Free Poachers by Tom Franklin

whispering.
    Bruce missing the wedding. No best man.
    How back from the long, silent honeymoon, I called Paul at Prissy’s and he said Bruce had quit his job at the plant and set out for New York.
    Jan saying, “Good riddance.” My ridiculous sunburned face in the wedding pictures.
    Paul trying to set Prissy’s afire and being arrested.
    After a couple more hours on the bike, Bruce and I stop under a bridge for a smoke. He says it was too cold in New York; he’d ridden back, decided it was time to get quote responsible. He says he found a job as a hose man in a chicken-processing plant. They killed a hundred and fifty thousand broilers a day. Millions of gallons of blood, Bruce says. It ran into the sewer like a river. That was in Guntersville, Alabama. He stayed there for two weeks, ten working days, a million and a half dead birds.
    He met a woman named Patty there. He left her there.
    “She was a health nut, a vegetarian,” Bruce says. “Into hiking and shit. But she showed me this one place that I’m fixing to show you.”
    We get back on the bike and ride for another hour. Green signs naming places come and go and I doze until he slows the bike. An exit says Guntersville. We pull off the interstate, cut right at a two-lane and Bruce walks the bike up to seventy. We’re leaving civilization, I decide. An hour later he slows and takes a dirt road for a mile, two, the cornfields swelling to trees and the
    trees closing in. Past a no-trespassing sign, Bruce turns onto a path I wouldn’t have seen. Vines hang and we creep along, ducking low limbs, parting the leaves with our fingers.
    In a clearing we dismount.
“As far as el bike-o can go,” he explains.
    “Where the hell are we?”
    He grins and tosses me the knapsack, tells me there’s shorts inside. He peels down to his running shorts and stuffs his boots and clothes into the knapsack, puts on his running shoes and takes off.
    I haven’t run much since being married so I expect my legs to cramp, but they feel great, never stronger, drumming over the soft carpet of leaves, hurtling stumps and tiny creek beds.
    We’ve covered about a mile when Bruce darts right, into a damp pine grove. I follow blindly, not thinking. Another mile passes, the undergrowth webbing, the treetops closing like fingers making a steeple. Behind Bruce I duck and dodge the sudden obstacles he creates, the whip of a limb, angry flurries from a hornets’ nest tipped by his elbow. He stumbles, goes faster. Then, half a mile farther, as we’re more falling than running, fingers dragging along the earth, the trees on both sides of us fly apart, as if painted on curtains.
    Unable to stop, I crash into him and nearly shove him into the sky—the sky mirrored in water, a lake, still as perfect glass, large as a baseball diamond, there at our feet.
    Bruce steps back and kicks off his shoes. He dives into the water and doesn’t emerge until he’s ten yards out, his arms breaking the surface, pulling him toward the white limestone bank across the lake.
    I follow him in, the water so deep I go under, so cold I come up gasping. I yell, begin to swim, following his distant explosions.
    I get a quick taste of fear on my lips but the water between my toes and fingers holds me high, and in minutes I’m swimming alongside Bruce. He nods at the bank.
    The bank, ten million years of limestone layers compacted against one another, is tall and hollowed, a bowl upside down, a cave whose rim rises five feet out of the water and spans forty feet. We move toward it, our strokes slowing as we near its mouth. We draw ourselves close enough to the cave to see the strange film of green algae that clings to the sunlit interior walls. Higher on the walls, where the sun doesn’t reach, there’s only rock. In a courageous spell, I move to go inside, to follow the dark, wide tunnel whose end you can’t see, but Bruce grabs my shoulder and leads me away from the bank. We tread water with our arms and legs, and