“Oh!” the woman yells. “Help! I’m being robbed!”
But Ed is gone. He’s too quick to be caught in the streets. “Damn,” he’s saying, steadying his walk around some narrow corner.
I keep expecting his return. I see him rowing in on a wave that he’s trained on the oak grove. He’ll coast up to the front doors, pulling the oars into the small boat he fashioned himself, a wooden craft, shiny hulled, clear-lacquered to show the grain. “I was about halfway across that ocean when I decided I better turn around,” he’ll say. The guard in the tower will lean his head out the window and say, “Row on over the wall, Ed. They’ll be happy to see you.”
That wave will spill out around the tower. It’ll slosh against the brick of the administration building and then against the cement of the wall. It’ll loosen the tar, rattle those cracks, inch them wider. The fire in those wires will short, and Ed will come slipping over the top, poured out in a gush that dampens the dirt yard.
Because I’ve never seen it, the ocean I know is capable of these things.
“They still using my chair?” Ed will ask, stepping clear of his boat.
“Yes,” we’ll tell him. “All the time.”
“I can’t even feel it anymore.” He’ll hold his steady hands out for evidence.
Ed will go back to the woodshop. He’ll start making those cradles again. We’ll mount his boat from the rafters in the mess.
He has sent one letter. It was waiting for me when I left the hospitaclass="underline" No one home. Left the letters on the porch. Nice place. Your friend.
I picture that bundle of letters coming untied. The first envelope waves a bit. It opens and its pages shuffle loose. Then the next. And the next. The paper is like smoke. It curls and loops and makes for the sky, where it breaks apart and disappears. When Marie comes home from her day at the school (for she is teaching, again — I see her there), a boy version of Gerald at her side, only the twine is left, a loose, ratty cord. She’ll tie it in a circle and slide it on the boy’s wrist because he asks her to. Later, it will hold up her hair.
These are all imaginings. Marie has made her choice. Ed, too, and Gerald. They are all gone from me, and I have a report to conjure from this hunting book. There are no wires, no conduits, no dam. There aren’t even cows, whose nature I have grown to know and predict. Here in my book, there are only the hunted and the pursuing, and I must plug men into one and prison dogs into the other.
Here is another ocean book, filed in the sciences of the 500s, a few poems for the 800s, a world atlas and a history of the state in the 900s.
“I don’t know what to take from this book,” I tell Rash at the end of the day. “It’s all about hunting other animals.”
“Just put a man in for the animals.”
“All due respect, sir, but men don’t act like coons and squirrels.”
Rash laughs. “You want my advice, Roscoe? Just give Taylor a story. There’s nothing in these books that’s going to help him train his dogs any better. Tell the man about treeing coons, and he’ll either think it’s groundbreaking or a pile of rubbish, and he’ll either commend you for the information or curse you for your ignorance. It’ll depend only on his understanding of the information. There’s no sure route on this one.”
I can imagine Taylor’s disgust when I tell him to set his dogs loose on a man’s summer scent. Strapping men to dogs is different from everything Hartley’s talking about. His dogs are off lead, the hunters well behind.
Rash gives me the book to study in my cell. “Taylor will be back next Friday,” he tells me as I’m leaving. “You’d best have something ready for him.”
TAYLOR is already at the desk when I arrive in the library the following week.
“Deputy Taylor’s ready for his report,” Rash tells me.
“Come on, boy,” Taylor says. “I got work to do at the pens.”
I look to Rash, but he just nods. “You’re free from your shelving as long as Deputy Taylor needs you.”
I resent Rash’s easy disposal of me. Maybe he knows Taylor will soon be over this want of knowledge, that I’ll be dismissed before I’ve said much of anything.
Taylor is walking away. “I’m listening, boy!” he shouts over his shoulder. “What’s it you got for me?”
Rash waves me on.
I follow Taylor out into the yard, drawing up level with him. He is quick-paced for such a large man, and it’s a challenge to match his stride.
“That the book?” He pitches his head toward the book in my hands.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well?”
I hesitate. “Due respect, but I don’t know that I’m turning up much, sir. Hartley’s methods are all about treeing coons.”
“Men have been known to climb trees, Martin.”
“His dogs are off lead, sir.” I turn to the page I’ve marked and read, “ ‘We will go into the woods and walk slowly, giving the dog plenty of time to hunt and if we don’t see him pretty soon, we will sit down on a log and wait a while.’
“That’s the sort of advice I’m getting, sir, and I just don’t know that it’s much help to you.”
I don’t recognize the guard on the east gate, who asks, “New dog boy?”
“Not sure,” Taylor replies, and we pass on through.
We go to the closest pen, the dogs leaping up at the sight of their master.
“They think they’re going on a run,” Taylor says. “Best not disappoint them.”
“Sir?”
“Might be something to this off-lead business. We damn sure slow the dogs down.”
Taylor rubs one of his thick earlobes between his thumb and pointer, pressing the color out of it. When he lets go, I watch it fill back in, red as his nose. He spits in the dirt. “Let’s give it a shot.”
“Sir?”
“You’ll push out through the north fields and into the woods there. After a bit, you’ll come to a creek. I want you to go ahead and cross that. On the opposite bank there’s a big old possum oak — you can’t miss it — and I want you to climb up in the canopy there. Kick up the soil at the trunk before you start climbing. Don’t want it to be too difficult the first time. I’m going to set our girl Maggie on it, with two of the new pups.”
“Sir?”
“Jesus, Martin. You’ve done the chasin’ bit. Now’s the time to be chased. It’s the other side of the job.”
Taylor had told me about this the first time with Jennings, but I hadn’t swallowed down the actual practice of it. It’s obvious, though, standing here now. Hartley trains his dogs on squirrel and woodchuck and finally the coons they’ll keep after. Of course Taylor trains his dogs on men.
I can see excitement growing in him. “Off lead,” he says again, the thrill shaking him, his cheeks wiggling along with his weighty chin. His fingers drum on the great ball of his belly, as though he were playing scales on a piano. “Bet that’s Atmore’s trick — setting the hounds loose.” He claps his hands down still and flat on his stomach and shouts, “Go, Martin!”
I still have Hartley’s book in my hands. Taylor sees it and grabs it. “North!” he shouts. “Across the creek and up into that possum oak.” He shoves my shoulder, and I start walking north out of perplexity and fear.
“Martin!” he yells, and I turn. “You get it in your mind to run past that oak, and the rest of your time here will be painful as I can make it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now get a move on! Men don’t usually walk when they’re running! And leave a stitch of clothing at the edge of the corn. Nothing else though.”