I could hardly breathe in the cloud of mosquitoes peppering the prairie ridge. I ran my hand over the back of my neck; it was damp with sweat and bloody with bug bites. There were spurs caught on my dress hem and they pricked my knees. Something had happened here. The air ached with it. I took a step forward, my boots squelching in the mud. The sound stretched wide over the silence. I took another step when within the little house, something moved. My foot twitched back, and the florid face of a woman appeared in the window.
My lungs squeezed. A person, all alone out here?
The sky reddened in wisps, veins bursting into smoke. It matched the woman’s blistered face as she emerged from a cracked wooden door.
She looked predatory. Her sight glided without focus, oscillating like the eyes of an old dog. She sniffed as she roamed in a tattered shirt of muddy plaid, large enough for a broad-shouldered man.
“Ma’am?” I called. Fear tightened around my throat, shrinking it, and I was not sure she heard me. Her head snapped in my direction. Her black haystack hair jerked with it in one stiff movement.
“Get!” she said.
“Have you seen a girl in these parts?” I unlocked from my crouch, still cowering. I took a step backward, balled my hands to my chest. “I’m looking for my sister.”
She swatted at the air. “Get! Go away!”
“If you haven’t seen her, please say so.” It was all I needed from her, a fibre of reality. No girl in the swamp, lost and scared. No girl but you.
I began to approach the woman in small, wobbling steps. As I neared her the smell of the shack thickened, and I saw how the wood moulded in grimy fractals. The woman eyed me over her shoulder as she turned to walk away.
“Wait!” My heart flung forward and I started after her. I lifted Connie’s necklace from underneath my collar. I did not know why, but I held it out for the woman to see.
She halted, turning back toward me. We were not far from one another now. Her face revealed a once severed lip, a shiny scar where there had been a swooping fissure. “Where did you get that?” she asked in a slow hiss, narrowing in on the talisman.
“It belongs to my sister.” I lowered my arm and cupped the peculiar piece to my chest. Suddenly, I did not want her to see it.
“Give that to me, little girl . . .” She swung at me, her fingers tipped with bloody tines, and for a startling moment her face was clear to me, underneath the dirt and sunburn, where young skin had dried and hardened, and eyes beat a yearning blue. The part of her resembling any young Southern girl stepped into the trickling sunlight. She did not look much older than Fritzi. We stood still in the sound of our own breaths and a sudden, shimmering descent of rain.
Hardly aware of myself, I was listening to her. I lifted the bloodstone, ready to hand it over, until her eyes widened, and her teeth chattered, and she looked about to rip my arm from my body.
The stone dropped back to my chest. “Daddy!” I shouted with a hurried glance through the woods. “Daddy, I’m over here!”
“No, no, give it! Give it here!” Her upper lip quivered.
“My daddy is just down by the water. He’s right down there, so don’t you come any closer, I’ll scream.”
The woman lunged for the necklace, her scabby-rough hands grabbing hold of me. Her nails dug and shocks of red painted the inside of my eyes. She took a clump of my hair and squeezed. A sharp wire of pain shot down my neck. I twisted against her, suffocated by her smell, squirming free with her cries hounding after me.
I ran bleary-eyed through the woods. Pine branches racked my face and giant tree roots lurched up from the dirt to catch my ankles. I lost my boot in peat like sinking sand, had to tug my foot free, run it bare and bloody against the ground. My ears were so deaf with wind and my own rush of blood that it took me a long while to notice that nobody was following me. I wrapped myself around a massive root, my cheek on the moss and my knees burrowed in a puddle, and cried until my throat felt peeled raw.
I was out of breath by the time I reached Saul. The rain had settled and the sun emerged. He hurried to his feet. “What happened to you?”
I collapsed into the boat. There’s a woman, she’s chasing me. I did not say it, only swallowed it down. “Quick, get in the boat with me.”
“We should stay here on land, it’s safer.”
