Neither Flint nor Pelvis spoke. They watched the big, brown-bearded man chewing on the bone in his greasy fingers.
“Don’t feel much like talkin’, do you?” Monty glanced quickly up at the sun. Then he threw the bone into the water beside their boat. The splash drew the attention of the alligators, and three or four of them quickly converged on the spot like scaly torpedoes. Water swirled, a tail rose up and smacked the surface, and suddenly an underwater disagreement boiled up, two reptilian bodies thrashing and the rowboat rocking back and forth on the muddy foam of combat.
“Them boys are hungry this mornin’.” Monty started sucking the meat from another bone. “They’ll eat anydamnthing, y’know. Got cast-iron stomachs. Bet they’d like to get their teeth in you, freak. Bet you’d be a real taste sensation.”
The alligators, finding no food on their table, had stopped squabbling. Still, they crisscrossed the pond on all sides of the boat. “Don’t you men think this has gone far enough?” Flint asked. “We’ve learned our lesson, we’re not comin’ back in here anymore.”
Monty chewed and laughed. “Well, that’s right. ’Course, you ain’t leavin’, either.” He flung the second bone in, and again the reptiles darted for it. “Hey, Elvis! You want some breakfast?”
Pelvis didn’t answer, and Flint saw his eyes glazing over again.
“It’s realllll good. Lotta meat on them bones, I was surprised. Want to try a bite or two?” He held up a hunk of white meat, and he grinned through his beard. “Woof! Woof!” he said.
Pelvis shivered. A pulse had started beating hard at his temple.
“Hang on.” Flint grasped Pelvis’s arm. “Steady, now.”
“I think he wants the rest of it, Mr. Freak. Here you go, Elvis! Arrrruuuuuu!” And as he howled like a dog, Monty tossed the rest of the plate’s meat and bones up into the air over the corral.
Before the first piece of meat or bone splashed the surface, Pelvis went crazy.
He lunged over the rowboat’s side. The chain of the handcuffs connecting their wrists jerked tight, and with a shout of terror Flint was pulled into the water with him.
For the last mile and a half Train had cut the Swift’s husky double-diesels to one-fourth speed — about seven knots — to keep the noise down. Now he switched off the engines and let the Swift coast along the narrow bayou. “Gettin’ close,” he said behind the spoked wheel in the pilothouse. Dan stood at his side, and Arden had found a benchseat to park herself on toward the stern. “She gonna run minute or two, then we doin’ some wadin’.”
Dan nodded. The rifles, pistol, and the ammunition backpack had been stowed away in a locker at the rear of the pilothouse. After leaving the cove Train had brought them along a series of channels at speeds approaching twenty-eight knots, the Swift’s upper limit. Before them, birds had flown and alligators had dived for safety. Train had told Dan his real name was Alain Chappelle, that he’d been born on a train between Mobile and New Orleans, but that he was raised in Grand Isle, where his father had been a charter fisherman. During his tour of duty in Vietnam his parents had moved to New Orleans, and his father had accepted a consulting job with a company that built fishing boats. Train had the swamp in his blood, he’d said. He had to live there, in all that beautiful wilderness, or he would perish. He’d known that the Swift boats — based on the design of tough little utility craft used to ferry supplies out to oil derricks in the Gulf of Mexico — were built by a contractor in the town of Berwick, which Dan and Arden had passed through forty miles north of Houma. In 1976 he’d bought the armor-plated hulk of a surplus Swift and started the three-year labor of restoring it to a worthy condition. Baby could be sweet as sugar one day and a raging foul-tempered bitch the next, he’d told Dan, but she was fast and nimble and her shallow draft was ideal for the bayous. Anyway, he loved her.
“Takin’ us in there,” Train said, motioning with a lift of his chin toward another channel that wound off to the left. “Gonna get tight, so tell the lady if she hear some thumps, we ain’t gonna wind us up ass-deep and sinkin’.”
