Swamp Sister

by Robert Edmond Alter

  Shad looked around, but there wasn't much to see. The fool gator was probably long gone. He squatted on the floorboards, bolted a fresh cartridge home, snapped the safety and set the rifle down.

  The skiff undulated as though a ground swell was moving under the flat bottom. Where's the current coming from? he wondered.

  The skiff lifted sharply, canted to one side and began sliding off. Shad grabbed for the gunwales, starting to get up, then stalled. He was tipping over. Out of the corner of his eye he saw water breaking on the scutellated back of a gator, and there was that angry red stratum replacing the missing scut. The gator's humped back seemed to be coming right at him; then – last instant – he knew it wasn't so. He was going to it.

  Gator reared – skiff skittered – starboard tilted high above Shad and all the swamp went with it, tumbling into a spinning green smear – Silver and black shocked his eyes. He felt the solid impact of his weight slamming water – and everything was liquid. What he could see wasn't worth claiming. Straight ahead, an opaque olive, below, total blackness, above, a silvery sheen – the surface. He struck for it, broke it, felt cold air on his wet face, sucked a breath – half of it brackish water – and went kicking and flailing for shore.

  He wasn't going in a given direction – _he was going_. He didn't know where the skiff was or where the nearest outcropping of bank stood and he didn't give a damn. He knew a king-sized gator was right behind him and the panic was on.

  He kept waiting for the sudden shocking snap of the gator-teeth in his legs, could actually feel it, could see himself being drawn down to the mushy decay on the black bottom, and the pressing scaly weight of the great gator over him, and the torrent of stagnant water pouring into his open, bubbling mouth – and he went wild.

  His swinging left hand struck a spongy something, and then his chin bumped into it. He raised his head, brought his knees and feet under him and started crawling onto the soggy bank.

  The ground, as far as it went, wasn't anything to boast of. It was marsh land, not an island. Semi-solid, and already it was trembling. Shad hesitated in a crouch, streaming water from clothes and body, smelling that damn musky odour. A matted hurrah and catciaw thicket fronted the bank, and it was tunnelled and a throaty rumbling was coming from behind it.

  He looked back. The skiff was seventy feet away and drifting downstream (ironic – thinking of Jort – but not a damn bit funny), and the scut-busted gator was kicking around out there in the run, watching him with wideawake eyes and snorfing and hissing, as though daring him to come back into the water.

  The gator-ground was quivering rhythmically now, and it sounded as though a whole army of them were coming at him. He felt around the back of his belt for his knife and drew it in a hopelessly futile gesture of defiance. He started to go right, stalled, took a step or two left, got caught in indecision, and then began backing up, watching the thicket tunnels.

  The first gator wasn't much – a clumsy female, and she veered off in a fright when she saw him crouching there. But the next one was a big granddaddy, and he came out on a direct line with Shad and his jaws unhinged, and Shad wasn't hanging around to see more. He legged it along the shore for the nearest water oak.

  He put the knife blade in his teeth and hauled himself up into the branches. When he looked down he couldn't believe it. The ground was acrawl with gators. Down the bank they came with their peculiar stumpy-legged run and went splam! in the water. After a while their roars and grunts and hisses died down, and after a longer while the hurons and limpkins and what-all birds let off their squawking. The silence picked up again with a completeness that seemed smugly complacent.

  There was the bogland- He didn't know how long he'd been in it. He was convinced it was endless, and knew it to be timeless. A thousand years came and went and nothing changed. He'd long ago lost the creek – without quite realizing at the time what was happening. But it had been impossible to follow it along the shore for more than a mile. Too many gators, too many thickets – he'd kept turning off, and farther off, and he didn't know how far he'd slogged or where.

  It was a step-over, climb-around, wading horror. Halfpetrified logs, all sizes, all positions except straight up; broken old stumps like rotten teeth; ankle to knee-high stagnant water, the colour of old ale.

  And sinkholes – he could never see them coming. And each time as he slip-shot down and the torpid, stinking water rushed up, his heart contracted with panic. And after a while he began to wonder how much of that a heart could take.

