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  “What now?” Fred said.

  Slade stared over my head where the trail disappeared into the trees. Then he bent down and picked up the sleeping bag and started toward the boat with it.

  “He’s not even my brother anyway.”

  “We can’t just leave him.”

  “I’m not his guardian,” Slade mumbled. Then he tossed the sleeping bag into the boat. “Get in, Fred.”

  Fred pointed to me. “What about him?”

  “You want to go to jail, Fred?” Slade shouted.

  Fred shook his head.

  “Then get in the boat!”

  Fred sighed reluctantly before stepping onto the gunnels and climbing on top of the marijuana sacks. He sank down into the heap and stared at me helplessly. Slade started the engine and backed away from the dock. Then he gunned the engine, and the boat roared away down the creek.

  36

  I turned to the dark wall of trees as the night sounds gathered around me once again.

  “Davey?” I said softly.

  The cicadas and frogs and crickets went silent. I waited for his reply—nothing.

  I had no idea how far he had gone back there. All I knew was that it had to be after midnight and there was no one else for miles and nobody coming. I looked down at my watch and saw that the face of it was shattered. I reasoned I’d hit it against the boat when we’d slammed into the deadhead.

  I climbed onto the deck and went inside the camp, searching for a flashlight. It was too dark to see anything, but it already sounded hollow. I crossed the room, kicking a few beer cans and some other trash left on the floor. I felt about the kitchen counter, touching Baldy’s pot and the old coffeemaker. Then I felt the box of matches I’d brought for Davey. I opened it and struck one and was amazed at how much just that little flame burned through the inky darkness. Davey’s jugs lay neatly stored against the wall like he expected to come back. The bunk beds were bare. The camp looked as empty and lifeless as it had the first day I met Davey.

  I shoved the matches into my pocket and went outside again. I thought about the flare and reasoned that I was too far away from help to use it. Even if someone saw it, they wouldn’t know where to come.

  “Davey,” I said again.

  But I knew he wouldn’t answer, and the fearlessness I’d carried not thirty minutes before was gone. Now the sound of my own voice against the night frightened me. But what scared me even more was the thought of what I had to do. I had to go find Davey. Somewhere out there.

  An owl hooted from the inky depths of the swamp, emphasizing the enormity of it all. I dropped into the marsh and started up the trail. When I entered the trees I stopped and struck a match. The giant cavern of darkness sucked the light away like it was an insult. I waved out the flame and found I could see better without it.

  I’d been on the trail before, so I wasn’t worried about where it went and I knew it was clear of obstructions at least as far as the marijuana field. I followed the path, feeling the gap in palmettos and listening to them rasp against my shorts. For the first time I noticed that my legs were stinging and I reached down and felt them slippery with blood. The palm fronds were slicing into my skin and reopening wounds I must have gotten earlier in the night. My muscles were growing weary. My body was working against me, trying to make me stop. And I began to get confused.

  What if he isn’t back here?

  What if he’s just hiding behind the camp?

  But deep down I knew better, and I blanked my thoughts and kept on.

  I knew I’d reached the field when the palmettos were no longer slicing across me and I looked up and saw the opening in the canopy. With the little light that was falling from the sky, I saw the ground torn and bits of Slade’s plants strewn about.

  “Davey?” I said.

  The owl called again, the only answer I was going to get. And I knew Davey had gone farther. He was going until he couldn’t go any more. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.

  I passed the marijuana field and slowed when the woods got dark again. Now I didn’t know the trail or what lay beyond. It made me feel better to think of deer and pigs traveling it in the daytime, like it was their private road. To think of some kind of life in this place, even if it was hidden and unfriendly. Dad had once tried to comfort me about being scared of the dark.

  “It’s the same thing as daytime,” he’d said, “except you can’t see.”

  And it helped to think of it that way. To imagine there was nothing around you except the same things you would see if it were daytime.

  The trail began to grow soggy underfoot, and I heard my tennis shoes slurping in a thin coating of mud. I had an idea and stopped and got out the matches. I knelt and struck one and held it close to the ground. There before me were the imprints of Davey’s bare feet. I suddenly felt better that I was on the right path and was no longer alone in this place. With new energy I stood again and kept on.

  A sharp crack echoed against the stillness. It sounded like a stick breaking. Then I heard splashing

  “Davey!” I yelled, my voice booming across the swamp like it was an abandoned church.

  Whatever it was began running through the water like it was shallow. The swamp canopy was thinner and it was easier to see. I thought I saw a frothy white disturbance far out in front of me. Then I heard a splash and then running again. It crossed my mind that maybe I was hearing a startled deer or pig. But I knew it wasn’t either of those. I knew it was Davey out there.

  “Stop, Davey!”

