LITMIR.BIZ

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      Beam moved into the unlit cabin. He leaned over the throttle lever, looking out the port at the sky spilled with stars. He fumbled in his pocket and found the bottle of caffeine pills his doctor had prescribed and ate three of them hurriedly, washing them down with water from a cup on the control console. His head felt cold and empty.

      “Hurry up there, bud,” the man called from outside. “I need to get a drink before I step off this jollyboat.”

      Beam leaned down and searched through a hickory wood tool box that held a tire iron, a pipe wrench, an assortment of claw hammers. When he brought his hand back up, it stank of rust, and cobwebs drifted from his fingertips like puppeteer strings. He looked at himself in the port glass. His cheeks narrow and clean and one eye like a burned hole. His hair smoothed and sculpted by the wind. His lips twisty and wormish. He reached into the toolbox again and found the pipe wrench and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans.

      “Come in here,” he grunted. “I need a light.”

      The man shuffled into the small cabin. Beam put his back against a tin wall and pointed below the console. “It’s down there somewhere,” he said. “Light a match and see if you can find it.”

      “Ain’t you got a flashlight?”

      “Batteries went dead on me.”

      “Lord help,” the man said, striking a match. “I just don’t see how somebody like you ever gets by without somebody else. You’re just about like an old goat, ain’t you? Don’t care if your ass is in the sun so long as your head’s in the shade. That right?”

      The man was stooping now, guiding the match under the console, throwing light into the webby shadows. His neck was bare above the collar of his shirt. The hairless knuckles of his spine showed a peeling sunburn.

      “You don’t know me,” Beam said. “You don’t know who I am.”

      The man went on rummaging through the boxes, the match lighting a small corona in the dark.

      “Forget it, okay bud?” he said. “I told you I was only goofing.”

      “No. You act like you know me, but you don’t.”

      The man turned on his haunches and looked up at Beam. The match flame halved his face, the fire splitting the cheeks into red and black, and his eyes were two glass bells to hold the flame.

      “You’re right,” he said, finally. “I don’t know you.”

      The match went out. “There ain’t no bottle down here,” the man said.

      Beam backed toward the cabin door. He put his hand behind him and felt the wrench in his back pocket, then took his hand away and leaned against the cabin wall.

      “My old man must’ve finished it off,” he said.

      The man stood up slowly, his form silhouetted by the moonlit window at his back. In the dark, he seemed much larger than he had in the lights of the ferry, and his breath rustled loud and grating in his chest.

      “I see you got a till here,” he said. He gestured toward the Tupperware bowl that sat on the control panel, then turned back to Beam. His lips cut into a dim smile. “How much it got in there?”

      Beam put his hand into his back pocket and gripped the handle of the wrench again. “I don’t believe that’s any of your business,” he said.

      For a moment, the man didn’t move. Then he took the till from the console and held it under his arm.

      “How’d it be if I just took this?”

      “You’re not going to take it,” Beam said.

      “You talk like you got some say in it.”

      “I do got a say in it.”

      The man shook his head. “No,” he said. “You don’t.”

      He made to move toward the door and when he did Beam pulled the wrench from his pocket and hit the man across the top of the head, opening a gash from the top of his brow to the bridge of his nose. The blood spilled down his face like a veil and the man stared at Beam a moment as if in shocked recognition before he fell forward onto the deck, the aluminum bonging hollowly beneath him.

      All of time seemed to have fixed itself on this point so that Beam felt he could not move from where he stood on the deck. Before him lay the body of the stranger, a damp black pool spreading from his head. Somewhere, the chug of the diesel could be heard but dimly so it might have been only imagined. His hand throbbed from the blow he’d dealt the stranger.

      So frozen was Beam he didn’t notice the ferry had reached the shore until it was too late and the prow crumpled against the concrete landing and sparks shot off the torn metal until the boat finally came to rest with half its hull beached on the muddy ramp. The impact knocked Beam to his knees. When he recovered, he quickly turned the engine off and leaned against the control console, sweat dribbling off his scalp into his eyes. He wiped them, then turned and saw the man had rolled onto his back on the ferry deck. Blood spilled out of his ear and covered his face. His eyes were drowsy and half closed. As the breath ran in and out of him it made small brushy sounds like a creature building a nest, readying itself to lie down and be still forever.

      Beam found the pipe wrench again and picked it up and then squatted beside the man.

      “What you got to say now, you sonuvabitch?” said Beam.

      The man coughed and then managed to whisper the name “Loat” and then the breath left him.

      Beam stood up. He dropped the wrench onto the deck, the metal droning out long and shivery. For a time he felt he would pass out. Then a breeze swam out of the locust trees and his breathing evened and he knew that he would not. Somewhere off in the night, a catfish rolled on the surface of the river and then the chiseling talk of crickets sounded in the dark.

      Beam staggered from the ferry and then up the landing toward the house that soon rose before him dim and quiet beneath the smeary vexed moonlight.

      He came and stood on the porch. Through the window, the vampish light of the television jerked eely blue and he knocked steadily on the blank unpainted door. As if this were not his home, as though he were but some traveler adrift in a country he did not know.

      “Wrecked her pretty good, didn’t you?” Clem said. He kicked the torn prow of the ferry and the metal boomed hollow and empty. “Where’s the fella you hit?”

      Beam nodded toward the body of the stranger. Clem hoisted himself aboard and then Beam followed, their boots clomping on the hull as it listed and swayed.

      Clem turned on the wheat light he carried. The beam lit a pair of ragged tennis shoes and two pale calves going up into mired corduroy slacks. The light went higher. Up to the pink nostrils. The stubble on the man’s neck aglint like filings of metal. The blood drying on his face.

      “Say he’s dead?” Clem asked.

      “Yes,” said Beam. “I believe so.”

      Clem went forward a step, then stopped. He turned back and walked to the duffel lying on the deck. Squatting, he tucked the light under his arm and moved the zipper down, his hands riffling through a bundle of clothes, old shirts and jeans. A tube of Crest toothpaste. A disposable razor. One canister of Barbasol shave foam. The remains of a tuna sandwich. Implements of hurried travel.

      “Say he tried to steal the till?” Clem asked.

      “He did,” said Beam. “He picked it up off the console and said he was taking it.”

      “What the hell was he doing in the cabin?”

      Beam stammered and then wiped the sweat from his cheeks. “He just come in,” he said, finally.

      “That so?”

      “Yeah,” Beam nodded. “That’s what happened.”

      Clem

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