THE EERIE PRESENCE of the Pearl River tingled under my skin. Never had a place felt so crawling, yet looked so wholly empty. I crawled out of the switchgrass into the speckled shade of the black willow.
“It was like she didn’t even see us,” I said.
Saul ducked his forehead against his sleeve and swept at the sweat. His under-eyes were plum purple. “I can’t honestly say I care right about now.”
The afternoon rays cut into us. I tore off my boot and scraped my nails against my scabbing bug bites, trailing blood up to my knees. I curled my toes, let the blisters between them squish together.
“Let’s get a move on,” Saul said. “You won’t be any good to your sister if you die of heatstroke.”
Sweat streaked his face. I pulled a small handkerchief from my pocket.
“Here,” I said, patting his forehead. “It’ll get in your eyes.”
We carried on through the swamp, tracking our distance from the boat. All the while I caught my sister’s dress in every streak of yellow petals, and heard her in each twitchy movement in the bushes, startling myself when a swamp rabbit or scarlet mud snake emerged, instead. I saw her eyes, those twin dark holes. I could not tell if the eyes or the heat were setting my mind off balance.
I forced myself to think of other things — absolutely anything, whatever came to mind — but the image would slip apart, rearrange itself like the shattered glass in a kaleidoscope, and fall into the shape of those unblinking eyes. I set my hand to my cheek, felt the blood beneath it burning.
Sheer silhouettes of leaves fluttered above me. I slid off my boot again and sank my feet into the relief of wet earth. The mud on my legs had mostly hardened and the itching again sprawled wild.
Saul looked my legs up and down. “Some of these look infected, Bon.”
“You feelin’ dizzy, too?” I asked.
“Not so much, but this ain’t my first day spent in the swamp.” He plucked from a whistling shroud of cattails as we walked. “You better eat something.”
I shook my head. “My stomach’s all twisted.”
He stripped a bloom spike and took a bite. “Have some. The swamp’s a cattail buffet.” He plucked off a couple more spikes and handed them to me.
I turned them over in my hands. They felt like petrified caterpillars. “You can eat these?”
“Sure can.” He bit off another piece.
I did the same and chewed, the plant squishing into a bitter paste between my teeth.
“My pa taught me how to eat these raw if I ever got lost,” he said. “And how to harvest the shoots, sauté the inside on the stove, all kinds of ways to eat ’em.”
The healthy scent of mud and wet green was fresh in the air. The breeze was pure, like all of its pores had been cleaned.
“Looks fresh as tap water, don’t it.” Saul nodded toward the river.
“I could throw myself in, gators or no gators.”
“Still got the leeches to worry about,” he said.
I stopped for a moment and leaned against a tree, my hand on my ribs. “You got leeches once, didn’t you?”
Saul took my arm to help me steady myself. “Right on the thigh. Did what you never do, which is rip them off. Could’ve sworn I bled my whole leg out.” He held two fingers up and pinched the tips together. “You got to find its mouth, sort of, and get your finger between it and the hole its drinking out of.” He curled his finger and dug into the air. “Then you use your nail to push the little rascal off your skin. Nothin’ to it.”
“Nothin’ to it,” I said, pushing away from the tree.
As the sun eased, orange washed over the sky and the shadows deepened, blackening the scrappy clumps of hanging moss. We found shade beneath some undergrowth, a damp open space under the low, cowering branches of an ancient oak.
By early evening, pink and purple clouds bruised the sky, and the breeze thickened, taking on a pillowed mist. Rain spat electric sparks against the dark green leaves as we watched from our shelter. The sun hovered above the tree line, the water reflecting a pale pink glare. For some time Saul talked, his voice thin with worry, but the sound of it floundered in my ear. It was distant, a tinny echo, the way voices sound travelling down from above water.
“You cryin’?” Saul asked.
“Maybe, if it’s all the same to you.” I hurried away a tear, burning up with shame. My mother had cried every night that week. Fritzi and I had heard her down the hall, silent at the edge of our room and watching one another as we listened.
I was not going to be like that, sitting around crying and waiting, twisted all up in myself.
I curled my arms around my torso, feeling that my whole middle had been hollowed out.
You should have been watching after her. You should have known better.
You had to keep an eye on Connie. How could I have forgotten that?
Saul fanned his T-shirt by the collar, smelling like he did after our bike rides, that mildly sweet, sour warmth. “I cried an awful lot after my pa died. Could hardly think straight, neither, like I was falling asleep when I was still awake.”
