“Fans will rejoice to see Daugharty do what she does best: showcase one character, setting her off against a thousand daily details, like a diamond nestled in the shards of lesser gems.” USA Today of Like a Sister

The Sacrifice
A Novel

by

Janice Daugharty

Published by Smashwords for Janice Daugharty

Janice Daugharty is the author of six novels and two collections of short stories. 

Part 1

At first sight of the house, Ruth felt she heard the shock gong of a horror movie. But it wasn’t shock so much as thrill at seeing something potentially grand in such simple surroundings. And why hadn’t she noticed it before? Really, all she could see from where she was standing was the brown roof in the green trees atop the steep east bank of the Alapaha River. It looked like a large sheet of corkboard floated up and lodged at highwater in the ricks of trees and cables of vines. No doubt about it, the roofing had been selected to blend in, was almost the same shade as the knee-deep water Ruth and Mandy were wading downriver. Camouflage. A mysterious stranger had moved right in among them and nobody had even noticed.  
Standing still, proudly picturing her known world through the eyes of this stranger, she felt the current trickle the coarse sand from beneath her feet till she was balancing center-soles on skate blades of sand. Clouds of silt like dust rose up to her knees. A hawk flew over the river crying and landed in a cypress old as God. Other trees were lined up and climbing the banks each side of the river, but the flat-topped cypresses stood tallest, noblest. The noon sun spangled on the water like shot glass.
No wonder somebody had taken a notion to build here.
She looked back to see if her best friend Mandy had seen this house in this out-of-the-way place. 
She was standing in the flocked shade of a river birch growing from a stacked ledge of soaprock along the west bank. The rock was blue as heated iron; springs between creases trickled and dripped. One heavy white leg cocked inward, blond head reaching round, Mandy checked the tan line beneath her cutoff blue jeans. Mandy would burn, but she wouldn’t tan. 
“Mandy, come on,” Ruth called out and laughed. “Forget the tan. Nobody suns anymore since they found out it’ll kill you.”
Slogging water from the shade to rippling sun, Mandy looked up. “Easy for you to say and you brown as an Indian.” She was a tall, busty seventeen-year-old, who had been tall and busty at thirteen. Only her face, hands and feet were as trim and neat as she would have liked to be all over.
Nobody built houses along this run of the Alapaha; nobody Ruth knew in this tobacco and timber-farming area of Southeast Georgia could afford to, timewise or moneywise. Besides, it was at least two miles to the nearest highway, two miles from the beach at the bridge and the turpentine community of Mayday. Her grandfather, who she was staying with for the summer, to keep him company after her grandmother died earlier in the spring, owned a couple hundred acres off the west shore and through the pine woods-timber, cattle pastures and hay fields. He would probably laugh at anybody crazy enough to build where the river was sure to come up in the fall and wash the house from its foundation. Well, not laugh exactly, not sweet old Poppee, but he might shake his head at people foolish enough to build a house on sand. Being a man of God, sure as Abraham, that’s how he would put it. 
Ruth waited for Mandy to step alongside, and then pointed to the house on their left. “Can you believe somebody building a house way out here?”
“Somebody from Orlando,” said Mandy, inspecting her soft pink nails for flaws. “Uncle Allen told Daddy that the man own’s the land’s been selling off lots. I bet it’s somebody moving out of the city before Y2K hits.” Her tone switched like a light from dim to bright. “Hey, aren’t you tired?” she asked. “I don’t think I can walk another step and we’ve got all that way to walk back to the bridge to get our shoes.”
“I thought you wanted to lose weight before school starts next week.”
“I do but...at this rate I’ll be dead and only my pallbearers will notice my weight loss.” Again, mid-sentence, her voice had changed. When she was sure she had come up with something good her sentences tended to twist, roll and throw. Mandy, the ventriloquist: her right ear, from the lobe up, was lined with tiny pierced holes. She had tried but failed to hide her trashy mutilation from her mother’s all-seeing eyes by wearing her hair pulled forward and cooped under on that side. No such luck. Her punishment had been that her small fake-diamond earrings were confiscated and she had been grounded-no TV, no rock music, no Ruth, for one whole week. The costly piercing would go to waste, the holes would heal over and, according to Mandy, she would forever look not only like a freak but a hovered-over child. 
A breeze wrinkled the water, stirring the tart smell of willow and mold of rotting leaves.
“Let’s go look at that house.” Ruth headed out toward the water-carved ridge of bright sand-a broad flat sandbar separating river from brush and the steep gullied bank. 
“Ruth, wait. Let’s don’t,” said Mandy, high-stepping behind her. “It’ll take at least another hour to get back to your granddaddy’s, even if we left our shoes at the bridge and cut out through the woods there without them.” She motioned west with her head. “Besides, I’m about to thirst to death. I’m sore as hell from loading all that hay yesterday.”  
“Sore as what?” Ruth laughed. “One day you’re gonna mess up and say that in front of your mama.”
“Shut up!” Mandy waved her away.
“That too.” 
“Shut up is not exactly a cussword.”
Following the tractor and baler with Poppee’s old two-ton truck yesterday, Ruth and Mandy would leap out and hook the hemp hay cords on the freshly minted blocks of hay thorough their hands, one on each end, then swing the bales up and over onto the other bales stacked on the bed of the truck. Ruth helped out because she loved the smell of the sweet green hay, doves cooing and the red cattle peering up from their grazing across the fence as if looking forward to winter and being able to eat without working for it. Ruth helped simply because she should help. Rumor of rain on the way. From the time the hay was cut and left to dry for a week or so, Poppee and the other hay farmers were on the lookout for rain. Of course Mandy had been working to lose weight. Also, Poppee paid them. For years Mandy and Ruth had worked together during the summer, in tobacco mainly, to earn money for their back-to-school extras-what they wanted as opposed to what they needed, which their parents footed the bill for.  
Already Ruth was stepping up on the shore, her tawny feet pushing sand into the arch of water rushing along the curve. “Come on,” she called without looking back, “it won’t take a sec. I want to see.” She was almost as heavy, as tall as Mandy-wore cutoff  blue jeans like Mandy’s-but was shapely, dark and pretty. What saved her from being perfectly pretty, too pretty, was her toeing-inward walk that thrust her butt outward, breasts forward. Thick brown hair pulled back in a high ponytail. Mandy had tried to do something with Ruth’s hair but she didn’t like it styled. No makeup, and her with that smooth clear skin!
When Mandy got to the hot white sand, Ruth was climbing a root ladder to the upper bank in a bush-flanked gully of powdery gray dirt. Her green-striped knit shirt rode up at the waist and it just wasn’t fair-Mandy’s favorite expression. Ruth’s exposed middle was as dark as her legs.     
“Ruth, I mean it,” said Mandy, almost to the shady gully, but still in the sun. “Come on. I’m starving to death, and you told your granddaddy we were just going walking.”
“We are walking.” Ruth was on the upper ledge of the bank, peering down through hedges of gallberry and myrtle bushes. She lifted one foot and picked a thorn-pronged holly leaf from her heel. “I hate these things.”
“Well, I hate dirt.” Mandy climbed up behind her, toeing the stringy roots in the gully. The dirt clung to her feet like sooty talcum. Between the path from the river to the house was a circle of crude wood benches surrounding the scattered charred wood of a cold campfire.
Ruth was now standing in the spotty shade of scrub oaks, holly, bays and sweetgums, spellbound by the square two-level cabin. The bottom level was screened in; the top, unpainted cypress, had a widow’s walk which appeared to run along each side and in front. The seasoning cypress smelled sweet and damp. On back was a concrete-floored carport, and the yard was a raw clearing carved from the woods, uncleared borders of palmettos and brush giving the place a new-lot look, but necessary, Ruth figured, because the system of roots was what knitted the bank together and kept it from washing when the river came up each fall and spring, depending on the rain.
Heavy rain drained from the flat pinewoods, fields and swamps to the veins of branches, to the arteries of creeks, to the single creek-width river in Echols County, the Alapaha, blood of their homeland. Some 250,000 acres with approximately 3,000 people to lay claim to this wild land. No industry, but with the prime timber and farm land, there was always a way to make a living. Nobody went hungry unless they were on a diet.
Mandy walked on the sides of her narrow white feet to where Ruth was standing. She smelled of coconut suntan lotion and stale deodorant. Her wispy bleached hair had lost its curl.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that we haven’t noticed this house before?” said Ruth. “I mean all those times we’ve swam at the gar hole down around the curve and we haven’t even noticed it. Poppee hasn’t even noticed it.”
“That’s cause it’s hid by the trees. That’s the point, right?”  Mandy turned, starting toward the gully to go down again. “Let’s go before somebody comes out and gets onto us for trespassing. Wonder how long it takes for your kidneys to quit with no water.”
“Your kidneys aren’t quitting. Come on.” Ruth laughed and grabbed hold of Mandy’s fine-boned hand. “I don’t think anybody’s home. Let’s just look.”
“You look.” Mandy snatched her hand away. “I’ll wait down there and work on my tan.”
“You’re a coward,” said Ruth and laughed. Sometimes Ruth wasn’t even sure she liked Mandy, but she loved her like a sister. And too, Mandy was the fun side of herself that had to be coaxed out from beneath layers of poetic thought, a kind of stillness that her busy family often mistook for brooding.
Another reason she liked to stay with her grandfather: like her, Poppee could sit silent and musing, listening to his soul speak, pondering beauty and light. Though in his case, that stillness was attributed to the void of sound, a hum of peace, wrought by old age and deafness. Ruth’s drifting, her stillness, was attributed to the absent-mindedness of youth. A barrier of girlish daydreams to break through to get to maturity-the reality of making a living, amounting to something. She couldn’t just be, she had to do.  When the time came, she would be expected to settle down, marry right, and that would serve just as well. Face it…she was abnormal; Mandy was normal.  
“I’m a coward?” Mandy crowed. “You’re gonna be a coward when your mama and daddy find out you slipped off to the river without telling your granddaddy.” Mandy hooked her heels in the roots and started down, daintily holding to tussocks and bushes to keep from sliding and further ruining her fine feet.
Today it was hot and dry, fine hay-baling weather, but under the shelter of green trees felt damp. There was a hint of smoke on the air, but the trees and moss and vines filtered the smoke, magical as the house.  
Ruth tiptoed through the cupped shed holly leaves on cool soft loam, around the circle of benches and on toward the house. A squirrel scamped along the south screened wall of the ground floor and vanished around the west corner with its furry tail still visible on crumbles of concrete. Then gone. Staring up at the railed widow’s walk, with a multi-colored hooked rug folded over one section, Ruth followed the mesh screen, panel to panel, to the open carport on back. Ah, so the front of the house faced the river, not the two-path road coming in, like most houses. Cool but gritty ribbed concrete under her feet. Dead oak leaves the color of saddle leather. Cobwebs swagged from the raw cypress rafters overhead and above the mildewed wooden door to the walled-in rear section of the bottom floor. There was an embossed ship anchor on the top panel of the door.
“Dang!” Ruth said low. “Somebody really went all out on this setup.” She got quiet and listened, taking it all in. Hearing nothing but the seesawing ring of katydids in the oaks, birdsong belling down, she opened the door and went inside: A shower on the left and a utility room on the right-fishing reels, tools, washer, dryer, freezer. Not new appliances, but newer than her mother’s at home. Smells of mold and dust and curing concrete filled her head. Ahead, another door opened into the dim screened area, facing the river bank; four redwood picnic tables with benches, a brick barbecue, and a stainless steel sink. Lizards flashed on the outer screen. 
She turned around and went out, closing the carport door behind her with a clap and a whoosh of air. Then on she crept toward the north side of the house and up the cypress stairs mounted to the vertical board wall and she was on the narrow widow’s walk. If she could have anything in the world, it would be a widow’s walk.
“Mandy,” she shouted through a megaphone of hands, “they’ve got a widow’s walk. You’ve got to come up here and see the view.”
“No,” she shouted in that twist of tone to indicate something clever coming up, “I’ve never even walked down the church aisle yet.” 
“You’re crazy,” hooted Ruth, laughing. “Come on.” She could hear her own echo, egging her on.  COME ON…come on…mon…on...
“No. I’m resting; I think I’m starting to tan.” Mandy’s voice came muffled-face down on her arms crossed in sand-and final. 
Really the view of the river from the widow’s walk wasn’t much of a view, only peeps of sunny water through the deep ridge of trees, like peeps of the blue sky through the leaves overhead. It would just be more fun with Mandy there. They often explored old empty houses together, never bothering even the inevitable trash and rags and old magazines piled in the middle of the floor by the last family living there for fear of what they might find. For fear of being accused of throwing rocks through windowpanes or ripping down loose boards. The risk of being found and held to blame was part of the thrill, though not if it came right down to it. Ruth was trespassing for real now  
Walking on, she came to another wooden door with another embossed anchor, then large windows running from the right side of the door, all the way around the widow’s walk. Trees mirrored on the glass rendered it almost solid green and opaque. She stepped up and peered through the first window with her hands each side of her face to cut the glare. An old couch inside was covered with a patchwork quilt. A high-back rocking chair was draped with an afghan of many colors, like Joseph’s coat in the Bible; more chairs, tables. More old-timey stuff. A disappointment. There was an oval hook rug on the hardwood floor like the one folded over the railing, to either air or dry, on the other side. And up above, skylights, countering her disappointment. Wow! A cathedral ceiling with meeting skylights! 
“Mandy, they have skylights,” she called out. “Come look.” 
Big delay, then, “No!” 
“Okay. You’re missing all the fun.” Ruth stepped to the next window on the widow’s walk and peered in again, trying to see along the left wall of the living room, but the glare limited her view to head-on slices of the room. She imagined the inside of the house done in white wicker, or blond rattan, with pastel print chintz. She might become an interior decorator; she wished she could skip college next year, own a house on the river like this one. But she wouldn’t group the furniture like this; she wouldn’t furnish her house with this clunky, musty cast-out junk. Her wishes seemed there, within reach. But really, she just liked to rearrange the furniture in her parents’ small frame house, twenty miles away in Valdosta, and she would probably end up teaching like her mother. 
A shadow darted from the left wall of the living room to the door. It jerked open, and before Ruth’s brain could register the shock gongs going off again, this time in waves in her head, the shadow had developed into a young man with long sandy hair, in cut-off khakis and boots. Still, she was only listening to the shock gongs, not shocked yet, only surprised, maybe even smiled and started to speak—“I’m sorry for being such a snoop.” But when she looked into his deep-set brown eyes spoked with light, his mouth pink and leering in his unshaven face, she knew this was the horror movie she’d been warned was coming up. She knew without knowing that he didn’t live in this house, that he was up to no good. His hairy legs were spread wide, railing to wall of the widows’ walk, blocking the stairs down.
Someone else was standing in the doorway—a heftier presence, less quick and less sure. Something about him, or her, that made Ruth feel foolish for gasping-delayed shock-for turning on the widow’s walk and stepping toward the corner, her back to the first man whose movement she could feel before hearing his boot soles bounding behind her. She sprinted around the corner to the riverside of the house, climbed up on the railing and jumped to the ground. She screamed, curdling the quiet and exciting her echo. Her right foot jackknifed, felt wrung from her ankle bone. 
She shouldn’t have jumped. She should have tried to push past the man blocking the widow’s walk. Why had she jumped? Decision or instinct, it had been the wrong thing to do. When she had started driving, her daddy had told her to always try to avoid a head-on collision—no matter what, don’t hit head-on.
On her knees, she felt the pain in her foot transfer to her head, the back of her head, her ponytail being snatched, then twisted. This was her car-wreak, this was her missing the head-on.
Mandy shouted up from the sandbar below, “What’s the matter? Ruth!”  Question followed by exclamation: Mandy with the coward heart. Heavy, plodding Mandy, thrumming with untapped dreams.
“Rewis! Go get the other one,” yelled the man with his hand wrapped in Ruth’s long thick brown hair. Then to Ruth, “I ain’t gone hurt you. Ain’t nobody gone hurt you long as you behave.”
Out of the slant of her eye, she saw the sandy-haired man in khaki shorts and boots run past the circle of benches and down the gully. Skidding, shaking bushes. Then vanish like the squirrel. Like the squirrel.
“Mandy, run!” Ruth hollered. “Run.”     
“Ruth?”
Ruth’s hair was still twisted, but the man behind her, who smelled of fish and sweat, had quit yanking. 
Mandy spoke up in a put-on voice, “What’s going on? What do you want?” Followed by a running scream and loud panicky shouts in her natural voice. “Help! Ruth, help!” A pause. Then shrieking: “No, don’t…quit…leave me alone! You better watch it, mister!” Smack of flesh. Sounded like Mandy had slapped him. “Ru…th! Help, Ruth!” Feet were seething in sand, water splashing. Laughing-not Mandy’s laugh. A piercing shriek from Mandy, then nothing but a riot of echoes, throngs of mocking people off in the woods, then not even that. Only the seesawing ring of katydids in the oaks, birdsong belling down.
“God help us!” Ruth cried. “Forgive me, Mandy, forgive me. MAN…DY!” 
The man holding to Ruth’s ponytail cursed. “Rewis, what the…?” He let go of Ruth’s hair and she crawled toward the hedge of bushes shielding her view of the river and Mandy. He caught her by the ponytail again, yanked back till she was kneeling. Her scalp was on fire, her ankle was on fire. Her brain was charged with feeling and no room for thought. 
“If that sorry S.B. did what I think he did...” The man behind her was talking to himself. Holding to her hair, talking to himself.
“Mandy?” Voice of another coward. “Let go of my hair,” Ruth said then and slapped at the hand behind, wrenching round till she could see him, whole body. A surprise: he was soft white, fat but tall, in a white T-shirt and new blue jeans, the too-dark, too-large kind a mother might buy for a growing son to wear the first day of school. Coarse black hair and newly-grown beard, tapered face, brown eyes, cheeks pink as a pudgy boy’s. 
Since she had nothing else to comfort her, she took comfort in this image of harmlessness. But not for long.
Rewis’s blanched face, framed in long sandy hair, showed at the top of the gully, then his white T-shirt, red-speckled, then his right hand holding a fat knife with a black handle and a red blade. If Ruth wasn’t careful she might conjure the red into blood-Mandy’s blood. But it could not be Mandy’s blood because Mandy was only seventeen, Mandy was almost a senior in high school; because Mandy was standing right next to Ruth not twenty minutes ago. Because nothing bad ever happened in this neck of the woods.     
“Don’t tell me you killed her?” said the soft white man behind Ruth.
“Okay, I won’t tell you,” said Rewis, still standing in the gully with only the upper part of his body showing. He stabbed the blade in the gray dirt, wiped it on his khaki shorts, folded and pocketed the knife. Then he stepped up. His white sock tops were flecked with red.
“Man, I can’t believe you!” Again the other man let go of Ruth’s hair. “Busting out of prison and robbing people’s one thing, but murder...”
“Don’t give me none of that.” Rewis walked toward them, breathing hard. His face was pinched with excitement. “Just cause they made you a trustee at Jackson don’t mean you was in there for robbing them old bellringers at Christmastime.”
“I gotta hand it to you. You got me good.” The man behind Ruth started toward the house, slinging his hands, then circled back. “I ain’t into this, I ain’t into this. Had it to do over with I wouldn’t help you get away. I’d let them go on and give you the chair.”
“Man, you’ll fall for anything.” Rewis laughed, his echo howling out over the woods.
Ruth scrambled toward the bushes along the riverbank, on her hands and knees. Forgive me Lord for I have sinned.  “Mandy! Poppee, help!”
“Who’s Poppee?”
“Hell, I don’t know.”
“My granddaddy,” she said. “Out there.”
“Anybody steps foot up that bank is a goner.”
Still crawling, Ruth wished she hadn’t called out. First, she had done it out of instinct, same as her jumping, then to make the men think she wasn’t alone. That help was nearby. For all she knew her grandfather could be close, but he couldn’t hear her, hard of hearing as he was. 
“Where you off to, sister?” said Rewis and laughed and stepped in front of her with his slim hairy legs spread. Blood-flecked white socks right before her eyes. He stepped forward, straddling her head, and clamped it between his knobby damp knees.
Muffled sounds of the two men arguing, then Rewis stepped back, laughed and said, “Okay, come on, Bobby. I’m gone give you this lil ole gal for a play pretty.” At the edge of the steep bank, he reached down and lifted Ruth by both shoulders, misting her face with spit. “What you think, sister, think you can fly?” She was so close she could see her face mirrored in his eyes. So close she could smell his sour hair.
Shock gongs, shock gongs...
The man named Bobby was talking, moving behind her. “What’d you do with her, Rewis?”
“What you mean, what’d I do with her? Here.” A doggy leer. He shoved Ruth into Bobby. She bounced off of his soft body and dropped to her knees in the thorny holly leaves.
“That other girl,” said Bobby, “what’d you do with her?”     
“Ain’t done nothing with her yet. But I aim to feed her to the fish in that deep hole aways down from here.” He spoke to Ruth. “Sister, you ever hear the one about the giant catfish that man caught? Had human hair and what-all in its belly.”
“Leave her alone.” Bobby bent and took hold of Ruth’s right arm, helped her to her feet. 
“I got a question,” said Rewis. “A good one.”
“What?” asked Bobby.
“If we don’t kill sister here, what we gone do with her?”
“I don’t know,” said Bobby. “I need to think.” Then to Ruth in a low raspy voice, “You sprainged your ankle.” 
“Well, while you thinking about it, you mind if I get on back in the house there and get our loot before her old man or the law one comes down on us?” Rewis stalked off, heavy in combat boots.
“Hold on to me,” Bobby said to Ruth and put an arm around her waist. “And be quiet. Least he notices you, better off you are.”
“Let me go. Please let me go.” She began hopping alongside him, toes of her right foot barely touching the ground. He led her over to one of the benches in the circle with the dead campfire. 
“Please let me go,” she gasped and sat, lifting her injured foot. Not a sprain, it had to be broken. How many bones in the human foot? A lot…she’d forgotten. But surely more than one was broken for it to hurt so bad. “Let me go before he comes back and kills me too.” It was all she could do to breathe. She didn’t dare cry. Praying seemed beyond the point now.
Bobby, sitting beside her, said, “He’d catch you before you got down that gully there. He’d as soon kill you as spit. I’ll do what I can.” Then to himself: “He ain’t changed, ain’t no changing in him.”
***
They were going back down the gully that Ruth had climbed up before; this was after and Ruth couldn’t say how long since she had leaped from the widow’s walk, how long since she’d heard Mandy scream and seen her blood on Rewis, who had gone on ahead. He was down there, on the sandbar-with the white garbage bags of supplies, a rifle, a pistol and a cement block.
Bobby had saved her she didn’t know how many times. One minute Rewis was going to kill her and next minute he was giving her to Bobby. On and on it went while Rewis lugged supplies from the house to the start of the gully and Bobby tried to soothe and encourage Ruth while Rewis raged and threatened. 
Halfway down the gully, she couldn’t see Rewis, only Bobby facing her, guiding her, arms entwined around her arms and backing to keep her from falling. Every step down on her injured foot sent an electrified signal of pain to her brain. The rest of her body was numb.
“Slow, easy now.” Bobby planted each boot solid on the root steps, glancing behind at intervals to check where he was stepping, to check for Rewis.
“Please let me go,” Ruth whispered. “Let me go back up before…”
“Just keep coming,” Bobby interrupted, speaking low between intakes of breath. He was pale, vibrating with fear. They both were. “Slow. I got you.” His hands tightened, firm but gentle, on her forearms as he took another step. “Little bit more and we’re there.” Her own fingers were digging into the soft flesh of his forearms.
Next step down, with Bobby standing below her now, she could see over his shoulder through the bushes on her left Rewis standing with a pistol on the south shore, slanting it at Mandy lying still at his feet. 
“Mandy!” Ruth screamed.
“Shut that gal up,” Rewis roared, swinging the pistol round at the gully. “Don’t, I’ll shut her up for you.”
Bobby stared up at Ruth with his walled brown eyes, taking another step back and down. He shook his head at her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t get your hopes up. She’s dead.”
At the bottom of the gully, on flat sand, Bobby eased Ruth down to kneeling position, then walked off toward Rewis and Mandy, sand squeaking beneath his shoe soles. “She dead?” he asked Rewis, same answer he’d given to Ruth only moments ago now posed as a question.
“What’s it look like?” Rewis nudged Mandy with the toe of his boot.
Bobby, Ruth’s only hope, rushed at Rewis with his head down, as if to butt him like a bull.
 Rewis backed into the water, eyes on Bobby, pistol on Bobby. “Come get it,” Rewis said, laughing, “come on. Got a bullet with your name on it.”  
Bobby kicked sand at him, but remained on the shore, head down and hands on his hips, circling. “You got yours coming,” he said. 
“You too.”
“Me too.”
Ruth remained kneeling, in praying position, listening to them quarrel, waiting her turn.  Sometimes Bobby would seem on the verge of taking control, then he would back off, and it wasn’t just because of the pistol in Rewis’s possession now. Could Ruth trust Bobby? He was all she had. Only more caring by comparison, he was all she had.
She felt she should be moving, doing something. Crawling up the bank behind her. Maybe Mandy wasn’t dead and Ruth could go for help; maybe the two men would go on and leave them there. She had to be still. Somebody would hear the shouts and come if only she could be still and wait. Just not her grandfather. Don’t let it be Poppee. 
“Mandy,” she whispered, “don’t move. Play dead.” Ruth knew better, she knew Mandy was dead.
Usually just imagining such would have made her cry. But the scene before her was too much like an overdone movie and she was getting set to act in it too. Besides, she was too scared to cry. 
***
There was an odd contrast to the slow golden flow of the river and the fevered, hurried movements of the two men with the white garbage bags of stolen supplies, the rifle, the pistol, and the cement block. 
 Mandy lay facedown with her arms flung out over the shore on the south end of the sandbar, near a metal half-hidden fishing boat beached in a clutch of reeds. Half in, half out of the water, her legs wiggled and waved in the tea-tinted river. It was as if she were sunbathing for real, sunbathing to the sweet dreamy music of springs purling from the blue soaprock walls along the east bank downriver. Pale shallow water rippled over scalloped sand from shore to shore-place where they usually played and sunned-then dumped into a dimpled black-water whirlpool where they were never allowed to swim-off another sandbar jutting from the west bank in peaceful shade.  
One day last summer while Poppee and Ruth were fishing what he called the gar hole, Mandy had been sunning in the shallows near the spot where the calm yellow water sucked swiftly into the contrasting black hole. 
She liked that spot because there the current would stream over her blistering body, cooling her as she lay back in her webbed vinyl lounge chair.
Thirsty as usual, she had stood and waded out to the sandbar to get a Solo cup of ice water they’d brought along. The bogged metal legs of her chair had washed free and the chair had been caught up on the current and swept into the gar hole, never to be seen again. 
This horseshoe sandbar was part of Ruth’s grandfather’s property, up to the run of the river. Still, he claimed the sudden deep black hole of water as his own fishing spot. Upriver and down, for several rivermiles, he owned this land along the west side. The woods and banks there, especially that sandbar, were as familiar and safe-seeming to Ruth as home.
She had to be careful. She wouldn’t scream again. Scooting back into the thin cover of bushes in the gulley, where she remained kneeling, waiting, she kept watch for her grandfather along the banks on the other side of the river. He may not be able to hear but he could see. If he spied her and Mandy, Rewis would have to shoot him. She wished she could close her eyes, she wished she could walk, she wished she go back to believing that this was a movie. Not the raw truth of this scene now opening before her. 
With his boot again, Rewis turned Mandy over, exposing a bloody gash in her sandy gray Class of 2000 T-shirt, right between the two and the first zero and her large breasts. Sand like sugar on her blistered face, in her sleepy green eyes. 
“No, no, no,” Ruth whimpered to herself, ducking her head to one side and closing her eyes, then blinking them as if to clear the sand from her friend’s eyes. Rewis had stabbed her, had stabbed her... How it must have hurt. How it was going to hurt. Ruth had to think straight, to do what she was told, no matter what, to keep from feeling that pain she was at that moment imagining, the crunch of bone she could imagine hearing. Feeling and hearing, one.  
But it was Rewis’s boots crunching sand, coming for her, ordering her up with the pistol. Up or else. “You going or staying?” he said, then spat to one side.
Ruth stood, hopping along in front of him, hot white sand hissing under their feet; she searched the far bank for signs of her grandfather maybe peeping through the bushes, from behind a tree. She had to step around Mandy’s body to get to the boat where Bobby sat waiting. Black ants were crawling all over her body, face, arms and legs, the fast moving kind that resemble fire ants but are merely annoying. She shuddered, recalling having pulled in a fish one time and within minutes seeing it covered in ants. Even the eyes. Ants were crawling over Mandy’s sanded green eyes like the fish. 
“Her eyes, let me...” Ruth tried to turn, to stoop and brush the ants from Mandy’s eyes. 
Rewis kneed her in the back, shoving her forward, toward the boat. Her shins caught the edge and she almost cried out. Bobby reached for her, to help her, just as Rewis shoved her again, this time all the way into the boat. Back, shins and foot aflame with pain, she landed on her side on top of the garbage bags on the floor. 
“Be still,” Bobby whispered to her. “Stay there.”
“I swear and bedamned,” Rewis said, then reached down into the boat for a small coil of yellow nylon rope next to the cement block on the floor near Ruth’s overlapped feet.
Reflexively, she drew up her feet and sat, expecting him to tie her up with the rope, or maybe strangle her.
But he stood, then bent over Mandy and worked one end underneath her waist, looping, knotting it, playing the rope out in his hands to the other end which he threaded through an eyelet in the concrete block on the floor of the boat. 
Ruth knew what he was doing now, what he was up to, what the rope had been intended for, and sad as she felt about his rough handling of Mandy, she felt almost glad. Tied up she would have no chance of escape.
“Lord in heaven help,” said Bobby and sighed.
 Rewis rolled Mandy’s body out into the water, twisting, waggling, drifting free into the swifter current, middle of the river, till the rope paid out and the block snatched her back and ground on the bottom of the boat. Then he kicked the blood-sopped sand where she had lain after her and stepped into the stern and sat on the blue vinyl pivoting seat. 
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get outa here.”
Bobby, in the bow, paddled back, then forward, and they glided downriver through the shattered sunglade with Mandy bending and swaying in the plowed wake and Ruth watching the water show from the nest of airy garbage bags on the floor in the middle of the boat to keep from locking eyes with Rewis, but the sun spiking on the silver pistol in his right hand made not-looking impossible. If she looked away she might see her grandfather; her looking might expose him and Rewis might shoot him. If she looked away the pistol might explode as she expected. She could not think of a single reason for this Rewis not to shoot her but could think of several why he should.
A single toppled willow grew sideways like a bench from the shady sandbar to the right of her grandfather’s gar fish hole. Approaching the jutted sandbar, Ruth noticed that the tree appeared set mid-river. All was still with the locusts’ nothingness hum, the concrete block grinding on metal. Clean tart air and mussels with day-moon eyes burrowing in the pale edging of black water. Pistol in the hand of a man waiting to explode. The sun had moved southward when she wasn’t looking and with it the tree shadows she knew so well from summer evenings spent at her grandfather’s since she could remember.
Rewis kneeled in the boat, rocking it, and reeled in Mandy’s sunburned body; she bent at the waist, almost touched her toes, hit the boat and bounced off floating on her side, then down and up. He lifted the concrete block with the yellow rope threaded through, tossed it out into the black hole with a great phlap and splash. Mandy doubled over, sat, and sank with her arms reaching up through the inky water of the gar hole, her blond hair waving like the wind-blown hair of a magazine model. So tan-looking, so graceful, so unlike Mandy, how she’d have liked to look if given a choice. 
Oh, Mandy. Ruth could hear the melody of the song, “Oh Mandy.” But she could only recall the title and the line, oh, Mandy. The tune played and played in her head. She could hear the voice of the man singing it but could not recall his name. Had the Mandy in the song died too? 
Nothing had been more glamorous than death to Mandy. She’d never even noticed Princess Diana before she was killed in a car wreck, then she’d cried for days. She had camped out in front of the TV for the funeral and various memorials. Princess Di, so beautiful in death. But this was death for real; this was death as-is. Mandy Shawn, average anybody, with blood on her shirt and sand in her eyes and her killer who had discarded her body like an old tire.
Mandy, in her class 2000 T-shirt. Sand and ants in her eyes. Oh, Mandy.
Like most people they knew, Mandy had been expecting some kind of catastrophe when the century rolled over-maybe the end of the world-but not this, not the end of her own unique life.
Y2K-all the talk! You couldn’t turn on the TV without news of people stocking up on water and food and generators. Ruth hadn’t really taken it serious though. She had been excited about the new century coming up with the new year. Pushing through the turnstile into 2000, a time of cars, music, movies, and boys. She might streak her hair, she might get a tattoo. She would be eighteen then and “off to college.” Though the truth was she’d be going to Valdosta State University, only blocks away from her home in town, and she had been too chicken to set foot inside a tattoo parlor. She might have been confronted by rough boys like Rewis.
She hugged her knees, shaking, beyond praying, watching the water close over the spot where Mandy had sunk, and then new water, a new spot. Actually, Mandy had been more of a hindrance than a help loading hay bales yesterday. Alone, Ruth could have hoisted the hundred-pound bales up and not have Mandy’s end dragging, not have to wait for Mandy to unhook her ring snagged on the string or drop her end of the bale because a black snake had gotten caught up in the baler and been baled alive. Ruth was strong and Mandy was frail in spite of her size; Ruth was alive and Mandy was dead maybe because of her being timid. Had Mandy tried to look glamorous and dramatic while running away from Rewis? Had she treated it like some kind of game? Ruth felt almost angry at Mandy that instant for letting herself be killed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and Rewis said, “Me too,” and laughed and Bobby turned and looked and turned back, rowing. “Man, I don’t know about you,” he said and shook his head. 
Ruth’s teeth began to chatter and she felt cold and hot at the same time. It was all her fault for being nosy. Mandy would be alive right now if she hadn’t been, but that thought soon slid and the gap filled in with paralyzing terror and disbelief. She had never even been slapped before.
Worst thing that had ever happened to Mandy was appendicitis. She would talk about it fondly, her operation especially, though she claimed that the four-inch scar on her side would ruin her life: she couldn’t wear a bikini, she could never snag a hunk. She might not even be able to have children, which she really didn’t want anyway. Wealth and fame, that was what Mandy had wanted.
The wooden paddle clacked on the side of the boat and they were in clear sunny water again, scalloped sand, tussocks and rock islands of low green grass and tender pink flowers. Such a relief to be beyond the horseshoe sandbar where Ruth’s grandfather might show up and be shot.
“Sister,” said Rewis, “you ever hear the one about the woman had a twenty-pound baby?” 
“Shut up, Rewis,” said Bobby, not looking.
Rewis waved the pistol over Ruth’s head. “Hey, I was just trying to cheer her up.”
“She don’t want no cheering up. Leave her alone.”
“I still say we ain’t got no business with a gal along.”
Bobby turned with the paddle leaking water onto one of the white plastic bags. “No more killing, understand?”
“Okay,” said Rewis and leveled the pistol at Ruth’s head the minute Bobby started rowing again. “Pow!” he said low. Ruth ducked. He laughed, bottom lip glistening with saliva.
Fear radiated and surged from her chest to her fingertips, tingling then numb. That laugh was both evil and silly. The sniggering of a schoolboy only acting evil to get attention. She turned her head. At school, Ruth would twist and flip her ponytail in the faces of boys like Rewis, then march off. But Rewis was not a boy and this was not school. His face was old but not wrinkled, smooth-tan. He was muscular and hairy, trashy-looking, the kind of youngish older man some girls like.
On the east bank was another sandbar, flatter with packed white sand, beer and cola cans, twiggy willows and driftwood, tufts of grass growing from sterile sand. And up ahead a straight channel of dark water running between over-reaching trees. Bobby’s broad fat-padded back partially blocked her view. His neck was red. Rewis behind her was whistling, then sipping from a bottle of whiskey. The gun was tucked barrel-first into the waist of his khaki shorts, pistol butt showing over the tail of his nasty T-shirt.
Ruth felt heavy, dazed, considered the root platforms on the west bank that led up and up into the woods she knew would carry her out to her grandfather’s land, to his neat unpainted old farmhouse, to Poppee who she had told earlier that day that she was going for a walk. She and Mandy had walked up Highway 135 a ways before taking a right at the crossing, heading for the Mayday river bridge, two miles away, and for what reason? Exploring? She could no longer recall why. All summer, he had taken the two girls to swim in the river and eat watermelon. And he would have taken them this time if they had asked. What would have happened if he had taken them this time? The same? Would Poppee be dead too? Dear, feeble Poppee, who could not hear the preacher but still went to church every Sunday morning and night. Even to prayer meetings on Wednesday evenings. This was Wednesday. Because of his curious, disobedient granddaughter, he would have to miss prayer meeting. The word “Godforsaken” leapt naturally to mind, but seemed blasphemous in Ruth’s present state. Blasphemy, the unpardonable sin. Forgive me, Lord.
Squirrels spiraled up the trees and crickets chirred and Bobby’s paddle dipped and pulled, clacking on metal and dripping water on the plastic bags, on the gallon plastic jug of water next to her right foot. It looked like a big blue boot crooked in front of her, but ached only when she moved.
“You want some, sister?” Rewis held out the tall square bottle of river-tinted whiskey to her. The label read “Maker’s Mark.” Red wax melted and oozed from the neck down. Some kind of expensive whiskey, meaning he had stolen it.
She didn’t answer.
He drew the bottle back. “Hey, Bobby?”
Bobby slapped a mosquito on his red neck. “No.”
“Bobby and Sister sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g...”
“Cut it out,” said Bobby, paddling again.
“You know,” Rewis said and paused, drank with his head thrown back and the knot in his thick neck sliding up and down like a bubble in water. “I’m beginning to think you were right after all.”
“About what?” said Bobby.
“About bringing sister here with us.” Rewis drank. Big sigh. “One thing, she’s kinda pretty; another thing, we can use her for a hostage.”
Scared as she was, Ruth had room for revulsion. Certain boys in school, in her experience, started out with those silly jingles, then graduated to breathy vulgarities. Rest-room talk. Thinking about Rewis in those terms gave her courage but not for long.
“I figger day after tomorrow,” Rewis said, crossing his boots at the ankles, toe touching toe, “we oughta be in Florida, heading down the Suwannee River.”
“I hope you figgering right,” said Bobby.
“Hightailing it out of Georgia by river. Who’d guess it?”
“Maybe that old man looking for these girls. Maybe the law.”
“Nah,” said Rewis and drank. “She was just saying that to scare us. And ain’t been missing long enough for the law to be looking yet. Say they don’t start looking till after twenty-four hours.” Then to Ruth, “Where bouts you live at, sister?” 
Ruth brushed at her shoulders, neck and arms, her temples where the whine of mosquitoes sounded loudest.
The nib of the pistol barrel jabbed her left ear. “Hey, I’m talking to you, girl.”
“Valdosta.” Piercing earache. He was not playing; this was not school.
“Anybody know where you and that other gal got off to?”
“Yes.”     
He jabbed her ear harder. “Lie to me again and you gone wind up like that other gal.”
“Let her alone,” said Bobby, wheeling in the seat with the dripping paddle raised. “Don’t, I’ll kill you like the dog you are.”
Rewis laughed, withdrew the pistol, drank from the bottle. “I swear and bedamned if y’all don’t beat all.”
It was almost dark in the tunnel of trees, but ahead was an opening, bruised light, and a large pine broadside in the river with honey-colored water curling over end to end of the massive brown trunk. Steep banks on both sides and only a swift narrow channel running through the partially sunk treetop.
“Think we can make it through there?” asked Bobby.
“Looks like it,” Rewis said. “What you think, sister?” He touched the exposed strip of skin above her waist on her back with the cool glass of the bottle and she sat up straight.
“I say, what you think?” He knocked the bones of her spine, playfully, traveling up to her neck, with the bottle. “You ever hear the one about that ole gal fell in love with a whiskey bottle?”
“Let her alone,” said Bobby without turning.
“Hey, we didn’t bring her along just to be a knot on a log.”
“Better be thinking about that log across the river up there.”
“Ease on over. Stay in the middle of that channel on the left. Soon as we get on top of it, we’ll pull on through holding to the branches.”     
The boat glided faster as Bobby rowed into the tumbling current; the boat rocked, then the metal bottom scraped on the pronged branches and green needles and sticks. There was a strong smell of pine mixed with willow, with whiskey. Water parting and rushing around the sides of the boat, Bobby reached out with his right hand, paddle in his left, and caught hold of a pine limb, snatching backward and rocking to and fro, but the boat, balancing mid-center on top of the upper trunk, only slipped an inch or two. Water burbled and lapped alongside the boat. Ruth held to the sides. Every change in rhythm and motion seemed a sign of Rewis’s mood shift. 
“Rock it!” Rewis yelled. “Pull.” The boat rocked. Then suddenly the stern lifted and Rewis was standing in the water, chest deep, cursing and shoving at the end of the boat. His white T-shirt ballooned, giving him the look of a big-bellied man, as he shoved the boat up and over the bushy treetop.
Then he waded on out toward the sandbar on the east shore, shirt clinging to his muscle-carved upper body. Ruth couldn’t take her eyes off him. She didn’t dare. Immediately as he stepped from the water, with his back to the boat, he unzipped, spraddled his legs, rared back and peed. Blocking the low sun, his body gave off rays of light, a halo of evil power with his back turned and daring the occupants of the boat. 
Bobby paddled over to the shore, to the left of where Rewis was zipping up, and jabbed the paddle in the sand to anchor the boat while they waited. 
All around Rewis sulfur butterflies tangled like tiny kites on strings, then lit on the damp sand to suck the moisture. One leering look from him and he stepped off across the narrow sandbar into the scant yellowing willows growing from sand and disappeared in the higher brush at the base of the gently sloping bank.
When he was gone, when they could no longer see or even hear him thrashing in the bushes, when the bushes quit moving, Bobby spoke. “You need to get out?” he asked Ruth, turning slightly to look at her.
“No.” Every minute she got closer to death. Or worse. She had to be careful, she had to use her head for thinking, not for grieving over Mandy or dwelling on her throbbing foot. Reminiscing would neither serve nor save her. “Oh, Mandy” was still playing in her head. She had to silence it. 
“Drink you some of that water,” Bobbie said, “then pass it on up here to me.” 
She uncapped the water jug, lifted it and drank. She hadn’t even known she was thirsty till she took the first swallow, the next one she took for Mandy, then passed the jug on to Bobby. 
“If you’ll look around in that trash bag there, you oughta come up with some skeeter spray.”
She opened the top of the white trash bag and pushed aside boxes of rifle and pistol cartridges, crackers and canned food, a couple of camouflage jackets, till she located a green can with an orange cap. She took it out and sprayed her neck, chest and legs. A rifle was on the floor in front of her, and the pistol was on the seat to her right. She pretended not to notice. She had shot rifles and shotguns since she got old enough to handle guns but never a pistol.
Bobby was sitting with the paddle across his knees. He drank and passed the water jug back to her. “I want you to know I’d let you go if you could walk,” he said low. “Too bad about your girlfriend.”
Leaning forward, she handed the can of insect repellent to him. Whispering, “Please go. Please let’s go and leave him. He left his pistol back here, we can go.”
Bobby didn’t answer, just gazed ahead, to the right of the boat and Rewis’s boot prints in the damp sand. 
“He’ll kill you too. You know that.” Could she swing the rifle up from her seat on the floor and take aim in time?
“I don’t know…I… If I leave him alive he’ll just go on killing. This is my mess to clean up.” Bobby looked side to side, ahead, then started to push off with the paddle, but instead lay it across his knees. “Reach that pistol up here to me, will you?” He breathed the words, only glancing back, cutting his slanted dark eyes.
Rewis suddenly leaped like a frog from the cluster of willows in front of the boat, planting both boots flat and apart on the sand, not a foot away from Bobby. His angry set face, stiffened body and gripped fists seemed all wrong, a contradiction, in the heavenly flurry of tiny butterflies. He drew back his right fist and socked Bobby on the left side of the face. A sickening thunk that sent the butterflies flying like flower petals in the wind.
Bobby tipped back like a weighted punching bag, then to upright position again. The boat followed his motion. He brought the paddle up and sideways, but stopped short of lamming Rewis over the head with it.
“Of all the sissies at Jackson for me to get saddled with...” Rewis clacked his tongue, chuckling. “Lil ole mama-boy, in on some charge of accidental killing. Knife fighting with your own daddy, at that. Hear tell you even took up crocheting. Uh uh uh.” Waves slapped on the bottom of the boat, lapping at his boots. Mad and make no mistake about it, he waded out, splashing water high, and stepped over the right side of the boat, slinging water from his boots onto Ruth and the trash bags. Every nerve in her body was drawn taut, she tried not to flinch. She tried not to bat her eyes. Not to blink. If she was going to survive, she had to stay calm and think. 
Bobby shoved offshore with the paddle shaking, straightened the boat and rowed slowly into the fast current shooting over the fallen tree behind them.      
Pistol pointed dead-center of Ruth’s forehead, Rewis said in a level voice, “Try that again, sister, and you both dead meat.”
***
To keep from feeling closed in with the two men in the dark, in the boat, Ruth fixed her eyes on the narrow stretch of skylight downriver. Grainy gray light, and when she looked down again, she could see only Rewis’s white shirt, his back. Frogs cheeped and katydids rang, a deafening shrill combined. Smells of leaf mold, oak moss and whiskey closed in.
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, she prayed to herself.  She didn’t continue because she did fear evil. She feared death. Her strength was ebbing, her will eroding. She was hungry, tired, scared—she needed to pee—on the verge of giving into her misery. But how?  Would she start crying? Would she beg for mercy? Somehow she knew, she sensed, that Rewis would like nothing better. He was just crazy enough, mean enough, drunk enough, to tease her weakness into a game of cat and mouse.
The two men had switched ends of the boat, Rewis paddling now, and Ruth turned too, toward the east bank of bent trees, head cranking up ahead, behind. Behind and home and Mandy’s body on the river bottom with her lost lounge chair. 
Where were they, what place on the river? When did Bobby and Rewis change ends of the boat? She felt utterly confused, turned around, could almost believe that they were headed upriver again but knew better. She tested herself again and again, imagining that they were moving north instead of south. The dusky light seemed unreal, her predicament unreal. She had wet herself and was now sitting in a puddle of her own pee. Humiliated, hiding it, her bladder relieved but her entire bottom chafed and stinging. She could smell the sour salt smell of her urine and wondered if the men could smell it too. Thinking about her granddaddy’s bulls sniffing the cows’ urine for seasons of heat, she wondered what the smell of her own urine would unleash in Rewis. 
Surely she was dreaming and any minute she would wake up. She would wake up and tell Mandy about her dream and they would laugh, sure in the knowledge that nothing like that could ever really happen to them. But Ruth was stuck in this nightmare, couldn’t shake free. 
Bobby had given her a camouflage jacket to wear and she tented the tail of it over her legs. Her sprained or broken foot looked shiny and white, plastic, not her own. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth and the tip of her tongue was raw from pushing against them. Her hearing felt too keen, irritating, picked up the least hiss or knock. The world was composed of hissing and knocking. Then up ahead there was a rushing sound, like water over rocks.
“How bout pulling that flashlight out and shining it up there?” said Rewis, paddling ahead.
Bobby reached down for the trash bag at Ruth’s back and pulled it to him, felt inside, looked inside, then tied it back with the red drawstring. Then he took the other bag and looked inside and pulled out a couple of flashlights, put one back, tied the bag and began playing the beam of the other across the river in front of the boat. Only smooth-flowing cloudy water, then sheer over a craggy rock flat, then a standing curl left to right with the motion of the hazy beam as if the light itself was the source of the gushing swell and plunge; and the dark was the source of the rushing, spilling, splashing-an apocalypse of water in a brown world. Just off the west shore, at the broad gnarled base of a tupelo, with branches storming in the wind making up from the water below, was an opening in the rocks, a thrusting, thrashing calamity of water folding over and under and churning up. And beyond that, beyond the fall, only foam like snow on the slow dreamy water. 
Rewis cursed loud, back-paddling. But the boat slipped sidewise, waggled and inched forward.
“Don’t look to be but about a foot deep,” yelled Bobby. “Then you’re over.”
The light beam wobbled, then curled with the water, then leveled out on foam.
“Just keep it straight,” Bobby yelled.
Loud plashing, gurgling, roaring like rain from a gutter. Oar on metal, oar on metal, waterspray, and the boat turned broadside and lodged on the ledge of rock, with Rewis battling, cursing, wrenching round, and then the boat tilted sidelong over the rocks, seemed on the verge of righting itself, but tilted again, with the bottom scraping rock, and dumped all three with the white trash bags into the white foam.
Ruth floundered, grappled at the gyring boat, at another thrashing body, went under, came up, with foam snapping in her ears, got her bearings: ledge of rock and rapids facing her, that hideous roar and elongated pitch of sky-lighted black water; boat twitching through the foam on her left toward the west bank and the evening star that still shone regardless. To her right, in stark relief of the white foam, the east shore exhibited overlaid shades of darkness. Odd how dark could be darker than dark, how the cold water could be colder than cold, how she could tread water, buoyed by heavenly warm clouds of foam, but she could not walk. When she got to dry land, she wouldn’t be able to walk. She swam east, east rather than west, because she could hear, sense, somehow see in the torn foam, that the men were swimming for the west bank, the nearest bank, the woods that could take her directly home if she could get past them. She struck a sharp rock with her left knee, dog paddled, then frog-swam toward the umbrella-shaped darkest darkness, treading water, listening, then swimming again, feeling for the unseen shore.
On the other side, the men were shouting, splashing, or was it the splash of the rapids? There was a black trail through the foam where she had swum across.
She crawled onshore, jagged rocks, pits in rocks, and crawled, feeling ahead, looking behind: the trail closed, the foam mended, white imprinted on white. Black on black before her. Ragged pits with water and maybe baby snakes. Was this the place where she had gone fishing with her daddy and Poppee and as soon as they climbed down the bank, they had seen a big-headed, big-bellied moccasin flow from the flat white lime rock into the black water? Then, getting set to fish, they began spying her babies, dozens of them, each curled in the round lacy sockets of rock like little toy snakes placed there. 
“Time to go,” Poppee said, winding up the line on his cane pole. “Ain’t nothing meaner than a moccasin. Most snakes’ll run from you, but ole moccasin’ll run after you. Specially an ole mammy moccasin.”  Serious chuckle from Poppee with sky-blue eyes and a glowing bald head like the moon.  Starlight, star-bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might... A world ago, another lifetime. Then Ruth hadn’t been afraid of the snakes. Now she was afraid. Afraid, but glad. Glad to be out of the boat and away from the men. Not yet safe but feeling free.  
Her fingers touched sand, her knees touched sand. She stood and tried her injured foot and the pain shot up to her head and out through her mouth, as if pain has a voice you better listen to. Spangles before her eyes tried to fool her into believing that now she could see. She started hopping, away from water, away from rocks, through the roar of the river and shrilling of insects and frogs, into the dark-on-dark that sloped up and up the rooty, twiggy, weed-bound bank. Latching to a dewy pine sapling and pulling, sliding back, on her knees and up again.
A sudden beam like heat struck her back and legs but blissfully the source of the light was without voice, or the voice was drowned out by the rapids. On the flat of the densely brushed cliff, she lay stiff and silent in dewy weeds, eyes on the evening star, while the beam of the flashlight swept above and over the surrounding woods like a beacon. Her teeth were chattering. She couldn’t stop shaking. To calm herself, to gain physical as well as mental control, she decided she would dwell on happier times, times of peace and feelings of wellbeing: warm water flowing over her, burying her; she had been baptized in this very river. But images of Mandy slowly sinking in the gar hole turned the water to ice.
If only she could walk. If she could walk, she would head upriver till she got to the Mayday Bridge. Or east to State Highway 129, running north and south, parallel to the river. Which was nearer? If the rock where she’d swum across to were the same place where she’d gone fishing with her daddy and granddaddy, she thought she remembered a long drive in the truck around and through mud slews. But that had been so long ago. She would probably get lost.
  The dripping jacket was cold and heavy when she rose to her knees and crawled further away from the bank. The light stabbed her, too bright to be shining from the other shore. Still she crawled in the dark, briers and bamboos tearing at her face, neck, legs and feet. Her hands and knees were raw, smarting, when finally she stood in a clearing of pines on the mat of russet pine straw.
 It was too dark to see, so she must have been seeing what she knew was there, what she had seen before, seeing through her imagination. Hearing was seeing in the dark. She started hopping tree to tree, branches slapping at her face, vines tangling in her hair, but the roar of the rapids was growing more distant. But the shouts were growing closer. Or did they only sound closer sorting through the river’s roaring? No matter, she was moving. She was going. Eyes on the evening star. What if the shouts were from Bobby and he was looking for her, coming to help her? She couldn’t take that chance. They would have to get the boat, meaning she had to be moving faster, but in truth she was only hopping from tree to tree, bare feet landing on thorns and pineburrs. She had to stay close to the river, that pewter gash through the woods she could glimpse only now and then through bushes and trees.     
At one point, she hopped past a palmetto clearing in the woods and saw a long stretch of the river shining on her left. She edged closer and peered south and saw the empty highway of water. She listened and heard only the purring of the rapids and springs trickling from the high banks into the river. An owl hooted once on the other side, answered by an owl on her side, but deeper in the woods. She hopped on—tired, hungry, thirsty, aching and smarting from the brier and bamboo scratches. She had to keep going. She had to stay ahead. She wondered what time it was, she wondered what her mother and sister and brother were doing, saying. Her daddy had just had a heart attack-stress, said his doctor. She wondered if he’d have another one when he heard she was missing. She wondered about Mandy’s family, especially her mother, who ruled like a queen from her fine brick house, and punished her four daughters for misbehaving by making them weed her tomato patch and flower beds. What would be the punishment for Mandy getting herself killed by hoodlums?
Ruth imagined her girlfriends, in Valdosta, crying and hugging each other when they heard that she was gone. All of them coming to her parents’ home to say how much they loved Ruth, how good she was: You never saw Ruth without she was smiling; she had a kind word for everybody. They would say that even though it wasn’t true, not really. They would make her mama and daddy and sister and brother cry, saying that.
One of Ruth’s group at school-the popular girls and the unpopular boys-had been killed in a car wreck the year before. A puny sixteen year old boy whose voice sounded like a duck’s. They hadn’t really noticed him before, barely tolerated him, but after he died, he was everybody’s best buddy. The year book had even been dedicated to him.
All at once, Ruth realized she was lying on the ground, listening to the river warble. How long? How long had she been in this one spot, wreathed in the whine of mosquitoes? She stood, listened, looked left and saw the river brighter than before. Moonlight or daylight? Heard the water stirring beyond a curve downriver. Was it a boat paddle?
She stepped farther into the woods, hopping, so thirsty she was tempted to go back to the river, to locate a spring and drink. Her foot was pulsing and swollen, beating with heat like a spare heart. Then only sensing the river to the west, she began north again. Hopping, hopping, her good foot hurting almost as much as her bad one. Twilight filtering down through the thick green needles of pines and leaves of the hardwoods. A hawk cried overhead. For no real reason, she felt energized, her foot like that big boot, sole numb so that she could step down on it. Moving faster and slapping aside branches, vines, fear. 
Good daylight and she was so curious about how far she had come, that she headed for the riverbank and stared down at the turning black water. She could barely make out the fallen pine broadside of the river north of where she was standing. When she looked south, she thought she saw the boat, a metal speck, but stood holding to a willow trunk to make sure it didn’t move, and didn’t move, and finally figured it was only a bent sheet of tin, part of some farmer’s barn roof maybe, lodged in cypress knees and flotsam. She followed a burbling sound down the cool damp bank and kneeled at a spring and drank from a thin crystal stream. Sand on her tongue, between her teeth, but no matter she was curing her thirst. One more glance upriver, and she stepped back into the woods and hopped northward. Her left foot now felt sorer than her right from bearing all her weight.
When the sun rose through the east woods, and the birds struck up singing, she felt almost happy till she thought of Mandy. But even then she didn’t cry. She sat and picked a thorn from her left heel, but didn’t cry. Her legs and feet look flayed. She would have to wear jeans for first day of school, next week. Such selfish thinking almost brought tears; she even placed her forehead on her knees in position to cry, to pray. Then she stood and was off again, somehow getting used to the hopping rhythm. 
When the sun was overhead, she knew she must be nearing the house in the woods where she had been captured, but resisted the urge to step out to the river to take measure where it would be more open because of the scalloped sandbars. She would get to the house by way of the woods and take the road to Mayday. Call home from somebody’s house. She had to be almost to the gar hole and Mandy, almost to the house on the river.
She stopped. That’s exactly what the men would expect her to do. She was the only person who knew they had killed Mandy and where they were headed for. She had to cross the river now or head out across the woods, east to 129. Almost the same distance as to 135 that would take her home. But home seemed closer, just the thought of it dearer. Today she was supposed to drive Poppee to the eye doctor.
Not making a sound, she was sure of it, though hobbling tree to tree, she stepped out onto the sloped bank and looked downriver, then upriver, then down, like crossing a street. The flat sandbar downriver from where Rewis had sunk Mandy’s body. And upriver, her grandfather’s gar hole and the horseshoe of brilliant sand, in full sun now, and its fallen willow tree, toppled but still sprouting leaves. The house on the river was just beyond that curve. All was still and silent except for the crickets and rill of springs, especially at the slavering blue rock walls over the gar hole. Nobody around.
 She had been smart to cross here, and though the water appeared deep and dark, she found slipping into it, that it was only about neck deep, then chest deep, mid-river, then waist-deep farther on toward the west shore. Looking again toward the overreaching trees downriver and up at the horseshoe of sand that looked set in the middle of the river and the willow which grew sideways from the sand, she could see, materializing from the benched willow trunk, as in a trick picture, the image of a man with a shiny pistol directed at her.
Shock gongs, shock gongs...
Face on fire with fear, and not knowing what else to do, with no plan in mind, not even hoping now to make it to the sweet green woods belonging to her grandfather, she looked downriver again and kept wading out with her arms spread, as if testing the soft water, easing like a kid caught and ashamed, pretending she hadn’t seen Rewis, feeling the marshy bottom with her feet, a forked stick, then hearing a double popping sound-Phafp. Phaft.-on her right, jets of water shooting up and raining down.
She ducked under, hearing the water roar in her ears and seeing her dark hair swirling, walking backward, she hoped she was walking backward. Reverse baptism with the weight of the water bearing down like her fear, her sins—Mandy was dead because of her. When she had to rise for air or burst, Rewis was standing on the steep sand slope directly in front of her with the pistol aimed at her head.
“Think I won’t shoot you, think again.” He said it as if they’d been talking all along.
Her ears were filled with water so that she could only imagine he was saying that, and imagined that in less than a minute-what time was it?-she would be with Mandy in the gar hole where she had every right to be.
She tried to pray. Said, “Where’s Bobby?” as if they were all friends.
Rewis laughed, squatted, pistol still on her. He spat to one side. “He sends his regards.”
Tiny fish nibbled at Ruth’s knees, her toes. 
“Now be a big girl and come on out, you hear?”
She eased forward. Relieved? Sorry? Only glad to be on the westside, homeside, of the river. A good place to die. 
“Why didn’t you kill me before?” she said, stepping up the bank in the sopping jacket and feeling naked.
“Listen at you! Act like I’m some kind of Bundy or something.” No longer laughing, he motioned north along the shoreline with the pistol. “Let’s just take little walk. Right around there, sister.”
Her injured foot grew heavier and heavier after its soothing weightlessness in the water. Limping along, she followed the wet ridged edge of sand till she got to the side-growing willow, trudged up the slope of blistering sand churned by her feet, by her grandfather’s boots, the footprints of all who had been on the bar since the last rain, though not tracks exactly, because the sand was so deep and coarse that tracks wouldn’t stick. Coming around the willow, she could see beyond the sloping sand the boat pulled up to a hulled-out tupelo in the golden sunglade of ruffled water. Woods on her left, her grandfather’s woods, beautiful green lonesome woods, she had to resist the urge to break and run, to flee, to make herself step into the boat again, not sure whether to feel relief or dread.
Rewis got into the bow of the boat and shoved off from the sandbar with the paddle and around the hook of sand and over the black water of the gar hole. A silver gar arced from the water, slapping the surface like an iron rod, and dove under. Rings on rings circling out into the current. 
And then Ruth cried. She cried for her friend beneath the black water and for her family worrying about her, but mostly for all those hard dark hopeful steps taken in getting this far. For the very pointlessness of hope. Then her foot started throbbing again, and she knew she would try to keep breathing till she was forced to stop.

Part 2

It was sundown and hot when they reached the rapids where the boat had overturned and Ruth had escaped the night before. Tree shadows striped the still dark water up to the sheer rock shallows, and then the watercurl like melted copper manufacturing from blackest oil. The end product, a form of foam. Roar of factory racket, bitter smell of tannic acid. 
Rewis maneuvered the boat toward the west bank, and a churning channel, and holding to an overhead branch of a large water-wrung tupelo to steady the bucking boat, aimed the bow into the braiding water and shot through the shady gap. Storm switching abruptly to calm, the boat glided on clouds of foam. And again they were floating toward an eye of light at the end of a tunnel of touching tree limbs. Sandbars and floodplains, gray and static dusk.
Ruth was done with crying now, done with her useless raging guilt over Mandy’s death. If she intended to live, to get home, she had to be tough. She had to match Rewis’s nervy determination to get where he needed to go, to beat down whatever stood between him and his destination. If only she weren’t so sleepy.
Once, through a net of blinking lightening bugs strung tree to tilting tree, Ruth thought she spied a man shadowed in the dimness of the west bank. Floating past, she turned on her seat in the bow of the boat, eyed the trees, eyed Rewis. He was stirring the water with the paddle in his left hand and the pistol in his right-same stirring motion in midair. He looked at her, then at the trees where she was staring.
"Is it alright if I drink some water?" she said.
His eyes darted her way, down at the jug, then back at the west bank. Pistol aimed straight at her.
Facing him now, she lifted the plastic gallon jug from the floor, broke the seal and drank. A new jug of water, meaning Rewis had gone back to the house for fresh supplies and probably more ammunition when he came looking for her. She drank again, watching him watching the woods, a stand of fan palmettos, more trees growing from slopes of raw gray dirt.
"Don't get your hopes up," he said.
She lowered the jug to the deck of the boat with hands so steady they alarmed her. 
Then he shouted loud, as if for the benefit of somebody listening, either close by or far away, "If I go, you go." He passed the dripping paddle to her. "You paddle. Give you something to do. I'll shine the light."
His voice layered fear on top of fear. Since they’d started out for the rapids the second time, he had said nothing. All those numbing river miles he’d only paddled and watched her. She could feel his eyes, could feel him about to speak till she’d grown numb from waiting. Every twitch of the boat a possibility.
She took the wooden paddle, scarred and nicked from battling the river, dipped it left, then right, pulling down and back against the weight of the water. Indeed glad to have something to do, but her eyes were so heavy and sandy-feeling that she found herself closing down with the daylight. Following the beam of light shooting around her, fusing with the shrilling of katydids and frogs, she was closing down.
Always there was that charm of the locusts’ rattling in the trees.
Ruth’s mother had bought her daddy a sleep machine for his birthday-a small gray box with a dial selector for different soothing sounds. First, rain, then the rumble of a slow train-no whistle to jerk you from sleep. Then there was the rattle of locusts with a glitch of repetition-one locust rattling louder. Soon, you would find yourself awake and waiting for that same note and for the recording to start over again.
Some afternoons, Ruth and her younger sister and brother would lie across their parent’s sleep-softened king-size bed, listening and drifting. As with all things new in their house, the children were at first fascinated by the sleep machine, couldn’t get enough of it, even quarreled over it, till it became old and just-there, like the bird clock with its twenty-four different bird songs to signal the hour, fast becoming a nuisance and a joke. But it would stay; they never threw anything away. Next to the bed, the children’s chocolate lab would sprawl belly-down on the gold shag carpet, drifting too. But when the locusts began rattling and that lone locust broke the rhythm, Ruth’s eyes would fly wide and so would the lab’s. She was tuned in to the difference between fake and real from nights in the country at her grandfather’s house. The old dog knew racket when he heard it.
"Hey!" Rewis shouted, and Ruth sat straight, empty-handed, and he jabbed her back with the wet paddle she had dropped and he had apparently fished from the river before it could float away.
 Then he began paddling himself with her guiding with the flashlight. The transition seemed instant, dreamlike, though her shoulder was cold and damp. She felt as awake and alert as she had while listening to the locust recording on the sleep machine. But the machine rattling of the locusts in the trees was pulling her under, down, inside where warm numbness crept.
 Thinking, trying not to think, she found she was thinking in her sleep: in a boat but not this boat, floating above the unseen water on a twist of river with the same view of overhanging trees and closing banks with snarled roots, nearly colliding but not colliding because in a dream you can’t collide, only drift through the mist. Amazingly the flashlight beam stayed on the river, on the smoking, buggy light. She thought that and what if the light went out. Would she wake up at home in her parent’s bed with her brother and sister and Brownie on the floor, listening to the sleep machine? 
Suddenly, the sleep machine became the bird clock and all the birds began twittering and calling at once.  The boat glided from darkness into twilight, and the rattling of the locusts softened to a hum in the quickening of birdsong. 
Oakmoss draped over the vaporous brown water and there was a murmur of springs and new light that made Ruth feel hopeful and bold.  The smell of the dirt and the water and the green and decaying leaves mingled and lingered on the still morning air.
Behind her, Rewis was rowing, slinging the paddle and dripping water plink plink plink  onto the metal floor of the boat. But slowly, as if coming awake himself.
She dreaded seeing him, hearing him speak. But she needed to stop and stand, she needed to pee. Her foot was aching and her bladder was full.
“I need to stop,” she said.
"Do it off the front of the boat, but we ain't stopping yet." He sounded hoarse, haggard, afraid. The rhythm of his rowing was off; the paddle struck the boat sides about every two beats. 
Sandbars, flood plains, palmettos and tilted trees. The water ahead breathed slow smoking vapors. 
Finally, when her bladder could hold no more, she took off the camouflage jacket and slid forward on the seat and knotted the sleeves above her waist, backside in front like an apron. She stood in the triangular well in the bow of the boat, facing Rewis, then unbuttoned, unzipped and slipped her panties down with the cut-off denim shorts. Afraid of what each motion would unleash in him, she backed slowly and sat with her buttocks hung over the point of the bow. Eyes on the wrinkled blue vinyl of her pivoting boat seat, to keep from looking at him, she strained till her bladder let go.
"Hate to tell you, sister," Rewis said, and grinned, "but you ain't my type."
He was subdued like somebody after a wild party, or somebody with a hangover. He was subdued like somebody on the verge of sleep and she had to keep watch or she might miss her chance to get away.
 She talked to drown out the sound of her own water pattering into the river. "Then why am I with you?"
"Cause I can't let you go."
"Why didn't you kill me?"
He yawned, laid the paddle at his feet, stretched with the pistol still in his right hand. "Well, like I say, anybody in a mood to shoot at me's gonna think twice cause I might shoot you."
No current and the boat yawed a little left then drifted straight. Barely moving.
"Like who?" She was through, buttoning up, zipping up, sitting on the seat again with the jacket still knotted about her waist. The boat rocked, water slapped underneath. But still it remained mid-river, barely moving. Her face was hot with the embarrassment of his having witnessed her foolish rushing and staring down as if his sick mind hadn't camera-clicked her most private flesh and thoughts both. "I asked who?" she repeated. 
"Anybody."
"Bobby?"
He placed the wide end of the wet paddle on her left shoulder. “Paddle," he said.
Not turning, not looking at him, she slid the paddle down her shoulder to the slender wood handhold below the top knob. "Is that why you aren't stopping yet?"
"I'll stop when I get to the Suwannee River."
"We haven't even reached the bridge in Statenville yet. It's days till you get to the Suwannee."
He seemed to be thinking about that. Then he began rummaging through the garbage bag of supplies. Took something she couldn’t see from the bag, pulled what sounded like the tab on a can. Plook, into the river.
She began rowing, smelling Vienna sausage, tomato sauce. She was starving, in spite of having believed that she would never be hungry again. "Can I have something to eat?"
“I don’t know. Can you?” He laughed hoarsely with his mouth full.
“May I?”
“Just to let you know you ain’t dealing with no uneducated fool here.” He drank water from the jug, washing the half-hearted teasing down with the sausage, set the jug on the floor again, and burped. "Sausage, beans, or sardines? Take your pick."
"Sausage."
"Hand me that paddle back."
As she swung round on the seat, she saw the pistol atop the stuffed white plastic bag. Meaning only to pass the paddle to him, she tipped the heavy end of the paddle down and knocked the pistol spinning like a bottle to the floor about halfway between them. When it stopped spinning the pike of the barrel was pointed at his right boot, his muddy white sock running up to his hairy muscle-knotted calf.
He laughed, reached down and picked it up, shook the barrel at her with his finger on the trigger. Eyes never leaving her face, he ran his tongue around his back teeth so that his pink lips screwed up. His spoked hazel eyes were like two flares sent up to signal danger. His light brown beard was about half-inch in growth now, but soft-looking and scattered, same color as his hair caught back in a ponytail with a rubber band. With his other hand, he picked up the squat round tin of sausages from the floor next to his seat, the can he’d been on the verge of handing to her when she had so rudely knocked his pistol to the floor. “Some people you just can’t be good to,” he said low and accusing, at the end of his patience. 
Facing the sun-flocked river again, she popped the ringed tab on the can and peeled back the shiny disk of thin aluminum. The pink sausages were stood on end and packed tight in oil. She pinched one from the center and put it in her mouth, chewing the spongy greasy salty meat she would never before have eaten but now tasted delicious, she was so hungry. She knew she should be quiet, not provoke him. But couldn’t help it. "You lose the rifle in the river?"
"You getting too smart, gal, too sure of yourself."
She had to know what her chances were. Whether she was as alone with him as she felt. Whether he was apt to fall asleep. Rattle of locusts in the tupelos and maples along both banks caused her to feel more alone with him. Hopeless in the lost world of the brown river, green trees and surrounding muddy swamps. "Bobby got the rifle, didn't he?"
At once, she felt his weight shift, rocking the boat, saw his slumped morning shadow moving forward on her right, across the water rippling out to the loamy root and vine-tangled bank, pistol in the air, and felt-heard-a hard thwack on her skull. Spangled light, throb, ache, rattle of locusts taking on a ringing sound. The can of tiny pink sausages in her hand dropped, rolled on the metal floor; his boot soles grinding behind her, going back to his seat. No shadow now and she swallowed the sausage in her mouth, watching the oil seep from the can and float iridescent on the water along the inner edges of the boat. Tears brimmed but she didn’t cry. She wouldn’t. Not-crying was her only revenge, all she could do, though her head hurt so bad she felt sick and crying would be a relief, the natural thing to do. She picked up the can, though she was sure she could no longer swallow, so swollen was her throat with lodged grief and unshed pain.
“Now shut up," he said. "I like a little peace while I eat."
***
The boat shunted through a canal of fast dark water and sweating soaprock, glister of low sun like a blast of gold paint. Riveting click of crickets in the dry weeds along the banks. Odor of smelting iron, then tang of willow and pine as the brown water spilled forth between steep, shady banks. Familiar smells, like any common-day lazy afternoon on the river with somebody older over Ruth, watching over her and taking care of her and just spending good time. One more curve and then a high white bridge with its barred shadow blocking off the pale water and white beach beyond. Like a barrier the boat couldn’t pass through. 
All day they had remained in the boat, spots of sun and shade, then openness like now and the sun baking down, hotter than hot, so that any shade coming up was a cool refuge. Ruth felt drained, parched but strangely not sunburned. Her head throbbed, her foot throbbed and her eyes ached from straining to peer thorough the sun for upcoming shade and somebody who might rescue her. Since morning, and many many tedious river miles, they had heard a chain saw, somebody hammering-maybe building a deer stand-a rooster crowing way off, but nobody in sight, no sign of possible human life till now.
Getting closer, Ruth could make out a square white truck, a car, like toys crossing the bridge, could hear their rumble and clack as they passed seam to seam of the concrete sections.
The bridge marked the city limits of Statenville, where Mandy used to go to school, and where Ruth herself was hoping to start as a senior next week. Her grandfather had said it was "okay" if she stayed with him, but she knew it was better than okay, that he simply didn’t want to sound too eager, too lonely. 
If not for him, if not for Mandy, she would rather have gone her last year to the school in Valdosta where she had always gone. But Statenville, Echols County, seemed as familiar as Valdosta because she had gone to church and the post office with Poppee since she could see the tiny town through the windshield while standing in the seats of his various new pickups. Poppee always bought new pickups--his sole extravagance, because everybody should have at least one extravagance, he said.
Another reason Ruth was switching schools in her senior year was to get over her old boyfriend, Troy Stone. They had been going together for two years, on again and off again, to the point that the on-agains were coming too close together. Before long, Ruth figured, they would naturally progress to engagement and marriage without ever having been with anybody else. Troy was too easy to be with, so comfortable he was boring. She didn’t love him and he didn’t love her, they were simply mutual seekers of safety in a big school.
Going from a big city school to a little county school would also give her a break from worrying about whether or not she would have enough credits to graduate. She might even be at the top of her class for once, way ahead of the others instead of number 256 or whatever at the city school. The appeal of the smaller school wasn’t only less competition for Ruth, but the relaxation of just being. She wouldn’t have to be always tempted to try drugs or dress rich. She would be cool in a pickup truck as opposed to a BMW. Really, she could just be herself, who she hoped she was, hidden away inside. Her not owning a cell phone would no longer matter-even if her parents could afford one they wouldn’t buy her one. 
Mandy had never known even to want a cell phone. She was cool without one because she hadn’t known she should have one. Nobody at her own school did.
Ruth wondered now if her parents would regret not buying her a cell phone. She might have called for help though she couldn’t imagine it.
She had never passed this bridge without seeing people on the sandy east shore--swimmers, fisherman, people simply staring at the queer lit yellow water. But now for the first time, nobody. There was a cemetery on her left, this side of the barred shadow, and she could see a lone white headstone through the holly trees and scrub oaks; she could hear what she imagined was a human voice wavering on the hot air. A car door slammed upbank. Names of lovers in red had been spray-painted on the tall stout white pilings of the bridge.
The front of the boat nosed into the thick bridge shadow and the shallow water appeared deeper and darker, teeming with tiny specks of riverlife. If she were quick enough she could double over and drop to one side, swimming underwater till she reached the east bank. She could try. Then the dark water turned amber and shallow as her eyes adjusted to the shade. Her chance had passed with the illusion of depth. Two men were talking up the bank between the trees. She couldn’t see them. If she screamed, maybe they would run down to help. But not before Rewis shot her. And them too, probably. Mandy was proof.
The boat had passed over the barred bridge shadow and again was heading toward woods. Thicker woods now with more banks of white limestone than blue soaprock. She found herself looking for Bobby along the shore, behind the trees. Only Bobby-the belief that Bobby was out there. She felt as if she had never known anybody else but Bobby. All she really knew about him though was that he had been a trustee, that he had accidentally killed his own daddy. Bobby was a mama-boy, he crocheted…and he had been kind to her. From what she had gathered back at the house where she had been captured, Rewis had somehow convinced Bobby that he had changed. Truth or lie, these clues to Bobby’s gentle nature only served as contrast for the murderous nature of this man she had to look to for mercy. Had to be murder or Rewis wouldn’t have been up for execution at Jackson.
The barred shadow of the bridge marked the end of familiar river-she had fished or swam almost every eddy and waded almost every shallow-and the start of a long lost journey with a proven killer that would surely end with her being damaged or dead. Another fifteen miles or so and they would be crossing into Florida. Would she ever again enter that stretch of river behind her in which any path west through the pinewoods would lead to the highway and home? Would she ever go home again?
She tried to lift herself out of that darkness of not-knowing and separation from God and all she cherished by gazing down at the inky water. Same water, same river. Same deadly stranger with a gun at her back. The fact that he hadn't yet killed her was an encouraging sign. But looking back at him with the paddle pinwheeling left to right, pistol on the floor at his feet, she realized that like herself, Rewis figured they'd lost Bobby, or worse, knew that Bobby was dead. Had known all along what she couldn’t know, just as he knew what he would do with her in the end. End of the Alapaha River. End of her life.
Through a tunnel of trees, and then on the next curve she knew Bobby was either dead or lost, because Rewis steered the boat right onto a narrow bar, quick with a grinding of sand and lapping of water. The bank was a high shoulder of climbing bushes intertwined with ferny red love vine, tiny delicate horns of red.
"Bail out and take a break," he said, standing in the boat. "We get back, I aim to let you row while I get a little shuteye."
Good news: he wouldn’t be killing her yet.
He stepped out into the tea-tinted edge of the river and held the pistol on her while she turned to step out with her good foot, bringing the other out behind her, then hobbled on toward the sand. The water felt so cool, so good, she longed to stay. Beyond the scallops of waves created by Rewis’s boat was another border of scallops drying in on the sand created by another boat. There were squiggly scored tracks of big athletic shoes, fresh tracks, boot toes gouging into the wet sand, then an older, smaller track, with tiny paw prints of a raccoon overlaid. Two cloudy green Coca Cola bottles lay next to a brightly painted Pepsi can and a small band of white cardboard, like the backing of a candy bar wrapper. People. People had been here.
"You can do your business right over there behind them gallberries," he said and motioned with the pistol at the strip of bushes where the slope started. "But I gar-un-tee you I'm watching."
She looked at the see-through hedge of maple saplings and sparkleberry bushes. Her injured foot was alive with pain, the center of her and a hindrance. She couldn't run if she had to. She hobbled toward the bushes, hearing thunder way off in the west.
"Did you shoot Bobby?" Talking made her feel he was distracted, not watching, as she squatted sideways behind the hedge. She gazed up through the ferny climbers of love vine, at the bruised light touching the top of the west bank. 
When she hung her head, it throbbed and pounded like her foot.
"Let me put it this way," he said, unzipping and peeing on the other side of the hedge, "I wouldn't be expecting that Bible-thumper to save me if I was you."
After hearing him zip up, she parted the bushes and stepped out behind him. Her own urine smelled mild and salty and his smelled strong.
"Go there to the boat and get us a couple cans of beans."  He motioned with his head, then wiped his sweaty face with the tail of his white T-shirt. The pistol was stuck in the waistband of his shorts. 
Glad to be away from him, from his smell, from his reach, she hobbled across the hot sand of the bar, again noting the wave scallops created by another boat. Couldn’t have been so long ago because the heat of the sun would have crusted it over. At the boat, she had to wade out a few feet to reach the middle and the white garbage bag of supplies. From there she could see downriver, maybe glimpse the other boat, but when she looked back at Rewis he was watching her and she didn’t want to tip him off if indeed there was somebody else nearby. The top of the bag was gathered with a band of similar white plastic. She stretched it open and peeped inside at the various cans of food and insect repellent, pistol cartridges. Felt like a full box. 
Thunder still sounded in the west and the hot sun peeked from behind a dark blooming thunderhead.
She took the two cans of beans as told and started back toward the north end of the bar where Rewis was now sitting on the sand overlooking the river. The pistol was on the dirt between his legs. He was holding a small pocketknife, rolling it in his hand. "Shit!" he said and leaned sideways and slipped it into his shorts pocket. Leaned to the other side and felt inside the other pocket and pulled out the familiar fat black-handled knife. He thumb-nailed a blade to open position, then jabbed the blade in the sand-once, twice-and wiped it on the leg of his filthy khaki shorts. 
She handed him a can of beans; he looked up at her, grabbed her wrist, squeezed it, shook it, took the can. She stepped back, still holding the other can. Her wrist stung like her foot. The thunder was closer, but still not close. He set the can on the dirt between his legs, punched a hole in the top and began ratcheting the blade around the indented seam of the edge. "You ain't my type," he said and laughed. "Course a man can't be too choosy on the run."
"I'm not afraid of you." She hadn’t meant to speak, to say that. And it wasn’t true anyway.
He looked up, spoked eyes glinting fire.
A fish wobbled the eddy water on the far side of the river.
"Now, I do like that. I ain't lying, I do. Ain't nothing gets me going like a gal with guts."
She swallowed hard, took the can of beans he held up. He started opening the other one.
"You plan to kill me, don't you?"
"Hey!" he said loud, as if speaking to somebody in the thick scrub woods across the river. "What I don't like is people accusing me." He stood with the opened can, tipped his head back and began shaking the clotted red beans into his mouth.
She put the lip of the can to her mouth and ate likewise; the insides of her fingers were hot and prickly with fear. She had to be more careful. Soon she would be free. 
When he finished, he tossed the can into the river and picked up his pistol from the sand. The can floated, gathered water, then sank. She had always wondered what kind of people threw their trash in the river and now she knew. Her theory of lazy but harmless litterbugs had been a lie. The ones she had seen, the litterbugs, hadn’t looked all that different from Rewis. Her innocence had been a lie too. It seemed a miracle that she and Mandy hadn’t been raped or captured or killed before, wandering the river as they had done. What had finally happened seemed bound to happen. A lapsed miracle.
Rewis waded out to the middle of the boat, fumbling around on the floor between the water jugs and the trash bag, pulled out a short length of haywire and a chrome flashlight, slogged to the front of the boat and began rigging the flashlight to the triangle of the bow. He tilted the light up, then down, tightened the loops of wire and stepped again to the middle of the boat, picked up the pistol and turned and motioned for Ruth to come on. 
Quick up and over, he stepped into the stern of the boat and sat with water streaming from his boots to the deck. "Shove us off," he said.
She set her can of beans in the bow on the floor, shoved the boat out and stepped in.
He steered the boat clear of a limby tupelo leaning out over the water along the west bank, then swung the oar up to her right shoulder. She took it and began paddling into the slow current. A navy darkness waited up ahead, close thunder. No sign of another boat, but at least she was feeling cooler. Growing cooler from the outside, in, and glad for the change.
What was that deepest sleep phase called? She tried to remember from health class. She knew that it was the dreaming part of sleep, about thirty minutes after falling asleep. REM, yes, that was it. She would keep paddling, for thirty minutes, not even changing rhythms or looking back to see whether he was sleeping. Then she would begin searching for ways to escape, using common sense and all the skills she had gained from her days on the river with her grandfather. Her injured foot would be the problem, of course, because she wouldn’t be able to run. Maybe she could ease the boat over to the bank and slip out, and even without running, make it through the woods before he woke up. Or get the gun. She shuddered, thinking about that because she wasn’t sure she could shoot anybody, not even him. 
Thunder sounded off like a gunshot, scattering her thoughts. 
Around the next curve, she could see lightning cracking the spreading hull of dark sky. She looked behind and Rewis was sitting in the bottom of the boat with his head laid back on his seat, eyes closed and one boot crossed over the other. The pistol was aimed straight at her as if set on automatic or alive.
The leaves of the tall thin bay trees flipped belly-up, showing white selvedges, and the wind sang in the tops of the cypresses and pines. A drop of rain dimpled the water--slow rain, one, two, three drops, then a downpour. 
The boat lurched side to side as the wind dropped down in the close-growing tupelos and generated a draft of rain-driven wind from south to north. Rain like needles on her face and arms. It was all she could do to keep the boat from spinning and wheeling into the whipped branches along the banks.
"Pull over under that tree there," yelled Rewis, pointing west to twin tupelos with fused trunks like legs of elephants and roots stepping down into the dark troubled water.
Rain lashed from the left, sideways, sending the boat sidelong into the trees she was aiming for. The right side of the boat slammed the stringy roots and Rewis stood, holding to a thick branch overhead, peeping through the green leaves. Lightening snapped, flashed and ripped the twilight sky. She wrenched round to watch him while hanging to a cypress knee at the base of the first tree to steady the boat. Hoping he'd say to get out of the boat because of the lightening which oddly seemed more terrifying than Rewis, who was now staring hard at the opening between trees. Rain streamed down both their faces, puddling in the boat. Was he looking at something or only hanging on till the wind let up? His hair was matted to his forehead, in bangs that changed the shape of his face from sharp and mannish to round and boyish. 
From where she sat, bow of the boat bobbing and scraping the roots of the first tree, she could not see where he was looking, but could see a cane fishing pole with its line wound around the end sticking out from behind the set of trees.
Arc of lightening, clap of thunder-close. Smell of ozone followed by wood smoke.
Abruptly Rewis squatted, picked up the pistol, and stepped from the boat to the tree roots, shaking loose heavy droplets of rain from the large leaves. The boat rocked and swayed and drifted, stern first, into the channel of the river which appeared now not to be flowing but lake-like with its evenly ruffled surface.
Still holding to the rough wet cypress knee, Ruth looked up at the bank, at the space between trees where he had vanished, and didn’t see Rewis at all, only wringing branches and bushes that showed no parting or human movement. Just the wind. Just the thrashing of rain on leaves. Then she heard a shot or limb crack or lightning strike off in the woods.
She let go of the cypress knee, lightening streaking like a string of fire across the river before her. At first she was only drifting, blameless, gazing back, terrified of the lightning, but free. She lifted the paddle and began rowing with the unseen current, left then right, left, right, the oar clacking on the metal sides no more than a murmur in the murmur of rain and the roar of thunder, the river up ahead now brighter, smoother, lightning snapping in the woods to the east; and in the west, that steep sandy, bushy bank with leaning trees almost still. No Rewis.
She felt light and at peace. She should pray now-In everything give thanks. But to pray now would upset her delirium of drifting peace and the hard real fact of her predicament, her reasoning.  
Rowing faster, she could feel her gladness in quickened heartbeats, but her mind lagged, not daring to believe yet, past a fallen tree with sand shining through the brown water, fanned out fish beds, and on, watching the trees alongside for assurance that she was gaining ground, gaining distance and no shots yet. 
How much faster could she move in the boat than a man can move on foot? 
Where would she stop? No matter. Just keep rowing. Her arms felt powerful and she couldn’t help but smile. She wasn’t even tired, she wasn’t hot, but steaming as if her strength was heat pushing through her body. 
Sudden brightness, like the start of a new day-that same pewter shine to the same river-and just as sudden, true twilight, but slow in its progress toward darkness. Leaves dripped with tiny measured kisses on the water, pocked sand on the banks, nothing, nobody shoving through the slope of trees. 
If Rewis was following, he was either far far upriver or else picking his way through brambles and bushes at the top of the steep bank.
Don't think, just row. She rowed harder, around a bend with boiling black water and overhanging trees. Clean green smell and mosquitoes whining and katydids ringing, tree frogs cheeping shrill as whistles.
She was almost onto a massive fallen pine, like a crude low bridge over the river, before she realized it and had to back-paddle with all her strength and keep her eyes straight ahead, expecting at any time to be surprised by Rewis, to see him materialize as before on another sandbar, on the one she could see now hooking mid-river up ahead. Nearing the stout pine trunk, she placed the paddle in the boat and reached out and grabbed the tree, lay back, as in a game of limbo, and the boat flowed under and downriver toward the sandbar. No Rewis.
Her nightmare was over. It was okay to be happy now. Even in the sullen dark beneath trees, she wasn’t afraid, even took a break in the shallow slow-moving water to rest her arms, to drink water, to spray with insect repellent. 
Tired as she was, she didn’t stop though. She continued rowing-she was not one bit sleepy--and would keep rowing till she happened up on somebody fishing. How far was she from the Florida line? How far from the mouth of the Suwannee and the river rangers' station there? How far from another set of rapids?
In the thin light of first-night, she saw a vine-twined wire fence trailing down the east bank of the river from up high. Then she smelled something burning-no, cooking. Curing tobacco. She started to row over, jump out and follow the fenceline to the farm. She was sure it was a farm. But her injured foot might slow her down and Rewis might catch her; it was too dark and she might step on a poisonous snake and get bit.
No, she would go on rowing till she found somebody, till she was clear of danger. She could make better time on water than on land. She felt rooted in the boat. Safe after feeling endangered for so long. A strange upended sensation in the upended day.  
But the smell of cooking tobacco was soothing, nostalgic, mined old memories and made the bad into the good. 
Ever since they got old enough, strong enough, to work, Ruth and Mandy had worked in tobacco to earn money for make-up, cheap jewelry, nail polish and other trendy school-girl essentials. Working together, side by side, under the hot airless tobacco barn shed, they got lashed from every direction by green tarry tobacco leaves, fresh cropped from the nearby fields. Hard work, sacrificing their summers, and low pay had been the least of it. For twelve dollars, and under, a day, they had suffered Bossie and The Twins. 
 Poppee didn’t grow tobacco. He wouldn’t grow what he wouldn’t use, he said. But he never faulted his neighbors who did grow tobacco. Privately, though, he would shake his head over the pesticides and sucker control sprayed on the plants which the tobacco companies in North Carolina claimed could be washed away. He’d seen big rains come up following applications of the poisons and next day the monstrously large horn worms would still be dropping from the stalks.
Mandy had spent the night with Ruth so that they both woke together, first morning of tobacco gathering. Break of dawn and not a sound in the lofty old farmhouse, divided down the middle by a closed-in hall. But outside, Poppee’s big blue-black rooster with the red cone was crowing from his corner fence post. 
Any minute now Poppee would be up, making his coffee in the kitchen on back of the house. Cooling and sipping it from his special saucer. Nobody to share the sunrise through the big east windows overlooking the red cattle rising up to graze the lush pastures through a new day. Lonesome as Ruth knew he was, since her grandmother had died, a smile still lit his countenance-that candle-wax white, hairless round head. Used to, sometimes, they embarrassed Ruth, hugging and kissing and pairing off to be alone in their room with a TV and couch and tall tester bed on the right side of the hall.
The house still smelled warm, of vanilla, as if only the evening before Lottie, the grandmother, had baked her special sour cream pound cake. Every meal she cooked, and she cooked a lot, was exclaimed over by Poppee-“A meal fit for a king!” That’s why she cooked.
She was a pretty, quick little woman who dressed neat and wore pearls every day of the week. One time Ruth saw her granddaddy pinch her grandmother on the fanny.
Tobacco being the main cash crop in Echols County, there were always plenty of neighboring farmers to pick from to work for. Often they rotated labor, swapping off women, girls and boys. Grown men, worth hiring, were out working their own farms, or otherwise employed by businesses, mines or factories in and around Valdosta. 
Mandy and Ruth leaned toward working for the farmers who paid less but by the same token were less serious about gathering. They had worked for a couple of farmers who boomed orders and cursed their labor and kept them on the job after dark to fill a barn with green tobacco to be fired that very night.
Today the girls were working for their favorite, Romy Kirkland. A funny, squat, fast-talking man who called all girls cabbagehead and all boys knothead. His wife made dinner for them and after work-usually knockoff time came any time right after dinner, depending.-he would take them to swim and eat watermelon at Mayday beach.
Another reason they worked for Kirkland was, Ruth’s grandfather and Mandy’s parents wouldn’t allow them to work alongside some of the sorrier class of people, who handed and strung at the barns or cropped in the fields.
The woman in charge of the barn help, Bossie Clanton, might stretch the truth a bit, as Poppee said. But she could outwork ten men and she had two daughters with her to keep in line and she wasn’t about to show out in front of them or let them show out. What Poppee didn’t know, or maybe he did, was that the two girls smoked and cussed and didn’t give a flip what Bossie thought. Really, Bossie only cared for a good fight in which she and her girls would come out on top. 
Bossie with both hands bandaged in yellow tarry adhesive tape to keep the taut twine from cutting into the flange of flesh between her forefinger and thumb could take a clean stick and lay it up on the sawhorse and loop and strip the twine on the flurry of leaves slung back at her by The Twins with cigarettes stuck to their lips and be hollering, “Stick off!” before Ruth and Mandy’s stringer, another woman, had her stick strung halfway with sheaves of green tobacco.
Made Mandy and Ruth’s stringer look bad with the bossman-made Ruth and Mandy look bad. But Miss Leodie, their stringer, was the poor neighbor widow of Romy Kirkland, and he wasn’t about to fire her and her four grown boys, sorry as the boys looked like they might turn out. Poor ole Miss Leodie.
Two of Miss Leodie’s no-count boys wore their dirty blond hair clipper-trimmed at the temples with long curls in back and they were more interested in the prettiest girls at the barn, Ruth and Mandy, than in getting their sleds unloaded and back to the field for the croppers, mostly black boys, girls and women, to load again with the giant leathery leaves of tobacco.
Bossis was a fat but firm, swarthy skinned woman with thin webby brown hair tucked under a hair net. Her voice was muffled and she dipped snuff. Her girls, The Twins, Teenitsy and Tootsie, were as skinny as she was fat. Growth stunted from smoking since they learned to light up, so figured Ruth and Mandy, though Bossie claimed it was because they’d been born “premachure.”
Mandy remembered them from high school when she was just starting and they were just quitting. And they were always “whipping tails.” The teacher, the bus driver (they rode the bus with Mandy), the principal. Bossie to the rescue. That was the understood-the skinny girls would be assisted by their cow of a mother in whipping tails. 
The Twins had large teeth, the kind you have at eight, with gaps between them; hair dry and black and skin white as paste, a contrast that doesn’t work. They parted their hair down the middle and tucked it behind their ears. They looked pretty much alike, except that Tootsie’s teeth were rotting on front. But they were popular-ask Bossie.
Every day, they wore neat pressed jeans and old-fashioned sleeveless, button-up shirts that showed clean white silky bra straps. (No breasts like Mandy and Ruth, who had BREASTS under their T-shirts). By the end of the day working tobacco, every stitch on your body would be so stained with tobacco tar that your clothes would have to be thrown away, or washed and reworn for tobacco gathering only in spite of the stains. But not so, Tootsie and Teenitsy. 
Stuffed green, scored horn worms, some six inches long, would cling to their shirts like Velcro badges. The caterpillars looked like cigars wrapped in green instead of brown tobacco, or like miniature replicas of the Inchworm toys that kids get for Christmas to ride on. Tootsie and Teenitsy would pluck the horn worms from their finicky-clean shirts and drop them to the ground and pop them with their slim white canvas “tennises,” as if out of habit or like some irrepressible fetish-squeezing blackheads, say, or knocking cigarette packs against the heels of their hands, which they did too.
First cropping, the dreaded sandlugs-dregs of the crop. This was the layer of leaves on bottom of the stalk. The rain would beat the sand into the leaves; in other words, these bottom leaves took the licking. When time came to crop, hand, string and hang the sandlugs on the tiers of rafters inside the barn, gummy sand stuck in your hair, on your face, arms, and your clothes-nothing got around the sandlugs. Even taking off the sandlugs dry, after curing, for first day of market, stripping the cooked snuff-grade tobacco from the sticks it had been so meticulously and expertly strung up on by Bossie, then hung in the barn by Miss Leodie’s boys, the sand clung to all it touched.
Many of the other farmers had quit feeding the help-an old-timey ritual, in these parts. But Romy Kirkland said when he got to where he couldn’t feed his help decent, he’d get out of the business, which really was no business but a hobby, or if not a hobby, a holding on to the way things used to be, an opportunity for kids and women to work, and good company at the noon meal. 
If you got right down to it, Romy Kirkland was the only farmer who still flue-cured or cooked off his tobacco in wooden barns; everybody else had gone to gas bulk barns. Nobody but Romy Kirkland messed with barn labor and the whole worrisome process of keeping everybody happy, fed and entertained like children. “They got harvesters, now, man, ain’t you heard?” 
Knockoff time at 2 p.m. today because Miss Leodie was “overhet” (overheated), practically bear-caught. That’s how Romy talked. So Bossie and her girls loaded up on back of the old faded red pickup. They got the choice spots on the tailgate with their feet dangling so Bossie could spit. Mandy and Ruth had to climb up the tire to get to the truck bed and sit perched on the right fender. Bossie was seated between The Twins, both lit up and blowing smoke through their flared nostrils, on the way home and happy of it.
Bossie had an opinion on everything. She knew something about everything and she was not one bit shy about sharing what she knew.
Let it be stated for the record that Ruth and Mandy, on back of the truck, had had “a bait” of Bossie and The Twins. They were hot, tired, sweaty and sticky, sand gritting between their teeth, and they’d had enough. Up till this summer, they had been for the most part overlooked by Bossie. They did their job and stayed out of the way of The Twin’s two-leaves-to-the hand flapped back to Bossie and her mean string. Mandy and Ruth were competition to The Twins, all of a sudden, some kind of threat to Bossie by bond of bone and blood.
The dirt road from the tobacco barn was a good two miles from the highway. The truck was going so slow that Ruth and Mandy's hair barely moved in the wind.
Times when Bossie was in the mood, anything passing could strike up a story. Insulted and mad as she was about Miss Leodie taking her rightful place up front with the bossman, she couldn’t resist a good ghost story prompted by an old graveyard with mossy headstones behind an iron gate.
Mandy, on Ruth’s right, rolled her green eyes at her, tuning out the story. “Another lie,” she said loud, forgetting the blowback of sound from cab to tailgate.
A pimple on her chin had flared up, the white tip festered to about the size of a match head.
“Hey,” Tootsie yelled, looking around. “You calling my mama a lie, pusface?”
Mandy bit her bottom lip. Pointing at her chest. Me? Are you talking to me? She looked too scared to speak.
Bossie shot Mandy a look. “Sticks and stones may break my bones...”
Teenitsy butted in. “Shagging ass out there in them tight jeans! Think you’re something, don’t you?”
“Now, girls,” said Bossie in that wheeze of a voice, apparently willing to overlook being called a lie and bring to a head the latest sore that had been festering in The Twin’s jealous hearts, the most likely source of a real cat fight. “Them ole boys of Leodie’s ain’t never been all that picky, you ask me.”
“I ain’t studying no boys, Ma.” Tootsie blew smoke up in the air.
Ruth and Mandy could vouch, having worked with them often over the years, that if they couldn’t interest anybody else in a fight, they fought amongst themselves.
“For your information”-how Mandy always started when she got mad-“ I’d say those boys are plenty picky to be flirting with me. Not that I would have them.” She turned to Ruth—what she always did in a tight. “You? Isn’t that what you say, Ruth?”
Teenitsy was standing on the tailgate, Bossie holding to one of her bony ankles to keep her from being blown off the truck-that’s how skinny she was. “You looking for a fight, you mess with my sister,” she said.
“Me and Ruth’ll fight you, you skinny b...witch. Right Ruth?” Up to that time Mandy had been speaking carefully, correctly. Leaning toward class.
“Girls, y’all hesh up,” Bossie broke in, scooting around on the tailgate with one fat leg crooked up. “Them boys ain’t worth it, y’all getting in a fist fight over em.”
Mr. Kirkland with his head out the window, shouted, “Y’all set down back there, you cabbageheads.”
Miss Leodie, weak-eyed and long-faced, peered through the back glass, cool as could be in Bossie’s deserved seat.
“You go to hell, Romy Kirkland.” Bossie shook a fist at him. Like a mad dog, she would snap at whatever got in her way. 
 Either Romy couldn’t hear her for the rattle and roar of the old truck-no muffler-or he opted not to get into it.
 Off and on over the years, Bossie had been known to quit and each time he would beg her back, which only upped her opinion of herself as queen stringer.
Bossie wasn’t about to let it slide. Whatever it was. “Hey, you with your tail stuck out of your cap,” she shouted, looking dead at Ruth, closest to the driver’s window, and the only one with her ponytail threaded through the hole of her cap in back. “You! Knock on the cab for me, will you?”
“No ma’am.” Ruth stood and placed one hand on top of the hot cab. Too hot but she left it there to steady herself over ruts in the road and to show she wasn’t about to do the temperamental, boring old woman’s bidding. 
“I have to come up there, yo ass is gonna be shucks.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ruth smiled. “I hear you, ma’am.”
“Ruth,” mewled Mandy. “You better do it.”
“No.”
“The Twins might be tiny but they can scrub this truck with yo head.” Bossie was really fired up now. Sparks flew from her dingy eyes.
“They’re welcome to try,” Ruth said, facing the empty road ahead with the hot wind blowing her hot face.
“Ruth,” Mandy said low, slipping close. “I wouldn’t if I were you.”
“I have already. I’m sick of it. No more tiptoeing around these people.” Then louder for their benefit. “We have to work together, we might as well have it out. Get it over with.” Ruth didn’t turn again, but any minute she expected one of them to tackle her from behind and take her down. She didn’t look around till they reached the highway and Romy Kirkland stuck his head out and told her to sit down before he hit the hardroad. 
Mandy, to be on the safe side as well as the winning side, was already sitting, seated on the tailgate, smoking with The Twins.

