Swamp Sister

17

"Yeah," Jort murmured. He watched Shad stob his skiff on round a bend and start north on the main artery of Lost Yank. Then he was gone and Jort looked down at his hands. "Yeah – I'll see you."

He didn't do anything for five minutes. He stood there in the warm mud and stared at the water until Sam came slogging back with the 12-gauge. Sam dropped right where he stopped. He felt like yesterday's newspaper left out in the rain. He gasped and moaned a little and looked around at the cane and palmettos.

"What we goan do now, Jorty?"

Jort blinked and looked down at him. "Do? We got us a lot a things to do. Got my skiff to go git first off."

Sam's alarm perked up. "Where is hit? Did that Shad go and -"

"Shet up. Hit won't go far. They's no end a log litter below here. Mebbe we might have to spend the night out here but that's all."

"Well, I ain't taking me back in no slough water again, Jorty," Sam said with conviction. "I tell you that right out." He stalled for a moment, his eyes slipping sideways to a hurrah blossom, but not really seeing it. "Did you see that gator's mouth, Jorty?" he whispered. "Did you see them stobpole teeth?"

Jort's pouchy hips jerked sardonically. "I shore God must a. Eight times I had my head down his throat. And that Shad said he was wore out. Some wore out."

"Yeah," Sam muttered. Then he trembled. "Why did you have to go to mention Dorry in front of Shad?"

"It don't matter. He don't know nothing about her."

"Well, I don't like talking about her is what. I keep hearing the noise that sinkhole made when we dropped -" His voice shut off and he trembled again.

Jort grunted and said, "Never mind about that now. If we cain't find that skiff, then we got to find us an islet. I ain't fixing to spend the night in no marsh."

Sam nodded and sighed. "Guess we just ain't never goan see that Money Plane now."

"You gone coo-coo?" Jort wanted to know. "We just made our last mistake when we went to stop Shad down at Breakneck. From now on we got us a plank and we're going to be God-busy nailing hit down. First off we're goan find my skiff; then we'll hustle back to Sutt's Landing and git us some more shotgun shells and pick up Shad's carbine from my place, and stock up the skiff with some eats."

Sam cocked his head curiously. "Why we doing all that, Jorty?"

Jort looked exasperated. "Why? Well, I'll tell you why. Because Shad is right now on his way to pick up his money, is why. And when he gits hit, he's going to come lam-tailing down to the Landing to git Dorry Mears – _he thinks_.

"Only you'n me is going to be waiting in Breakneck fer him, Sam. And this time they ain't going to be no hanky pankying er passing the time a day with Mr. Shadrack Hark. We goan blow holes in him, Sam. And we goan take care of him like we done with that girl. And then you'n me is goan take off to some cee-ment city with our cash and see how do other folks live."

Sam's head nodded slowly, absently.

"Yeah," he murmured. "Yeah. That's what we goan do."

Jort put his fist in his palm and rubbed it. He looked around at the wild splendor of unrestrained and endless growth.

"Hell of a place, ain't it?" he commented matter-of-factly.

In the stillness of swamp hush Shad went up Lost Yank until he saw an opening on his starboard. The breach was between two pine islands and it was a water-lettuce prairie. He grunted with satisfaction. It was what he wanted – a cut-through to the Money Plane creek. He stobbed the skiff to the edge of the thick green carpet and started in. Within twenty feet he knew it wasn't going to work.

He shipped his pole and went over the side. The water and lettuce rushed up to his lower chest and stopped. He grabbed the painter and started hauling.

An hour later he was still hauling.

By six in the evening he had crossed three creeks, had climbed back into the skiff and explored each one of them for a mile down, looking for his markers. He hadn't found anything he could say he recognized. Each time he would return to the broad belt of water lettuce and start hauling the skiff east.

"Well," he said to himself, "I'll find it in a minute here."

But the sound of his voice was incongruous with the vast stillness and he looked up with a start. The sun was sitting on top of the trees like a red hot disk. He knew he wasn't going any farther that day.

He hauled the skiff, bow first, onto a pine island and made a fire on the beach with lightwood. He was Godawful hungry but his stomach had to wait until he'd gathered enough firewood to see him through the night. He wasn't about to go looking for wood in the dark. It was a warm, miasmic night and the cottonmouths would be out frog hunting.

He made a broad circle around the crown of the island, gathering lightwood, and then took a swing along the shore on his way back. It was there in the muck that he saw the water-fified depression that looked like a track.

It was-a timber wolf's track. He made a sharp little sound between his teeth and shook his head.

He hurried back to his camp. And after that he didn't make a move without first picking up the old Springfield.

The night folded in like a navy-blue blanket being drawn over the chin of a weary, golden-whiskered old man, and an osprey's shrill cry sent spine-tingling echoes against faroff cypresses. Shad finished his beans and counted his taior-mades. Six left. He went tsk with his teeth and wished he'd brought his makings along. But he rolled up in his blanket and treated himself to a smoke anyhow. What the hell; tomorrow morning he'd find the Money Plane, and that evening he'd be a back at Sutt's Landing. Yeah.

He dropped fast into deep sleep and foundered there for a few hours, and then slowly started drifting upwards again and into the flickering imagery of dreams -.

The swamp was smoking. A sort of ghastly whitish jelly had crept in covering everything like a sickening spread of grave clothes. It was like a disease, as if leprosy were secretly digesting the mud and water underneath. He hated to put his foot down in it, and yet had to, or else how could he go on. And he had to go on – but he didn't know why.

When his first foot went down it disappeared as though swallowed by mush, and it felt like that too, and he wanted to draw back but couldn't – could only go forward. He waded.

If there was a sky it was a dull lead grey, but it wasn't like a sky; it was the dome of an endless room. And then he realized he was lost in a nether land. There was no beginning, no end, only a profound sense of emptiness.

Yet there was no end to the swamp. As he waded he sensed the passing of the years, and when he looked down at his rifle – it was only a slender bar of scaling rust, the stock half-rotted away and busy with wood-worms. He tried to throw it down, but it wouldn't throw. Then he saw his rust-scaling hand. It had solidified to the gun.

He was in the very center of a great shallow-water prairie. The grey walls of the nether room were so far off it would take him eternity to reach them. And he asked, "Why am I here? What has brought me to this place?" Then a hummock rose out of the smoke like a monstrous black bear, and he waded to it.

Something was sprawled spread-eagle on the black tattered crown of the hummock. He struggled up to it with great revulsion at every step and looked. It was the pulpy ash of a man's bones, except for the skull. The skull still wore its skin and hair in death. He looked at the dead face of his brother, and Holly stared back at him with stark blank eyes.

Shad sat straight up. He thought he'd screamed – but it was a wildcat sharing the island with him. He started to reach for the Springfield, and then noticed his fire was dwindling to embers. He heaped on more wood, got things going merrily again and felt a little better.

He curled up in the blanket again and thought about having another cigarette. But he decided to save it. Tomorrow this would all be over with, he thought. He closed his eyes and wondered what he was supposed to make of the dream he'd had of Holly. A warning?

In the morning the bull gators down the line began slaughtering the morning hush with a ferocious earthtrembling vigour. Shad kicked out of his blanket and stiffly stood up. He didn't do anything for a full minute but rub at the back of his neck, stirring up his circulation. His head felt as though it were riding sidesaddle to his body.

He ate some jerky and biscuit, found a little guzzle that wasn't too silty and had a drink, and then made some coffee and smoked a tailor-made with it. He was in the skiff and on his way before six-thirty

The swamp was very gaudy, spread-out, dressed in vivid tatters of leaves, in a great hush of green and turquoise, where the cabbage palms mutely met the sky in a ragged line of enchanted silence.

Too silent. It gave him the willies, somehow.

He came to another cross creek and turned south to search the east bank for blazings, and after a mile of it, leaned on the pole and said, "Well, fer God sake. What the hell's going on here?"

But standing there mumbling wasn't getting any wood chopped. He stobbed back to the channel.

And it went on like that. Brooks, creeks, guzzles, leading into prairies, savannas, lakes, back to the channel -.

And the goddam no-see-'ems zig-zagging about his head, in the corners of his eyes, up nostrils, zip into his mouth; and in the palm bogs there wasn't any air, only a thick heavy substitute of rank odour; and a gator in the water hissed at him instead of running when he jabbed him with the pole; and limpkins, bitterns, and ibises, and largemouthed bass, gars, and fat pan fish, and monster cottonmouths, timber rattlers, and coachwhippers, and titi and paintbrushes and hurrah blossoms and catclaws and log litter – and by two in the afternoon he'd plumb had it.

He snatched the pole inboard and set it athwart, placed his fists akimbo and glared at the swamp. "You goddam bitch, you!" he shouted. And the cry ran somewhere, maybe across the flat prairie on his starboard, and echoed faintly – _Bitch you_.

Shad sat down and rubbed the back of his neck. He'd been stubbornly evading the truth for the past hour, but now the fight had gone out of him and he felt like an old hat someone had kicked to the side of the road. So faced up to it and said it right out.

"I've pure-out lost myself. That's what I've gone and done."

Then he sighed heavily, sat up and said, "Goddam," and reached for the pole. There was only one thing to do and that was to try to find his way back to Breakneck, pick up his markers and start all over again. And he hated the thought of it. Not only because of the time it was going to cost, but because he felt certain that Jort and Sam would be hanging around there waiting.

He didn't pay any attention to the gator at first. It was fifty feet off with just its eyes and tip of snout showing above the water, and one gator more-or-less didn't mean much to him. Besides, he was busy right then ramming the skiff over and through a dense bed of golden-heart. The gator's corrugated back broke the surface and it opened its jaws and hissed.

He noted that the gator had been in some kind of brawl. One of its starboard scuts was missing and he could see the gleaming stratum of reddish-black scar tissue. But he didn't think anything of it.

The gator sank hurriedly as the skiff cleared the lily bed and bow came at him. Shad gave a shove ahead and the bow went tchuunk!, upset his equilibrium and reared upward crazily.

Shad swung around, clutching the stobpole giddily, as the skiff settled with a splamp! He thought it was a submerged log, until he saw the gator scurrying away underwater. The slough was so-so clear and he could see the magnified back and the laterally-compressed tail hitching. Then the gator entered that realm of the creek where the sky mirrored itself on the surface. Shad couldn't see him after that.

What was wrong with that fool gator? He'd never seen one act that way before. "What's he think I got in here – a goddam dog?"

He eased the pole from the water, letting the skiff drift. He crouched and felt for the Springfield. If the big scutbusted bastard thought he was going to have a Shad dinner, then he had another think coming.

He came up, slipping off the safety. But the rifle was only half up when the gator made a mad rush through the reed for the deep water. Shad swung the gun into position, panning fast in the general direction of blurred moving colour, and jerked – ca-blam! and saw the reed whip and the water spurt silver, and knew it was a clean miss, and saw the gator's thick tail slash across the water.

The gun crash caromed off the slough, rolled into the sharp protests of the bitterns and squawk hurons and echoed somewhere in the south woods. After that there was the quick _flut -a-fl utter_ of many wings.

Shad looked around, but there wasn't much to see. The fool gator was probably long gone. He squatted on the floorboards, bolted a fresh cartridge home, snapped the safety and set the rifle down.

The skiff undulated as though a ground swell was moving under the flat bottom. Where's the current coming from? he wondered.

The skiff lifted sharply, canted to one side and began sliding off. Shad grabbed for the gunwales, starting to get up, then stalled. He was tipping over. Out of the corner of his eye he saw water breaking on the scutellated back of a gator, and there was that angry red stratum replacing the missing scut. The gator's humped back seemed to be coming right at him; then – last instant – he knew it wasn't so. He was going to it.

Gator reared – skiff skittered – starboard tilted high above Shad and all the swamp went with it, tumbling into a spinning green smear – Silver and black shocked his eyes. He felt the solid impact of his weight slamming water – and everything was liquid. What he could see wasn't worth claiming. Straight ahead, an opaque olive, below, total blackness, above, a silvery sheen – the surface. He struck for it, broke it, felt cold air on his wet face, sucked a breath – half of it brackish water – and went kicking and flailing for shore.

He wasn't going in a given direction – _he was going_. He didn't know where the skiff was or where the nearest outcropping of bank stood and he didn't give a damn. He knew a king-sized gator was right behind him and the panic was on.

He kept waiting for the sudden shocking snap of the gator-teeth in his legs, could actually feel it, could see himself being drawn down to the mushy decay on the black bottom, and the pressing scaly weight of the great gator over him, and the torrent of stagnant water pouring into his open, bubbling mouth – and he went wild.

His swinging left hand struck a spongy something, and then his chin bumped into it. He raised his head, brought his knees and feet under him and started crawling onto the soggy bank.

The ground, as far as it went, wasn't anything to boast of. It was marsh land, not an island. Semi-solid, and already it was trembling. Shad hesitated in a crouch, streaming water from clothes and body, smelling that damn musky odour. A matted hurrah and catciaw thicket fronted the bank, and it was tunnelled and a throaty rumbling was coming from behind it.

