by Taylor Brown
The little girl threw her hands over her mouth, in awe.
***
They said there were gator parks popping up across the West, in Colorado especially. Ones that paid good, that didn’t treat you like another piece of meat. That didn’t hope you’d screw up and make news losing a hand or worse, boosting ticket sales.
This is what he thought about as he walked out to his truck in the employee lot. He did not walk so much as waddle, his knees crackling, his knuckles aching, his forearms engorged from the day’s labor. His tattoos warped and muddled by too much blood and sun. He was fifty-eight years old.
On the drive home he envisioned great mountains rising above the beachfront condos and gated townhomes, the department stores and box restaurants, the check-cashing places and pawn shops. He envisioned them rising jagged against the sky, like teeth, their summits snow-swept and treeless, the snow bright and cold in the sun.
He blinked and the vision was gone. The sky was an ocean, violet, empty but for the tiny jeweled lights of airliners winking in the dusk.
He stopped at a 7/11 and bought a six-pack of Coors. He sat in his big green corduroy recliner and let them run cold down his throat, his eyes squinted unseeing at the snowy screen beneath the bunny-ears of his TV antenna. When he was finished, before bed, he snipped the six holes of the plastic soda binder with a pair of scissors he kept in a drawer by his chair. The sea turtles, they could be strangled in the hoops.
***
Sundays he drove inland to the phosphate mines. He hunted the spoil piles of washed overburden. He hunted the slurry pits. The crews were gone. The quarries were like enormous craters on the moon, white-blasted and barren. The mining equipment strange and silent as the abandonments of spacemen.
This was the seafloor of prehistory. Sea monsters swam through what was now the sky. This land was a land of bones. The fossil bed lay twenty to forty feet under an unknowing populace. Shells and skeletons of fallen sealife had accrued for eons, for time so long that even man, with his highly developed brain, his short-lived ego, could not comprehend. Only exploit. Twenty-five percent of the world’s supply came from this phosphate. Bone Valley, it was called.
Hart would come home with giant shark’s teeth, some the size of a dinner plate. They were black. He would come home with three-toed horse teeth, shell fragments of giant tortoises, a few arrowheads. He would never come home empty-handed.
These treasures from the phosphate mines, he sent them to Colorado, to the last known address he had for his son. Six years old, his son had wanted to be an archaeologist, to unearth creatures heretofore unknown.
Hart wrapped the teeth and bones in bubble wrap, he packed them in manila envelopes. These calcium remains of periods past, species gone. He sent them first-class. He had to remember to write the address on the envelope before he packed it. Otherwise, his writing would be jagged and uneven.
His son would be twenty-eight years old this October.
***
His phone rang just after midnight. He rolled over in bed and found the receiver.
“Yeah?”
“Hart? It’s Bo Sherman with the FWC.”
“Shit.”
“I know,” said Bo. “You got something to write on?”
Hart fetched his reading glasses out of the side-table drawer along with a pen. No paper. He held the ballpoint to his open palm.
“Lemme have it,” he said.
“Two-oh-one Landon Drive,” said Bo.
“Uh-huh. Got it.”
“And Hart, I need you to make trails on this one. It’s got somebody’s arm.” The Fish & Wildlife officer paused a moment. “A kid’s,” he said.
“Don’t dare let them sharpshooters at it.”
“I’m trying,” said Bo. “Just get your ass over here.”
“I will.”
***
His truck was packed with everything he needed for wrangling, his moonlight job. The Fish & Wildlife boys called him when an alligator turned up where it shouldn’t, in a country club pond or somebody’s backyard. When they needed it brought in, and quick.
He steered with his knees as he buttoned his shirt. At 201 Landon Drive he jabbed the brakes. The drive had taken twelve minutes. On the way he’d watched a medivac helicopter blink across the sky. Headed toward Tampa General, most likely.
