Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  Justin didn’t move. “What if Stoat’s there?”

  “It’s a chance we’ll have to take. Stoat thinks we’re somewhere down the river, so we’re better off heading back upstream, don’t you think? Justin?”

  He just shrugged again.

  I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to get parental with him. “We’d better get a move on,” I said in a neutral tone, starting upstream along the riverbank. “Come on, Justin.”

  He didn’t say a word, but he got up and followed me.

  • • •

  The river had taken away Justin’s flip-flops.

  There’s an old saying my father liked to recite at annoying times: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost, for want of a rider the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” I guess Dad was a kind of philosopher on that subject. It’s the little stuff that screws you good, like the Columbia’s O-ring or the Crocodile Hunter’s stingray or, according to fractal theory, some butterfly in India fluttering its wings to eventually cause Superstorm Sandy.

  I still had my socks and sneakers, sodden but intact on my feet, but with Justin barefoot, for a thousand sharp, pointy, and/or venomous reasons we couldn’t slip into the woods to stay out of sight. We had to walk on the sandy bank of the river, where anybody could see us.

  Which explained why, luckily for me, he had been on the riverbank to save my life a second time.

  Progressing upriver, we discovered that we shared the bank with several snakes and four alligators, all of which slid into the water before we got anywhere near them.

  They weren’t what scared us.

  The whole way back to the boat ramp, neither of us said a word. We kept pausing to listen. Warily we rounded a bend in the river, then stopped, glimpsing somebody’s old blue pickup truck through a screen of leaves. If the river curve was the one that had hidden me from Stoat last night, then the blue pickup had to be sitting at the same boat ramp where he had taken us.

  The problem was, what if Stoat was there too?

  Justin and I stared at each other, silently discussing this. Then, gesturing for him to stay where he was, I headed into the woods to have a look at the boat ramp and its parking area from a hidden vantage point. The rain had soaked and muffled most of the noisy vegetation, so my main stealth problem was to keep my aforementioned big mouth from screaming or swearing as I edged between palmettos that tried to saw my legs off and knee-high Spanish dagger—each long leaf might as well have been a switchblade—and other things that tried to stick major thorns into me. What the hell. My skin was just one big mosquito bite anyway; why should I care if the vegetation now started sucking my blood?

  Finally I got to where I had a clear view of the blue pickup, which sat with its nose tilted upward and its rear end partway down the boat ramp. In all the open space around it I could see no other vehicle and no people, least of all Stoat.

  Rather than ouching my way back to Justin, I broke into the open, jogged down where he could see me, and beckoned forcefully. “Come on!” I snapped.

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “I’m hungry! I want to raid their truck!”

  By the time he joined me, I was already in the truck bed pushing aside fishing rods to open a tackle box with no idea what I hoped to find. Bait? I didn’t think Justin and I were quite ready to eat worms, especially not plastic ones, which were the only kind I found, along with fishhooks and sinkers and every conceivable lure, including bright-colored tubular foam ones with a fringe, kind of like Nerf squid.

  “Get out!” Justin meant this as an expression of excitement, I think, as he reached over my shoulder and picked up an insignificant-looking rectangular object.

  “What’s that?”

  “An everything tool!” He opened and explored it as he spoke. “Pliers, file, knives, can opener—”

  “Why would a guy keep condoms in his tackle box?” I had just found some.

  “Because his wife would never look there. Oh, my God!” Justin had opened the other tackle box, and he lifted out a can of “Field’s Pride Whole Kernel Sweet Corn.” Feverishly he applied his can opener to it.

  “Okay, why would a guy keep a can of corn in his tackle box?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Bait. Some people use corn on little hooks to catch bream.”

  Justin got the can’s lid off, flung it aside, and lifted his find to his mouth with trembling hands. He poured corn into himself almost as if drinking it. Trickles of cloudy liquid ran down his chin.

  When he had gulped all he could that way, and lowered the can to poke a grimy finger into it, he noticed me watching him and visibly startled. “I’m sorry! You said you were hungry. Do you want some?”

