He walked along the ridge of rocks until he passed into a swale and came up on the river where it broke over the shoals. Boulders spanned the river, stopping anyone trying to get upstream in a rowboat or a raft. Hardwoods grew along the riverbanks, including a few grand willows whose long leaf-covered branches drooped ceremoniously onto the grass below.
Elmer climbed up an incline to the top of a granite boulder that stood almost six feet above the water’s edge. He stood there watching the river for a while and then lit a cigarette and stepped onto the next boulder, following the narrow path across the river on the top of exposed rocks, water flowing through channels cut between the stones. He held his cigarette in his lips and raised his hands out to his sides to keep his balance. A few of the boulders were wet and slick where the river flowed over them and he almost slipped at one point, the worn heels of his old brogans not getting much traction on the wet stones. Almost to the bank of the far side, two boulders were a good three feet apart. He squatted on the rock at the gap and looked downstream at the swirling water where it picked up speed as the land sloped downhill.
He finished the cigarette and turned north and flicked the butt upstream into the water and watched the white speck bob and sink and rise again, making a path between two boulders. It dropped down the mini-waterfall and disappeared but then bobbed up, like he’d seen those river jumpers from Niagara Falls do on the newsreels back when he went to the movies, back before the war when he didn’t mind the company of others. His eyes followed the cigarette butt until it shrank, too small to see in the flattening water.
He noticed that the water smelled fresh, clearer here before it slipped down across the fall line and muddied with the loamier soil, and the temperature felt cooler in the midst of the wet boulders. He leaned down and cupped his hands and drank from the splashing current, swallowing several handfuls, splashing some on his face.
He stood and measured the space with his eyes and then stretched his legs and made the short jump across the gap in the boulders. He walked to the river’s edge and headed up beneath a stand of oaks and poplars and red maples. From a dirt rise he could see through the thinning leaves of the hardwoods and could make out the shape of the dam, hulking and beige, the fresh concrete filling in the gap where the river ran between two sloping hills.
He went about half a mile in the low hardwoods, the leaves crunching under his feet, stopping only to push back the briars that hung across his path. His tooth that sometimes hurt began to bother him, an ache that came and went deep in his back right molar.
The hardwoods ended and he reached a narrow stand of small pines surviving on the edge of a field of stumps. He sat down beneath the few remaining trees that the pulpwooders had been too lazy to clear or hadn’t had time to get to and leaned back on his elbows. He pulled the revolver out of his britches and laid it on the ground and reclined even more, tossing away a few pine cones. The loose brown needles made for a comfortable bed.
He turned his head and looked at the bark of a pine tree only a few feet from his face, the intricate patterns of the bark busy with ants, the trunk like a hazy map of roads and rivers and plateaus and valleys, little towns and big knotted cities, and vast lands of open pastures and virgin forests. The bark of the tree looked like what he remembered of his view of the country the time the Navy flew him on an airplane, the ants sorting themselves into highways just like people.
He lay there for a while and smoked, looking at the tree bark, until the sun moved to an angle where it shone down on him and it warmed his shirt and pants. He stubbed out the butt of his cigarette and licked his finger and then wet the remaining smolder to make sure it was out, just like they had taught him to do with matches in his three-week stint as a Cub Scout, something he quit because he had gotten tired of his daddy ridiculing his little blue suit and funny hat. He tossed the extinguished butt into the pine needles and put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He felt the sun on his eyelids and listened to the birds chirping and scraping the bark in the tree limbs above him, brown thrashers singing and blue jays anxiously calling. He heard the rustling of feathers and soft low clucking of quail and thought about flushing them out and shooting one or two, but a .38 revolver was no good for bird hunting. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dreamed of coming into the woods without his shotgun and taking back a few of the plump birds, but it had been a year at least since he had messed with the old 20-gauge pump he kept in the back of his closet. The shotgun had been his daddy’s. He had cleaned it and oiled it regularly but had not shot it in two hunting seasons.
He began to dream half-dreams of being a boy hunting in the woods alone with a .410 and then going home to his mama with a squirrel or a bird and her hugging him, his daddy being nowhere around and they liking it that way. Then the half-dreams became deep dreams, his fists uncoiled and his eyelids twitched and heavy sleep poured over and through him like a solid wall of water.
Percy was out again, his morning visit with the old lady and his first nap of the day behind him. He trotted through a field to the narrow road and followed it until he saw the empty blue pickup truck. He stopped and sniffed the tires, the smell of oil and gasoline heavy from the warm motor, a globular spot expanding in the dirt under the engine block. He peed on the left front wheel.
He ran on down the road until he cut his path through the hardwoods where the boulders began and the cliff was red clay and sandy over and around the boulders. Trees here grew at strange angles, some with two trunks and others joined together at branch level and some split apart at the top, crazy like the old lady’s hair got sometimes when no one had been to see her in the days and weeks when she stayed in the bed and didn’t speak and forgot to feed him. He got by on bugs and grass and whatever varmints, maybe a squirrel or even a rabbit, he could catch in the woods. He missed the old man and the hambones and biscuits he used to throw him after supper. He saw three gray and brown mutts from a distance and barked angrily at them as they ran away over a hill. Many a stray dog Percy had snarled at to keep away from the junkyard by the river, his home.
Percy went down from the road to his path through the brambles and leaves and fallen trees, trunks that had dropped sideways over time and sometimes were nudged by the hard winds of spring to lie horizontal and rot and become a home for snakes and lizards and even the occasional turtle if close enough to the water. He ran up on the boulders and looked downstream at the flow of the river and then tiptoed across. He had fallen off the boulders and into the water more than once in his younger days. The first time he had sucked water into his lungs and almost drowned. He had fought it with all his black chow fury and scrambled to the bank and coughed and gasped and rolled on the ground like a mad dog until he spewed up water and the pain stopped and he could breathe normally.
He didn’t go back to the river rocks for a few months after that first splash, but then one warm day the water had smelled fresh and clear on the spring breezes blowing up to the house and he trotted down there and stood at the edge, studying the boulders with his black eyes, his tongue hanging and his wet nostrils taking in all the scents of the fish and the turtles and the blooming flowers along the wide stream of water that never stopped moving. A few days of that and he was back on the boulders again, standing there looking across the water at the other side where birds skittered in the trees and squirrels and rabbits played under a canopy of branches and leaves. He could see cows in the distance, their existence on the other side of the river taunting him until it became his daily ritual once more to cross the river on the boulders. One rainy day he lost his footing and fell off the boulder into the water, this time banging his head, and when he came to he was down river, washed onto a shoal with the water lapping softly around him.
So today he crossed the river carefully, keeping to the middle of the rocks and taking short, sure steps until he reached the gap where he had to jump, an easy leap when he was a younger dog and still not a hard leap for him now, although he was very sure to jump plenty far enough from the one boulder to the next. He moved on across and jumped down from the last high rock onto the riverbank and ran along the edge for a ways, beneath a series of willows hanging long and sad over the edge of the water, and then to a stretch where the river was blocked with deadfalls of poplar and oak trunks that had not survived a twister that sprang up back in the summer and knocked over the trees like matchsticks, uprooting