The Pulse

by Scott B. Williams

  “We could run into delays and obstacles on the upstream part, of course, but I figure, if the Pearl is typical of the rivers that empty into the Gulf, the current won’t be very strong. The outboard ought to push us at least three knots—maybe five if the current’s real sluggish. And if it proves to be slower, maybe we’ll get lucky and find a johnboat before we have to go that far. I mainly just want to take the big boat upriver far enough up to get it out of sight of anyone who might see it as a grand opportunity to sail the hell out of Dodge, and that mostly means getting inland of the coast.”

  “So it looks like all day tomorrow to get the Casey Nicole situated, and then if we’re lucky and find a boat, the day after that Scully and I might make it to the cabin. I guess that’s not bad at all.”

  “No, and even if we lose an extra day, you’ll still get there faster than you could walk from here. Even if you could walk 20 miles a day, which you probably couldn’t given the conditions, it would take you four and a half days to get there from here, and at least as long to get back.”

  Once Larry had made his case Artie needed no further persuasion. Scully was certainly happy about the plan, as he had no desire to be walking any distance from the boat in ‘Babylon’ and just wanted to get the girls and their friend and get back to sea as soon as possible. With this settled, they hauled in the anchor and sailed back under the Causeway the way they’d come, and later in the night cleared the Twin Span Bridge and its awful smell of death. Once they’d gone a few miles farther east, they anchored to get some sleep and wait for daylight to navigate the Rigolets out of Lake Pontchartrain into the sound. But in the morning, when they were ready to leave, the wind had died down to a flat calm, and Larry said they might as well go ahead and use the motor; because of the land masses surrounding them it might be afternoon before the wind filled in again.

  The 35-year-old Evinrude hadn’t inspired much confidence in Artie when he first saw it in Culebra. But since that day, it had been out of sight and out of mind, hanging below decks under the cockpit with the cover fixed over the well. With the favorable winds that had carried them everywhere they had wanted to go for more than a thousand miles, the motor simply had not been needed.

  “It’s as good as new,” Larry assured him when he expressed his doubts. “Scully rebuilt the carburetor last time we used it to move somebody’s boat when a tropical storm was coming into Culebra. It ran like a top. One thing about these old two-stroke Evinrudes: they’re dead-nuts simple to work on and there’s little to go wrong.”

  Scully proved him right when the engine cranked and ran on just the third pull of the starter rope. Once they put it in gear and got up to speed, the small outboard was able to push the Casey Nicole along nicely at seven knots, owing to the slim, knifelike profiles of the twin hulls that presented little resistance to the water.

  “It’s not as fast as sailing, but it’ll get us there,” Larry said.

  They motored on through the morning, droning along over the opaque, brown waters between Lake Pontchartrain and the clearer waters of the Mississippi Sound, and by late morning reached the marked channel that designated the entrance to the navigable part of the Pearl. Turning north into the river, before they even got to the first bend they encountered their first potential obstacle: a low bridge that spanned the channel. It was far too low to clear in any sailing vessel with a mast, but it was a railroad swing bridge, so it was kept in the open position most of the time when a train was not expected. Luckily it had been open when it was abandoned sometime after the pulse hit, because they found it out of their way now. For a few bends beyond the railroad, the river wound through an expansive marshland of tall grasses, snaking along through the transition zone between salt and fresh water. The Evinrude outboard was proving its reliability and had consumed only a few gallons of gas from their supply. Larry did some calculations based on how much it had taken to get this far from Lake Pontchartrain and was certain they had enough fuel to make the trip upriver and back, considering both the distances they planned to go on the catamaran, and by small boat the rest of the way.

  “We probably won’t have much left after the trip, and I doubt we’ll ever be able to get any more, but if it enables us to get those kids and get back to the Gulf, it will have served its purpose,” he said. “After that, we’ll be real sailors like in the old days when no boats had an ‘iron staysail’ to fall back on when the wind died.”