  “No, thanks.” I had to laugh at him even though my gut grumbled painfully. “No, I have the usual feminine fatty deposits to draw on.”

  He grubbed the remaining corn kernels out of the can with his finger to eat them, making sure he didn’t miss a single one. Meanwhile, I felt insight forming. When Justin had set the empty corn can aside, I asked, “Did Stoat starve you?”

  “Sometimes.” He looked away from me. “Maybe you could find some food up front?”

  While he rooted around the truck bed some more, I searched the cab, finding lottery tickets, old and new, cigarette butts in the drink holder, and a filthy greenish item lying on a seat like a road-killed turtle, actually a battered Maypop Goobers baseball cap. And country music CDs in the center console along with all the usual detritus: pennies, toothpicks, three cough drops, rubber bands, greasy terry cloth rags, and a stubby flashlight. With some vague idea it might prove useful, I stuck the flashlight into my shorts pocket, then continued pawing through the truck cab. In some fast-food rubbish on the floor I found a few stale french fries, which I ate with revulsion. With similar revulsion, but knowing what the sun could do to my unprotected face, I jammed the greasy baseball hat onto my head. As an afterthought, I shoved the cough drops into my mouth for the sake of the sugar in them.

  Out of the cab and heading back toward Justin, I said, “Okay, while we wait, let’s use the fishing rods and those rubber worms—”

  Startled, he interrupted my hunger fantasy of food on the fin in the swollen river. “Wait? What do you mean, wait?”

  “Wait for these men to get back so they can take us to the police.”

  “We can’t do that! What if Stoat—”

  “We’ll hear the van in plenty of time to hide. But if he was going to come here, he’d be here already, don’t you think?”

  “I think you’re crazy! This is the first place Unc—Stoat is going to come, even if it’s just to park the van!”

  “Like I said, we’ll hide. This blue truck is the first vehicle I’ve seen in this godforsaken swamp and those two Bubbas in the boat are the first people I’ve seen, and I’m not—”

  Justin didn’t hear me out. He turned and ran away.

  “Wait till I leave them a note at least!” I screamed after him.

  He showed no sign of hearing, but sprinted straight up the weedy lane that ran down to the boat ramp.

  • • •

  Mail carrier Casey Fay Hummel pulled off the road and stopped at the pink house’s mailbox, which like all the rest of them faced inward, with its back side to the road. Looked kind of weird to people who didn’t come from around here, or so they said. Casey Fay had lived in the area all her life, and having the mailbox face away from the road made a lot more sense to her than having to stop on the road to deliver or pick up mail. This way she pulled clear off the pavement, nobody was likely to rear-end her, and she could sit in the driver’s seat, like a sane person, and put the mail into the box from there.

  Huh. The new woman who lived in the pink house hadn’t picked up her mail either Monday or yesterday, which was Tuesday. No big deal, just credit card applications. Casey Fay started to shove today’s mail in on top—

  Oops. L
iana Clymer—or Leppo; judging by her mail, she seemed to go by both names—anyway, Liana had a big package that would not fit into the mailbox, something from Kookrite Kitchenware.

  Retrieving the accumulated mail along with today’s, Casey Fay steered onto the yard in front of the pink house—hardly anybody had “lawns” down here, let alone paved driveways; the whole world was for driving on. Well, except for pure swamp, but people didn’t live there. Casey Fay stopped between two mimosa trees in front of the place where Liana Clymer lived, and beeped her horn.

  She waited a minute, because rather than just dropping the mail at the door, she really wanted to have a look at the new woman who was renting the house where Old Lady Ingle had lived so many years before going into the nursing home. Like everybody else around here, Casey Fay kept track of, well, everybody. But if Liana Clymer/Leppo was a Yankee, maybe she thought honking your horn was rude and she wouldn’t come to the door. The reason a little beep-beep was not rude was because it gave the person inside the house a chance to get some clothes on before somebody knocked on their door. Some people spent the summer days sitting butt naked in front of a fan, especially if they only had window air conditioners, when even central air couldn’t keep up with the heat.

