up went the sleeves, rolled tightly. He left his hat on, however, for its brim trapped the sweat that grew in his hairline and kept it from cascading down into his eyes. And of course he left his tie tight to his neck. There were certain concessions to the jungle one simply could not make.
He settled into the rear of the boat, uncomfortable, nestled against a gunwale on a pile of ropes. Luxury was out of the question, and an inch or two of water perfumed with gasoline sloshed around the bottom of the boat as it chugged onward, radiating nauseating fumes and a slight sense of mirage. Or maybe it was his splitting headache.
'Cheer up,' cried old Lazear. 'We got another five hours or so before true dark, then we lay up in a bay I know. You can sleep on dry ground, Lazear he sleep on the boat.'
'I'll stay with the boat, thanks,' said Sam. He imagined himself alone in this place. Alone: dead. It followed.
The old man now and then took a tot on a bottle of something, and once or twice handed it to Sam, who politely turned it down, until at last curiosity got the better of him.
Argh! It was some hellish French stuff, absinthe or something, with the heat of fire and the tang of salt; it burned all the way down, and he suddenly shivered.
'Ha! She got bite, no?' exclaimed Lazear.
In time, the light dwindled further, until it seemed impossible to go onward. Lazear found a little cut in the land, a miniature cove, surrounded by high grass and a copse of gnarled trees of no identifiable features, and there put in.
'I rustle up some grub. You eat.'
Sam was in fact ravenous. The scrofulous old man disappeared into the disreputable hatchway that led to the boat's forward interior and threw pots and pans around. He came up a few minutes later with white chunks of bread, a lump of butter at some indeterminate stage between liquid and solid, a warped segment of cheese, greasy, waxy rind still affixed, and a knife and fork.
'Fancy food for a fancy guy, no?' 'I've eaten worse,' said Sam, who remembered K rations in the snow during the Bulge, when it was so cold he thought he'd die of it, and the Germans were said to be everywhere, and all he wanted to do was head back to Arkansas and practice law.
Instead, he'd gathered his six 105s into a tight formation atop a low hill, dug them in, and waited for targets. A German panzer unit obliged, grinding through the gray snow and the gray fog a mile out, and Sam and his men stayed cool and blew it off the face of the earth in three minutes of concentrated fire. Only burning hulks were left.
He slept in his clothes, feeling the drift of the boat against the slop of the river and the dampness of his feet where the water had at last overwhelmed the leather of his brogues, penetrating them. But it was good, dreamless sleep, for the temperature at last dropped and the air seemed cooled of the corruption that so embalmed it during the day.
He awoke to the ritual of the coffee. Lazear had woken early, gone ashore, made a small fire. Now, as Sam watched, he boiled a pot of water, then moved it off the flame. With an old soup spoon he scooped coffee from an A & P bag, and spread it on the water. Next he produced a Clabber Girl baking powder tin, popped the lid and scooped out roasted and ground chicory root and again spread the material on the surface of the water until it seemed right. Then he swirled the black mix and let the grounds settle and steep. The smell of coffee and wood smoke made Sam's stomach rumble.
The old man sloshed through the water and handed Sam up a tin cup of the stuff; it cut to the bone, hot, raw and powerful. The French and their coffee; they were good at it beyond arrogance.
As Sam tried to focus, he found the fog was not in his mind but in the swamp. Tendrils of cottony moisture lay low on the water, curled through the trees, licked at the leaves.
'How much longer?'
'We hit the big river soon enough. Then we bear right where she splits, and that part takes on the name Yaxahatchee. That one's wider open so it'll go smoother. Don't you be falling in. That water deep and the current can be strong. Suck a man down, spit him back with his soul missing, his nose blue, his fingers shriveled and his false teeth out and floated off somewheres.'
'Sir, I have no false teeth.'
'Whatever you got, if you go in, the river, she take it. She's a black bitch of a river, you see. You don't be messin' ' with her, or she fuck you good.' 'My trust in you is absolute,' Sam said.
He settled back, got through a few shaky moments when the old man seemed to have trouble interesting the engine in life again, until at last it sputtered, coughed, shivered, then began to pull the boat back out from the shore.
They coursed through the blackness, passing in the morning fog a I ghost town, its rickety houses moss- grown and semi fallen 'What happened there?'
'Oh, dey got through Indians and plague and flood okay, but then some dogs, wild dogs, tore up some kids there. Kilt three. Little girls, I think, caught ' in the open, kilt ' fast, bled ' out. The people just gave it up after that. The swamp, she be a cruel bad place.'
Sam looked away, trying to banish the horror of the idea of it from his mind. The girls, the dogs, the screams, the smell of blood. He shook his head.
'Yah! Ha! Ain't no picnic out here, no siree. You ain't where you from, not by no long shot.'
At last the swamp seemed to diminish its grip on the earth. The gnarled trees, the jungly vines and dinosaur vegetation gave way to longleaf pines arrayed over ridges of land, saw grass and other green clutter, all leading to bleak shores. The river widened, deepened, turned ever blacker, grew swifter.
Then it split. It broke into two forks, one headed east, the other west.
Neither looked promising: highways of dark river, the texture no longer smooth as oil or glass but now ever so slightly giving evidence of disturbance, as if strong currents lurked beneath, hungry to pull a man to his death.
'You hang on now, Mister, she can be rough,' the old man cried, as he steered the weathered craft to the right ward of the two torrents, and took them dead up the center.
They progressed steadily against a current that suggested they try elsewhere. The piney woods sealed them off from any evidence of life except the pines themselves, low, heavy with gum and tar of some sort.
They were turpentine trees, bled in the fall for the chemical that oozed out of them. The weather remained malignant, even as the sun burned the last of the fog away, and if pines had ever reminded Sam of Northern glades as in Wisconsin or Minnesota, these were not such pines. They seemed to form two walls and a long, winding corridor, a madman's dream of nothingness, while above the sun scalded them and no wind dared stir.
Sam glanced at his watch, feeling the itch of sweat and bites all over his skin. He even thought about loosening his tie, but he'd fought the Battle of the Bulge in a tie, so that was really only the last thing one did before accepting death.
It was by now nearly 11:00 a.m. 'How much further?'
'Be patient, Mister. You cannot rush the river. The current's agin' us, she don't want us going there. Be glad you gots planks beneath to keep your bottom from what's under, yes sir.'
And so it went, seemingly endless, until at last, unbidden, as if out of a dream, Thebes revealed itself on a far shore.
He wondered: Am I in Africa?
For what he beheld was something out of a dream of a lost place, a place so benighted and run-down it seemed to have no right to exist in the country he knew to be America. Not even the meanest Negro shanty towns of Arkansas seemed so raw and sad. It was a collection of slatternly dogtrot cabins, tar-paper roofs scorching in the hot sun, low, rotting warehouses off to a side by docks, mud streets that were too congealed to sustain wheels of any sort, much less automobiles. The ruins of what must have been a sawmill stood isolated a bit farther down the river, most walls gone, nothing but decaying frame and un turning wheel left.
It seemed somehow to have devolved, to have gone backward in time.
'She ain't much. Why you want to come all this way for this place, I don't know. Merde. Do you know? Merde, shit you say in English. It's shit. A town of shit. Who could live in such a place?'
As the old man's boat maneuvered toward dockage, Sam thought the place was as abandoned as the last town, where the wild dogs had killed the little girls. But at the same time, he felt the presence of eyes.
