Page 49 of Bourbon & Blood

I swallowed hard and thought to myself I must be crazy. This was probably it. I wouldn’t have to worry if I would ever see Maya again; because surely, I was about to die.

I took his hand and stepped down into the boat and took a seat on the low bench, shivering. It wasn’t from the cold; I’ll tell you that much. With it being the height of summer, it had to be in the seventies and eighties even at night. Add the humidity and it felt more like the eighties and nineties. So no, I wasn’t shivering from cold at all.

My shaking only got worse the deeper into the swamp we went.

“You live in the swamp?” I asked as he steered the boat from the back, his hand on the handle to the outboard motor.

He simply nodded, and his silence just served to unnerve me all the more.

He pointed a light, and I shuddered at the points of light just above the waterline that blinked and then submerged – the eye shine of alligators. Points of light smaller than those surrounded us, along with raucous frog song joined by the evening scream of cicadas and the muted ratcheting tones of crickets – the symphony of the swamp.

I might have found it soothing, a far cry from the noise and flash of the city, but not knowing where I was headed, or what was going to happen to me? It put quite the damper on the experience.

We traveled for around twenty minutes, maybe a half an hour in reality – but it felt like a small eternity of turning this way and that through waterways that appeared random to me. I watched him steer us, and he seemed completely relaxed and at ease. I found myself wishing that some of that energy would rub off on me, but it seemed that the more at ease he seemed, the more anxious I became.

There was a light out there in the swamp. A manmade one, electric and shining steady. The closer we got, I realized that it was a porch light. The house was like a small, but regular-sized house, two-story and ramshackle by all appearances on the outside but sturdily built. It wasn’t until we were almost right up on it that I realized it was built on a big ol’barge.Just sitting there, out in the middle of the Bayou. Nothing around for miles…

“How…?” the word escaped my lips before I could stop it.

“How’s the light workin’?” he asked.

“Among other things,” I said.

“Solar,” he answered. “The water comes from rain catch barrels. Got me a sophisticated filtration system to make it potable.”

My fear dissipated in the face of my curiosity. He pulled the little boat up alongside the barge and stopped the motor. There was a little ladder to step up out of it and onto the floating platform. He went up first, reaching down a hand to help me up. I slipped, and he lifted me as though I weighed nothing onto the barge deck beside him.

“Oh, wow.” I took my hand back quickly and he asked, “You awright?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “Thank you.”

I looked around. Nearly half the barge, on the side of the house with only one narrow window with frosted and pebbled privacy glass, was a bank of solar panels. After a narrow walkway between the panels and the home, up snug against the side of the house, there were these big ginormous white tanks, the downspouts off the eaves of the house running into them. The roof of the home was pitched steep and was metal, the siding these shake tiles. Where there wasn’t any of the shake weathered silvery by the elements, there was corrugated tin that was rusting in places, tacked in a strange patchwork to the outside walls – as though the outside of the home was only half finished and he’d run out of materials.

The building looked shabby and poor, like almost anything out in swamp country and I was a little nervous about what it would be like inside.

He put his hand to my back and guided me to the front door of the small home that once we were near it, seemed to be about the size of mine and Maya’s apartment – which given that it was two stories tall meant that in all actuality, it was probablybigger.

Inside wasmuchdifferent from the outside – tidy and neat. Some of the furniture was certainly older and well-worn, but still well maintained. The kitchen was beautiful with dark tile countertops that gleamed softly under the muted light of the copper hood above the stove.

Inside the front door, there was a stairwell leading up to the second-floor loft, which took up half of the floor plan of the entire space and appeared to be the master bedroom. There was an office down here that didn’t look much used, and what I thought was one bathroom for the whole place that was a door beyond the stairwell. I didn’t see too much, because the front door was being shut behind me, and La Croix’s hands were over my shoulders, taking my coat.

I let him have it, lifting my purse off from over my head to allow him to.

“Hang that right here, cher,” he said, and I handed him my purse, which he hung with my jacket on a row of pegs along a board by the front door.

“How long have you lived out here like this?” I asked, as he turned back to me.

“Goin’ on two an’ a half years, now,” he said.

“Does anyone know it’s out here?”

“Hex, and Cy,” he said. “Some of the other boys in the club.”

I looked at my cellphone and no surprise – there was no signal. None, whatsoever. The fear crept back in.

“Wanna keep that charged?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” I said. He took the useless phone from me and plugged it in at the end table at one end of the couch.

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