For this week's story, a break for now from the In Council sequence.
A few months back, I put up the first chapter of one of my novels to be published, called In Her Eyes. This week's story is the second chapter in that story; if you recall, the first chapter concerned itself with a boy and what he found in the woods.
This second chapter concerns itself with that same boy, some few years down the road and now an older man.
One still occasionally finding himself digging around in the woods...
Two: (Chapter 2 of In Her Eyes, by M. K. Dreysen
She came to him from across the back yard. Walking out of the woods. Or from just behind Dad's old barn, the one where he'd kept all the projects, the tools, the stuff he'd built up.
Dad's home, house. A couple acres of heaven, hidden away in pine and beech and protected from the Calcasieu River by an all-mighty bluff. The floods might have locked him. Had locked him in, every hurricane Charlie called his father to see whether the road had been blocked off. The little house held up, but the power lines and the roads were always victims of the trees and the wind and the water that closed the bluff from the world.
"Is this what you hid from me?" she asked, when she made it across the yard to the back porch. "You would speak of home, your father's house, but you never brought me here."
Charlie ignored the accusation. Teasing, she would always go for the little bare spaces in the armor. It was one of the things he loved about her. He stepped through the french door and into her hug. "I didn't know if you still remembered."
"I will always remember. I will always return. For you."
"Come in," he said. "I need the company."
Because William Anderson LeBleu had passed on, and his oldest son had come home.
"We're putting the place on the market," Will, Charlie's younger brother, had told him last week. "Margie and I figured you wouldn't mind."
'You never asked, did you?' Charlie had thought. 'Any more than ya'll ever did.' He loved his half-siblings, and they returned it, he'd never questioned that for a second.
They just had their ways, he knew. And most things, they just didn't think he cared.
The house tugged at him, from across the miles. When he'd worked in New York, the place had been there. He'd wake up, get on the train into the city, and spend two hours listening to the woodpecker torturing the pine trees for their grubs. The quail calling from the fenceline in the front, the one Dad couldn't ever bring himself to clear because the covey had settled in. And Dad loved to sit on his front porch and laugh at the little fat buggers chasing each other through the blackberry thicket.
When Charlie travelled to New Mexico, now, or the East Coast, wherever, the place called him still. When the great-horned owl built her nest, every spring he knew it. Which tree, of the three or four that she always used, she'd chosen this year. And when he came home, and walked beneath those twisted beasts, there she'd be, watching, hidden in the crook, not at all nervous but just making sure, in exactly the place his dreams had shown him.
He knew. When his father died. Walking up the stairs from a late-night meeting with a glass of milk and a Popeye's biscuit, Dad had felt the hitch in his side. Then the weakness in his knees. The place connected Dad and Charlie in that instant. So that Dad wouldn't go alone, Charlie figured. Small payment, a little magic in exchange for fifty years of love and protection.
Charlie called Margie; that was the other gift the place had sent. Will had been on the road, with Angie and the kids, his own work schedule calling, but Margie and Mike were in town. "Margie, have you heard from Dad? He's not answering his phones."
The house phone, because the place was back in the woods and you could never tell. Dad's, and Margie's and Will's, cell phone services all worked just fine. Charlie's service, the personal one he'd had forever and the work cell, were a different story. Either case and Dad wouldn't be getting to the phones; Charlie felt him leave.
But Margie wouldn't take a feeling. 'Hardheaded,' Charlie told himself, smiling through the tears and the love that threatened to overwhelm him.
"You sure it's not your phone acting up again?" she'd asked.
"Try it and call me back," he'd answered.
She did more than that, she'd sent Chloe over to the house. Chloe, Margie and Mike's youngest, living at home while she finished up the master's degree.
Charlie stared at the walls of the hotel room, frustrated that he couldn't tell Margie why she should have gone, instead of sending the baby. Hurting, because he saw it, felt it. When Chloe came onto the land, the connection surged again. So Charlie was there.
When Chloe found her grandfather, she spent an eternity by herself, lost between holding his hands and his face, there where he'd collapsed on the stairs, and trying to pick up the phone and call somebody, anybody to come help.
When Chloe rode down the first wave of emotion, and the surge of it ebbed a little, Charlie rearranged his flights. He'd just about finished his trip; he'd been in Pennsylvania that week, a site visit, an equipment manufacturer had turned him on to a food plant that was using a new type of bagger. Different industry, different needs, but Charlie, unlike most of his engineers, liked to keep an eye on the world outside. "There's always something new to learn," he told them. "You never know when someone else might have come up with an idea we can use."
He had to push his flights up one more day, from Thursday to Wednesday. He used the chat window, to keep his phones clear for when Margie called him back. The lady on the other end of the chat found him seats on the same flights as he'd have taken Thursday; she even checked to see if there was a flight from Hobby to Lake Charles. "There's an eight o'clock flight, you'll get to Hobby with an hour or so to spare."
Charlie wouldn't have even asked for that. Then he remembered the casino traffic. "I haven't flown from Houston to Lake Charles since I was a kid." What was the point, two hours killing time in security and a hard seat at the gate, plus the hour flight, and he'd have been at the house by then?
This way at least he wouldn't have to deal with the traffic. "Go ahead and put me on it, if you've got a seat."
"Done, you're on the eight o'clock flight tomorrow night. I'm so sorry for your loss."
"Thank you for your help."
And the most surprising thing, other than the memories that flooded back when he was sitting in the little twenty-seater, watching the props run up and recalling the way the pilots had allowed him to stand in the cockpit when he was a kid, had been the flower arrangement waiting at the rental counter at the Lake Charles airport. "From Willamette, and all your friends at Delta, our deepest condolences."
He'd driven up to the house with the flowers on the seat next to him, alternating between tears and a soft smile for the occasional way things turned out.
Will had given him a hard time about the flight. "Did you have to get out and push?"
"I swear I heard someone in the cockpit yell 'Contact'," Charlie had responded. But the flight had been just as Charlie remembered it. An hour's journey; one long look at the chemical plants, the suburbs sprawling out from Houston, the way Houston-Beaumont-Lake Charles were ten more years from being just one long city.
And the cars on the interstate. All the people headed to the casinos. "I'm just glad I didn't have to sit through that."
"I-10's a nightmare. Add two hours to any trip with the construction."
He'd gone back to Houston after the funeral, back to work and his little piece of the world. Leanne had driven in from Victoria, where she'd set up her vet practice. "Dad, do you want me to come by the house on my way back?"
"Sweetie," he'd said. "I'm ok. I'm not going to complain if you're waiting when I get there, but don't feel bad. You and Gina do what you need. Just be careful on the road, please?"
She'd kissed him on his bald spot. "Love you, Dad."
"Love you, kid," he'd replied, "And Gina too."
They'd driven straight through to Victoria. Which he'd expected, a six hour drive from Lake Charles and they had to get back to their world. So it was him and the cats, Zoe and Moody complaining because he'd been gone a hell of a lot longer than his standard four days.
And now it was six months later, and Margie and Will were ready to get Dad's affairs settled, done, over with.
