Alligator Bayou - Donna Jo Napoli [21]
We pass a rice paddy and more small houses and outbuildings. Then nothing. No buildings. No noise. Just our joking around and the birds and the insects.
We fall silent.
I’m thinking ahead to giant jaws with giant teeth. The bears and the cottonmouths and the snapping turtles, they might all be a joke. But the ’gator’s for real.
Ben’s carrying an unlit lantern with one hand and a food satchel slung over his shoulder with the other. The lantern makes a slight squeak when it swings. Soon we’re all walking in time to that squeak. Walking and walking. I want to ask how much farther it is, but I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining.
“No one lives out here,” I say.
“Floods just about every year.” Charles waves his arm. “Sometimes two or three times in a season. Who can live in that?”
Slowly we walk through thorns and bushes and trees. I stop. “What are those?”
“Canebrakes,” says Charles.
Plants taller than a house stand close together, choking out everything else. Their tops ruffle like feathers in the breeze. They rise thick as a wall and run in both directions, blocking passage for miles.
Rock and Charles pull long, wide knives out of leather sheaths on their backs. Ben sneers at me. “No bush knife?” I don’t know what I’ve done to make him dislike me. “Here. This way y’all can be useful, at least.” He hands me the lantern and Cirone the food satchel.
Cirone and I each already carry a bag of food. Pizza. Thick crusts with cheese, bitter greens, raisins, and garlic. Carlo learned how to make it when he lived in New Orleans, right near a man from Naples. I can’t wait to see their faces when they taste it. That will teach them not to call our food “dago food.”
So now both our hands are full as we follow the boys, who whack a path through the canes. You can’t see more than ten steps ahead. The cut-off canes slap back at us, and their sharp ends poke hard.
And then the canes end, and it’s like we’ve passed through a door into a magic world of gauze-covered, graceful shapes. The air is hazy and heavy with water. I feel like I’ve entered someone’s dream.
“Swamp.” Rock moves close. “Cypress.”
He points out the red gums, white oaks, glossy palmettos. But it’s the cypress my eyes go back to. They rise from the black ooze like giants with big lumpy knees.
“Anyone see it?” Charles looks up.
My eyes follow his. “See what?”
“The bear,” says Ben, and he laughs, but everyone keeps looking up.
We walk along this side of the canebrakes through the vines and creepers that hang from the trees, trailing all the way to the water. A bark comes from the top of a tree up ahead. A black squirrel races down the trunk and jumps on something white—old antlers. He sharpens his teeth on them, and gives another harsh bark as we pass.
Something leaps from the brush, plops into the water, and disappears. “Swamp rabbit,” says Charles. “Good eating.”
A fat, furry creature with a striped tail goes by. “’Coon,” says Rock.
Well, I knew that. I’ve seen raccoon coats and hats in Tallulah.
“Follow him?” asks Charles.
“Yeah,” says Ben.
We follow that waddling raccoon through the undergrowth to a muddy flat. The raccoon climbs onto a heap of mashed grasses and sets to digging. We stand completely still. The afternoon has passed, and as the sunlight fades, I strain to see.
The raccoon reaches down through the grasses and pulls up a white oval. An egg? He holds it in both paws. It’s bigger than a chicken egg. He bites and rips. Thick yellow gook runs down his paws. He wipes his snout with his tongue and buries it in the egg. He eats another, and another. Then he waddles off.
We walk to the pile of grasses and Ben pulls them aside. “Good one. Must have been a big ’gator.”
The nest is a shallow hole brimming with eggs. Maybe a hundred. Is the mother coming back? I look around.
“Anybody bring a empty sack?” asks Charles.