By T.E. Hahn
Cedron remembers a time when the sunlight spread across Wasabi River, and Dylan leaned over the water’s edge, closed his eyes, and inhaled. His Dad’s body was buried in the hood of his car in the driveway while fixing his engine. His mom dug holes for flowers in her garden—this memory during a time when she still believed things could grow. “Come smell,” Dylan said. “It smells like summer.”
But now, from Cedron’s open living room window years later, Wasabi smells as stale as basemented baby clothes as it rages downstream, inflamed from an impending storm.
Cedron leans forward on the couch, grabs a section of his t-shirt, and sniffs. Maybe the smell isn’t Wasabi. Maybe he left a load of laundry in the washer too long again. But it isn’t his shirt either. It’s probably rainwater from last week’s storm. There are cracks in the foundation, and his basement floods after heavy rain. He needs a water pump. He needs to clean up the mold and mess.
He finishes his beer and leans back into the deep groove of his sofa as he watches a blank television screen. Past the T.V. is the front door, which opens into the tiny, mustard-colored kitchen, matching the house’s siding. He and Dylan had always loved the color, the house’s quirks, even as children before seeing the inside.
Wasabi shushes him from the open window. He crushes the beer can and throws it across the room. He stands, grips the armrest, lumbers to the lime green refrigerator, and grabs another beer from inside. He pulls back the curtains over the front door’s half-moon window to see the now empty section of dead grass next to his Jeep. Farther in the darkness is the dirt road. He can’t see across it. The streetlamps have long been extinguished. He hasn’t seen a Light and Power truck on his road since he was a teen. With or without light, he knows what’s across the road — a slight dip and then a sharp drop to the icy waters of Wasabi, as if God had cut a giant step into the earth for himself, just in case.
Cedron has called the river “Wasabi” since he was young. One humid day, his father took him and Dylan fishing where he told them that the river-bottom is covered with mossy rocks, and that there’s a time during the day when, if the sun hits the water at a certain angle, at a certain time of day, the rocks glow wasabi green. But no matter what time of day, or how many trips Cedron and Dylan had made to the river, neither of them had ever seen the luminous glow.
Hoping to drown the river, Cedron cracks open a fifth beer. He presses his face against the cool window, straining to see down the road, imagining the two mile walk to his parents’ house. His father would be at the front door with tobaccoed breath. His mother in the background, grinding her teeth next to a half-smoked, still lit cigarette in an ashtray, her framed photo of Dylan holding a catfish next to her dog-eared King James Bible on the coffee table. She’s searching for words. Searching for meaning. Searching for anything to pass the time. But now she’s tired. She has a headache. She needs rest. And it’s time for Cedron to leave.
Cedron collapses back into his groove on the couch. The fifth beer has helped. He can hardly hear Wasabi’s black noise.
“Hello?”
Cedron doesn’t move. He waits with the beer suspended in front of him. Then there’s a knock at the front door.
“You home?” a voice calls.
He can’t remember the last time he had an unannounced visitor. He waits for the person to leave, but there are more knocks. He stands, walks to the door, and pushes the curtain aside. A red Cabela hat hides the tall visitor’s face.
“What do you want?” Cedron yells.
“Can you open the door?”
He envisions fighting the man in several scenarios, but the result is always the same — Cedron loses. He takes another look through the window, grabs his rusted fillet knife out of the kitchen drawer, and holds it behind his back before cracking the door open.
“I’m your neighbor,” the man says.
Cedron doesn’t initially recognize him in the dark of the night.
“Can I come in?”
“What for?”
“Can I come in?”
Cedron hesitates, then thumbs the cool knife handle behind him. He steps aside and opens the door all the way.
The tall man enters, ducking his head to avoid the doorframe. The knife doesn’t seem enough. His thick-rimmed glasses make his eyes seem like halved hard boiled eggs. The dim kitchen light sallows his skin. His plaid shirt and jeans are stained. His boots track clumps of what looks like chocolate cake over the cracked linoleum.
“Is that shit?” Cedron says.
The man looks down at the mess on the floor, then back at Cedron. “I’m Bruce. I live down the road.”
Cedron places the knife on the counter behind his back. He tries to remember when he was a kid, if he had ever seen Bruce. He feels like he remembers him, but the beer has polluted his memory, and thinking that far back hurts Cedron’s head, like when Mom had pulled back his bedroom curtains the morning after a night of drinking.
