Swamp Sister

by Robert Edmond Alter

  Overhead the moon was fat and gold-dollar proud, drifting high and handsome in the clear vastness of its night kingdom. It shed down a soft thin layer of silent grey snow, and the dark things of the nearby woods and the further-off swamp stood black and stark against the navy blue sky, and some of them were straight but more of them crooked, and none of them moved until a zephyr puffed at them, and then the larger ones merely nodded as though going to sleep, but the little things fluttered and trembled and some of the holly leaves winked dull silver.

  The scut-shot gator was drifting bulge-eyed across the water, all but a few bumps of him submerged, going shopping. But a drifting flock of night-feeding ducks were suddenly and acutely aware of his sly approach, and they went streaming off into the star-night honking fear, leaving a good piece of the pond's surface broken.

  The gator ruffled a grumble through his throat and big glassy black bubbles formed at his nostrils and popped on the surface.

  Suddenly his flat head lifted, trickling water, and he merged his receptive senses with the night. Something was coming toward the pond – coming like fear, quick and brush-smashing. The gator slewed around in the water and looked at the pale ribbon of bank and the black wall of jungle.

  A doe came crashing through the wall, skittering to a gawky-legged halt on the bank. It looked big-eyed in every direction, ears fluttering. Right out of nowhere a good-God panther came after the doe.

  The doe reared sideways and made three sharp leaps, right-left-forward and gone. The panther scooted helplessly on its powerful hindquarters, head swinging, looking confused, snarling, and the doe went spang in the pond and started kicking toward the Money Plane, all neck and ears in the water and the little wet tuft of tail showing in the rear.

  The scut-shot gator hurriedly made his preparations for the windfall. He closed his earflaps, dropped the transparent films over his eyes, and wadded up his tongue to close his throat. Then he submerged, waited.

  The doe came plodding toward him, four stalky legs moving rhythmically like pistons in the dark water. The gator froze still in the pond, watching the doe step weightlessly over his head, then his jaw hinged open and with a shove of his tail he shot forward and snapped.

  The doe fought with its sharp hoofs all the way down to the mushy bottom of the black slough, but it didn't do any good. The gator's jaws were firmly clamped about the doe's middle. He waited until the doe went limp and then he knew it was drowned.

  "You see, Mr. Ferris? You see it's right there in print. That air's the first ten dollar Shad gived me, and here's the number of hit on this paper you gived me. And look a-here, Mr. Ferris, here's the next two he brung in to me this morning. And here be the one that Estee brung last night – which was sort of a set back to me, because Shad ain't never ben one to fool with no nigra, but -"

  "Yes, yes, I see. They all correspond, don't they?"

  "They shore God do. You think now that mebbe Shad went and give this here ten to his daddy? Old Hark he always is playing around with that Estee, but Shad is -"

  "I don't see that it really matters, Mr. Sutt. The point is that the bills are showing up, but they weren't until Shad started passing them out. Well – is that all?"

  "All? Well yes, I reckon so – no, now wait; Bell Means has got him a couple. I ain't seen 'em, but I have heered that Shad give him twenty dollars to rent that old shantyboat of his."

  "Bell Mears? Yes, I believe I remember him. Well, all right, Mr. Sutt, I'll go and see Mr. Means. I'd better take these papers with me to check the serial numbers."

  "Well I'll tell you, Mr. Ferris; if you want to git a line on Shad, you best git in touch with Sam Parkes or Jort Camp. You remember Jort, don't you? Well, they ben keeping tab on Shad. Sam'd be the best bet. (He chuckled.) That Sam, he's shore hell fer snoopy."

  "All right, and thank you. I'll check back with you later."

  "Uh – well, uh – you fixing to take that air forty dollars along with you, Mr. Ferris?"

  "Yes (smiling at the crestfallen face). They're evidence now, Mr. Sutt, and rightfully belong to the insurance company, you understand. But don't worry. As I told you four years ago – you'll be amply rewarded for your assistance."

  "Yeah, yeah – but – uh -just how much you think that air reward will be worth, Mr. Ferris? In round figures say?"

