“I b’lieve I do,” the old man said.
“Here you go, Mister Washington.” Elmer popped open the Zippo and lit the old man’s cigarette. The smoke paused in the air and then blew southward, the direction of the stream.
“Maurice, Lemon, what about you?”
Both men cut their eyes to him quick and then back to their cane poles. Maurice, the oldest and tallest of the two brothers, grunted an affirmative and moved toward Elmer and reached and took a cigarette from him. Elmer flicked the lighter and held the flame toward Maurice but he waved him away and pulled a pack of matches from his overalls pocket and lit it himself.
“Lemon?” Elmer said, but Lemon just shook his head and said, “Naw.”
The old man said, “Thank you. We ’preciate it.”
Elmer turned and looked back up the north side of the stream, the water running slowly along flat shoals out of the wild growth. A willow tree in the banks about one hundred feet up towered over the smaller hardwoods, its lithe branches catching a higher breeze and trembling for a second.
Elmer turned to the old man and asked, “Is y’all’s place in the flood plain?”
“The what?” the old man said.
“The flood plain. Where the lake’s gonna go. You ain’t too far from the river back in there, are you?”
“What you mean? It s’posed to come a big rain?”
“No, sir, the state and power company is damming up the river—tonight. All the low spots around it are going to be under water, for good, ’cording to the government. Has anybody from the power company been out there to see you?”
“Well, no, we haven’t heard from nobody.”
“Have you seen that dam they built up there? It’s the biggest piece of concrete in this part of Georgia.”
“For electricity, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s going to turn this half of the county into a lake. I guess you must be on a dry spot, or they’d moved you out by now. But I thought for sure Ridleyville’d be under water.”
Down below the bridge there was a scurrying in the brush. One of the boys yelled, “Pull ’im out.” The cane pole with the taut line shot straight up from the river and the biggest boy, about twelve, lifted it up and a foot-long bass, glistening green and silver and white, dangled at the end of the line. The second brother, about ten, grabbed the bass and pulled the hook out of its mouth and held it up for the men on the bridge to see.
“That’s a good ’un, Tyrone,” Maurice said. “About two pounds, I bet. String ’im up.”
The old man chuckled, a rumbling laugh like a big cat’s purr. Elmer and the men watched for a while as the boys ran a long piece of twine through the fish’s gills and tied it to the low thick branch of a shrub and tossed the tethered bass in the water and then rebaited the hook with earthworms from an old shoebox. The sun was warming on the bridge and the blue water flowed serenely under the wooden trestle.
“I guess I best be getting on,” Elmer said. “Y’all keep an eye on that river tonight. The power company says they know right where this lake will go and where it will flood and where it won’t, but I don’t see how somebody with a piece of paper and a little metal tool no bigger than a stapler can predict it.”
“Yes, sir, deputy. And don’t worry, we got these boys in school. We just giving them a day out ’fore it gets too cold to fish.”
Elmer paused and looked over the bridge at the boys. The oldest one was easing the cane pole back out over the water, propping it on the low branch of a swamp dogwood.
“You do that, now, you hear.” He nodded to each, speaking their names in the rhythm he’d say goodbye, but only the old man acknowledged his farewell.
Elmer got in his truck and turned the key in the ignition and pressed the starter button that cranked up the engine, but when he tried to put it into gear the column linkage stuck and he couldn’t shift it out of neutral.
“Goddammit,” he said under his breath, his face turning flush.
The men on the bridge had leaned tight against the railing to let him pass and were watching him curiously. The old man seemed to want to ask him a question but Elmer ignored him.
Elmer turned off the engine and got out and pulled the axe handle from the stanchion hole. He opened the hood and stood with his feet on the front bumper and leaned up over the engine and jammed the point of the handle into the linkage connectors and knocked them loose.
He stepped down and slammed the hood and dropped the axe handle back into its rightful slot. He got in and started the engine and popped it into first gear and sped over the wooden bridge, shifting into second as he passed the Washingtons, waving a curt goodbye without looking back.
He went farther up Fish Creek Road, the dirt ruts widening out and rising after the creek. He drove into a stretch of older pines and tried to figure where the lake would go. Maybe the chainsaws hadn’t gotten all the trees, but he knew the greedy bastards were too smart to drown their own forests. Where most men saw pine trees, some saw fat bank accounts, a fine car and a big-breasted woman waiting for them in the Imperial Hotel on Peachtree Street.
He looped around a back road to the north so he wouldn’t have to pass back by the Washingtons. He got on the highway and then drove south for about ten miles until he started to get close to town. He came up on Dam Road, the new one they’d cut when construction started three years ago. It was freshly paved and marked with a big new sign announcing Georgia Power Company: Lake Terrell Dam on a white background. He turned off on the two-lane with red dirt shoulders a few yards wide, driving about a mile until he saw two Cadillacs coming up fast behind him. Soon the first one was riding his bumper. He immediately pulled off into a short driveway leading to a fenced pasture. He stopped in front of the locked iron gate and watched in his rearview mirror as the Cadillacs passed by, all black and shiny and full of men in suits. One of the men had on a military dress uniform of some sort, Army perhaps, but Elmer couldn’t get that good of a look at it as they zoomed behind him, sleek and fast on the smooth road.
He took his eyes off the mirror and looked at the pasture ahead, busy with cows going about the business of eating grass and drinking water from an old bathtub set out in the middle of the field. Old bathtubs made good troughs for the cows once the drains were plugged up to catch rain. Maybe he could give Mrs. McNulty a dollar for that old tub of hers and sell it for more to one of these farmers with the fields full of cows that had been herded out of the low pastures that were soon to be lake bottom. He smiled sideways and spat out the window. It would be funny if some of the farmers had it wrong and their cows ended up drowning and floating in the lake, all bloated and stinky and their eyes glossed over and their waterlogged hides ridden with maggots and worms. Especially if it was some of Aubrey Terrell’s cows. He shifted in his seat and scratched his nuts, then tapped another cigarette out of the pack and lit it. He inhaled deep and let the smoke glide out around him like a cloud as he dropped the column into reverse.
He drove back to North Highway and turned right, passing three pulpwood trucks with cut sections of chained-down logs. He turned onto Finley Shoals Road and drove on past Drowning Creek Road about a mile until he turned left onto a year-old logging road scraped out through a thicket of sapling oaks and yellow poplars. He drove up a hill, the terrain changing from flat clay to rocky, the small trees giving way to an open field that had been clear-cut of pine trees and the road diverted around a six-foot high wall of granite boulders. Trees grew sideways and up from the low cliff. He remembered learning in middle school that this had been the coastline millions of years ago, back when dinosaurs and woolly mammoths had roamed the Earth, pterodactyls flying overhead.
He followed the logging road around the boulders and stopped and turned off the engine and left the blue Chevy smack dab in the center of the one-lane road amidst a thicket. No one would be able to get by his truck but no one was going to be back in