Nothing spurts adrenaline into your blood quite like a brush with death and witnessing a miracle. As soon as we returned to camp, I began making notes about my Baptism in the muck, which in truth had almost been my drowning, Mullet Man, alias Rikard, and the miracle of the porpoises. After almost five years, I had something genuine to write about, something no one else would have or could have but me. And that made all the difference.
When Cameron arrived, we could get photos of the porpoises performing another miracle. We would document a phenomenal event—a voodoo priest commanding animals—provided Rikard, this survivalist living in a land of no laws consented.
Sitting in my tent’s screened alcove I went to work. Information, impressions, and observations flowed onto my legal pad. Like a shy girl, Tyler edged toward my tent, not so curious as to what I was writing as how. She had never met a writer and wanted to know how writers work. I explained how I write for I didn’t care how other writers worked. My work involved making descriptions real, getting facts right, and style—involving readers by connecting them to the writing itself—a true art and the hardest part by far.
My murderous campmate’s interest was not feigned as bored, self-centered people do who feel compelled to ask about your work. English had been Tyler’s favorite subject in high school and she had wanted to study English or Journalism but her family could not afford college—they had no money.
After a series of odd jobs and a stint in a rainwear factory, she went to work for a florist and taught herself floral arrangement and did well, but she could never shake an American myth—the belief that college makes people better. The trial, which brought her lack of a degree to the surface, did nothing to destroy that belief. I told her college was among the most overrated aspects of American life. Hemingway had never set foot into a college and it doubtless helped him. No meddling professors had ruined him. I loved the fact that Tyler had never gone to college. We were two shirts cut from the same cloth, each with a blue collar.
Tyler watched as I finished making notes. We had about five hours of daylight, so we decided to take the canoe up a large creek running north right off the channel and hone our paddling skills.
We loaded the canoe with water, Voodoo hopped in, and we put out into the channel. On either side of us, the island’s blue creeks ran like veins, recycling nutrients into the great body of the planet.
We paddled like kids, hesitant and out of rhythm, but we were moving north into the interior where a rich abundance of bird life flourished. We drifted through marshlands where turquoise creeks snaked through emerald grasses and eased through this world eons from the city.
We floated through the fruitful estuary, through the heart of the island, where so much life begins. Magnitudes of waterfowl commanded attention, and Tyler, like a sentry, scanned the horizon for telltale signs of pelicans. Any bird rising from the marsh caught her eye, but pelicans alone pulled Tyler from her seat. With each flight of pelicans, rising and gliding on their wide wingspans, she fell reverent, half stood, knees bent as if praying, hands steady on the gunwales, as quiet as the hour before dawn, placing her faith in the solitary bird that would lead her to Lorie.
Her dream flew on the wings of a solitary pelican, and I feared her dream would forever fly out of reach.
***
For five days, we explored the island, gaining strength and skill as canoeists. We searched according to plan, checking off areas we’d explored on our Landstat maps. Nothing of significance took place. We were, however, coming to know the island and each other. Tyler’s preoccupation with pelicans grew day by day. The time was coming, I thought, to take a chance, to canoe into the northern interior, deep into some swampy recesses near the village.
Pelicans cruising the plankton blooms and the abundant menhaden they sustained proved momentous to Tyler. She sought the single pelican hovering over her daughter and I hoped she would find it. When the leader of a flight soared over a dune or hummock, she rose from her seat, but when its comrades followed in close formation, she slumped back into the canoe.
Silent and unannounced, with every bend the canoe turned, we startled waterfowl, snowy egrets, white ibises, and great blue herons, some of which flew away with a cry; others skulked away in silence, embarrassed they had not seen creatures as clumsy as humans coming.
The deeper we went into the island the less frequent pelicans became until we were so deep into the wooded interior, there were none. Schools of minute silver fish leaped from the water whenever my paddle shadow, a predator perhaps, passed over them. An osprey plummeted from the sky, talons reaching, plunging into the brine, a silvery fish flashing in the sunlight as it flew away. The waters teemed with fish in an eat-or-be-eaten world. Life here unfolded to a simple formula: live, then die, so another could live.
***
Two afternoons later, we set out north again, paddling two hours into the interior of this lush, natural greenhouse. Anything, it seemed, would grow here, and man, knowing that, had tried to exploit the island. Cameron had told me, and books confirmed it, that rice plantations once prospered here.
As we made our way inland, we passed heads of wild rice, shoulder high to a man and golden in the sun, brittle, and broken with ease by the wind. Like Indians, we could come back, pull the long stalks over the canoe and thrash them with our walking sticks. The reward would be summer sleet—white grains falling into the canoe, bouncing off the metal with dings and pings.
“Look, wild rice,” I said. “We’ll have to come back and get some, boil it, and eat it with shrimp and crab.”
“That sounds much better than that backpacker stuff,” she said. “Between the hiking and the paddling,” she said, flexing her biceps, “I feel like I’m training for the Olympics.”
She was right. We were doing something city dwellers found near impossible and doing it in record time: getting in shape and shedding weight without trying. The sun bronzed us despite the sunscreen, which had kept us from cooking.
An ulterior motive drove my desire to explore the rice fields. Exploring the north side where the villagers lived could best happen if we found a place to stay overnight. An encampment would save a lot of paddling.
We rounded a bend and spotted four boys, backs to us, on a spit of sand. Amid shouts of glee, in teams of two, they scooped large crabs from the brine and dropped them into battered baskets.
Two worked the handlines; two stood ready with long-handled nets. The task consumed them and they did not see us coming. They swung lines attached to fish heads in sweeping arcs, flinging them out over the water, then reeled in the lines slowly with ravenous blue crabs hanging to the fish heads. Then they scooped the blue and orange crabs with a swoop of the net and shook them loose into the baskets.
Each crab inspired musical banter as the boys tallied their numbers. They shouted and laughed, tallying the totals, taunting each other with each crab caught. Their language, a melodic mix of English and Gullah, flew over the creek upon the wings of rhythmical cadences, intonations, and shouts. It pleased the ear and was like nothing I had ever heard.
Cameron’s advice not to walk into the village unescorted stayed with me. To do so was to court death. Perhaps the boys might take us there. As we approached them, I could see a keloid on one of the boys, glistening in the sun. A long diagonal scar, eight inches maybe, running down the right side of his back shone like a bead of welded steel.
