by R. T. Kaelin
So I keep at it, swinging the pole on the right side of my body like Daddy always does, feeling the squish as it hits the bottom and my muscles tightening as I pull back, hearing the water swirling as the boat moves along. It helps some that I ain’t got much weight to move but me and the boat. But I ain’t ever poled this long or this far before. And looking around at the cypresses twisting down above me, the waterway getting more narrow all the time, I feel that empty spot in my stomach again. If I am going the wrong way, there ain’t no chance I’ll be able to get out again until morning, and that’ll be too late.
I go along another hour like that, sweat dripping from my face and down my arms to my wrists and then my hands, the wood of the pole damp. I’ve probably got another two hours of light left, but this far into the Mire the trees get pretty thick, and it’s already getting hard to see in front of me. I start thinking about places to make a camp, but I don’t know what the land’s like on the banks around here.
“Only thing you sure about with the Mire is you ain’t sure about nothing,” Daddy always says. Places that look dry as a bone got bodies deep below them where folks got swallowed up. Other spots that look like they’d suck you down quick and sure have got a foundation strong as you please…and then it’ll all change a week later. But if you know what to look for, you can figure out things pretty close.
Here, though, I don’t know what to look for. I got nothing to ground me. And even if I could find a safe place, I get one alligator catches my scent and that’ll be the end of that. “You knew all this before,” I say, shaking my head and looking to the right where I think I can see a break in the trees on the bank, pulling as hard as I can on my pole so I can get where I need to go before the light’s totally gone.
Out of the blue I hear a huge “crack!” and nearly pitch forward over the front as the boat stops dead in the water. I manage to keep from falling out by holding on to the pole, but I ram a knee into the side of the boat and start yelling stuff my Daddy probably wouldn’t believe I knew to yell as I feel pain shooting up my leg. But it ain’t the pain I’m really yelling about; it’s that “crack.” I ain’t great in a boat, but I’ve been in them enough to know what the sound means when I hear it. Looking down, I see I’m right, for once: there’s a big old split in the wood where the bow curves into the deck, and brown water’s already gushing in around the spot where the cypress root I ran my boat into is poking out.
It means there’s solid ground right near me, and looking left I see it, cypress trees leaning out from the bank, branches trailing down almost to the surface of the water. There’s a log leading from the bank nearly to the boat, too, plenty big enough to walk on. The bank’s probably only twenty feet away or so, and the water’s so shallow here I could probably wade it all right…but you don’t get into the water in the Mire if you can help it. Once an alli gets your scent it’ll follow you for hours. I got a feeling my skinning knife ain’t going to help much against one of them (even Daddy wouldn’t take on an alli by himself, and he sure as Sky wouldn’t do it with a knife).
Even though it looks like my knee ain’t too bad, it’s definitely cut, and my blood in the water’s going to make every alli half a mile in all directions come like I invited them personal. So I grab my sack (ain’t nothing in it but what’s left of the cooked craw I had this morning, but it’s better than nothing), sling it over my shoulder, and climb up out onto the log, my leg on fire as I stand tall. I turn and crouch to look at the bottom of the boat in the fading light. I can’t see it too well, but I can tell that even though the boat ain’t going to sink with that root locked in it, it ain’t going nowhere neither.
I turn back and head up the log toward the bank, keeping low and wide to help me balance. The log’s plenty wide and don’t roll or slip under me—but I’m so damned tired that I don’t pay proper attention as I go, and just before I reach the bank a rotten section of the wood falls away as I step on it, and with a splash I’m in the shallow water.
“Goddamned fool,” I swear as I get to my feet quick and scramble onto the bank, gritting my teeth from the pain in my leg. The water didn’t even go past my knees, but that don’t matter none. Now my blood’s mixed into the water—and that means it’s only a matter of time. “Fool,” I say again, breathing heavy as I look back at the boat. “Now you got yourself some problems, all right.” I guess I couldn’t have got much further by water anyway, but I got no way to fix my boat here, and without it I ain’t getting back home alive.