He looked back. The skiff was seventy feet away and drifting downstream (ironic – thinking of Jort – but not a damn bit funny), and the scut-busted gator was kicking around out there in the run, watching him with wideawake eyes and snorfing and hissing, as though daring him to come back into the water.

The gator-ground was quivering rhythmically now, and it sounded as though a whole army of them were coming at him. He felt around the back of his belt for his knife and drew it in a hopelessly futile gesture of defiance. He started to go right, stalled, took a step or two left, got caught in indecision, and then began backing up, watching the thicket tunnels.

The first gator wasn't much – a clumsy female, and she veered off in a fright when she saw him crouching there. But the next one was a big granddaddy, and he came out on a direct line with Shad and his jaws unhinged, and Shad wasn't hanging around to see more. He legged it along the shore for the nearest water oak.

He put the knife blade in his teeth and hauled himself up into the branches. When he looked down he couldn't believe it. The ground was acrawl with gators. Down the bank they came with their peculiar stumpy-legged run and went splam! in the water. After a while their roars and grunts and hisses died down, and after a longer while the hurons and limpkins and what-all birds let off their squawking. The silence picked up again with a completeness that seemed smugly complacent.

There was the bogland- He didn't know how long he'd been in it. He was convinced it was endless, and knew it to be timeless. A thousand years came and went and nothing changed. He'd long ago lost the creek – without quite realizing at the time what was happening. But it had been impossible to follow it along the shore for more than a mile. Too many gators, too many thickets – he'd kept turning off, and farther off, and he didn't know how far he'd slogged or where.

It was a step-over, climb-around, wading horror. Halfpetrified logs, all sizes, all positions except straight up; broken old stumps like rotten teeth; ankle to knee-high stagnant water, the colour of old ale.

And sinkholes – he could never see them coming. And each time as he slip-shot down and the torpid, stinking water rushed up, his heart contracted with panic. And after a while he began to wonder how much of that a heart could take.

He waded.

It ended finally, as the sun ended. One moment it was there, and a moment later only the after glow blazed on the rim of the swamp, like a bright lamp standing on the grave of the sun. Then a pale grey twilight hung over the wilderness and Shad slogged through it wearily, watching the edge of the bog come at him with agonizing slowness. Beyond high land stood, with palmettos and pine trees and swamp oak -and food. Way, hay, he was hungry enough to eat a last year's poor-joe nest.

And then, right on the edge of the bog, he met a panther cat with the same idea in mind. Shad pulled his knife and crouched. The cat's head lowered and its hair started to bristle. Its eyes were beryl green and placed in its head on a down-slant to its nose, giving it a mean, sour look. Its lips lifted and it snarled.

Shad hesitated and then realized that the panther couldn't quite make up its mind. He decided to augment the cat's attitude by pulling back into the bog. He retraced his own track for a hundred-some feet.

The cat didn't like the water. There were easier and more familiar prey afoot. It padded off silently, glancing back from time to time to see that Shad was behaving himself. But they weren't always like that.

Taking it easy, Shad came out of the bog and started up the high ground. He went to where the first palmetto clump squatted and looked back at the darkening badlands.

"God," he whispered.

He didn't eat that night. It wasn't safe to hunt in the dark, and it was also hopeless. But he had a fire. He had three matches in his denims and he dried the heads by rolling them in his hair. He put his four tailor-mades on a flat rock and set it next to the fire. When he lifted the rock he found some slimy slugs stuck to the damp bottom. But he wasn't that hungry He drank swamp water and had a cigarette, and then tried to go to sleep.

The night crawled by like a wounded snake. His sleep came piecemeal, and between the fits and starts fear expanded insomnia until finally he gave up the idea as useless. He threw fresh wood on the fire, lit another cigarette and listened to the whispering feet of nameless things beyond the palmettos.

"It's going to be bad," he murmured. "Going to be real bad."

He was up and moving with the sun, heading south.

In the runty bay bushes of another island he found the remains of a long dead wildcat. It was bones mostly, with a few patches of hair and hide and the claws. It was the claws that gave him the idea for a fish lure. He tore a hunk of the hide loose and sat down with it on a log, then traced an outline on the hide with the point of his knife. When he was finished, the strip of hide he'd cut had the appearance of a lizard. He got the wildcat's claws and hooked them to his dabbler.