“Connie’s not dead.”
Saul’s face fell and I was sorry for how I had said it.
Two otters, sleek as eels, moved in undulations through the brackish water. Saul eyed them so carefully, so avoidant of my stare, that my own eyes eased toward the river, and soon all there seemed to be in the swamp was the sound of synchronized splashing.
“You ever dream about him?” I asked.
He nodded. “Always the bad stuff, like nasty things I said — but it feels just as real as anything. I get to talk to him even if I’m being mean.”
“I don’t know if I sleep anymore,” I said. “Not long enough for dreams.”
Darkness gradually sponged away the light and the air hung thick and unstirred.
“Someone will find us soon,” Saul said, lying back on the dirt. “Nothin’ to find here, anyhow. It’s just any old swamp, like I told you.”
I looked out from the underbrush for any flash of flesh moving wildly between the cypress. I touched the necklace, tucked cautiously out of sight.
I woke to the sound of breaking twigs.
“Did you hear that?” Saul whispered.
Before I could answer I was lifted into the air. The sky was a burnt coal grey, the dead of night.
“There are two of them! Over here!” A featureless figure was shouting from the bank, his flashlight pouring a white haze onto the inky water.
I squished my lids tight, opening them again and staring hard until my eyes adjusted. The man carrying me was tall, with silver hair and a browning front tooth.
“Hell, girly,” he said, grinning down at me. “At first glance I gave you up for dead.”
I twisted against him, trying to push off from his chest and jerk my body out of his grip, but he had me semiswaddled in an itchy blanket despite the heat.
“It’s the rescue team, Bonnie!” Saul waved from up ahead. Another man, in plaid and muddy suspenders, was dragging him along by the elbow.
The man holding me gave a tight squeeze, my limbs bunched and crooked in his arms. “Name’s Atticus. You’re the Fayette girl, ain’tcha? Search team’s been lookin’ for you two all day and night.”
The man leading Saul hollered over to us. “Thought them gators might’ve got you.”
Atticus tipped me so that my legs swung up. He laughed. “Them insects ate up enough of you, gators prolly thought you’d gone to rot.”
Beyond a throng of dry roots, bunched and curling above ground, a skiff had been parked along the bank. Saul was already sitting inside of it.
Saul, why? Why would you get in the boat?
Leaning against the skiff’s edge, blond hair catching the moon’s light, was a boy about Fritzi’s age. Atticus lowered me into the boat beside him, then crawled in next to me, unravelling a bony arm over my shoulders. His cold fingertips sprinkled against my skin.
We rode along the bank on which Saul and I had woken that morning; the searchers’ skiff and the Chiffree’s boat were rigged together. Saul beamed with relief on the bench opposite me and I could have ripped off my rubber boot and thrown it at him.
Over the motor Atticus spoke to me. His breath carried the piney stench of moonshine. “So you know my name, Miss Fayette.” He pointed to the brawny brunette in suspenders next to Saul — “That there’s Rudy Madicker” — then the blond boy with the tall matchstick body — “and that’s Leo.”
I stared. The noise of the motor chipped and chipped at me.
“She’s shaken up some, I’d say.” Rudy Madicker was scanning the slough up ahead, holding a walkie-talkie to his waist. “Now we know what comes from runnin’ around with the wrong crowd, huh, missy?”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked. He could not possibly have meant Saul, when all of this was my doing. Saul was the persistent badger nipping at my heels every step of the way. I looked over to him and his beam had faded. “Mister Madicker,” I said, “we ran off into the swamp because of me. Saul was just trying to bring me home.”
Several beer bottles rolled out from under my legs as the boat jutted around a bend. Atticus’ blue eyes broke in between my muddy strands of hair. He tipped a canteen to my lips. “Y’all don’t listen to Rudy. Ain’t nobody’s fault.”
I leaned away, Fritzi in my head telling me not to take from strangers. “I’m not thirsty,” I said, but the steely scent of fresh water lifted from the canteen’s open mouth. It drew me forward until a drop of water landed on my tongue, tasting crisp, rejuvenating. I clutched the tin and squeezed its soggy wool-knit covering.
“Easy now, just sips,” he said. “Don’t make y’self choke. Plenty of water waitin’ for you at the lodge.”
He touched the small of my back and I shivered an inch forward. “Saul’s thirsty, too.”
Saul looked as weak as I felt, his lips peeled and gunky with cotton mouth.
“Leo, what’s the matter with ya?” said Atticus. “Pass the po’ boy that there canteen.”
Leo’s eyes remained flat as he picked up a rusted canteen and tossed it without a glance onto Saul’s lap. Saul thanked him and brought the canteen to his lips.
Flashlights lit a faint orb around us. Now and then one splintered off, and cast an eerie white follow spot through the draping moss, and up the smooth bark of giant oak and cypress trunks. We were pulling far from where the leaves went red like spotty bandages. I worried that the lodge would be so far I would not remember the way to the feral woman’s cottage.
“Atticus, sir,” I said. “Do you know where we are? Would you be able to point it out on a map?”
Atticus chortled, a big shoulder-lifting snort. “And why would I need to do that, little honey lamb?”
“Saul and I came to find my sister, Constance Fayette,” I said, folding my hands on my lap and lifting my chin, as Fritzi did when she knew she had to summon more authority than she had. “I’ve found strange goings on in this here swamp.”
Saul looked at me, confused.
“Sir,” I said, “if you know the place where you found the Chiffree boat, you ought to take people back there and through to the prairie. There’s someone out there who might know about my sister.”
Atticus and Rudy both stared at me with weightless curiosity.
“The city might give you a medal for it,” I insisted.
Leo had not spoken, but at the mention of a person in the swamp he had shifted to face me. His eyes slid over me with glintless fascination.
“Listen, hon,” Atticus said, “let’s say we talk about it with the rest of the search crew at the registration lodge.” He stretched his legs out and the toe of his shoe clinked against a rolling beer bottle. “Tons of people, they all came out lookin’. They’re waitin’ for you just through this stretch of trees.”
I looked out at the pale cypress beams, the stringy moss, from the tight crook of Atticus’ arm. “I don’t remember seeing a registration lodge.”
“Just up here,” Atticus said to Rudy, then tipped his chin toward me. “Rickety old thing closed down ’bout twenty years ago when the swamp tours couldn’t break even anymore. My family used to work the tours, take tourists all through this here gator-land. Shake the boat a little and scare ’em stiff.”
The motor slowed to a choked sputter. I looked down at my bootless foot, blistered raw.
“I’ve got you, girly,” Atticus said close to my ear. “Enough walkin’ on them little feet today.”
But for the whistle of crickets, the motor died away into silence.
Atticus picked me up from under my armpits and hoisted me out of the skiff. Behind me Saul was limping on his blisters, his blanket loose and dragging through the mud. He still clutched the tin canteen. His fingers shook against the canoe rental ad peeling down the front.
“Looks like y’all are out of the woods.” Rudy Madicker gestured to a truck parked on a muddy clearing covered in tire tracks.
“What about the registration lodge?” I asked.
“It’s down the road,” Atticus said, “near the edge of where the swamp meets the dirt path. Driving’s faster, is all.”
“A lot of people lookin’ for ya, can tell ya that much,” Rudy Madicker said. “Everyone who knows these here parts been chasin’ you two up one side of the swamp and down the other.” He turned from us to hold the walkie-talkie to his ear as sound crackled through.
“Stop laggin’,” Leo ordered. I looked back to find him yanking Saul by the arm.
“Leo, watch it. Don’t press me, boy. There’s money on that one, too, and I ain’t goin’ back in there if you chase him off.” Atticus pointed a firm finger at Leo before turning to Rudy. “What’s goin’ on over there?”
I touched Atticus’ wrist, surprised at the cool sweat dampening his cuff. “I don’t need to be carried,” I said.
“Ain’t no bother, missy. What’s the crew sayin’ there, Rudy?” He looked over his shoulder as Rudy hustled up from behind, the walkie-talkie to his chin. A voice fired out from the speaker like a cloud of flies.
“Something’s come up y’all are gon’ want to hear about,” Rudy said.
I pinched the sweaty cuff. “You can’t let them blame Saul,” I said. A chill caked the inside of my chest. “You’ll make sure they listen, right? We have to tell them it was me.”
Atticus ran his hand over my mouth, up against my nose so that I could not breathe right. “Say what now, Rudy? You tell ’em folks back at the lodge we found ’em, right?”
“Yeah, I told ’em.” Rudy’s big voice shrank to a jitter. “They’re sayin’ they gone and found somebody, too.”