D. E. Lee

CRAWFISH

Never were we freer than under the German occupation.
We had lost all our rights, and first of all our right to speak. . . .
And because of all this we were free.
Jean Paul Sartre

Tomorrow will be better, but at the moment the disgrace of being fired remains a sting with no precise location. The questions arrive now that I am gone from the shop, foremost: What did I do wrong? Mr. Pinchier, my boss, said I was worthless. A slick aphid of a man, Mr. Pinchier scolded me sharply on the rug showroom floor in front of everyone, and I fled, tears stealing my sight, out the door and crashed into a man not unlike the man sitting across from me on the R5 bus. 

This man, at least fifty, wears a wrinkled yellow shirt and a loose dotted tie, and the rapt penetration of his look tells me he is stubbornly inquisitive, but I also note, in spite of the avuncular shape of his head, a trace of brutality in his mouth as he stares at a photograph. 

Ordinarily, I say nothing to anyone. But I feel like raw meat, and the imposing presence of this man, simply because he sits across from me, conjures images of a mallet and a good pounding is what I deserve, and he seems stern enough to deliver it. He’s leaning a little, eyes on the photograph, and shades of annoyance or bewilderment ripple over his face. My trip is long, so I venture a guess. 

Relatives? 

The man inspects me a moment. And then, wiggling the photo, catches my meaning. 

Oh, no, he says, not mine. His smile feels oily. His nomadic stare finds the bend in my leg, and I stretch the edge of my skirt to my knees and look away. 

The R5 pulls to the curb. A somnolent man in a black jacket, bag slung across the back, taps his card on the fare-box scanner and camps in the rear. 

Castro, Miss, the old man, drawing me back, says. This picture. He turns the photo toward me. I was trying to decide if it’s important. 

Two men, both in caps, squint from the glossy finish. Plucky simplicity or brutal dedication lights the spirit of their faces. Castro’s grin comes into focus over the edge of the photo. 

Cousins, he says. Mr. Arden Brasher and Mr. Zeno Whitman. They sent me an email. Badly written. Nothing to take seriously. Certainly, not important. And I had much to do. You know how it is with deadlines. But an erratic zeal in the prose grabbed my attention. It was bad, Miss, but you could torch a building with it. It was that fiery. 

He cradles the photo in his palm, fixes upon it that solemn silence saved for funerals, school shootings, and the end of eras. 

They were gentlemen, Miss. Not by the looks of them. You might call them crude cavaliers. Proxies of something gentle. Not the sort at first glance you’d consider inviting into your home. But the sort who unselfishly keep the peace with you. They are—now, how do I make this clear to you, Miss? 

He pulls at his uneven sideburns, examines the gray harvest between his fingers. Dropping the tufts seems to inspire him. 

Their lineage goes back to the colonies, he says. Oh, it goes much further than that! But they aren’t concerned with royalty. And I don’t mean to imply such blood’s in their veins. No, Miss, they proudly chime the song of the mongrel and, laugh if you want, but I tell you they spoke without qualm. How did they put it? Yes. They said their hearts beat patriot blood and banners of liberty—something to that effect. Amusing. Perhaps sad. But a reflective moment, a bit of imagination, sets you on their course. The collective memory—our collective memory—evokes the ideal. The community where the town sheriff and the town miscreant are your relatives, the one living next to you, the other across the street. Where a person strides of an evening imbued with the confidence fairness brings. Don’t you see it, Miss? What they proposed was what we all imagine. That we take up a position. Fervently. On the cusp of—what would you call it, liberty, justice, happiness? The words are embarrassing, aren’t they? Like someone dressed in outdated clothing, but can you imagine it, Miss, the hostile journey through untamed land, unpaved, unsettled, disturbed only by the violence of nature? Can you imagine being the first person to set foot through that bramble? If you did not have courage when you entered that wilderness, you would have it soon. Or you would be dead, lying in a heap, ready for consumption by things having no time for your economy, society, or feelings. Sentiment, Miss, is the first casualty of raw experience. And what should we do about that? Mr. Brasher and Mr. Whitman argued for rebellion. Flat-out violence, if necessary. Edgy words, Miss. 