Stirred by their voices, which sounded like music, Voodoo stood and howled, a yowling caterwaul that pierced the salt air. The boys turned, froze for an instant, then dropped everything, and ran as if tigers pursued them.
We paddled to where they had dropped their gear and crabs and eased onto the sandy spit. I sprinted up onto a hummock high enough to reveal their heads bobbing then vanishing through an opening in dense marsh grass.
We must look like demons,” I said. “They took off, didn’t they?”
“Like scared rabbits.”
“Yes. They speak a beautiful language, don’t they?”
“Like music.”
“It’s Gullah, I’m sure. I’ve never heard it but I’ve read enough about it to recognize it … I think.”
“A far cry from Rap.”
“You know it,” I said.
“I bet those children don’t even know what Rap is,” said Tyler.
“I bet the village blacks gather around campfires at night to beat beautiful rhythms on hand-tuned drums made from goatskins. They beat drums to celebrate births, funeral rituals, and worship ancestors. In old Africa, the Dark Continent, drumming praised kings and sacred deities. So, perhaps skin drums “talk” the names of praised ones here on Forbidden Island. The cadence carries over the sea, down the creeks, over the swamps, and perhaps into Rikard’s hideout where his voodoo incantations mix with the music.”
“Rikard,” she said whimsical like. “He’s not really black.”
“Who knows? Genes and chromosomes—our molecular chemistry—work in strange ways. Human genome experts claim that modern Europeans descended from a few hundred Africans who left the Dark Continent 25,000 years ago. When I interview Rikard, I’ll get into his heritage.”
Tyler sat silent as if reflecting over her bloodline and we left, paddling beyond the spit where the boys had been crabbing, leaving the low marsh and entering the island’s interior. We crossed through the high marsh and entered an expanse where fields ran into distant woods. The creek we were canoeing was no creek—it ran straight—but an irrigation canal, dug by slaves during the rice culture period. We paddled in silence, watching transitional marsh slip by before coming across an upland oddity: a patch of wild cotton that appeared to be coated with dust.
I pulled the canoe over to hard ground to gather some bolls for Tyler. She had complained about bringing facial cleanser but no cotton puffs to the island. She had already used the bolls I cut in the moonlight. I sliced two stalks ripe with khaki bolls and placed them into the canoe.
“These ought to last ’till you leave,” I said, plucking one boll free. “They may not seem as pure as the others, but they’re purer. Swab your face with wild cotton … still grows as it did before farmers bred the color out of it: khaki. That’s Indian for dust, by the way, East Indian.”
“The seed makes a nice little handle,” she said, pinching the boll and rubbing it across her face.
As she rubbed the cotton across her forehead, beautiful women behind cosmetic counters in Atlanta floated into my mind. Perfume, painted lips, shaded eyes, carefully tended faces, and white smocks flooded over me. The city beyond conquering rose before me with all its memories. Balloons and heavy traffic, Murphy rolled around, spying in his wheelchair, and Brit surfaced connected to tubes and monitors. My wife’s funeral came to me in a kind of fog where polished granite gleamed in the Georgia sun and the heavy scent of a spray of red roses filled the air.
I recalled why I left the city and returned to my mission—breaking Brit’s trance, finding two men, writing a magazine feature, and delivering the mysterious package. So far, everything suggested Mallory was crazy. If he were, what would I do with the package? Give it to a crazy man I suppose.
Tyler tossed the boll overboard. The package was one thing; she was another. She distracted me. There was no doubting that.
***
This alleyway of wild rice and cotton dead-ended, and we backtracked to the main creek. We paddled onward and saw floodgates—remnants of the rice culture—standing across a creek. The books had said tidal gates of cypress still regulated the creeks and that old plantations still stood. One book—a university press publication—had a hand-drawn star marking an ancient map where a most unique Lowcountry plantation had stood. It was octagonal and open in the center with a glass roof beneath which an elegant garden had prospered. The book said an old garden rose specimen, Champneys Pink Cluster—a Charleston discovery—once flourished there. The plantation had a simple name, The Marshall House.
A famous evangelist-indigo-rice planter of the time, Reverend Daniel Marshall, had built the house for lavish weddings. Guests left the house after the wedding and the newlyweds spent their first night in a four-post bed amidst the garden, with its headboard to the north, the Atlantic to the east, and the mainland to the south. The first night of love was spent beneath the stars, surrounded by roses and tides of desire not unlike the crashing green sea beyond the forest.
I wanted to see the old house, which sat midway our campsite and the village, an ideal point from which to explore the island’s northern end. Using my compass and the map reproduction to get a bearing as to where the old home might be it seemed we should enter a creek heretofore unexplored. We did and soon spotted oyster-encrusted pilings. We tied up to the pilings and stepped ashore across muck into some grasses.
We walked inland until we came across a sandy path where a deer, unused to humans, stepped from the shadow of an old oak. He turned, looked at us, leaped high-legged-like into shrubs, and disappeared. Walking on, we came to a field and an old home place—the legendary Marshall House. The old house was in ruin, boards pulling away from corners, with shutters hanging at odd angles from nails whose rusty heads couldn’t bear the weight much longer. The roof still seemed good and we could see the octagonal architecture.
We peered through a window and saw an open area where an ancient but untended garden—rich with blue-green flowers, strawberries, and tangled roses—grew beneath what remained of a glass roof where shards jagged as shark’s teeth serrated the roof line. This eight-sided house stood at the edge of a field where an encroaching forest advanced like infantry. The house would be a good place to camp and not far from the village where blacks murdered whites for violating their sacred code.
So, it was settled. We left, agreeing, to establish an outpost here. The minute we put out in the canoe, a barred owl’s haunting call floated over the marsh, resurrecting an old superstition, that an owl’s hoot foretold death, and I was grateful July 2nd had passed.
That night, after dinner and drink-laced conversation, we took our aching arms and backs to the tents and crashed hard. Summer’s heat had hit us full force, sapping our strength, and the day’s canoeing had produced exhaustion akin to that of wandering through the desert beneath a brutal sun.
That night a magnificent storm rumbled over Sapelo, soaking the land, filling the solar shower. At the height of the storm, the camp security perimeter went off.
