From the college it’s about an hour to the Kings River State Park. We drive in, past picnic areas, a visitor center (closed), camping spots with hook-ups for trailers and farther on, places for tents and such. It’s deserted. A sign says canoe rentals and we follow it to a turnoff toward the river. At the water’s edge is an old building with a couple of dozen canoes stacked outside. As we’re getting out of the car, a guy steps out of the building. He’s an old hippie type, tall, with long black and gray hair, cutoff jean shorts, flip flops. He’s very surprised to see us. He reeks of pot.
“Hey, y’all,” he says. “I’m John. Wanting to rent a canoe, are you?” He’s brushing ashes off his shirt. I think it’s a woman’s blouse.
“Got one big enough for the lot of us?” Lowell says in his finest southern drawl.
“As long as you’re not including me, any of these will fit the three of you just fine.”
“Well, let’s haul one down to the water then,” Lowell says.
Old Hippie John and Lucas unchain a yellow canoe and drag it to the river and throw paddles and life jackets into the bottom.
Old John says, “Right through here the current ain’t too strong. Here’s the thing, though. Whichever direction you go, in about an hour y’all need to turn around and come back. You don’t want to be out there after dark. Kindly getting a late start, you know.”
“‘Preciate it,” Lowell says and climbs into the canoe. I sit in the middle with Lowell up front and Lucas in the back. From the rental joint, the river broadens southward and this is the direction we go. Fifteen minutes later we are floating among trees with water stretched out on either side of us out of sight. It’s not a river anymore. At least not recognizable as such. I’m put in mind of a Cajun swamp such as I’ve seen on television.
Lowell lights a joint and the smoke drifts back over me. Lucas says, “Did you get that off Hippie John?”
Lowell turns and silently offers it to me. I shake my head. It’s dark under the canopy of trees. The air is full of birdsong and the water mirrors the ripply dark of the leaves, another Impressionist painting.
“This river’s got a real Monet thing going on,” Lowell says.
“Should have left you back at the Love Shack,” Lucas says.
“I was just thinking about Impressionism myself,” I say. “Actually, I seem to think about it a lot.”
“Freshmen,” Lucas says.
The boys aren’t paddling. We drift along at the same speed as the fallen leaves and sticks and insects in the water.
“Still,” I say, “This is beautiful. It has to make you feel good, huh?”
Lucas says, “There is a negativeness in the universe. We endure the hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.”
Lowell turns around and looks at Lucas, frowning. “You didn’t just think that up. That’s out of a movie.”
“What movie?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Give me a title, Mr. Know Everyfuckingthing.”
“I need a minute. I’m going to find it. Where’s my phone? I can look it up, Herr Plagiarism.”
“Not out here, Eudora. There’s no signal.”
“Besides which,” Lowell says, leaning back and laying his head on my leg, “You’re positing Nothingness as an entity, which is in full violation of your Nietzschean world view.”
“I’m not positing shit.”
“Really? Up your diction, Stand Up Comedy Boy.”
“I’m just expressing a response to the random nature of nature. The lack of reason and purpose. It’s a reasonable reaction, I think, to the suggestion that we’re floating along here in a Monet.”
Lowell says, “The problem with your theory is that nature is not random. There’s patterning. Where do you suppose the Teleological Argument comes from?”
“The who?”
“Stop it. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
“Debunked.”
“Maybe.”
“In any case,” Lucas says, “Patterns in the physical universe are just the result of predictable forces. Gravity, magnetism, quantum flux. The strong force, the weak force. All meaningless.”
“What about patterns in human affairs?”
“Confirmation bias.”
Lowell laughs. “Let me tell you a story.”
“Fuck all. You Confederates. I swear to God. Is there anything you don’t have a story about? Or the overwhelming, gut-wrenching urge to tell it?”
Lowell sits up and turns around to face us. He’s gorgeous. Hair lifted by the soft breeze, face haloed in the diffused light falling through the canopy of green and brown. My thigh is burning where his head lately lay.
“My father grew up poor.”
