Color of Rust
Wilderstory 02
The old biker waded knee-deep into the river.
The first thing to go was his black leather vest, sewn up with a life’s worth of badges and totems. It dropped from his shoulders with a shrug.
Next was his shirt. Flung off, it descended softly to the water.
Shivering and half naked, he looked like a different creature. The ruddy neck. The unkept beard. The chaotic flash in his eyes. He was suddenly wild. Feral.
But not alone.
“Something’s up,” thought Abe.
He sat in the shallows along the far bank, himself mostly submerged, and looked on with an ever-increasing sense of dread. Only his head was visible above the surface, and even that was nearly impossible to discern.
The old biker would never have known he was here. Muck and mire, the accumulation from seasons uncounted, locked Abe’s visage into a permanent state of unmoving. He had been bound to this spot in the river; enslaved by some arcane bewitchment. But he felt a stirring.
Across the way, the old biker was singing. It sounded like a work song. A sea shanty. He struggled to pull his boots off in the water. Hopping and splashing off-balance, he chucked them, end over end, into the deep.
And then he slipped under.
“Shit,” Abe groaned. He pushed against the immutable force that restrained his limbs. What before was rigid, now felt malleable. Abe pushed again with renewed vigor. Decades of sludge and sediment slowly gave way. He felt fresh water coursing around his fingers and toes.
Abe looked across the river to the place where he last saw the old man standing. He took a deep breath and bent his body headlong into the water. And like an earthen dam that gives way at one fateful point — when a trivial fissure finally becomes an uncontainable rift — he broke free.
The underwater was stained the color of rust. Abe swam, frog-like, into its depths. He sensed a great vastness in the space below him. A bottomlessness. And then, a faint glow.
He was in the center of the river now — and deep — where the current moved but also didn’t seem to move at all. Holding his breath, he pushed down toward the light.
Amid a veil of swirling debris, Abe perceived the shape of a familiar figure. It was the old biker. He was caught in a creeping tangle of weeds. And his pale skin, reflecting the thin light from the surface, glowed with a fluttering phosphorescence of its own.
Abe watched as darkened tendrils reached out and encircled his arms and legs. Like delicate fingers, they moved hesitantly along his flesh. The man’s white hair and flowing beard mimicked their movement, swaying and curling in the abyss like something still alive.
Abe noticed a darkened blotch on the back of the man’s shoulder. It was bluish-black and florid. “A tattoo,” he realized.
He tried to swim closer, but was slowed by a churning from below. It swelled into a rush of bubbles; a boiling, frothing effervescence that roiled around Abe’s ears and sent him tumbling upwards. Amid the chaos, he heard an ancient, familiar voice.
“Away,” it whispered.
A legion of tiny fish rushed through, seething, and ruptured the mass of bubbles with a sudden burst of violence. They rolled and battered Abe. And they pushed him up; tumbling, until the light from above was inescapable.
Abe gasped and broke to the surface with a great heave. The water around him boiled with turbulence from the fish.
And then they were gone.
Abe waded to the edge of the river, his fists clenched. Looking down, he noticed the tail of a small fish caught between his fingers. He carefully opened his hand to reveal a slender, silvery shape. It was dark and metallic, and it quivered with an unnatural quality.
It bent and writhed in the palm of his hand, finally revealing its true shape.
A key.
Without thinking, he popped it into his mouth and swallowed. He felt the wriggling form go down by degrees. Slipping. Stopping. Until finally settling deep inside.
Abe exhaled with a long moan, as if a great weight had been suddenly lifted. Then, for the first time in almost one hundred years, he stepped free of the river.
Not knowing where to go, Abe followed a sandy path up from the river’s edge. The dry stones felt foreign beneath his bare feet.
The old biker had left his Indian motorbike in a clearing by the trail. On one of the handlebars, Abe noticed a clothespin with a small yellow envelope clasped inside. It was no bigger than a folded dollar bill. On the back of it, Abe read only one word.
Buddy?
A distant voice.
Hey buddy, you okay?
Abe shook himself, as if waking from a dream.
It was Carl, leaning into his field of vision. “I wouldn’t normally mind you stayin’ here,” he said, “But before long, someone else is gonna need to use that pump.”
A hot breeze was coming in over the nearby highway. Diesel was in the air, and the flittering triangular flags were doing their never-ending thing. The bus with the children was long gone.
Abe looked down at the small yellow envelope in his hand. He turned it over to reveal the single handwritten word: Yours.
After clipping the envelope back in its clothespin, Abe readied his bike to leave. He kicked it over a few times, opened the choke and flipped the ignition. As he stood up to push the kick-lever one last time, he noticed a shadow on the ground beside one of the gasoline pumps.
It was the rag doll.
Abe stepped over to pick it up.
Getting back on his bike, he turned to Carl, who was sitting on the curb drinking a cola. “Which way did they go?” he asked.
Carl pointed west. And the old Indian roared to life.
