Lost in the River of Grass

  “It doesn’t matter.” He shakes his head. “Gimme your boots.”

  I sit on the pile of cattails and pull them off.

  “What’d you do there?” Andy pointed to the raw, red marks in almost a complete circle around my calves.

  “It’s where the boots rub.”

  “Looks painful.”

  “Not too,” I say. In truth, it hurts a lot, but I’m not going to complain about another thing. I’m too ashamed of what I called him. I, of all people, know what that feels like.

  Andy pinches the top of a boot together and starts to make a cut.

  “What are you doing?”

  “They have to be short enough for the water in to equal the water out.”

  Using the butcher knife, Andy makes a long slit from the top to just above the ankles of both boots. He then tries to cut the tops off with the scissors, but they break apart without making a dent. My brother’s face, as he hesitated to hand over his knife, pops into my mind.

  I hold first one then the other by the bottom and the top while Andy uses the butcher knife to cut through until what remains are boots only as tall as my old hi-top Converse All-Stars.

  “Now try ’em.”

  I pull on the cold, clammy remains and step off into the water. “Almost perfect,” I lie. I take a couple of steps; they slap loosely against my anklebones, so loose that, if we get into any mud at all, I’ll have to curl my toes to keep them on.

  “They can’t completely empty when you’re in the water, but they should be a lot lighter.”

  “They are. Much.” I touch his arm. “Thanks. And I really am sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Sarah. I am a redneck.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “A hick. A bumpkin.”

  “I know the definition. I mean why red neck?”

  He shrugs. “Who cares?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, care later. Walk now.”

  The water gets deeper and the cattails denser, so dense that I have to elbow my way through the stand. The farther into them we get, the more suffocated I feel. The wet, soft strands of rotting cattails sliding across my bare legs make me feel like I’m wading through eels. My eyes snap from side to side, tracking every movement. I’m so consumed with watching what’s happening around me that I run right into Andy, who’s stopped suddenly. “What?” I peek around him.

  We’re at the edge of a clearing. There are maybe five yards of open water totally surrounded by cattails. For some reason, it makes me think of the eye of a hurricane. That peaceful, quiet, sunny circle of blue sky, with killer winds whirling just beyond.

  “This is a gator hole,” he says. “Let me go first.”

  I almost laugh, but it couldn’t have gotten past the lump of panic in my throat. “Okay,” I whisper.

  He doesn’t even look at me or get that the suggestion that he might not be first in is funny. Andy begins by slapping the water and kicking his feet. For a moment there’s no movement, then suddenly something huge and dark shoots out of the depths of the pond. Mud boils up as it plows through the cattails, flattening a trail as it goes.

  I whirl around and try to break through the wall of cattails that have closed behind us, but a step or two in and I feel surrounded. I’m gasping for air. I spin and cover my mouth with my hands to keep a scream from escaping. I see Andy, with the backpack raised over his head, moving deeper and deeper into the black water until he has to tilt his head up to keep his nose and mouth above the surface. Just when I think he might have to go completely under, he begins to move up the far side.

  “It will be over your head,” he says when he turns.

  He didn’t see my panicky attempt to escape, so I try to act calm. “Okay,” I say, but the quiver in my voice must have given me away.

  “You all right?”

  “Uh huh.” I take Teapot out of the sling and put her in the water. The gator, which is about ten or eleven feet long, has turned and lies about ten yards away on a pad of flattened cattails, watching me. My heart bangs in my chest as I tuck my shirttail into my shorts and start across. When I’m in waist-deep, I slip off my boots and put them down the front of my shirt. With a final look at the gator, I swim across. Teapot, sensing my panic, passes me and skids to a stop beside Andy.

  On the other side, I put my boots back on. “How come you didn’t swim across?”

  He shrugs. “Why swim when you can walk?”

  We slog another few yards, then suddenly break out of the cattails and are back in a shallow saw-grass prairie. Andy flops down and lies back. “We can’t rest long. It will be dark in a couple of hours.” He closes his eyes. “You did great in there.”

