by Pete Dexter
THE SUN HAD JUST DROPPED behind the trees at the west end of the clearing when I heard the boat. Ward and I stood up and walked to the backyard and watched it come across the inlet—a small aluminum fishing boat with an ancient Johnson motor. There were two men inside, one about my father’s age, the other one younger, perhaps his son. They were both blond, and they did not seem surprised to see us standing at the edge of their property.
The one in front—the younger one—stood up as the boat approached land, holding a Coleman cooler under his arm, and jumped to shore. The boat rocked violently behind him; the old man sat at the motor and waited while the younger one set the cooler down and pulled him onto the landing. The younger man’s arms were long and clearly defined, the sort of arms you get from work or swimming.
The old man pulled the motor out of the water, the shape of his own arms changing, and then stepped out himself.
My brother stood still, waiting for one of them to speak. The younger man tied the boat to a stump and then reclaimed his cooler and walked between us and up to the house. When he was almost there, the back door opened and a pale-faced woman stood in the crack and began to speak to him in whispers. He nodded, without answering her, and then stepped past her and disappeared inside.
The old man put his hands in the back pockets of his pants and approached my brother. He was wider than the younger man, but not as hard or as tall. He stopped in front of Ward, studying us like a problem. “You lost your shoes,” he said finally, a smile playing somewhere behind the words.
Ward nodded and looked over to the place we had come in. “Yessir,” he said.
“There’s snakes all through here, you was lucky that’s all that happened,” the old man said. He seemed good-natured, and looked at me a moment to see if I was afraid of snakes, and then turned back into the boat and pulled out a full bag of groceries. A sack of potato chips was perched at the top. His whiskers were coming in, a gray line that followed his jaw and in the failing light made him seem just out of focus.
“Mr. Van Wetter?” Ward said.
The old man nodded.
“My name is Ward James, I am with the Miami Times…”
The old man started up the bank to the house. His legs looked heavy. My brother followed, a few feet behind. “I wanted to talk to you about your nephew …”
The old man stopped before he went in the door.
“Which nephew would that be?” he said.
“Hillary,” my brother said.
The old man shook his head. “You come walking through them snakes for nothing,” he said. “Hillary ain’t my nephew. That’s the other branch of the family.” A moment passed.
“Which branch is that?” Ward said.
The old man stopped and scratched his head, still holding the groceries. “You might to ask Eugene there, he’s Hillary’s first cousin.” He nodded toward the house.
My brother looked at the house, trying to put it together. “Eugene’s married twict,” the old man said, “and bridged the two sides of the family. He’ll be out in a bit, we got to eat some ice cream.”
We walked back to the front and sat down again on the porch and waited. There was movement inside the house; a baby cried. The sun dropped farther into the trees, taking the house in the shade. There were specks of spit in the corner of my brother’s mouth. We had been a long time without a drink.
He stared into the treetops, sensing the place, the people in it.
Half an hour had passed when the door opened and the old man came out carrying a half gallon carton of Winn Dixie vanilla ice cream. The one named Eugene stepped out a moment later, carrying a spoon in his shirt pocket, and, after they had each settled in a spot on the ground with their backs resting against the blocks supporting the house, the old man slowly opened the top of the ice cream, looking up at Eugene after he had pulled back all four covers to reveal what was underneath. It was a kind of ceremony.
The old man went into his pants pockets and came out with a spoon. He considered it a moment, and then dropped it into the ice cream. He put the spoon in his mouth and left it there a long time. When he pulled it out, half the ice cream came out with it.
The door opened a few inches and the woman stepped out sideways, carrying a baby. She wore a man’s T-shirt, her breasts loose underneath. She kept her eyes down, not wanting to look at either my brother or me, and took a seat on the ground beyond Eugene.
The old man put the spoon back in his mouth again, and when he brought it out this time it was clean.
“You’re Hillary’s cousin?” my brother said suddenly. Eugene had been watching the old man eat, and his head snapped in my brother’s direction. He stared at Ward as the old man balanced a load of ice cream on the spoon and guided it into his mouth. The ice cream was soft and some of what had melted dripped out of the bottom of the carton onto his pants.
“Hillary Van Wetter,” my brother said. “You’re his cousin?”
The old man chuckled with the spoon still in his mouth, as if the ice cream had made him happy. “Don’t mind Eugene,” he said. “He gets irritable waiting his turn.”
My brother nodded, and Eugene looked away, back in the direction of the ice cream. Farther down the line, the woman was stealing looks in that direction too.
The old man caught her at it and said, “Ice cream,” before he put the spoon in his mouth again. Barely, the woman nodded.
We sat outside the house for twenty minutes while the old man ate vanilla ice cream. Swamp etiquette. He seemed to enjoy the feel of it in his mouth as much as the taste, and once, after he had slid the spoon out of his lips, he put it against his cheek, and smiled at the way that felt too. The ice cream melted in the carton and dripped onto his pants, and the stain there spread until it covered his lap.
And suddenly he stopped and closed his eyes and dropped his head back until it touched the bricks he was leaning against. He seemed to be waiting for a pain to pass, and when it was gone, he had a last, long look into the carton—it was still half full at least—and passed it along to Eugene.