  He waded.

  It ended finally, as the sun ended. One moment it was there, and a moment later only the after glow blazed on the rim of the swamp, like a bright lamp standing on the grave of the sun. Then a pale grey twilight hung over the wilderness and Shad slogged through it wearily, watching the edge of the bog come at him with agonizing slowness. Beyond high land stood, with palmettos and pine trees and swamp oak -and food. Way, hay, he was hungry enough to eat a last year's poor-joe nest.

  And then, right on the edge of the bog, he met a panther cat with the same idea in mind. Shad pulled his knife and crouched. The cat's head lowered and its hair started to bristle. Its eyes were beryl green and placed in its head on a down-slant to its nose, giving it a mean, sour look. Its lips lifted and it snarled.

  Shad hesitated and then realized that the panther couldn't quite make up its mind. He decided to augment the cat's attitude by pulling back into the bog. He retraced his own track for a hundred-some feet.

  The cat didn't like the water. There were easier and more familiar prey afoot. It padded off silently, glancing back from time to time to see that Shad was behaving himself. But they weren't always like that.

  Taking it easy, Shad came out of the bog and started up the high ground. He went to where the first palmetto clump squatted and looked back at the darkening badlands.

  "God," he whispered.

  He didn't eat that night. It wasn't safe to hunt in the dark, and it was also hopeless. But he had a fire. He had three matches in his denims and he dried the heads by rolling them in his hair. He put his four tailor-mades on a flat rock and set it next to the fire. When he lifted the rock he found some slimy slugs stuck to the damp bottom. But he wasn't that hungry He drank swamp water and had a cigarette, and then tried to go to sleep.

  The night crawled by like a wounded snake. His sleep came piecemeal, and between the fits and starts fear expanded insomnia until finally he gave up the idea as useless. He threw fresh wood on the fire, lit another cigarette and listened to the whispering feet of nameless things beyond the palmettos.

  "It's going to be bad," he murmured. "Going to be real bad."

  He was up and moving with the sun, heading south.

  In the runty bay bushes of another island he found the remains of a long dead wildcat. It was bones mostly, with a few patches of hair and hide and the claws. It was the claws that gave him the idea for a fish lure. He tore a hunk of the hide loose and sat down with it on a log, then traced an outline on the hide with the point of his knife. When he was finished, the strip of hide he'd cut had the appearance of a lizard. He got the wildcat's claws and hooked them to his dabbler.

  He cut himself a pole and attached the lure to it with some vine strings, and then went down to the first brook and started dancing the dabbler on the surface, pulling it in and out of the marsh bushes. Twice in over an hour he had a trout nibble, and then he had an honest to God strike; but the trout was five or six pounds and the catclaws weren't fishhooks. The fish got clean away and Shad gave up the idea with a mouthful of dirty words. He drank some swamp water and went on.

  The sun dragged its feet across the sky like a poky fat boy in no hurry to get home, and Shad stumbled along under the heavy droop of foliage that seemed to hang motionless with the expectant air of a deadfall. He didn't know which he hated more – the bogland or the jungle. The air was punk and the sharp palmetto fronds were cutting him to mincemeat, and twice now rattlers had given him fair warning, and –
and the Goda'mighty loneliness of the place.

  He couldn't understand why God had to go and do this to him. I never kilt nobody, er took what weren't mine – well, nothing much ner important. You cain't call that eighty-thousand dollars stealing, because I went and found that. I never made fun a God, like some I know. Like Iris Culver fer one. Now He'd have a right to punish her, but Shad didn't see Him doing it. No; one-sided, that's what it was.

  "Why me?" he suddenly shouted compulsively. "What You holding against me that makes You do me this way? What have I done?"

  Instantly the swamp turned shrill. Squawk hurons cut loose as though they'd been picked alive, and limpkins began wailing their we-are-lost-children cry. And a startled, irritated grunting sounded in the palmettos.

