Alligator (30 page)

The door of the truck had made him limp with rage. The boy was supposed to burn in the fire. First he would pass out or he might even crawl along the floor and breathe the smoke and perhaps find his way to the door but the door would be jammed, if the boy made it that far, and the boy would slump against the door and the firemen would find whatever was left of him there.

Valentin gave up. He accepted that he could not close the door to the truck and that the boy was alive and he could already hear the fire trucks and the police and it was over and then he saw the boy’s sneaker was in the way.

He pushed the boy’s foot in and slammed the door. There was another low deep boom from inside the house and black smoke was dragged across the lawn and shifted direction and lifted itself up over the burning trees. Two people were running toward Valentin’s truck and he got in behind the wheel and one of the men was waving him down with a baseball cap.

Valentin tore out of the driveway and took off down Morris Avenue. He drove through a red light and nearly side-swiped the fire truck and a fireman in his yellow gear looked into Valentin’s face as he went past. They saw each other.

He pulled into the Bannerman Park parking lot to stop from trembling. He was trembling all over, especially his hands. He sat there with the truck idling and saw teenagers hanging off the monkey bars. He would take Frank to the ship in Harbour Grace and keep him there until he was certain he had got away with it. No one had followed him. He could put Frank in his old bunk on the ship until he knew for certain what would happen next. If he got caught, it would be better for the boy to be alive. They would have the make and colour of his truck, but he had removed the licence plates. He would put the plates back on when he got to the highway. He needed to stop trembling in order to drive. He needed to drive slowly.

He reversed the truck and slowly pulled out of the lot. He drove down Monkstown Road and when he was near the Riverdale tennis courts he saw there were women playing tennis under big lights. They wore white shorts and tiny white T-shirts and one woman jogged over to the chainlink fence and she was waving her racket, trying to tell him something.

He rolled down the window and the breeze revived the boy; the boy started coughing and muttering again.

Watch out for the dogs, the woman shouted to him. She dipped the racket downward, pointing to the road in front of his truck.

The dogs are fucking, the woman called. She covered her mouth with her hand; she was giggling. Then she trotted back over the courts and her ponytail swung and she bent, lifting one foot in the air, and picked up a luminous yellow ball and she whacked it to the other woman and he heard her racket cut through the warm night air.

There were two dogs mating in the centre of the road, right in front of his truck. A small white poodle so closely shaven Valentin could see the pink of her skin under the silky, silver sheen of fine hair, what was left of her coat. The dog on top of her was twice her size and black and white and it hung on to her and jerked with a deliberate and awkward ferocity. The poodle tried to withstand the weight of the male, but her front legs, which were straight against the asphalt, threatened to buckle and she stepped daintily forward to maintain her balance. She turned toward Valentin’s headlights and her eyes went a weird luminous green and the tuft of white on top of her head was incandescent.

Valentin realized the radio was on and had been on the whole time and there was talk about an all-expense-paid trip for two to Orlando, Florida, for the first caller who could name all the songs on the countdown.

The boy began to mutter and Valentin heard the word
har-monica.
Frank was pawing his chest as if he had something in his shirt. He was calling for his mother. His eyes were still rolled back in his head, but the pupils became visible for a moment and the boy looked at Valentin. He looked at him and said he needed a harmonica. Then he was convulsing with a fit of coughing.

Valentin had dropped Isobel before a curve in the road near her aunt’s house in Old Perlican. She had come out of the water at the beach with the red dress clinging to her and her hair gleaming and in the truck she smelled of seawater. The cat was pressed against his leg because Isobel was wet. She was trying to wipe the wet sand off her feet. He could see the lace of her bra under the wet silk dress. She was breathing heavily. Perhaps what he felt was love.

He had watched her walk down a dirt path with a ridge of shiny grass down the centre and the branches of the alder trees met over her head and the light through the trees was green and full of clouds of golden mosquitoes. Her dress was wet he could see the straps of her bra and underwear. He had seen the red dress waver and flush beneath the water. She had been swimming near the sandy bottom and she came up for breath and went down again.