“We have to leave,” I said, but when he made no motion to join me, I fell against the wooden seat. I tried to catch my breath. “Where could your brother be?”
Saul looked me up and down, at the bloodied spurs caught on my dress and in my hair.
“Dalcour wouldn’t just sit in the truck all night waiting,” I said. “He drove back to town. He told your mama what happened.” An arrhythmic chill ran through my body, stirring my blood and breath out of place. “Even if he didn’t, Fritzi would realize I wasn’t home, wouldn’t she? She would look all over the house for me, she probably didn’t go to bed at all last night, she’d have been so — ”
It hit me with a swell of remorse. She’d have been so scared.
Saul stood in the glint of the oyster bed with his black pearl eyes motionless over me, and in their stillness I felt the rock of the boat under my feet, my own loose sway beneath the shadows of the dripping black gum.
A worried expression set into Saul’s face. He tempered it and looked low at the reeds, biting the far corner of his lower lip and letting it slowly slide out from the grip of his teeth. “What are you doin’ on the boat, Bon?”
“I don’t think we can stop moving. I think we always have to be moving here.” I could not tell if I heard the leaves rustling, snapping, were the twigs crackling, too? My breath tightened. “I won’t let anything happen to you. This is my fault. Come on, Saul, we’ll be safer in the boat.” I reached my hand out toward him. “Get on in here with me.”
His mouth thinned. He picked the oars up from the oyster bed and heaved them against the boat, and together we slid them over the edge. Once we were both sitting, we dipped our oars and pushed the water aside. My muscles pinched to their thinnest layer, moving with a loose tremble. As we pulled away from the forest, I watched for the trees to shiver, a glimpse of movement, of flesh, but only our weak strokes broke the stillness.
Countless red leaves fluttered overhead, bleeding across the sky. I shuddered in the heat, my nerves in tight convulsions, listening to the busy sounds of a new morning. Birds squawking, water rippling, little splashes out of sight.
Chapter 9
THE SQUISH OF mud, a groping wet thickness between my fingers. I could feel it everywhere, slimy against my knees and arms and crusting in my hair.
“Fritzi,” I moaned, rolling onto my side. She always did know how to get things out of my hair. I waited for her voice, the feel of a wet towel or comb against my head, but her name sounded strange once it left my mouth, and the idea of her spun overhead in such airy, unreachable circles that even in my stupor I knew something was not right.
My eyes cracked open. All around me was mud and small bushes like rows of cabbage, and water covered in a thin mossy soup-skin. My head was heavy. Thirsty. Hungry. Hot. The sun was too bright without the ceiling of cypress. I had to cover my eyes, slowly pull them from the ground. I lifted my chin up from the mud to breathe, but the air was a hot, thick swelter. It felt like swallowing a cotton ball. The sounds of my house played in draughty echoes. Feet pattering and the radio crackling, Fritzi’s and Connie’s jingly laughs dizzying through the morning halls. They filled my ears without shape, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Bonavere, was this you?”
Connie, yelling over a blond knot stuck in her hairdryer.
“It wasn’t me,” I mumbled. Cool clay slid against my lips. What had Connie said next? I could not remember. I had not been pleasant about the hairdryer, in no mood to be caught, because of course it was me, the hair was my colour, who else could it have been?
“Bonnie, wake up,” Saul said.
A throbbing flow of memory narr
owed in on my left temple. I felt a hand on my shoulder and shot to my knees.
“Easy,” said Saul. His hand floated toward me. When it squeezed the raw red of my shoulder I sank back into my skin and the where and why washed over me.
We were lost. I remembered now. My skin was so burned it felt peeled back from the muscle. I was thirsty enough to suck the sweat out of my dress.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Same as before,” he said.
But it did not look the same. The trees retained their red, but they were not as they had been at night. Gone was the blood of it, replaced by a soft autumnal hue. I looked around, baffled. The only forest in sight was the green and red blister behind us, curving around to either side. Ahead, beyond a sparse tree line, lay nothing more than another glittering bayou.
