River Rising

By Kevin Kearney

When Aaron Coleman hires Robert Lee Maggard to do a few odd jobs around his remote farm, he has no idea that the soft-spoken kid with the altar boy’s face has a violent temper, a history of assault and a taste for crank -- and that these volatile elements will explode three days later in a savage attack that will leave Aaron near death with a traumatic brain injury.

Six months later, on the eve of Maggard’s trial, a hundred year flood engulfs the rural Missouri county. The chaos of the evacuation provides an opportunity for Maggard to engineer a violent escape from jail. Intent upon settling scores, he makes his way to the isolated farmhouse where Aaron -- still trying to recover from the violent assault -- and his daughter Ellie are stranded in the middle of a vast, flood-created lake.

In the ensuing death struggle, Aaron Coleman has to call on physical and emotional resources he thought were lost forever – his daughter’s life depends on it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Kearney
• Release date: Apr 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476402765

Kevin Kearney

Kevin Kearney is an award winning writer living in Santa Cruz, California.

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River Rising

Kevin Kearney

Published by Kevin Kearney at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Kevin Kearney

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Autumn

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Spring

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Autumn

1.

Maggard just showed up one day. Aaron Coleman’s yellow Lab Sadie sensed him first. She growled quietly from a deep place in her throat, the lion-colored fur on the back of her neck rising. Aaron looked up from his work and there he was, this young guy in Levis and a black t-shirt with the sleeves hacked off, slouching in the doorway of his workshop.

You need someone to do some work around here? he asked in a flat, soft voice.

Aaron looked him up and down hard, wondering why he hadn’t heard him come up. He was around twenty-one, twenty-two. The pale clear skin of his face was nearly beardless. What whiskers he had were black and thick on his upper lip and lower chin -- coarse sketchy stubble that set off his altar boy’s flushed cheeks and serious dark brows. His head was shaved, but not cleanly or freshly, still short enough that his scalp showed blue-white along the contours of his skull. His eyes were dark brown, almost black. Just a kid, though, nothing too remarkable about him except for his arms, which struck Aaron as bizarrely overdeveloped for someone with such a slender frame. The sharply defined packs of muscle and the bunched cords of his forearms were blue with veins and crude tattoos: a panther, a flaming skull, an iron cross, a spider poised in the center of a cobweb, a large-breasted pin-up, a dagger, a pair of dice showing snake eyes, and a name, Robert Lee.

Sadie, you calm down, Aaron scolded the dog, setting down the unfinished yew stave he’d been examining. Then, to the kid in the doorway, What kind of work can you do?

No special kind – if you’ve got something, just point me at it.

There was work to be done. Aaron Coleman was a bowyer, a maker of traditional wooden bows. A longtime hunter, he had taken up bow making after retiring to this backwoods Missouri farm, just to see if he could. After several botched attempts, he’d gotten good at it, just as he’d gotten good at everything he did, and eventually it had become a business -- a small, specialized business to be sure, but two years into it he found himself busy nearly every day, either shaping bow staves, ordering supplies, or preparing finished bows for shipping. He was spending less and less of his time keeping up with basic maintenance around the farm. The orchard needed pruning; the house needed paint; the fence surrounding the neglected kitchen garden needed mending.

I might be able to give you a few days work. Odd jobs, that kind of thing. $15 an hour if you get things done the way I want them done.

Cash? the kid asked.

Aaron nodded. Cash. What’s your name?

Robert Lee. He seemed to blink a lot. And he chewed nervously on his lower lip. Robert Lee Maggard.

I’m Aaron Coleman. You live around here, Robert Lee?

Down off Blackie Road. Aaron tried to picture Blackie Road, one of a number of similar blacktop roads that twisted up and down the nearby ridges like tunnels through the dense woods.

How far down?

I don’t know -- a mile or two.

How’d you get up here? I didn’t hear a car come up. His workshop -- originally a tumbledown chicken coop that he’d converted -- was set off to the side of the old farmhouse, but not so far from the driveway that he couldn’t hear cars approaching. And in the mornings he always had an ear cocked for the UPS truck, which came lumbering up his drive to drop off the raw material for his bows and to pick up the finished bows that he shipped to customers all over the country.

I walked. I don’t have a car right now.

Aaron looked down at the kid’s dusty black boots, then up at his dark, glistening eyes. Okay. He extended his hand to Robert Lee, and they shook. Let’s put you to work then.

And that was it. No formal interview, no application, just an agreement signified by a handshake and the kid nodding his head. Aaron led him from the workshop to the barn. In the dusty shadows he found a pruning saw attached to a pole, which he handed to Maggard. They walked down to the old apple orchard.

