Suddenly the boat was jerked backward. Tommy Lee lost his balance for a moment and slipped awkwardly off the seat onto the bottom of the boat. As he struggled to get back up, at the same time reaching for the motor, the boat was tipped precariously to the right. Tommy Lee reached out to grab the sides of the boat in an attempt to right it by casting his weight to the left, but his right hand touched not the edge of the boat, but something else—something quite wet and slippery.
He jerked his hand away and looked. There was an arm, definitely greenish-gray and not black at all, ending in a wide, splayed, webbed hand, thrust over the edge of the boat. The hand was pressed flat against the seat.
Tommy Lee grabbed the plastic package of men’s magazines and hit the hand with it. The hand didn’t even flinch. Tommy Lee flung the magazines aside, picked up the rifle and banged the hand with the butt. The hand seemed to curl slightly and give a little quiver, but it remained pressed against the seat. Tommy Lee realized then that the boat was moving slowly away to the right. The thing wasn’t trying to climb up into the boat, it was only swimming away with it.
Tommy Lee didn’t dare look over the side.
He turned the rifle around and took aim at the hand. Yet he did not shoot, suddenly realizing that the bullet might pierce not only the hand, but the seat and the bottom of the boat as well. He did not relish foundering in the swamp with that.
He tried, without making too much disturbance, to get the motor going but it would not start. The boat was moving inexorably toward one of the larger hummocks in that part of the swamp, one that Tommy Lee recognized; one to which he had even given a name. He called it the Nest, because of all the alligators’ nests that fringed it.
Not knowing what else to do, he sat next to the motor and repeatedly pulled the cord, keeping an eye on the hand as he did so and trying to keep the rifle from slipping off his lap.
The motor started at last. He turned the rudder, and gave it all the gas.
The boat still moved inexorably toward the Nest. The power of the motor could not affect the direction of the boat by even a single degree.
With his leg pressed against the rudder to keep it in position, Tommy Lee raised the rifle and stared through the sights at the elbow of the creature where it appeared atop the edge of the boat. When it stood out of the water—if it could stand—Tommy Lee would shoot it.
He now began to think that the boat was moving too slowly. Faster, faster, he thought. Every few seconds, he had to wipe away the sweat on his hands and brow.
As the boat neared the Nest, for once he saw no alligators. All the nests appeared to have been abandoned. He heard no birds, but he did hear something else. A singing—there was no other word for it—high-pitched, droning, like nothing he had ever heard. He peered into the high grass and the trunks of the cypress on the Nest but could see nothing. Then, at the same moment that he noticed two mounds of dried grass that looked almost like huts large enough for a large man to crawl into half-hidden among the dense scrub, he heard a second voice in unison with the first. After a few moments, however, it branched off into a melody of its own, with a slightly different quality. The boat was being drawn ever nearer the large hummock of dry grass, massive cypress, and tangled underbrush.
Then, quite without warning, the boat swung around and floated alongside the hummock, past half a dozen large empty alligator nests. In some of them Tommy Lee could count the eggs, and when did alligators ever abandon their eggs? He could hear the two voices quite clearly now. Through the sight of the rifle he picked out their locations on the hummock. He was quite certain of their positions in that high grass; he wondered if he ought to shoot. Without even having consciously made that decision, he cocked the rifle and was about to pull the trigger when he was startled by the sound of something pulling up out of the water, and the addition of a third voice to that singing, a third voice that at first was gurgly, but soon became as clear and pristine as the two others. Over the edge of the boat, Tommy Lee saw a large flat perfectly smooth head. Its features were turned away from him.
Tommy Lee moved the gun forward until the barrel was no more than a foot from the back of that glistening head.
“Nerita!” The word came sharply across the water from the high grass.
The head disappeared beneath the water.
Tommy Lee automatically swung the rifle and took aim for the place from where he had heard the voice. He pulled the trigger and the rifle fired, knocking him painfully against the motor with its recoil. The boat had evidently been released by the creature that had had control of it, for now the motor shot the boat away from the large hummock.
