Chapter 1

I always liked the feel of paddling a pirogue (Pee-ROGUE: it’s a double-ended flat-bottomed watercraft made to be paddled. Cajun thing. It’s real. Look up ‘Cajun pirogue’) on this creek. Unlike the bayous and marshes and swamps more in keeping with the boat’s roots, this little creek had an actual current as it meandered through the Louisiana piney woods and mixed forests.

In this creek with its uneven and often shallow depths and snags of fallen trees, the pirogue was easily as appropriate as the more common canoes. My pirogue was rated for 600 pounds and drew about six inches fully loaded. Today there was me – six feet two inches and a hundred ninety-five pounds, and there was Colby Mason, five-four and I’m betting she doesn’t break a hundred. She’s skinny – lanky – angular. Her hair is dirty blonde – natural coloration, and it’s short, pixyish. Natural curl makes it a wreath for her face.

Colby’s not nearly within the boundaries of anybody’s ‘pretty’ or ‘cute’. Her nose is narrow and prominent above thin lips. Her eyes were a non-descript grey. That ninety-five or so pounds kept her from having either a round butt or sizable titties.

So why’s she sitting in the front seat of my pirogue? Kind of convoluted, really. Behind us, up on a clay bluff overlooking the creek, is a travel trailer. I wanted to get out away from town for a while. The travel trailer is mine. The location is a cousin’s. He’s got a permanent camp, a little cabin up on stilts, concession to the fact that while today the creek surface is ten or twelve feet below the crest of the bluff, in the winter, during heavy rainfall periods, the creek sometimes overflows that bluff.

When Jimmy bought the place he installed hookups for a couple of travel trailers. I was connected to one. The travel trailer provided air conditioning and running water and clean, dry beds. I was there with my wife. We brought along her close friend Doralee and Doralee’s daughter Colby.

My week so far had included me doing a lot of fishing, the four of us swimming in the cold water of the creek, and me lounging through the heat of the summer days with books on my iPad.

iPad? I wanted to get away from town on my terms, not ditch civilization entirely. The pirogue was my homage to my Cajun upbringing at the edge of the marshes and bayous of South Louisiana.

My presence here was a given. I was determined to do it, wouldn’t have minded terribly if I did it alone. Wife Samantha was determined to come along because she wanted a break from her job and bringing Doralee insured she’d have somebody she wanted to talk with. Me and Sam? I was on the tail end of a dying marriage. I had suspicions that she was sleeping around on me. We hadn’t had sex in months. The fact that Doralee was here was a guarantee that sex was off the table in the trailer. All those sandbars up and down the little creek? Sex in the sand wasn’t ever Sam’s thing.

That left the odd man (or girl – Colby was eighteen) out. Colby wasn’t working. I hadn’t heard of her having college aspirations since her high school graduation. She and I had done many sessions over the dining room table at home as I helped her through math and science in high school. She’s about as much friend and acquaintance as you can get from a thirty-five year old guy and a high school girl. The fact that her mom often left her and me at the house while she and Sam went ‘out’, well, that meant that me and Colby often did her tutoring and then watched TV until the older women got home.

I found her to be a charming young lady. Her looks weren’t going to ever draw drooling stares from most of the male population, but her demeanor, a lithe bouncing in her movement and her easy ability to laugh and show a quirky, somewhat twisted smile made her pleasant to be around.

Up until today, Colby’s time was spent reading and walking in the woods along the banks of the creek. When the rest of us swam, she swam, too. Instead of a swimsuit, she swam in the shorts and blouse she put on when she got dressed in that morning.

Water and cotton fabric are a bad combination. She might not have big titties, but what she had were treated well by the wet cotton. I had to keep myself from staring. I think she might’ve caught me a time or two.

So that brings us to now. The four of us got up, did a not particularly sociable breakfast, and then Doralee and Sam started talking about driving back into town for the day. That was good news to me. I’d have a day with fishing in the morning, lounging and reading all afternoon. I assumed that Colby would be there with them.

I announced my intent to paddle down the creek and check some pole lines I’d set out in hopes of catching a few catfish.

“Uh, Mister Cole, could I go fishing with you?” Colby. “I don’t wanna go shopping or whatever. If I don’t go fishin’, I’ll just hang around and read or explore the woods.”

“I don’t mind, little buddy,” I said. Perfectly innocent, that’s me. “Maybe we’ll get some catfish for dinner.” My fishing today was the passive variety of my ancestors – pole lines and trotlines set and left in place, ‘ran’ every day or so, sometimes more often, checking for fish, redoing the bait. It was fishing for food more than fishing for sport.

