Swamp Sister

2

Shad tossed his cigarette butt overboard and watched it take a quarter-turn in a sudden surface ripple. It was his last tailor-made. He looked up, suddenly sensing his aloneness. The swamp was still, brooding. It made him feel like an intruder in a rehearsal for eternity.

"The thing not to go and do," he said, as though passing on information to another not-quite-so-intelligent him, "is fer to lose your skiff. Don't lose your skiff and you won't lose your head. Amen."

A gliding shadow came across the water, reached the skiff and made Shad's eyes flicker. He looked high and watched a pure white egret drift against the turquoise sky, heading for its rookery with a bill filled with wiggly things for its young. The bird cleared a stunted, dead cypress and banked for the north.

Shad looked at the cypress, then fell to studying it. The tree actually wasn't stunted; it had been broken, sheared off at the top. A short dead limb stood out from the trunk near the top, and something round was caught in its fork. Shad's interest was alerted. He came to his feet, rocking the skiff slightly.

Something round, with a black stick coming out from the centre -or was it a stick? A strut maybe? A fever of excitement tidal-waved through him. He felt like a coloured boy finding a fat wallet in the woods. "Hi, God," he breathed. "A round something that goes for a wheel, strut and all. Shore as they's little apples, that's a wheel off'n the Money Plane!"

He slapped his hands together pistol-crack sharp, and a flock of wood duck hit the air as though they'd been thrown against it and splattered there. Shad pulled out his pole and shoved off toward the tree.

The broken cypress stood alone on a hummock island, a scaffolding of matted roots and silt, riddled with holes and teeming with life. The small animals Shad didn't care about, but the large was another matter. The long rumbling baar-oom of a bull gator came as a thundering warning and the hummock trembled. Shad hesitated, holding back on the pole, smelling the familiar musky odour which is peculiar to the gator's excretory fluid. "Gator ground," he said angrily.

Two – three – four long tapering objects slued through the maiden cane and slid with a surface crash into the water. Those were the young gators, the ones that retreated to the water at the sight or sound of anything new.

Two bumps like the knots on a floating log rose above the surface and gave the man in the skiff a malignant stare. Still stalling, one hand on the pole, the other resting on his carbine, Shad murmured a warning. "You son-o-bitch. Got me a gun here. You come at me and I'll kindly blow a hole through your flat head."

Shad didn't want to get anything started that he couldn't handle. But he wanted to land on the hummock and scale that cypress; maybe get a sight on the direction the Money Plane had taken after it had struck the tree. Other gators, little ones, were nosing around in the water now. But it was the big fellow with the mean eyes that Shad watched with wary suspicion. The gator opened its great jaws, trailing long riffles of silver water, and hissed. Shad stared at the large crooked teeth and the beefy lump of tongue and for a sickening moment vividly saw himself caught in that trap. A tingling sensation of dread needled up the back of his legs and petered out in his buttocks.

The bull gator closed its jaws with a steel-spring snap, lowered its head from sight. Shad felt it was just as well. He removed his hand from the carbine, straightened up, and looked up at the ragged cypress.

There couldn't be any doubt that the round something in the fork was a landing wheel from the Money Plane. He could see the hub metal now and the tyre tread. "It shore didn't just roll in here on its own and up that tree," he said. "Money Plane done put it there, and that's a frozen fact."

The cypress trunk was snapped high on the north and low on the south side, so he figured the Money Plane had been heading south in its glide. He looked across the slough, trying to spot further evidence of a crash path. But it was hopeless. A bog land of lush maiden cane and dead stumps covered five acres of slough, and beyond that was a thicket of catciaws, hurrahs and pin-downs; farther on stood the tangled, moss-hung, vine-draped wall of cypress, sycamore and titi. All right, but it couldn't do any harm to explore south. He started stobbing across the slough into a prairie of water grass and log litter.

He skirted the skiff alongside a trampled mudbank, not liking the look of it, watching the skyline. Everywhere was gators.

Shad spotted a broken tupelo along the bank, and though anything might have caused the break, decided to investigate. You don't go to venture nothing and you shore God goan gain just that. He ran the skiff ashore, and taking his carbine, stepped onto the bank.

The ground was semi-solid, quivering under his weight. He scowled, bringing the gun to port-arms, smelling the musk again. More goddam gator ground. He studied the numerous small openings in the tall thicket, knowing them for gator tunnels – escape passages.

