“Jack!” he barked, “Jack you halfwit sumbitch!”
“Don’t you worry, sir. I’ll take care of it,” Reggie called out
as he rushed onto the fishing dock from around back of the house. Then Johnny
said, “Mr. Binx, Reggie gonna get your son, don’t you worry, he’ll be fine.”
His voice was soft, soothing, like a mental health professional trying to talk
someone down from a fit.
Reggie ran out onto the dock under the light, his bare feet
sliding out from under him as he fell on his ass with a crash, shaking the
whole dilapidated structure. I stepped out onto the slick surface of the dock,
holding the doorframe and extended an arm to Reggie who pulled himself up,
grabbing my injured shoulder. I howled with pain, thinking I should have
brought the goddamn sling. Meanwhile Jack was sliding along the sloping
dock, then jumping, slipping his feet around in an uncanny display of natural
balance, all the while avoiding falling on his prodigious butt. Toya and Eddie
were on the screened porch, watching Jack’s crazy boogaloo and Reggie’s
flailing attempts to grab him, sliding and falling until he finally got his
arms around one of the crooked posts and righted himself.
Suddenly Jack stopped and stared out into the duckweed off the
stern of the Sissy Mae, probably twenty yards away where the yellow lights from
the dock faded into the darkness of the channel. “My pants!” he shouted,
pointing at small floating pile atop the swamp vegetation. “And my underpants!”
Goddamnit, I cursed under my
breath. I thought I saw those pants sink!
Then, just as Reggie leapt for the tackle, Jack ran down the
dock and right into the water, unaware of the line attached to his pants and
underpants. The duckweed barely came up to his middle, and he parted it with a
wide sweeping motion, like parting jungle growth on an expedition, steadily
sinking in the mud with each step. I ran down the pier to where I’d cleated the
line and attempted to pull the bundle closer to where Jack was thrashing in the
weeds.
“Grab the line, Jack,” I shouted. Then, just as he got his hands
on it a deafening shotgun blast split the soft and heavy night.
Binx dropped, out cold. Eddie pulled the shotgun out from under
his unconscious brother and headed back inside, cursing loudly at this pathetic
display of Southern idiocy. But before Eddie made it through the door Jack let
out an earsplitting feral howl, dropped the clothes, let go of the line and
started writhing in the water. A seizure? Puce foam formed around his flailing
limbs, a greenish, ochre mass of bubbles, a bayou milkshake. Then the writhing
teen was under water, drowning perhaps, then up again, wild, wiggling and
screaming in the mud. “Get that boy a life preserver!” Eddie shouted, “but do
not set foot or anything else in that water!”
There was a preserver hanging next to the door of the hold, so I
jumped off the pier onto the gunwale, tore it off the wall and pitched it to
Reggie, who in turn pitched it right onto the mass of bubbles.
“Jack! Jack! Grab the life preserver! Jack!” Reggie yelled. The
boy emerged with a hellish bark, glasses down around his neck, head strap
loose, eyes rolled back as he pulled a monstrous snake out of the water and
hurled it onto the bow of the Sissy Mae. Arm hooked in the donut, he collapsed
into the water.
“Mister Howard, get down here and help me pull him out. I don’t
think he’ll let go of the donut. Come on!” So Reggie and I began to try and
haul Jack – two hundred and fifty pounds of gelatinous flab – out of the muddy,
weed-choked water. Meanwhile Eddie had climbed up to the pilothouse where,
shotgun at the ready, he swept the emergency lamp around and over Jack as the
boy sank deeper in the mud.
“Jack, just relax your legs. We will pull you out, promise,”
Reggie yelled.
“Ten o’ clock, snake at ten o’ clock,” shouted Eddie from above.
I turned just as the report shattered and sent pieces of water moccasin flying
every which way.
“Arghhhhhhh! Ooooh! God save me!” Jack screamed from the water,
thrashing his arms to ward off more attacks. In another minute we got Jack to
the pier, but then we had to get him up. His terrified screaming was as
horrific as anything I’ve ever heard come out of a human – a Barney Fife
possessed by demons – and there was no doubt in my mind that his hysteria was
speeding the venom through his system at triple the normal rate.
After Reggie, Toya and I managed to get Jack’s whole limp body
onto the dock a light approached from further down the channel in the direction
of Dr. Raymond Cobb’s camp, where my sister was supposed to be staying. The
boat was screaming down the narrow channel at full throttle, creating a massive
wake that splashed violently against the shore, probably awakening every
cottonmouth and alligator in the area. Just before arriving the driver cut the
motor and coasted alongside the pier, to where we stood around Jack. The driver
jumped out without a welcome or introduction and started asking questions. Have
we found the bites, did we see the snake, how long since he was bit etc.
Finally Eddie said, “Thanks so much for comin’ over, Ray. I ‘spose you heard
the gunshots?”
Our group was silent as the doctor looked for the bites. “Looks
like more than one cottonmouth got a piece of this boy. You said he threw one
of the snakes on board?”
“Uh, yessir,” Reggie said. “I suppose that snake is up there
someplace.” The doctor wiped away some mud from Jack’s calf to reveal a heinous
wound, like the snake took a bite out of him. The calf was already bigger than
a football.
“Well, it looks like he ripped the snake right out of his leg,”
said the doctor. “See if you can find that fucker, will you please?”
Just as Reggie jumped over the gunwale with a flashlight I heard
a siren in the distance coming our way; whirling lights of red and yellow
flashed in the treetops, then around the corner into our smaller channel. It
was an emergency airboat, the water equivalent of a police car and ambulance
combined. Behind us a screen door slammed; Johnny with a small suitcase – a
first aid kit. But before stepping onto the pier he quietly shuffled to where
Binx lay in the Junebug muck on the dock, still unconscious. Johnny shone his
flashlight over the supine body, then bent over to see if Eddie’s drunken
brother was still breathing. Slowly he scanned the brother’s face, shaking his
head.
