The Year of Disappearances - Page 24/41

“I know all about those,” Autumn said. “The government wants us to think they don’t exist, but they got talk shows about UFOs on AM radio nearly every night. Sometimes I think that’s what might have happened to Mysty.”

“Mysty’s the girl who disappeared from our town,” I said, and Bernadette nodded.

“She went out there to look up at the stars,” Autumn said. “Maybe something came down to get her. Who knows? Anyway, is that why you all are going out there—to see a UFO?”

“No, we’re going to study nature.” Bernadette yawned. “It’s one thing to read about it, something else to see it up close.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever go to college.” Autumn’s voice was suddenly decisive.

“So what will you do after high school?” I reached to switch off the lamp.

“I used to think I’d move in with Chip.” Her voice sounded resigned. “Now I don’t know. Some days, I feel like I’m going no place fast.”

I wanted to say something to comfort her, but all I could think of were clichés: You’re still young. You’ll get over it.

Bernadette said, “Yeah. Some days I feel like that, too.”

Autumn was still asleep when we left the next morning. Bernadette wrote her a note, telling her to stay as long as she liked. “Don’t be sad about your ex,” she wrote. “You haven’t met the right one yet.”

She set the note near Autumn’s sleeping bag. Autumn slept on her stomach, and all we saw was her out-flung arm and a mass of dark hair.

“Thanks for being nice to my friend,” I said to Bernadette, once we were outside.

She shrugged. “I feel sorry for her. She seems a little lost.”

We carried our backpacks to the parking lot and found two seats at the very rear of the Hillhouse van. The March morning felt crisp, the sky streaked orange by the rising sun. Other students took their time finding seats; some carried cups of coffee or hot chocolate, whose aromas perfumed the van. All I’d had for breakfast was a gulp of tonic, straight from the bottle; often that was enough for my breakfast, but today I felt hungry, and groggy from lack of sleep.

Professor Riley and Professor Hoffman were the last two to board. They looked sleepy. “No singing,” Hoffman said to us.

When the van finally left campus, I turned to watch Hillhouse disappear—and that’s when I saw a beige van pass, headed in the opposite direction. I couldn’t see the driver or the make of the vehicle. Despite the heater in our van, I felt a faint chill.

Most of the students dozed on the brief ride to Okefenokee. I stayed awake. As the sun grew higher in the sky, my mood began to lift. There must be thousands of beige vans in Georgia, I told myself.

By the time we arrived at the swamp’s entrance near Waycross, picked up our camping permits, and packed our canoes, it was nearly ten A.M. The temperature was 65 degrees, warm enough to shed our down jackets and vests. We put our sleeping bags and supplies in trash bags, set them in the center of the canoes, and tied them down with bungee cords.

As I was tying my trash bags to the canoe, Bernadette said, “The poor thing—look!”

An alligator lay on the bank about a hundred feet away from us. It looked as if its skin had shrunk to cling to its skeleton—emaciated, but still alive. We could see life in its small, dark eyes.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Professor Hoffman said, “Could be old age, or maybe he was hurt in a fight.”

“Can’t we do something to help?” Bernadette’s voice carried across the water, and one of the park guides came over. “That’s Old Joe,” he said. “He’s getting ready to die. We don’t interfere with nature.”

Bernadette didn’t say anything, but her shoulders hunched, and I knew she disagreed. Later she said to me, “Something is dying. And no one is paying attention.” She shook her head.

Each canoe held two, and Bernadette and I were partners. For the initial part of the trip, we both paddled; later, we took turns. I wore a thick coat of sunblock on my skin, and she had sprayed both of us with insect repellent. I told her that bugs never bit me, but she wasn’t convinced.

The waterway we rode was called a canal. At first it was the color of slate—gray, with indigo veins and variations—and the canoes rode it calmly, our oars making barely a splash. There was no wind, and the only sound was the low groaning of frogs. Along the banks alligators lay, singly or in couples, some watching us, some ignoring us. Mating season was two months away, and they weren’t yet inclined to be territorial.

For several minutes, none of us talked. The air smelled fresh and aromatic, reminding me a little of the smell of witch hazel. My mother kept a bottle of it in the bathroom at home. I didn’t want to think of home, so I tried to categorize the scent more precisely: it was both acidic and sweet, with perhaps a hint of turpentine. Nothing like witch hazel, really.

After we rounded the canal’s last bend, we entered a prairie—a wide expanse of flowering swamp. Here the water became deep brown, the color of steeped tea. A breeze began, and conical yellow flowers bobbed close to the canoe. As we went further, those flowers seemed to multiply, emerging from fleshy green foliage strewn across the prairie as far as we could see.

Professor Riley said the flowers were called golden club. Their other name was “neverwet,” because their succulent-like leaves repel moisture. They resist the elements that do not favor them, he said. They are likely to endure.

By the time we pulled our canoes ashore on the island late that afternoon, our eyes were as tired as our arms. We’d seen green and blue herons, sandhill cranes, ibises, kingfishers, and more gators than we could count. As I flipped our canoe over, a thick blue-black snake more than six feet long emerged from a sandy mound close by.

