As I peered out the window of my bedroom through the darkest night I had ever known, I remember thinking, If I was at my grandpa's, I wouldn't be afraid. If I was at Grandpa's, I would have my shotgun, it would be loaded, and I would be ready as I searched through shadows that gathered for their nightly dance at the edge of the swamp. The swamp that was forever reaching out for the tired old house my mama had found for us to stay in until we could get back on our feet. There was something out there. There was always something out there, except on the nights Mama was off work or it rained really hard and those nights didn't happen often.

"Probably ain't nothin' but coon or possum," Mama told me anytime I mentioned whatever that thing was that stirred around in the thicket along the swamp behind the house. She always reminded me of what Mr. Fesperman, the old man who'd rented us what was left of his childhood home, said.

"I remember, Ma. 'The swamp's more alive in the dark than it is in the daylight,'" I answered, trying to sound like Mr. Fesperman.

"Don't go making fun of that old man," she said, cutting her eyes at me. Mr. Fesperman had a hole in his throat and talked through something that made his voice sound as if it had passed in and out of one of those big fans old folks used to bring out when the summer heat became unbearable.

That ain't a possum, and it ain't no coon, I remember thinking to myself as I wiped my eyes, and looked even harder into the darkness, both wanting and not wanting to see what was rustling around in the night.

"Quiet, boy," I whispered into the pricked-up ears of the best friend a kid could have, especially when there was something prowling around outside. I still remember sitting there, my heart racing, holding the collar of that big dog and finding comfort in the low, rumbling growl building deep inside of him. It was a growl which always spilled out no matter how many times I whispered for him to be quiet.

"Quiet, boy. You're gonna give away our position," I explained to Badge, the old dog who had adopted me. I sounded like a soldier from one of those afternoon combat shows we managed to pick up with the old television that had been left behind by whoever had lived in the house before us.

Giving away our position didn't seem to matter to Badge, and it was all I could do to hold him. Badge was a big dog and I was small for my age. I would hold his as long as I could and when whatever was in the woods seemed to be as close as it was going to get I would let Badge go. "Sic 'em, boy!" I would whisper, and sic 'em he would. Through the window Badge would go and out into the darkness as I disappeared into the corner of my bedroom and then into the closet. It was in that old closet where I hid along with my brother Larkin who was a baby and somehow was able to sleep through everything.

With the closet door pulled to I would listen as Badge barked and growled and snarled for a good long time before growing quiet. It was always the quiet time when I was most afraid. I dared not open the door of the closet until I heard the sound of the early morning train roaring past the old house as it made its way through the marshy lowlands. Then I knew the sun was up, and whatever was in the swamp had drifted back into the long shadows cast by the tall and ghostly cypress trees bearded with Spanish moss and wisteria.

Known as the Hummingbird by the locals, the early morning train never failed to startle me. This was partly because it was as loud as thunder, and partly because by the time it came rumbling past, I almost always had drifted off to sleep. Waking, I would push open the closet door and peek around its corner, along the floor, and under the bed in the direction of the open window. There laying sprawled out full length under the window with his back to me would be Badge, who never failed to turn his head and look back at me. Then I would know that the coast was clear and we were safe.

After gathering up Larkin from the pallet I had made for him on the floor of the closet, I would slip him into the crib that my mama had bought at a yard sale. Before Mama found the crib, Larkin slept with me on the little bed someone had left behind in the back room of the old house.

With Larkin in his crib, I would wiggle my quilt and pillow around, making my bed look slept in, snatch on my school clothes, and dig something out of the kitchen cabinet for breakfast. Then I would watch through the window for the red-and-white checkers of my mama's uniform to show up as she made her way up the long driveway. As soon as she reached the porch, I would kiss her on the cheek and then hurry to meet the school bus. And somewhere in all that hurrying, I would manage to get Badge out of the house. That was one of my mama's rules: no dogs in the house.

On the bus, I would peek into the brown paper bag Mama always handed me when I had kissed her. Sometimes it was a sandwich, and sometimes it was a doughnut or a cinnamon roll, but it was always something I liked. Mama made sure of that.

Looking back, Munro Junior High School wasn't such a bad place. At the time though, as a twelve-year-old, it was the last place I wanted to be. But going there was not a choice, so when the big yellow school bus grinded to a stop and its door swung open, I climbed on, even though a bigger part of me wanted to take to the woods and go where the long shadows had me under their spell.

