Robert Alter - Swamp Sister

Sutt couldn't wait for the last of his nightly regulars to clear out. And towards the end he was nearly rude to old Dad Plume. He couldn't help it. Shad's ten-dollar bill was burning a hole in his pocket.

Finally, after Dad Plume had quit the store in a huff, Sutt locked up, pulled his blinds, put out the light, and made a beeline to the rear room he called his home. There in his old worm-eaten rolltop he rooted and cursed through an aged litter of receipts, invoices, and lading bills until he found what he was looking for: thirty-two type-numbered pages, bearing the serial numbers of eight thousand ten-dollar bills.

The numbers were numerical, so the job was really quite simple. He placed Shad's bill alongside one of the sheets and started down the list.

L54427135B. That was the number on Shad's bill, and that was also one of the eight thousand numbers Mr. Ferris had given him. Sutt sat back in his chair and reached for his pipe, his eyes bright with speculation and the thought of remuneration. "By juckies," he mumbled. "I be bitched!"

After a while Sutt went out into the front of the store and dialed the long-distance operator on his phone.

Leaving the main road, Shad passed along a shadowbarred path and approached what at first sight seemed to be a small landlocked lake. Black turf sloped down on either edge, and black snaky tree-roots gleamed in the moon below the black-glass surface of the water. Out in the centre of the pool the moon had thrown a great smear of silver, and it rocked there gently like mercury in a cup. A soothing murmur, endless and smothery, came from the silver shoulder of a small weir at the foot of the pond. On the east bank, snug inshore, sat the squat dark houseboat.

Shad found the short gangplank between bank and boat and stepped onto it, grinning. He was remembering the night he brought Elly Towne out here and they'd tried to break into the houseboat. Elly had been too scared of snakes to lie in the bull grass in the woods, and Shad had suggested Bell Mears' old floating shanty. But it hadn't worked out. The houseboat had been locked drum-tight. Finally they'd settled down on the aft porch, amid a litter of old papers, cans and whatnot.

"Wasn't much of a gal at that," he reminisced. "Then she went to being scared of spiders. Never seen such a girl fer spookiness."

The forward porch had been an open-air workshop. He could see the black shape of the cutting table, and hanging on the forward wall, a tangle of racks and frames for drying the pelts, square racks for coon, narrow frames for mink. He went aft along the skinny gangway.

He reckoned that Elly had been the most inexperienced girl he'd ever cut across. There had been nothing new, nothing different, nothing exciting about the girl. But thought of her brought Dorry Mears back to mind, and then Iris Culver. Iris he knew about-perhaps knew too much, to the point where it was getting a little old. But Dorry- His mind, perverse with desire, tricked him into listening again to the giggles and hot whispers of Dorry Mears as she thrashed about unseen in the thicket with Tom Fort. Instantly he was infected with the remembered sound. He wanted to see her again, to mix with her kind, to have himself accepted as one of kindred sensuality.

He leaned against the frame corner, staring hard at the motionless night. "Got to find me a somebody," he muttered. "Somebody soon."

A coon had found itself a frog, had captured it, and now brought its prize down to a moony patch on the bank. Shad watched the minor spectacle absently. The coon held the frog in its forepaws and commenced peeling it, freeing the corrugated skin with a short, jerky, tearing movement. Then it washed the limp blob of flesh in the water, and straightened up to begin its meal.

Shad shuffled his foot, making a scraping sound. The coon froze, its body seemingly all sharp little points of listening attention. Abruptly it shoved the frog in its mouth, showed its tail and became a part of the night.

Life and death, Shad said, thinking now of something he'd read about the survival of the fittest in one of the books Iris Culver had given him. Well, I got mine because I was the fittinest of all of 'em.

And now he was going to buy a piece of the world with it. A big granddaddy piece. But as he unlocked the padlock with the key Bell had given him, he knew at that moment the only thing he really wanted was Dorry Mears.

It was musty inside. It smelled of decay, of mice and old newspapers. He fished up a match and struck the head with the edge of his thumb, exploding a small blare of saffron light. He walked the yellow ball over to the hingetable on the starboard wall and lighted the lamp he found there and looked around at his home.

The cook-stove stood against the forward wall with the dish cabinets on each side of the stovepipe and the iron ventilators above the heating shelf. The windows were shattered. Under the right window was the deal table, and under the left a bunk bed. Over the bunk on a shelf stood an old rust ball-dialled clock, its stiff hands insisting that the time was 5:32-any day, any year. A woman must have lived in the shanty at one time or another, because two or three potted tomato cans with grotesquely twisted dead geraniums stood on another shelf alongside the door. Shad grunted.

He went over the bunk and inspected his bed. The blankets were dustbags with a few nameless little crawling things, and the sheets were filthy. He gingerly gathered up the whole mess, took it out to the aft porch and heaved it overboard. Tomorrow he'd have to invest in some new bedclothes. He went back inside and surveyed the bumpy mattress. It seemed fairly sound, but the springs underneath screamed like a girl stepping on a cottonmouth when he pressed them.

"Old Bell should'a ast couldn't he pay me to live in here," Shad complained.

He went back to the table, sat down, opened his carton of tailor-mades and lighted up. The smoke hung about his head like swamp mist around a cypress knee. He stirred its sagging coils when he moved, pulled out his roll of bills and spread the six remaining tens on the table.

He'd only been back in the village maybe three hours, and already nearly forty dollars was gone. Funny thing, he thought, how short-lived money was.

It was damp hot in the little room where Dorry and her sister Margy shared a bed. And because they were girls, and because this was their room, and because of the summer-thick night there was a heady female odour.

But the not too subtle emanation that compounded the room's atmosphere was merely a nuisance to the sisters. Their warm, supple bodies, naked and only sheet-covered, stuck wherever they touched and formed glowing bubbles of perspiration. When they sighed with exasperation and pulled apart, the sweat-beads would plop and run down their smooth thighs and hips.

Margy was listening to the night music – the male crickets fiddling their leathery forewings, the bullfrogs grunting their deep bass notes as they hop-flopped about the garden searching for slugs, and somewhere the ethereal trombone bay of a night-running hound. She listened, trying to forget the heat and her own sleeplessness.

Dorry was listening to her parents' bedsprings, listening for the last squeaking cry as they moved fitfully in their own aura of middle-aged connubiality, settling down into moist sleep.

Five minutes passed without a squeak. And then five more minutes. She smiled in the dark. She'd give them half an hour. That would make it about eleven. Nearly everyone should be asleep by then – except maybe Sam Parks. She frowned, thinking of the skinny little man who was always prowling the night like a moon-feeding wildcat. He'd almost caught her two weeks ago-one of the nights she'd slipped out to meet Tom in the bush. But she'd seen him slouching through the woods before he had seen her and had hidden behind a tupelo. She wasn't afraid of meeting him, not physically; but Sam told everything to Jort Camp, and everyone knew that Jort Camp had the biggest mouth in the county.