The Rambling Read online

I WOKE UP AND IT was bright noon. Tally looked just like a normal girl right then—only two eyes, not a fang in sight—slumped over and snoozing in the front of the skiff. The day was hot and the swamp water glistened gold with sunlight. Damselflies touched water and danced away, and big fat lily pads floated on by. I saw a log sticking out of the water with a pile of turtles on it, one on top of the other, like a circus trick. One of them opened his mouth and gawked at me. It was a papa turtle I was pretty sure.

  “Howdy, papa turtle,” I said out loud.

  Tally jerked awake and snatched up an oar like she was about to smack me with it.

  “Good lord, Buddy,” she said, “you scared the dickens out of me.”

  The sunlight glistened off the dew-wet leaves above us and it was like a spill of gold coins jangled in the breeze.

  “It’s funny,” I said. “I never thought about the swamp being pretty. Guess I was too young to think stuff like that last time I was here. But it is, you know? It’s so calm and quiet, at least in the daytime. Peaceful even.”

  “That’s because you don’t see what’s happening underneath,” she said. “There’s a whole world of critters eating other critters just below us, not making hardly a ripple. You call that beautiful?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I do.”

  “Suit yourself,” Tally said.

  My stomach growled something awful. I realized I hadn’t eaten since Granddad’s stew.

  “Think we can stop and find some food?” I said.

  “Not on your life.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lest you forget, we’re on the run.”

  That made me pretty glum, if you want to know the truth about it. I didn’t want Tally to know that, so I tried to be brave about it.

  “Naw, you’re right,” I said. “We got to keep going if we’re gonna find Pop in time. The sooner we find Pop the sooner we can get back to our house on the river and everything will be fine and good again. Once I tell him I been hexed, he’ll go straightaway and fix that. And I’m sure he’ll know how to find a cure for you no problem. You’re gonna love Pop. Everybody does.”

  “I’m sure I will,” she said. Tally spat into the water. “I’m sure I’ll be durn glad to meet him.”

  “What are you so sore about?” I said.

  “Well, if you want me to be honest,” she said.

  “Oh, I do.”

  “A’ight then, I’ll tell you. One, I’m hungry and we’re floating down the durn swamp through goblin territory and I don’t know what else, all to try and find your daddy who’s probably locked up in Boss Authority’s jail by now. Two, you burned the hair off Granddad’s back and he’s mad enough to kill you and me both about it. Third, you’re so excited to see your pop, but guess what? I don’t even know my daddy. Not my mom either. They ditched me when I was a kid, on account of how I got the spider-blood in me, same as my granddad. My mom didn’t inherit it, because she’s beautiful and lucky and all them other things. But me? I got stuck with it. And they sent me to live with ornery old Granddad and I been robbing and stealing for him ever since. All because of this stupid spider-blood. It ain’t even my fault.”

  “Can I be honest with you real quick?” I said. “I think you being spider-folk is amazing.”

  “Amazing how?”

  “I mean, you healed me didn’t you? And the way you looked last night? All battle ready and tough? My lord, who would ever want to mess with me when I got you around. And you’re the best pickpocket I ever seen, no question about that. You’re the fastest, smartest kid I ever met in my life.” I was scared to say the next part, but I figured I would go ahead and try it anyway. “And you’re my friend, ain’t you?”

  Tally nodded.

  “I never really had one of those before. My bad-luck blood always made me ruin it somehow. Like this one kid, Freddie George Persons, who lived down the street from me? He was outside bopping a sheep’s bladder around pretty good. I never much cared for sheep’s bladders, but he was having fun, and I wasn’t more than seven years old. So I figure maybe I can run out and play with him too.

  “So I ask him, ‘Freddie George, can I bounce that sheep’s bladder?’ ‘Okay,’ he says, and bops it over to me. I promise you right now, I didn’t so much as lay a finger on it before that bladder up and shriveled. I mean deflated flat. Freddie George never talked to me again. That’s how it goes with everybody. That’s what happens every time I try and do anything. I mean heck, I was only with Pop for one night and he got kidnapped. Nothing to blame for that but myself and my durn hexed blood.”