  “Thanks.” I lie with my head on his stomach. Teapot climbs onto my chest, shakes her stub of a tail to fling the water off, and nestles down. We’re like a little family.

  It seems as if only seconds pass before Andy pats my shoulder. “We’d better hit it.”

  I sit up. “I’m dying of thirst.”

  “Your lips are cracked. Don’t you have lipstick or something?”

  “In the pack.”

  Andy hands the pack over. I find my lip gloss in the top part, but am reminded by the weight of the bag, that there is Gatorade left. I take it out. “Can’t we drink this?”

  “You can have a sip or two, but we have to conserve it until I can find someplace to dig a scratch well.”

  “What’s that?” I take a sip, hold it in my mouth, and play my tongue through it before swallowing. I hope it will make me feel as if I’ve had more. I hand the bottle to Andy.

  “A scratch well is a well you dig in the mud.”

  “I don’t think I want to drink anything from a mud hole.”

  “We’ll see how thirsty you get.”

  “I’m pretty thirsty right now.”

  He takes about a teaspoon of the Gatorade, swishes it in his mouth, and hands the bottle back to me. “One more sip.”

  A different sound from anything I’ve heard until now gets his attention. He rotates his head like an owl trying to locate where it’s coming from. Whatever it is sounds little, but while he’s distracted, I take a big slug, screw the lid on, and put the bottle back in the pack.

  Andy grabs my arm, puts his finger to his lips, and whispers, “Don’t make a sound.”

  9

  “What?” I whisper after a minute of not moving and barely breathing.

  Andy’s got his head cocked like a dog—listening. He puts his lips to my ear. “Didn’t you hear that?”

  “I heard a kind of peeping sound before.” I listen for a moment; then, just as I shake my head, it starts again.

  “That.” He jabs a finger at the wall of cattails off to our left.

  “It sounds like a puppy crying.”

  “Good description, wrong baby. There’s an alligator’s nest in there, and the babies are hatching. That sound is them calling to their mother to help them dig out of the mound.” He looks left, right, and behind us. “There’s nothing that will defend a nest like a mother alligator, and I don’t want to get in her way.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  “Keep your pants on. We could head off in the wrong direction and run right into her.”

  We stand where we are for a few minutes until—in the absolutely still air—I see the cattails begin to sway. “Here she comes,” Andy whispers.

  Just watching the cattails move gives me gooseflesh. There’s no way to tell if she’s headed toward us or to her nest which, judging from the little barking sound, is awfully close, but between us and her.

  “Ouch.” Andy pries my hand off his arm and shows me the half-moon dents my nails have made. “She’s probably the co-owner of that gator hole.”

  “You mean she isn’t the one who shot out of there?”

  “Look for yourself.” He nods to the right.

  We’d created a gap in the cattails where we broke through. It’s not a very wide break, just the width of us
walking single file. From where we are I can see back down the trail we made, and I’m not seeing anything and say so.

  “See those cattails moving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If it was a breeze, they’d be listing the same direction.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are they?”

  “No . . .” They’re being parted; something is coming along the trail we made.

  “Do the fathers guard the nest, too? What if we’re surrounded?”

  “We’re not surrounded. And the fathers could care less.”

  It’s “couldn’t care less,” I think to myself, though I’m not at all sure why, under the circumstances, grammar has become a concern of mine.

  The little barks increase, and we hear the scrape of the mother gator’s claw against the mound.

  “Come on,” Andy says. “But no splashing. Pick your feet up.”

  Like that’s easy.

  We move straight out from the sound of the babies calling, then make a large, slow arc toward an old pond-apple tree on our left. It isn’t very tall, but it’s bushy, with thick sturdy limbs.

  When we’ve put enough distance between us and the nest, we make a splashy dash for the tree. Andy climbs up first and pulls me up after him. The tree has lots of leafless, twiggy branches that cut and scratch my bare legs.