Part 3

Ruth in the boat waited as long as she could, until she could no longer safely negotiate the curves of the river without decapitating herself on a tree limb. Then she switched on the flashlight rigged to the front of the boat, but was tempted to switch it off, because bugs and beetles began to swarm and turn in the beam, batting against her face and chest, and the glare on logs and tree branches ignited red and green eyes of spiders and frogs. Besides, the light was confusing, showed branches where there was none, and none where there was some. She was rowing almost blind, rowing through a thicket of night sounds like a wall. A soft owl swooped over the river, not two feet ahead. So close she could see its extended talons, brittle and yellow as an old man's nails. 
All at once, the sound of the wooden oar clanking on metal was too loud, too nerve-racking. And she would have liked to merely drift, did for a fact give in to the urge only to have a branch swipe her backward. Righting herself, she rowed, keeping to the middle of the river, hearing through the insect swells a roar--either rapids or the engine of a truck. Growing closer and closer to the sound and seeing up ahead the west shore, a clean empty sandbar bordered by upland trees. If she stopped there, Rewis might find her. If she went on, she might overturn in rapids and he might find her anyway. She might drown. 
She had to stop. If for no other reason than to quiet herself. To get back that feeling of fight. Same feeling she had on back of Romy Kirkland’s truck when Bossy and The Twins threatened to whip her. It was as if only her jittering body was the problem and had nothing to do with her mind.  She'd never been jittery in her life. Her whole family--Joan, Cory, Mama, Daddy and Poppee--would tell anybody that Ruth hadn’t a fearful bone in her body. Well, they’d been wrong; she was terrified. She started to cry, backtracking over the past two--three?--days on the river. Since Mandy. Since Bobby. Since the belief in Bobby, and maybe even God, had died like Mandy.
 The bow of the boat had slisked onshore, as if of its own notion. A deep bar that jutted out on the river. She untwisted the wire from the light and held it up, the beam still turning with beetles and bugs, and swung it up across the rain-pocked sand to the trees, sweeping the beam quickly, then slowly, tree to tree, up and down, then quicker still across the river. Shallow water from bank to bank. 
She told herself that she could wade across in a flash if Rewis showed on the west side, the side she was on, but didn’t believe that. But, for a fact, he had no light. She stepped from the boat, reaching down and dragging it halfway onshore to be sure the current didn’t snatch it when she wasn’t looking. In her experience, which seemed to be the sum total of two--three?--days, rather than seventeen years, feeling too sure and too safe was like pride, certain to follow up with a fall. She checked the trees again, then switched off the light, and was stunned to see how bright the starry sky, the white sand, the metal boat. The roar of the rapids seemed louder without the light; it had to be rapids--a truck or motor boat would have moved on by now. 
She sat on the wet dirt, facing the west woods with her back to the river, eyes pinned on the bare white sand between trees. She wished she had stopped on the other side of the river, but she had seen no sandbars, only steep bushy banks, and wishes were like daydreams, didn’t amount to much.
In the stillness, she grew braver, quieter, sleepy. It would be so easy to give in, to let go, to sleep. Here in the cool air smelling of mussels and willow. Even with the constant throb of her foot that seemed as familiar as the floating motion of the boat while sitting motionless on dry land. Listening to the roar of the rapids that sounded upriver, then downriver, close, then far away, she craned her neck left and they sounded to the right, craned her neck right and they sounded to her left. 
Her spine tingled, hot needles.
It was a boat motor, a boat heading downriver.
She stood, looking for it through the branches of a tupelo, north of the sandbar, and already the water was rippling, stirring, and the frogs were growing quiet. She watched for the boat to show around the tupelo, in the pool of water trembling with stars.
The roar faded to a purring sound, as if whoever was operating the boat motor had idled it down, had spied her. She switched on the flashlight and stepped out into the water. "Over here," she called. "Over here. Help!" 
She waved the light to be sure whoever it was wouldn’t miss her and float on by. Even waded out farther, thigh-deep, as she saw the pricket of the bow plow into the field of reflected stars. She moved closer with waves lapping at her legs, at the sides of the boat. She smelled whiskey mingling with the tang of willow, the bitter water. A dark form in the stern of the boat turned toward her, pointing at her.
Before she had shone the light on the boat she knew that it was Rewis pointing the pistol at her. She turned, tramping, slogging through the water toward the beach with the boat whipping alongside. Stumbling, screaming, she fell facedown with his full weight on top of her, grinding her into the hassled mud of the shoreline. 
She tried to crawl away, inching forward on her belly with Rewis riding her like a gator. He laughed, grabbed her ponytail and snapped her head back. She stopped moving, screamed. He bit her neck.
“No, God!”-not a prayer. She knew what was coming next because she could feel his hard groin as he straddled her. Her first time shouldn’t be this way. 
Plowing wet sand with her twisting face, she spat and screamed. 
“Roll over.” He yanked on her ponytail again.
She rolled over, then drove a knee into his groin as he lifted up to unzip his shorts. He cracked her beside the face: fist or open hand she couldn’t tell. She bit his wrist as he settled his weight onto her, easy as a lover. He was breathing hard, covering her with his body.
“Yeah, baby, yeah,” he said low in her ear. “Fight me, baby, fight me.”
She still had some strength but her breath was giving out, replaced by his hot humid musk and reek of whiskey.
He couldn’t hold her down and rip her shorts leg aside to accommodate himself, so after much wrangling, he placed his left forearm on her throat and cut off her breathing so that her eyes spangled red and her body went slack.
***
Daylight and she was bruised, trembly and groggy, sitting in the bow of the wooden motorboat with Rewis working the lever of the motor, fast in open water and slow around bends. A high whine that seemed always to have been there, but renewed itself with every change in the unchanging river. Flat sand shores, then steep rock banks. Then sunlight and the east bank of the river was pitted limerock the color and texture of old lace, large slabs peeled away to form islands, pale rockbars in the dark water. Ferns and crystal springs sprouted from the high walls and slender jointed vines dangled free from up above like ropes let down for rescue of young women abducted by mad men.
At the base of the rocks were gator caves where the still water rippled out into yaws of darkness like light shone into night skies. Lonesome cattle lowed in the east and another wire fence was strung along the upper bank of rank green palmettos, ferns, heavy tytys and wax-berry myrtle bushes. And then a final-feeling sharp bend, a strange corner of the river, strange hollow sounds and cool cave-like light, blue-misty along curving soaprock walls at least twenty feet high, but strangest of all, Rewis was yet to say a word. 
He seemed more menacing not speaking, just staring and steering the boat. And now the roar of rapids for sure. Ruth could see them, no more than a single step down, beyond the queer turn of river. Rusty water curled over a ridge of jagged rocks and naked limbs, the kind of contrast that makes you sit up and suck in and question nature's design and balance.
Rewis motored close to the west shore, a flat of sand and humped tupelo roots. Flies buzzed over soured mud. He got out and motioned her out and together they lifted and guided the small fishing boat over the slippery, mossy rocks and into the wide berth of sulfurous water flowing over rust-tinged sand. Sun beating down; yellowflies and mosquitoes and no offer of insect repellent.
What would he do if she reached behind for it? Shoot her? If he had been going to kill her, he would have done it last night. But he had only raped her. Only raped her. He would kill her later. He would cap off this nightmare with her death.
She reached back for the white plastic bag of supplies like her own belongings, pulled it to her and felt inside for the round tall can, took it out and sprayed her face, neck, hands and legs and the stiff sandy jacket. Putting the can back, she lifted the gallon water jug, only half-full, and drank. And drank.
"Where'd you get the boat?" she asked, setting the almost empty jug on the floor next to her seat.
"Santy Claus," he said and laughed.
"You kill that man?"
"No, he just give me the boat out of the goodness of his heart."
"Where was it?"
"What?"
"The boat. Why didn't I see it?"
"Down a little slew. We come right past it."
"You did kill him."
"Sister, I killed a bunch of people."
"Why?"
"Why'd I kill em?"
Now she didn’t want to know. "Don't tell me."
"You asked. I'll tell you." He swigged at the whiskey. "Wadn’t but about fifteen, sixteen maybe. Just coming into rut, as they say. Followed a ole gal from a grocery store where she was using the pay phone. Raped her and left her unconscious in a alley’s what I done. Long story short, she lived but I had to serve a couple years; that was back in 1989, thereabouts, when you could get a extra day off for every good day you served.” He stared off, thinking, dredging memories. “Parole board let me go afterwhile cause they said I’d ‘developed a better attitude toward life’ after taking one of them high-school equivalency courses. Said they figured I could make it in society and abide by the set rules. That’s how they put it.”
He paused, drinking whiskey, and Ruth thought it was over and she was glad. Then: “Later on I kilt a woman in Waycross I was living with. Stabbed her eight or ten times after I caught her stepping out on me. Slit her throat.” He demonstrated by raking his left hand under his chin. “Got sentenced to life for that one.”
Ruth felt faint, sick. If she’d hoped for mercy from him she now knew that she had been wrong.
Obviously enjoying her reaction to his stories, her shock and revulsion, he went on. Then bored-seeming he wrapped it all up. “One got in the way, was in the wrong place at the wrong time you might say. After that, one thing led to the other and it didn't matter no more where it was one or two or ten. You know?"
"I don't know."
"Sister, listen." He drank from a flat pint of Lord Calvert whiskey. "I bet you'd kill me in a minute, give the chance."
"I would." God forgive her, she absolutely would send her soul to hell for the pleasure of killing him.
"See,” he said. “Me and you, we got a lot in common. How come I'm latching onto you."
"How come you’re latching onto me is for a hostage."
"I ain't gone lie--that's the way of it. But don't hurt to have a good-looking gal along for company."
"You aim to kill me when you get to Florida," she said. "Don't you?"
"Before, if you don't behave."
"And rape me how many more times between here and there?"
"I ever claim to be some gen’leman?"
She stared upriver at the yellow water marbling with black, then that same pewter gash through pinewoods. Rapture of nature, rupture of ugliness. 
"One more thing," she said.
"What's that?"
"Why'd you kill Mandy? Why didn't you take her hostage too?"
"What! And four of us in a lil ole fishing boat?" He sipped whiskey, sighed. "That ole gal, what was she ever gone amount to? She’d of hooked up with some ole boy, made him miserable, had a few brats, made them miserable. I know the type. Ole gal cousin of mine was like that. Feller she married finally got a bait of it and left her. Me about six, eight—hard to remember how old, and ain’t the point no how. My mama would leave me with her while she went to work, and this old gal cousin would drag me and her two younguns, some nights, out to an ole truckstop. Trucks’d be parked out front, lined up. One would blink its lights, then another one. And she’d trot off, servicing em, you know. For money. That’s how sorry she was.”
“Mandy wasn’t like that.”
“Well, that ole put-on scream, that’s what done it though.” 
"I screamed last night."
"Yeah, and I started to kill you. Keep that in mind."
***
Sun beating down on them, set at three o’clock, afternoon of the same day, they entered a wide stretch of shallow water and low weedy banks, straight river, so that up ahead they could see through the autumn haze what looked like a long flat bridge without railings. They’d been hearing for some time now the sounds of hammering iron, louder and louder the closer they got.
“Ole railroad trussel,” Rewis said. He was rowing, in the bow of the boat. Paddle pulling sand instead of water in most places. The boat was barely afloat, so the motor at Ruth’s back had been given a rest. The sand under the clear yellow water was scalloped, giving the impression of waves.
From maybe an eighth of a mile away she could make out a massive red-brick trestle support in the middle of the river and two red-brick retaining walls on either side, reaching up to the high banks where the trestle connected to the rails on land. Somebody on the east side of the trestle was hammering in a slow methodic rhythm that rang out over the river on the end. Every five licks or so, the hammering stopped. If they, Rewis and Ruth, could make it past the thick shadow of the trestle without whoever was hammering having seen them, then maybe that person wouldn’t be shot. It shocked her to realize that she was no longer thinking in terms of rescue, but saving people they might happen up on. 
Surely the law was looking for her and it was only a matter of time before she would be rescued. Maybe they’d already found Mandy’s body, or the owners of the new house on the river had come back and found they had been robbed, and with the help of the law they had made the connection between the escaped convicts and the two missing girls. No way they could miss the signs of scuffle in their yard. 
The sound of pounding iron could now be heard in echo as the boat nosed near the slanted shadow of the stout brick stanchion, middle of the river. Then intermittent staccato sounds, like riding past a line of parked cars, which is really no sound but an illusion of sound, more feeling than sound. 
In a couple of minutes they would be beyond the trestle, heading down the hazy tree-bound stretch where the river narrowed again and ran deeper.
Rewis was looking side to side, where off the weed-bound sandy banks, north side of the brick walls, the banks rose and rounded off to sand and gravel at the ends of the trestle. 
Underneath the trestle, in its lofty shadow of cool breathing clay brick, the water was still shallow but rushed faster over the bottom sand, streaked sand under darker water. Looked like finest mahogany, a respite of brick and mahogany with water burbling and rilling over logs and around the brick stanchion. 
To the left of the brick wall on the east bank, a heavy-set man skied down the slope of sand, one foot in front of the other. His black work boots halted at the pebble-strewn edge of the water. He looked to be about forty, older looking than his age. On top of his head was a black cap that read “FS&X.”
 “Y’all scared the living daylights out a me.” He laughed. He was wearing black suspenders trailing down to a huge round belly that bulged over an elasticized back support, the kind people wear for heavy lifting. All in black except for a uniform-blue shirt with FS&X on the pocket.
Up above, landside of the trestle, somebody was still hammering iron, and the sound rang out in hollow reverberation below. Everything smelled of rust and iron, even the copper-tinted water; the smooth pebbles along the edge looked dipped in copper and they shone. Two shades of water, mahogany and copper, shade and sun. And the constant burbling of water around bricks, around logs, repeating itself like Ruth’s daddy’s sleep machine.
Rewis rowed over to where the man was standing, stepped from the boat and immediately squatted in the dry weeds and sand, holding the bow of the boat steady. The stern where Ruth sat swung around in the fast current of the shallow water and stopped sidelong at the other man’s feet. 
They began talking weather and fishing. Rewis with his head hung and his light brown hair swung forward, hiding his face but for the peep space in which to eyeball Ruth; and the man lifting his cap and scratching in his thick black sweaty hair.
“It’s hot awright! Say it might come up a rain though.” He spoke with a benign drawl. Slow and lazy. Dumb but kind.
“Don’t say?” Rewis-good ole boy, Rewis with a pistol stuck in the waistband of his shorts, under cover of dingy-white T-shirt with one sagged breast pocket.
The man never looked at Ruth in the boat waggling just shy of his feet. His not-looking was the tricky kind of not-looking that Ruth had seen timid country men do to make sure they couldn’t be accused of making eyes at “the wife.” Another man’s wife.
“What’s all that hammering up there?” Rewis asked.
The man looked back and up the slope leading to the tracks as if to figure. “Ole boy works with me. Hammering spikes. Trains work em loose and they send us way out over here to drive em back down.” He hooked his fat thumbs in his suspenders and bowed his belly.
Rewis laughed low. “Working on the railroad, huh? I’ve done that too.” He shook his head in commiseration.
“Yeah, and y’all must be fishing. You and the old lady, huh?” The man grinned, showing smallish yellow teeth.
The hammering stopped, then started again, farther up the tracks.
“Yep.” Rewis’s grin was hidden by his hair, but he was speaking to Ruth with his eyes and the message was if you want to live and let this man live you better keep quiet. His features looked sharpened in the narrowing of his face from the overhang of hair. Concentrated evil in the stony stare and set of the mouth. 
“Listen,” the man said low and for Rewis’s ears only, moving closer and stooping with his hands on his blunt knees. His small eyes squinted. “I’d prechate it if y’all wouldn’t tell nobody bout me napping on the job. You know?”
“Napping, eh?” Rewis grinned up at him. “Yeah, I ‘spect the bossman’d have your job over that, wouldn’t he?”
“In a minute, he would!” The man stood again, looking out over the river as if he owned it or had grown right fond of this peaceful spot. 
 “Well,” Rewis said and stood. “Guess we’ll be shoving off.”
If he was going to shoot the man, Ruth figured, it would be now. But nothing was to be gained that Ruth could see by shooting him. A lot was to be lost, actually. The other man driving spikes on the rails might get away and go for the law.
Rewis started to get into the boat, stopped. “Hey, where bouts we at, anyway? The closest town?”
“Ain’t fur from the Flordie line, from here ain’t. Guess that’d be Jasper, Flordie.” The man seemed proud to be of service, puffed up over knowing something this outsider couldn’t know. “Course, you still in Georgie right now.”
“Am, huh?” Rewis looked downriver as if figuring the miles.
“How long y’all been on the river anyhow?”
“Two, three days.”
“Where’d you put in at?”
“Now I couldn’t tell you that,” Rewis said good-naturedly but at the same time as if it were none of the man’s business. The man seemed to take it that Rewis didn’t know the nearest town to the landing upriver.
They talked some more-good ole boy stuff. The man wandering off on the subject of boyhood trapping, fishing, hunting, how high he had seen this very river come up-“Up nigh to this here trussel.”
“Don’t say?”
The sun had shifted and Ruth was in the lacey edge of shadow cast by the middle brick wall, sizing up the sand bank to the right of the east wall. Too high for her to make it before Rewis could pull out his pistol and shoot her, her and the two men. Besides, growing from the silt sand were nettles with tiny white fool’s flowers and clusters of dangling prickly pears, pale green and fleshy flat orbs with long needle-like spikes shot through. Even if she could walk, barefooted she would never make it.
But at least she had a general idea of where she was: parallel to Jasper, Florida, straight shot along 129, about 15 miles from Statenville. East, yes east. What she didn’t know was how far from the river through the woods to 129 and Jasper where she could get help.
“Bad thing is,” said Rewis, “you don’t hear no news out here on the river like this.”
“Well, I tell you it hain’t good.”
“How’s that?”
“Y2K. You know. Looking for a whole buncha trouble. Me, I’m putting down a pi’cher pump on my place. Case we don’t have no lectricity when it hits.”
“Good idee,” said Rewis, trying to go again.
Ruth was heartened. Nothing had happened so far to cause Rewis to either need or want to shoot the man. And he even seemed to be enjoying hearing the fellow talk exaggerated cracker. Encouraging him.
“Wife’s been buying up all kinds of canned stuff to lay by in case.”
“What all else?” Rewis was retying the rope on front of the boat, back to the man.
“Rice, what-have-you, guns, amminition…”
“I meant the news.”
“Oh, that. Well, a couple young gals went missing up the river there. Somebody fount their shoes at the Mayday bridge, yonder-ways, some miles.” He pointed north with a crooked finger. “Say might be some ole mean boys grabbed em up, and you know...” He looked at Ruth, then down, embarrassed. “Say that ere man got hisself kilt was….”
Rewis butted in. “That’s bad. Bad, ain’t it, honey?”
Ruth didn’t answer. Didn’t move.
The man added, “Cain’t be too careful these days.”
“Reckon the law and all’s looking for em, them gals?”
“Say they is. Say they got roadblocks and what-all over three states.” The man’s brain seemed to have been stung by something, some important electrical connection that made Ruth sit up straight and get ready to go. To run. But where? How? “Hey, y’all didn’t put in up there at the Mayday bridge, did you?”
“No. Fu’ther down.” Rewis was through retying the rope on the bow of the boat and was standing. He turned toward the man and began wiping his face on his shirttail, pistol barrel shining in the sun and what of it?
Ruth tensed. Should she warn the man now that Rewis’s pistol was for more than shooting snakes, or could she wait and see if Rewis had accidentally exposed the gun? If Rewis was just being Rewis and daring the man or showing off to her.
“Where y’all frum anyhow?” The man’s eyes were locked on the gun and he was no longer grinning.
“Flordie,” said Rewis. “Come up here to float downriver. On vacation.”
“What you do?”
“What kind of job? I’m a ex-con.”
“Ex-con.” The man laughed. “You pulling my leg now.” Thumbs hooked in his suspenders, he grinned, hoping Rewis was pulling his leg.
“Ain’t.” Rewis laughed. “And this gal here’s one of them missing gals. Kilt the other’un.”
Ruth screamed, covering her ears.
The hammering on the rails stopped.
Rewis whipped the gun out from his waistband and shot the man with his thumbs still hooked in his suspenders right between the eyes. His head snapped back. His brown eyes blared, then closed and the blood ran down his face to his blue shirtfront. He folded over, on the verge of tumbling, face down in the river, next to the side of the boat. The boat drifted out and Rewis jumped in the water and grabbed it, snatching it onto the shore before the east brick wall of the trestle. 
Ruth was crying low, doubled over like the man, but holding to the sides of the boat to keep from falling out as Rewis twitched it farther onto shore.
“Make another move, sister, and you’re dead too.” He ran, sidling up the bank to the left side of the brick wall supporting the trestle on the east side, leaning in, tucking his shadow, and waiting, gun on her and at the same time watching for the man who’d been driving the spikes to step down from the railroad embankment.
Water burbled, burbled, hollow in the brick and mahogany holding place. 
One minute, two minutes and the bushes to the left of the trestle began to shake and rattle. Dry seed pods like a baby rattle or a snake. Then out stepped a young thin black man dressed in the same blue shirt, black suspenders and back support as the other man. Sledge hammer high over his head in both hands and eyes wide, he crept down. Spied Ruth, spied his buddy folded over in the edge of the river as if searching for something underwater.
Just as he lowered the sledge hammer and started to speak to Ruth or call out to his buddy, Rewis stepped out from behind the brick wall with the pistol drawn. The man turned to run and Rewis aimed high with the pistol to accommodate the man’s climb and the distance from his feet to the back of his head and shot.
The hammer dropped. The man went down with his arms held up as if to surrender. He yelped, then grunted as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Ruth could hear him crawling, the dry seed pods shaking and rattling.
Rewis turned on her with the gun. She put her head down on her arms, crying.
Next thing, she heard the gun go off again and the bushes quit rattling. All in echo of the magical mahogany and brick death chamber where even the burbling was repeated. 
***
Ruth felt feverish from crying but was no longer crying, only sitting, staring puffy-eyed at Rewis, now paddling in back of the boat to keep an eye on her. The fact that the river was deep enough in the main channel for the motor to work and he was still rowing meant that he must fear somebody nearby, or back at the trestle, would hear the boat. Keeping to the west side and the shade, the boat glided between close-growing overhanging trees, green tops softened by the late evening haze, though the sun still burned strong on the left side of the river and the east bank.
Ruth had never lived such a long day, a hot and terrible day, but she felt chilled, hugging her body close in the sandy camouflage jacket given to her by Bobby. The gamy smell was still in the dense cotton weave but for the most part it smelled sour. The fall leaf print was overlaid and repeated, didn’t really look like leaves. But she’d been seeing it so long she felt loyal to it, the jacket, and the print, the motif of flat brown leaves was something still and undemanding to focus on. The river scene was always changing, like Rewis. Ruth could never predict what was up ahead.
Rewis’s hair cooped and swung as he pulled the paddle side to side and then over, sprinkling Ruth. His face revealed nothing. What had happened little more than an hour ago was history, happenstance, nothing.
No sounds on the river but the paddle churning water and dribbling it on the floor of the boat. Crickets singing in the grass and katydids ringing tree to tree, but no sound. Just the emptiness left by Ruth’s crying spell. And sadness. No fear even. Rewis would wind up shooting her anyway, so why go through the motions of keeping quiet and out of the way? 
“Why are you torturing me?” She hadn’t meant to speak. The question was just there like the thought.
“I ain’t torturing you, gal. I ain’t killed you yet, have I?”
“That’s the point.”
“You talking crazy. So shut up.”
“Aren’t you kind of curious about what’ll happen when those men are found shot? Don’t you wonder about their families?”
“I say, shut up.” His voice was level, civil for such a callous command.
“You must feel something. Even you!”
“SHUT UP!” He jabbed at her with the paddle.
She rared back, barely escaping the thrust of the wet tip. 
He paddled again, seething, and his face was red.
The ringing of the katydids gave way to a sound of beating. Hammering similar to the hammering of iron at the trestle. A haunting sound, but faster, higher, coming out of the west and filling the strip of dusky sky between the treetops.
A dark green helicopter claimed the space like a giant mosquito hawk.
Rescue!
Ruth stood, waving her arms. But too late. The helicopter was gone.
Rewis leaped up, rocking the boat, and brought the paddle down hard on her right shoulder.
She tilted left and rolled into the cold water, sinking, flailing with the arms of her jacket so heavy, the pain in her shoulder so sharp, she thought she might drown. Water snapped in her ears, brown void before her eyes. Choking, strangling with her throat and shoulder on fire she rose to see Rewis kneeling in the middle of the boat and the pistol butt scanning for her head when it appeared. Target!
He held the pistol steady, in both hands, finger on the trigger. Out of the west, the beating of another helicopter. Rewis stared up, then back at her. Shouted, “Out of the water! Out of the water! Move!” Pushing her toward the bank of trees with the boat side like a sweep, he held to a low branch overhead for leverage.
The water was only waist deep. She got her footing on the soft silt bottom and began sidling toward the green marsh and tytys beneath the overhang of tupelos. Roots and stobs, then cushion of watergrass in mud. 
Before the next helicopter could pass over, Rewis was in the water, behind her, and the boat was hidden by the low leafy branches.
The terrible clattering of the copter’s rotors was followed by another.
Ruth lay back on the raft of grass.
Rewis turned toward her, aiming the pistol at her head, like always. “You better hope they ain’t seen you. Do, you’re one dead girl white girl. I ain’t messing with you this time.” His clothes were muddy and wet. He was still holding to the boat, settled sideways to the wavering marshy bank. 
This time was different. She knew he meant it this time. She didn’t move. Her shoulder was one mad throbbing. She was freezing, shaking, mesmerized by the deafening beating of the helicopters in the east. Or were there more coming out of the west?
Rewis was listening too, looking out and up.
It was dim under the trees, green-dark, but the river shone with the afterlight of sundown. The ringing of the katydids was maddening. Tree frogs closed in, their cheeping like dozens of whistles blown in Ruth’s ears.  
Tiny black mosquitoes buzzed, lit and bit her face, hands, legs and feet. She raked them from her face with the muddy sleeve of her jacket. She couldn’t reach down to rake them from her legs and feet, her toes where they were feasting, for fear that Rewis would shoot her.
She didn’t want to die.
Her heart felt lit with heat, beating with hope and fear, and she didn’t want it to go cold. To stop. She had made it this far and now they had come after her, the helicopters, the humans in the helicopters. Had the first one spotted her? Probably not, coming from out of the west and the boat so close to the trees along the west bank. And too she was wearing the camouflage jacket, probably hadn’t been seen. But she might as well hope.
Rewis was so still she could imagine he wasn’t even there, as the dark fell solid and chill.
She needed to move.
The water at her feet moved. The marsh wavered and quaked.
Mosquitoes had rendered numb the nerves beneath her bare skin. No more copter sounds. But Ruth was sure she smelled woodsmoke.
When Rewis did speak, his voice seemed that of an evil spirit she had convinced herself was no longer there. “Now we gone get in this boat. No light and ain’t gone be no racket less it’s my pistol going off.” He sounded steady, determined, hopeful.
Ruth was losing hope.
Did the smoke mean that there was a wild fire? Were the helicopters from the state forestry unit scouting out the location?
In the boat, as before, Ruth facing Rewis from the bow, he felt around for the white trash bag. Rummaging inside with little more than a whisper of plastic, he pulled out a bottle of whiskey, uncapped it and began drinking.
The smell of smoke became thicker, enveloping, dulling the shine of the river.
Rewis drank, whiskey burbling down in the bottle. Reminded Ruth of the burbling under the trestle. She felt wilted, drained, only her shoulder perking up with life, with pain.
Gradually an orange glow highlighted the clouds of smoke behind the treetops along the east bank. It appeared to go on forever, when Ruth looked behind. Like duplicated harvest moons coming up or lanterns hung in the trees.
“Now look at that, will you? Lil ole woodsfire. And you trying to wave down a fire copter.”  Rewis drank again, drifting through the smoke. Or was it the smoke drifting and not the boat? Regardless, he was no longer paddling, just drifting and drinking with the paddle across his knees. Now and then he laughed out, his muddy face and hair lit orange, like the devil in the glow of hellfire. “Course, help’s help and you can’t be too picky, a girl in your fix.”
Ruth coughed, then covered her nose with the muddy jacket sleeve. Her eyes burned, shone in the firelight.
Rewis held up the glistening bottle of Lord Calvert-the fire was so bright, Ruth could read the words on the label. Speaking seriously, he said, “I’d offer you some but I’m afraid you might take it. Then you wouldn’t be a lady no more. You’d be like ever other woman I knowed in my lifetime and I wouldn’t have no more use for you. Unnerstand?”
He set the bottle between his legs and lay the paddle on the floor. Then he wrenched round and after two yanks on the crank rope of the motor, it whined, revving as the boat rushed along the burning shoreline. 
***
Firelit faces: Early fall, some evenings, after Daylight Saving Time had fallen back to Eastern Standard, Ruth’s daddy would let her and her brother and sister ride out with him to help Poppee burn off the pastures of the old homeplace. A son’s duty and pleasure. 
Dark already at six, they would drive out in their daddy’s Jeep Wagoneer.  Charmed to silence by the great round moon rising behind pines in the dark and starry sky. 
At the lofty old house, Ruth, Joan and Cory would sit, doing homework at the round oak kitchen table while the men went out to burn, and their petite silver-haired grandmother stuffed her grandchildren with pound cake and ice cream. Their mother would be at home in Valdosta grading papers for her fourth grade class. The grandmother at the sink rattling dishes would go on and on about how she wished Sue could have come. But in truth she liked her three grandchildren to herself now and then. Not that she didn’t enjoy the company of her daughter-in-law. Often the two of them would go to arts and craft shows, all over Georgia, stay all day and come home with more “stuff,” as Poppee jokingly called it. To make his point, sometimes, he’d stop off at a trash-dump site and pick up a Williamsburg blue wooden duck plaque with some “korny kountry” writing on it, or a crafty carved wooden flower bought by some woman only the fall before to embellish her flower garden. Stuff.
Lottie the grandmother liked the children to herself, occasionally. Hers was a love that drew Ruth too tight and made her edgy. She tried too hard with the children, with everybody, and Ruth could always feel the strain in her taut little body, always at service, how it wore her down. Wore Ruth down too. But she attributed those feelings to the restraints of being inside-in the house-as opposed to outside in the open and free.  
Would Ruth like to learn to bake? No thank you. Sew? No thank you. Look at old snapshots. No thank you ma’am. 
Ruth had to work doubletime to justify being outside. Helping hay the cows, penning the chickens, walking fencelines and cutting trees off the wire following a storm, then repairing, pulling the wire tight to the posts, driving staples. Inside, the goings on inside, would have been easier, cleaner, prissier. So why did Ruth always go out? Because she liked out. The air, the trees, the animals-cows especially-and Poppee. Poppee’s girl.
She always stayed summers with Grandmother and Poppee. Her excuse being, they needed her help.
Ruth’s punishment for some infraction of house rules amounted to grounding-not from going out with Troy, or to the mall or movies with friends, but making her stay home rather than go to Poppee’s house. It kept her in line, kept her good. Using not letting Ruth go to Poppee’s house as punishment, the parents found, had a way of backfiring on them. She could always come back and say what did I do to make you not let me go? 
Her mother would say, “Just wait till you get older and you won’t be caught out in the country during summer.”
But Ruth got older and still she went. She could breathe there. She could be there without having to become-camp counselor, tennis player, swimming champ, a young lady. God help her if she would take another ballet class, much less summer workshop! She toed in, she didn’t toe out. Ballet was an assault on her bones. Let Ruth’s sister and brother be Sue’s model American children.  
Often, in those early years, she would overhear her parents talking. “Is something wrong with her?” Sue would ask.
“Hell no! She’s just Ruth being Ruth,” her daddy would say. 
“Is home so bad she can’t stand it?”
“Make her stay home if that’s how you feel.”
“She mopes.”
Then Lottie would have one of her little talks with Ruth about becoming a young lady…
When Ruth’s period first started she didn’t let on to her grandmother or her mother. She was at school, in literature class. She had asked for permission to see the nurse, got it, got her first sanitary napkin, generic brand, then after school stopped off at the nearby convenience store and bought Kotex with her own money. She felt no need to report. Her period was private; it was nothing that hadn’t happened to women since Eve. Lottie and Sue were always watching her for some sign. Is something wrong with her? 
Likewise, she never told them when she learned to use a chain saw. Or shoot an old bull bogged and suffering in the river swamp.
Finally, Ruth had expressed an interest in home decorating and both women had sighed. Ruth herself was privately relieved to find she had an interest in something “female.”
Anybody in the family who expressed an interest in something specific could look out on Christmas and birthdays: books on the subject, crafts on the subject, pictures on the subject. All meant to encourage but discouraging in their focus on what you would become, locking you into it like a vow or oath taken. Saying you would become a teacher was the safest bet. Dull, safe and respectable and nobody worried you might grow up abnormal anymore.
“My daughter-in-law the teacher,” Grandmother would say when referring to Sue. And Ruth didn’t have to wonder if, say, she turned out to be a bull rider in a rodeo whether her grandmother would ever speak of her as “my granddaughter the bull rider.”
On the sly, Ruth had tried that too, though the bull was a pet and only stood rigid, waiting for her to dismount so he could get back to his hay. She’d been maybe eight then. The bull had been only two. 
At fourteen Ruth had shot him after he got bogged down and she and Poppy couldn’t free him. 
All day, in the rain, she had wandered from the barn behind the house to the swamp, taking sweet feed and water to him, the red bull with the enormous head “buried up to the boss in mud,” as Poppee said. If the bull hadn’t died from being bogged down he would likely have died from foundering. Even bogged down he would eat. He always ate and Ruth always fed him and now he weighed at least 2,000 pounds. He resembled a mammoth buffalo in the wild--hairy, huge, burning with testosterone.
Ruth and Poppee had tried pushing from behind and pulling with a chain hooked from Prince’s neck to the tractor. But the lazy old boy was too fat and too weak from fighting the suction of the mud and anyway was bound for the sale. He’d been with the herd too long and there was danger of inbreeding.  But as Ruth had pointed out, he was too heavy to mount the cows anyway, so why not just let him graze till he died.
Here lay the same calf, 2000 pounds and six years later, that she had seen born, dropped like a splat of manure from his mother, Poppee’s first full-bloodied, registered Santa Gertrudis. An overfed stocky heifer, huge for a four year old.
Ruth had gone with Poppee to a breeding farm in North Florida the day before to pick out and buy the cow. Already with calf, she had unloaded from the back of the long trailer into the pen, walked forward, leery of this new place, and dropped her calf several weeks early. It looked like a glistening sack of water, a warped balloon with something brown and solid inside.
Stunned, Ruth watched Poppee step over the fence in a single stride and attack the dissolving skin of the sack, wiping the fluid from the calf’s nostrils and mouth. Then try to set the calf on his hooves, small and transparent as glass slippers. But the calf’s feet turned under and collapsed. The calf made a single weak blatting sound--maa, but the cow wandered off to the shade of the pecan tree and stood lowing and breathing hard.
Poppee shook his head.
The slick hide of the calf was reddish and matted, and his ears folded back like a scared rabbit’s. Longer hair on top of his head formed a peak, an almost curl, anointed with the birth-water of his mother.
Again and again Poppee tried to stand him on his feet. Finally the calf stumbled forward a few steps then collapsed again with his legs tucked, half under, half off to his sucked-in sides. The mama cow only looked at Poppee with her huge liquid eyes. She was so pure red that her hooves were red streaked. Her white scurr horns were red-veined, but lustrous as pearls.
Poppee turned and walked back over to the fence where Ruth was leaning, watching the calf. “Little bull,” he said. “Ain’t no hope and him born this early.” He wiped his forehead on his blue chambray shirtsleeve. “Likely his mammy got herself hurt trying to load or coming home, one. Besides, she’s done took a notion to be shed of him. First calves are like that sometimes.”
The calf lay blinking his large gelled eyes, long red lashes closing against the new morning light.  
“I’ll raise him, Poppee.” Ruth said. “Let me.”
“Ain’t no raising him to it.” Poppee climbed over the fence again and walked off to the truck. “Close the gate when I pull up. She’s a fine cow and she’ll have another calf.”
Throughout the rest of the morning and that afternoon, Ruth stayed, hovering over the calf, trying to interest the young mother in this sweet baby, trying to make him stand. He was amazingly heavy for such a narrow-bodied, limby calf. His hooves were soft as sunned rubber. 
After Poppee had taken the trailer to the tractor shelter, he drove back, got out of his pickup and walked over to the fence of the pen. “Leave him be, Ruth. We’ll bury him later. Don’t want to get his mammy all riled, now do you?”
Ruth stood straddled the calf’s back and lifted him to his feet, walking him forward. “Watch this, Poppee, he’s getting stronger. I named him Prince.” When she let go, the calf folded beneath her, useless legs turned under and out like sticks.
Poppee got in his truck and left.
When he came back later, almost sundown, he was carrying a croaker sack and four tobacco sticks. He had a quart bottle with a long red nipple and a gallon of creamy milk he’d gotten from a dairy near Valdosta.
Together, they built a croaker-sack sling supported by the four sticks driven into the ground. Four holes for the calf’s legs to hang through, just shy of the ground.
Then Ruth fed him from the giant bottle. His nose was tan and rubbery and every time she got the nipple into his baby mouth, he would suck once and let go and the milk would bubble from his nostrils. 
Watching, Poppee said, “Just don’t ask what they do with the dairy calves.”
Late evening, in the river swamp where Prince the bull was bogged down, it was still raining, gloomy green and droplets ticking on the giant notched leaves of the white oaks. The smell of mud and cow overpowered the tang of the wet woods.  Prince was no longer trying to lift his legs from the sucking mud. His head, weary from the repeated stretching of his fine neck, drooped barely above the churned mud, and his wet red lashes were almost closed. He looked sleepy, drugged. Nothing like the bull only months before who’d gone wild while Ruth was feeding him ear corn from the back of the pickup and began chasing the truck, bucking and kicking-What you mean the corn’s all gone?-when Poppee started driving away. On back of the weaving truck, Ruth had nearly toppled from the lowered tail gate, where surely she would have landed on his broad back, then on the ground, to be trampled by his tremendous hard patent hooves that used to be so soft and sheer. Always playful, he used to slip up behind her and butt her in the rump. For months on end, she would test his growth by cradling him in her arms till she could no longer lift him. How did he grow so fast? When did he get so big and mean?  She felt like she had closed her eyes, or come out to the pasture one morning, and there he was, full-grown, overgrown, bogged down like a corn picking machine, all that corn fueled by testosterone.
Poppee went to his truck and came back with his deer rifle. He had been all set to shoot when Ruth stepped up in her muddy black rubber boots. “Let me, Poppee. He’s my bull.”
He didn’t say, A girl ain’t got no business, or I hate for you to have to do it. He didn’t say anything; maybe she was hoping he would. He just handed over the rife.
Ruth peered down the nocked site, drawing a mental crosshair, an X from left eye to right ear and right eye to left ear, steadied herself and pulled the trigger. Prince’s buffalo head went down and he snorted, then slumped into the mud, like the sling made of croaker sack when he was born.
Poppee took the rifle. “Never name a cow, Ruth.” 
Watching through the open windows of her grandmother’s kitchen, Ruth could see the control fire creeping toward the east and against the mild draft. Her daddy tall and straight in silhouette, stringing fire over the dry grass with a spouted can filled with mixture of diesel and gasoline. And Poppee, shorter, top-heavy, strolling along the line of set fire with a pine top to beat back stray flames.
The smoke coming through the screens of the kitchen windows smelled sweet, sweeter than the cake, to Ruth.
Then her grandmother, all flustered, would rush over in her neat dress and apron and lower the windows, leaving only a reflection of the table and the three children sitting around it with their books open and papers scattered and the delicate pink-flowered dishes pushed to one side. 
Ruth would hurry through her math assignment, not even checking the problems for misfigures. Then out the kitchen door to the back porch.
Grandmother at the door would warn her about snakes--cool weather and the snakes are crawling and the fire is bound to run them this way.
Terrified of snakes. They all were, so no problem with the grandmother and younger sister and brother following Ruth into the sweet pale smoke and firelight and flames hissing and crackling in the broomsage. She could only imagine what would happen should the women in her family witness a rabbit scattering fire from its burning hair. Like the men in her family, she realized, Ruth instinctively protected the women and children from the cold hard truths that took place outside.
She’d learned her lesson when she was about five. While fishing with the men on the river, they’d come across a huge dying bass with a catfish about half its size stuck in the gullet of the bass. All agreed that the greedy wide-mouth bass must have been in the act of gobbling down the catfish when the catfish opened its fins and got pinned to the flesh of the bass. Inextricably bound, the two fish resembled a freak fish with a tail on each end. 
Fascinated, Ruth had lugged the giant fish into the kitchen to show to her grandmother. Fanning her hand at Ruth, she’d ordered her out of the house with “that thing.” Said she’d never seen anything so vulgar in her life. 
The moon rising above the fire-bright patch was the same color, as if cut from the fire with a biscuit cutter. Gaily shouting to one another, the two men’s voices would turn frantic when the draft changed to wind and switched from east to west. Then the blaze would become a wild beast, raring up on its hind legs higher than the men’s heads. Fear and excitement, one.
Ruth could never see their faces, only silhouettes in the firelight.
Now on the river with a mad man in the stern of the boat, following the line of fire along the east bank, she could see them, their faces bright in the firelight, but shadowy as the moon. Alexander men, father and son, nothing alike, one dark, the other fair, spiriting up in the foamy white smoke and breathing a prayer to her: remember who you are, be brave.

Part 4

It was a still foggy morning and Rewis was scouting for firewood along the slice of beach where they had stopped to sleep the night before. He gathered pinecones, dead leaves and twigs and piled them landside of the anchored boat and the breathing black water. Then driftwood--he gathered driftwood in the shapes of shotguns, birds, and mittened hands; deadwood from shed limbs he broke by hiking his right knee and snapping it at weak joints across his kneecap. Then he ricked the wood over the pinecones, leaves and twigs.
He took a blue butane lighter from his shorts pocket, squatted on one knee, and began flicking the wheel of the lighter and holding the tiny blue flame to the dead leaves. Again and again, he flicked the wheel, holding the tiny blue flame to the leaves. Shook his right hand-“Damn!"--tried again. Soon the tinder beneath the driftwood ignited, glowed, smoldered and drew its last breath in smoke. He fanned it with his singed hand and it glowed again, then burned. Slow smoke drifting low and thick beneath the fog overland, the fog over water. Flames licking and laying, and that clean odor of driftwood.
Leaves whispered down, tupelo berries plunked into the river, crows cawed, and over and under it all was the murmur of the river. It could have been any river, it could have been any morning. Rewis could have been any man.
He stepped to the boat, fished inside the white plastic bag and pulled out a square green and white box of ammunition, a can of pork and beans, and a small round tin of Vienna sausages. First things first, he placed all he had gathered from the boat on the shore, picked up an empty floating can from the bottom of the boat and began scooping water and dumping it on the sand at his feet. Then he headed for the fire, rolling good now, smoke braiding into the dreamy fog.
Kneeling on the sand, he opened the cans of beans and sausages with his multi-purpose knife, then began slicing the sausages wafer-thin into the empty can and set the can in the crook of a burning bird and a mittened hand.
He sat and began loading his pistol, clicked the chamber into place, and lay the gun on the ground. Then he ate from the can of beans, using the blade of his knife as a spoon, while the smell of the roasting sausages mingled into the rokey damp. All was well until his cooking caught fire, and he was on his feet kicking at the burning wood and cursing. 
Then he looked upriver just in time to see tandem canoes developing in the fog. Stark yellow canoes. Two canoes, two couples: a stocky blond man and an angular dark woman in the first, and a tall thin man and a woman with curly red hair in the second. All poised with sleek oars and smiling till Rewis started firing his pistol, and then their faces registered disbelief, then recognition: this is what the world is on the lookout for, mad men in unsuspected places who will put an end to your smiling and make your body fold over or slam backwards with pain and who will keep on shooting even after the pain has absorbed into the belief, the acknowledgment, that the odds against a mad man killing you on a slow river on a slow morning have just been upped to one-hundred percent.
Ruth, who had been sitting on the bank watching, staying out of the way, started screaming, crying, clutching Rewis's right arm, trying to offset his aim with the pistol. But it was too late. Only one man was left in the lead canoe and he was slumped on the floor and not moving, and the canoe followed the current, mid-river and correcting its balance, having been tipped by the woman falling or leaping out, followed closely by the other canoe, and the water was rippling out and slapping at the shoreline, and Ruth found herself flat of her back with the pistol now directed at her head. On the laden air were the combating smells of woodsmoke, scorched sausages and wet green, and the blood on her top lip.
"You got a nerve, ain't you, sister?" Rewis was glaring, squinting, set to shoot.
She kept crying, watching the canoes pass from view and the wrinkles on the water smoothing out. He would kill her too. Why not?
"I'm a good-a-mind to pistol whip you." His straight-across eyebrows were sandy where she had struck him.
"Now you get up from there and act like somebody." He motioned with the pistol for her to stand. 
She rolled over onto her stomach and cried into the wet sand and waited for the bullet in her back, the back of her head or maybe the kick of his boot if she was lucky. 
"You mess with me, sister, you can look out." 
She figured he was crazy and what was the point in asking but asked anyway, from the heart not the head. "You killed those people for nothing? I don't understand."
He started laughing; his right elbow waggled. “They was just marking time, doing what they seen done before. Old copy-cats, doing stuff cause other people they knowed had done it. Or something they seen in some old movie. Who cares? Who’s gonna miss em a year from now?” 
So he wasn’t going to kill her. Why not?
Eyes shut, she heard him walking away, boot soles squeaking in the coarse sand, just beyond the curve upriver. She thought she heard him talking, but the crows over the river were cawing and confusing sounds. One thing she knew though, he’d be watching, he’d be back. But she had to try to get away; every chance, she had to try. 
She sat up, scanning the bank on her right, the tiers of trees and tangles of thorny bramble like barbwire. Could she make the slope? With her foot like it was, could she make it?
Easing up, almost squatting, she stood, careful not to squeak the sand with her feet, and started to tiptoe toward a thick leaning birch with peeling white bark like curled paper. Beyond the birch, almost to the bank, out of her right eye she glimpsed stumbling around the sandbar along the curve of the bank a tall young woman in bright yellow with cherry-red hair hanging on her shoulders in wet squiggly curls.
Ruth stopped, staring at the woman from one of the canoes. No bleeding that Ruth could see; over her left breast was an emblem of a hot air balloon in rainbow colors which at first Ruth had mistook for an injury. Stretched across the front of her shirt were the words, “Up Up and Away.”  She looked shocked, beyond shocked, the dead walking in sleek navy mesh wading shoes. Sand in her squeezed hazel eyes, on her freckled face, muscular arms and legs. 
And then Rewis showed behind her with the pistol trained on her back. “Fresh meat for the camp,” he shouted, hawing and side-stepping to keep from slipping in the piled white sand.
The woman stopped a couple of yards away from Ruth, each taking measure of the other and the situation.
Rewis walked between them to the hem of the lacy birch shade, quickly squatting and breathing hard, raining sweat, using the pistol as a pointer. “Red here tried to give ole Rewis the slip.” He nodded to the woman, then to Ruth, speaking to Ruth. “Sister here can tell you ain’t all that easy. Right, Sister?”
Ruth hugged her body, but the woman kept her hands made into fists down by her side. 
Rewis stood, pacing out a circle in the sand, speaking without looking at either of them. “Now, here’s the way I see it. Can’t but one of you gals go to Florida with me.” He jacked his head around at Ruth to get her reaction. “So, after much consideration, as they say, I’m thinking it’s gonna be Red here.”
Ruth only stared ahead at the wet woman in yellow, who was showing no emotion; her clenched fists spoke for her.
Rewis continued, “Sister here ain’t really my type you see. Besides, she’s done got on my last nerve. Ain’t you, Sister?” He punched her shoulder with the barrel of the pistol. 
Ruth looked at him then.
“Got a little too sure of herself. Course I always was partial to redheads,” he added, laughing, leering at the other woman, who surprisingly leered back at him. 
Made braver, madder, by the other woman’s refusing to be reduced to meat, Ruth wondered aloud about the others in the boat. “Your friends?”
“My husband and sister and brother-in-law.” Her voice was steely but encrypted with anguish and pain. 
“I’m sorry,” Ruth said.
“I’m sorry,” Rewis mocked. Then, “Tell you what, girls, I’m gonna let y’all get acquainted—say anything you want to one another. Then I got a little proposition for y’all. Help me decide who goes on to Florida with me. Course y’all can guess where the one don’t win’s gonna go.” He walked away toward the dying campfire and his burned-to-crisp breakfast. 
Keeping their backs to Rewis, going from the campfire to the boat, one by one they sat at the rooty base of the birch, facing the steep bank of tiered trees and tangled bramble, leaning into the tree truck, sandy knees up and close together. Without making a sound the woman began to cry, muffling it with a sandy freckled fist in her mouth. 
“This can’t be happening—Winnie and Neil, Bob. Everybody. Dead. God!”
Ruth placed one arm around her wet shoulders and squeezed, whispering, “I know. He kidnapped me and killed my best friend. He’s crazy.” She glanced back to see where he was, if he was watching. Thinking that maybe the two of them together could get away. “I don’t know what he’s up to next, but I can promise you it’s not good. We have to get away.”
The other woman nodded, removing her fist from her mouth with teeth marks on the whitened knuckles. Seeps of blood. “How long have you been here, with him, I mean?”
She had thin reddish lips, no lipstick, no makeup of any kind. She smelled clean, of sweet soap and shampoo. Ruth smelled swampy and dank, like Bossie after a hot day at the tobacco barn. Gnats swarmed, humming. She hated that. 
“Days. Three or four. I don’t know.” 
“God!” The other woman bumped her head back on the tree trunk, gazing up. 
“I got away once. In the boat. Can’t walk much because I hurt my foot...maybe broke a bone.” Ruth looked back at Rewis, grinning their way, perching on the front of the boat with his boots crossed while reloading his pistol. 
He shouted, laughing, “Y’all getting to know one another, I guess?”
The fog and smoke over the river had lifted, the sun had come out, yellow on a bluing sky. Crows cawed way off. 
The other woman took a deep breath then fixed her narrow hazel eyes on Ruth. Her jutted breasts were rising and falling with her breathing—Up Up and Away. “My name’s Trish, for what it’s worth. Trish Bellamy.”
“I’m Ruth Alexander.”
“What do you think he’s up to?” 
“I don’t know. He likes games. Always trying to show how smart he is.” 
He was through loading the pistol and shoved off from the boat. Crossing foot over foot, slowly coming their way, making them guess and wait.
Trish wore a watch, a heavy black digital with multi-features. The time read 11:10.  
“You girls just keep on getting to know one another—real good, you hear?” He planted his muddy brown boots, hairy legs spread far apart. One hand on his hip and the other hieing the pistol. “Yeah, I think it’s Red’s gonna get to go with me, but I’ll let y’all decide.”
He turned then, mincing sand with his boot soles, as he ambled over to the umbrella tupelo making a noon shade over his smoking campfire near the edge of the brown and silent sliding river. He sat on the sand with his back against the tree trunk, as if mimicking Ruth and Trish, sideways to keep an eye, as well as a gun, on them. “Gotta get me a little shuteye before we head out, Red.”
“He’s not...not going to sleep,” Ruth said. “He does that to trick you.”
Trish straightened out her left leg, feeling for a brown leather holster attached to the waistband of her yellow knit shorts. Gazing around, she unsnapped it and eased a silver cell phone from its holster.  
She whispered, almost breathing the words. “I know it won’t work but... For one thing, it’s wet, and for another, I’ve had no service since we put in up the river about an hour ago.”
Ruth watched while she punched in digits with the thumb of the same hand holding the phone. Listening. Static.  
“Here,” Trish whispered, “put it face-up in the sun over there.” She passed the phone to Ruth, eyeing the spot of sun to the right of where Ruth was sitting. “Maybe when it dries we can get a signal.”
Propping an elbow on her knee, Trish put her fist in her mouth again. Shaking her drying red ringlets, staring ahead with tear-sprung eyes at the bank of dirt sprouting green brush and scraggly brown trees. Speaking around her fist, she said, “Well we can sit here and wait for him to kill us too or we can try to get away. He’s apparently going to shoot one or both of us, so doesn’t seem like we have much to lose.” She cut her eyes at Ruth meaningfully.
“You go. I’ll just slow you down. This foot...” Ruth reached down and encircled her filthy bruised ankle with both hands. “He has to have a hostage; he won’t kill me, I don’t think.”
Trish shook her head. “No. I don’t know. You don’t know. I couldn’t leave you now.”
“Get help, I want you to go.”
She bowed her head, sobbing silently again. “Bob...that’s my husband...”
“Don’t do that,” Ruth said low but sternly. “You’re not weak, I can tell that.”
“I always thought I wasn’t, but now I don’t know.”
“How you girls making out over there?” Rewis spoke up.
“Fine, you bastard,” Trish whispered. Then to Ruth, “What does he think?”
“He doesn’t think,” said Ruth. “He shot two men up at the railroad trestle for the heck of it.”
Trish stared deep into Ruth’s eyes, then down at her filthy, ragged green striped knit shirt, her raveling jeans shorts, her scratched and bruised arms and legs. “You’ve been through hell, haven’t you?”
“Yes.” Ruth longed to be clean and dressed decent. She wished she’d not worn the cutoff jeans—how often she had wished that—to get kidnapped in. Girl to girl was different than girl to boy. Besides, she had a feeling that Trish was prominent and rich; she herself must look like poor white trash, like Bossie and The Twins. She hoped that when, if, she got rescued she would get to change out of these shorts before her mother saw her. Of course, should she say any of this to Trish Bellamy, it would make her sound not only white-trashish, but shallow and superficial. 
Ruth looked back at Rewis with his head bowed and his eyes closed. Pistol resting over his folded arms. “I want you to get ready now to go. When I tell you I want you to crawl over here to my right, around that curve of the sandbar you came in on and then up the bank. Don’t make a sound, you hear?”
“Okay.”
“I can slow him down, trip him, something. He needs me. Or either you. My chances of living are better with you gone. And if he goes after you, if he gets too far away, he’ll be afraid I’ll take the boat and go. Run, dodge and hide, run like you’ve never run before.” Ruth reached over for the cell phone without moving either her body or head and passed it back to Trish. “Call for help when you can. He broke out of Jackson prison, near Atlanta, he and a buddy named Bobby. Kidnapped me and killed my friend near Mayday, Georgia. Plans to stay on the river till he gets to Florida. I won’t give you a phone number to remember, but my folks...there’s not that many Alexanders in Valdosta. Call them.”
While Ruth was speaking, she was looking back, watching, and if Rewis had moved a hair she couldn’t detect it. She doubted he was asleep, but he was in a state of rest that would slow him down. And there was no reason to wait. He wasn’t going to get more unaware, excited as he was, unless he started drinking and passed out. 
“Alright, I’ll do it,” said Trish. “I hate to leave you though.”
Ruth touched her warm arm. “Me too. It was good to have somebody to talk to. Nice to meet you.” She smiled but felt like crying, but this was the only way. How it had to be.
Moving like a cat, Trish on her knees stretched her long sinewy body around in front of Ruth’s, behind the tree blocking her from Rewis’s view. Eyes ever on him. He hadn’t moved. His mouth was open, he was breathing evenly.
Ruth knew better. She hoped Trish wouldn’t try to climb the bank here, but would keep on crawling around the curve of the sandbar where she’d come from with Rewis, then climb up and head out through the woods. 
She did. So far he hadn’t moved. Ruth didn’t dare move either. She quit watching and only listened for shaking bushes, breaking twigs, but heard nothing. She expected Rewis to come stumbling around in front of her any moment now; then she would trip him, tackle him, whatever it took to give Trish time to get away.
 But when finally she did look back, he was gone. He had crept out around the other side of the tupelo where he had been sitting, following the edge of the river. Nowhere in sight.
Ruth listened for shots, heard nothing. Then moments later she heard his boots mincing sand, and like a movie replay Trish came first into view around the curve of the sandbar, Rewis in her tracks. 
“What’m I gone do with you girls?” Rewis clucked his tongue. “Sister here’s been dying for somebody to bellyache to, and what do you do, Red, but run off and leave her.”
Pale now, her eyes stretched in fear, Trish sat down next to Ruth, in exactly the same spot, on Ruth’s left. 
“Now if you girls are done getting to know each other,” said Rewis, shaking his pistol, “I can get on with my game.”
Neither spoke. They didn’t even meet eyes. 
A cloud of mosquitoes settled over them like a net; they raked them from their bare flesh and scratched the bites.
“Up to y’all,” he said. “Y’all don’t speak up I’m gonna figure you had enough.”
“No,” Ruth said. “A little more time.”
“Okay, I’ll just mosey on back over there and rest a spell.”
He smelled sour, smoky and filthy, and his khaki shorts, white socks and t-shirt bore tell-tale stains and smudges of time, places he’d been, things he’d done. The blood specks on his socks had gone from red to brown.
Mosquitoes flocked to his legs.  
Passing in front of Trish, he reached down and patted her on the head like a puppy. “Yep, give my pick, it’d be you, Red. But Sister here’s wanting to go with me too. Ain’t you, Sister?”
What was he up to? His sick mind had conjured up something truly evil this time. He seemed too proud, too eager. He hadn’t shot at or even roughed up Trish when she tried to get away and that was not a good sign. There was a lesson in this break in pattern of behavior and Ruth dreaded learning it. She had to think about it. She watched him go back to his resting place under the tupelo. “Don’t let him trick you,” she whispered to Trish. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but don’t believe a word he says. Go slow and think it out. His rules are always changing.”
Trish was staring up through the clean branches of the moss-free birch, blowing at the fraying dried curls on her high forehead. “I feel like I’m about to panic, start screaming. Don’t let me. I know you’re right. He’s looking for just such a reaction. This is as bad a case as I’ve ever heard of.”
Ruth wanted to know more about her, where she was from, but she wouldn’t ask because somehow she sensed that this was exactly what Rewis had in mind—making them know more about each other and therefore care more about each other. She had to outsmart him. This wasn’t just about her now. She had somebody else to look out for and she found herself almost resenting it. 
Ruth swatted a mosquito on her right arm, raked it off and another replaced it. “Did he get the phone away from you?”
“No. It was here.” She patted the holster under her yellow t-shirt. “He didn’t see it.”
“How old are you?” she asked Trish.
“Twenty-two. You?”
“Seventeen.”
“High school?”
“Senior year.”
“Graduate studies, Florida State University.”
“Tallahassee?”
“Right.” Trish looked back at Rewis, then at Ruth. “Your family in Georgia, they must be worried sick.”
“Let’s don’t talk anymore.” Ruth needed to think. She didn’t want to know more about this stranger, warm and breathing, on her left—keep her strange. To do otherwise was to do exactly as Rewis wanted them to do, and whatever he had in mind scared Ruth more than anything before.
Trish’s watch read 12:30. Ruth would have guessed later. She was hungry, thirsty, but food and water were not nearly as urgent as what was going on, what was coming up.
Mosquitoes buzzed, lit and bit. Gnats swarmed. Ruth and Trish slapped at their arms and legs and blew at their faces. 
They lasted not-talking for about fifteen minutes. Then Trish whispered, “I’ve never been through anything bad in my life. Not really. I was in a motorcycle accident when I was sixteen. That was bad, or I thought it was.”
“Did you get hurt?”
“No, my boyfriend got killed though.”
“Now your husband. I’m sorry. How long were you married?”
“Almost a year.”
By unspoken mutual agreement they quit talking again, thinking, wondering what the other was thinking. 
She was really pretty, Ruth thought, expressive and intelligent. Classy. Rewis likes classy.
“What would happen if I asked for a drink of water?” Trish whispered. 
“I don’t know. I never know what might set him off. Like this morning with the canoes... I guess he got mad because his can of sausages caught fire. Y’all were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s how he would put it.”
Trish caught her breath leaving room for a mere squeak. “Burned sausages? That set him off? We didn’t even have guns. He didn’t know us from Adam.” 
“All I know is what I told you, just try not to give him too much of an audience. Try not to act too shook.”
“That’s a tall order.” Trish turned a bit, checking for him behind. “Hey, could we get some water to drink over here?” she called out in a booming masculine voice.
Rewis pretended not to hear her. If he was watching her Ruth couldn’t tell. Finally, he said, without moving, “Pretty please.”
“Pretty please. With sugar on it.”
Trish switched her eyes to Ruth. “Is he kidding?”
“No. Just say it.”
“Pretty please, sir, with sugar on it.”
Rewis hopped up, laughing and kicking his heels, dancing a jig. “Now that’s the kind of talk I like. Yep, Sister, Red’s my pick.”
At 3:30, by Trish’s watch, the sun was hidden behind the trees on the upper bank, and Rewis was passing the water jug for the second time. After each, he patted Trish fondly on top of the head as she stared up at him with open disgust.
“A little more time,” he said, walking away toward the boat. “Y’all look to me like you bout ready.”
“What?” Trish said, growing more desperate and edgy. Then she whispered to Ruth, “I’m going to try the phone again. “I’ve heard that 911 is supposed to work anywhere. Don’t know when that takes effect though. You watch him.”
Ruth watched him plundering around in the boat. Listening to Trish punch in numbers. He picked up a fifth of red whiskey, opened it and took a deep slug, capped it again. Placed it in the boat again.
“It’s wet, not working. The holder is keeping it wet.”
Ruth looked all about the shade for a spot of sunlight, but there were only spatters of weak light on the sand. “Blow on it if you can.”
Trish blew her breath into the phone. “Is he...has he raped you?”
Ruth hesitated before speaking. Would this information be too much? “Yes.”
“I’m so sorry. I needed to know.”
“That’s okay.”
“Let’s don’t talk anymore.”
Twice more Trish blew into the phone, and then tried again to punch in 911. “It’s ringing,” she said, smiling. Her hair had dried to a lighter shade of red. “Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?” She was speaking too loud, sitting forward, seeming to hurry before Rewis could figure out what she was doing. Up on her knees, sitting back on the heels of her mesh booties.
“He’s looking,” Ruth whispered, “be careful.” 
“Help, we need help. I don’t know. I think just out of Georgia, North Florida, canoeing on the Alapaha....”
“He’s coming.”
Trish clapped the phone shut and shoved it into the waistband of her shorts and sat as before. Her lips were parted as if she might plead, but didn’t. 
“Hand it over.” Rewis reached out for the phone. 
Trish took the phone from her shorts and gave it to him. Instead of the usual pat, he cracked her over the head with it, hard enough to break both skull and phone. Then lunging forward, he lobbed it into the river.  
Head on her knees, and hands latched behind her head, Trish cried, shaking all over.
Whatever he had in mind, Ruth figured, was about to take place.
“Y’all getting close now,” he said, coming back, grinning in spite of the fit he’d just pitched. “Just a little more time.”
With that he walked off again, looking up into the graying sky, and out across the river at the sunlight nicking the treetops. 
Head still on her knees, Trish asked, “What is he up to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you think?”
Ruth couldn’t begin to guess, but she knew that he wanted them to get to know more about each other, to truly care. She had a feeling there would be no winners, only losers, in this game they were about to play.
“Tell me.” Trish peeped out over her arm at Ruth.
“I’m sorry. I really don’t know. He’s drinking now, and sometimes that mellows him up, but could go the other way. Just do what I say and try not to let him trick you, don’t give him what he wants. Go slow and think it through.”
“Gladly, if only I could figure out what that is.”
Ruth didn’t want to tell her that she figured Rewis had decided to swap hostages; he was tired of Ruth, and ready to swap out. She didn’t want Trish to know that in all likelihood she would soon be dead. Ruth’s time had come as she always believed it would.
“If somebody would just show up,” Trish said. “Surely somebody will come along soon, some canoes...” Trish stared wide-eyed at Ruth. “I understand.” Head on her knees again, she cried.
Ruth had to say something, to comfort her. “The law is out looking for me and my friend, so maybe they will find us. If we can just hang on, keep him from killing one or both of us.”
“How do you know?”
“Man at the trestle said the law is looking.” Ruth peered up at the blanching sky. “Said the law is looking over three states. We even saw some helicopters right after that.” She didn’t tell Trish that the copters were only there to track and fight wildfire. 
“How’re you doing this?” Trish asked.
Ruth shrugged her shoulders. “What choice do I have?” 
“I’d as soon die.” 
“You don’t mean that.”
“Are you close to your family? Brothers and sisters?”
“One each. My granddaddy...that’s where I was staying when I got kidnapped...real close to my granddaddy.”
“Mine are all dead. My grandparents. Always wished I had some.”
“My grandmother died last spring. I was going to live with my grandfather and go to the school in his home county my senior year.”
“Where did you go before?”
“Valdosta. Twenty miles away from my granddaddy’s.”
“I know Valdosta. My sister has...had...friends there.” Tears leaped in her eyes. “I can’t believe Winnie’s dead.”
Ruth didn’t try to comfort Trish then. She could imagine that if her sister Joan had been shot, there would be no comforting for her. Besides, she was weary, terrified, miserable, but what else was new? Trish seemed to think there was some set of rules to go by, such as where to pee and was peeing permitted? All Ruth could say to that was, “You can try it,” motioning with her head to the blind spot behind the tree. Trish wanted to know if the mosquitoes were always this bad, and didn’t they have any insect repellent? “In the boat,” Ruth told her, motioning toward Rewis. “Oh,” was Trish’s only reply. There were no rules.
 “Okay, girls. Time’s up.” Rewis came walking with the pistol. Motioning with it. “Red, you move around here, this side of the tree.”
“What for? Why?”
“Don’t ask so many questions. Just do what I say.”
She scooted on her bottom, away from Ruth, leaned back against the tree trunk facing him. 
“Sister, you, I want you to sit on the other side of the tree, hear?”
Ruth looked back once at Trish, who was looking at her, fear and regret, for what they didn’t yet know, etched into both their faces. 
When they were seated back to back with the peeling white birch trunk between them, Rewis began pacing, whiskey fumes trailing, from one to the other with the pistol. 
“Now,” he said, posturing, lingering for effect, “here’s what I want y’all to do. It’s real simple.” He ducked his head, scratching in the beard of his chin, as if in great thought. “When I call out a name I want y’all to raise a hand to vote for the gal gets to live.” 
“Noooo.” Trish screamed. “No, you sick fuck!”
Oddly Ruth’s hurt foot felt like the receptor of her fear, its center, on fire and throbbing to the beating of her heart. She knew he had decided already who would die and she was it. She had no intention of voting either way—she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Of course Trish would vote for herself to live, as was only natural, as it should be. 
“I got one lil ole bullet in here.” He flipped open the pistol’s chamber, spinning it to show the one bright brass pellet implanted in its cell, the other cells dark and empty, pacing side to side of the tree and holding it close for them to inspect. “That means ain’t but one of y’all gonna die; lucky one hightails it out a-here to Florida with me. Unnerstand?” 
“Please don’t, I beg you.” Trish was crying, scooting away from the tree. 
“Sit back there, Red. Don’t, I’m gonna have to let Sister there go with me, stead of you. I bout got her broke.”
No crying now, no moving about, no sound from the other side of the tree. Ruth could hear only tupelo berries, one, two, dropping into the river. She’d heard them this morning before what was left of her world came crashing down. Before this woman on the other side of the tree, Trish Bellamy, before Trish’s world came crashing down. 
“All ready?” Rewis stepped nearer to the tree. “First name—Red. Who votes for Red to go to Florida?”
Ruth held steady, hands in her lap, staring out at the shining ribbon of river, so beautiful, so serene. She had to get ready to die but didn’t know how. For so long she had known how and now she was dumb to the facts of salvation, heaven she’d always felt was waiting but now seemed a myth. When had she quit believing? Had she ever believed? Help me Lord in my unbelief. 
Rewis paused, and then reported. “Okay, got that down. One down and one to go.”
Ruth could hear Trish crying, muffling sobs with her fist maybe. What did that mean?
Rewis stood facing the tree, swinging his self-astonished face from Trish’s side to the side where Ruth was sitting, waiting her turn. “Next name coming up. Y’all get ready. Hope it ain’t no tie since ain’t all three of us gone fit in that boat.” He cackled out. Then just as quickly quit laughing. “Now, who votes for Sister?” He spoke louder. “Hands up, you vote for Sister.” 
Ruth only sat, not moving, cringing, holding her breath. She wondered if like her Trish had refused to vote. Yes. She sucked in her breath, waiting. She could hear Rewis breathing, deciding what now. 
Next instant, she heard the hammer of the pistol snick, an ear-cringing blast close by, smelling smoke, wondering if it were true that there was often a delayed feeling of impact after gunshot. She felt nothing but her heart beating in her hurt foot. 
She scrambled to her feet, hugging the tree, and ducked around to find Trish slumped over with her hair spilling down the sides of her face, the part at the scalp in back drizzling blood, her hair growing redder and wet again. Still sitting, arms loose at her sides, her fists relaxed on hands full of leaves and dirt.
“Now look what you gone and done, Sister,” said Rewis.
***
Ruth dreams that night of a shepherd who looks like Jesus in the picture at her grandfather's church. Same long brown hair with a halo of sun, same wan face. He is wearing a blue robe and carrying a staff, walking through clouds that look like sheep, and she is in an airplane above the clouds, looking through a window, looking down. The clouds turn into sheep. Their heads crop up in the billowed white wool. Hundreds and hundreds of sheep.
"Water, Coke or Fruitopia." A young blond flight attendant in a white blouse and navy skirt and bright orange ear plugs speaks. The plane jolts, drops below the clouds, and when Ruth looks out again, through the rounded-off rectangle of scratched glass, she sees the flight attendant rising up through the clouds, on top of the clouds. 
And Ruth can feel herself in the plane again, the density of bone, flesh, blood and fiber that make her Ruth, breathing and feeling, looking down at Jesus and the sheep and the blond woman, now in a white robe. Her head is bowed--she seems to be weeping--as she walks toward Jesus now stalked by a bull ram with long sharp horns. Jesus turns, shakes his cane at the ram, and the ram drops through the clouds. Peeps of the ordered earth, blue, green and clay moving through its flocking of cloud-shadows.
The plane drops again, and below the clouds are the bodies of naked men, hundreds of men, dangling their legs like cranes in flight, with their heads hidden in the fluff of clouds above. And then Ruth looks at the person seated next to her--Mandy with Trish’s red curly hair.
***
In the bow of the boat again, the next morning, facing Rewis sitting sideways in the stern seat and working the motor with one hand, Ruth tried to figure the dream, tried to find comfort in it, but it wasn’t comforting. She was shaking, terrified, filled with guilt, praying silently for forgiveness with her eyes closed. She could not bear to look at him. For all she knew he was right—by not voting, she had voted Trish dead. That was something she would likely never know for sure, and not-knowing was for her a sentence of guilt by doubt. 
Rewis no longer seemed angry, only jubilant, as if finally he had gotten her attention, he had done the big thing. He had shook her so thoroughly that he'd be hard-put to follow it up. Try not to act too shook... she’d said to Trish, when shook had been the very reaction he’d been after.
"Open your eyes, sister," he said and stamped both boots on the boat floor. "How come you think I'm making you face me?"
She opened her eyes but didn’t answer. The sun on the water looked edgy, shimmering, too bright and the sky was too blue. Too hot for morning, like the end of the season turned up before it turned down.
Rewis laughed. "You ever hear the one about..."
She blocked his voice by thinking in her private voice and was lost in amazement at how she could raise and lower that voice and then more amazed that she was saying the Lord's Prayer and hadn't even realized it and then allowed in the reassuring mood of the dream and felt she was almost crying inside but it was a good kind of crying, cleansing, mellow, healing. 
Not only could she block Rewis's dumb jokes and boasting by silently voicing over him but she could be looking right at him and hardly see him. He was like the sun, too bright to look at. 
When he stopped to stretch and eat, she stayed in the boat and watched him sitting on the sloped dirt bank, eating from a tin of sardines, knees up and elbows on them. He was only in charge of her mind when she let him be; she could hear him only when she chose, when she broke her spell. He grew silent, watching her, brooding and chewing. Then he stood and loped down the bank with the flat tin out before him. He stepped up to the boat, so close on her left that she could see the rust flecks on the pistol stuck in the waist of his filthy khaki shorts. She could smell his sour musk and the rot of sardines. He tipped the can over her head and let the oil drizzle into her hair and down her face. The fish smell was overpowering.
"Now what you gotta say about that?" he said, laughing and tossing the can out over the water.
It floated like a tiny boat into the scalloped tree shadows of the eddy along the east bank, and then strangely began following the fishing boat as Rewis got in and started motoring downriver again. Her eyes stayed on the sardine tin and she struggled to overthrow his vile mocking with her own inner voice. Finally she locked into a prayer, saying over and again, Lord forgive them for they know not what they do, but her belief that Rewis did know what he was doing and what he had done and was only evil strained the voice in her head. And what about her? Had she known what she was doing by not voting the evening before?
“You shot her for nothing.” Being a Christian good-girl didn’t mean Ruth had to be weak. “Your crazy games.”
“Too bad about that. Gotta feeling Red would a-been a hell of a lot better company. But guess I’m just gonna have to make do.”
Ruth stood in the boat, rocking it. “Shut up! Just shut up!”
“Hey, gal. Ain’t you getting a little sassy here?” Rewis raised the paddle at her. “Set down. Behave yourself. Don’t, I’m gonna be looking for me another hostage. You getting too sure of yourself.”
She sat, holding to the sides of the swaying boat, crying openly. “You didn’t have to shoot her.”
“Me?” he shouted. “Now who’s the blame for that?”
“I wasn’t the one with the gun. I didn’t pull the trigger.”
“Yeah, you did, Sister.” Paddling left, then right, he glared at her. “Yeah, you did. You so holy and right, how come you didn’t raise your hand when I called her name?”
She looked away, sniffling, drying her tears with the back of her hand. She had to let it go, she had to quit, she had to survive. She wanted her mother, more than anybody in the world she wanted to see her mother. To have her hold her, touch her, tell her everything would be okay. She tried to draw on that refreshing feeling of thinking back to her daddy and granddaddy control burning, their saying, “Be brave. Remember who you are.”
Well, who was she? She certainly wasn’t brave. Neither was she good. Not honest. She’d used Mandy’s badness to contrast her goodness. Mandy’s flaws pointed out Ruth’s purity; Mandy’s getting in trouble pointed out Ruth’s not getting in trouble; her rule-breaking made Ruth shine. But more subtle than that, more telling of Ruth’s lack of character was her using Mandy as contrast while seeming to admire her spunk. It had all been a lie. 
At least Mandy was honest in her badness. Like Rewis, come to think of it, Mandy had never been a hypocrite. 
And what about Troy? Poor dull Troy, he was the boy she chose to “go with” so that her classmates would say, “But you can do so much better than that.”
“Poppee’s Little Angel” was an image she’d gotten used to and was never able to shed. 
Bossie and The Twins, as contrast, brought out Ruth’s highest light.
And the women in her family—yes, Ruth, think about them. Didn’t you intentionally try to pattern yourself after the men to make the women appear weak? Even to themselves. 
For something to do, all afternoon into the evening, she began scouting for the two free-floating yellow canoes. But on the brown and rolling river, she spotted nothing of color except the green of the bushes and trees. And then she began to worry that she might spot the canoe with the man still inside when it floated off on the current downriver and he might still be alive and Rewis, who of course would see the canoe too, would kill him. Would the man be Trish’s husband Bob or her brother-in-law, what’s-his-name? Neil, his name was Neil. Winnie was the sister. Which canoe was Trish traveling in? Her shorts and shirt were yellow, the canoes were yellow. All merged into one picture. And another thing: when Ruth did get rescued, how would she know who to contact about Trish and the others? Bellamy, Tallahassee, her married name, where she went to school. Yes, FSU. 
“Hey, what the hell you carrying on about up there?” Rewis yelled. “You going crazy on me?”
###

Every since Ruth had been captured, she slept only when she couldn’t stay awake, snatches at sleep, drifting, then startled awake to her ongoing nightmare and the ongoing river. 
Now she slept, escaped into oblivion. 
It was after sundown when she woke to the flushed hues of blue sky. Her earlier realizations of who she really was—Remember who you are—leaped first to mind, sickening. Trish’s execution was a hot spear in her head, though her senses felt dull. She itched all over with unbearable hopelessness. 
Rewis in back of the boat was letting it drift with the paddle across his wet knees. Not using the motor because the water was too shallow, clear amber and barely flowing over scallops of sand, waves of sand. 
She wondered how far they had come. Where were they? Nothing looked different; the boat could have been anchored in one spot for all the changes in the landscape around her. Same bitter willow smell, same murmur of current, same heat and drone of mosquitoes. Only the light had changed, and that too seemed somehow the same, more of last evening when Trish had been shot. 
She reached for the water jug, lifted it, unscrewed the cap and drank. It was lukewarm from the sun. She felt blistered, her skin dried like hide. Her head hurt. Her foot ached. The sardine oil in her hair smelled stronger. But one important thing was missing—fear of death. Rewis had to keep her now, he wouldn’t kill her, unless he found another hostage. 
The boat floated abreast of a wide flat sandbar, east side of the river, a beach depressingly like the one where Mandy had been killed. The image of Mandy was the dream-Mandy with Trish’s red hair. 
“Can we stop here?” Ruth set the jug down on the floor of the boat.
“Ain’t made two miles the whole day. Water no more’n a foot deep in places.”
Rewis yawned, stretched, took up the paddle and stabbed one end into the sand off the right side of the boat, shoving into it to maneuver the bow of the boat onshore. He looked tired and stiff. 
As he started her way, stumbling among the white trash bags of supplies, to get out of the boat on the sandbar, she slipped over the edge into the river and rolled in the tepid water till she was wet head to toe. 
“Hey now!” he said, laughing, holding to the rocking boat. He stepped out on the other side. 
When next she saw him he was running naked through the shallow yellow water on her right, whooping, then belly-flopping into the deeper water along the west bank of climbing soap rock.
She sat in the water, facing the boat, alarm creeping back as she scrubbed her hair and arms and legs. She knew what to expect, was almost resigned to it, though hot vomit tanked in her throat, just thinking about him touching her, and she would rather be dead. She willed herself numb. Still, she was shocked when she looked behind and he was gator-crawling toward her, his hair pushed up on top and only his spoked brown eyes and nose showing above the water. All the fear she’d thought was at bay attacked like a cat. 
She darted away from him, headed for the boat, kicking, splashing water and reaching out for the wooden side, only a foot away, then there, right before her eyes. She was already pulling up, seeing the pistol on the floor among the pillowey white garbage bags, when she felt her injured foot yanked and her face scrubbing wood and then slamming water like glass, behind which was cascading water, her chin plowing through it, racing backwards, as Rewis dragged her out, flipped her over and pulled her to his slick naked body, pinning her arms down by her sides.
Strangled, her nose burning, water became fire in her head. Coughing, gagging, she tried to turn away from him, but he was too strong, she couldn’t move.  
His long brown hair was plastered to his neck. His face looked sculpted of clay, his teeth clay, laughing. “You didn’t really think I’d give that ole gal any of your sugar, now did you?” 
“So she didn’t vote either, did she?” 
“Wisht I could help you out there, Sister. But yeah she did.”
***
The next morning, in the boat again, they had barely passed the south end of the sandbar where they had spent the night, heading downriver, when Rewis began casting questioning looks at the woods along the east bank. Ruth looked too and thought she could make out the fanned fronds of a palmetto shaking, but decided that it was only the wind, a solitary draft that wrinkled the surface of the river, then ceased as abruptly as it had started. 
“Somebody up there,” Rewis whispered. “One of them canoe-boys got away…” Eyes on the spot where he imagined somebody to be moving, following, trying to get away, he motored over to a shady eddy on the east bank and cut the engine. He stepped from the boat and lashed the yellow anchor rope to a tupelo branch. Then with the pistol drawn, going before him, he stumped up the sandy slope through the tiered scrub trees, bushes and bamboo vines.
Ruth placed her head on her crossed arms, resting atop her knees, and closed her eyes. Her heart was beating too fast and she was drowning in her own unshed tears. While she had slept yesterday Rewis must have been searching for the canoes. She didn’t want to see what he would do if he found one of the men. 
She was bruised and sore all over from fighting Rewis; she had been raped anyway. All she wanted now, all she was waiting for, was to die. She didn’t know how that would happen, or when, but there was no way out for her but death. That Trish had voted for her to live—and Ruth had every reason to believe that was true—was the most deadening fact she’d ever had to face. Mandy’s murder, though Ruth’s fault too, had not been optional.
She listened to the trilling of water through the roots feeding from the large tupelo trunk into the river. Then she heard a heavy rushing through the bushes on the upper bank, followed by a solid whump, followed by a pole of brittle wood rolling down and lodging in the brush, then Rewis right behind the pole, his limp side-winding body setting the pole in motion again and both sliding and rolling and rocking to a halt on the flat of ground only inches from the boat and Ruth on her feet in the boat staring down in shock.
Rewis looked dead, his eyes walled in their sockets, sand and dried leaves in his mangled brown hair. One arm twisted beneath his body. No movement, not a sound.
She had to make herself look up, up the bank in the direction Rewis had climbed only moments before. With his pistol drawn. First, she spied it, the pistol, caught in a net of thorny bamboo, halfway up the bank on her left. Then Bobby, a man who resembled Bobby, but more gaunt with longer black hair and a bushy beard like an old-testament Jew’s. He only stood there, as if deliberating over what he’d done, dressed in Bobby’s bought-too-big blue jeans, the dark of his eyes all pupil. Then he bowed at the waist to vomit. 
Latching onto an overhead branch of the tupelo, Ruth stepped from the boat, eyes on Rewis, still but seemingly sprung to strike, and eased in a wide arc away from where he lay, as far away as the tiered trees and bushes allowed.
Bobby was done vomiting, a clabber smell, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his stained and threadbare white tee. Speaking hoarsely with his eyes half-closed, “I thought....thought he’d be gone on. Hoped maybe you made it home.”
She shook her head no. Not taking her eyes off him. Not afraid but something close. 
“I was up there,” he pointed north, upriver, through the vine boughs and trees. “Sick as a buzzard. Trying to wash up when I seen the boat.”
“Can we go now...before?” She looked down at Rewis again, expecting him to leap up and snatch her back. His doing that was second-nature to her now as surely as his calling her sister.
Bobby looked at Rewis too, but made no move as if to do so might bring his old prison buddy around. 
“Let’s just go.” She took a few steps, pain streaked through her foot, up her leg, so she dropped, crawling up the bank, around the curdled vomit and sand. She had in mind to fetch the pistol from the bamboos, only a foot or so away, but didn’t, feeling that to touch it would set off another explosion of despair. She couldn’t touch the gun that had killed Trish. She just wanted to go. She wanted to feel free and she didn’t feel that yet.
“Get the gun,” Bobby said. “Don’t leave it.”
She hesitated for only a moment, then she reached for it, holding it in her right hand and aloof. She knew Bobby was right but the feel of the cold hard steel didn’t seem to pertain to her, was nothing she was capable of commanding, so long had it commanded her.
“I think I broke his neck,” said Bobby, meaning, Ruth supposed, that she didn’t have to shoot him.
At the top of the bank was open space with sunlit grass and sandy dirt in a surround of tall breezy pines. The heated air smelled of deer tongue, snuffy, dry and nostalgic of autumn and the known—spikes of purple flowers and white rabbit tobacco and curved prongs of golden rod. Start of autumn and Ruth hadn’t realized it. 
It made her hope for home. She couldn’t be far from Highway 129 and Jasper, according to what the man at the trestle had said. That would be east, east into the sunrise, away from the river.  She’d been to the little town of Jasper, just over the Florida line, and by car she would be less than an hour from home. 
“Let’s go.” Hobbled by her hurt foot, she set out east along a straight two-path road with Bobby beside her. She could feel the heat off of him. “How long have you been like this? Sick, I mean.”
“A while.” He was panting, almost reeling. “Don’t know. I go through these blind spells, like I can’t remember to see.” He shielded his eyes with one hand. “Too bright.”
Ruth turned to be sure that Rewis wasn’t following. Nothing but open sunny space and pines. She carried the alien but familiar pistol by its handle, a four-finger rubber grip, careful not to touch the trigger. 
“Tick fever’s my guess,” Bobby said, stumbling alongside.
“Maybe something you ate.”
“No,” he eked out, “like this a good long while. Not much to eat.”
They had to walk faster. Her injured foot was dragging, her legs weren’t accustomed to walking, her knees were threatening to buckle. Looking behind again, a straight shot from the upper bank where she had climbed up, she felt a burning streak of fear. Danger! They had traveled only a few yards, for one thing; for another, if Rewis came to and made it up the bank, she and Bobby would be bulls’-eye. 
But she had the pistol. Could she use it?
Up ahead, maybe another thirty feet, if she was judging right, she could see a fork in the road. North or south, they had to get off this road. They had to move now. She caught Bobby’s thick hot arm. “Let’s go, Bobby.” 
Again, he stooped to vomit, hands on his knees and retching. She waited, looking back in the direction of the river. “We’ll get you some help,” she said.
“Yeah,” Bobby sighed, pulling the tail of his shirt up to his face, wiping down.  His fever-reddened belly was covered in dark hair, swept inward toward the center of his body. “You go on up ahead. I’ll stay here. Think I broke his neck, but just in case...”
She lifted the heavy pistol, aimed away, to remind him of the power she now possessed, to remind him that Rewis was no longer in control, and frankly neither was he. “Let’s go.” Then she hobbled ahead, advancing on the fork of the road. Behind her, she could hear Bobby gagging, coughing, panting, but struggling on. 
At the fork, looking south she could see another endless looking road through the woods. Pines planted in rows. Some of the stouter trees had bands of yellow paint on them. Ruth knew somebody owned these woods, managed this timber. It was a kind of plantation with graded roads and cut ditches, but summer had had its way and the grass and weeds had wandered onto the dual paths of baked gumbo. On each side of the road were patches of longleaf yellow pines, then patches of new timber, then open space, meaning the owner understood timber management, prevention of wild fire. From Poppee she had learned that to prevent fire from forming a canopy, flames racing and spreading tree top to tree top, and burning untold acres of prime timber, these mixed patches of varying trees and then openness were the best prevention. 
Feeling queasy too, smelling Bobby’s vomit, ripened by the noonday heat, she began to hope that maybe it was a virus of some kind and she had it too, that he didn’t have tick fever, wasn’t seriously ill. If she could believe that, maybe she could go on ahead and leave him to waylay Rewis if he showed.  
Then she realized that she was slowing Bobby down, rather than the other way around. 
“Let’s get out of this sun,” he said, “rest that foot. Over there.” He nodded toward a stand of water oaks off the left side of the road, steering her across the shallow ditch and up into the shade. Sitting with one knee up, he pulled her down beside him, whispering, “Listen, you gotta calm down. You don’t know how to use that pistol, hand it over to me. If Rewis ain’t dead, he’s the one on the run now, keep that in mind. That foot’s gonna slow you down, but you gotta keep going till you come up on somebody to take you to the law.” He muffled a cough with one hand. “Can’t be all that far. I went up a railroad track aways but got scared and come back.”
He sat with an arm on his knee. “Wanting to turn myself in but scared of what was ahead of me, you know?”
Ruth nodded, rubbing her swollen foot, pistol like a stick on the loamy ground beside her. Had to have been the same set of railroad tracks where Rewis had shot the two men. Recalling that, she was reminded of Rewis’s lust for killing. Double that lust for her and for Bobby. 
“I’m cooled off, easy now,” he said. “You up to moving on?” 
“Yes.” 
“I say we keep off the road,” he whispered, “just follow it a spell, see if it turns back east. Give that foot a rest ever chance you get before you head out.
“Now, reach me that pistol over here, let me check that safety and see if it’s loaded.”
She picked it up, hesitated, then handed it over. Letting it go felt worse than hanging onto it, but was a relief too. 
“Ole Bobby ain’t gone hurt you, honey. Wouldn’t hurt a fly less I had to.” He closed his eyes, shaking his head as if to stay awake, while he snapped open the cylinder and spun it and snapped it shut again. “Four in it. Aimed right, one’ll put a man down.” He handed her the pistol again. “See there,” he said, snicking a button on one side between the handle and the barrel. “That there’s the safety. Ain’t gone go off less’n you do like this.” Again, he demonstrated the safety. 
He stared up at her with red-veined eyes, steadying her trembling hands on the pistol. “You all messed up and ain’t wanting to kill nobody, I understand. But leastways you can slow him down, give him a game foot too. Got it?”
“Yes.” 
“Tit for tat. Get mad and stay mad. You didn’t get that cut lip and bruise on your jaw playing no ladies’ softball.”
She hadn’t thought about how she must look from her scuffle with Rewis last evening. She touched the sore bump on her jaw. The scab of blood on her top lip.
Bobby smiled, his eyes closing again. “You good and mad?”
“Yes.” 
“Keep in mind the more you act brave the braver you’ll feel.”
She nodded yes.
“Now, ole Bobby’s gotta get a little shuteye, so I’m leaving it up to you.” He hung his head. “You feel up to it, head out. Now, who’s got the gun?”
“Me.”
She was thirsty. He had to be too. Especially with fever, after vomiting. She thought about the jugs of water back in the boat. Neither mentioned water, as if to say it out loud would be an invitation for their thirst to attack. 
By three or four o’clock, in the thicket singing with crickets, mosquitoes and heat, Bobby was sleeping on his side with his mouth open, his knees drawn up, and she was alone with the pistol she didn’t trust with the safety either in on or off position. She kept clicking it, hefting the pistol, getting acquainted with it. It felt powerful but at the same time useless as a rock. 
Across the open road, through the tops of the pines, Ruth could see the sun angling like a wayward party balloon. Mosquitoes swarmed and buzzed, lighting and biting. She had quit swatting them and began alternately rubbing up and down her bare arms and legs. 
Thirst now seemed more of a threat than Rewis. Almost welcome as a diversion, because she believed, watching Bobby sleep, mosquitoes feeding freely on his reddened arms, face and neck, that water couldn’t be far away. Even imagined that she could hear water rushing somewhere beyond the teeming of insects and the hissing breeze in the pines, another mirage in the stillness. 
But the longer she sat, the longer she listened, holding her breath now, she was sure she could hear water, the river maybe, which made no sense because the rushing sound was coming from the east, not the west. The river she knew was somewhere beyond the radiating sun sinking lower, not at her back. 
Doubtful though she was, she eased up, eyes on Bobby breathing heavy through his mouth, and tipped east through the sweet gums, pines and palmettos, following the rushing sound of water. Or was it wind? If she got lost, if she lost Bobby, it would not be her fault. She hated herself for thinking that way; she began to break bushes and twigs marking her trail through the woods so she could find her way back to him. 
When, thirty minutes later, she spied open space and watery light up ahead through the vine-swagged trees, when she was sure she could hear water rushing, she was more terrified than relieved, terribly disoriented, because the rushing had to be more than the kinds of gentle rapids she’d been seeing from the boat, it had to be a fall, a creek falling from on-high into the river. The same river, the Alapaha. She would know if there was another river nearby. The Suwannee was still miles away, a good distance out of Jasper. 
She stood at the edge of the woods, holding to a bunch of honeysuckle vines for balance and to rest her paining foot, staring down at the rock ledge of shirring black water being funneled into a spout and dumped into a white foam gorge fanning out to the river flowing south to north. Made no sense. The Alapaha flowed north to south. She shook her head, eyes on the clean, clear trickle along the mossy rocks feeding down into the creek. Water to drink was all that mattered.  She could smell it, minerals borne on a drift of damp air.
Caught up in the sounds of crashing, thundering water, she stepped out in the open and found herself on a high rock bluff overlooking about a half-mile stretch of marbled brown and yellow river, the north bend of which disappeared through the green trees, the south bend marked by sun-glittered water tumbling over rocks, river-wide rapids. Steep banks rose up on either side and flattened out to woods, but for an opening on her side of the river where she could see up ahead a longish unpainted house with a rusty tin roof capturing the sun shining through the trees. Behind the house a two path sand road, straddled with rank green weeds, stopped at the south side of the house. Had to be the same road she and Bobby had taken at the fork off the river road. 
Now she understood how this north-flowing stretch of river came to be. The southerly course of the Alapaha formed a jog, hooking east then north, creating a peninsula, before swerving south again on its trek to meet up with the Suwannee. Which meant that if Rewis were alive, and she believed he was, he would at some point be back in the boat and floating down to the rapids she could see from where she was standing. 
Had he seen Bobby before the limb came down across his neck? When Rewis came to, he would search the woods for them first, then if he didn’t find them, he would get back in the boat and follow the hook of the river. But he would not be able to ford the furious rapids she stood staring at with the boat. It was like a wall separating them from him. Rewis would get over that wall, she knew that, but at least it would slow him down and she’d be gone by then. 
Staring at the house from her lookout on the bluff, she did not even hope that somebody lived there, that she had found help at last. It was too dead and dilapidated, rusty screens on the front porch ripped and hanging like sun-rotted curtains. The wooden doorsteps were splintered and broken. A couple of clapboards on the side she could see had worked free and dropped, hanging by single nails. Her head was full of thundering and rushing, so that even if there had been some racket at the house she couldn’t have heard it. For that she would have to go look.
But first she knelt on the cool wet slippery rocks, placing the pistol in a shallow rock crevice next to her right knee, and drank water from her cupped hands. Thirst slaked, she lathed water on the mosquito bites on her arms and legs—she had to quit scratching, already her mosquito bites were beginning to fester—casting all about with her eyes for signs of life up or down the river, along the steep earthen banks. Then she spied an old green Coca Cola bottle below, in a wide dirt chute between the bluff and the house, a manmade boat landing that had been dozed from the bank to the gnawed shoreline of dark lapping water below the gorge.  
Pistol in the waistband of her damp and fetid cutoff jeans, careful not to slip on the mossy rippled rock, she fastened her hands to branches and bushes, making her way toward the boat landing, favoring her good foot, gazing all about, ahead at the grove of gnarled old oaks between the house and the river, down on her left at the sheer brown creek dashing into the foaming gorge and fanning out to river. 
Maybe Bobby was sick from having drunk tainted water. Maybe she had done the same thing and would wind up sick like him. Her thirst had made her foolish, her grieving over Trish had made her weak, and if she wasn’t careful her pity and sacrificing for Bobby would be her doom. She could do with a break from fear too. 
Feeling small and lost in the wedged boat landing, she picked up the bottle, and twisting it in her hands to loosen the crust of dirt, she limped up the gullied slope for a better view of the house. Level with the sun burning through the pine trunks, she was blinded, but within seconds it dropped out of sight.
Spangles before her eyes, she took in what looked like an abandoned lodge, an old fishing camp, would be her guess. Still under the spell of crashing water, she could vaguely hear katydids teeming in a see-sawing rhythm; she could smell the sunned wood of the house, but no sound coming from inside. One thing she knew, anybody she might happen up on in there would be more merciful than Rewis. 
She had to get back to Bobby with the bottle of water and hope Rewis hadn’t found him yet. She hoped he hadn’t tracked them along the dirt road, but if he had he would be venturing off into woods with no more clues to where he was, to where she and whoever had knocked him out were, than she’d had earlier that day.  
Would Rewis smell Bobby’s bitter, fly-buzzed vomit? 
It startled her to realize that she was thinking like Rewis, who you are. that she’d come to know him that well—using his killer instincts. Remember who you are.
###
Bobby was almost out of his head when she returned with the water. He was lying on his back, rocking, humming and hugging himself. Mosquitoes dotted his reddened arms, biting unbothered, so lost in his misery was he. 
Next to where he lay was a dried puddle of vomit. She would have to be careful not to let him drink the water too fast, causing him to vomit again before they could get back through the woods to the lodge on the river. Pistol drawn, she had checked out the house and decided that yes it was an abandoned lodge. Broken windows, a cot with a moldy mattress and blanket, an overturned 55 gallon drum that smelled of honey. Then she’d washed and filled the cola bottle with water from the spring where she had drunk, and followed her trail back through the woods. 
Kneeling next to Bobby, she whispered, “You need to drink some water, Bobby. Just a bit.” 
Up close she could see that what she’d thought was redness from fever was actually skin rash. 
He opened his eyes, then blared them as if surprised to see her. “What?” 
“Here,” she said and helped him lift his head. “Drink.”
“I thought you was gone.” His voice was raspy but loud. “Where’s your pistol?”
“Shh,” she said, showing it to him before laying it on the ground nearby. “I found water. Found a place for us to stay the night.”
“You need to go.” He caught her hand with the bottle of water and tipped it toward his mouth, drinking, then took the bottle from her, trying to slug it all down.
“You’ll get sick if you drink too much,” she said. “Just a little along and along.”
He let the bottle go, staring into her eyes. “You made it this far, now go on.”
She was about to let his head drop when she spied a tiny black mole in the line of beard on his left cheek. Maybe a grass seed. Maybe a tick.
“Okay, I think I see the tick. I’m going to have to get it off.” 
Still on her knees, she propped the bottle against the woody stalk of a nearby chinkypin bush and snapped a tough twig with warty acorns. “I’m going to try to rake it off your left check with this stick, so hold still.”
He nodded. 
Bracing the top of his head, scalp hot through his thick dry hair, using the shredded end of the twig, she began scratching at the black tick—deer tick would be her guess—careful not to gouge too deep into Bobby’s cherry cheek. He kept his eyes closed; she could feel the fevered air from his nostrils. He smelled sour and hot. Gnats swarmed around her face; she blew at them, stretching her eyes wide against blinking. Mosquitoes drilled into every inch of her flesh. She needed to scratch. But if she lost the tick in that beard, she’d never find it again.
When finally she scraped the tick free from his cheek she poured some of the water from the bottle onto the spot where the tick had been feeding its venom into Bobby’s system. Then she dropped the stick with the tick on the end into the bottle and again propped the bottle against the chinkypin bush. 
“Okay,” she whispered. “I got it. How could something so tiny make you so sick?”
“Yeah.” He managed a smile, reaching up to touch the tick bite.
She sat back on her heels; if possible her foot was hurting worse, swollen and pulsing. Light in the woods was going with the shadows, turning the trees and bushes a dusky green. Already she could smell the damp of night, but the heat only increased, pressing down under the tent of trees.
 “Let’s go,” she said, picking up the pistol and standing. “We need to get to the old campsite on the river before dark. Rewis is probably out here, so we have to be quiet.” 
“River?”
“Not where we left Rewis. It’s another place where the river makes a sharp turn.” 
 In the east an owl screeched like a wild cat. 
“I think I killed him,” he said low, raising his head and chest and propping on his elbows.  
“I hope so.” She wondered how long it would take for Bobby to get better after the tick was gone. She couldn’t remember but did recall hearing Lyme disease often meant brain damage, or something to do with the nervous system cropping up later on. Much as she hated to think it, she hoped to be gone from him before later on. She would leave first light of the following day.
Tripping on vines, stumbling and falling, they finally made their way through the woods to the bluff where the creek pitched into the gorge and the suds of foam. 
Ruth’s foot was swollen and blue, the same blue boot she’d worn the first evening in the boat with both Rewis and Bobby. Same time of day when the boat had capsized at the rapids and she had gotten away. From the bluff she could see through the twilight the twinkling of the rapids south of the lodge and shook free the eerie feeling of having been there before only to return again and again. No, these rapids were too rough, the drop too steep, there was no way around either side with a boat. 
Bobby was freezing, shaking, as she led him over to the spring to kneel and drink. Helping him to his feet, she could feel him sliding toward the deep gorge. The roar of the waterfall was disorienting. The foam disorienting, because it disguised the drop and the depth of the water in the gorge. 
“Can’t trust me with the pistol, me like this. So have to trust you. You still mad?”
“Yes.” It was true. She’d found that all she had to do was think about Trish and her anger flared. But thinking about going home finally was the match that set the fire.
Ruth was hungry now, starving. She had not eaten in she couldn’t remember how long. The stabbing pain in her foot and her fear of Rewis out there in the woods, watching maybe, waiting to pounce, had so far outpaced her need for food. Now her need had become craving, a beast eating away at her insides.
When she’d checked out the house earlier she’d found nothing to eat. Not a crumb. The smell of honey from the drum had been only a teaser. Could be that some bee farmer had once used the lodge for a storehouse. Now her mind was tricking her with images of the white plastic bag of canned wieners and beans in the boat. 
Walking up out of the boat landing to the level open site of the lodge, she thought she spied a mulberry tree growing from the river bank not far from the front of the house. Would it still have berries?
Helping Bobby along, almost to the fallen porch steps of the lodge, Ruth said, “I’d build you a fire if I could, but...”
“I have a lighter. In my pocket.”
“Rewis might smell the smoke, he might see the fire.”
“You got the gun, keep that in mind.”
“No. No fire.”
She wondered if his need for warmth was as urgent as her need for food. 
In the dim stifling lodge, she led Bobby over to the smelly old cot along the north wall. He sat down waiting like a child while she took the wadded wooly blanket from the foot of the bed and shook it out. She was glad she couldn’t see what she was shaking out—maybe black widow and brown recluse spiders? But as Rewis would say, a girl in her situation couldn’t be too picky. 
Then the room appeared unnaturally light. Were her eyes merely adjusting to the dark? Or was it the bright flashing of first-fainting? Her ears were ringing too.  
All four of the broken windows, two above the cot and two along the facing bead-board wall, glowed like pewter. Relieved, she realized that the ringing in her ears was katydids on a background of water crashing in the gorge, and the light was likely the coming of a moon. She tried to remember the present phase of the moon—something she usually kept up with—but couldn’t. That she had forgotten to look, to care, caused her to feel completely and forever lost from all that was familiar.
Bobby lay back on the cot and she covered him with the blanket. At least she didn’t have to worry about feeding him. He needed water to keep from dehydrating; food would probably make him vomit again, causing him to lose more fluids.
She had to think about herself, only herself; every bucket has to sit on its own bottom, as Poppee used to say. She had to keep that in mind. Only this morning she’d thought her only choice was death, and now she was practically home.
“I’ll be back,” she said, tucking the blanket around Bobby’s shivering body. She was burning up and the mosquitoes were eating her alive. 
“No. Go.”
“I thought you said you’d killed him.”
“I don’t know.” He seemed distant and resigned, nothing like the man who’d earlier encouraged her. 
No. He didn’t know. Like her he could only guess. 
In the last of the daylight in the stretch of starring sky above the river, Ruth gathered a handful of mulberries from the low-hanging branches of the giant sheltering tree. The ground underneath was soft from where wild hogs had been rooting. Felt cool and soothing to her aching foot, but smelled skunky. The berries tasted sweet, though seedy, withered and concentrated. From where she stood she could see out over the river, both ways, she could see the level sandy opening where the lodge sat, several yards from the mulberry tree. Of course, if she could see, she could be seen. But at that moment, she felt no fear. Her foot felt better, she was eating, and she had the pistol. 
The crashing of the creek into the river was mesmerizing. She felt at peace. She couldn‘t remember how long since she’d felt peace. Such moments were rare, to be savored, something she hadn’t known before Mandy had been killed and she had been captured. 
Her guilt over Trish she put on hold. Her hypocrisy she put on hold. A person couldn’t be sad all the time; a person couldn’t live in constant fear.
She stepped out to the edge of the high bank and stared down at the flowing black water, the stars riding the current. Puffs of foam torn free from the gorge drifted among the mirrored stars like cottony clouds in a night sky.  End to end of the river, as far as she could see, was how far the river reached, how far her world. 
A full moon popped through the trees across the river, flooding the river with silvery light. Bull bats darted and plunged, snapping up mosquitoes. A few mosquitoes still hummed and went silent, feeding on the bare flesh of her arms and legs. But because of the bats, there weren’t as many as before. 
“I can do this,” she said, smiling because she knew that by using her wits, strength and determination she could make it. Add to that the fact that she was the one with the pistol now, she had the upper hand. In the morning she would leave Bobby and not look back. 
She sat on the porch floor with her back to the wall, facing the ripped and sagging screen door, the pistol off-safety in her right hand. Then she slept to the crashing sound of water and woke to the same sound. The rusty overturned barrel in the corner on her left oozed the smell of honey. She wondered whether a bear in search of honey had clawed the screens to shreds to get into the porch, then tipped the barrel. In the east over the woods across the river was the rosy upshot of sun on the rise. 
Time to go.
But first she had to check on Bobby and be sure he had water. She had to find a bottle or jug to fill at the gorge and leave enough for him to drink till she could get back with help. Yes, she was going for help; though the truth was she would have left him anyway. 
Standing, pistol still in firing mode, and feeling friendlier, she tested her foot on the splintered floor boards, and scanned the scattered pines and oaks for signs of Rewis, on foot, not in the boat. Her foot ached dully but the swelling had gone down. It was no longer blue around the ankle. But from experience she didn’t expect that condition to last. 
Underneath the porch, in the ancient powdery dust and ladybug funnels, she found a filmy plastic liter bottle among other faded paper trash and balls of foil and a rusty hatchet with a broken handle. Searching the woods for Rewis she limped out to the boat landing and knelt in the edge of the river and washed the jug till is was free of dirt. Then she climbed up to the bluff against the water sheeting down on her right, and filled the jug with the clear sparkling water in the spring. 
She had decided to wait till she got the water to go check on Bobby, not have to see him twice before she left him sick and alone. Maybe he was better, maybe he was dead. It broke her heart, thinking that his death would make it easier for her to go. Her certainty of last night was leaving her by degrees in the revealing morning light.
Sitting on the side of the bed, she was barely able to rouse him to drink. He was no longer shaking, but still hectic red with fever. His eyes opened only to slits of white. Most of the water dribbled to his beard and down his neck to the filthy white t-shirt. 
“You have to drink,” she said, not saying his name to keep from getting too personal, too close. 
He hung his head as if to nod, opened his mouth and took one sip. Then his head dropped back on the bed.
“I’m leaving the bottle here on the floor,” she said, setting it down. 
He didn’t move; his breathing was shallow. 
She went to the door leading to the porch where the sun was now streaking through the ripped and hanging screens. She stopped, staring out at the sun through the layered mulberry branches. 
Bobby was dying. She couldn’t leave him yet. Maybe if she rubbed his skin with water like her mother used to do her when she was sick his fever might break. She had to do what she could. One more ounce of guilt and her burden would be too heavy to carry.
She had to roll him side to side of the bed to peel off his jeans, smelling his filth and seeing his alien flesh, hair and knobs of hip bones. Never once thinking beyond the fact that this was a sick helpless human, neither man nor murderer, if that was the case. He didn’t seem like a murderer, he wasn’t Rewis, he had a heart. 
Twice before noon she had rubbed his body and limbs with water to bring the blood to the surface, and though he still wasn’t speaking or really even opening his eyes, his skin felt cooler. Then an hour later it was as hot as before. At least she was doing something, and she had times of forgetting to look out for Rewis, times of forgetting how hungry she was—thirst and hunger, like the fever, repeated itself regardless—forgetting how badly her foot hurt from traipsing back and forth to the bluff. But she never forgot that she had to go, she had to leave this man who’d risked his life to save hers. 
The crashing of the creek into the gorge was numbing, making her careless, forgetful that life beyond the camp was not static.  Her foot was signaling its warning—rest or else. So, after she’d brought more water from the bluff to the lodge, and had plucked a handful of berries, she sat on the porch floor with her back against the wall facing the river and ate them slowly, swatting at mosquitoes while waiting for the return of the moon and peace.
The pistol was by turns enemy and friend. 
 In the jamb between the wall and an overhead rafter, Ruth watched a small pop-bellied brown spider spin a web. Long bent legs like needles tatting till the web became a fine lace doily. Then the spider climbed up to the crevice where the rafter joined the wall, waiting, shrunk into itself-a speck, a mere dot.
Before long, a small brown weevil or beetle, crawling along the wall, became enmeshed in the web. The more he struggled the tighter the threads tangled around his legs. 
The spider, on the lookout for just such prey, quickly stepped across the net, all four spindly legs at work when it reached the beetle, and began pulling threads and wrapping the beetle, then tugged him forward, inch by inch, with a single thread, heading toward the dark crevice-home. Stopping now and then to mend the net and leaving the helpless beetle bundled and unmoving in the webbing and caught, doomed. Then the spider again began reeling the single thread attached to its trussed prey.
Ruth closed her eyes. Her foot had finally eased off. Prickly and hot but not throbbing.
On the backside of her eyelids images popped up: the canoeists smiling then not-smiling; the man napping at the trestle wide-eyed when he saw the pistol; the other man with the hammer willing to be reassured by the sight of Ruth that what he thought he’d heard he hadn’t heard, then seeing Rewis with the pistol and dropping the hammer. The man whose boat Rewis had stolen, Ruth hadn’t seen. So, no image of him. Mandy? Ruth would never not see Mandy turned over with Rewis’s boot toe, sand in her death-set green eyes and blood between the two zeros of her gray Year 2000 T-shirt. Ruth would go to her grave seeing what she never really saw—Trish raising her hand when Ruth’s name was called out by Rewis.
Inside the lodge, Bobby was dying. She had no doubt about that. She wouldn’t rub him down with water again. She couldn’t. Besides it didn’t help. She had to rest up to be ready to leave the next morning, or if he died, before. She could head east by the light of the moon. 
When it rose pale and ghostly over the camp, shadows streaking the white sand and flocking on the darker dirt beneath the mulberry tree, she could make out dense squat shapes scuttling and shifting in and out of the shadows. Pistol in her hand, safety off, she sat watching, listening, and through the never-changing noise of the gorge, she heard squealing and snuffling—wild pigs rooting for mulberries and grubs. 
She watched them for a few more minutes, glad for the company, any company, then she got up to go in and check on Bobby, and if he were still alive, to make him drink some more water. 
He was shivering, mumbling, rocking his head side to side. She sat down beside him, pistol on the floor at her feet, and lifted his head to help him drink from the bottle. This time he took a couple of sips, and maybe she only imagined it, but his skin felt cooler; maybe she’d forgotten how hot he felt before. 
Earlier she had uncovered him, hoping to cool the fever. Now he was covered again, the rancid blanket pulled up to his neck, which meant at some point he’d found the strength and presence of mind to cover himself up. 
Yes, he was getting better. She was glad she hadn’t left him. But she couldn’t help wondering where she would be right now if she’d left early that morning. She thought about her mother and daddy, her granddaddy and Cory and Joan; by now she might be with them, or at least on her way. She couldn’t think about that or she would be too sad and her peace from last night would never be possible. She tried to be glad she had stayed. She tried to think that she had saved Bobby, just as he had saved her, and now they were even. 
In the moonlight through the windows overlooking the porch and the river, she could see his face, more hair than skin. She thought his eyes were open.
“How’re you doing?” she asked.
His eyes were open. “Cold. Skin hurts, neck hurts.”
“Well, you are better.”
“How long...how long have we...?”
“A day and a night.”
“I thought you was somebody else...at first. Now I know.” He gazed up and behind at the windows full of light. “I remember... I remember your name is Ruth; your friend called you that, I think.”
“Yes. Ruth. Sleep. We’ll leave in the morning.” 
The room smelled musty, but a cool breeze through the windows brought a mingling of piney air with the ever-rushing of the gorge. 
Needing to sleep, she picked up the pistol from the floor and stood to go out. 
Bobby caught her left wrist. She leaned close to hear what he had to say. “Will you lay down beside me?”
She thought about earlier having rubbed his body to cool the fever, about thinking of him as neither man nor murderer, only human. 
“I won’t bother you.” He rolled over on his side, facing the wall.
She started to walk away. But then she sat on the edge of the narrow cot and placed the pistol on the floor again, then lay with her back to his back. Hot and shivering, his whole body vibrated. She thought she heard a rat’s claws clicking across the dusty floor, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered because she was no longer who she had been, or who she’d thought she had been. Rewis had robbed her of that. She latched onto the sound of water rushing. 
“If I could just get warm,” Bobby said through chattering teeth.
She considered asking him how he’d made it this far. What had he eaten? Where had he slept? She considered asking him how he and a killer like Rewis could ever have been buddies. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to know Bobby any better or she wouldn’t be able to leave him the next morning, she wouldn’t be able to do what she was about to do next. 
She rolled over and pulled close to his back, at first only breathing into his sour shirt, feeling his skin through the worn knit so warm and soft on her face. Then she began to cry—so good to be close to a human with real heart. 
He rolled over, squaring his body away from hers but reaching to touch her shoulder and then her face. Pressing her face to his quivering chest, with his chin on top of her head. “I shouldn’t of asked you to lay down, I’m sorry. Not after all you been through.”
She shook her head no. “Not it. Not why I’m crying.”
He was still shaking but he didn’t move.  
“I’m lonesome as you are for somebody good to touch. Just to warm with and talk to,” she choked out.
“I’m getting warm now,” he said, again moving away from her. She could still feel the heat and vibrations of his body. “You go on and cry, cry to ole Bobby. Wadn’t for me you wouldn’t be in this fix.”
She brought both hands up and folded them between her chest and his.
“Don’t tell me you done chunked that pistol away?”
“No. On the floor by the bed.” She was so tired of carrying it, believing in it, that it could save her, that she would make it home. She cried low.
“Hey,” he said, laughing, “you ever hear the one about....?”
She pushed at his chest with her folded hands, laughing while crying.
“Once upon a time,” he started, “there was this good-looking gal...”
“No,” she said, serious now, dreading what was coming next, getting ready to spring up and leave.
“Let me finish, let me finish. Ain’t nothing ugly in this. This is just ole Bobby here.”
She nodded. She trusted him. Why else would she be lying next to him of her own free will? Her free will.
“So, this girl, she was what they called a Moabite, a bad bunch, hated by the Hebrews. Well, so happens she falls for a good-looking Hebrew feller with a real fine mama, name of Naomi.”
Ruth laughed. “I know this story, I know where you’re going with it.”
“Hush now, let me tell it.” Bobby slipped his left arm under her head and gently jostled her shoulder. “Well, wadn’t long after they married and this ole boy had to go to war, and wadn’t long after that he got hisself killed.”
Ruth covered her mouth with one hand, muffling laughter. “You sure leave a lot out, don’t you?”
“Anyhow, times was hard back then...”
“Yeah,” Ruth said, “waay back then.”
“Some years, yeah.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” Ruth warned, listening out but hearing only the rushing of the water.
Bobby’s voice dropped to a mumble. “Well, her mama-in-law, this Naomi, real wise, was getting ready to go home to Bethlehem, where maybe she might could find easier living.” His voice grew cracked, stressed; his heart was beating like bird wings against the wall of his chest. He drew a deep breath, continuing, “So, knowing how her people the Hebrews felt about the Moabites, she tried to get the young widow-woman...”
“They were both widow-women, in case you forgot,” Ruth said, laughing, indulging him—he needed to tell this, his gift to her.
“That’s right—I left that out. Now, hush.” He lingered his hand along her back, speaking stronger. “Naomi told her daughter-in-law it was high time she got out and looked for another man; said her being young and good-looking and good-hearted to boot she wouldn’t have a bit of trouble finding somebody to love her and give her babies.”
“Okay, you can say her name, Ruth.”
“Well, this Ruth, she says ain’t no way she’s gone go off and leave Miss Naomi and her been so good to her. Says, ‘Where you go I go; we’re all each other’s got.”
Ruth was smothering in her pity for this man, breathing in his fevered warmth. “’Whither thou goest, I will go. Wherever thou lodgest, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, your God my god.’” She could hear the words set to music, a wedding song she’d heard sung at one of her mother’s friend’s wedding.
“Okay, know-it-all.” Bobby laughed, too loud. “Anyhow, how it went was Naomi and Ruth set out for Bethlehem, not knowing how the Hebrews might take to Ruth. They were going home, since Ruth had made it clear that Naomi’s home would be her home. Lil ole gal scared to death of what she’d find when she got there. Now Miss Naomi was getting on in age, so Ruth took it on herself to go out and find something for them to eat. Back then, real poor people was allowed to follow the harvesters, gleaning what was left over by the main pickers. Every day Ruth would go out and pick over the leavings—I think it was wheat, best I recall.”
“Yes. Wheat,” Ruth said.”
“Right. Well, this Ruth was so smart and sweet to her mother-in-law that before long one of Naomi’s kinfolks, a gov’nor, I guess you could say, made it his business to go out and meet her.”
“A gov’nor?” Ruth laughed.
“Shh, hold it down.” Bobby placed a hand over her mouth, then took it away. “Well, anyway he was a big boss among the Hebrews and what he said went. So, you can figure Ruth bout had a heart attack when she seen him coming across that field she was working.” Bobby paused, maybe because he had to or maybe because he sensed Ruth tensing. “You know the rest of the story, don’t you?”
“Not this version, I don’t.”
“Well, it’s a story about homecoming. Of course they got married and lived happily ever-after.”
“I think that was Cinderella and the prince.” 
“Yeah, but the point is, you’re getting ready to head home and likely wondering what you’ll find—how people will treat you after being with a scandal like Rewis for so long. Scared to death like that other Ruth.” 
Ruth had been feeling the tears build, banking them behind laughter, but then she let go. Shaking the bed while sobbing low.
“Hey, I’m sorry.” Bobby propped on one elbow, looking down at her. “I was just trying to get you pumped up, thinking what you might be thinking.”
“I’m not good. You don’t know me.”
“Well, ain’t none of us all good; ain’t none of us all bad either.” Trying to break the spell, he said, “You ever hear the one about....” Then he stopped, changing tones from jolly to somber. “Go on and cry, cry all you want to. Get it out.”
When she cried out, she told him about the lie her life had been. She told him about how she would set her grandmother up as a contrast to herself by refusing to cook with her, to look at family pictures with her. How she would walk out the door, young, strong and straight-backed, leaving the sweet withering lady shaking her head, wondering what she’d said or done wrong.
Ruth told him about working in hay with Mandy, lifting bales beyond her strength to make Mandy feel weak and useless. She told him about her need to feel bolder, prettier, smarter at the expense of Mandy’s self-worth. It was Ruth’s fault that they’d gone for that long walk on the river—all because of her need to show Mandy up as weak and cowardly.
“My mama and daddy would wring their hands wondering why I’d rather stay with Poppee than with them.” She shifted, sniffling. “Half the time I did it to get their attention, and that’s the truth.”
Bobby was lying stiff, listening. Then speaking solidly, not even bothering to whisper. “I think right now you’re not being honest with yourself. Not then, but now. I think you’re remembering what’s worst about you to punish yourself for something that’s not your fault, not atall. 
“What about the good in you? I can see it even if you can’t. Your mercy toward me, the one caught you by the hair of the head and caused you to fall in with Rewis. But see that’s all done and gone, and we have to go on.” 
He propped on his left elbow, looking into her face. “Even Rewis, sorry as he is, is got a streak of good in him.”
“I haven’t seen it then.” Ruth shook her head.
“Yeah. Even him. Half-raised two lil ole younguns, a boy and a girl, belonged to somebody in his family. They’d come to see him at the prison and make over Uncle Rewis like he was the best ole boy in the world. Seen it with my own two eyes.”
Ruth wondered if those were the children of the cousin who would take them all to the truck-stop with her. 
“And his mama... I know for a fact while he was at Jackson that up till to the time she died, he made shore she was took care of. Would send her ever last dime he could beg, borrow or steal.”
Ruth couldn’t imagine, maybe didn’t even want to. She knew him just as she knew herself and the pictures weren’t pretty.
She cried harder. Choking, sobbing. “I want to tell you a story now. Two people in it, the real me—me and this girl named Trish.” And then she told him about Trish. All of it. She told him about not voting to spite Rewis, maybe believing that Trish wouldn’t vote either, maybe believing that Trish would vote for her to live because she’d gotten to know her so well and knew the hell she’d been through. “I don’t know,” Ruth said, sobbing low. “Maybe I just wanted to live so bad and believed Rewis would pick Trish for a hostage and not me.” 
Bobby let her cry, holding her to his hot chest. Then, when she began shuddering and got quiet, he raised his head, speaking directly into her moonlit face, his glassy dark eyes like spotlights. “Why would you of all people believe anything Rewis said?”

