Browntown

Whether that's true or not, that's the story, and it's the kind of place where people have always told stories about what's back in there.

One of the roads that runs along the edge of it is called Browntown Road, after the community of Browntown, which is a scattering of houses and fields along the swamp's edge.

At two in the morning on the twenty-ninth of June, 1988, a seventeen-year-old named Christopher Davis was driving home on it alone and his tire went flat.

Chris Davis worked the night shift at a fast food restaurant, and he was on his way home from work when the tire went.

He pulled over on Browntown Road, close to where it crosses the swamp, got out, and changed it in the dark by himself.

That part took as long as changing a tire takes.

He got the spare on, got the flat and the jack back in the trunk, and was closing the trunk when he heard something behind him.

She said she sits in the boat on those trips and looks at the laurel along every cove they pass and that it's all the same, head high and black-green and solid, and that something could be standing in any of it, and she'd never know.