I saw what looked like one big eye peer at me and blink, then dash away. I realized the river was a living thing, full of life and rushing and wild as blood.

Then my foot was free. I don’t know how it happened, in that moment I could not tell you. But I kicked and swam hard as I could and my face broke the surface of the water and I gasped in all the air my lungs could handle. I’d never noticed the air before, not really, never thought about what a pure cool breath actually tasted like. Let me tell you, I would never take air for granted again.

A bit of blown-apart boat floated by and I grabbed it, hugged it close to me. It was a huge chunk of the bottom of the boat, big enough for me to crawl my belly up on, so only my feet and arms dangled in the water. With my body on it, the boat scrap stayed afloat, it didn’t sink. I could keep my head up, the current dragging me onward, Cecily Bob’s dinghy disappearing swift down the starlit river, the two lowlifes who thieved my daddy cackling off into the night.

I worried about gators floating under me long as boats. I worried about their jaws that could crack a man’s bones in two. I’d seen them float up before in a body of water so slick and smooth it could have been a footpath, it seemed like the calmest most boring water on earth. And right underneath the surface the whole time is that. It’s the sort of thing that will make you sit back and take stock of the world and your place in it. It’s the kind of thing that makes you scared to set your foot out of doors, if you think about it too hard.

So what I did was try not to think about it at all. I didn’t think about gators or snapping turtles or alligator gars, which are like gators on top but with fishtails on their bottoms, sort of like a maniac’s idea of a mermaid. I tried not to think of the Creepy either, or fanged fish, which were both supposed to be rumors. I tried not to think of river spirits or dryads or the Dolly Witch or any of the other creatures I’d heard about from my daddy when I was just a kid wandering the Swamplands.

What I did focus on was holding tight to the boat scraps, to keeping the course as long as I could. What if I managed to kick myself all the way over to the bank, against the current, mind you, then what? Hitchhike after the men who stole Pop? They’d be long gone before I could get half a mile. River travel was the only way, and I was now without a boat. It’d take me a miracle, but I was sitting in this river until I wore out or caught them.