Robert Alter - Swamp Sister

The cypresses stood up from the marshy prairies. Straight up from the surface covering of water lettuce and the runty elderberry shrubs, until their tall mossdraped arms flickered silver in the sun against the vast spread of turquoise sky, like the walls and roof of a great greenhouse, covering and protecting in its sullen warm shadows a myriad of dank growth and crawling activity.

But to the pilot sitting behind the puttering motor, it was like a giant spider web awaiting a crippled fly.

The motor of the Piper Cub had been acting like a cranky child ever since the plane had come over the swamp region, and there wasn't a thing the pilot could do about it. He looked at the instrument panel – the glass dials that were the visible nerve ends of the ship, the score pad of her metabolism. Everything was quivering.

And in that instant the motor konked out completely. He looked at the panel again, like a magician searching through his bag of tricks. Then he looked out the window and watched the swamp coming up at him fast. Too fast.

And too close. _Can't jump_. He snapped the switch and the plane went into a glide.

Then he felt a hand on his back and even though he'd been expecting it, he started.

"What is it?" an urgent, already-frightened voice insisted in his ear. "Why has the motor stopped?"

The pilot shook his head, watching the green roof of the swamp.

"Master rod froze, I guess. I dunno. Shut up, huh? I got enough grief."

The hand beat an impatient tattoo on his leather-covered shoulder.

"Well, but what are you going to do about it? I mean, my God, aren't you going to correct the trouble? Is it bad?"

The pilot had to grin even though it hurt his cheeks.

"Want me to step out on the nose cone with my wrench?" he asked, then forgot about the frightened man.

He wondered why he hadn't used his head when he was a kid. Why he hadn't become a deep-sea diver, or a mountarn dynamiter, or a secret agent. Something soft where I get it fast. But not this.

As his mind leaped along idiotically, trying desperately to shove back the cold fear with tough-boy talk, he was busy with the wheel, trying to correct his glide, grimly looking at the unstable landscape for a clearing.

If you're unlucky you don't die right away. You get to kick around inside the wreck for a while, with your clothes and skin on fire and your hip bones shoved up into your stomach. Why wasn't there a clearing?

He felt very badly, sensed that this was one time he wasn't going to walk away. And the prescience, he knew, sprang from the vast rugged swamp. It was endless, stretched as far as the eye could see.

What if they did get down in one piece? How would they get out? Who could find them? But I'll take it! I'll take the goddam alligators and water moccasins and quicksand. I'll take a month of it. No, a year – if that'll make You happy. God, I'll take it!

And it annoyed him too, that he had to die with a louse like Hartog, the payroll agent sitting on the jump seat behind him. He knew it was a silly thing to think about, but couldn't help it. His mind was like that. A man shouldn't have to die with a guy he didn't like or respect. Him and his goddam floozies he's gonna have in Jacksonville – was gonna have, Willy boy. Was.

The Piper was planing steeply now, too steep. But maybe there would be a lake beyond the cypress barrier ahead. Well, maybe beyond the next one. God, let there be something open beyond the next one.

But there wasn't. The cypress, cabbage palm, sycamores reached up, fluttering, nodding in a zephyr, as though in accord with the inevitable, coming to them like a speeding gift from God.

Hartog, leaning forward, the brief case with the small fortune in it clutched tightly in his damp hands, was watching the swamp also. His eyes, bulged and staring, were incongruous with the narrow shape of his head and face. He was feeling what Willy, the pilot, was feeling, perhaps differently, but feeling it. For the first time in his life he was facing something that was totally inexorable.

"How -" The first word gagged in his throat, but he kept at it doggedly. "- How bad will it be if we hit?"

"Like an egg against a brick wall."

Hartog's lids stretched over his swollen eyes. God. He'd been in an auto accident once when the car had been doing fifty. Everyone said it was a miracle he lived through it. Two others hadn't. And that had cost him three painful months in the hospital under morphine and Demerol. Like an egg – Did that mean he wouldn't be able to meet Milly in Jacksonville? Then a half-conscious stab of contrition touched him. He shouldn't think of Mily at a time like this. There was Doris, his wife, for a moment his irrational brain confused the two. He was saying Doris' name, but seeing Milly's long nyloned legs – the nylons he'd brought her on the last trip, with the black toes and heels and black seam running up to black tops.

No, no! He raged in backwash of helplessness, fear and shame. Doris – oh God, Doris. I do love you. I -.

His eyes darted to the window, saw the earth quite close, vague and turtle-green, scampering underneath.

A new, very personal thought struck him and he cried out against it. My God! I'm only thirty-seven! You can't take all that away from me!

Exactly what the "all that" was-whether the fifteen years of complacent domesticity with Doris his wife, or the motel-room orgies with Mily and her long nyloned legs- he never had a chance to explain to God.

The pilot screamed LOOKOUT! and seemed to fly forward. Beyond the pilot's moving black shape was nothing but a whirling green blur. Hartog felt himself rise to meet the pilot, speeding toward the green windshield. It was the longest trip he ever made.

Shad Hark had left the river early that morning, striking a north-east course along a shadowy, still, cypressbordered slough. He was standing aft in his small skiff, stobbing the dark stagnant water with the stobpole. Overhead, Spanish moss hung from the branches, long and hairy, fluttering.

"Like a crowd of simple old men, rubbing their beards and a-giggling over a dirty story," he said.

If the coon and otter hunting turned against him, he'd get himself a long pole and go into the moss-collecting business. The harvest he could sell to furniture manufacturers for stuffing sofas and chairs. It wasn't lucrative but would keep body and soul together.

A ball-bodied, stork-legged limpkin, with a white and black neck like a charred log, went limp-hop-limp-hop out on a petrified log and sabered its long bill into the shallows to snap up a hunchbacked snail. With a bob of its head it placed the future meal in a crack along the upper side of the log and looked up to blink at Shad. It let out a loud, false cry.

Shad grinned good-naturedly. "Git on, you old phony. Go at to frighten some coloured mammy. I know you."

The limpkin, sensing no danger from the distant man, turned its attention back to the snail with bright-eyed patience. Slowly the snail relaxed and opened its trap door. Instantly the long bill flashed down and nipped the living meat, shook it loose from its house.

Shad worked the skiff around a low tussock of water grass and cursed when he saw a dense cloud of mosquitoes form in agitation. They came at him persistently, their tinny threads of sound humming in his ears. He did some slapping, damaging his ears and cheeks more than the mosquitoes, then got out of there.

He stobbed easily, taking his time, giving everything that his eyes, ears, nose and mouth could fetch his full observation. He could enjoy it more that way, and also it was a safety measure. The swamp was a poor place to become careless and start balling the jack like a young dog first time out. He spotted a long, scut-backed gator sunning itself on the right-hand bank. Grinning, he shouted-"YAH!" He hated them.