, the barrels themselves since that sonuvabitch Stone wouldn’t let Art have it back entire. It had been almost three weeks since he’d tried talking the man into letting him get the whole gun out of hock. He’d given Stone six hundred dollars of what he owed, and Stone had as much laughed in his face.
“Partial payment, partial gun.”
”My ass.”
Art set the bottle down and wavered upon standing up. He followed a snaky invisible line to the propped up barrels. He grabbed them and stared with bleary eyes at the vine motif engraved along the blued steel. The face and beard, imbued with leaves, of a man appeared in the vines. “Green Man,” he slurred aloud, surprising himself as memories of his Medieval English Literature (literachoor as he sometimes lapsed in the argot of they of the dusty dirt roads and rusted-out vehicles hiding in the grown-over backyards would ascribe). The gun whole was three generations old. It had been his since he was fourteen.
He walked out on his back porch and looked out over the pond. The sunset had inverted itself into the watery irreality. Bream popped the surface like creatures pressing the mystic cellophane threshold between a lost Gaelic world. He walked off the porch and stumbled to the shore and frightened a bullfrog in his drunken advance. With a trifecta of malice aforethought, alcoholic lunacy, and plain old self-loathing, Art threw the gun barrels in the water and watched the ripples run concentric races toward the far shore.
He staggered back to his trailer, then staggered back to the pond with his whiskey sidekick in tow. Plopping on the bank, he saw the pond absorb the sunset and evening’s ink and compose, as usual, his best poetry while drunk. Eva, the witch living on the other end of the pond, waved to him from the far shore. He could hear her singing as she turned to go back into her tiny shotgun-shack farmhouse. Then he lay back, looked up at some first magnitude stars for all of two minutes, and passed out.
A small wake split the water as something moved just beneath the surface to come onto the bank near Art. A slender, scaly form flopped onto the ground and with its ovoid head and flared gills looked around until it saw him. Saw him with its thoroughly human eyes. Mist condensed around it as it bucked and melted and shifted into human form, and there stood the witch Eva, dripping pond water and touched here and there with algae on her twenty-year-old body that was one hundred fifty years old. Water pearled on her breasts and shone in the starlight at the mystery of her hips. Her hair was the night. She leaned over Art and whispered archaic terms he read as footnotes in college. After she turned to slip back into the pond, Art stumbled back into his trailer.
The pond accepted Eva wholly as stars played in the ripples.