“Mister Eddie,” Johnny called over the sound of the approaching
airboat. “You best come over here and see ‘bout your brother. He ain’t lookin’
too good.” Eddie gave the doctor a pat on the shoulder and stepped quickly up
the gangplank to the dock.
The four paramedics pulled their airboat up to the dock and
rushed to the two victims, a pair for Binx and the other two for Jack. Dr. Cobb
had cut off the legs of Jack’s yellow rain coveralls and after the medic took a
quick look at the snakebites they called for an airlift. They quickly prepared
several injections while simultaneously cleaning and dressing the surface
wounds. Finally one of the medics asked me: “Does this boy have a parent or
guardian on the premises?”
“Yessir. That’s his father, Binx Sublette, over there with the
nasty rap to the head. That’s his uncle Eddie Sublette looking over him.” When
he asked where the mother was, I was tempted to say none of your business,
sonny. It was a stupid, insensitive question, but based on the available
evidence to date, this was an unusually stupid, insensitive part of the world.
I said, “She’s not here.”
“And who are you?”
“Howard Brown, a second cousin. Visiting from California.”
The paramedic nodded, smiling. “Oh, of course. Sissy Mae’s
brother from Cali. Does everybody grow so big in Cali? I reckon you ain’t never
been nowhere like this before, eh?”
“No sir, I have not,” I said with a slight chuckle, wondering
how this cracker knew my sister. The
paramedic chuckled a little, then bent over Jack, unconscious from the
injections. He pulled his eyelids up, then the lower part down. He opened
Jack’s mouth and stuck a gloved finger under his tongue, lifted it up. Nothing
unusual. But when we looked over his body there were strange concentrations of
shuddering muscle, and the wounds themselves were massive bruises covering his
legs, feet and forearms.
“Jesus,” I said, shocked by all the bites. “Is this kid gonna
make it?”
“Hard to say. Usually a bite from a swamp viper won’t kill a man
if you get to him in time, but I’ve never seen anybody with so many bites in so
many different places. It was like he stepped on a nest, but when you pointed
out the location...well, snakes don’t nest underwater.”
In the distant west the sound of a chopper approached. Jack was
loaded onto a gurney and rolled to the dock, an oxygen mask across his quiet
face. To look at him one might think he was just a typical overweight Southern
teenager with shitty eyesight, a bad hairdo, and in need of a shave, though
there was something about the shape of his mouth that suggested something was
awry in his brain.
On the dock the Junebug guts had become white and sticky as
Elmer’s glue. The paramedics had father and son, both unconscious, on gurneys
under oxygen with IV drips plugged into the back of their hands. The medics
were more worried about Binx; his pulse was slowed and his face has taken on a
tinge of yellow ochre. The lump on the back of his head was bad, but not bad
enough to cause any bleeding in the brain, according to the medics.
When Dr. Cobb – technically a psychiatrist that keeps his EMT
certification up to date for swamp accidents like this one, I’m told – examined
Binx he came to an entirely different conclusion.
“Alcohol poisoning,” he stated with authority. “We see it fairly
often out here in the bayou, and Binx Sublette is a prime candidate, with his
history.”
The amphibious chopper came into view, flying low over the
channel, then pulling up and circling
above the camp. After a couple of times
around it settled over the water, the wind from the blades kicking up whitecaps
that crashed against the pilings of the pier and the dock like a hurricane was
upon us. Once the chopper was at rest in the water with its blades still
spinning slowly, a skiff was lowered and two EMTs exited from the door behind
the cockpit, jumped in and piloted it over to where the two gurneys waited on the
dock. The gurneys were collapsed; Jack was loaded into the skiff and taken to
the chopper. Once Jack was loaded in the skiff they returned for Binx. His
other son Bolling shouted over the din that he would be the family
representative at the hospital and joined the crew in the copter. Slowly the
whirring blades picked up speed, the waves kicked up and splashed over the
Junebug guts on the dock, and the chopper, with Binx Sublette and his two boys
aboard, took off down the channel.
Then, for a what felt like a long, discombobulated moment as the
medics prepared to depart, I had a profound sense of complete displacement – an
abstraction of real self from virtual self – as if I was not who I thought I
was, but was exactly where I was supposed to be. The day’s events, especially
those of the last hour, had presented a glimpse of a familiar yet foreign
existence and, though I had a vague memory of my original purpose at Camp
Serendipity it was being crowded out by…by what? Ancestral memories? Had this
strange and dangerous environment been sucked through my buzzing Chown Hoon
Dong to create a disturbance in the chakras? Where was my psycho when I needed
her?
I paused to study the suddenly familiar scene – the backwards
boat, Sissy Mae, tied up to the rickety pier, the yellow light throwing its
beams into the all-engulfing dark of the swamp; the low droning thrum of
crickets and cicadas rising up like columns of circling smoke, punctuated by
the hoot of a solemn owl and the belch of the lonely bullfrog; the quiet, still
water, blanketed in its neon chartreuse, smoother than silk; all of it a part
of me from the day I was born and perhaps before.
And then I noticed one more thing. “Goddamnit!” I muttered under
my breath. There were Jack’s jeans and his nasty briefs, still floating at the
same spot, tied up to the line that was still cleated to the Sissy Mae.
I shuffled down the pier,
pulled out the clothes with a few globs of duckweed, schlepped the whole mess
to the dock and laid it out. Tomorrow I would get them washed with strong hopes
and maybe even a little prayer that Jack would think twice before he pissed in
them again.
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