Lost in the River of Grass (14 page)

It feels so good to be lying down, off my stinging, burning feet, that I close my eyes, but after only a moment I imagine the python has given up on the gator and is sliding toward us. I gasp and sit up.

Andy looks at me. “What?”

The snake and the gator haven't moved.

“Nothing.”

The hole is wider and deeper, but still full of soupy brown water. “I give up,” he says, falls sideways, and rolls on his back.

I pick up the palmetto shovel and am about to take over digging when, for some reason, I think of vinegar and oil salad dressing, and how the vinegar always settles to the bottom. I pick up the empty Gatorade container and begin to bail the muddy water.

More water seeps in, but not faster than I can scoop it out. When there is just a layer of thick mud on the bottom, I sit back and wait.

The python is again trying to work its tail under the gator by lifting and sliding beneath it, but the gator lashes its own tail and knocks the back part of the snake away. Neither moves for a few minutes, then the snake tries again. This time the gator makes the mistake of lifting up and trying to back away. The snake's tail shoots under and curls, making a full 360-degree loop around the gator's middle. In an equally sudden move that makes me jump, the python lifts and rolls the gator up in its coils. I can feel the tightness in my own chest as the snake constricts around the gator's abdomen. I take a couple of quick breaths and imagine I can hear the gator's ribs breaking as its chest caves in.

Andy snores softly. Teapot is asleep in the crook of his neck beneath his left ear.

The hole is full of clear water. I rinse the Gatorade bottle, fill it and hold it up to the light. A few particles float in it, but it is otherwise pretty clear. I let those bits settle to the bottom before starting to drink. When I've finished the first bottle, I refill it, then poke Andy, who opens his eyes and blinks. I hold up the bottle.

“No way.” He sits up, then glances at the snake and the gator. The python has let go of the gator's jaw and is wrapped so tightly around its body that only the gator's head and front two legs stick out through the coils. The snake's nose is pressed against the alligator's.

“It looks like it's kissing it,” I say.

“It's making sure that it's dead.” Andy's face is smeared with mud.

“I wonder if that's where the ‘kiss of death' expression comes from?”

Andy is looking at me in a way that makes me blush. “You're really pretty, you know?”

I laugh. “Yeah, right.” My hair is matted and snarled, caked with dried scum, and has leaves, twigs, and bits of saw grass caught in the tangles. I have a mirror, but I've purposely avoided looking at it. I don't want to see what I look like.

“What's funny?” Andy asks.

“Nothing. I just kind of wish my parents could see me right now—sitting here with a python getting ready to eat an alligator and looking like the thing from the Black Lagoon myself.”

“They'd be proud of you.”

I laugh. “If they survived twin heart attacks, they would be. Will your parents be proud of you?”

“After they kill me, maybe.” He lies back on the grass. “You shouldn't wear all that makeup like you had on Friday. You're prettier without it.”

“Where I go to school, everyone wears makeup.”

“Even the boys?”

I smile. “Not all of them.”

“So you wear it to fit in?”

That's exactly why I wear it. “No.” I feel defensive. “It's just . . .”

“Under all those bug bites, you have nice skin. Makeup should be for old women trying to look young, not young girls trying to look older.”

I refill and finish another bottle of water, then refill and hand it to him. “What do you know about it?” Him telling me what I shouldn't or should do irks me. At the same time I know he's right. Why do I slather on all that stuff, anyway? Nothing has changed. I still haven't made a single friend. I pull at my yellow Lance Armstrong bracelet—another attempt to fit in.

“What is that rubber thing, anyway?”

“Nothing. I like wearing makeup, and if I do or don't, it's none of your business. When we're out of here, I'll probably never see you again.”

“I'd like to see you again,” Andy says. He reaches for my hand.

I jerk away. “Well if you call first, I'll wash my face.”

Andy looks hurt, so when he stands and puts his hand out to help me up, I take it.

We stand by side for a moment, watching the reptiles. Our arms are touching. “I didn't mean that, you know. I'd like to see you again, too.” I look at him, then lift up on my tiptoes and tilt my head back. He takes my chin in his big hand, leans, and kisses me. It's a long, warm, soft kiss, and my first. “We'd better get going,” he whispers. His eyes are still closed, his hand cups my cheek.

I nod as heat spreads from my toes to the top of my head.

Andy drops his hand. “We're losing daylight.” He drains the water bottle, refills it, then we share it until it's empty again.

“I want a picture of you and the python and the alligator.” I get the camera out, step back and focus, but I'm not sure how to make Andy sharp when he's close to me, and the reptiles sharp when they are farther away. I choose the reptiles, and hope Andy's not blurry.

“Let me take one of you.”

He reaches for the camera, but I twist away. “No way. You could blackmail me for life with a picture of me looking like this.”

“You'll wish you had one one day when you're telling your grandkids about this.”

“I'll live with the regret.” I bounce up and down so he can hear my stomach slosh.

Andy fills the bottle one more time, and I put Teapot and the camera in the backpack.

We stand for a moment and watch the python uncoil itself from around the crushed body of the gator.

“Being caught and killed isn't at all like it looks on TV.”

Andy shrugs. “I wouldn't know.”

“It takes so long.”

The python opens its mouth and starts to fit its head over the dead alligator's snout.

“How is it going to eat something that is ten times bigger than its head?”

“Snakes can unhook their jaws. It will pull itself over the gator like putting on a sock.”

“It could have been one of us, you know.”

“Yeah, but it wasn't.” He slides his arms through the backpack straps. “Let's get moving.”

After we plow through the muddy perimeter of the hammock, I stop to catch my breath and look back a last time. The gator's whole head is inside the python's. I can see the outline of the bulbous tip of its snout poking up through the snake's skin like knuckles in a glove.

14

Once we're off the trail and out onto the prairie, we turn south and parallel the trees for a while. It takes us about an hour to round the tip of the island. I'm following right behind Andy, but watching my feet, so I only look up when he stops. In front of us the saw grass is taller and denser than any we've seen. It forms a barrier to the east.

“I don't know why it grows like this,” Andy says. It's almost an apology.

We stand looking at the golden wall. “I do.”

“You do, huh?” He kind of smiles.

“We stopped at a pumping station yest . . .
Not yesterda
y . . . day before yesterday. It's caused by the sugar growers. The fertilizer they use gets into the water and fertilizes everything. It's like the saw grass and cattails are on steroids. We could just keep going south for a while.”

“Look at it. I can't see an end, and it looks like it curves back to the west. We have to go through it.”

“But how? We'll be cut to pieces.”

Andy slips the backpack off, hands it to me, then steps to the edge of the stand, turns, crosses his arms over his chest and falls backwards into the grass. He stands and does it again, then again, until he's flattened the beginning of a path through it. I follow, walking high and dry, holding my arms out for balance.

For another hour we walk blind, no horizon visible, boxed in by the razor-edged grass. Wading has been slow going, but following Andy's path through the saw grass is harder. I keep losing my balance, falling, and cutting my hands and knees. It feels like I have a million paper cuts.

Every once in awhile the saw grass ends, replaced by cattails that surround a gator hole. We have to cross it, wade through the cattails, and be faced with more tall, dense saw grass. Andy keeps looking at the sun and adjusting our direction.

I'm so tired from the effort I can't keep my footing for more than a few feet. When I fell the first time, I twisted to keep from landing on Teapot, who was riding in the sling around my neck. After that, I put her in the top of the pack. At least when I fall it's forward, so I don't have to worry about squishing her.

It must be about three o'clock when we begin to hear thunder again. Before long, even surrounded by saw grass, we can see the towering top of the approaching storm.Once it blots out the sun, we can't be sure which direction we're walking.

I focus on keeping my balance, but look up now and then to track the storm. This time when I glance up, I see Andy put something in his mouth. First the Gatorade; now he's got food he's hiding from me.

“What are you eating?”

“Nothing.”

“You're chewing something.”

“I'm chewing chunks of my belt.”