  “Well here’s to finding a cure for the both of us,” said Tally.

  “I’m all in on that,” I said. “Just hope we can find some lunch on the way too.”

  Some big old seabirds flew over our heads, squawking up a storm. Somewhere a frog leapt out and belly flopped in the water. All of nature was out and having a durn good time. At least a much better time than I was. Probably eating too, frogs eating up flies, mosquitoes sucking up blood, gators chomping on fish heads. Every last critter with a bellyful, except me. I was hungry and thirsty and I didn’t dare drink any swamp water. I heard all kinds of stories about what would happen if you did that. Lily pads would sprout in your stomach. You’d open your mouth and a swarm of mosquitoes would come buzzing out. Worst of all, you might swallow frog eggs and be burping up toads the rest of your life.

  Also I found a tick big as a blueberry on my noggin. Must have been there for days but I was too preoccupied to notice. Tally plucked it off for me with her fingernails. She’s a pro, even got the head out, no problem, so the wound wouldn’t get infected. I figured she’d be sympathetic toward ticks, her being part spider and all, but when I mentioned it she stuck her tongue out at me.

  “I’m just gonna go ahead and pretend you didn’t say that to me.”

  “What?” I said. “What did I do?”

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life it’s that I’m aces at saying the exact durn wrong thing all the time.

  Tally didn’t hardly talk to me for a whole hour after that. Sitting in a boat with someone all day, trading off rowing until your hands get blistery when you’re hungry and they won’t even talk to you is pretty tough. You just don’t know what to do with yourself. I couldn’t figure out what in the heck this Boss Authority had to do with Pop. I figured maybe it was something about a Parsnit game gone wrong, knowing Pop. I bet Pop whooped him so bad Boss Authority sent spies after him, trying to make Pop pay for embarrassing him. But why did Pop know the two guys that came after him? It was too much for me to figure out right now. So I pulled out Pop’s Parsnit deck and laid out each card one at a time, peering close at each one, trying to will myself into them, like a real Parsnit player does. I started learning Parsnit. I mean really learning it, studying the cards, listening for their stories. Like how the Sleepy Town’s got a chimney just like Mom’s house, or how the Bramble has the feel of the woods not a mile from Collardsville.

  “You got a card missing,” said Tally.

  “What?” I said. “No I don’t.”

  “Do too,” said Tally. “I’ve watched you flip through that deck about a dozen times, and I tell you there’s one card missing.”

  Then I knew it. I hadn’t seen the Red Bride anywhere. She was the most powerful card in the whole game. She could evoke Oration so mighty whole duels turned whenever she popped up. But the Red Bride was being shy right now. I shuffled through the deck twice. No matter how many times I flipped the cards, she just wasn’t there.

  “Hold up a minute,” said Tally. She wiggled her fingers over the cards and then went stiff with them, like each one was a separate magic wand. Then she snatched a card from the middle of the deck.

  “Gotcha!” she said. “Now hold still, ain’t any use in getting away now.”

  The Red Bride was there all right, her gown gone a dark blood crimson, might and power in her eyes, like she didn’t need nobody else, like she could maybe marry lightning o
r maybe a house on fire, but anything else would be too weak, too tame for her. I’d always been a bit in awe of the Red Bride myself.

  But something seemed a little off about her now. Her gown hung limp and the spark was out of her eyes, her shoulders sagged. Worst of all, there was a long black scar over the card, as if someone had lit it on fire. I ran my hand over it, but it was smooth. The scar was something deep in the magic of the card.

  Tally whistled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand. What does that mean? Why’s the card all messed up?”

  “It means your daddy played a Parsnit duel,” said Tally, “a long fearsome terrible one.” She looked up at me, eyes dark and black and blinking. “And he lost.”

  “He lost?”

  I couldn’t hardly believe it. My daddy losing at Parsnit? It just didn’t happen.

  “Yep.”

  The Red Bride seemed about to burst into tears so I slid her back in the deck, so she could be alone again.

  “Could that be the source of my hex? All my problems?” I said.

  “It’s possible,” said Tally. “I’m no witch, but I’ve known a fair share of them. From what I gather, magic ain’t an exact science. It’s approximate at best. You send your dust out in the world, say a spell or two, and watch the threads of fate tangle. Sometimes they tangle in your favor. Who can say how magic works, or how it doesn’t?”

  “Lot of help that does me,” I said.

  “Since you’re all healed up,” she said, “how about you take a turn rowing.”

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “But it’d be a heck of a lot easier if I wasn’t so durn hungry.”

  Tally grinned at me then, a little spider-fanged smile. She let her spit dangle down and twirled it with her fingers, same as she did when she gave me the remedy. Except it was spooling differently this time, becoming a slender, taut thread between her fingers, almost translucent. I could only see it when the sun hit it just right.

  “Whatcha making?” I said.

  “Fishing line,” she said. “Think you can find me a hook?”

  We were moving so slow in that mucky green swamp water that it was no problem for me to reach out and catch hold of a twiny catbrier vine and cut an extra-mean-looking thorn off it. While I whittled that thorn sharp, Tally snatched a handful of crickets out of a passing spiderweb stretched between two low-hanging cypress limbs. I thought about making some dumb joke about her stealing from her own people but I was afraid she would take offense. The way she smirked to herself, though, I figured she was thinking the same thing. We hooked a cricket right through the thorn and dropped it in the water.

  It took a while, hours even, but eventually Tally caught us a catfish, a long-whiskered wriggling sucker that Tally yanked into the boat and I bashed in the head with an oar. After that, Tally tried to get me to fish, but I wouldn’t dare.

  “Why?” she said. “Is it because my webbing spooks you?”

  “Naw,” I said. “It’s my bad luck. Last time I went fishing the only thing I hooked was a snapping turtle the size of a bear. It like to took my hand off.” I sighed. “Fish always get away from me, right when I pull them out of the water. Yes ma’am, letting me fish with your line is a bona fide waste of time.”

  What I did do was stretch out on that skiff and take a good gander at my surroundings. I hadn’t been home to the swamp in ages, and oh my was it ever good to be back. I watched an egret swoop into the water and come up with a beak full of fish. I watched a woodpecker hammer away at a maplewood tree. I saw a meadow of yellowtops growing right up out of the water. I saw water bugs float themselves like pirate ships across the belly of the murk. I saw blackjack vines wriggle same as if they were snakes, you couldn’t half tell them apart. I saw swamp lilies so beautiful I wanted to yank them up and make a bouquet out of them.

  “Now we got to stop,” said Tally, “so we can cook and clean this sucker.”

  I nodded.

  “But let’s be quick about it,” she said. “We’re after your daddy, ain’t we? Can’t let him get too far ahead of us.”

  We pulled over on a sandbar, a small island rising out of the muck. It took a while but I gathered a few limbs from a dead, lightning-struck tree and built a fire, while Tally cleaned the fish. It wasn’t much divided between us, but at least it was a mouthful or two. I guessed that was better than nothing.

  We drifted on and on, sometimes Tally rowing and sometimes me, not seeing a single durn sight of Pop. We passed some stilt houses here and there, windows shut tight, doors barred, little eyes peeping from behind the curtains. Folks were watching, and that was a fact. Wary is what they were. One old man stayed seated on his front porch with a rifle trained on us.

  “Howdy,” I said.

  He grunted at me and spat in the swamp water.

  We kept on our way.

  “Folks sure aren’t too friendly out here,” I said.

  “Looks to me like they’re scared,” said Tally.

  “Of what?” I said. I tried to laugh a little. “The Creepy?”

  Tally didn’t say a word.

  By midafternoon, we still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Pop. I was getting worried. We passed another one of those bone garlands dangling from way up high in an oak tree. I still didn’t believe in the Creepy, but whatever made those things sure wasn’t up to any good. It was bad enough to be worried about my pop without having to worry about myself and Tally in the meanwhile.

