by T. C. Boyle
He lay there panting, too sapped even to brush the insects away from his face, the gloom of the big moss-hung trees darkening the morning till it might have been night. A swamp! Another swamp! A swamp so massive it could have swallowed up Ruth’s cabin, Ambly Wooster’s subdivision, the big house and all the piddling bogs and mud puddles on Tupelo Island without a trace. Shit, he gasped. Backayard. Son of a bitch. He felt like a mountaineer who’s dragged himself up the face of a sheer cliff, inch by agonizing inch, only to find a second cliff, twice as high, rearing above it. What had happened to him? How had he gotten here? Doggo, his obōsan, Chiba, Unagi: they were faces he could barely recall. But Ruth: he saw her clearly, in sharp focus, saw her in all her permutations: the slim white-legged secretary, the seductress, the lover, his protector and jailer. She’d shared her food with him and her bed, shared her tongue and her legs, and she was going to smuggle him to the mainrand —not this mainrand, not the mainrand of rot and stink and demented nature, but to the mainrand of cities and streets and shops where happas and wholes walked hand in hand.
It was then—delivered from the trunk of the Mercedes and thrust back into the swamp—that he had a thought that stopped him cold. For forty-eight hours now, from the time they’d run him down with their guns and their dogs and their glassy cold eyes, through his escape from the holding cell and the swollen stultifying hours of his entombment in the trunk, he’d been circling around the hard knot of an inadmissible question—Who bad betrayed him? —and its equally painful corollary, Who knew he was hiding out in the cabin in the woods? Now the answer came to him, the answer to both questions, wrapped up in a single resonant monosyllable: Ruth.
There wasa way the paddle dipped into the water and with a single deft motion of the wrist dug, rotated and dipped again, a rhythm and coordination that held out the possibility of perfection, and it pleased him. It was tidy. Neat. The stroke conserved energy and expended it too—not like those idiots in their motor launches on the public trails—and it felt good in the shoulders and triceps. It was so quiet too—he could almost imagine himself a Seminole or a Creek, slipping up on gator or ibis or even one of the palefaces who’d driven them into the swamp in the days of Billy Bowlegs.
Jeff Jeffcoat was gliding through a dream. Ever since he was a boy in Putnam Valley, New York, he’d wanted to do this, to push through the greatest swamp in America, skirting danger, unfolding miracles, watching the gator in its wallow, the anhinga in its nest, the cottonmouth curled in the branches of a tree in deadly semaphore. And here he was—thirty-eight years old, newly arrived in Atlanta to work in the colorization lab at TBS, his wife Julie perched on a cushion amidships, his son Jeff Jr. plying his paddle in the bow—here he was, doing it. And it was glorious—something new round every bend. It was hot, sure, he had to admit it, and the bugs were horrendous despite the repellent that stung his eyes, soured the corners of his mouth and dripped steadily from the tip of his nose along with about half a gallon of sweat. But what was a little discomfort compared with the chance to see an alligator snapper in the wild—a hundred and fifty pounds, big around as a cocktail table—or the legendary black puma or that rarest of rare birds, the ivory-billed woodpecker?
“Dad.” Jeff Jr.’s voice was low and insistent, the terse whisper of the scout; Jeff felt Julie come to attention, and his own eyes shot out past the bow to scan the mass of maiden cane and titi up ahead. “Dad: eleven o’clock, thirty yards or so.”
“What?” Julie whispered, snatching up the binoculars. She was wearing a hairnet to combat the bugs, a pair of Banana Republic shorts and the pith helmet Jeff had bought her as a joke. She was as excited as he was.
Jeff felt a thrill go through him: this was life, this was adventure, this was what the explorers must have known through every waking moment of their lives. “What is it, Jeffie—what do you see?”
“Some—”
“Shhhh: don’t scare it off.” ’
The whisper of a whisper: “Something big. See it, up there, where the bushes are shaking?”
“Where?” Julie breathed, the binoculars pressed to her face. “I don’t see anything.”
