“He’s going to go into the backyard for a minute,” Saul said. “Wait for the gate to make a big clang and then we’ll run.”
Dalcour brushed some dirt off the tarp and kicked up a light, bouncing jog as he turned around the side of the house.
“He’s loading up a cooler of cream soda,” Saul said. “He never goes fishing without it. Doesn’t even care it tastes like old gum.”
A rusty swing alarmed us of the gate door.
Saul tugged my sleeve. “Come on, quick.”
The sky was a greasy yellow, and the air as we stepped onto the porch tasted worn and brittle as dust. We crawled onto the end of the truck and pulled up a handful of tarp. We whipped it over our heads and flattened ourselves as best we could, pressing close against the wooden planks of the upturned boat as Dalcour hefted a cooler through the yard. I felt the thump of the cooler against the passenger seat.
Dalcour trailed around to the truck bed and paused. The long silhouette of his hand lingered on the tarp. My heart pounded all the way to the back of my head. I was certain he had spotted us, or heard our stifled panting through our cupped hands, but he only yanked the tarp tighter. Satisfied, he climbed into the vinyl-crimped front seat, started the engine, and with a rumble that vibrated up and down my bones we pulled out onto the road.
When we arrived in Red Honey, I knew it by the scent. The city’s smoke and sewage and sweet olive, and the clear drinkable air of the countryside had disappeared. In its place sweltered the brothy stench of algae. From beyond the tarp came the sounds of Dalcour stepping onto the dirt and rounding the truck bed. The ropes holding the tarp in place began to loosen, and in a blue sweep like the sky folding in and flying off, our eyes met.
This had been anticipated. The bad catch left Dalcour pressed for time. To drive us back to the city, then back to the swamp alone would be unfeasible. What I had not expected was the gauntness of Dalcour’s surprise. He looked more frightened than angry. He took a step away from me. Everything was still until he slapped the side of Saul’s head.
Saul yelled and covered his ear. “What you slappin’ me for?”
“Maybe it’ll knock some sense into you. What would Pa think of you bein’ so stupid?” Dalcour rubbed his hands over his face. He sprawled them against the small of his back and circled the Coca-Cola truck for a solution that would not present itself.
There was no option but to bring us on the boat.
Within thirty minutes we were floating on the Pearl River. Saul’s camera peeked out from his bag, its small but lead-heavy weight balanced against his knee. Dalcour arranged us close to him, and carried about his work with bristling caution. He kept his shoulders raised and his back stiff, never fully turning from his brother. I watched as a scaly slice, the shape of an almond, cut through the water and disappeared between spears of bald cypress.
I pointed to the ripples. “Saul, look.”
“A gator,” he whispered. “There are tons of them.”
We glided along a smooth surface of malachite-green, below ghostly hems of Spanish moss. Carmine-bellied snakes coursed through the reeds and over it all fell a slumbery disquiet.
“Y’all watch your feet,” said Dalcour, unhooking a bass. He stroked back his hair, straightened and gelled like Little Willie John, and smacked the fish down beside several others. “You never take too many from any one spot,” he said to Saul, who was busy adjusting his camera lens.
All afternoon we settled in pools of light along the bayou, Dalcour dangling traps, passing on his knowledge to Saul who was not listening. He swatted Saul’s shoulder and snapped his fingers. “See, this here is how you bait the traps. Make sure you’ve got escape guards, too. An inefficient trap and low bait will lose you them crawdads.”
“Sho nuff, Dally.” Saul handed me a peppermint, popped another in his mouth. I held the candy between two fingers and tilted its red spiral back and forth. I thought of the burning twist in my chest, the hot nerves that wanted to spill out.
“You know” — Dalcour took on the tired, slant-of-hip stance of my mother — “it ain’t my favourite thing in the world, either. You don’t think I’d rather be on the field right now ’stead of soaking through my socks with dirty muckwater? Now move your ass over, you’re going to step on the fish.”
I did not know Dalcour well, but I had heard from Saul that he was a real ace at baseball, could be the next Hank Aaron, his coach had said. When their father died, Dalcour gave up a college scholarship in Alabama. He took up fishing, their father’s trade, to supplement their mother’s teaching income, and Saul had said with no middling note of pride that it helped them hold onto their home — three generations a Chiffree home — in the downriver Lower Ninth Ward.