There was a part of him... His grandfather's kid, Charlie figured. Hell, half Mom's family. 'What the hell are they in such a goddamned hurry for?' He could have stopped everything. Said to them, "Just hold your horses, we'll get to it when I'm damned good and ready and not a second more."
Like Aunt Eunice, Grandma's second child. Eunice would raise hell if she'd been in the same position. Not for any reason, Charlie figured, other than that she could. Give her a position in things and she'd use it because she had it.
Same thing with the rest of Mom's siblings. The McGuins fought because they could; because they liked it.
Charlie didn't inflict that on his sister and brother. They weren't McGuins, they were Dad and Ophelia's, his stepmother's. They didn't need Charlie showing his ass. "Just give me the chance to go through them by myself," was all he'd asked. The house. And the camp on the river, Ophelia and Dad's pride and joy, their little retreat.
The camp he'd get to; the house came first. "When did you know?" he asked her, as he led her to the kitchen. "Coffee?"
"No, but enjoy yours. I knew as soon as you landed at the airport. You don't visit as often as you should have."
Both of his mothers gone, and she was stepping into the gap. "Story of my life," he told her. And it was. Always the connection, the questions when he did come home.
And none of them ready to involve him. Unless he or Leanne happened to be in town, in which case they were of course involved. "Dad, does it ever bother you?" Leanne had asked, when she'd sent invitations to her college graduation and received nothing but silence. And then a request to come back instead and throw a party at Granny and Granddad's house.
"Not really," Charlie had answered. "That's the exchange. Live far enough away so you don't get tangled up in the noise, close enough to enjoy the family, and you'll find the edges of what they will do for you. That's all."
"And don't blame them," he'd added.
"I don't. There are times it's frustrating, that's all."
"Your mother fought that for decades, kiddo. It drove her crazy, on occasion, but some things aren't worth the fight. All you do is hurt their feelings."
'Like kicking a puppy,' he didn't add. "Just remember, that road goes both ways. Anything you say about it, they've got similar to say about us."
Going through the house should have meant prying up old bones. Except Margie and Will had already done that. Charlie had a box of photographs, mostly the handful Dad had in the back of the attic from when he and Charlie's mom were still married. Margie had parcelled out the rest, but the three of them had been married and in their own homes so long now, where would they put them?
There were Dad's albums, but the phonograph had died the good death, and Charlie wasn't interested. Will had gone through those, picked out the ones he'd heard of, so Charlie had checked off on sending them to the used bookstore. Same with the books, but Dad had switched to using a tablet pretty much the minute he could.
Charlie made up a big cup of coffee, in one of the innumerable insulated cups Dad had accumulated, and gestured to the back door. "Care for a walk?"
"In August? You're feeling brave."
"Best do it now, before it gets hot." So they walked to the barn.
Nominally, the thing was a metal building Dad had put up because the wooden one he and Ophelia inherited when they bought the property had surrendered to entropy. In real terms, it had morphed into a warehouse. Of projects, yard gear, a drill press and welding machine.
The old Ford pickup truck. "Dad's pride and joy," he told her.
"I don't remember ever seeing an old truck that didn't leak oil."
"Not this one."
A '53 Ford, red, though that was only by assumption at this point. "Dad never got around to re-painting it." But he'd touched every part of the mechanicals. Re-built the engine, the front end and back end. "It was the only thing he could afford, after he and my mom split. I remember sitting at Granny and Paw-Paw's house, waiting for it to warm up."
In another life, maybe Charlie would have saved the truck. He'd been through the house, this was the second time through the barn. None of it jumped out at him, not even the truck, as a thing he needed to argue with his sister and brother over.
"You're being awfully nice. Shouldn't you be worried they're hiding something from you?"
He shrugged. "I'd imagine there are things in this world that might be able to make me fight with my siblings. I just can't see them sitting in this garage, accumulating dust."
That said, something in the whole place nagged at him. It didn't call; there was no dark link in his mind. But it was here. Waiting for him. What was it? And did he want her here to see it, when he found it?
"You don't trust me, then? After all these years?"
He didn't answer that.
Charlie didn't hear her question. No, he heard it. She'd ask him again, in his dreams. And he'd answer it then.
Right now... right now he had to take a look at something that shouldn't have been there. A collection of somethings, piled up in the back of the truck. This wasn't a working vehicle. The Toyota pickup parked next to the house fed that need. Why then were there tools, a couple of boxes, rope, in the bed of the Ford?
Charlie pushed aside a shovel, a pickaxe, a come-along; the cardboard shielded buckets of rock and sand.
Beach sand, Charlie recognized. 'Why'd you take the truck to the camp, Pop?' he asked his memory.
That fool part of him showed him images, of the Ford parked at the camp because Dad had just wanted to drive it. Two-wheel drive, so he couldn't bail off into the woods, nor drive out to the sandbar. But he could get it up to the camp, he and Ophelia like kids again, except for the part where they sweated like hell in the heat. So Dad drove it in April, May, when they were pretty much the only ones on the river.
'Complaining the whole time about the mud and the ruts,' Charlie reminded himself. The spring floods usually didn't let go of the land until late March, early April. So it was messy going, getting back there, past the fifty acres the little community held in common ownership, to the riverbanks where the camps all sat. Dad and Ophelia owned the camp structure, up on piers, but not the land beneath it. That they leased from the corporation.
"You remember the owners, don't you?" she asked. She'd moved to a bar stool Charlie's Dad used when he sat at his work bench, over in the corner next to the refrigerator and freezer he'd put in for the extra capacity. Sodas, beer, turkeys and hams and quarts of shrimp whenever he could get them cheap.
The owners of the camp... When his parents had first bought the camp, and signed the lease, the property had been owned by a lady from Shreveport, Abigail Ledoux. Ninety or so then, and that was almost fifty years ago, Charlie had been about fourteen or so.
Miss Ledoux had passed when Charlie was a freshman in college. Dad and Ward had tried to put together the money to buy the property from her heirs, they'd got a good price from them, and the two friends figured they would set up a trust. Let the families that held camps pay the trust, and maybe set aside a little money for when grandkids came along.
They were sitting in the credit union, waiting for the loan paperwork, when they got the call. Miss Ledoux's kids had sold out to a different set of the camp crew, a trio of families from Houston who'd had cash to work with.
"A hundred thousand dollars," Charlie remembered. "In the nineties, Dad and Ward could swing it, with the property as collateral. But the Bend Crew didn't have to ask a bank's permission. They just got together and wrote a check." By that point, Ward had been working for the plant for twenty years; Dad, ten or so, after he'd decided the hassle of working for himself wasn't worth it. Either way, they'd built up enough time that the credit union didn't blink.
They just didn't have the time.
The Bend Crew: the Smiths, the Taylors, the Rennards. B-C Properties was what they'd named the corporation they put together.
And at first, they'd run the camp, and the hunting lease that went along with it, just the same way Dad and Ward had intended to. No changes, just a different name on the check, and everyone was happy.
"Ophelia wanted to move the camp twenty years ago. When they were getting ready to retire, she'd gotten tired of the headaches and wanted someplace they could bring the grandkids that didn't involve the aggravation."
