Harriet stood very still. A tendril of vine hung over her face, quivering gently with her breath. His eyes—passing coldly over her, as he scanned the ground—shone with the bizarre, blind, marble-like cast that Harriet had seen in old photographs of Confederate soldiers: sunburnt boys with light-pinned eyes, staring fixedly into the heart of a great emptiness.
Then he looked away. To her horror, he started to climb down the ladder: fast, looking over his shoulder.
He was more than halfway to the bottom before Harriet came to her senses and turned and ran, as fast as she could, back down the damp, buzzing path. She dropped the notebook, flustered back to pick it up. The green snake lay fish-hooked across the path all sparkly in the dim. She jumped over it—batting with both hands the flies that rose humming in her face—and kept running.
She burst through in the clearing where stood the cotton warehouse: tin roof, windows boarded up and dead-looking. Far behind, she heard the crash of underbrush; panicked, she froze for an instant, despairing in her indecision. Inside the warehouse, she knew, were lots of good places to hide—the stacked bales, the empty wagons—but if he managed to corner her in there, she’d never get out again.
She heard him shouting in the distance. Breathing painfully, clutching the stitch in her side, Harriet ran behind the warehouse (faded tin signs: Purina Checkerboard, General Mills) and down a gravelled road: much wider, wide enough for a car to go down, with wide bare patches marbled with patterns of black and white sand swirled through the red clay and dappled with patchy shade from tall sycamores. Her blood pounded, her thoughts clattered and banged around her head like coins in a shaken piggy-bank and her legs were heavy, like running through mud or molasses in a nightmare and she couldn’t make them go fast enough, couldn’t make them go fast enough, couldn’t tell if the crash and snap of twigs (like gunshots, unnaturally loud) was only the crashing of her own feet or feet crashing down the path behind her.
The road slanted sharply down hill. Faster and faster she ran, faster and faster, afraid of falling but afraid to slow down, her feet pounding along like they weren’t even a part of her but some rough machine propelling her along until the road dipped and then rose again—abruptly—to high earthen banks: the levee.
The levee, the levee! Her pace wound down, slower and slower, and bore her halfway up the steep slope until she tipped over on the grass—gasping with fatigue—and crawled to the top on her hands and knees.
She heard the water before she saw it … and when at last she stood, on wobbly knees, the breeze blew cool in her sweaty face and she saw the yellow water swirling in the cut-banks. And up and down the river—people. People black and white, young and old, people chatting and eating sandwiches and fishing. In the distance, motorboats purred. “Well, tell you the one I liked,” said a high, country voice—a man’s voice, distinct—“the one with the Spanish name, I thought he preached a good sermon.”
“Dr. Mardi? Mardi ain’t a Spanish name.”
“Well, whatever. He was the best if you ask me.”
The air was fresh and muddy-smelling. Light-headed and trembling, Harriet stuffed the notebook in her backpack and made her way down from the levee, down to the quartet of fishermen directly below her (talking about Mardi Gras now, whether that festival was Spanish or French in origin) and—on light legs—walked down the river-bank, past a pair of warty old fishermen (brothers, from the look of them, in belted Bermuda shorts hitched high upon Humpty Dumpty waists), past a sunbathing lady in a lawn chair, like a sea turtle done up in hot pink lipstick and matching kerchief; past a family with a transistor radio and a cooler full of fish and all sorts of dirty children with scratched-up legs, scrambling and tumbling and running back and forth, daring each other to put their hands in the bait bucket, shrieking and running away again.…
On she walked. The people all seemed to stop talking, she noticed, as she approached—maybe it was her imagination. Surely he couldn’t hurt her down here—too many people—but just then her neck prickled as if somebody was staring at her. Nervously, she glanced behind her—and stopped when she saw a scruffy man in jeans with long dark hair, only a few feet away. But it wasn’t Danny Ratliff, just someone who looked like him.
The day itself—the people, the ice chests, the screams of the children—had taken on a bright menace all its own. Harriet walked a little faster. Sun flashed from the mirrored glasses of a well-upholstered man (lip puffed, repulsive with chewing tobacco) on the other side of the water. His face was perfectly expressionless; Harriet glanced away, quickly, almost as if he’d grimaced at her.
