Booty (iii)

Mugsie had knee boots. He came down off the bank and sat on his haunches at the river's edge, as if it were all he could do. "Don't kick it," he said. "Whatever you do, don't kick it."

I imagined it floating beneath the surface of the river current, a sub­marine drifting in slow motion toward some shallow spot downstream where it could rest up against a rock, a place where you might even spot it from the bank. I followed the path of the river in my mind, try­ing to find a rapids or a crossing up ahead, a place the bayonet might come to rest, a spot where we could just pick it up after school when we'd come back to hunt some more.

We kept walking, feeling over the bottom with our feet, kept search­ing through the gravel and the mud closer to the edge, but I realized I had lost the exact spot. "Where, Mugs?" I yelled. "Where did it go in?"

"Somewhere there," he said, and I knew from the way the passion had emptied itself from his voice that he'd already given up. It would be impossible to find it now, just a stroke of luck.

"You guys keep looking," Mugsie said. "I'll check the rest of the traps on this side."

I hadn't thought before that moment about time. There were more traps to check, a long bike ride back to town, and school.

"I better go on," John said. "You stay here. I'll get the rest of the traps."

I kept feeling along the river bottom, alone now and desperate. When I found something that crossed my foot, I reached in, oblivious to the soaking my jacket took. I dipped down to my shoulder to get in deep enough, but it was only a muddy, leafless stick.

Alone, I could cry. Why? --I started asking myself why: why on earth did I take that bayonet? what was in it for me?-the chance of looking tough? We didn't need that bayonet. We'd never really needed it. Hatchets worked better. Why did I steal it out of the closet the way I did? What did I want to prove? I swore at myself, cussed myself for the lame thing I'd done in the name of silly adventure.

"God, please," I said, "help me to find it." 

But right there in the river my father's God listened to my pleading and answered with silence. I was a child, my father's child, and I was sure I'd broken God's trust. So my father's God shook his head, because what I'd lost in the river's cold flow was something I'd taken in sin. I knew he couldn't bless sin.

So I stopped praying. Right there in the river, I knew it was hopeless. 

When we returned after school, the slow autumn sun had dried the grass. Sweat ran down behind my ears and into my hair by the time we reached the bend where the bayonet had disappeared. This time I went in without pants, barefoot, searching every inch of the muck close to the bank, reaching in for every stick or branch long enough to pro­mise anything. Mugsie and John stomped through the river with me, but I was the only one who was stripped.

Even when the sun fell beyond the cottonwoods at the edge of the pasture where the river turned back north, my friend never mentioned quitting. Finally, they let me say it: "It's gone forever probably," I told them, stepping out of the muck, my jaw quivering. "There's nothing we can do anyway."

Neither of them dissented.

___________________ 

Tomorrow: So many years later, he approaches the story with his father.