An excerpt from First Make Mad

The following is an excerpt generously shared with Dappled Things readers by Daniel Fitzpatrick from his new novel First Make Mad. The novel is available for purchase at Amazon or Wipf and Stock.

In a long curve from a shallow cove upstream to the deep outer bend to the south floated the jugs of orange juice, sweet tea, milk still bearing the insignias and slogans of corporate America: Tropicana, Arizona, Great Value, vessels emptied with a fisherman’s zest to range the weight of the upper world against the questioned deep. There were fourteen, their lids sealed shut again with silicon, their blank faces marked with my name and address and license number. Down the breathless surface of the river they sat, some motionless, others turning like instruments taking subtle measure of gravity, one nearby thumping into the water and bobbing back up, and the last, the one set hopefully, fearfully, in the deep bend in the river now some fifty yards from where I’d set it. A paper sheet of mist rested a foot above the surface of the water. It seeped beyond the banks and hung shining above the bare tops of my feet and coldly, tenderly licked my ankles in manacles that vanished and resolved anew wherever I stepped. A lemon colored spider swept the hair of my big toe, and I turned from the vision of the river to the van.

Down came the kayak again, the weight sliding from the roof to my neck to my shoulder and over the soft mud to the stream’s lucid edge, into which the bow slid, stirring up silt as the stern cut a V in the bank. Once more I turned to the van for the life vest, net, and pliers, then placing the net in a rod holder, the pliers beside the seat, and the vest unbuckled on my shoulders, I set one foot upon the flat curve of the boat’s bottom and with the other pushed off from the bank and slid, left foot dripping, into the cockpit as the glass surface rippled. All I knew was the urge downstream, down toward the last line and whatever, down in the dark, had dragged it and its anchor so far, and my neck prickled and a nervous tingling swelled in my calves, in my groin, and I pressed my legs hard against the foot braces and forced a long breath and imagined all urgency, all impulse slipping from my blood out into the mist that broke upon the bow and clung like the whispers of the dead making eternally downstream. And drifted with the dead and slalomed to the bottom like a sheet of paper through the air. The bow swung northward as I settled into the paddle’s easy milling rhythm. The white dawn rang with the brass clangor of geese, low enough to shoot, level with the decks of the houses ridged on either bank. From the far shore of stone and pine hung dry, decrepit limb lines, forgotten before the dam authorities had drawn the river down to its winter depth.

Summer, too, hanging there, decrepit, derelict though lingering like fingers in the current limestone green, baitless, rusted as the gars glided grey below the hull below the naked feet, surfacing to gulp the vivid humor, vanishing miles upstream or down with baits bottles leaders, long retired now, awaiting in cretacean endurance the slow tilt up to sun along the goldilocks circuit.

At the mouth of the northward cove, now dry, hulked a floating dock, long abandoned, too, and listing drunkenly downstream. Planting the paddle to starboard, I swung to beside the first jug, which lolled in the wake and spun on the freshly smoothed surface. Taking the line up hand over hand I felt only the five pound weight that had anchored the bait in place through the night, but as the line rose a faint throb coursed upward, and then the dull gold gleam of the channel cat appeared. In a moment the scaleless flesh flapped against the cold mud caked in the bottom of the boat. I wound the line about the jug, binding the hooks as I went, and set the rig in the stern.

The second and third lines rose empty, the untouched gizzards cold and white like gum chewed too long. I forced the barbs free and flung the unloved flesh back and watched it subside into the depths.

The fourth jug jumped as I approached and up to the net rose a six-pound blue cat, croaking. By the time I’d reached the deep bend of the river, seven fish lay gaping like Ruysdaels at my feet. The last, the longed-for, Tropicana bottle plunged as the boat approached, and through a long moment the advertised orange with the straw sticking out of its skin swelled again to the surface, scattering light as it rose. Reaching beneath the bottle into the chill, I gripped the line and gazed into the grey abyss. There was no resistance as I pulled but simply weight. The long hand-over-hand passage down the nylon was less fight than looming confidence of mass, detachment of the deep darkness drawn unbegrudingly up to the indistinct morning.

Vertical, all. No engines round the ridges and eternity’s atoms streaming down void renewing form, all being as it should have been unanticipated unremembered perfect since the second waking and mind now immobile drawn down to dark and nothing drawing eyes and skin into perception discrete and undistended as the sphere of every cell, osmosis foreign, mitochondria whirring soul to life as clouds like smoke along the crumbling surface.

