He stobbed easily, taking his time, giving everything that his eyes, ears, nose and mouth could fetch his full observation. He could enjoy it more that way, and also it was a safety measure. The swamp was a poor place to become careless and start balling the jack like a young dog first time out. He spotted a long, scut-backed gator sunning itself on the right-hand bank. Grinning, he shouted-'YAH!' He hated them.
Right now the gator was all startled action. Its flat reptile head came up, wide-eyed, and it scrabbled, unwieldy on its unproportioned legs, down the bank like a rough log coming down a chute and lumbered into the water. Shad watched the scutellated humpback sink, and then heard the air around him go mad for a moment as limpkins, bitterns, ibises, jorees and ducks took off screaming and flapping. The silence settled down again like a sick man lowering himself in bed and stayed there.
Shad hauled his pole inboard and set it athwart, letting the skiff drift smoothly into a floating bed of golden- heart. He pulled a bandana from his hip pocket and took a slow, pressured rub at his face with it.
Then he sat down on the thwart and looking up and around at the cypress wall, fished a cigarette from his shirt. He snapped a match with his thumbnail and held the flame to the tailor-made.
The prow of the drifting skiff pared back a cluster of surface bonnets and went thung against a cypress root, setting a climbing cat squirrel into a nervous chatter of protest. Shad relaxed, feeling lulled and peaceful, smoking. He thought about the Money Plane.
Four years now since the airplane went highballing overhead, crashed, and was swallowed on the spot by the swamp. Shad had been sixteen then, and his brother Holly had still been alive. They had gone out together, along with all the other swamp folk, to search for the wrecked plane. None of them had any luck, and after two- three days of it they all said 'to hell with it,' and returned home. But they didn't know then just how important that lost airplane was. It was Mr. Ferris, the insurance investigator from New York, who told them about the money.
He was a tall, rhythm-stepped man, with dark skin topped by a salt-and-pepper crewcut. His eyes sat far in the shadows under the cleft of his brow, the most penetrating eyes Shad had ever seen. Mr. Ferris looked at something-a man's face, a house, the dress on a girl-and Shad swore he saw right through it.
Over eighty-thousand dollars in a locked brief case had been on the airplane, is what Mr. Ferris told them. A payroll being flown to a factory in Jacksonville.
'Help me find it,' he said to the group of booted, denimclad swamp men as they stood in embarrassed, thoughtful silence, eyeing him with cautious respect.
'Help me find it,' he'd said, standing in the wagon grove facing Sutt's Store, the swamp behind him. He had been wearing a charcoal-grey suit with black shoes so new you could still see the polish through the dust and his strange, sad eyes picked out each one of them in slow turn. 'My company underwrote that payroll, you understand? And I'm authorized to guarantee ten per cent of the money to the man, or men, who finds it for me. I'll put that in writing'
Then he waited, and they waited-waited for him to ask them again. Not out of bullheadedness, but because they didn't understand the protocol of city manners, and this damn Yankee in the sharp city suit, with the gentle city face and talk, made them uncertain and shy.
'What do you say?' he urged finally, quietly.
They said yes. They said they shore God would find it for him. But they didn't. They tried; they went hungry, without sleep, got lost trying – but they didn't find the money. And after a month, they gave up. After a month Mr. Ferris was ready to give up. He shook hands with those who had helped him, with those he had grown to know and respect, and said, 'I'm leaving my telephone number with Sutt, and with the Culvers. If you hear of anything, find anything, let me know. Reverse the charges. Thank you very much.' And then he went away and they saw him no more.
Four years. The big search had ended then, but it was only the beginning for the little search parties-the private ones, a threesome, a couple, a one-man search. Where at you going, Link? That's my nevermind, I reckon. Going at the Money Plane, eh? Mebbe. If'n you find her-give me a call. I'll be obliged to help you tote hit out. In a pig's eye you will!
Ten per cent of eighty thousand. That was something to swamp men; some had never held or seen more than ten dollars at a time. But one hundred per cent of eighty thousand, that was something else.
Shad's older brother, Holly, had been one of the first. A taciturn cliff-shouldered youth with wide-apart eyes and a Negroid nose, who as a boy had spent his time wandering around the fringe of the swamp, kicking up rocks, pawing behind bull grass, rooting up dead leaves, looking for something. He had made many tentative passes at the heart of the swamp, but always came out fast-his eyes haunted, bewildered, but enchanted.
'Got me a sack of coin to git!' he'd called to Shad on the morning he had shoved off in his skiff. 'Got me a car to buy, and a red silk shirt, and a yaller-haired gal! See you!' He was one of the first to go, and he was the first not to come back.
There were others. The Dawes brothers who had their skiff smashed from under them by a bull gator trying to get at their dog. The brothers made the sandbank. The dog didn't. They were two weeks clawing their way back to civilization. They returned with strange, staring eyes in gaunt sunken faces, and they never went into the swamp again.
There was Ben Smiley. Old Dad Plume; Tony Wegg and Al Howell found Ben spread-eagled on a mudbank, swollen and ghastly, his skin black and blue. 'Cottonmouthbit,' the men said. They didn't have the heart to bring him back for his wife and two daughters to see.
And there was George Tusca. He was going to find him that old Money Plane or know the reason why. Yes he was. It was Shad that found him, when he was eighteen and looking for Holly, found him hanging by the neck from a tupelo tree. It hadn't been an accident. George's clothes were mute testimony to the time he'd had for himself alone and lost in the hurrah and titi and hoop bushes. Shad buried him in an old Indian mound. It was another sight no one would ever want to see. The birds had been at the suicide's eyes, and his head was nothing but a soggy maggot bag.
2
Shad tossed his cigarette butt overboard and watched it take a quarter-turn in a sudden surface ripple. It was his last tailor-made. He looked up, suddenly sensing his aloneness. The swamp was still, brooding. It made him feel like an intruder in a rehearsal for eternity.
'The thing not to go and do,' he said, as though passing on information to another not-quite-so-intelligent him, 'is fer to lose your skiff. Don't lose your skiff and you won't lose your head. Amen.'
A gliding shadow came across the water, reached the skiff and made Shad's eyes flicker. He looked high and watched a pure white egret drift against the turquoise sky, heading for its rookery with a bill filled with wiggly things for its young. The bird cleared a stunted, dead cypress and banked for the north.
Shad looked at the cypress, then fell to studying it. The tree actually wasn't stunted; it had been broken, sheared off at the top. A short dead limb stood out from the trunk near the top, and something round was caught in its fork. Shad's interest was alerted. He came to his feet, rocking the skiff slightly.
Something round, with a black stick coming out from the centre -or was it a stick? A strut maybe? A fever of excitement tidal-waved through him. He felt like a coloured boy finding a fat wallet in the woods. 'Hi, God,' he breathed. 'A round something that goes for a wheel, strut and all. Shore as they's little apples, that's a wheel off'n the Money Plane!'
He slapped his hands together pistol-crack sharp, and a flock of wood duck hit the air as though they'd been thrown against it and splattered there. Shad pulled out his pole and shoved off toward the tree.
The broken cypress stood alone on a hummock island, a scaffolding of matted roots and silt, riddled with holes and teeming with life. The small animals Shad didn't care about, but the large was another matter. The long rumbling
Two – three – four long tapering objects slued through the maiden cane and slid with a surface crash into the water. Those were the young gators, the ones that retreated to the water at the sight or sound of anything