  “Hey Copt’n, what we gonna do ’bout dis otha drawbridge up ahead?” Scully asked. “Dat one’s de highway and she closed, mon.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured. It wouldn’t have been open that day unless there happened to be a barge or something coming through, so it got locked down in the closed position. We’re going to have to lower the mast. Let’s drop the hook right here in the middle of the channel and get it done. We might as well stow the sails below. We won’t be stepping it again until we come back out under this bridge.”

  The way Larry had the rig set up, with synthetic Dyneema shrouds and stays tensioned by simple dead-eyes, rather than turnbuckles, and the mast stepped in a tabernacle with a pivot, lowering the entire affair was a relatively quick and simple task. To bring it down in control, he connected a four-part tackle to the forestay, with the tail led back to the central cockpit winch. The total time lost in the operation was less than a half hour, and soon they were motoring north again, passing under the steel suspension bridge that the chart identified as Highway 90. As on all the other bridges they’d seen, abandoned cars were scattered along its length, but they saw no sign of life, nor the evidence of death that had been so clear from the presence of vultures on the long bridges leading out of New Orleans.

  Immediately to the north of this bridge, they passed the small town of Pearlington on the right bank. It appeared that many of the residents here had chosen to remain in their homes, and they saw a few people as they motored by, all of them stopping to stare at the unusual catamaran going upriver. At a dock in front of a waterfront house, a middle-aged man was loading crawfish traps into a slightly larger version of the kind of johnboat Larry was on the lookout for. At his signal, Scully cut the throttle back to idle so that he could make him an offer to either buy or rent it. The man in the skiff just laughed out loud.

  “Are you kidding? How you think I’m going to feed my family without a boat? A boat’s the only way anybody can make it around here now. I wouldn’t trade it for nothin’, not even that fancy yacht of yours there.”

  Larry said he understood, and for the brief moments they were drifting within speaking distance, he plied the man for local knowledge of the river conditions upstream.

  “You might make it as far as I-59, I don’t know. I’ve never run the river that far myself. If your draft is only two feet, like you say it is, you can probably find a channel. The only problem is that thing is so damned wide you may not find a place to get through with both of them hulls. Good luck trying to find a small boat, though. I can’t imagine anybody letting one go right about now, but there’s a fool born every minute, so you never know.”

  Artie was beginning to second-guess his brother’s plan as they motored on upriver after hearing this bit of advice. What the man had said made perfect sense. In a world where the grocery stores were cleaned out and the delivery trucks were not running, anyone living on a riverbank with a functional boat would have a distinct advantage over those less fortunate souls who had no way to access the abundant food sources the river offered. And if they couldn’t find someone willing to part with the right kind of boat that could negotiate the smaller waters of the Bogue Chitto, they would end up walking once they reached the limits of where the Casey Nicole could go.

  After leaving what was left of civilization behind at Pearlington, they motored upriver the rest of the afternoon, winding through the endless bottomland forests lining the banks on both sides, while carefully watching the muddy brown current for signs of sandbars, hidden logs, and other dangers. These hazards made it necess
ary to go slowly, and when the sun dropped below the trees, they had not covered as many miles as Larry had hoped. They were well to the north of the Interstate 10 bridge over the swamp, but still several miles downstream of the next bridge at Interstate 59, at least by Larry’s calculation. The I-59 crossing was the last bridge spanning the river basin between them and the mouth of the Bogue Chitto, and Artie could feel a growing sense of anticipation at being that much closer to Casey, but he was also overwhelmed with frustration about not having an appropriate boat and having to stop for the night. Larry insisted it was too risky to navigate the river in the dark, though, and steered them off the river into a wide slough that led into a large dead lake bounded by tall cypress trees. As they were maneuvering about to find the best place to drop the anchor, Scully spotted something washed up in the debris of logs, plastic bottles, and other trash that had been deposited by the last flood among the cypress knees at the lake’s edge. Upon closer inspection through Larry’s binoculars, they could see that it was a boat—or at least part of one—turned on its side and halfway submerged in the shallows. As soon as the anchor was down, Artie and Scully off-loaded the kayak and paddled over to check it out. It was indeed a battered and abandoned aluminum boat, jammed in between two cypress knees, its stern end sunk and its port gunwale bent and twisted. Upon closer inspection, Artie saw that there was large hole punctured through the thin aluminum hull, which was why it sank and probably why no one bothered to salvage it. It looked to be at least a couple of decades old, and Artie knew that such boats were cheap to buy even when new. It likely had washed downriver from some camp upstream, and probably was already neglected and abandoned before then.

