They were having lunch on the porch when Angela spotted something far off on the flooded field near the tree line marking the edge of a swamp. It was blue and moving across the open water toward them.
“It’s a canoe or a kayak,” Angela said.
He picked up the field glasses and took a look.
“It’s a kayak,” he said.
They all took a turn with the glasses. The kayak came on straight toward them. Stephen could for the first time see the paddler clearly through the glasses. Her long blond hair was tied back in a ponytail under a baseball cap.
“It’s Holly,” he said.
It was if he was witnessing some act of magic, the dead raised before his eyes. The only thing better would be to see his father come paddling out of the trees. But finding his mother could turn out to be just the same. He imagined taking the airboat to Baton Rouge and there she would be, standing on the levee, as if she were keeping an appointment to meet him. Perhaps his problems with her had been his fault. After all, she had the right to a private life. Once he found her, he was determined to conceal his disdain for those young men. But he would not be unhappy if she sent him off to school. She would be easier to deal with if he just saw her at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Maybe in the summer he could go stay in his father’s house.
Mr. Parker asked for the glasses.
“Yes, that’s her,” Mr. Parker said.
They all went down to where the airboat was moored to await her arrival.
When she was several hundred yards away, she stopped paddling.
“What’s she doing?” Angela asked.
“Looking us over,” Stephen said.
“Yes, it’s what I’d do,” Mr. Parker said.
Angela began to wave her arms and yell out Holly’s name.
“I told you that smoke was off in the wrong direction to be the barge,” she said.
Stephen shrugged.
“I hope you’re right,” he said.
Holly still sat motionless in the kayak, her hair bright in the sunlight. She took up the paddle and dipped it into the water. As she lifted it, a shower of golden drops trailed after the blade.
Now Stephen and Mr. Parker began to wave their arms too and call out her name.
She finally waved back and took up the paddle and swung the bow of the kayak toward them.
“Come on!” Angela yelled. “Come on!”
Stephen and Mr. Parker joined her.
Holly stopped paddling. The kayak, caught by a slight breeze, swung in a slow circle.
“Stephen, if she doesn’t come in, you take the airboat out to her,” Angela said.
“I think she’ll come in,” Stephen said.
He was wondering where Fred was. Perhaps off fishing in the johnboat.
Holly took up the paddle again and, obviously having made up her mind, she paddled hard toward them.
Soon she was standing beside them, hugging Angela. She handed out hugs to Stephen and Mr. Parker. Then she abruptly sat down on the charred grass. She began to alternately laugh and weep, and then, it seemed to Stephen, she was doing both at the same time.
“I never expected to find you two here,” she said. “I came to see if William was sticking it out. I knew he would be.”
Her face was wet with tears.
“Where’s Fred?” Mr. Parker asked.
“Oh, William, I don’t know,” she wailed.
Mr. Parker reached down and helped her to her feet.
“You come on up to the house,” he said. “Have something to eat, maybe a drink. Then you can tell us all about it.”
Back at the house she stood at the screen and looked out over the flooded fields.
“The water keeps rising,” she said.
“It’ll go down,” Mr. Parker said.
He made her and Angela drinks. Stephen got his last Coke from the refrigerator.
Holly sat and sipped her drink and told them how she was in the kitchen cooking when Fred came running into the room with a deer rifle in his hands. At the same moment, she heard automatic gunfire, and the windows of the house fragmented. Stephen imagined the fragments tinkling as they fell, a heavy rain of glass, onto the steel deck. Then there was an explosion that shook the entire barge. She heard Fred shooting the deer rifle, the sound of it filling the small space.
“The kayak!” he had yelled. “Quickly!”
“Where?” she had asked.
“Into the swamp.”
She told them how she wanted to stay, but he pushed her out the back door. He pointed to the swamp.
“You hide,” he said. “I’ll come get you.”
She took the kayak down the creek, her escape shielded from view by the end of the barge. She worked her way along the creek bank for perhaps half a mile until she came to a canebrake. She paddled deep inside it, forcing the boat between the canes until she was completely concealed from the creek.
“Then it caught on fire, and the shooting stopped,” she said. “But Fred never came for me.”
Stephen imagined her sitting there in the cane, listening to the birds sing. She might have found the silence more threatening than the sounds of the shooting. Because she had no way of knowing if Fred were dead or alive, all she could do was wait.
They all offered opinions as to what had happened to Fred. Like the others, Stephen invented an optimistic outcome, but he was certain Fred had been killed. What chance did a man with a deer rifle stand against people with automatic weapons? He was going to be happy when they were on the airboat again. The house was a tempting target.
Or, he thought, was this fatalistic view part of what his father had warned him about? Was he going to be condemned the rest his life to see things painted in only one shade?
She described going back to the charred remains of the house after spending the night in the canebrake. The johnboat was gone.
It could be the same with his mother. He imagined riding in the bow of the airboat and Angela turning it onto their street. On either side would be the charred remains of big houses, burned down to the water that surrounded them.
In a metal storage shed at one end of the barge, Holly found fishing gear, a gas camping stove and a little fuel. Under camouflage material for a duck blind, a case of bottled water. The people who burned the house had probably been in too much of a hurry to search carefully or decided that what they found in the shed was not worth stealing.
She set off back up the creek, intending to go through the swamp to Mr. Parker’s house. That had taken her much longer than she had thought, especially after the water started to rise. She had had to struggle with strong currents in places. She had wandered about the swamp for several days until, almost out of water, she had paddled out into the flooded field.
She asked Stephen if he would use the airboat to search for Fred. He said he would, not having the least idea where they should start. There was nothing to be gained by going back to the barge. But she seemed relieved he was willing to try.
“We have a plan,” she said.
She continued to repeat the words under her breath, like a sort of prayer.
Stephen decided to suggest they look for Fred in the direction of Baton Rouge. It was logical he might have headed that way in the johnboat. He did not want her to start wondering why Fred never returned to look for her. He would have expected her to know better, she being a grown-up, but her good judgment had been twisted by the violent events she had endured. He was glad that had not happened to him. He thought he still saw things clearly.
As they continued to drink, Holly and Mr. Parker began to tell stories about Fred. He had dropped out of high school to be a commercial fisherman. Some universities had been interested in him as a football player.
“He always said he’d rather fish than play football,” Holly said.
“If he’d played, he’d have been a good one,” Mr. Parker said.
“Those coaches would come to his mamma’s house. All they got out of it was a good meal,” Holly said.
Stephen wanted to wave his arms and implore them to stop.
Can’t they see he’s dead? he thought.
And he wondered if Angela was thinking the same thing. She had clung to the hope the smoke was from some other source. He wished his father was here. He would make them stop and then explain in kind but direct language that Fred had been killed. One man with a deer rifle against people with automatic weapons. The outcome was obvious. Stephen recalled that his father, experienced in combat, had stood no chance at all.
“He’s out there someplace,” Mr. Parker said. “Catching big catfish and probably having a fine time.”
Stephen felt uncomfortable. He looked at Angela, who appeared to have found something interesting on the floor between her feet.
“If they killed him, I’d have found him,” Holly said.
Stephen wondered if the sort of fire that had occurred could consume a human being completely. Fred’s killers would not have bothered to bury him or even to toss his body off the barge and into the creek. It now was clear to him that both Mr. Parker and Holly were being foolish in some sort of grievous way that was going to entangle them all in a futile search for Fred.
“He’s out there,” Mr. Parker said.
“There’s miles and miles of flooded timber and fields,” Stephen said. “It won’t be easy.”
“We’ll start with the barge,” Mr. Parker said. “He could have gone back there by now, looking for Holly.”
Stephen agreed to use the airboat the next day to go take a look at the barge. He tried to let himself be seduced by their optimism. He imagined rounding the bend in the creek and there would be Fred standing on the deck of the burned-out barge. Perhaps he had pitched a tent on the barge or built a lean-to.
He went off to bed, leaving Mr. Parker and Holly to talk about Fred, and Angela to listen. As he drifted off to sleep, he caught snatches of their conversation. Angela was worried about returning to the barge. Holly and Mr. Parker were trying to reassure her.
Stephen wondered if this was Angela’s way of dissuading them from making the foolish search for Fred. He lay stretched out on the mattress someone had dragged onto the porch from one of the bedrooms and tried to imagine what finding Fred at the barge would be like.
First they would smell coffee. Then they would see Fred standing there, a coffee cup in his hand. Charred remains of the house would be scattered about on the deck of the barge. Fred’s face would be black with soot from the fire.
“Let me tell you about this big catfish,” he would begin.
And then he would tell a story about being towed up the Mississippi to Natchez by an enormous catfish as big as a whale.
Stephen thought he heard a train whistle off in the distance. But that could not be so because the tracks were underwater. He closed his eyes and imagined Fred hopping a freight.
Holly laughed at something and the others joined in, drawing him out of the dream.
As he finally drifted off to sleep, he remembered he had done nothing about disabling the distributor. At least he had carried all the provisions, including the extra gasoline, up to the house.
“All the way to Covington,” Holly was saying.
He could make no sense of that as he dropped into sleep.