by Chris White
• • •
In another hour, he’s pulling the kayak through the silty water, decay circling around his chest, wading through what can only be Boiling Creek Swamp in the direction of the forest, somewhere in the red section of the map. As he inches along, the cypresses begin to look like Ents, the walking trees from The Lord of the Rings, whose brave brothers helped save the realm from the curse of greed that rang from every mountaintop. This all-consuming hunger was what elves, humans, and dwarves alike had come to believe would rule their destiny. Adrian can’t remember how the trilogy ended, just that he watched it or the sequel at least twice with Zander and they were long damned movies.
The water is cold, maybe sixty degrees, and it is dark here as though it were dusk, when in fact it’s just late, late in the day, and swamps are dark places. Adrian knows he needs to keep moving and get out of the water as quickly as he can, but the swamp floor is now even, now a hole, now falling like a ski slope. He struggles to keep his head up and keep hold of the boat, threading it like a needle through cypress knees, fallen oak, and pine trees and dense reeds. He’s now certain, much as he doesn’t want to face it, that he can’t paddle back up river against the current. He had planned to camp for the night, of course, but even tomorrow, or the next day, he won’t be able to do it. As insects nibble at his face, he shakes his head in and out of the water, in and out of the water, and he decides it doesn’t matter how he’ll get back.
Then as the dampness clears from his ears, echoing from the forest, tapping against his eardrum—
The famous double knock.
Was it? The ivorybill hammering twice into a tree.
He stops, still, the water continuing on, and waits to hear it again, the batop.
Something swirls by him on his right, touching his elbow. A snake, maybe, but already gone. He has to move.
He continues his slow, watery trek, yearning for a bit of dry land and enough physical stability to take a pill or two, to ease the anxiety that mounts as he considers finally finding the pathetic man, or not finding him—as he considers actually seeing the ivorybill, or never seeing it.
“Please, be the bird,” he whispers into the cold lip of the swamp. “Please.”
• • •
Two hours later, Adrian is mired in shit-brown muck. The sucking sounds as he lifts his boots then sets them down again are flat obscene, and he sloshes forward, portaging the kayak on his left shoulder, backpack perched on the other like Quasimodo’s hump, edging toward the idea of higher ground. He considers abandoning the boat, but if he travels far from it, he’s afraid he won’t be able to find it again. He knows from experience with this type of terrain that without a boat, his exploration will be short-lived, that water is the only thing that guarantees movement. But his shoulder burns from the weight of the thing, and there is still no confirmation from the man beside the water.
When he finally makes his way out of the muck, his feet are like freshly poured cement blocks, and though the transition out feels like a victory, conditions are hardly improved. The jungle is such a tangle, the vines and bushes and palmettos so thick a mass, that he could no longer carry the boat if he tried. The itch and sickening dampness of the waders where the swamp water entered at his chest and seeped down over his body makes his bladder feel full and chilled. He lowers the kayak to the ground and unbuckles his waders, resting his hand against a pine for balance, and edges them down and off. When he pulls back his hand from the tree, it’s black with soot. The place is charred from the swamp up.
Free of the waders, Adrian lays them in a semilight spot and sits inside the grounded kayak with a nice view downriver. Even with Adrian’s weight, the boat suspends nearly a foot off the ground over a complex network of brush, so that he looks like a sailor navigating a gnarled green and brown sea, his breathing labored and raspy, all the while looking around as if for a storm, but he’s scanning the air for the bird. He takes a Vicodin, finally. He listens like the bobcat, the bear, the swamp deer, and the alligators crouched around him in the deepening dusk. Still only for a moment, the gnats, flies, and mosquitoes find his hands, his face, his neck again, and he wonders if there are ticks here this time of year—then quickly dismisses the whole line of thinking as unproductive and, really, the least of his worries. Listening for the double knock and peering through his binocular, his cigarette-pack-sized video camera in its waterproof case at the ready in his pocket, he will wait for the bird that will make sense of it all, even the pieces he left behind from blasting through the wrong doors.