I sigh. “Forward or nothing, Shade,” I say, picking my sack out of the water and slinging it over my shoulder. As I turn away from the water, I hear a low rumbling cry, like someone’s breathing through rocks, and I stop dead. Then I see something slide out of the shadows in the bank and crawl toward me, body moving side to side just like a…
Damn. They found me already?
But no, even an alli with a blood scent can’t move that fast. I just got lucky, that’s all: crashed my boat, cut my leg, fell in the water, and walked right into an alli what was heading down to the bank for an early dinner. And now he’s got one. I drop my pack on the ground and let my hand drift back to my knife, but I know it don’t matter. Even if he don’t see me he can smell me in the air now, and that’ll be all for me for sure; I can’t climb fast enough to get away from him with this leg, and the trees ain’t tall enough if it pulls itself up the trunk onto its hind legs. And now I see him lifting his head and tilting it a bit, then putting it down and heading straight as a rope for me. I back up a few steps and draw my knife, my heart drumming away in my chest, my stomach feeling like it’s falling out of my body. At least I’ll get to poke him one before he gets his meal.
A second later he’s close enough for me to see his mouth, and his head tilts and jaw opens as he gets ready to take his first bite. I ought to at least hold the knife out, but I just drop it to my side and close my eyes.
Daddy, Kann, I’m sorry.
A long time passes.
It’s just like what Daddy says happens to people who get attacked by allis: there’s so much pain when the bite comes that the body stiffens up right off, and you can’t feel a thing. My leg still hurts, but it ain’t gotten any worse. Did the beast swallow me whole somehow? Am I at the gates of Sky?
“Ain’t much sense standing in one place in the Mire, little girl. Things that don’t move are easier to eat.” The voice is high, soft…sounds almost musical, like Kann’s singing when he wakes up in the morning. I open one eye slowly. The alli’s still in front of me, his head tilted again, black eyes fixed on mine.
For a moment I just stare. Then I see something move, and I raise my head. Standing behind the alli is a tall man—long, shabby brown coat, broad-brimmed hat down over the eyes, wispy white beard, kind of stooped over. He tips back his hat as I see him.
“No, she don’t talk,” he says in that same soft voice. “Too busy eating most of the time to talk.” He leans over and pats the alli, which lifts its head and closes those eyes, reminding me of the strays I used to feed before the Shake hit. “But she likes you, or you wouldn’t still be standing there with your mouth open.” He sounds a little bit like someone from the Mire, but not totally—his accent ain’t right. But he’s got the right look, for sure…like he ain’t seen a new set of clothes or a bath for a year, and don’t much care about it.
I stay quiet. After a minute he raises his eyebrows. Even in the fading light I can see a pair of dark eyes staring at me. “That your boat?” He jerks his head in its direction. I nod. He walks to the bank of the waterway and stares at the boat, then turns back to me. “You ain’t likely to get that back.”
I nod.
“Ain’t no one lives near here. Where you from?”
I don’t say anything. Daddy says you can’t say the wrong thing if you just keep your mouth shut, and I don’t know who this is. Except something about him seems…familiar, like I’ve met him before. Don’t make no sense, but there it is.
He sighs. “Okay. Gue
ss you got your reasons for staying quiet.” He turns and begins to leave, but stops after only a few steps. “I’d be on my way, if I was you. Place gets kind of hard to handle once the light’s all gone.” Then he makes some weird sound, like he’s trying to breathe and spit at the same time. And like it’s been jerked, the alli whips its head around and starts crawling after him. Then I feel my heart start going again, because I’ve figured out why I know him.
“Caretaker,” I yell, loud enough to bring half the Mire down on me, but I don’t care. The man stops. “You’re the Caretaker of Mire,” I say, quieter this time.
He don’t say anything for a while, standing with his back to me. Then he sighs. “You better come with me.” And he heads off into the trees, the alli crawling after him.
