LYNN COULTER SWAMP WATER Every night Mama Hallie sits on the porch of her tin-roof shanty on the banks of a Louisiana bayou, listening as a chorus of mosquitoes sings in the swamp and bull gators honk love calls through razor-sharp marsh grass. Mama Hallie sits there drinking from a mayonnaise jar with a peeling blue and white label, a jar full of iced tea laced with something the locals call "swamp water," and on full-moon nights she talks to old Red Bob's leg. She says his legs were the best parts of Red Bob, until the blade at his sawmill sliced the left one off above the knee one steamy summer morning. Mama Hallie talks to a lot of folks. And to lots of parts of folks, because Mama Hallie's shanty sits on a bayou fed by a river that floods every time it rains.When it rains, that river rises up over the oldest graveyard in the city, the one where folks used to be buried in the ground before the locals found out about low water tables, before they realized Cottontree Parish is five feet below sea level. Sometimes when the river floods the graveyard, it floats one of the coffins buried there, lifts it right out of the ground and carries it downstream. Sometimes a coffin snags on the black branches jutting out from Mama Hallie's bank, or on the old, submerged barbed wire fence that used to surround her sixty acres of petroleum-rich land. Now the fence has been overtaken by the swamp and lies rusting under dark, foul-smelling water, snarled in a cruel hump of wire and tree limbs. When it snags a coffin, Mama Hallie goes outside after the water recedes, the ground nearly sucking her yellow galoshes off her tree stump-sized legs, and unsnarls the branches and hauls her find to her old garden spot. There she re-buries it, as is proper and fitting for Louisiana folks. On a summer night when the moon is cold and clear, and Mama Hallie's mayonnaise jar with the peeling blue and white labelis streaming sweat from something cold and clear that's in it, those folks -- or parts of folks -- rise up out of the garden patch where tomatoes and rhubarb stalks used to grow and sit down on her porch to talk a spell. And that's how she's come to talk a lot with Red Bob's leg. The assistant stood on Mama Hallie's porch in his ankle-length mackintosh and droopy cowboy-style hat, pleading to come in. The sagging roof over her sagging porch was leaking brown water, and cold rain trickled over the brim of his hat and underneath his collar. "But Miss Hallie --" Mama Hallie blocked the doorway to the shanty, her arms big as ham hocks crossed over her bosom, rock-like, immovable. "Not for sale." The assistant shivered. Water was sliding down his black raincoat and puddling in his wing-tip shoes. He was wondering who would be harder to placate-- Mama Hallie, blocking the doorway to the fireplace behind her, or his boss, ensconced in a walnut-paneled office at the headquarters for the petroleum consortium that had sent him here. He pictured his boss leaning back in his swivel chair, tapping his slender, silver pen on his desk blotter, listening as he tried to explain Mama Hallie's refusal to sell and complete their buyout of Cottontree land. Then his boss would lean over to jot notes in a thick book, notes that meant the assistant's future, that silver pen clicking furiously in and out. "Please!" He grabbed the door before she could slam it and wedged his foot in at the bottom. "Name your price to sell this property." "Not for sale," said Mama Hallie, leaning against the door with her full weight, like a boulder precipitating an avalanche, until he thought all the bones in his foot were going to break and tried to withdraw. He jerked his leg, but his shoe caught in the door. With a desperate yank he freed himself, but his shoe remained, left behind the closed door with Mama Hallie. He stood on her porch for a minute with rain snaking down his back, then turned and hopped down the porch steps to his car. Only then did Mama Hallie open her door, raise one beefy arm over her head, and pitch his black, size IOCC down the steps after him. Mama Hallie didn't need a man's shoe. After all, old Red Bob's leg already had one. Tyler Lott leaned back into the leather seat of the corporate jet carrying him toward Cottontree Parish. At a smooth thirty thousand feet in a frosted-white sky, the ice in his highball glass barely tinkled. He sucked on a cigar and exhaled. Ash floated down onto his knee, and a passing flight attendant flicked it off with a napkin. Ignoring her, he turned to watch their descent through the cabin window, thinking with satisfaction of the jet trail of ice crystals his arrival was making across the unsuspecting sky. "Nobody could have been more inefficient," Lott told the man sitting across the room from him. "Not only did you fail to close the deal, you antagonized her." He leaned back in the upholstered chair in his suite at the Cottontree Grande and glared at his assistant, like a scientist affixing an insect on a pin before he places a drop of fatal alcohol on the creature's head. "Your sources were wrong," the assistant squeaked. He cleared his throat. "Folks around here say she's a voodoo