FRANK

T
HERE IS A
monstrous chasm between being alive and being dead, two very distinct states; and the trick is always to be alive.

He would remain alive until he saw Colleen again because he wanted his money back. He thought about having sex with her and he wanted that to happen again even though she had stolen his money and he made a ball of himself and he flung that ball at the window.

There are blisters all over his body and his face is raw and the blanket hurts him because the wool has rough fibres that rub against his burns, but he doesn’t stay conscious long. He is being rocked gently, and sometimes he knows it’s a ship but mostly he has no idea where he is. A naked light bulb swings gently above him. He loses consciousness and regains it and sometimes he sees the two Russians and he wants the girl back, whoever she was, he wants the girl.

COLLEEN

I
AM WRAPPED
in a blanket and the guy is shouting at me and I’m shivering all over and my teeth are chattering. The way it started was he cut the engine and let me listen to the sound of the males. There were several males and they were making a vibration in their throats like engines, like lust, a calling out to the females; it makes the hairs on your arms stand up, and the surface of the water vibrates. The water was like glass and then beads of water rose up, bounced up off the surface, just as if rain were falling down but the water was falling up. Little beads of water dancing all over the surface and a strange warbling noise like a metal filling when you touch it against tinfoil, like finger-nails on a chalkboard, like the pulley of a clothesline. This is how the males attract the females.

We saw a few slide off the banks and Loyola said about the scars some of the old ones have because they can scrap at this time of year fighting for the females. He cut the engine and the sun was coming up and we just floated a little after flying over the surface of the water in his airboat, hitting bumps of air and lifting and knocking spray all over the place and getting flicked with mud and water. We saw the blue heron he said has been in the swamp for years and it was standing on a stump that was sticking right out of the water, all the twisty branches of the trees and the hanging green moss were reflected in the muck green water and he said, Did you call your mother? and I didn’t answer him.

The heron flapped its big giant awkward wings and it flew up and became graceful. Then Loyola putt-putted over to a little island, a hill, big enough for one tree, in the middle of the swamp and he showed me the alligator nest, which was a pile of twigs and grass and a hole dug into the earth and he said about insulating the eggs and how many he might find there. He got down on his knees and he was knocking the twigs back, just to check.

He was out of the boat and he had a stick and the mother was gone off and I stepped out of the boat to get on the bit of ground where he was. I had one foot on the boat and one on shore and the boat eased away from me and I thought there was land under me but there wasn’t.

The water was deep and I screamed and I could feel weeds clinging to my jeans and he hauled the boat in and I tried to get onto the little island of mud he was on but the land kept giving way under me and he jumped into the boat and I saw an alligator slide off the shore.

I had not seen it before and then I saw it. I thought I saw it. A shape that sank almost below the surface, just the ridge of its back visible, gliding quickly toward me. It moved with the same slow-fastness that things in dreams move with, it dipped under the surface but the wake, a soft V in the water, plaiting itself behind some invisible thing coming my way.

And then he had me in the boat. He reached over the side and hauled me up, which, how he lifted me I don’t know. I lost a shoe and he was screaming how stupid I was how crazy and stupid and he stopped shouting and he got me a blanket and he was crying with his face all screwed up with rage, tears rolling down his cheeks, and then he just stood over me patting the blanket and he stared for thirty seconds or so and I said his name and he didn’t hear me and then he started shouting at me again. How stupid I was.

I said but there weren’t any alligators around. There weren’t any around, I screamed back at him and I was crying too, and when I said that there weren’t any alligators, there was a whack against the side of the boat.

The aluminum rang out like a gong and the suffocating humidity of the swamp held the reverberations of the aluminum and made the echo last and last.

