“Sonofabitch!” Wilson yelled.
He and Jake ran to the street, paused, looked both ways in case of more dump trucks, and crossed. They glanced over the railing.
Buddy lay with his lower body on the bank. His left leg was twisted so that his shoe pointed in the wrong direction. His dark, crisp head was in the water. He was straining his neck to lift his blackened, eyeless face out of the water; white wisps of smoke swirled up from it and carried with it the smell of barbecued meat. His body shifted. He let out a groan.
“Goddamn,” Wilson said. “He’s alive. Let’s get him.”
But at that moment there was splashing in the water. A log came sailing down the river, directly at Buddy’s head. The log opened its mouth and grabbed Buddy by the head and jerked him off the shore. A noise like walnuts being cracked and a muffled scream drifted up to Wilson and Jake.
“An alligator,” Jake said, and noted vaguely how closely its skin and Buddy’s shoes matched.
Wilson darted around the railing, slid down the incline to the water’s edge. Jake followed. They ran alongside the bank.
The water turned extremely shallow, and they could see the shadowy shape of the gator as it waddled forward, following the path of the river, still holding Buddy by the head. Buddy stuck out of the side of its mouth like a curmudgeon’s cigar. His arms were flapping and so was his good leg.
Wilson and Jake paused running and tried to get their breath. After some deep inhalations, Wilson said, “Gets in the deep water, it’s all over.” He grabbed up an old fence post that had washed onto the bank and began running again, yelling at the gator as he went. Jake looked about, but didn’t see anything to hit with. He ran after Wilson.
The gator, panicked by the noisy pursuit, crawled out of the shallows and went into the high grass of a connecting pasture, ducking under the bottom strand of a barbwire fence. The wire caught one of Buddy’s flailing arms and ripped a flap of flesh from it six inches long. Once on the other side of the wire his good leg kicked up and the fine shine on his alligator shoes flashed once in the moonlight and fell down.
Wilson went through the barbwire and after the gator with his fence post. The gator was making good time, pushing Buddy before it, leaving a trail of mashed grass behind it. Wilson could see its tail weaving in the moonlight. Its stink trailed behind it like fumes from a busted muffler.
Wilson put the fence post on his shoulder and ran as hard as he could, managed to close in. Behind him came Jake, huffing and puffing.
Wilson got alongside the gator and hit him in the tail with the fence post. The gator’s tail whipped out and caught Wilson’s ankles and knocked his feet from under him. He came down hard on his butt and lost the fence post.
Jake grabbed up the post and broke right as the gator turned in that direction. He caught the beast sideways and brought the post down on its head, and when it hit, Buddy’s blood jumped out of the gator’s mouth and landed in the grass and on Jake’s shoes. In the moonlight it was the color of cough syrup.
Jake went wild. He began to hit the gator brutally, running alongside it, following its every twist and turn. He swung the fence post mechanically, slamming the gator in the head. Behind him Wilson was saying, “You’re hurting Buddy, you’re hurting Buddy,” but Jake couldn’t stop, the frenzy was on him. Gator blood was flying, bursting out of the top of the reptile’s head. Still, it held to Buddy, not giving up an inch of head. Buddy wasn’t thrashing or kicking anymore. His legs slithered along in the grass as the gator ran; he looked like one of those dummies they throw off cliffs in old cowboy movies.
Wilson caught up, started kicking the gator in the side. The gator started rolling and thrashing, and Jake and Wilson hopped like rabbits and yelled. Finally the gator quit rolling. It quit crawling. Its sides heaved.
Jake continued to pound it with the post and Wilson continued to kick it. Eventually its sides quit swelling. Jake kept hitting it with the post until he staggered back and fell down in the grass exhausted. He sat there looking at the gator and Buddy. The gator trembled suddenly and spewed gator shit into the grass. It didn’t move again.
After a few minutes, Wilson said, “I don’t think Buddy’s alive.” Just then, Buddy’s body twitched.
“Hey, hey, you see that?” Jake said.