  12

  Jort Camp was sitting in a sumac bush just upwind of the Means' privy. From his position he could watch the rear of the house, could see most of the clearing in the moonlight, and could follow the road coming and going. So why in God's name didn't something come?

  He started to chuckle, reminded of the time the Doaks and Finneys were having their feud. Couldn't anybody remember now, what started the fuss, or how many had been killed, or what ramifications it had caused, or why or how it ever died out. The incident of the Doaks' privy laughed everything else concerning the feud out of the limelight.

  The Finneys had attacked the Doaks' place one morning, and long about noon old Jim Finney had gotten all pepped up over some wild hair or another and had slipped up behind the house to burn the Doaks out. But Tully Doaks had seen him coming and Tully had a high-powered rifle and he'd cut loose on old Jim.

  First off he'd put a slug through old Jim's right leg, and that had slowed Jim down a mite. Old Jim had went hobble-legged all over the yard looking for cover, and Tully whacking away at him like a kicked-over hornets' nest, and the only cover Jim could find was the Doaks' privy. In he went a'clump-leggin along like a schoolboy who's just had an accident in his pants and sees the teacher coming, and slammed the door. But the walls of that privy were only cardboard thick and wouldn't stop a windblown straw, and Tully Doaks knew it.

  "Hi, boys!" he'd called to his kinfolk. "I got me old Jim bottled up in the privy. Let's pepper him some."

  So the whole family had opened up on the privy, and they said that old Granny Doaks had laughed till she went into a stroke, and didn't anybody notice it till it was nearly too late, and Old Jim had laid in there on the floor among the corncobs and catalogues, cursin' and duckin' and nunsin' his hurt leg, and pretty soon it got so bad there wasn't nothing for it but to nip up the two-seater board and climb down into the pit. And those Doaks kept him there until nightfall, when he was finally able to slip out and crawl off into the bush. And even then old Jim's kin hadn't wanted to have any part of him for a couple of days, and Tim Finney had even suggested that they dig a hole and bury Jim neck-high like you do when a man gets skunk-squirted.

  Jort laughed, his belly shaking around his belt until it hurt, and then he wiped his eyes and shook his head as if to say, don't it beat all? Don't it just? That Jim.

  He settled down to business again, watching the house. The light in the girls' room was still on and the shade up, but there wasn't anything of interest to see now. Just Dorry in some kind of new dress, primping herself before the mirror. She'd been going at it for half an hour. It had been better a little while ago when she first came in and turned on the light – when she'd removed her old dress to try on the new one. Oh my yes, that had been much livelier. And wasn't it a caution the way that girl never wore her undies?

  Old Sam had been corked off when Jort made him stay down at the backwater to watch after Shad. But it had to be that way because Jort knew Sam. The no-good woods colt would lose track of everything watching Dorry's window, and, too, there wasn't anyone who could trail a swamp man like that Sam. Shad was a tricky devil, but not tricky enough. Every time he made a move Sam would be riding in his hip pocket just as soft and unnoticeable as a bandana. That Shad.

  It didn't seem too long ago, Jort reflected, when he used to meander by the schoolhouse and pause to watch all the young hellions scrapping in the yard during recess or lunch. One thing he always noticed – that little Shad Hark never lost a fight. And he had his share of them.

  Jort used to lean on the schoolyard splitrail and watch the feisty little devils kick up a storm. He'd grin and chuckle and sometimes call encouragement to one or anothe
r of them, but never advice – that would be giving one kid an edge over another and Jort believed that each boy and man had to discover his own edge.

  Aside one day, he'd said to Shad, "You ort a start learning you something about eye-gouging. You gitting along to fourteen now, and someday soon some big brawler is goan take after you fer keeps and not fer play."

  But the overly tall, scrawny boy had shaken his head and said flatly, "I'm not fixing to damage nobody penm'nent. I make 'em say uncle and that's a-plenty fer me."

  "Tough's an old boot, ain't you?"

  And the boy, wiping at his mouth with the back of his wrist, staring blanidy at the big man, had said, "Enough so's when you fix to come at me you best bring help."

