Swamp Sister Read online

  Swamp Sister

  Robert Edmond Alter

  Robert Edmond Alter

  Swamp Sister

  prologue

  The cypresses stood up from the marshy prairies. Straight up from the surface covering of water lettuce and the runty elderberry shrubs, until their tall mossdraped arms flickered silver in the sun against the vast spread of turquoise sky, like the walls and roof of a great greenhouse, covering and protecting in its sullen warm shadows a myriad of dank growth and crawling activity.

  But to the pilot sitting behind the puttering motor, it was like a giant spider web awaiting a crippled fly.

  The motor of the Piper Cub had been acting like a cranky child ever since the plane had come over the swamp region, and there wasn't a thing the pilot could do about it. He looked at the instrument panel – the glass dials that were the visible nerve ends of the ship, the score pad of her metabolism. Everything was quivering.

  And in that instant the motor konked out completely. He looked at the panel again, like a magician searching through his bag of tricks. Then he looked out the window and watched the swamp coming up at him fast. Too fast.

  And too close. _Can't jump_. He snapped the switch and the plane went into a glide.

  Then he felt a hand on his back and even though he'd been expecting it, he started.

  "What is it?" an urgent, already-frightened voice insisted in his ear. "Why has the motor stopped?"

  The pilot shook his head, watching the green roof of the swamp.

  "Master rod froze, I guess. I dunno. Shut up, huh? I got enough grief."

  The hand beat an impatient tattoo on his leather-covered shoulder.

  "Well, but what are you going to do about it? I mean, my God, aren't you going to correct the trouble? Is it bad?"

  The pilot had to grin even though it hurt his cheeks.

  "Want me to step out on the nose cone with my wrench?" he asked, then forgot about the frightened man.

  He wondered why he hadn't used his head when he was a kid. Why he hadn't become a deep-sea diver, or a mountarn dynamiter, or a secret agent. Something soft where I get it fast. But not this.

  As his mind leaped along idiotically, trying desperately to shove back the cold fear with tough-boy talk, he was busy with the wheel, trying to correct his glide, grimly looking at the unstable landscape for a clearing.

  If you're unlucky you don't die right away. You get to kick around inside the wreck for a while, with your clothes and skin on fire and your hip bones shoved up into your stomach. Why wasn't there a clearing?

  He felt very badly, sensed that this was one time he wasn't going to walk away. And the prescience, he knew, sprang from the vast rugged swamp. It was endless, stretched as far as the eye could see.

  What if they did get down in one piece? How would they get out? Who could find them? But I'll take it! I'll take the goddam alligators and water moccasins and quicksand. I'll take a month of it. No, a year – if that'll make You happy. God, I'll take it!

  And it annoyed him too, that he had to die with a louse like Hartog, the payroll agent sitting on the jump seat behind him. He knew it was a silly thing to think about, but couldn't help it. His mind was like that. A man shouldn't have to die with a guy he didn't like or respect. Him and his goddam floozies he's gonna have in Jacksonville – was gonna have, Willy boy. Was.

  The Piper was planing steeply now, too steep. But maybe there would be a lake beyond the cypress barrier ahead. Well, maybe beyond the next one. God, let there be something open beyond the next one.

  But there wasn't. The cypress, cabbage palm, sycamores reached up, fluttering, nodding in a zephyr, as though in accord with the inevitable, coming to them like a speeding gift from God.

  Hartog, leaning forward, the brief case with the small fortune in it clutched tightly in his damp hands, was watching the swamp also. His eyes, bulged and staring, were incongruous with the narrow shape of his head and face. He was feeling what Willy, the pilot, was feeling, perhaps differently, but feeling it. For the first time in his life he was facing something that was totally inexorable.

  "How -" The first word gagged in his throat, but he kept at it doggedly. "- How bad will it be if we hit?"

  "Like an egg against a brick wall."

  Hartog's lids stretched over his swollen eyes. God. He'd been in an auto accident once when the car had been doing fifty. Everyone said it was a miracle he lived through it. Two others hadn't. And that had cost him three painful months in the hospital under morphine and Demerol. Like an egg – Did that mean he wouldn't be able to meet Milly in Jacksonville? Then a half-conscious stab of contrition touched him. He shouldn't think of Mily at a time like this. There was Doris, his wife, for a moment his irrational brain confused the two. He was saying Doris' name, but seeing Milly's long nyloned legs – the nylons he'd brought her on the last trip, with the black toes and heels and black seam running up to black tops.

  No, no! He raged in backwash of helplessness, fear and shame. Doris – oh God, Doris. I do love you. I -.

  His eyes darted to the window, saw the earth quite close, vague and turtle-green, scampering underneath.

  A new, very personal thought struck him and he cried out against it. My God! I'm only thirty-seven! You can't take all that away from me!

  Exactly what the "all that" was-whether the fifteen years of complacent domesticity with Doris his wife, or the motel-room orgies with Mily and her long nyloned legs- he never had a chance to explain to God.

  The pilot screamed LOOKOUT! and seemed to fly forward. Beyond the pilot's moving black shape was nothing but a whirling green blur. Hartog felt himself rise to meet the pilot, speeding toward the green windshield. It was the longest trip he ever made.

  part one

  1

  Shad Hark had left the river early that morning, striking a north-east course along a shadowy, still, cypressbordered slough. He was standing aft in his small skiff, stobbing the dark stagnant water with the stobpole. Overhead, Spanish moss hung from the branches, long and hairy, fluttering.

  "Like a crowd of simple old men, rubbing their beards and a-giggling over a dirty story," he said.

  If the coon and otter hunting turned against him, he'd get himself a long pole and go into the moss-collecting business. The harvest he could sell to furniture manufacturers for stuffing sofas and chairs. It wasn't lucrative but would keep body and soul together.

  A ball-bodied, stork-legged limpkin, with a white and black neck like a charred log, went limp-hop-limp-hop out on a petrified log and sabered its long bill into the shallows to snap up a hunchbacked snail. With a bob of its head it placed the future meal in a crack along the upper side of the log and looked up to blink at Shad. It let out a loud, false cry.

  Shad grinned good-naturedly. "Git on, you old phony. Go at to frighten some coloured mammy. I know you."

  The limpkin, sensing no danger from the distant man, turned its attention back to the snail with bright-eyed patience. Slowly the snail relaxed and opened its trap door. Instantly the long bill flashed down and nipped the living meat, shook it loose from its house.

  Shad worked the skiff around a low tussock of water grass and cursed when he saw a dense cloud of mosquitoes form in agitation. They came at him persistently, their tinny threads of sound humming in his ears. He did some slapping, damaging his ears and cheeks more than the mosquitoes, then got out of there.

  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 baar-oom of a bull gator came as a thundering warning and the hummock trembled. Shad hesitated, holding back on the pole, smelling the familiar musky odour which is peculiar to the gator's excretory fluid. "Gator ground," he said angrily.

  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 new.

 
Two bumps like the knots on a floating log rose above the surface and gave the man in the skiff a malignant stare. Still stalling, one hand on the pole, the other resting on his carbine, Shad murmured a warning. "You son-o-bitch. Got me a gun here. You come at me and I'll kindly blow a hole through your flat head."

  Shad didn't want to get anything started that he couldn't handle. But he wanted to land on the hummock and scale that cypress; maybe get a sight on the direction the Money Plane had taken after it had struck the tree. Other gators, little ones, were nosing around in the water now. But it was the big fellow with the mean eyes that Shad watched with wary suspicion. The gator opened its great jaws, trailing long riffles of silver water, and hissed. Shad stared at the large crooked teeth and the beefy lump of tongue and for a sickening moment vividly saw himself caught in that trap. A tingling sensation of dread needled up the back of his legs and petered out in his buttocks.

  The bull gator closed its jaws with a steel-spring snap, lowered its head from sight. Shad felt it was just as well. He removed his hand from the carbine, straightened up, and looked up at the ragged cypress.

  There couldn't be any doubt that the round something in the fork was a landing wheel from the Money Plane. He could see the hub metal now and the tyre tread. "It shore didn't just roll in here on its own and up that tree," he said. "Money Plane done put it there, and that's a frozen fact."

  The cypress trunk was snapped high on the north and low on the south side, so he figured the Money Plane had been heading south in its glide. He looked across the slough, trying to spot further evidence of a crash path. But it was hopeless. A bog land of lush maiden cane and dead stumps covered five acres of slough, and beyond that was a thicket of catciaws, hurrahs and pin-downs; farther on stood the tangled, moss-hung, vine-draped wall of cypress, sycamore and titi. All right, but it couldn't do any harm to explore south. He started stobbing across the slough into a prairie of water grass and log litter.