* *** *
Many minutes later I’m sitting cross-legged on the ground, my pack next to me, facing a small bonfire as I work through a cooked gallo rat steak. I ain’t much for meat, but I also ain’t eaten in better than a day, and I can’t remember the last time I had a real good cooked meal. The man sits on the other side of the fire, looking at me. He ain’t said a thing since giving me the gallo, which was already cooking when we got back to his house, sitting right in the middle of a small clearing maybe thirty feet around. That’s maybe a little much, to call it a house. It’s a small wood shack, actually, holes in the roof and walls closed over with mud and small sticks, and a big piece of canvas to cover the door. Looks like he’d barely fit in there by himself.
The alli’s a few feet behind, long body stretched out with the head resting on the ground. The light’s gone now, and I can’t see too well past the flickering of the fire, but I think he’s asleep. “Don’t he eat none?” I ask.
“She,” the man says. “Sure she does. But she ain’t going to eat now, and she ain’t much for cooked food neither. Likes her meat fresh.” I try to avoid shuddering, and the man must notice. “Don’t you worry none,” he says. “Cherie’s fierce as you like if she don’t know you, but once she does you can’t have a better friend.”
“Cherie?”
He raises one white eyebrow. “Sure, Cherie. Don’t you name your pets?”
“Ain’t got any,” I say. “We used to have two dogs, but we lost both of them in the Shake. I’m hoping we’ll see them again, but Daddy thinks they didn’t make it.” I take my last bite of the gallo. “Ain’t heard of making an alli a pet before.”
The man shrugs, glancing at Cherie. “Hard to make a pet out of something you think is only good for killing or eating,” he says. “Me, I found Cherie when she was little. Her mama must have died somewhere else, ’cause all I found was her daddy stuck in a trap and dead, and there she was on the bank of the waterway. Barely the size of my arm when I found her. But she took right to me, and we been together since.”
I take a drink of water from a wooden cup. “Some folks say an alli’s too wild to make a pet.”
“You always listen to what folks say?” The man spits. “You want to get along in life, little girl, you stop listening to other folks. Only one who gives a damn about you is you, and don’t you forget it.”
“I ain’t a little girl,” I say, getting angry. Only one person calls me that, and it ain’t going to be some crazy old man living by himself with a pet alli.
A little smile comes over his face. “Fair enough. You got a name?”
I hesitate, but decide there ain’t much more he could do with my name than without it. “Shade.”
The man nods, the smile turning serious. “Your Daddy give you that name?”
“Yeah. He says he and my mama talked about it a good long time before I was born.”
“Where’s she now?” he says quietly.
“She—” I stop, feeling angry again all of a sudden. “She died when she had me.”
The man nods again. “Okay. Shade. It’s a good name.” He pauses. “And your Daddy?”
“That’s why I’m here,” I say after a long moment. “I came to find you.”
“Me?” the man says, raising his eyebrows again.
I nod. “I came to find the Caretaker of Mire. That’s you, ain’t it?”
The man looks down into the flickering fire. “Why do you want him?”
I’m pretty sure this is the Caretaker, but if it ain’t… “It’s not for me. It’s for my Daddy.”
The man says nothing, crazy shadows dancing on his beard and face, and all of a sudden I find myself talking without even knowing exactly what I’m saying. “Daddy didn’t want me to come. He says if the Caretaker is real he won’t help swamp scum like us. But I don’t know what else to do. After the Shake…” I stop for a moment and swallow hard; my stomach’s full, but it can still feel nice and twisted when it wants to. When I start talking again, the words just keep spilling out. “A lot of our house fell down in the Shake, and Daddy says the rest of it ain’t safe to live in until he can fix it. But we—me and Daddy and my little brother Kann, he’s only four—have to sleep outside, and Daddy got real sick. Mire Fever, he says. He can’t hardly walk at all now. And there’s some folks live near us, the Canner brothers, and they say Daddy owes them money, even though it ain’t true, and everyone’s scared of them, and I…” I trail off as I see the man still hasn’t moved. “Anyway. Everyone says the Caretaker of the Mire is supposed to help people who need it, if you can find him. Everyone says it.”
