The Lost Skiff

by Donald Wetzel

  It was not as dark and the creek was not as twisty as it had been before we had reached the clearing at noon, but if we were moving toward some civilization on down the creek, we hadn’t seen a sign of it by the middle of the afternoon. Not even somebody fishing or just out for a ride in their boat. I mentioned this to Jack. “No sensible person,” he said, “would waste their time fishing at this time of day, or just go for a ride in this heat. Although I am surprised, to tell the truth, that we have not seen some fools by this time doing both. On a weekend, you would have seen at least a few Mobile people in their fancy motorboats by now. They cannot just haul them around behind their cars forever, so now and then you see them this far up the creek, usually blasting right along like they was out in the bay and had never heard of such a thing as snags. They will sometimes wave when they go by, but Pa just shakes his head.”

  Then Jack rowed for a while, and I sat in back and watched the creek slowly turning and twisting along ahead of us in the sun, with some shadows finally starting out now on the water here and there from along the shore. I kept watching for the skiff, but I believed along with Jack that by now it would have been taken in tow, and that we would find it, if we did, tied up at some landing farther down the creek. Still, I kept an eye out.

  Finally I asked Jack when we would start running into some signs of civilization, and he said it would not be until after Little Star Creek had got to be Big Star Creek. “Where does that happen?” I said.

  Jack kept rowing, but he seemed to be thinking about it, and then he answered me. “As far as I know, there is no certain place. It’s known as Big Star at the lower end and Little Star at the upper, and somewhere along the line I suppose it has to change. But where you start running into landings and then houses, all of that is on Big Star Creek. And we will not be there until tomorrow.”

  It seemed a strange way to me to name a creek, but I supposed that Jack was probably right about it. “Pretty soon,” Jack said, “you will notice a good-sized creek coming into this one from the northeast, which is called Mud Turtle Creek by some and just Mud Creek or Turtle Creek by others, and there are some who say this is where Big Star takes off and Little Star ends. But if you look about you will notice there are no landings or houses and no change to speak of. And when we are on the Big Star part of the creek, you’ll notice the change all right. For one thing, there will be some boats going up and down it, and some landings now and then.” I could tell by the expression on Jack’s face that I had brought up a puzzle he had not thought about before. Then he stopped rowing for a stroke, and looked about, and then he shook his head like he had settled it for himself, as much as he was going to, anyhow, and started back to rowing again. “You may have noticed by now,” he said, “that this little old creek we are traveling down is not exactly U. S. Highway Number 98. It’s just a creek. If you don’t know where it is you are going on it, you wait and see. If you do know, you don’t need no names or road signs.”

  “When I see some landings,” I said, “I will figure we have left the Little Star behind.”

  “That won’t be until tomorrow,” Jack said. “And what has got me worried now is whether or not we will make the next clearing before we are apt to get some rain.”

  For the first time in hours, then, surprised, I looked up at the sky and around. The sun was still up there, bright and clear, although moving down in the sky, with all the sky clear as far as I could see, except for one big white cloud sticking up off in the distance like nothing more than a cloud of white-colored smoke. “Rain?” I said.

  “For one thing,” Jack said, “I don’t like this stillness, and for another, I do not like at all that thunderhead you can see off to the west there.”

  “That one white cloud?” I said.

  “That one,” Jack said.

  It looked a long way off to me, and the way I understood it, rain came from the dark clouds, while white ones were fine; but I decided I would not argue this with Jack. “You watch it,” I said, “and I will row again for a while, and we will see.”

  Jack had been rowing at a good steady clip and I kept it the same, although I felt the pull of it up and down my back now each time I bent forward and then leaned back into the stroke. But I could see it hadn’t been without effort for Jack, either, as he sat resting in the back, fanning himself with his Styrofoam helmet, and taking long drinks of water, one after another, and every now and then shaking his head to get rid of the sweat, like a dog shaking off water. Then he pulled off his jeans and jumped off the back of the boat and swam along beside it for a way. When he climbed back in, he just sat there on the back seat dripping, not even bothering to dry himself off.

  The creek was slowly getting wider, and the shadows of the trees were starting to stretch out farther from the shore. The way the creek turned and twisted, sometimes the thunderhead Jack had noticed would be out of sight, and at other times, when the turn of the river was toward the west, without a near bank of trees blotting out the distance, then the thunderhead would be clear again, and looking bigger each time I saw it, still white as snow up near its top, but with a darkness farther down that looked darker and more spread out each time I saw it.

