Heron

by Colin S. Whitlock

In the morning on the water among the maze of low islands, fixed before a breeze which Odis, reclined on the bow, couldn't feel, the little blue sailboat--centerboard up, sail hung out to starboard like a single great white wing in the morning light--glided slowly on the lake. White vapor hovered low, spilling from shade of green islands, wisping on the flat plane of water between the sky and its reflection.

Odis' niece Joan pushed the tiller, and the boat angled across the edge of an island into the vapor in its lee.

"Like flying," she said smiling, raising her chin to the vapor. "Like clouds."

He saw a dark shape on the muddy beach. It was tall for an animal and grey in the mist and shades.

"A blue, look!" he whispered.

The heron--giant, tense, awkward--without panic eyed them, turned, and opening its wings jumped, ungainly, into the air. It beat three awkward strokes, audibly beating the air, each successive stroke less awkward, and then not awkward at all but gliding on fixed wings swiftly and bright grey in the light above the trees.

"Hailp!" The voice from the wood behind the beach was low, its timbre coarse. "Hailp me!" came the voice again. "Oh Gaawwwd."

Odis looked at Joan, holding her eye, listening hard past his pulse, past the impulse to laugh. He listened past the creak and ping of the mast of the boat no longer in the wind but in the shade and lee of the island. The boat no longer traveled but was neither quite still. The mast kept shifting uncomfortably in the hole in the deck.

Odis looked at the shore and saw the muddy line of the beach. It was not a real beach, only a strip exposed because the lake was low. It rose to an abrupt ledge of pinestraw matting that topped the forest's two-layered floor visible in cross-section: black topsoil, red clay. Immediately behind the ledge stood the woods of mature rough pine, crowded beneath by sapling hardwood, low green vine, and small woody plants in thickets.

"Hello?" Odis said.

The voice came louder, "Gawd help me, I been shot, robbed o' my boat, and Lee is dead back in th' woods."

Absurd, unreal that voice--until like a pale ghost the man appeared. Odis saw him both suddenly and slowly, as if looking through the mirrored glass at the butcher's ghostly figure in the supermarket. The man was not twelve feet away in a thicket. He was slumped against a fallen pine trunk and he cupped his head gingerly at the eye in one hand. He was naked and rippled with fat. His white skin was welted and rashed. He sat corpulent, unprotected on the rough vegetation.

He was about fifty, Odis guessed. Odis saw the sparse hairs like wilted grass pasted to his twin sweaty breasts. The man's gut too was hung with dimpling fat and grew a crop of hair in a broad trail down to the moss of his crotch. Large black ants crawled on the man in marbling, streaming waves of motion. The ants, Odis saw when the man pulled his hand away from his head as if to dramatize his deep necessity, massed themselves competing with flies and gnats for space at a wound where the man's right eye had been. The wound was swollen, hemispherical. It looked precisely like a burst pomegranate.

Odis whispered, "Turn the boat around."

"Jesus, man!" Joan said. "We can't just --"

"Gawd, for the luv o' Gaaawwd don't leave please hailp me, I been shot can't you see goddammit? Goddammit?"

Only mildly surprised at his irritation with such a person, Odis excused the emotion completely--indeed, he tried to excuse it without reflection. But he finally had to self-consciously justify himself: sure the man was in trouble, bad trouble, but who knows what he did to get himself into it? People took all kinds of chances. People took stupid chances these days. Odis felt his obligation was elsewhere--toward his brother, whose daughter he was entrusted with, as he understood the situation. Odis acknowledged to himself his obligation to get help for this man, to notify the sheriff, send medical help, whatever. Send a rescue. A fourteen-foot boardsailer, he maintained before his conscience, is hardly a rescue craft of any kind.

But Joan was at the tiller, and she pivoted the boat straight in to the beach and in the dead air behind the island drew the sail in along the center of the boat. She sculled the rudder hard back and forth to propel the boat waggling up to the muddy rime at the shore.

Odis was out of the boat now, on his feet in the shallows, gripping the boat by the aluminum fitting where the bow-line was tied. He forcibly turned it away from the beach.

"Joan stop. Listen to me."

She stopped fighting with the rudder and glared, listening.

"They could still be around here, Joan." Odis opened his eyes widely, spoke quietly, intently, with great carefulness, conscious of the balance necessary to control Joan. Speak too harshly to her and it backfires every time; speak not forcefully enough and she ignores you. "They really could be, Joan."

Joan nodded blankly. She climbed off the boat.

"Joan, please." But silently, to himself: Dammit there she goes, dammit to hell.

Perhaps he could drag her away on the boat forcibly. It would be no easy accomplishment given the light air and tippy boat, and the size of them both--she going he guessed over a hundred pounds now, growing up strong. Not easy at all. Then he imagined lashing Joan, out cold, securely to the bow with the bow-line, her head pillowed with his beach towel, her long hair fanned out upon it, arms cradled comfortably under the ropes at her stomach--the ropes tight enough to support but not to bind. There she would be, safe with him on the boat sailing for the Islands Marina; and as they bore down on the pier from across Miller's Slough, sailing a broad reach in a light breeze, she would wake up, apologize, laugh. She would not remember being struck.

To strike little Joan could never feel right, but it seemed the logical thing to do.