Dan went back to relay the message. Train steered Baby into the channel with a steady hand and a sharp eye. Tree branches scraped along the sides and half-submerged reeds and swamp grass parted before the prow. Overhead the trees thickened, cutting the light to a dark green murk. The Swift was slowing down now to the speed of a man’s walk, and Train came out of the pilothouse and picked up a rope with one end secured to the starboard deck and at the throwing end an iron grappling-hook. The boat shuddered, something bumping along the keel. Train threw the hook into the underbrush, pulled hard on the rope, and it went taut. In another few seconds Baby eased to a stop.
They got ready. Dan was sweating in the fierce wet heat, but he wasn’t afraid. Maybe just a little. In any case, the job had to be done.
“Leave the pistol here,” Train said as Dan took it from the locker. “She might be gonna need it.”
“Me?” Arden stood up. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life!”
“Ever’ting got a number-one time.” Train popped a clip into the automatic. “I’m gonna tell you ’bout this safety catch here, so you pay a mind. You get you’self a caller while we gone, only two fellas to save you neck be Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson. Ay?”
Arden decided it would be very wise to pay close attention.
“Take t’ree reloads. We need more’n that, we gonna be haulin’ butt,” Train told Dan after Arden’s quick lesson was done. Dan took three of the Browning’s box magazines from the backpack, put one in each front pocket and the third in a back pocket. Train did the same with the Ruger’s ammo, then he put on a gray-and-green camouflage-print cap. “ ’Bout quarter-mile from here, them fellas be,” he said as he slung the Ruger barrel-down to his right shoulder so water wouldn’t foul the firing mechanism. “They got guns enough to blow the horns off Satan: rifle, shotgun, machine gun, ever’ damn kinda gun. So from here on we mighty careful or we mighty dead.”
While Dan strapped on the Browning rifle, also barrel-down, Train opened a jar of what looked like black grease and streaked some under his eyes. “Don’t want no glare blindin’ you when it come time to take a shot. You miss — poof! That’s all she wrote.” He handed the grease to Dan, who applied it in the same fashion. Then Train got his face right up in Dan’s, his eyes piercing. “We get in a knock-ass firefight, am I gonna can count on you? You gonna stick it to ’em, no second thought? By the time you got second thought, you be twice dead. Ay?”
“I’ll do what I have to,” Dan said.
“They got a man spyin’ for ’em in a tower, up where he can see the Gulf and the bayou one turn ’round. They got a big metal gate blockin’ the bayou, and a bob wire fence ’round the whole place.” He nodded toward the forbidding wilderness, thick with spiky palmettos, hanging vines, and cypress trees. “We gonna go through there. Ain’t got no serpent-bite kit, so keep both them eyeballs lookin’.”
“I will.”
“If we see us two dead bodies layin’ out, we comin’ straight back quiet as sinners on Sunday. Then I make a radio call to Gran’ Isle. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
Train eased over the transom and lowered himself into the water. The swamp consumed him to the middle of his chest.
“Dan?” Arden said as he started to go over. Again her tangled emotions got in the way of her voice. “Please be careful,” she managed to say.
“I was wrong to let you come. You should’ve stayed at Train’s place.”
She shook her head. “I’m where I need to be. You just worry about gettin’ in and back.”
Dan went into the water, his shoes sinking through three inches of mud.
“Listen up,” Train told Arden. “You might gonna hear some shootin’. We don’t come back half-hour after them shots, we ain’t comin’. Radio’s up on a shelf over the wheel. Got a fresh battery, you’ll see the turn-on switch. We don’t come back, you need to start callin’ for he’p on the mike. Turn through them frequenci
es and keep callin’. That don’t bring nobody, you got the water jug, the pistol, and you two legs. Ay?”
“Yes.”
“Just so you know.” Train turned away and started moving.
Dan paused, looking up at Arden’s face. The deep-purple birthmark was no longer ugly, he thought. It was like the unique pattern of a butterfly’s wings, or the color and markings of a seashell never to be exactly duplicated again in a thousand years.
“I’ll be back,” he said, and he followed Train through the morass.
When they’d gotten out of Arden’s earshot, Train said quietly, “Them fellas kill us, they gonna find her, too, eventual. What they’ll do I ain’t gonna think on.”
Dan didn’t answer. He’d already thought of that.
“Just so you know,” Train said.
They waded on, and in another moment the wilderness had closed between them and Baby.
