Several families must have lived on our same road, but a stranger to town wouldn’t be able to tell from the drive to the boat launch, with vine-strangled hackberry and underbrush reaching out for the cracked pavement of the ground, ticking with insects and smoothed by shadows. Lonely mailboxes stuck out on opposite sides where two-track driveways disappeared into the woods, the flames of gas lamps burning somewhere far beyond. They all looked to me like tunnels through time, where families twenty thousand years ago brought their worldly horrors into the mouths of caves, painting on walls the lunges of wolves and thinly tossed spears. They slept with enemy portraits bearing down on them. Maybe they fought them in their dreams.
Papa Roy pulled his truck into a beaten, unmarked trail off the main road where a small wooden dock appeared within a matter of a dozen yards or so, sipping at the edge of a shallow bog. There, we slipped the boat off the last inch of dry land and climbed aboard. In the clean light of evening, each new ripple of the marsh’s mouth gleamed crisp as the curve of a sabertooth. Papa Roy pulled the string on the little motor in the back—a jolt of life to the slow pace of the water. Primordial soup. A steaming water reaching up from the earth’s depths, life’s claw popping at its surface. It spilled green onto the grass, spawning the fish and the slithering newts and the shape-shifting frogs, which crossed between the worlds. I rowed through the mist of the bayou and pictured on its untouchable canvas some scenes from the past. Ma in the hospital, delivering Eli. Ma at the neighbors’ apartment, smoking. Eli and I crossing the gang line to school. Straw houses, stick houses, stock-full of wolves. Just say no to them, I thought. Don’t look at their teeth. Bristle, pull your tail under.
Lights. Papa Roy handed me a plastic flashlight with the switch turned on. “Now,” he said, “what we’ll do is I’ll put us a bit deeper in the bayou, but not too deep. We’ll step onto the flatlands. No gators, nothin’ like that.”
“How will we know if the Blue Bull’s around?” asked Eli.
“You’ll just know,” said Papa Roy.
The rain started to fall within the hour, and suddenly I said I didn’t want to hunt anymore. I told them I would wait, low under my hood in the maidencane.
When I told Eli and Papa about my encounter with the Bull, Eli believed me, just as I thought. It was Papa who refrained, confused. He looked at me, then back out in the colorless wilderness, as if searching for something he had only just heard of, or else desperately conjuring a figure from each piece of swamp his vision touched. The moss, the feathers, the plants, and the still, waiting water.
Before summer grew too old and began to boil the sweat from our skin, Papa Roy and Mama Ilene invited everyone on our street to a crawfish boil in our backyard. The cave dwellers arrived with their offerings—small red potatoes, palm-sized cobs of corn, silver bowls of garlic and cayenne, and butter for smothering. Almost no makeup on these women, and no sleeves on the men, their skin burnt or borne into the colors of every spice in Mama Ilene’s kitchen. They roared with gull-cackle laughter. They moved in bursts of motion, the type of people trained to kill chickens with bare hands. They smelled like salt brine and dressed in overwashed clothing soft to the touch. Some even arrived carrying weapons, but not the kind I had seen in our old neighborhood. I led Eli to watch with some other children as a woman aimed an air gun into the creek that snaked behind the back of the property. She caught four little panfish this way, like magic, with no sharp hooks or blood, and fried them with flour and split them among us. Music—the kind of ear-wrenching zydeco which only appears at seafood boils or tourist restaurants—burst from a portable stereo.
Near the end of the evening, after we had washed our hands with lemon and water and siphoned out coffee and powdered creamer, I heard Mama Ilene call out Papa Roy’s name into the scattering of fold-out chairs where the adults sat decompressing. From a picnic blanket on the outskirts with Eli, I could see the top of Papa’s head look up toward Mama where she closed the screen door behind her and moved toward him, cradling something in her arms. I rose and entered the gathering of chairs, into the perfume of charcoal and mosquito candles, and watched as she deposited the object—a long and curving leather case, beaten and worn at the edges—into his hands.