She calls him to her where she is sitting on the pine straw next to Shelton and sets him on her lap and starts undressing him. His bottom is wet. But she’s done a better job of potty training on the road this long hot evening than she ever had at home.
She walks off with him, butt-naked, to let him peepee behind a withered orange wax-berry myrtle, one of the last bushes to hold its green after the drought got a grip.
Waiting, Kim hears Shelton reinforcing his earlier speech to Sis’ Shirley on caution when playing around with Adam. She seems to be mildly quarrelsome, defensive, but she gets it. Then she starts in on the radio news in the car—“I tell you things be bad all over. Last three years be the worse.”
After they have cleaned up and scattered the potato peels not eaten, Shelton softly sings and prays and Kim nurses Adam till he falls asleep.
A mother’s milk, she knows, is the only whole food, followed by the egg, so she’s in no hurry to wean him. Three more years, if Sis’ Shirley is correct in her timing, won’t matter psychologically to the boy. As with everything in her life now Kim is passing moment by moment and doing what comes next and next and is for the best. Did she do what was for the best this morning?
At first light, the next morning, they watch an orange fox, the color of the woods, scarffing down their scraps from supper the night before. He is all bones, eyes and furry tail.
Sis’ Shirley thinks he is rabid and wants to drive up the road aways to pee and eat and get herself together. Generally moody in the morning, she gets all agitated in the backseat and Adam mirrors her behavior.
All that Kim has so carefully packed in back before leaving home has now unpacked itself—a mound for the dog to drape her body over. And besides she stinks of old-dog musk.
Shelton makes Sis’ Shirley settle down and circles the Land Rover over the scratchy dead grass and briers and turns around, headed for the dirt road. He is almost there, out in the open, when Kim spies on her right a flash of light from what she suspects is an automobile hood on roof.
“Stop!” She throws out one hand the way she used to do with Buck when she had to brake abruptly.
Whoever it is has spotted them and is driving slowly forward to meet them when they reach the road.
Kim feels her face growing white, prickles of fear like yesterday when the police car had stopped her. Could this be the same or another police car? Maybe the Land Rover has been spotted from the air by a helicopter and the law has put two and two together.
“Jesus help!” squeals Sis’ Shirley. “Somebody coming to rob us.”
“Desus!” Adam cries, wanting his doll.
Dixie barks, high-decibel barking that echoes about the car.
“Can you make out any details on the car, Kim?” Shelton asks.
“Not yet. Too dusty.”
Sis’ Shirley is totally panicked and Adam is squealing, trying to worm his way out of his seat. Sis’ Shirley picks up the doll from the floor and hands it to him. He takes it but continues to squeal and squirm, as if unable to stop now that he has started. Same with the dog, who is now swallowing barks and belching them up.
“Y’all pipe down back there,” Shelton says, adding, “Please.”
“What we do now?” Sis’ Shirley dips back and forward, her rhinestone-studded glasses on the tip of her small blunt nose.
“I guess we just have to ease ahead,” Shelton says, “and pray it’s not a government patrol.”
“Or one of them people after our food.” Sis’ Shirley peers between Shelton and Kim. “Hear tell they kill you over a pair of shoes.”
“Sis’ Shirley, do something with Adam, will you?” His screaming is driving Kim crazy, making her milk leak.
“Hush, baby,” Sis’ Shirley hisses at him. “You keep that up the po-lice gonna get you?”
His screaming changes to the sound of a siren.
“Sis’ Shirley, no.” Kim turns in the seat, set to slap her sour face.
Suddenly, she pops open the door on her side and sails out, slamming it and high-stepping toward the other car—yes, it is black—bunching the waist of her yellow dress in back so that it is caught in the elastic of her panties and the lighter wrinkles behind her knees are showing.
“Kim, what?” Shelton almost shouts.
“I don’t know. Let’s watch. Give her credit. She’s not as helpless as she tries to act.” Okay, so the car is black but it doesn’t have a light bar on top.
“But what if she’s scared and decides to turn against us to save herself?”
Kim has already thought about that.
Adam still rares in his seat and screams.
Kim twists, knees in the seat, reaching back and flipping the safety latch on the baby seat. Baby Jesus tumbles to the floor as she drags Adam out and between the tall head rests. The dog hops over the seat and sits where Sis’ Shirley had sat. Kim sets Adam on her lap—“Shh! Hush, baby”—and fumbles a breast from her white shirt and lets the nipple pop into his mouth.
He has to be terrified, reliving yesterday. His tiny heart is beating like the wings of a caught sparrow. All she knows to do is nurse him. It’s the first thing comes to mind. She’s used her breasts as pacifiers and bottles and stoppers for so long that they itch and prickle as if she’s been wallowing in nettles.
When Sis’ Shirley gets to the car, she leans in the open window on the driver’s side, talking, smiling; the only giveaway to her murderous nerves is the jabbing of her shoe heels in the boggy dead sand of the road.
She stands her tallest, still propped with hands on the downed window of the car. She points up the road, down the road, north and south over the woods. She nods. She hums and smacks.
Now Shelton and Kim can see that the person in the car is a black man wearing a cap with a logo matching Sis’ Shirley’s Selah campaign button.
Another minute and he takes off the cap and whacks her playfully on the arm. They talk in earnest for a few more minutes, and then when he starts to go, they make a big whoopty-do about parting, waving, him backing up and both laughing while Sis’ Shirley paws up the road.
She watches him leave, grinning, then stomps across the road to the Land Rover. Opening her door and letting the dog out, she slides in, humming and patting Shelton on the shoulder. “Ain’t bad for a old lady, huh?”
“What were you telling him?”
“Tell him I work for you folks, taking care of the baby, and we on vacation and have to stop to pee.”
“Did he ask about us?”
“Not so you’d notice. Y’all black as me through these tinted windows.” She fidgets, overly satisfied with herself. “Besides, he know ain’t no Christians gone hire a old lady wearing a Selah button to help raise their boy to stand up for the side of right.”
“Good, you did good, Sis’ Shirley,” Shelton says, eyeing her and smiling in the rearview. “Just don’t rub it in.”
“God’ll get me, I know.” She folds over cackling, hanging one of her work-enlarged hands on Shelton’s shoulder. “Me and him, we talking bout the beast, my boy Selah’s bad car. Say can’t no bumbs or guns put a dent in it.”
“Sis’ Shirley, doesn’t that strike you as kind of strange—the beast? Same name given the antiChrist in the bible?”
“The car name that, Selah ain’t.”
While they argue good-naturedly Kim continues to nurse Adam—so happy to still have him—smoothing his blond curls from his forehead. She was right to do what she did yesterday and she was right about bringing Sis’ Shirley along.
Chapter 20
Shelton, driving east down the same dirt road, toggles the radio on and scans for music. Blips of news on every station and Sis’ Shirley gobbles it up like candy while Shelton, out of gratitude, feeds her more: China and Russia are still warring over Israel; a new virus has infected tens of thousands of China’s children; brown clouds of pollutants hovering over Beijing are causing health problems; a young man with a gruesomely painted black-and-white face went on a
rampage at a Belgian Child-care center Friday, stabbing two babies and a female worker to death and seriously wounding twelve others.
“What I tell you?” What I tell you?” Sis’ Shirley pipes from the backseat. “What worse than that, stabbing them babies?” Finally, she has found the piece of candy that satisfies.
“Cool it!” Shelton says to her face in the rearview.
Then at last a winter holiday song about snow and it ninety-seven degrees with hot breezes puffing about the car. To save on gas, they’d buzzed the windows down and switched off the air conditioner.
After Kim had fed, washed up and changed Adam’s wet diaper she’d allowed him to nap in Sis’ Shirley’s lap. She rocks him gently while brushing back the blond curls from his pink face. “Ain’t gone let nobody take my baby. Ain’t gone let nobody mess with you,” she croons.
The spell is broken; she and Shelton are no longer on the outs. He allows her to boast and talk and carry on and even jokes around with her about what a great job she did with that man back there. She is the center of attention again, this time good attention, and she is loving it.