Nasty brown water had flooded Flint’s eyes and mouth, choking off his shout of terror. Pelvis was flailing beside him, insanely trying to get across the ’gator corral at the man who’d chewed Mama’s flesh. Flint felt Clint’s arm thrash, his brother’s bones squirming violently inside his body. The thought of Clint’s infant-size lungs drawing in water and drowning opened a nightmarish door on gruesome possibilities. He started fighting to get his balance as he’d never fought in his life. He got his legs under him, and his shoes found a bottom of mud and mess that could be described only as gooshy.
He stood up. His head and shoulders were out of the water. Still, Clint was trapped below. Pelvis was standing up, too, his muddy wig hanging on by its last piece of flesh-colored tape, a strangled, enraged scream shredding his throat. With a surge of power that Flint had never dreamed the man possessed, Pelvis starting dragging him through the water to reach the pier.
Monty was laughing fit to bust a gut. “It’s show time, boys!” he hollered toward the house.
Flint stepped on something that exploded to life under his feet and scared the pee out of him. A scaly form whipped past them, its tail thrashing. The tail of a second alligator slapped Pelvis’s shoulder, and he grunted with pain but kept on going. All around them the pond was a maelstrom of reptiles fighting for the meat and bones Monty had just thrown in. Flint saw one of them coming from the left, its snout plowing through the foam and its catslit eyes fixed on him. Even as Pelvis kept hauling him, Flint struck out with his unhindered left arm at the thing, which looked large enough to make two suitcases and a handbag. He struck the surface in front of its snout, but the splash was enough to make it wheel away, its tail whacking muddy water into the air. Then Pelvis was hit at the knees by an underwater beast and he was knocked off his feet, the alligator’s barklike flesh coming up from the depths for an instant, which was long enough for the crazed Pelvis to give a bellow and pound at it with his free fist. The startled reptile skittered away with a snort, pushing a small wave before it. With his feet under him again, Pelvis dragged Flint onward.
Two of the beasts were going at it fang to fang over a chunk of meat, their noisy combat drawing the attention of four or five others. A battle royal erupted, the monsters fighting on all sides of Pelvis and Flint. But more alligators were rising up from the bottom, and others were speeding in to graze past them as if to test how dangerous this particular food might be before they committed their jaws to a bite. Pelvis was single-mindedly pulling Flint toward the pier, while Flint was doing everything he could to keep the alligators away: kicking, slapping the water with the flat of his hand, and shouting gibberish.
But now the alligators were getting bolder. Flint managed to jerk the shoe from his right foot, and he used that to hammer the surface. And suddenly a horrible, thick body with gray mollusks clinging to its hide erupted from the water beside him, a pair of jaws wide open and hissing. Flint slammed his shoe down across the alligator’s skull, going for an eye, and the jaws snapped shut. The head whipped to one side and its rough scales flayed the skin off his left arm from wrist to elbow. A mollusk’s shell or some growth with a sharp edge did its work as well, and suddenly there was blood in the water.
“Get ’em out! Get ’em out, goddamn it!” somebody shouted.
They had reached the pier’s end, which was three feet above the pond. Pelvis, his wig gone and his contorted face brown with mud, was trying to grip the timbers and pull himself up, but not even his maddened strength could do it with Flint on the other cuff. Blood floated on the surface around Flint’s arm, and he saw at least four alligators coming across the corral after them, their tails sweeping back and forth with eager delight.
26
To the Edge
THERE WAS THE RACKET of an electric motor and a chain rattling. “Grab it! Both of you, grab it!”
The winch’s hook and chain had been lowered. Pelvis and Flint clung to its oversize links as a beggar might grasp hundred-dollar bills. The motor growled, and the chain began to hoist them up.
Hands caught them, pulling them onto the pier. Below Flint’s muddy shoe and sock, three alligators slammed their snouts together. They started fighting in the blood-pink foam, and as their bodies hit the pilings the entire pier trembled and groaned.
