C H A P T E R 3 4
“Look,” he said. “Gator.”
On the bank ahead of us was a ten-foot gator with his long, flattened snout pointing towards us. His armor-plated skin had spikes running along the edges from head to tail. “They feed at night…at dusk.” Tully spoke quietly. “He’s just about ready for dinner.” “Oh whoopee!”
“We’ll stay well away. That thing’s nothing but a seeing, smelling, eating machine.” Tully angled his paddle, steering us to the far shore away from the gator, but in a thirteen-foot-wide stream it offered little comfort. The gator saw us and rose up on his legs as we passed. The horizontal line of his mouth opened in the massive elongated head. I couldn’t take my eyes off him although my brain was saying paddle like hell.
“He looks like a huge set of pointed teeth with stubby legs.”
“Never ignore that tail,” Tully warned. “He can break your leg with one sweep.”
The gator’s jaw closed and he ambled awkwardly forward and then slipped silently into the water. Only the nostrils on the tip of its snout and the two hills of its eyes protruded from the water, watching us and coming silently towards us. Then it disappeared.
I paddled like some demented cartoon character on steroids.
“Easy, easy,” Tully warned.
Panting with exertion, I asked, “Where is it? Why doesn’t it come up?”
“It can stay under for hours.”
“You’re just full of good news…among other things.” A soft laugh. He wasn’t perturbed by any gator.
I was still pulling hard but searching the water on the backstroke for any tell-tale signs of the monster. We were another hundred yards along before I started to feel safe. Then I saw two more gators, smaller ones this time, sleeping on the shore. They might be small but all the same we were within a dozen feet of them. “At this moment I don’t feel poaching gators is a bad thing,” I whispered to Tully as we drifted by. I took a deep breath and looked back over my shoulder at them. “Their backs look green. The ones I’ve seen have always been black.”
“Duckweed,” was his cryptic reply. Was Tully feeling it too, feeling this strangeness of the other world, the fear of the unknown and the alarm of a victim?
It wasn’t just the dread of what was to come but the “what if” of imagination that was having a go at terrifying me. Nature was no longer benign and welcoming. Maybe it never had been and I’d just been too young and ignorant to know.
My heart rate settled but we weren’t through with the gators. Now the water teemed with ones about four inches long, and as I watched a long-nosed fish broke for the surface, its mouth closing over a wiggling gator fingerling, and the hunter became the hunted.
The lake surprised me. One minute we were in a narrow, choked watercourse and the next, as we pulled free of the reed beds along the edge of the water, we broke out onto a broad flat lake with a cloud of white ibis rising up around us to signal our arrival. Tully steered the craft hard to the right. “Their camp is about five minutes down. No more talking.”
A chill swept over me. I turned to look at him, wanting to ask to turn back. Out here only the men who beat Uncle Ziggy would be able to hear me scream.
A breeze came up on the lake, sending tiny waves dancing across the water in front of us and pushing against our hull, demanding more of us. I swiveled around to the bow and matched Tully’s strokes.
We heard them before we saw them. They were coming from behind us, between us and the stream that led back to safety, to civilization where I wanted to be again. “Jesus Christ, hold it still you ass,” one of them said.
I didn’t need to be told to dig harder. We shot by the opening to the stream where their camp was, pulling hard to put distance between us and the men. There was no cover. The reed beds here were thick but only grew about a foot above the water.
Within seconds a curse went up.
A bass voice yelled from behind us, “Hey, you there.” “Pull,” Tully said. I went hard. Another twenty feet and we cleared a small finger of ground snaking into the water. We passed it and veered right. “Out,” Tully said. “Lie down in the water. I did as I was told, looking up at the sky, my paddle clutched to my chest and breathing hard. I didn’t look to see what Tully was doing but I heard the sheath slide off his rifle.
“Where the hell did they go?” That was clear even with water covering my ears. There was a heavy clunk, a sound like a foot hitting against the side of an aluminum boat. “Let’s get rid of the gator and get out of here.”
“No way. We’ll drop you back at camp. You dress this out, Bob, and we’ll keep looking.” “Why do I get all the dirty jobs?”
“Lets look on down farther,” a new voice put in. There was no sound of the electric motor or any more voices. I stayed where I was, flat in the water along the edge of the bank while overhead an osprey hovered and watched. Would it see my eyes and think they were food? Would it dive down to peck them out? I should close my eyes, but no way could I take my eyes off him. Then I saw it fold its wings and dive. A hand touched me. I jerked up.
Tully had his finger to his lips. I nodded. Waves echoed out from me and I froze.
He made a patting downward motion with his hand. I took it to mean he wanted me to stay down close to the water. Then he beckoned for me to come. I rolled on my belly and started to crawl through the reeds after him, no longer worried about leeches. Tully pushed the canoe ahead of him. I wanted to raise my head enough to search for the men but didn’t. I was going strictly on instinct here, instinct and a thousand adventure movies. Mostly I was following my dad and trusting to his sixty years of survival.
We moved deeper into the reed bed in the shallow bay. Were we leaving behind a trail of broken reeds and stirred water to show our passage?
Here and there, where it was as much land as marsh, bushes were growing out of the reeds, offering us cover. We fled from one small refuge to the next, hovering behind them without moving, waiting until Tully decided it was time to move and then we went on to the next bit of protection, angling towards denser shelter, thicker than the last, but still I caught glimpses of the lake when I looked back. Tully leaned in close to me, his breath warm on my cheek. “They’re waiting for us to break cover.”
I stayed as still as I could, staring into the emerald green bush in front of me. Five minutes passed and then ten. A red-winged blackbird landed on the bush, startling me. Tully reached out a hand to my shoulder. More time passed before we heard them.
C H A P T E R 3 5
“Have to be here. We lost them when they went around that point.” The voice belonged to the tattooed man.
“What does it matter? Just tourists likely, if it was wardens they wouldn’t have run away.” “Have to be somewhere hiding.”
“Well, we can’t get any closer, too shallow. Let’s forget about it and go back to camp. It’s time to get out of here.”
“I want to know who’s sneaking up on us. Bet it’s that cocky bastard from this morning. I’ve got a bad feeling about him.”
“We don’t know that it’s him and who’s ever out here probably ain’t got nothin’ to do with us.”
“How’d they get here and why? They didn’t put their canoe in by our camp. Least not while we was there. You don’t accidentally wind up here — you have to know what you’re doing to find this lake if you aren’t coming in from our camp. They came here on purpose. How many times we been around this lake? You ever see anyone out here in the last three years?” Another voice joined in with, “He’s got a point.” “You only stick up for him because he’s your brother. I always get the dirty work and I’m always the odd man out.”
“You’re odd all right.”
“Okay, I’m taking you back. I’ll drop you two off and then I’ll come back and look for them.”
We waited some minutes more and then Tully motioned me into the canoe. I was trying to guess how long it would take for the men to make the trip to their camp and back. How long did we have
to escape? Electric motors are quiet but slow. Maybe we could paddle as fast as they could go in a boat with an electric motor. But we couldn’t paddle fast enough to cross the lake to the stream before they got back, couldn’t paddle fast enough to go around the lake or any other improbable scenario I was coming up with to get us out of there without passing the men who stood between us and safety.
Tully motioned me to follow him as he pulled the canoe towards open water.
The jut of land protected us from them but I felt as if their eyes were boring into my back. Once at the water, we entered the canoe and paddled hard, focused on speed and distance.
We couldn’t go back the way we came. Even I knew this. The men were between us and the stream leading us out of the swamp. And dusk was falling.
We couldn’t sneak by them in the dark; we’d never find the mouth of the stream in the dark and no way would we want to show a light. If we were at the mouth of the stream at this moment, could we get out before blackness overtook us? And did I want to try slipping through those narrow banks with unseen danger waiting for us on either side in the night? Being the smartest of species wasn’t a help in this situation. We had no advantages out here; this was where brute strength and the size of your teeth won.
