Terror at Bottle Creek

by Watt Key

  I should be glad that she’s gone, I thought. Whatever they had just didn’t work. She was a girl like Liza once. She didn’t see all of this coming. She just wants to be happy. I could like her if she was happy. Dad loves her and he should want that, too. He just doesn’t know it. I’d feel the same way if Liza left me. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d be happy. For her.

  Eventually I arrived at a wide expanse of windblown water. I came up against a cypress tree and hugged it and studied the shape and size of the lake. I soon recognized it as the same one we’d come up against in the night. I kicked away and moved into the trees again to get protection from the wind and rain. I adjusted my course slightly and kept on.

  What do women really want? They want a nice house and money and friends. They want men who wear suits and drive new cars. What they don’t want is houseboats and smelly men who hunt and fish for a living. Who have dogs named Catfish. I don’t want to be this. I won’t be this.

  * * *

  I felt the Tensaw before I saw it. A greater pull somewhere out in front of me. A channelized, sucking monster of hydraulic power. I slowed and heard it licking through the trees. The small optimism I’d built left me.

  There’s no way, I thought. Dad, there’s no way.

  But I kept on, trying to shut out my fear, my reasoning. There was even something peaceful in knowing that soon it would all be over. I’d be swept under and tumbled in the liquid dark, choking for a moment, knowing I’d done what I could before the world went black. Dad once told me that if he had to choose a way to go, it would be drowning. He said there wouldn’t be any pain. It made sense to me.

  The current overtook my efforts before I reached the river. I stopped swimming and grabbed a tree and held it while my legs trailed downstream. I remained there, the water rushing around the trunk and into my face. The roar of the wind over the river was louder than ever. Like this had always been the source of the storm’s violence. I felt my leg muscles begin to spasm. Then the spasms went up into my arms. I pressed my cheek against the rough bark. The girls seemed so far away.

  “Dad,” I said aloud.

  I wanted to get it over with. I was exhausted. I was tired of the game I was playing with myself. Why do I have to keep trying? What’s the point? And I thought of the girls again and I imagined them strapped helplessly over that death scene.

  I can try to suffer more than them. It’s the least I can do.

  I let go of the tree and allowed the current to suck me backward. I slammed sideways into another tree and felt a sharp pain in my ribs. I twisted and kicked off it. I thrashed from one tree to the next, making slow, diagonal progress toward the giant slurping sound of the river.

  Suddenly it was there beside me. The wide roil of it, strewn with white flecks of trash and trees. I clung to a cypress branch, dipping and swinging on the surface.

  Find something. A log. Hold on to it. Paddle it. You might not reach the other side for miles, but grab something.

  I looked to the far trees, nearly a hundred yards away. Then down and across the surface of the water, the color of creamed coffee, sliding and rolling in upon itself. I watched a stripped tree the size of a telephone pole sucked under in a boil. Moments later it reappeared twenty yards downriver, the nose of it rising like a whale, gaining height, finally overtaken by its own weight, and slapping back to the water again. I knew it wasn’t possible to swim across and survive. But my arms and legs were trembling again. The girls were waiting.

  Quittin’ ain’t in my blood, and it ain’t in yours.

  The white hull of a refrigerator came bobbing toward me, eager and timely. As it passed I leaped out and clawed over it, feeling for a handhold. On the opposite side I found the door splayed open. I crawled partly onto it and wrapped my fingers around the inside edge. Then I kicked my feet beneath the box, trying to propel it across the river. The hydraulics sucked at my legs and spun us. I realized that I didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. I let my legs relax. I lay my face on the door and tasted the cold, gritty water as it ebbed against my mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  36

  I drifted downriver with my eyes closed, strangely comfortable, no longer worried about anything. The wind and rain beat on my face, and the cold water spun and rocked my limp body amid the storm debris. It seemed there was nothing left of me but a dreamy consciousness keeping my fingers curled around the door, savoring the moment before I let go and sank into the muddy depths.

  Then I felt something slam into the refrigerator, almost tearing it from my grip.

  “Cort!” someone yelled.

  I thought it was just part of the dream.

  “Cort!”

  I opened my eyes and saw Dad reaching out to hold the edge of the fridge.

  “Grab the side of the boat, son!”

  Dad hung over me in Mr. Stovall’s old center-console jon. When I didn’t respond he spun the fridge, leaned out, and grabbed the back of my pants. He pulled me over the gunnels and I flopped to the deck like a big fish.

  He leaned down and got in my face. “Where are they?”

  I still couldn’t make sense of the situation. I began to cough and cry. “Dad.”

  He punched me hard in the shoulder. “Come on, Cort! Where are they?”

  I leaped at him with the last of my strength, hit him on the leg, and fell at his feet. “I hate you,” I said. “I hate you.”

  “I’m here, Cort.”

  “You were gone!” I coughed. “You left me!”

  He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me up. “Come on, son.”

  I jerked away from him and wiped my face. “It’s too late,” I said.

  For a moment neither of us said anything. The turbulence spun the boat and sucked at it and carried us swiftly downriver. The storm blew and spat at us. But I didn’t see or hear or feel any of it. I felt like something curled into a hard shell.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was wrong to leave. I know that.”