It was mid-October. The farm sat in the rich bottomland of a pocket river valley. On the steep ridges rising on either side, the thick stands of hardwoods had turned. A cool red-orange blaze flared on the slopes. In the orchard, the long grass beneath the apple tree was weighed down heavily by dew.

Aaron had neglected the twenty apple trees all year, not even bothering to pick the fruit. Most of it had fallen on its own. What remained on the branches was dried out, discolored, splotched with rust or picked at by birds. It was time to get the trees back into shape, maybe even have some apples to sell the next year.

He showed Maggard what he wanted done, which branches to cut, where to cut them, and where to stack the dead wood.

Maggard didn’t talk much, but he seemed to listen intently, nodding, his eyes narrowed. He worked all right that first morning, even seemed to take pleasure in hacking away at the tree branches, his muscular arms glistening, triceps jumping under the taut skin as he pushed and pulled the eight foot wooden pole, squinting up at the saw biting into the dead wood. Aaron made him a sandwich for lunch. He ate by himself – smoking a Marlboro at the same time -- sitting with his back against the outside wall of the workshop, staring off toward the tree line that marked the course of the small river, the Waukon, that ran along the western edge of the property. When Aaron offered him a cold beer after work, he took it and drank it off in three long swallows, handed the empty bottle back to Aaron, and then walked off.

See you tomorrow then, Aaron said. Maggard nodded, not turning back.

He wasn’t much for small talk, but from what little Aaron could pull out of him he gathered that he lived with his mother in a trailer in the deep woods between Aaron’s farm and Benton, the county seat, fifteen miles to the north. It was easy to make assumptions about the rest of it, easy to guess that he was a high school dropout with no greater ambition than to work at whatever minimum wage job came his way until he got bored or fired. His free time was probably spent playing video games, drinking Old Style up on the bluffs outside of town with his buddies, cranking endless reps of bicep curls. Just another lost kid.

Aaron couldn’t help marveling at his arms, and the muscles, the veins, the tattoos.

That’s a lot of artwork you’ve got there, he said. He was showing Maggard where to stack the wood that was big enough to burn in the fireplace. Let me show you what happens to a tattoo when you get into your sixties. Aaron rolled up the shirtsleeve that covered his right forearm, displaying a blurred blue tattoo that read USMC – Semper Fi in scrolled lettering. I got that right before I was sent to Nam in 1965. I was probably right around your age. Maggard glanced indifferently at Aaron’s tattoo, then returned to his work.

You know what Semper Fi means?

Maggard didn’t answer.

"It’s short for semper fidelis. Latin for ‘always faithful’". He stopped himself from saying any more on the subject. It made him feel old. Something else caught his eye on Maggard’s right shoulder -- two raised purple scars, crossed diagonally.

That’s not a tattoo – what is it? he asked, almost tempted to touch it.

A brand, Maggard said.

"A brand?"

Maggard shrugged like it was no big deal. That’s me. Brand X.

That must have hurt like hell.

Not so bad as you’d think if you get your head ready for it. The smell was the worst part.

At the end of the second day of work, Maggard peered into Aaron’s workshop and took it all in – the workbench and Aaron’s tools, the bins holding unfinished yew staves and billets, and the bows in various stages of completion. You pretty good at shooting those things? he asked. It was the first time he’d actually initiated a conversation.

Pretty good, Aaron said.

They look like something out of Robin Hood.

Robin Hood probably shot a bow just like one of these. They’re called longbows, English longbows. It was a hell of a weapon in its day – the machine gun of the Middle Ages. If you were good with one, you could fire maybe fifteen arrows per minute. A line of English archers could rain arrows down on their enemy from a couple hundred yards away. And they’re still pretty damned effective. Maggard seemed skeptical. Aaron strung up a bow that was nearly six feet long and handed it to Maggard, who held it gingerly and tentatively twanged the taut bowstring.

What do you think? Aaron asked.

I don’t know. I guess it’s okay. I mean, I can’t really tell just by looking at it.

Come on, Aaron said. I’ve got a target range set up down near the river. I’ll show you.

Taking back the bow and grabbing three arrows, he led Maggard through a pasture that hadn’t been grazed for years, with Sadie plunging ahead of them through clover and bursting milkweed. The range was a wall of hay bales to which he tacked bull’s eye paper targets and also used as a backstop for three-dimensional target shooting. The target was a nearly life-size white tail deer, complete with antlers. Something he’d seen in an ad in the back of American Bowman. Fashioned out of dense plastic self-sealing foam, it had a replaceable scoring plug inset into the kill zone, a ten-inch diameter circle slightly above and behind the front shoulder where the heart and lungs would be.

