by Nancy Bell
Biggie explained about how we had been at the hotel when Annabeth was killed. “It was a terrible thing,” she said, “and I intend to find out who did it. Could you spare us a few minutes of your time?”
The man’s bushy brows came together and he glared at Biggie. “Ain’t you a town woman?”
Biggie nodded.
“Git!” he said.
Biggie turned to the woman. “She was a beautiful child with her whole life ahead of her. You’re her mother. Don’t you want to know who did this to her?”
“Git!” the man said, louder this time.
“Shut up, Mule.” The woman seemed to tower over her husband. “It ain’t no sense in you gittin’ your guts in a uproar. It don’t cost nothin’ to hear what she’s got to say.” She turned to Biggie. “Come on in and set a minute.”
While the adults went inside to talk, I spied an old tire swing hanging from the limb of a chinaberry tree. Since I don’t get many chances to ride in a tire swing (Biggie won’t have one in her yard), I decided to try it out. I was busy going around and around to twist the rope up real good so that when I let go, I’d whirl around in circles, when I heard a sound behind me, something like a giggle, but not exactly like one.
I let the swing unwind slowly, keeping my toe on the ground, for one time around so I could look to see what had made the sound. All I saw was the house, a barn, an old wagon, and some cows grazing behind a slat-rail fence. Must have been a bird, I thought, and lifted my toe off the ground to let the swing spin around and around as the rope unwound itself. When it finally stopped, I was dizzy, and, as the world spun around me, I saw something that hadn’t been there before. It was a person, or I thought it must have been a person, because it was standing on two legs. But that’s where the resemblance stopped. This creature had a mess of black hair sticking out in all directions. It was dressed in what looked like a potato sack with holes cut for arms, no shoes, and its arms and legs were brown and covered with scratches and mosquito bites. It was definitely laughing at me.
“What’s so funny?” I don’t like to be laughed at.
The creature pointed at me.
“Huh!” I said. “You ain’t much to be makin’ fun of anybody.”
It must have thought that was a real funny joke, because it laughed so hard it had to bend over, holding its sides.
“I don’t have to take this,” I said. “I’m going to the house.” I pulled my legs out of the swing and turned away.
“Wait! Don’t go.” The voice was like music. I spun around and stared. Suddenly, I noticed the eyes. They were sky blue, almost too light to belong to a human, more like the eyes of a kitten.
“Where ‘bouts did you come from?”
“Over yonder.” It pointed toward the barnyard.
“Do you always go around scaring people?”
Another giggle.
I squinted at it. “What are you, anyway, a boy, or a girl?”
Before you could say “Jack Robinson” it lifted up the potato sack, and I could see right away that it was a girl.
“Don’t be doin’ that,” I said, embarrassed. “You live up there?” I pointed toward the house.
“Tee-hee-hee.”
“Well, what’s so all-fired funny?”
“Me, livin’ in the big house.”
“What’s so funny about that? Hey, are you crazy or something?”
“I live over yonder in the hen house.” The girl pointed toward the chicken house, which was leaning so bad it looked like a strong wind would blow it over, and had inch-deep cracks between the boards.
“You what?”
She looked at me like I was the one that was weird. “I live in the hen house. Got me an old bed in there an’ everything. Him and her, they don’t never let me in the house.”
I looked at the girl. Dirty and ragged as she was, there was something familiar about her. The hair was black, and the nose was different, but she had the same pale blue eyes and slender figure that Annabeth had had.
“Hey,” I said. “Was Annabeth your sister?”
I like to jumped out of my skin when she commenced howling like a coyote, tears streaming out of her eyes and making rivers in the dirt that covered her face. “Her’s gone,” she said. “Her gone away and left myself alone.” She howled some more.
“Hush up,” I said. “You’re liable to disturb them up at the house.”
She hushed right away and looked up at the house like she was scared to death. “Them better not come.” She took a step back toward the barnyard.
“Wait, don’t go. You got a name?”
