And Crawling Things Lurk

“Jackie,” said the voice from above, “you’re a disgrace.”

Jackie peered up at the uniformed figure standing on the trestle with one foot resting on the short stack of railroad ties that served as a railing and leaning over the edge with his crossed arms resting on his raised knee. Jackie got both eyes focused enough to see the thatch of prematurely white hair above the face, and had a pretty good idea what was coming. It was Evans. “I ain’t hurtin’ nothin’. Whyn’cha lea’me alone?”

“Because it’s my job to keep this town clean. You know, I sure get tired of hauling your butt in to sleep it off every week.”

“Go t’hell,” Jackie mumbled. “I got my righ’s.”

“Yeah,” came a grumble. “You’ve got your rights. You’ve got a right to drink yourself to death if that’s what you choose, but you don’t have to be so messy about it. And, Christ, man, it’s the middle of February, with more rain and night both not far off. Why the hell didn’t you just go home?”

Jackie was getting mad. It didn’t take much to make him mad – just usually not mad enough to do anything about it. Squinting his eyes against the sun and the smoke from the cigarette hanging from his slack lips, he glared up at the half-silhouetted figure and wanted to yell that he deserved a little respect – no, a lot of respect. After all, he had fought for his country, bled, suffered. Evans oughta respect him instead of treating him like some punk. Yeah! He should be honored by the community, toasted by dignitaries, lauded as a hero. He just couldn’t remember why. Or when. Or where. He could recall disconnected bits and pieces if he thought hard about it, but that gave him a headache, so he tried to avoid it. But he knew he had served; he still had his uniforms. Gramma even kept a couple of his medals with a piece of paper that described something about how he had fought and that he had suffered. He just couldn’t remember who the enemy was that he had fought and how they had made him suffer, but, still, he was sure it must have been horrendous and heroic. He ought to read that paper one of these days to remind him what it was. It was just that his reading wasn’t so great anymore. Gramma would probably read it to him. He should ask her…some day. Still, he was deserving of respect, and it was damned time he stood up and demanded it!

He struggled to his feet and promptly fell back down. But instead of plopping back onto the crate, one leg supported him more than the other just enough to twist him and land him in the space between the crate and an old railroad tie half buried at an angle near the base of the riverbank. He tried to rise again, but his rear-end was wedged. He rocked forward a couple of times, but he had neither the coordination nor the strength to pull loose. He settled back and peered up at the officer who, he could now see, was accompanied by a second uniform. He took a drag off his cigarette, sneered a grin, and muttered, “Go t’—hic—hell.”

“Dammit! I ought to leave you stuck there for the next flood tide. If I have to come down there just to pull your ass loose, you’re going to the bucket, for sure. So, show me you can stand up – and remain standing.”

Jackie started to try, again, to work himself loose, but then sat back and grinned at his old nemeses. “Naw…think I’ll jus’ stay righ’ here.”

“Shit. Come on, Ray. Help me drag him up here.” Officer Don Evans hooked his thumb at his partner, Ray Edwards, a new reserve officer on the department, and turned toward the downstream slope. “This place is called the Hole. Not just that little space beneath the trestle, but that entire area down there. This spur splits off from the main rail line north of town that curves around to the east, and it runs down here all along the west bank of the river and past all the old warehouses and factories…except for that gap right there.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to a short section of the trestle just upstream that had collapsed. “And then it ends just past that building.” He nodded ahead toward the south and a second abandoned building with a trash-piled loading dock. “It’s a leftover from the days when Cedar City had a working waterfront…way back when. The others closer into town have been kept up and converted to the little marina and other uses, but these down here on the south end have been abandoned for years.”

“Why didn’t anyone ever build over there?” Ray asked as he pointed over at the east bank close to a hundred feet away. Hay fields stretched over the flat land from just beyond the bank to where the hills arose a mile farther out, with only the outbuildings of a few farms showing. “Seems like a lot of wasted riverbank.”

“Hay farmers have always been pretty influential in these parts. The Barnes family owns most of the land over there, and Old Joe Barnes won’t allow it. Just like his daddy and granddaddy. Small towns and their politics. They never make sense, but that’s what make them so charming.”

The east edge of the old trestle hung out over the high bank and rested on pilings the size of telephone poles driven into the ground. As Don led Ray along the rails that ended at a barrier of stacked ties over a hundred feet ahead, just beyond that last building overlooking the river, he said, “The trestle would probably crumble under the weight of a train if one could come along now, even up there beyond where it burned and collapsed. But trains stopped coming down the spur when the businesses closed. Besides egrets, ducks and frogs, about the only inhabitants of the area, now, are the homeless. Jackie’s not homeless. He just likes it down here.”

Twelve feet below the trestle was a flood plain stretching thirty or forty feet from the trestle bank out to the river.

“It goes from just to the right over there on the other side of the slope where that wall of blackberries stretches from the water’s edge to the bank beneath the trestle, and all along that flat area down there,” he swept his arm to indicate the stretch of ground a couple of hundred feet long still muddy from a rainy morning, the highest point of no more than three feet above the water being at the base of the bank beneath where they stood, “to over there where the ground above the high tide ends. At low tide, the water’ll be about four feet lower with the ground sloping out to the deep channel in the middle they keep dredged for boats.”

The slope, a graded ramp with the upper end abutting the trestle and angling straight out toward the river with its lower end within six or eight feet of the water’s edge, was formed so many years ago it had taken on the erosion-shaped naturalness of the low mountains to east and west. From the bottom of the slope, a path meandered across the flat ground and around a pile of broken ties half obscured in a bramble patch. Stands of reeds lined the river in patches, and a chaparral of mostly deerweed, thistles and anise grew in clumps across the whole area like splotches of shaggy fur on the hide of a mangy dog.