"Gator hole right smack behind there, shore's mud's soft," he whispered. He stalled, his mind dragging up shorings of courage to his queasy guts. If he tried to push on through the thicket he might be cutting a gator off from the water, and that was bad. He tsked a chipped tooth and started across the peaty earth in a half-crouch. Venture nothing and gain just that. He had to see what was beyond the thicket.

It worked out just as he'd pessimistically thought it might. He went toward the nearest tunnel, nearly bending himself double at the thorny entrance, and paused. The soggy ground trembled again and he heard a gator grunting. Instinctively he threw himself sideways as a swollen she-gator charged down the passage at him. Its paws scrabbled on the leaves and twigs; its jaws were apart. Shad started to level the carbine when he realized that the gator wasn't looking right or left. It slammed past him like a runaway wagon, its short stumpy legs chopping furiously at the muck, and went aflop in the slough, disappearing.

Somewhere beyond the thicket a bull gator uttered a loud roar, which, from its harshness and reverberation, resembled distant thunder. Shad held his breath, listening. Far off, a limpkin wailed its lost-child cry, then stopped.

Shad put his lower lip between his teeth and went into the passage on hands and knees, the gun pointing the way.

"Look out, boys," he warned. "I'm coming at you all. Got me to see what's in your homestead; and if one of you gets it in your brainbox to come at me, I'll purely blow your snout clean through your backside."

He made a fast, frantic crawl of it, catclaw briars snagging at him every inch of the way, and pushed out onto more muck. He was on a shelf so low and boggy that when he stood, the brown water rose over the soles of his boots. It was a water prairie, land-locked with forest, draped with strangler-fig vine as fat as fire hoses, and jungled with thick bamboo-like stalks of cane. The massive trunks of sevenhundred-year-old cypresses thrust skyward, so high their tufted crowns rubbed across patches of blue sky. A few rays of brilliant sunlight lanced through to the watery floor where a shadow-still pool sported jutting cypress knees – "breathers" some folks called them. The grey mossbeard, hanging in streamers, stirred slightly. And then he saw it. Across the prairie and half-hung in the matted jungle wall, nose-down, crumpled tail and rudder up – the Money Plane.

He sucked in breath, bringing a hand to his mouth to rub it absently, staring. Eighty-thousand dollars. One hundred per cent of eight-thousand dollars waiting for him across the pool. "Yah, hay," he breathed.

He had looked for the Money Plane for so long, had dreamed of it in the long tossing nights so often, that now when he'd found it at last it left him momentarily incapable of directing his own will. Like the slough, everything inside of him seemed to have stopped. He knew he should shout, bang off his gun, kick his heels and do himself a cakewalk there in the mud. But he didn't.

The spell broke as the surface of the pond splintered quietly and a bull gator brought its flat head dear of the water. Shad watched the monster spread into a floating prone. And it was a monster, far and away the largest he'd ever seen. He judged it would go for fifteen feet, easy. The gator nosed shoreward, propelled by its long laterallycompressed tail.

"Uh-uh," Shad grunted. "Cain't have us none of that."

He glanced across the pond again at the distant Money Plane. It looked like a crumpled grey bird hung in a tree. How to get there without a skiff? The pond proved to be not a true pond but a swollen place in the waterway. Not so damn good. He moved away from the gator, slogging along the bank.

Unwittingly, he stumbled through a stand of cane and into a gator nest. The reeds had been beaten down for half an acre around, and the curious little obtuse cones of mud and grass that housed the gator eggs looked like a jungle vifiage for Pigmies. Instantly there was a great yelping and whining as hordes of little foot-long gators came swarming from their huts.

Shad kicked off the first batch of four that made a voracious charge at his ankles, and leaped back toward the cane. The little devils, twisting and yapping, scrabbled across the marshy ground after him with a fury that was almost unbelievable. They were nightmarish, appearing to be six inches of jaw and six of tail, supported by crooked little spider legs. Then an outraged roar that drowned all other sound broke over the slough, and Shad saw coming from the water on a run, a mama-gator.

Shad beat a hasty retreat, not stopping until he was back to the shelf fronting the thicket. He was well aware that he had marched himself into a ticklish situation. The gator is generally disposed to retire from man – providing the gator has been frequently disturbed by, and has a standing acquaintance with, man. In situations or locales where they have seldom or never been bothered by men, it was a different story. Then they could show a ferocity and perseverance that was downright alarming.

And now the gator in the prairie was kicking up a storm, rearing its head from the water, bellowing and snapping its jaws as its tail thrashed up great sweepings of white water.