Tommy Lee grasped hold of the tiller and sped away, not the way he had come but around the Nest, and away toward Gavin Pond Farm. He held the rifle across his lap, flung the case of beer and the men’s magazines into the water and never once looked back.
He refused to look back not for fear of what he might see, but for fear of what he had seen.
It was not another creature that had stood up from behind one of those two grassy mounds in the center of the Nest, not another gray-green thing with circular staring eyes and a wide lipless mouth and a smooth round head; it had been Elinor Caskey, an old woman, an old woman he knew very well, her face contorted with fear, screaming Nerita! And it was Elinor Caskey that Tommy Lee had shot. The bullet had made a small black circle in her bared breast.
When he reached the farm he ran the boat right up through the reeds at the edge of the new pasture and leaped out, stamping through the mud. He groped his way through the strands of the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the pasture and ran all the way back to the house, trailing the barrel of the gun along behind him as he went.
Though the sun that morning had risen in a cloudless sky, and the radio had predicted fair weather for all this day and the next, it was now raining—and raining heavily—by the time Tommy Lee reached the house. His boots and trousers had gotten caked with mud when he had jumped out of the boat, but the rain washed it off and mingled it with the churning mud at the edge of the brick patio. He was sweating with fear and exertion; the rain poured down from the sky and saturated his clothing until he could smell and taste and feel nothing but that. Tommy Lee was scratched and bleeding in a dozen places, but as fast as he bled the rain washed the blood away and drummed it into the earth.
Chapter 85
Rain
It rains now, a rain less impressive for its intensity than for its unvarying relentlessness, soaking the sandy yards around the Caskey houses steadily all morning, all afternoon, all evening, and throughout the night. Billy Bronze hears it as he rises from his bed, and it continues throughout his unhappy day and into his unhappy sleep at night, without ever a slackening, or even an increase that could optimistically be interpreted as the darkness before the dawn. The water pours down the roof on all sides of the house, overwhelming the inadequate gutters, falling to the front steps below in a sheet of water heavy enough to smash an umbrella. It cascades into the flower beds that edge the house, digging sharp deep trenches and dislodging bulbs and tubers. It blows against sills and windows, opaquely filling a hundred thousand minute squares in the rusting screens.
The rain is an incessant thunder, inexorable and unnerving, louder than conversation, louder than music, louder than the bus to Mobile careering along the road at a quarter past four. The rain forces Billy to listen for patterns and rhythms that are broken as soon as captured. The sound of rain blots out his thoughts as he rocks in one of the swings on the screened-in porch upstairs; but that—it occurs to him just before giving up trying to think altogether—is just as well, for he does not like to consider that in her room inside, Elinor Caskey lies dying.
How she had been brought home, Billy does not know and never asked. He only knows that late in the afternoon when the rain first began Zaddie knocked on the door of his office and beckoned to him. Zaddie led him to Elinor’s bedroom, and there on the bed, still in her drenched clothes, and smelling strongly
of the Perdido, lay Elinor Caskey. She tore back the top of her blouse and there he saw, an inch or two over her heart, a small black bullet hole.
“Hold down my legs,” she commanded Billy.
Obediently, Billy sat at the foot of the bed and pressed his hands over Elinor’s ankles. Zaddie went around to the other side and pressed against Elinor’s knees. Billy had no idea what was going on.
“Have you called the doctor?” he asked. “Where is the doctor, Zaddie?”
“No doctor,” said Elinor.
“You could die!” Billy protested.
“I will die,” said Elinor solemnly.
“Who shot you?” Billy asked. “What happened?”
Elinor did not answer. With her head propped on two pillows, she looked down at the wound in her breast. She put her thumb and forefinger together and pushed them inside the small black hole. She hissed through her teeth, and her entire body twisted and bucked. She would have turned over or fallen off the bed, had not Billy and Zaddie so tightly held her legs.
She hissed and screamed—and finally pulled out the bullet.