  Shad crouched, catching his breath. It wasn't gatorgrunting this time, worse – wild hog. The leader came snorting through the fronds as mean as a walleyed bull with a rump full of buckshot. He was leggy and narrow, his back like a man's hand viewed edgewise. He spotted Shad and something went out of whack in his little piggy eyes. He dropped his head and charged.

  Shad forgot about God and went hell-for-leather out of there. He started for the tall timber, but too late – the hogs had cut him off. He veered sharply to the east.

  They chased him right across a marsh and into the horror of the pin-downs. It was a vast thicket and he went dodging in and out of its bays, trying to find an easy way through. But there was no such thing. Shad said "Aw hell," and lunged into the jungle.

  The Adam stalk of a pin-down grows out of water, pencil thin, nearly bare and red in colour, its branches bend down to the ground and take root wherever they touch, making natural hoop snares for feet, which in turn grow new stalks with branches that also bend down and take root, and the whole affair goes on like that endlessly- hoop after hoop after hoop. Shad had heard of men going insane when caught in the pin-downs.

  He was ready to believe it. He went jumping, highstepping, lunging and knife-hacking into the thicket, and within ten feet he was flat on his face in the slime and thought he'd twisted an ankle. He got up, panting like a blacksmith's bellows, and looked back. The wild hogs were snorting and head-ramming the edge of the thicket, trying to find an opening to get at him. Shad started picking his way farther into the pin-downs.

  What made it bad was the God-awful hurrah bushes and the titi. They rose right over his head and so thick he couldn't see an inch through them, and they whipped at his eyes, ears and neck every move he made; and that meant he had to keep whacking at them with the knife, and to do it he must keep his eyes on what he was doing, and every time he looked up from the marshy ground the hoops would snare his feet, twist his anides and send him tail over appetite.

  Then he saw a pine island a hundred yards away. It was like being offered a sky hook. He hacked toward the rise, gasping, sobbing, mumbling, "I kindly thank you, God. I shorely do."

  When he staggered finally onto the solid ground of the island a lassitude came over him like a ton of damp, warm earth, and he had to rib himself up to keep going.

  He was beat and hungry and lost and if he didn't come up with a trick soon the swamp would get him. He needed protection and food, and that meant a weapon of some sort, something more than the knife. He could make a bow and some arrows. When he was a kid they used to make them out of saplings. He got pretty good with one, too. He'd bowled over a plentiful of coons with arrows, so why not do it again? A coon dinner would go dandy right now.

  An edge, that's all he asked for. Just give him a little bit of an edge and he'd take care of the rest.

  Then he saw the shebang nestled forlornly in a stand of sycamores.

  He gaped, not understanding it, then roused himself and went toward the trees, but cautiously and with uneasiness, as though approaching a sepulchre.

  The shebang had been constructed from deadwood mostly, age-brittle branches and old ratty looking brown palmetto fronds. It was squatty and not much larger than a good sized doghouse, and he had to go on hands and knees to get through the little doorway.

  There was nothing inside except dirt, a few nameless crawlies, and a litter of dead trash that must have been a weed bed once. The only other thing was an old stiffened deerskin pouch, with a leather thong to go over a man's shoulder. The flap had two letters burnt into it:

  H.H.

  Shad sat down and rubbed at his cheeks with his fingertips. He'd swung full circle – right around to where his brother had ended four years before.

  "Me'n Holly," he said quietly. "We both come out here to beat the pants offn this old slough – and look what we got fer our pains."

  The lassitude was with him again as he left the lonely little wickiup. He walked a bit through the bays, and then looked up and around, wondering if Holly's body was somewhere nearby.

  It was mid-afternoon when he stumbled upon the Indian mounds. That perked him up somewhat. He'd heard oldtimers tell of how the Indians used to bury pottery, ornaments, tools, and weapons along with their dead. There just might be something in one of the mounds he could use to help along his survival.

  He circled an enormous mound that from its extraordinary size suggested that its dead inhabitant had been tenfoot tall. He'd heard tales of Indians nearly that tall but he'd never believed it. He chose a likely spot and started digging with his knife.