Get off my farm, Loyola shouted. I said I would. He said, Get off my farm. I promised I would. You get, he said. I said, I promise. I want you out of here so fast, he said. He had flung an arm out, rigid, his sleeve was soaking, and a finger pointing back over the swamp in the direction of the farm, but I couldn’t see anything except trees and moss green water and algae. I want it to be I never laid eyes on you, he said. I said I was going. Don’t worry I was going. And I said I was sorry, I was sorry, I was sorry. But he sat down and he turned his back on me and he wouldn’t start up the boat for a long time.

FRANK

T
HE DOOR OF
the room he was in crashed open and there was Valentin.

Where am I? he said. Valentin hauled him out of the bunk and punched Frank in the face and Frank felt his jaw break. He heard the bones break and it was a sound inside his head. He tried to move his teeth so the bottom ones were under the top ones and they would not go that way. It felt like a pedantic thing to insist upon, that the teeth align, under the circumstances. He was aware that he was having a small, private moment with his teeth in the middle of a larger argument, which was he’d probably end up dead.

That’s so you don’t open your mouth, Valentin said. Something was catching in Frank’s throat and he coughed it up and it was a tooth. Then Valentin punched him in the gut and Frank fell against the wall and Valentin kicked his head and Frank lost consciousness.

Frank came to hours later and focused on the cot he had been hauled out of. He thought he could drag himself up to the cot and he managed to grab the blankets and he pulled with all his might but the blankets and the pillow came down on top of him. He decided that would have to do because he could not move.

He lay there and listened and wished he could fall asleep or die and then he heard something and it sounded like a rat moving over the wooden shelf above his head. He heard the clatter of tiny claws and then stillness, then the clatter of tiny claws again and it sounded as if a rat was pondering which direction to take, where it might find food next, which was not possible, Frank decided. He decided it was not possible that there was a rat in the room and he fell asleep.

CAROL

S
HE TIDIED UP
her room for the police officers and made a pot of tea but they came with Tim Hortons coffees. One of the officers had been to the house before, when the Inuit boy committed suicide, and Carol mentioned that she remembered him and that they’d done a fine job that time and that the incident was a tragedy and she hadn’t felt right about the bed-sit ever since it happened.

She patted the couch, which had a crocheted throw of orange and lime green Phentex yarn that she’d made herself, and one of the officers sat down and she said about Frank’s hot-dog stand.

That boy was like clockwork, she said. Something awful has happened to him, I just know it.

If the officers wanted, they could check with the taxi drivers on George Street, that’s how regular Frank’s hot-dog stand was. She had gone down there herself last night and the night before last and there was no hot-dog stand on the corner and no sign of Frank. She told about Frank’s room being vandalized and how he had forbidden her to contact the police. He said it would be very dangerous for both of them if the police got involved. And Valentin was gone from the third floor and the other Russian he sometimes had sleeping in the room with him, the whole building was as silent as a tomb.

The police went upstairs and they knocked on both doors and there was no answer. They went away for a couple of hours and when they came back they forced the door of Valentin’s apartment the same way they had done when the Inuit boy had hanged himself, and they came out with two beef buckets full of tiny bottles with rubber stoppers that were some sort of prescription drug.

Carol stood in the door of her bed-sit wringing her hands as the officers went up and down the stairs, and then they came out with several armloads of cigarette cartons. It took them a lot of trips over the stairs to confiscate all the stolen goods.

He was off that ship in Harbour Grace, she said.

She reached out and took one of the officers by the sleeve of his uniform and she said she was afraid Frank was dead.

When the police left she stood in the centre of her bed-sit trying to think what she could do. She got down on her knees and she gripped her hands under her chest and she prayed to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost souls, and she prayed for Frank’s safety, she begged for it. She whispered. Please, please.

Later in the evening Carol heard someone walking around on the floor above her head. She had been watching television and she turned it off and listened. She heard footsteps and she got her housecoat and went up the stairs very quietly. She didn’t turn on the hall light.