He felt he must resolve to do it, yes really to strike her if need be, because here was a real situation. A real situation, by God. He hoped to Jesus he wouldn't have to hit her; she might never forgive him, although Danny would. He thought, God knows her father would do the same thing and he's told me himself a hundred times, in his simple way, do what you must to make her behave. She's a hard-head. Though Danny meant threats and bottom-swattings, and she was much younger then. Odis guessed she was widening out too much to swat down there anymore.

"Oh Gawd, oh Gawd," the man was bawling.

Joan was marching up the shallows to the beach while Odis stood in his daydreams holding the boat and watching her long skinny golden colt's legs popping through the water.

"Joan. Sooner we go, sooner he gets help."

Joan kept popping her colt's legs through the water, the long muscles snapping, recoiling, fluidly moving, and now she climbed the beach, the bottoms of her feet white then muddy. The plastic water bottle dangled from her finger on the loop that held the cap. She picked her way into the thicket.

"Joan." Odis felt himself breathing too hard. "Do what I say or I'm coming and take you with me."

But she turned, trembling, sane, not bawling or irrational. "We can't just leave him here. I'm giving him some water."

Well that would be fine, he supposed silently. Just fine, to give him some water and let's go. Guy didn't look too well, could use some water if he's been here long and looks like he's been here long, too long all right. Wound looks old enough, he thought, with the blood dried like that, and the heron felt comfortable here, so likely the robbers are long gone.

Odis hoped to God they were long gone and that Joan would listen to him and come on soon. He felt a prick of guilt and so he then hoped, for good measure, the guy would live.

"Ask him when it happened," Odis called from where he stood holding the boat.

Joan was rinsing the ants from the man's belly and giving him drinks of water. Then he was on his side moaning and rocking his body on the ground saying, "Oh man, oh man, ohhhhhhh."

"Shhh, shhh," Joan said. "Please mister, you're hurting yourself. Be still." He groaned louder, tone and volume rising, and she said, "Shut UP!"

The man became still.

Odis looked around behind him, west, at the long flat swell of the lake, deep water, a quiet flood connecting all the islands. They could be out there, he thought. He turned again, peered into the black woods where Lee, according to the man, lay dead.

A shape on the beach startled Odis. It was the heron. It stood stock still, flinty eyes watching him.

"God," he croaked. "Joan! The heron! It's back! It doesn't mind people! Joan!"

I sound irrational, he thought; I haven't explained to her that since the heron was here in the first place I thought the robbers had been gone because the heron would have been spooked if they had been here, but they weren't I thought, so the heron was here, or rather because the heron was here, but now it is back.

All these phrases occurred to Odis at once, so that the only opinion he could manage was that he himself, as a matter of fact, and of his own admission, was irrational.

But this opinion he made and perceived only dimly, briefly, in fragments and broken repetitions, like a single word or an unintelligible, intermittent code of beeps and dashes heard through whirling static.

She doesn't have any idea, Odis discovered himself thinking, not clearly meaning anything by the thought, nor intending to, nor capable of intention at that moment. Rather, he was making a simple reflexive use of the thought, as naturally as a stumbling person grasps at a handrail, or as in midair a falling person wheels arms backwards.

"Odis!" she called from the thicket, small and brown as a stick crouching beside the naked fat man. "These ants! Bring the sail and let's put him on it."

"No way," he said. He welcomed the opportunity to argue. "The sail? Did you say the sail?"

"We can row with our hands--it'll be faster anyway in this stupid wind."

"It'll be faster if we leave right now, but it won't be if we stay and fix up a hospital for him."

"Just bring the sail? Whoever did this is gone. Why would they come back?" Joan bent again over the man, speaking softly as a child pretending. "What's your name, mister? You'll be all right, we're getting the sail for you to keep the ants off. What's your name? Can you tell me?"

"All right," Odis said finally, "this much, the sail, then we go. All right." It was not apparent to him that she heard. "All right Joan?"

She went on with what she was doing. Odis sullenly beached the boat and took down the sail. He removed it to the thicket.

The man's bowels emptied onto the sail as they moved him, a steaming leaf-brown surge between his legs flooding slowly across white Dacron. The backs of his hairy legs were drenched in it. The stench exploded gaseous, hot, pungent, and Odis stumbled through the thicket desperate for distance between himself and the man. Joan remained and dribbled the bottled water onto the sludge between the man's legs as if it could rinse it away.

She called, "Bring my beach towel so we can wash this off him. Dip it in the lake, will you?"

Odis rinsed his mouth in the lake and spat repeatedly. He stood next to the beached boat. He said nothing.

"Would you bring my towel?" she said.

Still he said nothing. He stood clenching his fists, as if to believe he was steeling himself to hit her. But he could no more believe that, finally, than believe he could fly. He might as well flap his arms to fly away over the little archipelago to the marina as try to hit her. He stood knowing that he could not strike her, and thinking impotently Dammit, dammit all, dammit to hell.

"Odis! My towel!"

When he unzipped the vinyl dry-bag for a towel with which to clean the man, he selected his own beach towel to give her. He owed his niece that much, as he understood the situation.

This is Colin S. Whitlock's first published story. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is a freelance public relations writer.