Still damp from last night’s torrential storm, the engine made churning, troubled noises, wugga-wugga-wugga-wugga-cough, before bursting into a satisfying rumble. Geri breathed a sigh of relief. She looked back at the house, where she saw three people with three very different expressions watching this display: Mother with her rather bland face, her only concern being that Geri remembered to bring home ice; Roger with a mixture of anger that he’d been duped and anxiety about the cargo in the back of the truck; and Alma with that look of amused deviltry. That Alma! Geri said to herself. It wasn’t enough that she’d stirred up Roger. She’d have been glad to see Geri turn the truck over and let loose the whole shipment of worms upon the town. What a riot that would be!
Geri turned away and concentrated on the rest of the procedure. She cleared the engine’s throat, a big blue cloud of smoke spewing into the air from its rusty exhaust pipe. She let it idle a moment, then pushed the throttle back in. Her foot pushed the throttle to the floor and she was about to yank the gear shift into first when she remembered the hand-brake. She twisted and released it, then put the truck into first.
She let up the clutch too slowly without stepping sufficiently on the gas. Then she gave it too much gas and lifted her foot too suddenly off the clutch. The truck lurched out of the driveway and chugged forward like a bucking horse until she at last was able to find the right combination of pressures on the clutch and gas pedals.
As she steered out of the dirt driveway and onto the Fly Creek road, which would carry her some way toward town before flood waters would necessitate a diversion over land, Geri felt her irritation with her family and Roger melting away in anticipation of her first moments with Mick.
What would he be wearing? How would he look? Would he remember her, remember the warm moments they’d shared, or would he be indifferent and require a lot of chatter and kisses and caresses to warm him up to her again. The last time he’d been dressed rather stiffly in slacks, tie and jacket in keeping with his role as law office clerk. She hoped he wouldn’t be so foolish as to dress like a dude for a country vacation. Well, if he did, she’d change that fast enough.
She’d driven about a mile and was so lost in her fantasies that she almost skidded into the two feet of water that covered Fly Creek Road at Pimm’s Hollow, where Fly Lake’s marshy tip had swollen and overflowed. She brought the truck to a halt, wrestled with the stick until it fell into reverse, then backed up and aimed the truck for the well-worn double track that led over the Pimm farm’s grazing meadow to the woods, which would bring her within a mile of Route 41—and her Mick.
The truck jounced over the rutted path, and though she tried to hold her speed down, she kept losing herself in revery, and failed to hear the creaks and groans of the crates in the back of the truck as the heavy load bottomed on useless shock absorbers.
CHAPTER
III
The silver National bus, with its destination, “Miami,” bannered above its windshield, picked its way over the broken limbs, slippery leaves and other debris that still littered Route 41. Driver Ed Morris, a round, florid-faced North Carolinian, sucked in his gut as he downshifted for the pull up Smith’s Hill. He’d been over this route no fewer than two hundred times, and he knew that the sight that greeted him when he crested this rise would determine whether the bus made it to Miami on time, or with a delay of hours to accommodate detours, or possibly not at all if the flooding was so bad as to require him to turn back to Savannah.
The bus whined as it crept up the hill, strained at the summit, then glided down a long gentle grade and around a right-hand curve. “Aw, damn!” Morris muttered, pumping the brake. With a flatulence of released pneumatic pressure, the bus slowed and finally halted before the tremendous girth of a felled cedar. An ugly black wound, bleeding pitch, testified to the awesome power of a direct hit from a lightning bolt, its splintered, ragged trunk looking as if some giant had bent a sapling over his knee. Morris cursed again, sighed, put the bus in neutral, and tipped his hat back on his head. “This is as far as we can go, folks. I’ll turn around and backtrack to Williamstown. That’s the best I can do.”
A collective groan went up from the dozen or so passengers who remained on the bus on this last leg of the New York-Miami run. It had been a long, hard ride, as their disheveled clothes and worn expressions mutely declared, and now this—this was the final blow. They gazed in despair at the downed tree and the expanse of muddy water on the other side of it. The rest of Route 41 picked up like a severed ribbon about five hundred yards on the other side of this temporary artificial lake, beckoning ironically like a seductress tempting them to their doom. But they knew that even if that downed tree were somehow removed, the water hazard could not be braved: it would be almost five feet deep at its low point, too deep to accommodate the bus.
In the back of the bus, a young man lay curled in fetal position across two of the hot corduroy-covered seats. He’d been sleeping, or at least trying to sleep, and the driver’s announcement had somehow filtered through the fog and penetrated his brain. He opened one eye and peered, mole-like, over his arm and down the aisle. The bus was on a slight angle downward and he could see an expanse of brackish water before it. He’d heard the driver mention Williamstown, and now remembered being told that Williamstown would be the last stop before Fly Creek.
All at once he popped to an upright position, shouting, “Wait! I’ll get out here.”
The driver opened the door and Mick Gordon hurriedly hauled his belongings from the luggage rack and the space under his seat. This was no mean feat, as he seemed to have collected the combined inventories of a sporting goods store, army-navy store, and a camping equipment shop. After fumbling with an enormous backpack, a set of fins, snorkel and mask, a tennis racket, and a fishing pole, he began edging down the aisle, apologizing profusely as he bumped a lady’s head with his backpack, impaled a man with his tennis racket, and managed to stick the tip of his fishing rod into the ear of a grandmother who made her displeasure known in no uncertain terms.
“Sorry,” Mick breathed, trying to smile bravely. “Excuse me. Sorry. Sorry.”
At last he arrived at the front of the bus, where the driver sat mopping the back of his neck with a handkerchief. The man looked at Mick for a long moment, shaking his head at the sight of this slightly built, pale-skinned fellow decked out in enough paraphernalia to equip a summer camp.
Mick sensed he must look slightly ridiculous, but what the hell could a man do? If the bus had made it into town the way it was supposed to, this wouldn’t have happened.
“Do you have any maps of the area, sir?” he asked respectfully.
The driver glared at him, wondering if this wise-ass from New York City was putting him on. “Where you goin’?”
“Fly Creek?”
The driver gestured with his chin and hand: straight ahead.
“Can you give me some directions?” Mick pressed. His legal training had come in handy: if the witness doesn’t give you a specific enough answer, have another go at him till he does.
But the driver ducked out of it. “Straight ahead. But you’ll need a boat.” Then he studied the load of gear on Mick’s back. “I’m sure you got one back there someplace,” he added, chuckling.
Mick had to admit the man had gotten off a good one at his expense, but before the door could close he asked. “By the way, you wouldn’t know where a person could take a leak around here?”
The driver’s face dropped, and his reply was the slam of the bus door, leaving Mick on his own. After an intricate maneuver, the driver managed to get the bus’ direction reversed, and the throaty music of its engine soon faded into the stillness of mid-morning, and Mick was alone on the edge of a swampy woods that extended God only knew how far. Well, he reflected, here’s an opportunity to test out my camping equipment and skills. The problem was, the equipment was brand new and the skills practically unused, the product of a lot of book-learning and almost no experience.
He sig
hed, listening to the silence, then plunged in. Straight ahead, the driver said. Okay, goddammit, Mick was going to go straight ahead, and Heaven help the tree, bog, or predatory animal that got in his way.
But first—that leak.
Mosquitoes swarmed around him as he relieved himself against the trunk of an oak tree, and he hastily zippered his fly against the onslaught of one particularly horny mosquito. You can have the back of my neck, he told it under his breath, but leave that part of me alone.
As he was picking up his gear there was a splintering crack over his head and he had to dance out of the way to avoid a big dead branch that had almost diabolically waited until Mick was under it before giving up the ghost.
