After a moment or two of silence, they started up once more, a bit reluctantly.
“I don’t guess the heat bothers him,” Harriet said. “He’s from India. That’s hotter than here.”
Hely was careful where he put his foot—as careful as he could be, in the dark. From the black pines on either side a chorus of tree frogs shrilled back and forth across the road, their song pulsing vertiginously between left ear and right in stereophonic sound.
The path opened into a clearing, where stood the cotton warehouse, washed bone-gray in the moonlight. The recesses of the loading dock—where they’d sat, many afternoons, dangling their legs and talking—were alien in the deep shadow, but on the moon-washed doors, the muddy round marks they’d made by throwing tennis balls were perfectly distinct.
Together they eased the wagon over a ditch. The worst was over now. County Line Road was forty-five minutes from Hely’s house by bicycle, but the road behind the warehouse was a shortcut. Just beyond it were the railroad tracks and then—after a minute or so—the path emerged like magic at County Line Road, just past Highway 5.
From behind the warehouse, they could just see the tracks. Telegraph poles, sagging with honeysuckle, stood out black against a lurid purple sky. Hely looked back and saw in the moonlight that Harriet was glancing around, nervously, in the sawgrass which rose past her knees.
“What’s the matter?” said Hely. “Lose something?”
“Something stung me.”
Hely wiped his forearm across his sweaty brow. “The train doesn’t come through for another hour,” he said.
Together, they struggled to lift the wagon onto the train tracks. While it was true that the passenger train to Chicago wouldn’t be in for a while, they both knew that freight trains sometimes passed through unexpectedly. Local freights, ones that stopped at the depot, crept along so slowly you could practically out-run them on foot but the express freights to New Orleans screamed by so fast that—when waiting with his mother, behind the crossing gate of Highway 5—Hely could scarcely read the words on the boxcars.
Now that they were clear of the underbrush they moved along much faster, the wagon jolting explosively on the crossties. Hely’s teeth ached. They were making a lot of racket; and though there was nobody around to hear them, he was afraid that—between the clatter and the frogs—they would be deaf to an oncoming freight train until it was right on top of them. He kept his eyes on the tracks as he ran—half-hypnotized by the roll of the dim bars under his feet, and by the fast, repetitive rhythm of his breath—and he had just begun to wonder whether it might not be a good idea to slow down and switch on the flashlight, after all, when Harriet let out an extravagant sigh and he glanced up and drew a deep breath of relief at the sight of flickering red neon in the distance.
On the margin of the highway, in a bristle of weeds, they huddled by the wagon and peeped out at the railroad crossing, with its sign that said STOP LOOK AND LISTEN. A small breeze blew in their faces, fresh and cool, like rain. If they glanced down the highway to the left—south, towards home—they could just make out the Texaco sign in the distance, the pink-and-green neon of Jumbo’s Drive-In. Here, the lights were farther apart: no shops, no traffic lights or parking lots, only weedy fields and sheds of corrugated metal.
A car whooshed past, startling them. Once they’d looked both ways to make sure no more were coming, they dashed over the tracks and across the silent highway. With the wagon bumping along between them in the dark, they cut across a cow pasture toward County Line Road. County Line was desolate this far out, past the Country Club: fenced pastureland interspersed with vast tracts of dust scraped flat by bulldozers.
A pungent stink of manure wafted up in Hely’s face. Only moments later did he feel the repulsive slipperiness on the bottom of his sneaker. He stopped.
“What is it?”
“Hang on,” he said, miserably, dragging his shoe on the grass. Though there weren’t any lights this far out the moon was bright enough for them to see exactly where they were. Parallel to County Line Road ran an isolated strip of blacktop which went for twenty yards or so, then stopped—a frontage road, whose construction had been halted when the Highway Commission had decided to route the Interstate on the opposite side of the Houma, by-passing Alexandria. Grass poked through the buckled asphalt. Ahead, the abandoned overpass arched pale over County Line.
Together, they started up again. They’d thought of hiding the snake in the woods, but the experience at Oak Lawn Estates was still vivid and they faltered at the idea of tramping into dense brush after dark—crashing through thickets, stepping blindly over rotten logs—while encumbered with a fifty-pound box. They’d thought too of hiding it in or around one of the warehouses but even the deserted ones, with plywood nailed over the windows, were posted as private property.