Then an unseen tail lashed, and a boil broke the surface beside the boat like a monstrous breath sighed from the bottom. I’d seen nothing. Through the line, into my fingers, thrummed the slow impassive shaking of a wide head.

Disrupting not a single streaming atom, a mandolin sounded its faint fluted doublet notes, redolent of the Aegean. The limestone water maintained its flat stare, with now and then a rippling of the bow as the tail set the boat rolling to port and then back level.

Then the fish appeared, gold as the first created light and magnified by the river. A moment it hung weightless beside the boat. Leaning toward the surface I reached a length of line into the water and looped it twice around the yellow flesh near the anal fin and pulled. The chill green river beaded me as the sleek fin beat against the hull, while outside the contestant sphere, where the water surged as in a storm or the coincident wakes of the ski boats on the Fourth of July, the vast grey morning remained, even the mandolin in its Mixolydian sweetness.

The thrashing slowed, and the long body flexed faintly beside the boat as I lashed it to the black starboard cleats. We had slipped down center stream with the silent current and then near to the outer bank which rose, bare rock, to just above my eyes, then soared in white and violet sprays of dogwood and redbud to the ridge above. Hard pink nibs beaded the dark limbs, and in their diminutive season the white petals flickered like hieroglyphic eyes opening to remark the progress earth had made to Easter. Higher still floated the long prehistoric dry-bone stalks of the mimosas.

With a slow, courteous turn of the boat, arms and legs still dotted with river, I started toward shore, leaning to the left against the weight of the fish. Beside me passed two docks below a massive cabin of rain-red logs surmounted by the white dome of an observatory. In the quartz-blue water below hung the beautiful clown bodies of the long-eared sunfish, painted smiles rising past their black opercula and menacing each mote floating by their eyes. Above them roared a crow in a tumid pine, its breath flashing out cold and grey. The mandolin had subsided.

Heavily we steered along the shore. I leaned toward the dark grey clay bank, against the weight of the fish, gripping the paddle left of center to reach beyond the dappled back in pettish little strokes, gaze following each one gently past the fish’s head then drifting over the shore, hoof-printed and pawed in the parched nights. On the far side of the concrete ramp, beneath the pines now luminous with day mantling the mountains downtown, I eased the hull to rest against the bank and stepped softly out of the cockpit, keeping a hand on its edge against the sudden thrashing of the fish. But the fish was quiet. It lay calm in the clear water half the length of the boat, and its head merely moved side to side as I slipped the gloved fingers of my left hand into its gills and dragged it with the kayak up the bank to where the mud dried and dirt began to settle on my heels and to coat the ochre skin of the fish. The concrete ramp had risen on my right, and now ​my gaze, resting on the fish, fell instead on a slim pale foot, joined almost immediately by its fellow at the edge of the ramp. The nails were painted black with silver stars which, as I stared, took the forms of constellations. On the big nail of the first foot shone the Bear with Polaris guiding the eye over the ridge of the foot to the rim of black legging which rose without a wrinkle to the thigh and into a curtain of creamy fleece draped precipitously, as though immensely heavy, from shoulders straight as a scarecrow’s. A black strap ran up over the collarbone and down to the quieted mandolin. Clipped platinum feathers curved down and out about an oval face, pale as the feet so far below. The irises were black and seemed to spread their dark influence across the wide whiteness to the retracted lids. A blue vein beat down the aquiline china nose to pale pink half-curved lips parted without revealing teeth.

​“We’ve never met.”

​“No. But I’ve heard you.”

​“And I know,” she said, “that you are Roman Moran of 1922 Grant Lane, License 16061904.”

I’d returned to my fish, hoisted it from the dirt by leader and tail, and laid it at her feet. It slid three inches down the ramp and caught with a scratch of pectoral spine against concrete. She didn’t look down. 

​“I’m Searcy.”

​I coughed and looked down the fish’s back and over the river.

​“Yes, like the city.” I bent to the boat and sensed her eyes upon my back. “My mother was a Swanson. She had me in the creamery, so they say.” In my mind the word appeared, Swanson, blazoned in gold across the faces of gallon cartons of ice cream.

​The conversation needed nothing from me. I picked the seven fish from the floor of the kayak and tossed them onto the ramp.

