Floating Twigs Read online

  Floating Twigs

  Charles Tabb

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the copyright owner, except where permitted by law. Cover art by Dane of Ebook Launch.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 Charles Tabb

  Gifted Time Books

  Beaverdam, VA 23015

  ISBN-10: 1722104392

  ISBN-13: 978-1722104399

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing itself is a strictly solitary act, but no book is ever actually written alone. Many people help along the way, sometimes inadvertently. Friends and family lend encouragement and assistance when one finds himself stuck on a point. This book, of course, is no exception.

  First, thank you to my family for your undying support, especially my wife, Dee. The belief you all have in me goes further than you know. Writers are a strange lot. We doubt our ability to compose even a good sentence, and hearing from others that we can write good stories is like a healing balm. I mention here specifically family I thank who have moved on from this life and had characters, both major and minor, named in their honor: my maternal grandfather, Henry Pittman Mohead; my aunts, Mary Jane Dow and Dorothy Ledbetter, and my mother-in-law, Jane Terry.

  Thank you to friends who allowed me to name characters after them: Dawn Burton, Josh Cutshaw, Bob Ebert, Scott Humphrey, Anne Kennedy, and Chris Pinnix. A special thank you to Chuck and Trisha Shelton. Your hospitality and friendship are more abundant than water and more valuable than gold.

  Thank you to those who assisted by reading my manuscript, warts and all, and providing valuable feedback: Sue Schorling, Chuck and Trisha Shelton, and Laura Gariepy. You helped make this book much better than I alone could have ever made it.

  Thank you to my editor, Marilyn Mercer, and my book interior designer, JoAnn Meaker. All the good work you did shows. If any errors in text remain, they are my own.

  Finally, thank you to those who take the time to read this book. It was an intense labor of love and a story I’d carried around with me for years, which I believe all good literary books are. I hope you enjoy reading it even more than I enjoyed writing it.

  DEDICATION

  For my family, especially Dee, Cherisse, Laura, Dan, Alex and Cameron, and to my late mother, Martha Anne Mohead Tabb, known to her grandchildren as “Moopy.” She believed in me as only a mother can. Thank you all for everything.

  This book is also for all the dogs who teach us how to love. Now all we need to do is listen.

  Contents

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  About the Author

  These beauteous forms,

  Through a long absence, have not been to me

  As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

  But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

  In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

  Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

  And passing even into my purer mind

  With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

  Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

  As have no slight or trivial influence

  On that best portion of a good man's life,

  His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

  Of kindness and of love.

  --William Wordsworth

  From “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”

  No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

  --Aesop

  “The Lion and the Mouse”

  1

  I had known the day would come when circumstances forced my return to Denton, Florida, where I grew up. My parents had died before I finished high school, but another funeral brought me here now.

  The Denton of my childhood reminded me of an old man, settled and unchanging. However, on that sunny day back in 1990 as I drove across the bridge that spanned the inlet between Denton Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, I looked over the expanse of emerald-green water to the harbor that lay protected by Sugar Isle, a long barrier island of sugar-white sand. Instead of a harbor filled with fishing boats lazily dotting the landscape, a waterfront teeming with jet-skis and noise greeted me. New boat docks grew and twisted out of the adjoining land like cancerous growths. Beside the more expensive boats that had invaded the harbor, the older fishing boats looked like impoverished cousins. Seventeen years had scarred the town.

  Beyond the bridge I turned onto the road that led away from the harbor toward the house where I'd grown up. The small, rundown place still sagged among the pines and scrub oaks. As I approached it, grief and loss struck me, and I sat alone in my car and cried for the first time since leaving Denton. The memories flooded back along with the tears, but this time I welcomed them instead of pushing them back into their dark corner.

  Memory has a way of playing tricks on us. Sad memories fade into a haze that we never can be sure is honest, since we often embellish them with colorful hues to make them bearable, while good memories take on a luster they don’t deserve. But my memory of the events surrounding my thirteenth birthday is good. At least I think it is.

  It all began with finding Bones back in 1968 the day Roger, Lee and I swiped Dan Russell’s rowboat for a quick trip out to a barge that had become stuck in the sand a few days before. Roger and Lee were my best friends. We were always finding something to do, sometimes dangerous and often slightly illegal, and on that sunny June day we were on the verge of another adventure. Lee and Roger would be in trouble if we were caught with a stolen rowboat. I wouldn’t be because, well, my parents wouldn’t care.

  The barge sat mired on Sugar Isle’s north shore, which faced the harbor about three-hundred yards across the inlet. We figured fish would be swarming all around the accidental reef, and we wanted to catch some before someone hauled the barge away.

  We knew that Dan Russell, the rowboat’s owner, was in jail for at least the next few days after he vandalized his ex-girlfriend’s car and broke into her apartment, so he would never know we had “borrowed” his boat unless someone saw us and told, and that wasn’t very likely, but we still argued the point.

