He was living well but was annoyed a lot. Being a believer in the rule book, a sentimentalist, he didn’t like to hear her joke about their having met on the marina, as if it had been just a sort of pickup and as if she were lucky to have gotten married to the man, finally, instead of raped by him. Best were their evenings in bed, lying against the puffed pillows watching television after the kids had gone to sleep, then half an hour’s succulence after lights out, and being a person of substance the next day. He was reasonable by nature; he didn’t fume and fight as his restlessness increased. But it was really not a man’s life there, putting in the bluing, making change. Ellen was defeatist when they quarreled. If she let her confusion show, he was touched; if she was apprehensive, so was he; but she was unrelenting too. In the morning, she would tell him what she wanted done in the same remote, peevish tones, her face assuming the fat expression of someone drawing on inner resources. It was as if he’d as good as left her already and she had her children and friends to fall back on. Apparently, she thought her marriages were a sort of constitutional folly. She said her friends told her she was lucky to get off so lightly every time. Who these friends were Bush didn’t know; he only saw a bunch of business friends—the couple at the bakery, the liquor man, the electrician. He didn’t think her marriage to him had been foolish, but if that was her attitude what could he do?
He signed on the Esso Chile at last, and went off to Bahrein and Maracaibo. He was a wiper in the engine room; on other ships sometimes a steward. Actually, he wasn’t on the sea for many years during this second stint before the grittiness and bleakness of the life drove him to land again; yet he did love the ocean and continued to talk about it wherever he was. In his own mind he was a seaman—a seaman ashore. He was nearly as lonely ashore and often thought of Ellen, suspecting, indeed, that leaving had been a mistake. He knew her show of indifference had not been real. She hadn’t wanted him to go, but he’d let her pretend she didn’t care. They’d been afraid; they’d both pretended it was a matter of small importance—he would go back into the merchant marine, she’d live just as before and maybe marry again. So the proof that he had made a mistake was that he hadn’t stayed on the sea long. Every man made his share of mistakes. He missed being part of a household and painted her in pastel colors when he was disheartened, but he decided that it wasn’t the mistakes that mattered so crucially as where you were at the end of them all.
Bush was doing fairly well. Stocky and aging, he had crewcut gray hair and a mustache and lived off Ninth Avenue, close to the harbor, keeping up with a few old nautical jokers who patronized the bars he went to. Like them, he hadn’t seen much of the ocean from day to day, being hard at work or below decks in his off-hours, but what he remembered was the massive accumulation of what he’d seen. It overshadowed the other job surroundings of his younger years, just as his one marriage dominated the memories he had of other periods spent with women who for awhile had supplied him with housing and sex. He was a sailor, he told the neighbors, and at night or on his lunch hour when he took a stroll he remembered the ocean’s agitated sheen, like nobbled tin, and the majestic, chastening pitch of the water when the wind blew, the ship’s joints creaking, the heavily lumbering engines, the waves thudding, making a bass hiss against the hull. His apartment, although a walk-up, wasn’t too grim. One window faced south, and the sunlight wasn’t impeded, because the adjacent block of tenements had been torn down—a process that he knew might pose a problem for him eventually, but in the meantime his rent was low. He had a barbering position in an uptown office building, and managed to live on his salary, saving his tips.
The alligator, like an overgrown brown invalid confined to bed, lived in the big bathtub. If an outsider had been invited in to look at it, he would have gaped, because this was no ten-inch plaything but an animal of barrel-like girth, with a rakish, pitiless mouth as long as a man’s forearm and a tail as long as his legs. The cut of the mouth, however, was no clue to the alligator’s mood since, like the crocodile mask that a child wears in a school play, it was vivid but never changed. The eyes, eel-gray with vertical pupils, were not as static. They seemed to have a light source within them, and the great body, scummed slightly with algae, was a battlefield shade, the shade of mud. The last time Bush had tried to determine its weight, he borrowed a slaughterhouse scale, fixed a sling, and hung the scale from a ladder, and struggled to heft the animal into place, but he couldn’t get its hind end off the ground. Even so, the scale read a hundred and thirty-some pounds. He didn’t name the alligator, because it wasn’t human; in no way was it human. Like Headley, the fellow who had left it with him years before, he never lit on a name that sounded appropriate—not the Trinkas and Sams that apply easily to dogs. “Alligator” did very well for nomenclature, being a title that loomed in the mind, and “you” served for talking to it.
