Maybe going on this trip is not a mistake after all. Ever since I made up my mind to go I have not once masturbated or even considered it. Which is fabulous because there for a while it got so bad I was afraid of getting pimples. At my age, if you get pimples, everybody knows you’ve got this dirty habit, and it’s a big mess. So no matter how black it all looks at times, I’m really lucky as hell about certain things.

In twenty hours, I’ll be getting on the bus. I’m still afraid but it doesn’t make any difference because I’d rather die than not go where Berry-berry is. Even some awful death like toothpicks pushed under my fingernails and branding irons in my eyeballs. Do I really mean this?

Yes, I do.

See, in your mind, the west coast of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. Picture a chain of seven islands, linked together by bridges. This chain curves gently to form an S. The top of the S is attached, by another bridge, to the mainland, a few miles south of Naples. The bottom point of the S is an island called Key Bonita.

A bus called Tamiami will bring you as far down the coast as Naples, but from there a traveler to Key Bonita has to choose between a number of inconvenient alternatives. An Everglades bus would leave him four miles from that first bridge, and continue its journey east; there is a local bus line that would take him directly to Key Bonita, but it sends a bus down that way only once in two days. The third choice is hitchhiking; but motorists are few in the Everglades, and these few are nervous and drive fast: this is desolate swampland, and a lone figure on the highway arouses suspicion. Therefore, the hitchhiker’s chances are slim, and he may end up with a long mean walk before him.

But this was the method Clinton Williams chose. At first his luck ran high. A cheerful man in a long black car brought him to the fork, the very point at which the swamp bus turns off into the Everglades on its way to the east coast. But from there, the going was hard.

After an hour, in which darkness had begun to fall and only six cars had turned off in the direction of the bridge, he set out to walk the four miles. The road was straight and dreary, lined with mangroves and scrubby seagrape trees. Serpents lived there, camouflaged in the mangroves’ twisted roots, and on the surface of the dead-still waters, mosquitoes in their millions bred millions more. These bloodthirsty nuisances raised welts on Clinton’s skin. After a few minutes he gave up slapping at them or even scratching the places they had bitten. Scuffling lizards made nightmare noises, and frogs croaked in their hiding places. For a while, the boy sang any song that came into his head, just to drown out their sounds. But after a time, when he gave up resisting any of these miseries, they became strangely pleasurable. The full moon, like some demon skilled in chiaroscuro, made awful shadow creatures to hide imperfectly in the foliage. Clinton wondered why he was not afraid of them: it was as if he had died and gone to hell and found it curiously to his taste. He tingled with the excitement of this terrible place. If one of the moon’s monsters had come forward, he might have reached out to it eagerly, hugged it to his itching, perspiration-drenched body, and begged it to make love to him. For he had become, to himself, one of its miserable creatures, a shape of evil, ready to surrender.