Aaron found target shooting relaxing, and essential to keeping the components of his shot finely honed. A week’s hunt might come down to one shot, one instant in which you could succeed or fail. Developing and maintaining the muscle and breathing control necessary to draw an 80-pound bow, hold the arrow steady while aiming, and then release it smoothly required a champion athlete’s dedication.

He positioned himself twenty-five yards away from the target, fitted a target arrow onto his bowstring, and with a smooth confident pull, he drew the bow to its full arc. Concentrating as he’d trained himself to concentrate through hours of practice, he sighted the deer target. There was an instant when he was as still as a statue, and then the arrow flew, burying itself in a blink deep into the foam plug above the deer’s front shoulder.

What do you think? he asked, not without pride.

Maggard squinted at the deer, then shrugged. An arrow will kill a deer? I mean a real deer?

Sure will. I get one every year. You want to try?

Aaron handed the bow to Maggard, who took it in his hands and stared at it. Then he handed it back. It seems like you’d have a better chance with a rifle. If I go deer hunting, I’d either use a rifle or deer slugs.

Aaron caught himself just short of launching into a discourse on the challenges of stalking game armed with a primitive weapon, how it heightened the difficulty -- and the satisfaction -- of the kill. How it connected the hunter to hunters and warriors of the past. How it honored the game brought down. All concepts too fine for Maggard to grasp, he decided.

Well, that’s the way it is with hunting. Everyone’s got his own style. I hunted with a rifle for years. Then I got into bows, and never looked back. He notched another arrow, and with his classic, grooved form, sent it flying to a point an inch away from his previous shot.

Maggard still wasn’t impressed. A deer slug would tear a hole in that target the size of your fist.

You sure you don’t want to take a shot?

I’ve got to get going, Maggard said, turning back toward the house.

Aaron watched him trudge off, then took a third shot, which glanced off the target’s rear haunch. He stole a sideways glance back toward Maggard, wondering why he’d let him get into his head.

The third day Maggard showed up late. He looked haggard and jumpy. Just overslept, he explained. Aaron noted that he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the previous two days. The orchard was finished, so Aaron set him to the task of scraping and painting the downstairs window frames of the farmhouse. Work that didn’t require pure physical exertion seemed to bore Maggard. Two hours into the day, Aaron sensed he was slacking. He’d barely finished two windows, and hadn’t even done a thorough job on them.

You’ve got to step it up, Robert Lee. And I want every bit of that paint off the wood. You’re leaving too much behind.

You don’t have to check on me all the time.

That wasn’t the response Aaron was looking for. I don’t want to check on you all the time. But I won’t accept a half-assed job either.

Maggard didn’t say anything in reply, but Aaron could tell he wanted to. He could see it in his face and the way he gripped the wide-bladed scraper, the way you’d grip a weapon you were thinking about using.

Aaron Coleman was sixty-five, just shy of six feet tall and fit, with a construction worker’s shoulders. He wore his steel gray hair short, and his face was seamed deeply at the corners of his eyes and in the hollows between his cheekbones and strong jaw. Although he’d been a contractor, running big development projects for most of his forty years in construction, he had never allowed himself to become deskbound and soft.

He saw the need to put things into perspective for Maggard. People who had worked for him during his construction career knew him to be tough, blunt, and impatient. He had very little tolerance for a bad attitude in one of his workers.

Look, if you don’t like the work, I’ll pay you off right now, he said.

Maggard applied the blade of the scraper to a rough scab of old paint. He clenched his jaw and dug furiously until the paint broke away.

I know it’s not easy, Aaron said, trying a note of encouragement. Some of the paint’s been on there nearly a hundred years. It won’t come off without a fight.

I’ll give it a fight, Maggard said, pushing so hard the blade slipped, driving his knuckles against the rough wood, tearing flesh from three of them. Aaron watched for the pain to register in Maggard’s eyes. He saw only defiance.

Just try to leave some skin on your knuckles, Aaron said.

The fourth day got off to a bad start and never got better.

Maggard was late again, by nearly an hour. He didn’t offer any excuses, just a resentful glare when Aaron called him on it.

It’s not a big thing, he said. He looked terrible – somehow exhausted and hyped up at the same time. He kept blinking, as though dust had gotten in his eyes. I’ll just stay later.

