Eight

The first aid kit in the boat contained a box of Dramamine, so Toly was sleepy, but no longer hacking up his guts when they set out from the cabin. The same cabin where Mercy and Ava had spent their cut-short honeymoon, a little dusty, and damp, and in need of a deep-cleaning it wasn’t going to get, but serviceable for their sleeping bag and bathroom needs.

Once upon a time, Mercy could have navigated to their current destination in the semi-dark and while sleep-deprived, but it had been a long, long time since he’d made the trek. They grabbed three hours on the floor of the old hunting cabin, checked their gear, and headed out.

It took forty-five minutes to get there, the waterways growing narrower and more heavily-shaded the farther they went. The moss hung in great curtains so dense Mercy was forced to slow, and idle the boat while they swept them back with poles.

“Christ, man,” Devin said after the third such incident. “If you can’t get through how do you expect your FBI wanker to make his way out here?” For once, he wasn’t laughing, and when Mercy glanced over, he saw his forehead sheened with sweat, his mouth curved downward. For the first time since meeting him, Mercy thought he most resembled Walsh, of all his sons.

For a moment, Mercy doubted his plan – but, no. This was the swamp, and that was what it did: it turned even the most capable of men clammy and nervous-stomached. From Toly’s motion sickness, to Devin’s skepticism, it was working its magic on the outsiders.

But Mercy wasn’t an outsider.

And that clammy, nervous-stomached fear was going to work its magic on Boyle, too, and work in Mercy’s favor.

As quick as it had come, doubt evaporated on a laugh. “Don’t you worry, mon cher. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s bait a hook.”

Finally, Mercy recognized the landmark he’d been searching for, and grinned. “Here we go.”

Decades ago, long before Mercy navigated these waters as a boy with his father, someone had decided it would be a good idea to build a little stone house deep in the swamp, right on the edge of a canal. It must have been torture hauling all the construction supplies out this deep into the wilderness, where nothing more than game trails offered an overland route, and the water was tricky. Daddy said he’d heard it told that the stones had been driven out by boat, and that a whole pallet load had tipped overboard. Good way to scrape a big ol’ hole in your hull .

Mercy backed off the throttle and let their momentum carry them past all that remained of the never-completed stone house: a triangular column, and collapsed section of porch, long rotted. A low-hanging branch overhead dangled pendulums of ivy that Mercy chose to duck, rather than sweep aside. The others ducked, too, with soft curses, and Mercy pushed up the throttle.

The boat emerged in a lake. Not a big one, but a lake all the same, broad, and deep, its water black and gleaming beneath the burning midday sun. Cypresses ringed its perimeter, their roots ancient, naked knees the water slipped between, little hidey holes for rats, nutria, lizards, frogs. They were tall, curved inward over the mucky shoreline, their shadows turning the shallows twilight-dark.

But it was the center that drew the eye. That sat tall and spired and commanding as a king’s crown on a black satin pillow.

“An island?” Toly asked, drowsy, but a touch scornful.

“An island,” Mercy confirmed, and, looking at it, he knew he’d made the right decision.

It was more foreboding than he remembered: small, lushly green at its edges, where duckweed turned to grass in an illusory way that could get a man stuck in quicksand-like black mud. Crowded with trees, a blend of pines, and willows, and cypresses, all crowded together, half of them black and dead thanks to a lightning strike twenty years ago. The branches of the neighboring trees, and wrist-thick vines of poison ivy had kept the dead soldiers standing, and they clawed at the sky with skeletal, charcoal fingers. A lone sandbar jutted toward the lakeshore, and on it, heads tipped back, clawed feet braced as they sunned themselves, basked seven alligators. From a distance, Mercy estimated the largest to be eight feet long.

Mercy slowed the boat again, then killed the engine. In the ringing silence afterward, he could hear the low din of the birds who’d chosen to stay on the island, or hunt the lake’s edge rather than fly to safer hunting grounds.

“This, boys,” Mercy said, “is the rookery. And it’s where Harlan Boyle is going to die a slow, painful death.”

~*~

It was his first year of proper hunting – of checking the traps, collecting the tags, and wielding the .22 alongside Remy – that Daddy first brought Mercy to this place. They’d just dropped the day’s catch at the depot, and the sun was already sinking, that pink-gold May twilight that was warm, but not yet oppressive, redolent of jasmine and honeysuckle, singing with crickets and peepers.