I’ve made a mistake; this is not a man I can talk to. 

I’m certain it’s this light, Castro says, but you seem a little pale. If you’re uncomfortable, I can stop. The thing is this: the pair was not merely yahoos spittin’ and cussin’ but anglers reaching back to clearer beginnings. Liberty, Mr. Brasher wrote, sucks at the nipple of rebellion. Mr. Whitman added, Conformity medicates it. Oh, those droll fellows! Yet they were sincere, Miss. Completely sincere. 

A small laugh shakes from his lips as he considers the photograph. 

No, Miss, he says. Neither you nor I nor the man in the moon would willingly go into a thing that far. We just wouldn’t. And then he looks at me, a grin on his lips. But they did, Miss. Yes, they did. And who wouldn’t want to know something about that? 

Well, he says, it’s easy enough for me to get away and since the gentlemen invited me for a short trip, I thought, Why not?  

The R5 slows to the curb like a clattering beetle. A doughy woman with two children finds seats near the front. She reprimands in a voice like a hammer beating tin. A tall boy in khakis and hoodie sprawls near a window. The R5 lurches back into traffic, and relief within the rectangular shell of the bus returns with its rolling motion. 

I’ve gone on too long, Castro says. You must have a stop soon. 

It’s okay, I say, same as I said that afternoon a few months ago to Mr. Pinchier who asked me to help with storage bins. The room was tight, and the back of his hand grazed the back of my skirt, and maybe I made a noise because he apologized immediately, and I said, It’s okay. And the next time I kept quiet, not out of fear, but the space was cramped, and I was certain nothing was meant by it. 

Well, I’m no boor, Castro says, to conscript your ear to my story, to their story. Stop me at any time. 

The thick intonation of his voice spreads over me, spreads over the images of the past few months like the narration of a bleak documentary. I want to stop him, but I already know that he will not stop. I whisper, stop, but the word does not stand on its own. A source of extreme anguish, this word, stop. It should rise with power, but instead wilts on my tongue. And for how long, I didn’t know, but the first time I noticed was when Mr. Pinchier’s wife, Clara, stopped by the showroom one rainy afternoon and said that her husband had spoken of me and in her eye was a look that said her husband had spoken to her about many other women and perhaps because I was so delighted that I had drawn the attention of Mr. Pinchier it took me a moment to notice that Clara, as she insisted I call her, was completely indifferent toward the wonderful array of rugs in the showroom, and I sensed that she regarded me as a threat to her relationship with Mr. Pinchier, who interrupted our conversation with a sharp voice, and I followed him to his office. He could not go into the details, he said, but I was to refrain from speaking to his wife—and then he noticed a stain on my blouse, and I said it was from the soup I’d had at lunch. He insisted on cleaning it, and he came at me with a licked tissue, and I saw my left hand go up when his fingers slipped beneath the blouse placket, and I told him the stain was insignificant, but he insisted that it wasn’t, and his fingers settled on the skin between my breasts, and the left hand that had risen dangled like a dead limb against my hip and the power of that wafer-thin word, stop, melted on my tongue, while the urgency of his hands and the ambitious tone of his voice convinced me to swallow the fact that his reason for wanting my shirt clean was more important than my shame, but as I later lay in pieces in bed that night, I promised myself that it would never happen again.  

I have a long ride, I say, and Castro reaches for me. His fingers hook like bronze scythes over my hand. 

The woman upbraiding her children stares at me, as I cross the aisle, and the driver catches it in the rearview mirror. The tall boy, beating a rhythm on his khakis, slips me a jazzed look. But what can I do, now that I’ve taken the hand, but accept it? Only the black jacket in the rear slumbers through it all. 

