“Howdy,” I said.

He grunted at me and spat in the swamp water.

We kept on our way.

“Folks sure aren’t too friendly out here,” I said.

“Looks to me like they’re scared,” said Tally.

“Of what?” I said. I tried to laugh a little. “The Creepy?”

Tally didn’t say a word.

By midafternoon, we still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Pop. I was getting worried. We passed another one of those bone garlands dangling from way up high in an oak tree. I still didn’t believe in the Creepy, but whatever made those things sure wasn’t up to any good. It was bad enough to be worried about my pop without having to worry about myself and Tally in the meanwhile.

What was undeniable was the sunset, how it was able to change the swamp, to turn it all honey colored and lit alive. That was some magic we could all agree on. Pinks and golds, like a painter’s bucket upturned and spilled itself all over the waters. We could have been in a king’s tomb of gold, a forest of jewels, of glowing swamp cat’s eyes and the scaly glimmer of a snake slithering across the water.

Tally sat upright.

“Do you feel that?” she said.

The water exploded with fish then, the silver-bright flicker of fish scales as they flung themselves out of the murk and over our skiff, flying they were, popping out of the water like corn kernels on a kettle, bands of jewelry sailing wild over our heads and vanishing with a splash back to where they came from. It was like they were playing, these flying fish were, like it was the greatest joy in the whole world to be a fish and spend all day trying to be a bird. The way the sunset caught them midair and turned them to gold.

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my whole life.

It’s strange, I guess, to feel as happy as I was feeling right then, even though I’d left my mom at home and my daddy was off kidnapped by lowlifes. But it was true. I did feel happy, I felt joyful and wild and free, and worried and fearful too, scared we were too late to help Pop, scared that we’d never make it out of the Swamplands alive.

I can’t say it makes much sense, to feel two completely different feelings at once. But life doesn’t make much sense either, does it? Not in my experience. You can save all the making sense for stories, for tales spun from Parsnit cards and wild yarns whispered around campfires.

Real life is too big and weird and confusing for something so simple as making sense.

11

NIGHT CAME ON FAST. ME and Tally slept in shifts, which meant neither of us hardly caught a wink. Way past midnight and creeping up on morning time I was finally drifting off into some weird dream about Mom making a pie out of a one-eyed pigeon when Tally shook me awake.