“Well, yeah. I tole ’em to keep outta that river.”
“Do you have another boat?” the trooper asked.
“Not my personal self,” said Dime, feeling a thousand percent better about the situation. “But I know where I can git one.”
* * *
We get so hooked on being connected 24/7 to our friends, our playlists, our Tweets and Instagrams, whatever. The battery in our smart phone dies and it’s like somebody shut off the oxygen to our brain. Where’s my charger? I can’t find my stupid charger! Mom, drop everything and take me to Radio Shack!
That’s me. I’m definitely attached to my phone. Malley always gets crazy stressed whenever her parents confiscate hers, which happens on a regular basis due to her acting like a smartass brat. Without her cell she’s unbearable, mean as a moccasin. And when her computer freezes, she turns pure psycho. One time she threw it against a wall and cracked the screen. I’m not quite that bad, but my mood turns foul when my laptop crashes.
It’s amazing how soon you forget your electronic pacifiers when they’re at the bottom of a river, how easy it is to stop fixating on all the texts, messages and posts you might be missing. Not once did Malley and I gripe about being isolated from our precious social networks. Pursuing a desperate criminal through the wilderness drastically rearranges your priorities.
Skink had survived war and a multitude of other perilous adventures. My cousin had survived a kidnapping, and I’d survived the hunt to track her down.
If luck was an ingredient, how much did we have left?
“Don’t look up,” Skink said.
“How come?” Malley asked.
On the ground we saw where Tommy Chalmer’s footprints abruptly stopped, as if he’d been plucked off the planet by some aliens in a spaceship.
“He’s in the tree,” the governor reported in a murmur.
“Which tree?”
“The one we’re under. Keep your voices low, act confused and do not look up.”
The black dirt around the trunk was pitted by jumbo pig tracks. A wild boar had chased Tommy way, way up a pine.
“There’s fresh blood on the bark,” said Skink.
“So what do we do?” my cousin asked. Then, purposely louder: “Gee, which way do you think he went?”
We were both trying so hard not to look up that we were staring like morons at our own tracks in the muck. Skink said we should continue walking, circle back through the woods and wait for Tommy to climb down.
It sounded like a decent plan, except Tommy didn’t cooperate. We’d taken only a few steps before a hoarse voice crooned from above:
“Why, there she is! My sweet, beautiful bride!”
Skink spat a curse word. More than one, actually.
“Can we look up now?” Malley asked archly.
Tommy sat on a branch, his legs dangling, the gun held in his left hand. His right hand, the catfish hand, had swollen so grotesquely that it might as well have been inflated by a bicycle pump. The fingers didn’t resemble real fingers any more—more like scalded purple sausages. In fact, the whole arm was bloated all the way to the shoulder socket, as if he was wearing one of those padded tubes used for training police dogs how to maul crooks.
“Hi there, sweetie,” he called down to Malley. “You been missin’ me? Now, tell the truth.”
“You need a doctor, T.C. You look like poop on a Popsicle.”
My cousin, smooth as ever.
“Come on down from there,” she said.
“Ha, not with him around.” Tommy waggled the pistol barrel at Skink. “Or him, neither.”
I admit I flinched when he pointed the weapon in my direction.
The governor said, “We’re not armed, son.”
“You got a spear!”
“Naw, it’s just a golf club.”
“Shut up, dude, it’s a spear! I already shot you dead once, so are you some kind a zombie or what?”
“I’m just an old man who wants to talk.”
“No, a swamp zombie with a spear is what you are!”
Tommy was nearly delirious from the infection, though you couldn’t blame him for not wanting to tangle again with Skink. He wasn’t the least bit afraid of me; I was just a ninety-five-pound nuisance.
Malley said, “Then I’ll tell them to leave. It’ll just be you and me, T.C.”
Under his breath the governor said to my cousin, “Bad idea, butterfly.”
“Okay, but I got three bullets left,” Tommy hollered down, “say they get any bright ideas to come back for you. I shot at some dumb hog that got on my case, I’m not afraid to shoot a zombie.”
