The Lime Twig by John Hawkes

have expected it, should have carried a torch. Yet, whatever was to come his way would come, he knew, like this—slowly and out of a thick fog. Accidents, meetings unexpected, a figure emergingto put its arms about him: where to discover everything he dreamed of except in a fog. And, thinking of slippery corners, skin suddenly bruised, grappling hooks going blindly through the water: where to lose it all if not in the same white fog.
    Alone he waited until the great wooden shed was filled with the fog that caused the rotting along the water’s edge. His shirt was flat, wet against his chest. The forked iron boom on the quay was gone, and as for the two tankers that marked the vacated berth of the excursion boat, he knew they were there only by the dead sounds they made. All about him was the visible texture and density of the expanding fog. He was listening for the lorry’s engine, with the back of a hand kept trying to wipe his cheek.
    An engine was nearby suddenly, and despite the fog he knew that it was not Hencher’s lorry but was the river barge approaching on the lifting tide. And he was alone, shivering, helpless to give a signal. He had no torch, no packet of matches. No one trusted a man’s voice in a fog.
    All the bells and whistles in mid-river were going at once, and hearing the tones change, the strokes change, listening to the metallic or compressed-air sounds of sloops or ocean-going vessels protesting their identities and their vague shifting locations on the whole of this treacherous and fog-bound river’s surface—a horrible noise, a confused warning, a frightening celebration—he knew that only his own barge, of all this night’s drifting or anchored traffic, would come without lights and making no sound except for the soft and faltering sound ofthe engine itself. This he heard—surely someone was tinkering with it, nursing it, trying to stop the loss of oil with a bare hand—and each moment he waited for even these illicit sounds to go dead. But in the fog the barge engine was turning over and, all at once, a man out there cleared his throat.
    So he stood away from the packing crate and slowly went down to his hands and knees and discovered that he could see a little distance now, and began to crawl. He feared that the rats would get his hands; he ran his fingers round the crumbling edges of the holes; his creeping knee came down on fragments of a smashed bottle. There was an entire white sea-world Boating and swirling in that enormous open door, and he crawled out to it.
    “You couldn’t do nothing about the bleeding fog!”
    He had crossed the width of the quay, had got a grip on the iron joint of the boom and was trying to rise when the voice spoke up directly beneath him and he knew that if he fell it would not be into the greasy and squid-blackened water but onto the deck of the barge itself. He was unable to look down yet, but it was clear that the man who had spoken up at him had done so with a laugh, casually, without needing to cup his hands.
    Before the man had time to say it again—“You couldn’t do nothing about the bleeding fog, eh, Hencher? I wouldn’t ordinarily step out of the house on a night like this”—the quay had already shaken beneath the van’s tires and the headlamp had flicked on, suddenly, and hurt his eyes where he hung from the boom, onehand thrown out for balance and the other stuck like a dead man’s to the iron. Hencher, carrying two bright lanterns by wire loops, had come between himself and the lorry’s yellow headlamps—“Lively now, Mr. Banks,” he was saying without a smile—and had thrust one of the lanterns upon him in time to reach out his freed hand and catch the end of wet moving rope on the instant it came lashing up from the barge. So that the barge was docked, held safely by the rope turned twice round a piling, when he himself was finally able to look straight down and see it, the long and blunt-nosed barge riding high in a smooth bowl