The carton dripped as it was moved, and Eugene lifted it over his face and sucked on a corner.
The woman watched more carefully now, brushing insects away from the container, ignoring the ones that lit on her arms and shoulders. Her nipples were clearly defined under her shirt, and I looked other places, not to be caught staring.
The old man folded his hands over his stomach and closed his eyes. “Getting dark,” he said, I didn’t know to whom.
My brother nodded, as if that had been on his mind too. He had a quick look around the clearing. “Is there another way out of here?” he said.
The old man opened his eyes to consider that. “Two ways,” he said, “the way you come in and the boat.”
It was quiet again; my brother would not ask for the ride. The old man smiled at him again. “You proud, ain’t you?” he said.
Ward didn’t answer. The old man turned to Eugene, who had closed himself around the carton of ice cream.
“These paperboys is proud, Eugene. I like that …”
Eugene nodded.
“I might just give you proud boys a ride home,” the old man said. He started to get up—pretended to get up—then dropped back onto the ground. He shook his head. “Too much ice cream,” he said. “I’d sink that old boat with all this in me.”
He smiled at the woman, who had forgotten the baby in her arms and was watching the ice cream. Eugene was in it to his wrist now, and it had puddled on the ground between his legs; I couldn’t tell how much was left.
“Looks like you two got to leave the way you come,” the old man said. I thought of the moccasin lying on a branch in the dark, imagined putting my hand there to climb over.
“I have to talk to Tyree Van Wetter,” my brother said, and it seemed to ruin the old man’s good humor, that my brother didn’t care if we had to go back the way we’d come; that snakes didn’t frighten him.
“Can’t do you no good,”
the old man said.
Eugene picked up the carton and sucked from the corner again. He seemed ready to turn what was left over to the woman; he looked at it, he looked at her; then dipped his spoon into it again.
“He could help Hillary,” my brother said.
“Hillary’s gone,” the old man said. “They got him, and they ain’t going to let him loose.”
“Hillary says he was with his uncle the night Thurmond Call was killed,” my brother said.
The old man thought about that, but didn’t answer. When I looked at the ice cream again, the woman suddenly turned in my direction, glaring, as if it had just come to her that I might be ahead of her in line.
“They’re gone keep that boy,” the old man said.
“They’re going to strap him into a chair and electrocute him,” my brother said.
The old man nodded. “That’s good,” he said. In the quiet that followed, Eugene put the container on the ground beside his leg. The woman looked at him, then the ice cream, and then, on some unspoken signal, she picked it up herself. The old man said, “Then it’s settled.”
“He says he was in Daytona Beach when it happened,” my brother said.
The old man shrugged.
“Stealing sod …”
The old man rubbed his chin. “That’s against the law, ain’t it?”
“Yessir.”
“So they’d put poor old Tyree in the pokey too.”
My brother shook his head. “There’s a statute of limitations on that. They can’t arrest anybody for that now.”
The old man smiled again. “I seen your statues,” he said. And he caught Eugene’s eye and held it, as if they were deciding something, and a little later the woman put down her spoon and ran her finger along the inside of the ice cream carton and stuck it into the baby’s mouth.
THE AIR TURNED COLD as we made our way back, and we stepped on bare feet into pinecones and rocks that we could not see. The sky was dark and, looking up, it was impossible to distinguish it from the trees. A breeze came up from the east, the direction of the water, and behind it was a soft roll of thunder.
I walked ahead and heard him behind me, breaking through the trees even though I held the branches after I had gone through. He was breathing hard, and sniffing. I could hear him clearly, but I couldn’t see him, even when he was so close his hand touched mine on the same tree branch.
And then there was a flash of lightning, and in that flash I did catch a glimpse of him, walking with his hands out in front of himself, his head slightly turned away, like someone in a water fight at the swimming pool. I straightened my own posture, seeing his, and dropped my hands to my sides. A moment later I walked into a tree branch that felt as if it had taken off my ear.
There was a moment then, as I held the ear and waited for the pain to pass, when it suddenly seemed to me that the old man and his son were in the trees somewhere, watching, and I straightened up again, not wanting to look foolish.
Later, I slipped on some wet ground and caught myself with my hands. Ward walked into me from behind, but managed not to fall. “How far do you think we came in?” I said.
“Someplace in here,” he said.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” I said. And a moment later I thought I heard a smothered laugh; someone else was there in the trees and mud, watching. I was furious.
“You know what I think?” I said. “I think these fucking people are too stupid to know you’re trying to help them.”
“If we just keep headed straight a little longer,” my brother said, “we’ll find the path to the car.”
It was quiet while I got back to my feet, and then we began to walk again. “They aren’t stupid,” Ward said later. “They were playing with us.”
And then the earth gave way under my feet and I dropped off it, catching my arm on something solid on the way down, and then landed, it seemed like a long time later, sideways in the water.
“Jack?” His voice came from a distance, and from behind something. “Jack? Are you there?”
I got myself up and stood in the mud, which closed around my feet. The water itself seemed warm and came about to the top of my pants.