I wondered if Tommy believed in Bigfoots, too.
“You heard the young lady,” Skink said to me. “Let’s go.”
Of course we would be coming back for Malley. We’d be coming back for Tommy, too.
Side by side Skink and I began to walk. He said, “This will happen fast, so be sharp. Your job is getting your cousin out of the way. Do whatever’s necessary, Richard, but leave me a clear path to Mr. Chalmers. Comprende?”
The governor was smiling, naturally. As calm and casual as if he were strolling to the post office.
After disappearing from Tommy’s line of sight, we doubled back in silence, approaching the tree from a different direction. Skink pointed to a fluffy wax myrtle shrub, and we crouched behind it, spying.
Tommy had begun an unsteady descent from the pine, raining broken twigs and scabs of bark. He looked like a drunken scarecrow. The seat of his jeans had been ripped open, exposing a pimply crescent of gouged buttock where the angry boar had implanted a tusk. That explained the blood smears on the tree trunk.
When he finally reached solid ground, Tommy gave a feeble pump with his gun hand, yelling, “Oh yeah! Killed it!”
The governor told me to get ready.
Tommy held out his unbloated arm, beckoning my cousin for a hug.
“You poor baby,” she said sweetly.
Then she stepped forward and slugged him in the belly. It sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a sack of wet rice. He crumpled, goggle-eyed and wheezing, but he didn’t let go of the gun.
Skink was already on the move, crutching his nine-iron through the marsh bottom at a surprisingly zippy pace. I dashed past, grabbed Malley by the waist and pulled her off to the side. The governor was kneeling on Tommy’s neck, prying the pistol from his fingers.
My cousin broke free and ran back to kick and punch at her kidnapper. She was calling him names, screaming questions.
What made you do it?
How did you pick me?
Why’d you lie?
What’s wrong with you?
T.C. didn’t say a thing. He appeared half-conscious, loose-jawed and limp as a dirty rag.
Once again I dragged Malley away. Skink let go of Tommy and stood up, barking like a deranged pit bull, and I mean barking. It was more startling than one of his loud dreams, because he was wide awake.
After dumping the remaining bullets from the gun, he beat it against a maple tree until the cylinder broke apart and the barrel snapped. Then he began chanting in some unrecognizable language while performing a cripple-step jig that was even weirder than Malley’s pig-scaring dance. All the time he kept spinning that nine-iron like a drum major twirling a baton.
Malley and I sat wordlessly watching the governor’s bizarre fit, which we hoped would freak Tommy into a petrified state of surrender.
Finally Skink switched back to English. “I got blisters on my fingers!” he brayed before keeling facedown.
We figured he was just taking a rest; acting whacko had to be exhausting.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t acting. The fit he’d pitched came from the same dark place as his nightmares, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. But maybe a self-induced collapse was h
is subconscious way of stopping himself from killing Tommy Chalmers with his bare hands.
As we struggled to flip Skink over, we noticed he didn’t seem to be breathing. He felt like dead weight, and dead is how he appeared, his chin whiskers frothed with white spittle.
The next thing I remember is Malley cradling his head while I pounded on his bruised chest trying to remember CPR from the class that Mom made me take after Dad died. My cousin and I both noticed Tommy struggle to his knees and start crawling off, but the lifeless governor held our undivided and frantic attention.
I pushed down so hard on his ribcage that the wadding blew out of the bullet wound beneath his collarbone, followed by a spurt of dark blood.
I pushed down so hard that the snail shell got ejected from his eye socket.
I pushed down so hard that his hips bucked in a violent spasm that flung me like a cowboy from a rodeo bull.
The crusty old lunatic sat up coughing. “You ruined,” he said between hacks, “a perfectly good trance.”
Malley retrieved his snail shell. Tartly she sniped, “Gee, sorry for trying to save your life. I don’t know what Richard and I were thinking.”
