Who Is Brian Quinn?

Reggie's Pecans - Sneak Holes - The Ring - The Hand of Quinn

Reggie rocked back and forth on his bucket. He'd been sitting for nearly two hours and hadn't caught a thing. Not a single bite. His pole sat propped against a twig at a forty-five to the water, the river rushing past in endless swirling eddies like tiny whirlpools. Reggie tossed a nut at one of these momentary little holes in the river. He had a bag of nuts he'd been eating slowly all morning. They were his favorite nut.

"You see Bailey," he would say to his son. "They call them pecans because the little nut inside looks like he's peeking out at you. See that?"

Bailey would nod, scrunching his nose eyeing the nut. Bailey was eight years old but he knew the nut his father spoke of was not a pecan but a pistachio though he hesitated to disclose this fact to his father, not for fear that it would anger him but that it might wound him, cause him to deflate internally at the realization that the pecan did not peek out but rather a pistachio in its beige half cocked shell.

Reggie also had a name for the little whirlpools created by the river's current. He called them sneak-holes. "For a tiny little moment the river creates a hole, a peek-hole into another dimension, another reality. So you can sneak a peek at what's inside. Kinda like what the pecan's doing with us." He'd grin and chuckle. Bailey would nod and gaze out at the river.

He stood and spat at the rushing water. "Damn piss hole of a river," he said. "Ain't no fish in there."

This was true. There were no fish in the river. Hadn't been for some time. Pollutants, toxic substances and sewage had besmirched the water killing most everything. Reggie knew this. He pretended to care at times but in truth he didn't come down here to the pier with pole and tackle simply to catch fish. There were other things in this river more interesting than fish.

"The world's full of hidden treasure, my son," he would say. "It's everywhere. Hidden in every place you can imagine. In the ground, the sky, folk's houses, cars, backyards. Even in their heads. Some stuff hidden in invisible places. And sometimes you can find those things too. But mostly stuff hidden in this here river."

For years he'd been pulling things out of this river. Objects of all kinds. The typical tires and shoes of course and then the more exotic items such as toaster ovens, wigs, the occasional prosthetic limb and sometimes furniture. Reggie tended to be conscientious. He would only keep what he could use, throwing the rest back into the murky swill hoping it would spawn more various and unusual treasures in the depths of the river. And apparently it had.

Lately, Reggie had begun to find strange items.

"I tell you what, Madge," he'd say to his wife. She was a petite blonde woman with pale blue eyes and a voice like a finch. "There's things in that river that curdle the blood."

Madge did not doubt this. There were all kinds of things in the world that curdled the blood in her opinion. She knew this all too well. But being married to a large and swarthy longshoreman made her a little more comfortable with this fact. Reggie could take her head in one of his great calloused hands as though it were a softball. "I love you, little eyes," he'd say and then kiss her gently, like he was kissing a doll. She felt safe with him and their son Bailey was the spitting image of his father. This made her happy.

"Ain't no fish, cause fish got sense. They got sense enough to know when a place too damn dead to live in." Reggie kicked at the bucket and then sat down again. He checked his pole to make sure the line was still taut. Reggie always used the heaviest weight line he could find. "Gotta make sure I can pull up a four door sedan if I need to."

But Reggie was nervous. This old river had begun to seem foreign to him over the last few weeks. He'd pulled out a few things that made him think. First he'd hooked what felt like a bit of twig or a branch of some kind. Turned out to be a human finger.