She stopped, still watching the house. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Loosie-Goosie.” She swiped at her face with one grubby hand, leaving a trail of dirt across her cheek.
“That ain’t a name. What’s your real name?”
“Loosie-Goosie’s all I know. Hey, you ever see a alligator?”
“In the zoo’s all.”
“Want to see one? I know where’s a whole bunch of um.”
I looked up at the house. “I don’t know. We’ve got to be going pretty soon. Is it far?”
“See through them trees?” She pointed toward the back of the house.
I nodded.
“Lake’s right there. I got a boat down there.”
I figured this might be my only chance to get a look at Caddo Lake so, against my better judgment, I followed her.
“Keep your head down,” she said as we rounded the side of the house. “Don’t let um see us.”
We climbed under a bob-wire fence and started across an overgrown field. Pretty quick, I realized that those trees were farther off than they had looked at first. Loosie-Goosie walked barefooted right through a clump of bull nettles. I stepped around it, being careful not to let the nettles touch my skin. Finally, we reached the trees and I looked back toward the house, now just barely visible through the trees.
“Come on!” she yelled, darting in and out among the pines and sweetgums. Now the ground started to get marshy, and I could smell the lake. “Here!” she shouted.
By the time I caught up with her, she was untying a rope tied around an oak sapling, that was attached to a flat-bottomed boat. I stopped and looked around me. This lake was not one bit like our lake at home, which is open and blue. This lake was dark and spooky, the water almost black in the shade. Cypress trees draped with Spanish moss grew along the edges and out into the black water, their roots gnarled and wide at the bottom. The whole lake, as far as I could see, was a forest of trees with branches that hung so low some grazed the water.
“Well, git in.” She was already seated in the back of the boat, holding a long-handled paddle.
I got in.
“Don’t you have any oars?”
“Oars, oars, got no oars. Got some whores and lots of boars, but I ain’t got no oars,” she sang. “What’s oars?”
“Never mind,” I said, wondering what had possessed me to come here with her. She was obviously nutty as a squirrel, but it was too late to change my mind; she was already pushing the boat away from shore with that funny long paddle.
I looked around as we drifted through what seemed to be a broad channel that wound like a watery road through the trees. A great white heron swooped down near the shore and waded through the murky water, occasionally dunking his head and coming up with a fish in his beak. I liked to jumped out of my skin as a fat, black water moccasin swam by making a vee in the water not two feet from the boat.
“How far to the alligators?” I asked, and I’ll admit, my voice might have been just a little bit shaky.
“Alligator, crocodile, maybe a minute, maybe a mile.”
Now, I was nervous. I looked behind me, but all I could see was a wall of trees. It was getting darker as the trees grew thicker, and the branches almost covered the sky.
“Let’s go back,” I said, hoping she didn’t notice the tremor in my voice. “There’s not any alligators around
here.”
Loosie-Goosie dug the paddle into the mud of the lake bottom, stopping the boat. “Look,” she whispered. We had drifted to a place where a point of land jutted out into the water.
At first, I didn’t see anything but buckeye shrubs, cattails, and a few logs half submerged in the water. Then, one of those logs moved, then another and another. Loosie-Goosie sat very still in the boat, a little smile on her face. I looked closer and saw a partially submerged head with two round searching eyes. Alligators! Huge ones! I stared, afraid to move, while one opened his mouth wide showing off two rows of sharp yellow teeth. “I see four of them,” I breathed.
“One, two, three, four. That’s all there is, there ain’t no more,” she sang softly.
One of the gators slowly turned himself in the water so that one of his ugly eyes stared straight at our boat.
“Shhh,” I hissed. Suddenly, I realized that I’d made a big mistake. I should never have let this crazy girl talk me into coming with her. “Let’s go back,” I whispered.
