A smoky ribbon of blood, diffused in water and flowing downstream, looks like enough loss to kill you. Mine was rushing out of my heel, stone-cut on a serrated edge of riverbed flint in the shallows below the dam of the San Gabriel River.
I had been rescuing shad fish, catching their quicksilver bodies by hand as they staggered upstream and tossing them into the deeper water on the other side of the impassable dam. The blades of them mirrored the bronze July sky and dazzled my eight-year-old eyes. The closer they got to the dam the less progress they made. It was a losing battle. By the time they got to me, they were stationary and furiously thrusting, able to swim no faster than the flow they struggled against. I stood with my legs apart, my back downstream, and snatched the fish from the water as they faltered below me. They were as exhausted as I was graceless. I glowed with life-saving.
High above me, beyond the stairway cut into the limestone and flint riverbank that I had climbed down half an hour earlier, my father sat in the cab of his canned-pea green ‘76 Chevy pickup, window down and engine off, jeopardizing the battery with the ballgame on AM radio. The buff vinyl of the bench seat had cracked and splintered, letting its little clouds of batting escape, a humid nest for the sweating Coors Light tallboy between his thighs. He was between jobs. He ran printing presses by trade and there were only about five of them in town. He’d burned through three of them showing up loaded or not at all, so his restitution was this indignity of summer vacation babysitting while Mom worked.
Every day we came to the river and he parked under his tree. He called it his tree, but it was older than his father’s father and bigger around than three men could circle with their hands clasped. If someone else were parked there, a fisherman or a bored teenager, my father would circle like a turkey vulture in his green Chevy, muttering his frustrated “God damn it,” (which always came out like spit—gottammit), until they left. He’d marked his territory with a summer’s-worth of Cambridge Light 100 butts, ground into the dirt with the pecan shells. Not a problem today, though. We’d gotten to the river just past noon with a grease-spotted paper bag of drive-thru tater tots and hickory sauce burgers, now empty on the floorboard along with his first three Silver Bullets.
Down in the river bed, two dozen lives saved, I was growing bored with the role of shad-fish Jesus Christ, so I started for the stairs. I might walk across the top of the dam to the field on the other side of the river for a while, I thought, or down to the playground. Or if he was ready to go home, it could be air-conditioning and TV. I worked through my case for home when, two steps away from the stairs, the cold intrusion sank into my right heel. I’d never been cut so deeply. Clammy fingers of shock scrabbled past my knee and half way up my thigh before the pain registered. I could feel the river moving in the flapping mouth of open skin, and then I saw the first of the blood. It moved through the water the way cigarette smoke rises to the ceiling of a still room, in slowly unfurling coils. The high sun lit up the red in garish contrast to the gray and pale of everything else. Spot color, my father had called it once when I spent one of his better days in his print shop with him, everything monochrome but for one splash of extravagance. He had explained it to me as a value option, cheaper than full-color printing, but better at least than black and white. To me it seemed perfect, with more drama than either. A single bright color blazing out of everything shabby around it could change the pitch of the whole world. The spot color of my blood in the current was beautiful, but I was certain that I was going to die.
He was up there, above the high wall of the bank, and I needed to get to him. Back then I still believed that his cool ease under stress meant that he was in control. I walked on the toe of my flayed foot, praying not to slip on the algae-slick riverbed, and when I reached the first stair my foot left a darker, less living-red constellation of splatter. I put my hand to the cool stone wall of the embankment to steady my climb and made my way, one gush of red stars at a time, to the top. The twenty feet of ground to the truck still ahead was a wasteland of pebble-packed earth and crushed pecan shells. I could see him, gray head down, his tea-brown forearm hanging out of the driver’s side window with a cigarette between the gnarly fingers. I made my way, every hobbling step toward my certainty that I would be taken in arms, healed, and pitied. I reached the passenger side and opened the door with a grimace. Like the weeping Virgin hanging at the foot of the cross, I dragged myself onto the shredded bench seat, pulled my foot up to my father’s eye level, and presented my suffering.
He let out a quick resigned hiss. “Gottammit,” he said. “Let’s go.” “I’m sorry,” I said. But he didn’t say anything else or look at me.
This is how I learned to shut up, this day and others. When my father took me to the Possum Creek Inn so he could drink Highland Mist and play pool and I could drink Cherry Coke and shut up, I learned it. When I could hear the screaming and the slamming through the cardboard walls of the mobile home on I-35, and I wanted to intervene like in the very special episodes, but his thunder was too much, I learned it. When his boss, or a creditor, or a bookie called the house and I picked up and “Where the fuck is he?” came over the receiver, and I knew the anger on the phone would transform into his own, I learned it. When I was older and I could give him money, or buy him scotch, or get him pills, or teach him how to find porn on the Internet, and nobody could talk about it and nobody would talk about it, I learned it and learned it and learned it.
So, in the truck that day, I shut up about it. My foot wasn’t bleeding much anymore, just a few drips falling to the rubber floor mats of my father’s truck, black on gray in the shaded footwell.
Bryan Lindsey is a public high school teacher in Dallas, Texas. He lives with his wife, writer, editor, and teacher Chelsea Laine Wells. Together they co-edit a journal of teen writing called Hypernova Lit and raise a blended family of four children, two old cats, and two rescued pit bulls. When they aren’t working, caring for their animals, or parenting, they’re on a date, probably at the movies. Bryan has been published in Gravel Magazine, Shimmer, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. He’s @LitWithLindsey on social media.
