Rainy night and a whole car down there. That was the talk. Belted into the passenger seat, someone had reported, sitting bolt upright, they’d said, a man who thought he was going for a Sunday drive, crisp white shirt, shadows flickering over him. Music up, windows down, his old friend at the wheel.
Red lights flashing on the shore. Floodlights. Radios crackling with static, blurting metallic, unintelligible voices. A small crowd of people, some drinking beers, on the hillside above. The generator grinding under it all like a toothache.
First, they dragged a hook through the blood dark water, winched the car onto the shore. Battered and glinting beast in the floods. Nothing inside. Then they sent divers down, their lights vague haloes in the murk. The divers surfaced, shook their heads. Unclipped from orange safety lines. Had seen nothing. Felt nothing. Mud and weeds. A rake handle. A beer can filled with silt.
A thin black man, maybe twenty-five, wet and shivering, wearing a black beanie, sits handcuffed in the squad car. He cranes his neck to see, his intense eyes straining through mist and fog.
The white detective, a thick man, square-jawed, close-set eyes, stares at the water, then across at the row of pines lit up on the far shore. He finishes his smoke, tosses it into the river.
The uniformed cop, a big-bellied man with a pinkish baby face, stands at his shoulder.
“I’m calling it,” the detective says. “Let him go.”
The detective walks to his unmarked car, parked under a willow’s dark canopy.
The cop huffs over to his squad car, flings the rear door open—
bright light and the young man startles.
The cop yanks the black man roughly out, presses him face down against the trunk, jams the keys in and unlocks the cuffs. The man straightens, rubs his wrists.
“You’re free,” the cop says. “Go.” He shoves him. He stumbles and falls, sprawling in the mud.
Blast of static on a radio. Sudden roar and rumble of the detective’s car. Headlights flash over the man on the ground who looks up in time to watch the car spin past him, spattering mud.
The young man rolls onto his back, eyes squeezed shut. He lies there a long time, listening as his car is cranked onto a flatbed, equipment is stashed, doors and trunks slammed, engines started. He listens until all he hears is a faint rush of wind in the willow.
When he opens his eyes, the rain has stopped. Above him, the clouds have parted; a few stars are shining crisp in a clear pool of black sky. He is finally alone, and he lets himself breathe until his breathing turns to a choked sobbing and his sobbing turns to resolve.
He rolls onto his stomach and pushes himself onto his hands and knees. He rises shakily to his feet and begins the slog up the rise toward the empty two-lane road that will take him home, where his mother will be sitting in the kitchen with a smoke and a cup of black coffee, waiting up as usual for her boy to come safely home.
# # #
Jon Davis is the author of five chapbooks and six full-length poetry collections—Dangerous Amusements, Scrimmage of Appetite, Preliminary Report, Heteronymy: An Anthology, Improbable Creatures, and, most recently, An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat (Grid Books, 2019). Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize, the Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He taught 23 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts before founding, in 2013, the IAIA MFA in Creative Writing, which he directed until his retirement in 2018.
Photo: Matt Duncan
