Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

ever met a single car on this road, ever. See—not so many people even know this road is here.”
    “And if I was to turn the lights on,” he said, “then the sky would go dark and everything would go dark and you wouldn’t be able to see where you were. We just give it a little while more, then when it gets we can see the stars, that’s when we turn the lights on.”
    The sky was like very faintly colored red or yellow or green or blue glass, depending on which part of it you looked at.
    “That okay with you?”
    “Yes,” said Jinny.
    The bushes and trees would turn black, once the lights were on. There would just be black clumps along the road and the black mass of trees crowding in behind them, instead of, as now, the individual still identifiable spruce and cedar and feathery tamarack and the jewelweed with its flowers like winking bits of fire. It seemed close enough to touch, and they were going slowly. She put her hand out.
    Not quite. But close. The road seemed hardly wider than the car.
    She thought she saw the gleam of a full ditch ahead.
    “Is there water down there?” she said.
    “Down there?” said Ricky. “Down there and everywhere.
    There’s water to both sides of us and lots of places water underneath us. Want to see?”
    He slowed the van. He stopped. “Look down your side,” he said. “Open the door and look down.”
    When she did that she saw that they were on a bridge. A little bridge no more than ten feet long, of crossway-laid planks. No railings. And motionless water underneath it.
    “Bridges all along here,” he said. “And where it’s not bridges it’s culverts. ‘Cause it’s always flowing back and forth under the road. Or just laying there and not flowing anyplace.”
    “How deep?” she said.
    “Not deep. Not this time of year. Not till we get to the big pond—it’s deeper. And then in spring it’s all over the road, you can’t drive here, it’s deep then. This road goes flat for miles and miles, and it goes straight from one end to the other. There isn’t even any roads that cuts across it. This is the only road I know of through the Borneo Swamp.”
    “Borneo Swamp?” Jinny repeated.
    “That’s what it’s supposed to be called.”
    “There is an island called Borneo,” she said. “It’s halfway round the world.”
    “I don’t know about that. All I ever heard of was just the Borneo Swamp.”
    There was a strip of dark grass now, growing down the middle of the road.
    “Time for the lights,” he said. He switched them on and they were in a tunnel in the sudden night.
    “Once I did that,” he said. “I turned the lights on like that and there was this porcupine. It was just sitting there in the middle of the road. It was sitting straight up kind of on its hind legs and looking right at me. Like some little old man. It was scared to death and it couldn’t move. I could see its little old teeth chattering.”
    She thought, This is where he brings his girls.
    “So what do I do? I tried beeping the horn and it still didn’t do nothing. I didn’t feel like getting out and chasing it. He was scared, but he still was a porcupine and he could let fly. So I just parked there. I had time. When I turned the lights on again he was gone.”
    Now the branches really did reach close and brush against the door, but if there were flowers she could not see them.
    “I am going to show you something,” he said. “I’m going to show you something like I bet you never seen before.”
    If this was happening back in her old, normal life, it was possible that she might now begin to be frightened. If she was back in her old, normal life she would not be here at all.
    “You’re going to show me a porcupine,” she said.
    “Nope. Not that. Something there’s not even as many of as there is porcupines. Least as far as I know there’s not.”
    Maybe half a mile farther on he turned off the lights.
    “See the stars?” he said. “I told you. Stars.”
    He stopped the van. Everywhere there was at first a deep silence. Then this silence was filled in, at the edges, by some kind of humming that could have been faraway traffic, and little noises that passed before you properly heard them, that could have been made by night-feeding animals or birds or bats.
    “Come in here in the springtime,” he said, “you wouldn’t hear nothing but the frogs. You’d think you were going deaf with the frogs.”
    He opened the door on his side.
    “Now. Get out and walk a