***
While Bobby slept the next morning, Ruth lay still, trying to reconcile herself to the girl she had been and the girl in the bed with a stranger. Not only a stranger but one of her kidnappers. Throughout the night she had made him drink and his fever was now on the wane, as far as she could tell. She thought about him tenderly teaching her about the pistol, calming her, and never once had she felt threatened, not really. She thought about the story of Ruth and Naomi and why he had told her that—to make her know that when this nightmare was over, she’d wake up and be okay; that she was strong enough to keep hoeing corn till she could be rescued. She laughed to herself, thinking about the corn. Then the corn figured into a story Bossie had told about hogs and one thought led to another and she was back to thinking about food and the mulberries and the wild hog smell beneath the tree and how more than anything she’d like some barbequed pork. 
When Bossie was eight or ten, she said, her mother would take her some afternoons to visit her Aunt Sudie and Uncle Leftie at the crossing in Statenville.  The two homebodies would pass the afternoon rocking on the front porch of the clean little shack-of-a-house, talking family, sewing and cooking, while dipping snuff, keeping watch over the crossing and the townspeople on foot passing in and out of the turpentine commissary and the white two-story courthouse across the way. Behind the house was Troublesome Creek which crooked through the acorn and mulberry trees where wild hogs fed and cooled in the mud wallows. 
West up the road, the two women could see the wooden river bridge and the graveyard where they would be buried if the good Lord didn’t rapture them before they died. It was a fact, said Bossie, and the graveyard would be about the farthest they ever got away from home, neither of them ever wanting to go anywhere anyway. Another fact, Uncle Leftie was a thorn in Aunt Sudie’s side. Not only was he the town drunk but he was the town thief and was known far and wide for his skills at arson. 
Well, Bossie said, this one afternoon while they were visiting, Uncle Leftie was off to one side of the porch letting the women talk when up comes a good-sized shoat from the wallow behind the house. Bossie could hear the pig snuffling and rooting underneath the porch but so far had not been able to lay eyes on it. 
Tired of doing nothing, of waiting for the visit to end, she lay down on her belly on the pale lye-scoured boards of the porch to peep through the cracks, hoping for a look at the shoat.
Uncle Leftie, a slick lean fellow with no teeth, and generally not all that friendly with children, or old women, as he called his wife and sister-in-law, came walking over with a dry cob of corn and handed it to Bossie, who lay belly-flat on the porch. 
“Heah, babe,” he said, “shell off some of this corn and poke it through the cracks and then you’ll get to see that ole shoat.”
She took the corn and did as he said, dropping kernel after kernel through the cracks.
“Now move on up towarge the edge of the porch, babe, and shell out some more.”
Shelling off more corn from the rough cob, she looked up at him holding to an axe and shining his red gums. Then peeping back through the crack she poked some more corn, watching the black and white pied shoat move out toward the light along the edge of the porch, following the trail of corn. 
“Thow some off the edge of the porch, why don’t you?” said Uncle Leftie.
She shelled off a few more kernels and tossed it off to the raw dirt where the two women’s snuff juice was drying in.
The shoat scuttled out after the corn, and in a flash, the axe flew, clubbing it on the head. Pocket knife out, Uncle Leftie jumped from the porch, and while the women hollered and carried on and Bossie cried, he slashed its throat with one swipe of the knife. Barbeque.
Ruth had to smile at this Bossie-story, probably about half true. The old queen-stringer just wouldn’t let her be. Ruth thought about the broken hatchet underneath the porch; no, the pigs under the mulberry tree had nothing to fear from her. And she didn’t have the bullets to waste on stray shots at pigs for a chance at some barbeque.
She had to leave now, but she would try to get Bobby to go with her and turn himself in to the law. She would tell how kind he’d been, how he had helped her escape. How much that would count against an extended term in prison, she didn’t know. He’d said if not for him, she wouldn’t be in this fix. That alone should have enabled her go on without him. 
Sitting on the edge of the bed, daylight spilling through the windows overlooking the porch, she looked at Bobby’s back, his white shirt and black hair. She tugged at his left shoulder, “Bobby, wake up.”
He didn’t move. 
“Bobby, Bobby wake up.”
Still he didn’t move. She stood, tugging harder, rolling him over onto his back, not stiff but limp. 
“Oh, God, no!”
She placed her right hand on his chest, feeling for a heartbeat, but couldn’t find it. 
“Bobby, wake up,” she said louder, filling the room with her strange voice. He couldn’t be dead; he had seemed better last night.
Then she placed her thumb on his left wrist, seeking out the tender spot of his pulse, at first she couldn’t locate it. But when she did it was faint and inconsistent, no rhythm, reminded her of an eye blinking. 
His face was a blank, at rest. At least no pain, no misery. He must be in a coma, she decided. She didn’t really know anything about comas, but she was pretty sure he was near death. 
“Bobby,” she said, her voice bouncing about the dim empty room, “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ve got to go get help for you. I’ll be gone for awhile, but I’ll be back.” Her voice cracked, thinking that even if she did make it out of the woods, got help, he’d be dead by the time she returned. At least, if he could hear her, he’d have hope. 
She leaned down and kissed his cool cheek between his closed left eye and his bushy beard. “Thank you,” she said. “You were right about Rewis.”
Then she picked up the pistol from the floor and went outside, turning in circles to check for Rewis at the corners of the house, behind each tree. She had to be careful; she had to leave right away. She’d been lucky so far, and her foot was better, only ached. If Rewis came now and somehow got the gun from her—which seemed entirely possible—he might find Bobby and shoot him, not that he wasn’t dying anyway. She would just like the matter of whether Bobby lived or died not to be left up to Rewis, the way Trish’s death had been. 
Thinking about Trish made her mad, thinking about home made her brave. But really what made Ruth braver was knowing that unless Rewis had found another hostage, he wouldn’t kill her. That fact too terrified her because she knew he would try harder to find her. 
Squatting on the bluff, at the spring, in the cool of the morning, with the sun rising over the east bank of the river, she began filling the plastic jug she’d found under the edge of the lodge porch, getting set to follow the north hook of the river till she could make her way east toward Highway 129, which she had all faith would be there. 
But first she would have to try to make Bobby drink.
Pistol in the rock crevice next to her right foot, she watched the narrow brown stream of the creek endlessly dump into the gorge of frothing foam, bubbles popping and building and glistening in the sun. When the jug was full of sparkling water and light swirls of sand, she stood, getting her balance on the slippery rock bluff, facing Rewis not four feet away, standing along the edge of woods.
In the mind-numbing clatter of water in the gorge, he appeared always to have been there, part of the jungley dewy landscape, and yet also the nightmare image imprinted on the undersides of her eyelids. Her nightmare made flesh.
“Well well well.” He spoke loud, to be heard over the waterfall. “I thought you’d gone on off with that ole canoe-boy. I fount his canoe and got all his grub, and soon as I get up with him, I aim to lay him low.” His eyes dropped to the pistol in the rock crevice.
So, he didn’t know about Bobby yet; he hadn’t been inside the lodge. That was something at least.
Ruth’s heart was thundering in her chest, but the crashing of the water lulled her into a false state of belief that she could get hold of the pistol in the crevice before he could, but first she had to let go of the jug in her right hand. She dropped it to the rippled rock and it tumbled and rolled down into the gorge, vanishing beneath the foam. 
She considered following it, letting the foam swallow her up. But no, she had to somehow get the pistol. She had to take it slow, think. If Rewis got the pistol, she would need to lure him away from Bobby. 
“Where’s he at?” Rewis shouted. “Your new boyfriend?”
“I got away.”
“What’s that?”
“I got away,” she shouted.
“Bet you fifty bucks he’s up there in that house, ain’t he?” He nodded southwest, in the direction of the house whose tin roof could be seen shining in the coming sun.
His hazel eyes were hollows, sockets of sun. Had to be blinded. Drop and grab the pistol, she told herself, while you have the chance. 
For all Rewis knew there could be a man in there with a gun too. No matter what, Ruth was thrilled to have an edge over this man she hated, if only a temporary edge.
He laughed out, ducking, bobbing his head. Then spat to one side. “Me and you’s got a job waiting on us down yonder at them rapids, Sister. First, though, I got a bone to pick with that new boyfriend.”
So, she thought, he’d stopped the other side of the rapids and walked around through the woods, had seen her on the bluff from there. 
“I’m Florida-bound and ain’t nobody stopping me long as I got you.” 
As afraid as she was her courage was unwavering. “You want me, you’re gonna have to come get me. Me and this pistol.” She felt out the pistol with her left foot, then stepped on it. 
He eyed her, then peered suspiciously around at the tin roof winking through the trees. “You got somebody in there, he ain’t got no gun. Had, he’d a-used it on me back there, stead of lamming me back of the neck with that pole.”
Suddenly he lunged for her. She dodged right and watched as his boot soles hit the slick rock and he landed on his back, eyes stretched and flashing alarm, reaching behind for the pistol or trying to stay himself with both hands. He was still looking at her when he went over the edge of the bluff, plunging into the foam, going under and rising with a cap of bubbles just in time to see her pick up the pistol and aim it at his head. 
He ducked beneath the foam again, and when he came up again, he was mid-river, swimming hand over hand toward the other shore, a spot of white sand leading up the steep bank into the woods.
She had the gun! She had the gun! She couldn’t shoot him from that distance but she had the gun. It felt solid and familiar in her hand, but she had to use both hands to steady it. She was shaking, exhilarated, terrified. 
When Rewis reached the sand bar, he crawled from the shallow water, running, stumbling into the woods. Ruth caught glimpses of his white shirt, heading south toward the rapids where his boat would be. Then she lost sight of him.
During the scuffle for the gun, she had wrenched her injured foot. It felt like she was standing in a bed of fire ants. She would have to stand guard over the lodge and at the same time be ready to shoot Rewis when he passed in the boat, if he passed in the boat. Meanwhile she would rest her foot and try to find another jug for water for herself and Bobby. As soon as Bobby died, she would strike out through the woods to get help and someone to come back for his body. 
From her lookout atop the steep bank under the splotchy shade of the mulberry tree, she could see end to end, from the gorge bluff to the tumbling rock rapids, the half-mile stretch of river.  She had watched Rewis step from the woods and cross the river, knee-deep on the flat rocks above the rapids. She couldn’t see the boat but knew it was lodged somewhere on her side of the river, because before long he was back on the rocks, mid-river, looking her way while eating from a can. He stopped eating once and held out the can, offering her some of whatever he was eating, or making a sort of toast to her. Regardless, he was mocking her, he was back to his old self. 
She stood, pointing the pistol at him. She had only four bullets; she couldn’t afford to waste one just to scare him, though she would have liked to. She had to get reacquainted with this hated, familiar gun. It was one thing to see it, another to hold it. To be in charge of it.  
After noon she was starving, hot and worried about Bobby inside the stifling lodge, needing water. She was thirsty, so she knew he had to be. No more mulberries within reach, and her foot had gone from burning to a solid ache.
Another hour passed, and she was thirstier. No sign of Rewis, but so far he hadn’t crossed the river again. Meaning he was on her side. She had to be careful. She was exhausted from craning her neck to check the lodge, then the river, the woods all around. Soon she would have to go to the spring on the bluff to drink. The rooty smell of hogs under the tree festered in the heat. Her foot was raging with pain. She dreaded standing on it. She stood anyway, scanning all around for signs of Rewis, keeping the gun ever aimed ahead as she made her way north through the brush and trees along the bank. 
Limping past the lodge on her left she considered going inside to check on Bobby first. No, not without water for him. If only somebody would come. All day she’d been listening for sounds of a car or truck, but her head was so full of the crashing sound of the water in the gorge she had to remind herself that she was hearing anything at all.
When she reached the inset chute of the boat landing, starting to climb up the sliced dirt to the bluff, she spotted the bottom of a buried bottle glinting through the scanty brown and green weeds and grass. With her fingers she dug it free, then began beating the bottom with the flat of her hand to dislodge the dirt inside. 
On the bluff, feeling the cool mist from the spray of water dumping into the gorge, she rinsed and re-rinsed the bottle, casting all around for signs of Rewis, expecting him to pop up out of the woods, across the river, climbing up the slope from the boat landing. He could be inside the lodge. He could be anywhere. 
When she got back to the lodge with the bottle of water, rushing in and in her mind already rushing out, she found Bobby exactly as he’d been. He hadn’t even moved. But still he had a pulse, weak but there. She lifted his head to make him drink, but when she put the bottle to his lips the water only dribbled down into his beard, onto his neck. Was she only imagining that his fever was coming back? She didn’t dare speak.
Seated again at her lookout under the mulberry tree, with the pistol in her right hand and the bottle of water in her left, she set her sights on the rapids downriver where she had last seen Rewis. No sign of him above the ridge of tumbling, twinkling water; no sign of him right or left or behind. She lifted the bottle to sip, and spied him directly in front of her, across the river, as if daring her to shoot. Then he was gone, his white shirt flickering through the trees. 
It occurred to her that even though she was the one with the gun, Rewis was still stalking her, waiting to jump her. He was the one with the boat, with the food, her jacket, and the insect repellent. 
She knew he wouldn’t turn the boat around and head upriver, for fear of being caught by the law—that’s how he would think. The law might possibly be investigating the area where he had killed the fisherman for his boat, or the trestle where he had killed the two railroad workers. Then farther along, downriver...  She was making herself crazy, thinking like him, remembering, trying to forget. Hoping that what Bobby said about Rewis half-raising the children meant there was some mercy buried inside.
In the increasing heat shortly before sundown, she watched as Rewis stepped out in the sun-struck shallows above the rapids, stopping midway and flapping his naked arms and legs, squawking like a chicken. Could she hear that or had she only imagined it? 
She had to outsmart him. She had her water bottle and right now while she could see him, while she knew where he was, and he was that far south, she could head north, then east and stay ahead of him, but not without her hurt foot hindering her. Not without leaving Bobby to be finished off by Rewis.
She would have to go for the boat, shoot Rewis if she had to, then motor upriver till she could find help. What was uppermost in her mind was to get somebody to come back and take care of Bobby’s body; that’s how sure she was that he was dying. Was she right now at this moment only guarding a dead body? 
Not long after dark she fell asleep hot, then woke in the moonlight freezing. What time was it? How long before sunup? Where was Rewis? Moonlight through the leafy branches of the tree made her feel colder. It crossed her mind to go inside and take the blanket covering Bobby, but the thought crossed from her mind before the plan was fully formed. 
Was she losing her mind, as she was losing hope, growing weaker? She was barely aware of the water crashing in the gorge, had to think about it. Then the racket was maddening. Unbearable. 
She stood, testing her foot, and stabbing pain streaked up to her thigh. She sat again on the damp ground, hugging her knees to her body. Pistol on the ground beside her. 
She watched the woods across the river lose the silvery sheen of moonlight and take on a golden glow, upshot of the sun on the rise. 
The pistol was cold in her hands and she couldn’t recall having picked it up. 
Yes, she would have to go to the boat. She had to have food and she had to try one more time to get away. 
But in the light of day, morning in full bloom, she remained sitting, watching Rewis streaking through the woods across the river, watching Rewis cross the river above the rapids, listening to the crashing of water in the gorge, and then listening to a new sound, a screeching, scrubbing, grating racket, almost relief from the monotonous water rhythm. Till she realized that Rewis was somehow winching the boat around the rapids. 
She stood, hopping out to the edge of the bank, gazing downriver. But all that she could see was a tall pine top trembling as though isolated in a storm.  
Then it came to her that soon Rewis would be passing in the boat below her. Maybe he had given up on the notion of needing a hostage. If she could hang on, and not starve, or go crazy from thinking about Bobby inside the lodge while listening to the concussion of water in the gorge, he would be gone and she could get away. Or, she could shoot him. 
Sure of where Rewis was for once, she went back inside the lodge. Bobby still hadn’t moved from the way he had settled when she’d rolled him over the morning before. Large black carpenter bees were buzzing, floating about the room. On the dusty floor boards were drifts of sawdust from where they had been drilling into the wood ceiling. She placed an ear to Bobby’s cool, still chest but could hear no heartbeat. She listened for breathing but could hear or feel not even a wisp of air. But when she checked his pulse, she found it, slower than before, much weaker. He was alive, but only technically.  
When the sun was overhead, shining straight down on the little river, the screeching, scrubbing, grating racket had ceased and the clatter of water in the gorge was back doing its job of torture. Birds winging past were silenced by the water noise. The tree top downriver had quit trembling, and no sign of Rewis. 
She was on the verge of going for more water, with her pistol and the bottle, when Rewis trumpeted an announcement from inside the lodge: “Thought you’d like to know, ole Bobby’s kicked the bucket in here.”
Later, after recovering from the shock of Rewis getting past her to get to Bobby, wondering whether Bobby had died naturally or Rewis had maybe strangled him—maybe he wasn’t even dead—after recovering from the shock of Rewis being so near, of his having come so close to attacking her and taking the pistol, possibly using it on her, she made up her mind to go after him. She had no choice. He had no intention of leaving without her. He would be waiting at the boat because he knew she needed food, he knew she couldn’t walk and she’d have to come for the boat to get away, he knew she wouldn’t let Bobby decompose in the lodge. He knew her. 
Pistol first, like a heat-seeking device, she limped along the bank, run of the river on her left, woods on her right. Unless he had crossed the river again without her seeing him, he would be out there among the vines and palmettos and trees, somewhere on her side, watching her, waiting for her. 
Already she was far enough away from the gorge to be hearing the shrilling of katydids, the singing of crickets and grasshoppers clicking in the dry grass, welcoming but warning of how close she was getting to the boat, which she still could not see. And another sound, the tumbling of water over rocks at the rapids where the boat was docked. 
Her foot was throbbing. She was starving, so weak and dizzy she had to hold onto sweet gum and pine branches to keep her balance, to keep from tilting into the deep black water below where the furious rapids had beaten out what looked like a bottomless pool. 
She stopped, swinging the pistol all around at the woods. He had to be there, watching her. Up ahead she could see where the woods dropped off to a flat sandbar with a scattering of large mossy tupelos, a tall cypress and its knees. Then she saw the boat, just as she suspected, docked north side of the rapids, just on shore, and ready to go. The churning of the water on her left was making her dizzier, seeing the white trash bags with the food, was making her hungrier, just the thought of beans and wieners made her mouth mist hot saliva. She had to be careful. So far, no Rewis, but she knew he was there, but almost didn’t care, only about the food and Bobby. Just as he had appeared dead to her last time she saw him, he may have appeared dead to Rewis. Besides, Bobby had been right, asking, “Why would you of all people believe anything Rewis said?” 
Beyond the sand bar was a lazy circular lake of water where the river made its bend before plunging over the rapids. The lake was so peaceful looking, no ripples, a mirror reflecting the green trees around the banks. 
A few more steps and she would be on the edge of the upper bank that she would have to climb down to get to the boat. She scolded herself mentally for daring to believe that Rewis was on the other side of the river, that she could get to the boat and float off without him. The pistol felt like a slingshot in her shaking hands, that unhandy and harmless. 
Again, she checked the woods on her right, behind her, listening but hearing only the trundling gushing water, the notes varied and unnerving after so long listening to the crescendo of the gorge. 
The sun was now hidden behind the trees, withdrawing its warmth and light. Below, the boat on the sandbar was becoming more alluring, a promise just out of reach. She would have to go back to the mulberry tree soon or climb down the rooty bank to the boat. She couldn’t stay where she was after dark. She couldn’t last another day without food, not that she would die of starvation, not right away, but the gnawing in her gut was unbearable, that and knowing Bobby was inside the lodge either dying or already dead and soon to rot. More than anything though, what was most unbearable, was her waiting for something to happen rather than making it happen. 
Once she had set her mind to risk all, to go for the boat, the throbbing of her foot and the gnawing inside were snuffed by the adrenaline rush. Moving fast she stuck the pistol in the waist of her shorts, as she’d seen Rewis do, then stepped to the edge of the upper bank, staring down at the boat, turned, and began backing down the bank, holding to roots and branches, placing one foot and then the other in routed out places in the dirt. Then she slipped, falling, landing on her butt. Not even thinking what to do next, keeping her eyes on the boat only a few feet away, she scrambled up and dashed toward it, shoving it out into the deep pool and leaping inside. 
Boat rocking and tilting she sat in the stern, at once locating the paddle on the floor. She was at that moment about to reach for it, thinking she should be reaching for the pistol in her waist band instead, thinking, then not thinking as she felt the bow of the boat snatched toward the bank and saw Rewis leaning into a cleft in the soap rock bank, hauling on the rope tied to the bow.
“You don’t reckon I’m fool enough to let you take off without me.” His lips were glistening with grease. “You gonna shoot, you better do it now, cause you ain’t gone get no nother chance. I gar-un-tee you that.”
Her hand was on the pistol, the barrel of which was stabbing into her soft belly flesh. She would have to stand to free it from the waistband of her shorts. When she did, Rewis hopped into the boat, rocking it wildly, so that she lost her balance and landed in the midst of the white trash bags. 
The last thing she remembered was Rewis howling, laughing, before she woke floating downriver with the moon. 
She slept, she woke, she ate and slept again, the sun taking over while the moon slept too.
###
With fresh supplies and water from the canoe Rewis had discovered, and having reclaimed his hostage, Rewis was focused on getting to Florida. No more games and down to business. Sometimes rowing, sometimes using the motor to power the boat, he rode with the current.
It felt good to Ruth to be moving; every mile, every minute, she was coming closer to rescue, closer to getting home, even heading in the opposite direction. Soon they would meet up with somebody. Soon Rewis would be caught. Best of all, Rewis was no longer goading and tricking and punishing. He hadn’t raped her again since the evening after he’d shot Trish.
Ruth never knew when somebody would be around the next bend, and there was always, always, that hope of help. Also that dread of what Rewis’s reaction would be. She believed that in his present fixation on getting to Florida he wouldn’t shoot this whoever they would happen up on.   
Then he slowed down. Maybe figuring he was far enough downriver from his last murder-spree, he began talking to her more, trying to pick a fight or shock her. She had to constantly be on guard against slumping into bewilderment again. Battling that old fear and dread. She’d made it this far and she would make it all the way. She had to keep believing that until help appeared around the next bend.
And then it happened. 
Downriver, she heard what sounded like a song, a chorus of guttural high-pitched and bass voices, men and women singing, an old-man contralto trailing like chimes. She couldn’t make out the words but the melody was one she recognized from going to the funeral of an old black man who used to help her granddaddy cut and bale hay. Fine hay, horse hay, and people would come from all over to buy it and her granddaddy and Uncle Willie, the black man, would grin, not because of the money but because they had produced such green sweet hay. Not a weed in it.
It isn’t Sunday and it isn’t a funeral, the voice in her head said low. Was she only imagining the song? She didn’t turn to look, just kept her eyes on the shiny sardine tin that Rewis had tossed moments before, now wobbling in the wake of the boat. Maybe she was hearing the hollow bouncing reverberations of the boat passing along the soap rock wall on her left, or the whine of the boat motor.
She remembered how she'd fallen asleep in the car with her family coming home from vacation in St. Augustine, Florida, last summer. How she'd drifted to the singing of the car tires on the gravel. Safe in the dim dash light glowing between the heads and shoulders of her daddy at the wheel and her mother on the other side, like busts of local heroes. Nothing could harm Ruth. The warm press of familiar flesh--her sister and brother, one on each side, nodding off to the same song Ruth was losing herself to. Earlier that day they'd had an argument about...Ruth could not remember what...but in the song it was all over, in the song it was okay.
Eyes wide and disbelieving now, Ruth stared at Rewis and he was staring over her head.
"A nigger baptizing," he shouted, smiling. “Wish ole Bobby was here to see this.”
The song was coming clearer now. Her first thought was to beg him not to kill anybody, but her begging might trigger him to do just that. Shook was what he wanted.
Grinning, he cut the engine and picked up the paddle, rowing, then letting the boat drift. Drawing closer to the song, a song of gathering home.
He placed the paddle across his knees and laughed loud, meaning he had no fear of the people singing only a few yards downriver, that they should fear him.
"Amen, brother," he bellowed, rowing with calm measured strokes of the paddle now toward the east shore, passing between the stalwart light-skinned preacher with his black Bible and a thick-chested black man, both in glaring white shirts and standing waist-deep in the clear brown water, and the congregated women, men and children, maybe eight, maybe ten, on the flat sand bank a few yards away. No singing now, all was silent. They merely held up their threadbare maroon hymnals with humble and penitent enduring and waited in the paisley shade of a gnarled water oak, which had suffered more outrage and trifling sacrilege than a single one of them having lived to tell about it. A tiny girl in a blue dress with many stiff braids sticking up on her head wound herself in her mother’s dress tail.
Ruth made herself so stiff she thought her back would crack.
Rewis spoke low to Ruth, “I’m just funning with em. Watch this.”
On her left now, she could see the river bottom, spiraling sunlight on the water-scalloped sand, the two men's bare brown feet planted like roots of ancient trees. Ruth could hear them breathe, she could smell their coarsening fear. On shore, the little girl whimpered, then cried.
"I've seen de resurrection and de lamb!" Rewis shouted. “T’was a baptizing just like this one set me free.” 
He wedged the left side of the boat onto the water-lapped sand of the shore and got out, rocking the boat and Ruth in it, and began walking among the small crowd standing three-deep in orderly rows and gazing up at the blue sky and the crying streak of a hawk flown and hiding in the trees limning out the sun-sparked and languid river. Nothing to fix their gazes on and these people were used to that.
"I'm just taking up a collection, folks," said Rewis and laughed out. 
Stepping from one to the other, he held out his left hand, pistol in the right and punching at random chests and bellies with the barrel. Maroon hymnals tucked preciously under their arms to keep from dropping them. An old old woman in a faded black dress and woven hat pulled a knotted handkerchief of coins from her drooped bosom. Her hands were bony but smooth and shaking. Her hair was gray and straight and broomed out. Somebody was praying, somebody crying. Moans rose like the onset of a song from the group, mixing with another unnamed drone.
"Thank you, sister, bless you," Rewis said, taking a couple of bills from a tall skinny woman in a dressy white picture hat. She looked at him, then up at the sky again as he passed on. Wise-cracking as he wandered--on a roll now. "And you, brother, bless you," he said, taking some wadded bills from a man in indigo bib overalls and no shirt standing farther back in the crowd. The man's hands went up, hymnal dropping, pages splayed, to the ground, and he hooked his thumbs in his gallowses. His cheeky cream-brown face revealed nothing. He had been robbed, that's all. The wasted hymnal told another story.
The preacher and the man in the water inched closer to the boat, like an altar table between them and the hushed congregation on shore. So close Ruth could have touched the preacher, Ruth covered her face, whispering, “Be careful. Careful. Name’s Ruth Alexander. Kidnapped.” 
"Bless you, chile," he whispered and reached out one huge tawny hand, but didn’t touch her. "Let us pray," he said louder for the benefit of his flock under siege and clasped the black Bible to his heart.
All heads bowed, all prayed. A chorus of mumbles and humming growing to a chant. 
“Wherebouts you from?” whispered the preacher, keeping his eyes closed tight, humming, mumbling, chanting with the crowd. 
Face still covered with her hands, Ruth breathed the words, “Georgia. Valdosta. Call law, my people...”
The preacher's voice rose, trembling, then formed solid. He lifted his sober light-skinned face, bathed in sunshine, sunshine and then sudden blood.
"No! Don’t! Run!" Ruth shouted from the boat. 
When the shooting began everybody on shore started shouting and scrambling up the bank: women running with squalling children, dragging them by their arms; old people trudging behind through the boggy sand. But as one and then another were picked off like animals by Rewis’s gun, they stopped and turned, praying and waiting their turn at slaughter.
Even when Rewis had to stop shooting to reload his pistol, they waited--patient lambs, all--prayers dying on their lips as one and then another dropped to the ground like the hymnals.
When the shooting stopped, the white sand was a maze of bodies blazed with martyrs' blood like crops of trees or soldiers with armbands; the preacher and the man in the water were floating downriver in diver's arcs, the backs of their white shirts filling with air like buoys. In their place, where they had been standing, the sardine tin spun like a trick fish. On shore only Rewis was moving, bending, going through pockets, wallets and ladies' purses.
The little girl in the midst of the dead bodies sat up bawling in her sandy blue dress, and he shot her in the chest and the bullet bradded her back to the sand and she went silent and still as the ancient drone of locusts, that sound unnamed, in the moss of the old baptism oak.
Ruth squinted her eyes shut, trembling, holding to the edges of her seat to keep from toppling from the boat as Rewis pushed it offshore and stepped inside.
Rattling change and bullets in his shorts pockets, he took up the paddle and began rowing, settling into a rhythm of rowing. “Just can’t keep that trap shut, can you, bitch?”
He was breathing hard, breathing for both of them, because Ruth couldn’t breathe. Her face was drained of blood and so was his. He looked like he might faint. Then he raised the paddle to her; she ducked. Keeping her head down, hugging herself, closing her eyes tight.
On the backsides of her eyelids was a picture of the little girl sitting up, shot backwards. If Rewis did that, he would do anything. Bobby had been wrong about his having some good in him. She had to be more careful, make her contempt for him less conspicuous. No more reacting to his outbursts, no matter what. No more involving other people, begging for help. If she could stay out of Rewis’s way, maybe he would let her live.
“Keep that in mind next time you try something like that.” Again, he raised the paddle to her, water dripping on her shoulders and head. Then he began rowing again, faster than before. “Told you I was just funning with them. Didn’t have no notion of shooting nobody, not till you and that nigger went to jabbering with one another.”
Ruth believed what he said was true. Then she remembered the last thing Bobby had said to her about him.
 She opened her eyes. Rewis was staring at her. Color returned but face closed to reading. 
“But all of them...did you have to shoot all of them?”
“What? And leave witnesses? The law’d be down on me by sundown. Nigger-killing, what they call hate-crime’ll get you the chair when won’t nothing else.
“And don’t think I’ve overed you taking up with ole Bobby, cause I ain’t. I got one laid up for you, and soon as I don’t need you no more, you’re on the way to that gloryland them niggers was singing about. Got it!”
 For an answer she gazed off at the sunned water on her left. Like a light coming on, it occurred to her, that without her he had no audience and no reason to shoot anybody. He may have started out by shooting the preacher because she was whispering to him and he was whispering back, but shooting everybody else had been one more attempt to shock her, to keep her in line. 
Turning in the boat, he gave two angry yanks on the motor rope and the boat shot forward, roaring and churning a rooster tail of iridescent water and gas fumes.
***
Sunup, the next morning, Ruth was sleeping on the floor of the boat among the white garbage bag of supplies, empty water jugs, an empty brown whiskey bottle, more trash, and a green plastic tackle box belonging to the owner of the boat. The cane pole was taut and curved like a bow by a hair-like line and a gold hook threaded through an eye midway the pole. She woke to birds singing, to the burble of a spring somewhere. The leaning trees on the sloping west bank, across the river, grew brighter, accented by the sun rising behind the east slope of trees. Brown water flowed around the boat. She had never felt so alone and still and sad. But she had to let go of what she couldn’t change and focus on changing what she could.
 She hadn’t been responsible for Rewis shooting all those people at the baptism, and regardless whether Trish had voted or not voted, Ruth knew her own heart and she’d not wished for her life to be spared in exchange for Trish’s death. As for Bobby, she had done what she could for him, for herself too. Yes, maybe if she had tried harder to shoot Rewis when she had the chance, if she hadn’t let hunger make her so weak, the baptism murders wouldn’t have taken place. But she hadn’t shot him, and maybe she couldn’t. But she could quit mourning and clinging to dreams, what-ifs and what-was. She had to think clear. She didn’t want to die.
She had never worn a watch, never needed one. Now she needed one, if for no other reason than to create an imaginary timeframe to go along with her imaginary plans. A watch would tie her into the real world where time truly mattered, gave a day structure. Time would give her the impression of doing something, getting somewhere. As it was, her minutes, her days, were being swallowed up by this timeless river. It was as if she were viewing the same place, same water, like standing before a backdrop of moving pictures. 
Her daddy and mother used to take her and her sister to the museum at Stephen Foster Memorial, near White Springs in North Florida for a day picnic. They were young then-Casey hadn’t been born-and none had yet been desensitized by Disney World and TV and life. They hadn’t been indoctrinated with a sense of fairness and recognition of subtle misrepresentations. Ruth hadn’t thought about the Stephen Foster Memorial in years-she couldn’t remember how long-but now she recalled the coolness of the sacred-seeming museum on a hot day before they had air conditioning in their home or even in their car. She thought about the dim, dreamy music written by Stephen Foster, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” the preserved smells, but most of all she thought about one particular display case behind wine velvet ropes, behind glass, and the old contented-looking slaves seated forever before a crude cabin in miniature, tapping their feet while some whittled and others played banjos, watching a slow blue river flow across the backdrop of perfect trees and sky. The same enchanting scene reeling off, over and over, and a white paddle boat passing at intervals of about thirty seconds. The same boat, the same river, the same people, locked behind glass in a same world. (She had to be careful here not to see “Poppee’s Little Angel” mirrored in the glass.) Always, it seemed, though there was something else to discover, something in motion-a dog wagging its tail, smoke rising from a redbrick chimney. Hands moving on a clock. 
With access to time now, Ruth would still feel locked in to this unchanging world. But she would feel more in control; she would be better able to picture what each member of her family was doing at this very moment. With a watch, she could fool herself into believing that at such and such a time she would be set free from this encased display and on her way home.
She looked around for Rewis but didn’t see him. A thin hemp rope was knotted to a side handle of the stern and wrapped around a cypress knee, so that the left side of the boat was snug-up to the east shoreline. 
More cypress knees, like pagan idols, stood in the eddy along the edge. Hazy sunlight rayed through the tiers of trees climbing up the steep east bank. She looked upriver where gold water flowed around a curve. An umbrella tupelo grew from the jut of the west bank. Downriver was a tunnel of trees, shimmering black water, with sunglades at the start and end.
She was hot and thirsty. She needed to pee. Mosquitoes swarmed around her head and lit on her bare arms and legs, her neck and face. She reached inside the white plastic bag and took out the can of insect repellent, sprayed till she glistened, then put on the stiff sandy camouflage jacket she had used as cover while she slept. Its sour odor ripened in the fake pine smell of the repellent.
Hand inside the bag, she felt for the sharp corners of the box of pistol shells. Lifted it, hefting it. Not full, not empty. What if she should lower the box over the off-side of the boat into the water? No matter, since Bobby’s surprise attack Rewis had started loading his pockets every time he loaded the pistol. 
What if she cranked the motor of the boat, or started paddling? She looked about for the paddle and it was gone. Would she have time to get away before Rewis got back from wherever he had gone? Maybe, maybe not. But what settled it for her was thinking back to him shooting the little girl. The little girl slammed back onto the sand was what did it, because if he could shoot a child he could certainly shoot her. Again, she scolded herself for thinking weak and looking back, but she was thinking clear now and she was being careful. Moment by moment, she could do it-no watch necessary for that-and she would know when the time was right to run.
Holding to the sides of the boat, she knelt, then stood. The boat rocked and waves slapped along the shoreline, water-marking the cypress knees. She stepped from the boat, between two cypress knees, onto a ledge of hairy roots feeding into the water. She reached back and picked up an empty water jug, while watching ahead. Favoring her good foot, she started south along the root ledge, following the burbling sound of the spring. Bullous vines and brambles were snarled around saplings. She located the spring-a miniature fall of water spouting from the sandy earth upbank, over clumps of rotted leaves, flat white pebbles, and stringy leached roots-not five yards from the boat. Spotty shade at the site of the spring, and where it met the river, in full sun, cloudy brown water like smoke under glass. She stooped and tilted the mouth of the jug under the thin clear trickle and listened to the lilt of water flowing, filling, the rattle of palmettos in an unfelt breeze. Looking back, expecting Rewis to be there.
Her sprained foot was almost shrunken to the size of her other foot. Pink nail polish put on fresh the night before her capture was now wearing off. Last sprain, received jumping from a tree, the doctor had said, Stay off the foot. Well, she had not stayed off the foot. Standing with the jug full of water, watching the sand settle to the bottom, she tested the foot, felt only a twinge of pain. Needling, then numbness, spread from her heel to her toes. Could she run? Would she run? She drank, staring up through the sunhaze between river birches, bays, and oaks. The water was cool but gritty. The sun was warm but hazy. If she tried to get away, she risked being chased down and raped. She risked being killed and then raped, or being raped and then killed. Whatever occurred to Rewis, whatever sick trick popped first to mind. 
And then she spotted him, sitting with his back to a blackgum-there all the time-halfway up the bank from where the boat was anchored. Sun showering around him. The boat paddle across his lap, and the pistol on the dirt by his right side.
She picked her way through the roots and vines, back to the boat, set the filled water jug on the floor, took the other two jugs, not quite empty, and started back to the spring, hobbling, hanging to saplings. Careful not to let him know that she could walk normal now.
She could walk now!
When both jugs were filled, she carried them to the boat, set them inside and slowly, carefully, began walking upriver, close along the bank, listening to the plunk of tupelo berries dropping from the trees to the river. Not quite red, not quite green, like dye that didn't take on Easter eggs. She didn’t look back because, for a fact, she wasn’t trying to get away. Maybe testing Rewis, but not trying to get away. To show her good intention, she stopped in front of a stout tree trunk, facing the river, unbuttoned and unzipped her cutoff jeans, pulled them down with her panties, squatted and began peeing and watching it trickle down into the black water.
Immediately, a fishing boat with two men showed around the curve of the river, marked by the umbrella tupelo growing from the jut of sand. A tall man with black and gray hair was in front, and an older man with full silver hair in back. The older man had an oxygen tube attached around his ears, feeding into his nostrils. Both men were fishing, drifting down. The younger man stirred the water with a paddle on the offside, away from where Ruth was squatting, either pretending not to have seen her or having not seen her after all. She decided they had seen her-how could they not?-because both took in their fishing poles and begin paddling downriver.
"Go," she whispered, stood and pulled up her shorts. She couldn't bear it if Rewis shot the man on oxygen, which made no sense to her after all she'd been through. Except that in the older man she saw Poppee-simple, reserved, respectful.
Walking back to the boat, she watched the two men head up the green alley of arching treetops mirrored on the water. Expecting any moment to hear shots ring out from the upper bank and see the two men either slump in the boat or flip over the sides.
But looking up, when she got to the boat, she saw that Rewis was still sitting with his back to the tree trunk. Pistol glinting in the sun, on the ground next to his right hand, and the boat paddle still across his lap. He had to be asleep.
She could keep walking, maybe catch up with the men. But Rewis would only chase them down with the motor boat and kill them. If she tried to get away in the boat, she would probably wake him. Her best chance to stay alive was to do what he said and wait. Humor him, and wait. And yet all the time she was thinking this, she had her eyes on the other boat, appearing to have stopped off the west bank, in the tunnel of trees, while at the same time, she was sitting flat in the boat and pouring water from one of the jugs into the red tank of gasoline with a black rubber tube leading to the motor. 
Just as she capped the water jug, she heard Rewis cough, looked and saw him stand with the pistol in one hand and the paddle in the other and come lumbering down through the tiers of trees, shorts pockets chiming with brass pistol pellets, while she was screwing the lid on the gasoline tank. Crooked, but no time to screw it straight.
Downriver, the boat was still sitting there in the thick shadows. 
 Same place. 
She could mark the two men's progress along the alley of overhanging trees by the distance from shade to the sunglades, ahead and behind. Their poles were stuck out, one to the left, the other to the right of the boat. She had to distract Rewis. She couldn’t let him kill them.
She climbed from the boat and started walking upriver, in the opposite direction from the men, when he got about halfway there.
"Hey!" he yelled.
"Be right back," she said.
She didn’t look behind, but she felt sure he wasn’t following. 
He was watching though. At the curve where the boat had appeared earlier, she stepped up through the trees, now looking down and back at Rewis in the boat, now seeing him get in, hearing the motor start, him coughing, and watched as the boat swung round and headed her way. Full throttle.
"Hey!" he yelled again, circling the river and stopping short, in full sun, below where she was waiting.  Rings of waves rippled out and slapped along the shoreline, rocking the boat. 
She was squatting behind a stout tree with her shorts not down but pretending to pee, peeping around. He kept his eyes on the tree for a minute or so, then wrapped the rope around one of several cypress knees serving as docking for the shore-side of the boat. Leaning over the off side, he scooped water from the river to his face. Coughed. Drank water from the half-filled jug she had used to doctor the boat motor. 
How long would it take for the water to mix with the gas and stall the motor? She had no idea. She wasn’t even sure why she’d done it. Motor or no motor what difference would it make? But at least she was doing something instead of just letting something be done to her. 
Rewis knelt in the boat and began moving stuff around. Loud clatter and clack, thunk of water jugs. Even the red gas tank, which apparently he didn’t notice had grown heavier, refilled and recapped. 
She started downbank, skidding in the cool gray dirt all the way to the river's edge. Just as she started to climb into the bow of the boat she spied a small brown-pied moccasin wound around the cypress knee next to the one where the rope from the boat was wrapped. She stepped into the boat and sat. 
"I'm sick as a dog," he said, mopping his fevered red face with the sleeve of his dirty white T-shirt. "I believe I'll sleep a spell and let you work the motor."
"I don't know how," she said, eyes on the moccasin, eyes on Rewis.
"All you do is..," he turned, coughed, "work this lever up and down, left and right." He demonstrated.
"Let's get out of the sun," she said. "Pull up there in the shade and show me again."
She motioned toward the shady strip, gradually indenting with sun, where the boat had been anchored before. The fishing boat and the two men had passed into the sunglade beyond the tree tunnel, continuing to fish.
"You up to something...what you up to?" He was gazing all about, watching her, while leaning leftward, feeling for the rope wound around the cypress knee.
The small snake rared its pitted head, yawned, showing a white mouth, then sank its fangs into Rewis's little finger as his left hand passed overhead in search of the rope. 
He yelped, squalled, yanked his hand back. A shocked look, followed by astonishment and even insult, before he grabbed the paddle and raised it, eyes on Ruth now. She leaped to the shore, shoving the bow of the boat out, scrambling up the slope through the trees. Hearing behind her the hard thwak of the paddle coming down on the cypress knee.
She had taken all of five steps when she heard the unmistakable snick of the pistol, then felt the dirt behind her spitting at her legs, then the shot. Delayed sound.
"I'm gone shoot you this time, sister. I'm gone shoot you for real," he said.
She stopped, turned. "Do. Go ahead. Do it. I'd as soon be shot here as downriver."
His snake-bit hand was tucked into his right armpit. His sandy-bearded face was splotchy red. He leveled the pistol on her, holding, then lowered it. "Ain't nothing stopping me now but this snakebite. Let me put it like this, sister, the minute I don't need you, you're dead meat." He leveled the pistol on her as before. At her heart maybe, as if to make her death mercifully quick. "Now make up you mind-you can die here or go on. Who knows, you might get lucky? I might get sick and you can get away. Them two fellows down there fishing might save you." He nodded downriver. "Course, I might shoot em first."
"You're gonna die, Rewis," she said, still standing there with the backs of her legs stinging.
He took his hand from beneath his armpit, held it up to check the bite. The tip of his little finger looked like a garlic bulb. "I doubt I'll die from a lil ole snake bite on my little finger. But, if I get too sick, I figure to take you with me. You, and them old men up there too."
"Don't shoot them," she said.
He looked at his hand, slung it, stuck it into his armpit again. "You the one's gonna decide that. Just like yesterday when you ratted on me to that nigger. Now, get on in here." He motioned toward the stern of the boat, then trained the gun on her while she stepped down, around the dead snake, ribbed white belly up in the water, to the boat. Rewis sat in the floor of the boat, at her feet, and watched her sit in his seat, unwrap the rope from the cypress knee, start the engine and motor forward.
Rewis was leaning into the left side of the boat with the pistol hidden when they drew boat-to-boat alongside the fishermen. "Catching anything?" he called.
"Old mudfish is all," said the younger man. "You?"
Rewis grinned, nodded. "None to speak of."
The older man with the oxygen tube smiled, nodded his silver head and waved. 
Ruth kept her eyes on the pistol in Rewis's hand, watched it tilt up behind the left wall of the boat, then down, but still hidden from view of the men. His mocking feverish face framed by his back-blown hair.
"Pow!" he said to her after they had passed the other boat.
She looked behind, alternately watching the boat vanish and watching ahead. Watching behind: suddenly angry at the men, who no longer reminded her of Poppee; they reminded her of the general population of good men who wouldn't hurt a living soul but wouldn't save one either. She was sure they had heard the yelling and the shots, but had chosen not to get involved. She wondered if they had heard the news about two girls missing and would maybe report what they had seen. Watching ahead: Rewis slicing into the tip of his little finger with the all-purpose pocketknife, then bleeding it off the side of the boat. Pistol on her, his long hair back-blown.
***
Rewis was coughing, sweating, his sandy hair still swept forward like fringe around his face. He brought up his knees and placed his head on them, pouches of ammunition protruding from his hips. She wondered whether he was sick from the snake's venom or just sick. No matter, he was sick. She could smell his blood, the sour stench of his fever breezing into her face. 
When the motor had begun to sputter, he seemed not to have noticed. Had been busy wrapping his bleeding, swollen hand in a strip ripped from the tail of his shirt. The pistol was on the floor and junk from the garbage bag was scattering and rolling around it. When the motor began to cut out, she feared that Rewis would check the gas tank between them and find that she had diluted the fuel with water. 
But he didn’t, even when the motor stalled; he simply reached for the paddle and handed it to her.
"Out of gas," he said.
His voice sounded loud in the lapse of motor noise. He stared at his wrapped hand, with interest or disgust, hanging down from one raised knee. He coughed, uncapped the water jug and drank. 
Without the scold of the motor, they seemed only to be drifting, though she was rowing regularly.
Rewis lay back with his head on a green jacket he had dumped from the plastic bag, rested his left hand with the cast-like wrapping on his chest. Gun pointed at her, he wheezed, coughed.
He looked sick. He was right, she decided, her luck might outlast his. 
***
He had taken a brown cap from the bag and placed it over his eyes and was peeping from beneath the bill propped on his nose. "I ain't done for if that's what you're thinking.  This ain’t ole Bobby here. Now, what say you drip that paddle off before you swing it round here," he added.
"You need a doctor," she said. "Let me go up there"-she motioned west with her head-“and see if I can get help."
"Yeah, baby, and I'll go get you a Big Mac."
She rowed on, watching the shady undergrowth and sand slides where otters had climbed up the bank and slid down. Wondering if it was a fact what her grandfather had said, that otters are so finicky they won't urinate or defecate near their food supply. She watched Rewis with his wounded hand overhead, blood soaking through the strip of shirt.
"You might bleed to death."
No answer, but his lips moved. He was sallow-looking underneath the sunburn.
***
Rewis was either sleeping or half-dead when Ruth happened up on a sandbar of picnickers. A whole family. Unbelievably, a little boy and two little girls, about two years apart in age, a mother and father, and a shaggy black dog. The standard children were splashing about in the shallow water off the sandbar while their slender young father in green swim trunks was standing over a round portable grill. The mother was sitting in a webbed lounge chair, reading a paperback book.
At the top of the steep, wooded bank was a crude cabin, with lumber the color of raw leather. Low white fencing enclosed the small yard, then concrete blocks angling down, sunk into the green ferns and weeds.
Level with the camp, middle of the river, Ruth stopped rowing, drifted. The standard children stopped splashing and watched. The standard dog barked, stepped into the water. The standard father lifted his spatula at the boat, then flipped a burger.
Festive charcoal smells. Ruth was starving.
The standard mother sat straight. "Here, Blackie," she called to the dog.
It was all too much: even the name of the dog was standard. He waded out, barking, seeming to swallow back each yip. Reminded Ruth of her own standard dog named Brownie.
She thought about the opening line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Like her own family, she believed, this was a happy family, the standard family. If they were unhappy she didn’t want to know about what. She felt pangs of happiness bordering on envy, sweetened by sorrow. She didn’t want to leave them.
An explosion sounded inside the boat. A double POP POP, and the dog yelped and folded back in the water, his hair streaming and his thin black lips parted in a grin. Rewis was sitting in the floor of the boat with the pistol aimed at the shocked-still family on the shore. 
“Up to you,” he said to Ruth, still squinting at his targets.
Ruth rowed faster, wreathed in cordite, glancing back at the previously standard happy family so like her own. Both made unhappy, different now, for different reasons.
***
It had started raining, end of July, too wet for the tractor and sleds to get in the tobacco field, so Bossie and her crew were taking off cured sandlugs and packing it for first day at market, a big deal for Romy Kirkland and Bossie too. Bossie talked about “first day” and “the buyers from North Carliner” like Christmas and Santa Claus. 
One thing Ruth had learned, following her run-in with Bossie and The Twins, was that she had to keep proving how tough she was. At the packhouse, unstringing the cured snuff-grade tobacco and sheeting it up, Ruth would put Miss Leodie’s boys to shame by lifting one end of the round packed 400 pound sheets of tobacco to be stacked in the right corner of the dim musty falling-down house.
Ruth had to stay on top and Mandy had to keep smoking-Mandy’s way of being one of them, and keep herself and Ruth both from getting their tails whipped, though it was getting harder and harder to keep her mother from smelling smoke in her hair; her clothes, ripped jeans and ragged-out T-shirts, didn’t matter. Besides, once she got started smoking, she couldn’t stop. 
The way Mandy looked at it, at least she was losing weight. Like ten pounds in two weeks!
In her bathroom at home, she would stand in a chair beneath the ventilation fan and blow smoke up into it.
At Ruth’s granddaddy’s house, where there was no ventilation fan in the spare added-on bathroom, she would kneel before the toilet with a towel over her head, puffing and flushing intermittently. 
Cans of Glade air freshener went up in air like cigarettes going up in smoke.
At work, in the packhouse, a tin-topped shack in the middle of woods, she had to be on constant lookout for Romy Kirkland who would tell her mother if he caught her smoking. 
Dry as a paper dollhouse with all that dry crumbling tobacco it was a matter of time, Ruth figured, before Mandy burned the place down and with it, Romy Kirkland’s pitiful, snuff-grade, easy-earned entire crop for the summer.
Word was, the remaining tobacco on the stalks, the better grade, was steaming in the heat and rain, going bad in the fields, and probably wouldn’t be worth cropping and curing. All that money on fertilizer and labor and what-have-you, according to Bossie, “a plum waste.” She felt sorry for Romy Kirkland, she said, but long as she got paid it wadn’t no skin off’n her back.
Every time Mandy would hear Romy Kirkland’s truck puttering up the woods path to the packhouse she would drop her lit cigarette in the corner with the sheeted and stacked mounds of tobacco, ready for market, and dash back to her sawhorse and begin stripping the string from the cooked sandy leaves.
Which tickled Bossie and The Twins and endeared her to them and they’d be more than willing to buy more cigarettes for her which was getting her more and more in debt to them and smoking away her earnings at the same time.
They loved her!
Tootsie and Teenitsy were even talking about stopping off at Mandy’s house next time they went to their favorite “watering hole”-some jook in Jasper, Florida-for her to go with them.
“Lord, y’all don’t get her started drinking,” Bossie cackled. “Do, she’ll turn into a pure ole alkie.”
If Mandy let them come to her house, her mother would kill her. If she didn’t let them come, Bossie and The Twins would kill her. She was doomed.
Ruth was exhausted, on the verge of giving up. Tail whipping or no tail whipping. At the same time, she was growing stronger, building muscles from lifting the heavy sheets of tobacco, making it less likely that they would be able to whip her tail anyway.
At the river, on evenings when Romy Kirkland took them to bathe and swim, The Twins would dog paddle out to the old bridge post, middle of the river, in bikinis so tiny they would fit in a hip pocket. They did fit in hip pockets. Mandy would follow in her cutoff jeans and shirt-no bikini, ha ha ha! Mandy laughing, calling herself fat to keep them happy. Nothing Bossie and her girls liked better than a self-putdown. When they jumped from the concrete bridge, The Twins did, Mandy would stand back and ooh and ah over how brave they were. She would feign fear for their lives, diving like that and not knowing where the sand had shifted since last time the river came up and went down.
All for more cigarettes.
Hating The Twins as Mandy did put her at cross-purposes: if while diving from the bridge they broke their necks, she would be rid of them; if while diving from the bridge they broke their necks, she would lose her source for getting cigarettes.
Bossie would lift her skirt tail and wade along the edge and often Mandy would gator-swim off to one side of her fat knees-tiny roach fish nibbling at the flesh. Bossie would warn her not to never let no pesky roaches get in her pond, then advise her on her love life and hand out beauty tips for free.
But the cigarettes would cost Mandy.
Funny how anywhere else you wouldn’t pick Bossie out in a crowd to be somebody. But being queen of the stringers, plus oldest at the barn, everybody looked up to her. Even Romy Kirkland.
It was sort of like a family-the tobacco workers-and you were so close you knew everything about each other and you would love one day and fight the next and use what you knew against that person to bring them down. 
Nothing could make you feel closer to somebody than the both of you being mad with another person. It was Mandy and Teenitsy teaming up against Tootsie. Or Tootsie and Mandy teaming up against Teenitsy. Bossie on the side, egging it on.
Ruth did her dead-level best to keep out of it, though Mandy did her dead-level best to draw her into the hissing fray.
Really, Mandy didn’t much care as long as she was on the side of somebody who smoked.
Romy Kirkland would be taking his first sheets of tobacco to the warehouse in Valdosta, he announced, first day of the sale.
The biggest blow-up between Bossie and The Twins and Mandy and Ruth came when Romy Kirkland asked Mandy and Ruth to wear shorts and sit on top of his tobacco stacks at the warehouse to up the price per pound with the lusty buyers. Something nobody did anymore-but why would that matter to Romy Kirkland?
He didn’t know that for the price of a steak dinner and a drink, the buyers out of North Carolina could have the whole package. He didn’t know that sex was free now. 
Not that either girl had any intention of doing it-they never would. But the problem was, he’d asked Mandy and Ruth, not Teenitsy and Tootsie. “A slap in the face if ever they was one,” Bossie explained.
Rosettes of ripped string beneath her feet, she stripped the brown speckled sheaves of cured tobacco along a length of string. Broke the string shorter and began stripping and snatching again, like a woman mad that all her work has been in vain. All that tarry green tobacco strung up in hands, and here she was having to strip it off. And The Twins, her very own “get,” daughters of the queen stringer and unstringer too, being slighted by the bossman! “That ole coot!”
The Twins, in slim white imitation Keds, pouty, sulky, smoking, stripping tobacco too. Legs no thicker than the skinny squared-edged sticks on their sawhorses. No butts.
Mandy and Ruth, butts packed in ragged-out, faded jeans, were on the job, staying out of the way to keep their tails from being whipped. Armloads of tobacco were slapped down on the spread croaker tobacco sheet, stems placed inside to form a monster gold tobacco wreath.
Ruth’s job: to pack it with her butt, and when the tobacco stack grew up to her shapely thighs, with just enough give to bring together the four corners of the sheet, to knot them. No easy thing, knotting rough scratchy burlap. Then one of Leodie’s boys would rush over and help drag the sheet to the corner, Ruth lifting one end and the boy the other, swinging it up on top of another sheet of tobacco bound for the sale.
“Big butt,” Bossie said and spat snuff to the curls of string growing under foot. 
Ruth’s butt had been hired. All day she would stand and sit, plopping on her butt in a circle, packing the tobacco. It would start out fluffy, but when she got done the tobacco leaves would be pressed flat, stuck together. Providing, that is, the tobacco was “in order,” meaning the weather was damp but not too damp when at dawn they unloaded the cooked tobacco from the barn to take to the packhouse and stack like pulpwood. Layered with leaves overlapping the ends strung on the stick, then vice versa, layer by layer. If the tobacco was taken from the barn when the weather was too damp, it would mold. If the weather was too dry, or the help got to the barn after sunup, which was often the case with Romy Kirkland’s crew, the tobacco would crumble like old paper.
Mandy’s butt was broader than Ruth’s, bigger packed, but she was weaker, especially since she’d begun smoking. In fact she could barely walk across the room to the corner and take a smoking break with The Twins, much less pack and lift sheets of tobacco.
“Stick!” yelled Bossie, on an average of a minute and a half-you got paid by the stick. Leodie’s boy at the packhouse would swing a stick of cured tobacco off the stack in the other corner, adjacent to the stacked tobacco. Running with it and passing it over The Twin’s heads to Bossie. The Twins averaged about a stick every two minutes, meaning less money for cigarettes.
Next day at the packhouse, no cigarettes for Mandy. She hinted, she pouted, she cozied up to them. Finally desperate for a hit of nicotine she came right out and asked to borrow a cigarette from Teenitsy.
She turned tail, flipped a lit cigarette butt on the floor, in the nests of string and tobacco crumbs, and walked away. 
At first, there was only a small circle of fire in the corner of the packhouse, which Mandy had no trouble stomping out.
Or thought she’d stomped it out.
Next morning, they learned that during the night Romy Kirkland’s packhouse had burned to the ground, and with it his uninsured sorry-prize tobacco. 
Overcome with guilt, Mandy had confessed to all who would listen, not daring to mention that Teenitsy and not she had dropped the lit cigarette.
The way Mandy’s mother figured it, by working in tobacco every summer-a prison sentence extending throughout her college years-Mandy should be able to pay off her debt to Romy Kirkland.
***
Ruth wasn’t prepared for what happened next. It was as if God himself had spoken through Rewis's mouth, assuring her that Rewis's luck would run out before hers: Be still and know.
She was truly free now. She was ready to leap through the glass of the display case.
Rewis writhed and twisted on the wood floor of the boat, knocking aside the water jugs and tackle box and cans of beans and sausages. The pistol shells in his pockets tinkled like background music to the racket. The can of insect repellent rolled seam to seam, crack to crack-left then right, as she paddled left then right. Rewis rolled left then right. Moaning, even calling out, he hugged himself and gasped for breath. The familiar pistol on the floor beside him took on the same significance, the same value, as a can of beans or a tin of sardines. It was of no use to a dead man; what it could accomplish was of no use.
Actually, if Ruth liked, she could have reached down, picked it up and shot Rewis in the throat. Same place he shot the dog. But she didn’t really believe that—not after all the opportunities she’d had while in possession of the pistol.
She shuddered, rowed, stared ahead.
Somebody would come along soon. This stretch of river was too beautiful not to be used, to be seen. She hoped her mother was wrong when she said that most people would rather watch a moonrise on TV, or a sunset. Would rather read about nature on the Internet.
Of course, Ruth had been quick to point out herself as an example of one person who actually experienced nature. Put Sue in her place!
The air was thick with sunned-green smells. Cupped gold leaves whispered down from the maple trees and floated like flowers on the slow golden water. The rattle of locusts and the ringing of katydids had thinned out and toned down, resting after the long hot summer. The rooty banks breathed, the sandbars shimmered, the river rolled on. 
Rewis seemed to be trying to meditate, lying still on his back with both hands on his chest, corpse-like, but breathing deep: in and out, in and out. Puffing.
Ruth found herself breathing with him, breathing in the roky damp, willows, pines, and camphor. The sharp fish smell of a brim bed shining through the clear gold water around a cypress tree. Far ahead, up the straight channel of black water, was a sandbar with a single tree which appeared situated in the middle of the river. She knew that trick.
Rewis sat and swung his upper body over the left side of the boat and gagged, retched, vomited--a bitter, sour smell, foam on the water and pink pulp. Ruth had to lean right to keep the boat from tipping over. The pistol was on the floor, two feet away. 
She rowed.
Would she have to kill him to get away?
No. So far, waiting had proved to be a plus. She would wait. She had been rescued once by Bobby and she would be rescued again.
Rewis cupped water from the river in his good right hand and slapped it to his red face. Breathing, breathing. He seemed lost in his pain. She could have rendered him more lost with a smart swift crack of the paddle over his head.
"I reckon I'm done for," he said with his head still hung, but boatside now. One leg was crooked behind him, childlike, girl-like. So strange. "That lil ole snake had some powerful poison."
The sandbar up ahead was closer, an eye in the middle of the river for real. Just as it appeared from the distance.
Rewis was vomiting over the side of the boat again.
"You want me to stop up there?" she said. "Let you get out for a bit."
He cupped water to his face again, still clinging to the side of the boat. Leg crooked behind him. He looked ahead. "Yeah. Yeah. Do that." He lay back on the floor with his hands crossed on his chest as before. And breathed. His eyelids flickered. Bumps of eyes darting beneath. She hadn't thought about his sandy beard before, how it made his face look rounder. Almost innocent. The kind of man who could have half-raised two children not his own?
She rowed toward the eye-shaped sandbar where willows grew in clumps beneath a tall cypress. Damp dirt tracked by turtles, the green slime of gators maybe, some driftwood. Not a scrap of human trash. Not a track belonging to man. As the bow of the boat slipped onto the sand, Ruth stood and placed the paddle alongside. At ready for her quick getaway.
 She stepped out and slid the boat farther onshore, then stepped aside for Rewis to clamber out, rattling the bullets in his pockets. He dropped to the shallow bobbing water on his knees, then sat, then rolled, landing belly down. The bandage on his left hand was crusted with sand, the red blot fading to pink. The pistol was in the boat. The paddle was in the boat. Soon Ruth would be in the boat.
Rewis vomited again, on his hands and knees, head hung as if praying. The nape of his neck looked tender where his hair parted and hung down each side. He turned and crawled toward shore, then lay as Mandy was lying last time Ruth saw her. Face to one side, arms overhead, lower body wiggling in the water.
Fighting back feelings of pity, she reminded herself of him shooting the people at the baptism. She reminded herself of all those people he'd shot that she had witnessed and wondered how many she didn’t know about. He was a monster.
Ruth, still standing next to the boat, took a jug of spring water and set it down beside his head. "Here's some water," she said. "Drink."
She thought about trying to make Bobby drink, and she wondered if she would ever know how he and Rewis became buddies.
The breath from his nostrils dried the sand in a perfect circle.
He raised himself up on his left elbow and reached for the jug with his right hand. Tried to drink without opening his eyes, without removing the cap.
Standing over him, Ruth stooped and uncapped the water and held the jug for him to drink. His eyes opened a slit, red-crazed eyewhites. 
"Thanks," he says. Closed his eyes. Lay flat again.
She set the jug down and dropped the cap beside it. Then she stepped to the boat while he watched-even his brown spoked eyes seemed to breathe. She breathed: willow, damp sand, brass of brim beds.
She loaded her arms with canned foods and carried them to the shade of the tree, recalling the emptiness and ache of starving. Went back and got another jug of water and set it under the low-growing willows. Dug a pit and set the jug in the sand-lined water to cool.
A hawk cried upriver. Birds warbled from shore to shore. Flat autumn shadows of trees on the golden water.
He turned his face toward the east bank, away from her. 
He looked calm, easy, dead.
Should she leave now?  Should she wait? For what? Upriver and downriver, she searched for another boat. For help. For herself or for Rewis? 
He turned his face to her. "I'm getting eased off some," he said. “Another minute or two and I'll..."
She stepped to the boat again, stood next to it. "You need to get out of the sun."
He jacked his head up, looked around. "A little island, huh?" He rested his face on the cool sand, closed his eyes. "In Jackson, I used to think about a place like this. All by myself and it cool on a Sunday."
He was talking low-had he said "Sunday?" She wasn’t sure.
“Sunday to my mama meant getting ready to go back to work at the sewing plant on Monday." He laughed, puffed at the weeping sand. "Her hell-hacking and nagging me and the old man about all she had to do and what we didn’t do. But that was her."
"You were close, weren’t you? You and your mother?" asked Ruth.
"I reckon you could say that. She’s dead now, so what’s it matter?"
"Where was she before-where are you from?"
"Clearwater. Florida. Where we was bound for." He held up the bandaged hand and examined it like a strange rock. Then clutched his chest and rolled over, face up to the sun. A few brass pistol shells trickled from his pockets to the damp sand, shining in the sun like precious metals given up by the river. 
Maybe Clearwater was where the girl and boy he helped raise lived now. She decided not to go into that now because as Rewis said, “What’s it matter?”
She shoved the boat out a ways and got in with the tip of the bow still touching sand. 
"You aiming to shoot me or just leave me here to suffer?" he said.
"I won't shoot you." She lifted the paddle. Jabbed it into the sand, right side of the boat. "I won't kill you like you killed all those people. That dog."
He sat up. “How many dogs you seen running around? They’s always another one. I was a boy, I had Lord knows how many. One’d get run over by a car, another one’d come along. And I’d be done forgot the one got run over by that car.” He was so sandy he looked like a raw concrete statue. His boots look darker wet. Turned out. Head hung and holding his chest. “Had me a dog name of Spot, when I was a boy. Crazy bout that dog. The old man got in one of his moods one day and picked him up by his hind legs and slung his head against a gum tree till it busted wide open.”
Breathing, breathing. Trying to breathe.
“I’m sorry.” Ruth breathed for him. "Is that what made you like you are? Made you want to kill people?"
He didn’t answer at first, and at first she believed he wouldn’t answer. She started to shove the boat out, to leave. Then, "Nah. Just bad raising I reckon," he said. "Bad company, drinking, crazy, I don’t know. Maybe cause I think most people don’t matter no how, don’t add nothing, just take away. Truth is, sometimes you just have to kill."
She couldn’t let it go. “What about the two children you helped raise?”
He snagged eyes with her then, half-smile playing on his lips. “Ole Bobby told you bout that, did he? That’d be Bunny and Taco. Ole gal cousin’s younguns.” He paused, still staring at her, as if to hold her there. “They ain’t like me; I want you to know that. Better raising, I seen to that.”
She wanted to leave it at that; he closed his eyes, seeming to let the image of them slide from his eyes up into his head.
The pistol looked like a play gun on bottom of the boat among the jugs and junk. Of equal value. She’d had it before and what good had it done her?
I'll send somebody back after you," she said and shoved the boat out with the paddle, then rowed forward, toward the tip of the island where he was sitting, breathing, watching her. "I left you some food," she said, rowing forward. "Under that tree behind you." 
Eyes downriver, she paddled on around: shade and sun and open water, sunglade like crystals scattered by hand. Halfway to the end of the sandbar, rowing deep, but tentative, on one side and then the other, listening to the soft lapping of water disturbed by her paddle, she looked around, surprised to see him lying on his back with his hands on his chest, face up to the midday sun.
He was letting her go! She couldn’t believe it—he wasn’t cursing and chasing after her.
She rowed faster. This time she could walk and she had plenty of daylight to search for help. She would walk east through the woods, in the direction of Jasper, though she knew they had long since passed that point. Live Oak, White Springs, Lake City, south of Jasper. Any one of those little towns would do. All she had to do was keep her focus, strength and nerve, and she would make it through the woods and find help.
She kept looking back, seeing blank river, the streaming current in sunshine free of Rewis. According to the sun, it should be about one o’clock. She had to pull over soon, around the next curve and start walking. East side of the river, a few yards ahead, was another sandbar, flatter land and sparser trees. 
Placing the paddle on the floor of the boat, she leaped out, knees trembling, tugging the bow through the shallow water and onto the beach.  Should she take the pistol? No, just a jug of water. This time she was traveling light, thinking light. Making a beeline through the woods, as straight east as she could go till she came to a house, a highway, or a town. 
It occurred to her that she was not only battling time left before dark, but also time before her foot began swelling and throbbing again. Climbing up the bank through the trees, she could feel only stinging in her instep. Don’t think about it, just move and keep moving and keep your focus on the east. Listen and walk, walk and listen. 
Deep into the woods with the sun at her back, shining through trees and vines, she could hear only birds—sounded like jays, that scraping-metal sound. So good to be away from the sounds and smells of the river, to be dry and on solid ground. Rewis...no more Rewis. She stopped, listening with all her might, while drinking from the half-jug of water. All around were woods and more woods with no clearing to be seen yet. That was okay, she was still traveling east and her foot was still only stinging. Then she realized that she had been walking on tiptoes, that one foot. Not a good sign.
At last, with only a couple more hours before dusk, she heard the distant whirr of an automobile, car or truck she couldn’t tell. It seemed to be moving south, and it was all she could do not to follow the sound, to stay the course east. She had to keep moving away from the sun. Tall stout pines served as standards to keep her line of vision east. 
She stopped to rest again, gauging time by light, listening, checking her foot, now swollen again and throbbing. “Don’t think about it.” She had to quit thinking too about not having heard anymore traffic moving north to south. She had to quit thinking about the pistol she should have brought, about the food she should have brought. No, she had been right to travel light and keep her focus. She was glad though that she’d brought the camouflage jacket, because the mosquitoes were buzzing and swarming, biting her legs and feet but not her arms. 
Almost dusk and she happened up on a rickety wooden, four-legged deer stand with a rusty tin roof under a shelter of gum trees. She climbed the splintering steps, up and through the opening, careful to keep to the half-walled sides and away from the weakened floor in the middle. Chalky bird droppings were everywhere, meaning the birds had been using the stand as a roost since last deer season. 
Gazing east from there she could see mostly treetops. But when she turned north she saw a narrow stretch of greening grass, somebody’s deer-food plot. So people had been here and people would be back and all she had to do was settle in for the night and not panic and she would be found. 
Again, she sat and rested, glad to be off the ground before the night snakes began to crawl. Glad to be high enough to see out, even if mostly into leafy tops of pines, bays and gums. Over and over, she stood peering out at the greening plot planted by some deer-hunter till the many possible links to that began to fade, till the plot grew from green to gray, then black, then not there.
The changing of the season was bringing about a changing of insect and bird sounds. More hushed, she thought, though having been on the river so long, maybe she’d only grown accustomed to the night shrilling. 
The first rushing of bird wings past her head made her almost faint with fear. Then she braced herself and let it happen, let them come, realizing that they were as afraid of her as she was of them. And too after all she’d been through with Rewis she felt tough, unstoppable. 
Over and over, though, she chided herself for not bringing food, for not bringing the pistol. If Rewis had gathered enough strength, if he wasn’t dead, by now he would have walked downriver, found the boat, took the pistol and followed her through the woods. No, if he’d been able to move he would have tried to stop her from leaving. He had to have been dying. 
Still standing, chilled by the night air, with her throbbing foot lifted, she thought she spied a light, far-off and not bright. In the east, north-east. “Thank you, Lord,” she whispered and stared till it blurred, to get a fix on it. She would rest and wait till morning then head out in that direction. In the soughing of pine tops, needles whispering in the light breeze, the light flickered and shook. But it was still there. But her foot was hurting almost as bad as ever, or worse. Hot. She sacrificed a trickle of her precious water to cool and soothe it. Then keeping close to the east wall of the stand, she curled up with the jacket covering her and, close to happy, so close, she immediately fell asleep. 
Opening her eyes to dawn light, she imagined that she heard motor noise, a small engine, maybe a four-wheeler. No matter, it was moving nearer, the scold of the engine growing louder. She stood, staring out in the direction of the sound, north, just beyond the deer food plot. Then she saw it, a block moving along a trail through the woods. Somebody driving with pale hair, white hair. 
For some reason she sensed danger—she was expert at that now. Her first thought had been to shout out and scamper down the steps of the stand, but her second thought was to wait. To watch a few minutes, let him or her get closer, as if she could read a face and body and figure if this would be another Rewis. Her foot was still raging. A mess. 
Almost level with the north tip of the deer-food plot, the engine of the four-wheeler cut to silence. Then ticking, cooling down. The white hair belonged to a man, maybe forty, dressed in green camouflage. He swung one rangy leg over, stepped to the ground and reached back for what looked like a fat sword, no, a machete, then walked off swinging it into the cover of woods. 
Ruth waited. She knew no matter what that she would take her chances with this man over returning to the boat and Rewis, if he wasn’t yet dead. If....  
Barely breathing, barely moving, she watched the muddy green four wheeler with its green canvas saddle bags. She could hear the man hacking wood with the machete. Then, after about thirty minutes, she saw the bushes and pine saplings shaking near the four-wheeler, and the white haired man stepped out, arms loaded with what looked like rich-green tree branches. A huge bundle with the machete on top.
 Looking left and right but thankfully not up, he placed the bundle on the ground next to the cooling four-wheeler, and took from the saddle bags a twist of hemp string. Kneeling again, he rolled the bundle, wrapping it in string, then slung it onto the rack behind the seat, strapping it fast. 
Ruth knew it was marijuana and this man like Rewis was not exactly law-abiding, but she had no choice. 
Taking a deep breath she began climbing down, hearing the engine chime into action, an easy roar, knowing he had spied her now and was about to be driving her way. But on the ground, looking right at him, she saw that he was only sitting astraddle the cycle, chewing on a green twig, eyeing her. Figuring what to do since he now had a witness to his gathering marijuana. He was caught with the goods.
He cut the engine again, waiting, watching her hobble his way. 
“Huh? What?” He was lean as a wolf with a tight angular face. Skin like cured hide. 
“I need help,” she said, drawing closer, smelling musk of marijuana and burned fuel from the four-wheeler. He was wearing pull on brown leather boots with the legs of his pants stogged into them. 
“Where’d you come from?’ His voice was edgy, smoldering. “How’d you get here?”
“The river, that away.” She stopped walking, weight shifting to her good foot. 
He looked back at the bundle of marijuana, then at her again. Suspicious looking, troubling the twig between his front teeth. His lips were thin and his eyes pale as the bleached autumn sky.
She had to talk, she had to keep him now that she had found him—he was all she had. But the story seemed too long and complicated, too time-consuming. “Do you have a phone I could use?”
He laughed, twiddling the twig. “I look like a fool to you?”
“No. Not that.” She shook her head. “I don’t care. That’s your business.”
“Right!”
“I was kidnapped, my friend got killed. Mayday. On the news. You must have heard. Law everywhere’s looking for me.” 
“Say law, lady, and I’m liable to run. You know?”
“Just take me somewhere. Drop me off where I can get help.”
He pulled his left boot up on the seat, crossed his arms, chewing, watching her. “You do look like you been through some kind-a shit, you do. Bet you clean up good though.”
Her face grew hot; she thought she might faint. Was this a Rewis with white hair? Was the world so rife with people who didn’t care about other people? Why hadn’t her family warned her? Regardless, she couldn’t let him go. She wouldn’t let him know what she was thinking. She laughed. “I do. People say I clean up real good.”
He put his leg down and leaned forward, both hands on the handlebars. “I got a little place not far from here. You can rest up there if you want to.”
“Thanks.” She limped past him to the rear of the cycle. Oh, God, what now?  
 He scooted forward, making room for her to climb up and get seated between him and the bundle of rough, stubbly marijuana. Both hands placed on his ribby sides. His narrow body encased in a tight t-shirt of soft faded camouflage. 
He started the engine, grinding into gear. Jerking forward. “What happened to your foot?” he shouted back at her.
She was biting her bottom lip, trying not to cry, trying to believe that whatever happened she would be closer to getting help. “I sprained it a while back.”
She had to be friendly. She tried to keep her breasts from touching his sweaty back, but he kept leaning into her. 
“You live by yourself?”
“Sometimes I do, right now I do.” 
She could see the right side of his face, him smiling, twiddling the twig. His skin was blotchy, sun-faded, like skin so long exposed that it resisted tanning and began the reverse. 
For once, she was glad of her swampy underarm odor, hoped it repulsed him, but he didn’t smell much sweeter.
“Where’s the closest town from here—from where you live?”
“Bout halfway between Jasper and White Springs.”
She had hoped for more information. She’d have to wait. The four-wheeler was bucking over ruts, around stumps, trees and palmettos, heading south, then west, then south again. West again. Toward the river! 
“You don’t happen to live close to the river, do you? The Alapaha?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He sounded proud. “Well, not right on it. Walking distance though.”
***
She stood under the shower in his tiny bathroom and cried softly, sulfur water streaming down her face with the tears, puddling on the mangy fiberglass floor of the stall. Her hurt foot was twice the size of the other, like the feet of a side-show freak. She felt like a side-show freak—if only she’d brought the gun. She kept thinking about the light in the east that she had seen from the deer-stand last night. How far she had gone only to come back close to the same place. 
Driving up to his small white mobile home, seated behind him on the four-wheeler, she’d tried to see the river through the trees, to figure where she was in proximity to the boat or Rewis or both. Acting gay and light and girly, she’d hopped off, her back gnawed to ruins by the rank sandpapery leaves. 
“Wow! You really do live out in the woods.”
“Told you,” he said, loping towards the front door, opening it, standing back for her to step inside. “Bet you starving, huh?”
“I could eat,” she said. “Then shower, if you don’t mind.”
She followed him through the narrow, neat living room with a plush velvety beige recliner, a brief brown sofa and a large-screen television. The place smelled clean, of oily soap. No phone that she could see. She wondered what he watched on TV. Not the news, that was for sure. 
“Peanut butter okay?” He was standing before the small white refrigerator, peeping inside while holding to the door, one boot toe rocking on the black and white tile floor.
“Sure. Love it.” She sat at the small table with two chairs under a jalousie window overlooking the west, where the river would be. 
“Beer while you wait?”
“I’d like a glass of water right now. Beer later.”
“Yeah. Planning on grilling some thi’safternoon. Ribs.”
She was fighting back tears, staring at the thick woods beyond the window. A red vine like fire was climbing some of the pines. Barbeque. She’d been wanting barbeque and now she was going to get it. 
Stepping from the shower, she could smell burning charcoal. She could hear him in and out, rocking the trailer every time he slammed the door. Done with crying, she began half-heartedly tallying available options for another get-away.  The old red but waxed pickup parked on the left end of the trailer—had to be a road somewhere. The four-wheeler with its key in his pocket. Probably the truck key too. 
She looked in the fogged mirror of his medicine cabinet and stared at her bitten face, her hurt red eyes. She shook her head, water droplets from her hair sprinkling her face. If Rewis wasn’t dead, if he’d revived, he would likely be headed on to Florida by now. So, she had only to get past this one last obstacle anyway she could. One moment at a time. She had to be sharp. 
Stepping out the trailer door to his grilling spot, she was wearing the long crinkled paisley skirt and brown knit shirt he had left for her. Old girlfriend’s, he said. 
“Hey hey hey!” He laughed, working the long black, hooded grill to her right, staring at her. “Now we talking!”
“Told you I clean up good.” She spread the skirt to a fan and smiled. The four-wheeler was still there, beyond the round metal table with four chairs, but the marijuana was gone.
His name was Brad—no last name, none needed. Her name was Sabrina. It just came to her that he would want a girl named Sabrina. No last name, none needed. 
She’d never had beer. Only wine, only once. She and Mandy had sneaked a glass of Mandy’s mother’s bitter red wine. But now sitting at his picnic table outside, at four o’clock, she was having a beer. Listening to him talk while flipping ribs and sausages. Sampling sausages, spicy, browned and plump with grease, sandwiched between a folded slice of white bread he talked and grinned. (Because he was lean and trim she absolutely could not tell his age.) Somehow she worked into the conversation familiar locations on the river. That little island in the middle of the river, the one shaped like an eye, how far would he say it was from where he lived here. 
Waving the turning fork, facing north. “Yep, that one. Not far from that cabin up aways from there. The one some nut built right on the edge of the riverbank?”
“Yes. That’s it!” She actually was feeling friendlier, easier, from the beer. Her foot was no longer at the center of her feelings. “How far from here?”
“Ah...say... Say a couple, three miles maybe.”
“North or south of here.”
“Oh, north. Up that away.” He looked at her, squinting his crinkled blue eyes with jaundiced whites. “So you was on the up and up when you said you come in off the river.”
“Yeah, I was on the up and up.”
He laughed. “But not about the kidnapping and all, right?” He kept his eyes on her even tipping his head back and slugging from the brown bottle of beer.
“Had a fight with my boyfriend. Left the boat with him a ways down from that island.”
“Now that makes sense.” Turning to the grill, he drained the bottle, shrugging his narrow shoulders. “His loss, my gain.”
No matter what, Brad Whomever was still better and kinder, less apt to explode than Rewis. She was full, she was clean, she was off the river. Though still attached to her leg, her foot, for the moment, belonged to somebody else.
Comfort was only comfortable by comparison.
Brad came out the door with its rankling chain to keep it from swinging wide and banging the white metal siding. Two beers by the necks in each hand, he walked over to her at the table and set them down. Grinning, asking, “You getting a little buzz yet?”
She shook her head yes. A head full of bees without stingers.
“Here. Eat you something.” He shoved the foil pan of sausages toward her, then the loaf of bread. Back to the grill with his back to her.
Red-neck luxuries: large TV, four-wheeler, recliner, and a grill. Oh yeah, and the waxed lipstick-red truck. 
Smoke from the grill drifted her way. She looked up at the pale blue sky, the color of his eyes, out at the trees blocking their view of the river. She sipped cold beer. 
When Brad looked around again, slamming the lid of the grill with a burst of smoke, she was crying. He came over and sat in the chair next to her, hairy arms crossed on the table. “How old are you, honey?”
“Seventeen,” she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of the girlfriend’s soft knit shirt. 
“I figgered that.” His eyes didn’t even blink; he butted his head following each sentence. “Where’s your folks at? They know where you at?”
She needed more beer. She sipped it, strangling, coughing. 
“You a runaway?”
“No.”
“You wanta talk about it?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead then. Tell ole Brad.”
“I was kidnapped by an escaped convict named Rewis.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
The pistol on the floor of the boat loomed huge in her head. She shouldn’t have left it; she should have thrown it out in the river, some deep place, never to be found again. Before Rewis, she’d not thought of guns this way. Guns were tools, guns were what deer hunters used to bring home sausages like the ones in the shiny pan before her, to bring home racks of antlers to hang on the wall and grow a felt of dust. 
She sipped from the bottle of beer again, then spoke, telling Brad from start to finish what she’d been through. Not all of it, but enough. Gushing it out while he was of a mind to listen. She couldn’t tell whether he believed her or not, but there it was. 
The sun had gone down and the stars had come out, pricking the graying sky as if lit behind, by the time the ribs were off the grill. She was quiet now, eating, drinking. Brad too. Downtime. 
The ribs were seared but juicy, tangy and tender. He gnawed them end to end before chewing and swallowing, eating only bread with the barbeque, and washing it all down with beer. But he’d made her a salad of iceberg lettuce, the only greens she hated, smothered in Thousand Island dressing, the only dressing she hated. It was delicious. If she ever got home, she would eat it everyday. And drink beer.  
“You don’t mind if I smoke a little pot, do you?” he asked, pushing his plate of gnawed bones to one side and getting up to go inside.
“No.”
“I’d offer you some,” he said, going through the door with the musical chain, “but I expect that beer’s about done a job on you.”
“You still don’t believe me, do you?”
Coming out again, with a small plastic bag in hand, he sat at the table across from her. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. And come tomorrow, I’m gone take you over to the law in White Springs.”
“Thank you.” She took a deep breath. “I need to go back to the boat for something first though, if you’ll take me in the morning.”
“Yeah. Okay. Now lighten up on that beer, will you? Can’t take you in with a hangover.” He took from the plastic bag a small square of cigarette paper, placed it on the table and slowly, methodically, sifted out what looked like giblets of hay and seed, end to end of the paper’s center. Zipped the bag closed and left it on the table and began rolling the joint, sealing it with a lick of his tongue. Then he lit it with a cigarette lighter the red of his truck.  
It felt so good to Ruth to be believed, and to believe. To be safe. She had absolutely no fear of him. She watched him take a deep drag, holding, savoring the smoke, with his tired eyes closed, his sun-ruined face tilted up. She wondered if the dope would make him mellow or mean? 
“Will you let me call home now?” she asked.
“Would if I had a phone.” Smoking joint held between his thick and calloused right thumb and forefinger, he shook it at her, as if to solidify his support of her. “I would, by gollies, I would.”
They were still sitting there at dark lit only by the light of the kitchen shining through the window, that and the entrancing pulsing glow of the charcoal. Smell of ribs still rising from the grill. He had rolled another joint and brought her another beer—her third. 
“No more after that now,” he said. “Foot all better?”
“Yes.” 
“I got a ace bandage in there somewhere. I’ll wrap it for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Feels good out here, don’t it?” He inhaled the air just as he had the smoke. “Love this time of year.”
“Almost fall,” she said and smiled. Lightning bugs flickered among the pines.
He perked up, listening. “Hear that?”
She turned, facing the trailer front, the place he appeared to be staring at. “What?”
“Somebody coming through the woods.”
“Who? Where?” Then she heard the hum of a car, moving closer, but blocked from view by the trailer. 
“Here comes trouble,” he said, laughing as a small white car with diving headlights braked on the right end of the trailer. Lights out, door opening, slamming. 
“Who ishit?” Ruth’s speech was slurred and she was seeing two cars. Then two girls in their twenties with flipped up shoulder-length dark hair. Two little furry brown dogs in the girls’ arms, dogs wearing red-checked diapers with bows on the side. Both girls were wearing identical white knit polos with red-checked knee shorts.
“Looks like I’m just in time,” the girls said, sneering with the corners of their wide mouths pulled down and their eyes rolled up. 
“Come sit down, Shirley.” Brad slid back the two chairs on his right for them to sit down.
They just stood there, cradling the two dogs licking their thick arms. 
“I don’t think so!” the girls said, sneering, rolling their brown bulb eyes.
“It ain’t what you think.”
“Then what is it?”
“Girl got kidnapped, took down the river. Been through all kinds a shit.”
“And you just happened to find her.”
“She found me.”
“Oh, right!” They all sounded like they were shouting through hollow metal pipes. “How come she’s wearing my skirt and shirt?”
“Her shorts were filthy; she hadn’t bathed in I don’t know when.”
Now there were two Brad’s, both lighting up another joint, sitting back. “What the hell’s them red-checked britches on that dog?”
“She’s on her period, for your information. I know how ticky you are about your old trailer.” The girls patted the dogs’ diapered bottoms with twitching tails stuck through, then stood them on the table. Both dogs began lapping pork crumbs. The girls snatched them up. “Ank! Don’t eat that.”
“Where the name of God you think dog food comes from?” Both Brads were smoking, motioning with all hands. 
The girls kept sneering and quarreling with the Brads. Threatening to leave but not moving from the table, not sitting either. 
Since none in the crowd was talking to her, and anyway she couldn’t speak without slurring, Ruth dozed with her head on the table, the dogs nipping at her hair.
When she came to, she was no longer seeing double or feeling safe and buzzy, she was freezing. Damp from the dew. Her foot was on fire, hers again and at the center of her feelings. The charcoal on the grill was cold and ashy, and the car was gone. Her camouflage jacket was draped over her back, and her stiff cut-off jeans, underwear and striped shirt were in a heap on the table before her. 
Queasy, dizzy, she stood and the bones in her foot stabbed the flesh. Still, she hobbled over behind the grill in the dewy high grass and tried to peer through the kitchen window, but it was too high. Holding to the wall, shivering, while slipping on the jacket, she limped to the door, up the steps and tried the knob. It was locked. 
“No,” she whispered. “No.” Then loud, “Brad, Brad” while banging on the door. All the way around the trailer, she beat on the walls, past the place where the white car had been parked, the dark backside of the trailer, and again to the warm, promising kitchen light. 
“I’m not leaving,” she squalled, “you promised.” 
Even after realizing that the red truck was gone, she pounded on the walls and called out to him, “Brad. Where are you?” knowing he wasn’t there. “Hey, where are you?” With her head resting on the cold metal siding, she could hear only the humming of the refrigerator inside. Outside, dew ticking from the nearby woods, dripping on the dirt. 
She hopped to the table and gathered her cold damp clothes and went back to the dark side of the trailer and began stripping off the girlfriend’s body-warmed clothes and putting on her own horribly filthy shorts, underwear and shirt. Before, she hadn’t noticed the stink so much, now she did; now she almost gagged. 
Placing the girlfriend’s clothes on the table where hers had been, she slipped on the jacket and sat, propping her foot on the chair beside her and staring down at it. 
She had to calm down, wait. He would be back; he had earnestly promised to drive her to White Springs and she meant to make him do it.
Eyes on the woods blocking the river, she watched the dark shiver into shades of gray. The trees leaping forth from behind the black curtain, like stage props, there all along, and the sole actor, Rewis with the pistol pointed at the sole member of the audience. 
Spellbound by the scene opening up before her, she leaned forward and said, “I should have...”

