The Tangled Bridge (36 page)

“I'm ready,” she called instead.

The limbs parted and Gaston sprung through them and was by her side, not so much lifting her as yanking her along. “Alright then. We'll eat again and then we got to get.”

“Get where? You said yourself we can't hide from her.”

“No, but some places we go she can't follow so easy. Not even with her river magic.”

“How far is it?”

“Far, as the crow flies.”

“And we aren't exactly crows.”

He pulled her over to his hollow cypress and she staggered inside, so exhausted and in pain she wanted to curl in and cry herself back to sleep. “I don't think I can make it, Gaston. The poison must still be in my system.”

“Miss Madeleine, when the scratch poisons work their way out it'll be too late. Your river devil will be waiting.”

She couldn't imagine making a journey. She looked at her ankle, hot and empurpled.

Gaston handed her a bowl of something that looked like it had feet sticking out. She knew frog legs when she saw them. Choked them down out of desperation many a time when she was a kid, and she'd sworn to never eat them again. But her stomach rumbled, and she accepted the bowl with gratitude.

Gaston had grilled them with leftover duck fat while she was sleeping, and he served them to her with swamp mushrooms and some kind of fry bread. A dish she might not ordinarily touch but now she ate each as though her life depended on it.

“You eat like this all the time?”

He shrugged. “I guess this is a little special, you bein a guest and all.”

“What do you usually eat?”

“Fish, crab. Just about ever day.”

She smiled, swirling her bowl. “Fish and crab are good.”

He looked up. “You don't like frog legs?”

She felt sheepish, ungrateful. But Lord, those feet hanging out!

And then he burst with a gurgling sound that sounded like
kee-he-he.
It took her a moment to realize he was laughing. She laughed, too, more out of shock at him, and he slapped his leg.

She asked, “Where you do your cooking, is it…”

And then they both said simultaneously, “Another tree.”

She looked through the opening toward the woods, unsure which of them would be his kitchen tree, and smiled. The sunlight had turned rosy red. The mists of the briar were still present, but weak. And then she noticed a carving just above the opening to the doorway, very similar to the one in the willow tree.

“Did you do that?” she asked him.

He looked. “Yup. Did most of them.”

She realized, then, that much of the inside of the tree had been whittled upon somehow. She couldn't believe she hadn't noticed it before. Perhaps the sunset had lighted it for her just so. She slumped against the inner wall, her eyes so heavy she had to fight to keep them open, and gazed at them—images of spirits, words like “Pointe au Chien.”

She said, “I wonder if I'm related to you, somehow.”

He nodded. “I's figurin on the same thing.”

“My father's name was Gaston.”

“That right?”

She nodded.

“Well mine wasn't.”

She looked at the images again and smiled. Daddy Blank—the name most folks knew Madeleine's father by—wasn't a carver. She had wondered if Gaston was yet another long-lost half-brother like Zenon had turned out to be.

“No you don't,” Gaston said.

She'd fallen asleep again. Some of the contents of her bowl had spilled onto her jeans.

“Come on, time to go.”

“What, now? Honestly Gaston, I don't think I can make it.”

“Well little lady you gonna have to. Here, this is for you.”

He took her hand and placed a kind of necklace in it. A long leather thong, with a click beetle carved into tupelo wood hanging as a pendant. The big false eyes stared like a voodoo doll. Strange, yes, but strangely beautiful.

“Gaston, I don't know what to say.”

“Here, let me tie it for you.”

He put it around her throat and pulled it snug, cutting away the leather tails. “You can't take it off while you're there.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “Why not?”

“It's tricky over there. Look, I got one, too. Cut the ends off for me.”

He produced another necklace just like the one he'd given her and tied it around his own throat in a permanent knot. She accepted the knife and fumbled to cut off the crude leather tails.

He looked at her then, gazing at her for a long moment, then he swallowed and nodded as if answering a question.

“Right. Now we gotta get.”