  But the house door didn’t open, so Casey Fay sighed, gathered all the mail plus the parcel, got out of her aging Chevy Cavalier, and walked up three wooden steps and across a small porch to the door.

  Even before she knocked, she knew something was wrong. That strong odor, unmistakable. Something had died.

  Why would anybody let something dead lie and stink in their house? Unless it was—the person herself?

  Nose wrinkling, Casey Fay put the envelopes and the parcel into a transparent plastic bag she pulled from her pocket, knotted it to protect the contents against rain, then left the entire package on the porch by the door, as was policy when something wouldn’t fit in the mailbox. Yet, after slowly retreating down the steps, she didn’t leave. Not sure what she was looking for, she walked to the side windows and peeked in, seeing nothing except a shadowy bedroom. Still uneasy, she ventured around back—

  Now, why in hell would anybody leave her car, in this case a metallic blue Toyota Matrix, parked in the backyard under the clothesline?

  And if the car was here, why didn’t the Clymer woman seem to be home? Unless she was lying dead inside the house . . .

  Casey Fay knocked at the back door anyway, but when nobody opened it, she found she’d already made up her mind. She sure didn’t like that smell coming from behind the front door. As she walked back to her old Chevy, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911.

  ELEVEN

  “Hey! Justin, damn it . . .” Given no choice—or it felt like no choice, as if Justin were a three-year-old chasing a rattlesnake and I were his mom—I ran after him.

  I might never have caught up with him if it hadn’t been for sandspurs. Those small weeds didn’t look like much, but just as their name implied, they grew thick in sandy ground and had seeds that were—prickly was not the word. These things were vicious, like Mexican cowboy rowels.

  “Ow!” Justin yelped, trying to run through them barefoot. Cursing fluently enough to show that he was indeed no longer the sweet little boy his parents remembered, he limped to a halt before he could reach the dirt road. He raised one foot to pull sandspurs out of it. Catching up with him, I glimpsed red; the little green devils had stuck him deep enough to draw blood. And he couldn’t bear putting his weight on either foot for long. Swearing, he hopped from one to the other as if he were standing on hot coals.

  “Sit down,” I told him, trying to get hold of him somehow to help him ease the weight off his feet, but like a drowning person he grabbed me instead and nearly pulled me down with him. Yet his butt had barely touched the ground before he started protesting, “What if Stoat comes?”

  It was a horribly real possibility with no solution. Sitting on the ground, I lifted one of Justin’s feet into my lap and started pulling the sandspurs out of it with my fingernails as quickly as I could.

  “What if he drove down here right now, what are we going to do?” Justin insisted.

  “What if we’re little pink seashells on a vast ocean beach and someone steps on us?” I grumbled, waxing existentialist at him. “What if the world is a flake of dandruff on a Titan’s head, and he gets itchy?” I finished with one of his feet and grabbed the other. “Hold still!” I complained as he winced—whether from physical pain or from mental anguish, it was hard to tell. “What if Stoat the Goat doesn’t drive down here right now?”

  “You’re loony,” Justin said.

  “Kierkegaard called it a leap of faith. Stay where you are a minute.” Finished with his feet, I reached for my own to yank off my wet sneakers, then my equally soppy socks. “Put those on.” I handed them to Justin.

  “These?” He accepted them with two fingers. “How am I supposed to fit my feet into these?”

  “However you can.”

  “They don’t even reach past my heel,” Justin complained, stretching my socks to their utmost.

  I pushed my sneakers back onto my bare feet, but just as I started to stand up, I heard the growl of a vehicle approaching on the dirt road that passed not nearly far enough away from us. I lapsed back onto the ground, mutely terrified it might be Stoat.

  Justin whimpered, “If they turn down here, they’ll see us!”

  Terror had made me memorize the sound of Stoat’s van bone-marrow deep, and—I exhaled in relief—this vehicle wasn’t it. “That’s not Stoat,” I said, lurching to my feet.