Shad retreated even further along the bank, then squatted in a hurrah-nest to roll a smoke and think it over. The trouble was the law wouldn't allow shooting a gator – unless the gator attacked.

He started grinning. "What law is goan know what I'm about way out here?" he asked, stroking his palm over the oiled butt of the carbine. "Besides, I kin always say he done come at me. I got me eighty-thousand dollars to git at. Ain't no son-o-bitching big-mouth gator goan keep me shed of that."

He went back along the bank, watching the placid water so intently he hooked his right foot in a pin-down hoop and went sprawling into the warm muck.

Shad rolled over, sat up. "By juckies!" he grunted. Then he shut up, thinking – only thing that surprises me about now is why didn't I trip on a cottonmouth, or fall my fool head into a panther's mouth? He grinned savagely, telling himself to take it easy.

He came to his feet and saw the gator skimming through a bed of golden-heart. He levelled the carbine and took a sight along the barrel, panning slowly with the drifting reptile. He fired.

The Plam! of the shot caromed off the water and rolled away, and the gator rose clear of the pool, coming straight up as if standing on its tail. Then, with an agonized bellow, tipped over, curving itself into a capital C, and fell back with a splash. The pool gurgled, and a rush of blood bubbles wobbled to the surface.

Shad lowered the gun. "That's done fer you, old eatmouth," he murmured. There was nothing left now but to get into the water and go for the Money Plane.

With his boots, denims, shirt and carbine tucked in the fork of a titi bush, Shad entered the torpid water gingerly. He held his hunting knife shoulder high in his right hand. For a good ways he was able to wade, the pooi graduating up his naked goose-fleshed body in slow degrees; knees – hips – armpits. The oozy muck underfoot was ankle-high and cold. He hated it. And snags, sharp and dull, reached for his toes each time he shuffled a cautious step. Once something bumped his lower left leg, wrapped around, then wiggled on. It turned his blood to ice water and the sick knot in his stomach took another half-hitch. Cottonmouths wouldn't strike under water – so he had always heard.

But when he was neck-high and only half across, he knew he'd had enough. He wanted out. He kicked his feet and levelled himself into a slow crawl. There was the heavy suggestion of ominous danger in the shadowy pool and in what he was doing, a sense of not-too-safe adventure. He slacked the crawl to a cautious dog paddle, taking care that his hands and feet never broke the surface to shatter the watching silence.

Ten yards to cover – and the green rosettes of the water lettuce were so thick that for a vivid moment he thought he was tangled and would go under. The panic came at him like a female bobcat guarding her young. It clawed his nerve ends into dripping mush. He opened his mouth to shout as his legs, twisted and captured, sank down-and touched the silty bottom. He was standing on his feet, armpit-high in the water.

His glands discharged relief juice through his body, and for half a minute he just stood there with the nervous giggles. Then he got himself in hand, put his face down among the rosettes and in the water and massaged it. "Cain't lose my head like that again," he said.

He started on, feeling the ground rise until the water lettuce fell to his waist. Then he was before the dark, wet bole of the great cypress that had pared back the left wing of the Money Plane.

The under belly of the wreck was right above him, four or five feet over his head. The tilted nose cone was completely obscured by the hole it had punched in the jungle mat. Shad stayed where he was, studying what he could see of the problem. The heavy nose was probably well supported by the matting, and parts of the body and crumpled wings had been caught in a crazy network of strangler-figs.

He didn't relish the idea of climbing up into the plane and having the whole shebang break loose and dump him into the swamp. But how else could he get the money if he didn't give it a try? He nodded with resolution, put the knife in his teeth and, reaching up, tested the give of a vine. A moment later he was scrambling upwards.

The sorry-looking left wing was in his way. He had to detour -climbing down, around, over its tip. Then he worked his way back along the face of the cypress. Once, about mid-wing, he set a tentative foot on its metallic-like fibre. It punched right through. Shad left the wing alone after that. He worked around the rough bend of the tree and found himself at the canted top of the Money Plane's cabin. Hanging by one hand he cleared away a litter of ivy trumpets, leaves and jasmine with his knife blade, and lowered himself into a warm musty pit of the jungle wall. He was squatting on the hood of the plane, facing the shattered windshield.

The cracked glass was in a star pattern, opaque with scum. He couldn't see a thing. By a spider-like suspension bridge of vines he was able to swing down under the starboard wing to the door. He took the handle and gave it a try. Jammed. He put his right foot against the side of the fuselage, his back into the vines, and reared backwards. He almost upset himself for a header into the swamp. The cabin door was hanging open. Shad pulled himself up and in with a grunt.

