Robert Alter - Swamp Sister

"How do you know that?"

She looked around at him and her eyes were like shards of glass.

"How do you think I know?"

He did something slight with his face, a noncommittal shifting of his features. "Shad Hark?" he tested the name. "I don't know him, do I? Oh wait – no, that was Holly. Yes, I remember a Holly Hark. He went out with me in the skiffs a few times."

"He's dead," she said. "Lost in the swamp right after you left. Shad is his brother."

"Oh yes. He was just a boy. But of course by now he's a man."

She looked away from him. "That's right – a man."

"Is he the one you took under your wing, as I advised you to?"

"Yes, he's the one."

She walked away from him, going back to the bar. "Would you care for another drink?"

He looked down at his hand, remembering that it held an untouched martini. "No thanks. One is enough."

So it had happened as he thought it might. She'd found a stupid boy and made him her slave; had sent him boggleeyed into the swamp to find that airplane, and lo-he had. But then something went wrong. Very wrong. She'd scared him somehow. And now he wouldn't admit it. Now he was trying to get away from her. And it wasn't the money so much that was killing her, as the fact that she had been rejected.

"What happened?" he asked.

"He's a stupid little swamp creature." Iris didn't look at him. She set down the shaker and put her hand around the stem of the glass. "He found the money, and now he thinks he can keep it all for himself."

"But what went wrong? Why do you think he didn't come and tell you he'd found it? That was the plan, wasn't it?"

"I don't know! How can I be expected to know what goes on in his abysmal little mind! He – he's -"

For a moment he thought she was going to smash her glass, and he felt a touch of superior disgust. She had always been a fool. And he had been a fool as well. He'd trusted her too much, but there hadn't been any help for it. You either trust a woman completely or not at all. There can be no half measures between females and trust.

"I don't want to discuss him," she said.

A silence tumbled between them as if they were afraid to speak, as if conscious, in an obscure sense, of an impending crisis. He knew that for a woman, passing the age of thirty-five created a compulsion of recklessness, a kind of helpless wild defiance against the approaching horrors of middle-old age. After thirty-five everything was downhill – a roller coaster hill going faster, faster, screaming into broken-down skin tissues, unmanageable bulges, greyness and decay. It was something a woman couldn't be expected to take graciously.

"That's rather absurd, isn't it?" he said finally. "I mean this Hark boy is the point of my being here. I feel it's imperative that we discuss him." She looked at him, a long, studied across-the-room look.

"You've never really loved anyone, have you, Tar!?" she said. "Never wanted anyone. Things, yes. But never a person." She paused, searching down inside herself for meanings, finding a clutter of old truths that she usually managed to keep swept back in a corner, but also finding herself in the corner with them.

"It makes our situation rather awkward, doesn't it?" she said quietly, absently amazed at her own new strength and reserve. "You see, I'm not sub-human."

He said nothing. He watched her. She came part way into the centre of the room, stopped.

Mr. Ferris realized that he was surrounded by the mysterious aura of femininity, and felt like a man lost in a fog and afraid to move because of unseen deadf ails.

Because they were playing a game over eighty thousand dollars, and because they were partners on the same team and partners must make concessions, he went to her with an odd little smile and let her swarm all over him, and put his arms around her.

"Tell me you love me," her mouth whispered. And her brain cried -Lie to me! Lie to me! He heard the stem of her glass snap behind his neck and heard the glass shatter on the floor near his feet.

She didn't come to him that night, and he paced the cabin of the shantyboat like a hound dog on a chain in the spring. Each time as he went by the lamp his shadow would leap in front of him and run on to smear its exaggerated self on the bulkhead, then when he wheeled about the shadow was left helpless on the wall and it would have to slide down to the deck and slither after him, hurrying to bypass him and sweep on in the lead again, to beat him to the other wall.

God – was this why he'd given her the ten dollars? So she could go running off sassy and have herself a time? And him hanging around here useless and like an old paint rag hanging on a nail?

Maybe she went to show off to that Tom Fort in her new dress -maybe Tom was button-popping the back of that new dress right now. Maybe she was saying, "I got that money right outn him and it weren't no trouble a-tall, and I bet I kin git more any time I hanker to." And that Tom was saying, "Yeah, yeah. Shet up about him now, cain't you? I don't want we should talk about him now. Hold still there." And she'd giggle like she does and Tom would be -.

Shad put his right fist into his left palm with a splat! _

"I'm cold going at that Tom. I'm goan -"

But then he relaxed, dropped his hands, and grinned shaking his head, walked on chasing the shadow.

"What is it I'm going to do? Tom is probably long gone to his own bed – by hisself. Here I'm fixing to rugbeat him for nothing. Dorry's got hung up to home, that's all. Shore."

That Tom. He was all right. He'd just lost out, that was all. You had to pity a poor fella like that. It didn't do to go and beat him. No. But why didn't she come?

Overhead the moon was fat and gold-dollar proud, drifting high and handsome in the clear vastness of its night kingdom. It shed down a soft thin layer of silent grey snow, and the dark things of the nearby woods and the further-off swamp stood black and stark against the navy blue sky, and some of them were straight but more of them crooked, and none of them moved until a zephyr puffed at them, and then the larger ones merely nodded as though going to sleep, but the little things fluttered and trembled and some of the holly leaves winked dull silver.

The scut-shot gator was drifting bulge-eyed across the water, all but a few bumps of him submerged, going shopping. But a drifting flock of night-feeding ducks were suddenly and acutely aware of his sly approach, and they went streaming off into the star-night honking fear, leaving a good piece of the pond's surface broken.

The gator ruffled a grumble through his throat and big glassy black bubbles formed at his nostrils and popped on the surface.

Suddenly his flat head lifted, trickling water, and he merged his receptive senses with the night. Something was coming toward the pond – coming like fear, quick and brush-smashing. The gator slewed around in the water and looked at the pale ribbon of bank and the black wall of jungle.

A doe came crashing through the wall, skittering to a gawky-legged halt on the bank. It looked big-eyed in every direction, ears fluttering. Right out of nowhere a good-God panther came after the doe.

The doe reared sideways and made three sharp leaps, right-left-forward and gone. The panther scooted helplessly on its powerful hindquarters, head swinging, looking confused, snarling, and the doe went spang in the pond and started kicking toward the Money Plane, all neck and ears in the water and the little wet tuft of tail showing in the rear.

The scut-shot gator hurriedly made his preparations for the windfall. He closed his earflaps, dropped the transparent films over his eyes, and wadded up his tongue to close his throat. Then he submerged, waited.

The doe came plodding toward him, four stalky legs moving rhythmically like pistons in the dark water. The gator froze still in the pond, watching the doe step weightlessly over his head, then his jaw hinged open and with a shove of his tail he shot forward and snapped.