“You’ll have to be very brave, kid,” the Bird Man had said when we rounded the first blue bend, gesturing at all the humming greenery that ringed our stern. He’d made this same emptiness seem so exciting, like a field for real magic. I bit my lip and I thought about how good it had been that first day, back when I was separated from Ossie by twelve hours, tops. Just one meridian, really, one sunless wedge of time. Who knew how many hours separated us now?
One excellent luckiness was the moon. It was full and enormous, and without it, I doubt I could have made it even half a mile through the swamp that night. Water the color of hard cider slid between the trees and everywhere I looked I saw schools of tiny red and black fishes. I’d never seen fish like this before (although they looked very ordinary, it’s not as if they had coals for eyes or anything) and I didn’t know any of their names. Linty flowers covered the floating twigs. The air was smelling saltier to me; perhaps I was nearing the Gulf.
By this point I had given my sister up. Not for dead — I don’t mean that — but I’d given up on the idea that I was going to find and save her. I had failed her so completely that my mind would not permit me to think about it. I kept sticking my finger into the bib pocket where my red Seth had been, wiggling it around the way you do when you’ve misplaced your house keys and you keep checking the same four places with compulsive hopefulness. Where was she, my alligator? The Bird Man had killed her, I thought, kicking a rock and unearthing a squeal of ants. Even if she’d gotten away from him the prognostications were grim — alligators with unusual pigmentation can’t camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That’s why you don’t see albino Seths in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man, but during the first few years of a hatchling’s life it has to worry about predation by pretty much everything: wading birds, buzzards, garfish, raccoons, snakes, the cannibal kings in our Pit.
I myself felt naked without her, as if I’d been wearing an armor composed of one scale and I’d thrown it away.
Ossie, I’d think in spasms, I’m coming, but these promises were like mental hiccups. Just thoughts, mindnoises, because I didn’t feel strong enough to voice a promise. Sometimes I’d stumble on the rocky glade and not really want to get up, and then I figured out how to use the promises like poles or crampons. Just the name “Ossie” could hook me up.
The moon moved so slowly through the clouds above me, high and white, with a frightening grace, and I wondered how we’d never recognized the terror of the moon before, this big thing that you couldn’t alter or ever reach. If I lived I was going to alert my brother and my sister to this interesting feature of the moon. Kiwi used to come running for us beneath the Perseid shower: “You are missing it, everybody!” he’d flail evangelically. “The end has already begun!”
Something caught at my shoelace, and when I looked down I was startled to find the dirty bowl of my face reflected on the water. My eyes rippled up at me. I didn’t look anything like an alligator wrestler, I didn’t even feel so much like a girl anymore.
Right at daybreak I started drinking the water. I’d stood sweating in the dome all night, until my thoughts shriveled up and I was just one feeling at a time: COLD or SORE or HUNGRY. All the cypress trunks were sopping up the limited sun and blushing against a gray sky. I crawled forward and bent like an animal over my own dumbstruck face, washing and cupping my hands in the shallows between the roots. The stick-and-needle-flickered brown water floated around the trees, and I drank and drank. This particular cypress dome was huge: I’d covered at least a mile of it and still it pulsed outward, the goliath trees ceding to six-foot dwarf cypress stumps at the perimeter. Skylight poured through the trees and reappeared in the cup of my hands as I crouched in the water. I drank in hot, foul gulps. One day without water should have been easy to tolerate; the torture part was thinking about the future of my thirst. It would grow and grow and do what with me? Thirst was bad, but the idea of night falling on me out here a second time was worse.
I have to get to higher ground, I decided.
“Think!” I commanded my brain. But my brain was a roaring liquid between my eardrums—“thinking” felt like trying to get a river to flex. This I guessed was panic. Pounding everywhere, timpani to bridge a waterfall. A headache throbbed from my temples to my earlobes. I’d never felt this way during a wrestling show; I’d never realized how much the tourists were helping me, just by holding down those chairs. Fear onstage was a thrilling feeling — often it was the prelude to a Bigtree victory. Fear out here was a new species. The sky above me got torn to small crystals by the cypress leaves and as the sun rose it went blue and deeper; some creature shouted kee-ow, kee-ow in the middle distance. I did and did not want to be found by the Bird Man. You couldn’t fool yourself into thinking a discovery like that would be a rescue. But who else knew to look for me, or where? I peered into the thick brush and got angry at the future: it seemed there was not one good thing left to hope for.
Okay-okay-okay, my mind kept chattering. Why was my mind feasting on the worst pictures? I saw the dredge hung up on rocks and my sister’s body inside it, as quiet as a sleeper, her purple skirt draped over the railing. I saw the red Seth floating belly-up on a nameless slough. Every time I heard a stick snap I knew it was the Bird Man. Fear kept making itself inside me. Certain feelings kept making themselves inside me, the way that blood rises to a tiny bead. But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.
I did more mental math. I recited primes, which my brother had taught me were the strong, indivisible numbers. 1, 3, 7, 11 … I counted, wrestling off a shoe. I stood on my left leg in the dark water and struggled to pull the soaking shoelace out of its tabs. I was alone, but maybe not for long.
Because the vast floodplain from Okeechobee flows in a southwesterly direction, you can use the swamp water as a compass. I undid the laces from my left sneaker and tied them to a cypress knee. Water in the limestone depression of a dome only appears to be stagnant, you just have to watch it to give the lie to that. After five minutes of storky balancing on one leg, I had my answer. Bingo! The shoelace pointed southwest, toward the Gulf. I relaced. I had a strong itch to run, which would have been a very stupid relief to seek — already I’d found one sinkhole with my stick. A scarlet king snake slithered over a stump, its fantastic licorice colors glowing against the blacky green resurrection ferns.
Although the underworld had been a big hoax, the black raptors continued to map the sky. The buzzards from Ohio had migrated here, too. Turning circles, as docile as party ponies around a mainland carousel. Then they fell, one by one, like little black razors, into the paurotis palms. And it was hard to see this and not to think of carnage. A line of birds falling in a row. Red clouds massed in the southeast and it looked like the sky was getting its stitches out after an operation.