Dark and Shallow Lies(5)
La Cachette is made up of two dozen or so little houses – all of them on stilts – connected by a half-mile stretch of elevated wooden walkway. Every bit of this town was built to let the floods and the tides and the mud flow right underneath us. Down here, there is no water and there is no land. There’s only an uneasy in-between. When it’s dry, we have yards. Sort of. When it’s not, you wouldn’t know where the river ends and the town begins.
Right now, the tide is coming in and the water is slowly rising beneath our feet. I blink against the glare bouncing off the river. And off the gleaming white paint. The whole town gets a new coat each spring. Every square inch of it. All the buildings. The boardwalk, too. Even the dock. All the same bright white. Living their whole lives a few feet above the relentless muck, everyone down here craves that kind of clean, I guess.
The Mystic Rose sits smack in the middle of the boardwalk, right across from the boat dock, and Hart and Elora’s place is on the downriver end of town. The very last house. A quarter mile and a whole five-minute walk away. In between, every single structure has a swinging sign hanging from the front porch or painted lettering on the windows advertising a buffet of psychic services – everything from séances to palm readings to past-life regressions. There’s even one lady who claims she can contact the spirits of your dead pets, and that – for a nominal fee, of course – they’ll relay messages to her. In perfect English.
The sign that hangs out front of the little house where Elora and Hart live is made from plywood cut in the shape of a heart. It’s painted bright red with fancy gold letters that spell out psychic love readings – miss cassiopeia, romance counselor.
If you bring Hart’s mama something that belongs to a boyfriend or a wife or a fiancé, she can hold it in her hands and tell you if their love is true. I’ve seen her do it a million times, and she’s never wrong. People even send her things by mail from all over the country. A girlfriend’s pencil or a husband’s cuff link. Their front room is papered with wedding invitations from happy customers. I don’t doubt her talent, but her name is Becky. Not Cassiopeia. In La Cachette, the line between what’s real and what isn’t gets blurry sometimes.
The boardwalk ends just past their house, and that’s where Hart and I are heading. There’s an old pontoon boat rusting away in the mud down there, washed up by some hurricane I can’t remember the name of. Elora’s daddy, Leo, chained it up so it wouldn’t float away in the next flood, and that’s where it stayed. I guess he thought maybe he’d fix it up someday, but he never did. Then, the summer we were all seven, we claimed it as our hangout. And it’s been ours ever since.
It was our pirate ship that first summer. Evie’s mama sewed us a skull and crossbones flag to fly. Another summer, it was our spaceship. When we got older, that’s where we’d go to sneak cigarettes or pass around a can of beer. Most of us had our first kiss there, too. Some of us more than that. I know for a fact that Elora lost her virginity there with Case the summer we were all fifteen.
Hart jumps down into the bow of the old boat. It’s not that far, maybe four or five feet below the boardwalk, but my legs aren’t nearly as long as his, so I climb down the rickety wooden ladder to join him.
“Hey, Shortcake,” he teases. “You think you’re little ’cause you live in Little Rock? Or is that just a coincidence?” I roll my eyes. It’s an old joke – and a bad one – but the familiarity of it feels good, and when I reach the bottom of the ladder and step off into the boat, Hart’s almost grinning at me. I’ve always loved the way his eyes crinkle up at the corners when he smiles, and it makes me happy to see the old him, even if it only lasts a second.
We sit together on one of the cracked and peeling bench seats. The boat’s canopy is long gone, and I’m grateful for the shade of a single bald cypress tree that rises from the murky water of a pond a few feet away. I slip off my flip-flops and pull my knees up to hug them to my chest.
“You seen Willie Nelson this year?” I ask.
Hart nods. “Yup. See him almost every day, seems like. Still big as a barge and ugly as sin.”
Willie showed up three or four years ago. A monster gator. Probably thirteen feet at least. Somebody probably would’ve shot him for meat by now, except the tourists like taking pictures of him. Sometimes he’ll disappear off into the bayou when it’s flooded out, but soon as the water starts to recede, he comes crawling right back here to this pond. Year after year. Because this deep hole never goes dry. Once, Leo caught us throwing hot dogs to him, and he threatened to beat the shit out of all of us – Willie included. Since then we’ve coexisted in a kind of cautious truce. He sticks to his side of the muddy pit, and we stick to ours.
Hart leans down and picks up an old nail that’s rusting in the bottom of the boat. He pitches it out into the center of the gator pond, and I hear it hit the water with a plink. We watch the ripples spread across the surface, and for a few minutes, it’s so quiet between the two of us that the angry buzzing of the water bugs is almost deafening.
Finally, he takes a deep breath. “We were out hunting fifolet. Like we used to do when we were kids, remember?”
I nod. We all grew up hearing stories about the mischievous ghost lights that appear in the bayou. Strange, eerie balls of floating blue gas. Cajun folklore says they’ll lead you to Jean Lafitte’s pirate treasure, if you’re brave enough to follow. But sometimes the fifolet play tricks, leading people farther and farther from safety until they’re lost forever deep in the swamp.