The Lime Twig by John Hawkes Page A

scooped out of the fog. Someone had shut off the engine.
    “Take a smoke now, Cowles—just a drag, mind you— and we’ll get on with it.”
    She ought to see her hubby now. She ought to see me now
.
    He had got his arm through the fork of the boom and was holding the lantern properly, away from his body and down, and the glare from its reflector lighted the figure of the man Cowles below him and in cold wet rivulets drifted sternward down the length of the barge. Midships were three hatches, two battened permanently shut, the third covered by a sagging canvas. Beside this last hatch and on a bale of hay sat a boy naked from the waist up and wearing twill riding britches. In the stem was a small cabin. On its roof, short booted legs dangling over the edge, a jockey in full racing dress sat with a cigarette now between his lips and hands clasped round one of his tiny knees.
    “Cowles! I want off …I want off this bloody coop!” he shouted.
    The cigarette popped into his mouth then. It was a trick he had. The lips were pursed round the hidden cigarette and the little man was staring up not at Cowles or Hencher but at himself, and even while Cowles was ordering the two of them, boy and jockey, to get a hop on and drag the tarpaulin off the hold, the jockey kept looking up at him, toe of one little boot twitching left and right but the large bright eyes remaining fixed on his own— until the cigarette popped out again and the dwarfed man allowed himself to be helped from his seat on the cabin roof by the stableboy whose arms, in the lantern light, were upraised and spattered with oil to the elbows.
    “Get a hop on now, we want no coppers or watchman or dock inspectors catching us at this bit of game. …”
    The fog was breaking, drifting away, once more sinking into the river. Long shreds of it were wrapped like rotted sails or remnants of a wet wash round the buttresses and hand-railings of the bridges, and humped outpourings of fog came rolling from within the cargo shed as if all the fuels of this cold fire were at last consumed. The wind had started up again, and now the moon was low, just overhead.
    “Here, use my bleeding knife, why don’t you?”
    The water was slimy with moonlight, the barge itself was slimy—all black and gold, dripping—and Cowles, having flung his own cigarette behind him and over the side, held the blade extended and moved down the slippery deck toward the boy and booted figure at the hatchwith the slow embarrassed step of a man who at any moment expects to walk upon eel or starfish and trip, lose his footing, sprawl heavily on a deck as unknown to him as this.
    “Here it is now, Mr. Banks!” He felt one of Hencher’s putty hands quick and soft and excited on his arm. “Now you’ll see what there is to see. …”
    He looked down upon the naked back, the jockey’s nodding cap, the big man Cowles and the knife stabbing at the ropes, until Cowles grunted and the three of them pulled off the tarpaulin and he was staring down at all the barge carried in its hold: the black space, the echo of bilge and, without movement, snort, or pawing of hoof, the single white marble shape of the horse, whose neck (from where he leaned over, trembling, on the quay) was the fluted and tapering neck of some serpent, while the head was an elongated white skull with nostrils, eye sockets, uplifted gracefully in the barge’s hold —
Draftsman by Emperor’s Hand out of Shallow Draft by Amulet, Castle Churl by Draftsman out of Likely Castle by Cold Masonry, Rock Castle by Castle Churl out of Words on Rock by Plebeian
…
until tonight when he’s ours, until tonight when he’s ours
. …
    “Didn’t I tell you, Mr. Banks? Didn’t I? Good as his word, that’s Hencher.”
    The whistles died one by one on the river and it was not Wednesday at all, only a time slipped off its cycle with hours and darkness never to be accounted for. There was water viscous and warm that lapped the sides of the barge; a