  “Lee Anna, what’re you doing?” Justin yelped.

  I windmilled my arms. Trying to flag down some help for us, that’s what I was doing, but the truck—spewing loud country music, it was one of those asinine jacked-up trucks with balls, literally, having a long antenna with tennis balls skewered on it arching over its cargo bed. Stained yellow by sand, ballsy whip bobbing, the overtall truck drove past the boat ramp entry without stopping.

  To stifle a pang of hungry disappointment I said, “Well, at least now we know there are people back here.”

  “Who cares? We need to get out of here.”

  The restrained panic in Justin’s voice echoed the fear I had felt when I heard the car, and helped me concede in my mind that we could not hang around to wait for the boating Bubbas to get back from Chipoluga Swamp. We were on the run from Stoat.

  Looking back the way we had come, I noticed with dismay the clear prints of our feet in the sand. “Justin, may I borrow that knife you found?”

  “Sure. Which blade?”

  “Biggest.”

  He pried the blade into position with his thumbnail and handed the knife to me. “You’re, like, really polite,” he said as if I puzzled him. “If Uncle, um, Stoat wants something, he snaps his fingers.”

  “I noticed.” I struggled to cut a low branch from a catalpa tree, succeeded, returned the knife to Justin, then backtracked to sweep the sand with it—catalpas, aka bean trees, have very broad leaves. My branch resembled a fan more than a broom, but did a pretty good job of erasing our tracks.

  “Sweet,” Justin remarked when I had made my way back to him.

  “Like tupelo honey,” I agreed. “Okay, let’s go. Single file.” He went first, and I followed, trailing the catalpa branch behind me. Looking back, I saw to my satisfaction that my improvised drag was doing a pretty good job of erasing our footprints.

  Weeds flourished around my ankles—wildflowers, really, and any other time I would have been exclaiming over their blossoms. But now all my attention was focused on listening for the sound of a certain vehicle approaching. Okay, Stoat was so anal that maybe he had reported to work and was putting screen prints of cats in bikinis on the front of T-shirts right now, in which case we had time. But what if he wasn’t quite that anal? What if he was out here looking for us?

  Still, we reached the dirt road safely and turned left, away from where Stoat would enter. Justin d
idn’t need foot protection on the smooth, sandy road. Standing on one leg to pull off a pink sock, he remarked, “I feel like a flamingo.”

  He made me smile. “Okay, flamingo, keep walking.”

  “Just a minute.” Balling my socks into his pockets, Justin deployed his knife and cut himself a tree branch to drag. Side by side, we hiked onward at the quickest pace I could manage.

  Any other time I would have been fascinated, crossing the most rudimentary of wooden bridges and looking down between the boards at minnows, frogs, maybe a baby alligator in the water below, passing forests that were not forests, seeing the still green sheen of swamp water between trunks shaped like tepees. But under the circumstances all I could think was that we had to keep moving, find some kind of sanctuary before Stoat found us. Silent, we listened for the cough of the white van, or for any crackle of brush or outcry of birds in the muted midday swamp.

  Time passed without any alarm. I decided to speak.

  “You okay?” I asked Justin, wanting input but not wanting to ask the specific questions on my mind: How do you feel about me? Will you listen to me or do you think I am a pain? How about what I’m trying to accomplish, which is getting you home; are we on the same page at all?

  Understandably puzzled by my question, Justin stared at me. “Okay? Compared to what?”

  “Compared to yesterday or the day before.”

  “I am, like, floating, it feels so good to be away from Unc—uh, you know. I guess I sort of never saw how bad it was until I got away.”

  “Are you looking forward to calling your parents when we get out of here?”

  Silence.

  “Justin?”

  Without turning to look at me, he said, “I kind of wish we could just be like this forever.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, just kind of be lost in the middle of nowhere. Walking in the sun. I don’t care that I’m tired and hungry. That gives me something to think about, so it’s okay, okay? I don’t want to think about my parents yet.”