It was after midnight and I had just put a couple of motel rooms on my American Express card in Childress.
In the balmy Texas night, bats darted to and fro gobbling down moths and mosquitoes in the parking lot lights, and Julie stood behind me in the doorway in just her bra and panties, waiting for me to come inside and be good to her.
Inside the room, lights off, the blackness near complete, Julie and I once more got into the act; doing what teenagers and old married folks and even animals do.
And sleep came.
I had dreams in which old truck drivers adopt little kids and barbecue tastes like new money. And then I had the dream.
My dad and I were fishing in the late afternoon. The mosquitoes had been buzzing in my ears despite several layers of bug spray and the sweat was running down my cheeks and spine. The river was a mirror for the sky, reflecting each cloud, each ray of sunshine perfectly. I was hungry and tired and anxious and I hadn’t had so much as a nibble. I was gazing at the white hemisphere of my cork, floating immobile, as if it were embedded in a sea of glass. I could almost see my reflection in the cork. My line was a strand of angel’s hair or spider-web silk making a series of long, undulating indentations in the water.
The cork went under fast, disappearing into obscurity, into the upside down alien landscape that existed beneath the mirror in which I was fishing.
I felt a tug, a strong pull, and for an instant I got a mental image of my alter-self sitting on an upside-down embankment, pulling with all his strength.
The little Zebco fishing rod nearly pulled free of my hands. I pushed all of my strength down into my fingers, my wrists, my lower arms, my biceps, and pulled back hard. The pulling from down below gave a little and I was winning.
“Got something?” my father asked, but he said it slowly, like his mouth was filled with Karo syrup or he was on twenty-eight rpms instead of forty-five.
I did have something. Something big. I pulled it further in. I remembered that I could reel-in and pull at the same time. I cranked hard and fast on the reel, my rod bending double. I thought it might snap before I landed what was on the other end.
I got the sense that something was coming up toward me, almost could feel the slickness of it against the cloying, cottony river bottom silt on the embankment below the surface. And what was coming was not a fish.
“Not a fish,” I tried to tell my dad, only no sound came out. It was like I’d gotten too much peanut butter wedged up against the roof of my mouth.
I saw two white things down under the water as the cork came up into the air, and I could see something waving, as if blown by the wind. It was hair.
The body had been dead in the river for eons. No fish or eel or crawfish would touch it, because the dead hands brushed them away each time they come near. That was why it could pull against me. But I’d snagged it. I was bringing it in.
The two white things were eyes. They were dead and knowing and accusative all at the same time.
When the head broke the surface the eyes blinked at me. The mouth opened and gallons of water spilled out.
It was someone I knew.
“Oh,” my dad said at Driving Miss Daisy speed, “It’s just a hank. Kill him and throw him back in.”
The hank was reaching for me, green and gray fingers dripping river bottom mud, contorted, grasping at the air just a short space from my ankles.
The hank’s other arm stretched up, dislocated from its shoulder and grasped my hip and squeezed.
It was Julie, squeezing my hip. I’d been nightmaring again.
She shook me.
“Awake,” I managed to mumble. “Ahm awake.”
She stopped.
I turned and curled into her, my stubbly cheek pressing against her soft breast.
She hummed me back to sleep.