by Bret Lott
“Get that radio out,” he called to Jessup, his words way too loud. Something was up in him, a rush, I could see with the solid jab he made at the mud beneath us, and the hard lean into the pole, the pull to get us off and out as fast as he could do it.
But then we stopped hard, a sudden cold halt of the boat, and I looked behind me, back to the few feet of water between us and land. There, taut all the way in, shot a thin ratty line of nylon rope: the cinder block, still back there, still cleated off here.
I turned, ready for whatever shit Unc’d be laying on me now for this next sin against him.
“Don’t matter,” he nearly whispered, still working the pole, but not to move us anywhere now. He held it just like I’d seen when we got here, up like he was gigging a frog, and now I knew what the all of this was about: whatever it was he’d poked and that’d scared him when we were on our way in. “This way we won’t be moving all over,” he said.
“If this is about a gator,” I said, “then you need to get out more often. They’re a dime a dozen around here. You said yourself he’s long gone.”
He said nothing, and now the pole went deep, almost to Unc’s knees, and he pushed down on it, the gunwale of the boat a kind of fulcrum he was working the pole over. He pushed, gave out a grunt, and pushed again, the boat heeling over for it, but still Unc pushed down and down.
“Unc,” I whispered, and sat, leaned out over the gunwale on the opposite side to give him a little more depth.
Because there was something he was after, and he was getting it.
Now a sudden pitch of the boat away from his side toward mine, him nearly falling down for whatever it was being freed of the mud, and here was the sound of water against that side, a push of it against the boat, and the thick stink of pluff mud for all of it roiling up.
“Tell me what it is, Huger,” he said, out of breath. He stood up straight, waggled a moment to get back his balance for the boat righting itself beneath him. The pole was still down in the water, at an angle beneath the thing.
I stood, looked over the edge into the black water there. “Nothing,” I said, and swallowed. “Maybe lift it up a little more, to the surface.”
He grunted again, lifted and lifted, and Jessup called out, “You all right?”
We didn’t answer. Unc pushed down, and still I saw nothing in the water, the black of it so deep. That half-moon we’d had coming in was hidden now behind trees somewhere, and at the same instant the idea came to me, Unc whispered, “Get the goggles.”
I sat, reached to the book bag up in the bow and zipped it open, pulled out the hard hat, the goggles still strapped on.
“What if Jessup sees them?” I said, though I was already putting them on.
Unc said nothing: answer enough.
I was on my knees now, and leaned over the gunwale again, flipped down the goggles. Green water was all I could see, the bottom edge of the porthole the gunwale, the top edge the line where pluff mud started. Between them water, green and green and green.
“Nothing,” I said again, but then here it bulged up, something wet and thick and glistening, water streaming away off what looked like a log at first but smooth, and then, Unc still working to lift it, I saw a cleft halfway down its length, where it split in two on the right, and I knew of course it was a body: two legs, above them the torso, and now I saw two small mounds of a sort—breasts—then wider and higher above that two sharp points that were shoulders, all mired over in a thin cast of pluff mud, and I turned my head to the left, moved my line of sight to the head.
Mud over it, no features at all.
Then it disappeared, washed over by green water, Unc letting it back down.
“Unc,” I breathed out, “it’s—”
“I know,” he whispered, and I felt him push down to bring it up again.
And then, like it’d forgotten itself altogether and started up just now, I felt the surprise shock of my pulse, and the roar of blood in my ears, and I heard too the odd and cold whir of cicadas I hadn’t noticed out here yet tonight, and Unc’s breathing loud beside me.
It was a body. I’d just seen a body, and in a moment I’d have to look at it again, and now I heard inside that whir of cicadas and the rush of blood through me water lapping against the boat, and heard too water everywhere on the creek, from the top of it where a cinder block lay holding us in place right on down to the Cooper River miles away. I heard all this, all this, and I took in a shallow breath, because there was nothing other my own body knew to do than to breathe.
Still I looked over the edge, and here came rising up through this green water not a body in mud but a bright green body only streaked with it, mud washed free for Unc’s letting it back down and bringing it up again. A woman: that blank cleft of her legs, a thin snarl of muddied hair there, her breasts. The pole was beneath the middle of her back so that she was arched as she rose, and I turned my head to the left again so that this time I might see her face, though I didn’t want this. I didn’t want this.
It wasn’t a face I saw, but first teeth, a green and bright grimace inside a ragged pull of flesh away from them, the nose and chin the same ragged matter, and next her eyes, or what was left of them: a burl of loose flesh down to the cheekbones, the bones two green shards beneath where eyes should have been.
“God,” I whispered.
“Huger,” Unc whispered. “We need to get help in here.”
“It’s a woman,” I whispered, then whispered again, “God.”
I eased back slow until I was on my butt in the bottom of the hull. I felt my stomach going, felt it almost in my throat, and I swallowed, swallowed again.
“Jessup,” Unc called out, the word the loudest thing I’d ever heard. “Call up to Segundo, get the Hanahan PD in here. Sheriff too.”
I still had on the goggles, and I swallowed again, then one more time, and slowly turned my head to look at Unc, because he knew what to do. He always knew.
There he stood, looking back toward Jessup, the pole at an angle to hold the body up, him pressing down with both hands. He was fully lit and breathing hard for the work he was after, and I could see the stars above him weren’t a thin wash but a green galaxy spread thick.
“Yessir,” Jessup called back after a second.
I made myself stand, still with the scope on Unc, and looked at him, hoping in just these few seconds he’d have figured out some way to help me, and that with the goggles on I could see the words out of his mouth so that I could get them all the more quickly into me.
But all I saw was the reflection of the IR illuminator in his sunglasses: those two marbles of fire.
“Can’t get it any higher than this,” he said, his breaths still heavy, him nearly winded. “Not totally free. Anchored on two ends, feels like.” He leaned down hard yet again on the pole, and disappeared from my field of vision, those white fires gone.
But here they still were, smaller but sharper, closer together and a long way off.
I blinked quick, squinted a second.
Two lights, pinpoints far off but certain and sharp as lasers pointed this way. They bobbed a second, and I could see now they were inside the tree line all the way across the marsh. A good half mile away, there in the Naval Weapons Station tract.
Infrared illuminators. Had to be. Looking right here.
Then they disappeared, first one, the other an instant later.
“Unc,” I started.
“Can you spell me, Huger?” Unc said, and stood, filled my line of sight: those marbles again. “Just hold the pole right here until they—”
“There’s somebody out there,” I said. “On the other side of the marsh.”
“What?” he said, and turned, still holding on to the pole.
I looked past him, to those trees, and the nothing of them now. Only trees.
“On their way!” Jessup called from behind us, and then, quieter, he said, “Huger, what you got out there?”
“A body,” I said, and slowly flippe
d up the goggles, took off the hard hat. It didn’t matter how quickly I put them away now, I knew, the whole idea of taking them off what felt already a year too late.
Because if I’d seen them all the way across the marsh, two somebodies a half mile away on the Naval Weapons Station tract, both of them wearing night-vision goggles at least as good as mine, then they’d seen my IR looking right back.
Somebody over there had been watching us without our even knowing.
“It’s a body,” I said, and I turned, looked back at Jessup: a man dressed in black in the plain old dark of the world, standing at the head of a finger creek into Landgrave Hall.
And then, like what I’d said was a cue, that light in the upstairs window turned on.
“Here we go,” Unc whispered behind me.
I took over for Unc, just like he’d asked, traded places with him so it was me stood there at the transom pushing down on the pole. Though I couldn’t quite figure why, given there might very well be a gator out here and us now dangling a body in the water like it was bait.
A body. A woman.
I wouldn’t look down there. Not that I could have seen anything, or seen it as sharp and clear as I had with the goggles on. But I wouldn’t let my eyes go down to the water.
Unc sat on the center seat getting back his breath, head down, elbows on his knees, and now an outside light on the back of the Dupont house came on behind him, flooded the yard and its patio furniture and French doors. Jessup, still back there on dry ground, turned to it, his radio up to his mouth.
Next, at that house with the coach lamp I’d seen when we first put in, the one back about fifty yards through the trees, an even bigger outside light smashed on, the woods between here and there filled just like that with the black silhouettes of trees.
“Here comes the neighborhood,” I said, and looked down at Unc.
“Of course.” He took in a breath, shook his head at the ugly fact of what always happened next when we were busted for golfing: one or another of the neighbors would show up as we were being escorted off the premises, there to give us intruders a kind of self-satisfied send-off. But this time it’d be different. This time whoever it was would find something more than they’d bargained for after calling us in for whacking at golf balls in the middle of the night.
And now it began: one of the French doors on the Dupont house opened up, a small black-haired woman—had to be the nurse—standing there in a pale robe.
“Everything here is under control, ma’am,” Jessup called up to her.
“Judge Dupont wants to know what’s going on out here,” she nearly shouted, her voice high-pitched and thin.
“It’s under control, ma’am,” Jessup said.
She stood there in the door, and it occurred to me she didn’t sound Guatemalan at all. It’d been Jessup who’d told me once where she came from, and she looked like she was from somewhere down there, but she’d had no accent at all, and I watched as she took a step out the door onto the patio, held herself in the cool out here.
“What you saw could have been just a couple boys out patrolling for whatever reason,” Unc breathed out. “Over to the Weapons Station.” I glanced down at him, saw he still had his elbows on his knees, but now he was looking past me across the marsh.
I turned, looked out there. The light from off the back of the house let me see only about twenty yards out into that cordgrass and spartina, this narrow lane of black water snaking away. The stars were gone for that light, too, the jagged line of trees across it all now only a dull rim on the horizon, black and far away.
But I could still feel the hot of my blood up in me, my chest pressed down on and at the same time pushing from inside for those pinprick lasers of light looking right at us. And I could feel my blood up in me because of this body.
I said, “What does it mean? I mean, soldiers watching us. Even if they were on patrol.” I swallowed, felt how heavy this pole was for the weight at the other end, thought of those teeth bright and green, her face like it was melted away somehow. I turned from the marsh back to the house, careful not to look down at the water.
Jessup was at the porch off the French doors now, talking to the woman, who still held herself. His back was to us, and I could see her looking up at him, listening.
“Sailors,” Unc said. “Not soldiers. And it don’t mean anything.” He sat up, his palms on his knees. “Means we might have to turn in those goggles is all. So we got caught with them, we turn them in. Won them fair and square off Commander Prendergast, and if anyone wants to charge us with anything, a little reminder to him of how he lost government property in a hand of poker’ll make sure the matter’s dropped.”
He looked up at me, his face dark altogether for the light behind him. He said, “How you doing?”
“Fine,” I said, too quick. “Seen them before.”
“Sorry,” he said, and looked down again.
Now out from the shadows along that fence we’d just walked and into the light from off the back of the Dupont house came the next guests at this little gathering: first Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbert, the real estate couple owned the place back through the trees, him in a pair of sweat shorts and a T-shirt, her in a running suit, the both of them with hair matted and snarled for sleep; next, shriveled and old and with her helmet of white hair done up perfect, came Mrs. Quillie Izerd Grimball, the widow lived in the Spanish place back on the fairway, a woman had to be even older than Judge Dupont. She stopped a couple feet to the right of the Cuthberts, and had on a dark skirt and white blouse, a sweater draped over her shoulders like it was a cape. Of course she’d show up dressed for the event, her so old school.