On arrival, it had still been of a size to permit it to go through the motions of swimming, drawing its arms alongside its trunk and wriggling abruptly downward into the tub until its belly brushed the bottom and its blunt snout bumped the front. It had been four feet long then, and Headley and he had carried it up to the apartment wrapped in a blanket against the cold. The fellow, who was a barfly, a lathe operator, was going south to Gainesville, Georgia, to visit his brother and wanted Bush to take care of the creature until after the holidays. He kept saying that, as big as it had grown since he had bought it—a small water lizard in a pet store—it must be worth lots of money. But he didn’t show up again.
Bush laid a plank on the toilet seat and sat in the bathroom watching his new companion porpoise and wallow for exercise as best it could. Once he realized that Headley wasn’t coming back, he bought a jumbo junk bathtub from a wrecking company, paying eighty-five dollars, including the delivery charge. He could shower at work, and so the inconvenience of keeping the animal was slight. Furthermore, he soon entered into what he considered an intimacy with it, so that he wouldn’t have wanted to give it up. While he knew very well that alligators inhabit fresh water, having it in the apartment, he found a great many of his seaman’s memories springing alive with a clarity even surpassing the clarity of life. The smoldering waves, the sharks and whales, the dull colored, impassive seas on a smoky day—these sailors’ sights and many more churned in the roil along with the alligator, who smelled, in fact, quite like the sea. He fed it on chunks of stew meat twice a week, not a demanding chore, and opened the window when the weather was warm to let in the sunlight direct.
At the public library, Bush read that alligators were mild-tempered compared to their crocodile relatives—that a man could swim in a slough populated with alligators without the likelihood of being attacked. He read that they preyed on waterfowl, muskrats, and slow-swimming fish, and he fed it a fryer chicken once in a while, bones included and the feathers left on. He fed it fish, too, always heedful enough of his overtures to its mouth end not to provoke an incident. The furor of feeding time was the main danger, when the alligator, after wringing a slab of meat like a rabbit, threw it up into the air for the pleasure of catching it deep in its throat when it came down, gargling the beef like a strong syrup. Splashing, galloping in place, it chomped and worried the meal, and Bush was touched because, after all, in such scanty quarters there weren’t many satisfactions available to it. On less frenzied occasions, it liked to feel its throat rubbed, including the gums of its eighty teeth—just as long as he kept his hands off its muzzle, where the nostrils were, and away from its blistering, satin-gray eyes. The eyes sat on top of its head like two midget riders, and the nostrils collapsed and blew open like a horse’s nostrils when it ducked under water.
Though the books gave a vague set of criteria, he couldn’t figure out the sex of his animal. He did learn that at only five years an alligator may already be sixty-six inches, which put into perspective Headley’s brief role in its life; he would have been jealous to think Headley had had it longer than him.
Except to run water into the tub, Bush
often left it to its own devices. It produced a clacking sound by chopping its teeth and at eating times it grunted, too, which he assumed was some kind of adolescent version of the drumming, reverberating boom with which full-grown alligators shook the bayous. The grunt, faintly explosive, contained an animal resonance as well—a waw. At the zoo, an attendant told him that alligators rarely bred in captivity, and what he observed of conditions there assured him that he wasn’t unkind to keep his at home. Like an eccentric, he didn’t even regard the arrangement as strange. He was a dignified man, with a serious nose, his mustache fluffy as a Russian’s, and when he got a little bit drunk nobody handled him roughly. Cutting hair every day in the week but Sunday and drinking draught beer in the evening on Twenty-third Street, he had no trouble making ends meet; and he didn’t acknowledge his birthdays as landmarks at all, tucking the crimping sensation of being in his sixties into his well-knit walk. He didn’t resent the gator’s composure, since he himself was self-sufficient.