Mostly, aggravation being the crowds. The B-C families had grown; on a hot summer weekend, or any holiday you could think of, those three camps most have held close to a hundred people between them. Four-wheelers, side-by-sides, motor noise and drunks and trash.
The quiet little place they'd gone to, to get a little peace and a little drunk and a lot sunburnt, wasn't there anymore. "So why are we paying for it?" Ophelia wanted to know. "Why don't we buy a couple acres somewhere else? At least then the money's going to our own land."
Life has its way of knocking the good things off track. Ophelia's father, Granddad Jake, had started going downhill, just a little, about the time Dad and Ophelia were putting their situation right for retirement. By the time Dad had walked out of the gates to the plant for the last time, Granddad Jake had come to the point where he couldn't drive, and needed someone to check in on him three times a week.
"Next thing we all knew, ten years had gone by, and it was too late, really." To move the camp, to do much of anything but bury Jake, and wait for Ophelia and Dad to come to the clearing at the end of the path.
She'd asked about the owners. Charlie couldn't have picked them, any of the three families, out of a lineup. He'd been itinerant, the oldest kid off to college, and the weekend and holidays kid before that. Great, really, because he'd been in on the important things, but the day to day stuff, the frictions and the irritabilities, had mostly passed without Charlie's input.
Charlie closed the box lids back into place. If there'd been a treasure somewhere, the old man hadn't left a map to guide those coming after. Not here. And if Dad had been a diary keeper, not for a day had Charlie known of it. Music, sure. Reading, laughing at the folly of internet commenters, absolutely.
Taking time to write things down? Nah, Dad didn't do that. So here was Charlie, looking at some tools that didn't belong, a box of detritus, and tangling with a weird feeling in the back of his head. He turned away from the only bits of that equation he could ignore, in favor of walking past the shelves. Dad's other collections. Tools and more tools. A drill press Charlie had helped him lug in. A welder. An engine lift that had never seen an engine since the Ford got rebuilt. Coolers, balls and toys accumulated from the grandkids, electric cars and remote controlled vehicles and a life well lived, tucked away a shelf at a time in the barn in the back.
"What are you looking for, Charlie?" she asked.
He started to make a smartassed comment, or even a dumbass comment. "I wish I knew," about all he could manage of either category, was struggling to get free of his lips when he finally noticed something even more strange than Dad lugging something around in the garage queen.
"Oh, no, you didn't..." he said. And then he wished he hadn't, but it was too late for that.
"You found something, didn't you?" She stood next to him. "Well, go on, pick it up. Let's see what dirty secrets your dad found to dig into."
He shook his head, but then he stepped over and took the ancient leather briefcase down from the shelf. Dad had tucked it into the back, among a bunch of files, most of them from his long-dead business. The old man couldn't quite bring himself to get rid of them, "Just in case one of my old clients needs paperwork on a part I installed."
Charlie had wanted to argue with his dad. But the old fart was right. Here and there, all through central and south Louisiana, Dad had put together kitchens for restaurants and grocery stores.
And more than a few of them were still running some of those things. Freezers, mostly. Charlie had stopped in Dequincy just last year, and there was Mrs. Grady behind the counter, and there was the walk-in freezer Dad had put in for her about the time Charlie was getting his driver's license. A little less than fifty years on, and the thing was still going.
That didn't mean Dad couldn't have thrown most of the files out. But once they'd made it back here, what was the point? They were out of the house and out of the way, and that was what really mattered.
Charlie walked the briefcase over to the bench, and every step with the thing in his hands was like walking through a wormhole, back to life at knee height.
The briefcase had been his grandfather's. Not Dad's dad.
Mom's dad. Theo McGuin. A name that wouldn't mean a damned thing to Margie and Will. Charlie's mom and Dad had split up about the time Charlie was getting a decent grasp of bipedal locomotion. Ophelia and Margie had become Charlie's second mom and sister just another year or so after that. And then Will had come along a few years later.
Papa Theo's briefcase had been around that whole time. Charlie had asked about it, "Where'd that come from?", once or twice when he'd tagged along with Dad on a work call. Head over to Sulfur for a service call on an ice machine, say, or out to Lafayette to recalibrate a deep fryer. Dad had the briefcase tucked in between the seats of the Chevy van he'd used for his business.
Charlie liked to trace the leather with his fingers, the stress marks in it. The thing was a deep, heavy, bull's leather, hard and supple and shiny and faded from the sun, all at the same time. "It'll stand up to anything you could imagine," Dad had told him. "Your Papa Theo gave it to me, when I started my business. He told me it would do me as much or more good as a new set of tools. Turn's out he was more right than he knew."
And Charlie had been there when it was Will's turn to ride along with Dad. Same van, same leather briefcase between the seats, Will getting pride of place because the seat had a seatbelt; Charlie didn't mind the bucket, because he was sixteen, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that the chances he'd ever get to ride along like this, him and his brother and their father, just the guys out for a little work. Well, those chances were fast disappearing into the rearview mirror.
"Where'd you get this?" Will had asked, tracing the same cracks and fade marks, and a few new ones, Charlie noticed.
"An old friend gave it to me," Dad had said, and Charlie remembered who the old friend had been. The name that wouldn't have meant anything to Will, so Dad hadn't mentioned it. So Charlie didn't either.
Just a few weeks later, Dad had taken a job at the chemical plant. So far as Charlie knew, and he'd seen it himself, that briefcase had gone into the van, the van had been parked just about ten yards from where this barn stood, and van and contents had been left to fight off the weeds and the rodents, the sun and the hurricanes, if they could.
Charlie went through the ancient briefcase. It held papers, most of them ancient receipts, invoices. Except for a handful, every bit of paper dated to Dad's old business.
The handful that didn't all seemed to be related to the camp. The credit union loan application that had gone out the window, with a great big red X across it. Then a handful of letters.
No contracts. Charlied had already gone through the lease agreement for the camp, and the title to the camp building, those sat in the file in the house, with the rest of the important stuff. Here were just a handful of letters. Notifications that the B-C bunch had bought the property; that they'd bought the property next door, and closed the gate so no one could access it from the main road.
"That must be Gantry's Bluff," Charlie murmured. If you wanted a good long float trip, a couple hours of fun without having to commit to a full day of it, you'd put your tubes into the river at the camp, and then float down to Gantry's. Until Charlie and Sharon had married, and Leanne came along, Charlie owned an ancient little Toyota pickup, two-wheel drive but it could slip through the trees just fine, so he'd drive that down to the Bluff, Dad would follow and then bring him back on the four-wheeler, then everyone could drop into the water. Charlie's little truck would be there to ferry everyone back around for another go at it.
They'd bought the Bluff and closed the gate to it because Gantry's Bluff had been the local community's river run for generations. A place for the hippies and the straights, the kids and the grandparents, to get loose and get crazy and otherwise have a good time. Dad and Ward had gone to Gantry's when they were kids, Dad had dreamt of his own place on the little river his whole life.
The Bluff was noisy as hell, trashed up, trouble on the hoof because, inevitably, someone would get way too drunk and start beating his wife, his kids, or whoever the fuck got in his way. The B-C group had bought it for sanity's sake. "We've been advised that.." and "It's best for all concerned..." and "In consultation with the parish...", and the other phrases that let Charlie know the money folks were involved.
