Years ago, in high school, Ken Matlock often joked with a girl named Debbie Watson about going to Murphey`s Pond. It was a dare between them. They were chemistry lab partners-buddies, never sweethearts. Ken had imagined that if he had gone with her there, she would have loved him. But they never went. They weren`t sure how to find it, and people got lost there, returning with tales about the snakes they had seen. It was even said that boa constrictors and alligators were there. Now the university had built a boardwalk out onto the swamp and graveled a road leading to it. And at last Ken is going with Debbie to Murphey`s Pond.
It has been 10 years since they saw each other, and both have been divorced. Ken ran into Debbie at the K-Mart. He was buying a tube of caulking, and she was buying flashlight batteries. She was home from Lexington, visiting her parents. She had on a wool cap with reindeer on it. Her cowboy boots made her taller, and she was better-looking than Ken remembered. They had hardly exchanged greetings when she said, mischievously, looking him straight in the eye, ”I dare you to go with me to Murphey`s Pond.”
”That snaky swamp?” he said, grinning. It was strange that he had put Murphey`s Pond out of his mind, though he had often thought of Debbie. He had imagined her in other settings. He thought of her on a beach, running in the sand.
She laughed at him. ”Don`t be silly. The snakes are hibernating this time of year.”
She explained that she had returned to school. She was getting a master`s degree in wildlife biology at the University of Kentucky. It was a relief to be divorced, she said. ”Thank goodness I didn`t have any kids.”
”I`ve got two little girls,” Ken said. ”They live with my ex-wife and her husband in Paducah, but I get to see them.”
”What are their names?”
”Shayla and Christi. Six and four.”
”Those are cute names.” Debbie paid for her flashlight batteries and put the change in her jacket pocket. Then she said, laughing, ”I like that hair, Ken.”
Ken had a permanent in his hair. Although everyone seemed to like it, he suddenly knew when Debbie commented on it that it was entirely wrong. He felt ashamed. After they had made arrangements to go to Murphey`s Pond, Ken went to his car and sat there for a moment, his face burning. He peered in the rear-view mirror and saw how silly his hair looked. On the radio, someone was singing a dumb song about radioactivity. Ken shifted gears and shot out of the parking lot, as though he were late for something.
In high school, Debbie was a cheerleader and an A student. She went steady with a linebacker named Chuck, and she always wore his gold-and-blue letter sweater. Ken worked after school in a grocery store and drove a junky Chevy. Debbie rode in it once. She was always leading him on, teasing him, and she begged him for a ride home from the grocery store. He almost stripped the gears at a traffic light. In chemistry lab, Debbie sometimes gave him her homework, saving him from failing the course. When she sneaked him her notes once during a test, he was so impressed by her boldness that he felt there was a possibility for something to develop between them. But it never did, even after she broke up with Chuck. After she went away to college, Ken went to work for his father, building houses, and later he married Betty Stairs, a quiet, conventional girl who belonged to a homemakers` club, taught a Sunday School class and held down a full-time job at the telephone company. But Betty shocked him by running off to Cairo, Ill., with a cemetery-plot salesman. In a way, Ken was glad. It saved him from asking any serious questions about his marriage, which he realized later was pointless, if there was supposed to be a point to marriage, other than children. From time to time while he was with Betty, the memory of Debbie surfaced in the middle of the night, the way a realization that one is going to die someday will sometimes strike at odd moments. He realized Debbie was a central fact of his life. But he would not have been at all surprised if she had not recognized him that day in the K-Mart.
Debbie`s mother, Erlene, is their guide to Murphey`s Pond. She drives them there in her husband`s pickup truck on a sunny, cold afternoon. Erlene, a farm woman, is fat and unpretentious, with a hearty laugh like Debbie`s. For several miles, she talks about snakes. She tells a story about a man who has been bitten by a snake at Murphey`s Pond. When his friend returned with help, they could not find the man at first. He was so covered with mosquitoes that he was camouflaged, appearing to be a log.
”But the mosquitoes drawed out the poison,” Erlene says. ”They saved his life.” She downshifts as they turn onto a dirt road. ”Snakes are the most dangerous in the spring, when the fish start sponding.”
”She means spawning,” Debbie says to Ken, who is sitting on the narrow seat behind her. Debbie pats her mother`s shoulder affectionately, but Ken is disappointed that she is along. He admires the truck, a Dodge Ram Charger with a topper. His head bumps against a Remington 12-gauge shotgun on a gun rack behind him. It occurs to him that he has not been hunting in more than six years.
”Cottonmouths will come right after you,” says Erlene. ”I had one come out on a log at me when I was fishing. They crawl at you.” She makes a curvy, swimming gesture with her arm. ”They just keep a-coming. In the spring, about the time the grass is up, that`s when you have to watch out for them.”
”I don`t guess we have to worry about that today,” says Ken.
It is a bright, cold day, well below freezing. The sky is blue and clear. Ken should have dressed more warmly. Debbie is wearing her reindeer cap pulled down over her ears. Her hair falls around her face the way Sissy Spacek`s hair did in ”Coal Miner`s Daughter.”
