Looking back on it, I realize now it never was nothing but me and old Tiger chasing cars.

Or, more accurately, pickup trucks. That's about all that runs the lonely roads in the swamp during winter time.

And damned few pickup trucks, even.

Anyhow, it was us all the time, but I didn't come to realize that until it was already a full-blown legend. And folks in the Atchafalaya Swamp aren't going to part with their legend even after this honest effort at confession.

They likely wouldn't give it up even if old Tiger wrote this confession.

A swamp the size of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin, the world's largest river bottom swamp, needs a legend. wants a legend, you might say.

And, unknowingly and without malice aforethought, me and old Tiger gave it one.

I had suffered a mild heart attack in 1965, and the doctor told me to get out of the rat race or get my will drafted.

I had come into a little money when Aunt Maggie died, so what with selling the cafe I was able to retire and buy a cabin at Butte La Rose, a little settlement which sits on a bend in the Atchafalaya River in the heart of the Atchafalaya Swamp. At that time, it was pretty primitive, but close enough to Interstate 10 that you didn't feel absolutely alone.

The fellow I bought it from asked me to keep old Tiger, because the dog had lived there all his life and might pine away and die if he were moved.

I know now that he asked me to keep Tiger because the 101st Airborne Division and six Marine Battalions couldn't have moved him.

The camp belongs to Tiger, and I'll always be grateful to him for letting he share it.

Best I can judge, Tiger is a cross between a German Shepherd and maybe a grizzly bear.

Once when a dog at the next camp down the bayou came in season and all the male dogs in the swamp gathered outside the fence where she was kept, Tiger trotted down there and systematically whipped hell out of all of them.

The owner of the female was so impressed that he opened the gate for Tiger, and Tiger still had strength left to go in and enjoy the spoils of war.

That was an uncommon amount of excitement.

Ordinarily, the swamp was serene and beautiful and until they came with their giant oil field equipment, men were unable to leave much of a mark on her natural splendor.

I found the peace I was looking for.

Threw away the cigarettes and breathed the wonderful clean air.

The doctor was impressed when I showed up six months later for a check-up.

But he told me I had to lose weight and get more exercise than dangling a cricket in a bream hole.

Well, I got a bargain at a second hand store on a fire-engine red jogging suit, almost exactly the color of my hair and beard (which were both hanging nearly to my waist by then) and took up jogging.

I did it, but I didn't like it.

I even moved up from jogging to running.

After a few months I was in uncommonly good physical condition.

I got down to 220 pounds, which was lean enough for a man that stands six feet, six inches tall, and could run for miles along the levee--going like a bat out of hell--without even breathing hard.

But, truly, it was just boring as hell.

One night it dawned on me that old Tiger was getting just as much exercise, and having a damned site more fun, chasing pickup trucks. They say running can give you a natural high, and maybe I was in one of those euphoric states the first time I did it, but me and old Tiger ran a pickup truck from Butte La Rose to the Henderson guide levee that first night, and I never had so much fun in my life. I discovered I could bark pretty good too, with all that lung power I had developed.

Like I say, there's not much traffic in the swamp on winter nights, and sometimes we didn't get to run a car or truck more than two or three nights a week.

But I guess that was enough for the legend to start.

About six weeks after we started chasing cars and trucks, I found an old copy of a Lafayette newspaper somebody had left at the boat landing, and there was a story about some folks who had encountered a monster in the swamp.

They had about a dozen eyewitness accounts from motorists who "deep in the bowels of the Great Basin," as the newspaper story said, "had been terrified to see a gigantic creature covered with red fur leap from the marshy woods and pursue them down the eerie, winding roads of the mysterious swamp."

Especially the part about the great, hairy, four-footed creature that accompanied "the ferocious, two-footed giant with the scarlet fur"--both of them "snarling, barking and howling."

For awhile, me and old Tiger stayed inside the fence at night.

During the day, we scouted the area around the cabin for footprints left by what the newspapers by then were calling "The Swamp Horror."

The only footprints we ever found were our own, and after the only radio station we could pick up dropped the story, we went back to chasing cars and trucks.

Right away, The Swamp Horror was back on the radio newscasts.

Besides motorists being chased and terrified, there was a story about a troop of Explorer Scouts who had come upon The Horror and its companion, "with their heads tilted back, wailing and shrieking in a mad, half-human way."

That really shook me up, because it happened in an area near Bayou Benoit where me and old Tiger were camping that same night. I remember it well.

We weren't too sleepy that night, so when a full moon came out, me'n Tiger commenced to howling at it, just for the hell of it.

I recall trying to teach Tiger to howl to the tune of "The Orange Blossom Special," but he never could get it just right.

Anyhow, we were right there in the area where those Scouts came upon The Horror, "shrieking and wailing," according to the news report.

I decided to stay close to the cabin after that, and give up camping out in the swamp.

The next thing we heard, a couple of hunters reported spotting The Horror and shooting at it.

The radio said they were making their way through the swamp when it rose up in the air about fifty feet in front of them.

The reporter had a tape recorded interview with one of the hunters: "It just seemed to float up out of nowhere," he said. "We could see it plain through the trees. It was waving and snapping at us like a red ghost, and it was floating on the air. It's feet didn't even touch the ground.

Joe blasted the son of a bitch with his .12 gauge, and I know he hit it.

But it just kept floating there above the ground, twisting and waving its arms at us.

That ain't no human thing down there."

It was real breezy and I had washed my red sweat suit and hung it up on a limb to let the wind blow it dry.

While me and old Tiger were out checking a trot line, something got hold of the sweat suit and made a hole in the seat of the pants the size of a cannon ball.

I figured maybe The Horror had come right up to the camp and took a bite out of my britches.

I thought about reporting that to the radio station, but they seemed to have enough news about the subject.

There was what they called a traiteur, a faith healer, that the Cajun people there in the swamp believed in without reservation, and he had begun to give interviews to the radio station.

He explained that the red thing and the big hairy four-footed thing were undoubtedly "loup garous," which is a kind of Cajun werewolf that roams at night, stealing souls and other valuables and making cows' milk go sour.

According to the traiteur, a loup garou can change its shape into anything it wants to be.

He said the only protection against it was some kind of powder that he made up from a secret recipe passed down to him from his father who got it from his father and so on and so on.

Me 'n old Tiger slipped over to his cabin one night and there was a gang of people there. He seemed to be doing a brisk business in loup garou powder.

Well, I figured the powder was doing the trick, because pretty soon the news about The Horror died down again, and before too long, me 'n old Tiger got back to running cars. And that's when the realization came.

One night, we set in behind a pickup truck that was weaving pretty bad down the swamp road, and when the driver looked in the rear view mirror and saw us, he ran the pickup half way up a cypress tree.

He jumped out, looked right at me and old Tiger and hollered, "It's The Swamp Horror," then he threw a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam at us and took off down the road, running like a spotted-assed ape.

Old Tiger inspired him to an impressive pace, snarling and nipping at his butt as he ran.

I called the dog back and we went home to the cabin.

There, sipping on the remainder of that Jim Beam and reviewing in my mind all that had transpired, it came to me clear as a bell that The Swamp Horror never was nothing but me and old Tiger chasing cars.

So we stopped that, and after about a month or so the scare died out.

But the Swamp had its legend, and I guess it will live on forever. Now they've even added a new one, about fishermen seeing something in Bayou Peyronnet that could have been the Loch Ness Monster or worse.

Me and old Tiger are not contributing to that one.

We never did intend to scare people and just to avoid the possibility of it happening again, we gave up running and have taken to swimming for exercise.

As a matter of fact, we swim in Bayou Peyronnet two, three times a week, and I've never seen anything that resembles a monster. ~Àp8>þ'''û÷û÷ûï'çÎ8$àà#Ð p@à°P ð0$àà#Ð p@à°P ðF Þ&0'ì[#&ÿÿ§ÿÿtÿÿÿÿ¬ÿÿ''(

When Uncle Ditimus run the blade of his jackknife down the stick he was whittling on and sliced off a quarter-inch of skin from his finger, he didn't even feel it.

That's how sharp the knife was.

The blade was old and narrow and hard like him.

It was worn down from being honed ever morning and whittled with all day--that being Uncle Ditimus' chief employment.

I figure the knife was keen enough to shave with, but if Uncle Ditimus used it for that purpose, it wasn't a daily occupation like whittling.

I was probably eight years old that time when Uncle Ditimus sliced the skin off his finger.

Me and Mama and Gramma had been going to visit him and Aunt Della every six months or so for as long as I could remember, and him cutting his finger was the first thing he had ever done that was different from his ordinary performance.

Usually, me and him would sit there on the floor of the front porch while Mama and Gramma and Aunt Della talked in the kitchen, and he wouldn't do anything except whittle and sip.

About every twenty minutes or so he'd shift the stick over to his knife hand and pick up his bottle with his stick hand.

He'd drink, his big old adam's apple would bobble up and down, and he'd kind of shiver all over when the whiskey hit his belly.

Then he'd put the bottle down careful, wipe his mouth on his hand, spit towards the rickety old porch railing, take the stick back from his knife hand, and commence whittling again.

I guess I probably saw that performance upwards of a hundred times before I was eight years old.

It was when he wiped his mouth that I noticed his finger was cut, because he got a little blood in the bristles on his face.

He noticed it when he raised the stick to evaluate his handiwork (which never amounted to anything more than whittling til he ran out of stick).

He studied the blood on his finger very seriously for a while, like he might just let it drip on his raggedy old overalls until it was done.

But finally he shook some of it off on the old raw timber the porch was made of, and some on his bare feet, and commenced to calling Aunt Della.

"Deller," he hollered.

I knew that made Gramma rare back in her chair.

Uncle Ditimus sitting on his behind and hollering for Aunt Della to do everything for him was a major source of irritation for Gramma.

And her back would go rigid when he said "Deller" instead of "Della."

Gramma always pronounced her sister's name properly.

I had heard Gramma say probably a hundred times that "Ditimus Banks wouldn't get off that dad-blamed porch for the Second Coming, even if it happened right in his own kitchen; he'd probably holler for 'Deller' to bring Jesus out there so he could look at him."

He was aggravated enough that he even scooted himself around a little on the floor.

I tried to see if there was a hollowed-out place where his behind always rested.

Gramma claimed there was, but I didn't see it.

I knew Aunt Della could hear him, because her and Mama and Gramma were right there in the kitchen with the window open onto the porch.

Even if the window hadn't been open, the old wall was just one plank of one-by-six lumber thick, with knot-holes in it a squirrel could have got through.

I knew, too, that Aunt Della wouldn't pay any heed to him until she was finished talking.

She ordinarily didn't have anybody to listen to her, so she saved everything up until Mama and Gramma came.

I could stand about twenty minutes of Aunt Della's non-stop talking, then I'd slip out o the porch and watch Uncle Ditimus whittle.

There wasn't any place else to go.

The old house was just a porch and kitchen and bedroom.

Mama didn't want me getting off the porch because of snakes.

There wasn't much yard, anyhow.

Just one little bare spot under a tree where Aunt Della's wash pot was.

The tree had pieces of an old swing dangling from a chain, but the wood had pretty nearly all rotted away.

Past that was a little trail that went out to the toilet, cow shed and Aunt Della's vegetable garden.

I never had seen Uncle Ditimus get up off the porch, but I figured he did from time to time.

He'd of had to walk about three feet from the shaky old steps to get into the woods and break off a limb to whittle on.

Of course, he might have just set there and hollered until Aunt Della brought him a fresh stick.

"DELLER!" he hollered again.

She don't hear nothing when she gets to flapping her damn tongue."

He pulled at the bottle of Early Times, shivered all over and spit. "The whole damn family is crazy as Bessie Bugs," he told me. "Your chances of growing up with any sense ain't worth doodley squat.

"I was over at your Uncle Ben Howard Wilbank's house last week, and they ought to put him and both his daughters in a home.

He threw the stick up against the rickety old porch railing and jabbed the knife into the floor.

I squeezed back against the wall, trying to get a little more separation between me and him.

"We going to Uncle Ben Howards's house to visit when Mama and Gramma get done talking to Aunt Della," I said.

Uncle Ditimus flipped some more blood on the floor, rubbed some in his overalls and hollered for Aunt Della again.

"Your grandma is too damn charitable," he said, "going to see Ben Howard Wilbank when she don't have to.

If I didn't need to borrow his coffee grinder ever now and then, I wouldn't go near the old lunatic."

Uncle Benjamin Howard Wilbank--another one of Gramma's brothers-in-law, had been a total cripple for probably forty years even then.

Gramma said he went into Winnfield in a wagon one time to get some medicine for one of his daughters, either Martha Adelaide or Mary Priscilla.

They were just little girls then and their mother (Gramma's and Aunt Della's sister, Rhoda) had died when they were babies.

Gramma said it was a hot day, and Uncle Ben Howard got thirsty.

He started sipping the medicine, which was mostly alcohol, and got drunker'n a hoot owl.

Gramma said somebody told her they saw him standing up in the wagon, whipping the mules and hollering, "The first shall be last and the last shall be first, giddy-up goddamit."

Later they found him under the wagon with his back and various other parts broken.

He wasn't able to walk after that, but he lived another half century and never got off his front porch.

"DELLER!" Uncle Ditimus hollered.

He shook his hand again and this time some blood spattered next to my big toe.

I pretended I didn't notice.

"Your Great- Uncle Ben Howard Wilbank been in nothing but either his bed or his front porch chair for forty years," he said.

"He ain't seen no progress and he ain't let none into his house.

And them two daughters of his have growed up without knowing diddley-squat about what the world's like outside their own cow pasture. DELLER."

"What do you want, Ditimus?"

Aunt Della could make three syllables out of the word "want."

"Come wrap this damn finger," he told her.

"Last month," he said, talking to me again, "Martha Adelaide and Mary Priscilla seen the world end."

He flicked his wrist again but the bleeding from the little cut on his finger had almost dried up.

He took another big swig, shivered all over and spit.

Then he scooted his behind around on the floor and stretched his long, skinny body almost flat on the boards, just raised up enough that he could tilt the bottle to his mouth without spilling very much.

"I guess that story will be an embarrassment to their kinfolk to doomsday," he said, "even to us that's just their in- laws."

He got a little more blood in his whiskers when he wiped his mouth, and I guess that's all there was left in the injury.

"That Pepsi Cola airplane was flying over here," he said, "writing out stuff in the sky with smoke to advertise their damn bellywash, and of course we all knew what it was except Martha Adelaide and Mary Priscilla.

Old Ben Howard was asleep in his chair on the porch and he might just as well of been, because he wouldn't of had no idea what it was either."

Aunt Della bustled onto the porch tearing up an old rag of some kind.

She was short and round like Mama and Gramma and had on that flowerdy print dress she always wore when we came visiting.

Another one, a little more faded and worn, was hanging on a clothes line that ran from the corner of the house to the tree where the old piece of swing was.

When we came she always had the one on and the other hanging. I figured the one hanging on the line was her every day dress.

She wrapped Uncle Ditimus' finger without speaking a word, and he never looked at her while she did it.

When she was finished, it looked like his finger was wrapped for a Christmas present, with a big bow in the middle of it.

She was talking to Mama and Gramma again before she got back through the door.

"Now, Martha Adelaide and Mary Priscilla told me this theirselves," Uncle Ditimus continued.

"If it had happened to me, I wouldn't of told nobody.

But that's how them two are.

"I think it was Mary Priscilla seen the Pepsi Cola (he pronounced it 'coler,' just like 'Deller.') writing first.

She went running up on the porch, hollering and carrying on and trying to wake up old Ben Howard.

I don't know what the hell he would have done about it anyhow.

Been sitting in that same spot for forty years and don't know nothing except when the Harlan and Salter bus is gonna pass on the way to Winnfield.

"People think it's a marvel and a wonder that Ben Howard can tell the exact minute when the bus is gonna round the curve in the road by where the sun is on that sweetgum tree he looks at all day.

Hell, I could do that if I lived up on the road."

He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

"Anyhow," he went on, "Martha Adelaide heard Mary Priscilla carrying on and she come running out of the house and overshot the porch.