He threw the truck into park amid the police cruisers and FWC pickups. They were all empty, their light-bars whirling silently under the oaks. The house was an aged neo-classic behemoth with unruly vines spiraling its columns, kudzu rampant on the lot. He fetched his go-bag from the truckbed and hurried around the house and through the foot-high backyard and down the embankment to where a half circle of men in uniform had congregated at pond’s edge. FWC officers in khaki, sheriffs in green, city cops in navy.
In their middle was an officer in black garb with a scoped bolt-action rifle steadied on the back of an ATV. It had the heavy sniper’s barrel, and he was aiming it toward the middle of the pond. He was wearing a ballcap backwards that read: SWAT. The moon was up, nearly full, but visibility across the water was low, ripples silvering across the black surface of the pond.
He ran faster, straight toward the marksman.
“No,” he said. “Don’t shoot!”
He stumbled on a root and crashed to the ground amid the wildlife officers and sheriffs at water’s edge. When he got up he was covered in blood. The victim’s. He was shaking his head.
“Don’t,” he said.
The officers stood back. The SWAT man turned his head slowly toward him. He had a square jaw and golden skin. “You want to shut up?” he asked. “I got a shot to make.”
Hart started toward the man. Bo Sherman tried to stop him. He pushed past.
“Oh no you don’t,” Hart said. “You don’t have the visibility, the angle either. You miss by a quarter inch and that gator’ll be under for forty-five, fifty minutes.”
“Then I won’t miss.”
Hart looked to his side. Two paramedics were standing by with a biovac cooler filled with ice. It was starting to melt. He turned back to the SWAT officer.
“You can’t do this,” he said.
Bo Sherman came up and touched his arm.
“It’s not your call, Hart. I’m afraid the decision’s been made.”
Hart didn’t move.
The SWAT officer jutted his chin toward him. “Can somebody get this civ outta here, please? Jesus.” He shook his head and went back to his scope, his left eye mashed up to aim.
Bo tightened his grip on Hart’s arm.
“Let’s go,” he whispered. Hart conceded. Bo guided him a few feet back from the scene, coaxing him gently like you would some large and obstinate animal.
The SWAT sniper let off his shot. They watched a silver geyser erupt on the pond’s surface. A miss. The black head of the gator slipped underneath the surface.
Hart unzipped his go-bag and got out his throw-lines, the ones with the custom-brazed treble hooks.
“Let’s get me in that Zodiac,” he said, nodding to the inflatable boat sitting by pond’s edge on a set of rollers. “We’ll wait for him to come back up.”
Bo Sherman nodded.
The SWAT officer was breaking down his weapon as they readied the boat. The big muscles of his arms rippled and contracted visibly as he detached the bipod, capped the scope, latched the case. Finally he came over.
“Might of made that shot you hadn’t got in my head.”
“Get your finger out of my face,” said Hart.
“You old son of a—”
Hart caught him under the chin with an open palm and put him down across the back of the ATV. He clamped down on the man’s throat. It was soft and compliant in his hand, weak. There were yells that hardly reached him, coming as if from a long way off. Then blows across his back, his arms. A white tongue of power ripped through his body. He blinked and found himself on the ground, dazed, the blood at water’s edge creeping coolly through the seat of his shorts
. He saw the blue jag of electricity coming again for him. A taser. A cop’s.
Bo Sherman knocked it away.
Hart struggled to his feet. The city cops were rabid now. They wanted him arrested. They had their stunguns and batons out.
“Not if you want that little girl’s arm back you don’t,” said Bo Sherman. The other Fish & Wildlife officers stood behind him, arms crossed.
***
They chugged out to the middle of the pond. Hart stood in the front of the boat.
“How’d it happen?” he asked.
Bo Sherman leaned forward from the throttle. “Son of a bitch couldn’t keep his mouth shut, I reckon—”
“I mean the attack.”
“Oh,” said Bo. “Little girl’s dog went missing earlier this evening. You can imagine who done it. She was down in the shallows, looking for him in the reeds. Grandma called. Said it’d got her arm. Told the dispatcher it was something prehistoric, apparently. Sarc, Sarco-something.”
“Sarcosuchus,” said Hart. He had a treble-hooked line hanging low over the water in one hand. “SuperCroc. Probably saw it on 60 Minutes. Big as a city bus.”
“Let’s hope not.”
“Yeah,” said Hart. “Let’s.”
***
The gator resurfaced sixty-five minutes later. Hart had never seen one stay under so long. These were air-breathers, after all, and must hold their breath.
The head was massive, like a giant floating log. He hooked the pale belly with an underhanded throw. This was how the Cajuns did it when they did it in open water. Bo Sherman made the shot. The bullet severed the brainstem at the base of the skull. Bo did not use his service pistol. He used a short-barreled .22 rifle that Hart kept in his go-bag. Less paperwork, he said. The gator was twelve feet, easy.
They beached the Zodiac and rolled the reptile over the side. Hart kneeled and gutted the belly with a hooked knife. The paramedics gave him plastic gloves before he reached into the stomach. He dug into the great lizard’s innards. He found the dog first, a chihuahua it looked like. He kept digging. Through fur, slime, undigested teeth and bone.
Up came the arm. It was ghostly pale, lifeless, like the special-effects prop from a slasher film. Strange, inhuman. The bloody stump held a white stab of bone. He held it by the forearm, so tiny. His pressure on the tendons made the fingers move. On one of the fingers was a plastic gumball machine ring in the shape of a butterfly. It looked like a moth now, no longer bright.
He knew that ring.
The paramedics cast the ring aside and placed the arm in the bed of ice and zipped the cooler closed. They had already been on the radio. You could hear the medivac chopper setting down in a church parking lot a block distant. They hurried off to deliver the limb.
Hart cleaned and packed his gutting tools and throw-lines. No one spoke. It had taken too long. The tissue of the limb would be dead by now. Too long cut off from the heart, little hope for reattachment. Everyone knew it. Bo Sherman patted him on the shoulder and shook his head, silent.
As he walked to his truck he saw the SWAT officer leaning on an unmarked cruiser. He was smoking a cigarette. Hart could see the shadow of his own hand blooming darkly upon the man’s neck. The officer picked something off his tongue and flicked it away and stared at his boots. Hart dropped his go-bag into the bed. He turned around. Two city cops were standing by the door of his truck, their handcuffs out.
***
He was six hours in the holding cell. Beside him slumped a drunk, snoring, his beard stiffened by vomit. Across from him a young man with no shirt, his body inked with tattoos like a skin-tight suit. The designs reached up his neck and under his chin. He was staring down at his open hands, as if they had betrayed him.
Hart was not charged. He could thank Bo Sherman for that, most likely. Dawn was just breaking when the heavy metal door clicked shut behind him. He was standing in a parking lot. The razor-wire fence was open for him. How many sobered degenerates had shuffled into daylight this way, wishing they could crawl back into the darkness?
His truck had been impounded. He didn’t have the cash to get it back. He thought about using his credit card, if they allowed it. He didn’t want to put anything more on credit. He was supposed to be at the park in two hours. That was east from here. He could make it if he started now.
He started walking west.
He walked until the buildings grew taller, newer. The people parted before him, before this bloodied hulk. They switched their suitcases to the outside hand, they moved toward the street. He crossed a short bridge. Tampa General rose before him. There was a chopper on the helipad, its rotors wilted and still. He walked through the sliding glass doors. It was cool and clean indoors. He drank a cup of complimentary coffee in the lobby. A news crew arrived a half hour later. The first of many, he expected. They would know the room number.
He followed them into the elevator and got off on the same floor they did. The crew headed purposefully down the hallway. A reporter, a cameraman, a producer. Hart saw a nurse coming from the other direction, ready to intercept.
His moment.
He got in front of the news crew and threw out his arms. His shirt was still crusted with dried blood, and his eyes were wild.
“The family doesn’t want to see you,” he said. “Not now.”
They stuck a microphone in his face.