  But he kept on, cracking through more tree limbs. Then the splashing stopped and I heard the distant swirl of the water.

  I began walking swiftly toward the sound, eventually feeling my tennis shoes slap into the shallows. I realized I was at the edge of a cypress pond, the black shimmering water stretching on both sides of me as far as I could see. I kept on, splashing across it, weaving through the cypress knees, trying to keep my eyes on the last place I’d seen him.

  “They’re gone!” I called out. “Everybody’s gone!”

  I didn’t hear the splashing anymore, but the sound of my own feet hitting the water was so loud that I thought maybe I just couldn’t hear over it.

  “It’s just me left!” I shouted.

  The water was soon up to my knees, and the mud sucked at my shoes. Then it was too hard to lift my feet above the surface, so I began wading, pushing limbs out of my way, searching for any sign of him.

  “Davey!” I shouted again.

  37

  I stopped to listen and look. The owl called again from farther away. The pond before me faded away into darkness and shadow. Shimmering ripples moved out from me in concentric rings, colliding with other ripples coming from beyond me.

  “I’m scared, Davey,” I said softly.

  “Why’d you come after me?” he said.

  I trained my eyes on a tree twenty feet in front of me and saw the outline of him standing next to it.

  “Because I was worried about you,” I said. “Because I didn’t know what you’d do.”

  “I told you what I’d do.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “I got nobody now.”

  “You can come home with me,” I said. “There’s lots of good people you can live with. Your dad was a good person. You know that now.”

  Davey didn’t answer me.

  “Let’s get out of the water,” I said. “There’s probably snakes everywhere.”

  After a moment he began wading toward me and stopped.

  “Where are your glasses?” I said.

  “They fell off somewhere. I don’t care.”

  “How can you see anything?”

  Davey didn’t respond.

  “All right,” I said. “Just follow me.”

  I turned and started back the way we’d come, but Davey didn’t follow.

  “Come on, Davey!”

  The owl hooted again in the distance.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,�
� he said.

  “Well, I did.”

  “I wanted you to,” he said, “but I didn’t think you would.”

  “Fine. Will you just come with me now?”

  Davey nodded and approached me. I turned away from him and started wading again.

  “I don’t want to stay in the camp tonight,” he said.

  “We’re not,” I said.

  “Is Slade gone?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s gone. But he might come back. We’ll stay hidden in the woods until we hear search and rescue.”

  “What makes you think they’re comin’?”

  “My parents will figure out I’m gone.”

  “How long?”

  I didn’t know all the answers, and I didn’t have a plan. I wished Davey would stop asking me questions.

  “I don’t know when they’ll come,” I said. “It could be tomorrow sometime … But they’ll come. And I have a flare I can shoot.”

  I kept wading through the water, waiting for it to get shallow again.

  “You’ll get in trouble,” he said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “I hope Jesse doesn’t go to jail,” he said.

  I was glad Davey was starting to think about other things besides whatever he’d had in his head earlier. But I was also getting a sinking feeling that the water should have already been shallower. I stopped and looked up at the trees, trying to find some pattern that I recognized. But it all looked the same.

  “He was always nice to me,” Davey said.

  I didn’t want Davey to know I was growing concerned about finding our way out of the water, so I started forward again, slightly changing course to my right.

  “This way,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about the Bream Chaser.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just a boat.”

  The water was getting deeper, and it was all I could do to keep myself calm. I didn’t want Davey to talk anymore. I needed to concentrate. I stopped and turned back to him.

  “We have to get close to a river or a creek bank. There’s no way the helicopters can see us down here.”

  “Why don’t we just get back on the trail? We don’t have to go all the way to the camp.”

  The owl called again, sounding even farther away. I looked up at the trees again. “I don’t think I can find the trail,” I said. “And now my matches are wet.”

  But Davey didn’t seem to care. “How long do you think it is until mornin’?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My watch is broken.”

  “My dad told me one time to stay where I was if I got lost.”

  “We can’t stay in the middle of this pond. We have to keep going. If we go straight, we’ll have to come out somewhere eventually.”

  Davey didn’t answer me.

  “Come on,” I said.

  I picked an unusual-looking treetop in the distance and started forward. Soon the water was above my thighs and I pulled the flare from my pocket and held it so that it wouldn’t get soaked through.

  “Is that the flare?” Davey asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We might have to swim soon.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Are you scared?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not. Not anymore.”

  “Good,” I said, moving a tree branch out of my face and looking up into the trees again. “It just all looks the same.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s just all the same.”

  I didn’t like the way he said it. Like he didn’t care what happened to us. I wanted to get out of that dark cypress pond more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life. I couldn’t help but think about alligators floating quietly around us. Snakes hanging in the trees. And there was no way to know how much more of it lay ahead.

