Don't be afraid, she said. Go with Al.
I don't want to this time.
You mustn't worry about those things. We both love you.
You're about to go away from me, aren't you?
Her face was kind, and her eyes moved over my face as though she were an older sister looking at her younger brother.
I followed my father into the marsh, our tennis shoes splashing through the sloughs, the wet willow branches swinging back into our faces. The early sun was big and hot on the edge of the flooded woods, and the cypress trees looked black against the red light. The water was dead and covered with green algae; cottonmouth moccasins were coiled on the low branches of the trees. The smell became stronger, so that I had to hold my hand to my face and breathe through my mouth. We came up out of a slough onto a hard-packed sandbar, and lying stretched on the sand, huge divots cut out of its back by a boat propeller, was the rotting carcass of the biggest bull alligator I had ever seen. His tail drag and the sharp imprints of his feet trailed off the sandbar back through the trees. I could see the open water where he had probably been hit by a commercial boat of some kind, or the screw on a seismograph drill barge, and had beached himself and begun his crawl to this spot, where he had died on high ground and turkey buzzards and snakes had begun feeding on his wounds.
"Mats, that stink," my father said, and waved at the air in front of his face.
"You start dig a hole." He handed me the shovel, then he grinned as he sometimes did when he was about to play a joke on me.
"Where you gonna dig a hole, you?"
I didn't understand him. I started to scrape in the dry sand with the shovel's tip.
"Que t'as pres faire cher? Tu veux travailler comme un neg?" he said, and laughed. ("What are you doing, dear one? You want to work like a Negro?") I pressed down again into the hard sand, felt it grate and slide over the blade. He took the shovel out of my hand, walked to a dip in the sandbar where the water from two sloughs had washed a small channel, and dug deeply and easily into the wet sand and flung it out into the sunlight, his face grinning at me.
"You do it where it soft," he said.
"Ain't you learned nothing from your old man?"
I woke to a clatter of birds in the trees outside the window, my head thick with afternoon sleep. I rinsed my face in the bathroom sink and looked at the tight purple lump that ran down through my hairline. The dream made no sense to me, other than the facts that I missed my father and Annie, that I feared death, and that I conducted a foolish quarrel with the irrevocable nature of time.
Al, what are you trying to tell me? I thought, as the water streamed off my face in the mirror's silent reflection.
Shortly before three o'clock I walked down to the school and waited for Alafair by the side of the playground. A few minutes later the doors of the building were flung open, and she came running across the small softball diamond with a group of other children, her Donald Duck lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her elastic-wasted jeans were grimed at the knees, and there were dirt and sweat rings around her neck.
"What did you guys do today at recess? Mud wrestling?" I said.
"Miss Regan let us play dodge ball It's fun. I got hit in the seat. You ever play it, Dave?"
"Sure."
"What happened to your head?"
"I hit it when I was working on the truck. Not too smart, huh?"
Her eyes looked at me curiously, then she put her hand in mine and swung her weight on my arm.
"I forgot," she said.
"Miss Regan said to give you this note. She said she'd call you anyway."
"About what?"
"About the man."
"What man?"
"The one at the school yard."
I unfolded the piece of paper she had taken from her lunch box. It read: Mr. Robicheaux, I want to have a serious talk with you. Call me at my home this 'afternoon Tess Regan. Under her name she had written her phone number.
"Who's this man you're talking about, Alafair?" I said.
A bunch of children ran past us on the sidewalk. The sunlight through the maple trees made patterns on their bodies.
"The other kids said he was in a car on the corner. I didn't see him. They said he was looking through, what you call those things, Dave? You got some in the truck."
"Field glasses?"
"They called them something else."
"Binoculars?"
"Yeah." She grinned up at me when she recognized the word.
"Who was he looking at, Alafair?"
"I don't know."
"Why does Miss Regan want to talk to me about it?"
"I don't know."
"What time was this guy out there?"
"At recess."
"What time is recess?"
"First- through third-graders go at ten-thirty."
"Is that when he was out there?"
"I don't know, Dave. Why you look so worried?"
I took a breath, released her hand, and brushed my palm on the top of her head.
"Sometimes strange men, men who are not good people, try to bother little children around schools or at playgrounds. There're not many people like this, but you have to be careful about them. Don't talk with them, don't let them give you anything, don't let them buy you anything. And no matter what they say, never go anywhere with them, never get in a car with them. Do you understand that, little guy?"
"Sure, Dave."
"That kind of man will tell you that he's a friend of your father's. That your father sent him to pick you up, maybe. But if he was a friend, you'd recognize him, right?"
"They hurt children?"
"Some of them do. Some of them are very bad people."
I saw doubt and fear working into her face like a shadow. Her throat swallowed. I picked up her hand in mine again.
"Don't be scared, little guy," I said.
"It's the same thing I've told you before. We just have to be cautious sometimes. Miss Regan tells all the children that, doesn't she? It's no big deal."
But it wasn't working. Her eyes were locked on images in her memory that I could not touch or eradicate.
"Look, when I tell you not to stick your hand in the window fan, that doesn't mean you should be afraid of the fan, does it?" I said.
"No."
"If I tell you not to put your finger in Tripod's mouth, that doesn't mean you should be afraid of Tripod, does it?"
"No." Her eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.
"If Clarise won't let Tex eat at the breakfast table, that doesn't mean she's afraid of horses, does it?"
She grinned up at me, her face squinting in the sunlight. I swung her on my arm under the maple trees, but there was a feeling in my chest like a chunk of angle iron.
At the house she poured a glass of milk and cut a piece of pie at the kitchen table for her afternoon snack, then washed out her lunch box and thermos and began straightening her room. I took the telephone into the bathroom so she could not hear me talking to Tess Regan.
"What's the deal with this guy at the school ground?" I said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You sent a note home. Then Alafair told me about the guy with binoculars."
"I was referring to your tone. Are you always this cross with people over the telephone?"
"It's been an unusual day. Look, Miss Regan Tess what's the deal?"
"At recess we use some of the eighth-graders as monitors for the lower grades. Jason, one of the monitors, said a man was parked in his car under the trees across the street. He said the man walked over to the fence and asked where Alafair Robicheaux was. He said he was a friend of her father's, and he had a message for her. We teach all the children not to talk to people off the street, to direct all visitors to the principal's office. Jason told him he should see Sister Louise inside the building. Then the man pointed to where the little ones were playing dodge ball and said, "Oh, there she is." Jason said, "Yeah, but you have to see Sister Louise." The man said he didn't have time but he'd be back later. When he got back in the car, the children said, he looked at the school ground through a pair of binoculars."