The Trackers

by Charles Frazier

I’ve been lost a hundred times and found my own way out.

A TWENTIES PLASTER MANSION WITH vertical streaks of dark mildew dragging in stripes from the eaves down the cream walls. A strip of lawn between sidewalk and front door had been mowed recently, but at the sides the grass had begun reverting to nature, following the early stages of plant succession on the way back to wildness. I knocked at the door and waited and then walked around back past a clay tennis court growing flat plates of plantain and tall ragweed. The net was rotting, and the mildewed headband drooped almost to the ground. A swimming pool, empty except for a foot or two of dull black liquid vibrating with tadpoles. Something larger moved under the surface, and the liquid churned viscous as Karo syrup. Even if the tadpoles lived long enough, they’d never be able to climb out of the pit unless a tree limb fell exactly right and the newly transformed frogs could use it to climb out. But probably that larger thing under the surface would eat its fill of tadpoles and then lie in the black water waiting for the next thing to fall in.

The daylight dimmed. A dirigible drifted over silently, like a great gray whale against the milky sky. It floated out over the Gulf and then very slowly turned south and followed the coast until it faded out of sight. A wealthy middle-aged couple walked by arm in arm like ghosts from the previous decade. He wore a dove gray suit and a yellow straw hat with a pink silk band, and she wore a straw-colored suit with a ham-colored hat shaped like an upturned bucket. Their outfits seemed coordinated, but maybe they had become so synchronous that such things happened naturally. Sunset swelled over the water in a preposterous gradation of pinks and oranges and reds.

Spanish moss nearly dragged the ground from live oaks six feet thick through the trunks. Lower limbs fat as normal trees stretched almost horizontal, and a thick carpet of dead leathery leaves covered the dirt underneath. When we could see the river, it lay flat black and moved too slow to tell which direction it flowed unless you sat awhile and studied the things that floated on it. Now and then we saw a black and motionless alligator lying armored on a sand bank, soaking up sun.

black ground that’s rich but doesn’t drain and turns to swamp in a heartbeat. Everything