 

Part 5

She was in the boat again-they were in the boat again--and the pistol was stuck in Rewis's waistband again, when she realized that she would probably have to kill him. Next time she got the chance, she might kill him. 
There was no other way. He had been right, sometimes you just have to kill. But she couldn’t come up with a single scripture to bless such an act. An eye for an eye was her sole consolation, and her heart spoke above it. All those years and years of Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, church, scripture drills at summer camp. Really it was as if she were born hearing the Word, truth and light. A litany on sun-bright air of childhood, hymns like birdsong. God of fear and Jesus, love, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity and one. She felt that she’d been born saved, then born again, then over the years she’d had to modify Jesus to accommodate her relatively innocent sins. The first part of her halved-up life, before she turned thirteen, she had read her Bible, kept it on top of the table next to her bed; then when she became a teenager she had covered it with school books, magazines, decorating books received for Christmas and birthdays. She would uncover it later, when she got older, when she got done having fun. Now she was paying, now she was lost. On her own, and lost.
But hadn’t she always been lost, born a pretender, lost?
Her hurt foot was better, but her jawbone felt broken, dried blood stiff on her face, apparently from her nose, which she could not even remember Rewis’s fist making contact with. A blood mask. He might let her wash in the familiar black water shirring alongside the boat, but she would leave the blood to signal for help, could picture herself sitting in the boat and somebody in another boat or on shore seeing her bloody face and rushing to her. But at that moment, she couldn’t picture that person who would rush to help. When she did conjure the picture, in the person of the man Brad, he was as bloody-faced as she was from being shot by Rewis.
She couldn’t let that happen. More than anything she wanted to believe that Brad would have returned for her; she wanted to believe that he would still do the right thing and go to the law in White Springs and they would be coming for her for sure now, because Brad would have given them an exact location, a precise point to work from. 
Of course he wouldn’t, otherwise he would be leading them to his hideaway and marijuana crop. As for the girlfriend, her dog would stand a better chance of getting help from her. Ruth had been a convenient object to fight over, enhancing the girlfriend’s notion of romantic love. 
Kneeling on the floor, she cupped water in her hands and scrubbed her face. Her hair falling forward was matted and rank with blood. Souring in the sun like her jacket, shorts and shirt. Her reflection on the water broke and mended, was somebody she didn’t know. She dipped her hands into the face to shatter it, to feel that face she didn’t know, then sat back on her heels and stared at Rewis.
His eyewhites were red-veined, deep-socketed. His face was drawn and hollow, and he still wheezed and coughed. But he was able to row and smirk. He said, "It ain't over till it's over." He dipped the paddle and pulled, then clutched at his chest. "See, my luck ain't run out yet," he added.
In her seat, in the bow of the boat, she faced ahead-just river and more river, a brown and green and unchanging world. She would never be off this river and didn’t know that she wanted to be till she had done what it seemed that she would have to do. 
“That’s right, turn the other way,” said Rewis, speaking louder. “Think I care, after you going off and leaving me to die like that?”
Ruth didn’t answer but stiffened her shoulders for a lick from the paddle. 
“But, see, I always find you, don’t I?” He slung water at her instead and laughed when she flinched. “Me and you could get along if you’d act like somebody.”
He swung the paddle to the right side, careful now not to sling water on her. “You ever been in love, sister?”
How to answer? Don’t answer.
“I SAY,” he said louder, “you ever been in love before?” 
She turned her head halfway round to see if he was wielding the pistol or the paddle. Neither.
“Pretty gal like you, I bet you have.” He coughed, exaggerated hacking. Then, “Ole snake’s made me sick as a buzzard, I tell you.”
Ruth steeled herself for an outburst. Up ahead, the river changed from wide and shallow to narrow and deep. No change really, just more of the same. Mentally, she tallied up the dead, those she had seen murdered by Rewis and those she had not seen but figured he had killed. After Mandy, the man fishing at the twin tupelos, whose boat they were now using; people Rewis had told her about. She didn’t know how many so couldn’t very well count them.
“Listen, sister.” More coughing. “It’d go a whole lot easier on you if you’d quit bucking up against me at ever turn. Know what I mean?”
He had asked a question. Should she answer? Must she answer?
“In prison, a bunch-a ole boys’d try to make a woman out of you. And don’t make like you don’t know what I mean.” He slung water at her with the paddle. Felt like rain.
“Yes,” she said to keep him from going into detail. “I do.”
“Well, no need to worry you gone get the AIDS nor nothing from me. Cause couldn’t a one of em hold me down.” He laughed, coughed. “Too much man for em. Like to kilt the whole bunch and got put in solitaire. Know what I mean?”
“Yes.” She felt the bump on her jawbone, right side. Her teeth ached. She recounted the dead in justification of what she might have to do. She included the dog named Blackie.
“Me nothing but a boy, skin and bones, this mean ole neighbor man, yaa big”—he measured his girth with his arms rounded, hands not touching. “Bastard always messing with kids, boys specially. Well he caught me one time on the way to the store for my mama, got me down, dragged me inside his house and raped me like a girl. Wadn’t nothing I could do bout it then, but in prison, I made shore and certain wadn’t gone happen again.
“Reason I mention it is, ain’t no more lonesome place on the whole earth than solitare. Nobody to talk to and nobody to talk to you. Know what I mean?"
“Yes.”
“Then I ‘magine you better turn around and talk to me now. Don’t you reckon?”
“Yes.” She pivoted on the seat, facing him.
“Now talk. Tell me bout that there boyfriend. You and him, what all y’all used to do.”
“I don’t have…I never had a boyfriend.”
“Liar, liar pants on fire.” He laughed out with his head thrown back. “Course I don’t blame you. I’d sock you black and blue on that other jaw if you told the truth.”
“I’d like to ask you one thing. No, two.”
“Shoot.” He swung the paddle side to side, pushing water. The shells in his stuffed pockets rattled, reminder that for each tiny pellet a human life could be spent. They were almost into the deep dark water downstream. “Ask me anything and I’ll tell you. Ain’t got nothing to hide from you after all we been through together.” He appeared to be pumping himself up for a clever answer.
“Did you really believe Bobby was dead before? Did you try to kill him when the boat turned over?”
“Yes and yes.” He laughed but turned serious. “Bobby, poor ole Bobby. Prison-life had done got to him. Made him weak where it made me tough. He tried to stop me from going after you and you knowing what-all went on, where we was bound for. We went to tussling in the water and I got the upper-hand on him. Thought I drownded him.
“Now, what else?”
“Did Trish vote?”
“Red?” He laughed, shaking his head. “Now, if I said yes you wouldn’t believe me, would you, Sister?”
“No.”
“Then you won’t never know for sure, will you?”
***
Going through the motions, she ate when Rewis ate. She drank water from the same jug. She emptied her bladder and bowels on the upper bank, behind a tree, while he sat in the boat below, coughing and piddling with the junk on the floor, waiting like a dutiful lover.
Sometimes she would get that bright lit feeling of hope, thinking that now Brad and his girlfriend knew her predicament, they might report it to the law. Then the feeling would dim, then go out.
The woods were thick and aside from a few squirrels barking, the rattle of locusts, and the cheery song of red birds, she heard nothing except Rewis rattling cans and water jugs, coughing and mumbling to himself about how sick he was. She didn’t even consider trying to escape; he seemed to sense her defeat. The pistol stayed in the waistband of his frayed and filthy khaki shorts.
The river went on flowing. Boat floating down toward the end, if there was an end. She’d heard there was an end-even a cow’s tail has an end, as Bossie used to say-but she was beginning to doubt it.
That evening he raped her again. Again. Just as they were in the boat again, just as the pistol was stuck in his waistband again. 
She had never gone all the way with a boy before, but Mandy had. She had told Ruth, sparing details; and what had occurred with Rewis came close to Mandy's experience: one-sided pleasure, shame, an accident. Except that Ruth had had no choice. Could she still boast of being a virgin? Would she even want to?
Ruth she was stronger than him. She thought she was. Thinking, it was true that physical strength was ninety-percent mental determination, but a mad man’s drive to inflict evil was one-hundred percent.
The imagination of an evil man, his bent for humiliation and pain, she would find before dark, was huge and awful.
When he crawled on her back, she mustered all her mental strength gained from hating, her physical strength gained from lifting tobacco sheets, and bucked him off.
He could kill her but she wasn’t going to let him rape her again.
He landed on the packed sand of the bank, to her left, and the pistol fell from his hand and slid down to where the boat was docked at the edge of the water.
Not looking back, she began crawling up the bank, swift as a gator, digging sand with her hands and pushing with her feet. Stubble and briars scrubbing her face, neck, arms, belly and legs.
“Hey, what the…!” he shouted, scrambling downbank after the gun.
Still she didn’t look back but kept crawling up the bank, aiming for a thicket of scrub oaks and vines on her left. It was still light out over the water and sand but under the low-hanging branches and snarled vines it was almost dark. Not dark exactly, but confusing in the fusion of dusky tree shadows and shrilling of katydids under the vine canopy.
Below she could hear Rewis scrambling for the pistol. She was breathing too hard. Was she whimpering? She got quiet, listening behind as she reached the top of the bank and crawled into the thicket of teeming insects, stunted trees and vines. Curling her body and pulling her legs in and holding them at the knees, she could hear Rewis starting up the bank. No time to crawl farther. She had to be still and hope she was hidden from view.
Beneath her ribcage, cushioned by fallen leaves and moss, something slithered-a snake. 
Halfway up the bank, Rewis began firing in the air. “Hey!” Another shot and another and another. Meaning he hadn’t spotted her yet. 
The snake slid close along her right side, down the curve of her back and buttocks. Stopped, slid again, following the crook of her overlapped legs. Not a long snake. If it was a rattler, she would have heard its rattles; if it was a cotton mouth it would have already struck.
Another shot and sand squeaking under Rewis’s feet; he was coming. 
The snake was gone, either gone or coiled at her back, set to strike. Her worst fear then, other than Rewis, was that the snake was a coral, whose red, yellow and black banded body she could see so clear in her mind. That sleek black head, body thin and polished, coloration like that of a plastic play snake. If she could keep from moving probably the snake, if it was a coral, wouldn’t bite.
“Wanta play rough, huh?” Rewis’s voice, more than halfway up the bank. “Counting to ten, ready or not, here I come.” He laughed, coughed.
She closed her eyes, expecting to see him, not wanting to see him. Opened them, no Rewis. The shrill of katydids and frogs made her ears ring. Mosquitoes droned above the vines. The snake hadn’t struck yet. Every nerve in her body had risen to the surface of her skin. But at the same time she felt numb. 
Then Rewis was moving again. At the top of the bank, he stopped. His breathing and smell of whiskey only a few feet away. Hard to tell.
Then he moved again, crashing through the brush to the right of where she was hiding, rattling palmettos. Away from her, farther along the bank.
Face tingling from not breathing, from fear, she breathed deep. Heard him coming back. Counting now, laughing: “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9…” 
He stopped. “I see you now.” For a fact he was standing only a heartbeat away, near her folded bare feet.
She was still as death. No, he couldn’t see her. But then she realized that she had shut her eyes, her eyes were squinched shut, and when she opened them she could see him parting the vines, standing bare-chested above her.
“Gottcha!” He dropped and grabbed both her feet, flipped her onto her back, and yanked her from her hiding place.
Had the snake struck, she wouldn’t have felt it. Her right foot was ripping, flesh from bone. She screamed.
Still, he dragged her, down the slope, over bamboo and stubble and what felt like a cypress knee in her back. Sliding past she thought she glimpsed the silver pistol in the sand. Trying to reach it, she knocked it spinning, gone. Only her ankle mattered, his grip on her ankle was all. 
At the bottom, on the flat of sand just off the water, where she started from, he sat next to her, on her left, clay-tinted with a hairless chest. When he leaned over her, he had the pistol in his hand. With a hard jab, he poked the end of the barrel into the flesh under her chin.
“Now off with them clothes, you hear?”
After he got done raping her, he made her sit naked in the same spot, same pitched slope, while he lay with his upper body across her lap, nuzzling her breasts with his soft-bearded face. Gnats swarming between them, covering them. Barrel of the pistol biting into the flesh under her chin.
Her back, a single spot above her waist, throbbed and stung-snake bite or cypress knee puncture? Something to focus on, to keep her mind from focusing on this slobbering idiot, this most humiliating of intimacies. 
He felt feverish, oily, his body smelled rotted, had rubbed off on her-the rot.
“Now, talk to me.” He nudged her chin with the pistol butt till her eyes were staring up at the graying sky which somehow made the ringing of katydids sound shriller. “Put both arms around me and talk to me.”
She placed her arms loosely around him. Left arm around his hot neck and back and right arm resting on his left side. A patch of hair, just heavy enough to keep that one spot on her forearm from touching flesh. One spot bearable.
“Tighter. Talk to me.”
She tightened her grip. Her back throbbed, the flesh under her chin throbbed and she could hardly swallow. “About what?” Her voice came strangled, choked off by the point of the gun and the angle of her neck.
He quit nuzzling her left breast, relaxed his grip on the pistol so she could look down at him, so she could speak.
Still, she stared up at the sky.
Her breasts felt damp, sickeningly slick from his saliva.
But when he spoke again it sounded as if he were crying, or about to cry. Could it be tears on her breasts?
“Talk to me.” He coughed, snuggled closer. “Tell me you love me, say what a sweet boy I am.”
She stiffened, thinking, What would Bossie do? Whatever she had to do.
The barrel of the pistol jabbed into the soft flesh of her chin. “I love you.”
The barrel jabbed again.
“You’re a sweet boy.”
“Now make it up. Baby-talk me for real, real natural.”
“I don’t know…”
He snicked the hammer back on the pistol, finger on the trigger.
“What a sweet baby, Mama’s baby. Mama’s baby, I love you.” She felt stuck.
He nuzzled her breasts. “Keep going.” He snuggled closer, pulling his body into hers and encircling her buttocks with his hairy drawn legs.
“Mama loves this sweet baby.” Again she was staring up at the sky, barely blue now. Hot, when she should have been cold since the sun had withdrawn from the west slope above the chill water.
He pulled her head down with his left arm around her neck-was he going to kiss her?-pistol barrel under her chin and finger on the trigger.
“You’re a liar, a frigging liar! Know that?”
Her eyes were staring into his; gnats swarmed around them.
“Now tell me another one—what about you and Bobby? What-all did y’all do?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He poked the soft flesh under her chin with the pistol barrel. “Don’t huh?”
“Bobby was sick, you know that.”
“A man ain’t never too sick to fuck.”
The need to move, to be free, was an urge. Impossible to be still another second. She started to say the two names that might change things, Bunny and Taco, but feared what their impact on him would be.
“I’m gonna kill you now.”
She sucked in the cool air, opened her chest, breathing. Closed her eyes and listened to the ringing of katydids, seesawing tree to tree.
The trigger clicked.
He rolled from her lap to the sand on her right. Laughing. Laughing. Doubling over, laughing. Then he rolled again, flat on his stomach, laughing with his head on his crossed sandy forearms. Tan back and pale buttocks coated with sand. His hairy muscled legs stretched out, coated with sand. Where the sun had touched him, his skin was the color of the river, as if he’d taken on the tannic stain from exposure. 
Was he crying? No matter, laughing and crying were one and the same.
She had never hated anybody so much; she had never felt so sorry for anybody in her life.
Standing, she began gathering her clothes from the heap where she herself had been allowed to shed and drop them for show. Then she stepped down the slope to the pale edge of the river, hearing behind her Rewis’s laughing or crying, like yawning while talking, satisfied or exhausted. Mumbling, “Lordy me, I don’t know.”
Suddenly, he was on his feet, streaking down the bank, past her—yes, he was crying, wide-open crying—plunging into the river and curling up and under. Then he waded out, not looking at her standing on the shore, watching. He was still crying, mumbling, arms crossed over his streaming chest, as he headed again for the spot where he’d been sitting and sat again. Very still, very quiet.
Ruth watched him a few minutes to see what he would do next. Nothing. Then placing her clothes on the blue elevated pivoting seat in the bow of the boat, she waded out to where the cool dark water measured neck deep, and began diving over and under, arcing through pulsing waves of varying warmth. She scooped sand from the river bottom and rose to the surface and scrubbed her body, face to feet, scrubbed till her skin felt raw. Then she ducked under and swirled her hair and scratched at her scalp with her ragged nails. Thinking she would like to drown, to die, she wondered what it would be like. She recalled having read somewhere that dying was like standing naked in the wind and melting into the sun. She was overcome with feelings of peace, thinking that, until her hand brushed her legs and she felt prickles of hair and thought about shaving for school on Monday, though she had only a general idea of what today was.
Little things saved her.
She missed her perfumed soaps, especially the Yardley lavender bars in the long linen box. She missed all sweet smells, her pearly shampoos and conditioners; she missed color. Before she’d believed there was no smell to compare with the river, none so clean as the tart willow scent of the Alapaha, yet untainted by chicken rendering plants and septic systems of holiday houses. 
The river seemed different now, colorless, lonesome, dangerous, predictable but unpredictable. The brown water felt harsh, smelled bitter on her skin. 
 What if she were pregnant? What if Rewis had given her AIDS? Nothing he said was believable, only what he did. Posing those remote, not-fair possibilities before would have caused her to feel she would rather die. But now, faced with dying every moment, she only wanted to live a little longer, one more day. She washed away his touch. She washed away her cowardice, her weakness and her pity.
Midway up the sandy west slope, Rewis rested naked and animal-like with his back to a blackgum tree. One leg crooked before him and the other sprawled. His head was tilted to one side. Was he watching her or sleeping? In the gray light, she could not see his eyes. It didn’t matter.
On his right, on the white sand next to his crooked hairy leg was the shiny pistol, plus the dusk-fused junk from his shorts pockets, and standing out in her mind's eye, the pocket knife with the broken bone handle. What about it was so familiar? Only a spark that kept going out before she could fix its source in her mind.
She waded toward the shore--going from neck deep to chest deep, to waist, to knees. Not even trying to hide her big-girl body. Cool, raw, new. A warm pine breeze lifted over the water and began whisking her stiff and dry. All bruises and aches seemed to dry first, a curious healing sensation. She stopped at the boat and picked up her green-striped shirt, stooped and swished it in the pale water, wrung it out and placed it wadded on the boat seat again. Then she rinsed her cutoff jeans, the camouflage jacket and her white cotton panties and bra.
Bundling the clothes in her arms, she walked naked to a willow tree, south of the boat, and draped her clothes over the fanned branches to drip on the sand like the ticking of many clocks. Then she went to the boat again and took a can of chickpeas from the white plastic bag, picked up a jug of water and stepped around the boat and sat cross-legged on the shore, facing the river and listening to the ticking like many clocks. Listening to her own even breathing and the tearing metal of the bean can when she pulled the tab. Rewis coughed. She flipped the tab into the boat and began eating from the can, using her tongue as a scoop. 
She had never eaten chickpeas before, never even heard of them. Had to be from the supplies in the canoe belonging to Trish and her family. She could imagine smart, healthy Trish liking the pale, soft, buttery peas. Ruth was back to believing that Trish had voted for her to live. But she wasn’t about to be weakened by what she couldn’t know.
She drank water straight from the jug. Across the river, a band of sunlight suddenly accented the tops of the tall blackgums, pines and cypresses, meaning the sun had been covered by a cloud in the west. But it seemed to her that its sudden appearance was a sign of some freshening change to come or the change she felt budding within her. 
The sun slid down behind the trees at her back and the band of light across the river slid up. A large hard-shelled horsefly buzzed over the still black water before her but didn’t fly near her. Not even a mosquito, and she wondered if she was putting off a toxic odor, or an aura of hate and madness, that repelled them. 
After she had eaten, she stepped out into the water again and turned facing Rewis and the topaz sky behind him, light spilling down from the top tier of trees. Staring into what she imagined were his open eyes. He was now clutching his hairy tanned chest and breathing fast and raspy. 
Still human, but barely.
***
Midnight, and Rewis was raging, pacing with the flashlight side to side of the boat's bow, where Ruth lay curled, naked, half-sleeping, trying to focus on the bellowing of a gator downriver, the throbbing of frogs, the trilling of katydids, anything but Rewis's feet grinding sand, the brass tinkling of bullets in his pockets and him cursing her and the snake both for making him sick. 
The beam of the flashlight circled and cut and cast foggy runners of water, sand, trees and the glittering pistol in the waistband of Rewis’s shorts. The light shrunk Ruth in the boat. But she didn’t move.
Hours and hours, it seemed, she had lain huddled in the cold damp, toughing it out, toughening up for when she would need to really be tough. She had watched the sky, watched the light go and the stars come out and then clouds and fog draw a blind on the whole process. She wished she hadn’t washed her clothes.
One more pass by the boat, and Rewis tramped over to the willow tree where she had hung her wet clothes and began ripping down her shorts, shirt, jacket, bra and panties, returned with them and ordered her to put them on and paddle him upriver to look for whiskey at the family's cabin where he had shot the dog.
Why there? Why not the trailer belonging to Brad where he found her and beat her into oblivion? Had he sensed something in the setting that warned him he might meet his match there? Maybe he’d been watching from the woods while the couple quarreled and Ruth slept and recognized something menacing about Brad before he got in his truck and left. Brad would have a gun, a deer rifle, a shotgun, and when he went out at night he would have one or the other with him. Of course. 
Rewis was a coward. From what she had witnessed and been told by him, he attacked mostly the weak, unaware or unarmed. 
She was shaking cold in her wet clothes, but not scared, rowing in the bow enveloped in fog. The beam of the flashlight Rewis was shining from the stern stopped about a foot in front of the boat. A buzz of fog.
Rewis mumbled, cursed, shouted for her to go faster-he was dying, he said. He was frigging freezing and he needed a drink. He rocked to and fro, rocking the boat, disrupting the shells in his shorts pockets. The beam rocked. “Man, I don’t understand you, slow-poking around,” he said through gritted teeth. “I have to come up there and take that paddle, I’m gone use on you for the fun of it.”
She wondered what would happen when they got to the cabin and there was no whiskey. Would the family still be there, would they be gone? She imagined that the house on the river was a weekend getaway, and the family had gone home till next weekend or holiday. The children had looked school-age, so they would have to go to school during the week. Probably in some near-by town. That was, assuming that this was early Monday. So strange that she would know that without knowing she knew.
The beam went dark. She stopped rowing, seeming to reverse in the fog streaming around her as if parting for the boat to go through. 
“Frigging batt’ries.” Rustling of the plastic bag of supplies. More cursing. 
Her teeth were chattering and the fog was like misting snow. Smelled like snow. Behind she could hear him unscrewing the end of the flashlight, shaking the spent batteries out and replacing them-klok klok-one on top of the other. His teeth chattering too. The light snicked on, flashing over her, almost warm-feeling, then up ahead and the low-hanging branches of a green tree dulled by the fog. Streamers of moss dragged over her face, then whoomp as the bow made contact with the trunk. Almost hugging the tree, smelling its winey bark, she shoved back with the paddle and straightened up. The beam following her progress as if rigged to the bow of the boat.
Rewis said, “Ata girl! Just follow the light.” 
For some reason his level encouraging tone made her scalp tingle. But still she wasn’t scared, only unprepared, stunned. She had expected all such unpredictable excursions to take place downriver. Not upriver. Not to have to turn around. Another lesson learned--forget the predictable because there is no such thing, not on this journey.
“Know where them bat’tries come from?” Rewis’s teeth were clenched again.
She didn’t answer. Knew that whatever his explanation, he intended it to shock her. 
“One of them ole canoes.”
Ruth dreaded hearing what he might tell her next.
“Nope, wadn’t nobody in it, that’s what you wondering. How come me to think ole canoe-boy got the drop on me.” He paused, then, “Hey, you listening up there?”
She glanced back, expecting him to hit her. 
“Still and all, you can’t say I ain’t got one on you, can you, Sister?” He laughed, his voice cracking with glee. “For the rest a your born days, you gone be wondering how Red voted. Ain’t that a fact?”
The fog was so thick that she couldn’t have seen Brad’s light even if she’d known where to look. She was almost beyond the island where she could have killed Rewis--her big chance--before she recognized it. Place of her undoing. Bloody bandage twisted along the shoreline at the tip of the island where he had been sitting. Proof of her weakness. 
A long time ago.
In a few minutes or an hour--she couldn’t remember how far, how long, to the cabin--she might very well have to kill him or make him have to kill her. She would not let him kill that family, that standard family. To kill them would be to kill all good people just living day to day. Living the best they could till they could do better.
A mosquito drilled into her right leg above the knee. She swatted it with her hand. Rowing on. Feeling she had never not been rowing. Had been born rowing, born on a river.
They had to be getting close to the cabin. Staring ahead at the lit spots of river was like watching a film in reverse, rewinding a video while standing before the television set, but in slow motion. Yet some scenes along the river she felt she was viewing for the first time. She was amazed by the newness of a view in darkness, in passing from a different direction, but most of all she was amazed at the recall of emotions from the time when she’d passed the same place, what she’d missed, say, trying to keep Rewis from shooting the entire family after he’d shot the dog. 
It was almost daylight when she spied the narrow beach with the blue webbed lawn chair. The portable grill. Smells of charcoal and moldy damp. Bloody trail from the water where the dog had either been drug or had drug himself ashore.
The sky glowed behind the treetops in the east, in the west darkness and the house looking closed-down for the week without lights. Out over the river, fog. 
She clanked the paddle on the side of the boat as she cut hard to the left and the bow scrubbed onshore, facing the bluff with the house built close to the edge. Rewis stabbed her in the back of the head with the light beam. Fog streamed around her in rays of light. She could hear him breathing behind her-raspy, rattled, eager.
He stepped out of the boat, holding to the sides to steady and silence it while keeping his eyes on the cabin on the bluff. Waves from the boat slapped underneath and lapped along the shoreline. Rewis’s boots sloshed, sand sucked at the soles, the flashlight in his snake-bit hand scoped for danger, searching out the foggy recesses of bushes and trees each side of the dirt stairs going up the steep bank. All at once, he almost lost his footing and had to grab to the sides of the boat, flashlight shining beneath his chin, up at his face.
In the upshot of the light beam, Ruth could see through his sparse beard, the cleft under his bottom lip, the sheer pink of his flared nostrils, and his eyes like slices of glass marbles. He seemed to be holding his breath; he seemed afraid. He was truly sick and craven and it showed in the twitching of his jawbone, the clenching of his teeth and the trembling of the flashlight as he got a fresh grip and motioned Ruth out of the boat and toward the shore.
Should she shout out a warning to the family if they were there, or let Rewis surprise them? She couldn’t let him shoot them. She felt incredibly strong and she would try to stop him, even if it meant giving her own life. But she couldn’t stop shaking. Her teeth chattered like ice in a glass.
Stepping over the side of the boat, one foot and then the other touching the surprisingly warm water and packed sand along the edge, she felt the butt of the pistol barrel poke between her shoulder blades, the shaky light shining around her body. Her shadow loomed like a giant’s as she waded out. 
Rewis began hauling the boat up behind her, farther onto shore, pistol and light clanking on the sides and the bottom of the boat scrubbing sand.
The bitter sharp smell of burned charcoal and beef fat loaded the air. In the bushes and small trees along the bank, leading up, water dripped like her clothes hung on the willow last evening-that ticking of many clocks.
Again Rewis used the light to motion her ahead, past the cheap aluminum four-legged grill with its ashed-over charcoal, to the thicket of trees on the slope where at the top the crude cabin perched in fog.
Pistol and light at her back, Rewis stepped closer, breathing, breathing hard now, climbing the carved dirt steps behind her, shadows of the trees folding up the slope, to the bluff and the white flower-bed fencing along the east side of the house, like a wall to prevent falling down the steep drop-off. The kind of frivolous thing a young wife with little money might do to decorate her yard and set off her house, then later conclude that the fencing was tacky. Too late-she had spent the money, the fencing had become a fixture in the husband’s mind, the children thought it was grand. 
Don’t be here, please don’t be here. 
Rewis seemed to be struggling up the steps behind her, stifling coughing with repeated muffled clearing of his throat. Wheezing, grasping at bushes to keep from falling down, with the light flashing wildly off to the sides and up only by accident. 
Ruth kept climbing, steady on bare toughened feet, in spite of the lapses in light to guide her, mere glimpses of the next and next memorized steps as the light glanced from the bushes to the tree tops, to the dirt and up her back. She felt almost certain that the pistol was stuck in the waist of his shorts, not in his hand, but not certain enough to turn and shove him down. Not certain enough to take the risk. Probably she could do it and she might even get away but Rewis would still be free-the fall wouldn’t kill him-and he would go on maiming and killing—the innocent, unaware or unarmed. He would for sure shoot the family in the blocky dark cabin if they were still there. How many more killings after that, she didn’t even want to think.
Hugging her body in damp camouflage, she stepped around the end of the white fencing, out of respect, walking easy over the low-growing runners of thorny bamboo the family had missed grubbing up with their hoe. Everywhere were spots of soft chopped earth. When the river came up at its highest, the whole bank and the house with it would probably wash away because the roots knitting the yard had been disturbed. The family was in the throes of trying to tame the wild bluff and river and Ruth thought of their efforts as foolhardy but at the same time admirably human. 
Don’t be here, please don’t be here.
Rewis had reached the top of the bluff and was moving up quickly behind her. Light skimming the uneven dirt ahead and the house front, a screened in front porch, facing west, then along the south and east walls. Raw, rough lumber, darker in the damp, with concrete blocks four-high to support the house and elevate it should the river flood its banks and flow beneath.
Had the dog died? Had they taken it to the vet? In the pouncing light she scanned for a new grave, a grave with a cross and maybe the dog’s favorite ball or bone.
No automobile that she could see, unless one was parked on the north side of the house. 
She was waiting on the second plank of the porch steps when Rewis stepped up behind. "Make a peep and you're dead," he said low and jabbed her in the back with the hot end of the flashlight. Momentary blackness, then light on the dewy screen of the door to the porch. The tiny mesh wire squares were filled with water. Looked like plastic sheeting. 
Always the same threat. She was beginning to wonder if he would actually kill her. After all, she was the only audience he had on this lonesome trip downriver. But then, she was the only witness to all his “little jokes” too.
Except for this family whose dog he had shot.
Opening the screen door, shuddering water droplets, she stepped inside. Shadow shaky on the pieced-together board floor. A stranger's shadow. On the solid door, padlocked from the outside. Her head felt light, her shoulders dropped with relief. The family was gone.
The place reeked of wet wood, mold and mildew.
No sound till Rewis sprinted ahead, coming to life and rupturing the dreamy ambiance of the fog, leaping up and karate-kicking the solid paneled door with the flat of his boot sole. It gave a bit, the green padlock swung and rattled against the hasp, but except for a crack across the bottom panel, the door was still solid, shoe-polish brown paint barely marred.
Still not speaking, though he must have deduced from the padlock that nobody was there, he backed up and motioned her toward the window on the right, smeary in the beam turning with fog and bugs and the dust of life. Again he kicked and the window shattered, glass clattered to the floor inside and out, wooden frames twisted inward. Another kick and the lower part of the window was framed in points of glass. He took the flashlight, turned it so that the beam was on his body, on his white shirt and the hard outline of the pistol in his waistband, and knocked at the points like breaking ice. He motioned her inside, then stepped behind her, shining the light over the dark musty chairs, a sofa with an olive-green blanket over it. A cot with a scrap-work quilt along the beige bead-board wall to the right of the window, and on to the next room, through the door ahead and on the right.
The smoked-yellow kitchen with an angled ceiling and a large side-set mullioned window faced the river. Open cabinets boasted of canned soups, spaghetti, sardines and sausages; boxed cereals and crackers. All quickly raked to the green linoleum floor--an avalanche of food--in Rewis's search for whiskey. Finally, he located a square bottle with a black label, but only about two-fingers of red whiskey. 
He cursed loud, so loud that Ruth’s ears stormed. Then he drained the bottle to his upturned mouth. 
Up to that time he seemed to have been measuring each movement, to be saving up energy for just such an outburst.
While he slung bottles and cans, dishes and jars, from the shelves above the stove on the north wall, to the wall behind him, Ruth stepped into the room where they had entered. She leaned frozen against the wall just outside the kitchen door. Rewis’s back was to her as he shone the light on the shelves, on glinting metal and glass. His racket didn’t bother her but she felt sad that he was wrecking the kitchen. At the same time, she was happy, so thankful, that nobody else was in the house. She meant to kill him soon. She had killed him in her heart a thousand and one times, same as actually doing it, according to the bible.
First chance she would locate a phone, call home; she would listen to the radio for news of the law searching for her. From where she was standing, she could see a small portable TV set on spindly legs in the far corner of the front room.
Actually, if she wanted to, she could walk out the front door this minute and maybe get away: with all the racket he was making he wouldn’t hear her leaving and she would have no trouble hiding under cover of trees or dodging around corners of the house, and the family wasn’t there, so she didn’t have to protect them.
So many choices. She just stood there.
The light flashed wildly in the kitchen, crisscrossing wall to wall. She closed her eyes, listening to Rewis ranting and cursing and breaking glass and flinging cans, utensils and pots and pans. A dish drainer full of plates clattered to the floor.
Then sudden silence as he located what he had come for. A full bottle of Vodka, clear as water and his malicious intent.
In the small bedroom facing the river and a window admitting the dawn light, she slept with her back to Rewis. Shorts pockets bulging with shells, he was sitting with pillows propped against the white iron bedstead, drinking straight vodka between coughs. Pistol in one hand and bottle in the other, he watched the door in the southwest corner of the room.
So sleepy she itched, she knew if she could stay awake he would pass out and she could slip the gun from him, she could shoot him. If only she could quit cringing at the thought of killing as she’d seen him kill.
Love—key word in Christianity. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Love your enemies; pray for those who despitefully use you. God is love. Love as Christ loved. She could go on and on recalling scripture with an emphasis on the word love. Still, she hated Rewis, she meant to kill him. 
She could smell the dank of the river and the lightly scented sheets, sleep-softened by either the couple or the two children. Her harsh river-rinsed clothes and Rewis’s body stench were taint enough to the family’s simple moral lives, without the shock of red blood on white they would have to walk into, branding it on their minds forever. That’s how well she imagined she knew them. It was a comfort.
When she woke, it was raining, same twilight in the room she fell asleep seeing through the east window where rain tapped and slid down cheap glass panes framed in dull metal.
Careful not to shake the bed, she rolled onto her left side and placed one foot on the cool damp floor, then eased her body up by pressing down on the mattress with her hands, standing quick and soundless and watching to see if Rewis would open his eyes.
Still, he sat, one leg sprawled and the other crooked, muddy right boot sole touching the inside of his left knee. Mud on the white sheets and if the bottle tipped, vodka.
Stepping easy over the rough wood flooring to the door, she entered a short narrow hall, another bedroom facing the one she had just left and twin beds with maple headboards shaped like half wagon wheels. Children’s toys and loose pieces of a picture puzzle were scattered on a brown hook rug between the beds. One chest, matching the headboard, at the foot of the beds along the east wall. Runny, watery light played on the small window between the two beds and filled the dark-wood room.
From what Ruth had seen of the inside of the house, it had been built of odd old lumber, some painted before, old-white, and intermixed with brown plywood and fake-grained sheet paneling. Rough-cut joints not quite joining, cracks filled in with webs and dobbing, crafted by spiders and dirt daubers. The house looked built in spare time, a proud and ongoing project. 
Still, it felt tight and cozy with the rain pecking on the tin roof. She would like to stay, almost cried with longing to stay, but she felt filthy. She didn’t belong; the time of belonging in a clean cozy place felt over. She didn’t want to get comfortable. Like Rewis, she was tainted. Like a soldier, she had a duty to perform and couldn’t give in to thoughts of family and comfort.
Not yet.
On the left of the dim hall was another door, a bathroom with an old clean but rusty, mildew-reeking lavatory and commode and a standing-room-only metal shower stall. Bottles of liquid soap and shampoos on a built-in shelf in one corner. 
She shouldn’t, she thought, but already she was shedding her clothes, the damp sandy jacket and her river-stained green shirt and denim shorts. Her panties and bra looked tea-stained. Immediately, without thinking in case she should change her mind, she stepped into the shower and stood under the showerhead and turned on the water, freezing cold. 
She should be looking for a phone to call home and let her family know she was alive. But she knew without knowing that this family wouldn’t be able to afford the price of a phone line strung out on the river for their use alone. She dreaded another disappointment. She couldn’t bear it. This shower was possibly her only non-disappointment. 
Gradually the water turned warm, beating on her face and head. Unable to resist, she reached for the thick green shampoo on the shelf to her left, opened the spout and poured it onto her head, then all over her body. Again and again, she repeated, lathering until the shampoo was almost gone.
At Brad’s place, there had been no shampoo in the shower, only a bar of unscented soap. Feet in soft suds on the floor of the shower and scent wafting up like the sweetest of flowers, she stayed under the spray of water. Only when it went cold again did she turn it off.
Stepping out of the shower stall, she took a rough pink terry towel from the shelf between the shower and the door. The towel was almost worn free of its nap-what could be spared from home. While she dried her body, she listened to the rain coming harder.
Dressed in her musty damp clothes, she began quietly searching the house for a phone. No shoes, so she couldn’t go into the kitchen and its floor cobbled with broken glass. But from the doorway she could see each wall and each counter surface and shelf and there was no phone. It would be black, she figured, an old dial phone if they had one, and nothing black in the heap on the floor resembled a phone.
Eyes adjusting to the grayer light of the kitchen, she again searched for a radio. It would be black too, maybe small and battery operated. But just to be on the safe side she changed the color in her mind, the color and the shape, and nothing even close struck her eye.
In the front room she switched on the TV-long time warming up, meaning it was an old tube-type; and when it did, the small screen emitted only static and snow. She cut the sound and left on the picture of winter somewhere.
Losing heart, blinking back tears, she sat on the cot by the broken window, feeling the rainy air through the wet screen of the porch. Everything smelled of mold except her wet hair. She couldn’t get enough of smelling her scented hair. Through the window she could see scrub oaks with blowing moss and behind them tall swaying pines, not all that different from the scenes on the river.
She turned her attention to the TV. Now and then a human figure emerged from what looked like a desert sandstorm. And later, a man speaking out from a desk-maybe weather news. No point in turning up the volume because she would hear only static, and besides the man was beginning to fade.
The rain tapping on the roof turned into a gentle clinking sound. Then framed in the hallway, to the left of the TV, Rewis materialized, as always, pockets bumpy with those never-decreasing, deadly brass pellets that went with the pistol aimed at her. “I thought you was gone,” he said in a hoarse voice and passed into the bathroom.
What would Bossie the Stringer do at this point?
Clean up the glass.
 It occurred to Ruth that if not for Bossie she may not have been able to dodge and manage Rewis as well as she had so far. Bossie was the old drill sergeant who had trained Ruth to drop and roll and rise up fighting. To be rough and tough and hard as tempered steel. To watch her back and front and both sides at once. But more than all that, Bossie the Stringer had taught Ruth never to get down and stay down—keep on coming—and try never to show weakness.
***
They stayed in the musty, damp cabin for three days. At first, waiting for Rewis to recuperate from the venom of the snakebite, or a respiratory infection. Or maybe, Ruth thought, it was the venom of his soul, that such evil doing and thinking would wear a body down. Then they waited for the rain to let up.
Heavy, fall-like rain, which meant that a tropical storm or hurricane was making in the Gulf, along the Florida panhandle. In the little cabin with Seventies Barbies and Nineties Spice Girl dolls, Ruth considered possible houses nearby, a store-telephones. But, she had no intention of trying to escape from Rewis. 
In part, because escape seemed so futile, but rather than feeling weak, she felt strong. She no longer thought of his frequent sexual assaults as rape because she didn’t move, she didn’t scream, she didn’t speak. He took her silence to mean that she liked it--liked him. By his reasoning, she must have wanted to be with him because she had had so many opportunities to go, to leave the house, but hadn’t. Or maybe he liked her. Or maybe he didn’t think at all.
She merely listened to the rain pecking on the tin roof--eyes closed and mind on what she had to do, mind on the standard family so like her own. Not thinking about her own family, because they were so distant now. Right now, she had to worry about getting Rewis out before the weekend, when she figured the family might be coming back. 
How many chances had she had to kill him? Many. But she couldn’t kill him here; she couldn’t kill him yet. Not only because of the blight his death would leave on the family and their treasured cabin on the river, but because she wasn’t done with him. 
There was something she needed to know that only Rewis could tell her.
Much of her time had been spent cleaning the cabin while considering what she suspected. Sweeping broken glass and placing damaged cans of food on the shelves in the kitchen while considering what she suspected. Scrubbing Rewis’s scum from the shower stall, mopping mud-over and over in her mind she turned and examined the image lodged there.
On the third day, Wednesday, according to the calendar she had found next to the refrigerator, she changed the sheets on the soiled bed where they had slept; that’s how certain she was that this would be the day they would leave. Had to be the day. 
She dreaded leaving the house, going out on the river again, but she had to. 
In a wicker stand of shelves by the door in the parent’s bedroom, she found white twill jeans and a long-sleeve navy shirt with specks of white paint on it, belonging to the mother, Ruth supposed. Earlier, on the front porch, she had found a pair of rubber thong sandals, dime-store shower shoes, to wear while cleaning up glass. 
While Rewis was napping on the cot in the front room, she put the clothes on. The jeans were too tight but the shirttail covered both back and front to her crotch. She even penned a note on a square yellow pad: "Thanks for the clothes, glad we missed you." No name, no message pleading for help. She would handle Rewis herself.
In the children’s bedroom, in the watery light from the single window, Ruth dressed one of the Seventies Barbies in silver bell-bottom pants, a royal blue crop top curled with age, and black plastic clogs that a couple of years ago would have looked so old-fashioned, but now looked merely old. Smelled old. Of dust and cedar combined. 
She wondered if the mother had been the one who chopped off the Barbie's brown-striped white hair. She wondered if Rewis-the-child chopped off cats' tails, or shot bluebirds, or tripped girls in class. Had he been shaken, whipped, shamed, mocked or starved?  She knew he’d been raped by a neighbor man; she knew he’d gone with his cousin to the truck stop for her to “service” the truckers; she knew about his daddy slamming pet his dog against a tree. Had Rewis been born a killer, had he been made a killer? What about Hitler? What about herself? 
During the day Rewis slept on the cot by the broken window opening onto the porch. Sometimes liquored out of his head, sometimes following sex. But the pistol was always close by.
Most times he wouldn’t leave the bed till noon, but this morning Ruth had insisted that he get up so she could change the sheets before they left. She hadn’t told him why she was changing the sheets, and he hadn’t asked. She’d been telling him she wanted to go, now she meant to go. When she’d made him get out of bed, he acted like she was being a fussy housewife and he’d do whatever to humor her, to get along. One of his favorite games was playing the “hen-pecked” husband to the bossy little wife.
Rewis had lots of games, many faces, and the hen-pecked husband was the least hurtful. 
Ruth, always up-front and natural, had refused to play her part; for each refusal, a light bulb had been shot into triangles of glass for her to sweep up; the TV had been shot into a movie featuring blowing smoke. And more glass. Sending Rewis back to the boat for more ammunition. How long would those green boxes of brass pellets last?
As it turned out, the father of the family, or somebody, was a drinker, and there was no end to beer stored in cases under the house, whiskey in the bathroom behind the towels, even under the parent’s bed.
Rewis had uncovered every hiding place, it seemed. Each empty was broken against a wall.
More glass.
On Wednesday afternoon, Ruth stood out on the screened porch and watched the rain slash through the pines, palmettos and oaks, branches bent like broken sticks still attached by the skin of the bark. Cool rain misted her face through the screen. The sky was gray and bloated with rain. Low clouds swirled beneath layers of darker clouds, streaks of clouds. No sounds except for the hiss of rain through the leaves, the pecking of rain on the tin. A moldy smell of rotting leaves, the musty smell of the unceiled house. A two-path road led south through the oaks, west side nothing but woods. Run of the river and its song to the east.
It was possible--just possible--that she could walk out the screen door and up the road and get help. Or maybe take the boat and try to find Brad’s place. Her foot was well. Boatrest, not bedrest. She should go.
Behind her, through the broken window, she heard the cot springs screak. She turned to see Rewis lying on his stomach with his chin elevated on a bunched pillow, watching her. On the windowsill before him, at eye level, were his pistol, some change, a metal clip with folded bills, the fat black knife he had killed Mandy with, and the small pocketknife with the broken bone handle, the image of which had been lodged and festering in her mind like a cancer she had accepted would kill her, so no fear. 
The front door, to the left of the window, had been unlocked with a spare key to the padlock found in the kitchen. Stood open now.
“What would happen if I walked out this door?” She placed her right hand on the wet screen of the porch door, looking out at the rain.
