Causeway

***"Roads out. Washed out." He squinted, he couldn't make out her face from where he stood.  His nostrils flared a moment as his lungs nipped into the filter. He spat the butt onto the gray, time slashed, pavement of Route 8 and watched Rawna climb through the empty windshield onto the hood. She formed her small hands into the shape of a megaphone.


"What!?"


He scratched his chin a moment, casting his eyes away from her sweat stretched pink tank top tweed slacks ensemble they'd picked out together at the local flea fair last season and into the cat tails in the ditch by the road side. He turned back to where Yipsbend road was supposed to have been. "The road's out! Causeway's gone."***








Acey squinted for several minutes at where Yipsbend road was supposed to be.  He closed his sun cracked eyelids for another fistful of seconds, splaying his right hand over forehead and gingerly messaging his temples.  Crushing his duck bill cap into his hand has he ran his fingers over his bare scalp he turned back toward his once white, rust specked, hunk of far east pickup truck and stared straight through it.

"What's the matter, A-C?"  Rawna sat in the passenger seat, silent for most of ride out to the Yipsbend river, and was not in a very humorous mood.  She rarely was, but since the second largest storm system that year plowed through the high country only two days ago she was especially disinclined toward laughter.  The homes of Yipsbend were not proofed against something so rare as a flood.  Rawna leaned awkwardly out of the passenger side window, trying not to burn her forearms on the sun scoured body work.  "Are we gonna keep lookin or what!"  Her words rattled off the cracked concrete like blunt bits of brass, pulled taught into the unmistakable twang of a fourth generation Yipsbender.

A heavy sigh collected in Acey's chest and then piled out of his nose like the Yips High baseball squad out of the dugout after a bean ball on another losing night.  He pat his plaid chest pocket for his soft pack and succeeding in finding a stump of something that must have gone through the wash last week.  He plucked it, put it to his lips, and lit it.  "No, Rawna.  No, no, no.  Can't go this way."  He popped his sun bleached cap back on his squarish head.  "Roads out."

"What?"

"Roads out.  Washed out."  He squinted, he couldn't make out her face from where he stood.  His nostrils flared a moment as his lungs nipped into the filter.  He spat the butt onto the gray, time slashed, pavement of Route 8 and watched Rawna climb through the empty windshield onto the hood.  She formed her small hands into the shape of a megaphone.

"What!?"

He scratched his chin a moment, casting his eyes away from her sweat stretched pink tank top tweed slacks ensemble they'd picked out together at the local flea fair last season and into the cat tails in the ditch by the road side.  He turned back to where Yipsbend road was supposed to have been.  "The road's out!  Causeway's gone."

"Well," she stomped a calf skin boot on the bent aluminum hood of the truck, "how are we supposed to find the generator if we can't get across the river."  He didn't have to look to know her hands were in her back pockets, one foot just in front of the other, maybe tapping impatiently, maybe not, tanned forehead wrinkled into that look of anger he was still not comfortable looking at directly.  No one really was.  Her anger looked like a mixture of confusion and bowel discomfort.

"I'm not really sure," he groused.  He couldn't leave her.  At least not here.  She'd wander back again.  And there would be hell to pay the Tanner clan.  There weren't enough shells in all of Yipsbend to put an end to them, and he was already in the hole once over.  Twice over was time to go shovel shopping and plot picking.  He scratched the patchy hair on his cheek.  The sun was getting to him.

"Do you want to try over there!"  Rawna shouted.  He looked over the shoulder where her voice seemed to be carrying loudest and tried to see into the knee high brown water, reflecting parts and pieces of the morning sun like an oil painting he saw for sale at the back  of a financial magazine he found rolled up in his glove box when his truck was still new.  "It looks like it might not be too deep there."

The river swell was bad two days before and was still in its early stages of recession.  She might be right.  But she was not the brightest Bender by a long shot.  Route 8 descended into the murky water and turned into a fifteen mile stretch of sun dimpled brown water with patches of reeds and tall grass dotting where the road should have been.  A bit farther down was the forest green Yipsbend road sign, bent at a 45 degree angle, the blue and white painted belly of a dislodged natural gas tank nestled against it.  Beyond it were the gentle inch high caps and ripples of the wide and deep Yipsbend river.  And no bridge.

"Doesn't matter Rawna."  He turned around and strode in brief steps back to his pickup.

"What doesn't matter, A-C?"

"There's no bridge."

"What'd you say, A-C?"  The C always got pinched between her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

"No bridge, hon'.  Doesn't matter where it's shallow in front of us. It drops about 52 feet 'round the middle."

"No generator today?"

"No," he climbed into the driver's seat through the empty space where the door Rawna pawned used to be and turned over the engine, "not today."

"What about tomorrow A-C?"  Rawna climbed through where the windshield never was, the tweed of her pants popping and snapping where it snagged on the deeply scratched blue vinyl of the dashboard.

"Tomorrow, sure."  The generator had not washed down onto the delta like everything else did.  It was not lost in the recent flood.  It was not lost at all.  Berry had it safe and sound in his back shed a few plots over from Acey and Rawna's mobile.  "Maybe they'll fix it by then."

"You mean the causeway?"

"Yeah."

The delta was a perfect hunting ground.  That was the first reason anyone ever went there.  It was also where things tended to collect when they washed away before they rode the monthly swell into lake Oswell.  Sometimes you could find anything.  Sometimes you could lose anything if you weren't careful.  The trench at the delta's edge was no place to go carelessly.  The currents were said to never release what they claimed along an almost 40 yard long stretch of sandy bank if you ventured past the sand bars.  A bottomless mouth beneath the stiff murky current.

"I hear some engineers are coming.  Crisis and all is what they're saying on the radio" he pat his chest pocket again.  She stuck a slightly twisted cigarette, butt first, under the rim of his cap just behind his ear.

"Are they gonna pontoon bridge it again or something?" She crossed her arms and stared at the side of his head.  Stared at his patchy high country beard.

"I figure, yes."  A brief smile creased his lips then evaporated as he glanced past Rawna, over his shoulder, and back across Route 8.  The road behind them turned into a glittering pencil as it vanished between yellow marshes and the tiny brown and white dots of more cat tails and willows against the flat horizon.  He shifted the pick up into reverse and swung it around, backing it up until he heard the easy rush of water through the iron rims of the rear wheels.

He paused a moment, nose wrinkling, before shifting back into first gear and pulling on into the long drive back to their plot.  "I figure, yes."