  “Man, what if your sister finds out and tells someone?” Roger said to Lee. “We’ll get it for sure then. Not only will Dan find out we took his boat, but our parents will kill us, too.”

  “Maybe we could bribe her,” I said.

  “Naw, Jack,” Lee said, his blue eyes twinkling at me from beneath his shaggy, sun-bleached bangs. “Sandra won’t tell. I got something on her if she does and she knows it.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Caught her smoking with Greg.”

  Greg was Sandra’s boyfriend. I knew she wouldn’t tell with that hanging over her head. Her parents despised Greg. Adding smoking to being with him would only make the offense worse.

  “What if they come for the barge and we’re fishing from it?” asked Roger. His freckles would grow as red as h
is curly hair when he became agitated, and they shone brightly now.

  Lee looked at Roger as if he had sprouted another nose. “So? We just leave. All they can do is yell at us.”

  “So, what are we waiting for?” I asked with a grin.

  Lee and I clambered into the small rowboat and Roger followed, still complaining under his breath. We stored our fishing gear in the shallow hull while making bets about who would catch the most fish. Untying the rope that secured the boat to the dock, we took turns rowing across the waters of the natural harbor. Once we were on our way, Roger's apprehension faded, as we knew it would. He would always complain, but he never backed out of a plan.

  Soon we were approaching the trapped barge. After we found a place to tie the boat to the abandoned craft, I climbed onto the flat, metal deck and instantly regretted it.

  “Hot feet! Hot feet!” I squealed as I danced around the surface of the barge, lifting my bare feet as soon as they landed on the sun-heated metal. Laughing, Lee and Roger grabbed two of the buckets we had brought to hold the fish, filled them with water, and emptied them onto the hot surface.

  I immediately hopped onto the wet area.

  “More. It’s better but still too hot,” I said, still doing a jig.

  They doused the deck a few more times before I was able to walk on it. “Man, you looked like your feet were on fire,” Lee said, laughing.

  “They were,” I said, joining their laughter.

  I was enjoying our simple camaraderie despite my home life, or maybe because of it. Although Lee and Roger knew my situation at home, we never discussed it. Everyone in town knew my parents were drunks. I had watched lots of Andy Griffith on TV and thought every town had its own drunk, and that it was my bad luck to have been born to Denton’s resident “Otis” and his equally intoxicated wife. However, I never laughed at the comic character on the TV show. For me it felt too real to be funny.

  We prepared to drop our lines into the water, baiting our hooks with bits of the raw bacon Lee had taken from his family’s refrigerator. The emptiness of Sugar Isle stretched out behind us, with only sand dunes to witness our day. The sun hung overhead and cooked our backs, already browned to a deep, golden tan from a lifetime of exposure.

  Lee’s line hit the water first, and a swarm of silver trout rushed to the greasy bait. “Whoa!” Lee said as he pulled his line up as fast as it had gone into the water. A small silver trout dangled and flipped on the hook.

  “Wow! They must be starving or something,” said Roger, dropping his line into the water. Immediately, a fish struck the bait. “Man, I ain’t never seen anything like this!” he said as he lifted the squirming fish from the water.

  “You ain’t never been to school either, huh?” I said and laughed.

  Roger looked at me. “Yeah, well you better get your line in the water if you expect to catch more than I do, Poindexter.”

  I dropped my line into the salt water with the same result. “Cooler than grits,” I said, holding up the wriggling fish.

  Within fifteen minutes, each of us had crept past any reasonable limit, but we continued to fish, undaunted. Finally, Roger noticed the abundance of fish and spoke up.

  “Hey, guys. I think we’re past our limit.”

  Lee and I looked at the three buckets, which were nearly overflowing.

  “Aw, man, look at that!” Lee said, amazed at how many we could catch so quickly. “We must have at least fifteen apiece!”

  “If someone sees that, we’re sunk. We’re gonna have to put some back.” Roger’s tone hinted he expected disagreement.

  “Are you crazy? I worked hard for those fish,”

  Lee said, seeming to dare Roger to force the issue.

  “Worked hard? It’s only been ten minutes!” said Roger.

  I watched the exchange. “More like fifteen.”

  “Gee, five more minutes. I’m sure the Marine Patrol will overlook the fact we’ve doubled what we could legally catch and keep because it took us a whole fifteen minutes to catch this many,” Roger said.

  Of course, it was Lee who made the pronouncement. “We’ll keep the thirty biggest ones. That’s ten apiece.”

  “But the limit is eight,” reminded Roger.

  Lee looked him in the eye and shrugged. “I’m keeping ten. You can throw all yours back if you want. No skin off my nose.”

  As we began choosing our fish, I heard a sound behind Lee. I looked toward the soft noise and my eyes bulged. “Oh, my God,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Look,” I said, but they had seen my frightened gaze and had already turned in its direction.

  “Sweet Jesus in a chariot race,” said Roger.