Come early evening the sky purpled, and swelled with mosquitoes and the shy sparks of fireflies. On the cusp of my ear ticked Dalcour’s low-hum voice. I heard it distantly, like the tink tink of a loose faucet, a shapeless marker of time as I peered into bushes and up trees and through glassy patches of water, with a mouthful of pounding heart at the utter absence of any trace of Connie. The air was gutted of her voice, the trees unmarked by hair ribbon or carved message. Only bright mantis-green leaves and cattail, crickets and bubble-throat frogs, or cigarette stubs and shattered beer bottles whose delicate glints snapped like gator teeth.
I did not want to find my sister here. I wanted her to be curled up in Suzanna DeClouet’s ugly orange-walled basement, watching our favourite show Sherlock Holmes, or fashioning flower crowns in the park as she did when she was dreamy, like some maiden of Avalon. But an inexplicable feeling told me not to fall back on these hopes. For the first time, I felt my understanding of her as if it were a flimsy cloth in my hand, a fabric to be turned and twisted and reshaped. I was not so certain now that Connie’s previous disappearances were how they had seemed, either, that the stories of her being with a friend had ever been true.
I tugged my dress over my knees and leaned over, wrapping around myself. My arms were sweaty and stuck to the rubber of my red rain boots. Silent as it was, noise crowded in on me. Crickets and low water trickles and the scree of birds scratching up the sky.
“Motion sick?” Saul asked.
I set my chin on my knee, stared hard at nothing. “It’s just an ordinary swamp.”
Late afternoon, back on the mainland, Saul and I slumped down onto the cooler of empty cream soda bottles. My mood hung low.
“Where’s he going?” I asked, when Dalcour chugged his last soda dry and told us to stay put.
“ To find a bush.” Saul pulled a bottle of calamine lotion from his backpack and squeezed a pink glob onto his palm. “I told you there was nothing going on out here.”
I stared at the countless fiery bug bites pocking my legs. They bloodied my fingers as I scrawled my nails up and down my calves. I thought of Connie all alone, scared and starved, and scratched harder. I had been seeing her eyes at night, in that sliver of a moment cushioned between consciousness and sleep. Two amber-black eyes like the darkness hovering just above a fire. I looked up at the descending nightfall; it spread evenly over the bayou, bluing the water and blackening the trees.
“It’s getting dark,” I said. “Do you think we looked too early in the day?”
Saul looked at me like I had flicked him between the eyes. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“In ghost stories, everything always happens after dark.”
He was giving me such a look of disapprobation that I could not bring myself to continue the thought. I looked over his shoulder at the boat — half on land, half on the water. Every muscle in my chest constricted as I stared at the motionless stern, dug deep in the encasing mud — and its other end, rocked and swayed by little nudging laps of water, pointing straight back into the bayou.
I will say this, for what it is worth: I never meant to drag Saul into what followed. To this day I do not remember running down the muddy path to the shore, nor leaping back into the boat. Only a needling urge cutting through me. An
d Saul barrelling after me, fear stricken across his face, Dalcour hollering his brother’s name, his frantic splashing. Then there was a sharp jolt with a sudden drop in the water — and my stomach tangled with the realization of what I had done, as the river swept out all around us.
Chapter 7
WE DID NOT pay attention to where the crawfish swam, or count the screech owls as they squeaked overhead. We paddled with purpose, drifting farther and farther into the dense cypress dome.
“He won’t tell,” Saul said. “Our ma would kill him.”
“I doubt Dalcour is so cowardly.”
“He might as well just wait a few hours instead of getting everyone in trouble.”
I felt wretched. I could taste my guilt, sour in my mouth. Saul was not supposed to have followed me back onto the boat. “You shouldn’t have jumped in with me.”
“Well, I did.” He shrugged and looked into the mosquito-peppered water. “Don’t rightly know why. You should’ve expected I would.”
He was right, and my looking away told him that I knew it.
I leaned over the boat’s edge. “Do you know where we’re going?”