  Scully said Larry could fix the hole, though, and if they could get it out, he thought it was big enough to carry the outboard. But try as they might, because of the way it was jammed between the cypress knees and weighted down with water inside, the two of them couldn’t budge it. They paddled back to the catamaran; Larry passed them one end of a long mooring line and handed Scully his machete. After cutting one of the cypress knees that had it hung up and fastening the line to the bow, they were able to winch it free just as they had pulled Craig’s sailboat off the bottom at Ship Island. Once it was alongside, Artie and Scully muscled it aboard the forward deck.

  After a close examination, Larry was ecstatic. “Sure, it’s all beat to hell and ugly as shit, but I can fix this. We’ll straighten the bent gunwale as much as we can and hammer the aluminum flat around the hole, and then sandwich the damaged area between two pieces of quarter-inch marine plywood, which I’ve got plenty of.”

  “How will we attach the plywood so it won’t leak?” Artie asked.

  “It’ll be a quick and dirty job—not pretty—but simple enough. We’ll just slather the plywood pieces in 5200, one of the toughest marine adhesives on the planet, and bolt’em together right through the hull. It’ll keep the water out long enough to get you where you’re going. This hull is twisted some too—not much we can do about that—but at least it’s big enough to mount the outboard on. I say let’s get it done tonight and then you and Scully can take off in the morning. This is as good a place as any for me to wait with the Casey Nicole. If you go from here in the skiff, you’ll get there before tomorrow night, easily. I think that makes more sense than trying to navigate this big-ass catamaran any farther upriver, don’t you?”

  Artie did think it made more sense, and he was thrilled that he could possibly be reunited with his daughter by tomorrow night! They set to work and got the repair done after dark, leaving the boat upside down on the deck so the adhesive could at least partially cure. Larry said it wouldn’t fully cure for days, but it was thick enough to keep the water out anyway, and the screws they bolted the plywood together with would keep the patch in place. The only thing left to do was pack some food, water, and emergency gear, along with the shotgun and ammunition. Artie and Scully were going on an expedition!

  * * *

  More than a week had passed since Grant and Jessica had seen any sign of Casey and her abductor. He didn’t even know exactly how long it had been, maybe even longer than ten days. The days all ran together, now that every one was just the same struggle to survive and keep looking. Though they scanned every likely place someone might land a canoe during their entire descent of the Bogue Chitto, the tracks they had examined on that one sandbar their second morning on the river were both the first and the last that they found. That seemed like the distant past now to Grant, almost like another place in another time, miles and miles upstream on the banks of a river they had long since left astern. Today they turned once more down yet another twisting bayou in the lower Pearl River basin, looking for anything that might be a clue to Casey’s whereabouts. But each waterway they traveled in this labyrinth of flooded forest confirmed what he’d already known. Searching for two people, in one small canoe, in 250 square miles of swampy forest—was a daunting prospect. There was simply no way he and Jessica could try all the possible routes that the man who had Casey could have taken, and he knew there was also a chance that he had left the river and taken her somewhere overland. They could have missed any sign where he did this and continued on downriver without knowing it.