My hair was full of wet dirt and leaves. “Dude, we thought you were dying,” I said to Skink. “You looked really, really bad. Much worse than …”
“Usual?” He gave a razor-edged chuckle. “I’m just curious. Did either of you happen to notice where Mr. Chalmers went?”
Twenty-Three
During the commotion Tommy had crabbed back to the canoe and shouldered it down the bank. Now he was paddling along the creek, an awkward and noisy effort with one arm swollen to the size of a Yule log.
“I hate you! I HATE YOU!” Malley shrieked from the shore.
For a moment I thought she might dive in to give chase. As sick and woozy as he was, Tommy still knew which way to go: Toward the river.
With a lopsided leer he called back to my cousin: “You’ll see me again one day, honey, don’t you worry! I know where you live. I know which school you go to. I know everything I need to know about you!”
Malley whirled toward Skink. “Why’d you break the gun? That was so … so … STUPID!”
She grabbed the golf club from his hand and flung it at the canoe. The nine-iron pinwheeled harmlessly over Tommy’s head and splashed into the creek.
The governor got into the Pathfinder and turned the key. The engine shuddered but didn’t start. Again and again he tried, until only a dull clicking noise came from the ignition switch—another sign of Dime’s loose approach to boat maintenance.
“Hell,” said Skink, and a whole lot more.
From the canoe Tommy continued taunting my cousin. “We’ll get married just like I said, don’t you worry! On a beach somewheres far away, just me and my dream bride. …”
He was paddling faster than I thought possible for a man in his wrecked condition, faster than any of us could swim.
Skink clambered from the boat and snatched his fishing rod off the ground. The same bass lure was still tied on the line—a skirted spinner with two sets of treble hooks, meaning six total barbs. The hooks weren’t large, but they were plenty sharp enough to pierce human flesh.
He began casting at Tommy while he gimped along the bank, crashing through bushes and skidding across tree roots, trying to keep pace with the moving canoe. Although the creek wasn’t wide, you couldn’t safely wade in it because the bottom was basically quicksand.
The governor’s aim was off the mark again and again. The lure sailed left of Tommy, then right. Short, long, longer, then short again. Tommy wasn’t ducking out of the way—in fact, he was completely clueless, huddled in the bow carving feverishly toward freedom. His good arm did the stroking while he used the bloated one to steady the paddle, those gross sausage fingertips hooked over the handle.
“Here, let me give it a shot,” I said to Skink.
He handed me the rod—no argument, no lectures. I couldn’t believe it.
On my very first cast I snagged the back of Tommy’s shirt and jerked firmly to set the hooks. He yelped, dropped the paddle and started swatting at himself. I’m sure he thought he’d been stung by a big-ass bumblebee.
I tried to keep the pressure tight but the drag mechanism buzzed, line peeling off the spool as the current carried the canoe away. Skink’s light spinning rod wasn’t designed to crank in a hundred and seventy pounds of anything—fish, man, or beast—though I knew some extraordinary catches had been made by skilled anglers on flimsy tackle. I pictured myself heroically yanking Tommy into the river and hauling him kicking and hollering to the shore, where we’d tie him up with vines and hold him for the police.
But of course that isn’t what happened.
Tommy did end up in the water, though not because I had a burst of superhuman strength. He flipped the canoe all by himself while flailing around, trying to dislodge the unseen killer bee.
This occurred outside the mouth of the creek, a full one hundred yards from where I stood holding the bent fishing rod, Skink on one side of me and Malley on the other. We could see the glinting hull of the capsized canoe clocking down the rain-swollen Choctawhatchee.
T.C. wasn’t moving quite as swiftly, because he was still attached to me. The spinner’s treble hooks held fast.
“Don’t let him get away!” Malley shouted. “Reel him in, Richard! Reel fast!”
But he was too heavy, and now the powerful tug of the river began carrying him along. He didn’t panic. We could see him lifting his head taking deep breaths. There was no frantic spluttering, no desperate howls for help. Tommy was just riding the current, paddling with his good arm.