Jeff fanned the paddle in the water, ever so silently, the canoe creeping forward under its own momentum. It was probably an alligator—the swamp was crawling with them. Yesterday, their first day out, they went nearly an hour before they spotted their first gator—and it was a runt, two feet or less even—but the moment had been magical. They’d spent half an hour motionless in the canoe, just watching it lying there, as inert as the cypresses towering over it. He must have taken two rolls of film of that gator alone, and every shot would be the same, he knew it—gator in ooze—but he’d gotten carried away. Later, as the day wore on and the gators popped up everywhere, as common as poodles in the park, the family became so inured to their presence that Jeff Jr. had done a very foolish thing. A big gator—ten, twelve feet long—had nosed up to the canoe while they were lunching on the chicken breast and avocado sandwiches Julie had made the night before, and Jeff Jr., bored or heedless or just feeling full of the devil, as boys will, had begun to toss bits of bread and lettuce into the water and the gator had gone for them. That was all right. But familiarity breeds contempt, as Jeff’s father used to say, and Jeffie had flung an apple at the thing. Hard. He was a pretty good pitcher, Jeffie was, the ace of his Little League team, and the apple drilled the alligator right between the eyes—and that was when all hell broke loose. The thing had come up out of the water and slammed down again like a cannonballer coming off the high dive, and then it vanished, leaving the canoe rocking so wildly the water sloshed over the side and soaked the camera bag, the picnic basket and Jeffie’s backpack. That was a close one, and Jeff Jr. had seemed so upset—his eyes big and his shoulders quaking—that Jeff had forgone the lecture till they set up camp later that evening.
But now they were closing in on it, whatever it was—he could see something thrashing around in the weeds up ahead—and Jeffie suddenly sang out: “It’s a bear! A—a—a brown one, a big brown bear!” ’
A bear! Jeff could feel his blood racing—a bear could turn on them, upset the canoe, deliver them in an instant to the snakes and gators and snapping turtles. He backpaddled hard, his eyes leaping at the vegetation ahead—there it was, a snatch of brown, the maiden cane trembling, a splash, then another—
But it wasn’t a bear after all—and they had a good laugh over that one—it was a pair of otters. Otters. “My god,” Julie gasped, “you had me scared half to death, Jeffie.” She’d dropped the binoculars in her lap and her face was pale under the brim of the pith helmet. The otters darted under the boat, bobbed up again and gave them an inquisitive look.
They were like puppies, that was what they reminded him of, sleek and playful puppies, and they instantly incorporated the canoe into their game of tag. It was a thrill, and they watched them for half an hour before Jeff remembered himself, checked his watch and got them going again.
They were on a schedule, and they had to stick to it—by law. Jeff had made reservations for this canoe trip a year in advance, as soon as he’d gotten a firm commitment from Turner and put the house up for sale. The Park Service allowed only six canoe parties at a time to overnight in the swamp, and competition for those six spots was fierce. Each party had to follow a set itinerary and was required, by park regulations, to arrive at its designated camping platform by 6 P.M., when the rangers closed the park down for the night and all fishermen, bird-watchers and other day trippers were required to return to the dock. The Park Service literature explained that this six o’clock deadline—all paddles out of the water, all overnighters to be on their platforms—had been established for the canoeists’ own safety. It was dangerous out here, what with the gators, the cottonmouths, coral snakes and rattlers, and that gave Jeff a thrill too—but he was sensible and punctual and he didn’t really like surprises, and he always obeyed the law to the letter, even on the highway, where he stuck doggedly to 55 while the big rigs and
Japanese sports cars shot past him as if he were parked in the driveway. The Park Service allowed them eight hours to get from platform to platform, and so they had plenty of time to dawdle and see the sights, but after the otter business they were running late. Jeff dug deep with his paddle.