The alligator slipped imperceptibly toward adulthood, as befitted an animal that was created to live for a century. Its corrugated back was patterned with gray diamonds, although blurred, olive-drab colors overlaid that—not like the bright baby checks Bush saw on the specimens in the pet stores. These little ones were yellow and black and had tiny bills, with a Donald Duck ski-jump effect at the end. Their tails, though, were crenellated already and their eyes, tinted cinnamon-sulphur, were gay, iridescent, and savage.
Like a runner running a treadmill, his big friend surged in the tub, as if a birler were birling. Sometimes it inflated its lungs and then would deliberately try to submerge, swimming against its own buoyancy, until with sensuous relish it released the air and sank down. Another exercise was to seesaw, lifting and lowering its tail, making its hind legs the fulcrum—legs like afterthoughts that were tacked on. Its tail, of course, was the motive force when it swam—a walloping paddle of muscle, which the saurians of the Everglades, three times the size of his monster, swung so powerfully when they hunted at night that they could knock a drinking doe into deep water and seize her. Limber as hide, it whacked up over the edge of the tub and against the wall when the alligator wanted the sting of the blow. The tail seemed to lead a life of its own, twitching quite independently, motorized separately, and when the body moved forward, the tail, which followed after a short delay, was what lent its progress the appearance of irresistibility and crisis.
Bush provided big roasting cuts of meat now, and real mama hens. He found he was trusted more, and he could stroke the nostrils, opening and closing under his hands, or reach behind the ungainly legs to the tender, pigeon-colored armpit skin. He loved the apartment’s sea smell, strong as it was, and knew that in possessing such a remarkable prize he was erasing all of that bulk of his life when he’d stayed ashore as a dreamer, working in lumberyards and snipping people’s hair.
Reptile leather in the handbag shops began to be labeled “Caiman,” the South American relative of the alligator. Then it was gavial skin, and the baby alligators also were unobtainable; he was told they weren’t being shipped any more, though his own animal, continuing to grow, seemed prepared to live on forever on behalf of the species, linked back to the dinosaur dynasty. As its girth increased, the grin on its jaws became more theoretical, as if it were pulling the wings off a barfly in its mind’s eyes, while in actuality it lived like a very fat fellow, whitening like ash gradually, its eyes a white furnace. The grin wasn’t precisely gloating, however, because the two corners sliced back to the very roots of its head—there was more grin, perhaps, than the gator wanted—a grin of chagrin, a grin like that worn by a man whom events have let down and who, grinning to cover the fact, betrays the bad taste at the back of his mouth.
Bush, too, grew grizzled. He read the newspapers and kept up in a less hectored fashion by hearing the headlines read on the radio—the violent malaise of the sixties, the fads and bizarreries. There was a spate of suicides in the neighborhood, and people signaled with mirrors from their bedrooms, or blinked their lights. The streets were tight with pedestrians. He made his home his castle and used binoculars to keep in touch with his neighbors, though he was not himself overswept by the claustrophobia abroad in the world, being accustomed to shipboard conditions. He watched the buildings smoking, and then when the city stopped them from smoking for the sake of the air, that in a way was eerie, too, because so much was going on inside, you knew they ought to be smoking.
The alligator had been ill only twice, when it seemed unable to open its eyes and the eyelids turned blue. It lay with its long maw closed, and a fixed vaudeville smile, propping its head on the side of the tub so that it needn’t come up for air. Bush poured bouillon into its mouth through a tube and furnished heaters, and for the time that the illness lasted he didn’t attempt to exercise it. Ordinarily, hauling, assisting, he got it out onto the floor every couple of days for a walk and to let it dry thoroughly—let it lie flat, sprawling its arms, while he cleaned the interstices of its skin where fungi might gather. The logistics were not ideal, but the business was very brotherly—the struggle, shoulder to shoulder, to jimmy the heavy body out of the tub—and he didn’t get tired of rubbing his hands across the rich hide. On both occasions, the alligator had got well in a week or so. There were some gradual changes, though. Whereas before when he watched the beast’s clumsy galumphing he had imagined the alligators in the swamps in their glory, now he began to see his friend just trying to stay alive. The alligator stared at him through its cruel pupils which contained all the harshness of millenniums past—and he wasn’t so sure it was going to outlive him. A man downstairs kept fish, and Bush arranged that if he should die this person would telephone the zoo and get them to take the alligator safely. Since he wasn’t made to last for a century, he hadn’t expected that he might outlive his friend.