Lucas snorts.
“It’s true. He and his brother Paul and his sisters, Evie and Melissa, lived in the deep country with my grandparents, who were a mere step above sharecroppers.”
“What does that mean?” I say.
“That they actually owned the poor dirt they farmed.”
“What did they grow,” I say.
“Not the point. Whatever it was, it didn’t keep the great ballyhooed wolf from the door. Paul and my father started hiring themselves out to construction jobs here and there around the county and eventually started their own construction business, which is how they pulled themselves up.”
“Made themselves rich.” Lucas.
“Yes.”
“So, you’re outlining a ‘pattern’ of avarice, greed, and social mobility?”
“No. I haven’t gotten to that story yet.”
“Jesus! Enough warming up. Enough foreplay. Get to it before the bourbon kicks in, Faulkner boy.”
“It was my grandmother what told me this story, don’t you know.” Lowell is exaggerating his accent now. “Paul and my daddy were little, Daddy five or six and Paul four, I think. Evie comes running into the house and says, ‘Paul’s in the water’. Granny goes running out the house and down to the road. There was a big washed out place in this dirt road where water had collected, and there she found Paul floating face down in it.”
“Lord a mighty.” Me.
“So she yanks him up by the feet and shakes him upside down and squeezes the water out of him and somehow—he’s not dead.”
“Miracle.” Me.
“Yeah.”
“Nice story,” Lucas says, “Signifying nothing.”
“Not done,” Lowell says.
“I’m shocked.” Lucas.
“So it’s forty years or so later. Paul is playing golf at this country club he belongs to—”
“Rich folks.” Lucas.
“—and he’s on the ninth green up near the clubhouse and he sees this commotion over by the pool. Ambulance, folks gathered round, some hollering and crying and whatnot. So he drops his putter and runs over there. And just as he gets there, the paramedics are stepping back from the laid out body of this teenage boy and they’re saying ‘He’s gone,’ and people are weeping and hugging up on one another. The boy had drowned in the pool, you see. Well, old Paul says, and I’m quoting my Bible-spouting grandmother here, ‘Fuck that’, and he drops down to his knees by the boy and gives him mouth-to-mouth, every once in a while stopping to do some chest compressions. The paramedics tell him they’ve been working on the boy for ten minutes with no luck and that Paul should just give it up. But he won’t. He breathes into the boy and pumps on his chest for thirty minutes, and damn if the boy doesn’t start breathing and coughing up water and comes right back to life and Paul is the big hero. Story goes that that young man went on to graduate high school and the University of Mississippi Law School and is a highly successful Capitol Street lawyer right this very minute.”
“Wow.” Me.
“Wow’s ass.” Lucas. “Your point?”
“Not there yet.”
“Seriously?”
“Some years later Paul and some of his friends are canoeing the Homo Chitto river, doing an overnight float. They’ve camped on a sandbar and are bonfiring and drinking expensive bourbon and smoking fine cigars and generally enjoying the good life. During the night, a flash flood washes away the sandbar and everybody on it. A couple of the guys drowned, a couple more survived and Paul, or his body, was never found.”
“Have mercy.” Me.
“Now the point?” Lucas.
“Pattern. Water, Paul, life, death. Can’t you see it?”
“Are you crazy? That’s not pattern. It’s—poetry or something.”
“Forced to disagree. Water, the source of all life, a pattern of turning points in Paul’s life and death.”
“Stop. Please. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s simply the pattern of tragedy that runs from Oedipus through Achilles down to—”
Lucas sits up straight and says something like nnh, nnh, and points at a murky dark place. He drops his paddle into the water and the canoe slides left. Lowell puts his paddle in and they pull hard to port, I guess you’d say.
“Darling. Scull.” This is Lucas.
“Skull? Where?”
“Paddle, Darling.”
“Toward the skull? Is that what you mean? Where’s it at?”
“Between the ‘A’ and the ‘T’,” Lowell drawls with all his might.
Lucas says, “There’s no skull. Just—never mind.”
