Wishing Aces

Setting: The play takes place in a train depot in the Pearl River Swamp in Louisiana: an outpost on the edge of time. The Pearl River Swamp, as its name implies, is a dreamlike marsh the color of mother-of-pearl, a pale slightly bluish gray of high brilliance. Its dense mass is filled with cattails, papyrus, Cyprus trees waist deep in water. Amid the weeds, snakes, lizards, locusts, and alligators crouch from the treachery of the sun. The waiting room of the abandoned way station is filled with signs of decay: dirt, cobwebs, bugs.

At rise: Ninety degrees at nine a.m. in mid-September. Beau leads Kitten protectively into the depot. Every now and then, she screams back hysterically toward her son, on the train, some hundred feet away.

KITTEN: Bunky. Get off the train. It's broken down.

BEAU: Careful, sugar.

KITTEN: Don't sugar me. (Calls) Come out here, son.

BEAU: You call this a train station? Whoa. We're on stilts in the water. Looks like a ghost town that went under the marshes. Careful, darling.

KITTEN: Don't call me darling.

BEAU: The floor's broken through.

KITTEN: Where?

BEAU: Over there. Ssh. A water moccasin.

KITTEN: That brown thing?

BEAU: A cottonmouth moccasin. It's opening its mouth. Hand me that board.

KITTEN: That filthy wood?

BEAU: Hurry. (Beau grabs a piece of wood and smashes the snake) I got it. It's dead. (Beau dumps snake through the hole in the floor)

KITTEN: I hate assisting you with these lectures. You wouldn't fly.

BEAU: Awe sugar. Warm water coaxes all the animals out. Alligators float up. Crawfish tunnel over.

(Noise heard from offstage. Kitten jumps up and crosses to the door)

BEAU (Continued): Come here.

KITTEN: My son's at the door!

(The porter pokes her head in the door.)

KITTEN: How bad is the hurricane?

HETTY: We'll know at the next stop.