Midmorning it dawned on the Toup brothers that it would be insane to venture further. They turned around and headed back toward the boat. Whatever they planned on doing to Lindquist and the man named Cosgrove once they caught up with them the swamp had probably already done for them. No way could they have made it through this kind of wilderness back to Jeanette. Not when they themselves were on the edge of delirium.
Reginald led and Victor plodded behind, the veins in his forehead popping, his face sheened with sweat. The vegetation, sweet bay magnolia and swamp cyrilla and black willows, enclosed around them like a dripping jade-green cave. Sometimes they had to stoop to make it through the tunnel of overarching branches and leaves. The ravenous swamp wanted to swallow them whole.
After a while they passed the ruined shack, the old man already gone.
They were skirting the edge of a reedy marsh when Victor tottered sideways and stumbled crazily through the muck. He clung to the trunk of a green ash tree. Reginald stopped and looked around. Victor’s face was flushed the color of a blood orange, his eyes a sickly hepatitis-yellow.
It was around eleven and already the heat was stifling. Whenever the foliage thinned they could see the sky, hazy washed-out lavender.
“That old guy cursed me,” Victor said.
“That’s crazy.”
“Motherfucker cursed me.”
“You’re dehydrated. Exhausted. We both are.”
“I still hear him in my head.”
“Just keep your shit together.”
Reginald took a few tentative steps forward but stopped and turned around when he didn’t hear his brother following.
“Victor,” Reginald said.
“How much longer?”
“An hour. Two. I don’t know.”
“He cursed me, Reggie.”
“You’re having a panic attack.”
“Bullshit.”
They slogged through the bog for what Reginald judged about forty-five minutes and came again upon the collapsed swamp shack. The brothers looked around in confusion. Reginald slapped his cheek and wondered how they ended up here again when they’d been traveling straight in one direction.
Was he losing his mind? Were they both?
“Reggie,” Victor said.
Reginald said nothing.
“Reggie,” Victor said.
“What?”
“We’re back where we started.”
“There’s no way.”
“This is the shack. The same fuckin’ one. We went in a circle.”
Reginald raked his fingers through his filthy hair and looked around. The noon sunlight pierced through the leaves ceiled overhead. A fat green katydid thrashed in the middle of a web stretched between two saw palmettos. A golden silk spider watched from the edge of the trembling skein.
“We went in a circle, Reggie.”
“Wiggin’ out’s not gonna help anything.”
“Maybe a tick burrowed in my ear,” Victor said. “Maybe I got that Rocky Mountain fever.”
“Vic? Shut up.”
They sloshed along. Gnats and horseflies and pond striders. A yellow-throated vireo bird in a winterberry holly. Baby alligators by the dozen skimming away like rubber toys.
Then Victor saw it. A nine-foot alligator, a behemoth, sunning atop a barge of floating logs and detritus. He pointed, his finger shaking. “Jesus Christ, look at that thing,” he said.
“Keep moving,” Reginald said.
“Fucker’s just staring at us.”
“Stop screaming. Keep moving.”
“Now he’s coming.”
“More scared of us than we him.”
Victor collapsed to his hands and knees, bright green water lapping to his chin. He struggled up, fell again. Reginald turned and went back and yanked his brother up by the arm. Leaning on his brother, Victor tottered forward a few steps before collapsing. This time he took Reginald down with him. Reginald rose and grabbed two fistfuls of his brother’s shirt and pulled him up. He felt Victor’s heart laboring beneath his hand. Felt his fever, palpable as heat wafting off a stove burner.
“Another big gator right there,” Victor said.
“Just keep going.”
“I gotta sit.”
“Move.”
“Give me a piggyback.”
“There’s no way.”
“You go on then. I can’t.”
Something was coming quickly toward them through the palmettos and brush, the water churning. A chevron of sparrows sounded a shrill one-note call of alarm and winged out of a red maple.
Then Victor was ripped away from Reginald. He let loose a lunatic scream before he was pulled underwater. Reginald gaped in mute horror. He saw pink flesh. A flash, pebbly black, of alligator hide. Then Victor’s raised arm, grappling for something that wasn’t there.
His hands quaking wildly, Reginald unholstered his Bearcat Ruger and took aim. He couldn’t get a bead on the alligator in the churning chaos, the water already a tumult of red and pink curd. When he saw another alligator swimming toward him he shouldered the rifle and turned, rushed for the nearest tree. He scrabbled monkey-like up the gnarled live oak, perched on a middle limb.
He looked down at the calming water. Smaller alligators were now hemming in. A dozen of them swam off with glistening pink hunks of meat. Reginald glimpsed a floating length of organ, like a piece of raw sausage. He felt hot bile rise in his throat. He couldn’t believe what he saw. Refused to believe.
He vomited down into the water.
When the alligators scattered away, Reginald remained on the branch and wept. He waited to wake from the nightmare and when he didn’t wake he wept for a long while more.