Maggard’s attitude rankled Aaron. Look, Robert Lee. I set the terms of your employment. 8:30’s a reasonable start time. You’re the one who’s going to have to make the accommodation, not me. This is just a bit of friendly advice from someone who’s hired and fired a lot of guys like you. You can’t just waltz up to a job site when it suits you and start working. You want to keep a job, you listen hard to what your boss tells you to do, and then you shut up and do it. You get out in the world a little more, you’ll see that’s what it’s like.

Maggard rubbed his eyes, then pressed his hands against his face for what seemed like a full minute, pressing so hard his fingertips whitened.

You okay? Aaron asked. Maggard let his hands drop to his side, and Aaron saw that his eyes were irritated and shadowed. It looked like he hadn’t slept for days.

He blinked back at Aaron. The rims of his eyes looked almost raw. I’m okay, he said finally, his voice surprisingly soft and even. I’ll just go get started.

Maggard finished up the windows by mid-morning – not entirely to Aaron’s satisfaction, but good enough. It wasn’t work that suited him, Aaron conceded; it required too much patience and attention to detail. And, maybe there wasn’t any work that suited him. Maybe he should just pay him off and let him go. But it was still fairly early in the day, and almost in spite of himself, he decided to give him one more task to see how he’d do.

His wife Diane had lived on the farm barely a year before she died. That spring, she plotted out a kitchen garden in a sunny spot between the house and the orchard. Aaron put up a fence to enclose about fifty square yards. She’d planted sweet corn, tomatoes, squash and pole beans, and had taken a good deal of joy and maybe consolation in the first green sprouts and shoots that she summoned from the rich soil. This was right at the time that she had started chemo, and the hours she spent tending the garden seemed to give her a way to take her mind off of her grim prognosis. It wasn’t long, though, before the deer got into it. Aaron, no farmer himself, had made the fence six feet high – at least two feet too short, he later learned, to keep out the deer. There was no way to fix it other than to pull out the existing fence and replace it. The day after he pulled out the posts, Diane’s doctor had her admitted into the hospital, and she never left. She was dead three weeks later.

Now a few volunteer tomato plants gave the only clue that Diane’s garden had ever been cleared and cultivated. The new fence posts he’d purchased the day before he drove her to the hospital were still in an orderly stack to the side. The roll of heavy gauge wire fencing was in a corner of the barn, along with the sacks of concrete meant for the post footings.

For months he’d intended to re-establish the garden, in part because the failure of his fence to protect it rankled him – the way any failure would – and in part because he saw it as a way of honoring Diane’s spirit. He still had vivid memories of her on her knees during her final month, weeding between the rows, her bare hands dark with soil, the floral print bandana on her head covering what little hair the chemo had left her. But getting the garden restarted never seemed to make it to the top of his to-do list, not with everything else that needed to be done every day.

You ready for something else? he asked Maggard.

What have you got?

Aaron led him to the garden plot, where they staked out the outline of the garden, and performed the rough calculations that dictated the placement of the twelve fence posts.

Here’s your new best friend, Aaron told him, handing him a two-handled posthole digger. Those posts are ten feet long. Each footing should be two feet deep, and about a foot across. And here’s a yardstick so you can keep track of the depth. Got it?

Yeah, I got it.

The soil here is pretty loose. You should have those holes dug in about two hours, then we can set the posts in concrete.

He watched him work from the window of his workshop. His shirt stripped off, his wiry frame glistening, the big muscles of his arms cut like a body builder’s, Maggard seemed to attack the ground with the posthole digger, plunging the twin steel tongues into the ground with shuddering force, closing the scoops by widening his grip on the handles, then heaving each load of fresh dirt out of the hole with a mighty grunt. To Aaron, it looked like he was fighting his work. His long experience with tools had taught him that there was a particular rhythm that allowed you to wield each tool efficiently. Once you found the rhythm, you reduced effort to a minimum. Robert Lee Maggard hadn’t arrived at that understanding – nor, in Aaron’s estimation, did he ever seem likely to.

When Maggard announced that he’d completed the task, Aaron left his work and walked around the perimeter, measuring the depth of the postholes. Nearly every one was several inches short of the two feet he’d asked for.

I want all of these two feet deep, Robert Lee. Twenty-four inches, not twenty-two or even twenty-three.

They were two feet when I measured them.

I’m not going to argue that with you. They’re not two feet now.

They’re close enough, aren’t they?

Close enough is not what I asked for. Just get it right.

Maggard was angry, but he directed his anger at his work, attacking it savagely. In fifteen minutes, he came back to Aaron, with the yardstick in his hand.

You want to measure now?