Lost in the River of Grass Page 14

Thunder rumbles again. I turn to see how close the storm is. Earlier in the day one had rained itself out before reaching us. But now an isolated curtain of rain, with blue sky on either side, is moving toward us. I can smell it coming.

  I turn back and glance at Andy’s ankle. The snake’s head is up, and its ebony tongue is sliding in and out. I touch my cheek where the corn snake’s red tongue had brushed my face.

  The muscles in Andy’s jaw work. His left calf muscle quivers. “I think it smells Teapot,” he whispers.

  I look down. Teapot is working the zipper-pull back and forth through her bill. I start to push her back into the pack. Why hadn’t I thought to use Teapot to lure the snake away before now? “How fast can that snake move?”

  “Very fast, but it will move slowly on the hunt. It’s the strike that’s like lightning, but it can only strike its body length . . . I think.”

  “How long is that?” Seemed a logical question.

  “Not very. Two feet, maybe.”

  I’m about six feet from Andy. “If I put the pack a little closer, do you think it will let go of you and come after Teapot?”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “I guess we’ll find out.” I push Teapot’s head back inside the pack and close the zipper, then lean over as far as I can and put the pack an arm’s length closer to Andy— three feet from the snake.

  “When it loosens enough,” he says, “I’ll kick it off. If it lets go before I can do that, grab the pack and get away.”

  The moccasin is so obviously toxic that I can’t imagine not recognizing the difference between it and the benign brown water snake before now. Its pupils are thin slits like a cat’s eye in sunlight. It doesn’t have the corn snake’s small delicate head. This snake’s head is shaped like an arrowhead, with a scaly plate like a hood over the eyes. There are large swellings where I guess the poison is stored, and pits behind its nostrils.

  The snake’s coils have loosened, and its head is up, tongue sliding in and out.

  “Can you see it?”

  “Not too good,” he says.

  “Don’t move. It has the tip of its tail coiled around your shoelace.”

  “Tell me when.”

  I hold my breath.

  Andy tightens his right calf muscle in preparation.

  I blink and take a deep breath.

  Teapot scratches to get out, peeping.

  The snake—for a split second—undoes its tail and lies still across the toe of Andy’s tennis shoe.

  “Now!”

  Andy kicks so hard that the snake sails out over the canal, twisting in midair, trying to strike, its white mouth open, fangs extended. It splashes into the water nearly to the far bank of the canal.

  Andy just stands there, looking at where the snake hit the water.

  I leap up, fists punching the air. “You rock.” I grab and hug him, but when I start to let go, he clings to me; his head is bowed and pressing hard against mine—so hard it hurts. It isn’t a hug of joy, quick and full of relief. It’s clingy, holding on out of some other emotion. “We shouldn’t cross right here, should we?” I say softly. “There’s one mad moccasin over there somewhere.” I pat his back. Still he holds on. “Andy, are you okay?”

  He nods against my shoulder, then lets me go, but doesn’t move.

  “You owe Teapot an apology for all the bad things you said about her, you know?”

  He doesn’t smile.

  “It’s okay to have been scared. I would have been too terrified to hold still.”

  “I thought the levee was on this side of the canal,” he says.

  “Oh,” I’m confused. “Does it make a difference?”

  He shrugs but continues to look at the other side with an odd expression on his face.

  18

  I watch the water for a minute. When Andy squares his shoulders and starts for the edge, I say, “The current’s running north to south.”

  “So?”

  “Why don’t we walk north a little ways so that snake is headed one direction and we’re headed in the other?”

  Andy turns and marches off. I follow, baffled by the way he’s acting.

  We’ve gone maybe fifty feet when we come to a nice wide break in the cattails. Andy trudges right past it.

  “What’s wrong with right here?”

  He turns and comes back. “Yeah. This is as good as any.”

  “What is the matter with you? You act like you are disappointed that we’ve finally made it.”

  “Nothing.” He stands looking at the other side as if it were miles away.