Wilson was touched with wisdom. “He’s alive, the gator might be too.”
Wilson got on his knees about six feet from the gator’s mouth and bent over to see if he could see Buddy in there. All he could see were the gator’s rubbery lips and the sides of its teeth and a little of Buddy’s head shredded between them, like gray cheese on a grater. He could smell both the sour smell of the gator and the stink of burnt meat.
“I don’t know if he’s alive or not,” Wilson said. “Maybe if we could get him out of its mouth, we could tell more.”
Jake tried to wedge the fence post into the gator’s mouth, but that didn’t work. It was as if the great jaw was locked with a key.
They watched carefully, but Buddy didn’t show any more signs of life.
“I know,” Wilson said. “We’ll carry him and the gator up to the road, find a house and get some help.”
· · ·
The gator was long and heavy. The best they could do was get hold of its tail and pull it and Buddy along. Jake managed this with the fence post under his arm. He didn’t trust the gator and wouldn’t give it up.
They went across an acre of grass and came to a barbwire fence that bordered the street where Buddy had been hit by the dump truck. The bridge was in sight.
They let go of the gator and climbed through the wire. Jake used the fence post to lift up the bottom strand, and Wilson got hold of the gator’s tail and tugged the beast under, along with Buddy.
Pulling the gator and Buddy alongside the road, they watched for house lights. They went past the church on the opposite side of the road and turned left where the dump truck had turned right and backfired. They went alongside the street there, occasionally allowing the gator and Buddy to weave over into the street itself. It was hard work steering a gator and its lunch.
They finally came to a row of houses. The first one had an old Ford pickup parked out beside it and lots of junk piled in the yard. Lawn mowers, oily rope, overturned freezers, wheels, fishing reels and line, bicycle parts, and a busted commode. A tarp had been pulled half-heartedly over a tall stack of old shop creepers. There was a light on behind one window. The rest of the houses were dark.
Jake and Wilson let go of the gator in the front yard, and Wilson went up on the porch, knocked on the door, stepped off the porch and waited.
Briefly thereafter, the door opened a crack and a man called out, “Who’s out there? Don’t you know it’s bedtime?”
“We seen your light on,” Wilson said.
“I was in the shitter. You trying to sell me a brush or a book or something this time of night, I won’t be in no good temper about it. I’m not through shitting either.”
“We got a man hurt here,” Wilson said. “A gator bit him.”
There was a long moment of quiet. “What you want me to do? I don’t know nothin’ about no gator bites. I don’t even know who you are. You might be with the Ku Kluxers.”
“He’s…he’s kind of hung up with the gator,” Wilson said.
“Just a minute,” said the voice.
Moments later a short, fat black man came out. He was shirtless and barefooted, wearing overalls with the straps off his shoulders, dangling at his waist. He had a ball bat in his hand. He came down the steps and looked at Wilson and Jake carefully, as if expecting them to spring. “You stand away from me with that fence post, hear?” he said. Jake took a step back and this seemed to satisfy the man. He took a look at the gator and Buddy.
He went back up the porch and reached inside the door and turned on the porch light. A child’s face stuck through the crack in the door, said, “What’s out there, papa?”
“You get your ass in that house, or I’ll kick it,??
? the black man said. The face disappeared.
The black man came off the porch again, looked at the gator and Buddy again, walked around them a couple of times, poked the gator with the ball bat, poked Buddy too.
He looked at Jake and Wilson. “Shit,” he said. “You peckerwoods is crazy. That motherfucker’s dead. He’s dead enough for two men. He’s deader than I ever seen anybody.”
“He caught on fire,” Jake offered suddenly, “and we tried to put his head out, and he got hit by a truck, knocked in the river, and the gator got him…We seen him twitch a little a while back…The fella, Buddy, not the gator, I mean.”
“Them’s nerves,” the black man said. “You better dig a hole for this man-jack, skin that ole gator out and sell his hide. They bring a right smart price sometimes. You could probably get something for them shoes too, if’n they clean up good.”
