The man suddenly went quiet as if weighing the subject at hand with cautious attention, his eyes squenched into the look of one at grave counsel with himself.
“Believe I’d try and jack off,” he said, finally.
Beam stared at the man. “I don’t think I could do that,” he said.
“Ten minutes not long enough for you, huh? Well, I never had that problem. Every circle jerk I ever was in I finished first and third.”
Beam expected the man to end such a thought with a laugh and when he didn’t, his lips set grimly under the red bristles of his mustache with a look of definite affirmation, Beam shook his head and looked away into the night.
“Oh, well.” The man shrugged. “It’s some folks out there would pay to jump off a mountain. All you’d have to do is tell ‘em there was pussy and birthday cake waiting at the bottom and they’d dole out a hundred dollars and just be tearing to get over the edge.”
The man turned back to the railings. He lifted one shoe to rest it on the bottom rung. Beam saw the outline of the wallet in the back pocket of his jeans and wondered suddenly how much cash a dirty stranger like this might carry and if there was a way to take it from him. And the canvas duffel slouched in a corner of the deck? Who could say what a traveler might be bearing through the foggy dark?
“You smoke?” the man asked over his shoulder. He turned and produced a pack of Kenyon cigarettes from his jeans and took one out and then offered the pack to Beam.
Though he wasn’t a smoker, Beam slid a cigarette out and lit it with the man’s proffered matches. The tobacco crackled as it burned and a thick bower of smoke grew about them, singeing Beam’s lungs until he coughed and spat.
“Smoke,” said the man, grinning. “But not too much, huh?”
Beam threw the cigarette overboard and it hissed in the river.
“Who is your mama and daddy?” the man asked.
“Clem and Derna,” Beam said.
The man repeated the names and then shook his head. “I don’t believe I know them.” He drew on his cigarette. “What’s your mama look like?”
Beam put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He tried to think of his mother. He wondered what she would be doing at this hour and then knew she would be asleep, and then he tried to think what a woman like her, roughed and filed down by years, would dream of, or if she even dreamed at all anymore.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s older.”
The man flicked the ash from his cigarette. “How old?”
“She’s up in her forties.”
“That’s older?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. Her hair is getting gray.”
“I bet she’s a real good woman,” the man said.
Beam’s hands grew cold and numb in his pockets. A breeze swept in off the river and rattled against his jacket and the sweat cooled on his cheeks and then he remembered his mother again, and what he’d heard said about her, even as a boy when what was said was spoken by other boys who didn’t know truly what it meant to say things such as that. And the smell of the locust blooms, ghosting white and flurried over the black wind-folded river, lifted hot and sweet to him again, and he heard the branches shaking, the leaves a-shiver like rain in the dark.
“I bet she’s just about the best woman a man could ever hope to mama him,” said the stranger. “What’d you say her name was before she married?”
“I didn’t say.”
The man drew on his cigarette and then tossed it into the river. “Well, what was it?”
“Kurkendayll.”
“Kurkendayll?”
“Yes. That’s what I said.”
The man put his head down, the smoke running out of his nostrils and blowing away in the wind.
“You don’t know her,” Beam said.
The man looked up. His eyes were red with whisky and appeared beleaguered and mournful in the lights of the ferry. “I don’t know her,” he said. “I don’t know anything, bud. You just got to ignore most of what I say.”
Beam felt a sudden weariness descend on him. For a moment, he thought one of his sleeping spells might be about to overtake him and he braced himself against the aluminum wall of the tug cabin and squeezed his eyes shut until the blood boomed in his head. He pressed his cheek to the cold metal and it stung him and roused him further. When he opened his eyes, the stranger was looking at him.
“You sick or something?” he asked.
Beam dragged a hand over his eyes. “Just a little,” he said. He lifted his head and drew a long full breath and then exhaled.
The man had walked just out of the ferry lights now and stood in the dark shadows, his body outlined by the moon.
“You don’t look like any Sheetmire,” he said. His voice sounded thick and slurred, and Beam felt it slide through him. He closed his eyes and steadied himself against the cabin and in a sudden gust all the faces from the Sheetmire homecoming arose from the blank river, but when he opened his eyes only the night was there, black and swirling with cold wind.
“What are you talking about?” Beam asked the stranger.
“I’m saying how you don’t look like any Sheetmire I ever seen.” The man hooked his elbows around the boat railing and licked his teeth. “Wasn’t there a Kurkendayll girl from over around Leachville that married a Sheetmire?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Beam answered.
“Well, is your mama’s family from over around Leachville?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“You don’t know if your mama’s folks are from over around Leachville?”
“No.” Beam felt his head begin to ache and pressed his palms against his eyes. “I don’t know any of my mama’s family.”
“You never met your mama’s folks?”
“No.”
“Well, you don’t really know what you are then, do you? You could be an eighth nigger or three quarters sonuvabitch and not have any clue.”
Beam took his hands from his eyes and stared at the man. He looked pale and sickly with the moonlight at his back, his frail arms bowed over the boat railings. Beam wondered suddenly what it would sound like to hear a man drown. To hear it and know you had done it.
“You look like somebody done pissed in your Cheerios, bud,” said the man. He laughed a little and then stopped. “I’m just goofing on you. You ain’t got to act all hard. I never met no Kurkendayll’s or Sheetmire’s in my life.”
The wind cut off the river and Beam shook inside his jacket. What he’d told the man was true. He didn’t know his mother’s family, had never met a single one of them. She claimed they were all long dead, but now Beam wondered why she never traveled to any of the cemeteries to place flowers on their graves or to at least show him where his ancestors were buried. She never spoke of them at all. It were as if they didn’t exist, and Beam knew it was only bad trouble in someone’s past that made them not want to talk about it. Good times and happy days were recounted so often the stories became dried out and useless. But bad times were left untold about, as if to speak of them would call down all the old despairs once more.
“Ain’t you ever had nobody goof with you, bud?” the man asked.
Beam stared at the man a moment, then nodded to the tug.
“I