23. Witless

Witless let himself in and he was crying. He didn't make no noise right away, but the first part of him I saw was the light from the naphtha lamp shining on his cheeks. I say "what's with you" and he don't say a thing, so I go on tying up my fishing flies like I was doing.
His big long face was drawn so tight that when my wife came in the room, she says right away, "What's the matter, Witless?" and out it comes in bawls.
"It was the most unnatural thing I ever saw," Witless says, finally wiping at the streaks on his face. “Lydia – my Liddie! – stood atop the water, clear as I see you now.” He broke into a sob. “I seen her ghost! Not one hour ago, Irv! Her spirit, my dead wife!”
The way he was, it was a damned sight. I’ve never seen a man break down like that before or since, all gulping for air, babbling and blubbering and making a damned spectacle of himself. “Quit acting a damn fool, Wit,” I tell him, “start at the beginning: where’d you see this?”
“In the glades! Her ghost walks the waterway – oh, Irv, I know you’ll say there ain’t such a thing, but I know what I saw, and –”
“Just tell it like it happened, Wit.”


He snivels a little more and my wife brings him a whisky to calm his nerves. Once he’s collected enough to swallow his sobbing, he says “Well, early this morning I set to hunting wild hog on the far banks of the lake, by the mouth of the Caloosahatchee, you know? I tied the boat there and tracked around the glades, came upon a big old boar and shot him. Only he didn’t die, just ran off with a bullet in his, in, between his shoulder blades. So I went after him, ‘cos you can’t just let a wounded animal go... Anyways, I caught up with the pig a ways towards La Belle and put him down right. It was a few hours’ chase and we’d gone real far, so I trekked back for the boat and brought it into Lake Hicpochee ‘fore dressing the carcass. Big bastard. Time I finished it was sunset, and heading back, it got real dark.”
I could see the fear creeping back into his face. Witless’ voice trailed off and he was quiet for a minute. I pour him another whisky and say, “What happened then, to get you so shook?” He drinks it and wipes his mouth on his arm, he goes on talking, and I fill both our glasses up again.
“Well,” he says, “a thick fog had crept in from the shallows and it was hard to see. I was just entering Lake Okeechobee again when the lilypads got snarled up in my propeller and choked out the engine. So I went to clean it up and the boat drifted, or maybe some eerie force pulled me in, I don’t know! Next thing, I lift up my head and she’s there in the fog – glowing, with unearthly light, standing on the water’s surface like Christ Almighty, and her face – oh, it’s Liddie all right, she’s looking right at me, and those eyes! Those dead eyes!” and he sets right back on wailing with that, won’t even take another whisky for it.
Then it’s just “all right, all right,” I’m saying, and my wife, she’s looking at me like I’m going to know how to straighten everything out. Any married man’d know that look when he saw it. So the best I could figure, since I had to have some answer and all, it was “We’ll go back out there right now and get to the bottom of this.”
“Yeah,” Witless says. There was something about the way he nodded, so solemnly, that it stuck in my memory. Wouldn't have guessed then how it would stick, but now I just look back and see old Wit saying “yeah” and nodding slow. He got real quiet and stood up, put on his hat, and walked towards the door like a man headed off to his own hanging.
Witless, despite all his howling, he ain’t a coward. Exceptional circumstances might have had the better of his courage for a while, but in spite of that, he was up and ready to go right back for another look, figuring leastaways he couldn’t be surprised twice. So we got our gear on. I never been ghost-hunting before, ain’t superstitious, figured we was just going fishing with no rods or nothing.

It’s dark and Witless is jumpy. He’s gone so rattled that when the lantern makes the shadows turn around, he thinks every rock and tree is about to pounce him. There's an almost-full moon shining through the occasional hole in thick cloud cover, light that comes and goes. We get down to the docks and there’s two boats there, mine and his. “What about that boar you killed, Wit?” I point at the bloody smear on his bow.
“Lost it,” he says with his eyes on the smear. “Got so spooked that I gunned the engine, whole boat lurched. It must’ve went right overboard.”
"Damn shame, after that work. Big hog, feed'n you for a week, two. Just chow for gators, now."
He keeps on staring at the big red stain on his boat, thinking about no good.
"Look here, Wit. I can tell you right now there's nothing out there, not on the Okeechobee, not anywhere."
He shakes his head. "Stranger things'n heaven 'n earth, Irv."
"What's that mean?"
"Don't matter." He breathes a heavy sigh. "Let's just get on with it."
I start up my engine. He gets in, we go.