Maybe things would have been better if I had grown up in Munro or had started school there in August along with everyone else. Showing up in November, in my secondhand clothes, I felt mixed up and out of place. Climbing the tall cement steps of Munro Junior High School alongside of my mama on my first day I remember wishing it was all just a dream, but it wasn't. Mama, in her red-and-white checkered uniform with Larkin on her hip, promised me that I was going to be fine. My mama made lots of promises, and most of them were too big for her to keep, so I was pretty sure that this was just another one. Somehow I managed a smile.

"You just wait and see," she said with the smile she always got when she tried to convince me it wasn't raining and I knew better.

There wasn't much waiting before I found myself standing in the dimly lit cafeteria of Munro Junior High School and looking for some teacher named Mr. Snoddley who later I would find out most of the kids called Mr. Snotly behind his back — and some to his face. Mr. Snoddley was my homeroom teacher and turned out to be a nice man.

With a cafeteria full of eyes bearing down on me, I remember being nervous — so nervous, in fact, that I introduced myself to several teachers before one was kind enough to point out Mr. Snoddley, a stooped and graying man on the far side of the cafeteria with a clipboard in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other.

I handed him the yellow envelope the lady in the front office had given me, and then I looked around while he studied my paperwork.

"Sam, welcome to Munro Junior High School. I'm Mr. Snoddley, and I'll be your homeroom teacher," he finally said, still eating his sandwich. From the looks of it, it was peanut butter and jelly — the same as mine.

Mr. Snoddley pointed me to a long table near the cafeteria door, where a little old lady sat surrounded by students with downturned and silent faces, eating their lunches. In her black dress she looked scary, and she was reading a Bible. Mr. Snoddley told me she would be my fourth period teacher. Her name was Ms. Hattie Mae Creech and she looked old and mean as she cast a sharp stare my way. I remember her first words to me.

"Quiet," she said. "I am a Protestetarian, and we don't talk while we eat." After a long silence, she looked even harder at me and added, "Do you understand?" I nodded taking my seat between a boy with red hair who turned out to be Travis Radford and Mary Leadbetter, a girl everybody called Blimp.

Wanting to ask what Ms. Creech taught I held my questions and focused on my sandwich as she continued to study me with the disdain some teachers have for students who show up midyear, messing up their grade books and seating charts.

When Miss Creech caught me looking her way, she smiled and nodded before turning her attention back to her Bible. I was almost finished with my sandwich when the bell rang. Ms. Creech stood, closed her Bible, and looked upward toward the heavens and the streaks of mustard that had long since dried on the ceiling tiles from some forgotten food fight.

In unison, every kid at that table stood. I stood too, somehow caught in their gravitational field, and found myself moving out of the cafeteria and into the long hallway. We stopped, and each child got a drink of water. Those who had to use the restroom lined up on one side of the restroom door, and those who didn't lined up on the other. I lined up on the other side of the restroom door after taking a long drink of water. With its stream weak, I almost had to put my lips on the spigot of the fountain, but it was good water, and because I had eaten my peanut butter and jelly sandwich without milk, it was even better.

I figured out Ms. Creech taught reading and writing as I stood by her desk and waited for her to point me to a seat. On her desk were neatly stacked reading books and some essays written on notebook paper and crowded in a basket. When she caught me looking at the essays she covered them with a paddle. It looked like my grandma's cutting board.

"I am a Protestetarian, we believe in discipline," she said soberly. I nodded, and she pointed to an empty desk. I took my place at the end of the last row near the radiator and the window.

The rest of my first day at Munro Junior High School seemed to go by fast. If only they all went so fast but they didn't. Day after day I found myself in the classroom of Ms. Hattie Creech, where time seemed to slow down no matter how I tried to use my special mental powers to make the hands of her old clock turn faster.

After Ms. Creech's class, I had gym, which amounted to us playing kick ball when it wasn't raining and basketball when it was. Coach, who taught me health and gym, was also my history teacher, and he had a lady who helped him. I was never quite sure whether the lady was his girlfriend or his daughter. At the time it really didn't matter to me either way.

When I asked Mama if I could try out for the basketball team she said, "no." Somehow I managed to change her mind but I wished I hadn't. Trying out for the basketball team taught me two painful lessons. Lesson one is that it's hard for a new kid to get a second look from a coach who is serious about having a respectable season — that is, unless the kid is an athletic phenomenon, which I wasn't. Lesson two is that junior high school kids are mean. This lesson the kids at Munro Junior High taught me even before Ms. Creech made us read The Lord of the Flies.