Mick sighed, then, hands shaking, he reached into his pocket and produced a cigarette and a disposable butane lighter. The impact of the smoke on his lungs relaxed him considerably as he contemplated his journey. Though the woods were dense, even the small amount of sun penetrating to the floor of the forest was blazing hot, and the damp heat of the moldering leaves beneath his feet made the air intolerably sticky. He doffed his blue windbreaker, reached into his pack and hauled out a blue tee-shirt, still wrapped in the plastic bag it had come in at The Gap. The Gap! New York City seemed to be on another planet, he reflected as he yanked the tag off the tee-shirt. What the hell am I doing here, anyway, when I could be playing softball in Central Park?
He’d met Geri Sanders at this antiques fair—he was passionately interested in crystal, and Geri just happened to have a handsome piece of Lalique nestled among the routine stuff at her stand. He’d asked her how much she wanted for it, and when she told him, he’d said, “That’s not enough. I’ll give you twice that,” and so stunned the svelte hazel-eyed redhead that she’d dropped the crystal decanter. Mick, horrified, stuck his foot out instinctively to prevent it from shattering. He’d succeeded, at the cost of a bruised instep. Naturally, Geri had to nurse it, and that was the start of their romance.
But that had been months ago, and though they’d written each other and talked several times on the phone, he seriously wondered if she really remembered him, let alone cared for him as much as she had then. Indeed, to be perfectly honest about it, he wasn’t sure any more how strong his own feelings were. This would be a good opportunity to pit against each other those two warring proverbs, Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder vs. Out of Sight, Out of Mind, to see which was the more truthful. He knew which one he was rooting for, of course. Hell, for all the trouble he was going to, doing this Livingstone-Stanley expedition through the jungles of darkest Georgia, Geri’s heart had damn well better have grown fonder, he thought bitterly, as he slapped himself nearly senseless against a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. He reached into his pack and pulled out a can of 10-49 insect repellent. He sprayed himself liberally on the neck and arms, then put some on his hand and smeared it on his face. Repellent was the right word for it. There wasn’t an insect alive that would dare come within a yard of him, and as for snakes and other nasty creatures, he doubted if they’d hazard an attack on the bizarre creature with a life-support system on his back, and what appeared to be several dangerous weapons clutched in his hands.
And thus he trudged, for what seemed an hour but was probably considerably less. Ugly blue sweat-stains marred the chest, back, and underarms of his new tee-shirt, his shoulders ached from the unaccustomed load of a backpack and the chafe of the straps on the thin cotton of his shirt, and the muscles of his thighs and calves began to cramp and throb.
In spite of it all, he was feeling rather proud of himself. After all, the purpose of this vacation was to get back to nature, and here he was confronting nature eyeball-to-eyeball. If it didn’t kill him, it would probably be good for him.
He had no sooner enunciated this thought than he found himself exactly eyeball-to-eyeball with a patch of flooded ground around the roots of a cypress tree. He looked to both sides and the ground looked no drier, and besides, he was reluctant to veer from the straight-arrow path he’d determined to follow. Though the Okefenokee Swamp was still many hundreds of miles to the south, this territory was sufficiently rural for a man to get himself permanently lost. So there was nothing for it but to plunge straight through the wet spot.
And plunge he did: at least four feet worth. The wet patch turned out to be the surface of a boggy hole at least that deep, and the intrepid woodsman plummeted up to his armpits into a morass of vile-smelling muck. For a moment his heart sank—literally—as his boot-toes found no purchase whatsoever, and he struggled to get the straps of his pack down over his shoulders before it pulled him under. Then he located a solid root, which at least bought him a moment to think.
Okay, the first thing I do is chuck my tennis racket and fishing pole on the dry ground on the other side of this hole, he determined. Then, off comes the pack and it goes beside my sporting goods. Then I look for something solid my fingers can get a hold on, and haul my behind out of here.
Relieving himself of these items, he reached for what he thought was an exposed cypress root, but it turned out to be a dead branch lying on the forest floor, and he fell back into the fen, submerging this time up to his chin.
He heard a titter.
