It was raw beauty, floating through a forest of trees older than time itself, trees that seemed to stand sentinel against outsiders, against any man or woman who didn’t respect the lake’s history, who didn’t respect or understand what had been here before any of them on that boat had been born, before America was even an idea, before Mexico and Spain had a piece of it, before the French tried it too, before Texas was more than a word of kindness on a Caddo’s lips. Tayshas.

When they broke through the forest and onto the open water of Carter Lake, Darren was happy to catch a snatch of sun behind clouds that were moving in from the east. They would face nighttime or a storm if they didn’t get through this quickly. In the open sound, Jim picked up speed, as Darren had asked him to. They moved into Back Lake and skirted along Horse Island and then the southern border of Goat Island, which stretched for a few miles. The Blue Heron was closing in on the area on Marcus’s map that represented Gogo Island. Darren scanned the water in front of him, staring at the stand of pine trees that seemed to shoot up out of the water but were actually more like a wall around a piece of land that grew bigger the closer the boat got to it. Darren turned to Marcus, who was still pressed into his seat at the back of the boat.

“Is this it?” Darren said.

Marcus was quiet. Darren waved him forward. “Is this the island?” When Marcus shook his head uncertainly, Darren yelled at him to get up and come look. Jim had started to slow his engine as they approached not so much a shore but a place where the land rose a solid foot out of the water. Darren pushed Marcus against the railing.

“I don’t know, man,” Marcus said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“You lied to me?”

With an embarrassed shrug, Marcus said, “I can’t swim.”

Hence the two life jackets, the way Marcus was clinging so hard to the boat’s metal railing that Darren could see every ridge and wrinkle on his knuckles. He caught a flash of lightning out of the corner of his eye, followed a few seconds later by a cannon shot of thunder. There was a storm coming for sure. “If y’all finna do this thing,” Jim said, “now’s the time.”

Marcus snatched the map from his book out of the captain’s hands. He stared at it for a while, then looked at the open sound behind them. He nodded with less certainty than Darren would have liked and said, “This is it.” Followed a few moments later by an equivocal, “Gotta be.”