A few days of that got them into the heart of Waco. There the river forked in the middle of a park where a smaller tributary, the Bosque, spilled into the main channel. A few miles upstream of that confluence, right next to the airport, the Bosque had been dammed to form Lake Waco. The Brazos for its part wandered off into the heart of Texas. So this was literally a fork in the road for the Snout expedition. There were good reasons to devote
some time and some care to making sure they didn’t now take the wrong turn.
They had this embarrassment of huge vehicles. In open country this was fine, but in the leafy neighborhood of Waco where the river split, there was no place for them. Around the shores of Lake Waco, however, were a number of campgrounds with spaces for RVs. In any other year some of those would have been available, but now they were all full because of the problem with the fire ants and the relays. “Relayfugees” had set up unauthorized campsites along the roads that snaked through the wooded land between the lake and the airport, and they encroached on patches of open ground where those were to be found. As in every other human settlement there was good real estate and bad. Good was a legal campsite along the lakeshore, high and dry. Bad was illegal, marshy, and in the woods. With a combination of hustle, social skills, and bribery, Beau was able to secure a place that was only semi-terrible, large enough to create a little compound consisting of Rufus’s dually, Rufus’s trailer, Beau’s pickup, and the flatbed he used to transport the pontoon. Beau’s wife, Mary, flew up from Lake Charles, which was the Boskey clan’s home base, and they hunkered down on the site for a couple of days while Rufus probed up both branches of the river on an inflatable that Beau usually towed behind his pontoon.
Beau was everything Rufus wasn’t: comfortable on the water, interested in large reptiles, gregarious, cheerful, diurnal, and married. He and Mary had raised three kids on the edge of what most people would consider to be a swamp outside of Lake Charles. Their oldest daughter had married this Reggie, who looked to be the heir apparent to Beau’s gator mitigation business. Not that Beau seemed of a mind to retire any time soon. He seemed more the type to keep going until he dropped dead from cardiovascular issues related to his diet （pretty much what you would imagine） and sedentary （sitting in boats all day） lifestyle. But he would do so cheerfully, surrounded by photographs of his grandkids. Three of those were Reggie’s, and Reggie seemed like he was on the phone to them fourteen hours a day. Sometime he would aim his phone
at Rufus, and Rufus would flinch as he came in view of some number of kids and the kids would call out, “Howdy, Red!” and he would be forced to answer. He could infer from what they said to him that Beau had spoken of Rufus respectfully and even affectionately. Mary, for her part, once she had shown up and taken over the operation of the compound, seemed unduly open-minded and tolerant of Rufus’s determination to find and kill Snout. Rufus wondered what was considered normal where she came from.
An interesting thing about campgrounds was the way that a little temporary society would spring up, complete with the social hierarchy and attendant drama of more permanent settlements. This place was more complicated than most. Some people were towing palatial trailers behind gleaming Escalades—these tended to be your fire ant relay refugees. There was a middle class of snowbirds who had migrated away from the Mud Bowl—the vast, sodden triangle of former heartland along the Missouri and Mississippi valleys that seemed to be flooded all the time nowadays. The lower class were people of various backgrounds, but quite often Spanish-speaking, living in tents in the woods, blue tarps thrown or pitched over those to provide some additional shelter from sun and rain. Many of them seemed to have found work cooking, cleaning, and doing handyman work for the more upscale trailer dwellers. So, past the Rufus/Beau compound, there was a regular flow of foot and bicycle traffic as such people went to and fro between their camps deeper in the woods and the better-drained sites where the mega-RVs resided in a purr of generator exhaust and a nimbus of light thick with bugs.
There was an old scary story that kids had been telling one another at least since Rufus had been a little boy, the punch line to which was: “The call is coming from inside the house!” Such a moment arrived on their third day in the Lake Waco camp when Rufus figured out that Snout and his herd had been within a mile of them the whole time.
This was an unforeseen consequence of Beau’s suddenly becoming interested in a very large “meth gator” rumored to be lurking