  There’s a berm on our side of the canal, a ledge no higher than the edge of a swimming pool. I let Teapot out, then sit at the water’s edge and take my boots off. I leave Andy’s socks on. I don’t want to look at the condition my feet are in.

  “I’ll swim across with Teapot, then you throw our shoes over, okay?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Andy?” I touch his arm.

  “Yeah.” His skin twitches under my touch.

  I drop my hand. “That way if you miss, I can swim out and get them.”

  No answer.

  There’s a pile of limestone boulders that disappear like a staircase into the dark canal waters. When I step off the berm onto the top of the closest one, even through Andy’s socks, it feels like I’m standing in broken glass. I dive into the canal and swim slowly, using the breaststroke so that Teapot can keep up.

  The canal is about the same width as the University of Miami’s Aquatic Center pool. I learned to swim there and am not even winded when I reach the other side. I heave myself out onto the embankment, then turn and grin at Andy. “Piece of cake. Now let’s see that pitching arm.”

  Without smiling, he throws the first boot across. It lands in the water at my feet. I only have to lean forward. “Wow. What a shot,” I say as the next one comes sailing across and passes so close to my head that I have to duck. It lands against the steep side of the levee and slides down to stop beside my right hip. “When we get out of here, I’m taking you to a carnival so you can win me a teddy bear.”

  No reaction.

  I can’t figure out what’s bugging him, but it’s beginning to piss me off. He stands staring at the water, maybe to make sure the snake hasn’t decided to swim upstream, too. Teapot is safely nestled beside my right ankle, so I flop back against the smashed seashell slope and close my eyes.

  A minute or two passes before I hear Andy enter the water. There’s splashing, then silence. I roll my head to one side and open my eyes. Only his right hand, holding the pack, sticks out of the water. I sit up. “Andy!”

  He’s going down. I dive in, swim out to him, and grab the backpack, thinking—stupidly, since there’s only the camera, the knife and an empty Gatorade bottle in it—that the weight has pulled him under. I start for the levee with it, but glance back in time to see his hand, in a cascade of air bubbles, slide beneath the surface.

  In the water safety course I took years ago, I learned that when someone is drowning, you have to be careful that they don’t latch on and drag you down, too. I dive after him. The water is clear, but dark brown. I can only see the white skin of his outstretched palms as he slips toward the bottom. I push the backpack into them. His right hand clamps closed on a strap. Holding the other strap, I kick with all my might against the drag of his weight and pull for the surface with my other arm. It already feels as if my chest will explode, but if I let go, I’ll never find him again. There is sunlight above, total darkness below.

  The stale air in my lungs puffs out my cheeks and tries to seep through my lips. I swallow it back into my lungs. If I let the air out, I’ll have no choice—either drown with Andy or release him. Bright circles of light explode behind my eyes. I can’t make it, my mind screams as the last of my air ruptures from my nose in a silver bubble. A moment later, my foot strikes one of the limestone boulders piled against the berm side of the canal. I take a step up, grab the backpack strap with both hand
s and pull as hard as I can, then tip my head back. My face breaks the surface and I gulp air, a great huge lungful.

  The backpack goes slack in my hands. He’s slipped off.

  I leave the pack on the berm, suck in as much air as I can hold, and dive after him. I can see him sliding down like a shadow against the yellowy limestone. My hand and arm look like rust in the tannin-stained water as I reach for him and miss. The pressure makes it feel like my eardrums will burst. I ignore the pain and kick harder. This time I make a grab for his hair, catch a fistful, turn, and drag him toward the surface. With my hands in his armpits, I back up the side of the boulder, tugging and pulling until his head is out of the water.

  I hold him there for a second, gasping for air myself.

  The sky opens up and it begins to pour.

  “Andy?” His head lolls to the side.

  Panic rises like bile. He isn’t breathing. “Andy!” I shriek.

