Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [57]
Around here it’s known as “the hatch.” It sounds like a car in the distance driving toward you with squeaking brakes. You know the high-pitched sound that makes your skin crawl? The hatch occurs regularly here because this is where the mosquitoes lay their eggs. Up here, where the water is slow-moving and the still pools are many, the larvae are safe. Then, whenever they’ve done whatever it is that they do, they hatch, sending tens of thousands of mosquitoes into the air at once where they swarm and make that high-pitched sound that only a mosquito makes. Normally, you can’t hear it until they’re buzzing around your ear, but fifty thousand is another thing entirely. You can hear that nearly forty yards off. The swarming is an indication that they are hungry, and mosquitoes really only eat one thing. Abbie heard it, too. “Are we near a highway?” I shook my head while considering our fastest escape. “Then, what’s that sound?”
About then, they reached us. Most of my skin and hair turned black. I grabbed Abbie, put her into the wheelbarrow and started running down the bluff. Every inhale brought bugs down my throat. Abbie was screaming and slapping herself, while the bugs flew into my nose, my ears, my eyes and bit me through my clothes or on bare skin. Within seconds, my skin and face were on fire. We barreled down the hill, up through the long grass, across the open area next to the house and into what would become the garage. Most of the mosquitoes had flown away by the time we reached the house, even fewer followed us in, but there was still a cloud in the house hovering around me. I lifted her out, climbed the steps into the house and when we reached the den, I set her down and rubbed and patted her legs while she slapped my shoulders and face. She slapped me six or eight times in the face, each slap growing harder each time. Abbie hated mosquitoes. She was about to slap me again when I grabbed her hand. “Honey…you’re not helping.” Blood was dripping out of the corner of my mouth where she’d hit me. “Oh…oops.” That’s when she started laughing. I brushed the few remaining bugs off her right leg and sat down. Since those guys on the river threw most everything we had into the fire, I didn’t have any antihistamine, which meant that I was in trouble if Abbie started to swell up. I searched her arms, legs, neck and face for any sign of rising welts, but found nothing. Not a single one. I, on the other hand, was swelling and starting to look like somebody had shoved an airhose up my nose and inflated my face. I took my shirt off and Abbie started to count the red bumps from my waist up. She quit when she got to a hundred. Finally, she sat back and chewed on a fingernail. “Oh, Doss. Does that hurt? It looks painful. Is that painful?”
Her adrenaline was pumping and she was talking fast. I closed my eyes and laid down on the concrete floor with enough bug juice flowing through my veins to kill a small animal. I sneezed, clearing my nose of the last of them. “No, honey…” My lips were growing numb and fat. “It feels good.”
“Well, I’ve always wanted to know what you looked like as a baby. Now I know.” She stared at her arms and legs, marveling at the absence of bites. “I guess mosquitoes can sense the difference.”
“Difference in what?”
“Between blood that has been poisoned…and blood that hasn’t.”
MY SWEET LITTLE REUNION was over. My face was on fire and both my left ear and left eye were nearly swollen shut. The tops of my hands and fingers were so fat that the paddle felt twice as thick as it had an hour ago. If I could have come out of my skin, I would have. I packed up the canoe, shoved off and shook my head.
While the view downriver had changed, the framework had not. The trees—swaying with Spanish moss—had spiraled taller and leaned in further across the river, but the bend still swept right in a slow easy arc disappearing some four