• • •
She’d been looking at the journal where he keeps all the birds, drinking his wine, reading his entries, smelling of tart sweat and freesia.
“This is just amazing,” she said, her thumb running along its cracking edge, as if along his own spine. “And here I thought we were equals earlier today.”
“Just wanted to show you,” Adrian said, sheepish as an altar boy, knowing that she now knew everything there was to love about him, and that maybe it wouldn’t be enough to hold her. He took it from her hands and set it on the coffee table to put a stop to the longing, to the tensing in his groin and the slacking in his mouth. Then he bit his lower lip and nodded, senseless.
Her green eyes liquid, she said, “I have something I want to show you too,” and took his hand.
They lay naked under the ceiling fan in his sparsely furnished bedroom, and he thought of nothing else. He pressed his mouth into the crease of Stella’s arm, the opposite side of her elbow, and the pulse in the veins lacing through her skin resonated in his lips. He found her left breast by way of that arm, approaching it from the side, feeling its weight as he lifted it with his face before her nipple fell into his open mouth like a berry. The fan paddled, paddled, paddled above them, the air flicking over their exotic, common bodies. Her thighs opening under him.
In what seemed like the boldest of gestures but was, really, momentarily unintentional, the tip of him came to rest against the rim of her, that warm, stretched soft-skinned arrow thick as a sapling suddenly straining against—then penetrating—her outer folds, her inner folds, the soundless, lightless, boundless, hot squeeze. She swelled and enveloped him. He pressed forward, and out, forward, and out.
“That’s enough,” he whispered wet at her temple. “We probably shouldn’t . . . Isn’t that enough?”
• • •
Adrian jerks himself awake.
The temperature has dropped: the air is maybe fifty degrees now. He’s clutching a life vest to his chest in the dark. He closes his eyes again, cramped in a kayak over a tangle of jungle, to allow the perfect ache of the past to sustain him a little longer. That first night with the woman he knew would be his wife, though he was ablaze with passion, some effortless but overwhelming gratitude overtook him, allowing him to pause, and that moment, that feeling, was stronger than even desire. It’s the deepest pleasure he’s ever known—that pausing, that restraint in the midst of everything he had ever wanted.
Adrian wills his eyes to open, tosses the life jacket aside, and fishes out his phone to check for messages. He’s got to get to higher ground, to a soft needle bed under some longleaf pines or the protection of a live oak grove, to put on some warm, dry clothes, spread out his sleeping bag to dream again. He wonders what he’s done. Legs cramped, hungry, feverish, damp.
At least the camo waders are a bit drier. He pulls them on to avoid having to carry them. Abandons the boat. Finds his flashlight. Shoulders his pack. Sends his GPS coordinates out to the man beside the water, and slogs his way through the jungle. In a particularly dark patch, he fords a spider web so strong, the force of it slows him down. The forest is too dim to make much out now, so he trains his light on the web, to find a black-and-yellow arachnid big as a half-dollar scrambling away, leaving only a decomposing green-bean-sized lizard hanging by one arm.
Farther on he trudges into nothingness. A quarter mile later, his light skims a patch of waist-high grasses, and something flic
kers back at him. When he approaches and threads his fingers down to the grass roots, he pulls up a bullet casing. He drops it quick, like a fool, then says aloud, “What can it do to me now?” no one to hear him. He’s weaving his way through an arsenal, built over native bones that are scattered underground.
Blood roars in his head as he reaches to the ground to pick up the casing again, and he walks on, holding it tight in his palm, looking only for an open space out of the mud, with darkness nearly full upon him and fever building behind his eyes.
Finally he spies a clearing up ahead where the muddy earth is patted down to a sheen, protected on three sides by thick grass and short leafy bushes as if made for him. He moves nearer—as the brush shuffles with an agitated grunting—and two wild boars charge out of the bushes, their razor-sharp tusks gleaming in the moonlight and one of their long snouts bloody red. They see him there and stand stock-still too, then just as quickly trot away.