“We need you to help us load him up into your pickup and take him home,” Jake said.
“You ain’t putting that motherfucker in my pickup,” the black man said. “I don’t want no doings with you honkey motherfuckers. They’ll be claiming I sicced that gator on him.”
“That’s silly,” Wilson said. “You’re acting like a fool.”
“Uh-huh,” said the black man, “and I’m gonna go on acting like one here in my house.”
He went briskly up the porch steps, closed the door and turned out the light. A latch was thrown.
Wilson began to yell. He used the word nigger indiscriminately. He ran up on the porch and pounded on the door. He cussed a lot.
Doors of houses down the way opened up and people moved onto their front porches like shadows, looked at where the noise was coming from.
Jake, standing there in the yard with his fence post, looked like a man with a gun. The gator and Buddy could have been the body of their neighbor. The shadows watched Jake and listened to Wilson yell a moment, then went back inside.
“Goddamn you,” Wilson yelled. “Come on out of there so I can whip your ass, you hear me? I’ll whip your black ass.”
“You come on in here, cocksucker,” came the black man’s voice from the other side of the door. “Come on in, you think you can. You do, you’ll be trying to shit you some twelve gauge shot, that’s what you’ll be trying to do.”
At mention of the twelve gauge, Wilson felt a certain calm descend on him. He began to acquire perspective. “We’re leaving,” he said to the door. “Right now.” He backed off the porch. He spoke softly so only Jake could hear: “Boogie motherfucker.”
“What we gonna do now?” Jake said. He sounded tired. All the juice had gone out of him.
“I reckon,” Wilson said, “we got to get Buddy and the gator on over to his house.”
“I don’t think we can carry him that far,” Jake said. “My back is hurting already.”
Wilson looked at the junk beside the house. “Wait a minute.” He went over to the junk pile and got three shop creepers out from under the tarp and found some hanks of rope. He used the rope to tie the creepers together, end to end. When he looked up, Jake was standing beside him, still holding the fence post. “You go on and stay by Buddy,” Wilson said. “Turn your back too long, them niggers will be all over them shoes.”
Jake went back to his former position.
Wilson collected several short pieces of rope and a twist of wire and tied them together and hooked the results to one of the creepers and used it as a handle. He pulled his contraption around front by Buddy and the gator. “Help me put ’em on there,” he said.
They lifted the gator onto the creepers. He fit with only his tail overlapping. Buddy hung to the side, off the creepers, causing them to tilt.
“That won’t work,” Jake said.
“Well, here now,” Wilson said, and he got Buddy by the legs and turned him. The head and neck were real flexible, like they were made of chewing gum. He was able to lay Buddy straight out in front of the gator. “Now we can pull the gator down a bit, drag all of its tail. That way we got ’em both on there.”
When they got the gator and Buddy arranged, Wilson doubled the rope and began pulling. At first it was slow going, but after a moment they got out in the road and the creepers gained momentum and squeaked right along. Jake used his fence post to punch at the edges of the creepers when they swung out of line.
An ancient, one-eyed Cocker Spaniel with a foot missing came out and sat at the edge of the road and watched them pass. He barked once when the alligator’s tail dragged by in the dirt behind the creepers, then he went and got under a porch.
They squeaked on until they passed the house where Sally lived. They stopped across from it for a breather and to listen. They didn’t hear anyone screaming and they didn’t hear any beatings going on.
They started up again, kept at it until they came to Buddy’s street. It was deadly quiet, and the moon had been lost behind a cloud and everything was dark.
At Buddy’s house, the silver light of the TV strobed behind the living room curtains. Wilson and Jake stopped on the far side of the street and squatted beside the creepers and considered their situation.
Wilson got in Buddy’s back pocket and pulled the smokes out and found that though the package was damp from the water, a couple of cigarettes were dry enough to smoke. He gave one to Jake and took the other for himself. He got a match from Buddy’s shirt pocket and struck it on a creeper, but it was too damp to light.