The bus was my only way home from school, so it probably worked out best when Coach left my name off of the list of those who made the team which he posted by the cafeteria door. As much as I liked the idea of being on the team, I knew getting home from practice would be a problem. I would either have to walk or hitch a ride with a teammate and long before tryouts ended that first afternoon I realized walking home was really my only option.

Mr. Snoddley was my science teacher, and Mrs. Minerva Baldwin, Ms. Creech's sister, was my math teacher. Mrs. Baldwin was a Protestetarian too.

Long though they were, those days at Munro Junior High would eventually come to a close, and I would find myself once again aboard the faded yellow bus that had brought me to school. Now the bus took me someplace where I had much rather be, that was as long as there was lots of daylight. As much as I didn't like Munro Junior High many were the nights I spent watching the darkness through my bedroom window and wishing I was back there. When the sun was up, however, there was no place like that falling-apart old house, the long dirt road, and all the woods in between.

Climbing off of the bus in the afternoons and not being in a hurry to get home, unless it was cold, I would wander along the edge of the woods with Badge. Badge was always waiting for me at my bus stop under an ancient pickup that seemed to be disappearing into the tall highway grass. The old truck must have belonged to someone way back in Mr. Fesperman's family.

I didn't have to say, "Here, boy," for Badge to rush out from under the rusty old truck, tail wagging, but I did it anyway. Partly because that was what I saw some kid on television say to his dog, but mostly because I was as glad to see Badge as he was to see me. I never wondered what he had been up to while I was away at school, or whether he was happy or sad. All I knew was that he would be waiting on me, and together we would drift in and out of the tree line that ran along the dirt road and I would forget about everything that had happened since I'd climbed on the bus that morning.

Not every kid is lucky enough to have a dog like Badge, and not every kid needs one as much as I did so very long ago.

My daddy, whom I hardly knew, had almost made it home from the war. Mama beside herself after Daddy got killed had fallen for a man named Walter Lee. Walter Lee was a truck driver who showed up in our lives just long enough to sweep Mama off her feet — and then sweep us all under the rug. Twenty-one months after Mama and Walter Lee married, Walter Lee dumped us out at a truck stop in a little town called Munro. Looking back, his leaving us was the best thing Walter Lee ever did for Mama, me, and Larkin. At the time though it was like the worst part of a bad dream.

There Mama was, no money, no job, and two kids. Whatever my nightmare was back then, my mama's had to be worse, but she never let on like it bothered her that much. "We'll make it through somehow, Lord willing," I remembered her saying when we got pretty low. And she was right: we did make it and with the Lord's help no doubt. It was as if it was meant to be. Mama got a job at the truck stop where Walter Lee had left us, found us a place to stay and managed to get some groceries on credit to see us though until she started drawing a check.

Along with all the normal kind of stuff that comes with growing up, I had a lot of extra things to sort out, and there on that long sandy walk with Badge by my side, I sorted as much as I was able. Even all these years later, I find I am still sorting.

Leaves aglow and falling and the chilling hint of winter never fails to remind me of those walks with Badge and the two of us stopping every now and then to listen to some sound carried by the autumn wind.

Mama always rested in the afternoons. She worked from eleven at night to seven in the morning and I made it a point to linger outside as long as I could, so as not to wake her.

"Where've you been?" she would ask, and then before I could reply, she would answer for me. "In the woods again," looking concerned. I would tell her not to worry, that I had Badge with me. "Badge or no Badge, you better not go too deep in those woods," she would say, ironing her uniform with her hair in curlers and a cup of coffee by her ashtray and cigarettes; cigarettes she promised she was giving up.

I would watch as she ironed, wondering if she had missed the cigarettes I had been sneaking out of the packs she left lying around. Somehow I think she did, but she never mentioned it.

"What do you do out there, anyway?" she asked on one of those days Badge and I stayed outside until it was nearly dark.

"We just look around," I told her, which was pretty much what Badge and I did as we rambled about. That was, until my new best friend Oliver Efird told me about Three Toes. Three Toes was a mysterious creature locals claimed lived out in the shadowy swamps around Munro. It's just something for the old timers to talk about, Oliver explained. He was right. It was while listening to old timers that I first heard about Three Toes. They were gathered in front of the church, a bunch of old men smoking cigarettes. Larkin had started crying during preaching, and Mama made me take him outside. Somewhere in their talk, I overheard one of the old men mention Three Toes and swear on his old mama's grave he had seen him.