“Can you tell us your relationship to the victim?”
Hart noticed the nurse standing next to him now.
“Her grandfather,” he lied.
***
The nurse led him to the room. She opened the door for him and shut it behind him, a gentle click. The girl was asleep, her body swaddled in bandages and fed by tubes, her life charted by colored graphs. The old woman was sitting by the bed. She looked up at him.
“You,” she said.
He dipped his head. “Ma’am.”
“You,” she said. “You.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Monsters,” she said. There was conviction in her eyes. A crazed conviction. “Monsters all.” She began to tremble and shake. Her hands writhed in her lap. “God damn them,” she said. “They should kill them off. Extinct.”
“No,” he said.
“No? No?” She looked at him, her mouth agape. “You make of them toys,” she said. “Playthings.” She leaned forward and hugged herself, as if someone had punched her in the gut. “Why weren’t you there to protect her? You or someone like you. Off showboating, when you ought to be hunting them down, every last one.”
He knew how she saw him then. A link to another world. To the violence that lay sleeping underneath the sidewalks, the neatly-painted streets and four-lane superhighways, the fiberglass hulls and bermuda grass lawns. The violence that was never really asleep. She thought that he could wrangle it. Could bend it to his will. That it could be bent.
He walked over to the steel sink and pulled something out of his pocket. He washed it with soap and scalding water. He walked back to the old woman. He felt he could say anything. He squatted down before her and put the butterfly ring into one of her palms. Her wrists were thin, her veins blue. He closed her fingers over the treasure. He held her hands.
“You tell her not to be afraid,” he said. “You tell her this was not evil that done this to her. Not a monster. You make sure it don’t ruin her, you hear me?”
The old woman’s eyes were wide. She seemed to be listening.
“You tell her not to be afraid. She is, you take her to come see me.”
He stood and looked down at the little girl, the empty space where her arm should be.
“Yes,” said the old woman, her eyes lost somewhere. “Yes.”
***
Hart stood outside on the sidewalk. The side of the hospital glowed brightly, glass spangled by a dozen mirrored suns. He turned and looked west. He felt that if he were to squint hard enough, long enough, he might just make out those distant ranges, the treeless granite serrating the sky, the rising sun
scrawled in ragged traces across all that nakedness, as upon a prehistoric world.
He turned and walked east, toward home. Hobbling. His bones grinding in their sockets, his architecture stubborn, unbroken.
THE VIZSLA
His father was a breeder of gun dogs. Pointers, wire-haired, enlivened the fields before him like some vanguard of old. The dogs stepped lightly through the tall grasses. Their ears were flung outward like small wings, their heads cocked. Their noses ever-twitching, telling them secrets he would never know. He cradled his shotgun close against his chest. He watched them work. He was sixteen years old.
They flushed a covey of game-birds, doves, from a tall thicket of scrub-grass. The birds exploded from the roost, panicked and whistling, and he shot two of them black against the blue sky. Their wings folded against their bodies and they tumbled from the air. The dogs retrieved them, soft-jawed and light-eyed. One of the birds was still alive, twitching. He twisted its neck until it cracked.
***
The light was dying when they crested the last hill toward home. The dogs were slinking a little, tired and hungry. Him too. He put them in their kennels and fed them. They each ate separate. He slid the bowls through slots in the chain-link. He called them boy or girl, depending. He rarely called them by their names. He was not the one who named them.
The last light retreated into the horizon. He leaned against the old willow and smoked a cigarette. From here he could see the yellow rectangle of light, the kitchen window. He could see his father in there, in his overalls. He could see him fishing in the fridge for a new beer. When he stood up straight, beer in hand, his head was right in the crosshairs of the windowpanes.
***
The screen door banged shut behind him. His father was sitting in his recliner, as always. A can of Budweiser sweating in his palm. He did not turn around to look.
“You feed ’em?”
“Yes sir.”
“Drizzle on some that fish oil, like I told you?”
“Yes sir.”
“You get dinner?”