But now Flint and Pelvis had solid wood under their feet. Flint could smell his blood; it was coming from a blue-edged gash across his left forearm and dripping from his hand to the planks. He staggered, about to pass out, and he found himself clutching Pelvis for support. Through a haze he looked at the choppy pond and saw two alligators battling for something between their jaws that appeared to be a mud-caked, scruffy bird. It took him a few seconds to realize it was Pelvis’s wig. He watched with a kind of strange fascination as the two monsters ripped it apart and then each of them submerged with a souvenier of Memphis.
His chest heaving, Pelvis stared slack-jawed at the faces of Doc, Monty, Mitch, and two other men he didn’t recognize. Doc was wearing his sunglasses again.
“Crazy as hell, man!” Doc was blasting Monty. “I don’t want ’em dead till he sees ’em!”
“Well, shit!” Monty fired back. “How was I supposed to know they were fool enough to jump outta the —”
Flint had felt Pelvis’s body tense. He thought of a hurricane about to wreak death and destruction.
Pelvis pulled back his right fist and then drove it forward like a fleshy piston into Monty’s nose. With a gunshot pop of breaking bones the blood spewed from Monty’s nostrils all over Doc’s Harvard T-shirt.
Monty staggered back, his eyes wide and amazed and the blood running into his beard as if from a faucet. One step. Two steps.
And onto the corral, right on top of the reptiles fighting below the end of the pier.
“Oh, Jesus!” Doc shouted, blood on the lenses of his sunglasses and spotting his cheeks.
“Monty!” Mitch hollered, and he ran to operate the hook and chain.
But the sense had been knocked out of Monty, and maybe that was for the best because he might have been unaware exactly of his position. One of the other men Pelvis hadn’t recognized drew a pistol and started shooting at the alligators, but they had already taken hold of Monty, one with jaws crunched into his left shoulder and another gripping his right leg. The winch’s chain came down, but Monty didn’t reach for it. The alligators started shaking him the way Pelvis had seen Mama shake one of her teddy bears. He recalled, in his dim cell of thinking at the moment, that the stuffing had come out everywhere.
So, too, it was with Monty.
Now Mitch had pulled his pistol and was firing, too, but the taste of blood and living meat had driven the creatures to a frenzy. More of them were racing over for a share. During the shooting, amid the thrashing bodies and the gory splashing, at least two bullets went into Monty. Maybe he was dead before his bones started to rip from their sockets. Maybe.
Doc didn’t want to see any more. He’d known Monty was finished when he went in there, bleeding like that and with the ’gators already so riled up. He’d seen them go after the ranger, so he’d k
nown. He turned away, removed his dark glasses, and slowly and methodically began to wipe the blood off the lenses with a clean part of his T-shirt. His fingers were trembling. Behind him Mitch threw up into the corral.
“Bummer,” Doc said, mostly to himself.
He took the handcuff key from his pocket. He unlocked the cuffs and let them fall. Pelvis blinked at him, still dazed but his fury spent. Flint grasped his injured arm and then pitched to his knees, his head hanging.
Doc reached back, drew the .45 from his waistband, cocked it, and laid the barrel between Pelvis’s eyes. “You’re next,” he said. “Walk to the edge.”
Pelvis was already brain-blasted; seeing that man eat Mama for breakfast had done him in. He knew what was waiting for him, but without Mama — without his adored companion — life wasn’t worth living. He walked to the edge.
Below him was something the alligators were still tearing at. It was getting smaller and smaller. It had a beard.
Doc stood behind him and put the automatic’s barrel against the back of his naked head.
“Do it!” Mitch urged. “Put him down!”
Flint tried to stand, but he could not. He was near fainting, the smell of blood and mud and ’gator filth was making him sick, the harsh, hot sun had drained him. He said, “Eisley?” but that was all he could say. He hadn’t felt Clint move since they’d come out of the water, but now the arm gave a feeble jerk and Clint’s little lungs heaved like a hiccup deep in the folds and passages of Flint’s intestines.
Doc put his other hand up to shield his face from flying bits of bone and brain matter. His finger tightened on the trigger.
He heard a gurgling noise.
He looked around, and saw brown water trickling from the mouth on the bizarre baby head that grew from the freak’s side.
Flint heard boots clumping on the pier. There was the sound of bare feet on the planks as well.
Doc saw who was coming. He said, “Takin’ care of business, Gault. Shondra don’t need to see this.”