“You ain’t got your dough done in the middle,” I said.
Cecil clenched the cables hard and shook them. The bridge swung out from under me and I found my feet hanging out in midair. Only my arms wrapped around one of the cables was supporting me.
I jerked a look at Tom. She had fallen and was grabbing at one of the board steps. As she clutched it, I could see bits of rotten wood splintering, throwing splinters into the moonlight. Tom’s feet swung out into nothingness. The board creaked. She groaned. The bridge sighed in the wind and the rusty old cables screeched like a rat being slowly crushed to death by a boot heel.
Cecil shook the cables again. I hung tight, my feet swinging way out. I tried to pull up and get my feet back on the slats, but the bridge had tilted, and every time I tugged, it merely leaned with me, the cables being flexible, shaken, and wind-driven.
The board Tom clung to didn’t give, just shed more wood; she was holding nothing more than a thin fragment bolted to the lower cables on either side.
I glanced toward Cecil, saw another shape lurch out of the shadows; a huge one, with what looked like horns on its head.
Mose’s boy, Telly.
Telly grabbed Cecil around the neck and jerked him back. Cecil spun loose, hit him in the stomach. They grappled for a moment, holding each other’s biceps, pushing and pulling.
Cecil got loose, losing some of his shirtsleeve in the process. He snatched up the cane knife, slashed it across Telly’s chest. Telly let out with a wail, leaped against Cecil and the both of them went flying onto the bridge.
When they hit, boards splintered, and the bridge swung violently. There was a snapping sound, followed by a hiss as one of the cables broke in two, whipped out and away from us like a lash, then dropped into the water.
Cecil and Telly plummeted past us into the Sabine. Tom dangled for a moment from the bridge slat, then it cracked, but before it could break all the way and drop her, the remaining cable snapped, and we tumbled into the fast-rushing water after them.
I went deep, surfaced in choking foam, bumped into Tom. She bellowed and I grabbed her shirt collar. The water churned us under again. I struggled to bring us up, all the while clinging to Tom’s collar. When I broke the surface of the water, I saw Cecil and Telly in a clench, riding the blast of the Sabine over the little falls, shooting out into deeper, calmer waters.
Then we were part of the falls, and over we went, and the water covered us, and I clung hard to Tom’s shirt collar. I felt as if I blacked out for a moment, then we rose up and I came to as the night air hit me.
I tightened my grip on Tom, started trying to swim toward shore. It was hard in our wet clothes, our clinging shoes, tired as we were, and that damn current.
Tom wasn’t helping herself a bit. She had gone limp, letting the water pull her. I thought several times I wasn’t going to make it, or that, worse, I would let go of Tom to save myself, but I clung to her until my fingers lost feeling.
Eventually my feet were touching sand and gravel. I waded onto shore, Tom in tow. I collapsed on my knees. Tom rolled over and puked.
I fell forward and rolled on my back and gasped in cool draughts of air. My head was spinning. Absently, I realized it had quit raining.
I raised my head, glanced out at the water. The moon, happy to be shed of rain clouds, cast a glow on the Sabine like grease starting to shine on a hot skillet. I could see Cecil and Telly gripped together, a hand flying up now and then to strike, and I could see something else all around them, something that rose up in a dozen silvery knobs that gleamed in the moonlight.
Cecil and Telly had washed into that school of water moccasins, or another just like them. Had stirred them up. Now it was like bullwhips flying from the water, lashing the two of them time after time.
They washed around a muddy bend in the river struggling with each other, accompanied by the lashing snakes, and even before they had completely gone from sight the clouds came again and the moon went away and in the shadows of the trees overhanging the river, they were lost from sight.
When I was able to stand, I realized I had lost a shoe. I got hold of Tom, pulled her farther up the bank. We lay there for a moment, still recovering.
Finally we felt strong enough to move, and we staggered toward the gap in the trees that led to the road. My bare foot found every sticker in existence.
When we got to the Preacher’s Road, I stopped, sat down, and picked the stickers out of my foot as best I could. I took off my other shoe, and we started walking toward home. The rain came in earnest now, not letting up at all. No more moonlight, just night and rain so dark it was hard to stay on the muddy road.
It took us a long time, but as we neared home, we heard Mama in the yard, calling our names.
When she saw us she let out a roar of relief, ran toward us with her hair wet in her face, her nightgown clinging to her like a satin glove.
When we arrived that night, Daddy was off in the woods looking for us, and Grandma was in bed, ill from excitement. Toby, who I thought had died, was in the house, lying on a makeshift pallet Mama had made for him. She had also bandaged his head. She called him a hero. When he saw us, his poor pathetic body managed to make his tail work, and he beat it a few times to let us know he was glad to see us.
Near dawn, wet and tired, Daddy arrived, found us sitting at the table telling Mama and Grandma all about it. When he saw us, and we came to him, he dropped to his knees, took us both in his arms and began to cry.
Next morning they found Cecil on a sandbar. He was bloated up and swollen from water and snake bites. His neck was broken, Daddy said. Telly had taken care of him before the snake bites.
Caught up in some roots next to the bank, his arms spread and through them, his feet wound up in vines, was Telly. The cane knife wound had torn open his chest and side. Daddy said that sad old straw hat was still on his head; it had somehow gotten twisted up in his hair, and that the part that looked like horns had washed down and was covering his eyes.
I wondered what had gotten into Telly, the Goat Man. He had led me out there to save Tom, but he hadn’t wanted any part of stopping Cecil. Maybe he was afraid. But when we were on the bridge, and Cecil was getting the best of us, he had come for him.
Had it been because he wanted to help us, or was he just there already and frightened? I’ll never know. I thought of poor Telly living out there in the woods all that time, only his Daddy knowing he was there, and keeping it secret just so folks would leave him alone, not take advantage of him because he was addle-headed.
In the end, I remember mostly just lying in bed in what had become Grandma’s room, our old room, for two days after, nursing all the wounds in my foot from stickers and such, thinking about what had almost happened to Tom, trying to get my strength back.
Mama stayed by our side for the next two days, leaving us only long enough to make soup. Daddy sat up with us at night. When I awoke, frightened, thinking I was still on the Swinging Bridge, he would be there, and he would smile and put out his hand and touch my head, and I would lie back and sleep again.
During the day he took a side of the barn down and used the planks to close in the sleeping porch. He said he’d never feel safe with anyone sleeping out there again. I missed the old porch, but it was best he did what he did. I could have never lain out there again, closed my eyes for a good night’s sleep.
It was nearly two years later before he replaced the boards he had taken from the barn.
Over a period of years, picking up a word here and there, we would learn that there had been more murders like those in our area, all the way down from Arkansas and over into Oklahoma and some of North Texas. Back then no one pinned those on one murderer. The law just didn’t think like that in them days. The true nature of serial killers was unknown.