We slip up next to a place that might be called the “bank” if there were any solid ground instead of just shallow water and grass and weeds pushed up three feet high. You couldn’t’ve stepped out here, not earth, but not river proper.
What we’ve come to see is a formation of bent over weeds and bushes and skinny trees, twisted in such a way as to form a cave-like opening. Inside is darkness and a smell out your nightmares, equal parts rot and death and putrefaction.
“I know we ain’t even fixin’ to go up in there,” I say.
“And Darling reverts to country-speak. It’s a panic-site thing, isn’t it?” Lucas says.
“I will not be defined by my accent nor my inflection at any particular moment.” I don’t know the term “panic site,” but inferring from context, I think, yeah, that’s probably right because I really do not want to go into that hole.”
“I am put in mind of a quote heah,” Lowell says. He’s in full Scarlett O’Hara mode now, accentwise.
I say, “It gaped like a dark open mouth.” I read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in the interim. Shouldn’t I be reading such things so as to impress my professors instead of these two?
“Look at little Darlin’, trotting out with the O’Connor allusion.” Lowell laughs. “Well done, Sissy.”
To this day, that’s what my father calls his sister. Sissy. Even though she died two years ago. The dead sister.
The boys tie the canoe to a spindly tree right in front of the opening. A snake swims out and a bullfrog croaks from within. “Nest of water moccasins,” a phrase from back in my childhood somewhere, worms around in my brain’s gearbox. The water, the swamp, these woods seem to be growing darker. Of course, my panic-sight may be getting worse, glaucomatizing even.
“I think this place might be evil,” I say.
“Evil?” the boys say in unison and then jinx and coke each other.
“Can’t you feel it? I feel something here, something dark and cold, even in this heat. A place can be evil, can’t it?”
“For example?” Lucas says.
“I don’t know. That weird-ass suicide forest in Japan? Teotihuacan?”
“Tay tee a what?” Lowell says.
“There are places that make me feel good. If there are places that make me feel good, then aren’t those ‘good’ places? And if there are good places, why not evil places?” I say.
“Let me guess,” Lucas says and waves the paddle around over his head, hurling black drops of water which I instinctively duck. “The library makes you feel good, the soft chairs, the smell of the books. Sitting on the bank of a river watching the swirl of leaves in water, the dance of light in the ripples, the liquid silver voices of birds in the trees—all this makes you feel good, no?”
“Maybe.”
He sneers. “No maybe, Darling. You want to live in a poem, a beautiful poem, a nineteenth century poem, Keats, I’m guessing, but everything you bring to your worldly experience is wish fulfillment. Those things you experience that are like your poem-world are good and those that are not are evil. Or banal.”
“So, when I consider this dark and terrible hole you’ve brought us to and I feel dark and terrible, that’s just my psychology. It’s all coming from me, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, Darling,” Lucas says. “It’s so obvious. It’s right there in your grammar. You feel, and the world corresponds to your feeling.”
His voice softens here. He sounds like he actually cares about me, wants me to understand, when he says, “There is no evil in the world, but what man has wrought. The universe is morally neutral.”
Maybe his voice didn’t soften. Maybe that was just me, wanting to be cared about, projecting that need onto him. And I see now that’s probably what he would say too.
“Man doesn’t make hurricanes or disease,” I say. “Those seem to be evils man didn’t create.” And man didn’t make this hole in the river, I don’t guess. I’m trembling a little bit.
Lucas doesn’t say anything back. He looks off, back upstream. I can’t tell if I’ve caught him in a paradox or if he’s just fed up with my recalcitrance.
Or if I’ve rejected his care for me.
Or if I’m too dense to see his point.
Lowell stands up in the front of the canoe, almost turning us over, nearly blinding my panic-vision, and strips. In this gloaming of greeny black shadows, he is marble smooth, as if rubbed by the loving hands of a Renaissance sculptor, gleaming, radiant in a fall of white light spilling through an aperture in the tree sky. I grip the sides of the canoe, trying to keep him from tumping us into the water. He turns away from us and looks toward the swamp cave. His behind is a peach. Or an erotic poem.