It was quarter to six in the evening, and he was beginning to stew—had they taken a wrong turn somewhere?—when Jeffie crowed, “I see it, I see it, dead ahead!”—and there it was, the elevated platform that was their second night’s destination. The weathered support beams and the crude roof detached themselves from the wall of vegetation, a great blue heron lifted itself into the air with a clap of its wings, and they were there, gliding up to the platform on a burning shimmer of light. Like the platform on which they’d camped the previous evening, this one was three hundred feet square and roofed with porous planks, and it rose a precarious three feet above the water level of the swamp. Its amenities consisted of a chemical toilet, a charcoal brazier and a logbook, in which each overnighter was required to record date and time of arrival and departure.
Jeff Jr. and Julie steadied the canoe while Jeff clambered up onto the platform, alert for snakes or lizards in the rafters—or anything else that crept, crawled or climbed. The previous night Julie had let out a shriek they could have heard back in Atlanta when a coachwhip suddenly appeared from one of the overhead beams, plunged into the potato salad and lashed itself across the floor and into the duckweed on the far side of the platform. This time, they were taking no chances. Jeff was thorough, visually inspecting the beams and the underside of the platform, and poking a stick into each of the overhead crannies where beam and plank came together. Then he turned to the logbook. The Murdocks, of Chiltonberry, Arkansas, had preceded them, and in the space reserved for comment they’d observed: “Skeeter Hell.” Before them it was the Ouzels of Soft Spoke, Virginia, and all they had to say was: “Beautiful stars.” It was the line above the Ouzels’ that caught his eye—someone, described only as “Fritz” and whose handwriting was so pinched and secretive Jeff could barely make it out, had written: “Note: 14′ gator can get up on platform.” “Can” was underlined three times.
“Jeff, what’s taking you so long? I’ve got to use the ladies’.”
“Yeah, sure,” he replied absently, wondering if he should mention the acrobatic gator and deciding that he would, but later, after supper, when they were all settled in for the night. “All clear,” he called, keeping it simple.
Jeff made a fire with the real oak briquettes he’d brought along from Atlanta, and Julie extracted three princely New York strip steaks from the cooler. They shared a beer and Jeff Jr. had a Coke while the steaks sizzled and sent up a clean searing aromatic smoke that for a while overwhelmed the reek of the mud and disoriented the mosquitoes. The water was shallow out back of the platform—no more than shin-deep—but out front there was a considerable pool, an enlarged gator wallow, no doubt, and Jeff kept his eye on this for the agile gator, who for all Jeff knew liked his steak rare. Jeffie got out his fishing pole, but Jeff and Julie both insisted that he practice his clarinet first—they believed that an individual should be well-rounded, and though Jeff Jr. was only ten, they were already looking ahead to college admissions—and so while the meal cooked and Jeff swirled his half a can of warm beer round a plastic camp cup, the angst-ridden strains of Carl Nielsen floated out over bog, hammock and wallow, tempering the mindless twitter of the birds and tree frogs with a small touch of precision.
After dinner it began to cloud over and Jeff suspended a groundcloth from the beams to cut the wind from the southeast, where lightning had begun to fracture the sky and the distant dyspeptic rumble of thunder could be heard. Then he built up the fire with an armload of pine branches he’d thought to collect earlier in the day, and the family gathered round to roast marshmallows, swat mosquitoes and tell stories. “Well,” Jeff said, settling down beside Julie as the groundcloth flapped and the smoke swirled, “you all know why this great swamp is called the Okefenokee—”
“Oh, come on, Dad—you’ve already told us about fifty thousand times already.”
“Jeffie, now don’t you use that tone with your father—”
“—the land of trembling earth, because it’s important to the story I’m going to tell, a tragic story, horrible in its way”—and here Jeff paused to let the adjectives work their spell on his audience, while the rumble of the thunder came closer and closer—“the story of Billy Bowlegs, last of the great Seminole chiefs.”