  “I don’t like the look of it,” Jack said. “Sometimes a thunderhead like that will come up in the afternoon and only hang there, doing nothing. Just something to look at. But another time it will build and move, and get blacker at the bottom while you watch it, and then you can be in for a storm. And there is a storm in this one all right. It’s just a question of whether it is moving or not. If we had some wind I would know better about it. With an easy wind from the south, I would say we would get it sure.”

  “I suppose there is a reason you know of for that,” I said.

  “A good one,” Jack said. “I have seen it happen.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You only have to remember,” Jack said, “that the winds around a moving storm just naturally blow in a counterclockwise circle. The rest is a matter of figuring things out.”

  I kept rowing. After a while I noticed a creek behind us, off to my right, which I guessed was Mud Turtle Creek. Jack had said there would be no change, and I could see he was right. If I hadn’t been watching for it, I might have missed it altogether. And then in a few more strokes of the oars it was out of sight behind a bend. “Well,” Jack said, “I guess from here on we should move in close to the west bank and stay there, if we are serious about looking for the skiff. That’s the bank on your left. While the sun may switch around and be sometimes on the right of you and sometimes on the left, or in front of you or behind you, for that matter, the left bank, facing back up the creek, is still the west bank, which is where we want to stay.”

  So, I thought, in Alabama, creeks change their names wherever they please, and a wind will blow one way while the storm will come another, and by sticking to the west bank you are apt to see the sun set in the east; and if I just keep rowing hard enough we may get to this wonderful clearing of Jack’s before it gets dark or we get struck by lightning. I kept rowing.

  Now and then we would pass close enough to the bank to move through some shade, and that helped. But then I noticed I was passing drifting leaves a good deal faster than I had been doing before, while at the same time it seemed that the shore passed by even slower, and the rowing seemed harder. “Jack,” I said, “I believe the tide has changed and we are going against it now.”

  “I was waiting for you to notice it,” Jack said. “You have been moving us right along, but I will take the oars for a while now, as we are in a race with time, against either a thunderstorm or night, whichever comes first.”

  “What about that clearing you talked about?” I said.

  “It’s where I said it was,” Jack said, “which is still a good ways off.”

  From the back seat, I got a more regular view of the thunderhead now. It had spilled up higher and hung closer to us, with the sky around the sun darkening down to a kind of hazy purple color while the s
ky to this side of it, to the north, I guess, had gone altogether black. Then we moved out around a bend and onto a straight stretch of creek pointing straight toward the storm. And with the sun low in the sky but still bright and practically shining in my eyes, I saw a straight thin golden-colored streak of lightning dip down through the blackest part of the cloud. I waited and listened but there was no sound of thunder. “You won’t believe this,” I said, “but just now I saw a streak of lightning up ahead.”

  “I believe it all right,” Jack said, “and I believe that before we are done with it you may see a good number more.”

  I started watching both shores as we kept moving along, wondering if there might at least be some dry ground where we could go ashore if we didn’t make it in time to the clearing, but it was all a kind of swampy jungle again, and seemed to stay that way. And then in a matter of seconds all the brightness had left the sky and the shine was gone from the water and the green of the trees went dull, and the shadows stretching out from the trees along the shore beside me had changed to reflections. Off in the woods a bird sang and then stopped, like it had only meant to signal the change.

  The dark cloud at the bottom of the thunderhead had finally moved up and blotted out the sun. The next streak of lightning I saw was bright and clear, and though it took a while, this time I heard the thunder. Jack heard it, too. “I wish,” he said, “that we was one hour further down this stupid, lousy creek.”

  “What happens,” I said, “if it rains before we get to that clearing?”

  “We get our asses soaked,” Jack said. “What the hell do you think?” It was clear that Jack did not like the looks of our situation at all. He only swears when a thing is no longer a joke to him.

  “What about the lightning?” I said.

  “There is nothing we can do about it,” Jack said, “except stay in close to shore and take our chances. What I am worried about is the darkness and the storm both. There is no way to keep rowing on down a creek like this in the rain and darkness together. And I do not care for the idea of sitting in this boat tied up to some water oak along shore, with that heavy tarp hung over our heads, the rain pouring down and with the lightning to worry about, waiting for the rain to quit and the moon to give us some light. Or just waiting there for morning, like two rats in a barrel.”

  It didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun to me, either. But from the way Jack rowed and from the look on his face, and the way the light kept fading away in the woods and up and down the creek, and the thunder followed the lightning louder and quicker each time, it began to look as if we might be in for a night just as bad as Jack had described it. It seemed to me, though, that with that big tarp we had brought, we should be able to do something better with it than just sit there holding it up with our heads.