The smell was bad. Dead. He had to come right out, bringing with him the vague impression of two dead men- a clutter of old bones in parchment skins and baggy, dusty clothes. He wedged himself in the wing strut, waiting for the cabin to air. And he thought about the two dead men. "At least they went at it together," he said. "And that was nice fer'em – seeing that they had it to do."

But the tragedy was four years old, and it was the death of strangers. He forgot about them and brought his mind back to the money. Suddenly he couldn't wait any longer. To hell with the smell. He wanted that cash. He swung up into the cabin again.

It was there. He knew it when he saw the dusty brief case with the lock. It was clutched in the skeletal hand of one of the dead men. Shad tore the case from the hand. The forefinger came with it by right of adhesion. That bothered him. He made a face and gave the case a quick snap, flicking the bony thing into the musty shadows. Then, for a moment he hesitated with just a touch of superstition. But the tactile feel of the brief case that contained a fortune conquered.

He didn't monkey with the lock. He punctured the case near the clasp with the knife and sawed a six-inch incision. He didn't have the patience for more, dug his hand inside and brought it out with a fistful of damp ten-dollar bills.

He laughed. He couldn't help it, didn't want to. He tipped back his head and roared. Until that moment the slough had brooded with the hush of an empty cathedral. Now the strident cry of a water bird ripped up the silence and was joined by the high lonesome tune of a hermit thrush.

Shad chuckled and began digging more and more bills from the gutted case. All of them were tens. For a while he busied himself counting them, but then gave it up. It would take too long. Eighty-thousand, give or take a ten or two. What did he care?

He still had the pond to cross over. What if some sassy cottonmouth or gator came at him, and him up to his chin in water lettuce? What if he lost the brief case? He looked at it, sorry now that he'd hacked it. Money, money, spilling everywhere – He could take what he needed for now – say ten of the bills -cache the rest – where? He looked out at the savagery of unrestrained growth. Yeah, where? Not just any old where in the swamp, not with nosy bears and buttinsky coons poking around. Right here then. Sure. Right here in the Money Plane that no one had been able to find in four years. Then the next time he came back, he'd fetch along some tools. Slap me a log raft together to cross the pond in. He caught a distant glimpse of the sky and saw that the blue was turning pale. He had some rambling to do. He'd have to blaze a trail clear back to Breakneck Lake; after that he knew his way.

But he delayed the departure, looking at his money. He had lots of plans to make, a way had to be found to get the money out of the swamp, out of the county, out of the state if necessary. He'd go to Jacksonville and take up with some young slick-looking girl-hell, he'd take up with three or four of them. He could afford it. He wouldn't have to play around with Iris Culver ever again.

The great gator wasn't dead. The. 303 slug had ploughed a hole in one of his horny starboard scuts, passing on to gouge a deep gash in the softer section of his flank. When the bullet first struck, he didn't know what had happened and reared out of the water on reaction alone. Then the burning began. He had sounded hurriedly, trying to evade the thing in his side. Twisting, S-shaping himself in the muck on the bottom, he'd finally fled down the waterway in a paroxysm of fear and pain.

A pair of playful otters met him at the mushy base of a reed bed and went for him in a mood of frivolity. They made quick fleeting nips at his paws and eyes, keeping clear of the dangerously thrashing tail. The scut-shot gator drove after them in a snapping fury, though it was a hopeless chase.

Mad, tail-whipping, the gator rammed himself into an oozy thicket of water grass and settled. The pain didn't go away. He surfaced and bellowed his anger at the swamp. Then he thrashed ashore and waddle-legged himself down to the gator nest. There he went amok, demolishing cones, snatching up two-three young gators in a scoop, crushing them to baggy pulp.

Then the she-gator charged him with thunderous bellows of rage. But it was a mistake. The bull opened his mouth, emitting a sharp hiss, and went for her with a short, fast lunge. They tangled – paws, mouths and tails – over the smashed nests and little mashed corpses of the pups. The bull's tail swung heavily through the air and landed solidly against the she's flank, spinning her into the cane. He went at her again with hissing mouth, snapping at her throat.

In the end the she-gator lumbered for the water in a blind panic, two of the scuts on her back flapping loose and showing red blood underneath. The bull felt better after the fray. He grunted and snorted and ploughed himself through the thickets until he found a boghole. There he rolled his wound in the plastering swamp mud, and finally settled down to rest, too exhausted to fret.