Kim’s arms ache from tugging at Adam and holding him tight and it feels good to hand him over to another woman who loves him too. As obsessive and unhealthy as Sis’ Shirley’s love for Adam may be—much like Kim’s nursing him still—it’s just as necessary. She knows Sis’ Shirley would never allow him to be taken away. Her eyes sting thinking about those stabbed babies in Belgian. She wonders if the Child-care Center where the attack took place isn’t really an institution like the one the police woman told her about.
“We should be getting close to Fargo.” Shelton says low, turning down the radio, whose music has faded into news—“polls show popularity of Abdul Selah is on the plunge due to broken promises and policies.”
He switches it off. “That’s the last of Sis’ Shirley’s news for a while.”
“But we’ll listen, right?”
“Some. When we have to.”
“I guess we’re not taking the highway?” Kim asks.
“No, not till we have to. From Fargo to the park. We won’t be meeting much traffic because John says the government closed it down for lack of funding.”
He hadn’t told Kim that—maybe believing she wouldn’t go if she thought it was so isolated.
Sis’ Shirley, in the back seat, now has her head tilted back, sleeping, with her pop-eyed glasses peering up at the ceiling. Even Dixie is sleeping, curled head to tail high up on a mound of bedding and clothes.
In Fargo, a little four-store town with a scattering of run-down, frame houses and a Methodist church, set back from the road, with a tall white steeple and a red sign on the door, Shelton takes a left and crosses a rusty railroad track and drives on past the facing buildings. All are dark inside behind broken windows.
The hot air smells of pine tar, smoke and dust, but the woods farther to the north appear to be the source of the smoke. The woum-shish sounds of the Land Rover passing buildings is all at once broken by chimes from the church’s steeple—“Nearer My God to Thee.”
Shelton and Kim look at each other, eyes filled with disbelief, with unasked questions. When the hymn is over, Shelton drives on.
Kim remembers the Catfish Cafe, stuffed with dusty “antiques,” deer antlers and crochet pieces for sale, from the weekend she and Dan had gone to the Swamp and rented a boat, then stopped back by to eat before the long drive on to Valdosta, sixty miles away.
Now the cafe with its rough cypress vertical siding and front porch is a splintered hull, though a few of the faded plastic flowers stuck into a bed of cypress mulch remain. It looks like a pet cemetery.
No sign of anybody as Shelton drives on up to the last gutted service station and turns around to head south and then east to the Swamp.
Ahead they can see the concrete bridge over the Suwannee River. A few small cinder-block and wood houses line the right side of the road, backed by parched woods.
“Do you think there are people inside these houses?” Kim asks.
All is quiet in the back seat.
“My guess is the good people are inside and the bad are out prowling.”
Crossing the bridge, they can see far below that the swift black water of the Suwannee has quit flowing and all that remains are puddles contained in bowls of white sand. The bristles of most of the tall cypresses, each side of the river bed, are the shade of dead straw, but many are already shed and the trees stand like poles with perches for birds if there were any birds but they are all gone.
At the turn-off leading straight to the closed-down park, the house on the left corner has burned down to its concrete foundation. A red brick chimney stands like a monument to the people who had lived there.
The supplies inside the car shift with various loud rattles and clanks as Shelton drives the Land Rover over a partially dismantled railroad crossing.
More houses on the left. All look empty. The old unpainted turpentine commissary has partially caved into the briers and weeds since Kim had last passed this way. Behind a large unpainted old house, Kim sees a woman in a white sweater pulled close dashing to her backdoor and staring out at the car.
Kim and Shelton had long ago quit wondering what other people thought about the seemingly sudden sorry mess the world is in; they figure most people, like themselves, are just trying to stay put and stay alive and hidden out from others who might steal what they’ve managed to save and destroy them.
Her son has never even played with another child.
“The quiet’s kind of nice back there,” says Shelton peering in the rearview.
“Maybe it’ll stay that way till we get to the Swamp. What? About twenty miles?”