"There are so few places left," she said, "Where the old energies cut loose."
"That's not your river, is it?" he responded. The Calcasieu was hers; the river Dad's camp sat on fed the Calcasieu, one of a hundred little tributaries. This one didn't even have a proper name, so far as Charlie knew. On the topo maps, it just read as "North Branch Tributary Number Eight".
"If it feeds me, then it must be mine."
Charlie wasn't sure her logic covered all the bases, but he wasn't going to argue the point with her.
He left the papers for another walk through the barn. If there was a story there, to justify the buzz in his mind that had dragged him here, Charlie couldn't find it. So, he figured he'd give it another chance. But the instinct, or maybe it was the curiosity, wouldn't let him forget the briefcase and the papers.
No matter where he stood in the barn, something in Charlie's head pointed at the briefcase, a little compass showing him North, or something like it. So Charlie packed up the briefcase and headed back to the house. "Are you coming in?"
The sun was going down. Charlie felt a little nervous, asking her that. Like he was fifteen again, and he was seeing the girl whose adult face the river spirit had borrowed.
"I think you've other things on your mind tonight, Charles William LeBleu. Go bury yourself in paperwork and organizing."
And then she was gone, no trace of a hint of her presence to indicate she'd ever been there to begin with.
Charlie let the old nerves disappear, without regret.
He didn't want the river's spirit looking over his shoulder while he finished reading Dad's correspondence.
Most of it really was trivial. Oh, the notifications were important; contractually though, they had as much effect on the lease agreement as a coffee stain. Dad hadn't kept them because he needed to, anything like that was already sitting in the fireproof filing cabinet.
Charlie found a hint, after he'd showered, made a sandwich and grabbed a Coke out of the fridge, and sat down at the kitchen counter with the contents of the briefcase sorted in front of him.
"Dad wanted a map," Charlie told the empty house. "Little reminders, of the way the owners dealt with people."
This letter, that letter. The ones that showed when the B-C group threw their weight around. There was the one saying they'd bought the place, and the one saying they'd bought the Gantry propery. A couple letting everyone know they'd changed a few things in the hunting lease, no one under eighteen allowed to hunt without an accompanying legal guardian. "No aunts, no godparents, no friends of friends," Charlie said.
Leanne had pressed her grandfather to take her squirrel hunting; the owners had taken that away. Along with a few other little things, here and there. Gun types, investment in feeders and stands and trail maintenance. The things people had done informally, if they wanted to hunt deer, but Dad and Leanne and Charlie had been happy for wood ducks or squirrels, or the occasional deer if they stumbled across each other in-season. "They're down to just a handful of people who can afford to go through the trouble, and they're all after trophies, wall-hangers," Dad had said, the last time this had come up.
"And let me guess, they're all members of the three families?"
"Funny how that works out, isn't it?" Dad had answered.
Fishing, at least, the owners couldn't do anything about. Hunting from a boat they could restrict, but only so far, because anything within the maximum non-flood water line of the river was community access.
The owners had put in their restrictions; each one common sense, and Charlie and his dad had mostly agreed with them. But the hunting, and Gantry's Bluff, were only parts of the whole.
It all paid off where it had been leading from the beginning, in the last piece of B-C correspondence sitting in Dad's briefcase. An offer letter, to buy Dad out of his lease, eighty-five thousand for the camp, the lease, and a quit-claim on anything else Dad might have to do with the thing. "Ward and Bea got 100K for theirs, but they've remodeled their place," Dad had written in the margin of the letter. And, "Will's the only one who spends much time up their, anymore."
'Fair,' Charlie thought. They all got together, a couple times a year, at the camp. Will and Angie liked to pull their fifth-wheel up there, other weekends, but with the kids getting ready to graduate, Angie had been talking about heading out to see the world. Dad had been thinking about cashing out, putting a little money aside for the inevitable. Charlie didn't blame him.
But what did any of this have to do with the shovel, the tools, and the digging? Sure, Dad would have done anything for the grandkids, he'd dug seashells when Leanne wasn't big enough to go without a diaper instead of a swimsuit. You passed an ancient plastic bucket of them sitting in the rose beds, on your way to the front door, five grandkids' worth of grins and sand in the hair and "Look, Grandad, Granny!"
You didn't need a come-along and the rest of the kit, not when the kids had all graduated to "Ah, Dad, why do we have to spend a weekend where there's no internet?" and "It's so hot" and "Are you sure, Granddad's getting kind of old to go down to the sandbar, last time we had to make him go inside because he was fighting heat stroke".
If the old man had been digging around like the tools in the back of the truck indicated, Charlie figured they were lucky he'd passed in his own house, instead of at the end of whatever slough or bayou he'd found. "What on earth were you up to, Dad?" Charlie asked the empty house, and the papers in front of him.
Nothing answered.
"It wouldn't hurt to go up there, one more time," Charlie said. "Will, or Margie, will get another letter soon enough. Chances are, I'll never have another look at the place before they sell it."
Charlie found the last piece of the puzzle when he started putting all the paper away. That's when he flipped the briefcase open; old as it was, the leather flap stayed open. Enough so that Charlie noticed something, a picture... No.
A diagram, carved and burnt into the leather. Charlie stetched the briefcase open, as far as it would stretch, to get a better look.
Someone, Papa Theo or Dad, had used a soldering iron to burn a diagram, a map, into the leather. Charlie ran his fingers over it in wonder. Time and use had worn the edges from the map, and oxidation had just about turned the rest of the leather the same color as the burn marks. If he hadn't been keyed up, and looking for any hint, he'd never have seen it.
A map. Of rivers, Charlie recognized. If he went upstairs and got out the big topo maps from Dad's closet, he'd have traced out in five foot by eight foot relief the same pattern.
The Calcasieu, the tributaries, from English Bayou, through LeBleu Settlement, all the way up past Kinder. And there, just a mile or two above where North Branch Tributary Number Eight fed the river proper, was a tiny little mark. Right about where the camp was located.
"Isn't it funny how things work out, Dad?" he asked the empty house. "Now just what the everlong fuck did Papa Theo leave you?"
Charlie took the truck, because it already had the tools in it. Because maybe it would be the last time he ever drove a stick shift. Hell, because there was a good chance he'd never drive a vehicle that used gasoline again.
He almost gave it up when he stalled the thing getting out of the driveway. "Too fucking long since I used a clutch," he apologized to the truck. But he had it, the long slow shift that almost, but not quite, gave away all the momentum you'd built up, then the easy release of the clutch, and on the gas a little and they were on down the road. An hour or so, gravel roads most of the way, west a ways out of Reed's Ferry, toward Moss Bluff but only a little, then back north for a while, out to Highway 190, then back east toward Kinder and look for the little post office and the Methodist Church Camp sign. There, on the north, ease it into neutral and with a little luck, coast through the turn and back onto gravel again.
The truck walked a little down the gravel. Too light in the back, and Dad had never bothered with anything other than the standard tires, so if Charlie saw any mud he'd have to be careful. The roads were good and dry, though, so that was alright.
"Just don't let the muffler catch the grass on fire," he reminded himself. August, the rains hadn't come yet, the route was a hayfield as much as it was a trail. "When's the last time anyone's been back here?" Charlie wondered. "All the belly-aching the owners go through, and by July 4th their done with the place?"
He pulled up to the camp, turned off the truck, and just sat, watched, and listened. To jays arguing, squirrels barking, crickets.
And not a soul in sight. There were just a dozen camps, each on a half-acre or so, spaced out between the trees. Four of them, Dad's, Ward's old place two lots down, two others farther up, had been the originals. The Ledouxs, the Rennards, the Martins, the Redmonds. Four families who'd moved here because the Calcasieu had flooded one too many times on their original campsite. Abigail's husband had inherited eleven acres or so from his grandparents.
There had been just about a dozen camps. Charlie got down from the truck and walked first to the east. Past a little park for the kids, and Ward's camp, to the edge of the cleared land, and the little bit of dirt lane, the landline connection between the camps. When he got to the edge of the map, he turned and walked the lane through what should have been the rest of the camps, all the way to the end of the line in the west, and the Rennard camp.
That was still there. Dad's camp, the Rennards, the Taylors.
Everyone else, even the Smith place, they were all dead. As in, some of them down to sand and grass dead. Most of them were in various stages of demolition. Ward and Bea's place, the cypress wood of the place still stood, and the pilings beneath, but all the insides had been gutted. Even the windows were gone, the only thing left the cypress frame and sides, on top of the telephone poles that kept the thing out of the floods.
Charlie read the story there, that Dad's offer letter, from six months ago, had been a culmination. Even the Smiths, it looked like. Charlie figured that had been the actual start of it. "Buy out the junior partner," Charlie murmured to himself. "And then buy out the lease agreements."
Those had all been perpetual. As long as the payments were up to date, the original lease holders, or those who'd bought one of the original leases, held their leases in perpetuity. One of the things Charlie's Dad had done, on top of the note for the actual camp building, had been to go ahead and pay thirty years' worth of lease payments. He'd done the same thing, ten years or so before he retired, when the plant was in the middle of an expansion and paying so much overtime Dad hadn't known what to do with the extra money besides clear every debt. So now, even when the B-C crew wanted to raise rates, Charlie's Dad hadn't been affected.
Except by the nonsense. Charlie walked down to the Rennard place first. Another cypress wood place, an Atchafalaya style place; Charlie had once spent a summer and drove from South Louisiana all the way up to Quebec. Through Detroit, Missouri, every now and then you'd catch a hint.
The Acadian style house, steep roof pitch, a porch to sit and watch the world go by. The Rennard camp, like Ward's place, echoed that. The Rennard place, though, instead of being a little one-room cabin, like Ward and Bea, was two stories, two main rooms below and a long, skinny loft space hiding in the roof peak. With the porch and the rest of it, all in cypress, the place hid among the trees, with a garage alongside that spoiled the idyllic.
"At least it's quiet," Charlie told himself. There weren't many of the Rennards, but when they came, they all came. If they'd have been there, the barn would have been a hum of conversation and four-wheelers, and the latest great-grandkids running at full steam. They were fishermen and hunters and talkers of great endurance, the Rennards. Like the McGuins and Lemoignes, Mom's side of the family.
Charlie had never approached the Rennards. That side of the French families would all be related, somewhere along the line, but up here he came for Dad, not for Mom. That was a different part of his life, Charlie kept them separate.
Charlie walked back up the road to Dad's place. He stopped at the Smith place. Halfway in distance between the Rennards and the LeBleus; a world away in everything else.
The Rennard place was Atchafalaya and old marsh; Dad's place was an ancient trailer, up on piers, then built out, covered and expanded and grown like a honeysuckle vine. These were camps.
The Smiths didn't camp. They lived wherever they stayed. If six foot piers had been good enough for the other places, Curtis Smith needed nine foot piers. If cypress and tin were the order of the day, then he wanted steel, coupled and welded and hurricane proof. He wanted his grandkids to be able to walk from the garage to the bedroom, with the party room and the kitchen between, and not have to get down to the ground to do it.
The Smith place was a Bahamas special, a sugarcane island plantation house, yellow and green and white, up in the air and built to last. Curtis had spent half a million dollars to build his dream, gotten ten years out of it, and then died in it.
And now, Charlie saw, it was as stripped out as Ward's place. The windows gone, somebody had gone through with a crowbar and peeled up the flooring, the trimmings, anything at all worth a few pennies in the refurbishing market.
There were piles of scrapped pieces of oak and chrome and wire, sitting at the edge of the trail, to testify to this. Charlie had spent a summer with Dad, pulling apart an old mansion in Lake Charles, so he knew how to read the signs.
Knew, as well, that there was more to it than the obvious. This memory wasn't an accident, Charlie realized. His dad had been here. Not pulling the Smith camp apart, no.
Charlie walked through the piers, wondering when the trucks would show up, and the crew to pull the place down to the sand.
But it was the trail on the other side of the Smith place that interested him most. That's the one that led down to the sandbar.
The pride and joy of the camp. Unless you knew it was there, the white sand beach was invisible from the land side. For those who knew, though, you rode your four-wheeler, or drove your four-wheel drive truck, or just walked like Charlie was doing, down the little trail on the edge of the Smith camp, through a patch of willow trees, a slough that only held water after the spring floods.
Through dappled shade and thickets, and then finally out into the sunshine, to greet the river.
The sand was so deep and soft that walking over it was closer to mushing through a brand new snowfall than it was to walking on the beach. Every big weekend, they'd have to pull someone out of the sand, usually a show-off who bogged his four-wheeler down to the axels because he didn't know to stick to the grass, or get down to the water line just as soon as you came out of the trees. If you tried to drive the sandbar itself, God have mercy, because the sand sure as hell wouldn't.
Charlie walked that line, it was easy enough, his only companion the wind devil picking up the sand and playing with it. Middle of August now, the last good rain months in the past or just a couple weeks in the future, there was plenty for the devil to handle. When Charlie stepped to the water line, just like always, the first thing he wanted to do after the heat of the walk was to dive out into the river.
It shocked him, the cold of it, heat of summer and the sun blistering you above and the water didn't seem to care at all. The cold gripped him, seized him, bit into his muscles and threatened to hold him still until he fed the holes and the catfish. But the bitter faded, and he grabbed and kicked until he broke free of the surface, back into the sun. The heat and the cold below worked their magic again, Charlie settled onto his back, feet downstream because the river's current was a player in this.
The current played with his mind. Fast, Charlie drifted past the hundred yards of the sandbar in a blink of an eye, around it and then the current held him up. He had all the time in the world now.
In front of the sandbar, the river was shallow. Inviting, but fast as hell, it didn't linger there. The river pulled around that bend the way a race car driver went around a banked turn.
And then it crashed into the downhill bluff. On the lefthand bank, another sandbar, completely inaccessible from the land, the only way you could get to it was as Charlie did, by the river. But the sandbar was the river's afterthought, an accident. On the righthand side, that's what the river concentrated on, a bluff to eat on, nibble on here in the tail of summer, to take huge gaping gulps of in flood.
And in front of the bluff, the river swirled. It held Charlie there, where the echo sandbar shone on his left, and the stand of willow trees that marked the end of the camp's sandbar held sentinel duty.
That swirl, that whirlpool, held no secrets from Charlie. They knew each other of old. Deep, twenty, thirty feet deep, at least, and that had been the last time Charlie had dove to the bottom of it.
Twenty or more years ago. "How much more time have you had to eat away at the bottom?" Charlie asked the 'pool.
It didn't answer. It didn't have to, because the river was done with anticipation. It dragged Charlie into the grip of the pool, and now time stood still. Here, there was only the grasp and pull and kick, the pulse in his heart and his head, the breath and the reach, oh shit somebody's fucking trot lines.
The bluff caught everything the river threw at it. And then dumped trees onto whatever caught on its banks below. The river carved relief, and the bluff let the trees go, sacrifices to the river's hunger. One tree at a time, and the big ones stayed there in front of the bluff, a bare hint of protection for those that remained.
The deadfalls were perfect for laying out your fishing lines, the river rats put their boats into the bank, set lines for the big catfish that held the depths and feasted on what drifted down through pool's currents. Charlie had set his own lines there, and now, he had to fight like hell to make sure he didn't end up caught up in someone else's fishing lines.
Like the way the river bit in with cold, on that first dive, the whirlpool's currents eased. Once Charlie was in the middle of it, he had gauge of the thing; it played, but it played fair. He paced and kicked, grabbed water and reminded himself that it was swimming, and the bank was there. Drift, then grab and kick, crawl, he could swim against the current and he did.
Up to the bank, where the roots from the trees above, the ones that would be next spring's deadfalls, made for a hell of a good handhold this summer.
He climbed the bank, then made his way back to Dad's camp. Here, there was no trail. Even the hints of the old paths, those that had led up to Gantry's Bluff, were gone. The forest and the river had reclaimed this area, humans, if they used it at all, were few and far between. The birds let Charlie know his intrusion was of no moment; the squirrels ignored him completely. It wasn't hunting season, and even then...
He loved the way the world had turned here. Sure, someone was busy taking the place for themselves, but the accident of it had meaning for Charlie. Nature, river below and trees above, moved on. The spirits hummed beneath his feet and around his head.
Along with the mosquitoes. By the time he climbed up the porch, Charlie was grateful for Dad's screened-in porch, and especially that it was still in good repair. He let the door close behind him, swatted the couple of mosiquitoes that had been dogged enough to chase him through to safety.
And then turned to greet her. She sat in the farthest rocking chair from the screen door. "You couldn't stand it, could you?" he asked her.
"You spoke of your father's home, in the long ago," she answered. "But somehow you forgot to mention this place at all."
Charlie stood still, listening for the high-pitched whine, the tell-tale sign he'd missed a bloodsucker bent on an epic feast. When he was satisfied he'd eliminated that threat, he walked to join her. She'd chosen his grandmother's rocker, a hand-carved, age-delicate chair with a deerskin hide for a seat. Somehow, the chair remained, but Charlie hadn't trusted it, or his weight in it, since he was a kid.
His favorite was the rattan and bamboo chair, one Ophelia had had in her apartment since before she and Dad married. Charlie remembered it from that apartment, and the dove cage she'd had next to it. The rattan was torn here and there, the stained bamboo scratched innumerably, but it held Charlie with the comfort of a long hug.
He didn't answer her question because she still wore the face of someone else. Not that the river spirit ever wore her own face. 'If she even has one,' Charlie reminded himself. The river below him didn't have a face; he had many. The face of bluff and willow and the devil's dance of sand. Trot lines and whirlpools. Up here, this river's spirit hummed with the slow current of the heat.
She'd chosen a face and a form meant to do what? Charlie didn't know.
"I'm wondering what sort of negotiations it takes you to travel in his domain," Charlie said. He waved at the river; his dad's camp stood on the highest part of the bluff, some thirty feet over the water. The whirlpool chuckled and ate a hundred yards or so downstream, where the main channel cut.
She didn't answer. Which told Charlie something else.
She'd come here without the river's permission. No matter what she'd said, back at home, that this tributary was part of her because it fed to her main channel, here in the actual of it she held no sway.
Charlie reminded himself that he didn't get involved in family squabbles. She had come here, silently and without explicit permission, for a reason. He went inside and pulled two cans of beer from the refrigerator, then returned to his chair. "Dad, or more likely Will, keeps a good selection." He passed her one, and the two of them shared the silence and the cold beer.
When she finished, he took the empties to the trash and returned once more. She stood as he came, and moved next to him, stopping Charlie before he could return to his seat. When she tilted her head, and reached for the back of his neck, Charlie let himself fall to her, for a few wonderful hours.
Later, with the scent of their activities still on him, and the sun falling below the horizon, Charlie went out from the camp again. To commune with his Dad's memory.
This wasn't vocal, as in the river spirit lounging in the camp's master bedroom. It wasn't even active, as with the marsh at Uncle Levi's farm, the one that had opened Charlie's young mind and spirit to the quieter world hiding around him. This was a thing of memories, impressions. The same way Charlie had remembered their time demolishing an old lakefront mansion for the bits and pieces William LeBleu could salvage for his own home; his father, or his father's spirit, had laid memories here, impressions.
The mosquitoes left Charlie alone. Maybe that had something to do with his closeness to the river spirit, or maybe not, but Charlie had spent too much time here in the summer evenings not to know her blessing had helped him. With the sun sliding below the horizon, he had little time.
There were old trees aplenty in these woods. If you'd asked him, "Which ones are old enough for my grandfather to have buried something there, even well before my parents split up?", Charlie would pointed out plenty of examples. And that without leaving his Dad's property.
Oaks, beech, pine, elm and maple and hackberry. All around him stood trees fifty years old, a hundred years old. And if his Dad's spirit had left him a message, Charlie wouldn't find it until he'd in turn found the tree he was looking for. Where do you hide a needle, in a haystack? Or in a bucket full of other needles?
But when Charlie asked himself, "Which tree would my grandfather have used to hide something in?"
He got a slightly different answer. Because when Charlie thought of Papa Theo, the only answer that came to mind, and fit the man Charlie knew, was the crow's rest. And they were coming in now.
Each morning and evening, if you knew what to watch for, the crows came for congress. To consult, complain. To hold court with each other. One at a time, they would come, drifting in on the morning, or evening, breeze. And with each one's approach, the others waiting in the ancient pine would call their greeting.
Charlie knew to watch for them. To listen as they gossiped, or brough suit against one another. And Charlie knew to watch. When court adjourned, the crows would repeat the cycle, leaving in slow ones or twos, each single or pair sent off with farewell from the remainder.
The gnarled old pine wasn't visible from the bank. You couldn't even get to it. It held reign over the interstitial space, between the bluff proper and the sandbar, that intermediate ground otherwise defined as a willow thicket. Yet, deep in its heart, the pine held an older, more foreboding space.