“No — but we’ll keep in a straight line.” His eyes maintained their sterling calm. “That’ll make it easy to find our way back.”
A familiar unease was spreading through me like mould. Perhaps Saul was right and I was acting like my grandmother, who forbade my speaking with the mailman for fear he was a German spy sniffing out our ancestral blood. We had not found signs of Connie in the daylight; why would the night be any different? What pearls of truth were ever uncovered on the flimsy threads of folklore?
My fear grew acidic, burning and sinking through each layer of nerve. I heard the backdoor buckling after Connie, its crooked click. It kept coming to me, bullying all other sounds away. I had revisited the moment a thousand times. Haunted it, like a ghost. I could not shake that last sight of her, dark eyes downcast and a wrinkle burrowed in the centre of her brow. I handled the memory like a photograph, its edges already smudging from overuse. I thought, somehow, if only I could trap a part of myself inside of it, I could grab hold of her. I could convince her not to leave, or ask where she was going, or do any number of the things I should have done but did not. Things that could so easily have let me keep my sister close, instead of a shred of memory like a scrap of paper, a tear of fabric, something ripped from time.
Saul touched my hand. “You’re going to turn the boat over if you shake like that.”
Overhead, massive trees extended from one side of the bank to the other, cradling us in the middle. I swallowed, heart drumming. Even if Dalcour reported our runaway boat once he hit town, it was roughly an hour’s drive. By the time anyone reached the water to search for us, how deep in would we be?
The long reflections of the cypress trees, lit vaguely by the moon, stretched all at once toward us. Spikes of bark shot up through the water, watchful and still, like a murder of crows.
I bit down hard on my lip. “We’re lost, aren’t we?”
“We’re still going straight, you see? Right from the mainland.” Saul pointed behind us, but he sounded more certain than he looked. The trees crowded, dripping with grey moss, and I could not see how anyone might know east from west.
At last we reached a small clearing and the starry night unrolled to every side, as trees grew sparse and the sky and water merged, with only a silver crease of horizon between them.
The switchgrass rustled.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” Saul said, gripping the oar. “Just a snake or bullfrog.”
“Hello?” I called.
“Shush.”
“You said it was nothing.”
Saul dipped the oar into a sheet of algae, coating the wood in clumps of putrescent green. “Shh,” he said. “Bon, I don’t know what it is.”
The rustling broadened. Silhouettes were sharpening in the trees, and birds batted their wings together as if gathering wind, balling up cyclones like twine. I could not see their beady eyes, but I felt them slide against my skin like cold marbles.
I had never seen the moon so big. Its glow looked tangible, a chilled, chalky luminescence that I could graze with my fingertips.
“Look at the moonlight,” I said.
“Bonnie, don’t move.” Saul reached forward to touch me but stopped. He had paled to the spongy tint of sea-sickness. “Your nose,” he said.
I brought my hand to it and wiped off a warm streak of blood.
“Are you hurt?” he asked. “Why are you bleeding?” He took my clean hand in his own and I could not tell which one was shaking.
My fingers gravitated toward my sister’s bloodstone. I had been wearing it since we saw it in the Bellrose photograph. I felt around my chest now, trying to clutch it through the cotton of my dress. All of the light in the swamp had come together in a fine point floating up ahead. It blurred and expanded and made me lightheaded. It was not quite a shape, more a layer of phosphorous dust that had once decorated a person, but with the person gone it hovered only in the illusion of form.
“Sit down, you’re going to tip us over.” Saul’s voice was far away, lost back down the mossy channel. The figure in front of us gave the only clear sound, as longing and primeval as the howls of the French Quarter dogs at night, restless for one another. Barking and howling and wrestling against their chains.
I thought I heard my name.
“We should follow it,” I said. “That shape in the light.”
“What shape?” Saul asked.
The light drew closer. It had the quality of crumbled crystal, broken and luminous and filled with meaning. It weaved in and out of form, shrinking and trickling downward until only the stars on the water remained.
Saul and I stood still in the centre of the boat, listening to our breaths and the dry whistle of dead leaves blowing from the cypress.