I walked into the rain with my rifle as lightning lit up the night. Wild hogs stood on the edges of dunes overlooking camp. With each burst of lightning, their tusks shone blue-white. Tyler came out into the rain.
“Get back in your tent, ” I shouted and shot over the hogs but they stood unmoved. I rushed them, firing into them, and they scattered squealing and snorting. Tyler ran back into her tent and came out with her sleeping bag, basket, and suede bag.
“God, did you see those tusks?” she said breathing hard.
“Yes, they looked like scimitars, blue steel in the lightning. Garrett told us wild hogs roamed the island. He was right.”
Tyler was soaked and I gave her a shirt of mine, which she took and then turned her back to me, removing the wet T-shirt and slipping mine over her head. For the remainder of the night she stayed in my tent, she on one side, I the other. She had one thing to say. “You don’t seem the type to own a gun.” Then she lay quiet and still for so long I was sure she was just lying there, not sleeping.
A familiar fragrance filled my tent, the scent of a woman. It had been five years since a woman lay close to me. I lay there listening to her breathing until at last it slowed, deepened, and fell into rhythm, then she turned in her sleep, moaned and threw a slender leg atop the bag. I lay awake in the dark a long time thinking of all that had passed me by.
***
Dawn, the air cool. The tent damp. I awaken before her. She sleeps. I ease the tent’s fly down, go to the fire, and stir up live coals for brewing coffee. I pull a few charred limbs over the coals. Soon flames burst forth.
The earth sheds its darkness. Stars fade, and the Atlantic horizon reddens. I have a moment to myself, a time to reflect. I am thinking of her. In the short time I have known Tyler, a weakness has seized me. Without trying, she is breaching the walls of self-defense I have built with such care. Also, I have fallen into a bad habit: underestimating her will to find her daughter.
The aroma of brewing coffee invades the sea air, and Tyler awakens in a sullen mood and joins me by the fire. She shatters the majesty of the night before with a hateful attitude. She felt we should forget Cameron’s advice and go into the village unescorted. I disagree. When it comes to putting yourself in position to be killed, argue fails to describe our differences. We clashed. We had a hot exchange over breaking the principle we had been warned to observe—entering the village unescorted. Tyler didn’t give a damn anymore.
“I say fuck the village.”
“Did you say ‘fuck’ the village?” I asked.
“You’re damn right. Fuck the village. You have a gun. We go there armed. What do they have? Spears?”
“Just about every time I decide you’re level headed, you go off half-cocked. You know that? You let a bunch of wild hogs scare you but now you’re ready to invite death.”
“I thought the pigs might trample me in my tent. That’s all.”
“Well, they could have trampled my tent as well as yours. Forget the hogs. Let’s say we go into the village and find they have guns, lots of them. What do you hope to accomplish? You won’t learn anything about Lorie going in there armed.”
“Either a young white woman lives here or she doesn’t. And if she does, I intend to find her and take her back home to North Carolina. No one or anything will stop me.”
I had a point but so did she. Her time here was getting shorter, a matter that concerned me. I hoped we would stumble across someone we could talk to, someone who could provide an entrée to the village, but so far we had come up dry. If something didn’t break our way soon, to appease Tyler, we’d go to the village, but I didn’t have my heart in it.
My own missions were wanting though I had all the time in the world compared to Tyler. I had little to write about so far except Rikard and the porpoises and that was not voodoo or was it? We could enter the village with a white flag affixed to a walking stick though going in unannounced invited suicide. The smart thing was to find someone who could take us into the island—but who?
Tyler calmed down a bit and came over to me.
“I come on a little strong, don’t I?” she said.
“A little, but I understand where you’re coming from. Well, you could be in my shoes, know where your daughter is and it not make a damn difference in the world. Would you like that any better?”
“No, not really.”
“Then consider yourself blessed.”
Sipping coffee, we reviewed our maps, checking the creeks and surrounding areas we’d searched. We were making a little progress but not nearly enough. The vast majority of the island awaited exploration and time was slipping away in a routine of rising early, taking care of camp, securing water, exploring the island, and resting in the evening. By day we were eager explorers, by dusk, uneasy homebodies. Time was changing that though. If time heals all wounds, it also spans the abyss separating strangers. We cooked together, ate together, drank together, argued, bathed in the sea, and shared memories and feelings. We had begun with small talk, and our conversations had grown intimate, impossible as it seemed considering our clashes. A sense of belonging—a connecting—grew along the edge of my soul terrifying me. Of all human hurts, wounds of the heart take the longest to heal.
Isolation and mutual need had forced us together and soon she would leave. I would have the solitude I sought when leaving Atlanta but I wouldn’t have her anymore and that bothered me. And it bothered me that it bothered me.
Outside stressing over lost days—we had, after all, three people to find—these first weeks had been a furlough from the city and memories where people were the main source of unhappiness.
Life on Sapelo and the day itself ran truer than any day in the city. Nothing false marred life—in particular, meddling people. Unvarnished reality made life genuine and it made death what it was—a noble and inevitable end to all things, a reward and relief for having done nothing more than survive.
Sapelo provided for us but we had to earn our existence here with sweat unlike the city where you barter your soul for money. The backpacker food grew unbearable and more and more we gathered wild rice, broke off oyster clusters, and I cast the creeks in the late afternoon for shrimp.
Each day was hard and at day’s end, we rewarded ourselves with a dip in the sea, drinks, a dinner of wild rice, boiled shrimp, and oysters, and true conversation but Tyler began to change as her time ran out.
She no longer talked or ate as much. One night I had slipped into a deep pool of sleep and was dreaming of the Atlanta office when crying entered my dream, but it was a dream, nothing more. The next night, while reading about the island, I heard crying again. I went over to her tent and stood outside, unsure what to do. Soft sobbing came through the tent.
“Tyler, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m all right.”
“What is it?”
“Go back to your tent. I’m fine.”
“No. What’s wrong? Can I come in?” I asked.
She unzipped her tent’s fly. I stepped in and sat down at the end of her sleeping bag. She had on a long T-shirt and her eyes were reddened.
“Now tell me what’s got you so low,” I said.
“Everything. Everything that happened to Lorie was my fault.”
“Tell me what you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Get it out,” I said. “It’ll do you good.”
“It was my fault Hines had sex with Lorie. After the honeymoon, so to speak, wore off, I did anything to avoid sex with him. Anything. I’d fake being sick. Be too tired. A lot of nights I pretended to be asleep. You name it; I did it. And that’s not smart when you have a daughter who was emerging sexually—and believe me, I knew she was. Oh and he knew it too.”
“A lot of married couples go without much sex,” I said. “It’s common. What was the problem?”
“Not long after Caroline died I lost all feelings for him. We had no, no…. There just wasn’t any….”
“Chemistry,” I said.
“Exactly. No attraction.”
“Did you ever have it with him?” I asked.
“No, not ever.”
“Then why didn’t you just leave him?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve asked myself the same question a thousand times. I just didn’t want to be known as a divorcee, I guess.”
“So, you chose to be known as a murderess,” I said.
“Well, that’s how it worked out. It was my fault either way you cut it.”
“What he did was wrong. He could have turned to other women instead of a child. Maybe he did.”
“No, but I wish he had,” she said.
“Maybe you expect too much from love.”
“No. You can never expect enough from love. We didn’t have love. The thought of sliding beneath the sheets with him made my skin crawl.”
“So, he preyed on a child, your child, and you blame yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Even if you’d slept with him, he may have taken advantage of Lorie. He got what he deserved and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this. Move on. We’ll find Lorie. I promise you that. Please don’t cry.”
Tyler reached over and placed her hand on mine.
“Just try to get some sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow will be a hard day. Nothing is easy here.”
I returned to my tent and lay there a long time trying to imagine what this woman had gone through. Somehow we would get through the summer; somehow we would find ourselves and carry on. Somehow.
The days passed and Tyler’s moods came and went like the summer storms. At times, she could be tender, at times argumentative. I gave her my word we’d try to reach the village and find Rikard before she had to leave. I had to do something to help her find Lorie or prove beyond a doubt Lorie just wasn’t here. It always came back to Rikard. He held the key to everything and we had to find him. The village, I hoped, would give us some answers, if we survived going there.
The next morning over coffee, we planned a desperate move. We decided to paddle back to the old plantation and set up an overnight camp near the village. From there, we would try to find some passage into the back of the village.
As I slid the canoe through the break between the dunes, Tyler ducked into her tent. At the channel, I tied Voodoo to the canoe for safekeeping and began loading the canoe with my sleeping bag, lanterns, and enough gear to last a night at the old plantation. Tyler put her sleeping bag and a few personal possessions just outside her tent.
I packed just enough supplies to last a night and a day and took care that the canoe was balanced, water jugs on both sides, essentials in the middle. The canoe sat steady in the water. Then Tyler brought a few more things to the canoe forcing me to do some rearranging. I reworked the canoe’s content and walked back to camp with her.
“We should have whatever we need tonight,” I said.
“What about camp? Do you think it will be okay to leave it overnight?”
“We’ll find out when we return. Maybe your protective spirit will watch over it,” I said, thinking of her amulet, which hung still on her tent.
Tyler went back into her tent and came out with tissue and her precious basket and headed for her latrine, which despite a strong offshore breeze, soon would need a new, more distant location.
“Meet me at the canoe,” I said.
I walked down to the beach that looked like no other beach. Toppled trees, like armaments, gave the beach an eerie Omaha Beach-like appearance. The white sand, emerald water, and frothy white line of falling surf awaited invasion.
I returned to the canoe and again checked it for balance. It sat a bit low but not too low to be a problem. Tyler was taking her time, and Voodoo lay by the canoe sleeping as the minutes went by.
Gulls cried and waves crashed and the wind whispered in the palmettos. The day seemed good for an adventure, and I was eager to set out. Waiting on a woman was one thing that had not changed in five years. When you wait for a woman ten minutes, it seems like twenty.
I walked through the dunes to Tyler’s tent and called her name. Nothing. I thought about walking over to the latrine but didn’t want to embarrass her. I went back to her tent, just to be certain, and peeked inside. Nothing. I went down to the canoe to wait some more. For what seemed an eternity, I sat waiting on the gunwale of the canoe when restlessness got the best of me. I walked down to the shore and looked up and down the beach. I walked north and south. I went back to camp yet again, hoping she would be there piddling in her tent. No luck.
Patience is no virtue when every second counts. I went within ten yards of the latrine and called her name. No reply. Hesitant, I looked inside. She was gone. I walked to the top of a dune and saw nothing but wilderness. I called out her name and it floated out over the island and vanished, swallowed by the vastness of the marsh and dunes. I went back into camp and checked the sand where so many footprints covered the campsite it was impossible to pick out a clear set. I went up to the latrine to check for footprints, and one set—plain as day—led behind it into grasses where bent blades of grass left a trail. Tyler had gone inland through a stretch of pines to a creek and had done the unthinkable: left her precious basket in some tall grasses and in it sat a .38 handgun.
I tucked the gun into my belt, picked up the basket, and looked around. Her shoes sat at the creek edge. She had swum the creek, which at high tide was wide. I knew I couldn’t cross it. So, I could wait there for who knows how long or I could get the canoe, find the creek, and set out on the other side searching for her. Because creeks stitched in and out of the land like brocade, finding the right creek would not be easy. Tying her tennis shoes together, I hung them on a shrub. She could find them and know that I had been there, plus I could spot the shoes from the water and know I had the right creek.
Walking back to the canoe, the island had become a different world, a world of unknowable vastness. My compass and maps meant nothing anymore, and loneliness and fear seized me.
Old Voodoo and I shoved off and set out for Tyler’s creek. The canoe was heavy and paddling by myself was hard. I went up the channel and cut left into a major creek. All the creeks looked the same and after many dead ends and creeks leading nowhere, I kept taking left turns off forking creeks. A lot of time slipped by.
At last, I spotted her shoes and pulled into the grass on the other side of the creek and untied Voodoo so he could track her. Unlike that first day when Tyler had struck out on her own, Voodoo was no help. Some dogs become lazy when they are well fed and Voodoo was no exception. He sprawled out to sleep but I dragged him with me by the rope that had become his leash. The dog and I worked our way through a boggy area to high ground and lush vegetation made the going slow. If Tyler were twenty yards away, I wouldn’t have seen her.
I spent the entire day searching and shouting her name to no avail. Finally when it was apparent I’d never find her, I returned to the canoe and sat for a long time. The woodsman’s cliché that lost people go in circles came to mind, offering hope, but she never showed.
Sitting in the canoe was hot and nerve-wracking, so Voodoo and I headed back to camp. As I paddled out of the creek toward the channel, panic seized me. What if I never saw her again? The possibilities raced through my mind. I tried to think why she had taken off and one possibility always came out on top. She had to have spotted a solitary pelican and tried to follow it—that had to be the answer. I paddled hard and thought—exertion and clear thinking are comrades, as every runner knows.
The long channel back to camp seemed longer than ever and camp itself now seemed large and empty. All the solitude I’d thought was so crucial meant nothing now. I unloaded the canoe and put Tyler’s things back in her tent, except for her basket and gun. I kept those with me.
That night thunderheads rolled in from the west. All evening thoughts of poachers, big gators, and island weirdoes worked me over but I tried not to dwell on the worst. I drank more Southern Comfort than I should and sleep came in fits and starts. I awoke early and my head hurt and I needed water bad.
I walked back to the creek where her shoes dangled from a struggling marsh elder. I canoed back to the creek and spent another day searching but found no sign of her.
As I paddled down the now-familiar channel, I rounded its last great bend beyond which I could see where the channel met the sea, near camp. Someone sat on the shore.
Approaching the putout place, I saw a soggy Tyler sitting by the channel where the canoe had last cut a groove into the sand. She stood as soon as she saw me, a wet shirt clinging to her like skin. As I pulled ashore she waded out to me. Relief washed over me, and my heart came up into my throat.
I jumped from the canoe and she came up and hugged me. For a long time we clung to each other, knee-deep in the water. Then she began to cry.
“I’m sorry. I know I scared you again. I am so sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry,” I said, pulling out my bandanna to wipe away her tears. “Yes, you scared me, but it was an altogether different fear. I am so happy to see you. I was scared something bad had happened to you.”
“I didn’t mean to wander off like that. I saw a pelican, just one. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to find Lorie. Of course, I didn’t. Then, I had trouble finding my way back. All these creeks look the same.”
“Yes, that’s for sure,” I said. “I tried to find you. I looked for two days. Tell me. Where did you get the gun?” I asked.
“I keep it on me all the time, right here, she said patting her navel through badly torn shorts. I always have it on me but salt water’s not good for it.”
“I guess it’s good you have it,” I said, not believing that could be the gun. That gun, I knew, was locked up in some judicial chamber in North Carolina.
We waded ashore where she broke down and fell onto the sand. I knelt beside her. Wet hair clung to her slender neck.
“I know you’re mad at me,” she said between sobs.
“Not at all.”
Then she raised and turned to me, wet, a mess, crying, to hug me again.
“I’m so sorry for worrying you. I mean here you are on this island with a woman who does nothing but cause trouble.”
“Yes, you are trouble with a capital T, but believe me, it’s all right. I’m glad you’re here. I really am. What happened?”
“I came out of the latrine and saw a pelican across the creek, flying in tight circles. I had to follow it. I know you understand.”
“I figured something like that had happened. You swam the creek?”
“Yes, I was captain of my swim team in high school. The day you nearly drowned trying to get the canoe, I felt so guilty. I could have made it to the canoe, but I didn’t know if I could get back to land without a paddle. So I kept quiet and watched. When you disappeared and the canoe drifted out, I knew something had gone wrong. I went all the way down the marsh until I could see you in the muck. I backtracked to the bamboo place and was going to swim out and bring you the bamboo to breathe through.”
“Well, it was my stupidity that got me in trouble. I can’t swim a lick.”
“Not at all?”
“Maybe dog paddle, but I wouldn’t make it far.”
“I’m a strong swimmer. I swam the creek trying to follow the pelican. It just hovered over the woods. It flew like no pelican I’ve seen so far, in tiny, tight circles. I knew it was following someone. It had to be Lorie. It had to be. When I got into the woods it had flown over the marsh and then it went into the woods on the side of yet another creek.”
“You swam it too?”
“Yes and two other creeks also.”
“I looked for you, but I couldn’t swim the creeks.”
“After I got across and in the woods, I lost track of the pelican. I swam the other creeks and then I lost myself. I called out Lorie’s name but nobody was there … nobody.”
“So, we were both wandered around shouting,” I said. “I was so afraid something had happened to you. Where did you stay during the storm?”
“Somewhere back in there”—she pointed back toward her latrine—“a huge oak has blown down. I sat under the trunk right where a huge clod of earth had come up with the roots and had a shelter that kept the rain off me.”
“Good for you. I about got a hangover worrying about you. I still don’t feel too swift.”
“I could have used a bottle too last night. I’ll tell you one thing though. I just know the pelican was flying over Lorie. My daughter is here on this island and we’re going to find her.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes we are.”
She had welts from jellyfish stings on her legs and arms and her hair was a mess. Her face was scratched and her feet were badly cut up and in need of attention. My heart ached just looking at her, but not because of the stings and feet. They would heal. The cut in her heart would not close until she made things right with her daughter. I had tasted the fear of losing her and it was not a comforting thing. I wanted her to be happy.
I rinsed seawater over her stings and removed pieces of tentacles from her back and legs. Then while she went off to shower, I went to my tent and got my first aid kit and took out a vial of vinegar for her stings and ointment for her cuts. She came from her tent in fresh clothes, a white oxford shirt and cut-off jeans—like a college kid at the beach—and sat against the driftwood tree we used as a bench, kitchen, and workspace. I poured the vinegar over some cotton bolls and swabbed her stings. She lay back against a massive limb and relaxed as the vinegar did its magic. I worked ointment into her cuts and took my time treating her, more time than was necessary.
We spent the next day and night at camp before leaving at last for the old plantation. We paddled in silence, saying little at all, absorbed in worlds of our own. I could feel her staring at my back as I paddled, a stroke on the left then a stroke on the right, onward always. She had stirred something inside me that had long lain dormant.
***
We made it to the old sea island plantation late in the afternoon and pulled the canoe ashore, heavy with provisions. We tied it to an oyster-encrusted piling and walked the sandy lane toward the Marshall House with our first load of supplies.
We made several trips to the old home. Voodoo, dragging his rope-leash, followed us, leaving a trail in the sand like that of a slender snake.
After emptying the old canoe, we pulled it ashore and hid it in some yaupons growing beneath a copse of slash pines and made ready to pitch camp in the old plantation home, which on closer inspection was frail. In places the flooring had fallen in and we walked the planking with care.
We eased through the front door and made our way around the hallway to a step through facing what remained of a small porch leading to the open interior where a garden, wild and luxuriant, rose to meet us. Though long unattended, the garden was rich with strawberries, roses, and flowers, and grew a medley of violet, green, and red plants. Compared to the dunes, seaoats, and scrubby pines, it was the Garden of Eden. Tyler leaned over and plucked a delicate purple blossom from graceful vines arching over the old porch’s warped steps.
“Plumbago, the first plant my mother gave me. Some people call it Sea Lavender.” She handed it to me.
“Sea Lavender. You must know a lot about flowers, working for a florist,” I said, taking the tender bloom from her.
“Oh yes, but it’s not hard to learn about the things you love. From the time I was a girl watching honey bees in clover, I’ve loved flowers—all beautiful things really,” she said, looking up at me.
“I’d better go get our sleeping bags and the lanterns,” I said. “Someone may spot them. We can camp in the garden; no one can see us there. I know this house has been here forever but it looks as if it’s ready to collapse.”
I went out to the crumbling porch where we had stashed our supplies and began bringing them into the garden, the home’s centerpiece. Tyler helped and soon we had a small camp in the garden amid roses, strawberries, and plumbago. It was idyllic and I was certain no one would have a clue we were camping there. We could see the stars above but no one could see us.
“Too bad we can’t stay here forever,” she said.
“Yes, it’s special all right. I’m just glad you’re here. When you disappeared the other day, it scared me to death”
She stood and turned toward me.
“Did it really?” she asked, her eyes a deeper blue than ever though the indigo circle above may have caused the intensification.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve come to realize just how special you are. You’re beautiful but tough, you and your handgun and killing ways. I’ve never met a woman like you. Never.”
“Funny, I’ve been thinking how special you are too. I wanted to tell you but couldn’t. I’m not very good at breaking the ice. I suppose that’s why I come across so cool. So, do you think we’re different? I mean we do have some things in common.”
“Yes we do,” I said. “We’re different but it’s a good difference.”
“Most men I’ve known worked with their hands, and their hearts were rough, like their hands. You work with your mind and both your hands and heart are soft. I can tell that much. I knew you were special the first time I saw you back at the Last Chance Café.”
“Why did you keep breaking eye contact back at the café?”
“Something drew me to you. I was afraid I would do something stupid, like walk over to you and introduce myself.”
“I wish you had,” I said.
“Well, I mean we were total strangers, but we’re strangers no more,” she said coming up and running her arms around me.
I drew back her hair and kissed her neck, which tasted of salt. Then the most fleeting of kisses at last happened.
Tyler took me by the hand and led me into the garden. Strawberries grew everywhere, but the mandolin shaped leaves of plumbago grew thickest in deep green clusters, with purple streaks scoring the pale violet blossoms. The vines ran thick, a natural mat, cool and receptive. As we stepped into the deep foliage, a fragrance of strawberries filled the air.
Tyler sank to her knees and pale clouds of flowers, some rolled into delicate tubes, spread beneath her. I sank to my knees beside her and pulled a stem of blossoms and one strawberry and held them up to her.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the fragrance.
“Keep your eyes closed,” I whispered.
I bit a strawberry in half. With one half I rubbed her lips, coating them with the juice and then I kissed her. I took the other half and squeezed its juice onto her neck, letting run down her throat, then licking it away.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Nothing, nothing at all,” I said.
Then I plucked plumbago blossoms from the stem, dropping one blossom after another into her open collar. They fell deep into her blouse, out of sight.
She murmured something too low to understand.
I dropped more blossoms into her blouse until a small heap spilled from the opening, tumbling down the oxford cloth. Then I plucked the blossoms from the top of her blouse with my lips. The heat rising off her carried the fragrance of the flowers. I lay her back into the flowers and unfastened her top button. I kissed her until I found more blossoms nestled deeper in her blouse. Then I plucked each one away, pursuing the blossoms deeper and deeper.
I unbuttoned two more white pearl buttons. Mounds of delicate blue petals rose and fell with her breathing and we rolled over into the flowers.
“You are so beautiful—inside and out,” I said, the white-hot words escaping like incandescent vapors.
Pale blossoms banked above her jeans, like windblown petals. I worked my way down and removed them, one by one. I opened her jeans just enough to remove the flowers, one by one, kissing her, caressing the plain around her navel. She pulled me to her.
Now nothing but pale violet flowers clung to her. We lay beneath a circle of blue sky on a bed of crushed, fragrant flowers on an island forgotten by time. Somewhere beyond the trees, one wave after another crashed against the distant Atlantic shore, and a force as old as the surf itself surged through us as well. Beneath a circle of blue sky on a bed of crushed, fragrant flowers, there was no such thing as the past or the future. Only now. The fragrance of strawberries joined her sweet smell and for the first time in years, I felt more alive than ever.
Afterwards, we lay together quietly, saying nothing, holding each other, legs interlaced, on this primitive island with the entire continent of North America to our backs. Atlanta and its loneliness seemed light years away.
***
The next morning, we set out for the village from our new camp and resumed our explorations north of where we had seen the boys crabbing. We paddled the big creek north for two hours, then stopped to study the map. We paddled north a bit farther to explore a long but narrow creek that coiled into a swamp not far from the village. That creek, I hoped, might get us close enough to see villagers from the water but it never did.
After much meandering, the creek straightened and fed us into a cathedral-like lagoon—a backwater breach where light slanted like spotlights onto black water edged with cypress knees. The creek exited on the far side and led to yet another lagoon just visible through a curtain of buttressed cypress columns. The swamp afforded one way in and one way out.
The swamp water was coal black and the trees and moss shimmered on it as if a mirror lay just beneath its surface. Now different breeds of the island’s inhabitants made music. Birds trilled, bullfrogs boomed bass, and a shrill chorus of tree frogs provided swamp violins. The swamp appeared and sounded beautiful in all respects but one: a suffocating smell permeated everything.