​“That’s why we came here, you know. When the family cut Mother she said it was time--had been time for a long while, actually. So she came home to the river one night and it was days before Father found her or long enough anyway that the black-eyed man walked with her more than once up and down the bank with the mist licking at their ankles. They can say what they want but I don’t think I’m Father’s. He’s never minded. If he’s ever known. But he’s always been religious and it’s really only a little while ago that men got tired of raising the gods’ children. And of course there’s no one else out here.”

I’d raised the kayak to my shoulder and I heard the drops sliding from the hull striking cement and mud as I met her eye. The evolution of tense had not eluded me but her gaze said nothing as to whether she meant myth or prospect. The blood drummed a moment in my ear and I imagined the muddy drops rolling off the hull onto the concrete were blood and the kayak was lighter as I stepped up onto the ramp. A moment I stood straight, there between the long fish and the ramp’s edge. I leaned, felt the rush of blood as the boat bore me back downhill, and flung my left foot down over the fish’s back. I gazed away from the girl, looking intently over a hedge of holly to a wood pile tied beside a neighboring house, and started unevenly for the van, straddling the fish the first three steps.

“We’re not far from the Happy Hollow of course.” I flicked her a glance. She had turned and walked beside me, hands behind her back, eyes down as though to navigate by the stars flashing into view as her feet swung out ahead and fell to the ground from which the mist had vanished.

“There’s Eden hidden somewhere in the mountains. The natives brought them there, heard their weeping, the Caddo princess and the Cherokee exile. Sometimes you can hear them laughing.”

A pileated woodpecker chuckled in the row of pines along the water.

“See.”

The kayak slid onto the roof.

“That was a woodpecker.”

She caught my eye. Till then I’d registered nothing and her beauty struck me and appeared so perfect that I could have believed anything of her--believed that every word she said sprang entire from the nature of things as much even as that she herself were not real. Perhaps there lurked Eden in the mountains and the pileated woodpeckers bore out in the flaming touches of their red heads the sound of lovers laughing in that paradise. Similar had been the Lord-to-God before extinction. Though now they spoke of it and I believed it back from the dead in Delta swamps. She would have borne without effort all metaphor.

I turned to the river and the fish. It had lain immobile and swelled now with each step and each insistent inequivalent spreading of the gills. The black eyes were soft upon my back and waited as I turned, one hand within gill, the other below the deep cold curve of belly. The body hung in a mottled yellow smile while my own face fell blank with plodding straight across the damp grass brushed with brown needles, arms extended, thin cords of slime slipping now and then onto the bare tops of my feet. I slid the fish up alongside the kayak and lashed it to the driver’s side rail. From the moment we’d landed it had fallen still and remained so now save for a sudden slapping against the stained white roof, the first six beats falling precisely so that to the drunken accompaniment of the woodpecker I found my brain beating out a tango there in the grey morning growing warm.

“Exactly as I imagined it,” she said. “My pillow looks out on the bend and I knew as soon as I opened my eyes. Those were tarantelle I was playing. From holes out of the dark.”

I turned once more to the river, descending to the cool, caked bottom to collect the last of the gear. Once more across the cement and grass and the lift gate creaked aloft. At the driver’s door I stopped, three fingers on the handle, and stared about. She had gone. I listened for the chords and was afraid. Heard now not the mandolin but the lyre, the drum, a tango turned Dionysian. Furies unfurled bite by bite, a blaze arose, and what had been a self was white ash scattered on the ocean, dissolving drifting deeper into time, into memory. A doorbell rang and I jumped, child’s heart thudding from the green couch, now not watching dust in sun almost asleep but creeping, breathing sash and curtain aside to see the terror of a Thursday afternoon in New Orleans and the dead of what was not incarnate in white shirt, canvas pants paint-spattered casing brown muscle, brown bulk, brown arms broken with paint and the bell again, insistent, alarmed, and the frightened white face whispering from the dark of the hall don’t answer as a mourning dove glowed on a wire in the Sun.

And then again came the chuckle and the unimagined pluck of strings and the slap of tail on roof. I sat, removed my sandals and placed them sole to sole on the passenger floorboard and turned the key. The ice in the glass of coffee lingered, murky, tasteless dilution. I sipped, clicked my tongue against my top teeth, sipped again, and reversed and took the straight lane back up to the road, the river receding in the mirror as the tires grumbled over white rock and the wide scaleless tail beat its inscrutable signals.

Just beyond the gate, level with a verge of pine on my left and an angular sequence of shorn, knuckled crepe myrtle to my right, I stopped, stepped stiffly on bare feet to lock the gate, resumed the seat, and turned onto the road.