“I’d bring a Colt.45 if I was hunting up a Skadlock.”

“I don’t even own a pocketknife. I just want to find this woman and talk to her. Then I’ll know what to do, I guess.”

A truck rumbled into the intersection and stopped. Two women in a REO approached from the far side, and the driver squeezed the bulb on her horn.

Melvin blew his whistle and waved the truck on through. “I’ll tell you everything I know, bud. Vive la France and all that. You just have to ask.”

“Well, then. Here goes.”

AFTER THE MOONLIGHT cruise the boat steamed all night to Bayou Sadie, little more than a mud landing and a few plank stores connected by a thread of road to the nearby towns. At seven the next morning the purser gave Sam an advance against his salary and told him to get back for the eight-thirty cruise or he’d be docked two dollars. He walked all the way into St. Frank and found the livery on the north side of the main street. The owner, a fat man wearing a cut-down pair of overalls held up by green suspenders, didn’t know him, so he took all the money he had as a deposit on the worst horse in the pen, a small, nervous-looking animal the color of a stained mattress. Then he tried to explain where Gasket Landing might be. “You have to go down this here lane and then ford the bayou, but it’s pretty shallow this time of year and it’s got a hard bottom. Then you head west into the stickers for a while and you’ll get into a big swamp that’s dry right now and pretty clear of brush. Those big trees cut back on the undergrowth. Keep the horse moving through there, don’t let him stop and look around too much. If you keep an animal busy he won’t get spooked.”

“What’s to spook him?”

The fat man looked up thoughtfully as Sam swung into the saddle. “Best not tell you. Just keep going a few miles till you hit the riverbank, then you’ll ride up to some ruint houses. That’s where the Skadlocks stay. You related?”

“No.”

“I figured that. You don’t have the look.”

Sam motioned toward the woods with his chin. “You know if Ninga Skadlock lives in there?”

“She couldn’t live nowheres else.”

“How many miles am I lookin’ at?”

“I don’t know.”

“No idea at all?”

“Somewhere between ten and fifty. It’s crazy country back in there.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who?”

“The horse.”

The livery owner scratched the yellow hair on his chest where it boiled up out of his undershirt. “Number 6.”

HE GOT the animal out into the road, and when a lumber truck went by, Number 6 whinnied, reared, and clambered down into a twelve-foot ditch. He sat the horse in water up to his stirrups, petted it, and coaxed it up the bank and back into the lane, where it commenced a pelvis-hammering trot, weaving from side to side. Sam stopped it, rode it several times in a circle to the right and then to the left, as his uncle Claude had taught him, and when he set the horse forward it seemed to remember that it was supposed to travel in a straight line, and its gait evened out. After a few miles they arrived at a place where the road sloped down into a broad bayou. The horse would have none of it. As soon as the water went over his pasterns, he kept turning upstream. Sam got off, stripped down to his drawers, and walked in ahead, tugging the reins. The water was only up to his waist, but the bottom rose in stinking clouds as he pulled across. He sat on the bank in the heat to dry off, then pulled on his khakis, debating whether he should just give up and cross back into town. He closed his eyes a moment to see if the girl child was still caught behind his lids, and her image came up glowing, but beside it was another face, that of his son losing consciousness, slipping away in a fever. He was the type of man who didn’t want the bad things that happened to him to happen to anyone else; maybe somebody told him things when he was three or four years old that landed like seeds in the furrows of his character. However he was formed, his tendencies were costly ones. He mounted up with a yodel and kicked Number 6 in the flanks, the horse barging into a hummock of blackberries, scattering dust and dead stalks, wasps flying behind its hooves like red sparks.

Number 6 labored on, now and then hanging up between saplings. In a tight spot it raised a hoof, put it through a fork in a trunk, then pulled it back and wedged around the tree, lowering its head and rooting through the trash woods like a hog. Four miles into the maze, a ropey wisteria vine caught the toe of Sam’s shoe and flipped him off like a playing card. Number 6 didn’t even look around and cantered west. Fighting the brush, Sam ran after it for a hundred yards in the smothering heat, finally leaping for the saddle horn and pulling himself up. The horse stopped then and looked back at him.

“You ugly son of a bitch,” Sam rasped. “You thirdhand hook rug pulled from a privy.” Here the horse bucked once, and Sam came down on its neck. After gaining his breath, he slid down and led the animal to a deep puddle of clear water and let it drink. “All right,” he said, pulling out his compass. “Eat some of that grass there and we’ll move on.” The horse rolled its ears away.

Soon they entered a low-water cypress swamp, the treetops closing off the sky. The red-bark trunks were the size of factory chimneys, and everywhere their roots rose from the soppy mud like stalagmites. He checked his compass and headed across the weedless, canopied land. Everywhere he looked he saw the stout windings of water moccasins, and he felt the horse go rigid with fear. Sam put heels to its flanks, keeping its mind on movement, not on the flint-scaled multitudes boiling in the dim mud.

He was four hours beyond the bayou when he saw bright light between a mossy picket of trees, and he rode through a tussle of brambles into the open air. Reaching into the saddlebag, he pulled out a Mason jar of water and a cheese sandwich and sat, eating and staring at the Mississippi, sensing what de Soto must have felt when he stumbled out of the brush to wonder at this wide arm of water.

He rode down under the bank until he saw sun-lavendered bottles on the mudflats and then turned the horse up a washout that led past a roofless cabin. He turned right into a trash woods that forty years before was a pasture and followed a leaning barbwire fence beyond a weather-flattened barn and into a sudden green rush of old magnolias, sycamores, and ground-hugging live oaks. He glimpsed a chimney top through the greenery and stopped the horse, stepping down and tying it to a low oak limb. After ten steps he was standing in the rear of a three-story house with two encircling galleries and tall stuccoed pillars on four sides. It was invisible to the world, warped and paintless, its windows smudged or broken out, daylight pouring through holes in the upstairs gallery floors. The brick porch was strewn with rags, broken chairs, desiccated watermelon rinds, and a cow skull. He knew better than to present himself at the wide front entrance, and what could he say when someone opened the door in his face holding no better greeting than a cocked pistol? He stood and thought and then went back to the horse, leading it slowly away, but in a circuit so that soon he was going along the riverbank as though traveling through to somewhere else. There was no road, just an area too sandy to support more than weeds and thistle. When he got opposite the woodsy patch where he thought the house was hiding, he talked to the horse in a big, good-natured voice. Number 6 wouldn’t look at him and turned his head away, engaged in patient urination. Sam picked up its rear hoof and caught it between his legs, pretending to examine the frog for an injury, but after ten minutes, no one came out to ask what he was about. Finally, he said loudly, “Well, let’s us just go in and ask for what we want, like the dunderheads we are.”