“The little titty-baby wants to go back,” she said, almost to herself. “Us just rock the baby to sleep. That’s what us’ll do; us’ll rock the baby.” With that, she put her hands on either side of the boat and commenced rocking from side to side. “Go to sleepy, little baby. Go to sleepy, little baby,” she sang, rocking harder and harder until the sides of the boat slapped the water with each rock.
“Go to sleepy, little baby.” Slap, Slap. “Go to sleepy, little baby.” Slap.
I tried to hold on, but the water was making the edges of the boat slippery. I tried to grab the wooden plank I was sitting on, but it came loose from the boat and flew out of my hands. I grabbed wildly for anything to hold on to just before I toppled over the side. Just as my face hit the water, I thought I heard Biggie calling, “J.R.! J.R.!”
The next thing I remember is bumping down the road away from the Baugh’s place sitting in the backseat of Biggie’s car. I was wrapped in an old camp blanket Rosebud keeps in the trunk. My hair was caked with mud; my head hurt; my ears were stopped up and rattled whenever I turned my head. I smelled like mud and dead fish. The wool blanket itched and stuck to my skin.
“At least, I’m not dead,” I said.
“You might have been.” Biggie turned around in the seat and glared at me. “What in the world were you thinking about, J.R. Don’t you have a brain in your head?”
I didn’t think she expected an answer.
Rosebud was wearing the army green coveralls he keeps in the back of the car for fishing. “I ought to whup your butt,” he said. This was serious. Rosebud was never mad at me.
“I’m sorry.” I squirmed under the itchy blanket. “How’d I get rescued?”
“We couldn’t find you when we got ready to go,” Biggie said. “I called and called. Finally, Mrs. Baugh said maybe you’d gone to the lake. When we got there and saw the boat gone, we went around the shoreline looking and calling.”
“We were way, far out,” I said.
“Not as far as you thought.” Rosebud drove slow around a pothole. “There’s a trail that goes around the lake. Took us right to where y’all was.” He shook his head. “When you fell out of the boat, you hit your head on the side. Knocked you clean out.”
“What happened to that crazy girl, Loosie-Goosie? I’d like to kill her.”
“Her pa just about did,” Rosebud said. “Started right in beatin’ her upside the head with the boat paddle. I had to pull him off of her.”
I felt sick to my stomach. “And y’all just left her there?”
“I’m going straight to child protective the minute we get back to town,” Biggie said.
“They make her live in the hen house,” I said, starting to feel just a little bit sorry for her.
“We’ll soon put a stop to that,” Biggie said. “She’ll be taken out of that home and put in foster care.”
“This blanket itches,” I whined.
“You stink, too,” Biggie said. “Rosebud, let’s stop somewhere and get J.R. cleaned up. Look, there’s a house right up there, and somebody’s outside. Maybe they’ll let us clean him up with their hose.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And, Biggie, I just remembered, I left my gym bag in the trunk when school let out last May. I got some clothes in there.”
Rosebud pulled the car into the driveway in front of a little white house that was set close to the road. The yard was clipped neat as a pin, and I could see tubs of red geraniums growing on each side of the front door. An old black man was standing out in the yard watching a little dog do its business.
Biggie jumped out of the car and walked up to the man, who took off his old felt hat and smiled at her. She spoke to him for a minute and pointed to me. He nodded his head and she motioned for us to come.
“This is Mr. Hance Johnson,” she said. “He doesn’t have a hose, but there’s a well out back with a bucket.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Mr. Johnson said. “Looks like y’all had a little accident.” He pronounced it acci-DENT.
“I just about got eaten by some alligators.” I couldn’t wait to get back to Job’s Crossing and tell Monica about my close call. She’d never believe it.
“We were visiting with the Baughs. Their daughter took J.R. out in a boat, then tipped him over into the lake.”
“Mmmm.” Mr. Johnson was watching his dog. “That girl tetched. Uh-hmm.”
“Do you know much about that family?”
“I mostly don’t go ’round them, lest I cain’t hep it.” Mr. Johnson kept on looking at his dog.