  I grab his collar, lift, and pull him higher onto the boulder. I feel his shirt tearing as I drag him— like cheese across a grater—up the rock. With an adrenaline-charged burst of strength, I jerk him out of the canal and onto the berm. Grabbing what’s left of his belt, I pull him around so that his feet are higher than his head, then roll him over on his stomach, straddle his waist and start pushing on his scraped and bleeding back. Water gushes from his mouth. I push again and again until no more water comes out, then I roll him over, tilt his head back, pinch his nose closed, and put my mouth over his. I blow and see his chest rise. I place two fingers against his throat to feel for the pulse in his neck. To my relief, I find one. I blow more air into his lungs, feel it exit smelling like canal water, then breathe for him again. He suddenly begins to cough and gulp air.

  I sit back on my haunches and cover my face with my hands.

  He struggles to sit up, choking, his face scarlet. I pound his back, fury rising in me until I’m hitting him as hard as I can. “Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t swim?”

  He tries to say something, but his voice is raspy and raw. He begins to cough again, so he grabs my wrists and holds them pinched together in his fist. I pull free and throw my arms around him. Teapot waddles up and nestles in beside us.

  We sit for a while in the pouring rain with our arms around each other until our breathing is normal again.

  “I think you should walk out and bring help back for me,” Andy says.

  “Andy, I can tow you across the canal. I could have the first time if you’d just told me. What’s so frigging macho about drowning?”

  “I watched how you did it. It looked easy enough.”

  “How can you live surrounded by all this water and never learn to swim?”

  “It’s shallow. Besides, there was never anybody to teach me.”

  We sit a little longer.

  “We need to go, Andy.” The rain has stopped.

  “I can’t, Sarah.”

  “I’ll tow you. It’s easy. I learned it in a water safety class. I’ll just hook you under the chin and swim us across.”

  He shakes his head. “You go ahead over and we’ll just parallel each other.”

  “I have to get my feet out of this water.” I pull a sock off.

  Andy glances at my foot, then quickly looks away.

  I’d known it was bad, but it’s worse than I imagined. Most of the top layer of skin on my foot is still in the sock. I pull off the other one, then turn them both inside out, lean over the edge of the berm, and dip them in the water. Pieces of skin float off. In few seconds, minnows, hiding in the shallows among the reeds, gather in a feeding frenzy around the strips of flesh. Teapot, curious about the minnows, waddles to the edge, settles into the water, and begins to eat my skin, too.

  I wrinkle my nose. “I guess I should be glad it’s not going to waste.”

  …

  Nothing I say persuades Andy to get back into the water, so Teapot and I swim across alone, back to where I’d left my boots. Once there, I take my socks off again, wring them out, and put them back on. Then, clutching willow branches to keep from slipping, I climb the steep side to the flat top of the levee.

  What I’d wished for—to see cars whizzing past on a distant Tamiami Trail—isn’t to be. There’s only the glaringly white levee stretching endlessly before me, with a humid mist rising as the sun dries the hard-packed surface.

  I’d hoped that once on the dry ground, I’d be able to let my feet dry out, but my soles are too raw and tender to walk barefoot across the sharp seashells and gravel. They are too raw, even, for the rubber boots without the damp socks. With Teapot in my bandana, it feels like I’m crossing hot coals. I bend my knees to absorb some of the pain, but it doesn’t help.

  I’m so focused on the pain of walking that I hear the rattled warning before I see the snake, even though it lies just two yards ahead of me in the middle of the levee. It coils and rings its tail again.

  “There’s a little rattlesnake right in front of me,” I call to Andy. He’s walking nearly parallel to me, but in the knee-deep water on the saw-grass prairie side of the canal.

  “Find a stick and poke it out of the way.”

  I look around. “There’s nothing like that here.”

  “Can’t you walk around him?”

  “He’s right in the middle.”

  “The levee’s gotta be ten feet wide.”

  “That’s not wide enough.”

  There’s probably a four-foot clearance on either side of the snake, but it looks like four inches to me. Teapot squirms in the bandana, wanting out since I’m not moving. Andy is wearing the backpack, which would have been a safer place to carry her.