“Stop him!”
“I can’t, Mal!”
Helplessly I watched the spool empty as Tommy was drawn farther and farther away. If I tightened the drag knob, the line would snap for sure. There was nothing to do except hang on and hope he swung into the calmness of an eddy.
The governor said, “It’s over, son. Break him off.” His lone eye was fixed intently downstream.
“Over? Seriously?” My cousin stomped up and down. “Are you like totally lame? That monster’s getting away! He is getting away!”
“Not likely,” said Skink.
An instant later, Tommy Chalmers went under in a fierce boiling swirl, and my line went slack.
I reeled in. The lure was gone, still hooked to Tommy. I put down the fishing rod and sat on a stump.
Skink said, “ ‘Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.’ That’s a quote from Billy Bob Shakespeare himself, though he was not personally familiar with crocodilians. Now, I’m gonna take a stroll and clear my brain.”
He grabbed my shoulder and said, “You keep close to her.”
“I will, don’t worry.”
“Remember our rule, son. There was only one, for God’s sake.”
“I remember.”
“Do whatever I say, whenever I say it. And now I’m telling you to stay right here, both of you, no matter what. I won’t be far.”
“Okay.”
At the boat he stooped to get his shoe box, which he tucked under one arm. Before clomping away he said, “You’re one of the good ones, Richard.”
Whatever that meant.
Malley didn’t see him go because she couldn’t look away from the rolling river. Her gaze was locked on the spot where Tommy had disappeared.
“What just happened?” she said.
“Gator.”
“Did you see it?”
“Skink saw it.”
“But did you?” she demanded. “’Cause I didn’t see anything, Richard.”
Gently I turned her by the shoulders and showed it to her—the dull black brute pushing a wake, its ridged back as wide as train track, its long tail slicing a leisurely S in the water. The alligator was already halfway across the Choc
tawhatchee, but there was no mistaking what was jackknifed in its open jaws.
The green of the T-shirt, the dark blue of the jeans.
“Really” was all my cousin said. Then she sat down, shaking.
We stayed quiet at first, each of us trying to deal with what we’d just seen. Malley finally asked where Skink went, and I repeated what he’d told me—to stay where we were, he wasn’t far away. She thought we should go find him, but I said no, not this time.
The rims of the clouds were pink and rose, sunset colors. A good breeze brought a faint smell of salt from the Gulf. There was a soft shuffling in the woods behind us, and Malley and I turned expectantly. Nobody was there, although later she insisted she’d heard a hushed voice telling us to look up.
I’m not sure what I heard, but for whatever reason we both raised our eyes.
Poised high in a moss-draped cypress was the Lord God Bird, one bright eye slanted down toward us. The woodpecker was a full-grown male, regally tall and more vividly colored than the drawing we’d used for my science project. Its blue-black breast feathers gleamed like coal, and a snowy stripe sloped down its neck and fanned at the tail. His long, flat-tipped bill truly looked like raw ivory.
And the crest on the crown of his head was a shade of crimson brighter than blood.
“I told you so,” she whispered. “Told you I saw one.”
“Amazing.” It was the only word that sprung into my mind, and it seemed too small for the occasion.
The great woodpecker made a squeak like a dog’s chew toy when you step on it, or maybe the rusty hinge of a screen door. Three times the bird repeated the call, but no other ivorybill replied.
Everyone’s memory works differently, so I can’t honestly say how we long we sat watching that supposedly extinct creature—or more accurately, how long it sat watching us. The whole time we remained motionless, as still as moths on a leaf. Maybe it was five minutes, maybe it was thirty seconds. My cousin isn’t certain, either.
“Surreal” was her description of the encounter, a better word than mine.
After the woodpecker flew away, our eyes remained fixed for a while on the top of that tree. We knew the bird probably wasn’t coming back, just as we knew the governor probably wasn’t coming back, but that didn’t stop us from hoping.
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