Text Leveling System

The Underneath

RDQ:	2419	Max Word/Sent	77	Total Words	3756		Diff Words	1048
Lex	970	Ave Word/.Sent	13	Hi Freq occurs	2744	73.1%	Hi freq	406	38.7%
AR	5.6	Long Sentences	28.7	Low Freq occurs	288	7.7%	Low freq	207	19.8%

THERE IS NOTHING lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road. A small calico cat. Her family, the one she lived with, has left her in this old and forgotten forest, this forest where the rain is soaking into her soft fur.
How long has she been walking? Hours? Days? She wasn't even sure how she got here, so far from the town where she grew up. Something about a car, something about a long drive. And now here she is. Here in this old forest where the rain slipped between the branches and settled into her fur. The pine needles were soft beneath her feet; she heard the water splash onto the puddles all around, noticed the evening roll in, the sky grow darker.
She walked and walked, farther and farther from the red dirt road. She should have been afraid. She should have been concerned about the lightning, slicing the drops of rain in two and electrifying the air. She should have been worried in the falling dark. But mostly she was lonely.
She walked some more on the soft pine needles until at last she found an old nest, maybe a squirrel's, maybe a skunk's, maybe
a porcupine's; it's hard to tell when a nest has gone unused for a long time, and this one surely had. She was grateful to find it, an old nest, empty, a little dry, not very, but somewhat out of the rain, away from the slashes of lightning, here at the base of a gnarled tupelo tree, somewhere in the heart of the piney woods. Here, she curled up in a tight ball and waited, purred to her unborn babies. And the trees, the tall and kindly trees, watched over her while she slept, slept the whole night through.
AHH, THE TREES. On the other side of the forest, there is an old loblolly pine. Once, it was the tallest tree in the forest, a hundred feet up it reached, right up to the clouds, right beneath the stars. Such a tree. Now broken in half, it stands beside the creek called the Little Sorrowful.
Trees are the keepers of stories. If you could understand the languages of oak and elm and tallow, they might tell you about another storm, an earlier one, twenty-five years ago to be exact, a storm that barreled across the sky, filling up the streams and bayous, how it dipped and charged, rushed through the boughs. Its black clouds were enormous, thick and heavy with the water it had scooped up from the Gulf of Mexico due south of here, swirling its way north, where it sucked up more moisture from the Sabine River to the east, the river that divides Texas and Louisiana.
This tree, a thousand years old, huge and wide, straight and true, would say how it lifted its branches and welcomed the heavy rain, how it shivered as the cool water ran down its trunk and washed the dust from its long needles. How it sighed in that coolness.
But then, in that dwindling of rain, that calming of wind, that solid darkness, a rogue bolt of lightning zipped from the clouds and struck. Bark flew in splinters, the trunk sizzled from the top of the crown to the deepest roots; the bolt pierced the very center of the tree.
A tree as old as this has a large and sturdy heart, but it is no match for a billion volts of electricity. The giant tree trembled for a full minute, a shower of sparks and wood fell to the wet forest floor. Then it stood completely still. A smaller tree might have jumped, might have spun and spun and spun until it crashed onto the earth. Not this pine, this loblolly pine, rooted so deep into the clay beside the creek; it simply stood beneath the blue-black sky while steam boiled from the gash sixty feet up, an open wound. This pine did not fall to the earth or slide into the creek. Not then.
And not now. It still stands. Most of its branches have cracked and fallen. The upper stories have long ago tumbled to the forest floor. Some of them have slipped into the creek and drifted downstream, down to the silver Sabine, down to the Gulf of Mexico. Down.
But the trunk remains, tall and hollow, straight and true. Right here on the Little Sorrowful, just a mile or so from a calico cat, curled inside her dry nest, while the rain falls all around.
MEANWHILE, DEEP BENEATH the hard red dirt, held tightly in the grip of the old tree's roots, something has come loose. A large jar buried centuries ago. Ajar made from the same clay that lines the bed of the creek, a vessel with clean lines and a smooth surface, whose decoration was etched by an artist of merit. A jar meant for storing berries and crawdads and clean water, not for being buried like this far beneath the ground, held tight in the web of the tree's tangled roots. This jar. With its contents: A creature even older than the forest itself, older than the creek, the last of her kind. This beautiful jar, shaken loose in the random strike of lightning that pierced the tree's heart and seared downward into the tangled roots. Ever since, they have been loosening their grip.
Trapped, the creature has waited. For a thousand years she has slipped in and out of her deep, deep sleep, stirred in her pitch-black prison beneath the dying pine. soon she whispered into the deep and solemn dark, my time will come. Then she closed her eyes and returned to sleep.
IT WASN'T THE chirring of the mourning doves that woke the calico cat, or the uncertain sun peeking through the clouds, or even the rustling of a nearby squirrel. No, it was the baying of a nearby hound. She had never heard a song like it, all blue in its shape, blue and tender, slipping through the branches, gliding on the morning air. She felt the ache of it. Here was a song that sounded exactly the way she felt.
Oh, I woke up on this bayou, Got a chain around my heart. Yes, I'm sitting on this bayou, Got a chain tied 'round my heart. Can't you see I'm dyin'? Can't you see I'm cryin'? Can't you throw an old dog a bone? Oh, I woke up, it was rainin',
But it was tears came fallin' down. Yes, I woke up, it was rainin', But it was tears came fallin' down. Can't you see I'm tryin'?
Can't you hear my cryin'? Can't you see I'm all alone? Can't you throw this old dog a bone?
She cocked her ears to see which direction it came from. Then she stood up and followed its bluesy notes, deeper and deeper into the piney woods. Away from the road, from the old, abandoned nest, away from the people who had left her here with her belly full of kittens. She followed that song.
FOR CATS, A hound is a natural enemy. This is the order of things. Yet how could the calico cat be afraid of a hound who sang, whose notes filled the air with so much longing? But when she got to the place where the hound sang, she knew that something was wrong.
She stopped.
In front of her sat a shabby frame house with peeling paint, a house that slumped on one side as if it were sinking into the red dirt. The windows were cracked and grimy. There was a rusted pickup truck parked next to it, a dark puddle of thick oil pooled beneath its undercarriage. She sniffed the air. It was wrong, this place. The air was heavy with the scent of old bones, of fish and dried skins, skins that hung from the porch like a ragged curtain.
Wrong was everywhere.
She should turn around, she should go away, she should not look back. She swallowed. Perhaps she had taken the wrong path? What path should she take? All the paths were the same. She felt her kittens stir. It surely wouldn't be safe to stay here in this shabby place.
She was about to turn around, when there it was again the song, those silver notes, the ones that settled just beneath her skin. Her kittens stirred again, as if they, too, could hear the beckoning song. She stepped closer to the unkempt house, stepped into the overgrown yard. She cocked her ears and let the notes lead her, pull her around the corner. There they were, those bluesy notes.
Oh, I woke up, it was rainin',
But it was tears came fallin' down. Yes, I woke up, it was rainin',
But it was tears came fallin' down. Can't you see I'm tryin'?
Can't you hear my cryin'? Can't you see I'm all alone? Can't you throw this old dog a bone?
Then she realized, this song wasn't calling for a bone, it was calling for something else, someone else. Another step, another corner. And there he was, chained to the corner of the back porch. His eyes were closed, his head held back, baying.
She should be afraid, she should turn around and run, she should climb the nearest tree. She did not. Instead, she simply walked right up to this baying hound and rubbed against his front legs. She knew the answer to his
song, for if she could bay, her song would be the same. Here.
Right here. Ranger.
LIGHTNING IS NOT the only thing that strikes. On the very same night twenty-five years ago when that single blinding bolt struck the old loblolly pine beside the creek, there was a boy. A boy who prowled the mean streets of south Houston in the run-down neighborhoods next to the Ship Channel.
A boy who embraced the darkness, darkness filled with huge, gray wharf rats that scurried along the rafters beneath the tar coated piers of the docks-scavengers; once he caught one in a crab trap and kept it there, hidden, watched it slowly die from hunger and thirst. Watched it while it twisted against the wooden slats of the trap, desperate in its hunger, fierce in its desperation.
Here was this boy whose father worked on the wharves, his shoulders broad and thick from loading and unloading the ships all day, who spent his free evenings at the Deep Channel Bar, a place that served only dockworkers and the women who served them, a man who drank the hard-edged vodka brought in from Russia and the bitter gin from England, who stumbled home, just as hard-edged and bitter as the vodka and gin.
This boy, a boy who sneered at kindness, even from his mother, his mother who loved flowers and birds.
