The boats we did not sell, and they remained tied to the trailer with oars intact. The doctor had promised that he and Papa and everyone else would be welcome to join him again one day at the Gulf or at any of the nearby lakes and rivers which wove through the delta.
Eli and I clamored into the back seat of the truck, a cloud-softened glow on the fluff of our hair, the books in our lap. Outside my window, her form blurry, Mama Ilene stood beside the passenger door beneath the umbrella Papa extended above her. Mama’s hands rested at the back of her hips, and she swayed and nodded at the house on stilts as if she had just finished building it herself, a work of art that far exceeded her blueprints. I watched her take Papa’s hand for a moment before he walked around to the driver’s side. A brief gesture which any stranger might have ignored, which my own mother abandoned, but in which I saw a field so densely bloomed that I could not count one-thousandth of the flowers that grew there.
I stared down the gravel driveway and onto the main road, envisioned the mailboxes of the cave dwellers and the wooden docks into the swamps, which led to the great Gulf. All the twills of herons and rattling cicadas appeared and disappeared like shadows around a corner. No matter where I looked to find their source, I saw only the rain as it rustled softly the leaves of the trees, as if to soothe a child to sleep. I didn’t know whether I felt happy or sad.
Papa Roy slid into the car, slick as a salamander. “Guess what?” he said, hands slapping onto the steering wheel. “Someone spotted it.”
“Spotted what?” asked Mama Ilene.
“The Blue Bull,” Papa said. “Some out-of-towner at Hebert’s bait shop came to fish the rivers with his boy—next thing he know, his boy come to him with stories of a blue frog he seen in the bayou. Hebert done told me hisself.”
Mama frowned. “When was this?”
“A few days ago. He’d done come by to tell me so long.”
“Did you say a few days ago?” I asked. My heartbeat drummed in my chest.
Papa nodded. “That boy ain’t never even heard of no Bull until he saw it with his own two eyes. I don’t think he playin’ around.”
I looked down at A Fairy Tale Companion in my hands, focused there, lent the rest of my energy to my ears so they could listen to every note and texture through that rain. I had seen the Bull in the maw of the bobcat, unquestionably dead. Hebert must have been lying.
I looked at Papa Roy’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, trying to conjecture if he somehow knew what I knew. But he didn’t betray anything.
“Did they catch him?” I asked.
Papa Roy looked at me with make-believe malice. “What I teach you all this time, girl?” he asked. “Ain’t nobody ever catch the Blue Bull.”
I thought back to the last night in the swamp, that night of the bobcat, of the little green creature in the palm of my hand. I had put a kiss on its head, laid it away beneath the trees where no one else would find it. Such a thing did, in A Fairy Tale Companion, turn frogs into princes.
Once, in the city, I found a speckled blue eggshell beneath the gutter of a condo. Until coming to Bonne Chance, I had considered it the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I hadn’t thought that the world might contain millions just like it, tucked out of reach under discarded feathers and twigs.
As we pulled away, I stared back to the stilts of the house and the algae around the edges and imagined all of it sinking, spreading atop the oily silt and the remnants of one last storm’s debris. The rain would fall and the water would rise, and the diving whales would be right there on that doorstep, one day.
When that time comes, maybe they will be the proper animals for a place like Bonne Chance, whose swollen trees already breathe an air half-drenched.
On these amphibian outskirts, in the present day, a few creatures continue to straddle the divide. On boats that float, on houses that rise, on and under lily pads.