woman. Collects weird stuff from the swamp. Money's no inducement." Lott leaned back and smiled at the ceiling like a secret floated there. "Everybody wants money." The assistant perched on the edge of his chair. Then he got up and walked to the bar, poured some bourbon into a glass emblazoned with the hotel's crest, and drank slowly. Finally he dared to say, "Everybody but her." Lott squinted in the sunlight reflecting off the tin roof of the shack in front of him. Behind him the engine of his rental car cracked and popped as the metal contracted. He loosened his tie; already his shirt was wilting in the bayou humidity. He knocked on Mama Hallie's door. It opened a fraction. He saw one brown eye, fish-like, staring suspiciously out. "yes?" "Hallie Defleur?" "Folks calls me 'Mama Hallie.'" He gave her a smile. "Mama Hallie, then. I'm Tyler Lott, from Louisiana and Arkansas petroleum." The brown eye blinked. "One of y'all already been here." "My assistant inadequately represented our intentions. May I?" He shouldered in. "Guess you won't leave till you've heard no, too." Mama Hallie opened the door. His pupils adjusted painfully to the dark interior. He saw one room with a fireplace and a lumpy, battered sofa covered with an afghan crocheted in blocks of pink, green, and mustard yellow. Two rocking chairs sat by a fireplace which smelled rancid and smoky. Above the soot-blackened stones of the hearth a mantel hung at a precarious angle. Curious, he eyed her collection of things on the mantel. There was a jar of dried cat's tails, a branch with dead leaves, and three bottles filled with a liquid the color of iodine. He stared. On the mantel sat three small, bleached-white skulls, some kind of swamp creatures with pointed snouts and tiny, sharp teeth. Moles? he wondered. Shrews? Possums or even house catst Mama Hallie was moving out of the room and into the kitchen beyond. "Want some iced tea?" she asked, wiping her hands on her skirt. "Humidity makes you-all sweat, don't it?" He glanced around. The kitchen linoleum was caked with dirt, grease streaked the squatty refrigerator and stove top, but he dared not insult her. "I'd love some." He sat gingerly in a rocking chair while she cracked trays of ice and poured tea into two mayonnaise jars, sloshing it over the sides and onto the floor as she handed him one. He sipped. "Delicious." Surprisingly, it was delicious. Cold, bracing, smelling of mint and lemon. "Now, what you want, Mr. Lott?." "Mama Hallie, you're living here alone." She nodded. "You are -- shall we say, a certain age?" He tried to size her up, but she might have been fifty or seventy. Her face was cantaloupe-round, crisscrossed with wrinkles, but her hair was black. He continued. "One day you'll need assistance. With cooking perhaps. Or housekeeping." He bent over the mayonnaise jar, smothering a laugh at his joke. "We want to develop your land. We've bought out everyone else, and we're prepared to offer you the same attractive deal your neighbors have gotten." He leaned back and crossed his legs, resting his arms on the arms of the rocker, reasonable, friendly, warm. "Not my land." She smiled. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. The cold tea seemed to be making him hotter. "The courthouse books --" "Books don't make things so." She swigged at her jar. He looked around for a place to put his mayonnaise jar and giving up, set it on the floor between his feet. He leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees, his eyes level with hers. "Okay, Mama Hallie. What do you want?" "Got all I need," she said. She turned her eyes toward the mantel. "Now, I collect things." Her gaze shifted back to him. "Stuff the swamp's through with, like after a wolf's ate some animal and coughs up feathers and bones. I collect what the swamp don't want." The inside of his mouth felt like cotton. "You want something for your collection? In trade, for your property? I'll make it worth your while." She smiled. "Told you, property don't belong to me. Folks think we own land. We don't. It tolerates us, till it's had enough, then earthquake or fire comes along, swallows everybody up." "Those are natural disasters, Mama Hallie." He tried to restrain his anger. "You think we're some plague of corporate locusts, come to desecrate your land? Well, earthquakes and fires happen even to 'good' people." He watched her eyes. "And we'll make something good out of this land. Drain it, produce petroleum products that enhance peoples' lives. What's a swamp worth to anybody?" She drained the tea from her jar and leaned forward in her chair, too, her brown eyes unblinking and her breath sweet-smelling, like peppermint, in his face. "People got this idea a thing's got to be worth this, worth that. Some things just are. Leave this swamp alone." She stood up. "Time for you to go, I reckon." "Get something on her," Lott told his assistant. They sat across the table from each other over breakfast on the hotel veranda. "Everybody has a price." He buttered a slice of burnt toast angrily, scattering crumbs. "There's nothing,"' his assistant said. "Just a voodoo woman, like I told you. Barters for