Читать книгу Longleaf - Roger Reid - Страница 14

There are sounds in the Conecuh National Forest night that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. I didn’t hear any of those sounds that first night. All I heard were air conditioners. Yep. Out in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama about as far from civilization as you can get in the southeastern United States and I’m not hearing bobcats. I’m not hearing frogs. I’m not hearing night owls. I’m hearing air conditioners. About three-fourths of the Open Pond camp sites have water and electrical hook-ups for RVs, and about three-fourths of those were full. That means about twenty-five motor homes, urban sprawl on wheels, filled the air with the hum of air conditioners. Mom promised we would be spending the following nights at different frog ponds away from the main campground. That first night we would have to try and get to sleep with the whirr of climate controlled camping.

To make matters worse, there was that girl. Leah. She turned her back on me. She said things like “ain’t” and “hell.” Did she know Celsius from Fahrenheit? I don’t think so. How could she run so fast? Maybe because there was no brain in that head to slow her down. “Come back in May if you ain’t scared,” she said. Hell, I ain’t scared. And why did she have to be a year older than me? She couldn’t be thirteen; she had to be fifteen. One lousy year. Never seen eyes like hers. Dark, dark, dark eyes. Some kind of Alabama voodoo eyes. I didn’t know they had voodoo in Alabama. Leah? What kind of name is that?

I must have dozed off around midnight. It was not a restful sleep. I had too much to dream. In outer space. Alone. Quiet it was except for the drone of the spacecraft’s life support systems. Weightless, I drifted up to a porthole and looked down upon this strange new world. It was not the blue planet. Not mother earth. Green. Everything was green. The green planet. In my dream I wanted to go there. To the green world. There was something for me in the green world; I just didn’t know how to get there. Then I heard the voices.

“Shut up,” said the first voice.

“You shut up,” said the second voice.

“Both of you shut up,” said the third voice. The third voice sounded like it was in charge.

The voices were coming toward me. “How you know this is it?” asked one of the voices.

The voice in charge said, “You ain’t gone fly in no airplane with no motor home.”

Then there was a voice I recognized. My dad said, “Hello? Who’s there?”

This voice—my dad’s voice—woke me up. I sat straight up in my sleeping bag. My dad was sitting up, too.

Mom snuggled her bag up under her chin. “Let me sleep, please,” she said. “We’ll be up all night tomorrow.”

Dad looked at me through the darkness. “Did you hear them?” he whispered.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Probably a couple of drunks who couldn’t find their own tent,” he said.