Besides the problems of fresh air and space, there was the elaborate question of diet. How could he duplicate the crunchy, glittery nutrients of a jungle river? Of course finally he couldn’t—not with powdered Vitamin D and not with steer beef. Sometimes the alligator loped like an otter with constipation, humped awkwardly, and when that happened his own belly ached. These seizures disturbed him dreadfully, especially when he decided they were the result of a deficiency, and one he couldn’t correct. Dancing like a bear that had burned its feet, the creature suffered sadly, though its mask was still heavy and comic and rigid. Great gouts of gas came up in bubbles, released from the alligator’s digestive tract after much lurching and shuffling. It craned its neck to persuade them to come, after doing an agonized gandy dance, or a dance of death.
During the night one weekend, at last, it died. Bush didn’t discover the fact until midmorning, because its position underwater was painless-looking and natural, the head floating just in the attitude of an alligator at peace with itself; he only noticed that it was dead when he saw that it didn’t come up to breathe. However, the expression was a terrible one. The expression was like the Angel of Death’s, if, as seemed likely, an alligator confronts the Angel of Death with the expression of the Angel of Death. And all of those eons were etched on the mask—all of the meals in the bubbling mud, the procession of species extinguished, the mountain-building, the flooding seas and the baking sun. The framework of daily courtesies was over between them, and the fury and barbarism photographed on the face were alive like a flame.
He might have called the leather-toolers, but didn’t. He and his neighbor who kept fish got help and carried the alligator down to the street late Sunday night, leaving it stretched in solitary magnificence across the sidewalk for the city to figure out what to do with.
He had these three memories, then: the sea, the few years in Texas, and the years on Twenty-first Street, with the mumbo-jumbo that filled in between.
The Colonel’s Power
GERRY SCHUYLER’S TECHNIQUE with the officers was the soft voice, since the soft voice, of course, was a gentleman’s voice, and if they were being loud th
e roles were reversed. It was the peacetime army and they didn’t want that. Except for the barracks end of the life, he seldom had dealings with officious types. His were in the Medical Service Corps, Gerry having the plushy job of running the hospital morgue, which was seldom in official use and most of the time was his private apartment, where he kept his civilian clothes and whiled away hours that he otherwise would have had to spend in more hectic surroundings. Of the four rooms, two were storerooms unconnected with death, so he locked off the rest. He was personable and quick, with a cocked-head approach to the world he was in, expecting to become a lawyer. He enjoyed the lawyer’s egalitarian eye, the apprentice cynic’s, and was relaxed and responsive with his fellow privates, respectful and friendly enough to the sergeants, and got along with the colonel, a most subtle man with a face like a doge, a pill-taker and amateur sphinx, quite paranoid. After an inadvertent affront to him, there were about three hours before the misunderstanding could not be explained away, but Gerry was just sufficiently quirky himself to be able to spot these emergencies.
The colonel had a master’s degree as a chemist-virologist and a sense of humor about doctors, an intimate knowledge of how they were. He came from Florida and was on his way toward thirty years in the army now, uncertain whether he oughtn’t to quit, letting the extra pension rights go. His one great mistake had been a disastrous quarrel with his professor at Duke as a young man, after which he had left in a sulk without starting a more rewarding career. He believed in wearing a smile, and he liked to do double takes, show surprise, and appreciated the comforts of life such as soft beds and round slumpy shoulders. His handwriting looked like debris but his clothing was smooth and casual, never exactly khaki. He bought the off-shades available to officers, either a summery-looking tan or a rich business-suit ochre. He had an acute, ironist’s face with jug-handle ears and open, unmilitary eyes, which he turned to one side as he spoke, as if slightly shocked at the stories he told—wonderful childhood stories built up with the fancifying talent of a Southerner, about pigs, dogs, and Negroes called Brother Some-thing-or-other. Ordinarily he was all gaiety and games on rainy days or when circumstances were gloomy, as if he were feeling less lonely. Then his fur rose as the weather improved.
The Devil's Tub Page 6