He cut himself a pole and attached the lure to it with some vine strings, and then went down to the first brook and started dancing the dabbler on the surface, pulling it in and out of the marsh bushes. Twice in over an hour he had a trout nibble, and then he had an honest to God strike; but the trout was five or six pounds and the catclaws weren't fishhooks. The fish got clean away and Shad gave up the idea with a mouthful of dirty words. He drank some swamp water and went on.

The sun dragged its feet across the sky like a poky fat boy in no hurry to get home, and Shad stumbled along under the heavy droop of foliage that seemed to hang motionless with the expectant air of a deadfall. He didn't know which he hated more – the bogland or the jungle. The air was punk and the sharp palmetto fronds were cutting him to mincemeat, and twice now rattlers had given him fair warning, and – and the Goda'mighty loneliness of the place.

He couldn't understand why God had to go and do this to him. I never kilt nobody, er took what weren't mine – well, nothing much ner important. You cain't call that eighty-thousand dollars stealing, because I went and found that. I never made fun a God, like some I know. Like Iris Culver fer one. Now He'd have a right to punish her, but Shad didn't see Him doing it. No; one-sided, that's what it was.

"Why me?" he suddenly shouted compulsively. "What You holding against me that makes You do me this way? What have I done?"

Instantly the swamp turned shrill. Squawk hurons cut loose as though they'd been picked alive, and limpkins began wailing their we-are-lost-children cry. And a startled, irritated grunting sounded in the palmettos.

Shad crouched, catching his breath. It wasn't gatorgrunting this time, worse – wild hog. The leader came snorting through the fronds as mean as a walleyed bull with a rump full of buckshot. He was leggy and narrow, his back like a man's hand viewed edgewise. He spotted Shad and something went out of whack in his little piggy eyes. He dropped his head and charged.

Shad forgot about God and went hell-for-leather out of there. He started for the tall timber, but too late – the hogs had cut him off. He veered sharply to the east.

They chased him right across a marsh and into the horror of the pin-downs. It was a vast thicket and he went dodging in and out of its bays, trying to find an easy way through. But there was no such thing. Shad said "Aw hell," and lunged into the jungle.

The Adam stalk of a pin-down grows out of water, pencil thin, nearly bare and red in colour, its branches bend down to the ground and take root wherever they touch, making natural hoop snares for feet, which in turn grow new stalks with branches that also bend down and take root, and the whole affair goes on like that endlessly- hoop after hoop after hoop. Shad had heard of men going insane when caught in the pin-downs.

He was ready to believe it. He went jumping, highstepping, lunging and knife-hacking into the thicket, and within ten feet he was flat on his face in the slime and thought he'd twisted an ankle. He got up, panting like a blacksmith's bellows, and looked back. The wild hogs were snorting and head-ramming the edge of the thicket, trying to find an opening to get at him. Shad started picking his way farther into the pin-downs.

What made it bad was the God-awful hurrah bushes and the titi. They rose right over his head and so thick he couldn't see an inch through them, and they whipped at his eyes, ears and neck every move he made; and that meant he had to keep whacking at them with the knife, and to do it he must keep his eyes on what he was doing, and every time he looked up from the marshy ground the hoops would snare his feet, twist his anides and send him tail over appetite.

Then he saw a pine island a hundred yards away. It was like being offered a sky hook. He hacked toward the rise, gasping, sobbing, mumbling, "I kindly thank you, God. I shorely do."

When he staggered finally onto the solid ground of the island a lassitude came over him like a ton of damp, warm earth, and he had to rib himself up to keep going.

He was beat and hungry and lost and if he didn't come up with a trick soon the swamp would get him. He needed protection and food, and that meant a weapon of some sort, something more than the knife. He could make a bow and some arrows. When he was a kid they used to make them out of saplings. He got pretty good with one, too. He'd bowled over a plentiful of coons with arrows, so why not do it again? A coon dinner would go dandy right now.

An edge, that's all he asked for. Just give him a little bit of an edge and he'd take care of the rest.

Then he saw the shebang nestled forlornly in a stand of sycamores.

He gaped, not understanding it, then roused himself and went toward the trees, but cautiously and with uneasiness, as though approaching a sepulchre.

The shebang had been constructed from deadwood mostly, age-brittle branches and old ratty looking brown palmetto fronds. It was squatty and not much larger than a good sized doghouse, and he had to go on hands and knees to get through the little doorway.

There was nothing inside except dirt, a few nameless crawlies, and a litter of dead trash that must have been a weed bed once. The only other thing was an old stiffened deerskin pouch, with a leather thong to go over a man's shoulder. The flap had two letters burnt into it: