At a dizzying three miles per hour.
Over water black as ink, flowing at a tenth our speed.
Water smooth as old bourbon, but not nearly so sweet smelling.
Luckily, I'd taken my motion-sickness pills.
I was dressed in the only sensible clothing for the Bayou: a head-to-toe silk khaki jumpsuit pulled over my own clothes, rubber boots and gloves, topped off by a safari hat fitted with a mesh beekeeper's veil. Wrists and ankles of the suit were elastic, worn over the sleeves and legs.
They told me the suit was sprayed with a harmless repellent, which had sounded like overkill at the time. The insects couldn't get to me, I reasoned, so what was the point?
Five minutes into the boat ride I decided, with a touch of awe, that without the repellent the bugs might actually pick me up and carry me off, to devour at their leisure.
Though it was night in the Bayou, it was far from pitch black. We frequently passed homes set on stilts, or built on flat-bottomed boat hulls. Most had kerosene lamps hanging outside the porch and a softer light spilling from the windows. There was a lamp on a pole at the bow of the pirogue, as well. All these light sources were swarming with clouds of flying insects. Moths and lacewings and dragonflies—"skeeter hawks," to Beaudreaux—and beetles and lightning bugs and June bugs and gnats and I don't know what all.
And mosquitoes. Enough mosquitoes to suck you dry in ten seconds.
I hate bugs.
I'd been hearing what sounded like flapping wings since shortly after the trip began. About halfway to Polly's something whooshed by my head, inches away. I ducked, and Beaudreaux laughed. Beaudreaux, who somehow was enduring this trip dressed in denim overalls and a short-sleeved chambray shirt, no hat, no gloves.
"Bat," he told me. "We got many t'ousan bat in hya. We got de froo' bat, de Mex'can bat, de pug-nose bat, de leaf-nose bat, de red bat, de gray bat, and de renard volant, de flyin' fox, en anglais." At least I think that's what he said. He spoke with an odd accent, a patois of broken English and the occasional French word, and he called himself a "Cajun." Pronounced kay-jun.
He kept up a running commentary throughout the trip, pointing to things I mostly didn't see. We threaded our way through gnarled cypress with long gray beards of moss. I never had a chance to ask him a question, but if I had, it would have been "How do you keep from being eaten alive?" I later learned the answer, which was that residents got a small gene alteration that caused their skin to exude an insect repellent.
According to Beaudreaux there were seventeen species of bat in the Bayou, and they worked in two shifts separated by the two brief light periods known as dawn and dusk. How they got the plants to grow and all the insects to breed with so little light I never found out. I'm sure they could fill you in at the visitors' center. No doubt it's a fascinating story, but keep it to yourself, all right?
Other than the close encounter with the bat, the trip proceeded without incident until I heard a splash and felt the boat rock as if we'd passed the wake of another boat. Beaudreaux stood up and used a long pole to poke at something in the water. He shouted at it, poked again, then sat down and grinned at me.
"Gator," he said.
I hate alligators. Bats, too, now that I think of it.
Polly's shack stood three feet above the water on cypress pilings. A ramp led down to a floating dock where another pirogue was tied up. This one sported a bright red paint job and looked much more seaworthy than Beaudreaux's. Maybe Polly could give me a ride back to town.
The dock shifted under me as I stepped from the boat and I almost fell in the water. Beaudreaux grabbed my arm, probably saving me from being stripped to the bone in ten seconds by ravenous piranha. I heard a screen door creak and then slam shut, and a hoarse female voice.
"Hey, Beaudreaux! Where dat bucket ecrevisses you gon' brought me?"
"You get you crawfish, ma p'tit, jus' soon as I cotched 'em." He laughed, and motored quietly into the darkness. I went up the ramp to a screened-in porch, where the woman was holding the door for me. She was gray-haired and stooped, wearing a long gingham dress with a daisy print. She waved gnarled hands around me as I hurried in the door.
"Vite, mon cher! Vite! Don't let the skeeters in."
The inner door was closed. Sort of an air lock for mosquitoes, I realized. I let myself through into a small, rustic room with a small fire blazing in the hearth, knitted rugs on the wood floor. The light came from two dim floor lamps with shades dripping tassels in lavender and gold and yellow. Hideous things, by themselves, but not bad in this context. I looked around for Polly, and the old lady spoke from behind me.
"I thought you'd never get here, cher," she said.
I don't know who I had thought she was. Being in a disney, I had probably pegged her as an authentic. Disneys are one of the places you can go to see "old" people, folks who look like humans did when age was pretty much synonymous with decay. Almost all of these are only old on the surface, with wrinkled sagging skin and gray hair and perhaps a "colorful" age-related bit of ghastliness like missing teeth, eyeglasses, arthritis. They limped, they doddered and tottered and feigned deafness, but under the epidermis they were as hale and hearty as I am.
To see "real" aging you generally had to go to a fundamentalist enclave of one type or another. They seldom visited the public corridors; they kept to themselves like the Amish.
Polly had joined such a sect shortly before her departure from Sparky and His Gang. I can't even remember the name; there are scores of them, all with different beliefs. Some go so far as to reject all medical treatment of any sort, and you hear of people dying horribly in their thirties and forties, even in their teens, though the authorities sometimes stepped in to stop that.
Polly's group was more moderate. They didn't reject all medical care, just that group of therapies usually called "long life." "Eternal life" by the optimists, though no one really believes a human can live for even a million years. But it's true we don't seem to be anywhere near the outer limits, and there are people well over two hundred years old now, thriving.
It was a sobering thought, though, to look at her and realize she was only a year older than I.
On the other hand, for a natural centenarian she was in pretty good shape. It's all relative, I guess.
"Don't ask how I'm doing," she said. "It would take all day. Never get old folks started on their aches and pains."
"All right, Polly," I said. "And I won't tell you how well you look."
She laughed, and I smiled, and suddenly I realized how good it was to see her again. I went to her and we embraced. She had shrunk several inches.
"Don't squeeze too hard, cher," she whispered. She didn't need to tell me that; she was brittle and dry. I could feel every bone.
I don't want to get into details of her appearance. The elderly share a suite of atrocities as they are battered by the tides of age. They erode in much the same way. Much of it has always seemed to me to be a struggle by the skeleton, the symbol of death, to emerge from its soft shell. The fat is blasted away, the skin grows loose, sags, becomes translucent. Soon you can see the skull beneath the skin. There's a morbid little computer program you can buy. Feed somebody's picture into it and it will age that person fifty, sixty, a hundred years. If you'd like to see Polly as I saw her, find a picture of her from the old show. She hasn't allowed herself to be photographed since then.
"Come on in, Sparky, mon ami." She took my hand and led me into a small kitchen. It looked like the only other room in the house. Her hand was cool and the joints were swollen.