Sketcher Read Free Page B

in the cypress trees, so I knew they’d started runnin’ after me. I took off at top speed and just kept lookin’ behind me from time to time.
    Now, I don’t know how soon it was, but I just felt the ground getting soggier and soggier, and then I heard a voice from heaven say: “Skid, stop.” Actually it was Frico’s voice – but that was good enough. He sounded like he was up above me in a tree somewhere – and that was weird, but that’s ol’ Fricozoid for ya. Then, when I stopped and peeled my eyes and looked dead ahead into the night, there – right in front of me – was a steep slope straight into the dark swamp water.
    â€œDon’t move.”
    Hell, like I needed him to tell me that. I started reversing slowly, and he said again from up in the tree: “I said don’t move – till I tell ya.”
    That’s when I saw the eyes. Just above the water surface, right in front of me. One massive bull alligator, about a twelve-footer, right behind the grass, just waitin’ for me to keep walkin’ forward. Even though I’d just finished runnin’, I felt colder than a dead eel and I started wondering where the hell was Doug and Tony when you need ’em? When they finally caught up, Tony was pantin’, cos he was kinda pudgy. In the dark I could still see that Doug had a “what the hell is wrong witchoo” look on his face. He had dragged on his soccer uniform back to front and he had only half-pulled out his cornrows when all the chasin’ started. He shone the light on the bank in front of me and said: “Look, fool.”
    I saw that I was standing in an alligator slide – that’s the long slide marks that an alligator’s belly makes in the mud when he’s gettin’ off the river banks to prob’ly get dinner. And that gator just sat there down in the water like a fleshand-blood submarine and gave everybody the evil eye. Then Calvin came up and started yapperin’ just to impress us, and the alligator raised his head and hissed just to let us know he wasn’t off-duty. So I walked backwards slowly and Doug started givin’ me a lecture, while Tony took the light and swept the area. He shone it into that monster’s mouth and saw those teeth and started with the vampire stuff again until Doug, who was a year younger than him, told him to grow up or shut up, whichever one came first. So just to annoy him, Tony put on his nerd voice and looked at the sky, pointin’ out that US satellites look different from stars and they can move them around from secret locations on earth – and Daddy knew, cos he helped build a rocket at the NASA Assembly Facility over in Michoud and blah blah blah.
    In the middle of all that science fiction and Doug lecturin’ and Calvin overdoin’ the barkin’ thing, here comes Frico’s voice again from up in the tree, real slow and soft in the darkness: “See, this is exactly why I got out here in the first place. Can’t catch a break from y’all. Jeez.”
    And Tony swung the flashlight into the trees and Frico shielded his eyes and nearly fell off a branch. The guy had climbed into a tree with some branches that hung out over the water. Moms said it was a tamarind tree. It was tall, but still smaller than those big old cypresses and beech and willow trees. It had low branches, so it was much easier to climb. We always went up into that tree durin’ the day, cos it was like our lookout point. From up there, we could see clear across the train tracks over to that scrap-metal junkyard where those mean Benet boys live, north of us. Beyond their dungeon was an old clogged-up canal that could give them access to the far-east end of Lake Pontchartrain. Lookin’ east, all youcould see was train tracks. You couldn’t see the end of the tracks, but we knew that one train went to Slidell – which when you’re in the swamp is