  “I needed you,” I said. “I just need you. It’s just us.”

  He touched my shoulder again. “I know,” he said.

  After a moment my head began to clear and I said, “The mounds. They’re at the mounds.”

  He pulled his hand away and shoved down on the engine throttle. The boat started swinging against the current.

  “Bottle Creek?” he said.

  I wiped my face again and grabbed the steering console and started to pull myself up.

  “Are they at Bottle Creek?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I stood and held the running bar of the console. He bent down and grabbed a life vest and shoved it toward me.

  “Put it on.”

  I leaned against the console and worked my arms into the vest while the boat surged upriver, chewing against the current.

  “What happened, Cort? I need somethin’ to work with here.”

  I didn’t answer his question. “We need guns, Dad.”

  “What?”

  “They’re in a tree on top of the big mound. There’s a boar hog and alligators and snakes and everything in the swamp. Liza’s snakebit. They were both in bad shape when I left them.”

  Dad bit his bottom lip, trying to get his thoughts around it all.

  “We’ve got to kill the hog, Dad. You can’t get past it. It’s snakebit or something. It’s gone mad.”

  He swallowed. “The guns are still in my truck,” he said. “Way out across Nelson’s field.”

  “We don’t have that much time.”

  He studied the river ahead and didn’t answer me.

  “Dad!”

  He looked at me.

  “We can’t get past it,” I said. “It’ll kill us.”

  He stared ahead again and clenched his jaw with determination. It was a look of resolve I hadn’t seen in a long time.

  “We’ll do what we have to do,” he said. “Hang on.”

  He jammed his palm against the throttle again, hammering all he cou
ld get from the outboard. The boat leaped and strained against the river.

  37

  It seemed to take forever, plowing upriver to the mouth of Bayou Jessamine, wiping water from our faces, dodging debris, and strong-arming the boat through the river boils and undertow.

  “We’re gonna get those girls, son,” Dad shouted over the wind. But the tone of his voice didn’t have any confidence behind it. It was just talk to make us both feel better. My eyes searched the boat and my mind raced with ideas, but I could think of nothing we had to fend off Rusty. Dad didn’t understand. He hadn’t seen what was out there.

  Dad pointed at a spot on the west side of the river. I saw the remains of the houseboat, just a few pieces of the roof, twisted and torn and caught up in the trees.

  I looked away. “I had to leave Catfish on there,” I said. “He wouldn’t get off the houseboat.”

  Dad shook his head like he didn’t want to hear any more bad news. After a minute he slammed his hand on the throttle.

  “Come on!” he said. “Why can’t this thing go faster?”

  Finally we swung into the mouth of Bayou Jessamine and had to slow down. The river let go of the boat and the trees closed around, giving us shelter from the storm. The creek was normally only twenty feet across and impossible to navigate in anything wider than a canoe. Now the biggest obstacles were tree branches and spiderwebs. We crouched behind the console and let them scrape and whip across the boat.

  “We need to get an ambulance on the way, Dad.”

  He swatted a banana spider from his arm. “Yeah,” he mumbled, thinking about something else.

  “Curly told me they won’t help out during the storm.”

  “The hell they won’t.”

  “They can’t get to the landing.”

  “I did,” he said. “Take the wheel.”

  I took over driving while Dad ducked beneath the console and pulled out his handheld radio. “Curly,” he said into it.

  No one answered.

  “Curly!” he shouted.

  “Yeah?” came Curly’s voice. “That you, Tom?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. I’m in trouble. Where can you get an ambulance down to the river? I’m bringing in the Stovall girls.”

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  “One’s snakebit and the other…” He looked at me.

  “Hypothermia, I think. Lots of ant bites,” I said.

  “Hypothermic and ant bites.”

  “You on the river, Tom?”

  “Listen, I don’t have time to explain all this. Get me an ambulance. As close to the landin’ as they can get.”

  “You know—”

  “Don’t give me that crap, Curly! Make it happen. You drive it yourself if you have to.”

  There was a pause. “All right, Tom. Let me see what I can do. Stand by.”

  Dad shoved the radio back under the console and took the steering wheel from me. He bumped more speed out of the throttle and we plowed ahead. He took a hard turn and I fell against the gunnel, wincing as the wound on my thigh pressed against the steel.

  “Stay down on the deck,” he said.

  I got to my feet again. “I’m okay,” I said.

  “What happened to your leg?”

  “That hog tusked me.”

  “We got to get somethin’ on it.”

  I steadied myself and didn’t answer him.

  “Look under the console,” he said. “There’s a couple of towels. You need to warm up. They’re wet, but they’re better than nothin’.”

  “Later,” I said.

  The boat smashed and cracked through another mass of limbs. I pulled a net of sticky spiderwebs from my face, then looked back at the creek, trying to get some clue as to where we were by the pattern of the turns. I had a faint idea, but I knew we still had maybe a mile more to bull our way through.

  The boat suddenly hit a log and threw us against the console.

  “Aw, come on!” Dad said.