This won’t be so difficult, Miss, Castro says, helping me to the inside near the window. He takes up the remaining space amply. 

I stayed at a motel, he says, and the next morning took a cab to a crossroads and sat on a wooden bench beneath a covered roof at one of those country stores that can never quite enter the twenty-first century. July, Miss. Sultry and humid. Sweat crawled buggy down the back and it was only eight o’clock. Shortly a truck pulled up and Mr. Brasher and Mr. Whitman climbed out. A few formalities. We settled on what we should call each other and so on. The roads progressively degraded from rolled to rocky asphalt and then to clay the farther we drove into the country. Finally we arrived on a sandy lane bordered by mulberry and pine. 

A large white clapboard house on cement blocks stood in a clearing. A fir shaded the eastern side and on the western a buckling tin smokehouse, its shades of ochre and gray punctuated by trumpet creeper and wild grape. 

A three-step climb led onto a screened porch. Dozens of shoes in various states of decay littered the floor. A history of familial shoeing laid out like museum pieces. 

Find you a pair that works, Arden said. In the back rooms you’ll find old clothes. 

The house was dark. Two long tables cluttered with hooks, lures, string, dominos, caps, broken reels, boxes, and beans stood before a small kitchen. Cast off furniture in the main room. A narrow passage to the back. Slacks and shirts, plaids, bellbottoms, banana jeans, frill tops, and dolphin shorts hung from wires on walls. It was obvious that no one in any generation had ever heard of Goodwill. I picked up a black wool toque resting on a shelf and smelled it and wondered what luscious head had once worn the hat and how the evening had gone. I found dark slacks frayed at the bottom and a pullover dress shirt and returned to the porch and rummaged through the shoes. 

When I lifted a pair of cracked Adidas, Arden warned me about spiders. I hooked the heels with two fingers and banged the shoes together like bags of sugar. The grass turned white. 

Zeno, leaning against the truck, made fine adjustments to a reel. Then he shouted. The reel wobbled like a football. He lurched madly to contain it. But the reel exploded. Plastic pieces hurtled in magnificent arcs and scattered across the yard. A fatty disgusted grin swelled on his face. Arden looked on from the steps and shook his head then rose to join Zeno. 

Like hyenas scavenging a carcass, the pair combed through the turf for the reel fragments. Arden sheltered recoveries in a cupped hand. At last Zeno rose in disgust. Cheap crap, he said. Everything’s disposable. Never mind. I got another inside. Something else’ll go wrong, Arden said. I’ve seen it before. 

We stranded one vehicle at the exit bridge and drove to the entrance. Zeno threw on a vest and shoved a box of lures into a pocket. He patted himself and said to Arden, You bring a stringer? 

Arden shook his head, then rummaged in the cab. Zeno flipped over trash in the bed. Well, shit, Arden said. No stringer. He grinned. Hope we don’t catch too many. He opened a pocketknife and cut a vine. We’ll use this. He rolled it into a ball and stuffed it into his pocket. 

Recent floods had cut gullies that were still glistening beneath high banks topped with scrawny pine. We picked our way past briarberry down red clay paths. Humid air abated with our descent into the water. Zeno, taking another path, got his leg entangled in a thorny vine. He finally worked through the understory and slipped into the stream. Anger crossed his face, but not because he’d been caught by the vine. Look there, Castro, he said, pointing where the water lapped over a cut below the bank. There. That’s what we’re talking about. And it was nasty, Miss, a blight and a shame, these several soiled diapers heedlessly cast off at this otherwise pristine spot on the river. 