Had he not recognized the graceful tinkle of the titter’s voice, he might have thought it was a goblin come to divert herself at his expense. He looked up and there she was, the girl he’d come by land and mud to see. For an instant he relaxed in his boggy prison, drinking in the sight of her slim figure snugly clothed in a purple frock, her long auburn hair glinting in a fugitive ray of sunlight, her bright eyes and clear complexion. He now knew the meaning of the cliché, a sight for sore eyes.
Then he realized what he must look like. It was not precisely what he’d had in mind for a grand entrance.
Luckily for him, Geri had a sense of humor, and though he felt like a stupid ass, Geri didn’t appear to be thinking any less of him for his predicament. Nevertheless, it would be a bad idea to test how long she would find it amusing; another minute of floundering and she might begin to think he was a stupid ass too. That would never do. Testing another root and finding it firmly attached to its tree, he hauled himself out of there with a mighty effort.
Geri gazed, mouth parted in a smile and eyes twinkling with good humor, as the muddy water drained in a widening circle around his feet. In what had to be the profoundest understatement since “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” Mick said, “Hey, Geri. How you been?”
Her engaging smile told him everything.
CHAPTER
IV
“I’ll get you some dry clothes when we get to my house,” she said as they made their way toward the truck. Glancing at Mick’s gear, she added, “Wow. It looks like you’re ready for action.”
Mick shrugged, feeling slightly dumb and embarrassed. “I just picked up a few things.”
Mick tilted his head at the wording on the side of the truck. “Where’d you get this?”
“You like?” Geri laughed. “It’s the latest model.”
They climbed into the truck and looked at each other a moment, and for that moment the mud-caked Mick disappeared into the good-looking, good-humored young man she’d met a few months ago. She raised her lips for a kiss, but in Mick’s own mind, the good-looking, good-humored young man was still a mud-caked fool, and he merely touched his lips to her cheek to avoid smudging her. There would be plenty of time for deeper kisses.
Geri wrinkled her nose and rolled her window down. Mick got the hint and rolled his own down, moving as close to the door on his own side as he could.
“What kind of bait does Willie sell?” he asked.
“Worms.”
Mick turned around and peered through the rear window of the truck’s cab. “Any back there?”
“Crates of them,” Geri replied.
“Live?”
“Live and wiggly,” Geri said, with slightly devilish gusto. She was fairly certain how a city boy would react to the notion of crates and crates of live
and wiggly worms.
She was right. “Yucchh,” he said.
“It’s my neighbor’s truck,” Geri explained. “He runs a worm farm.”
“Do they eat worms around here?” he asked, keeping a straight face.
Geri sighed exasperatedly, not realizing he was putting her on. “No, dummy. They raise them for bait. He has a store in town.”
She started the engine, turned the truck around, and headed for home. “Tell me about your trip,” she said. “Did you have any trouble in the storm?”
“I guess we missed it,” Mick said. “We had clear sailing until we got near Fly Creek. Then the driver had to turn around. Hey, how’d you get here?”
“I took a back way through the woods,” Geri explained. “A bus could never make it through there.”
They jounced over the unpaved road, then onto a tarred one scarcely any smoother. For a moment they did not speak, reveling in the happiness of being reunited. Then Mick spoke, sounding a serious note.
“Hey, Geri, I’m really sorry to hear about your father. Must have been pretty rough.” Geri opened her mouth to say something, but what could she say? The man had suffered more, she felt irrationally, than a human should be made to suffer. The mere mention of it tied her tongue. “You have any brothers and sisters? You never mentioned in your letters,” Mick added.
“One sister and my mother.”
“How’re they taking it?”
“Alma’s okay,” Geri said uncertainly. “It’s really hard to tell with her. But Mom’s taking it very hard. She’s been a nervous wreck.”
“What are you doing for money?” Mick asked. He was only trying to be helpful, but then, realizing how indiscreet it might have sounded to her, added, “Uh, sorry . . .”
Geri held up a hand. “It’s okay. I’m running the business. Before Dad had the accident I was doing a lot of the refinishing and selling. Oh, by the way, I’m going to take you to the greatest antique shop today.”
Squirm Page 4