said, “I can’t believe you’d say something like that. That’s mean.”
“You don’t know my little sister,” I said. “She’d make excellent gator bait.”
“I bet I can out run you,” Leah said. “Maybe I just leave you here for gator bait.”
And she proved it. She took off, and I’ve never seen anyone run that fast. I ran after her for about twenty yards before I realized I was embarrassing myself. I called after her, “I was kidding.” I don’t think she heard me. I think she outran the sound.
8
There are sounds in the Conecuh National Forest night that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. I didn’t hear any of those sounds that first night. All I heard were air conditioners. Yep. Out in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama about as far from civilization as you can get in the southeastern United States and I’m not hearing bobcats. I’m not hearing frogs. I’m not hearing night owls. I’m hearing air conditioners. About three-fourths of the Open Pond camp sites have water and electrical hook-ups for RVs, and about three-fourths of those were full. That means about twenty-five motor homes, urban sprawl on wheels, filled the air with the hum of air conditioners. Mom promised we would be spending the following nights at different frog ponds away from the main campground. That first night we would have to try and get to sleep with the whirr of climate controlled camping.
To make matters worse, there was that girl. Leah. She turned her back on me. She said things like “ain’t” and “hell.” Did she know Celsius from Fahrenheit? I don’t think so. How could she run so fast? Maybe because there was no brain in that head to slow her down. “Come back in May if you ain’t scared,” she said. Hell, I ain’t scared. And why did she have to be a year older than me? She couldn’t be thirteen; she had to be fifteen. One lousy year. Never seen eyes like hers. Dark, dark, dark eyes. Some kind of Alabama voodoo eyes. I didn’t know they had voodoo in Alabama. Leah? What kind of name is that?
I must have dozed off around midnight. It was not a restful sleep. I had too much to dream. In outer space. Alone. Quiet it was except for the drone of the spacecraft’s life support systems. Weightless, I drifted up to a porthole and looked down upon this strange new world. It was not the blue planet. Not mother earth. Green. Everything was green. The green planet. In my dream I wanted to go there. To the green world. There was something for me in the green world; I just didn’t know how to get there. Then I heard the voices.
“Shut up,” said the first voice.
“You shut up,” said the second voice.
“Both of you shut up,” said the third voice. The third voice sounded like it was in charge.
The voices were coming toward me. “How you know this is it?” asked one of the voices.
The voice in charge said, “You ain’t gone fly in no airplane with no motor home.”
Then there was a voice I recognized. My dad said, “Hello? Who’s there?”
This voice—my dad’s voice—woke me up. I sat straight up in my sleeping bag. My dad was sitting up, too.
Mom snuggled her bag up under her chin. “Let me sleep, please,” she said. “We’ll be up all night tomorrow.”
Dad looked at me through the darkness. “Did you hear them?” he whispered.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Probably a couple of drunks who couldn’t find their own tent,” he said.
9
I woke up thinking about what my dad had said, “A couple of drunks who couldn’t find their own tent.” Maybe I did hear voices. Real voices. That morning I was hearing real voices. My mom’s, my dad’s and another voice that sounded familiar. I crawled out of my sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. Our tent was on a slight slope that dropped off toward Open Pond. Down close to the water’s edge was a picnic table, and the morning sun was reflecting off of the water so that all I could see were the silhouettes of three people sitting at the table. I could tell from the voices and the shapes that one of them was my mother, one my dad, and the other was . . . Deputy Shirley Pickens. That shape, that voice. Yep, it was the deputy.
I slipped back into the tent and decked myself out for a day in the forest: heavy nylon olive green pants with zip-off legs, a sandy-colored nylon shirt, synthetic wool hiking socks and waterproof leather boots. Then I joined the group at the table. They were all drinking coffee. They didn’t offer me any.
“I guess you’re right, Professor,” Deputy Shirley Pickens was saying to my dad, “probably some drunks who couldn’t find their way back to their own tent.”
“So, we did hear voices last night?” I said.
“Your mother didn’t, but I did,” said Dad. “Sounded like the Three Stooges coming through the campgrounds. I thought they were about to get into the tent with us.”
I looked around the campgrounds. I counted twenty-five motor homes. I counted one tent.
“Do you notice anything?” I asked.
And then I answered my own question, “There is one tent out here, and it’s ours.”
Mom, Dad and Deputy Pickens looked around to confirm my claim.
“Lot of tents on the other side of the lake,” said the deputy. “The unimproved tent sites are on the other side of the lake.”
“We had to set up our base camp here at the RV sites,” said my mom. “Had to have electricity for my PowerBook.”
“You think those Three Stooges were on the wrong side of the lake?” Dad asked the deputy.
“Yeah,” he answered, “if you ain’t used to the longleaf you can get out there in the forest and it all looks the same, ’specially at night. Come in at night and you wouldn’t know which side of this lake you on.”
Deputy Pickens stood up, finished off his coffee and set the cup on the table. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said to my parents.
He turned to me. “Young man,” he said, “I told your folks that so far I ain’t turned up nothin’, but I’m still lookin’.”
I nodded. “Thanks for letting us know,” I said.
“You think of anything else, you let me know,” he said. “See you folks later.”
Deputy Pickens tipped his hat and walked away. His patrol car was parked on the road up the slope and past our tent. I watched as he paused just above our tent and seemed to study the sandy ground. He squatted down for a closer look. When he stood back up, he took a glimpse back toward me. I don’t know if he could see my face with the sun behind me like it was. I waved. He made a slight wave back and then took his foot and shuffled up the ground where he had been looking.
“Orange