what she needs by doctoring the locals." "What kind of doctoring?" "Folk-medicine stuff. Poultice for an ingrown toenail, herbal tea for a headache, that kind of thing. She was born on that land. She'll die there, before she sells." Lott broke the overdone toast in half and threw it down onto his plate. He reached for a basket of fresh breads on the table. "Whatever," he said, spearing a blueberry muffin with his knife so that the berries bled purple juice. "I'm your man," said the man with gray hair combed carefully over his balding head. He slouched in the upholstered chair in the hotel room as though unaccustomed to comfort. Leaning back, he propped his fingertips together, cathedral-like, watching through half-closed eyes. He smelled faintly of kerosene. Lott opened his wallet and flicked three bills into the man's lap. The man did not move. Only his eyes changed, lizard-like, as if an inner eyelid had closed briefly over them. Lott made a disgusted sound and flicked another bill at him. The man picked up the bills one by one, wafting them past his nose, before he stuffed them into his jeans. "You know what to do?" "It's my business. You're paying for a professional." The man got up to go. At the door he turned around. "You must be desperate, man, burning an old lady for a few lousy acres." Lott allowed a smile to break across his face, like a crack in a frozen lake in a false spring, before winter surges back. "That's not your business." The man shrugged and walked out, leaving the door open. Lott closed it behind him. Then he looked down at his hand and shuddered. The door knob was slick with a film of grease. He woke two days later to the shrill of the telephone in his room. Groggy, he sat upright in bed and fumbled for the receiver. "It's still there," said a voice on the other end of the line. Lott yanked the clock from the bedside table and held it close to his face in the darkness. Fluorescent green numbers pulsed on and off slowly. "It's three A.M. What the hell are you talking about?" The line was silent for a minute. Then the assistant said, "The shack. He didn't show. He split with the money." Lott squeezed the clock in his hand as if it were an egg he could crash in his fingers. Then he pitched it across the room in the darkness. It slammed into the far wall and fell to the floor, its soft green numbers throbbing at him from the other side of the room, confused, upside down. The voice spoke again. "You want I should go down to the waterfront, find another torch?" Lott hung up on him. You want a thing done right, he thought savagely, you do it yourself. Lott eased the nose of the rental car deep into the brush along the roadside. Branches scraped the doors, like tingemails on a blackboard. He raked through a bag on the seat beside him, finding a tin of black shoe polish that he smeared across his forehead and cheeks and nose, war paint-style, then opened the car door and got out, swinging the bag over his shoulder. He crept along the road until he saw the shack rising before him like a shadow under the full moon. The assistant had done his part tonight; the shack was empty, Mama Hallie on a fool's mission to answer a call for doctoring miles away. It was easy to enter. He'd bought a tool from one of the stooges along the waterfront to pick the lock, but there was no lock at all; the handle turned on the first try and he walked in. He leaned against the door for a minute, listening. Nothing. The white skulls gleamed on the mantel like moths against the screen. He tiptoed past them into the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed behind him as he passed from the kitchen into the bedroom. In the moonlight through the window, he could make out a thin mattress covered by a quilt. He opened another door. A closet. This was it, then. Three matchbox-sized rooms and a closet to call home. This, worth any price she would have asked. He felt anger bloom in his heart. He knelt in her bedroom and lit the pot bought from the thugs along the waterfront. There was a hiss, like gas escaping from a balloon, and then an eruption of the blue flame and sparks. Lott jumped to his feet and ran out of the house. He ran, crouching, across the yard and slid down the bank to the swamp. At the water's edge he turned to watch. The curtains at the window swayed as the fire from the pot pulled oxygen from the shack. He saw a blue glow. In a moment, he glimpsed the refrigerator through the window, illuminated by low flames creeping through the house. He heard the tin roof buckling from the rising heat. He was sweating, and he licked his lips and tasted salt and a bitter taste, like robber. Wiping his forehead, forgetting the shoe polish, he was startled to see his blackened hand come down in front of his eyes. The night was hot. Frogs stopped croaking and insects stopped buzzing. Maybe, he thought, they were listening to the sounds of the fire eating. The flames were sucking now, popping, crackling, chewing. They burned and ate along the pine flooring of the shack. Nails and rivets popped and snapped out of tin and wood, and he sat down at the edge of the swamp to wait for the