He didn’t have time to go home the way he’d come, hugging the north shore of the lake, sailing along a thin canal of relative safety, porch lights on boathouses and craggy lake cabins twinkling hints of civilization. That would take nearly an hour. It would be full-on dark by then, and Levi hadn’t brought a flashlight. He’d set out in a thin jacket with nothing on board but Pappy’s old radio and a single oar pitted with rot that his grandfather had used to pull himself ashore. The radio kept cutting in and out. The antenna was bent halfway down, and in the pockets of silence, a deeper kind of fear took hold. He’d heard the lake went silent come nightfall, Spanish moss on the cypress trees dampening all sound, so that you could feel in this primeval lake on the edge of the state, this swamp at the edge of time, that you were the last man alive.

Not that he’d ever been on the water this late, not even when his granddaddy was still alive. Pappy believed in supper at five o’clock sharp. The Swamp Loon would have been drying in the boathouse by now, Pappy on his third or fourth beer in front of the TV. The old man steered clear of the lake after dark, always warning Levi how easy it was for a man to get turned around once night fell if he was moving solely by the light of a weak headlamp or a shy moon. The lake was big and complex—the many bayous, tributaries, and inlets like a tangle of snakes on the Texas side, at least the part that sat in Marion County—a wetland maze that had mystified outsiders for hundreds of years. If you didn’t know the lake well, you could easily mistake one cypress tree for another, take the wrong bayou pass, and never find your way out, not in near blackout conditions. The thought made Levi’s heart race. The radio shot back on, startling him, Patsy Cline cutting through a burst of static. It was a station out of Shreveport that switched from zydeco to country near suppertime—another sign he was late.

I go out walkin’ after midnight…

Midnight.

The word felt like a warning. His granddaddy used to call it “spending a night at the Caddo Motel.” Now, don’t you ever fart around and end up alone out here at night, son. ’Cause ain’t a soul gon’ save you. Pappy was old enough to remember his granddaddy’s tales of moonshiners and murderers hiding on the lake’s many large islands. Injuns and spooks alike, boy, thieves and Yankees too. Pappy had grown up with gruesome tales of shoot-outs and knifings, not to mention ghost stories about souls roaming the waters, haints hiding in the trees. According to Pappy, wasn’t no telling how many souls had disappeared out on this water.