*   *   *

WHAT MADELEINE WASN'T EXPECTING
, what she couldn't possibly have conceived, was that Gaston would not take her outside to some boat or byway or high ground trail. Instead he led her down, straight down, deep into the trunk of the cypress.

He lifted a cutout of wood that had blended in as the floor of the tree hollow, and he slipped down into a kind of chamber below. Briar mist rolled up to her, silver and cool.

She realized Gaston must use this little chamber for storage to keep the animals out of his stash of food. It smelled like salted herring in there, which might have repulsed her at any other time but under the circumstances, having been in starvation mode for so long, she felt the urge to leap down in there and hoard the salted fish to herself.

“Well come on,” Gaston said.

She hesitated above the hole; roots and bits of rotted wood pointed downward to a shimmer of reflection deep below where bayou water had leaked in—like the inside of a bog pitcher plant.

He must have seen the expression on her face, because he said, “Yes, this here's a trap alright. But not for you.”

“For what?”

“It's like I done said, where we goin ain't so much gonna hide us as make it tough to follow.”

She took a deep breath. Gaston seemed trustworthy. And he'd pretty much saved her life. Still, she had little defense left if he turned rogue. She looked at him and swallowed. There seemed no choice but to follow, and so she climbed in and he replaced the hidden hatch.

Now the only light came from the briar. She felt strangely exhilarated, as though while her body was feeling all the more dragged down with each moment, her spirit was shedding a dead weight and was anxious to run free. Like above, the inside of the chamber was covered in carvings, many so old that they'd weathered into the wood, which made them difficult to decipher without careful inspection. There were also wooden crates and chests, one of which must have contained the salted fish.

They had to slide-climb down on their backs, the opening growing narrower as they descended. A sudden change of temperature indicated they were below water level. The air tasted like river bottom. Now there was only enough room to admit one person at a time, and Gaston was sliding down just ahead. Sounds of his body going into water. She got the sense that going down was much easier than climbing back up.

“Ah, to see a nice hidey slide,” came Severin's voice.

She was creeping down from above, and the thorns had curled in to form a tunnel along the inside shaft of the tree. Severin moved face-first, climbing hand over hand along the thorns like a funnel spider.

Madeleine's body was going slack; her grip insufficient to stabilize her descent. So hard to keep alert. Loose, rotted wood dislodged beneath her feet and showered down in a series of splashes.

“Take it easy!” Gaston said.

“We—we won't be able to get back up!”

And with those words, the stinging thornflies emerged from below. They seemed to have sprung from the water.

But the thornflies were supposed to exist in the briar only. Had she transcended?

Gaston gripped her hand and yanked her down into the pool. “I said, take it easy.”

Madeleine's feet hit a slippery bottom and she would have fallen altogether were it not for Gaston's grip. He was out of breath, not from exertion—it seemed more from anticipation. Water sloshed up and around them, the basin so narrow that the combined body displacement caused the level to rise to their chests. He had one hand around her wrist and the other atop her head. A child preacher about to baptize a new servant of God. The circumference of space had grown so narrow Madeleine could no longer raise her elbows to full expanse. A drowning chamber.

Severin said, “Asleep, to sleep, beneath the brine.”

“We ain't got no choice, not any,” Gaston was saying. “Your river devil here?”

Madeleine nodded beneath his hand.

Gaston gripped her tighter. “Mine, too. Not much time. You gonna have to hold your breath a good long while, alright?”

Fear clenched her chest, but she nodded again, unable to speak.

He lowered his voice as though someone were listening. “On the other side, don't talk to a soul. Don't look directly at'm. We ghosts over there, you understand? We ghosts now.”

“No!”

Madeleine jerked from him, but he was already pushing her head down. Down into the water. Where before her feet had caught hold on a slope, they were now sliding down, her legs pumping in a reverse bicycle motion. Gaston held her tight and was pushing and pulling her deeper than seemed possible on the inside of a tree trunk. Down into the black, waterlogged soil.