  I was still thinking about this when the first wind came, not hard, but making a kind of humming in the trees and then roughing up the water and turning it darker than it had already been. It was warm and gusty and you could feel the wetness in it, and then it picked up and got stronger and cooler. All the swampy smells of the river seemed to be blowing in it. Jack gave one big stroke with his oars that made the boat give a jerk, and then he just coasted, looking back up ahead of him at the sky, and at first one shore and then the other, and then he said, “There is no point in being foolish about it. We are not about to beat either the rain or the dark to that clearing, so we might as well take our time and find us some nice little tree to tie up to.”

  What we finally found was a small magnolia, more or less out and away from the taller trees back along the shore. We tied it close with the front line. “While we still got some time,” Jack said, “we might as well eat.” Now and then we would catch a glimpse of the lightning through the trees and the thunder was loud, but the sky was still clear straight up above our heads.

  “Jack,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about that tarp. One thing about it, it’s big. With those rope holes all around it, it has given me an idea.” The oars were still lying in the oarlocks where Jack had left them, with the handles back toward the front of the boat. I didn’t know for sure if it would work or not, but I slid an oar forward and then shoved the pointed end of the handle back into a V-shaped place that had been cut out of a piece of the frame that came down the side of the boat and was joined to another piece going across the bottom of the boat to the other side. I wasn’t sure whether this had been done to strengthen the joint or to let water in the boat run down out of its front end along each side, but I had noticed it, and the handle of the oar fit it perfectly. The way I’d done it, it left the blade of the oar sticking up in the air about three feet high along the side of the boat, and maybe two or three feet toward the rear past the middle seat. The thin edge was up, and that didn’t look right to me, so I unwedged the oar and got the blade flat side up, and then I fixed the other one the same way.

  Jack had been sitting on the back seat, watching me and not saying a word. “What do you think?” I said. “We can use some of that trotline cord of yours and tie the tarp to the ring in the bow and then just let it hang over each side of the boat and bring it on back and slide it up along the oars and tie it to each oar, and what is left over we can just stretch out over the back of the boat as far as it will go.”

  “Rodney,” Jack said, “I take back everything I ever said about how stupid you was. The only thing I can’t figure out is why I never thought of it myself.”

  “Pure ignorance,” I said, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He even laughed. Then he grabbed up the tarp and we went to work, tying it up and stretching it out the way I had planned, and it was done without any trouble at all, except that Jack had to poke some holes in the tarp to tie it to the oars. The main thing was, it looked like it ought to work. There was only about two feet left of the tarp hanging down over the oars, and I was afraid the wind might get under it and give us trouble, but Jack fixed that by tying a couple of pieces of cord to the holes in the edge of the tarp and then opening the lid to the fish well on each side of the seat—the seat we sat on when we rowed was a fish well also—and tied the cord to the hinges of the seat. So what we had when we were finished was a kind of crazy V-shaped tent, about four and a half feet high at the front, figuring it from the bottom of the boat, with a tied-down flap at the front which lacked only about a foot of closing the tent in tight. It gave us room to squeeze in and out without untying the cords; and anyhow, I figured we would need the air. “Also,” Jack said, “it will give us a view of the storm, which sounds like it ought to be a good one when it gets here, if it don’t swing by us to the north after all.”

  It seemed to me that it was already right at our backs. I looked up and most of the light was gone from the sky, but I couldn’t tell if it was the storm coming on or just the coming of darkness I was looking up at. While it was still light enough, we got the stuff out from under the tarp that wouldn’t be hurt by the rain, mostly canned goods and pots and pans, and moved them to the other side of the middle seat. Then we fixed our blankets and tried them out. While it would be cramped, we could see it wouldn’t really be bad at all. Then I took a quick swim to get the day’s sweat off me, swimming out into the creek and seeing the lightning back off through the trees, and the white boat with its crazy tent, back in by the shore, and thinking, well, that is my home for the night, and then swimming back to it with really no great worry about the storm at all. Which surprised me.

  When I’d got back in the boat and dried off, Jack had opened us each a can of tomatoes and of corned-beef hash, and with the last of the light we sat on the back seat and ate it all, cold, with the wind gusting cool and stronger all the time, and with the lightning close enough so that we could see it now and then lighting up the woods across the creek with a kind of soft, quick glow even though it had struck somewhere off behind us. I had never known cold canned food could taste so good; particularly the tomatoes.

  Then it was dark, and I saw Jack looking up at the sky and I looked and the
re was nothing to see at all. “Well,” Jack said, “there went our stars.” And then I heard a new sound in the wind, like dry leaves blowing, it seemed, although it couldn’t have been, and then the first few drops of rain slapped against my back and plunked around us in the water.