  38

  When the water was up to my chest I stopped, my head racing with panic. Something splashed and swirled to my right.

  “We’re in trouble, Davey.”

  “Let’s stay here,” he said.

  “Nobody’ll ever find us! Don’t you understand that?”

  “We can see better when daylight comes. And we can find a way out.”

  “See what?” I said. “You can barely see fifty feet through this swamp. And there’s no telling how far we are from land.”

  “I’ll be here with you.”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore. I just want to go home.”

  “Let’s swim,” he said.

  “What if we can’t find shallow water again? There’s alligators everywhere.”

  “Listen,” he said.

  I tried to calm myself. I took deep breaths.

  “You hear that?” he said.

  I hadn’t heard anything. “What?”

  “The owl.”

  Then I heard it. An owl called from just ahead and to the left. Then another answered from somewhere beyond it.

  “Hear it?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “When I was at the camp by myself I watched the animals and the birds a lot. There was an owl that came near the water in the early mornin’ or right before dark. I watched him because I was worried he might get Baldy.”

  “So what?”

  “He never hunted near the water at night. He always moved back into the trees.”

  “So you think he’s over the land?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a long way away,” I said.

  “It always sounds farther than it is. We can swim.”

  Paralyzing visions of alligators and snakes and deep water fell over me again.

  “We can make it,” Davey said.

  And I didn’t understand why he was suddenly so optimistic.

  “What about the flare?” I said. “We have to have it. Search and rescue won’t know where to look.”

  “We can take turns holdin’ it out of the water.”

  “And swim with one arm?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We can do it. You have to take off your shoes.”

  I sighed. I didn’t see that we had a choice if we wanted to find land. And the flare was useless under the thick swamp canopy.

  Davey pulled up his feet and did a breaststroke past me. I held the flare overhead and kicked off my tennis shoes. Then I pushed off the soft bottom and sidestroked behind him.

  “You know which way?” I gasped.

  “Toward the owl,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure anymore where the last owl call had come from. Struggling to swim through the pond and keep the flare out of the water was all I could do without having to worry about the direction we were headed. I was going to have to rely on Davey to lead us and find the clearest channel through the limbs and tree trunks.

  * * *

  We had been swimming for some time when I came to Davey holding on to a limb. I grabbed next to him and began resting and catching my breath.

  “I’ll carry it for a while,” he said. “You take the lead.”

  I didn’t answer right away.

  “Do you think we’ve been going straight?” I finally gasped.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Have you heard the owl again?”

  “It’s not far,” he said.

  I held the flare out to him and he took it.

  “Which way?” I said.

  Davey pointed into the darkness. “That way. Pick trees ahead of you and swim toward them.”

  I rested a moment longer, then found a tree in the direction Davey had pointed.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “Let’s go.”

  I let go of the limb and kicked out. It was a relief to finally use both arms. I breaststroked through the still water with ease, keeping my ears tuned to the sound of Davey paddling behind me.

  “You okay?” I said back to him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  At one point we came across a group of wood ducks that flushed and cried away into the trees. The racket was terrif
ying, but there was nothing I could do except struggle to stay afloat and take deep breaths and fight the screaming fear in my head.

  “God, Davey,” I stammered.

  “It’s okay,” he replied calmly. “It’s just ducks.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  “Keep goin’,” he said.

  I must have been swimming for a half hour before I heard Davey call from behind me. I stopped and looked back and saw him standing waist-deep. I lowered my feet, felt mud and leaves beneath, and stood.

  “We made it,” he said.

  I looked ahead. I saw nothing but shimmering water, but it was a relief to be able to stand again, and I reasoned we were probably close to finding land. Davey came up to me and held out the flare.

  “Still dry,” he said.

  I turned and picked out another tree in the distance and started for it. The water grew shallower, and soon it was no higher than our knees. I jumped when a blue heron startled before us and flew away, screaming its raspy alarm.

  “We’re close,” Davey said.

  We finally trudged out of the pond and into a thicket of palmettos. I sat against a cypress tree to rest, and Davey sat beside me. He put the flare into my lap.

  “I told you we could do it,” he said like he was proud of himself.

  “That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” I said.

  “You were always brave,” he said. “You just never had to prove it.”

  I looked up at the sky. It didn’t seem like there was any trace of daylight yet.

  “We’ve got to be close to a river,” I said. “I don’t know which one, but we have to be close to something.”

  “No way Slade can find us now,” Davey said.

  “No way anybody can find us,” I replied. “We have to keep going.”

  “I’m ready to go again when you’re rested.”

  “I never heard the owl again,” I said. “Not once. I just kept trying to swim straight.”

  “I made that up.”

  “Made what up?”

  “About the owl bein’ over land.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.” Davey laughed. “But it sounded like it would work.”