“What you mean, what would happen?” He laughed. “You know damn well what’d happen.”
“You’d shoot me right?”
“Why you always starting something?” He sighed, plumped the pillow under his chin.
“I’d shoot you if you tried to get away.”
He laughed. "Now I like that, you saying that, I do. Ain’t nothing gets me going like a gal with spunk.” He rocked side to side, screaking the cot springs, then settled his chin on the pillow again. “Hey, why don't you come on in here?" he said. So strange, the chummy, friendly sexual tone of that question.
"Why don't you get up?" she said.
"And do what?"
"Get ready to go."
"Huh uh. I'm just beginning to get settled in here." He crawled forward, heels of his hands propping his chin and the pillow wadded under his arms and chest. His clean hair swung each side of his freshly shaved face. The skin where his beard had been looked soft and pink contrasted with his tanned forehead and nose. 
"I thought you were in a hurry to get to Florida."
"Not me, baby." He yawned. "Ain't nobody waiting on me in Clearwater. Reckon the truth is you're all I got."
So, that answered whether the names Bunny and Taco would have some impact on him. 
She was looking out the screen at the rainy road again. "Well you got me, so let's go."  White and bisque mushrooms had pushed through the dead leaves under the trees.
His left hand was still swollen. His finger was bandaged. "You ain't fighting me like a tiger no more. How come?" He sat up on the edge of the cot, framed in the window. His chest was bare and his hair was humped on top. Clean borrowed jeans too big but gathered with a white elasticized belt at the waist, pockets loaded with bullets salvaged from the flooded boat. He coughed, coughed, spat on the floor.
Still, she didn’t turn around. Kept staring at the woods, at the hoods of mushrooms springing from the ground.
Suddenly she had to know whether the pocketknife with the broken handle belonged to her grandfather. It looked like his knife, but it had been so long since she’d seen it she had almost forgotten it. If it was his, she had to hear how Rewis came by it--the keepsake pocketknife given to Poppee by his father when he was a boy, transferred from pocket to pocket and of little use save for touching, the broken bone handle felt daily like a tongued broken tooth, transferring memories, love in all its complexities, love in its simplest form, a poor man's inheritance. She thought she knew the truth, but she had to hear it. For some reason she had to hear it, though hearing wouldn’t change anything, wouldn’t change her mind about what her duty was, what she had to do now.
"Tell me about my grandfather," she said, "tell me how you got his knife." Her arms were crossed, fingernails biting into flesh.
"Uh oh," he said. Cot springs screaked. "Now I'm in the dog house."
“Tell me.”
He spoke up. “Why you wanta hellhack me all the time? First, you don’t want me on the bed, so I lay on the cot. Next thing you’ll have me standing on my head.”
His trying to change the subject, to turn it around on her didn’t work. "You killed him,” she said, “didn't you?"
"What if I told you I didn't?"
“I'd know you were lying."
"Well, I ain't gone lie to you no more, and that's a fact. Not and me and you like we are now."
"Yes," she said and dropped her arms. Left them dangling unnecessarily alongside--no matter what. "Tell me."
She now knew that her grandfather was dead. She wanted to know how he died. She wanted to know so she could give it back to Rewis, measure for measure. “Did you stab him like Mandy?”
“Hell, no. Had of, you’d a-seen the blood.”
“Cause I walked up that morning, right after you…”
"Dang!" he said. "You don't need to hear all that. Let's just let it go."
"You want me to tell you?" She turned, eyeing him sitting on the cot, eyeing the knife in the window, broken bone handle up. "After the boat overturned at the rapids that first day, and I got away, you went back to the house on the river looking for me. Poppee, my granddaddy, was there..."
"Not at the house--he wadn't at the house..." Rewis held up both hands in self-defense, as if the place where it happened was the point.
"He asked if you'd seen two girls anywhere, and you shot him."
"Not right off--not like that. He'd asked around and somebody told him they seen y'all walking toward the river. He fount y'alles' shoes at the edge of the water near that Mayday bridge that railroad fellow was talking about. Said wadn't no way his granddaughter would run off without telling him and wanted to know was that blood on my shirt and I..."
"Okay, okay," she said, walking through the open door to the living room and facing him sitting on the cot with his hands on his knees. "I don't want to know after all."
"You mad at me?"
Do you know how much I loved that old man? Do you know he was my heart? Love is one of those things that doesn’t have to have a reason—it just is.
Rewis wouldn’t have understood love. He understood only what served him.
“Let's go." She walked off, heading left and through the kitchen door and began loading a white plastic trash bag with raisins, potted meat, canned beans and crackers. Her head felt light, her face numb but prickly. Her ears roared as if underwater. She had trouble focusing. Fact, as it turned out, was not the same as guessing. This was unbearable, beyond preparation by imagining. Crying would bring relief but she wouldn’t cry. She didn’t want to be relieved.
She didn’t know how long it would take, how long she would be on the river this time. But she would do what she could to be prepared.
"That rain's still coming down," he called.
She didn’t answer. There was no answer.
"Dang!" He was talking loud over the rain, his voice and the tinkling of bullets in his pockets following. "I want you to know, I wadn't just killing to be killing. Not then I wadn't."
She kept piling food into the bag.
"I won't lie, I been knowed to kill people just for the hell of it." He stepped to the doorway. “That old man, how long did he have anyway? He’d a-died of something-right? Say I saved him some suffering. You ever been to one of them nursing homes?”
What he’d said should have made her crazy, should have made her bolt and run or jump on him and kill him with her shaking hands. It was there way down deep, but on the surface was nothing. Do nothing. Because he is nothing. Besides, it isn’t time.
"You mad at me?" he asked meekly.
When she didn’t answer, he wheeled around--"Shit!"--and went back into the living room. “Wadn’t I willing to let that business with you and ole Bobby slide?”
The kitchen smelled of coffee grounds, a rotted orange. Smelled faintly of the round steak she'd found in the small refrigerator freezer and fried for supper last night. She had added sliced onions and canned tomatoes, then smothered the steak for a couple of hours. Mistake: her captor took her cooking as a sign that she was trying to please him. Said he'd never met a girl with such know-how and class. Had, his life might have been different.
She drew a glass of water from the outdoors-type spigot at the sink, drank, listening to the rain drumming on the low section of sloped roof above the window, guttering outside. Below, at the bottom of the bluff, only the bow of the boat was beached on the wet sand from the rising of the river. Rain dimpled the clear water within the boat, the opaque water without. 
Already the pale edge of the river had eased over the sandbar and the aluminum legs of the grill stood in shallow water. The river was wider, sheeting rain, gray more than brown. A treacherous lake. And on the far side, the pines and cypresses had waded out into the river, water two feet up their trunks. Tops of drowned scrub willows, maple and brush wrung in the invisible but swift current.
Ruth had tricked Rewis into telling that he’d killed her granddaddy. She wished she hadn’t. Likely she would die and she could have died never knowing, just as she would never know the truth about Trish. Tears welled in her eyes and tracked in tickling streaks down her cheeks. 
The first railroad worker Rewis had shot under the trestle had been about to tell that the grandfather had been killed, or maybe that he was missing, too. Rewis had cut him off, meaning he hadn’t wanted Ruth to know. He hadn’t wanted to talk about her grandfather’s death to her, meaning he did after all have some feeling for her, sick and crossed-up as they were. Meaning she now had an edge, he’d be easier to approach for the kill.
One night, she and her grandfather had been getting ready to go out to gig the overstocked and overgrown predator catfish in the pond behind his house. He had handed her the gig, a long pole with a three-pronged gaff on the end, and told her that when he lifted the boat for her to shine the headlight underneath and if there was a moccasin for her to gig it.
When he lifted the boat, easy, walking forward, a mud-brown cottonmouth was coiled with his white mouth gaped. Steeling herself, she had driven the gig through its thick wriggling body. The vibrations along the pole of the gig grinding into flesh and bone had made her nerve endings flare. 
What she had to do she would do for the right reason: to get rid of Rewis and not for revenge, not for punishment, but to put an end to his murdering. What she had to do, she would do anyway she could.
Suddenly she heard what sounded like Rewis's heels pounding on the floor from the front room to the screened porch. Either a door slamming or a pistol shot. Her face prickled, the insides of her fingers grew warm. She walked from the kitchen into the room with the blasted TV in the corner by the hall. Rewis’s dingy white pillow was on the floor and his pistol was gone from the windowsill. The two knives were still there. 
Easing closer to the window, she could see out in the yard, in the rain, Rewis’s clay-colored upper body, all that was visible above the half wall of the screened porch, and him pointing his pistol down, looking down.
She dropped the glass. Water sloshed, spread on the wide floorboards. The glass rolled, revealing a nick on the rim, a crack on the side. She stepped around it, ran out on the porch and stared through the screen door at a heavy-set man in blue shorts and white socks and white running shoes flecked with mud, black grass seeds and wet thatch. He was lying in the dirt, in the rain, broadside with one hairy blunt knee up as if somebody had pushed him over backwards and he had rolled to one side.
At first, Ruth thought he looked alive, getting ready to spring up from the ground, but a closer look at his face revealed dead eyes, a closed-down look, that unmistakable blankness death brings.  A fount of red, dead center of his white polo shirt, looked like a trick symbol-Give Blood!
Rewis saw Ruth and cocked his head, studying her in much the same way he had been studying the man on the ground. He motioned south with the pistol, toward the sounds of the rushing river and the crashing of rain in the woods along the bank. "Let's hightail it out of here." 
"Who is he?" She sounded foolish, even to herself. She couldn’t stop. She placed her right hand on her hammering heart.
"Hell!" he shouted, "I don't know."
"Why did you kill him?"
"He was sneaking around, peeping through the screen." Rewis was still yelling, still standing over the man, reloading the pistol from the stash of ammunition in his pants pockets. Rain streaming down his face and chest and dripping off the end of the pistol barrel. “So don’t tell me he didn’t have it coming.” 
A gust of wind drove the stuck droplets of rain through the screen. The tall pines rocked and somewhere off in the woods there was a creaking sound, like the timbers of a storm-tossed ship.
The pistol in Rewis’s hand no longer seemed alien to Ruth, no more alien than he did. Both were her duty to get rid of. She could remember the feel of the cold heavy metal in her hands. She could imagine pulling the trigger.
In the bow of the boat, facing Rewis in the stern, she watched him row. 
Rain slashed at her back. Both of them drenched, shaking cold. The boat feinted toward the east bank, slow progress toward the island where she could have left him, could have killed him, could have kept him from killing again: man in white socks and blue shorts, nobody she knew, but human as she was, human as Mandy, the fisherman, the railroad workers, the canoeists, the people at the baptism, who Ruth hadn’t known either. And her grandfather... 
“Poppee, can you open this?” Ruth popped through the screen door from the wide hall to the front porch, where her granddaddy was sitting in one of the rockers.
She handed him the jar of stewing tomatoes for him to open. Her grandmother had put them up before she died and the jars were dwindling on the pantry shelf, because Ruth knew how to cook only rice and tomatoes. Her granddaddy never complained. 
He twisted the gold lid, holding it firm between his stout legs in khaki twill, then held the jar up to the setting sun like a treasure of stained glass. 
“Which you like better, Poppee, sunset or sunrise?” Ruth sat next to him in one of the large rockers.
“I think sunset.” His voice was pitched low as if to prevent breaking his quiet time.  “Used to, I liked sunrise.”
“Why?”
“Sunset, you don’t have to worry your head about what you got coming up to do that day.”
Her ponytail was wet from swimming in the river an hour before, she and Mandy, with Poppee sitting on the white sand of the shore with his knees up, cleaning his fingernails with his inherited pocketknife. His bald head downy as a baby’s in the backlight of sun. His gentle face was always pink and shone with smiling, even when he wasn’t smiling. 
“Ruth,” he said, not looking at her.
“What?” 
“I was just saying your name.” He looked at her then, shaking a finger playfully. “Never forget what it stands for.”
“You mean the story in the bible, Ruth taking care of her mother-in-law after her own husband dies?”
“I’m thinking of duty and love all wrapped up together. And sacrifice, giving yourself for something bigger than yourself.”
She didn’t tell him that she figured it had all been done, all the great discoveries and inventions, all the important things.
He seemed to read her mind. “I’m not talking about making history or drawing the attention of the world. I’m talking about doing the right thing in the ordinary sense, no matter how hard, the great thing that marks your own life. Sometimes it might be bending the rules a bit; sometimes it might be something nobody will ever know but you, or leastwise wouldn’t understand.”
The pistol barrel was tucked into the waist of Rewis's huge geared-up blue jeans. "Damn wind's getting worse," he yelled and dipped and pulled the paddle left, right, furiously.
Just as furiously, she scooped water from the floor of the boat with a red Solo cup and slung it over the sides. For every cup scooped up the rain dumped another. They were riding fast and high on the swollen river, rocking in the boat, Rewis struggling to row the boat in the middle of the river but being tugged into funneling whorls and beneath low-hanging tree limbs, draped with plastic trash, moss and moccasins. Islands of foam like ice floes maintained a foreboding calm, moving slow through the swift water. Tops of green scrub trees and brush were visible just below the surface of the black water. Fallen pines were now torpedoes aimed at the boat. Ruth watched each distant bank for where she would swim when one of logs hit its target. But she doubted she would ever make it that far; she would be sucked under and dragged along like the flotsam and foam collecting around the boat and shedding into the current. 
The water seemed to breathe of dank wood, green leaves and brass. Gone were the thick sullen smells of willow, mussels and damp sand. The sound of rushing water was deafening, broken only by the smart sharp cracking and crashing of trees upriver and downriver and water slapping at new shores, seeking a stopping place. No more sloping banks and sandbars. The wobbling pale edge of the river had taken to the high-ground, flowing and gathering in low-lying slews, panned out floodplains eerily glimmering in the gray light.
The rain at its hardest came harder in violent gusts. The sky darkened. Near-dusk or heavier cloud cover, Ruth couldn’t tell.
Through the rain-peened skin of the river, Ruth spied a sunken sandbar, maybe the one where Rewis had lain sick. Deep streaming white sand like a flooded village she had visited before.
Rewis had either seen it too or determined where the island would be located by the bunched shoals of tupelos, branches now spread out over the water, threatening to net the boat threading through. "Couldn’t of stopped here anyhow," he yelled. "Law might catch us."
Us.
He looked exhausted, red-faced, panting. Coughing. Must have been expecting that the sandbar would be a place to stop and rest. 
“Ole motor would run, we’d have it made.” Left, right, he swung the paddle, at the same time kicking at the red gas tank on the floor before him. "Looks like that fucker woulda put in some gas." 
The black rubber tubing feeding up from the tank to the motor wiggled. The tank didn’t move. He kicked it again, then lay the paddle in the water rippling over the wood floor afloat with aluminum cans and their ring tabs and tongues. 
Eyes ever on her, hair streaming down each side of his face, he left the boat to drift where it would. Stern waggling as the boat shunted through the raging narrow channel between the walls of tupelo. Then the bow dipped into a whorl and shot beneath a wide sheltering branch, wiping Ruth and then Rewis almost clear of their seats. Shower of water droplets, green leaves, bark and twigs. The boat lodged sidelong and bobbing against the fused trunks of two tupelos and a bole with just enough space to step out on.
As if nothing had happened, as if sitting on dry land, Rewis unscrewed the cap on the tank, stuck his right middle finger inside the mouth, took it out and smelled it. Looking up at Ruth clinging to a branch near the bole of the joined trunks, he grinned, rubbing the pads of his finger and thumb together. 
Wearing laurels of green leaves, both of them, they sat watching one another, listening to the river rushing and the water slapping the shore on the other side of the trees.
Knowing she had been found out, she swung up with the wet bark of the branch grinding into her hands and got her footing in the cupped juncture of tree trunks. 
Boat tossing in the ripping current below, left side knocking against the trees-a calamity of motion and sound. Rewis grabbed each side of the boat, staring up at her trying to get her footing to leap to the shore on the other side. A broad swath of black boiling water between the trees and the strangely flat sodden ground and sparse woods leading nowhere.
“Hey!" He laughed out, picked up the tank and set it down hard on the bottom of the boat. "Get on back down here. I ain't gone eat you or nothing over watering down the gas. Been me, I'd a-done the same thing."
In the boat again, she faced the rain with her eyes closed, back turned to Rewis. Rowing and grinning in an unnerving secret, fond way. Her having watered down the gas seemed to have enlarged her in his vision, and shaking cold and scared as she was, she was glad to be on the river. To be out in the rain and moving closer to whatever end she would find. Gone with the warmth and shelter of the cabin were her courage and strength. But not her determination to put an end to his grinning, an end to his games.
Slow going, with the current snatching the boat from the main channel, dodging tree limbs and logs and fighting against the west wind trying to blow the boat into the outstretched arms of shortened thrashing trees that used to stand tall along the east bank. Same watery dawn light in daylight, then dusk. It took more than an hour to get to the sandbar where they had camped before going back to the cabin, another sunken city. Ruth was glad when they got beyond all points holding memories, history, but found without them she was too focused on her misery.
For something familiar to do, and hopefully to regain that feeling of control that she had lost, or probably never had in the first place, she turned in the bow of the boat and took a can of stolen potato chips from the white plastic bag brought from the cabin. The chips were cut to look like real potato slices, then stacked neat and nestled. She began eating, chips going soggy in the rain. Thinking of Mandy whose pastime had been munching chips in the middle of her bed, talking boys, clothes and school.
Ruth would let her talk, let her “vent” as she called it. Shallow stuff—cliches. Mandy had been such a cliche and Ruth just the opposite. Mandy’s face of caulked acne scars—too much foundation, too much mascara, too much. Ruth by comparison, fresh-faced and clear. She had loved it when Mandy’s mother would say, “Mandy, why don’t you try looking more natural, like Ruth?” Why? Ruth wondered now. 
This was Wednesday and neither had started their senior year. Why had Ruth really decided to go to the same school as Mandy? To stay with her grandfather had sincerely been part of it, but there was more: big-duck-in-a-little-pond syndrome. She hated who she had been. Had she changed? If she hadn’t, would she be hurting so with humbleness? 
She wondered if Cory and Joan were back in school. Maybe they were out looking, asking around whether anybody had seen Ruth and Mandy. No, the search would have gotten beyond that stage. The law was looking now. The law in three states, according to the man at the trestle. Who else? Where and how? Nobody had known that the girls had gone hiking downriver. Not a trace. Except for their shoes left by the edge of the river at Mayday and no tracks leading back across the sandy beach and up the bank to the highway. Surely the law would take that into account and be searching along the river for their drowned bodies or tracks on the banks where they might have walked out and been captured by somebody like Rewis. She shivered thinking about her grandfather, where his body might be now--how her family was holding up with both of them missing. Had he driven his truck along the much-used woods track to their favorite fishing and swimming place? If so, either the law or her family would have found his truck and be searching close to the gar hole. Maybe dragging it for bodies.
Brad knew much of this, enough. She looked east, over watery land and swallowed trees and hoped his marijuana crop drowned for him not caring enough to send help. No wonder Rewis had sensed a likeness to Brad, if that were the case. 
Rewis coughed, then scraped angrily, deeply, the phlegm lodged in the bottom of his throat.
Shredding gray clouds scattered southwest to northeast, and still the rain drove across the woods, the river, wind wringing branches and darting the water like giant fish. Rain hissed like hot grease, stung Ruth’s skin like bees.
By dark, she was rowing while Rewis shined the flashlight from the bow of the boat, the beam composed of rain, like tiny glass points. Her arms ached from rowing, her eyes burned from staring into the spasm of light. The bow of the boat was onto a fallen pine before she even saw it, driving the boat back with an angry whump. 
No control, no matter. Probably never had any control anyway.
Rewis’s white shirt flickered like phosphorous. He tipped backward, then to the left, and the beam of light shot up at spun trees, arched down to cloudy water, then went out. Ruth felt her body flying, following the light up into the trees, arching down into the water that had been clear-looking before dark, but was now black and deep, an airless cold room without ceiling or roof.
She curled, dove up and struck sand, swam down, struck air, tried to swim toward the west bank--frying rain and rilling river--and decided she must be swimming toward the middle of the river. Turning she swam hard, hand over hand and pulling, but felt that she was paddling in place, water sucking at her body as if trying to carry her back to the same sealed room and her death. She paddled harder--same sensation of not getting anywhere. 
From instinct and not reason, she flipped onto her back, floating with the current. She imagined that her fanning hair was a raft keeping her head above water. Gentle hands seemed to press against her back but their pressing up turned to pulling down. A strong whorl sucked her under, spat her up. Gasping for air she swallowed water, sniffed at it like smelling a rose, eyes popping in their sockets and water roaring in her ears. Then she either flipped herself over or was flipped over by the whorl, gave up the urge to fight, to see what was ahead and around, surrendered and began floating with her eyes stretched wide. Same darkness as with them closed, same darkness as underwater.
Drifting, with the nothingness roar of water in her ears. It would be so easy to let go, just let go and it would be over. She relaxed, felt she was sleeping on the bed of bouncing water. So smooth, so dark, but for the bright pricking of rain on her face and the fire of water in her nostrils.
Fear not for I am with you.
 Not a voice but a memory, recollected scripture in red, Jesus speaking. Still she answered, “Yes.”
Her right foot rammed something solid, something pronged, stiff and twitching, a branch. She flipped forward, caught it, held on while the current curved around her body. She felt warm from the chest down, cold from the chest up.
How far had she floated? Where was Rewis? Was she free now?
Unless he had drowned, she wasn’t free.
The current tugged at her legs, folded them under, till she was on her back again. She began feeling hand over hand along the branch, toward where she believed the body of the tree and therefore the shore to be, east or west she could not say, and had no real reference. Her right foot touched mushy leaves, now riverbottom, tree roots, blunt tussocks and sharp twigs. Then she was heavy, cold, out of the water and sitting onshore. Then she was tired, beyond thinking, wishing, caring. She couldn’t stop coughing. She couldn’t stop crying.
***
She was walking, on solid ground; east or west she couldn’t say and it didn’t matter really. Rewis could pop up behind her and it wouldn’t surprise her. No shock in her now. That had been washed away in the river with her fear and doubt and maybe even her scabbed-over will to live. 
Chilled and wet with the rain gone to drifting mist, she followed a pressed-grass animal trail curving through woods. Same gnarled oaks and pines but ahead always an illusion of clearing and overcast sunshine. 
After a few yards or miles of slapping aside brambles and branches, of no more concern to her at that point than Rewis, she thought she heard voices, distant but shrill. Like children squealing and laughing. She didn’t trust it. She knew that trick. 
Still, she found herself drawn to those sounds, to that mirage of happiness and home like heaven as she imagined it. Not streets of gold, but close, with the sun now raying in a nimbus beyond a hedge of planted pines. Here was order, planned life, not the random doings of nature seemingly bequeathed by a disgusted God. 
She stopped, listening. A short distance away, other side of the thin pine hedge, was a lone child squealing and laughing, water splashing. Was Ruth headed back toward the river? What? 
Walking on, slower now, and ducking under branches, turning to look for Rewis, but keeping to her course, she entered the neat rows of pines. Rain in the form of wind shished in the pinetops overhead. Beneath her bare feet was a comparatively soothing carpet of pine needles-shag carpet like at home that her mother was always threatening to rip up and replace with hardwood flooring. But ever that sound of the child squealing, laughing, shouting, splashing, lured her on. Suddenly there was another sound, somebody else calling out-a woman-and a baby was crying. 
Again, Ruth turned to check for Rewis. It was as if the woods bordering the river had never been and she was alone in the planted pines, an Eden-like orchard, moving toward people-decent, real, wonderful humans-going on with living as Ruth had done before. Common life without taint of evil and blood and unrelenting struggle.
Almost to the last row of pines, stepping down, then up, over the bedded earth that the trees grew from, she could see the white of a house and a streak of flesh dashing the length of the house, over and over, water splashing, squealing, a woman shouting and a baby crying.
Ruth started to call out to them, but feared that after all if Rewis was nearby he would hear her, come to her, kill her. 
No. Not fear of him killing her, but them, the woman, the child, the baby. Taco and Bunny—if Rewis had “half-raised” his cousin’s children, he must love children. Wouldn’t harm these children. But what about the little girl in the blue dress at the baptism? Well, Rewis hadn’t considered her either human or child because of her race. Still, no comfort in thinking that.
She had to go back now. She had to leave. But she couldn’t resist easing like a fugitive-she was a fugitive-up to the last row of pines and peeping through: 
A small girl wearing only muddy white panties was running, splashing through a ditch of rainwater in front of the house. She had blonde hair, was maybe five or a small seven or eight. Very thin in that way of poor but blissfully ignorant children who are stuffed but starving. 
The house, set behind the ditch, was small and old with scaling white paint and rusty tin roofing. On the porch, framed for screens, a screened porch in better times, stood a skinny woman with dark hair who was holding a tiny squalling baby and bouncing it her arms in a weary, desperate manner. To Ruth she looked too old to be having a new baby, but maybe like the child in the ditch age had been rendered indiscernible by lack. 
Everywhere chickens were pecking in the mud of the yard, as oblivious of the weather and the lack as the child in the ditch. 
“You get on a snake, don’t come running to me,” the woman called out to the child. “I got my hands full.”
The woman headed across the porch to go inside. A stout old woman in a wheelchair rolled out on the porch and stopped, watching the little girl.
The two women spoke in low tones, but the baby’s heated squalls and the little girl’s happy squeals rose above what they were saying.
Ruth craned to hear all that was being said, though it didn’t matter really. She simply wanted to live inside their sorry lives for awhile. She wanted to belong with them and not with herself.
The little girl quit her game and stopped midway the ditch of water, facing the old woman who had what could only be described as a collapsed face. 
“Molly, watch!” The little girl darted, kicking water all the way to the far end of the ditch where a pipe ran under a ramp. Then up the ditch she ran, muddy head to toe and her dingy panties bagging below her popped belly. She sat on the doorsteps, at the old woman’s warped bare feet.
“Don’t tell me you ain’t cold.”
“Me? I ain’t cold.” The girl squinted up at her, her squint forcing a toothless grin. “You just got the fever, Mama says.”
“Yep.” The old woman gazed out at the chickens and the rain, at the very spot where Ruth was standing hidden by the pines.
“You get bit by a ole moccasin, your mama’s gonna be crying her eyes out.”
“I ain’t skeered a no moccasin.”
“Don’t go back in that ditch, you hear?”
“Hey, I’m the one brung you here. You ain’t even no kin to us, we just taking care of you. Didn’t, you’d have to go to the old-folks’ home. So how come you bossing me around?”
“I know stuff. I been around. Don’t go down to the river again neither, not lessen your mama or daddy’s with you.”
***
Coming to from a state of neither sleep nor non-sleep, another morning, Ruth was facing the mean wide river: muddy dark, foamy, racing toward its end. Growing light in the east, behind the flat woods along the upper bank where she was sitting, though she imagined she had washed up on the west shore. Her trip to the house where she had seen the two women and the baby and the little girl had been a dream, or may as well have been one. This was where Ruth belonged, this was where she had to be. 
If she had had any doubts, qualms, about her mission, her duty to get rid of Rewis, they were gone now. 
This is my mess to clean up, Bobby had said. And now he had passed the job on to her.
She stood holding to the thin trunk of the birch whose sparsely leafing branches had saved her, leaned out and looked upriver, west side where she believed the boat had struck the fallen tree. No tree in the water, no boat, no Rewis. Just openness-same rain, same river. Same watery brown world.
The impulse was to go back into the dream and check on the little girl in the ditch to be sure Rewis hadn’t killed her, to protect them all. The impulse was to start along the bank, upriver. Maybe go back to the family’s cabin where she and Rewis had stayed, then cross over to the other side. But she believed that Rewis--if alive--would continue downriver, and that was the direction she took. Was it instinct, reason or holy directive?
Be still and know.
A queer greasy yellow light settled over the woods and river, smells of sulfur, and she was tacking the course south along the sloped treeline, so hungry that the gnawing felt like a boil ruptured in her stomach. She picked gallberries and ate them though they were so bitter she gagged. Even bullous vine leaves, tart chloride. She tried to remember all she had learned about berries from her grandfather--how to identify blue berries from huckleberries-- but knew both were spring berries, this was autumn, only gallberries, sparkleberries, which probably weren’t valid classifications of berries at all. Human being was a valid classification for what it was worth.
The river was growing wider, the water yellow and shallow, flowed over scalloped lit sand with rusty edging. Even the air smelled of rust. The rain had quit. Drops ticked from the leaves throughout the woods and overhead. Her white jeans were muddy. Her bad foot throbbed. The sun was still hidden by dingy clouds, but was hot, steaming the river. Pits of black mud along lower banks soured and scaled in the heat. Soaprock plateaus had dried and their surfaces had weathered to shale. Every morning the sun had moved farther south than the day before, tricking the shadows she had come to think of as the same trees, the same rocks, the same place.
How long had she been walking, how many days? How many nights had she lain on the hard banks and woke the next morning to the river dropping and dropping, like a giant plug had been pulled on the bottom? 
Up ahead, always around the next curve of water and trees, she could hear the sucking sound of the pulled plug. 
The sun crossed the river, rising on one side and setting on the other, followed by darkness and the insect hum of nothingness. But the rushing of the river was always with her, even after she realized that it had ceased rushing and had toned down to a murmur.
She had times of forgetting whether she was walking north or south, whether the river was flowing north or south, and why she was walking, to where and for what purpose.
She forgot what she looked like. She was tangled dark hair stringing on her shoulders. She was moving scratched feet. But Rewis’s face loomed clear as the moon in her mind.
One time, she turned and started walking in the opposite direction, covering ground she had already covered, thinking that Rewis had followed her through the woods and killed the little girl playing in the ditch. No, that had been a dream. She was going back to the cabin where she had stayed for so long with Rewis; the family was due to return for the weekend, and she had to save them. Realizing that this probably was the weekend and she couldn’t make it in time, she turned around again and treaded downriver, picking her way slowly on twice-covered ground. Her thinking kept snagging on something important, something sad but significant, in association with the family’s safety. When finally she pinpointed what it was-there was a dead man lying in front of the cabin, so the family would be on the lookout, the law would be looking out for them-she felt feeble and edgy.
Her shadow belonged to somebody else; somebody was after her and it wasn’t Rewis. It was a stalker who went away if she could stay in the shade. Her own sliding tracks in the damp gray dirt of the east slope terrified her, even knowing they were hers-the girl’s with the moving scratched feet that had been programmed to walk in light and stop at dark.
She had times of recognizing her own madness, shook it off, only to have it pop up again. Then she named her shadow Jesus and walked in sunlight.
Mid-afternoon of another day, and she was resting with her back to a tree trunk to clear her head of the same river view when she heard that clacking of wood on wood she knew so well. She turned easy, waited, saw Rewis, bare-chested and gliding into view, him and the boat, small down below. A long-dreaded sight, though relief and even thrill. It was like a picture in which the subject remained centered and you had all the time in the world to study it. Each detail coming into focus. 
Still as dead, she pressed her head against the tree trunk, becoming one with it. He looked straight at her but apparently didn’t see her. From where she sat in the slope of dense tiered trees, she could see through the gaps between trunks his head turning left, right, him rowing left, right. She saw him pick up the pistol from the floor with its chamber open and blow down the barrel as if drying it. The boat side she could see was molded, green algae, as if it had been set on its side in stagnant water. The warped black motor was tilted back, prop almost touching the shallow water.
After he had passed from view, she sat awhile longer, listening to the oars striking the sides of the boat. It seemed a bad sign that he had survived the capsizing of the boat and the boiling water, as if he could not die. As if he would never die.
She stood and started stepping tree to tree, soft and steady in the whisper and drift of shedding leaves. Listening to the clack of paddle on wood, a measured rhythm like drumming. When she could no longer hear the drumming, she figured he had outdistanced her; she walked faster. Eyes on the wide shallow, rust-colored water ahead. A deep curve, deeper slopes, and when she came out to a straight stretch, she saw him no more than fifty, a hundred yards away, walking ahead of the boat and pulling it through the ankle-deep water over scalloped sand. She walked slower, lighter, tipping tree to tree and stopping when he glanced back or had to step behind the boat and shove it forward. She watched him high-stepping through the water to the west bank. Leaving the boat lodged in sand, middle of the river, the water almost clear now but rust-tinged in the narrow channels along the tree-lined banks. More vines where she was walking and she had no trouble hiding, peeping through the yellow-speckled scrim of leaves to watch him kneel at a spring and drink, stand and start back toward the boat. She heard him cough and realized she may be getting too close. Got still, then started tipping tree to tree again as he tugged the rope attached to the boat.
Open, wide river, straight stretch as far as she could see, then green watergrass and white sand where the water played out to dry land and woods.
The sun was now above the west bank, glittering on the shallow water. Must have been no more than ankle deep, though it appeared calf-deep as Rewis, lifting his boots from the sucking sand, gazed all about, behind now and then.
Staying close, but still hidden by ropy vines and trees, she watched him get into the boat and sit in the stern, back to her and boat unmoving. So strange, like a crazy man sitting in a boat on dry land. 
She reminded herself that he was crazy. Then asked herself did that mean he couldn’t help what he had done, what he would do? She prayed for an answer, literally prayed. She had to know: Lord Jesus, I don’t know what you want me to do. I know Christians are supposed to expect persecution and I know you won’t let more be put on me than I can stand. I know you are with me and I don’t deserve it. I believe in my heart that to let this man go would be worse than to kill him. I ask thy will be done and not mine. I accept, Lord Jesus, when I step out there, you’ll act for me, speak for me. It’s me or him-maybe that’s the way of it. Help me, Lord. Have mercy on both our souls.
Rewis opened a can of beans with his knife, ate, tossed the can into the yellow water. It turned, floated, upended and sank. He lifted the pistol to the guttering sun, blowing down the barrel again. Placed it on one knee and began drying one cartridge then another and dropping them into the chamber. Whirling it shut, he placed it easy as if made of glass on the floor of the boat. Then he got out, treading water to the bow of the boat, took up the rope and began towing the boat again. He was now less than a quarter mile away from the south ridge of green grass, white sand and then woods. Source of the sucking sound: water flowing underground, end of the river.
She had heard that the Alapaha runs underground, somewhere in North Florida, springing up at odd lost places in the woods, sudden pools of water, like blackest ink, mirroring green leaves and blue light, before gathering again and making the short journey to the mighty Suwannee and joining forces en route to the sea. 
She had always imagined the juncture of confluence as the same headwaters and now imagined the headwaters flowing underground at the base of a huge toppled tree as the headwaters that had carried her down with this killer, stopping him finally.
Oh, ye of little faith!
The end of the river was so abrupt and miraculous it took her breath. But at the same time, the scene before her was startling in its simplicity-everything has an end. Every living thing has to renew itself: this spread of tired stagnant water, named the Alapaha, alive in its rank ugliness with the rust-tinged sand and water and uprooted trees. It looked like a desert under water. Then the contrasting oasis of green trees and blue skies beyond.
Beauty is never boastful.
No birdsong, only the weary water sucking under the most massive of tree roots on the southwest corner of the river’s end, the roots clotted with dirt, a raw but magnificent grave. A terrible sundering of earth and water and light that could pass for fire. She didn’t know who she would be when it was over, but she would never be the same. 
She had never seen this stretch of river before and yet she’d seen it a thousand times in her mind, on the river with Rewis. She’d seen the beginning and she had seen the end.
Ruth stayed close along the bank, barely behind him, in the whine of mosquitoes. She brushed at them, raked her neck and face with one hand, back of the other hand on her shirt sleeve and one foot and then the other on the legs of her pants. Not slapping, not swatting, not really caring. She was shocked when she looked down at the connecting red welts of insect bites on the tops of her feet. Her legs were brown bones; her stubby toes looked longer because her nails had grown out and were cooped under like claws. She felt her hair, dry and limp. The touch of her fingers on her face alarmed her-plump cheeks now hollows. But she was still breathing, dead but breathing. All that was left of the girl she knew-Ruth-was inside, where oddly was all that mattered. A stranger outside but inside was Ruth. Though that had changed too. Not gone, but different, older but newer. Alive with a mission. Poppee is sleeping in his grave till the Rapture, like a flash.
Was Rewis crazy or evil? Neither? Both? When she looked up again, she saw Rewis standing with his hands on his hips. His light pants were filthy, greenish-gray and sagging from the weight of his stuffed pockets. He only stood there, staring ahead. That what-the-hell look on his face when he saw that the river he'd been rowing had run out. Did he think that she had drowned? Had he searched for her? Not important.
But she would have liked to know.  She would like to know too whether like her Rewis had heard the child playing in the ditch and gone there, killed her, her family. But Ruth’s wanting to know now had nothing to do with her hoping for rescue; it had to do with them and not her. She didn’t even want to be rescued.
The sun was behind the blind of green vines and leaves, west bank of the river, the sky was almost clear, just shred cotton clouds moving northwesterly.
Rewis was walking slower now, twitching the boat along in the soupy sand, water covering only the tops of his boots. Scalloped sand, clear water, rust-tinged channels alongside. The closer he got to the white sand and green grass and trees, where the river quit, the slower he went, but still he yanked at the boat. Miserable, tired, but determined. Mad as a rabid dog.
Hiding on the east bank, she was almost level with him, near the west bank, when he stepped onto the white beach and dropped the rope, leaving the stern of the boat waggling in the shallow water. Not looking back at the boat, not taking his eyes off the green woods, the blue sky, he wandered ahead, then circled right toward the sucking sound of the water flowing beneath the mammoth tree root. Gone. 
Dwarfed by the giant tree root and its wall of clay and dirt, roots protruding like rusty cables, he stepped behind it, then showed again, just his head and shaking branches, bushes and vines, following the thick broadside trunk up the steep bank, out of sight. 
Vanished in a stand of rustling fanned palmettos and dog fennels higher than his head. 
When he appeared again, popping into view from the cover of vines and bushes, then hopping to the wet sand to the right of the river braiding and funneling beneath the tree root, Ruth was standing at the end of the boat, in the sunlit middle of the river, with the pistol aimed at him.
"What the...?" He stopped in the shade along the bank. "I thought you drownded or something."
He took one step, two steps, stopped.
"You can get closer," she said. "I don't want to miss you when I shoot."
"Hell, gal, you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with that thing." Still, he didn’t move. The sand was washing from around his boot tops. Curling around the tree root in a small cyclone of water.
"You ever seen anything to beat this?" he said and motioned toward the coppery water folding under the tree root. "Looks like the river just runs underground."
"It does."
"You mean to say you knowed that all the time?" His beard was long enough to crook up on the ends, rust-tinged like the water. His voice was amazed, though high-pitched and uncertain, still hoping to just talk.
She stepped around to the middle of the boat with the pistol still pointed at him.
"You know what," he said, hands on his hips and them cocked in the low riding stained white pants, "I ain't never even asked you your name."
"It's Ruth," she said. Bobby had remembered; Rewis had never cared to.
"Ruth. I like that."
"A person should know the name of the person who will kill him."
"Listen," he said and took another step with his hands out. "You ain't no killer. Let's me and you just talk about it. What's eating you? Think I didn't try to find you back there, is that it?" 
Another step, talking. "I did, swannee to goodness, I did." He raised his right hand to swear.
"There's a DNR station about a half-mile up from here." She nodded out through the yonder woods, strikingly green in contrast with the dead water and sand. "Now you can walk it ahead of me, or I can send somebody back after your body. Which?"
He looked in that direction, laughed. Stepped closer, shadow first, into the sun, into the level yellow water, but still a good twenty feet or so from the boat. Contrasted with the tree root, he looked shrunk. Less than man size. "You serious, ain't you?" he asked.
"Yes."
Ratzach. Thou shalt not murder, O giver of life. 
“Yes,” she said again, motioning again with the pistol toward the beach and woods and beyond.
On Rewis’s right, a rusted five-gallon bucket was embedded on its side in sand, water washing through the lacy bottom like a sieve.
"Okay, okay. If nothing else won't do you." He sloshed toward her. Stopped as he heard the pistol cock. 
He held up both hands. Stared at her. His eyes registering her seriousness. 
Be strong in the Lord.
"I will shoot you," she said. "Make no mistake about it."
"Okay, okay." He faced away, then faced back. "Let's go. I'm beginning to think I'd as soon be locked up as free anyhow. If I ain't on the run, I'm waiting trial. Get back in and they got a nother whole list of things against me. But don't never amount to a hill of beans."
“So you just get out and start all over, right?”
“You got it, sister.” He eyed her, hands on his hips again “They wadn’t no more gone give me the chair than they would you if you killed me.”
“Have you ever thought about changing-doing good instead of bad?”
“Shoot, gal!” He laughed, holding up both hand. “I mean, don’t shoot.” He loved his own cleverness. He turned in a circle, churning sand and water. “Next thing you gonna be trying to save me.”
“Jesus saves.”
He stopped, frozen. “You kidding, right?”
“No.”
He laughed. “Hell, I been saved so many times I could do it in my sleep. Parole boards look serious at stuff like that. How come Bobby to be a trustee, he got saved.” 
“Tell me about Bobby; I want to hear how the two of you wound up together.”
“Well, it was like this.” He looked behind him, left then right, hands on his hips and waiting for the chance to rush in and take her down. “Bobby had been what he called witnessing to me; that’s when you…”
“I know what it means, go on.”
“Him up for parole and me bound for the chair he was what you might call turning up the heat. Had me down on my knees next to him and him doing the praying. He could get away with all kinds of stuff, him being a trustee. Besides, he’d saved I don’t know how many guards and what-have-you; the lifers wadn’t on deathrow, most of em, had been made trustees cause of Bobby. Cut down on trouble and got to where you couldn’t tell guard from trustee from Holy Ghost. Like I said, parole boards look real serious at that kind of stuff…”
“Get to the point about Bobby.” She raised the pistol higher, held it tighter, to bolster herself, to let him know she meant business. “He helped you escape, didn’t he?”
“Okay, okay.” He held out both hands like a shield. “Just look out that thing don’t go off with you.” He laughed. “I don’t know how he did it but somehow he convinced the warden to let him spend more time with me; I didn’t have but another eighteen days before chair-time. I had to make like the biggest Christian in the world to make him go before the board and beg for my life. I don’t know what-all he told them, but meantime I was working on them guards.
“The dangdest thing was, I did get one or two of them thinking, confessing their sins and begging God’s mercy where Bobby hadn’t got to first base with them. Me acting the whole time, that’s how good I was at it.
“Listen,” he said, “you mind if I set down a spell in this water? I’m feeling kind of weak-kneed.”
“No. Stay where you are.” The sun was shining straight into her eyes; Rewis’s shadow was growing taller, almost touching the spot where she stood. His bulging pockets looked like humps of lumpy fat on an otherwise thin man.
He placed both hands over his face, then dropped them by his sides. “Maybe I wadn’t saved. I wadn’t, but now…”
“We’re talking about Bobby, not you.”
“Ole Bobby, bless his heart. I led him astray sure as Satan done Jesus. Or tried to. Is that the way it went?” 
Ruth didn’t answer.
 “Talked him into getting me baptized the old-fashioned way, like my mama was. In a river.” Rewis looked around. “Not all that different from this one.”
She felt unbalanced with the water washing the sand from beneath her feet. “Go on.”
“Course the guards had to close their eyes while Bobby was praying. Rifles down by their sides like sticks.
“That’s when I made a break for the woods, Bobby right in behind me hollering for me to come back.”
“That’ll do.” The shadow of his head had reached her. A breeze off in the woods rattled the giant dry poplar leaves.
He talked on anyway. “But wadn’t no going back for neither one of us. And I reckon the guards figgered they was in about as much trouble as we was, since they’d helped Bobby slip me out without the say-so of the warden and all. They come after us, but wadn’t no way they was gone shoot Bobby, not and him the one saved em.” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s how much they thought of him, so all I had to do was stay close.”
 Show me the way, O Lord, stay close.
Steadying the pistol, peering down the barrel, she drew a mental cross-hair from shoulder to shoulder, center of his chest. She would give him one more chance. “Okay,” she said. “Now I want you to turn around and start walking.”
He yanked his head north, upriver. “Hey! You see that?”
She glanced upriver, heard splashing water and imagined in the spangling of the sun that she saw the little girl who had been playing in the ditch. Blonde and fair and blameless, with angel wings in place of arms, the girl flew up, rising, melting into the sun, just as Rewis lunged at Ruth.
Wrestling her down into a spray of sun-shot water, he caught her right wrist, wringing it till she let go of the pistol. Then he began backing through the bogging sand, pistol aimed at her, lying still in the streaming shallows with her neck stiff and her head high. He stopped where the river funneled and braided beneath the tree root, smiling, sun raying around him. 
She knew what was coming up; she thought she did. 
“Hey, girl!” he said. “I couldn’t let you do this.” He stuck the barrel of the pistol into his mouth, pulled the trigger and fell back with a blast into the twist of water. Legs spread, arms spread, he lay there gathering roses of blood washing underground with the river.