I noted that Doralee and Sam were getting dressed while Colby gathered a few things.

“What’s that?” I asked, just to hear her response.

“Beach towels,” she said. “And some drinks.”

“Dunno if we’re gonna need that,” I said. “The lines aren’t far down the river.”

“I thought maybe we could explore.”

I laughed. “Not much to explore. It’s a creek. You go down, you come back up.”

“I know THAT!” she snorted. “Scenery. It changes.”

“It does. But if we drift down, we have to paddle back against the current.”

I noted what she was wearing - cotton shorts that seriously approached ‘hot pants’ length and one of her characteristic cotton blouses – simple lines, button down the front, and from my previous observation, essentially transparent when wet.

“We’re gone!” shouted Sam. Nope, no kiss goodbye. Just “We’re gone.”

“Just me ‘n’ you,” Colby noted as we put the towels and cooler into the pirogue.

“Yeah. I get used to it being just me.”

“Am I disturbing you, then?”

“Nope. You and me, we get along just fine.”

“I thought we did. You never said it before.”

I turned to look at her face. Colby does this ‘shy’ thing that I find both totally genuine and absolutely charming. For not being conventionally cute, she does have her moments. I smiled at her.

“C’mon, you. Lemme get your end into the water.”

“What?” she squeaked, making an obvious joke.

“Your end of the boat, nutcase,” I laughed.

I slid the lightweight craft down the bank into the gently flowing water of the creek. She got in and took the front seat. I pushed us completely off the bank, took my seat in the rear. With a shove of the paddle, we were off down the creek. Beautiful day for this, blue sky with about thirty percent cloud coverage, that being fluffy cumulus. The creek alternated between dapples of sunlight and cool shade from passing clouds.

I pointed out my pole lines as we passed them. No indicators that we had fish on any of them. I was going to take them up anyway, but didn’t need to do that right now.

“So we can go down the river,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Exactly.”

The creek meanders through the countryside, mixed forest on both banks. Its channel cuts through clay bluffs, some like our campsite reaching fifteen feet or so over the normal level of the creek. With every curve there’s a sandbar of white sand on the inside of the curve. Some of those sandbars are quite large, hundreds of feet long, along the creek. A few are accessible, becoming destinations for picnickers and campers. The creek’s cool water is great for swimming if one is mindful of the ever-changing bottom profile and the proliferation of snags from fallen trees. A lot of the bars, though, are completely isolated, a good distance from roads, accessible only by logging trails or four-wheeling through brush.

I was paddling.

“You want me to paddle?”

“No, go along for the ride,” I said. “We’ll both have to paddle on the way back.”

“Okay. I can do my share, you know.”

“You always do.” True. When her and her mom came to visit Sam and I (mostly Sam. She was Doralee’s friend), Colby didn’t sit still. She helped out in the kitchen, didn’t make or leave a mess, often coming into the den to watch TV with me. The same thing happened when she was over for tutoring.

So down the creek we went, mostly drifting with the current, occasionally paddling the spots where the creek widened and the current was slower, or to avoid shallows or snags.

I knew quite a bit more about the creek and its flora and fauna than did city-raised Colby. She asked a lot of questions, starting conversation between the two of us yet again.

She broached the personal part of the conversation. “Mizz Sam – she’s kinda distant to you, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Guess things are on a downhill slide. One of us’ll probably file for divorce any time now.”

“I’m surprised she came with you out here. Glad, though. I got to come with Mom.”

“Yeah, I don’t think your mom would be here if it was just me.”

“Uh, yeah ... her ‘n’ Mom are good friends. They talk all the time.”

“I know...”

“So you’re admitting it’s just about over?”

“Pretty much.”

“Then it wouldn’t be a big surprise if you found out she already did the divorce papers?”

“You know something I don’t know?”

“Heard ‘em talking.”

“That’s just peachy,” I spat.

“I thought you were ready for it.”

“I am. It’s just that she didn’t come at me herself...”

“Uh, they said that for uncontested, y’all have to have lived apart for a hundred and eighty days or something. Mom’s talking about saying she lived with us. If you, like, deny that...”

“Don’t know why I’d do that,” I said. “Sooner she’s gone, the better.”

“THAT sounds like you’re ready for it.”

“Thank god we never bought a house together.”

“Or she’d have half...”

“Yeah, that. And her savings is the same as mine, so she’s not getting half of that.”