I didn’t like snakes then any more than I do now, but they had more right to be on the island than I had. I stood still. As the snake slithered into the brush, I felt the presence of someone behind me.

Professor Hoffman didn’t speak until the snake had disappeared. “Well, well,” he said. “Recognize it?”

“An indigo snake?”

“Very good. They’re an endangered species, you know. Their natural habitat has been turned into shopping malls and housing developments. Now, unfortunately, they’ve developed the habit of napping on roads.”

After dinner that night (potatoes and vegetables and herb-seasoned tofu, wrapped in foil and roasted in the fire), Hoffman talked about the species that we hadn’t seen that day.

“The Carolina parakeet—the only parrot species indigenous to the United States—was wiped out in the usual ways. Its habitat was destroyed by foresters. Some birds were captured and kept as pets; their feathers were used to decorate hats, but the tame birds weren’t bred because they were considered so common, and eventually they died off. Most of the wild ones were hunted by farmers, who thought they were pests.

“The Carolina parakeets were highly social creatures. When birds were shot, the rest of the flock would return to the site and gather around the dead bodies. Of course, hunters were waiting for them. We don’t know what caused the birds’ ultimate extinction, but it’s suspected that the remaining few succumbed to poultry disease.”

Bernadette set down her plate. “This is so depressing.” Her voice was low, but I’m sure it carried.

Nonetheless, Professor Hoffman kept talking. “Similarly, the ivory-billed woodpecker was wiped out by heavy logging and by hunters. By the 1920s it was considered extinct. One pair—the birds mate for life—turned up in Florida, but they immediately were shot by specimen collectors.”

“Idiots!” Bernadette said. The other students ignored her.

“A few years ago, research teams found evidence of ivory bills in Florida and Arkansas. If their findings are confirmed, the bird would be called a lazarus species. Anybody know what that means?”

The girl called Jacey said, “In the Bible, Lazarus was raised from the dead by Jesus. It was considered a miracle.”

“Well, in scientific terms, it’s no miracle. It’s simply a sign that the original survey claiming the species extinct was flawed. When a creature presumed dead forever reappears, the scientific community is always glad to be proven wrong.”

Bernadette nudged me. “I have to pee. Come with.”

The cabin had no bathroom, but an outhouse wasn’t far away. So far only the girls in the group had used it, the boys preferring to go behind trees. Bernadette went into the wooden hut, complaining about men using the world as their toilet.

I waited outside, watching the lighted windows of the cabin and listening to the night. The air was filled with the sounds of frogs, occasional moans from owls, and rustles from the woods near us. And then, the sound of Bernadette screaming.

The outhouse door swung wide and slammed against the wall. Bernadette leapt onto the grass, clutching the waist of her jeans.

The cabin door opened. Professor Riley said, “You okay?”

Bernadette ran inside the cabin, and I followed.

“Something in there bit me!” she said. “Do you think it was a snake?” She held out her ankle, turned it to show a red welt.

“That’s not a snakebite,” Riley said. “More like a blackfly.”

A fly bite was so much more acceptable than a snakebite. I confess, my first thought had been of the huge indigo snake, slithering through the long grass into the outhouse to wait for one of us. (Later I learned that the indigo isn’t poisonous. It swallows its small prey alive.)

The food and exercise made all of us sleepy. But Jacey refused to spend the night in the cabin. “This place creeps me out,” she said.

We’d brought along two tents, and Jacey proposed setting one up. She said she wouldn’t sleep outside alone.

No one else wanted to join her, so I volunteered.

Bernadette said, “You’re crazy.”

“The bugs don’t bother me,” I said. “And the air in here is a little stale.” It smelled musty, like dead fires and old clothes.

So, Jacey, whom I knew only as the smallest girl with the longest braids in school, and I spent the night in the tent. We didn’t sleep much. The rustlings I’d heard before seemed louder as the night passed, and we heard nearly constant movements on the ground near the tent.

“Raccoons,” I said, but Jacey said, “Too big for raccoons.”

We dozed off and awoke to more sounds: something seemed to be walking around the perimeter of the tent. It made a rattling sound as it moved.

Jacey sat up in her sleeping bag. She whispered, “Ari, Ari. I’m scared. I think it’s the fetcher.”

“Who?”

She breathed loudly. “The devil’s fetcher. Coming for our souls.”

Like most vampires, I’m not easily frightened. I remember watching horror movies at my friend Kathleen’s house; I was more intrigued by the faces of her family responding to the movies than by the monsters on-screen. But that night, on an island in a swamp so remote that our cell phones didn’t work, I let myself succumb to the sensation of fear. It was curiously pleasurable.

“What does he look like?”

“He can change his appearance.” Jacey whispered in bursts and breathed deeply in between. “Sometimes he’s an animal—a dog or a wolf or a calf. Other times, he’s a person—an old man, or a woman with bloody hands. Sometimes they cut out your heart and eat it.”

“How do you know about them?”

“I’ve always known.” She took another deep breath. “I’ve dreamed about them, too.”

Outside, the footfalls slowed, then sped up again. They sounded too loud to be an animal’s, too fast to be a human’s. Around and around the tent they went, accompanied by the strange rattle.