“Why?”

“I'm trying to trick my stomach.”

“How's it working?”

“Not great. Want some?”

“Yeah.”

At the next gator hole, we rest at the edge of it and, after making plenty of racket to ensure the owner isn't sleeping on the muddy bottom, let Teapot out to feed. I clean the poop out of the backpack, wash the blood off my hands, and spit out the chunk of belt. I felt so full after drinking all that water, but that was hours ago, and I've peed it all away. Now having the flat, leathery taste in my mouth only makes me think more about food, not less. I can't think of anything else, though not the food I really love to eat, like Chinese and Thai. All I can think about is the breakfast I pushed away at the Miccosukee Indian restaurant. What I'd give now for burned eggs, undercooked shredded potatoes, greasy, half-raw bacon, and fried pumpkin bread.

The sky is growing darker. In the distance, toward Naples, lightning flashes in jagged lines, sometimes to the ground and sometimes between thunderheads like they are at war with each other.

My mother is afraid of thunderstorms and has rules: Don't take a bath or talk on the phone or stand near a window or under a tree and certainly don't be in water—the absolute best conductor of electricity. Now here we are, with thunderheads black as tar on the bottom, towering white and puffy on the tops, so high that airplanes headed for Miami International have to fly around them. Though there's no place to hide, I still have to ask, “What are we going to do about that?” I hitch a thumb toward the monstrous cloud.

“Not much we can do.”

“We shouldn't be in the water.”

“I know, but where are we not in the water?”

“We could lie in the saw grass.”

“That's not really out of the water. I don't think a few inches of grass will make any difference, but we can if you want to.”

If I was home, I'd be happy it was going to rain. I love to watch the hot summer sky turn black with the promise of a cooling rain. It's so curious to me that as soon as the rain starts, the sky goes from black to gray, as if the clear raindrops contain the color. I try to imagine black raindrops.

Here, where every lightning strike is visible, I feel as wimpy as my mother—and we all tease her when she screams every time it thunders. The storm, coming from the northwest, is nearly on top of us, but the sun is still shining in the southwest sky. The saw grass looks like spun gold beneath the black clouds.

The lightning and claps of thunder are constant. After one particularly loud boom, a flock of white ibis— maybe thirty birds—takes off and flickers in the sunlight, swirling with indecision. Their white bodies against the pitch-dark sky look like someone drawing circles in a dark room with a burning sparkler. “Andy, look.”

“What?”

“Aren't they beautiful?”

“That flock of Chokoloskee chickens?” he says.

“I mean the way the sunlight is hitting them.”

“Yeah. I guess. The young ones are good eating.”

We stand and watch the birds wheeling and turning as the rain, like a gray curtain, comes at us across the prairie. I'm filled the hopeless urge to try to outrun it. Impossible even if my feet didn't hurt so bad I can barely stand. Thunder booms again, and the sky goes white with another flash of lightning. If I'm going to die, at least I won't be able to feel my feet anymore, and those beautiful birds will be my last memory.

As quickly as we can, we move toward the next thick wall of saw grass. Andy gets there first and launches himself into the stand. I crawl in beside him just as the sky opens and the deluge begins. We turn on our sides, face to face, with Teapot in the pack between us. Andy puts his arm across my shoulder. “You're bleeding,” he says.

I shiver and nod.

We both cringe when the next lightning bolt strikes. It seems to just miss us. Thunder crashes so loudly, I throw my arms over my head. The raindrops are large, heavy, surprisingly cold, and they hurt. To lie exposed, as we are, is like being hit with pebbles. The blood on my arms and legs begins to dilute until my skin has a reddish wash.

With the rain come gusty winds. I shiver uncontrollably. Andy rubs my arm. “I'm really sorry about getting you into this, you know?”

“I know.” My teeth are chattering. “My father says what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. I'm gonna look forward to that, aren't you?”

Just as I say that, lightning blazes over our heads like a meteor passing. I grab Andy's arm and squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them a moment later, Andy grins at me. I smack him. “Some things deserve being scared of.”