“Here,” Jake said, and produced a lighter. “I stole this from my old man in case I ever got any cigarettes. It works most of the time.” Jake clicked it repeatedly and finally it sparked well enough to light. They lit up.
“We knock on the door, his mom is gonna be mad,” Jake said.
“Us bringing home Buddy and an alligator, and Buddy wearing them shoes.”
“Yeah,” Wilson said. “You know, she don’t know he went off with us. We could put him in the yard. Maybe she’ll think the gator attacked him there.”
“What for,” Jake said, “them shoes? He recognized his aunt or something?” He began laughing at his own joke, but if Wilson got it he didn’t give a sign. He seemed to be thinking. Jake quit laughing, scratched his head and looked off down the street. He tried to smoke his cigarette in a manful manner.
“Gators come up in yards and eat dogs now and then,” Wilson said after a long silence. “We could leave him, and if his Mama don’t believe a gator jumped him, that’ll be all right. The figuring of it will be a town mystery. Nobody would ever know what happened. Those niggers won’t be talking. And if they do, they don’t know us from anybody else anyway. We all look alike to them.”
“I was Buddy,” Jake said, “that’s the way I’d want it if I had a couple friends involved.”
“Yeah, well,” Wilson said, “I don’t know I really liked him so much.”
Jake thought about that. “He was all right. I bet he wasn’t going to get that Chevy though.”
“If he did,” Wilson said, “there wouldn’t have been no motor in it, I can promise you that. And I bet he never got any pussy neither.”
They pulled the creepers across the road and tipped gator and Buddy onto the ground in front of the porch steps. “That’ll have to do,” Wilson whispered.
Wilson crept up on the porch and over to the window, looked through a crack in the curtain and into the living room. Buddy’s sister lay on the couch asleep, her mouth open, her huge belly bobbing up and down as she breathed. A half-destroyed bag of Cheetos lay beside the couch. The TV light flickered over her like saintly fire.
Jake came up on the porch and took a look.
“Maybe if she lost some pounds and fixed her hair different,” he said.
“Maybe if she was somebody else,” Wilson said.
They sat on the porch steps in the dark and finished smoking their cigarettes, watching the faint glow of the television through the curtain, listening to the tinny sound of a late night talk show.
When Jake finished his smoke, he pulled the alligator
shoes off Buddy and checked them against the soles of his own shoes. “I think these dudes will fit me. We can’t leave ’em on him. His Mama sees them, she might not consent to bury him.”
He and Wilson left out of there then, pulling the creepers after them.
Not far down the road, they pushed the creepers off in a ditch and continued, Jake carrying the shoes under his arm. “These are all right,” he said. “I might can get some pussy wearing these kind of shoes. My Mama don’t care if I wear things like this.”
“Hell, she don’t care if you cut your head off,” Wilson said.
“That’s the way I see it,” Jake said.
Incident On and Off a Mountain Road
When I wrote this was trying to write a good solid story that worked. This is not to say I’m not ambitious, but am a professional writer, and sometimes you commit to something, and then you have to follow through, and for some reason you feel like your brain is stuffed with cotton. Every word is a chore.
I consider myself enough of a pro that can do a good, competent story any day of the week. I prefer, of course, to always write a masterpiece, but, unfortunately, you can’t make that choice. You can only choose to write as well as you can. Even if you have to wade through cotton.
When I was doing this one, I felt I was doing a solid job, and nothing more, but I gave it everything I had. When I reread it in print I liked it much better. It may not be a masterpiece, but it’s been picked up for a best of the year volume, optioned twice for film, and I meet people all the time who think it’s one of my best. Go figure.
I guess the motto of this story is simple. Listen to your gut. Write the best you can every time out. You never know what you’ll come up with. And even if it’s just a good professional story, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
WHEN ELLEN CAME to the moonlit mountain curve, her thoughts, which had been adrift with her problems, grounded, and she was suddenly aware that she was driving much too fast. The sign said CURVE 30 MPH, and she was doing fifty.