by Otto Penzler
As he pushed open the door, a bell tinkled. That didn’t seem to mean much. The knotty-pine-paneled office was deserted. Behind the long counter, whose front was paneled to match the walls, was a half-eaten sandwich on a desk, next to an old black IBM Selectric typewriter. The only furniture on Carver’s side of the desk was a red vinyl chair with a rip in its seat that revealed white cotton batting struggling to get out. On the wall near the chair was a framed color photograph of a buxom woman in a bikini and cowboy boots, riding on the back of a large alligator. She was grinning with her mouth open wide and had an arm raised as if she were waving the ten-gallon hat in her hand. Carver leaned close and studied the photograph. The woman was stuffed into the bikini. The alligator was just stuffed.
“Some sexy ’gator, don’tcha think?” a voice said.
Carver turned and saw a stooped old man with a grizzled gray beard that refused to grow over a long, curved scar on his right cheek. The right eye, near the scar, was a slightly different shade of blue from that of the left and might have been glass. The man had a wiry build beneath a ragged plaid shirt and dirty jeans. He was behind the desk, and Carver couldn’t see much of the lower half of his body, but what he could see, and the way the man moved, gave the impression he was bowlegged. His complexion was like raw meat, almost as if he’d been badly burned long ago.
“I didn’t see you there,” Carver said, noticing now a paneled door that matched the wall paneling behind the desk.
“I was in back, heard the bell, knowed there was somebody out heah.” He had an oddly clipped southern accent yet drew out the last words of his sentences: heeah. He leaned scrawny elbows on the desk and grinned with incredibly bad teeth, shooting a look at Carver’s cane. “What can I do ya, friend?”
Carver saw now that he had a plastic nametag pinned to his shirt, but it was blank. He immediately named the man “Crusty” in his mind. It fit better than the baggy shirt and pants the man wore. And it certainly went with his faint but acrid odor of stale urine. “You can give me a room.”
Crusty looked surprised. Even shocked. “You sure ’bout that?” “Sure am. This is a motel, right?”
“Well, ’course it is. ’S’cuse my bein’ put back on my heels, but this heah’s the off-season.”
Carver wondered when the “on” season was. And why.
Crusty got a registration card out of a desk drawer and laid it on the counter along with a plastic ballpoint pen that was lettered Irv’s Baits. “You want smokin’ or nonsmokin’?”
Carver thought he had to be kidding, but said, “Smoking. Every once in a while I enjoy a cigar.”
“Be eighty-five dollars a night with tax,” Crusty said.
“That’s steep,” Carver commented as he signed the register. Crusty shrugged. “We’re a val’able commodity, bein’ the only motel for miles.”
‘You might be the only anything for miles that doesn’t swim or fly.”
“Then how come you’re heah” — Crusty looked at the registration card — “Mr. Carver from Del Moray?”
“The fishing,” Carver said.
Crusty’s genuine-looking eye widened. “Not many folks come here for the fishin’.”
“No doubt they just come to frolic in the pool,” Carver said. ‘You take Visa?”
“Nope. Gotta be good ol’ U.S. cash money.”
Carver got his wallet from his pocket, held it low so Crusty couldn’t see its contents, and counted out 850 dollars. The cost of doing business, he thought, and laid the bills on the desk.
Now both of Crusty’s eyes bulged. The glass one — if it was glass — threatened to pop out.
“Ten nights in advance,” Carver explained. “I always give myself enough time to fish until I catch something.”
Crusty took the money and handed him a key with a large red plastic tag with the numeral 10 on it. “End unit, south side,” he said. Carver thanked him and moved toward the door.
‘You got one of the rooms with a TV, no extra charge,” Crusty said. “Ice machine’s down t’other end of the buildin’. Just keep pressin’ the button till the ice quits cornin’ out brown.”
“I’ll make myself at home,” Carver told him and limped out into the sultry afternoon, astounded to realize it was cooler outside than in the office.
Number 10 was a small room with a dresser, a tiny corner desk, and a wall-mounted TV facing a sagging bed. The carpet was threadbare red. The drapes were sun-faded red. The bedspread matched the drapes. An old air conditioner was set in the wall beneath the single window that looked out on the unhealthy hole that was the pool, then across the road to the shadowed and menacing swamp.
Carver tossed his single scuffed-leather suitcase onto the bed, then went over and opened a door, flipped a wall switch that turned on a light, and examined the bathroom. The swimming pool should have prepared him. There was no bathtub, only a shower stall with a pebbled-glass door. The commode and sink were chipped, yellowed porcelain and so similar in design that they looked interchangeable. A fat palmetto bug, unable to bear the light, or maybe its surroundings, scurried along the base of the shower stall and disappeared in a crack in the wall behind the toilet.
I guess I’ve stayed in worse places, Carver thought, but in truth he couldn’t remember when.
As he was unpacking and hanging his clothes in the alcove that passed for a closet, he laid his spare moccasins up on the wooden shelf and felt them hit something, scraping it over the rough wood. He reached back on the shelf and felt something hard that at first he thought was a coin, but it was a brass Aztec calendar, about two inches in diameter and with a hole drilled in it off-center, as if to make it wearable on a chain.
Carver stood for a moment wondering what to do with the brass trinket, then tossed it back up on the shelf. People might have been doing that with it for years.
He sat down on the bed and picked up the old black rotary-dial phone. Then he thought better of talking on a line that would undoubtedly be shared by Crusty the innkeeper and replaced the receiver. He decided to drive into town and make his call.
Outside Muggy’s Lounge was a public phone, the kind you can park next to and use in your car, if you can park close enough and your arm is long enough. There was a dusty white van parked next to the phone, with no one in it. So Carver parked his ancient Olds convertible on the edge of the graveled lot, climbed out, and limped through the heat to the phone. If the humidity climbed another few degrees, he might be able to swim.
He used his credit card to call Ollie Frist in Del Moray. Frist was a disabled railroad worker who’d retired to Florida ten years ago with his wife and teenage son. The wife had died. The son, Terry, had grown up and become a cop in the Del Moray police department. Terry had come to Mangrove City six months ago, telling anyone who’d asked that he was going on a fishing trip. Ollie Frist had gotten the impression his son was working on something on his own and wanted to learn more before he brought the matter to the attention of his superiors. Two days later Ollie Frist was notified that Terry had been found dead in the swamp outside Mangrove City. At first they’d thought the death was due to natural causes and an alligator had mauled and consumed part of the body afterward. Then the autopsy revealed that the alligator had been the natural cause.
The Del Moray authorities had gotten in touch with the Mangrove City authorities. Accidental death, they decided. The grieving father, Ollie Frist, didn’t buy it. What he had bought were Carver’s services.
“Mr. Frist?” Carver asked when the phone on the other end of the line was picked up.
“It is. That you, Carver?” Frist was hard of hearing and roared rather than spoke.
“Me,” Carver said. He knew he could keep his voice at a normal volume; Frist had shown him the special amplifier on the phone in his tiny Del Moray cottage. “I’m checked into the motel where Terry stayed.”
“It’s a dump, right? Terry said when he phoned to let me know where he was staying that the place wasn’t four-star.”
; “Astronomically speaking, it’s more of a black hole. Did Terry actually tell you he was coming to this place to fish?”
“That’s what he said. I didn’t believe it then. Should I believe it now?”
“No. There’s some fishing here, I’m sure. But there’s probably more poaching. It’s the kind of backwater place where most of the population gets by doing this or that, this side of the law or the other.”
“You think that’s what Terry was onto, some kinda alligator poaching operation?”
“I doubt it. He wouldn’t see it as that big a deal, or that unusual. He probably would have just phoned the Mangrove City law if that were the case.” A bulky, bearded man wearing jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt had walked around the dusty white van and was standing and staring at Carver. Maybe waiting to use the phone. “I’ll hang around town for a while,” Carver said, “see if I can pick up on anything revealing. There’s something creepy and very wrong about this place. As of now it’s just a sensation I have on the back of my neck, but I’ve had it before and it’s seldom been wrong.” The big man next to the van crossed his beefy arms and glared at Carver.
“Keep me posted,” Frist shouted into the phone. “Let me know if you need anything at this end.”
Carver said he’d do both those things, then hung up the phone.
He set the tip of his cane in the loose gravel and walked past the big man, who didn’t move. His muscular arms were covered with the kind of crude, faded blue tattoos a lot of ex-cons sport from their time in prison, and on his right cheek was tattooed a large black spider that appeared to be crawling toward the corner of his eye. He puffed up his chest as Carver limped past him. He probably thought he was tough. Carver knew the type. He probably was tough.
The striking thing about Mangrove City’s main street, which was called Cypress Avenue as it ran between the rows of struggling business establishments, was how near the swamp was. Walls of lush green seemed to loom close behind the buildings on each side of the road. Towering cypress and mangrove trees leaned toward each other over the road as if they yearned someday to embrace high above the cracked pavement. The relentless and ratchety hum of insects was background music, and the fetid, rotting, life-and-death stench of the swamp was thick in the air and lay on the tongue like a primal taste.
The humid air felt like warm velvet on his exposed skin as Carver crossed the parking lot and entered Muggy’s Lounge.
Ah! In Muggy’s, it was cool.
There were early customers scattered among the booths and tables, and a few slumped at the long bar. Carver sat on a stool near the end of the bar and asked the bartender for a Budweiser.
The bartender brought him a can and let Carver open it. He didn’t offer a glass. He was a tall, skinny man with a pockmarked face, intent dark eyes set too close together, and a handlebar moustache that was red despite the fact that his hair was brown.
“So whaddya think of our little town?” he asked.
It’s conducive to insanity, Carver thought, but he said, “How do you know I’m not from around here?”
The bartender laughed. “There ain’t that many folks from around here, and we tend to know each other even if we ain’t sleeping together.” Someone at the other end of the bar motioned to him and he moved away, wiping his hands on a gray towel tucked in the belt of his cut-off jeans.
Carver sipped his beer and looked around. Muggy’s was a surprisingly long building with booths lining the walls beyond where the bar ended. On a shelf high above the bar was a stuffed alligator about five feet long, watching whatever went on with glass eyes that nonetheless seemed bright with evil cunning. There were box speakers mounted every ten feet or so around the edges of the ceiling, tilted downward and aimed at the customers as if they might fire bullets or dispense noxious gas. Right now they were silent. The only sound was the ticking of one of the half-dozen slowly revolving ceiling fans, stirring the air-conditioned atmosphere and moving tobacco smoke around. It occurred to Carver that the clientele in Muggy’s might have stopped talking to each other when he walked inside.
The bulky man who’d been watching Carver outside entered the lounge and swaggered toward him. He was about average height but very wide, with muscle rippling under his fat like energy trapped beneath his skin and trying to escape. He smiled thinly at Carver, then sat down on the stool next to him as if using the phone in succession had formed some sort of bond between them. When he smiled, the spider tattoo near his eye crinkled. Carver had seen real spiders do that after being sprayed with insecticide.
“You Mr. Fred Carver?” the man asked in a drawl that moved about as fast as the alligator above the bar.
“How did you guess?” Carver asked, continuing to stare straight ahead at the rows of bottles near the beer taps.
“Didn’t guess. I was told you checked in at the Glades Inn. I went and talked to the desk clerk, found out who you was.”
“Why?”
“Curious. Stranger here’s always news. Ain’t much happens to amuse us ’round these parts. We take our pleasure when we can.”
“You think I’m going to amuse you?”
‘You got possibilities fer sure.”
Carver decided to meet this cretin head-on. “Ever hear of a man named Terry Frist?”
“Sure. Got his fool self killed and damn near et up by a ’gator a while back. Terrible thing. ”
“Alligators usually kill their prey, then drag it back to their den at water’s edge where they hide it and let it rot until they can tear it apart easier with their teeth. The way I understand it, Terry Frist’s body was found on land.”