  Hobbling toward us was a large, mixed-breed male dog, at least that was what it seemed to be. It looked more like a dog’s skeleton with skin thrown over it like some threadbare rug tossed over a bush. The dog was starving. It was easy for us to see every bone beneath his hide. His fur was pale yellow with some white areas mixed in, but his most noticeable feature, other than the fact he was starving, was he was missing his right foreleg. It appeared to have been amputated at some point, and he had adjusted to getting around on his remaining legs.

  “What do we do?” asked Roger, the fear straining his voice to a squeal.

  At the sound of Roger’s voice, the dog’s tail began to wag sluggishly as his head drooped in submission. I exhaled, unaware I had been holding my breath. We didn’t know where the dog came from, or how he came to be on Sugar Isle, but he appeared to be friendly at least.

  “He must have smelled the fish,” said Lee.

  “Or the bacon,” I said. With that, I reached down and picked up the remaining bacon and tossed a few small pieces of it to the dog, who caught every piece before it hit the ground and swallowed it before he knew it was in his mouth. Fascinated, we stared at the result of extreme neglect.

  “What do we do?” asked Roger again, this time with pity.

  “He looks like he’d be a fine-looking dog if he wasn’t starving,” I said.

  “Yeah, and had four legs,” Lee added.

  “So what do we do?” asked Roger a third time.

  “I’m taking him home. I’m adopting him,” I was as surprised at my decision as my friends were.

  “Are you nuts? Your dad won’t let you keep a dog!” said Lee.

  I looked at him. He looked exasperated, as if I’d suggested we bring the barge home and store it in my back yard. I could tell what Lee was thinking; it was in his eyes. Your dad and mom are drunks. They’ll never go for this! Dogs cost money. You’re poor, the look said. But I had made up my mind.

  “Are you gonna take him home?” I asked Lee, challenging him.

  “I can’t. My mom’s scared of big dogs, especially ones that look hungry enough to eat you.”

  I looked at Roger.

  “No way!” said Roger without being asked. “We already have a dog. My dad would just put him down anyway, which may not be such a bad idea. He’s suffering.”

  “Not if he gets fed,” I said and began to approach the dog warily.

  “Ja-a-ack,” said Roger.

  “It’s okay. I’m the one with the food,” I said, holding up the remaining bacon. When I walked closer, the dog went to its back and bared its belly. I knelt to pet him, and he wagged his tail some more and licked my face. I could smell the raw bacon on his breath. I fed him the rest of it a piece at a time and smiled down at what I was already viewing as my new dog.

  “See? He’s my dog.” I looked at him as if he had suddenly been transformed into an award-winning show dog. “Come home with me, boy. I’ll figure out a way to fatten you up.”

  I stood and made a kissing sound, patting my thigh as I walked to the rowboat, the fish all but forgotten. The dog struggled to his feet and followed.

  I saw Lee and Roger exchange bewildered looks. “What are we gonna do?” Roger asked Lee, this time referring to me.

  Lee shrugged his shoulders and continued sorting the
smallest fish from his catch and throwing them back. “Help him bury the dog when his dad shoots it, I guess,” Lee said, not caring if I heard. They lacked my faith, which in reality I had no right to have.

  They looked at me again. I must have looked as though I had just found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And in a way, I guess I had.

  We climbed into the rowboat, making room for the dog, and paddled back to shore. We cleaned our catch, tossing the fish guts to the dog, who continued to swallow the offered food too fast to taste it while I wondered how I would convince my parents, especially my dad, to let me have the dog. Keeping a dog costs money. He obviously needed some veterinary care and lots of food. As we took turns rowing, we discussed how the dog ended up on the island in the first place. It was apparent from his condition he’d been abandoned for some time, probably roaming the beach and looking for food until we showed up.

  “You wanna come with me?” I asked Lee and Roger.

  “Where?” Lee asked.

  “To talk to my dad about the dog.”

  For the second time that day, Lee looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “No way.” I didn’t even need to get an answer from Roger. His look said it all.

  “How you think I should do it? I mean, you could at least try to give me some advice or something.”

  “You already ignored my advice,” Lee said.

  “Come on, Lee,” I said.

  He looked at me, accepting my decision with a shake of his head. “Well, I’d make sure he was in a good mood first. Other than that, I don’t know.”

  Roger spoke up. “How will you get the money to feed him? Your dad’s sure not to like that.”

  "I guess I could clean fish,” I said.

  In Denton many of the older kids would go down to the docks where the larger party boats brought the tourists in from a day of deep-sea fishing. They would stand along the edges of the dock, asking those getting off the boat if they needed their fish cleaned. The going rate was ten cents per pound of fish. A few red snapper and a couple of large grouper could net as much as three dollars. If the fishing was good and the tourists drunk enough, they might even add a tip on top of that. That was a lot of money in 1968, especially for a twelve-year-old. It would also pay for enough dog food for a week at least. One good week could pay for a veterinarian to look at the dog and take care of any minor problems. Three good weeks, and a kid my age felt like a Rockefeller.