  The bones he unearthed went to powder in his fingers, and the weapons didn't stand up any better. He found some stone implements that he couldn't account for and didn't see how he could use, and so, doggedly, shifted on to the next mound.

  He dug mechanically, loosening the dirt with the knife blade, pawing it aside with his left hand. Suddenly he snatched back his hand as though he'd touched something unwholesome. He'd uncovered a small part of a man's leg – but the leg was clothed in rotting denim.

  Shad stood up, staring. All at once comprehension burst through the blank barrier that shock had created. It was George Tusca's body.

  "Great God A'mighty!" he whispered. "This here's the mound I done buried poor George in two years ago!"

  His head snapped around and for the first time he actually saw the nearby tupelo trees, saw the very tupelo that George Tusca had hanged himself from.

  He knew where he was – he was out!

  You go into that hurrah thicket there and down to the guzzle he'd named Tusca Creek, in honour of George's memory, and you follow the creek for two miles and it flows you right into Tarramand Lake, and you take Mink Creek for another mile and that brings you to the river. And way-hay, roll and go! You're heading for home!

  18

  Mr. Ferris was sitting on the edge of his bed in the Culvers' guest room. He was wearing a pair of khaki trousers and a corduroy jacket, both belonging to Larry Culver; and he was bending over, absorbed in lacing up a pair of Larry's boots. He looked up when he heard Iris Culver's heels click as far as the open door.

  She was in a pink negligee so sheer it might have been made of gossamer. She was standing with one hand on the jamb, and after a glance at her bright, glassy eyes he decided she needed it for support. It was obvious that she'd been leaning heavily on the martinis.

  "Why, Tarl," – drunk or not, you couldn't shake the smooth Vassar-intonation from her voice – "what are you up to?"

  "I'm going into the swamp," he said. "With Jort Camp and Sam Parks."

  "With – but why?"

  Mr. Ferris finished with the right boot and switched to the left.

  "I've just come from Sutt's. There was a great deal of talk about a girl called Dorry Mears who ran away with Shad Hark. Everyone seems to be of the opinion that they have gone off with the money."

  He stood up and tested the feel of the right boot, took two heavy steps forward on it. He seemed satisfied. "This Camp person and his little friend were just returning from the swamp – from 'gator-grabbing' I believe they said. Camp said he saw Shad and the girl going downriver in a skiff."

  Iris looked at him. "Then that's that," she said.

 
; Mr. Ferris glanced at her. "No. I don't think it is."

  He went to the dresser and began putting things in his pockets: comb, keys, wallet, cigarettes, matches, folded handkerchief.

  "It seems that the genial Camp and his nervous shadow are going back into the swamp immediately – 'gatorgrabbing' again, they say. I'm going with them."

  "I don't understand, Tarl -"

  "You don't need to. In my business I must know a great deal about the people I come in contact with. I know something about these two men. That is why it is imperative I go into the swamp with them."

  Iris came into the room.

  "What is it you know, Tarl?"

  He smiled. "Don't press this insurance investigator, my dear. My information is my hole card."

  She sensed that she was losing him; and he was her last hope.

  "Then you don't think it is too late to recover the money?"

  "No. I don't think it's too late."

  "You think Shad is still out there?"

  "I'm certain of it."

  Her eyes were too bright. They sparked as though the light had glanced from black spear points. "Tarl -" she breathed. "Tarl, I don't want him to come back."

  "Iris -" his tone could be very official, "you must be very careful what you say. Someone might misintepret -"

  "He's a thief!" she hissed, and her breath was like warm gin on his face. "An outlaw. And he's dangerous, Tar!. You don't know -"

  "Let's forget about Shad Hark now," he said coldly. "I'll manage that young man when the time comes." He made a move as if to go around her. "I really must be going now, Iris."

  But she couldn't have it that way. She raised her white arms to his neck.

  "But you'll come back to me? You'll promise to come back?"

  He opened his mouth to promise, but she didn't let him speak. She ground her mouth on his.

  "Iris!" The voice had the high bleat of shocked belief. It belonged to Larry Culver.