Drawn Into Darkness(41)

He did so and followed me. The grass and weeds, I noticed, looked bent or flattened where we had swished through them or stepped on them. I went back and whacked the verdure with my catalpa branch until I’d achieved a sort of parity, either flattening everything or making some of it spring back up. Justin picked a path forward while I walked backward, flailing away.

He started to laugh. “You look insane!”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“Gimme the branch.” Interesting that he had managed to lose his own. “I’ll do it.”

“Why? You want to look insane?” I had to smile as I handed him the catalpa branch.

“Just trying to lend a hand,” he said in a manly tone. Back turned, swinging his new weapon as I led the way, Justin called, “Watch for snakes, Miss Lee Anna.”

The “Miss,” I knew by now, was a Southern honorific, usually affectionate but sometimes patronizing.

“Just call me Lee,” I responded.

Typical of myself, I had chosen the oddest moment to decide that I did not want to be Liana the clinging vine ever again. Miss Lee of the Jungle, I stalked along, watching for snakes.

And seeing them. They sure grew big down here, all different kinds and colors, their thick coils pressing down the springy grass. Big and lazy, reluctant to relinquish the sun after too much chilling rain, they generally slipped away like water down a drain when I got close enough to really look at them. But a few played possum. One of these, a large but harmless gray and white oak snake, I grasped firmly around the middle, lifting it and taking possession of it.

I did this on impulse. When I was a little girl, I had often captured turtles, frogs, caterpillars, praying mantises, and, yes, snakes, to keep for a few hours, just long enough to get acquainted with them before I put them back where I had found them. My mother approved; she had helped me look up the various species in her twelve-volume nature encyclopedia. But my ex-husband, who didn’t seem to like anything about nature, went postal if I so much as touched a hoppy-toad, vehemently insisting that I wash my hands at once, as if I were plotting to poison him with critter cooties. So I had been away from my truer self for a long time.

The oak snake came with me so docilely it felt almost as if he or she were welcoming me back. It tucked its head into the comforting cave of my shorts pocket, while the rest of it wrapped around my waist.

I walked on, and the next snake I saw, as if to restore antithesis to my life’s dialectic, was a cottonmouth as thick as my arm, a snake only God the mother of us all could love. It reared its mud-colored head and gaped the puffy white lining of its mouth at me, threatening to use its fangs even though I stood a good ten feet away.

I called, “Justin, bring the stick, would you?”

He did, and by repeatedly swooshing the moccasin with its leafy end, he discomfited it enough so that it departed to find a more peaceful place. “Better stand still awhile till we’re sure it’s not coming at us,” he said.

We did stand still, and the late afternoon light cast long shadows, and I noticed that the grassy way through the swamp we had been following, the opening between trees barely worthy to be called a lane, had broadened into a wider clearing. Was it ending? If so, why?

Before I had realized what I should start looking for, Justin spotted it. “Hey! There’s a little fishing cabin under the live oaks!”

“Where?” I saw nothing at first. When he pointed it out, I understood why. I would not have called it a cabin, or even a shack; it was barely a shanty. Its gray and splintered never-painted planks blended into the swamp woods and the shade of the live oaks that stooped over it. Judging by the weeds everywhere, no one lived here or had been here for some time. Although a rickety gray outhouse stood by, the place seemed barely habitable overnight. Very likely we would find rats in there, and mice, and maybe snakes. But for me, and I thought I could speak for Justin too, only one thing mattered: was there by any chance some food?

• • •

Maypop County sheriff’s deputy Bernardo “Bernie” Morales caught the call regarding a suspicious stench at a rental property on the state road north. Maypop PD took calls only in town; the Sheriff’s Office took care of the county, and what the Staters did, Bernie often wondered.

Bernie had responded to many such calls, and usually they involved dead fish left under the front steps as a prank. Without hurry, he drove to the address in his much-abused old cruiser, which in his birthplace—Chile, South America—would have been called by an insulting name insinuating that it was a latrine on wheels. Although he was the only Latino cop in Maypop County, Bernie did not think of himself as Hispanic, but rather as a Chileno citizen of the U.S.A. Like many of his friends in the Chilean army, after discharge Bernie had gone on a work visa to Orlando, Florida, kingdom of a cartoon mouse and many good jobs. His plan had been to save his money, go home to Chile, buy a taxi, and be rich. Instead, too many beautiful gringas had spent his money for him, until he had fallen in love with Tammy Lou Steverson.