Alligator (13 page)

What a fight that would have been. Randy against those powerful hairy arms. Smashing those gapped teeth. A rabbit punch to that thick bull neck, a hammerlock on the coach of the year, the man of the century. Until, kicking, gouging, and biting, General Randolph P. Hutchins, sixty-seven-year-old ball-buster, Army man and hero, was the uncontested champion.

But the son of a bitch went and died. Game over. No contest, no war, just stinking, rotten death.

After that, death became real to Randy. That's why he'd been able to do such a bang-up job of acting for Rye. The money Rye offered hadn't hurt, either. After all, the salary given a retired general wasn't all that generous. However, when he'd accepted the job he hadn't expected to have to lay low for so long. So far, he and Clete had been stuck up in a room at the Rod and Gun for twenty-four hours, and he was getting itchy.

"I wonder just how much longer that asshole Whitman expects us to stay up here," Randy grunted as he stalked a fly with the rolled-up
Sports Illustrated
.

"It better not be much longer, as far as I'm concerned," answered Clete. He picked up a Plastic Woman comic book. "Shit, I read this already," he said, throwing it down in digust.

"Shut up, will you?" snapped Randy. He crept up to the window, slowly raising his weapon. Randy paused for a moment to take aim, then smashed at an indolent fly. It crumpled into a death pose. He picked up the corpse and put it alongside the nine other flies he was collecting on the windowsill.

"Well, it was your goddamned idea to go along with him," whimpered Clete, "and now we're going to miss the gator hunt and everything."

"For Christ's sake, stop whining. Who the hell said we're going to miss anything?"

"Whitman told us to wait until they leave, then go home—didn't you hear him?"

"So?" asked Randy.

"So how can we go with them if they've left already?"

"Who needs to go with them?"

"You mean we go by ourselves?" Clete brightened.

"Brilliant deduction, Watson. Of course we can go by ourselves, you idiot." Randy looked around for another fly, but he had cleaned out the room. He batted at the curtains, hoping a lazy one was resting there. All he raised was dust. Finally he sighed and turned to Clete. "How about a little arm wrestlin'?"

"No." Clete defiantly turned his back on his father and faced the wall.

"Oh, come on. It'll help the time pass." Randy's voice was jovial. He hated when Clete pulled his moods, but at the moment there were no other diversions.

"No." Clete was fighting back tears. He dug his nails into his fists, and the pain helped some.

"Jesus Christ, what the hell is eating you now?"

"You shouldn't talk to me like you do," sniveled Clete.

"Well, you shouldn't be as dumb as you are, either. Now, come on."

"No."

"Goddammit, Clete."

"Not till you say you're sorry." Clete could feel blood on his hands, but he wasn't going to cry. He was relieved.

"I order you to arm-wrestle me."

"No. Not till you say it." Clete's voice was adamant.

Randy lifted the rolled
Sports Illustrated.
Sometimes he wished he could dispose of Clete in the same way he did the fly. "Oh, shit," he relented, "have it your way. I'm sorry. Now, let's wrestle."

It wasn't until noon that Rye got out of his pajamas and left the hotel. It was sweltering out, and by the time he got to the edge of town his clothes were soaked with sweat.

He had hoped to spend a good part of the day in bed with a bottle, but between Maurice's bit of news and Lee's visit, his adrenalin was going too fast for that. Instead, he got dressed and, picking up Maurice, headed for the outskirts of town to look for the shack where he was born.

Everglades City wasn't like most towns. It didn't trickle off into shacks spread farther and farther apart; it just stopped abruptly. One moment there was civilization, the next there was nothing. It made coming to the end of town like standing at the edge of a huge black hole.

When Rye and Maurice walked off the sidewalk and into the thick jungle of waist-high sawgrass, they felt as if they had stepped back into another age. The dusty earth vanished and became a black, spongy muck, pitted with holes. Millions of tiny crabs scurried along the ground and popped in and out of their tunnels. Monumental cypresses, dripping mosses, grew so close together that in some places they blocked out the sun entirely and in others threw strange shadowy shapes twice their size.

The smell of rot was intense; even the locals held their noses when they first entered.

There wasn't a house around. The area was so deserted that only the hardiest of jungle plants and the animals that fed off them remained. Except for a molded plastic outhouse, stamped PROPERTY OF EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK BUREAU, there was no sign that the land had been anything but useless swamp.

"It was here," said Rye, as they came to the deserted clearing. "I guess they must have torn it down."

"Maybe it was farther on," answered Maurice.

"No, it was here. I'm sure of it." Rye continued to look around the empty field until he spotted the rusty remains of a water pipe hidden in the thick grass. "What did I tell you," he said triumphantly. "The shack was right on this spot."

He paced around excitedly, like a dog on the trail of a scent. "This was the kitchen," he yelled. "And over there was the living room where I slept. And there was the bedroom."

For a moment, the shack still existed for him. Rye wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve and slammed his hand on a large convention of mosquitoes that were in the process of dining on his arm. "Shit, there ain't nothin' left of it, is there. Nothin' but a lousy outhouse. Some monument to my birthplace, a one-hole crapper."

Rye threw open the door of the portable toilet and peered in. He smiled. "Tell you the truth, that cabin wasn't a hell of a lot better. