Mighty Blue Sea

 

Keith lee Morris

The plan was to float down the river on a raft of their own making. They would move across the river to a new job and a new life in a more exciting place, away from the perfect time-consuming lawns and flowerbeds and perfect curving asphalt streets of the housing development, the scooters and the bicycles and the helmets littering the driveways, and the perfectly contented homeowners walking their dogs on Sunday.      The raft was Donovan’s idea. He took all the blue plastic water bottles from the purified water system and the Clorox bottles from the laundry room and lashed them to the mesh surface of the backyard trampoline. Then they drove everything, all the earthly possessions they felt like keeping, down to the riverbank in the Audi, and they stacked these possessions on the raft, and then Donovan put the Audi in neutral and let it coast into the river.

 He and his son, Jared, and his wife, Jessica, pushed their raft offshore. The sun was poised above the horizon, a couple of hours away from setting, enough time for them to negotiate the river and find lodging for the night on the other side. The breeze picked up offshore and Donovan relished the wind in his hair, the blistering sun, the sight of boats bobbing on the water. After making sure Jessica and Jared and the dog, Tootie, were situated properly in the raft’s center, braced between the microwave and the memory foam mattress and the 65” flat-screen tv, he picked up the canoe paddle and began to forge his way across the river, the paddle twisting through the water in long swirls, the blue and white plastic bottles prancing on the rippling waves. Donovan sang a little song called “The Mighty Blue Sea,” and Jessica and Jared joined in. It was a song they’d made up at home especially for the occasion, and it went like this: “We are the Vandermarks, navigating our little raft, braving the mighty blue sea.”

 For the first half of the journey their spirits were high, the pinking sunset clouds and dark water of the river and waning sun making the prettiest of pictures to drift along to, and they almost wished they could stay on the river, never arrive ashore, just share each other and this raft and the objects of their life, the lawnmower and the yoga mat and the boxes filled with clothes and kitchen ware and video games, out on the river to perpetuity, a drifting aquatic life that would last until they emptied into the sea.

 But Donovan’s muscles began to ache. Jared was eleven—could he help paddle?  They tried changing positions, but when Jared grabbed the paddle he accidentally kicked over the microwave, which dislodged the television, and the television went over one side of the raft with a heavy plunge, ripping away several of the plastic jugs on that side, and the portion of the raft where Tootie resided collapsed, and Tootie went overboard, barking loudly. A strong dog, Tootie, a shepherd, but the current was too much, and they watched her wash away.  She became a dot on the sparkling river, and then nothing.

 Jessica and Jared struggled bravely to hold the refrigerator in place, but it dove into the waves, taking more jugs with it, and more belongings. The trampoline was torn now, the sun dipping low, all of them sinking into the water, and after a while Donovan abandoned the paddle, and all of them merely hung on. Soon the trampoline had disappeared entirely and the three of them floated the jugs downstream, kicking as they could.

 Jared’s legs gave out first. In the dying sunlight Donovan and Jessica saw him begin to drift apart, his head sinking down onto the blue jugs Donovan had strapped him to, and Donovan held onto him by a rope they’d tied to his waist. But Donovan’s hands grew tired, and then the rope cut through them till they bled, and then he couldn’t seem to control the hands at all anymore, and the rope began to rip through the flesh, pulling Jared away. For a while they kicked along behind him, but Jared moved faster somehow, and they couldn’t keep up. Soon, like Tootie, he had disappeared.

 But Jared, of course, was more to Donovan and Jessica than Tootie. Jared was their son. Donovan had helped to make Jared, and he had watched Jared come out of his wife, and he had taken tiny Jared home in blankets, and he had cared for him and nurtured him all these years. On the weekends they played baseball, Donovan throwing batting practice for what seemed like hours on end, feeling a surge of pride every time Jared smacked a hard line drive to left, sometimes feeling perturbed, angry even, when Jared had a hard time connecting, when he would cry. Donovan and Jared went on hikes. They strolled through the woods and clambered over rocks and picked their way carefully up steep inclines. They ate beside clear-watered streams, feeling the sunlight and the cool mountain air on their faces, sharing a bag of potato chips. At home, before Jared went to bed, they read books to one another. Jared read beautifully. Sometimes they watched TV.

 Sometimes, too, Donovan whipped Jared with a black leather belt, raising long red creases on his backside. He taught Jared object lessons, selected carefully to suit Jared’s particular transgressions. When Jared used up all the hot water in the shower once, Donovan made him go down into the frightening cellar and sit next to the water heater in the dark until the water came out hot from the faucet again. When Jared, one time, left an apple on his windowsill until it rotted, and a trail of ants got inside the house and went to work on it, Donovan dumped the garbage from under the kitchen sink on the floor of Jared’s bedroom and made him pick it up with his hands.