“Rosebud,” Biggie said, “why don’t you take J.R. around back and help him clean up while I talk to Mr. Johnson.”
Rosebud opened the trunk and got out my gym bag, and we went around to the back of the house. Up close to the tiny screened-in porch was a well with a bucket and rope hanging over it.
“Strip,” Rosebud said.
I looked around. There wasn’t even a tree to hide behind. “Here?”
“You betcha.” Rosebud was already lowering the bucket into the well.
I figured I was already in enough trouble, so I stripped and stood there, shivering, while Rosebud poured bucket after bucket of icy-cold water over me. He opened my gym bag and pulled out a towel, tossing it to me. Fast as I could, I dried myself off and put on my shorts and tee shirt.
“Rosebud, are you still mad at me?”
“You did a dern-fool thing and mighty near got me and you both killed,” Rosebud said. “Ain’t I got a right to be mad?”
“I guess. Rosebud, did you pull me out?”
“Who else?”
“Thanks,” I said, following him back to the car and thinking how Rosebud was the best friend I had in the world and I had almost gotten him eaten by an alligator. I’d have to think of something real good to make it up to him.
Me and Rosebud got back in the car and waited while Biggie finished talking to Mr. Johnson. He was doing most of the talking, all the while pointing back toward the Baugh place. Every once in a while, Biggie would ask a question and he would talk some more. Finally, she came back to the car and slid into her seat. She waved to Mr. Johnson.
“What all were y’all talking about, Biggie?” I asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough.” Biggie looked out the window and wouldn’t say another word. I hate it when she does that.
15
When we got back to the hotel, a familiar smell made my mouth water. “Fried chicken!” I yelled and headed toward the kitchen.
“Not so fast.” Biggie caught me by the elastic waistband of my gym shorts. “Upstairs with you, first. Get a good bath, shampoo your hair, and get into some clean clothes. Then you can sit down for supper like a gentleman.”
I got cleaned up in no time on account of I was having a fit to get downstairs and get my lips around some of Willie Mae’s good fried chicken. It’s my favorite thing in the whole world. The others were all seated at the table when I slid into my place. Biggie took
her napkin and wiped a little soap I had missed from behind my ear. “My soul,” she said. “You must be hungry.”
“I guess you would be, too, if you’d almost gotten eaten alive by an alligator.” I looked at the platter of chicken that was being passed around the table, hoping nobody would get the pulley bone before it got to me.
“Don’t be a smart aleck.” Biggie spooned a pile of mashed potatoes onto her plate and slopped some cream gravy on top. “Want some potatoes?”
I nodded, then looked around the table because everything had suddenly gotten quiet. The people had all stopped eating and were staring at me.
“What?” I said.
“Well, land’s sakes, J.R.,” Miss Mary Ann said. “You just said you almost got eaten by an alligator!”
“What happened?” Mr. Lew Masters looked at me, concerned.
Brian, who was sitting on my left, mussed my hair. “Like, what happened, man?”
So I told them. I left out the part about the girl, Loosie-Goosie, raising up her dress. “That girl’s crazy,” I finished, “but that’s no reason for her daddy to beat her on the head with a boat paddle.”
“My stars!” Miss Mary Ann said.
“Had anybody consulted me, I would have warned you not to go out there,” Lucas said. He tut-tutted and shook his head. “No place for civilized people. No place at all.”
“Well, first thing tomorrow morning, I’m going right down to the courthouse and report him to the child protective people,” Biggie said. “That child needs to be taken out of that home.”
“Rosebud was ready to put her in the car and take her right then,” I said, thinking how glad I was that Biggie wouldn’t let him. I’d had more than enough of Miss Loosie-Goosie Baugh for one day.
“That would have been kidnapping,” Lucas said. “Now, Biggie, are you sure you want to go poking your nose in something that doesn’t concern you? They are ignorant swamp people. They have their ways of raising their young—and they have never been our ways.”
“That’s right,” Miss Mary Ann said. “You really should stay out of it, Biggie.”
