Jason felt his heart stagger into a quicker tempo. These forlorn signs of a once-human presence—the weird old tree-house, the abandoned power poles—were enough to kindle his hope. Suddenly he couldn’t leave Retired and Gone Fishin’ quick enough. He wanted to leap to the shore and kick out, run down the embankment as fast as his legs would carry him. Or swarm up the tree to the strange old dwelling, stand on the roof, look for rescue as if from the crow’s nest of a sailing ship.
“I’ll check out the treehouse,” Jason said.
“See if someone’s home first,” Nick said. He hailed the treehouse several times. No answer came. Nick maneuvered the boat to the cottonwood, touched it once, and Jason sprang for the homemade ladder.
“Watch out for snakes,” Nick called. “In floods they climb high.” The thought of snakes didn’t deter Jason. He practically ran up the tree, came to the platform where the treehouse rested. A weathered door of hammered-together planks, four feet high, was closed with a simple hook-and-eye. Jason hoisted himself onto the platform and unhooked the door. A strange smell, rotted vegetation and moldy fur, floated out of the old structure, and for the first time Jason hesitated. Then, slowly, he pushed the door open.
The hinges weren’t metal, but oiled leather. Jason blinked as he gazed into the darkness of the interior. The small room seemed to be full of old junk. He crawled partway through the door and tried to make sense of what he saw.
There were homemade nets, a rusty tackle box opened to reveal old wooden fishing lures, some hand-carved duck decoys. Animal pelts and snakeskins were tacked up on the plank walls, along with pictures from a calendar, Beautiful Black Women 1992. Scattered on the floor were metal objects that Jason eventually decided were animal traps.
There was a narrow pathway through the clutter to the shack’s other room, which had been built on a higher level. Jason crawled along the path to the upper room, where he found a stained old mattress with the cotton ticking sticking out of the seams, some plastic plates, cracked porcelain mugs, cooking tins for boiling water. They all looked as if they’d been scavenged from a rubbish heap. In one corner, on a little stand, were some small plastic statues of Catholic saints beneath a tacked-up card of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin was a strange contrast to the calendar girls, who occupied most of the rest of the wall. The place smelled musty and unused. Jason guessed that no one had been in this place for months, if not years.
Jason backed out of the treehouse and stood on the narrow platform, craning to see through the trees. The mist was thicker here, but he could just make out, through a curtain of leaves, the embankment behind the stand of trees; and he could see that the top of the embankment was paved with a two-lane asphalt road.
He called out this news on the way down the ladder. Nick nudged the bass boat up to the cottonwood, and Jason jumped across.
“Anything in the treehouse?”
“Fishing gear. Animal traps. A few plates and pots.” He looked at Arlette as he recalled the provocative smiles of Beautiful Black Women 1992, and looked away quickly.
Manon looked at Nick. “Should we take the pots? They’d come in handy if we find something to cook.”
“They were pieces of junk,” Jason said, “but they were better than what we’ve got.” Nick considered their course of action. “Let’s check the road first. If we can’t find anything there we can come back.”
They motored along the line of cottonwoods, looking for a break in the vegetation, and found it soon enough: the embankment veered toward them, through the trees, but there it was washed out. The broken asphalt lay on the tumbledown slopes of the embankment as if trying to extend the roadway under water.
The other end of the washed-out road was lost in the mist. Nick drove the boat onto the grassy slope of the embankment. Jason slung the Astroscan over his shoulder, jumped off the boat, and helped Arlette and Manon disembark. Then he tied the boat to a sapling growing on the verge of the line of cottonwoods, Nick stepped off the boat, and they all climbed to the top of the road. The blacktop stretched forward into the mist. It had not been in good condition before the earthquakes, and the quakes had buckled it in several places. On the far side of the embankment were still more flood waters, lying dark and featureless as far as the mist permitted them to see.
“That’s somebody’s field,” Manon said. “There’s no brush, like in the floodway. Somewhere around here there are people. All we have to do is find them.”
They walked a few hundred feet along the road. Jason and Arlette fell back and let the adults walk in front of them. Jason felt his arm brush against Arlette’s as they walked, and he reached out and took her hand. Her warm fingers curled around his. He looked at her, and they shared a smile. The embankment continued to stretch before them, marked only by the downed power lines. A road sign came slowly out of the mist, and they paused before it.
“Well,” Nick said, “we may be getting somewhere after all.”
THIRTY-TWO
The earthquake that was felt at Natchez on the 16th of December, has been severely felt above and below the mouth of the Ohio—we may expect detailed accounts of the damages soon. Travelers who have descended the river since, generally agree that a succession of shocks were felt for six days; that the river Mississippi was much agitated; that it frequently rose 3 and 4 feet, and fell again immediately; and that whole islands and parts of islands in the river sunk.
“You came from Rails Bluff?” the deputy said. “The place that’s on the news?” Jason saw his own surprise reflected on Nick’s face. “On the news?” Nick repeated.
“The Army flew in there and took the place over. The radio hasn’t been talking about much else.” Jason and the others looked at each other. If they had stayed in Brother Frankland’s camp, they might be living safely and happily on government bounty.
“Was there any shooting?” Nick asked.
“Some, I guess. They needed the Army and all.”
Well, Jason thought, maybe it was smart to have left anyway.
“Let’s get these people to the camp,” said the other deputy, the one without a uniform. It was a strange, eerie world that Jason and his party had walked through, the mist floating overhead and graying the world in all directions, the floodway waters on one side and the flooded field on the other. When the police car rolled slowly out of the whiteness ahead it seemed to emerge from nothing at all, as if the mist itself had formed itself into the car, into the ghostlike occupants. As soon as the car pulled to a stop in front of them and the deputies swung out onto the road, Nick ran up to the deputies and told them he needed to get to a phone to speak with the authorities about the camp they’d just escaped from in Arkansas.
“Rails Bluff, right?” the uniformed deputy said.
This deputy, obese and wearing a khaki uniform, seemed relaxed and talkative, but his partner radiated hostility. The other man was young, in his early twenties, and wore a mixture of military uniform and civilian dress, with his deputy’s star pinned to a hunter’s camouflage vest. He wore wraparound shades and glared through them at the four refugees, arms folded on his chest.