Black Surface

Paw wasn’t really my Paw. He was my girlfriend’s grandfather, sapling-thin and dangerous as a forgotten family secret. I was at his house to help him with a few chores, trying to return to his good graces after being the direct cause of him being recently routed from sleep by a county deputy sheriff.

Granny came into the living room, where I was pretending to watch tv while Paw stood at the kitchen window and drank scalding coffee the way most people drink cold water. She rushed in on her short legs and asked me if I wanted anything to eat before heading out with Paw. I declined and thanked her and glanced over at Paw, who was watching me without looking at me.

Six foot two, maybe a hundred seventy pounds, and about thirty of that was Adams Apple. Pure coon-ass out of some obscure Louisiana parish, Paw had trekked with his paw to the bayou country of Arkansas when he was still a boy, and the transition had been easy. Black water and cypress knees, fried fish and daily sweat and weekly baths and zydeco music, guns as common as handkerchiefs, and be careful of who you insult or cheat. Paw had worked the paper mill all his adult life, he and Granny bringing up three children in a raised shack while he built his house out of cinder blocks on the banks of Atkins Lake on the weekends. And now two of his children were dead and his remaining daughter had given birth to the daughter who kept company with notorious me.

I was always on my best behavior around Paw, but it never mattered. The first time he met me, he told his granddaughter as I drove away, “That boy’s higher ‘n a Georgia pine.” This was mostly untrue, but I had never debated the point with Paw. He collected the grinning skulls of gar and kept them nailed to the eaves of his workshop, and he carried a hunting knife strapped to his belt and a jackknife in each trouser pocket. He ate one meal per day — supper. Up before first light, he made the first of several pots of coffee in a battered aluminum percolator with a glass bulb and drank one cup after another as if caffeine were hemoglobin, right up until the noon whistle over at the paper mill blew. No matter what he was doing, when the noon whistle sounded, he would dump out the remnants of his coffee, go to the old fridge in his workshop, and crack open the first of many Old Milwaukees. He would snug it down in a styrofoam holder with a Razorbacks logo and drink half of it down in a swallow. A beer was in his fist all the rest of the day until along about ten p.m., when he would eat supper.

Granny would have laid a good table of fried fish or jambalaya or gumbo or fried chicken each night, but only she and my girlfriend and any visitors would partake. Paw would sit at the table and chat in his glint-eyed way, but he would touch no food. Once everyone had eaten, Paw would clear the table and do the dishes and sit and watch the tv in the den from his chair at the kitchen table. When the evening news started at ten, the old man would rise, take a soup bowl from the cupboard, and open the cabinet above the stove. Sitting there were bags and bags of Brach’s candies, everything from jewels to caramels to candied orange slices to malted milk balls to chocolate covered raisins. Paw would grab fistfuls from several of the bags until he had filled the soup bowl to the top. Then he would sit back at the table in his BVD undershirt, begin unwrapping candy pieces, and eat the entire bowl while washing it down with swigs of Old Milwaukee. A hundred seventy pounds, tops.

And so on this morning, Paw filled his green Stanley thermos with coffee and placed it, along with an extra mug, into a brown paper grocery bag. He wadded the top of the bag down like an oversized lunch and butted it against my stomach, bidding me take it. He picked up a small cooler sitting by the door and motioned for me to come on. Granny told us to watch out for water moccasins and we went out the back door and walked down the slope to the dock.

The john-boat was a dull green and had a large outboard motor and a small trolling motor attached. I had never seen Paw use the outboard. A red-winged blackbird called from the tree above us and Paw looked up at it, half-smiling. He swung the cooler into the boat and motioned for me to board as he untied the boat. He got in and pushed off with an oar against the piling, then picked up another oar and rowed us across to the far side of the lake. I was in the stern of the john-boat and Paw was staring at me with those black coon-ass eyes while his skinny arms and shoulders pulled and rotated. I thought of Granny telling us to watch for water moccasins.

When we reached the far bank, Paw shipped the oars and started the quiet little trolling motor. He showed me how to steer with it and had me take the bar, directing me to hug the shoreline under the overhanging tree branches. The black water peeled aside from the boat’s flat prow, making a sound like someone swallowing a long drink. Abandoned trot lines angled down into the inky water, and a turtle the size of a helmet sunned himself on a half-submerged cypress snag.

I kept waiting for Paw to tell me to stop at such-and-such a trot line so he could check it, but he just watched, his gaze alternating between me and the lake’s surface. After many minutes, he motioned for me to cut the motor. We drifted for a bit, and I thought to break the silence. I asked Paw if he wanted a cup of coffee.

He pointed at the cooler. “Tell you what. You’re a man, right? How about a beer? Ever drink a beer of a morning?”

I shook my head but warmed to the idea of being invited into such an adult ritual. Paw opened the cooler and pulled out two beers. He pulled the ring tab from one and handed it to me, then opened one for himself. He dropped the two ring tabs into his shirt pocket, then nodded at me. “Go ahead on.”

He tipped his can back and poured the beer down his throat, watching me as he did. I took what I thought was a large swallow and forced myself to keep my face as placid as the lake’s dark surface. I wasn’t crazy about beer, and every time I drank one, I felt an immediate need to empty my bladder, as if some interior pump had been primed. I also felt the beer in my head, a low buzz, a welcome sense of well-being.

“Good, is it?” Paw asked.

I nodded and took two more large swallows. Paw nodded, then drained his can and put it in the deck by the bench seat. He reached to the cooler and took out another Old Milwaukee and opened it. He took half of it at a breath and then put it on his sharp knee, holding it against the khaki with a hand as wide as the oars in the boat. The mustache above his lip, thin as fishing line, shifted as he grinned at me.

“So. You like to steal stop signs, that right?”

I looked back across the lake. Paw’s yard was empty. I looked back at him. Something bumped the thin metal bottom of the john-boat. Paw’s grin grew wider.

~ by S.K. Orr