“You’re loony,” Justin said.
“Kierkegaard called it a leap of faith. Stay where you are a minute.” Finished with his feet, I reached for my own to yank off my wet sneakers, then my equally soppy socks. “Put those on.” I handed them to Justin.
“These?” He accepted them with two fingers. “How am I supposed to fit my feet into these?”
“However you can.”
“They don’t even reach past my heel,” Justin complained, stretching my socks to their utmost.
I pushed my sneakers back onto my bare feet, but just as I started to stand up, I heard the growl of a vehicle approaching on the dirt road that passed not nearly far enough away from us. I lapsed back onto the ground, mutely terrified it might be Stoat.
Justin whimpered, “If they turn down here, they’ll see us!”
Terror had made me memorize the sound of Stoat’s van bone-marrow deep, and—I exhaled in relief—this vehicle wasn’t it. “That’s not Stoat,” I said, lurching to my feet.
“Lee Anna, what’re you doing?” Justin yelped.
I windmilled my arms. Trying to flag down some help for us, that’s what I was doing, but the truck—spewing loud country music, it was one of those asinine jacked-up trucks with balls, literally, having a long antenna with tennis balls skewered on it arching over its cargo bed. Stained yellow by sand, ballsy whip bobbing, the overtall truck drove past the boat ramp entry without stopping.
To stifle a pang of hungry disappointment I said, “Well, at least now we know there are people back here.”
“Who cares? We need to get out of here.”
The restrained panic in Justin’s voice echoed the fear I had felt when I heard the car, and helped me concede in my mind that we could not hang around to wait for the boating Bubbas to get back from Chipoluga Swamp. We were on the run from Stoat.
Looking back the way we had come, I noticed with dismay the clear prints of our feet in the sand. “Justin, may I borrow that knife you found?”
“Sure. Which blade?”
“Biggest.”
He pried the blade into position with his thumbnail and handed the knife to me. “You’re, like, really polite,” he said as if I puzzled him. “If Uncle, um, Stoat wants something, he snaps his fingers.”
“I noticed.” I struggled to cut a low branch from a catalpa tree, succeeded, returned the knife to Justin, then backtracked to sweep the sand with it—catalpas, aka bean trees, have very broad leaves. My branch resembled a fan more than a broom, but did a pretty good job of erasing our tracks.
“Sweet,” Justin remarked when I had made my way back to him.
“Like tupelo honey,” I agreed. “Okay, let’s go. Single file.” He went first, and I followed, trailing the catalpa branch behind me. Looking back, I saw to my satisfaction that my improvised drag was doing a pretty good job of erasing our footprints.
Weeds flourished around my ankles—wildflowers, really, and any other time I would have been exclaiming over their blossoms. But now all my attention was focused on listening for the sound of a certain vehicle approaching. Okay, Stoat was so anal that maybe he had reported to work and was putting screen prints of cats in bikinis on the front of T-shirts right now, in which case we had time. But what if he wasn’t quite that anal? What if he was out here looking for us?
Still, we reached the dirt road safely and turned left, away from where Stoat would enter. Justin didn’t need foot protection on the smooth, sandy road. Standing on one leg to pull off a pink sock, he remarked, “I feel like a flamingo.”
He made me smile. “Okay, flamingo, keep walking.”
“Just a minute.” Balling my socks into his pockets, Justin deployed his knife and cut himself a tree branch to drag. Side by side, we hiked onward at the quickest pace I could manage.
Any other time I would have been fascinated, crossing the most rudimentary of wooden bridges and looking down between the boards at minnows, frogs, maybe a baby alligator in the water below, passing forests that were not forests, seeing the still green sheen of swamp water between trunks shaped like tepees. But under the circumstances all I could think was that we had to keep moving, find some kind of sanctuary before Stoat found us. Silent, we listened for the cough of the white van, or for any crackle of brush or outcry of birds in the muted midday swamp.
Time passed without any alarm. I decided to speak.
“You okay?” I asked Justin, wanting input but not wanting to ask the specific questions on my mind: How do you feel about me? Will you listen to me or do you think I am a pain? How about what I’m trying to accomplish, which is getting you home; are we on the same page at all?