Outcast (14 page)

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in the swamplands. I’d driven through them a lot, to get to other places. But turning off the main road, going deep into the bayou where the air was as thick as the plant life, I hadn’t done that since I was kid.

The only way to get there was to take that one long winding road. It pulled you in, sucked you in, like stepping into warm wet mud. You might try to pull away, but that makes it hold you even faster. The trees here dripped with Spanish moss above and all around you. If the muggy air didn’t make you feel claustrophobic, the trees certainly would.

I’d borrowed the car the second I got home from school, and, now driving along with the sun low, I realized that finding Gabe’s place might be a little trickier than I thought. What’s more it occurred to me, as I slowed down, trying to scan for houses, that I had no idea where I was going or what I was looking for. Well, obviously it would be something house-like. It wasn’t like it was going to be a bucket or anything.

The swamplands were pretty under-populated, and homes were usually well hidden off the main road, which by this point was little more than a thin lane with vegetation seeping its way onto it, so I had to drive pretty slowly and look through the trees for a glimpse of life. When I did pass the rare homes, they were obviously lived in, with trucks parked on the lawn, or fresh gardens, or somebody sitting on the front porch. I was starting to think that maybe I’d gone wrong somewhere, or that worse, maybe I’d been wrong in my conclusion, when I saw the bike in the distance. I slowed the car down to turn in beside it.

I pulled onto the overgrown patch of land next to the bike. There was just enough space for a car. I climbed out and instantly felt uncomfortable. For someone growing up in this part of the world, you think I’d be okay with bugs. And I am, sort of. I can handle mosquitoes, even though they’re annoying. Little spiders are okay too. I guess my problem was with big bugs, juicy bugs, bugs that when you squashed them made a crunch sound, bugs with intentions, motivations and philosophies. Those bugs I could do without.

There were a lot of those bugs in the swamplands. Wetlands. Lowlands. Bayou. I never knew what to call it. Teachers always referred to that area as different things. Basically we have a lot of swamp down here. Makes it hard to build up anything, so the people in this part of the community have homes on patches of land surrounded by water, like the little house I was now standing in front of.

It wasn’t a shack. But it wasn’t much more than that. One floor, two windows in the front, paint almost entirely stripped from the walls because of the humidity, totally overgrown.

“Gabe?” I called out as I approached the front door. Or at least where a front door would be. The ground beneath me was soft, almost squishy. Once I got closer to the house, I could see that it was little more than a shell. I figured once Gabe had disappeared fifty years ago, what with his ma gone and everything, there was no one left to look after it. Made sense that some folk would take the bits that could help a home that needed it. Fifty years deserted, you don’t think anyone’s coming back.

I climbed up the three rotten steps to the entrance that splintered under my weight.

“Gabe?” I peered into the house. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go in. It was dark and spooky and probably way unsafe. I took a deep breath and went to take a step.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I turned around and saw Gabe staring up at me, his head tilted a little to the left.

“Was looking for you.”

“Well, don’t go in there, it ain’t safe. Come on down off the porch before you hurt yourself.”

Well, that seemed unfair. It wasn’t like I didn’t know it was unsafe. The point was that I was willing to sacrifice my own safety for him. I was a damn saint. And now he was acting all superior…

“I know that,” I said as I came down and joined him.

“Why were you looking for me?” he asked. He looked at me with suspicion, which I didn’t think was necessary.

“I was worried about you.”

“Why?”

“Well, you haven’t been yourself lately, and then you just ran off…”

“What’s that to you? Can’t a guy be on his own, to think and stuff?”

“Well, I’m sorry. I’ll just go then.” I was angry now, though I wasn’t sure why. I guess I’d expected a more moving scene. More appreciation that I was there. I felt stupid now, worrying so much. I marched toward the car, violently waving away the massive deer flies in my way.

“Riley,” he called after me. I heard him coming up from behind. “Riley, stop.”

I stopped and tried to turn in an appropriately frustrated way.

“Why’re you mad at me?” he asked. “What’d I do wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. You just totally disappear, and I spend all this time trying to figure out where you are, and I think it’s pretty impressive that I figured out that you’d be here. Had to drive out this way, and it makes me a little nervous to be so deep into the swamplands, and evidently you’re totally cool, and you’re mad that I’m bothering you. No ‘Thanks,’ no ‘Wow, awesome detective work.’ No nothing. And that isn’t fair.”

Gabe just looked at me in his way. Then he said, “Come with me.” He stretched out his hand. I didn’t take it. “Riley.”

“Say sorry first.”

“For what?”

“For making me feel bad that I came to find you.”

“Riley, I’m happy you came to find me. I just couldn’t figure why you did it. No one’s really cared enough before to even notice me missing, let alone try to find where I’d gone. Not mad. Never was.”

“Oh.”

“How about I just say thank you?”

I shrugged.

“Thank you.”

I looked at him, and he gave me that smile. That stupid, stupid smile. “You’re welcome.”

“Now come with me.” I took his hand, and he led me around to the back of the house. The path was overgrown, but I could see where he was taking me, to a small rotting dock on the edge of the murky water.

“That can’t be safe.”

“It’s okay, been working on it in places. Just watch your step.”

We walked out onto it, and yeah, it did feel pretty secure, but I could see some fallen boards ahead. “Let’s just sit here, ’kay?” I said.

“Sure.” We sat down.

The view from the small dock was lovely. Even though we were staring out into a swamp, it looked more like a small lake. There were several large cypress trees not too far out before us cloaked in Spanish moss that dripped down into the water. The branches soared above us and created a canopy that the light broke through in shafts, highlighting knots of fallen trees or floating logs in a way that made them look almost like live creatures. Everything was reflected back to itself by the water, almost opaque and still.

“It’s nice,” I said. But it wasn’t nice. It was more like magical, mysterious, haunting. “Nice” was so rarely an appropriate word for anything.

“Used to catch crayfish here. Had a small boat, too.”

“Any uh, alligators?” I asked, looking at a floating log with suspicion.

“Oh yeah, definitely.” Gabe laughed like it was no big deal. “Not as many as is even further south, but yeah. Sometimes we’d sit and watch them from inside. Kind of boring. They’d never do much.”

“So you’ve never had an encounter them?”

“Not personally, but I remember when Jacob Taylor lost his leg.”

“You saw a guy lose his leg?” That freaked me out.

“Nah, didn’t actually see it. But it happened, and we all knew about it. Kid almost died.”

“Wow.” I’d been on those bayou tours before. I’d actually been twice, once with my parents as a family trip, and once with the school as an “educational experience” (real educational, with the boys trying to see who could dangle themselves out of the boat the furthest). I’d seen plenty of alligators. And they were pretty freaky creatures. The idea of them just floating in your backyard, which I guess was pretty normal for the folks in this part, was terrifying to me.

“Hey,” said Gabe noticing my change in comfort level, “you don’t got to worry. I can recognize a gator right off. It was my thing. My friend Deke and me, we’d compete. And there ain’t no gators out there right now.”

“Okay, but only because I know you’d take care of me,” I said.

I could tell now that Gabe was looking at me. So I turned and looked back at him.

“What?” I asked. Had I done something wrong again?

“You keep doing that, just throwing out that kind of thing, and for you it’s nothing, but you don’t know what it does to a person.”

“What kind of thing?” Now I was just totally confused.

“You saying you know I’d take care of you.”

“But I do.”

“I know, but I don’t know why.”

I looked at him hard, and I could see pain in his expression. Why would such a thing upset him so much? “Does this have anything to do with why you’ve been acting how you’ve been acting lately?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been all sullen these last few weeks, last month even. Running off to be on your own all the time…”

Gabe sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…all this stuff with Pastor Warren and with everyone going nuts about the angels lately just kept reminding me that I didn’t really belong here. Then you and your ma voted, now she’s going to the Church…”

I knew it. “It’s not that we don’t agree with you. You know how much I hate him. It was the moment, the whole town was there…”

“And you never care usually what other people think.”

“I know.” I tried to remember why I did it. All I could think was that I hadn’t wanted Pastor Warren to notice me. I’d wanted to be invisible. “I don’t. But I also don’t want to stand out. I don’t want that man interfering with our detective work, and if he knew my real feelings about him…” I trailed off.

We sat quietly for a moment. Then, finally, Gabe said, “I guess it makes sense.”

A huge wave of relief. “Is that why you left? Because we’d disappointed you?”

“No. Well, maybe a bit. I was mad y’all voted, but then I realized I hadn’t got any right to be. Y’all ain’t my family, and I was treating you like you were. I ain’t like you and your parents. You’re all educated, been lots of places. Sweetheart, I ain’t gone no further than New Adamstead.”

“That doesn’t matter, lots of people don’t travel till they’re older, and you had to take care of your Ma…”

“It ain’t about the traveling, that ain’t my point. It’s…I realized I had to start taking care of myself, couldn’t rely on you forever.”

I hadn’t expected to hear that. “Gabe, have you been here all this time?”

“First it was just to think. Then I thought, well damn, it’s my home, ain’t it? So I decided I’d fix it up. But I needed to take extra shifts at the garage to make money to buy supplies…so I started skipping school.”

“If you need money, we can help you. School’s too important, especially with you being so close to finishing, graduating and everything.”

“I can’t take your money, Riley.”

“It’d be a loan then. You’d pay us back. Just promise you’ll come back and live with us, go to school, all that. You’re breaking Mother’s heart.”

“Why would you do that for me?”

“I dunno, I know you. I know you’ll pay us back. Besides…” I looked away and out into the bayou. “I miss you.”

Once more what I said appeared to hit him like a bullet, square in the chest. “You shouldn’t,” he said softly.

I looked up at him again and saw he was staring down at the dock, picking at a splintered edge. “Gabe.” I thought for a moment. “I don’t really get it, to be honest. I mean, you act like you’re some bad boy or something, and some of the things you say, sure, they’re not always politically correct…but…you don’t seem so bad to me. You even get all your homework done on time. Well, before…”

Gabe lifted his head and stared out into the water, throwing the piece of wood he’d peeled off the dock out into it. “I guess if you spend a lot of time being told you’re a bad kid…”

“Who told you that?”

“Plenty of folk. My ma…”

“Your ma?”

“Riley, you didn’t know me back then. I was always getting up to trouble, stole from the store, always trying to skip out on school, getting in fights. No one cared right? So what did it matter? I guess now I kind of have this second chance. Maybe now I’m behaving a bit better, had time to change…”

“But it isn’t like fifty years have passed for you. It’s not like you’ve had time to grow wiser and better. You woke up thinking it was the morning after that fight that night, thinking your mother had just died. You woke up, and this is who you were.”

“What’s your point, Riley?”

“My point is, you’re talking about time to change, but I just think that maybe this is who you’ve always been. Maybe that bad boy thing, I dunno, maybe that was the act. A way to get by when everything else was…I mean…you know…”

“Shit?” asked Gabe with a small laugh.

“Sure. Shit.”

“I dunno…” He gave me a small grin. “I’m not a good boy either.” The way he said it gave me butterflies.

No, you’re not.

“No, you’re not. You’re you. I guess my point is you don’t have to try to be anything. Just be. And when I say that I know you’ll take care of me, don’t go off on this, ‘But why would you think that, I’m such a bad egg?’ thing. Instead, just believe me. Because I’m honest.”

“Almost too honest.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means I’ve never met anyone who says exactly what she’s thinking and feeling, like you do.”

“Don’t see why I should hide it.”

“You shouldn’t. Just saying.”

“So am I. Just saying.”

We both sat there after that, in perfect quiet, thinking. I could understand why Gabe used to spend hours staring out into the bayou like this. It really calmed a person.

It was probably because we were so quiet that I heard the singing. It was faint at first but grew as she got closer. Etta Mae. Singing one of her songs. I’d heard this one before. It was about Moses. I always thought it was interesting that so many of the old songs had to do with a leader from the Old Testament. But of course the songs were always about freedom, and that was the point of his story, leading his people to freedom.