I eyed the orange smudge of Dalcour’s boat, resting about twenty metres away. Its paint pulsed against my eyes, burnished and bright. Around it the sun was sharp, all of the swamp’s purples and greens and blues reflected in the abalone water.
“You didn’t come across a gator pit, did you?” Saul asked.
“What?”
“When you came scrambling out of the woods last night. You were shaken up somethin’ fierce. Figured you must have seen a gator, right?”
“No, no gators,” I said. Far scarier, Saul, you wouldn’t believe.
I had almost told him, in the boat the night before, what had actually frightened me, but the words lodged against the back of my teeth.
“I thought I saw a wolf, but” — I shook my head — “I think I just imagined it.”
What good would it do, telling him about a shiver of ghost on the water, or a dog-eyed woman living in lone squalor in Red Honey’s exsanguinating pit? He would laugh, or worry. The neighbours in Collonges-la-Rouge, and later too in Paris and our own oak-lined Toulouse, made rude little smiles whenever my grandmother spoke of vampires scaling the Arc de Triomphe, Nosferatu whispering flecks of poison into the thought-streams of Germans, pulling poison from their hearts. Unleashing bats disguised as ash across northern and western France. My sisters and I had kept vials of blood under our beds at her instruction. Garlic and silver, too.
“We better find some underbrush.” Saul walked to where his T-shirt twisted from a branch in the low breeze. His satchel lay on a dry rock next to his camera. He took his shirt from the branch and wrapped it around the Straight Eight, bundling it safely into its carrier. He leaned over and rested his palms on his knees, letting his head sag. “This sun’ll kill us.”
“We can’t just sit and hide from the sun all day.”
“I say we hide as long as we need from anything ’bout to kill us.”
“You can sit, then. I’ll search around. There’s no need for both of us to be out here getting hit by the heat.”
On the water there was a cool black clearing in the moss that looked so drinkable I nearly convinced myself that maybe it was not saltwater, or that my body could somehow work around it drying me up.
“Bonnie, this swamp is huge.”
“Well, we need to find water, too,” I said. “This whole place is made of water and there’s nothing to drink.” Like limbo crafted by a trickster, the rules of logic flipped around so that nothing made sense.
“Ain’t going to find fresh water, but maybe food. We can look for some while we find shade. Bonnie, you listenin’?”
“If I were lost alone out here I’d leave a trail or something. I’d tear up my skirt and leave pieces of it tied to the ends of branches.” I looked around at the unmarked trees. “It’s hard to say with Connie, she doesn’t think like that.”
Saul ignored me. He remained hunched over with his hands squeezing his knees. Sweat drops beaded the countless whirlpools of black curls on his head. I ran my hand through my own hair, saw sweat fling from the tips. I was desperate for shade. Desperate for cover, too. I could not see her, or hear her, but I felt the canine watch of the wild woman with her bruised, unwashed face, patchy as mould, fouler to smell.
Sweat laced my lashes, stinging my eyes when I blinked. The thought of Connie alone out here hardened to a deep, tight cramp in my rib. I cupped my side and pictured my sister clawing through the dripping bramble, her bright eyes like black jelly. I saw the lace-trimmed skirt she wore for our parents’ party, even though we were not invited, and its pretty yellow fabric all dirtied and torn. I scanned the perimeter for which direction to go. Dark streaks of cypress ripped through the enveloping curtain of green and yellow. There was no direction, only a spinning sense of sameness. I doubted a compass could have found its way, had I been wise enough to bring one. The sole mark of human activity was a white string stretched from one side of the bank to the other. I pointed to its reflection on the water. “What’s that there, y’think?”
Saul followed my finger to where the light caught the steel of three rusted hooks. “Huh. It’s a gator trap,” he said.
At the far end, the line was smeared in coppery red. “Not the trap. Look, it’s spoiled.”
“Not so close,” he said, his hand on my spine. “Might be gators in there. Those belong to hunters.”