Castro’s hands tap my knee from time to time, and I recoil, but his movements are so quick I’m convinced the touches are incidental. Mr. Pinchier—could anyone be more incidental? He said I was too sensitive, told me to lighten up. It’s part of the job, he said, brushing off my resistance in the same cavalier manner that he brushed the hair from the back of my neck. As Mr. Pinchier wished, I no longer spoke to Clara, but I still noticed, in her eye, reptilian indifference and, in an odd twist, found that the less she cared about me the more inspired Mr. Pinchier became and, because he was well-known from those cheesy television ads, he made me handle the check-ins and always gave me more cash than was needed, and I guess he meant for me to keep the change but, eventually, this made me feel cheap.  

Damn trashy people, Zeno said, Castro says, but that ain’t the worst of it. See up along the banks and all along? Pastures and farms. Fertilizer runoff dumps mercury in the creek. Wildlife Agency says to limit the consumption of fish. Why? Tell me why? Did we do this? Not us. Some other greedy bastard did it. 

Mercury exists naturally in all environments, I offered, Castro says. 

Zeno and Arden cocked their heads. Bullshit, bullshit, they shot in rapid succession. Consider it a possibility, I said. But they wouldn’t hear of it, Miss. A long memory germ infected every thought they had. Never been a problem, Arden said, until government got involved and since they lie there’s never been a consideration worth pondering. Don’t matter what you say, Castro. We’ve known things since the beginning that was crystal clear. By what right except some law that someone who ain’t never been here wrote can one person tell another what to do? Tell me that. 

You take those diapers there, Zeno said, picking up the thread. Ignorant people left them. And that ain’t no different from agents coming along posting signs and making matters worse and then coming back along and trying to regulate mistakes they made in the first place. Them that left the diapers knew what they was doing. They just don’t give a damn. But that’s honest. We can pick a fight with that one. Worse to be fawned over for your own sake. 

We were walking upstream, Miss. Tea-colored water gently tugged submerged limbs and whirled darkly beneath tupelo. Their lures plunked softly and disappeared into darkness to arrive once more magically at the tips of their rods and I observed a certain contradiction, Miss, between the vehemence of these two and the slender peaceful space we occupied. As Arden predicted, Zeno’s reel fell apart again, and, shoving the broken reel into his pocket, he went on about it, as if he’d found the culprit for his dissatisfaction: This is what all that Made in China crap does for a country, he said. Some asshole’s getting rich and some Chinese is eating well but the quality of my life is going to hell. It’s what I’m trying to tell you, Castro. God damn cheap plastic. Ain’t nothing good no more. 

His rant was interrupted by a sputtering motor. A pale-green John boat floated around the bend. Arden’s and Zeno’s jaws dropped as if they were seeing fire for the first time. Perched atop, a man in camouflage tossed his line into a hole. Another man, bearded, glanced at us. Nods exchanged. Camo said, Fishin’ ain’t none too good. 

But they had caught seven. We were empty-handed. The boat glided past and then vanished, the sound of the motor fading like the dying call of an ancient bird. 

How long you and me been fishing here? Arden said to Zeno. 

Nineteen and sixty-three, Zeno said. 

You ever see anything like that? 

Never did. Never seen nobody here before. Always thought this river belonged to us. 

They were gloomy after that, Miss. Both continued to fish, but they were chewing on the notion that their river had been invaded. Their memory could trace generations of fishers who simply walked upstream to catch food. It never occurred to either of them that a modern contrivance might one day surpass them as that boat had just done. They were genuinely perplexed. The river, their river, Miss, had never before been molested by modernity with such brutality, and they were dumbfounded. 

When the first of our family made its way here, Arden said, they came from Virginia through Georgia and crossed the Conecuh. Cut through this forest long before there was any roads or anything. Holed up in caves and starved a good bit of the time. Can’t really imagine how it was back then. How difficult and hostile. 

Zeno laughed and shook his head. And then we all laughed. But I realized that they were laughing like someone whose guts had been spilled and had just now grasped the hopelessness of it. 