Lucas pulls out his phone and photographs him.
Lowell says, “Lucas is not entirely correct here, Darling.”
“Where’s your phone, Darling?” Lucas asks.
“I left it in the car.”
“Cliché, at this point,” Lucas says.
Lowell says, “The universe is not neutral. It is, for lack of a better phrase, what it is.”
“You had to get naked to say this?” Lucas.
“It moves, like music moves, only in time, cutting its path with no discernable goal. It creates and it destroys. There is no good or evil for there is no consciousness, at least as we know it. Consciousness is, above all, about choice. Does the universe choose to expand? To hold stars together in galaxies, or is that all the function of physical law?” He turns to look at us. “Darling, you come up to the front. I want to get some pictures of you.”
When I stand up, the canoe tilts again, and Lowell and I have to pass each other awkwardly, holding on to one another and sort of shuffle stepping by. I’m pressed against his naked body. He’s all sweat and musk and some aftershave or cologne I don’t recognize. Maybe it’s disingenuous to say I am not doing it consciously or on purpose, but in those couple of seconds when we are face to face, I arch my back, just a little, I swear, so that my breasts are sort of “there” against him.
What do I want? The answer is obvious. Because I am a cliché, just as Lucas said. I want what I had with Roger, with the couple of other boys I let take me out in high school. I want him to want me. I want him to be filled. With an ocean of want. A glacier of desire. His desire and want overwhelming him. I want him to want me, to want inside me. Outside me. I can say it. I want him, both of them really, begging for my body, my heart, my soul. Or. I want them to want what they want of me. What do they desire?
Would I let them kill me, if that’s what they wanted?
I have to consider the very real possibility that I’m a perv.
Lucas scoots over and Lowell sits next to him, mashed together on one seat. Naked and dressed, soft hearted and hard headed, dark and dark. I’m bent over holding the sides of canoe. Lowell motions for me to sit down. He says, “In the scalding interior of the sun, hydrogen is broken, the promise sworn between one neutron and one proton broken again and again, becoming helium, the mayfly helium already dying as soon as it is born, becoming iron and so on until the sun collapses and flames out, flames out like shook foil some poet says. And who would bemoan ‘O poor hydrogen, poor helium, to have lived and died, and for what’? You see, those are the sorts of things that folks will think, for the will to anthropomorphize is strong. But we, too, Darling, are but hydrogen and helium and iron, no more permanent than the smallest immeasurable unit of time.”
“I’m not gladdened by that.” Me.
“Darling, can you give me something other than the resting bitch face, please,” Lucas says.
Facing them, their phones, firefly flashes trapping photonic versions of my face. And the dark cave behind me.
“That’s not her rbf, old son,” Lowell says. “That’s worried Darlin’.”
“Darling. Do you imagine that there is such a thing as a perfect murder?” Lucas.
Not gladdened even more, I say, “Like maybe killing me here and stuffing me up in that hell hole?”
They look at each other. And then laugh.
“We love you, Darlin’.”
“And we’d get caught,” Lucas said.
“Would you?”
“Yeah. And that wouldn’t be the perfect murder, now would it?”
I think for a minute. “Well, if you’re really asking and if this is really not about me, I suppose a perfect murder could be done. But there would be limitations.”
“Preach, sweetheart.” Lowell.
“Well, let’s start with this well-known fact and investigative given. In 99.9999 percent of murders, the perpetrator is someone the victim knows, mostly husbands and wives, though, also children and coworkers. Neighbors. Did you hear me? Someone the victim knows. I know you.”
Lowell laughs. “She knows us.”
“Yeah. funny. Darling, we’re not gonna kill you.”
“Shoot, I hope not. I’m just joking, Lucas.”
He sighs. “So. Ninety-nine percent?”
“Yeah, and since the cops know this, they always look first at the people within the victim’s immediate circle. Eventually they find a motive, one third of the three-legged stool of guilt presumption.”