  What was undeniable was the sunset, how it was able to change the swamp, to turn it all honey colored and lit alive. That was some magic we could all agree on. Pinks and golds, like a painter’s bucket upturned and spilled itself all over the waters. We could have been in a king’s tomb of gold, a forest of jewels, of glowing swamp cat’s eyes and the scaly glimmer of a snake slithering across the water.

  Tally sat upright.

  “Do you feel that?” she said.

  The water exploded with fish then, the silver-bright flicker of fish scales as they flung themselves out of the murk and over our skiff, flying they were, popping out of the water like corn kernels on a kettle, bands of jewelry sailing wild over our heads and vanishing with a splash back to where they came from. It was like they were playing, these flying fish were, like it was the greatest joy in the whole world to be a fish and spend all day trying to be a bird. The way the sunset caught them midair and turned them to gold.

  It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my whole life.

  It’s strange, I guess, to feel as happy as I was feeling right then, even though I’d left my mom at home and my daddy was off kidnapped by lowlifes. But it was true. I did feel happy, I felt joyful and wild and free, and worried and fearful too, scared we were too late to help Pop, scared that we’d never make it out of the Swamplands alive.

  I can’t say it makes much sense, to feel two completely different feelings at once. But life doesn’t make much sense either, does it? Not in my experience. You can save all the making sense for stories, for tales spun from Parsnit cards and wild yarns whispered around campfires.

  Real life is too big and weird and confusing for something so simple as making sense.

  11

  NIGHT CAME ON FAST. ME and Tally slept in shifts, which meant neither of us hardly caught a wink. Way past midnight and creeping up on morning time I was finally drifting off into some weird dream about Mom making a pie out of a one-eyed pigeon when Tally shook me awake.

  “Look,” she whispered.

  Ahead of us glimmered a small fire burning on a patch of dry land that rose like a giant elbow from the water. Two figures were gathered around the fire, cooking something, I could smell it. It smelled awful. Tally and I ducked low in the boat, hoping we would drift past in the fog and the darkness and no one would notice, they wouldn’t see a thing of us.

  It worked. We passed them by no problem, we drifted until they were far out of earshot. Tally slumped over, all relaxed and pleased with herself.

  That was a clo
se one.

  But I didn’t feel that way, not one bit. It was a missed opportunity is what I was thinking.

  “I got to find out who they are,” I said. “They might know something about my pop.”

  I didn’t know why, but I had a feeling about those two. It was something bothering me deep in my guts.

  “Buddy, that is about the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my whole durn life.”

  “Probably is,” I said. “But I’m feeling better now, half-healed-up thanks to you, and Pop’s life is at stake. I’d do anything to save my daddy, and you know it. So what I got to do is this.”

  I untied my boots then and slung them around my neck. Last thing you want to do is hop into water with your boots still on. That’s how folks drown, or best case that’s how folks lose their boots and have to wander around barefoot the whole rest of the journey. Tally rowed us over to a big cypress tree and half docked us there, tying a rope around a knotty root sticking up in the water. We were lucky we didn’t get stuck right there, we were, seeing as how shallow the swamp could get. Maybe what I was doing was brick dumb, or maybe I’d find some folks that could help me. Who knew? But it was Pop we were talking about, and Pop was worth the risk. So I took a deep breath and then I hopped. I held myself close and tried to splash as little as possible, and when I went under, it was so deep my feet couldn’t touch, and my head popped up into the air and I was treading water.

  I swam my way toward the two men, paddling quiet as I could. My feet could touch bottom now, the marshy, soggy earth. They sank deep but I could walk, and boy did it feel good to touch ground again. I was waist-deep in the water when my knee kicked a log real hard and I tried to step over it but the log rose in the water, it broke the surface with its green armored scales tough as tree bark and eight foot long.

  It wasn’t any log. It was a gator.

  The gator opened its jaws and it was like the mouth of the river opened up, it was like a sinkhole widened to swallow me whole.

  I clapped my hands over my mouth and stood dead still as I possibly could while that gator circled me. I could feel its rough gator skin slide across my back, feel its tail whip my knees, until it circled me whole and faced me, eye to eye, its snout not one inch from my nose.