  I started for the stern. He cut the throttle and toggled the electric lift on the outboard to raise the propeller out of the water while I got out of the boat and stood on a submerged log and shoved us over. As soon as I climbed aboard over the transom he lowered the motor and started ahead again.

  “I don’t know how we can get to them,” I said. “It’s like nothing you ever saw.”

  “I never gave it a thought,” he said. “Where they’d all go.”

  “You’re about to find out.”

  “Deer, too?”

  “Yeah. And bears. There was a bear in the tree next to us.”

  Dad bit his lip again and shook his head.

  “If the snakes haven’t killed it. I think it’s snakebit, too.”

  “Damn snakes,” he said.

  “They’re all over the mound. I’ve never seen so many in one place.”

  Dad set his jaw again. “Sounds like we’re about to go to war,” he muttered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Except we don’t have any guns.”

  38

  When we broke from the trees into Bottle Creek the wind and rain came against our faces again, but not so hard this time. I looked at the sky, and the gray clouds seemed higher and less dense. Then I looked down and refocused on where we were going.

  “You think the trail’s wide enough?” I said.

  Dad gunned the boat downstream. “It’ll have to be.”

  In a moment we arrived at the bend in the creek where the trail started. I studied the trees, trying to find a break in the canopy.

  “Can you tell where it is?” Dad said.

  I kept running my eyes over it all, using my imagination to redraw where the sandy footpath would be if it weren’t flooded over. Finally I thought I recognized the crooked cypress that marked the trail.

  I pointed. “The cypress tree. There.”

  Dad studied it. “Yeah,” he said. “I think you got it.”

  He swung the boat toward the bank and plowed into the foliage, and the swamp canopy closed over us again like a protective cloak. The wind and rain grew quiet and distant. I began to listen. Gradually, I felt myself being pulled back into the nightmare.

  “I hear it up there,” Dad said.

  Now squirrel and bird chatter filled the treetops. I looked up and saw the canopy was no longer being tossed and whipped about by the wind gusts. The smaller creatures were coming out. A hog squeal pierced the wetland, but I knew it wasn’t Rusty. It was one of the smaller ones. Still alive.

  Dad drifted off in thought, focusing on the tangle of wet green ahead, working the boat slowly through the trees.

  “Go to the stern and break off the navigation light pole,” he said. “Then snap the bulb off the top. Maybe I can sharpen the metal.”

  A cottonmouth plunked onto the bow and quickly slithered over the gunnels into the water.

  Dad ducked reflexively. “Crap,” he muttered.

  He looked about in the trees. They were filled with small animals staring back at us. More snakes.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Watch out for those things.”

  I went to the rear of the boat and broke off the light pole. I studied it doubtfully, but it was all we had. I broke off the bulb and was left with a three-foot length of aluminum pole the diameter of my thumb.

  “I don’t know how we’re gonna sharpen it,” I said.

  “Just give it to me, then.”

  I passed the pole to him and went back up to the bow and studied the trees ahead.

  “Liza!” I shouted. I didn’t expect her to answer me. “I’ve got Dad! We’re coming!”

  Something crashed and squealed and grunted not fifty yards ahead. Two alligators glided away silently over the concentric rings of disturbance lapping against the boat.

  “Look at the water,” Dad said.

  I glanced down and saw the bloody soup.

  “I’ve seen it,” I said.

  “How’d you get out of here?”

  I didn’t answer him. Through the tangle of vines and
tree branches I saw the dark shape of the mound.

  Where’s Rusty? I thought. Where is he?

  39

  “I see the mound,” I said.

  “Liza!” he shouted. “Francie!”

  There was no answer. Another squeal erupted from the mound. It seemed the level of noise and confusion was even more than when I’d left it that morning, especially with the squirrels fussing and birds flapping in the trees. It was all the chaos of a washed-out zoo.

  “You can’t get past that hog, Dad. He’s up there. Don’t ground the boat yet.”

  “What?”

  “Back off!”

  Dad slammed the boat into reverse just as it was about to nose into the base of the mound. In that instant a blur of rust-colored hair came charging down the hill, crashing through the underbrush. Rusty plowed into the water and slammed against the hull. I lost my footing and toppled into the water, falling across the back of the crazed hog. I sank and swirled in the murky depths, watching the white belly of the beast and its hooves slicing above me. I flipped and swam under the shadow of the boat and came up on the other side. I grabbed the gunnels and felt Dad’s hand grip my arm and haul me into the boat once again.

  “You hurt, son?”

  I got to my knees and shook my head while I caught my breath.

  “God almighty!” he said.

  I looked across the bow to see Rusty wading ashore. The hog turned his black eyes to us, and I saw the crazed hate and rage twitching in his muscles. His face and tusks were red with blood.

  “I’ve never seen anything snakebit act like that,” Dad said.

  I stood. “We’ve got to get the girls.”

  Dad dropped the pole on the deck. “This won’t do us any good against that thing.”

  “Liza!” I called.

  There was no answer. Dad walked to the bow of the boat and stared back at Rusty. The hog wheezed and grunted and pawed the mud.

  “I got an idea,” Dad said. He bent and picked up the bow rope and began making a loop on the end. “Get me closer.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m gonna get a noose around his head.”

  “You think you can hold it?”