Swamp Sister

ice and they were spilling into her eyes, and the fiddler's fingers were cakewalking furiously over the violin's neck, and the bow was leaping and squeaking and all the bright dresses were flashing by and twirling away with the stars and her dress was torn and that's the last thought she had.

Sam stood agape, watching her tilt slowly and stiffly away from the tree, leaning right at him, her eyes wide open and staring at his, fified with a glassy awe. He leaped aside with a gasp as she toppled past him. And then she was down, all of her and all at once.

She lay in a great opaque swath of moonlight.

'Sam, Sam,' Jort whispered.

Sam's head jerked. He looked at Jort.

'Jort – Jorty, is – is she – she ain't -'

'Shet up.' Jort squatted down and looked at the pale, still girl. 'Dead as a mule-kicked tad,' he muttered.

Sam was drying his hands at his sides, wagging them up and down witlessly. 'No – no – no, Jorty! All I done was to try to stop her squawking. I didn't hardly – I only -'

Jort got up and came at him fast, grabbing one pipe-stem arm to give it a shake. 'Stop that ruckus! We ain't got time fer you to have a case a hop-about fits. She's cold dead and that's that.'

Sam went limp, dropped to his knees by the dead girl, his left arm still cocked grotesquely in Jort's hand. 'Oh, God, oh my, Jorty – I didn't mean to do her. I didn't, Jorty. She was so young and soft and -'

Jort gave the scrawny arm another shake. 'Will you stop yipping about her? We got us bigger fish to fry.'

'What'll they do to me, Jorty? What're they goan do to me?'

'Neck-swing you, if you keep a-going like a chicken with a gator egg up her box. Now git away from that, Sam. Sam – you hear me? We got things to do.'

Sam looked up and caught Jort's pants leg with his free hand. 'Jorty – you goan help me, Jorty? You goan stand by me?'

'Well, I ain't got no choice, and me one of them what you call 'ems -'complice. Now here's what we're a- doing Sam. I'm going to pick her up and tote her, while you swing on ahead and see do the woods be clean. We'll tote her down to my skiff.'

Sam's head was bobbing like a marionette. 'Yeah, yeah. And then what do us do, Jorty? And then what?'

'Why then we haul-tail out'n the swamp.'

Sam felt a shiver tremble through him. He hated the swamp at anytime; but he nodded. 'Yeah – and weight her down in a slough.'

Jort looked disgusted. 'No, we don't do no such fool thing. You think I want the first butt-nosed gaton that comes along to haul her back up again? No, we takes her way out to a sink-hole I know of. Hit's big and hit's just as soft as fresh cow pie with quicksand. And what goes in there don't never come up again.'

Sam looked down at the dead girl. He didn't hanker any going out into that old swamp at night, but if it would save him from being neck-tied with hemp, he'd cold go at it like he'd been born there. Already he was feeling better The claw crazy bobcat that was inside his chest was starting to relax a little. Everything would come out clean as long as Jort handled it.

Jort was staring at Sam, and all of a sudden he started to grin.

'You gaddam wood-colted little idjut!' he whispered. And then he began to laugh, and Sam went panicky, hiss ing, 'What? What's wrong with you? What you meaning?'

He swung Sam up and around, and Sam felt as helpless as a checker piece being moved to a new position on the board. Jort gave him a flat-of-the-hand prod in the back. 'Git to snooping,' he ordered.

Sam went off like a deaf mute lost in a fog, his equilibrium running down a hill that wasn't there. He squinted at the darkness as though he didn't recognize his surroundings, but all he was really seeing was that new dress – pale white in the moonlight, pushed up and crumpled. genesis

In the Silurian ending was the swamp.

The sea made it and it was everywhere. The earth buckled, mountains reached up, land as soggy and porous as wet sponges spread out, and the sea drained back to its ocean basin and never returned. The weeds and plants, abandoned in this abrupt manner, cast about desperately for substance, and settled for the next best, the in-between of land and sea, the marsh; and the world was warm and damp and green, and the swamp stretched from Greenland to Antarctica.

One period followed another and each in turn brought something new-the anthropods, the amphibians, and the plants learned how to develop seeds and breed them on the wind, and this reproduction created land food. The Penmian days came in with a slam, with the Appalachians and the Urals, and inland waters receded; ferns, rushes and plants died and covered the earth in huge rotting clumps, swamps drew in on themselves and glaciers crawled across the land, and everywhere the swamps were doomed; but not yet, not for a few million more years.

The Indians came and felt the soggy earth and it trembled, and they were superstitious and gave it a name, and when they went away they left a legend; and the white men followed and found the grave mounds, found the legends and the superstitions, and saw where it was written that the Great Spirit had sent his son down to earth to teach the red men right from wrong. And they said, 'Why, look a-here – them Injuns had them a Jesus.' But they didn't really believe it, because God made the swamp and He wasn't an Indian, and went away scoffing and spread some superstitions themselves.

And the swamp continued to not and to wait for the end, and everything was as it had been in the beginning.

part two 16

Shad left the lake in the dark brittle hours before dawn and stobbed his way upriver, working close along the high silt banks, and when the sun winked over the far away pines and cypresses it found him approaching the true swamp.

The river narrowed, the banks fell away into a greyish black morass, and the tupelo and scrub oak were replaced by titi and laurels. The cypresses towered up from their swollen boles that sat on wet, spindly legs and fluttered their grey mossbeards. They stood rank-and-file as far as the eye could see, and everywhere cast their green reflection across the face of the mirror-tarnished slough. The poisonous breath of the swamp waited like an invisible barrier – as sharp and commanding as a wet hog pen on a rainy day.

He worked the skiff up an inlet, heading for Breakneck, poling quietly with a touch of caution, like a cross- eyed man trying to find his way in a delicate house of mirrors, uneasy about disturbing the sleeping giant. But it wasn't really sleeping. It was more, he decided, like a mute monster gaping at him, absently wondering why he was foolish enough to deliberately enter its trap.

He entered a long, narrow, dead-stifi lake and drifted for a bit, letting the pole drag. The sad cypresses reached such extraordinary heights, and the jungled vegetation entwined with such fierce and ardent vitality that the sun could only find the swamp floor in white shafts. It lay like great slabs of light among the shadows.

This was Breakneck, and it always reminded Shad of a great deserted cathedral.

Evil he'd heard the swamp called, by those who had been in it and those who had not, and they were right. But it had always struck him that it was a purely beautiful form of evil.

At the north end of the lake was a tongue of land, giving the place its name, and beyond, a network of tributaries formed. The slough nearest the west bank was the one he wanted – the water course that would lead him back to the Money Plane. To save time he shipped the pole, sat on the thwart and used his paddle, and began cutting across the center of the lake.

A swallow-tail kite was tracing aerial patterns in the sky. It held a struggling lizard in its talons and was