Again the man is quiet. “Could be there’s no such person,” he says after a while. “Could be you’ve been looking for a fairy tale, Shade.”
I shake my head angrily. “It ain’t a fairy tale. They say the Caretaker got a way with things that live in Mire. He can heal any sickness, just by using plants from the Mire—and he can tell allis what to do, and call a bunch of gorros, and make the trees turn, and…and everything.”
“And that makes me the Caretaker?” he says, frowning. “Because I have a pet alli?”
“You fixed up my knee,” I say, pointing to the spot where he cleaned the cut and put on some kind of leaf that dulled the pain.
“I live by myself,” he says. “If I didn’t know how to fix up a few cuts, I wouldn’t last very long out here.” He shakes his head. “Ain’t nothing in a story but what you put in it, and you’re putting too much on me without cause, Shade. I’m just an old man living in the middle of the Mire, far away from folks as I can get. Your Caretaker—” He stops and rubs the back of his neck. “Only Sky knows where he is, if he is real. But it ain’t me.” He looks up, dark eyes staring into mine again. “I ain’t nothing to anyone. Not no more.”
I feel my eyes starting to tear up, and I stand and turn away from the crackling fire with my arms folded. Cherie stirs, a low rumble in her throat.
“I’m sorry to hear about your Daddy, Shade,” the man says behind me, voice as calm as before. I don’t say anything, keeping my back straight as I can. “You’re welcome to stay in the house tonight. Nothing’s going to bother you this evening, not with me and Cherie around. I got an extra boat you can use, and tomorrow morning you can take it back home.” A long pause follows. Then I hear his steps moving away, and when I turn back to the fire he and Cherie are gone.
* *** *
The next morning I wake to find the fire out, though there’s another piece of gorro steak the man must have cooked up for breakfast. I eat the fish in my pack and put the gorro in; I figure I’m going to need it to keep up my strength for the trip back. I follow the trail back to the bank—and even though I ain’t really expecting it to be there, sure enough, the boat he promised is sitting right where he said it would be, a paddle and pole lying on the bottom. My boat’s gone, almost like it was never there, and I ain’t got time to worry about it. Daddy was right—you can’t rely on no one but yourself.
“You hush, Shade.” I say to myself, blinking away a tear as I get into the boat and pick up the pole. I think about going a little farther, looking again for the Caretaker. But I don’t need to spend more time chasing a fairy tale. “You already messed thi
s all up enough. Now you need to get home before you make things worse.” Pushing back from the bank, I carefully turn the boat around and then set off back down the waterway.
The trip back’s a lot easier than the trip here, and I guess that ain’t too surprising. The waterway gets wider and wider as I go, and pretty soon I’m heading past places I recognize. I’m rested now, and not hungry. But it still takes hours, and the whole way I just feel weepy and sad and stupid. Why’d I waste two days wandering the Mire to find someone who ain’t around no more, if he was ever around in the first place?
“Because you think too much,” I say. “Because you think too much, and you always think of crazy ideas that ain’t got a prayer in Sky of working, and then you go ahead and try to do them when everyone else tells you not to.”
Well, not any more. I’m done with crazy ideas. Just let me figure out how to help Daddy and Kann.
Only stopping once for lunch, I make pretty good time, and it’s still early afternoon by the time I’m getting to our spot in the Mire. The trees are pretty open around where we live, and there’s plenty of water to get from place to place, so I use the paddle to bring me the rest of the way. As I come around the bend in the waterway I see our house up on the hill, the front half mostly sheared away from the Shake. There’s no sign of Kann running around the bank or the docks like usual, and I don’t hear him singing…and when I don’t see Daddy either, my stomach drops a little. But Daddy probably kept Kann up near the house while I was gone, especially around mealtime; he wouldn’t have wanted to go down that hill and back up given how he was feeling.
That better be right. Sky, please, let that be right.
I pull the boat up to the dock and lash it to one of the pilings, then clamber onto the dock and look around. Nothing’s moving, and I can’t hear anything but the splashing water and the flies buzzing in the trees. I put my hand on my knife and start climbing the hill to the house.