finale. Then he heard another sound, a hissing, like water droplets on a hot frying pan. Then he heard soft plops in the swamp around him, as if an army of invisible frogs had leapt in unison into the dark water at his feet. He looked up. Rain. A cloud had rolled across the moon, and it was raining. Rain. It fell in sheets, then in buckets. The flames inching through the shack were beaten back, smothered. He watched steam curl out of the blackened timbers, spin out and away from the windows. The [ire sputtered and died as he wondered how much damage he had done, if he had done enough to drive her away. It was over in minutes. Wind scuttled the pale clouds, blowing the rain away, and Lott shivered. He remembered the car hidden up the road. The assistant, he thought. He'd send him to find another bum to do the job. They all had a price. He turned to go. As he climbed the rain-slick bank, he stumbled and fell face-down, sliding back down the bank and into the water before he recovered himself. He got up onto his hands and knees. Although he was near the bank, the water was surprisingly deep, almost to his elbows. He tried to stand, but something under the water had snared him around his ankle. He managed to balance on one leg for a minute, hopping, then tried to drag the caught leg behind him toward the bank. Impossible. Lassoed like a calf in a rodeo, he fell. He groped underwater, squeezing cold mud between his fingers. Whatever was holding him eluded him he felt only slick weeds and grasses that floated, snake-like, in the smelly water. He sat down in the water, his heart pounding with fear. It occurred to him how dangerous this was, this game played outside hotel rooms and corporate of{ices. He tried to stand again, and the thing kept its hold. Panicked, he grappled underwater, clawing, struggling. Something dragged him back. He rolled over, staring down into the dark water. One hand burned. Holding it up, he saw his fingers were ripped and bleeding. He kicked like a mule, but the thing kept its grip. He lay still, fighting fear. Nearby he heard wings rushing out of treetops. Desperately he thought of snakes and alligators. He was afraid he would die there in the darkness, and he leaned back to pace his breathing. A few white stars emerged in the clearing heavens. He was not the kind of man to believe in things unseen, but he whispered, "Let me go, and I won't come back." He could not say how much time went by. Finally he heard a voice, and he strained to look down Mama Hallie's dirt drive. At the end of the drive a light swung back and forth; a lantern, he guessed. Somebody was coming down the road. I'm saved, he thought with a rush of relief, and then, I'm lost. Mama Hallie's bulk disengaged itself from the darkness and appeared on the bank, illuminated by the phosphorescent water. Turning, she looked at the smoldering shack. Then she put down her lantern and waded into the water, holding out her hand. "Caught in that old barbed wire, ain't you?" she said. Lott lay on his back, staring at the swirls of paint in the stippled ceiling of his room, trying to make sense of the patrem. He thought about who might have painted these ceilings. When he'd been a young man, he'd wanted to be an artist. Once he'd bought a glossy book about Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He'd wondered what was in Michelangelo's mind as he lay on his back all day, paint dripping in his eyes, seeing the whole majestic mosaic of his work in his mind's eye while his physical eye could focus only on a small patch of plaster directly overhead. Lott tried to focus on the workmanship of his life, on the larger picture of his career and ambition. He tried to imagine his worth to his corporation, to his family, to himself. But worth was a word as light as air, as empty as a shadow, without weight or meaning, and he could see only the stippled ceiling above his bed in this New Orleans hospital. His doctor came in that afternoon to wrap a fresh bandage around Lott's lower leg and worked without speaking shaking his head when he was finished. Lott watched the doctor's face intently. Then he turned to stare out the window of his room. He didn't need to ask what he already knew. His leg smelled just like swamp water, the foul, sick odor of things rotting. Gangrene. Things go on much the same as before on the bayou of the Louisiana swamp. Mosquitoes sing and bull gators honk on a summer's night. Mama Hallie sits on her front porch and rocks, the new pine planks of the porch groaning under her weight. Summer still brings rain to Cottontree Parish. After a heavy storm, the nearby river swells and overruns its banks, flooding the local graveyard until it sometimes floats a coffin downstream. When Mama Hallie finds a coffin, she carts it down to her old garden spot and re-buries it there, as is fitting and proper for Louisiana folks. Of a night when the moon grows full, some of the inhabitants of those coffins join other ghostly apparitions who pass the time on Mama Hallie's porch. They pass the time as she rocks, sipping from her mayonnaise jar full of cold, clear "swamp water," talking to old Red Bob's legs.