Chapter 8
WE HAD FALLEN asleep in the boat. When we woke up in a state of chilled alarm, dawn was nearing. A yellow streak wedged itself between the overhanging night and the tops of the tallest trees.
“We’re lost. Ain’t got a doubt about it.” Saul leaned his oar against the side of the boat and caught his chin in his hands.
I set my own oar on my lap. My arms shook from so much rowing, and my muscles felt frayed, but still I gripped the oar like a weapon. Not so much as a twitch ran through the water. I looked down the grassy bank, in the direction the shape had appeared, where a rock pinnacle shot up in giant spears.
Saul looked over his shoulder at the trees leading into the clearing. “The trees look sick.”
I squinted through the darkness. Blood-tinted tupelo spotted the bank all the way to the rocks. “They’ve gone all red.”
I lifted the oar and sank it head-deep, my arms squeezing to a burn that bled all the way to my spine. Black ash drifted up from the trees. It scattered before the bright pearl moon, and in a moment I saw that I was looking at dozens of blackbirds, breaking away from the forest like burnt bark.
As we reached the rock pinnacle, a stretch of tall tupelo snuffed out any lingering light. A dull shiver ran through me. I scanned the water but saw nothing, and heard only the engulfing splashes of sinking creatures not far enough away.
“There’s dry land up here,” I said.
Saul’s oar made a thick wrinkle in the water as he quickened his pace.
The sharpened stone rose around us, and beyond its thick, grey wall the bank curved into a forest. Bright red leaves erupted in a scarlet boom of black gum trees. I had not told Saul about the red forest, the leaves birthed of blood. No part of me had believed it was true.
We paddled the boat toward the woods and wedged the stern in the mud. Resting our oars by an oyster bed, we stepped onto the bank, and the spongy peat welcomed our feet with soft hisses.
“Forget the boat,” Saul said, as we tried to haul it farther in. “It’s not going anywhere.”
I did not want to leav
e it with its bulk half in the water, but my arms were like sandbags. I sat there motionless. I heard how my breaths shuddered, like they were tumbling down a staircase. Get up, Bonavere, I told myself. You’re here, get up and find her. Stout palmetto waved at me from the edge of the forest, inviting me closer. “Don’t move from this spot,” I said.
“You joshin’ me? You’re going to get yourself lost.”
“We are lost.”
“You’ll get lost alone. Big difference.”
I looked at the dark water before the pinnacle. The figure had fallen there, whatever it was — a trick of light, a sign of hunger. It had led to this forest.
“Someone needs to watch the boat,” I said. “It ain’t wedged in there enough.” Saul motioned to stop me, but I had already passed the threshold of palmetto. My breaths felt wet, as if punctured, bleeding air, as I stumbled over roots and through the sinking peat. I breathed Connie’s name. Each syllable burned a hole inside of me, flaming through my throat. I walked straight until I came upon a dry hammock of land. The morning was dark, the grass and trees chilled blue, and a mild wind licked my face and watered my eyes, but I saw it well enough — a small house on a pond.
The house was balanced on stilts, while the pathway before it, leading to the pond’s edge, was tied on either side with floating tires. It could not have contained more than one room, perhaps a wash-house or a fisherman’s cabin; it looked as though an old canon-and-musket battle had taken place around it, throwing ash and smoke and gunpowder into the wind to smother the wood and windows. The chimney collapsed through the torn tin roof, its holes canopied with moss. The curtains were reduced to soiled strips as browned as bandages, and mud dragged across the wooden planks as if trying to grab hold, pawing at them in terror. In a story, this would have been where the witch lived. I looked over my shoulder through the forest. How long would it take to run back?
There was a fire pit out front. Its stone was smeared in charcoal, and around it lay tin pots with dribbling rust stains. A laundry line stretched along the branches of a stately willow. The clothes were dripping, freshly washed. In the middle, the string sloped with heavy male clothing, but pitched tight at the ends, only lightly weighed by winter-blue blouses, the kind a girl my age might have worn. I thought of the Scarecrow Witch, but of course that could not have been it. The Scarecrow Witch was a story, used by Fritzi to torment me, draping our mother’s crushed-velvet shawl over her face and lunging at me from the cupboard under the stairs.
Bonavere Howl Page 5