  And Jort had bellowed laughter and thigh-slapped himself, and said, "Bet I might at that." And the funny part of it was it had given him a premonition. Something out of the nameless future had told him he was going to mix with that boy someday and it was going to be hell on earth. So he'd gone on watching Shad fight his way out of puberty, and he'd waited, and he'd put it off. Hedidn't really know why because he knew he could beat him, and yet couldn't seem to bring himself around to proving it. And so Shad bothered him and always had.

  Down under the birch and paw-paws and maple Sam Parks sat in cross-anided restlessness. He was watching the squat black hulk of the shantyboat that never went anywhere in the weir-gurgling backwater. He'd been lurking there for three hours now, waiting for Shad to make a move, and though he was so fidgety he was fit to be tied and placed in a basket, his faculties were always greedy for signs, and there was an alertness about him so tense that at times he thought he could hear the weeds growing. And so, though there were only the thin lines of light where the shanty's shutters clamped to the frames, he detected just the sporadic flickering, and knew that Shad was having himself a pacing time in there.

  Plain mad, Sam thought.

  And that got him to thinking of Dorry, which made him mad all oven again because Jort had put him down here in the slough to watch Shad, while he, Jort, sat up there at the Means' place.

  He fussed around and fretted and mumbled. "That Jort's always bossing me about like I didn't have motherwit of my own. And me that has to tell him what Shad's doing and ever'thing. And what do I git outn hit? That's what I'd kindly like to know? Nothing."

  Well, things were going to be different. When he got his share of the money he'd be his own man. He wouldn't have anything more to do with Jort, not ever. He was tired of playing slave to the big bully. He was sick to death of the craven feeling that the big man's physical presence evoked in him. He wanted to stand on his own two feet for a change and answer to no man.

  That was what he wanted and that was how it was going to be. But right now the air was humid and buggy and there was a colony of night-rambling ants on the prowl and they were pestering him to distraction.

  "Gol durn antses!" he hissed furiously.

  The door of the shantyboat opened, throwing a big block of white light on the afterdeck, and Shad stepped through it like someone magically coming out of the mouth of a furnace and went to the edge of the porch.

  Sam forgot about the ants and the weight of the cross life had given him to bear. He rose to a crouch and became a statue-man, waiting. Maybe now he'd get some action. Maybe this was what he and Jort had been waiting for. But Shad just stood there a while; then he walked on back inside slamming the door behind him.

  Sam sank back on his haunches and the ants with a groan. "Tain't fair," he muttered. "Tain't fair a-tall."

  It was getting late. It was getting on to bedtime. Shortly now she would have to take off the new dress and get into bed with Margy. And she dreaded it because she just knew that Margy was going to be an endless question box. She was going to want to know about the new dress, about the ten dollars. She wasn't going to settle for the story Dorny had given their parents about saving up her allowance. Margy knew better than that, much better. And she would keep at it and keep at it, there in the hot, muggy dank, and she wouldn't go to sleep until she learned, and that meant she would still be awake when Dorry slipped off to go see Shad, and she would want to know all about that too.

  "Bother," she said, but then she looked at her reflection in the tarnished mirror again and saw how pretty she was and how beautiful the dress was and how well it fit, and she was pleased that it wouldn't have to be taken in at all, because, my goodness, a dress just couldn't be any tighter than this one – not and be decent – and she forgot about Margy and her nosy questions.

  She pushed her hair all away from the left of her neck, bunching it along the right, and gave herself a side look, making her eyes soft and smoky, opening her overpainted lips and putting her front teeth together so that just the tops and bottoms touched – the way those pin-up girls in magazines did.

  A muted knocking vibrated through the wooden walls of the house, and she looked at her own closed door, wondering, and heard the rasp of her pa's chair in the other room and a moment later the squeak of the door opening, and then a murmur of voices minus words and meaning.

  Dorry went to the door and put her ear against the panel, The result was unsatisfactory. She still couldn't pick out the words, but the tone of one of the speakers was definitely foreign. She raised her eyebrows and paused to adjust the dangerously low line of the dress about the burst at her breasts, and then opened the door.