Even a skinny deer would have needed dispensation to get to the base of the pine. The willows grew close, thick, they'd gone so long wihtout disturbance that Charlie couldn't force them apart. And yet, when he came close enough, the willows, grudgingly, allowed him passage. Charlie felt them, whispering among themselves. He thanked again the river spirit.
She was in the shower now. He grinned; she indulged her human form. And then he returned to the immediate.
The willows allowed him passage, but they couldn't give him a clean sightline, no matter who his current paramour. He knew he'd found the pine tree when the crows called down to him. They quieted their complaints when he stood still, and made no effort to approach their tree.
Not yet. Charlie listened, watched. Examined. There were dig marks, here and there, Dad's tests. But Charlie thought they weren't exactly real. There was something a little off. Posed. About the whole scene.
He stepped closer, until his hands touched the bark of the ancient pine tree. The thing towered above him, but where the birds watched him, the trunk had twisted. The tree crouched in place. It had been bitten and twisted, by lightening and wind, into a protector of this spot. What did it hold, besides the murder above?
Charlie knelt, to pass his hands among a century or more's worth of pine needles. There. He pushed aside the needles, and found an ancient leather suitcase.
'And isn't it funny how these things work?' he told himself.
The suitcase would be the big brother of the briefcase Charlie had left at the house. Charlie began to smell a rat.
When he gently pulled the leather straps loose from their buckles, and just as carefully opened the suitcase, when the last of the sunlight revealed its contents, Charlie smelled more than a rat.
He closed the case, thinking of his father. Of the way the B-C crew were working to buy everyone out. Of the way Papa Theo had with a joke, and what both his father and his grandfather thought of those who'd cheat people, especially those who didn't know any better. Thinking of these things, Charlie smiled. Closed the case, fed it back into its hole. Then he scattered the pine needles, but thinly.
So that when someone came along, and someone would, he knew, they would look at the holes, and the exploration, and they'd dig a little and find the case. Exactly where they should.
Charlie looked around, gauging whether he'd disturbed the artful scene too much. Then he looked up.
A crow sat on the nearest branch. A big beast, almost as big as its raven cousins. The crow watched Charlie in return, then it nodded, called to its murder, and the flock scattered to the night.
Before it left, Charlie would have sworn the crow winked at him. He chuckled, laughed in full, and then walked back out to the camp.
He didn't expect company for the night. And she wasn't waiting for him when he returned. She had left him a note. A simple thing, a little doodle of his face with a heart below it. Charlie set it aside until he'd showered and eaten from the canned goods Dad and Ophelia kept.
Then he sat on the porch, a beer on the floor next to the rocker, and contemplated the note. By the time the beer warmed so much that he noticed it, midnight had swung into view, so he gave up wondering of a spirit's motives in favor of a little sleep.
That he got, but by morning, when the pickup truck pulled in behind the Ford, he was back out on the porch, a cup of coffee getting cold by the rocker, the crows had ended their morning congress, and Charlie had still not found an understanding of the spirit's note. Since he couldn't manage that one, he figured he might as well go find out what the Taylors wanted.
The Taylors were the one camp he hadn't paid much attention to. The Smith place stood out for its money and now its demise. The Rennards were the big family with the big get togethers. The Taylors kept themselves to themselves, mostly.
'Except for now, I guess,' Charlie told himself. He sat on the top step, cold coffee in one hand, and a memory of another meeting with a pair of men he didn't know, getting down from a pickup truck in the middle of the woods.
This one was a little more high dollar than Stan's old ride, Charlie admitted. Big money Dodge crew cab, four-wheel, diesel, with the mods that told him this was someone's idea of style. The guy getting down from the driver's side looked like he'd rather be offshore fishing than crawling around through the piney woods.
"Howdy," Charlie said, as the two men came up to the bottom step. "What can I do for you, gentlemen?"
Charlie recognized the passenger, at least. Rick Wilson, or maybe it was Watson, Charlie couldn't quite remember. Local hand, handyman who'd spent some time out at the camp, fishing and making himself useful, and then got adopted by the Taylors when they'd helped buy the place. The original Taylor, probably this guy's father, had bought an old farm at the road, just ahead of where the gravel turned to dirt. He'd wanted a place to keep the family four-wheelers, and a couple other things, so they wouldn't get flooded every year.
And he'd moved Rick Watson into the place, to mind the manor for the Taylors while they were gone. Rick was their man now.
The funny part, to Charlie, was that Rick appeared, for the first time in Charlie's memory, sober. And he didn't appear to be all that happy about it. Usually, if Charlie saw him at this time of morning, it was with a beer between his legs and the side-by-side that had replaced the four-wheelers crawling along in low gear. 'Must be hell when the boss shows up,' Charlie thought. 'Wait 'til they get a little farther along in their plans, Rick. Chances are, you'll be the last to go, but go you will.'
Charlie didn't get up to shake anybody's hands.
The Taylor man didn't seem to mind that, or pretended not to notice. Rick leaned up against the post next to the end of the stairs. "Howdy, neighbor," the Taylor man said, finally. "I'm Jim Taylor."
"Charlie LeBleu," Charlie returned. "Mister Taylor is your father, then?"
"Father passed away about this time last year," Taylor replied.
And the offer letters started going out just about six weeks later, Charlie recalled from his Dad's correspondence. "It's a funny old world, Mister Taylor. I'm sorry to hear about your loss. I hadn't met your parents very often, but I remember them well."
"Rick tells me your father passed recently," Taylor continued.
'Might as well get to the point,' Charlie thought. "I'm afraid so. We're all just getting on with things now, as best we can."
"Now, I know it's a hard thing to worry about..." Taylor started in.
Charlie more or less ignored it. There wasn't much point, the guy wasn't much of a salesman, but his pitch was rehearsed enough Taylor could at least deliver it without tripping. Considering how many empty spots there were in the camp lots, he'd certainly practiced his speech enough. Charlie let him get all the way through it.
"I appreciate your offer," Charlie said. "To be honest, my siblings and I don't have the foggiest clue what we're going to do here, now that Dad and Ophelia are both gone." He waited; Rick didn't look like he was paying any attention to these goings on, but both he and Taylor couldn't quite hide a bit of hope over what Charlie hinted at. "Dad had something going on up here. I don't know if he'd spent too much time watching the History Channel, or what. Probably, he'd just hit eighty and lost any interest in pretending what anyone else thought of him."
If the two men at the bottom of the stairs had been hopeful at what Charlie had said before, now they could barely conceal glee.
Charlie, for his part, understood. He was having a pretty hard time not grinning. "I'll have to talk to my brother and sister, you understand. For all I know, my sister's kids could decide they want to take the place over. Greg's getting to the point now, first good job, he might be brave enough to tackle it on his own."
The two men didn't respond at all to that, their hopes were full and their glee had made them bullet proof. "I understand how families are, Mister LeBleu. You do what you need, and you all get back to me just as soon as you feel like it. I don't want to rush you at all."
"You having just gone through it yourself," Charlie added. He figured the guy might have dropped a line from his script, given the joy he was dealing with.
"You're exactly right, Mister LeBleu, you are very much right in every way. You have my number?"