The R5 lunges through a changing yellow, and I’m distracted by a deep sense of melancholy and then by an insect crawling inside my blouse along my belly and when I look up, trying to ignore the invasion, I see that the driver is staring at me in the mirror, as if somehow it’s my fault, and then the R5 veers to the curb, and the woman and her children stand. She glowers at me and huddles her brood close to her legs and turns their heads away. It’s all these insects, I say, looking at her. The woman speaks to the driver but I know she’s talking to me. I ain’t never seen such a sight, she says, and then she thumps down the steps into the pale afternoon. 

The mosquitoes were bad, Castro says. They came at us from every direction. Terrible. Terrible insects. And nothing to do about it. You spray a bit, but to a pesky creature like that, you submit. That’s what you do. That’s all you can do. The best we could figure, Arden had gone under a drooping fetterbush to retrieve a snagged lure and stirred them up. 

The creek was mid-calf and red. Zeno pointed at a row of orderly stumps and said, That trestle’s what’s left of a rail that run through here in the thirties. Then he directed my inspection to the jutting bank. You can see it goes on back that way. But there’s nothing left of it. This forest used to be filled with huge yellow pine, Arden said. Bigger than anything you and I will ever see. Logged, Zeno said. Every bit of it, Arden said. Daddy says they hitched the timber together and rode it downstream to the small towns for milling. 

Another creek merged into our river. Water, black as molasses, Miss. Thick and swirling with golden leaves. We crossed a log jam and came up to wide beach. Arden directed my attention to a placard nailed to a tree. The writing was red and small. These No Trespassing signs belong to a man that lives up yonder, he said. Our family’s been here long before he ever heard of this place. Don’t a prior footstep do for a claim? Don’t it? Tell me. But then he answered his own question. No, it don’t. 

They went on with their ‘plaint for several minutes, unaware or ignorant of the settling darkness. When you’re in the creek, Miss, you’re already in a dark place. The understory is thick. Menacing at times. Trees on the bank are twice as high as when you’re trekking along some path in the woods. You feel at once uneasy trudging in this damp gully and at the same time awed by the quiet splendor. And that’s what I was relishing when I saw the wet corpulent darkness rising above the pines. It was upon us quick and we scrambled up the bank to escape the downpour beneath the shelter of the forest. 

Afterward, I often escaped into the shower and there, feeling uneasy, I listened to Mr. Pinchier criticize the shabby carpeting of the motel rooms—he knew carpets, that was his love, whether they would hold up or wear thin, lose color or remain vibrant, resist stains or ruin easily—and I swore I would never do it again. This went on for some time until someone—a newly hired brunette named Sophia—came along and reduced my value like last year’s rugs. And then, today, like the storeroom inventory, I was purged, and I ran out crying. 

Hunkered down, soaking wet, watching silvery streams of rainwater, I reflected a moment on these two throwbacks. They felt invaded, Miss. They had no possession of this land. And it was unclear to me whether they wanted possession of it. Nonetheless, they sensed that they had been assaulted. If not to body, then to memory. To that memory meandering back to their parents and to the parents of their parents all the way back to the first footstep. How dare anyone molest them while their memory stood prior to any deed of land? They were incensed, all right, but utterly unable to defend themselves, and I had no use for that. 

Have a heart, you say? No offense, Miss, but they’d said as much, and their sappy poopings about the loss of their idyllic, pristine land and noble way of life, the skewed imaginings they held of their forebears’ journey, did little to stir me—and in fact I found their naïveté tedious. They’d succumbed, don’t you see, and still had the gall to complain that their lives were falling apart. 

The R5 stumbles over potholes. The tall boy in khakis rides it, his boney fingers drumming callously over his legs, while the rest of him thrashes with cannibalistic desire. Something about him alarms me, the devouring expression of his body, though I am nothing to him, but that is the point, I realize, and I’m cowed by his presence, which, like Mr. Pinchier’s, strikes me with its impudence.  