“Give or take a few.” His solemn face breaks into smiling. He glances out then back at her; she imagines he is wondering what she thinks about the dead trees, shed and unshed, and the ghoulish, blackened fingers of giant ferns, withered palmettos and other bushes.
“Do you think it’s safe to stay back in here?” she asks.
“Who knows? We can go on to the coast if you want to.”
She longs to stand on white sand with waves crawling over her feet like soft kittens and as far as she can see there is only blue water and joined sky. No. There will be people there, lots of people and police. She can’t risk Adam being taken from them. And the people won’t be like she remembers people when she used to be one of them.
“We’ll scout it out here,” she says.
Dark clouds mixed with gray have been building overhead since early morning, so maybe it will rain.
“How much drinking water did John let us have?”
“Enough to last a several weeks, depending. Then we’ll be boiling to sterilize.”
“We can do that.”
“Yeah, if we can find the water.” He pats her knee closest to him. “Always water in the old Okefenokee. Probably one of the last places to go dry. We’re blessed.”
She smiles. “Yes.” She covers his scarred hand with hers.
They are quiet passing through the open swing-gate and brick booth where visitors used to stop and pay to enter the park. Left and right are bronze plaques with historical and geographical information and facts about the Okefenokee: Indian lore, battles won and lost; how many acres—half a million—are contained within the largest swamp in North America. Opening and closing time and regulations, other pertinent information no longer pertaining.
Loose gravel spins from the tires of the Land Rover, pecking at the underside of the car. Warm breezes smell of pine tar and swamp mud as the clouds gather overhead and you can almost believe in rain again. If not for the fine sand wind-swept to the gravel road furling around the sides of the car and through the open windows.
At the end of the road where the main channel into the Swamp is usually alive with fish-teeming black water it is mostly mud with a few large puddles bright orange from the reflection of dead trees. The woods all around look like rust and cast
an eerie shade over six rows of unpainted cabins on the left.
Shelton brakes and puts the car in park while they look through the windshield. The two-room park commissary, built over the channel, has been looted with broken glass and trash on the surrounding wooden deck. A red Coke machine has been overturned, the metal back pried open and the walls kicked in leaving pools of light.
On their right, the picnic area is a shamble of fallen oak limbs and overturned trash cans. “Hopefully coons,” Kim says.
“Okay, lady. Which house will it be?” Shelton puts the car in drive, heading left down a wind-swept lane through the dead oaks and pines, past the first row of cabins—some doors open and see-through broken windows with shudders flung wide.
“You pick.” She feels light with fear, seeing the woods so dry. The fact that no one else is here makes her doubly afraid. If the park is safe people would be here trying to get water and hide out. Well, maybe they’d all gone to the coast where even though the sea water isn’t drinkable it makes them feel less thirsty and safe from fire.
Shelton drives around to the farthest cabin, on the northwest corner, and stops on the woods-side of the house, hidden from the main road. He buzzes the windows up halfway, switches off the car and then motions for her to slip out quietly on the other side.
In the back seat, Sis’ Shirley is still sleeping with her head tilted back and her mouth open, revealing the gold tooth. Adam’s head is in her lap, thumb poised at his parted lips. Behind them, Dixie is flattened, belly-down, on the mound of clothes and blankets and sheets. One perked ear twitches, eyes open a peep, then close in her wrinkled square face.
Out of the car, heading for the cabin, Kim catches up with Shelton and grabs his hand. “Even Dixie’s asleep. Can you believe it!”
He squeezes her hand, walking on toward the small front porch facing woods on two sides. Warped wood benches and shelves line the edges of the porch.
“I guess you picked this cabin because its windows aren’t broken.”
“Back off the main road too.”
They climb the wooden steps up to the porch covered in nail-pricked tin.
Kim looks out at the close dead woods and thinks about fire.
“Anybody home?” Shelton calls from the open door.
Kim wraps her arms around his waist, stepping forward with him. What will they see inside? All she can smell is pine sap, dried leaves and sunned wood. Not bad. She wants nothing this moment but to be alone with him, in-love and alone.