Hunting, Bonavere, harvesting — these are economic words for death. Connie’s voice pulsed through my ears, warm and rhythmic as blood.
Saul’s face was grave.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
His eyes had not left the hooks. “It ain’t season,” he said. “Nobody should be hunting here. Best to just stay good and far from the bank.”
I tried to give a collected nod, but he could read the concern on my face as surely as I read it on his. The heat was making me sick. It curled up behind my ribs with thoughts of Connie and pinched whenever I moved. I slapped some mud on my skin and Saul followed, and our arms and legs were just about caked in it when a faint buzzing sound rose from far off in the distant cypress. It grew loud into the drum of a motor, kicking up water and speeding down the channel.
Saul’s eyes flew up. “The search party.”
“What if it’s whoever made the gator traps?”
Saul pulled his shirt over his head and slid his arms through the sleeves. “It could be the Tainted Keitre on a stolen skiff for all I care.”
He started toward the sound, but I tugged his arm, urging us both into a bushy heap of switchgrass. The drum grew into a heavy drill. I shot down to my knees, dragging him with me.
The cordgrass formed a fortifying wall around a black willow. We crouched behind it, peeking through the blades, as the low-brushing leaves jittered wildly with the drill. Ripples cut through the water.
“Steady now!” a man called. He had a wood-creaky voice, struggling to shout over the noise of the motor. A girl’s shout accented his, nipping at the ends of his words, but I could not make out what she was saying.
The girl looked out from the side of the boat as it drifted into view. Her hair was auburn and her dress the green of the floating algae. At the wheel was a man I nearly recognized, like an older version of someone I might once have known. I could not get a proper look at his face. He wore a straw hat and a handkerchief tugged up over his nose. All I could make out with any distinction were the strands of hair along his neck, spilling from under his hat in incandescent red.
“Any fishermen you know?” I asked.
“Not that I’ve ever seen,” Saul said. “No tools on their boat, neither.”
The motor tapered to a sputter and the air fell quiet. The man hobbled out of the skiff and onto the bank, sinking run-of-the-mill rubber boots into the peat with a thirsty squelch. “You keep an eye out, Candice,” he said.
Candice. I thumbed the name into my head like gum under a table.
“Don’t let anythin’ slip now,” he ordered. He was unfastening the line on the bank across from us while the girl named Candice helped him, with deft caution, lower it and the hooks into the skiff. “Don’t you lose a thing, not a thing, y’hear?”
I expected the girl, with her flinching features and
frown so thin it looked drawn on, to bark back at him, but she merely looked on with seriousness, big glossy sweat beads clinging to her face. She stared down that trap line and those hooks like she had really better not leave a single speck behind.
The skiff was too close now, inching across the water. I could make out Candice’s eyes. They were as furtive as a squirrel’s, one dark blue, the other faded but for the pupil, like a grey pearl with a hole in the middle. I felt Saul growing restless beside me. My own limbs were restless, too. The instinct to run through the switchgrass was overwhelming, maybe we could make it, noisy but unseen. I grabbed Saul’s elbow — don’t move a muscle.
“Check ’round the shrubs ov’ yonder there,” the man called. He scraped his boot over all of his footprints in the soft dirt.
Candice rode the skiff up against our side of the bank and followed the white trap line to a knot tied around our willow. I kept so still I felt my heart rattle. The itchiness of the switchgrass against my shins, of the sweat between my toes, was unbearable.
“Getting some real heebie-jeebies out here,” Candice called in a small, squalling voice.
“Keep your voice down, little girl,” the man said. “Nobody’s askin’.”
The girl climbed from the boat onto land, her dress ruffling in the breeze as she walked through the tufts of salt meadow. The baby-shrill voice grew louder. I squeezed my eyes shut as a shadow’s full height drew over us.
Nothing followed. I opened my eyes and Candice was staring at me, stern and clear, with her one bleak-blue eye and pinprick pupil. I bit into my hand as she loosened the knot around the trunk.
Bonavere Howl Page 6
