[Short Story] Wade Into The Water With Me (part 1)

Bennett was missing out. He could tell as soon as he woke up. Through the window came the crackle and boom of a car stereo turned up beyond its means, punctured by the occasional whoop or yell. He didn’t know what was going on but he resented the fact that he was being left out. Had no one in the whole damn camp bothered to invite him?  He started to cultivate the spite that would motivate his whole day. 

Bennett made no immediate move to rise from the bed, let his temperature rise a little. The heat of the day was coming on strong and the trailer would soon be uninhabitable. It was a simple, unadorned domicile with no air conditioning. It had stopped working one day, for reasons still unknown, and he had never bothered to try and fix it. By definition, the inside of the trailer qualified as "clean" but that was only because he kept little. The kitchenette, bathroom, and little fold down table all went unused. He shit and pissed outdoors and felt no shame about it. He bathed in the rivers or lakes or with a camp shower hanging from a tree. His clothes occupied one cabinet and he kept a small store of dry goods in another. The rest were empty. 

He got out of bed the way every narcissist does—with a heavy heart and a bare conscience. As if it were the greatest sacrifice that anyone had ever made, he swung his feet out of bed and pulled on shorts. He stepped outside and slammed the door shut behind him to make sure everyone knew who was up. He was shirtless and unshaven, but his sharp cheek and jaw kept him from looking vulgar. Eyebrows like hedgerows slashed across his brow and his deep set eyes  could menace with ease. But if he kept his face neutral or even smiled, then he was considered good-looking and it tempered the fear you might feel around him. 

One of the little ones ran by and Bennett flagged him down. The child was dirty and without pants, 5 years old and still not named.

“What those guys doing, huh?” he asked.

The toddler spit on the ground the way he had seen his mother do, shoulders and arms back, head out and forward—like a rooster crowing. 

“Making a swimming hole.”

“Like a pool or something?” Bennett demanded. 

The toddler shrugged, tried to spit again, and ran off. Bennett took a beer from the cooler he kept right outside the door and sat down in his lawn chair. He watched.  For the past 3 weeks the caravan had camped in a clearing in a river valley where they did seasonal work at a million square foot warehouse. A sprightly creek separated the field from the deep of the woods. The water was clear and cool with a bottom of smooth, flat stones, but it was shallow, only about 10 inches deep. Far as he could tell, they planned to divert a little channel from the river to a pit. 

And the dig went well for a time, car stereo full volume and straining, the soil loamy and forgiving, beer and sun. But the project was larger in scope then they had anticipated and with the hole only 10 feet wide, 3 feet deep, enthusiasm flagged. They lay about sullen and drunk, flat on a car hood or slumped over in the river, faces flushed, arms and backs roaring. They let the beer cans float away, cigarettes stubbed out on top like little masts, an armada of the marginalized. The heat in its choking phase.

Bennett got an idea. He walked up to Warren.  

“Y’all don’t have half a brain between you.” And while they yelled and threw empties at his head, he laid out his plan. There was a construction site a couple miles up the road, new tract housing going up outside the town. He had seen the backhoe when they had driven by and he would bet his trailer they left the keys in it. It was Saturday, no one would miss it, and they only needed an hour. 

They dug the hole out in 20 minutes and lined it with a tarp staked to the ground. The heat broke and the women hung Christmas lights from the honeylocust trees and drank liquor from cans. Bennett piloted the backhoe up to the river, something softening in him as he made the trip numerous times for river rock to fill the bottom of the pool. He was an expert of machinery and he dug a straight and narrow sluice from the river to fill the pool and then a drainage ditch back over to meet up with the river. The caravan hummed with activity while the pool filled. They wheeled out the grill Warren had made from a 55-gallon honey drum and they cooked chicken to black atop beer cans. The little ones around the edge of the hole with their chins in their hands, the teenagers off in the woods in rut, and the grown folk doing nothing. 

Cheyenne came over to Bennett sitting on the edge of the tractor’s bucket. 

“You don’t wear pride so well,” she said. 

“Well I’d prefer to wear nothing at all.” His grin was all teeth and stretched cheek, with the tip of his tongue poking out. 

But he didn’t mind her walking up to him like that, the five other guys standing around, and she acting like it's just them two. Those guys hadn’t moved when she had come over but it had felt like she had blown them five feet back. She carried space around with her is what she did. 

“Where’s the little one at?” 

“Waiting for a turn by that cesspool y’all dug.” 

The children were canonballing off milk crates. Bennett gave a low whistle, crushed the can and threw it to join the others in the bottom of the bucket. 

“Don’t you have another kid too?” Though he knew very well that she did. 

"She’s round here somewhere,” Cheyenne said. 

“Well let’s take a walk and see if we can’t roust her.”

They walked into the woods. Cheyenne was a woman built for the woods and to be alone with her in it made it difficult for Bennett to focus. She picked up a fallen branch and would prod the ground in front of her as they tromped about aimlessly, sharing a beer from the sixer Bennett dangled in his hand. They found their way to the clearing where the cracked and mossy boulders jutted from the earth in a semi-circle. The teenagers were spread across the top in various states of repose, flinging a bottle of Southern Comfort from boulder top to boulder top, catching it with one hand, the thwock of the glass against palm the most satisfying sound Bennett had ever heard. They egged each other on, taking a shot and then whipping the bottle to the next one, faster and faster, so fast it wasn’t corked and never spilled a drop, the pulls between throws longer and longer, the girls catching and throwing as equals till the bottle emptied and they obliterated it against a tree. Daphne was taking a deep hit from a little pipe. 

“Girl, toss that down here.” 

Cheyenne finished what was left in tiny rapid puffs. 

“You owe me $20 dollars,” she told her daughter. 

They all snorted.   

Daphne, honey and milk, hair still wet, didn’t care, would never marry, didn’t want to live.  

O, Daphne what’d you do to him?  

~