“What happened to your girl? I’ve seen a girl come and go.”
“She doesn’t live here anymore.”
“You screw up?” Bruce says, composed, unblinking.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m selling stuff.”
“Like what?”
“This and that. Cleaning out the basement. Need anything?” he says, scanning the inside of the kitchen.
The front door is still open. The cool night pushes a heat-seeking mosquito inside the house. It bounces off the kitchen light and vanishes deeper into the house where it will wait until Cedron has forgotten.
Bruce lifts his head and inhales deeply as if resurfacing from water. “It wouldn’t hurt you to come and take a look.”
“No, I’m — ” Cedron gestures toward the living room, but there’s only his impression in the couch cushion. ” — in the middle of something.”
Bruce nods. “Just down the road. You’ll see the torches.” He turns and disappears into the night, leaving the door open.
Crickets and frogs fidget in the darkness. Cedron grabs a newspaper from a week’s worth of mail piled on the counter and rolls it into a swatter. He returns to the living room and stands still, waiting for movement. He can hear the blood throbbing in his ears, or maybe it’s Wasabi’s current. Cool air floods the room. The walls swell inward like a smoker’s lung. Cedron spots the mosquito. He’s on the glass of the open living room window. Cedron imagines that the mosquito may have come here by mistake, that he may have changed his mind after realizing this place isn’t what he expected. Cedron moves to the window, raises the paper bat high in the air, and slams it down onto the bug. It explodes across the pane in a smear of bug-body and donor blood.
“You comin’?” Bruce’s voice beckons from somewhere in the night, the front door still open.
Gnats swarm the kitchen light. The couch groove. The blank television. Bug guts. Musty air. Wasabi crowds the living room. Cedron’s mouth salivates as if he might puke, so he chugs the rest of his beer and hurries outside into fresh air, gasping for breath, slamming the door closed behind him. Bruce has vanished.
Flames flicker in the darkness down the road. The path is paved in dirt and gravel. The town barely considers it a street. Cedron walks farthest from the river, avoiding all its noise, its history. Dylan liked to walk barefoot alongside Wasabi. His small, calloused feet walked over the street’s gravel as if he had walked on rocks in the womb. But Cedron can’t recall the last time Wasabi was this incensed. Maybe when he was young.
Bruce’s gravel driveway is outlined with citronella torches. Three rectangular tables form a U cluttered with piles of junk. Bruce sits in a lawn chair behind the tables next to a squinty-eyed old lady with curly, copper hair. The torches’ flames cast shadows across her face and illuminate her gold crucifix necklace. Her eyes sink into swollen lids. Her oversized, red t-shirt matches her complexion. Bruce’s face has a similar glow.
“It’s late,” Cedron says. “I don’t think you’ll get many people at this hour.”
“Late?” Bruce says. “You mean early?”
Cedron looks down at his watchless wrist.
“This is Nilly,” Bruce says.
“Your wife?”
Bruce doesn’t respond.
“It’s a pleasure,” Cedron says, wiping cold sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.
Nilly smiles as if remembering a joke. She nods and stares at the darkness behind him.
“Let me know if you see anything you like,” Bruce says.
Machine parts, old baseball cards, cassette tapes. There is a little of everything, except Barbie dolls. There are many of them scattered throughout the piles. Most of the dolls are headless or nude. Or Cedron finds just a head, an arm, or tiny hands. It reminds him of a Nat Geo documentary on the Talheim Death Pit. Between a hubcap and a book, he spots a hand-carved wooden cross with the whittled initials BN and GK.
“Whose initials are these?” Cedron asks.
“Me and my wife,” Bruce says.
Cedron looks at Nilly, who’s still smiling at the darkness.
“You like movies?” Bruce asks.
“Depends.”
“You a man of God?”
“I’m not sure,” Cedron says. “I haven’t been to church since—a long time.”
Bruce motions with his head to another table. He only has one VHS movie. The Exorcist. Cedron saw this. Dylan swore he wasn’t scared, that he wasn’t closing his eyes. But during scary scenes, when the music would build, he’d look down at the bowl on his lap and say something like, “The popcorn’s a little burnt.” There was only one other time Cedron saw Dylan frightened — that blurry day, his small hands cut from gravel and rock, grasping, trying to take hold of something tangible in the cold waters, in the darkness below, first reaching for those slippery green rocks, then reaching for someone, for Cedron.