  “I need the pack—for Teapot.”

  Andy looks across at me. “I can’t throw it that far.”

  “Well, try.” I back away from the snake, then cross to the edge of the levee.

  Andy takes it off, swings his arm in a couple of wide circles . . . “Wait!” I scream as he launches the pack. I watch it soar across the water to land among the willows about three feet shy of where I’m standing.

  “The camera,” he says. “I forgot the camera.”

  “So did I. I hope the willows cushioned it.”

  Holding onto branches as I go, I lower myself down the slope until I can reach the pack, snag it, and climb back up. I unzip the bottom compartment and take out the Leica. The body seems okay, but the barrel of the lens is badly dented. I’m so sorry, Daddy.

  “Did it break?” Andy’s standing with his hands on his hips.

  “The lens doesn’t look too good.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  The snake hasn’t moved except to relax its coils, which it tightens again when it sees me, or smells me or whatever it does.

  I put Teapot in the top of the pack, then break off a willow branch, but it’s too wispy and not nearly long enough. Most of the shells and gravel are ground too fine, but at the edges of the levee there are a few larger chunks. I find one that isn’t too big to hurt the snake if I actually hit it, throw it, and miss completely.

  “That does it.” I scoop up a handful of shells, sand, and gravel and rain that down on the snake.

  It lifts its head and rings its tail. I throw another fistful. The snake strikes, fangs exposed.

  Though it’s too far away to actually bite me, I leap back when it strikes. The pain that shoots up both my legs drops me to my knees. I fall forward, catch myself with my hands, then scramble backwards away from where the snake was when I fell. I stop only when I realize that it has disappeared into the willows at the side of the levee.

  I look at Andy, ready to let him know I’m all right, only to find he’s walked on ahead.

  “I’m okay,” I shout.

  My knees are covered with a powdery white dust, through which I’m bleeding from a dozen cuts. The heels of my hands look the same, cut, scraped, and bloody. I sit picking shell fragments out of my knees and crying.

  Andy must have glanced ba
ck and seen me sitting there because he shouts, “Are you okay?”

  “I fell.” I wonder what he would have done if the snake had bitten me. It wasn’t like he could swim over or run for help.

  I finally get to my feet and start my limpy, gimpy way along the levee. I’ve only gone a dozen yards or so when I see something glinting in the sun. I shield my eyes. Whatever it is flicks like someone sending a signal, not like the wings of the airplanes when they bank to turn. Besides, it’s closer than any of the planes, and it’s coming from a tree island.

  Andy’s ahead of me again. He turns when I shout his name.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I see something in those trees over there.”

  Whatever it is isn’t moving. The flashing is caused by the wind moving tree branches.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s shiny.”

  He looks where I’m pointing, then shrugs. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Well, I’m higher than you are.”

  He loses interest and trudges on.

  I begin to move again, too, but the light keeps drawing my eye. “Do they ever use tin for the roofs of the cabins?”

  Andy’s plodding along, but when I say that his head snaps up. “It’s a camp,” he shouts. “Where? Where is it?”

  I point a little south and west of him.

  “Come on.” He begins to run.

  “Wait for me,” I call.

  He’s running, plowing the air with his elbows held like Teapot’s nubby wings, twisting from side to side with each step.

  “Andy!” I shout. “Don’t leave me—” I say to myself.

  When I can no longer tell he’s a human, I sit down. I’ll wait for him to come back or for the searchers to find me. My T-shirt is yellow. Surely, they’ll be able to see me when they get a little closer. I take the backpack off, hug it to my chest, and lie back. If I think school is a lonely place, look at me now. Tears run from my eyes into my ears.

  19

  I don’t know how long I lie there before I begin to hear Teapot peeping. “Shhh.” I pat the pack. It’s hot to the touch. “Oh, my God.” I sit up. The dark maroon pack has been soaking up the sun and cooking Teapot. When I unzip the top, she’s lying with her neck stretched out and her beak open. Her sides heave.