Jon Clinch - Finn

Contents

F OR W ENDY AND E MILY ,
without whom, nothing.

U NDER A LOW SUN, pursued by fish and mounted by crows and veiled in a loud languid swarm of bluebottle flies, the body comes down the river like a deadfall stripped clean.

It proceeds as do all things moving down the Mississippi in the late summer of the year, at a stately pace, as if its blind eyes were busy taking in the blue sky piled dreamily deep with cloud. There will be thunder by suppertime and rain to last the whole night long but just now the early day is brilliant and entirely without flaw. How long the body has been floating would be a mystery if any individual had yet taken note of its passage and mused so upon it, but thus far, under that sky of blue and white and upon this gentle muddy bed aswarm with a school of sunfish and one or two smallmouth bass darting warily as thieves, it has passed only empty fields and stands of willow and thick brushy embankments uninhabited.

A crow screams and flaps off, bearing an eye as brown and deep as the Mississippi herself.

Sunday morning, early, and the river is without traffic.

An alligator gar, eight feet if its an inch, rises deathlike from the bottom and fastens its long jaw upon a hipbone, which snaps like rotten wood and comes away. The body entire goes under a time or two, bobbing and turning, the eggs of blowflies scattering into the water like thrown rice. The urgent sunfish eddy. The bluebottles hover, endlessly patient, and when the body has recovered its equilibrium and resumed its downward course they settle once more.

Boys note its passage first, boys from the village taking the long way to Sunday school, and their witness is as much natures way as is the slow dissolution of the floating body into the stratified media of air and water. The corpse is not too very far from shore and clearly neither dog nor deer nor anything but man.

Ill bet its old Finn, says one of them, Joe or Tom or Bill or perhaps some other. On this Sunday morning down by the riverbank they are as alike as polished stones. My pap says theyll fish him from the river one day for sure.

Go on, says another.

Yes sir. A worthless old drunk like that.

Go on, says the other again. He picks up a flat stone and tests it in his hand, eyeing the crow, which has returned and sunken its beak into a pocket of flesh. Shows how much you know. That aint even a man.

I reckon you think its a mule.

Its a woman, no question.

The lot of them go jostling together and squinting into the sunrise and blinking against the glare on the water as if the only thing superior to the floating corpse of a man would be the floating corpse of a woman, as if seeking in unison for a lesson in anatomy and never mind the cost.

Finally, from one of them or another but in the end from the childish heart in each save the learned one, this confession: How can you tell?

Men float facedown. Anybody knows that. Skipping the stone across the water to flush the crow, ruining his good trousers with the offhand brush of muddy fingers.

They draw straws, and as the unlucky boy lights out toward the village to enlist an adult the rest of them locate a skiff and cast off and make for the body. They hook her with a willow switch, these boys inured to dead things, and they drag her like bait to shore. One of them has been keeping a dead cat on a string for a week now, a kitten really, just a poor stiff dried husk won exactly this way, string and all, in a game of mumblety-peg.

The corpse floats low in the water, bottoming out in the mud that sucks at heel and buttock and drooping wrist. During its journey down the river it has failed to swell in the common way of corpses left in the sun. It lacks for skin, all of it, from scalp to sole. Nothing remains but sinew and bone and scraps of succulent yellow fat that the crows have not yet torn free.

One boy panics and loses his balance and falls into the water, his clothes spoiled for Sunday.

T HE BOOTLEGGER STIRS his fire, oblivious to the sparks that circle upward into the night sky. He hears everything, every whisper in the dry grass of the pathway that leads from behind his shack, every snapping twig in the surrounding woods, every wingbeat of sparrow or jay or owl. You cant steal whiskey from old Bliss, he likes to say, as if anyone would stoop so low as to steal whiskey from a blind man.

He repeats this reassurance now to Finn, who has proven him wrong before. Thats so, says Finn.

Pleased with himself, Bliss cackles until he coughs. Then he spits between his crooked teeth into the fire, where the sputum lands with a satisfying sizzle. You got a jug?

Course I got a jug. Finn is as regular around these premises as the weather, even more regular than Bliss knows. But tonight his first purpose is neither to buy whiskey nor to steal it but to dispose of something in Blisss perpetual fire. He has a tow sack between his feet, filthy even in the firelight and slowly leaking something into the dust. He bumps the blind mans knee with his jug, a signal.

Go on get it yourself, says Bliss. Cant you see Im occupied?

Ill tend. You pour. Give me that stick.

Bliss wont let it go. Leave an old man be. I reckon you know where I keep it.

I reckon I do, if I could find it in the dark.

He has a point, so Bliss hands over the stick and limps off into the woods muttering to himself like an old priest.

Finn unties the tow sack and lays out its contents, long strips dark and dimly glistening, pieces of flayed flesh identically sliced save one. Their regularity in width and length and thickness speaks of a huntsmans easy skill and a plotters furtive patience and something else too. He chooses one and throws it upon the fire, where it sizzles and smokes and curls in upon itself as sinuously as a lie.

Hope you brought some for me, says Bliss from the depths of the woods.

Theres plenty. Throwing another piece into the fire to blacken. Bring a couple of them jars when you come back. Well have ourselves a time.

Bliss, weighed down with Finns crockery jug of forty-rod, adjusts his course and shuffles down the path toward the cabin. Halfway along he uses his head at last, plants the jug midpath like a tombstone, and makes for home unencumbered, counting off the paces so as not to stub his unshod foot during the journey back.

By firelight Finn locates the piece hes set aside for his host. He clears hot ash from a rock and places it there in the manner of an offering.

I aint had nothing but beans all week, says Bliss as he squats on his log. He swirls whiskey to cleanse a pair of canning jars. One of them is cracked about the rim and fit to tear someones lip, and this one Bliss chooses for himself as long as Finn is paying. He minds the crack with his thumb. Bliss is a poor drinker and he knows it. Not mean like Finn, but morose and persistent and beyond satisfying. A little of your fatback wouldve gone good with them beans.

Youll like it well enough plain, says Finn.

Bliss sniffs the air with satisfaction and mutters something unintelligible, pours himself another whiskey.

You be sparing with that. But Finn doesnt mean it and he knows that Bliss will pay him no mind anyhow. Once you get Bliss started theres no slowing him down until the jug is empty. Besides, I aint paid for it yet.

Dont worry none. Ill put it on your account. Tapping the side of his head with a finger.

They sit in silence while the meat cooks.

Ive broken it off with that woman, says Finn.