 

forty-six

BAYOU BOUILLON, 1927

PATRICE WAS IN THE
water for a very long time. She could feel her lungs contort. The shadow river must have somehow merged with the Mississippi and taken them all. She had a distant sense that she had told it to do so.

But when she broke the water's surface she was nowhere near the ferry dock. Not physically, or through the bramble. She didn't know where she was. She realized she was not in the briar because it was dark—no briar light. An actual sky existed somewhere above. But there were no stars, only the wink of torchères somewhere to her right. Her shoes were gone and the water felt soothing against her bare feet.

She realized she was clutching something to her bosom—Francois' Bible. It seemed such an absurd and frivolous possession after having lost so much.

Arms around her waist pulling her through the water. She could see only a flash of black skin over her shoulder before he was saying, “Hold onto this,” and placing her hand on a raft.

“Ferrar?” she said, relieved at the sound of his voice.

That she could actually hear him. That he was there.

She walked her elbows along the wooden surface and swung her leg up and onto it. Francois' raft. But Francois wasn't there. Nor was Trigger. Nor the dead man nor the vulture. Just the raft.

“Hey give me a hand, will ya?” Trigger's voice somewhere nearby in the darkness.

“Stay put,” Ferrar said to her, and swam away in the direction of Trigger's voice.

Patrice looked over her shoulder to where the flames of those torchères wavered above water, a halo of insects buzzing in the light. She could see little else.

And she thought,
That's what has become important, that space between that firelight.

She stared at the dark gaps in between. There came a strange, detached sense of seeing herself, as though a different part of her was watching Patrice look at the vacant spaces instead of looking at the safe torchlight.

They were in Bayou Bouillon, of course. It seemed odd that she had been trying to pretend she didn't know where she was.

Ferrar and Trigger were swimming back to the raft, and between them, a listless body she could not see.

“Oh, Francois!” She reached down and helped pull him onto the raft while Trigger and Ferrar pushed him from behind.

Francois still had a measure of strength left in him. He made his arms push against the raft instead of slumping in a heap.

“You really are alive,” Patrice said, her hands cradling Francois' head.

Even in the darkness she could see that his face was all wrong. That disgusting bird had been real, not just briar. Francois said not a word and she couldn't tell the extent of his consciousness. She held onto him while Trigger and Ferrar swam the raft in the direction of the torchères.

*   *   *

THEY SPENT THE NIGHT
in a one-room shack floating over the bayou. The shack didn't rock but it did turn from side to side in lazy arcs. Patrice tended Francois by wrapping his eye in strips of woven cotton that Ferrar brought her. The room was illuminated by candlelight, a kindness on Patrice because dear Francois' face had undergone such brutality. His eye and part of his lip were missing. Cuts and sores and dry, salt-burned skin. It seemed she had his wounds cleaned and wrapped all too soon, because afterward she could do nothing further but allow him to sleep. There had been no needle and thread to sew him. Just wrappings.

Ferrar had left them alone in the shack for the night.

Trigger was leaning against the wall near the door with his eyes closed. She could tell he wasn't sleeping and wasn't going to sleep. Neither would she.

*   *   *

THE SUN HAD YET
to rise, but the bird chatter on a distant shore told Patrice that dawn was near. She wanted to go out, find a water closet or at least a place where she could improvise one. She opened the door and found Ferrar sleeping just outside on the boardwalk.

He leapt to his feet though his eyes were still half-closed. “Where you goin?”

“I need to … walk around some.”

She wasn't sure why she didn't just tell him what she really needed to do. Never thought anything of saying so around her sister or her brothers or anyone at Terrefleurs. But she couldn't say it in front of Ferrar. Of course he knew she peed just like everyone else. But she didn't want him thinking of her peeing.

He'd caught on all the same. “Come on, little girl, I'll show you where.”

Her back went rigid on the “little girl” part.