Startled into a wave of nausea, Adrian warily approaches the clearing the pigs had rooted out for themselves. He flashes his light at the underbrush to be sure there are no more, but finds, on the ground under the sheared-off branches only just broken, oil paints freshly squeezed onto his mother’s palette. No, a fallen Wood Duck, nothing left but the feathers—blue and scarlet, black and white, green and gore.
He presses himself back to standing, throat closing, aimlessly circles the clearing, counting steps, then leans against a sooty pine. He shakes hornets of sleep from his head, as his mother sings a lullaby: “Been a busy day . . . with some heavy seas . . . but you’ve done your best . . . sleepy boy . . .”
From the north, a flash and muted BOOM. Just what he needs, a storm. Just what he needs, more water to contend with. “Keep moving,” he whispers, so he pushes off again from the tree, aiming his flashlight back out into the jungle, walking, always walking, toward something, never resting. The light reflects back at him again from the distance. Another piece of forgotten ammunition, he thinks, but as he moves toward it through the tangle, he sees, to his utter amazement, the beer can, hanging eerily from the tree. He’s somehow back to where he was.
Some twenty feet nearer, something uncoils thickly from the darkness. Some beast being birthed from the ground.
Chapter Fifteen
* * *
You lost?” the shadowy figure murmurs, almost inaudibly.
Adrian gasps, starts to bolt, then blinks. “Jesus. Is that . . . Is that you?”
It rises, stiffly, heavily, and says, “Can’t see you too good.”
Adrian laughs, instantly giddy. “Can’t see you too good, either.” He teeters on unsteady legs, staring out into the dark.
“I . . . got a tarp down over here,” the figure mumbles, and sinks again. A dim lantern is shakily lit.
Adrian makes his way, stunned with relief, to what looks to him like a sturdy skiff in a black sea.
“We can rest here a minute,” the man says.
Adrian lowers himself, grateful, onto the camouflaged tarp, letting his pack fall away from him. “Wow. Jesus Christ.”
The man shakes his head over and again, as if he too has just emerged from the belly of the swamp. He looks maybe sixty-five in this light, gnarly and gray. Nauseous, sore, waders slippery with muck, Adrian’s head reels.
“You haven’t got any other gear?”
“I, uh . . . left it a ways back,” Adrian says, and he knows that sounds idiotic, but he doesn’t want to explain it all, because, well, it is idiotic.
He puts out his hand, “I’m Adrian. I don’t know your name, but glad you changed your mind.”
The man doesn’t reciprocate the gesture, probably doesn’t see it. “Rick,” he says.
Adrian tries to settle his breathing. He feels like a kid, up way too late, fragile and saved.
“This where you saw it?” he asks.
“What’s that?”
“The ivorybill.”
The man glances at Adrian, then motions with his hand. “Down the swamp that way. There’s no marker, so I thought, tell him the beer can.”
“Good idea,” Adrian chuckles. He feels as though he’s going to cry. Above them are stars he hadn’t noticed until this moment. Everything seems possible now. “Thanks for . . . coming out.”
When they are quiet, the night sounds swell. Half a million dark acres breathe.
“Been watching you for a year,” the man says.
Adrian looks over at him, mouth slightly ajar.
“On the Internet. Read your article about thrushes. Kept seeing your name.”
“Oh, well, thank you. I’m always glad if I can . . .” He suddenly doesn’t know what he was going to say. “Thanks.”
Adrian’s been watching him too, truth be told.
“Sorry about those fucked-up messages. I took the rest of the Jack Daniel’s and poured it out in the sand. Took my lighter to it and made a nice little blue fire.”
Adrian nods broadly, his head still throbbing, still reeling. He can smell the alcohol coming off this guy in waves. He looks like he’s been through a firefight, his bulky shoulders pulling him forward, rutted scarring down his cheek, his ear, and his neck.
“We can pitch a tent,” the man by the water nods, looking straight ahead.
“Sounds great,” Adrian agrees. There’s nothing they can do in the dark.