And of course the first residents to see Unc and me tending to a dead body on the property would be these three: the realtors who’d sold us our place over on the seventh green, and the lead dog in the fight to keep us trailer trash from moving in here in the first place.
“The Cuthberts and old lady Q are here,” I said low to Unc, and because of this pushing down and pressing out in my chest, and because here was the first posse of these old-money folks we were surrounded with by living out here to Landgrave Hall, and because I didn’t know what else to do with any of it but to fill in the dark with words, I tried to make a joke: “Guess Mrs. Q was right when she said we’d bring the wrong element into the neighborhood.”
“Ain’t us brought a dead body in here, that’s for damn sure,” Unc said right back. “And like I said a hundred thousand times: I got just as much right to live here as that battle-ax’ll ever have.”
Slowly he rubbed his palms on his knees now, what he’ll do when his own blood is up. “When are those boys going to get here?” he whispered, and already I was sorry for trying even to make him laugh. It was an old fight, the one about the element we were bringing into Landgrave Hall, and whether or not we could even buy a place here. It was an old fight. I should have known better.
Unc stopped rubbing his knees, sat up straight. He took in a breath, held it a moment. He half turned in his seat, called out toward the house, “Jessup, you call in DNR?”
Jessup, still talking to the nurse, spun quick to the words. He was quiet a moment, then said, “Who?”
“Department of Natural Resources,” Unc called out. “The warden’ll have to be in on this too.”
“Leland?” Mr. Cuthbert called out, “you got you a gator?” and I saw him put a hand to his forehead to block out the light from the house. He took a step forward, said, “Must be a good one to have to call in DNR.” He took his hand down, put his hands on his hips. “Don’t suppose you could just clobber that bad boy with that three wood you’re always out here with.”
“Just let the local fauna alone,” Mrs. Q said in her high-pitched and wobbly old lady voice. She gave out a solid tsk, said, “Wrestling alligators won’t prove anything of your worth out here, Mr. Dillard. Neither you nor the boy both.”
“Quillie,” Mrs. Cuthbert said, her arms crossed, and I could see her shake her hea
d, that hair of hers at odd angles. “That’s enough.”
“I’ve already called your momma, Huger,” Mrs. Q said. “She’s on her way as we speak.”
“Perfect,” Unc whispered. He let out a hard breath, called out, “Jessup, just get the DNR boys on down here too.”
“Yessir,” Jessup said.
“You bag that son of a bitch,” Mr. Cuthbert called, “and we’ll cook us up some steaks tonight, you want to, Leland. We’ll barbecue us some fauna, I tell you what.”
He let out a laugh, a loud one that seemed more forced than anything else. And even though it was a kind of innocent laugh, meant only to poke both at that old bag Mrs. Q and at the fact he knew Unc was out here golfing in the middle of the night again, still that laugh echoed cold and easy across the marsh, and very very wrong.
There was a dead body right here with us. A dead woman right here at the end of this pole I was pushing down on to hold it up. A laugh out of Mr. Cuthbert was the wrong thing to happen out here, just as an idiot joke about the trailer trash element we’d brought here was wrong too.
There was no joke to any of this.
But there was still in me this pressure in my chest I knew wasn’t going to leave any time soon. Still in me, too, that rifle-scope view of the body, my line of sight filled with those teeth, that flesh, and whatever had happened—whatever had been done to—her face, and the glow and glisten of water runneling off a body, and I had no choice in that second of Mr. Cuthbert’s laugh echoing back across the marsh but to bark out sharp, “It’s a body.”
I said it loud, and heard my own echo come back to me, same as that laugh.
Nothing happened for a moment, everyone in the Dupont backyard just standing there, frozen. The only thing alive seemed that echo back at us, hanging right here in the air around us.
Mr. Cuthbert, hands still on his hips, took another step forward, said, “What you mean, ‘a body’?”
“He means a body, Grange,” Unc said, the words quiet. “A woman’s body. Now we need to just wait until the authorities get here before we can—”