  Bell Means had just given Mr. Ferris a split-bottomed chair, and as he'd been making his first preparations for bed, he suddenly discovered he was in his stocking feet, and it embarrassed him because he didn't want to give Mn. Ferris the idea that they were poor whites. Now he was blinking around confusedly for his shoes while Mrs. Mears was covering up very nicely, asking Mr. Ferris if he wouldn't have some coffee. And Mr. Ferris was smiling, saying politely, "Thank you. That's very kind of you." And so Margy was on her way to the stove to reheat the coffee, and her expression was blank except for that little suspicious frown she always made when anyone she didn't know well approached her.

  But Dorry remembered Mn. Ferris – though she'd only been fourteen at the time – remembered him very well. She had never seen a man like him. He was something that had just stepped out of a magazine – one of those Esquire's they sold in the drugstore in Torkville that her ma would never let her buy, but that she looked at anyhow while her ma was browsing around the notions counter. There couldn't be another man in the world like Mr. Ferris. He was the type of man she dreamed of having for herself.

  Mr. Ferris had just looked at Dorry – a quick, penetrating look, too quick for her parents to take offence -and was trying to place her in his memory, but without success. Good Lord – he'd thought they only bred ignorance, apathy and filth in the deep south. That girl was positively a Freudian study. And then, because he was a man who had full control over all the tributaries of his mind, he switched Dorry onto a siding.

  "I shan't beat about the bush with you. Mr. Mears. I'm here to discuss one of your neighbours – Shad Hark."

  Bell nodded wisely, said, "Thought so."

  Mr. Ferris nodded also. "You've heard the rumours about Shad and the Money Plane then?"

  "Couldn't help but hear'em, less I was stone deef."

  "And I understand Shad gave you two of those bills?"

  "Yeah, last night he did. You want I should show'em to you, Mr. Ferris? I got'em still, night in my iron box in t'other room."

  Mrs. Mears suspended her knitting needles to look over the rims of her glasses at Mr. Ferris. "You really think that Shad went and found him that Money Plane, Mn. Ferris?"

  "It looks that way, yes."

  She shook her head, looking down as the needles began hopping one over the other again. "Just don't seem possible. Such a nice boy and all. Always so polite and friendly. Just don't seem like the kind that would find other people's money and not give hit back."

  "Well," Mr. Ferris said kindly, "he's young, and eighty thousand dollars is a lot of money. I rather imagine his thinking is
temporarily confused."

  Dorry was biting her lower lip. It wasn't until this moment that she realized what a wrench Mr. Ferris could throw in the wheel of her brightly spinning future. Mn. Ferris suddenly was no longer the suave, educated, middleaged gentleman of her dreams. He was a cold, methodical brain-machine – invulnerable to any attack.

  "Will you put Shad to jail if'n you catch him with that money?" she asked abruptly.

  "Dorry!" Mrs. Mears said in a fierce undertone.

  But Mr. Ferris smiled. "Not if he's willing to turn it over to me. I'm going to talk to him tonight." He looked at Mrs. Means. "I understand he's living on your husband's houseboat?"

  Bell came back with the two tens in his hand and gave them to Mr. Ferris. "If them bills be off'n the Money Plane, do I got to give'em up, Mr. Ferris?"

  "Temporarily, I'm afraid. But I'll see to it that you receive a worthwhile remuneration."

  Bell said "Oh," and then "Yeah," and looked at his wife to see if she had the hang of the word.

  Mn. Ferris brought out his sheaf of papers, spread them on the table and began checking the two bills against the list. Mrs. Means tried to keep her business to herself and her needles, but Bell couldn't. He leaned over the table and asked Mr. Ferris "what that there was?"

  "This is a list of the serial numbers of the money that was on the airplane when it disappeared four years ago. I've already found four bills that Shad passed out, and they tallied with this list – Yes, see here? Here's another."

  Dorry felt very cold. Who would ever think that city folk had such sneaky ways to catch you out? Serial numbers! Then a new thought whacked her, shattering the brittle veneer of her respectability. That ten dollar Shad give me was marked. I went and bought this dress with hit, and now they goan trace it back to me.

  She caught Margy's attention and imperatively gestured toward their bedroom. Margy let out a sigh of exasperation and stood up, frowning. She left the room. A moment later – her parents and Mr. Ferris studying the list -Dorry slipped after her.