"Will and Margie do, they'll most likely be the ones to talk to you. I'm in Houston, and I'm on the road for work three weeks out of four, these days." Three days a week with four-day weekends, Charlie didn't add, but he had two on the hook, there wasn't any need to let them get suspicious now.
"You be careful going back to Houston, and give my regards to your brother and sister," Taylor said. Then the two of them loaded up in the big truck, straight off the front page of a Dodge brochure, and idled up the road.
Charlie kept the grin from his face. He was proud of that.
He made it all the way back upstairs, into the house and the safety of a closed door, before he let the howls of laughter fly.
Charlie waited until he'd put the old Ford back in its garage, Dad's paperwork back where it needed to be, and the house to rights, before he called Margie to talk about it. "You don't have any plans for the camp do you?"
"Mike and I haven't been up there in a couple years. My allergies can't take it."
Charlie well remembered. After Greg, her first, was born, Margie's allergies had gone from an occasional annoyance to a full blown, perpetual pain in the ass. A day or two at the camp, with its musty interior and pine tree surroundings, gave Margie weeks of tortured recovery to deal with. Once she'd realized what was going on, and once Chloe had reached an age where she didn't have interest in it, they'd basically quit going at all, except for the few hours of a lunchtime get together. "None of the kids, then? Or Will and Angie?"
"I'll ask them, but you've heard what Angie's ready for." A life on the road, with no house note, no lawn to deal with. No shift schedules.
Charlie admitted to himself that he was looking forward to something resembling a quiet life himself. "Sounds like the Taylors hit us at the right time."
"If we wait, we could end up with a place none of us get to, and none of us can find a buyer for. Best sell it while we have a price. Where are you, anyway?"
"Just past Beaumont. I'm headed to Victoria for a couple days, to catch up with Gina and Leanne and the girls." Charlie's twin granddaughters were starting first grade in a few weeks. He knew time was short.
"Give 'em all a kiss for me. You'll be in for Thanksgiving, right? Will's decided he's hosting this year, I'd imagine that it might be the last time we have a big one."
"Last time we can easily get all of us together. I'll be there, even if I have to get you or Chloe to pick me up at the airport." Now that he knew he could catch an easy flight, with a little timing. "Love you, take care."
"You too. Be careful on the road."
Leanne wanted to know when Charlie was going to get back to his cats. "Your kittens are going to think you've abandoned them Kayla forever."
"They'll get over it. About the time I've gone through a case of tuna."
Father and daughter sat on the porch, Charlie letting a beer warm up in front of him, and trying to stay awake after the drive. "Sorry about the girls, Gina had them booked at the skate park since June."
"No worries, kiddo. They'll be back soon enough."
"And you'll be asleep in your chair."
"Shh, don't wake me."
Leanne shook her head at that. "I have to, Dad. You took care of Granddad's things, right?"
"Our part in it, at least." He gave Leanne the breakdown, of photographs and personal things. The financial side would show up again; they'd done the accounts already, the real estate had had to wait until everyone had the chance to do their thing.
Which mostly meant everyone had to wait for Charlie's work schedule. "Such is life, sometimes, sweetie. I don't much care if we have another round of property taxes to pay, and that's about all that the house matters to. Other than keeping the a/c on."
"What about the camp?"
Charlie couldn't resist a giggle, one that turned into a laugh when his daughter gave him The Look. "Turns out Dad had already set us up to unload the place, whether we wanted to or not. That was pre-determined, I just had to make sure your aunt and uncle were ready to sell." He explained to her what he'd found buried at the camp, with her grandfather's elaborate setup of the B-C families to go along with it.
"Whorehouse stock certificates? Really?" she asked.
"It was an old scam that my grandfather Theo loved to giggle at. Storyville attracted all kinds; the con-men came along for the ride. Selling fake stock certificates in the whorehouses appealed to a certain type. Papa Theo collected them the same way people collect postcards, or stamps. Because they bring along a story with every one."
"How'd Granddad get involved in this?" Leanne continued. "He wasn't much for practical jokes."
"Accident, probably. Theo gave Dad the suitcase and the briefcase, the fake certificates came along for the ride. And then, once the B-C group bought the property, and Dad got pissed off once too often, the rest of it probably just sort of fell together."
"And you'll never know for sure, will you?"
"Nope," Charlie admitted. "Your grandfather didn't leave any evidence behind. Other than a suitcase full of whorehouse souvenirs."
'Or,' Charlie thought to himself, 'Dad and Papa Theo can be persuaded to talk. They will, eventually, because neither one of them will be able to resist telling on themselves.' But Leanne had never shown any sign at all that she had seen the quiet world.
Then, two days later, when Charlie was mounting up to ride back to Houston, and his cats, Roxie, the youngest of the Roxie and Janet double act, reminded Charlie of something.
"Papa, who's the lady you've been visiting with? The one with all the hair?"
Charlie knelt down, to ease the back pain he didn't want to admit to, and to look Roxie in the eye. He didn't lie to her; which lady was pretty obvious. Her hair was long, straight, to her waist, it flowed in the wind, or just because she wanted it to. "Did you see us, honey?"
"Yep. You were at Granddad Will's house. He just died, I remember."
"Did your sister see, as well?"
Roxie nodded. "We dreamed it, together."
"I'll tell you who the lady is, but you have to promise me just one thing."
Roxie said, "I promise."
Charlie couldn't help but smile. "You don't want to know what you're promising?"
"You're going to ask me and Janie to keep our dreams to ourselves. We already do that, Papa. Because we dreamed this, too. When we were little."
Charlie's smile grew, at how much the girls had grown, that they had been little, and how far they yet had to go. "She's a spirit, Roxie. Do you remember the river, the one by Granddad Will's house? She is the river, the part of it that deals with humans. The ones that can see her, anyway."
"Does that mean you love her?" Roxie continued. Going straight to the point, and letting her grandfather know just how much she'd seen.
'Oy,' he thought. "You know, in a way, I guess I do, kiddo. But it's kind of like loving music, or reading."
"There's so much of it?" the little one asked.
"Yep." He leant in for his goodbye kiss. He'd already kissed Leanne and Gina and Janet, they were all waiting behind the screen door, where Roxie had had to leave them in favor of her question. "I've got to get on the road, sweetie. I'll be back in a couple of weeks."
"I'm gonna have more questions for you. I love you, Papa." She whispered one into his ear, then gave him an extra big squeeze and ran back to the screen door.
Charlie waved, and kept waving, until he cleared the driveway and his silly grin.
Roxie's last question reminded Charlie of what his grandmother, his dad's mother, had had to say about this. She'd said, "It's not one thing, it's a bunch. Seeing hints of the future, or where you've left your glasses. Hearing ghosts." And, "It skips a generation. Your father can do many things, but this is yours, not his. So keep it to yourself."
Charlie smiled; it covered up just a hint of fear, that smile. Because the quiet world wasn't always a haven.
Roxie had asked him if he loved the river spirit. And then, she'd whispered the question she'd been leading up to this whole time. "Why's she wearing someone else's face, Papa?"
Charlie didn't know the answer to that one. 'I don't think that anyone could ever answer that question, Roxie. Not even the spirit herself.'