My nervous heart trembled and I wanted to ask a hundred times, in a hundred different ways, what’s going to happen to me? I wanted to ask where we were headed and what we were looking for, but our roles had changed. We weren’t two equal adults. Not by a long shot. Out here I was following his lead, a neophyte at the feet of a master. He would tell me what I needed to know and I would listen. Until then I would keep my concerns to myself. I needed my strength for the paddle.
Tully steered us around the end of a cypress tree. There was a small narrow cut of water into the land. We nosed the canoe into the bank. I scrambled out without being told and reached down to pull the canoe up onto the bank.
Tully opened the duffel and handed me a thin blanket, a bottle of water and a power bar. The light of day disappeared.
Before long another light appeared and a bright shaft danced through the bushes and cypress at the edge of the lake. “Spotlight,” Tully said. “They’re looking for us. We can’t show a light but we don’t need to.”
Night came swiftly. A full moon hovered over top of us, making me feel exposed. Although the humid air was still full of warmth, new sounds chilled me with their strangeness.
I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. A chorus of peepers and frogs covered my hushed question. “Are there still panthers out here?”
“A few, I suppose.”
“Did you ever shoot one?”
“Naw. Why’d I do that? Can’t eat them.”
“So, there’s panthers. What else?” I meant, of course, what else is there to kill me besides men and panthers.
“Don’t worry,” he soothed, “you’ll be fine.” A bull gator sounded. It had been a long time since I’d heard that sound but I recognized it; only now, instead of excitement, I felt fear and dread. “Yes,” I replied, “we’ll be fine.” We fell quiet, with me thinking about what being fine meant. Heaven only knew what Tully was thinking about.
Somewhere up above us an owl called out, “Who, who.” I wanted to answer him, “Me, me,” wanted to say I was there, wasn’t forever lost to the world.
And then in the dark some huge creature screamed in agonizing death.
Tully answered the question I hadn’t asked. “Gator. They must have left a hook set. They won’t take him ’til morning. Can’t take a gator in the dark.”
“Hook?”
“You take a steel hook, a great big whopping steel hook, and you spear some chicken on it. Gators only like dead things. They get you, they gonna pull you into the water and drown you before they eat you.”
“A comforting thought and one I’ll surely keep in mind.” A soft laugh. His strong arm snaked around my shoulders and pulled me to him. I let it stay. “Anyway, you take a rope and put it on a pole you’ve stuck in the water and then suspend this hook from it over the water. It has to be high enough off the water to make the gator jump for it, so’s he sets the hook, you know?”
I nodded. I was so hoping I wasn’t ever going to need this information.
“Anyways, then you tie the rope to a big old tree. The blood drips in the water, let’s the gator know it’s there, and that old gator snaps up that chicken, hook and all.” His left hand flashed out in front of us and snapped shut in a fist. “Then the gator goes into this death roll. Gator will always do that. Roll over and over with prey in its mouth.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Just does. Maybe it’s to kill whatever it has hold of. Maybe it’s to break off bits of whatever it’s got in its mouth. Don’t know. Anyway, that’s how a gator does it. And as it rolls over and over the rope, see, the extra rope you’ve put over the pole, wraps around him. He trusses himself up like a Christmas turkey.” “And then it dies?”
“Nope. Then you have to kill it. That’s the tricky part.”
“I can see it might be.”
We listened some to the night sounds, life and death in the dark, strange and foreign to me.
“How do you kill a gator?” I asked.
“You shoot it.”
“What’s tricky about that?”
“Well, there only one spot you can hit a gator that’s going to kill it. Shoot it anywhere else and it’ll ricochet off and kill you or one of your buddies. Or maybe you’ll just make the gator madder.”
“I wouldn’t want that. That wouldn’t be a good thing, would it?” “Nope.”
“Won’t the gator just die?”
“It could live for days.”
“Oh. So when I get this gator all roped up and ready for dinner, where do I shoot it?”
He let go of me and placed his right index finger low down on the back of my head and to the side. “Right here at the edge of that bony plate. Bullet will go right into its tiny little brain. Only thing that will kill it. Some fellas will tell you to shoot it in the eye. Doesn’t work.” He tapped his finger on the back of my head, “Shoot it right there.”
“Good to know,” I told him, nodding to let him know I’d taken it in.
“’Course there’s one other tricky thing.”
“Only one?”
“Only one important thing.”
“What’s that?”
“How to tell if it’s dead.”
I wasn’t going to ask why that would be tricky. Dead is dead, isn’t it?
“How do you think you can tell if it’s dead?” he asked.
“If it passes on a beer?”
“No, that would be how you tell if your old man is dead. A gator’s a little different.” His arm went back around my shoulders and he hugged me to his side. I’d wait ’til tomorrow to correct this new and nasty habit.
“Hard to tell if a gator’s dead. One time Zig and I took a gator, had it in this big old aluminum boat Zig used to have. Goin’ along nice as you please, maybe an hour after we took it, when this damn beast rears up its big head, bucking and twisting on its back, its feet going like sixty, those big old claws scratching at the sides of the boat as it flipped itself over to its belly.”
He was laughing softly to himself, remembering, until the laughter set him coughing, choking and gasping for breath. He hawked and spit into the darkness. I asked, “What did Uncle Ziggy do?”
“Well, Zig and I kinda had this discussion when we took it. Zig always likes to take good strong tape and wrap it around the gator’s mouth to prevent nasty surprises like the one we were having but I’d told him it was a waste of time and tape, so old Zig wasn’t too happy ’bout now, what with the gator going crazy, tossing his head until the rope came free and there was nothing left to stop it doing pretty much anything it wanted. Don’t know why Zig was worried, the business end of the thing was facing me and its smile didn’t warm my heart. Now Zig, well he just got real excited like your Uncle
Ziggy does, and he didn’t think too clearly. He pulled out this big old hand gun and shot at the gator. Wasn’t close enough to get under the armored plate so the bullet just bounced off and put a nice big hole in the boat — just ’bout the waterline.”
“Oops.”
“Big oops.” He was laughing again and I was smiling a bit myself, two fuck-ups on their day off.
“Zig got him with the second shot. That one stayed in the gator but I tell you I was expecting the bullet to go right through and put a hole out the other side of the boat.” Tully was collapsing with laughter. “Funniest damn thing you ever seen, that gator going crazy.”
“So how do you tell if a gator’s dead?” Why was I asking? Guess because we’d come this far, it was only natural to want to know the rest.
“Well,” he said, “me, I always poke them in the eye.”
“Does that work?”
“So far.” He gave a hoarse chuckle and added, “’Course even dead they can still hurt you.” I didn’t rise to the bait.
Layers and years of sophistication and independence were sanded away by fear in the night. I leaned into the shelter of my father’s body, a solid barrier between me and the unknown. Tomorrow I could win back my cool indifference and urbane contempt but at the moment I was a child again in my father’s arms and happy to be there. With his protection came a twinge of guilt at the selfish thought that whatever danger came for us it would have to get through Tully before it got to me.
C H A P T E R 3 6
The world lightened around us, false dawn, not quite real. Hundreds and thousands of noisy raucous voices, more birds than I would have believed to exist, called and answered across the ragged bloody sky.
Somewhere in the night our bodies had curled together for warmth and safety. I stayed still, reluctant to wake him. Finally Tully awoke, turned away from me, stretched and yawned, sat up, hawked and spat into the bushes. He rose to his feet, shaking his legs and pulling the legs of his jeans down over his boots. He looked down at me and grinned. “Morning, little girl.” When had he taken to calling me that?
3 A Brewski for the Old Man Page 17