“Daddy, it’ll be dark soon,” Mercy cautioned, snugged next to Remy in the stern, beside the till, hands still smelling of gator, back of his neck prickling with nerves when Remy steered them away from home, and toward the deeper parts of the swamp where they rarely hunted.

“Mmhm,” Remy hummed. “That’s what spotlights are for.” He put his free arm, heavy with muscle, around Felix’s shoulders, and said, “I wanna show you something. Something good. Don’t be scared.”

He piloted them out, and out, until Felix could smell the salt of the ocean as strongly as he could smell the muck of home. Down narrower and narrower inlets and causeways and canals. He pointed out the ruins of what had never been anyone’s stone house. And as they emerged onto the lake, the sunset flared vivid as a forest fire through the lower rungs of the trees.

Felix gasped.

The world was alive with birds.

The egrets and herons stood in thick clusters on the banks of the lake, necks stretched as they called and trilled to one another. Others flew from the lake to the island at its center, and on the island itself, the trees were decorated more ornately than any Christmas spruce, draped in garlands of snowy egrets, and blue herons, and shrieking gulls, and swooping kingfishers. The baby sandhill cranes, downy gray, still unable to fly, were making a swim for it. As Felix watched, he saw one disappear, snatched beneath the water.

The noise. It was chaos, and it was music, and Felix could feel it in his chest.

“This,” Remy said, arm squeezing tighter around him once he killed the engine, “is the rookery. This is where all the birds come to roost for the night.”

“Wow.”

“They’re safer together. It’s where they have their nests. When their chicks hatch, up in those trees, nothing can get to them. But…” He breathed a quiet laugh. “Did you see that one go under?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s safe for any bird that can fly. But anything that swims…”

“Gators?”

“There’s more gators under us right now than you could shake a stick at. The birdsong, it calls to them.”

Felix said a sad, silent prayer for the stolen chick. But his fascination was too great to mourn it; that was life, that was nature – and never had he seen nature so noisily, unexpectedly resplendent.

“See that sandbar there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where you’ll see them in the daylight. Sunning themselves.”

“All of them?”

“No.” Remy snorted a laugh. “Just a few at a time.”

“How many do you think there are? Total?”

“Oh, who’s to say? Not me. Hundreds, probably.”

“Well,” Felix said, as his pulse leaped. “It’s a pretty big lake.”

Remy chuckled. “It sure is, son.”

~*~

The boat was still – as still as a boat could get without dropping anchor. It bobbed gently, water lapping against the hull with a sound that was embedded in Mercy’s bones. A sound his imagination conjured in the wee hours when he woke from a nightmare, rolled over to bury his face in Ava’s hair, and willed himself back to sleep. The sunlight on the water was blinding, and he squinted against it, peering up at the mostly-empty trees.

“That’s lovely,” Devin said, and sounded sincere. “But, no offense, son, we’re not going to wait here until the birds come to roost, are we?” His tone, at the end, suggested he thought that Mercy might have cracked.

Maybe he had.

He didn’t feel like he had.

“Nah. Gray. Hand me that cooler.”

He did so, and Mercy popped off the lid to reveal the chicken drumsticks they’d bought at a dockside bait shop on their way out. He’d forgone ice, and left the lid only partially closed, and the meat had begun to thaw, and warm, and smell . Perfect.

“When I used to live down here, this place wasn’t zoned for hunting. I don’t see any bait lines or tags, so I guess it still isn’t.”

“We poaching?” Devin asked.

“No. Not here, at least.” Mercy picked up a drumstick, and hurled it overhand across the water. It landed with an unremarkable plop twenty yards away. “We’re feeding.” He cranked the motor, and steered them closer to the sandbar and the sleeping gators there.

Over the roar of the engine, he said, “These are the shy boys and girls out here.” As they approached, all but one of the sunbathing gators scrambled off the sandbar and into the water. Mercy steered one-handed and chucked chicken legs into the ripples they’d left behind. “But in a day or two, they’ll be coming right up to the boat asking for a hand-out like the ones on the tourist routes do.”

It must have clicked, then, for Devin, what Mercy was trying to do, because his belly laugh cracked high above the drone of the motor.