She lay panting for perhaps two minutes, holding the small lead missile tightly clenched in the palm of her hand. Zaddie wiped her brow with a cloth.
“Tommy Lee did it,” said Zaddie.
“Why?” cried Billy in amazement.
“He didn’t mean to,” whispered Elinor. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“Elinor, we have—”
“We don’t have to do anything,” said Elinor. “I’m going to lie here in this bed until I die, and you and Zaddie are going to protect me.”
“Protect you from what?” Billy demanded.
There was silence for a long moment.
“Billy,” said Elinor after having gathered the strength to speak, “I want you to go and make two telephone calls. Call Tommy Lee and tell him to come into town because I need to speak to him. Call Miriam and tell her that I’m sick and that she should come see me tomorrow. Don’t call anybody else. If you call the doctor, I won’t see him, and I won’t speak to you again. Do you understand?”
Billy nodded, and did just as he was asked.
Tommy Lee came that afternoon and entered the house wet, abashed, guilty—and fearful. Billy took him upstairs to Elinor’s room, then waited curiously to see what Elinor would say to him.
But Elinor sent both Billy and Zaddie away, and was alone with Tommy Lee for several minutes. Tommy Lee emerged from that interview more shaken than he had been when he came into the house. He hurried out into the rain, threw himself into his pickup, and barreled off down the flooded road.
“I had to make sure he wouldn’t say anything foolish,” said Elinor later. “Tommy Lee won’t say anything. We don’t have to worry about that.”
Miriam came the next day, as Elinor had requested, and by then Elinor was weaker, but she looked more presentable. Zaddie had bathed her and got her into a nightgown and embroidered bed jacket. The rain continued to pour. Miriam said, “Mama, you look perfectly awful.”
“I’m going to die, Miriam.”
“Soon, you mean?”
Elinor nodded. “I just wanted you to know that everything is in order—the will, and all the rest of it. Billy knows everything.”
“Good,” said Miriam. “But I knew that you’d be ready when the time came.” She looked at her mother closely. “Are you sure the time has come?” Elinor nodded. “I’m sorry for that,” said Miriam briskly. “I really am.”
“I think you mean that,” said Elinor.
“Are Zaddie and Billy taking care of you?” Miriam asked. “You want me to send Malcolm off for anything?”
“Yes. I want you and Malcolm both to do something for me.”
“What’s that?”
“One last request, Miriam.”
“I won’t promise, Mama. But what is it?”
“I don’t want you around when I die. I want you and Malcolm to leave town until I’m dead.”
“Go away! Mama, I cain’t just up and leave the mill—”
“Yes, you can. So do it. Go away until I’m dead. You don’t want to be around here anyway, tending to me.”
“I wouldn’t be tending to you anyway,” remarked Miriam. “But where do you want us to go?”
“Go visit Lilah. Go to Houston. If you really have to stay in the area go out and stay with Grace and Lucille. Lord knows they’ve got plenty of room out there.”
“Mama, why don’t you want Malcolm and me here?”
“I have my reasons,” said Elinor. “And they’re good ones. Go away, Miriam. Go away tonight. Or tomorrow. No later than tomorrow.”
“Well,” said Miriam. “I still haven’t promised. I’ll have to speak to Malcolm.”
“Malcolm will do what you say.”
“Mama,” said Miriam with some delicacy, “how long do you imagine that Malcolm and I will have to stay away?”
“Miriam,” remarked her mother dryly, “what I’ve left you in my will is going to make up for the inconvenience.”
Miriam returned to the house the next morning with Malcolm and they spoke brief goodbyes to Elinor. The rain kept up.
“You ought to see it out there, Elinor,” said Malcolm, shaking his head. “The whole damn yard is about to wash away.”
“Where are you two going?”
“Someplace dry,” said Miriam.
“Houston for a few days, and then to New York,” said Malcolm. “After that, I don’t know where.”
“Goodbye, then,” said Elinor. She reached up weakly and took Malcolm’s hand and squeezed it. “You be good to Miriam,” she said.