  “There she is. Can you see her?”

  I spot the volcano-shaped nest first. Leading away from it is a wide, muddy path of flattened cattails that opens to the water at the far end. The mother alligator is walking away from the nest and us, across the packed-down cattails. She reaches open water, glides in, and propels herself away with her massive tail sweeping back and forth like a thick wet noodle. “Where do you think she’s going?”

  Andy shrugs and starts to climb down.

  “Wait. I want to see a baby hatch.”

  The mound is flat on top and reminds me of a swan’s nest I saw once in a picture, only the gator’s nest is bigger, a lot bigger, maybe seven feet across and three feet high. “How did she get all that stuff here?”

  “I’ve never seen them do it, but a hunting buddy of Dad’s watched one build a nest,” he whispers. “It took days. She bites off the cattails and carries them here in her mouth. She even brings in branches and limbs and mouthfuls of mud. The mound heats up like a compost heap. I read somewhere that how hot it gets decides whether boy or girl gators are born.”

  “It’s the same with sea turtles,” I say and want to cry. “My dad . . .” Tears brim in my eyes. I swallow and start again. “When I was eight, Dad volunteered us with a sea turtle rescue group. Every Saturday that summer, he’d wake me before dawn and we’d drive to the beach at Crandon Park to dig up sea turtles’ nests. The females come ashore at night to lay their eggs.”

  He glances at me. “How’d you find the nests?”

  “We looked for the flattened mark in the sand the mother turtle’s belly scraped as she dragged herself from her nest back to the water. We’d follow the trail, then dig up the eggs.”

  “Why bother?”

  “Loggerheads are endangered. Moving the nest someplace safe gave the babies a better chance to survive. That’s why we had to get there ahead of the beach-cleaning tractors, which drive up and down, scooping up the trash people left and the seaweed that washed ashore at high tide.” I’m a little behind Andy in the tree, so he doesn’t see the tears that slide down my face as I remember walking the beach, holding Dad’s hand. “The eggs are shaped like ping pong-balls and rubbery . . .” I wipe my eyes with my T-shirt sleeve. “There were eighty or ninety, sometimes as many as a hundred. Dad would lift each one out like it was made of crystal, and I’d arrange them in a bucket. When we had all the eggs, he’d measure how deep the hole was, then we carried them to a fenced enclosure, dug a hole the same depth, and reburied them.”

  “When did they hatch?”

  “In August. We’d get there before dawn each morning to check for hatchlings, and if we found a nest hatching we’d gather them up and carry them to the water. We got there one morning and found the gulls and frigate birds swooping on the babies that had hatched before dawn and crawled through the chain-link fence. It was awful. Dad gathered as many as he could carry rolled in the hem of his T-shirt, ran that load to the ocean, then came back for more. I ran back and forth waving my arms, screaming at the birds, and collecting as many as I could in our bucket.”

  I don’t tell Andy, and I never told my dad, but I had nightmares for about a year after that. In them I was as little as a baby turtle and the birds were after me. Instead of hands I had tiny flippers that beat the sand as I made a mad dash for the ocean, where I imagined barracudas and eels were waiting to eat me. It never occurred to me before, but I bet that’s why I’m afraid to swim in the ocean.

  Right now, I feel like one of those baby turtles again. Here I am, making my way possibly to safety, or maybe just into deeper trouble. What did Andy know, really? Had he ever walked even a single mile in the Everglades? Why hadn’t I asked him that before I traipsed after him? I look at the blue sky and the towering white thunderheads off in the distance, close my eyes, and wish with all my might that my father would appear and gather us up.

  The mother alligator is returning. She lumbers out of the water and gently, with a front foot, scrapes away dirt and rotting cattails to expose a yellow-and-black striped baby. Another one wiggles out of the mound on its own. When there are four or five barking babies, she begins to eat them.

  I grab Andy’s arm. “Why is she doing that?”