‘Yeah. What was left of it. He was a cop, we found out later. From over in Del Moray. Say now, ain’t that where you’re from?”
Maybe not such a cretin. “It is,” Carver said, “but Frist and I didn’t know each other. I read in the newspaper about what happened to him here.”
“What is it you do for a livin’ there in Del Moray?”
“I’m in research. Decided to come here for the fishing.”
“Really? We ain’t known for the fishin’.”
“Didn’t I see a bait shop when I drove into town?”
“Oh yeah. Irv’s. Well, there’s some fishin’. More likely you’ll catch yourself a ’gator like that Frist fella did. Fishin’ suddenly becomes huntin’ when that happens, and you ain’t the hunter.”
The pockmarked bartender came over and asked what the big man was drinking.
“Nothin’.” He slid off his stool and looked hard at Carver. “Fishin’s no good this time of year at all. Not much reason for you to stay around town.”
“I like a challenge.”
“You’re more’n likely to get one if you go fishin’ in them swamp waters.”
“Can I rent an airboat anywhere around here?”
“Nope. Nowheres close, neither. Fella name of Ray Orb rents ’em some miles east, but the swamp’s too thick around these parts for airboats to get around in it. I think you best try someplace in an easterly direction.” He winked, then turned to leave.
“You didn’t mention your name,” Carver said.
“I.C. is what I’m called. Last name’s Unit. The I.C. stands for Intensive Care.” The spider crinkled again as if dying, and I.C. threw back his head and roared out a laugh. Carver watched him swagger out through the door, noticing that all the other customers averted their gazes.
“That his real name?” Carver asked the bartender when I.C. had left.
“He says it is. Nobody much wants to differ with him.”
“He as tough as he acts?”
“Oh yeah. Him and his buddies from over at Raiford.”
“Raiford? The state penitentiary?”
“That’s right. The three of ’em, I.C., Jake Magruder, and Luther Peevy, was in there together after they come down from Georgia and committed some heinous type crime. Some say it was murder. Luther Peevy, his folks died and left him a place nearby, so I guess that’s why they all s
ettled in here ’bout a year ago.”
“I’ll bet the town was happy about that,” Carver said.
“This town was never happy,” the bartender said and moved away and began wiping down the bar with his gray towel.
Carver finished his beer, then walked around the town for a while before going into its only restaurant, Vanilla’s, for lunch, even though it was just eleven o’clock. He was hungry and he was here, and he didn’t know if the Glades Inn had a restaurant and didn’t want to find out. Crusty was probably the cook.
Though Vanilla’s was a weathered clapboard building that leaned on its foundation, it was surprisingly neat and clean inside. Small but heavy wooden tables were grouped evenly beneath a battery of ceiling fans rotating only slightly faster than the ones in Muggy’s. There was a small counter and double doors into the kitchen. Carver saw an old green Hamilton-Beach blender behind the counter and wondered if Vanilla’s sold milk shakes.
There were two men in white T-shirts and bib overalls at the counter, drinking coffee and eating pie. One of them, a redheaded man wearing a ponytail, turned on his stool, glanced at Carver, then went back to work on his apple pie. They seemed to be the only other warm bodies in Vanilla’s.
“’Nilla!” the redheaded man yelled. “You got yourself a customer.”
The double doors opened and a heavyset, perspiring woman in her fifties emerged from the kitchen. She had a florid complexion, weary blue eyes, and wispy gray hair that stuck out above one ear as if she’d slept too long on that side. She was wearing maroon slacks and a white blouse and apron and had a faint moustache. “Sit anywhere you want,” she told Carver in a hoarse voice as deep as a man’s.
He was aware of her looking at his cane as he limped to a table near the wall, well away from the counter. Fly-specked menus were propped between the salt and pepper shakers. He opened one and saw that the selection was limited.
Vanilla came over with an order pad and Carver asked for a club sandwich. Then he asked her if she served milk shakes and she said she did. He said chocolate.