The waters of Okeechobee keep a lot hidden underneath. It's real easy to hit a shallow patch and stick the propeller right into the mud without ever knowing what was coming. Hitting a stone in the glades could knock you right out of the boat; put you in the drink with the gators and snappers. There was enough moon, even with the clouds, to get around once we were accustomed to the darkness. Witless turns the lamp down low and we keep our eyes wide open to the treacherous night.
"Be there soon," Witless mutters, "Liddie." I watch him. He sways side to side with his arms around himself like he was cold, but it was balmy out, humid like sick breath over the water.
"Why d'you reckon it was her anyhow, eh?" He didn't turn to look. "Wit? You hear?"
"Wandering dead, now," He spoke like it was the night he was talking to. "You never was laid to rest right. Wasn't no priest to say a blessing."
"Well, that hardly seems worth coming back for."
"That ain't the only..." He mumbles.
"What else?"
Quiet.

What I know is, about half a year back, Wit and I went hunting on a regular basis, and one day he says, well, Lydia’s got the dengue pretty bad and I’m-a take her to a doctor. Then I don’t see him for a week or two, and he says, well, Liddie died. And that’s all he ever did say about her passing.

We come up into the mouth of the Caloosahatchee Canal. I feel then like the whisky was worn off, and if it had’ve done that while we was still on land, we would never have been on this fool's venture in the first place. Any case, there we are, and we ain't turning back, so downriver we go. There's a heavy mist drifting around the watergrasses at the banks of the river, and I can hear the rustling of animals in the bush, all them raccoons and lizards and things out at night. Witless turns to look at me and I see he's got the silver streaks of tears down his face again.
"We're almost there, Irv."
"You know what a damn fool you look like, Witless?"
"I know, Irv. But I saw what I saw. My wife's spirit come back."
"The hell it was. The hell it wasn't a cluster of fireflies, or you dozing off and dreaming!"
"Nope. Never been more awake. Not in my whole life." He sounds so sad I don't say anything. We just listen to the boat motor putter and the water lap up on the hull. "Reckon it's a blood debt she’s after."
"What are you saying, Witless? It was the dengue, what killed Liddie." He looks at me with a face, a damnable look like a dog that’s done wrong. "It was the dengue, wasn't it, Wit?" He turns away, don't say a word, but I see his shoulders move, him stifling his sobs. Then he raises an arm and points to a spot on the bank where the grasses were torn up by a boat. I steer us in and turn the lamp higher. The light makes some creature, maybe a mud snake or softshell turtle, slide back into the cover of the water hyacinths, rustling the weeds. I put us in neutral and let us coast in.

"Nothing here, Wit."
"Wait," he says, all the fear in his voice. I stare out and look for what, I don't know what for. There's the torn grass, a fresh swath of earth disturbed on the bank where it looks to have been it with a boat, but that's all. I'm turning away when a glint catches my eye. It's gone when I look back. Hair on my neck raises up, my skin starts to crawl. I look back at the opposite shore and see the moon’s gone behind some cloud. Through a couple sparse holes in the canopy, I see the silvery glow as the cloud starts thinning out.
"Wit, you see anything there? By the bank?"
"Is it her?"
"I saw something, a light, something shiny. Like metal."
"A knife?"
Looking at the grassy bank, I see it now, knife sticking up in the dirt. "What's that doing there?"
"I threw it. At the ghost."
"Why would you throw--"
"Irv," he says. "Irv."

I turn and he's looking at the other side of the boat where there stands a column of emanating light in the midst of the fog. My heart skips a beat at the sight of it standing bolt upright in the middle of the river, glowing unearthly. It’s his ghost all right, Witless goes totally apoplectic. We're moving towards it and I come to my senses. Nothing’s pulling us in, we're just drifting with the current and a stalled motor; he's scrabbling on the floor of the boat and gibbering 'Liddie please Liddie I'm sorry Liddie oh help me,' and "Witless!" I say, "it's just the moonlight for Chrissakes! Just moonlight on the mist!" but he's in the grips of panic and not thinking no more. I grab up the lamp to shine through the fog and when the light hits it anyone can see it’s just the damn fog, but Witless already made to flee and jumped overboard.

"Jesus God, man, get back in the boat!" I'm yelling to him as he flops towards shore. Maybe he didn't hear me. He grabs the knife out of the earth. I start pulling at the engine, trying to bring the boat around. It kicks and sputters and I hear thrashing in the water and Witless screams. He's fighting something, splashing in the water, and I pull up the lamp to see a gator's hindquarters as it pushes him under, and then the whole commotion starts rolling.

I make to drive in with the boat, to nail that gator on the bow, but it's too shallow and soon I'm stuck in the mud. Water’s still churning, and then the gator comes up and I grab the first thing at hand to throw at it. The lamp shatters on the creature’s scales, naphtha fuel catching fire and burning on top of the water. The blaze drives the thing away and I shout for Witless, I shout his name again and again but it’s all for naught and I can see in the dying light that the waters run red all around me.

The whole night passes, me in that boat. After the light starts coming back, I get the oar and dig out of the mud. Nothing left to do. I did go back to that place once, but there was nothing to find. Just an awful mess of snapping turtles, congregated on a sunny stone.