“Yeah. Three-legged huh? What?” Lucas.
“Means, Motive, Opportunity. Cops look for all three. One isn’t enough for a conviction. But once they do find one of them, they start looking for the other two, even if it takes forever. No statue of limitations on murder.”
“Darling. Statute.”
“What?”
“It’s statute.”
“What did I say?”
“Statue.”
“Bullshit.”
“Carry on then.”
“So, you couldn’t kill some asshole jock that you both hate or, let’s say, Dr. Richmond, who never gives A’s.”
“That polecat son of a bitch.” Lowell.
“Wait,” Lucas said. “There must be lots of people who want Richmond dead beyond us. People in the department, students he’s screwed over or felt up. Surely there would be a long line of suspects ahead of us.”
“Us? This us?”
“Figuratively.”
“So, figures of us. Okay. Anyway, once the cops are there on campus, we are in the suspect pool. And they’ll never give up. They will eliminate every possibility until they get to us. What does Sherlock say? Eliminate the something something something. Suddenly it’s walls closing in, concentric circles tightening around us, the center of the labyrinth just ahead.”
“Listen to Darlin’! Going all Harold Bloomy on us.” Lowell.
“If you really want to get away with it, the best option is to kill somebody we don’t know. What am I saying? ‘We’?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Lucas.
The wind has picked up and turned the canoe around so that I’m facing the hole. I was gladdened when they said unto me. But I am not gladdened now.
“Shall we stop a moment and review why we’re even talking about this?” Me.
Lucas says, “No. Let’s don’t. And fuck all this Leopold and Loeb shit. What are we? Scientists? Engineers? Nerds in white lab coats holding clipboards? Running some experiment? From which, by the way, we have removed all subjectivity? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t even remotely want to do that. Kill somebody I don’t know for no reason. Bullshit. I want to feel what I do. I want to wallow in the sty of the subjective. I want to come from a place of will.”
“I get so hard when you go all Overman on me.” Lowell.
“Well, better close your eyes then because I’m about to go full-bukkake Nietzsche all over your all-too-human face.”
“Spray me, then.”
“There is the will to power and then there is everything else. You’re going to kill some random stranger? What’s your emotion? Neutral? Objective observation? For what? To see somebody die? To see a stranger die? You can see that every night on television, in both fiction and nonfictional accounts. And since they’re both on TV, they are, for all practical purposes, the same thing. I don’t need any neutral experiences. That’s what I have college for. That’s what these professors do. They drag the emotion and subjectivity screaming out of every aesthetic or scientific or creative discussion in favor of the cool dispassion of analysis. No, no, no. I want to feel something. If I have enjoyed seeing my enemies punished, and I have done, then how much more will I enjoy watching one pay the ultimate price, as they say on TV?”
“And yet everything you just said places Darling’s three-legged stool between us and that goal.”
“Risk is part of crime.” Lucas said this, but not with much fire.
“That’s true, but there is no need to take it on unnecessarily. Kill Dr. Richmond. I know I might like to, but howmanyfold do we increase our risk versus killing someone completely unconnected to us?”
“Well, you could use forensic countermeasures,” I say.
They look at me.
“The fuck you say.” Lucas.
“Where did you pick up such nomenclature, sweetheart?”
“Law and Order. Everything I know about investigation and the criminal justice system comes right off of Law and Order.”
“TV girl.” Lucas with a mean voice.
“Kill the prof, frame the jock,” I say.
“Probably doable,” Lowell says.
“Lots of planning. Lots of work,” I say.
The boys seem to consider the options. Eventually, they unknot the ropes and paddle us back the way we came.
“Paddle, Darling,” Lucas says.
Coming back against the current, though it is meandering at best, is still harder than straight up floating downstream, so I pick the paddle up out of the brown water in the bottom of the canoe and row.
Lowell does not put his clothes on. When we get back to the rental place, Old John comes out to help pull the canoe out of the water. He looks at Lowell and then at me, but if he has anything to say, he keeps it to himself.