Jeff Jr. was sitting cross-legged on one of the flotation cushions. He leaned forward, that alert look he got when he was practicing or doing his homework settling into his eyes and the incipient furrows of his brow. “It’s because the peat rises in mats and trees grow on them and stuff and then when you try to walk on it you fall through—like Mom yesterday. It was so funny. It was like”—his tone had begun in the adenoidal reaches of exasperation, but now he was enjoying himself, riding the pleasure of his own authority—“like all these little trees were attacking her or something.”
Jeff brought him back. “Right, Jeffie: and what is peat?”
“Um, it’s like coal, right?”
Jeff wasn’t too sure himself, though he’d devoured every guidebook available on the Okefenokee, but then the lesson had gone far enough anyway and the story was waiting. “Right,” he said. “It’s important to know because of what happened to Billy Bowlegs after one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of this region. Anyway, this was about in 1820, I think, and Billy Bowlegs was chased into the swamp with about thirty braves after raiding a settler’s cabin. He hated the whites with a passion, even though he wasn’t a fullblooded Indian—legend had it that his father was a white man, a criminal who escaped from a lynching party and got himself lost in the swamp …”
It was then that the first wind-whipped spatters of rain began to tap at the groundcloth and Jeff paused to mentally congratulate himself for having thought to secure the bottom too. There was a flash of lightning followed by a deep peal of thunder and the whole family looked round them, surprised to see that dusk had crept up on them. Jeff wanted a cigarette, but he’d given up smoking—it was unhealthy, and both he and Julie agreed that it set a bad example for Jeff Jr.—so he took out a pack of sugarless gum and offered it round instead.
“That last one was close,” Julie said, the glow of the fire playing off her smooth dependable features. She looked good, tough, a pioneer woman who’d fight off the Indians with one hand and burp babies with the other. “Good thing you thought to hang the groundcloth. You think I should put up the tent—I mean with this roof and all?”
He was wise, fatherly, firm. “No,” he said, “we’ll be all right.” “What about the story, Dad?”
“Yeah. Well. It was a stormy night like this one and Billy Bowlegs and his men smeared their faces with mud on Billy’s Island and then poled their dugouts to the edge of the swamp. There was a white family there, settlers, who’d just come from, from—from New York—”
“Aw, come on, Dad—you’re making it up.”
“No, no: I read it. Really. Anyway, there were three of them, husband, wife and son—a boy about your age, Jeffie—and they had a dog and some cattle, a mule, I think. Farmers. They’d drained a couple of acres and were trying to grow cotton and tobacco in the rich soil underneath. They’d been there a couple of months, I think it was—they hadn’t even been able to get a house up. All they had was a lean-to, on a platform like this, a roof, but the sides were open—”
“Dad.”
Jeff ignored the interruption. He had him now, he knew it. He gave Julie a furtive wink. “Billy Bowlegs told his men to take the woman and leave the men for dead. But the rain was coming down so hard one of the Indians slipped and fell and the musket went off, just as the rest of them were coming out of the bushes with a whoop. ’Run!’ the father shouted, and all of a sudden there were tomahawks and arrows everywhere, but the son and mother took off and the father fired his gun
to give them a headstart and then he ran too. But you know what?”
Jeff Jr. was leaning so far forward he had to prop himself up on his elbows. “What?” he said in a kind of gasp.
“They ran right out onto a peat island that had torn loose in the storm and suddenly it was like they were running in a dream, going as fast as they could and getting nowhere, and there was Billy Bowlegs, his face streaked with mud. the tomahawk raised over his head—”
At that moment a gust of wind tore loose the binding of the groundcloth and it collapsed, dousing them with a wild oceanic spray. Suddenly it was pouring, whipping in through the opening and gushing through the colander of the roof. In the confusion, Jeff sprang to his feet and shot a glance out back of the platform, while Julie and Jeff Jr. howled and scrambled for their rain slickers, and what he saw there froze him in place. A figure had materialized from the gloom, and it wasn’t the acrobatic alligator and it wasn’t the bear they’d missed either. Bowlegged, tattered, smeared with mud and filth, it was the figure of Billy Bowlegs himself.
