Dead Low Tide

“Hold on,” Unc whispered, warning me.

I turned, saw him standing there at the stern and poling the jon boat in. He was only a silhouette in this dark, thin stars around him for the half-moon we had out here.

“
You
hold on, old man,” I whispered, and turned, looked ahead.

None of this was my idea.

He knew we were almost there for how shallow he had to set that pole and give it the push. But it was me here in the bow about to toss the cinder-block anchor far as I could into the marsh, hoping I’d make it onto the dry ground past it. It was me could reach out and touch pluff mud and cordgrass on either side of us, the two of us at the head of this finger creek at dead low tide.

Like always, it was me looking out for the two of us, because Unc is blind.

Two-thirty in the morning, and we were where we shouldn’t be.
Though a higher tide would have helped us get in a little farther, this was when Unc wanted to be here, for no other reason than two o’clock was too early, three too late.

The cordgrass and spartina and salt-marsh hay stood silver in the moonlight, all of it crowding up on us the closer we got in, the thick rim of black pluff mud a couple feet wide beneath it. To the left and above and past the marsh I could see a house a good twenty yards in, another one to the right, back through trees and maybe fifty yards away. All I could see of that one was an outside light, a coach lamp looked like, and the dime-sized halo it cast on the brick wall it was mounted to.

What worried me was the house to the left, the closer one. Like all the houses out here—they call them cottages, only thirty-three of them on this whole parcel of land—it was big, this one white stucco and two stories, two chimneys, a circular gravel drive out front.

But I only knew that from when I’d seen the place in daylight. At two-thirty in the morning, and creeping in through the marsh at the back of the place, all I could make out was the white of that stucco, and the waist-high brick fence that ran alongside the whole thing almost down to this creek.

And the light in an upstairs window somebody’d cut on a couple minutes ago. A light still on, right now.

“Let’s go back,” I whispered. “That light’s still on.”

We were almost there now, me already up on my knees and leaning a little farther out over the bow. I had the cinder block in both hands, the ratty nylon rope it was tied to trailing back to where I’d cleated it off, because I knew we wouldn’t be turning back. I’d been out with Unc on these efforts enough times to know once we were this close there was no going back, and now here of a sudden and yet no surprise at all was the cold stink of the pluff mud thick around me.

“That light probably means ol’ Dupont’s nurse is up to change his diaper,” Unc whispered. “He’s got to be a hundred if he’s a day.”

“And what if his nurse takes a look out the window, sees—”

“Oh,”
Unc let out then, the word more a solid chunk of sound than a word at all, nowhere on it a whisper, and at the same time I felt a hard shiver through the boat.

For a second I thought we’d hit bottom, the creek shoaled in here at the head. But I knew this spot. I’d been here before, knew the bottom didn’t come up until the very end. I quick turned back at Unc, saw he was looking down and to the left, the bill of the Braves ball cap he always wore part of that silhouette now, him in profile to me.

He’d touched something down there, had the pole up out of the water, held it with both hands like he was ready to gig a frog. And then I could feel that the jolt hadn’t meant the bottom at all, and that we were still floating free, still inching closer to that pluff mud and where I’d have to heave the block to anchor us in.

Something’d scared him, made him flinch hard enough to shake the whole boat. That’s what it was, and even though he couldn’t see a thing he was still turned to it, ready.

“What?” I whispered.

“Don’t know,” he said, too fast. He lowered the tip of the pole to the water, eased it down slowly, like he was testing for something. “Thought it was a gator,” he whispered. “But I don’t think it was.” He let it down all the way, until the top of the pole was even with his chest, let it set there a second. “Something,” he whispered.

He turned to me, said again, “Hold on.”

And then we hit ground for certain, and here I was, shoved forward out over the bow for the pitiful bit of momentum we had going in. I let go the cinder block, tried hard to get both hands on the gunwales or on the bow itself or just somewhere, anywhere, to keep me from tipping over and into that mud.

But it was too late, and I heard the huge aluminum
donk!
of the block hit the hull in the same instant I fell forward and into pluff mud to my elbows.