Lightning, Castro says, startling me, crashed all about us. At first the rain fell musically like plunked harp strings, but then pounded like drums. We crouched beneath the shelter of a magnolia bower, and the intensity of the thunder grew and echoed against the bark of the trees, and at some point, whether caused by the chill of the rain or by some unspoken fear, both men were shivering, and I turned away, leaving them alone with their thoughts. When the rain ceased, we stepped back into the river, a tad colder than when we’d started.   

At last we arrived at the object that had so mortified these men and spurred them to write to me. Initially, I didn’t see it, Miss, because I was taken by a view of huge bay limbs stretching over a halcyon region where a gentle spring trickled down the bank. The sun dispersed the clouds and the creek narrowed. Juniper and blueberry jostled for space. Up there, Zeno said, as we approached a small building perched on stilts on the eastern bank. 

Anyone live there? 

More likely a party house, Arden said. Some fishing and drinking. Who knows what else? But here’s what we want you to see. 

In the middle of the creek, a table built of rotted wood stood about four feet up. Wet splinters jutted from its ends. Rusty nails held one-by-fours in sloppy rows across the top. It was an unexpected sight, Miss, but stranger still was the assortment of fountains, rockets, Roman candles, spinners, mortars, and wheels littering the top. A sharp gunpowder smell lingered. We circled the table like vultures awaiting a thing to die. After a while, Zeno said, This ain’t right. This just ain’t right. When I said nothing, they finally grasped that I did not see in it the horror that they saw, and the two men became sullen. It was a table, Miss, and no big thing, and we could have, right then and there, lifted it out of the water; or couldn’t I have given them advice on how they might protest the misuse of the river? Certainly, and easily. But they were content to hold hard to the fact that they ought to have been treated better, that respect was owed to them, to the memory of their ancestors, and to the simple, plain beauty of the river.  

At the exit we shook sand from our shoes. Arden dipped his hand into the shallows by some driftwood and pulled out a discarded beer can. He poured water from it and then shook it until a small creature dropped onto his palm. Its feelers twitched nervously. Plates of red and black shell worked as if run by hydraulic pumps. See, Arden said, this little fella is all wrapped up in his shell. But that ain’t enough. So he finds a beer can to settle into. Now ain’t that something? 

Castro stares at the photograph. Arden didn’t know what he was talking about. But that’s clear, isn’t it, Miss? Then Castro’s expression settles slowly like sediment. 

While they cleaned the gear, I discovered a table on the side of the house with fish scales, like fallen socks, piled around its legs, and I was amused by an idle notion that, had I dug around in those scales, I might have found the first scale from the first fish cleaned by the first ancestor who set foot in these woods. Idle thoughts, yes, but one wonders . . .  

And he then presses the signal strip and the bus comes to a halt near a five-story brickwork apartment building. 

The photograph falls into my hand, or it’s given to me, as he rises, and I look up at him and see in his face something other than the brutal features I’d seen when I’d first looked at him; they are not soft but practical, and then his hand comes toward me, inviting me. 

I shake my head. 

It’s the end of the line, Miss. Won’t you come with me? 

No. The word lacks volume. 

He looks at the boy in khakis, he looks at the man dozing in the back. If you stay on, you’ll go back. 

I need to go back. This time I hear it; the voice isn’t strong, but it’s believable. 

Will you ride all day? 

If I have to. 

D. E. Lee’s novel, The Sky After Rain, won the Brighthorse Books 2015 novel contest and is available in paperback. His novella Mexico Beach (2020) is available from Running Wild Press. Awards include Pushcart Prize nominee, finalist in Prairie Schooner’s 2018 Book Prize, Honorable Mention in the Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adelle Shiff 2018 & 2022 award, Nimrod’s 2011 Katherine Ann Porter Prize, and the 2014 Nelson Algren Award.
His short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Barely South Review, The Adirondack Review, South Dakota Review, Palooka, Little Patuxent Review, Quiddity, Lunch Ticket, Alligator Juniper, The Lindenwood Review, Broad River Review, and others.