Malcolm laughed. “You tell her to be good to me!”
Miriam dropped down onto the side of the bed. She took Elinor’s other hand and drew it to her breast. She leaned down and kissed Elinor’s cheek.
When Miriam drew back, she saw a tear in Elinor’s eye.
“Mama,” said Miriam, “that’s the first time I have ever seen you cry.”
Elinor smiled wanly. “It’s the first time you ever kissed me.”
Miriam stood up. “Goodbye, Mama.”
“Goodbye, darling,” replied Elinor. “Be good to Malcolm. He probably deserves it.”
Zaddie stood at the door downstairs and gave Miriam and Malcolm umbrellas before they stepped out onto the front porch.
“Will you call me?” Miriam quietly asked Zaddie. Zaddie nodded silently. Malcolm led his wife out to their car. It was only a dozen yards away, but by the time they reached it, despite the umbrellas and their haste, they were sodden with rainwater.
. . .
Rain has fallen incessantly on Perdido for the past seven days, more than twenty-six inches of precipitation in all. At first, for most people, this persistent inclemency had been nothing more than an excuse to complain—for once with sufficient cause—about the state of the weather. Perdido merchants were certain that customers were being discouraged from driving downtown; and for the farmers, who recently had completed spring planting, it was a disaster. Seedlings were beaten back into the earth or washed down their own furrows to float in thick clots in drainage ditches. Not-yet-sprouted seeds rotted in the earth. With each day the rain continued, the dread of the people in the town increased, for it was no longer simply a question of the nuisance of umbrellas and soggy newspapers, no longer only a matter of reduced retail receipts—it was the threat of another flood.
It did not matter much in fact whether it rained on Perdido or not, but whether there was precipitation in the vast forests northeast and northwest of town was of great concern. Water falling there would wash down the gently sloping land into the Perdido and the Blackwater rivers and would swell those streams from their sources to the junction behind the Perdido town hall. In short, if it continued to rain in the forests where the water and the wetness inconvenienced no one at all, it might very well flood in Perdido.
After the fourth day of rain the weather reports on the Perdido radio station, and even thos
e over the television stations in Pensacola and Mobile, well removed from the danger, had begun to give the heights of the rivers along with daily and cumulative totals of the rainfall. On the seventh day of rain an army engineer was sent down from Fort Rucca to inspect the Perdido levees, for already the water was higher than at any time since 1919.
That engineer drove his jeep to the top of the levee behind the town hall, prodded the earth with a spade, pulled a few blackberry bushes out of the side of the embankment, peered through the rain to the opposite bank of the swollen rivers with his field glasses, and tried to ignore the questions of the mayor, who had insisted on accompanying him on this tour of inspection.
From the mayor’s house, where he had been invited to lunch, the engineer telephoned Fort Rucca and requested his superior to come down to Perdido that afternoon. In fact, to depart immediately. The mayor and his wife overheard this conversation and were unsettled by it. They became even more worried when the army engineer asked them where a helicopter might set down in the town.
At quarter of two, the army engineer—and each and every one of the town’s municipal workers—watched the helicopter descend through the rain into a cleared space in the town hall parking lot. A colonel and two other men, one of them a civilian, emerged. They shook hands with the mayor, then drove off in the first engineer’s jeep, peremptorily declining the mayor’s offer to tag along.
At half past four, all four men arrived at the mayor’s house on Live Oak Street—low land—and informed him that the levee was not safe and might collapse if the water were to reach a level higher than thirty-two feet. At this time the rivers already were at twenty-eight feet. The mayor, as well as his wife and cook, who were listening from the kitchen, were aghast and wanted to know how on earth the levee, which had protected Perdido for more than four decades, could be considered unsafe—it had always been thought of as the most substantial construction in town.
“There are places,” the engineer said with a shrug, “where the levee is very weak. Here and there some of the vegetation burned and the levee eroded. There are places that weren’t built right in the first place. There’s even a break down by the railroad track near the junction. It wasn’t kept in repair.”