On the way, Debbie tells him about the old house in Lexington she is renovating. ”It`s so neat,” she says. ”It has this old brickwork in the kitchen that I exposed, two stone fireplaces and a lot of good oak paneling in the dining room. It`s a terrific house.”
”It`s a awful big house to keep up,” says Erlene.
”I like it. I feel comfortable there.”
”She`s got a living room you could roller-skate in,” says Erlene.
When Debbie says she had siding put on the house last summer, Ken demands to know all the details-what kind, the price, the installation. He has a siding business now.
”Damn,” he says. ”I wish I`d known. I could have saved you a lot of money. I could have given it to you at cost.”
”Well, it wasn`t aluminum siding,” says Debbie. ”It was Masonite.”
”You have to paint Masonite. I could have gotten you vinyl steel. That`s big now. We`re doing more of that than aluminum.”
”Well, I didn`t know.”
”I could have saved you a hundred dollars, I bet.”
”Too late now!” she says. She tugs at her cap and looks out the window. After driving up a bumpy dirt road, Erlene finally jolts to a stop in a graveled clearing. She opens the door, and as she gets out of the truck, she yells. ”Oh, not another one!” Debbie scoots behind the wheel and helps her mother step down to the ground.
”She has a charley-horse in her leg,” Debbie explains to Ken.
”You`re not supposed to rub a charley-horse,” says Erlene, grimacing with pain. ”But you can pat it.” She touches her calf and tries slowly to stretch out her leg.
”Why can`t you rub it?” asks Ken.
”You might work a blood clot loose, and it would go to your brain.”
After Erlene`s charley-horse subsides, they walk down a path to the pond. Trees and small islands are scattered throughout the water, giving the impression that the pond is shallow. The surface is rough. It has frozen, thawed and refrozen, and hunks of ice stick up from below. The weeds and dried stalks embedded in the ice are like the objects Ken`s wife had on the coffee table-flowers and seeds captured in clear plastic. Ken`s leather shoes crunch on the bog. Then he steps in some mud.
”Look how the sun`s shining,” says Erlene. ”It`s liable to draw snakes out.”
”If you see a snake, it`ll be so sluggish, you could probably pet it on the head.” Debbie points to a yellow, diamond-shape sign that has had its lettering obliterated by bullet holes. ”That sign probably said `No hunting,` ” she says sarcastically.
She skips out onto the boardwalk, which makes a roughly drawn semicircle out over the edge of the swamp. Ken takes Erlene`s elbow when he sees her hesitate. She smiles at him, and they walk out behind Debbie. It occurs to Ken that in the summertime the long leafy arms of the cypress trees will be stretching in a canopy over the boardwalk.
”Everybody said I was crazy to come here,” Ken says with an awkward laugh. He is thinking of snakes dropping from the cypress limbs.
”I wish we could see a Great Blue Heron,” says Debbie, leaning over the railing. ”It`s an incredible sight. It`s a deep, dusky blue all over, and it looks like a stork.”
”That would be something,” Ken agrees. He imagines a giant blue bird carrying a baby.
”They`re white when they`re young and turn blue when they mature. The young ones are sometimes confused with egrets.”
”Where`d you learn so much?”
She shrugs and walks away. Ken sees a bird in a tree.
”There`s a blue bird over there,” he says, pointing.
”That`s just a bluejay.”
The jay squawks, flaps its wings and flies to another tree.
Erlene shivers and tightens her thin headscarf. Leaning against the railing, she says: ”That time the snake chased me, Patricia Williams was with me, and she just stood there. I asked her later, `Why didn`t you help me?` and she said: `I couldn`t. I just froze.` That snake was after this bullfrog. The bullfrog came jumping along, and after it this big snake humping along like this-it had these humps in it like the Loch Ness Monster? That thing was six or seven feet long and as big around as both fists. Patricia got in the car, but I was afraid to get in because the snake was on my side. Then it crawled under the car.”
”Why didn`t Patricia drive the car away?” Debbie asks.
”Oh, she can`t drive. She sat in the car, and I walked down to a house and got some men to drive the car away for us. Then we tore the car apart to see if the snake had got in through a hole or something.”
Ken thinks of a snake story of his own to tell. He tells about two guys he heard of who were fishing in the swamp in a boat when a snake fell out of a tree into the boat. ”One of them grabbed his shotgun and blasted out the bottom of the boat trying to get at that snake!” Ken cries, laughing. ”And then they sat there and looked at one another while they sank!”
Erlene laughs appreciatively, but Debbie seems to be studying a patch of bark on a tree. She breaks off a piece and studies it.
”Let me take your picture,” says Erlene. She has brought a camera.
She poses Debbie and Ken on the boardwalk. They lean against the railing, side by side, not touching. Some of the railing has fallen down, and parts of the walk are broken, the wood splintered. Ken has been imagining men in hipboots building the boardwalk, sinking four-by-sixes into the snaky swamp. Beside him, Debbie shifts position. Her arm brushes his.