We were both silent for how loud that sound was, and the way it caromed like a billiard ball one end of the world to the other out here
on the water. I already had words lined up in me, pissed-off ones it was everything I had to hold back for the cold of this mud, and the stink of it, and the stupidity of falling in like this when I’d been out on jon boats my whole life. I had words for Unc, and this mission, and how none of this was my idea. I had words. But all I could do was swallow them down.

And watch that window up there, past the marsh grass. Somebody had to have heard us. Somebody had to.

Nothing happened. Nothing: no face at the window of that Guatemalan nurse Judge Dupont had taking care of him, or no old Dupont himself, holding close a shotgun. No turning off of the light, or turning on an outside one so’s to scare off whatever dangerous intruders these were out here. Nothing.

And so I leaned back as best I could, pulled my arms out of the mud, and whispered “Shit!” through teeth clenched tight for holding off every other word I had.

I held my hands out in front of me a second, looked at the pure black of them in this dark, whatever moonlight there was soaked right up in that black so that it seemed I had stubs for arms. “Shit,” I whispered again, though this time there was nothing for it. Just me, pissed off.

“Nope,” Unc whispered from behind me. “Pluff mud’s only detritus. Organic material breaking down. Maybe you’d know this if you hadn’t quit college.”

“Not funny,” I whispered. I turned toward him, made to move farther back in the boat to where I could lean over one side or the other, wash my hands off in the water, the bow set tight in that mud. “And one more time: I quit for good reason.”

“I’m sure you did,” he whispered.

I looked up at him, ready to spit words at him. Ready for it.

But he was looking off to his left again, and a little behind him now. Back, I could tell, to where whatever he’d touched had been. As though he could see anything at all.

“If it’s a gator, he’s long gone,” he whispered, “but you might ought to wait a sec before you put your arms down in that water.”

He turned, looked down at me: that silhouette again, behind him those thin stars.

“Thought I told you to hold on,” he whispered.

M
y name is Huger Dillard. You say it YOU-gee, not like it’s spelled. When I was a kid and people would ask about it, I’d tell them I heard it was French. That’s all.

But then I went off to college, started after what my friends used to call an
edumacation
. By friends I mean the ones I used to have, before my mom and I moved out of the old neighborhood and into the new one. It’s a different set I run with now, if you’d even call them a set, or if you’d call what I have to do with them running. I’m twenty-seven now, and still living at home though, like every one of us still hanging out with Mom and Pop at the ranch, I’ve got my reasons.

And Unc isn’t my uncle. He’s my father.

It’s complicated.

But to my
edumacation:
Huger, I learned in a course called History of the South, taught by a tweedy and mildewed old professor who never once lifted his eyes from his notes to look at the class, is short for Huguenot, a fierce people who came here to Charleston from France once they’d had enough of being burned at the stake and forced to be galley slaves and whatnot because they wouldn’t lick the silk slippers of Louis XIV, Mr. Sun King himself. Back in the day, the word
Huguenot
meant a kind of curse on who you were and what you believed. But then it became a good thing, and meant you were a durable son of a bitch who wouldn’t put up with anything.

Huger. It was a good name before I went off and had my go at getting schooled, and it still is.

But it’s come to me in the six years since I’ve been back that it’s a name I don’t think I deserve anymore. Because it was this kid named Huger who chose to quit said college after two and a half years,
though the word
quit
is a lie: my grades kicked my ass all the way from Chapel Hill to here.

Some kid named Huger quit because he was lost up there. He wasn’t as smart as he’d led himself to believe, even with an SAT of 1510.

And I don’t think I can live up to being an endurable son of a bitch anymore because, if you were to ask me point-blank, I’d have to tell you I actually
like
being twenty-seven and living at home. I like watching after Unc, taking him to whatever appointments he might have with his financial adviser, or to the bank, or out to what’s left of Hungry Neck Hunt Club on those Friday nights when we have a hunt on a Saturday. I don’t even mind hauling him out to his Thursday night poker parties at that huge orange monstrosity of a house in Mount Pleasant, though I won’t set foot in the manse for the bit of history I have between the host’s son and myself.