One of the torches huffs, claiming a winged life, and Cedron can’t help but wonder if the bug was the brother of the one on his newspaper back home.
“You sell beer?” Cedron says, half joking.
“No beer. I got guns.” Bruce moves to the last table. “You hunt?”
“Not really.” Even as the older child, Cedron wasn’t allowed to hold a rifle after accidentally dropping his father’s gun down Snake Staff Cliff.
“Give it to you for a hundred.”
Cedron holds the gun, hefts the wood and metal. He stares down the barrel. One eye shut. Inhales. It smells like burned wood. He runs his finger along the barrel and places it on the surprisingly warm trigger. He takes aim at Wasabi.
“Careful. One in the chamber. Safety’s on, but I’m always ready.” Bruce grabs the gun and places it on the table.
Cedron exhales. “It’s getting late.”
“Gotta be something you need.”
“I need a beer. I’d pay more than I should right now for one.”
They stand in the flickering light for a moment. The creases and wrinkles on Bruce’s face cast pockets of darkness across his skin like pieces of torn flesh.
“Wait here. I know what you need.” Bruce turns and walks the short gravel path back to his house and vanishes inside.
“Sit,” Nilly whispers, tapping the armrest of Bruce’s chair with her finger.
Cedron sits, and she grabs his hand. He wants to pull his arm away, but then it tingles, like running warm water over a frozen limb. The last time his mother touched his hand was after the unsuccessful attempt to fish Dylan’s body out of Wasabi, but that felt less like a touch and more like a release of a harbored vessel.
She squeezes Cedron’s hand so hard it cracks his knuckles. It sounds like the crunch of gravel, and the sound crescendos and swells until Bruce is standing next to Cedron, holding a bulky shadow that looks like the silhouette of a small body. Nilly releases Cedron’s tingling hand.
“I’ve had this ever since — ” he begins, but doesn’t finish.
“What?” Cedron says. “What?” he says again. “Is it —?”
Wasabi now sounds less like a river and more like his mother’s sobs with a pillow around his skull. Out of breath, Cedron leans closer to Bruce. His chair creaks. The torch huffs. Cedron’s hand reaches for the darkness.
Bruce extends the shadow so that the torches’ light can illuminate it. “A water pump. Only used it once. I even put new hoses on it.”
Cedron takes a deep breath. “How’d you know I need a pump?”
“You got a water problem. I smelled it when I walked in your house.” Bruce’s hands tremble as if the pump were too heavy for him to hold.
“Thank you.” Cedron stands and takes it from him. “How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing. Just take it.” Bruce sits in his chair next to Nilly and grabs her hand. “You should get started on cleaning your basement. Mold can kill.”
On the path back home, Cedron walks along Wasabi, but this time much closer, off the road, on the grass directly next to the steep drop down to the river. The sun is clawing up the sky and peeking over the top of the forest. Cedron slows, then stops altogether. He faces the river, closes his eyes, and listens with the water pump in his arms. Something heavy splashes into the river nearby. When Cedron opens his eyes, he’s blinded by thousands of wasabi green bulbs radiating at the bottom of the river. Wasabi slows, crystallizes. As Cedron’s eyes adjust, an outline takes shape in the water — a head, torso, legs, and hands — cut and bleeding, arms flailing, fingernails packed with dirt. As if God has snapped his fingers, the river rages. Cedron grips the pump and runs alongside the ledge, finding the safe path down to the edge of the turbulent water. He throws one hose into Wasabi and the other onto the dirt bank where he stands. And he pumps. He pumps so fast his arms burn. His palms bleed. His eyes sting. The sun rises too high, and now Wasabi’s green bulbs are an afterglow. Cedron pumps faster, sweating and bleeding, but all that remains is a muddled mess at his feet and two bloody and blistered palms. He collapses into the puddle, out of breath.
The river is black. The bottom is murky. He dips his raw hands into the cool water and allows the river to carry his blood downstream, swirling and snaking with the current, vanishing into the light of the morning.
losing our grip on purpose 