Brief observations of the swamp:

1) The swamp is loud.

The bellow of cicadas, the Doppler-ing zing of passing mosquitoes, bird calls, the competing belches of randy frogs. It is never really, fully still: there is always something creeping about in the darkness, trying to get a jump on its next meal.

2) The swamp is eating itself.

The palmetto leaves mask a pulsing carpet of warring, cannibalistic insects: tiny ants swarm giant grasshoppers, slipping through their body walls to their soft and vulnerable entrails. Peripatetic black eyes glint in the murk. Attached to them drift crusty planks of alligators.

3) The swamp is guided by water.

The whole place looks to water to dictate its pattern, pace, and even existence: like an angry flooding, receding, clinging dewily to the shadow-side of everything it touches (the flooding ebbs create some of the richest soil in the world; thousands of plants agree on the deliciousness of this fine loamy dirt, their pale sprouts charging up out of the ground at a sprint’s pace in the critical competition to secure roots and a spot of sun before they are washed away).

4) The swamp is evasive.

True to the guileful nature of the place, much of its ground is fake: thick mossy algae blankets and bunches of grass disguising swamp water. It is a vicious deceit (this fake ground is, in fact, one of the alligator’s prime allies in its steady diet, with a “Whoops!” — Splash! — Chomp! sort of thing arranged). The ridges that are solid enough to stand on are devious and slippery — muddy slopes that rise and recede unpredictably, season to season.

The whole thing is a wild and frankly treacherous mess – a thoroughly inauspicious place for us human beings. Alligators, leeches, hungry mosquitoes, and malignant diseases are everywhere, all vying for a bite at a man’s naked leg. Some have found lives in the swamps, here and there, propping their houses up on stilts and getting used to the feeling of wet between their toes, trapping and fishing their way through their feral Barataria neighborhood. The longer they spend in the swamp, the more they forget of their humanity. The swamp perverts them. They are survivors – unnatural survivors — and to survive they must bargain with the swamp, letting it replace a little chunk of their souls with its own mean devilry.

No bodies for sixteen months. Flow Panther was plumb straight-up proud, as a man should be for such a prodigious triumph. The grace and justice of his engineering had been praised as the consummate perfection of digestion, and he was feeling the balmy glow that shines on a man at the top of his profession. He sat on the stoop, picking off flakes of its loosening mint-green paint and waiting for his coffee to cool. The Ninth is wet and hot this morning. His plastic thermometer dangles, battered, from his neck on a cotton shoelace. Seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit at oh-six-hundred. Idyllic.

He blows the steam off his coffee, watching its oily ghosts slip around on the meniscus. The empyrean host of Phyla Eisenias are already wiggling, he knows, at seventy-six degrees. Closing his eyes, he can almost feel the cool grace of their slippage through his own ungainly fingers. The kiss of the wet membrane on his dry skin; their erotic squirm swarming against his palms. He can nearly smell the intoxicating bouquet of Eisenia flesh, siphoned from the milk at the pit of the Earth.

The beauty of a compost pile is its private universe of perfect self-containment. It’s precision is mechanical, really. Like an engine, when you feed and tune it with loving care, it will hum back at you, harmonizing its joyous efficiency with your own devotion. Once you have experienced this – felt its tender warming against your own palms, listened to the delicate burps and sighs as it settles into its self-digestion – the compost pile becomes no easier to neglect than a purring cat or tail-wagging dog.
Flow Panther checks his thermometer again. It’s already flirting with seventy-eight. Maybe it’s best to go stir now. It’s not hit the absolute ideal conditions just yet – that would be eighty degrees and roughly fifty percent humidity — but Flow’s got that itchy feeling telling him that he’ll do nothing but worry about suffocation until it’s done. It’s just at this moment that Patshawn calls at him from down the street.

Something moving in the sewer grate in front of Frond’s across the street. The drain is still clogged with all sorts of dark brown matter, and a thick oily puddle is beginning to froth at the drain’s slow, eddying bleed.

Some thought the flood had started there, at that very sewer grate. It had been the first to fail when those massive concrete storm drains, tall and wide enough for a man to walk through upright, had astonished everyone by filling with rainwater faster than they could dump it into the Chesapeake Bay. When this happened, the fat raindrops massed in angry black pools at the sewer grates, the first bad one right there across the street in front of Frond’s. These bad-tempered puddles then agitated a gradual extension outward from every corner in West Edmondson. The flood rushed up through the storm drains from the center of the Earth, and the lake miraculously breached its shores – miraculous because this is how some have described it, as if god himself reached one hairy Caucasian finger down to sweep away the pestilence of muddy West Baltimore. Patshawn snorts, thinking of this, a pale Cadillac-sized index finger with a giant clamshell of a nail trembling among roiling clouds. Gitchi Manitou sure did a work-shy job of sweeping if that’s the story. The swelling puddles had merely sent the high-held queenly types – the ones who had formed a loose constellation of unimpeachable reputability, holding together West Edmondson – the puddles had sent this type scattering to extended families high and dry in Ten Hills or Carroll Park. A peel of lung-scratching mirth echoed from the squatters who had taken up in Frond’s place. No, the pestilence was the tenacious sort. Dug in like ticks. Poor Frond; she had flit off to her sister-in-law’s in the suburbs, and now her square brick home had surrendered to the most malodorous dregs of the city, perhaps too far gone to recover.

The façade of Frond’s house was still, but Patshawn was sure he had seen something in that grate moving. The frothy lather rose in fine golden bubbles the size of pinheads. He watches it closely, sucking at his thumb. A black shape thrashed. Patshawn gapes, eyes big and curious as a baby. It looks like a dark shoe. The thing lurches forward, emerging from the yellow foam inch by inch. Its movements appear spastic and excruciating. Patshawn thinks it may be a half-dead rat, its fur slicked flush to its skin with water and motor oil. But when the rat’s staggered propulsion have cleared the yellow froth — in fact propelled it several horrible feet into the street — Patshawn notes, with a leaden stomach, its rubbery dorsal fin and fine barbels dragging on the pavement.

In retrospect, the advent of the walking catfish in West Edmondson seemed impossible not to predict. The story was that this was the third horrible thing Gitchi Manitou did to the neighborhood, as punishment for who knows what. The first was the explosion of 1993, when the Cenex on Western had blown sky high due to a completely avoidable static electricity accident. Burning plastic rained over a three-block radius around the gas station, and for two long days sunlight was strained by the noxious purple plume of smoke. The second was the flood. And the third, right on its heels, was the horror of the walking catfish.

It had been a while since Patshawn last saw Viola. She looked different to him, now, but not in a way you would expect. No, she looked better. Her skin had a luster to it like a fine new boot, and seemed to now be filled out by a healthy shield of fat around her neck and collarbone. Her lips were not thin rags but pillowy; her mouth a rose in full-flush. The wild knot of hair was gone, supplanted by a thin lawn of silver. Blooming across the backs of her hands and forearms were swaths of gleaming russet-colored skin that outshone the once-prominent scratches and roiling burns. The nightgown was the only remaining aspect of her craziness, but even this now appeared well-kempt, giving off sweet little puffs of baby’s-breath detergent when the stoop they were sharing caught a rare breeze.

She talks on, and he watches her, wondering how that big hot flood left her so robust and healthy and everything in the city around them dirt sick. In Holly Grove, which is where Viola roosts, the water came up to the light switches. They say that past the door knobs is bad, but not so bad as some, because in some it soaked even the ceiling fans clear through, so they looked like giant wilted daisies pinned up on the muddy ceilings. This is how Viola describes it to Patshawn.

Nevertheless, the sort of person who willingly shells out $13.50 a piece for “0-12yrs” tickets (and $15.50 for adults) to follow a stoned 16-year-old “tour guide” on a perfunctory twenty-minute circuit of the U.S.S. Atlantic (permanently anchored in the otherwise largely un-nautical Inner Harbor) will likely never even consider setting foot west of Charles Street.

When Lobelie Bunchflower “Bunchie” Webb fell bleeding from a perforated lung effected by a stray .8mm bullet fired from a stolen handgun wielded by one Harold W. “Bay” Baylor, just 46 days ago, the Corner fell silent for three entire days. No one congregated on the steps of its row houses, kicked sneakers against its fraying curbs, or set up with patio chairs and frosty glasses of icebox lemonade. And why would they? There was nothing to see but a fading chalk outline and bleached patches of Portland Cement where Bunchie Webb’s O- had spilt.

At the end of the third day, two young boys pass through. They note the unusual hollowness of their footsteps and hear the scratch of a stray plastic bag blowing haphazard in the wind.

“Tumbleweed,” the taller one remarks to his companion.

“Phuhh, Derrick. When you gon get over that John Wayne shit?”

Derrick T. Colvin is a tall boy, his reedy frame hidden in an XXXL t-shirt that hangs so low it brushes his knees. In the morning, before he pulls on his jeans, his mother comments that it looks like he’s walking around the house in one of his granny’s nightgowns. He likes John Wayne a lot. Just yesterday he watched The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence on AMC at his granny’s place. They were both pretty good, but he found it weird that Liberty Valence, the newer film, was shot in black and white, while the older Searchers played in a vivid palette that reminded him of a Saturday morning cartoon.