  “Shhh. Wait. She’s moving them to a safer place.”

  The mother gator, with her jaws slightly open so her teeth form a cage, turns, trudges down her path, and slides into the water. She’s gone only a minute or two when a great blue heron flies in, lands on the mound, spears a baby that has just emerged, bashes it to the ground a few times, then swallows it whole and flies away.

  Andy whispers, “As my mother loves to say, what goes around comes around.”

  “Mine says the same thing,” I say, but chill bumps rise on my arms. It’s so life-and-death out here. Plain and simple. One minute you’re fine, and the next you could be dead.

  I’m still watching the nest when Andy starts to climb down. “Whoa,” he says and steps back up beside me.

  “What?” I look where he’s looking. About ten yards away, at the break in the cattails, are two pigs—wild pigs, and one has tusks that arc up to form almost a complete circle. It’s sniffing the air.

  My own breathing turns to trembling gasps.

  Andy puts his hand over my mouth. “Don’t make a sound.” He speaks against my ear. “They’ve got great hearing and a terrific sense of smell, but they can’t see too good.”

  The boar is headed straight for our tree, sniffing, snuffling, and grunting. We can’t climb higher, and his tusks look like they could cut us to ribbons.

  From the nest, a baby gator calls. The boar stops. He listens for a moment, then turns left and sniffs the air again.

  “This should be good,” Andy whispers.

  10

  Since the hogs are too low to the ground to see the nest, which is beyond a barrier of cattails, they follow the sound, splashing toward it. We can see the mother gator coming back up her trail. She must hear them, because she stops, settles down on her stomach and waits.

  Andy pries my hand off his arm again. “You’ve got quite a grip.”

  “Sorry.”

  The boar is in the lead when the pigs reach the mound. First he, then the female, put their heads down and start pushing into it with their noses. I nearly jump out of my skin when the mother gator hisses, rises up on all fours and charges. It takes just seconds for her to barrel the length of the trail, and only that long for the hogs to see her coming. The male grunts an alarm, and the two pigs run in different directions. The mother gator rips after the female. Her mouth opens and snaps closed. The pig squeals in pain, but escapes with just a gash in the flesh of a back
leg.

  We wait until the splashing and squealing stops, then climb down and start out again. The water is shallow and the view unobstructed, which gives my mind time to focus on all the reminders of how quickly a life can end.

  …

  “What time do you think it is?” I ask some time later.

  “Six or six-thirty.”

  The trees we’re headed for look more spindly the closer we get. “How far have we come?”

  “Not far enough. A couple miles, maybe.”

  “Two miles! You’re kidding?”

  “Look back.”

  I turn and look where he’s pointing. I can see the tops of some tall trees above the line of cattails we’ve just come through. “Those trees look sturdier, why don’t we go there for the night?”

  Andy laughs, then stares at me for a second. “You’re joking, right?”

  “I am not. That looks like a better place than where we’re headed.”

  “Those are the trees around the cabin.”

  I’m leaning one way, then the other, trying to work out the ache in my shoulders. “You’re lying.”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “I don’t know,” I whisper. “I’m so tired. I thought we’d come much farther.”

  Andy walks over and puts an arm around me.

  “I don’t think I can go much further.”

  “You’ve got no choice, Sarah.” His voice is soft. “You’re doing great, you know? I’m proud of you.”

  “Are you?” I think about my dad and how he used to hug me when I was little. I feel that small and needy again, and the pressure of Andy’s arms around me makes me cry all the harder.

  “Hey. Come on.” He kisses the top of my head. “A couple of miles are a good start. Think about it. At this rate, we’ll do four or five miles tomorrow. Maybe the levee is closer than I think. Don’t get bummed and start talking about giving up, okay?”

  I nod against his chest.

  He lets me go. “The bad news is, these trees ain’t gonna work.” His hands are on his hips as he looks at the thin, wispy branches of the cypresses.

  “What can we do?”

  He shrugs. “Keep walking.”