Page 36 of Frankly, My Dear

James looked at the alligator, then back at her. Grabbing her by the forearms, he pulled her back roughly and asked with concern, “Did it bite you? Where?”

“No, it didn’t bite me. But it would have. It wanted to,” she stammered out.

“What are you talking about?” he snarled impatiently, dropping his hands from her arms. “Are you hurt or aren’t you?”

“No, not exactly. But look all around us, the alligators.”

“This is a swamp! What did you expect? Swans?”

“They want to eat us.”

He put his hands on his hips. “So?”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do if you scream like that again. I’m going to throw you in the water. And you’d better hope that bones float, sweetheart, because I’m not jumping in to save your scrawny hide.”

She said a very vulgar word, one she had never spoken aloud.

“Likewise,” he retorted angrily and stomped away.

It took a long time for Selene’s adrenaline to settle down. Actually, she felt a little silly now. She should have been prepared for the dangers of the Louisiana swamplands.

She sat back against a wooden crate and let the primitive beauty of the age-old bayou with its teeming wildlife soothe her nerves. Loons cried piercingly, ducks took wing, egrets rose in wispy white spirals. A thousand frogs rasped out their throaty mating calls, and muskrats made small splashes as they dove into the murky water.

Selene saw the bayou as a microcosm of the world’s ever-regenerating soul and felt privileged to be a silent observer of its wonder. But she knew too well that it was a deceptive calm, and she shivered briefly at its vaporous shadows and the overpowering musk of centuries of decaying vegetation.

“Are you all right now?” Reba asked with concern.

“Yeah. I suppose I made a fool of myself.”

“Well, if you’ve never seen an alligator, I guess your reaction was understandable.” She looked dubious, though.

“But James overreacted a bit, too, don’t you think?”

“Actually, no. When you screamed like that, someone could have jolted with surprise and fallen overboard, especially one of the new slaves who aren’t yet steady on a flatboat.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize I’d put anyone in danger.” Selene promised herself to be braver in the future, not to scream at the least little thing. Not that an alligator was a little thing, no matter what these Southerners thought.

Her brave front lasted about twenty minutes.

Reba slept lightly at her side, and Selene had been half dozing herself, staring at a long grayish black stick that stretched across the deck. With eyes barely open, she wondered if one of the slaves had forgotten to pick up a pole used to propel the boat. But she realized almost immediately that it couldn’t be a pole, at least not one used for that purpose. It was too thick and would weigh too much.

Then the damn pole moved.

Her body broke into a cold sweat, and blood roared in her ears. Selene felt her mouth open wide, almost in slow motion, preparing to scream. But then she remembered that she’d promised James not to scream again. Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, what should I do?

She clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle her silent cries. Frantically, her eyes darted from side to side. When the snake inched forward on its yellow underbelly, Selene grabbed Reba’s arm. Shaking Reba awake, Selene pulled her sleep-disoriented body upright. With a soft shriek, she jumped up onto a bale of wooden barrel slats, and Reba followed without question, gasping.

The serpent’s coal-black tongue darted out and trembled in the air, testing. Then it opened its mouth wide, exposing the pure white, cottony interior. Cottony! Oh, great! It must be a cottonmouth…one of those poisonous water moccasins.

With no one nearby to help them, Selene reached for the first thing in sight—a huge burlap bag full of apples. She threw the first one and missed the monster snake’s spade-shaped head by a country mile. But the second one landed smack between the reptile’s elliptical eyes. “Did you see that?” she excitedly asked Reba, who was gaping open-mouthed at the snake, horrified into silence.

Of course, the apple didn’t kill the snake, but it did make the reptile pause. Selene threw a half dozen more. Only one more hit, but her efforts weren’t in vain. The snake seemed to stare at her with its lidless eyes, then slithered away, heading toward the edge of the boat.

“What the hell are you doing?” James barked as he rushed toward her and Reba.

Selene and Reba both pointed, too frightened to speak. They all watched as the enormous snake began to slide into the murky waters.