When she finally left him and his hard-edged father, the boy never even missed her, his timid mother with her small garden behind the house, her pitiable birdbath that he had laced with rat poison one evening while she slept. The last time he saw her, she was holding the body of a bright red cardinal in her hands, so red it could have been blood. He laughed. Laughed at the blood red feathers, dripping between her fingers, at her, his mother with the cardinal in her palms.
Beware this cruel boy, this boy of darkness.
This boy who had a name once, a real name, whose father, in a drunken rage, caught the boy's face with the side of his fist and broke the bones in his left cheek, split the skin of that
r tender boy cheek and left a deep and ugly gash. The boy gasped	, in a blaze of pain. And the father hit him again, then fell to the floor, passed out at last.
Any other boy might have felt sorry for himself, he might have stood over his hideous father and wept. But not this boy. This boy stood in the shabby house where he grew up, took one look around, and glowered. Hatred, like sweat, coated his skin. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.
He picked up his father's brand-new rifle and walked into the dark, damp streets of south Houston, his nose dripping, his right eye swollen shut, his jaw never able to close properly again. He walked. Past the docks, the ships with their flags from India
and Liberia and Austria, their holds full of spicy curry, of baby monkeys poached from the jungles, of aged red wine in caskets made of ancient oak. Past the concrete warehouses and broken down houses of the southeast end of Houston. His face burned. He walked. Past all that, past the ships, the refineries, the marshy bayous of the steaming city. Into the deep, dank forest, trees so dense they blocked the sky, kept the hated sun off his shattered face. A boy. On foot for three hundred miles, three hundred miles north of Houston. Disappeared into the woods, hung his real name, whatever it was, on a post oak tree, carved it there and never looked back, never used that name again.
Lightning struck a tree. A father struck his son. A boy struck out.
This boy, whose broken face now resembled the prehistoric fish that still swam in the muddy waters of the bayous, half fish, half alligator. A gar. The most vicious of the scale-and-fin crew. Beware his razor sharp teeth, his steel-trap jaws, his eyes that glow in the murky water.
Here then is a hard-edged bitter boy become a man known as Gar Face. For twenty-five years, while the old loblolly pine shed its branches and bark into the Little Sorrowful Creek and watched them drift toward the sea, Gar Face has roamed this hidden forest. Here, underneath the canopy of the watching willows and birches and ash. Over this past quarter century, the years have softened the old pine. Not so Gar Face. Do not cross his angry path. Do not.
AT FIRST THE hound was surprised. What was a cat doing here? In his yard? Oh yes, there were cats in the forest, he had seen their shadows at the edge of his vision. But none had ever entered his domain before, wouldn't think of crossing the edge of the twenty-foot circle that was marked by his chain. He had warned them to stay back, just as he had warned the raccoons and the possums and the occasional snake. Stay back. This time, he just stood there while this cat walked right up to him.
He looked down at her, this small calico cat, purring now, and he knew through and through. Here was someone who had found him all alone. Here was someone who walked right up to him and rubbed against his sturdy front legs, stood on her hind legs and licked his silky ears, who touched his brown nose with her small pink one. At long last, after so many years of being tied up in this corner, chained to a post, here was someone who understood his song.
THIS PINEY WOODS forest in far East Texas is wet and steamy. Take a step and your footprint will fill with water. Look up and you will barely see the sky, only small blue puzzle pieces, blocked by the ancient trees. It is hidden, this place, and so are its denizens.
Watch out for its sluggish bayous and tumbling creeks. There are oxbows and fens that make small lakes here and there. Beware the vipers, the rattlers and corals, the copperheads, the venomous crew. Then there are the nonpoisonous varieties, the black snakes, the corn snakes, the rat snakes. Even though they are not toxic, they can still pack a bite.
In these waters there are also snapping turtles, box turtles, sawback turtles, that have lived here for well over a hundred years, old centenarians, and bullfrogs whose songs make the needles on the pines rattle.
Crawdads scoot backward in the gumbo-like water of the bayous.
But the rulers of these swampy glens are the alligators.
They swim just below the surface, the same color as the water, brown-gray, their backs resemble a floating tree.
Nothing scares an alligator, especially the alligators of the Bayou Tartine, the large stream that flows to the west of the Little Sorrowful Creek. It flows through the heart of these forgotten woods. Halfway down the Bayou Tartine, the land drops off in a channel, which creates just enough room for a little bayou, the Petite Tartine. It makes a semicircle and rejoins its big sister, and all the land between is marsh and swamp and quicksand.
Do not go into that land between the Bayou Tartine and its little sister, Petite Tartine. Do not step into that shivery place. Do not let it gobble you up. Stay away from the Tartine sisters.
GAR FACE, FROM his ratty old pirogue, first saw the beast while he floated down the Bayou Tartine. He trapped and skinned a lot of animals, beavers, foxes, rabbits, even an occasional skunk. But it was alligators that called to him. It was alligators, the soft skin of their bellies, the piercing beams from their yellow eyes, eyes that looked directly at him, alligators. When he looked into the eyes of other animals, all he saw was fear and panic. Not so the gators. They feared no one, not a single soul.
Gar Face cared little for the deer and wild hogs and raccoons that he shot and killed every day. But the gators were a different matter.
Now here he was, just before dawn, just as the light began to weave its way between the limbs of the towering trees, a soggy predawn morning, when the air was so wet it felt as though he needed gills to breathe, when the humidity clung to him like a second skin, that gray morning of unbearable sticky stillness. Gar Face pushed against the pole as he stood in his flat-bottomed pirogue, a kerosene lantern hanging from the bow. Just as he passed the Petite Tartine, he looked over his shoulder and rubbed his eyes.
Had he just seen what he thought he saw? The black rum that he had drunk the night before still lingered behind his eyes. The night had been long, too long.
"Couldn't be," he said out loud. "Only place gators grow that big's in Africa." He looked back over his shoulder, then grabbed the lantern and held it out over the water, but all he saw was a pair of eddies, twin whirlpools swirling on the glassy surface. He shrugged and dipped his pole again. Then shook his head. Only something enormous, sinking fast, could cause whirlpools that far apart. The eddies were at least a hundred feet from one to the other. Was there a beast a hundred feet long, sinking to the bottom of the Bayou Tartine?
Gar Face felt the hair on his arms stand up. The vein in his neck pulsed. The word "respect" floated in the thick and heavy air surrounding him. Respect buzzed in his ears, like a thousand hungry mosquitoes. He swatted at his face and neck, but couldn't shoo away the hissing sound the word made on his tongue. Respect. He swallowed the word whole and licked his lips.
Only a fool would fail to respect a beast like that. Respect. A word he had never had any truck with. Respect. It crawled down his back like a rat. He reached around as if to catch it, then held his empty hand in front of his hideous face. Respect. He wanted it.
As he poled his boat along, a fine mist began to come down, bringing with it a small amount of coolness. I'll be back, he thought. Then he turned toward his tilting house. "Yes, I'll
be back." This time he said it out loud, as if to seal the deal. He shoved the pole into the mud.
We are all of us composed of cells, cells that join together and fuse to make blood and skin and bones, but at the root of all these are needs. Gar Face's needs were simple. He satisfied them with basic things like food and water and shelter and a nightly bottle of something hard-edged and bitter, gin or vodka or rum, rum that eased him through the night and into the early morning. But as he made his way to the tilting house, he could feel the cells in his body gathering up into a tangled mass of yearning, yearning for something stronger than liquor. Respect. The yearning dug at him, dug into his very core, formed an ache, like a fist in his solar plexus, hard and unyielding, but it was an ache he liked. He clung to it.
He would get that alligator. The Alligator King. Or he would die trying. He dug his pole into the thick brown water and the rain began to fall.
RANGER. THAT WAS the hound's name. He loved the calico cat straightaway. But he knew he had to alert her to the danger she was in. He pointed out the pelts of foxes and muskrats and mink nailed to the front porch railing, the skins of alligators and rattlesnakes that lay beside them on the slats of the porch. It was Gar Face, he said, the man who kept this old hound chained. Gar Face.
"If he finds you . . . ," Ranger said, and he looked over both shoulders ... but he couldn't finish. Gar Face was mean. And then there was the rifle that he carried with him always. The Rifle.
Ranger knew about the rifle. Long ago, how many years he couldn't say, he had gone along with Gar Face when he hunted, had run by his side, watched when he aimed the gun and shot the raccoons and the white-tailed deer. And then there was the night, that awful night, when Ranger cornered a bobcat, a beast with glowing eyes. Ranger bayed, bayed his victory song, but just as Gar Face aimed at the cat, had the creature in his crosshairs, Ranger sensed that something was wrong. He moved, and Gar Face shot Ranger instead.

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: Little support

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Few descriptive words

Sentences: Many Long Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several ideas - closely related

Sequence of Events: Mostly chronological

Features

Excessive # of characters

Integral Setting - Cultural/Regional

Parallel plots

Flashback

Personification

Metaphors

Topic

Snakes

Storytelling

Dogs

Cats

Reptiles

*Animals

Friendship

Survival

Low Frequency Words

abandoned	ache	ajar	bayed	baying
bayou	bayous	beckoning	birches	bluesy
boughs	calico	calming	cardinal	caskets
centenarians	chained	charged	chirring	composed
concerned	concrete	contents	copperheads	corals
crawdads	crosshairs	cruel	cryin'	curled
curry	curtain	dank	denizens	desperation
divides	dockworkers	domain	drunken	dwindling
dyin'	eased	eddies	edged	electricity
electrifying	embraced	etched	fallin	fens
fuse	gash	gathering	gators	gin
glassy	glens	gliding	glowered	gnarled
grateful	grimy	gumbo	hatred	hideous
hind	hollow	houston	humidity	hunger
jungles	kerosene	kindly	kindness	laced
languages	lantern	liberia	lingered	liquor
loblolly	lonelier	longing	loosening	louisiana
marsh	marshy	meanwhile	merit	mink
moisture	mosquitoes	mourning	murky	muskrats
nailed	nightly	nonpoisonous	occasional	oozed
overgrown	oxbows	palms	panic	pelts
petite	pierced	piercing	piers	piney
pirogue	pitiable	plexus	poached	poled
pooled	porcupine's	possums	predawn	prehistoric
prison	properly	prowled	pulsed	quicksand
rafters	ragged	railing	rainin	random
rattlers	razor	rejoins	resemble	resembled
respect	roamed	rogue	rusted	rustling
sabine	satisfied	sawback	scavengers	scent
scurried	seared	semicircle	sensed	shaken
shoved	shower	shrugged	sizzled	skinned
slashes	slicing	sluggish	sneered	softened
solar	solemn	somewhat	soul	southeast
spicy	splinters	stillness	stirred	straightaway
sturdy	surely	surrounding	swallowed	swamp
swampy	sweat	swirling	swollen	tallow
tangled	tartine	tilting	timid	towering
toxic	tryin'	unbearable	uncertain	undercarriage
unkempt	unused	unyielding	varieties	vein
venomous	vessel	vicious	vipers	vision
vodka	volts	warehouses	warned	wharf
wharves	whirlpools	yearning