Fell clean out in the yard, hollering, 'My God, Mary Priscilla, My God.

What has happened to Papa?' "And Mary Priscilla says, 'Ain't nothing happened to Papa, Martha Adelaide.

Get on your knees right there in the yard and pray. The end of the world is here.

Look yonder in the sky.' "Well, Martha Adelaide looked up there and likely wet her drawers.

She commenced to hollering, 'Oh Lord Jesus Holy Savior God Almighty it's the end of the world there's the writing in the sky Oh Sweet Jesus.' "Then Mary Priscilla jumped off the porch without touching one of them eight steps and landed on her knees next to Martha Adelaide and they begun to wailing and hollering to The Almighty and singing Rock of Ages and hugging one-another and praising Jesus.

You'd a'thought it was camp meeting and every sinner in Winn Parish and parts of Caldwell was come to baptizing.

"Then Martha Adelaide jumped up and says, 'My God Mary Priscilla My God, do you reckon anybody else in the world knows it but us?' and Mary Priscilla says 'let's tell everybody we can before the fire and brimstone comes upon 'em.' And they lit out down the hill to the road.

They ran right out in the damn road into a line of cars headed towards Winnfield.

"What it was, it was a funeral procession.

Old Man Wilmer Barnes had died that week and they had waked him and preached over him and was taking him to the grave yard at Gaars Mill to plant him.

Everybody in the procession was riding along solemn as they ought to be when Martha Adelaide and Mary Priscilla came galloping right into the traffic.

"They went to flapping their aprons to flag down cars, and running from one car to another telling everybody 'For God's sake, get out of that car and pray. The world's coming to an end. We have seen the writing in the sky.' "They disrupted the funeral procession so bad that Wilmer Barnes' soul probably never will get no rest.

Old Lady Tannehill got all three hundred pounds of herself out of Pollard Bennet's car and went to running with them, hollering 'Hallelujah Oh Come Emmanuel suffer little children to come unto you,' and such as that until she got winded and just set down in the middle of the road.

It took half a dozen stout men to get her up and into the back of a pickup truck.

"Some folks towards the back of the line of cars figured there had been an accident up ahead and was sure and certain some of their kinfolks was in it and bad hurt or killed.

Women folks started screaming and crying, and pretty soon Ardis Gates's coon dogs, nearly a mile down the road, heard all the commotion and they busted out of the fence and come running and barking loud enough to wake up old Wilmer.

"Dempsey Swilley was drunk as usual and thought he was caught up in a traffic jam, and he started to blowing his horn and cussing loud as he could.

It was such a calamity and a hell- raising that I could hear it clean over here.

I almost got up off the porch and went to look, it was so bad.

"Finally, Preacher Walker got hold of Mary Priscilla.

He had to run her down and get a head-lock on her and holler as loud as she was until she shut up for a minute.

He says, 'Miss Wilbank. Miss Wilbank.

That ain't the Lord writing up there. That's an airplane putting out smoke to make letters and advertise Pepsi Cola soda water.

It ain't the Lord writing in the sky, Miss Wilbank.

It ain't the end of the world.' "Well, by that time, Martha Adelaide had doubled back up the other side of the line of cars and she stopped to see what Preacher Walker was hollering at her sister about.

When she got the gist of what he was saying, she stopped dead in the middle of a chorus of 'Rock of Ages,' grabbed Mary Priscilla by the arm and headed back up the hill. 'Mary Priscilla,' she says, 'you should have knowed.

You been to Shreveport'."

Uncle Ditimus laughed a short, mean laugh.

Then he took a drink, shivered and spit.

"Some people are plumb eat up with ignorance," he said.

"What do you want now, Ditimus?" she hollered back, making those three syllables out of 'want' again.

"Come out here," Uncle Ditimus snapped.

"You've wrapped the wrong damn finger." ### ~Àp::#:ûóû9: ::çÎÎÎ$àà#Ð p@à°P ðà#Ð p@à°P ðF Þ80:öØ·#u,b5y88ÿÿ/ÿÿ£&ÿÿÄÿÿòÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ#::(