  Of course Grant didn’t have a map of the river basin with him, and he’d only paddled through it once, several years ago, and along just one the dozens of possible routes that a canoe could take to the river’s end at the coast. Now he was faced with trying to explore all these possibilities, without the benefit of a map, and each time they reached the end of one bayou, they had to backtrack upstream against the current to check out others that branched off on different routes. It was incredibly frustrating, not to mention physically exhausting. Grant knew that even if he had a boat with an outboard motor and could zip up and down all these waterways at speed, it would still take days to cover them all and there was no way to account for the endless changes in route that the man he was pursuing might take in the meantime.

  On top of the difficulties of trying to find Casey, Grant had the even bigger problem of trying to forage and catch enough food for them both to eat while they traveled. This was proving to be a greater challenge than he had imagined, despite the fact that they were in a rich ecosystem with great diversity of plant and animal life both in the water and in the forests it flowed through.The biggest problem with trying to find food while also looking for Casey was the amount of time it took away from their search for her. While he’d had been lucky that first night he set drop hooks and caught a catfish, night after successive night he was unsuccessful in catching another by this method. He did manage to land a decent-sized bass on one occasion with the rod and reel and one of the lures he’d found in the canoe shed, but other than that, fishing was not as productive as he’d hoped.

  Jessica finally succumbed to hunger and ate a sizeable portion of fish when he cooked the bass in the coals of their campfire that night, and that was a big relief to Grant, as he was worried about her getting weaker. Just as he expected, it was proving really difficult to find enough food to support her vegetarian diet in the swamp, especially this early in the year when a lot of seasonal wild plant foods simply were not available. It was the right time of year for tender cattail shoots, though, and they both ate their fill of these whenever they came to a patch of them at the water’s edge. They were tasty and easy to gather, but not very sustaining for the kind of effort they were expending each day paddling the canoe. When they reached the swamps of the Pearl, he was also able to gather hearts of palm from the dense thickets of palmettos that grew there, but getting to these required a lot of effort with the machete for the small reward in each plant.

  The easiest source of available protein in the swamp, he soon discovered, were the abundant freshwater crawfish that were everywhere in the still backwaters and slow-running creeks. At first, catching them by hand proved nearly impossible, but then he tried wading in the edges of the shallows at night after they’d made camp, using his flashlight
in one hand to spot them and cause them to back away from the beam. This made it possible to grab them with the other hand and eventually collect enough to make a meal. Jessica was reluctant to try the bug-like creatures at first, but again, her hunger was becoming so constant that she gave in and discovered she liked them almost as much as the fish. Grant said they were exactly the same as lobsters, only smaller, and having crawfish boils was a long-standing tradition among the locals throughout the region. The only problem with this food source was that he only had one more set of batteries for the flashlight, and using it for a couple of hours at a time would soon deplete those. He also saw bullfrogs along the bank at night, but could never get close enough to even attempt to grab one. If only he still had the .22 pistol, he knew he could shoot them before they hopped away, but then again, if he had that, he would be able to put a wide variety of meat in the pot fairly easily.

  They frequently passed chattering squirrels from just a few feet away and saw many small birds, rabbits, and even wild turkeys that would have been in range of a well-placed shot, but they were all out of reach without a projectile weapon. Grant had seen the Wapishana hunt with primitive bows and arrows and the blowguns they made from materials collected in the jungle, and while he knew a lot about the theory of primitive weapons from his anthropology studies, he lacked any practical experience in making them. He did know enough to know that producing useable weapons, especially bows, required not only skill in choosing materials and crafting them, but also time for the wood to season properly. It was not something he could invest that much time in yet, but after seeing all those frogs at night he did fashion a rudimentary spear out of a large section of river cane in hopes of getting lucky and impaling one. They also saw plenty of big garfish in the shallows practically every day, and he knew that with patience he might be able to spear one. At this point, he was ready to eat anything that moved, and also kept a lookout for snakes and turtles, both of which were abundant, but difficult to approach close enough to catch.