The man unzips a pack Adrian can barely see, produces a thermos. Shakily, deliberately, he unscrews the cup and pours something into it. “So, you’re a doc.”
“I am, yes,” replies Adrian, hoping he’s getting some of whatever’s hot.
“Kids, you said.” Rick passes him the cup, holding it near the ground, like it’s heavy.
“Thank you.” Adrian drinks—cold, black coffee. “Yeah, Zander’s thirteen, Michaela’s eight.” He swishes it around in his mouth, tannic and sour. “How about you?”
Rick slurps out of the mouth of the thermos. “I had a family.” He moves to stop the coffee spilling down his chin. “But I lost it . . .”
“Sorry to hear that,” Adrian says.
“To alcohol and ignorance.”
AA guy, thinks Adrian, probably a vet. They dominate Boulder’s parks every summer, a look in their eyes like they’re peering out from a long distance.
“I started going job to job, couldn’t keep a place, spent any money I made on booze. Finally couldn’t eat at all, even mac and cheese and ribs.”
The man is visibly trembling. Probably wants a drink right now.
“First they said irritable bowel, then they said pancreatitis. Said I had to stop drinking or I’d be dead in a year.”
Another BOOM rumbles in the distance, but neither mentions it. Why are there stars if a storm is so near?
“Sounds like you’re back on track now though,” offers Adrian.
“I was planting trees at a maximum security prison in Jersey. Next thing I know I’m in the hospital throwing up blood.” He takes a drink of his coffee and spits it out. “Last time I saw either of my kids.”
Rough, Adrian thinks. He hopes this isn’t going to be the longest night of his life.
Rick slaps at the side of his neck, sits up a little straighter, sharply inhales. “You get along good with your son?”
“I love my kids,” Adrian replies. Zander stands on the bench at the Pearl Street Mall, shouting his name into the crowd. Michaela’s nose is bloodied. He presses his forearms into his knees to take the weight off his back.
“You see the bird today?” he asks. That’s why he’s here.
“Week after I got out of the hospital,” Rick continues, unimpeded, “I got a DUI and landed in rehab at the YMCA. Figured twelve steps was better than puking up my own stomach lining.”
Adrian takes a laborious breath. “Well, good for you, man.”
“I admitted I was powerless. Then I made a ‘searching and fearless moral inventory.’ Got a job in a auto-glass factory, working six days a week, going to meetings at night. Next thing I know I’m up against step f
ive. ‘Admit the exact nature of your wrongs.’ So I told my sponsor a lot of ugly shit. Couldn’t tell it all, though. Didn’t feel like I could anyway.”
“Right,” Adrian says, wondering what the man left out. Probably something from the war. Some dead comrade, some unforgivable mistake.
A tiny light some distance away swells and disappears like a firefly.
“Step eight,” says Rick. “ ‘Make a list of all the people you harmed.’ ”
The smell of the swamp rises on a light wind so the forest creaks. “No easy matter,” says Adrian. He knows it isn’t.
Rick says, “That shit will . . . bring you to your knees.”
The silence between them expands again. Adrian’s eyes feel like burned-out buildings.
He reaches toward his bag for a Xanax, but when he glances at Rick, the man’s lips are peeled back in a grimace from some kind of pain, so Adrian draws back his hand. His gut contracts. Powerless, he thinks. He is powerless.
Rick drains the rest of the coffee out onto the ground. “You gotta make amends with the people on that list,” he says. “Except when it would cause them more harm than good. You understand that?”
“Uh . . . yeah,” Adrian answers, “I think I can imagine how telling somebody the truth might hurt them worse than leaving it alone.” He’s spent his whole life that way. He holds out his empty cup to Rick, but he doesn’t take it, just rubs, up and down, up and down, along the length of his left arm.
“I didn’t know the difference between making amends and harming somebody. Didn’t see how I ever would.”
Making amends. Adrian moves the words around in his head, wondering if they will ever settle into an order he can comprehend, wondering if they are possible. “Did you make amends?”
