64 pages • 2 hours read
Watt KeyTerror at Bottle Creek
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Cort is a young boy who lives with his father on a houseboat in Alabama. A hurricane is approaching the region, but Cort has no time to think about it. His father, who works as a guide on the river and the surrounding swamps, is late returning home to take two men out to hunt alligators.
Cort knows that his father is away visiting Cort’s mother, who left them six months ago and moved into town. He is still trying to convince her to come back, but Cort believes it is hopeless and that his father is making a fool of himself by trying. He resents his mother and, when his father returns, he thinks of how skinny he looks, reflecting, “She’d sucked the life out of him in more ways than one” (5).
Chapter 2 Summary
Cort helps his father on weekends and joins him on the hunting expedition with his dog, Catfish. They are trying to find a large, old alligator called No-name that lives in the middle of the swamp near the ruins of an ancient Native American settlement known as the mounds. Although they are not supposed to, they travel without navigation lights to allow their night vision to improve, relying on Cort’s father’s intimate knowledge of the river.
Visiting the mounds for the first time is one of Cort’s earliest and happiest memories. Helping his father on trips like this used to be Cort’s favorite pastime. However, since his mother left, he finds it lonely because his father is too distracted thinking about her. He doesn’t want to see his mother again.
Chapter 3 Summary
Cort’s father cuts the engine and they drift, using a light to search for the reflection of alligator eyes. While his father tells the men more about the mounds—how the Native Americans lived there for hundreds of years before disappearing and how isolated and remote they are—Cort thinks about his neighbor, Liza Stovall. Lisa is in Cort’s class at school but spends her time with other friends. Although he did not mind before his mother left, this now makes him feel left out; he is embarrassed about living on a houseboat and spending so much time out on the swamp. They find the alligator and one of the men, Hoss, hooks him with a deep-sea fishing rod while Cort’s father warns them that the struggle is only just beginning.
Chapter 4 Summary
The alligator struggles for more than an hour and a half, towing them a long way downstream, before eventually tiring. Cort hands a rifle to the other man, Jim, who shoots the captured creature. Cort’s father tells him to get the rope; when Cort starts trying to loop it around the alligator’s neck, the beast snaps at him, narrowly missing him. His father yells at him, and Cort thinks that he really “did know better. A reptile’s reflexes last long after it’s dead” (20). He is embarrassed and simply wants to be done with it all and return home to bed.
Chapter 5 Summary
The next morning, Cort’s father reprimands him for his carelessness, reminding him that the swamp is “a pretty place, but you pull back the curtain and it gets evil real quick” (23). While his father runs errands, Cort walks around the property, which is owned by the Stovalls, who live in a brick house at the top of the hill. They have been moored on the Stovalls’ property for seven years. Since Mr. Stovall died five years ago, Cort’s father has been maintaining the grounds instead of paying rent.
When Cort’s mother was still living with them, his father used to talk about building a brick house. He could never get his finances together to sort it out, so Cort thinks he was only suggesting it for her sake. She wanted him to change and get a job in town, but Cort knows that would never happen because the “swamp ran in his [father’s] blood all the way back to our Creek Indian ancestors” (25).
Cort is playing with an old, deflated basketball when Liza comes over, telling him that he should not give up on the basketball team. Cort explains that he still needs someone to drive him in for practices. Despite knowing her since they were children, in the last year, Cort has felt increasingly nervous around Liza and is beginning to notice how attractive she is. She invites him up to the house for lunch and he agrees.
Chapter 6 Summary
Liza’s sister, Francie, opens the door, carrying her Elmo doll. Mrs. Stovall invites Cort to eat. Mrs. Stovall is the opposite of his mother, and he admits that he sometimes wishes she would marry his father so that they could all “be a normal family in a brick house” (28). Liza says that she is seeing a friend that afternoon, and Cort bitterly thinks that they will do something fun, like “normal teenagers do” (30), while he is stuck on the river, preparing for the storm. Mrs. Stovall says that he and his father can stay with them and invites him back for dinner.
Chapter 7 Summary
Cort was five when he first met Liza, having previously lived a few miles further down the river. With no one else around, they became friends. Cort had no problem playing with a girl because she was always into the same things he was: exploring the surrounding area, helping out with repairs, and playing in nature. She was tough, practical, and interested, and Cort was “proud to show her the things Dad taught me” (33). However, when her father died, she withdrew and lost her excitement about life on the river. She once even admitted that she wanted to move away because the place reminds her of her father. So far, she has not spoken about it again, but Cort worries about it, not wanting her to leave his life.
Chapter 8 Summary
Cort’s father is in a bad mood when he returns from seeing Cort’s mother. They fish for catfish and discuss the storm. When Cort asks his father where the animals go during hurricanes, his father says that a lot of them die but some get to high ground, crowded together on whatever safety they can find. The conversation moves on to Cort’s mother, and he tells his father that he wishes she was out of their lives. His father tries to explain that it is more complicated than that and snaps, “Quittin’ ain’t in my blood, and it ain’t in yours” (40), before ending the conversation.
Chapter 9 Summary
Cort and his father spend the morning preparing the Stovall house for the storm. Cort’s father cannot decide what to do with the houseboat. Cort’s classmate Jason arrives with his father to remove their boat from the landing. Jason’s family is rich, and he is a popular basketball team captain at school. Cort did not mind this until Jason asked Liza to the school dance the previous year. Now Cort feels jealous of Jason, regretting not asking Liza himself. Cort’s father suggests that Cort’s mother might pick him up from basketball practice, but Cort cannot rely on her.
In the evening, the sheriff, Curly Stanson, comes to check on them. He warns them that an evacuation order has been issued and the state will not provide assistance for anyone who stays behind. He asks what Cort’s father will do with the houseboat, but Cort says he still has not decided. Cort begins to worry that his father is distracted and they have not done enough to prepare for the storm.
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
In the opening chapters, we learn about the protagonist, Cort, and his relationship with his parents. Since his mother left them six months ago, his father has been spending a lot of time trying to win her back. As a result, Cort’s father has become unreliable, neglecting his son and turning up late to jobs, as he does in the very first chapter. Cort believes his father is making a fool of himself and resents his mother for leaving and having such a hold on his father’s attention. Cort used to love being on the river with his father but, since his mother left, his father is distracted, and Cort now finds the experience isolating. The conflicts within these relationships point to the theme of loss and separation. Cort is struggling to come to terms with his mother leaving and, at the beginning of the novel, mostly expresses this through anger and resentment. However, he is also processing the loss of a sense of closeness and connection with his father. Together, these mean that Cort is attempting to accept the loss of the stable family he enjoyed growing up.
Because of the distance between Cort and his father, Cort loses their shared connection to the swamp. Combined with knowing that his mother left partly because she no longer wanted to live with a man who worked as a river guide, Cort now finds, “everything he’d taught me about the swamp seemed useless” (10). This is the first indication of the swamp’s symbolic meaning, representing both a sense of identity and belonging and a more negative force, as something familiar that becomes unfamiliar. This is highlighted when Cort is nearly bitten by the alligator, No-name. Although Cort admits that he should—and does—know better than to try and rope the alligator in the way he attempted, he is no longer as in touch with this familiar knowledge. For the first time, the true dangers of the swamp are revealed; Cort is beginning to see the swamp in an unfamiliar light. This shift in perspective is emphasized when Cort’s father reminds him of the evil lurking beneath the swamp, foreshadowing Cort’s experience when he must survive a hurricane and confront dangerous animals without his father’s help.
Cort’s changing relationship with the swamp, and especially his mother’s judgment of his father’s job as a river guide, is made worse by his relationship with Liza. He is just starting to recognize that he is interested in Liza, an aspect of the theme of the journey from childhood to adulthood. However, since his mother left, he is concerned that Liza will feel the same way and not want to be with him if he continues the lifestyle of his father. Cort’s father impresses upon Cort that the swamp is part of their heritage, and he will not quit, which predicts Cort’s later refusal to give up in the face of great danger and hardship. However, Cort is still conflicted about this lifestyle for himself, especially with regard to Liza. He loves that Liza is tough, practical, and enjoyed life on the river when they were younger. However, after Liza’s father died, part of the way she processed her loss was to withdraw from this life and focus on what “normal teenagers do” (30), which makes Cort anxious and envious.
More broadly, both the swamp and the symbol of the houseboat represent this sense of conflict Cort feels about his identity and where he belongs. He sometimes wishes that he did not live in such an unusual way and that Mrs. Stovall would marry his father; to Cort, living in a house with a mother and a father would normalize his life. He especially wishes that he could still attend basketball practice; however, his mother can no longer drive him there, his father is too busy working on the river, and his houseboat is too remote for him to travel there on his own—these reasons support why he is alienated from other children his age and increasingly unsure about his lifestyle. This is made worse by the fact that the captain of the team, Jason, went to the school dance with Liza; this makes Cort jealous, and he assumes that a different lifestyle will make him happy and win Liza’s love.
As the storm nears them, Cort’s father’s uncertainty about what to do with the houseboat, and Cort’s belief that they have not prepared properly, symbolically highlights that his father is not as invested in their shared home as he should be, his mind being elsewhere, focused on Cort’s mother rather than Cort.
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