 And now Jared was gone, and Donovan knew and remembered both the good and the bad part of himself in relation to Jared, but he didn’t recognize himself at all hanging onto the blue and white bottles, crying blindly in the dusk, wanting only to be dead now, find a means of killing himself, but still kicking wearily toward the shore.

 They arrived. They had floated down the river far past their destination. There was no exciting city with a dream job and a dream house within walking distance of the parks and restaurants and museums. There was instead a burnt-out, ashy feel to the air, and the muddy bank along the river, and a weedy field dotted here and there with fires burning in rusted metal drums. Exhausted, Donovan and Jessica staggered over the uneven ground of the field, drawing the stares of the evil-eyed men and women warming their hands by the makeshift fires, eating pieces of meat off sticks, fucking on the cold ground out in the open, bludgeoning one another with their fists in the firelight, laughing and howling and dying and being born.

 Far across the field they saw the flickering light of a lamp in a window, and they stumbled faster there, until the field emptied out into a muddy street. The light came from a ramshackle hotel, a broken signboard with a faded name. In the street, dozens of cats yowled at the moon.

 They dragged themselves wet and shivering inside, and the wooden door of the entry fell off its hinges. There was no one inside, just a marble floor, a marble desk, a chandelier that seemed to sparkle a thousand colors of glass. And cats, yellow-eyed cats slinking over the old furniture, licking their paws, their eyes fixed on Donovan and Jessica.

 Upstairs they found a suitable room, and Donovan laid Jessica on a tiny old canopied bed, and she was already sleeping, her hand still clutching stiffly the sleeve of Donovan’s shirt. She said the word Jared in her sleep, and Donovan’s lips made the shape of the word at the same time.

 He walked back out, his feet tramping again across the field, the sky icy suddenly and star-strewn. His clothes were frozen, his gait stiff.

 He approached one of the fires. Where would he be likely to find a boy, he asked the first man he came to. The man turned to him, smiling, half of his face melted from the heat of the flames, the eye a slushy mess poised on the cheekbone, like a soft-boiled egg. The melted corner of his lip made a little tongue, hanging below his chin. A particular boy, not just any boy, an 11-year-old boy with slightly curly blond hair and a scent about him like grass and air and trees and hot sun, a boy name Jared whom his father desperately missed already even after a very short time, about whom his father had particularly heart-rending regrets that could not be placed aside easily, that required the locating of this boy and a long period of atonement. Did the man know where he might find a boy like that, whom his father loved?

 The man’s face dripped elastic bubbles of flesh, but it was clear that he was smiling. He might know where to find such a boy for a price. Donovan clawed with his icy hand, clawed at his pocket, crying now, his skin beginning to tingle at the fire’s warmth, his forehead hot but the tight skin of his cheeks still frozen, numb to the tears. He attempted to fumble out some bills, a credit card, anything, and the man reached over with an arm that smelled of cooked meat and took the wallet almost kindly, and he called to others near the fire, and they rushed to the task of beating Donovan with sticks.

 He awoke sometime later, lying in the dirt. The money was being split up between the men in a jovial camaraderie. They hailed his awakening as if he were an old friend, gave him a share of the stake. Everything inside Donovan raced with an immense heat, and the fire roared in his eyes. There was Jared in the midst of the flames. He held a baseball bat, a fearful look in his eyes, waiting for his father’s next pitch. From his mouth issued a steady stream of water, like the water from a cupid fountain, the water of the river that sloshed and foamed and leaned its way sluggishly down into the sea like the flowing of blood or tears.

 “Jared?” his father said. “Do you know me?”

 Jared’s mouth curled up on one side in a smile but melted down on the other with flames, his teeth set in a grimace. His face seemed to say, yes he did, and the long stream of water that came from his mouth seemed to say, yes he did.

 Donovan stepped into the flames and regretted in his searing flesh that he had no way to tell Jessica how he and Jared would be there in the fire a long, long time.

 Around the field in the dark pool of that night, all the doomed people cheered, raised a lusty cry to life such as it was between the icy stars and the quiet running river and the thoughts of the distant sea.

 Downstream, Tootie in her hunger chased the yellow-eyed cats, remembering home, telling her story in her simple language to the moon.

 

Published in The Cincinnati Review