All swamps are fetid dank places but this one’s oppression was matchless. A roiling humidity crawled over us, our shirts stuck to us, and when it seemed it could get no worse, it did. Entering a large, watery cul-de-sac, a miasma took our breath away, and the smell of death overpowered us in the space of a gasp.
“God, that smell,” said Tyler who began to heave over the side of the canoe. Voodoo stood and for a second I thought he would leap from the canoe to escape the rotten air.
I felt sick and the contents of my stomach fought to escape. I held my nose and back-paddled one-handed to escape the stench when a thick slab of mud slid into the water. A gator twenty feet long came right at us. We had barged into a monstrous gator’s meat locker where carnage rotted until ripe for eating.
“Keep the dog down,” I said. Backstroking stone-blind, I rammed the canoe into some cypress knees, bouncing us back toward the gator who came straight for us jaws agape. She was right on us and I had my paddle ready to smash her between the eyes when two shots ripped into her open mouth. A third shot broke off a massive tooth, turning her away. Stung but hardly hurt, the primeval gladiator headed back to the muddy bank.
Tyler had both hands on her pistol ready to fire again.
“Jesus,” I said, “If you hadn’t had that gun ...”
“We’d be in the drink,” she said, holding the gun on the retreating gator.
“You saved us, you really did. She was going to turn us over and then we were history.”
“You’re pale as a ghost, Slater.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
I turned the canoe around and headed back out of the swamp while the gator crawled onto the muddy bank. I kept looking back and so did Tyler.
“Keep that gun ready in case she makes another run at us.”
“I only have two rounds left. It’s not a six-shooter, just five.”
“Let her hold it in the eyes if you can. Blind the bastard.”
Using cypress knees as handles, we hauled the canoe into an area where the water braided through a profusion of trees. Like pickets, they made it difficult for her to come after us again. She was too wide to swim through them, at least I hoped so.
I had stumbled onto dead dogs by the roadside, but the gator’s meat locker was like a steam bath where open coffins held bodies bereft of embalming such that putrefaction ruled and green slime could cover anything resembling flesh.
My stomach kept rolling. We said nothing but both of us stared back toward the gator’s lair, and so did Voodoo. Then we made it to a resting place and did nothing but sweat. Here, we rested pondering how best we might get to the elusive village when a strange sound from some distant place began to build.
“Listen, do you hear that?”
Tyler turned her head left and right, then slowly held it to the right where rising above the birds and swamp sounds a treetop flyer, an airplane, seemed to be heading toward us. The craft was moving fast and the noise gained strength. It was almost on us, but it couldn’t be an airplane for now the sound came at us through the trees. It could be nothing but trouble.
“Let’s get the canoe into the rushes,” I said.
We paddled into the rushes until a curtain of canes hid us. Then, peering through the reeds, we saw an airboat glide over the water, pushed by a large yellow fan. It skimmed through the maze of trees as if it had been there a hundred times and three black men sat together joking, and a fourth, the driver, sat above them, working the control stick. Two grim white men were aboard: our friend, Garrett the game warden, and a redneck wearing a red bandanna with riotous hair that looked as if he’d combed it with a firecracker.
The airboat glided toward the gator’s meat locker. The big rotor slowed, chopping the air with a thwacking sound before stopping, quieting the swamp. Thirty yards, if that, separated us.
One black man clutched a black leather bag with prominent handles; another held what looked like an aluminum camera case between his legs. The third held a long tube, which he kept turning in his hands.
Just then, Voodoo stood, hackles erect, to bark. I clamped my hands around his muzzle as fresh sweat popped out all over me. Tyler ran her hand down the dog’s back and forced him down in the canoe.
Two black men stood up, a native and a man in safari clothing who addressed the native in a thick African accent, tinged with British influence.
“Now precisely where is the big gator? Show me. We want to sedate it with the blowgun and then measure it. We want to take photographs so that we can compare it to the crocodiles and alligators back in the Rokel River. Then we will, of course, release it, unharmed, I might add.”
The native, dressed in shorts, nothing more, possessed the body of a heavyweight, narrow at the waist, muscled, and broad shouldered with chiseled biceps. He faced the lagoon we had just left, oblivious to the lesser men around him and peered across the blackwater where his reflection lay like an apparition. His voice had that same lilting quality the boys had had.
“She would be down there in that opening,” he said pointing. “Her den be there. It is a bad place, a place of bones. Long before you get to it you will smell the death and then the gator—”
There was no finishing the sentence. The man holding the long tube blew a dart into the native’s right shoulder, crumpling him into the airboat. The man with the camera case then rolled the native over and pulled out the dart, handing it to the blowgunner who admired its bloody point.
“The drug Ketamine, she works fast,” he said, wiping the dart point clean with a white cloth as the doctor donned rubber gloves. “The poor devil thinks he’s floating above the earth. Yes, this ‘Kat Valium’ makes people feel as if they’re leaving their body. Perhaps he’s having a near-death experience,” and he laughed, “he is close to death all right.”
The doctor replied with sarcasm, pointing to the gator den.
“You are closer to the truth than you know. His kidneys are leaving his body and his death will be over there. Isn’t that so, Officer Garrett?” And he laughed. Everyone laughed, even Garrett, but not the redneck.
Garrett nudged the stricken native with his foot, who lay where he had been rolled onto his stomach. He was as good as dead. The third black man began swabbing the native’s back with a bright orange substance.
The doctor opened his bag, removed a shiny scalpel, and with deft movements sliced two openings into the man’s back, unleashing dark purple spurts of blood.
Making precise incisions, the doctor cut deep into the lower back and prying back flesh, removed two dark-red kidneys that looked similar to computer mouses. Jubilant, he held them up—the color of rubies, dripping blood and shiny—for the others to see. They all smiled and nodded. It was as if a miner had pulled gold nuggets from brown earth and a great party was to follow. Everyone rejoiced except Garrett and his silent companion.
The other black man popped open his case, and billowing plumes of silver vapors rose as the surgeon, in elation, juggled the kidneys and hummed a ditty before dropping them into the cooler where their warmth caused fog to rise. Garrett fumed, touching his gun, then shaking a finger in the good doctor’s face.
