I called out for Leonard, but the wind took my voice and carried it away and all I got out of my yelling was a hoarse throat.
And then my feet were touching ground. Not well, but they were touching. I pushed on toward some reeds, and after what seemed like enough time for the Big Bang to have happened and all the species on the planet to have developed and moved on out to the stars, I made it to some waving grass and reeds and stumbled into that, went down a few times, came up with a mouthful of muddy water. As I tromped through, barely able to stand, hardly able to see, I came across a long four-foot-wide fragment of our boat. On his back in the water, hanging on to the fragment, was a big black guy.
“Leonard,” I said.
He let go of the board and sat up in the water and said, “Well, Ahab, that boat trip was sure a good idea.”
I checked for my .38. I still had it.
Leonard checked for his automatic. Still there. Well, at least we had that going for us. We were in a position to add to the worst nature of man and the final downfall of the world. By God, we had our guns.
Leonard stood up slowly and looked around. The minnow bucket had floated up into the tall grass and was hung there. He focused on it, said, “I guess the cookies and the Dr Pepper didn’t make it.”
“Missing in action,” I said.
“Now that’s a blow,” Leonard said.
Slogging along the shoreline through the rain, we saw a boathouse and made our way over there. It was wide open and we went inside. There was a boat floating in a stall and there was fishing tackle in the boat, and on one wall were some croaker sacks for hunting and some nasty-looking towels that were probably used to wipe the boat down after fishing. There were four rain slickers on nails. A fairly large dead fish floated belly-up near the boat and the waves washed at it until it went under the flooring, out of sight.
We used the towels to dry off and to dry our weapons, hoping they’d still shoot. The towels made us dry enough, but they left us smelling like fish. We sat on the edge of the boathouse dock with the heavy damp towels over our shoulders and looked out at the boat that was docked there. There were paddles in the bottom of the boat and no motor. The boat was bouncing up and down and we could see the lake from where we sat, and the rain was furious. Everything was gray. It was as if the sky and the lake had joined together.
I pulled my cell phone out of my pants pocket, shook the water out of it. It was still working, but there wasn’t any signal, like Jim Bob had said. I put it away.
“I saw a dead alligator,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I think I saw him too,” Leonard said.
“Was he big and dark?”
“Yep.”
“That was him, all right.”
“Say he was dead?”
“Very.”
“Thank goodness for small favors.”
We waited for the downpour to slack off, but it didn’t. Freezing, we toweled off again and took a couple of slickers off the wall and put them on and went to where we had come in and stood in the open doorway and looked out at the rain.
“I don’t want to,” Leonard said.
“Me neither,” I said.
“But, alas …” Leonard said, and we went out into the rain.
39
I had no idea where we had ended up, but my guess was near where we wanted to be. But that didn’t change the fact that near was not the same as being there, and every tree looked pretty much like the other, and I didn’t see any trails. We wandered around in the rain, damp inside our slickers but better off now with the hoods pulled up and the cold rain not coming right down on us.
Ending up again where the boat had come apart, or at least where part of it had been in the tall grass with Leonard, we again saw the foam minnow bucket caught up in the grass, and floating in the water where it hadn’t been before, pushed up in the shallows, was our six-pack of Dr Pepper.
Leonard waded out in the water and got the six-pack, carried it by its plastic holder onto the shore. He set it down on the ground and pulled one of the Dr Peppers off one of the plastic rings, pulled the tab, and nearly drank the whole thing with one big gulp.
He peeled off another and handed it to me, and then got another for himself. We both drank. When he was finished he dropped the can on the ground with the other one and said, “I’m tough enough today to litter.”
Even under the circumstances, anal as I am about such things, I wanted to find a trash can but figured it might be best in this situation to be able to draw the .38 more than be an environmentalist and tote an empty can around. Reluctantly, we left the three remaining Dr Peppers there and wandered around like a couple of geese.
I saw a narrow trail and pointed it out, and Leonard said, “Who the hell knows? Let’s try it.”
The trail went up a steep hill, through some pines. The pines were close together and the soil there was sandy and had turned the color of milk-and-flour gravy. The rain ran down the hill and into ruts that tires had made, and the whole thing was just wide enough for a car. After we had walked halfway up the hill, the trees got thick enough to cut the rain a bit, and finally we broke out at the top of a hill into a clearing, and there was a line of little cabins that made our tourist court digs look like the Taj Mahal. There was one cabin that wasn’t in a row, and it was a little off to the side. I presumed that would belong to the owner, the fellow Annie had called The Crippled Fellow With A Funny Haircut.
There was a car in front of one of the cabins. It was the only car present. It was a black Escalade.