Part 6

When Ruth first got out of the hospital, fifteen days later, her mother had packed up what the family needed and moved them out to Poppee’s house. The move was made to get away from everybody crowding and pestering her exhausted daughter. The law, the press, and people-in-general had answers but wanted details, the more salacious the better. Ruth wasn’t ready, may never be ready for that. 
It was at Poppee’s house that Ruth’s mother had broken the news that her daddy was dead. After learning that not only was his daughter missing but his father had been found shot dead, he’d had that inevitable heart attack that his doctors were always warning him about. Ruth had expected that, because all those days in the hospital her daddy hadn’t come. She hadn’t asked though; she’d been waiting to be told. 
Already, to Ruth, there were more dead than living, it seemed. 
The home-side of the story was that Poppee had called the evening Ruth and Mandy had gone missing, to tell Ruth’s and Mandy’s parents that the girls were gone. He’d searched everywhere but couldn’t find them. Then the next morning while the search party was combing the woods around Mayday Beach, he had gone to the horseshoe to look for tracks, and that’s where Rewis had happened up on him and shot him, then hid his body in the palmettos on the upper bank.
Ruth had been the one who told that Rewis had killed her grandfather. She hadn’t gone into detail, hadn’t even told them the part about her making her way back to the horseshoe that first morning after she’d been kidnapped and had managed to escape. She must have arrived shortly after the shooting and interrupted Rewis trying to dispose of her grandfather’s body where he couldn’t be found—in the gar hole. That’s how well she believed she’d come to know Rewis, how he would think, what he would do with a body when he was done with his torture and humiliation.  
She didn’t tell about the keepsake pocketknife belonging to Poppee in Rewis’s possession, because to tell that she would have had to pull everything together into a narrative that she hadn’t been able to do. As for Mandy, she had only been missing till Ruth got home and made her dead, like all the others she had been listing.
On the TV news and in newspapers a trail of death from Mayday to the cabin on the river where Rewis had shot the man out running in the storm had created its own bloody link to the missing girls. Speculation. Rumor. The family had reported a dark-haired girl in a fishing boat with the man who’d shot their dog. The family had found signs of “co-habitation” in the cabin, along with a confusing, inflammatory note, in Ruth’s hand, “Glad we missed you.” 
Initially, the massacre at the baptism had been attributed to a gang of North Florida boys known for their hatred of all-humans-not-Southern-and-white. But FBI ballistics had traced the pistol back to the owners of the river house where Ruth had been captured and Mandy had been killed. After the call to the owners in Orlando, the couple had driven up to Mayday, an elderly man and his wife, and verified that their house had been broken into and guns and ammunition among other things were missing. And that along with the girls’ shoes found at the Mayday bridge had been the evidence that led to the girls’ suspected abduction and linked up to the escaped cons from Jackson, linking up to the trail of deaths along the Alapaha. 
Still, the FBI, the GBI, and local law enforcement in the various counties where the boat had passed en route to the end of the river, hounded the living victim for the locations and names of more bodies. So, it was Ruth’s duty to write them down as they came to memory, while the law waited for her to embroider the whole story from Rewis’s handiwork.
1. Mandy Shawn
2	Fisherman whose boat Rewis stole 
3.    railroad workers (2)
             4.   couples in canoes (Trish Bellamy, her husband, sister and brother-in-law)
5.	multitudes at baptism – little girl in blue dress
6.	 Blackie the dog
7.	man out running during storm at family’s cabin
8.	others Rewis only told about 
She hadn’t mentioned the interlude with Brad because apparently he hadn’t bothered to tip off the law to her whereabouts. And too, she would spare him; and too, she would spare herself more confusion and suspicion. All the press needed was to hear of her passing out drunk to elevate the “co-habitation” rumor to latest-breaking-news status.  
Soon, Ruth would have to see Mrs. Shawn, Mandy’s mother, her daddy and her three sisters. She would have to tell them the truth about why #1 was dead and Ruth herself was alive. She would tell them that her curiosity about the house caused Mandy’s death. But for now #1 on the list would have to wait.
***
Ruth is so thin that she stays cold. Every day she waits till her family is gone, then turns up the heat. Actually, she isn’t as frail as she looks.
 The fake cardinal on the bird clock cheers one time, 1 PM. Ruth’s family will be coming home from school in a couple of hours. Coming through the kitchen door, they will call out “Hello?”—a question—Are you here? Then they will come down the hall and softly knock on Ruth’s bedroom door with its hook of many colored scarves and belts. They will peep inside, shaking the scarves and belts, smiling, asking uncertainly if she needs anything. At first, their smiles would break into tears, but they are making progress, their smiles are holding longer and longer. “Have you eaten today?” her mother, Sue, will ask. Then as always they will close the door softly again, barely moving the belts and scarves on the hook. 
Her family wants her happiness, proof in a smile. Radiance and health. Everybody else wants her to shrink up and be the good victim on TV evening news. 
It has been decided for Ruth that she will start her senior year the following year, 2000. Ruth doesn’t plan that far ahead, not even a day ahead. Not even an hour ahead.
Still, she needs the bird clock to monitor time. Her little brother Cory had brought it from the living room to her bedroom. She doesn’t know why she needs it really, but he had been glad to do her bidding. The princess is home! Ruth hates that. The phoney tomboy is dead. Poppee’s Angel is dead. 
Cory has freckles and really doesn’t act that way, but Ruth thinks he should. 
“Talk to me,” she says.
“Whada you want to talk about?”
“Anything.” 
Cory plays guitar, wants to be a country music singer. While Ruth was away he had won a Middle-school talent show but thinks he didn’t deserve it. Thinks that his winning had to do with his famous sister, not his talent. 
They are celebrities now, the whole family. They don’t know what to do with it. Ruth has told her mother what to do about it: “Wait till another better scandal comes along and we will all be forgotten.”
Ruth’s sister Joan behaves the same way with Ruth that Cory does. 
“Talk to me.”
“What about?”
“Whatever.” 
Joan tells about all Ruth’s friends, naming them. She tells how they cried when Ruth went missing, about those daily circles of crying girls, and the psychologists brought in to counsel them. Troy being Troy, he refused to talk about Ruth, except to his and her family. He would call and call and call, said Joan. “Ruth, you really need to see him.” 
“I can’t. Talk to me about something else, about you.”
 Joan’s been making straight A’s ever since Ruth left; she even made cheerleading squad. Three times she’s tried out and finally she made it. Her happiness cracks, her smiling turns to tears and she is gone.
Ruth’s mother is a nagger now. “Ruth, talk!”
They are losing patience.
Ruth is too.
***
So much has happened while Ruth was away. She has missed memorial services for herself and Mandy, then another for Mandy alone, after Ruth had returned and told where Mandy’s body could be found, and her remains had been recovered from the gar hole. She has missed her daddy’s funeral, her grandfather’s funeral. Her dog has died, but blessedly from old age. Her mother has grown old, her soft curly brown hair has turned to iron. Her face looks drawn, and when she smiles, to Ruth she isn’t really smiling. How can she smile? 
Lying across her bed, warming beneath her white down comforter, Ruth watches her ceiling, white popcorn with sparkles like stars (her mother and grandmother had tried to talk her out of adding the glitter, long ago when her room had been redone). She is loved, fed, safe and free. She is supposed to be going through “the grieving process,” as the counselor appointed to her had called it. Ruth hadn’t needed the counselor to help her sort through all the bad stuff that has happened to her. She has the One from the river, her shadow, for that.
 It’s been tricky, tricky, tricky explaining that. The churches that invite, beg, her to speak about her experience on the river with Rewis, would like to hear the name “Jesus.”  But the others, most of the others, want to hear only the shocking details of the murders and rapes. Say the name “Jesus” to them and immediately Ruth gets labeled ignorant or insane, or both.  
After Rewis had shot himself, Ruth had been led back to the house in the woods near the site where the Alapaha ends, the place where she had earlier watched the little girl chasing through ditches of rainwater. 
Ruth remembers when she got there how the mother on the porch had called the little girl to her, afraid of Ruth, while at the same time trying to be kind and helpful, to reach that calm of overcoming her fright of this ugly pitiful creature washed up by the river into her yard.
The old lady in the wheelchair sat on the porch watching Ruth in the yard. She had thin reddish hair and her skin was speckled, her legs bloated like a dead person’s. She might have been waving at Ruth because her right hand was ever in motion, fanning gnats with a roll of the wrist.
It had taken so long for Ruth to speak. “He’s dead,” she kept saying when she could speak. 
“Who? Who’s dead? Where?” The mother had dark blonde hair; she looked drained, skin and bones, a poor nursing mother. 
“Him. He’s dead.” Ruth could see herself mirrored in the faces of the woman and the old lady in the wheelchair.
The little girl stood with her arms crossed, watching Ruth while backing into her mother, whose hand was pressed flat on the child’s bare chest, as if to shield her from the swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, to protect her from Ruth. 
Dogs all around Ruth were barking, nosing her, licking the insect bites on her legs, her hands hanging down by her side.
“Go draw her a glass of water, Robin. Go.” The mother had shoved the little girl aside. The little girl hung back, staring with those huge blue eyes, then went on across the junky porch and through the open door to the house. 
It was close enough to dark to feel up-ended, the shadows blending. Shrill of insects growing shriller. The peeping of tree frogs had been deafening. There was a stench of goat and mud and human filth. An old dingy toilet had been deposited on the porch like a stool for sitting to enjoy it all. 
“He’s dead, he won’t hurt you.” Ruth had stood shivering, cold. 
“What’s your name, honey?” The mother swatted at a mosquito on her thin arm.
Unbothered, chickens pecked and stepped in the raw dirt below the porch. 
Ruth tried to remember her name, started to say Sister. “Ruth. I believe it’s Ruth.”
“Where you from?”
“The river. Out there.” Ruth gestured toward the river through the darkening woods to the east. Where the weeds and grass turned to trees, she spotted what looked to Ruth like a sunken grave with a weathered wreath of plastic pink and white flowers. A child’s grave maybe.
“You a runaway?” the old lady piped up in a scolding voice. “What ails you?” Then lower to the mother, she said, “Gal’s messed up, bad messed up. Skeeters and gnats ain’t even fazing her.” 
Ruth said, “I want to go home.” 
The little girl had slipped back through the doorway, onto the porch. She eased up to her mother and handed her the glass of water she’d been sent to get. Then she went over to stand next to the old lady in the wheelchair. 
“Here.” The mother stepped forward, fearfully, handing the glass down to Ruth.
Ruth took the glass. Looked up at the woman as if to ask what she should do with it. 
“Go on, drink it.”
The little girl was fiddling with the brake lever on the wheelchair and the old woman told her to quit. “What did I tell you about that ole river?” 
“Quit, Robin.” The mother glanced back at the child called Robin. “Y’all gone wake up the baby.” Then to Ruth in the yard, “My husband’ll be on in with the truck any minute now. He’ll take you where you need to go.”
“Why can’t she come in, Mama?” Cross-armed again, the little girl came to stand at the doorsteps, peering down at Ruth. “You let Molly come in. The skeeters is eating her alive.”
“She can’t feel them. Hush, Robin,” said the mother. Then to Ruth, “Go on and drink. Drink you some water now.”
Ruth sipped the water at first, then slugged it down, then vomited it up.
***
From then till now, it had been light and dark and voices and staring up at the grainy sky, then ceilings, hospital white tiles with butterflies painted on them, her Poppee’s unpainted bead-board, the foamy white-sparkly ceiling of her own bedroom. 
So many questions that she couldn’t answer for so long. Who, what, where, when? Who, what, where, when? Those alone got answers. Not the whole untellable story. No details. No why. When the doctor, a short blond woman with a common but memorable face, had asked Ruth if she’d been raped, Ruth had only nodded yes. The woman had probed and probed for more information, details, on the rape—once, more than once? But Ruth hadn’t answered. Partly because she didn’t want to and didn’t need to but also because she couldn’t recall how many times. And too what did it matter now?  Now, it was all coming back in pieces, particles of remembering. 
Ruth’s memory is filling in, her mind filling out.
 So many dead. More dead than living, it seems.
Sue-the-teacher so far has been able to handle the list, to go over each name with the law officer who comes and goes, day after day. Being a teacher, she is good at speaking in abstracts, the language required by law for wrapping up such notorious matters.
Sometimes she talks about moving away. She won’t, though she could afford to. Money comes at them from every which-way. Pity-and-absolution money. The givers are so relieved that it wasn’t their daughter this heinous crime happened to, they are glad to hand over their money. The churches too—love offerings, they call them. Mandy’s family probably receives more money than Ruth’s does, Ruth thinks, because regardless, death remains the biggest draw.   
###
Ever since her kidnapping Ruth has been terrified of going outside. Everyday she peeps around the curtains of the very same window, overlooking the mannerly street and neat houses of her neighborhood in Valdosta, as if showing herself, like a withdrawn child, how calm and harmless is the world out there. But she knows that beyond, that other world, even the humble Alapaha River, had once also seemed peaceful, no danger as long as you obeyed the laws of man and nature and kept clear of water moccasins. It had all been a ruse. She wouldn’t take more chances.  Snakes in the form of Rewis were everywhere. 
This day she lingers at the window, parting the curtains, staring at her grandfather’s bronze pickup parked to the right of the driveway off the carport. After his funeral, after his only son’s funeral, somebody had brought the new pickup to Sue’s house; the truck had been locked and the keys put in a blue ceramic tray with other keys on the counter next to the kitchen/carport door. 
Ruth imagines that the inside of the truck still smells of her grandfather, like peaches to her, and she considers, same as everyday, taking the key and going out and unlocking it and just sitting inside. With the doors locked, of course. Her heart beats harder just thinking about it. She really wants to do it, and reason tells her that she could make it safely from the house, only a few yards from the dead-bolted kitchen door, to the spot of overgrown grass where the truck is parked, without being caught and hauled away by somebody like Rewis. Sometimes she has trouble believing he is dead. He’s behind every bush, every tree, every corner of the house, even inside sometimes. Often she hides in one and then another closet till her family comes home from school, then scurries like a thief back to her room where they expect her to be. 
Heart hammering wild and her hands shaking so that she can hardly tug on her soft leather black boots, she means to go out that door she can see from the bench in the hallway where she is sitting. She has dressed in her younger sister’s blue jeans—her own are too large now—and a red-plaid flannel shirt; she has dressed to go out and she means to go out. 
Fishing the brightest brass key to her grandfather’s truck from the tray on the counter by the kitchen door, she flips the padlock, turns the knob and sucks in the cold dry air as the door swings open. Staring left then right and ahead, she steps outside to the concrete carport with a greasy spot like a rain cloud that has been there as long as she can recall. Quickly, she heads for the bronze pickup, then panics when she tries the key in the lock and it doesn’t fit, looking behind, front to rear of the streamlined walls of Poppee’s last new truck. Then she turns the key over and it fits and she is inside the truck with the doors locked again before she can change her mind and race back into the house. 
Because the truck is so cold, she pokes the key into the ignition and after a few tries, starts the engine, waiting for it to warm up before toggling the heater switch to High. Yes, the inside of the truck does smell like Poppee, and his old John Deere green cap is on the seat, maybe where he left it the morning he met up with Rewis at the gar hole. 
Not intending to, really, she puts the truck in reverse and backs out onto the street—nobody out and about and not a single car till she reaches the end of her own street and heads east toward downtown Valdosta. She has in mind to turn around and start for home, save going out to Poppee’s for another brave day. She’s shaking way too much to be driving. She praises herself for her progress in getting this far, no need pushing it. 
But when she gets to the railroad overpass south of town, and sees from up high all the row shanties and even a white church with a spire rising up to the clear blue sky, she decides to go farther before turning around. But she keeps driving, driving on and driving on, toward the outskirts of town on 94, then takes the left arm of the Y onto Howell Road, the road to Poppee’s house. 
The clock on the dash says 12:10, but she knows it’s really after 1, because of daylight saving time. Poppee had been dead when October rolled around and so the clock hadn’t been reset. 
Really, Ruth likes to be rolling along, in the truck alone, with only the green cap and the smell of peaches and the heat inside and cold sun outside. She feels safer than she had inside the house. No corners, no nooks for hiding. What can it hurt just to drive on to Poppee’s and have a look at the old place? She knows the cows are gone, that they have been sold. Her mother has told her that. She won’t get out of the truck, she will just turn around under the huge, touching live oaks in the front yard, and be back home before school lets out and she is missed. She should have left a note saying where she had gone. No, she shouldn’t have come. But she is now over halfway there, driving up the curvy narrow road lined with tall pines, tree tops swaying in the wind. 
If she turns back now, she thinks, she will never leave the house again. 
At the crossing in Howell, she can see on her left the large gray frame house, Mandy’s house. No car in the driveway, meaning nobody is home, but Ruth has no intention of stopping anyway. Save that for another day, another drive, another nerved-up venturing forth. 
She turns right, past four or five facing frame house, then across the railroad track due south of the leaning two-story white Masonic Building, one of those old closed buildings that she and Mandy used to explore. The dark tilting stairs at the back had been fascinating, daring. At the top were ghostly old podiums and benches, broken windows, even a couple of rotting red silky robes, and a few ripped and rat-gnawed Masonic rule books that had at first seemed intriguing, then boring because they gave up no secrets of the secretive club, only something called Robert’s Rules of Order.
Ruth takes a left off the sun-glistened paved straightaway into the shade-dappled dirt yard of Poppee’s lofty large unpainted house, green rockers tilted to the wall of the wide, full-length front porch, how he always left the chairs when he wasn’t sitting out there. Kept the dew and rain from collecting in the seats, and any stray dogs happening up in the yard from curling in them.
Nothing has changed really, not that Ruth can tell from looking through the windshield, but anybody could tell that the place is empty, nothing is moving or has been moved. The green tractor that goes with the cap on the seat next to her is parked under the nearest tin shelter to her left, hay stacked in blocks under the farthest tin shelter, the one nearest the pasture fence. She finds herself driving on through the gate, open pasture to the left and right of the track running through to the woods ahead. Windrows of cured but ungathered hay, and a few naughty weeds cropping up, which Poppee would never have allowed when he was alive.  
Meaning to turn around at the end of the pasture and the start of the woods she keeps to the bumpy two-path road through close-growing pines and scrub oak, the road to the gar hole on the river. 
It’s okay, she tells herself, when at last she admits that she is going to the river, to the gar hole which she’d last seen the morning Rewis appeared on the bench-like willow with a gun in his hand. 
She’s still shaking, almost petrified, when she drives up to the bank of the unseen river and sees a strip of yellow police tape in the stands of swamp palmetto running to swamp and slews on her right. Driving up as far as she can go, to a large fallen oak on the upper bank, she tries to see down to the sunken river, the gar hole, by leaning forward, but can only see openness beyond the leafy live oak, felled by the river last time it flowed out of banks.
If she had thought about it she would have expected the river to be out of banks now, in December. 
No longer shaking, but in place of shaking are sharp spears of fright with every tree shadow overlaid on the truck. She starts to put the truck in reverse and back out into the palmettos, to leave. She checks the door locks to be sure they are in punched-down position. Still, she sits there, overcome suddenly with the need to hear and see and smell the river. Something she never thought she’d either want or need to do again. 
This is where Mandy died, where her grandfather died. This is the location of her capture for the second time and her nightmare ride down the river alone with Rewis.
She can picture him sitting on the willow bench with a gun in his hand, just below the upper bank where she is sitting safe in the truck. What did I tell you about that mean ole river? The voice of the old lady warning the little girl near the end of the Alapaha echoes in Ruth’s ears.
Ruth had been prepared for how she would feel after shooting Rewis, but not for how she would feel after he shot himself. It was so unreal, so unlikely, that all she could do was sit in the shallow water where he had shoved her when he wrested the pistol from her. She hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him sprawled and bleeding in the stream where the Alapaha flowed beneath the giant tree root.
Then something on the upper bank above the spot where he had fallen caught her eye. The little girl Ruth had imagined seeing only moments before was standing cross-armed, watching the scene before her with unbelievable detachment. Bare feet, bare chest, in only filthy white panties, she stood watch. 
It was as if, Ruth thought, one was waiting for the other to make the first move, to set the world in motion again now that Rewis was dead. But what if he wasn’t really dead? She started to call out to the child, to tell her to go, just in case, but found she couldn’t speak. 
Of course he was dead. Ruth could see from where she was sitting that his face was a bloody pulp, half his head was blown away. His pants legs ballooned with air made him look long-dead and bloating. As a Christian she should have felt compassion, love, brotherly love, that love of suffering-with, same as she felt for Jesus in pictures of him nailed to the cross. But all she felt was hollowed out from all she had been through. A purged feeling, and yet not happy, not even relieved yet. All she could do was go through the motions, do next and next and next, move. But how, where? Now that she was free, she felt bound, uncertain. The end of the river, the end of Rewis, became her end too. 
Katydids all around were the natural ringing in her ears, the sucking sound of the river washing underground had always been there inside her, the rushing of blood to her heart. The smells of rust and rot, the sharp smell of the river, were her own personal odors. Off in the woods, overland, crows were calling, calling, but not for her.
She would stay where she was. She would die there. Sick as she felt, it wouldn’t take long. 
All this time on the river with Rewis, every moment, every hour, every rivermile, she had believed that as soon as she was rid of him, as soon as she could get away, she would hike out of the woods to somebody’s house or a highway, head home and pick up her life the way it was before. From the very beginning, from the moment she spied Rewis on the widow’s walk of the river house, till now, sitting in the water soon to be washing underground, that hadn’t been true. She wasn’t the same girl as then, and nobody she knew before would be the same. All she’d fought for, all the miles she had gained to get to this end, had been pointless, futile as her escape that first night, her making it back to the gar hole the next morning only to have Rewis waiting on the bench-like tree with a gun in his hand. There would always be a gun on her.  
“What now, Lord?” she said, gazing off toward the going sun and the little girl motioning with a hand for her to come. Arm reaching out with an upraised palm, wiggling her fingers, a sort of upside-down bye-bye. It was the same mesmerizing method Poppee had taught Ruth to lure the calves to her when she wanted to pet them. 
The little girl started walking, slowly, along the bank, still gesturing for Ruth to come. 
“No,” Ruth said. “I can’t.”
Either the girl hadn’t heard her or refused to take no for an answer, because she kept walking, motioning with that upside-down bye-bye.
Ruth stood, water streaming down her body and trickling into the river. She was shaking, freezing, even in the edge of sun slipping away into shadows of the trees on the upper bank. Her legs felt heavy. Though the water was shallow it felt deep, as she slogged out toward the little girl, stepping slowly, looking back, motioning for Ruth to follow. 
After what seemed like miles of wading water, Ruth made it to the bank, climbing up over tupelo roots and stobs of broken trees, never taking her eyes off the blond child, not once looking back to see if Rewis was following. Her fear was for that moment gone. It had been with her so long, and now it was gone, lifted like a heavy coat from her shoulders that she would need back to keep from freezing, trembling with fear so natural to her now.
The child stayed always a few yards ahead, sloping up the bank gradually, not glancing back now at Ruth stumbling along through the bamboos and bushes leading up and into the woods.
She reminded Ruth of the little bull she’d raised and later had to shoot. The way he would tip ahead so lightly, eager for the head-scratching from Ruth but at the same time afraid of her. Then Ruth recalled the image of the child turned angel, flying up and melting into the sun, as Rewis slammed into her and she fell back into the water.
Ruth gasped, holding to a tupelo branch to steady herself. “An angel?”
The child stopped and turned, cocking her blond head, her hand out in that upside-down bye-bye.
Ruth opens the door of the truck, leaving the engine idling, and steps out slowly and slowly walks forward to the path leading down to the left of the fallen oak. Below she can see the bench-like willow where she’d last seen it with Rewis perched there with a pistol in his hand. 
Only white sand and bare hickories, green pines and tupelos. The strong tart smell of the tannic water. The river flowing peacefully around the hook of the horseshoe of bright white sand. Springs trickling from the farthest walls of blue rock. Shallow yellow water marbling brown before dumping into the inky black gar hole. 
Looking around at the clustered palmettos cordoned off by the yellow tape, she sighs, “Make good memories here to overpower the bad.”
She climbs down the bank, hanging to rank bushes, at last standing on the squeaky sugar sand with only her shadow cast ahead, and thinks about how she got here, safe and free, in body the same, but a new Ruth.

†††