“God damn it, you ruin those kidneys, and we got a big problem. Those kidneys fetch more money than I can make in two years.”
“It’s all right,” said the physician in his African accent, looking into the cooler. “Look. See for yourself. They are fine. See. They sleep on a clean layer of gauze. They are beautiful and they are ours, and soon we’ll put them to good use in someone who matters. The important thing now is to get back to the hospital ship right away.”
The doctor shut the cooler. Garrett was all business, resting his right hand on his service revolver while his pal looked around the swamp, bored.
Tyler whispered through rushes.
“If I hadn’t been for the gator, I could shoot all five of them before they would know what hit them.”
“Garrett’s got a gun.” I whispered.
“I’d shoot him first,” and I knew she meant it.
“We’re not moving until long after they leave. To move is to die,” I whispered, placing my hand upon hers. Just then, a cry rose into the swamp. An anguished wail resounded through the cypress trees, a haunting sound that couldn’t have come from a human but did—the native. The airboat’s giant fan roared to life and Garrett jerked the drugged man to his feet, more dead than live. Blood poured from slanting incisions, staining his shorts and running down his legs.
The men wrapped their noses and mouths with bandannas and handkerchiefs, and the airboat glided toward the gator den as Spanish moss fluttered in its draft, and voices from behind the handkerchiefs rode the clammy air.
“Here’s the gator,” said the driver, throttling the engine down and staring at the doomed native. “The ravenous gator. Nice of you to introduce us.”
“Yes, you’re going over for dinner,” said Garrett, laughing, “over board” and he and the dartsman—holding the dazed man by an arm and a leg apiece—heaved him into the water. From the lagoon of rot, the gator slipped through the water and headed for the native. Incredibly, one of the Africans held a digital camera to photo the attack. The gator took the native by the waist full into her jaws and as the camera flashed, thrashed the black man against the water before taking the stunned soul beneath the swamp into eternity. The water roiled as the gator rolled the man’s body.
The pilot pulled hard on the stick and the airboat spun on its axis until it faced the open creek, blowing the stench back against the rotten den, and the men removed their handkerchiefs. Then the boat flew by us at a pace more furious than it had appeared. In seconds, it was gone, leaving nothing but a dead man, fading noise, and death’s stench, which stirred and renewed, reached us in the rushes.
We turned toward the water where the gator had vanished with the black man. Unearthly stillness held the swamp. Even the frogs remained silent, and the airboat and its horror seemed an illusion. No evidence remained, no noise, nor any ripples. The water had smoothed again to a mirror-like polish and the swamp was as it had been: green, beautiful, reflective, but oppressive. Silence ruled except for burbling water where the creek swelled and pushed over a log in a quavering dome of water.
Then the gator surfaced.
The smell of death and the sight of the gator emerging from the murky water with an arm in her jaws erased any doubt as to what we’d seen. Tyler wept as the abhorrent gator went about her business. The sound of cracking bones ricocheted through the swamp as the gator thrashed the arm about until she had it right. Then she swallowed it whole, the hand waving as it slid down the jaws of hell.
“God, what a nightmare,” said Tyler. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
‘Yes, nothing but a nightmare. But, no, we stay put until twilight. If we leave too soon and they spot us, they’ll kill us. We can’t outrun them, so we just have to outlast them. Garrett would never let us make it back to the mainland.”
“The surgeon, that mutilator, said they had to get back to the ship.”
“Yes. He called it a hospital ship, though I doubt that’s true. We can’t be sure they’ve left. What if they stopped just out of hearing in the next lagoon?”
“What if the gator comes for us again? What about that?” she asked.
“She’s not interested in a meal right now. The smart thing, the only thing, is to wait.”
We waited and as dusk descended, we could see a cloud of mosquitoes floating over the gator’s den—a mound of rotting vegetation lined with mud.
“What is Garrett doing with those black men?” she asked.
“I’ve been sitting here thinking about that. No wonder he told us not to come here. It looks as if he’s in business with human poachers. I’m glad Jackson’s coming for you now. You need to leave the island.”
“Aren’t you afraid to stay here?”
“I’m staying.”
We waited until dark, fanning away mosquitoes and talking of a day so eventful as to defy belief. Then we slipped back to the old plantation after dusk, paddling as fast and as close to the marsh grass as possible beneath a dome of stars on an island where lawmen abetted the lawless.
***
We spent much of the next week avoiding the northern half of the island, exploring the south side seeking Rikard’s hideout. The narrow escape with the alligator and human butchery set us back on our heels. We were afraid to venture north, though I was very curious about the hospital ship. We couldn’t chance bumping into Garrett or the evil black murderers. They could have taken one kidney from the native, but they took both and fed him to the gator. They would do the same to us and as the burnt journal pages foretold, nothing would remain save our organs, which would carry on without us.
So far, we had shared a memorable but monstrous time on Forbidden Island. We had gotten the canoe, which almost cost me my life, and Rikard had found us as Jackson and Cameron predicted. Tyler and I had grown close and we had witnessed the miracle of the porpoises, which never strayed far from my mind, and we had witnessed a reprehensible crime.
Black Magic paled compared to the ravaging of organs on a wild island where animal magic and organ thievery were sisters to voodoo. The story of my life—of any writer’s life—surrounded me.
***
August arrived, the month when seaturtles lumber ashore under darkness to lay eggs in the dunes. We stayed busy. When we weren’t searching the island, Tyler made floral arrangements from sea oats, drift wood, flowers, and shells … beautiful works of art. Our campsite relinquished its character as a wild outpost and took on a domesticated air.
We crabbed and cast for shrimp to supplement our rations, prepared meals, did chores, and took care of ourselves. We had clothes to rinse in the brine and dry in the wind and sun, which left them stiff and starchy. Shaving with cold water had become a chore and I gave some thought to growing a beard, though I hated facial hair and its barbaric look.
Soon, Jackson would come for Tyler and she had nothing to show for coming to the island. She had failed to discover her basket’s maker and she had failed to get any leads on Lorie other than Jackson’s comment about a young woman followed by a pelican. I shared her disappointment but thought it best she leave the island for safety’s sake. We had made a vow to keep up with each other, and I knew we would … if I survived the summer.