“Each one has their own space down there, even Jackie. Some try to dig into the bank for better shelter, and others just curl up on the ground in the brush. That’s mainly in the summer, though. This time of year, it’s a bit damp down there, and cold. When you start working nights after we get you properly educated and oriented, your partners’ll probably bring you down here on occasion. Some of these characters aren’t exactly above lifting a thing or two from stores if they think they can get away with it...or if they get so soused they don’t think about it at all.”

Don reached over and patted the rookie’s shoulder and chuckled.

“But don’t let me give you the wrong impression. They’re not all that bad. They’re hardly ever violent, and then it’s usually just with each other, and never anything serious. Mainly, they’ve just got lousy personal hygiene and table manners. It never hurts to take a look down here occasionally just to make sure one of them isn’t so blotto they wander into the river or pass out and drown in their own puke. Just remember to bring gloves; it can get messy.”

Don pulled a wad of light blue, disposable gloves from the inside pocket of his Tuffy jacket, handed two to Ray, shoved most back into his pocket, then worked another set onto his own hands.

Jackie was still sitting in his own little hole when the officers stopped in front of him. He took a final drag and dropped the cigarette butt to the ground beside him, then he peered up at Don and glared. “You got no righ’ to h’rass me alla time. What’d I do?”

Don returned his glare for a moment then ground the still burning cigarette out with his toe before answering. “You crawled inside another bottle is what you did. Why don’t you clean yourself up? How can you live like this?”

“’s my business how I live. Like to have a drink wi’ my friends. Wha’s wrong with that?”

Don leaned forward and glared into Jackie’s face. “What’s wrong is that you don’t stop with a drink. Hell, you don’t stop with a bottle. You drink that boosted-alcohol crap until you piss and shit your pants. You puke all over yourself. And then, if you don’t pass out, you stumble back to the store for another bottle where you bump into folks and rub your stink off on them. You stagger across the street and make cars veer so they don’t run over you or smash into each other. Then, half the time, you pass out before you make it back down here, and I have to come and scoop you up out of the gutter. You stink up the neighborhood. You stink up my patrol car. You stink up the drunk-tank. One of these days, you’re going to stagger into the river instead of up the slope and stink it up. Then, it’s going to my job to fish your bloated body out of the water and explain to your Gramma why you didn’t come home. I don’t want to do that.”

Jackie didn’t take his eyes off Don’s face during the whole tirade, but when it was over, he dropped his eyes to his lap for a moment. When he looked back up, with a tear beginning to roll down one cheek, his face became stern again, and he said, “Well, it’s my life. I got a righ’...”

“No, Jackie, you don’t have that right. Not when it affects other people like it does. Come on, you’re going to have to sleep it off in the tank…again.”

With one hand under each armpit, they lifted him to his feet, but as soon as they started to take their hands away, he began sagging towards the ground. Their hands quickly went back to his armpits and raised him back up, but this time, they stayed. Taking most of his weight, they guided him around through the clutter of the corner of the Hole he had long ago staked out as his personal retreat.

Don kept his hand under Jackie’s armpit, but he pulled back as far as his arm would allow. “Jesus Christ, man,” he said, scrunching up his nose, “You are ripe! It’s going to take a week for the stink to go out of my car.”

“Then, lea’ me here,” Jackie responded with a grin showing his ready willingness to a clearly logical solution.

“No, not this time. Once again, you’re too far-gone. If I left you here, you’d probably just dissolve into the mud. Then I’d have to explain to the EPA why I let the river get so polluted.”

“Go t’—hic—he—hic—hell.”

Between Don’s stocky musculature and Ray’s long, ropy one, they had just gotten Jackie to the top of the slope and were about to step out onto the trestle. Jackie stopped walking and stood with his legs spread. Then, with a grin spreading across his face, a patch of wetness spread from his crotch down the inside of his left leg. Don was just about to berate his prisoner when Jackie’s grin got that unique, extra scrunch in his cheeks like a baby working to fill a diaper, and the aura of an overfilled outhouse increased substantially.

“Goddamit, Jackie! Why’d you do that? You could have held it, dammit!”

Still grinning, “Din’t wanna.”

“And, this, Ray, is why I carry a plastic tarp in the trunk. I’m not going to put him on the car seat even if it is vinyl, and I can throw the tarp away afterwards if it won’t hose clean.”

They guided Jackie and half carried him over the small ramps of packed dirt and rocks that made it easier for muscling shopping carts over the rail to and from the space between the rails where sheets of old plywood smoothed the way to another set of rock and dirt ramps over the other rail and descent to the street. Don left Ray to support Jackie leaning against the fender of the patrol car parked next to the trestle. With efficiency from practiced skill, Don got the tarp in place over the back seat and draped to the floor. With a bit more effort than probably should have been necessary, even as drunk as Jackie was, they poured him in and closed the door.

With the car’s interior air now not much different than that wafting from an open sewer, Don reached in and took a small blue jar from the glove compartment. He leaned against the front fender and noticed Ray eyeing the jar with confusion lining his young face. Don got a dab on his fingertip and handed the jar to Ray, who turned it to look at the label.

“It’s just Vicks,” Don said. “Put a dab in each nostril. It helps to take the edge off the stink long enough to get him to the station and into the tank. That mesh behind the front seat isn’t airtight, you know. Even as cold as it is, you might still want to keep your window down.”