Scott Williams: The Pulse

Immediately to the north of this bridge, they passed the small town of Pearlington on the right bank. It appeared that many of the residents here had chosen to remain in their homes, and they saw a few people as they motored by, all of them stopping to stare at the unusual catamaran going upriver. At a dock in front of a waterfront house, a middle-aged man was loading crawfish traps into a slightly larger version of the kind of johnboat Larry was on the lookout for. At his signal, Scully cut the throttle back to idle so that he could make him an offer to either buy or rent it. The man in the skiff just laughed out loud.

“Are you kidding? How you think I’m going to feed my family without a boat? A boat’s the only way anybody can make it around here now. I wouldn’t trade it for nothin’, not even that fancy yacht of yours there.”

Larry said he understood, and for the brief moments they were drifting within speaking distance, he plied the man for local knowledge of the river conditions upstream.

“You might make it as far as I-59, I don’t know. I’ve never run the river that far myself. If your draft is only two feet, like you say it is, you can probably find a channel. The only problem is that thing is so damned wide you may not find a place to get through with both of them hulls. Good luck trying to find a small boat, though. I can’t imagine anybody letting one go right about now, but there’s a fool born every minute, so you never know.”

Artie was beginning to second-guess his brother’s plan as they motored on upriver after hearing this bit of advice. What the man had said made perfect sense. In a world where the grocery stores were cleaned out and the delivery trucks were not running, anyone living on a riverbank with a functional boat would have a distinct advantage over those less fortunate souls who had no way to access the abundant food sources the river offered. And if they couldn’t find someone willing to part with the right kind of boat that could negotiate the smaller waters of the Bogue Chitto, they would end up walking once they reached the limits of where the Casey Nicole could go.

After leaving what was left of civilization behind at Pearlington, they motored upriver the rest of the afternoon, winding through the endless bottomland forests lining the banks on both sides, while carefully watching the muddy brown current for signs of sandbars, hidden logs, and other dangers. These hazards made it necessary to go slowly, and when the sun dropped below the trees, they had not covered as many miles as Larry had hoped. They were well to the north of the Interstate 10 bridge over the swamp, but still several miles downstream of the next bridge at Interstate 59, at least by Larry’s calculation. The I-59 crossing was the last bridge spanning the river basin between them and the mouth of the Bogue Chitto, and Artie could feel a growing sense of anticipation at being that much closer to Casey, but he was also overwhelmed with frustration about not having an appropriate boat and having to stop for the night. Larry insisted it was too risky to navigate the river in the dark, though, and steered them off the river into a wide slough that led into a large dead lake bounded by tall cypress trees. As they were maneuvering about to find the best place to drop the anchor, Scully spotted something washed up in the debris of logs, plastic bottles, and other trash that had been deposited by the last flood among the cypress knees at the lake’s edge. Upon closer inspection through Larry’s binoculars, they could see that it was a boat—or at least part of one—turned on its side and halfway submerged in the shallows. As soon as the anchor was down, Artie and Scully off-loaded the kayak and paddled over to check it out. It was indeed a battered and abandoned aluminum boat, jammed in between two cypress knees, its stern end sunk and its port gunwale bent and twisted. Upon closer inspection, Artie saw that there was large hole punctured through the thin aluminum hull, which was why it sank and probably why no one bothered to salvage it. It looked to be at least a couple of decades old, and Artie knew that such boats were cheap to buy even when new. It likely had washed downriver from some camp upstream, and probably was already neglected and abandoned before then.

Scully said Larry could fix the hole, though, and if they could get it out, he thought it was big enough to carry the outboard. But try as they might, because of the way it was jammed between the cypress knees and weighted down with water inside, the two of them couldn’t budge it. They paddled back to the catamaran; Larry passed them one end of a long mooring line and handed Scully his machete. After cutting one of the cypress knees that had it hung up and fastening the line to the bow, they were able to winch it free just as they had pulled Craig’s sailboat off the bottom at Ship Island. Once it was alongside, Artie and Scully muscled it aboard the forward deck.

After a close examination, Larry was ecstatic. “Sure, it’s all beat to hell and ugly as shit, but I can fix this. We’ll straighten the bent gunwale as much as we can and hammer the aluminum flat around the hole, and then sandwich the damaged area between two pieces of quarter-inch marine plywood, which I’ve got plenty of.”

“How will we attach the plywood so it won’t leak?” Artie asked.

“It’ll be a quick and dirty job—not pretty—but simple enough. We’ll just slather the plywood pieces in 5200, one of the toughest marine adhesives on the planet, and bolt’em together right through the hull. It’ll keep the water out long enough to get you where you’re going. This hull is twisted some too—not much we can do about that—but at least it’s big enough to mount the outboard on. I say let’s get it done tonight and then you and Scully can take off in the morning. This is as good a place as any for me to wait with the Casey Nicole. If you go from here in the skiff, you’ll get there before tomorrow night, easily. I think that makes more sense than trying to navigate this big-ass catamaran any farther upriver, don’t you?”

Artie did think it made more sense, and he was thrilled that he could possibly be reunited with his daughter by tomorrow night! They set to work and got the repair done after dark, leaving the boat upside down on the deck so the adhesive could at least partially cure. Larry said it wouldn’t fully cure for days, but it was thick enough to keep the water out anyway, and the screws they bolted the plywood together with would keep the patch in place. The only thing left to do was pack some food, water, and emergency gear, along with the shotgun and ammunition. Artie and Scully were going on an expedition!

More than a week had passed since Grant and Jessica had seen any sign of Casey and her abductor. He didn’t even know exactly how long it had been, maybe even longer than ten days. The days all ran together, now that every one was just the same struggle to survive and keep looking. Though they scanned every likely place someone might land a canoe during their entire descent of the Bogue Chitto, the tracks they had examined on that one sandbar their second morning on the river were both the first and the last that they found. That seemed like the distant past now to Grant, almost like another place in another time, miles and miles upstream on the banks of a river they had long since left astern. Today they turned once more down yet another twisting bayou in the lower Pearl River basin, looking for anything that might be a clue to Casey’s whereabouts. But each waterway they traveled in this labyrinth of flooded forest confirmed what he’d already known. Searching for two people, in one small canoe, in 250 square miles of swampy forest—was a daunting prospect. There was simply no way he and Jessica could try all the possible routes that the man who had Casey could have taken, and he knew there was also a chance that he had left the river and taken her somewhere overland. They could have missed any sign where he did this and continued on downriver without knowing it.