“There’s a drop into the water here,” I said. “I’d say five feet.”
It was quiet then, while Ward reconsidered the terrain.
“We must be too far east,” he said finally. His voice was muted; I felt my feet sinking into the mud and moved to another spot.
“The edge gave way,” I said. “You better watch where you’re standing or you’ll be down here on top of me.”
“Can you move around?”
A pattern of lightning lit the sky, and was followed a few seconds later by more thunder. In the light, I saw the root system of a tree in the bank over my head. It resembled a nest. Farther down, to my left, I could see a fallen tree lying one end in the water, and beyond that the ground dropped level to the water. I was suddenly cold.
“I think we came in over here,” I said.
The lightning moved in and the thunder behind it shook the sky. It began to rain. Underneath that noise, I could hear my brother above me on the bank, making his way through the trees.
And we walked that way back to the place where we crossed to the island earlier in the day; Ward contending with bad footing and branches he could not see, and me, waist deep in water, ankle deep in mud, thinking of snakes.
MY SHOES WERE ON the bank where I had left them. The car was where we had left it too, but had been rolled upside down and left with its doors open, glowing inside from the small light in the ceiling. We stood in the rain looking at it.
“You know the worst part?” I said, “we can’t even get in to wait out the storm.” Ward didn’t answer. He seemed tired and weak; his clothes clung to his skin and underneath them he was frail.
Without a word, he began walking toward the highway. I waited a moment longer, watching the car rock in the wind, hoping in some way that the wind would blow it right and we could drive home. And then I turned and couldn’t see him, and felt a quiet panic that he might be lost. I jogged up the dirt road in the direction of the highway, calling his name, and found him standing still again, staring back into the darkness where we had been.
He looked at me and blinked. The rain washed across his face and dripped off his chin. He looked pale and desperate, but then, looking back at the swamp, he smiled, and I understood that he’d gotten what he came for. That we had spent the afternoon with Uncle Tyree.
I SLEPT IN YARDLEY ACHEMAN’S bed that night, too tired to make the trip back to my father’s house in Thorn. The pillow smelled of his cologne, and I woke once in the night, full of the smell and nauseated.
HE AND CHARLOTTE RETURNED from Daytona Beach at two o’clock the next afternoon. When they came in, I was sitting at Yardley’s desk, on the phone, going over the particulars of the overturned car with a claims agent at the car rental company headquarters in Orlando. I had been over the same story three times, starting with the clerk at the desk in Palatka, where we’d rented the car, and ending up with the man in Orlando, and at each step the person receiving the information seemed to take what had happened more personally.
“You just left it there, in the swamp?” he said. He had a distinct, mouth-full-of-grits north Florida accent.
“We parked it at the end of the road,” I said. “We didn’t leave it in the swamp.”
“And when you found it, it was upside down,” he said. Something in this was hitting a false note with the claims agent, and he wasn’t trying to hide it.
“It was upside down,” I said. I was tired, and I was wearing Yardley Acheman’s shirt and a pair of his pants, which did not fit in the crotch and smelled faintly of his cologne. “And you didn’t leave the keys in the ignition.…” “You think it rolled over because I left the keys in the ignition?” I said.
“I don’t know what to think,” he said.
And that was when Charlotte and Yardley Acheman came through the do
or. Charlotte appeared first—it looked as if Yardley had held the door for her—and I could see in that moment that something was different.
“Mr. James?” said the man in Orlando.
“I’ve gone over this four times with you, and three or four times with two people before you, and nothing’s changed,” I said. “I didn’t turn the damn car over.”
Yardley recognized his shirt, I don’t know how. It was a plain white shirt with long sleeves that I’d found in his drawer; I’d never seen him wear it.
“What’s he doing in my shirt?” he said to Ward.
“We had trouble with the car last night,” my brother said. “He had to stay over.”
Yardley Acheman nodded as if he understood. “What’s he doing in my shirt?” he said.
“He didn’t go home last night,” Ward said.
“Your shirts don’t fit him?”
“We’ll send it to the cleaners,” my brother said. “We’ll expense it.” As much as Yardley liked to expense things to the Times, he shook his head no.
“I don’t want the fucking thing now.”
Ward and I looked at each other, then I glanced at Charlotte, hoping she was about to tell Yardley off, but she stood quietly, listening to him, as if this discussion of a single shirt made sense.
“I hate people wearing my clothes,” he said. And then he turned back to Ward and said, “And I hate people sitting at my desk.”
“He’s getting us a new car,” Ward said.
“He’s sitting there in my shirt, on my telephone.…”
He was angry, but I’d seen that before. Then I found myself noticing the way Charlotte was looking at him.
I stood up and opened the shirt without unbuttoning it, then balled it up and threw it at his head. It landed in his hands. He took a step back, remembering the headlock. Then I kicked off my shoes, still frosted in mud, and stepped out of his pants and threw them at him too. I stood in Jockey shorts and socks, daring him to say anything else.
Slowly, he began to nod, as if this were the sort of behavior he’d been expecting all along. I realized I’d spent myself, or at least had nothing else to tear off, when Charlotte interrupted.