Scott Williams - The Pulse

“This is scary,” Jessica said, her voice barely above a whisper, as if she were afraid something unseen out there in the night forest might hear her and come their way.

“It is creepy,” Casey agreed. “Are there bears or anything like that in these woods?”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Grant said. “The only animals we need to fear are the two-legged kind, and we’re way out of sight of the road here. But to answer your question, there are a few bears around in the river-bottom swamps in Louisiana and Mississippi, but they are so rare you hardly ever see one. And they’re certainly too shy around humans to be a threat. They’re not like the bears in the mountains and places where they are plentiful. Snakes are the biggest wildlife danger in these woods, but unless you’re walking along through here at night without watching where you’re stepping, you don’t have to worry about them either.”

“Who would be stupid enough to walk out here at night?” Jessica asked. “You can’t see anything out here.”

“Just take the light and watch where you step if you have to go out to go to the bathroom tonight. But most likely, even the snakes won’t be moving around in this weather.”

“There’s no way I’m going out there for anything tonight. I’ll hold it ’til morning.”

But when they had finished eating and the cooking pot was empty, Grant scraped it out and washed it in the rain running off the edge of the tarp, then boiled more water for tea. After drinking a couple of cups of hot tea Casey and Jessica did have take a short trip out from the tarp before going to bed, but they went together and stayed close, checking the ground carefully with the beam of the light after what Grant had said. When they were back in their sleeping bags, Casey found it hard to believe they could be so comfortable in such miserable conditions with so little. The night wouldn’t be half as bad as she had imagined, and besides, she was so tired she felt like she could sleep anywhere.

When she awoke the darkness was replaced by the foggy gray of dawn, and the heavy downpour of the night before was now lighter, but a steady, soaking shower was still falling and showed no sign of letting up. Grant already had the coffee ready, and after they all had a cup he made a pot of oatmeal. The hardest part of the day, he said, would be leaving the shelter of the tarp and getting back out on the road. The hot breakfast would help, but after that there was nothing to do but face another day of riding in the wet. When Grant had taken down the tarp and helped repack the bicycles, they pushed them back to the highway along the muddy logging road and set out to the north again. The highway was still deserted, and riding was a bit easier in the gentler rain compared to the afternoon before.

They hadn’t gone a half mile when there was a loud popping sound from Jessica’s bike and then her chain came off the gears, forcing her to stop.

“What happened?” Casey asked.

“Looks like that cheap Chinese derailleur finally broke,” Grant said. “I was afraid of that, as much noise as it’s been making.”

“What am I supposed to do now?” Jessica asked. “Does this mean I won’t be able to ride it?”

“I think I can get you going again,” Grant said. “You just may not be able to shift gears, at least not on the rear cassette. Hold on, let me get my tools.”

Grant dug around in his pack until he found what he was looking for. It was a chain-breaker tool that allowed him to remove enough links from the chain to shorten it so that the rear derailleur could be bypassed altogether. After doing this, he then took the broken derailleur completely off and placed the chain on the middle cog of the eight-speed gear cluster.

“That should do it. I’ve put it in the gear you’ll probably need the most on these roads. If we come to a hill you can’t climb in that speed, you can still use your other shifter to drop down to the smaller chainring up front.”

“Ingenious,” Casey said.

“Bicycles are simple enough. No big deal really. A lot of people prefer single-speed ‘fixies’ anyway. It’s kind of a trend, even.”

Grant’s repair worked fine. With the inferior rear derailleur gone, Jessica’s bike ran much more quietly. The terrain became flatter again anyway, as the highway here ran in the bottomlands of the Bogue Chitto River. When the route finally took a right-angle turn to the east towards the town of Franklinton, Casey and Jessica got their first look at the river that was to play such an integral role in their lives in the near future. Riding across it on the bridge in the rain, they saw its rising waters swirling among fallen trees and stumps, coursing through a jungle-like forest of tall hardwood trees that leaned over its current from walls of greenery along the banks. Both upstream and downstream of the highway crossing, there was nothing but wild, dark woods on both sides of the river.

In the outskirts of Franklinton, the highway turned north once again. They stopped for a few minutes under a large open roof covering gas pumps at a convenience store, when two local policemen who had switched from cruisers to horses waved them over and asked where they had come from and where they were going.

“What do you mean, they won’t let us in?” Grant asked, in disbelief.

“I’m just telling you what we’ve heard,” one of the officers said. “Officials in Mississippi are turning back refugees from Louisiana. They say they can’t take care of their own people, much less hundreds of thousands of people coming up from New Orleans and Baton Rouge. They’re afraid it’s going to be like another Katrina, where they’ll have a flood of people coming in who won’t leave for months—or maybe ever.”

“This situation is a lot worse, and they do have a point,” the other policeman said. “Nobody has power, either here or north of the state line, so what would they do with a bunch of refugees?”

“But we’re not refugees,” Casey said. “We have a place to go. He has his own cabin, on his parent’s land.”

“I understand,” the first officer said. “But they are turning people back. We’ve already seen people coming back here through Franklinton. You’re the first we’ve seen today, out in this weather, but a couple of days ago some people who had running vehicles were reporting they couldn’t get in.”

“The thing is,” the other man said, “you all have to have proof of Mississippi residence or they’ll turn you back. You have to show them your Mississippi driver’s licenses or some other official I.D.”

“We’re screwed,” Jessica said. “All I have is a California license.”

“And mine’s from Louisiana,” Casey said.

“Mine too,” Grant said. “But we own our own land there. It’s right on the Bogue Chitto. My parents bought it more than fifteen years ago.”

“I’m sorry to be the one to bring bad news, but I just felt like we ought to flag you folks down and tell you. I figured you were planning on passing on through when I saw the way y’all were loaded down. I hated to see you ride on up to the state line only to be told you can’t cross it.”

“I appreciate it,” Grant said. “But we’ve got to try. I’ve got to see this for myself. Everything we need is in that cabin. I don’t know what we would do or where we would go if we couldn’t go there.”

BY SUNRISE THE SECOND DAY after leaving Isleta Palominito, the Casey Nicole had sailed some 220 miles in just under 24 hours and made landfall off the Samaná Peninsula, on the rugged north coast of the Dominican Republic. Scully insisted on keeping their course several miles offshore, and from that distance it was impossible to tell in daylight whether or not the electricity was out on the first part of the island they could see. But from what Artie could glimpse of the land they were sailing past, there might be little indication even at night. Much of the coast here appeared to be a rugged wilderness of steep, jungle-cloaked mountains, with jagged cliffs of gray rock looming like the walls of a fortress over the sea. In only a few places were there breaks in those cliffs, and in some there could be seen the openings to small bays or coves, where Scully said there were a few tiny villages and farming settlements.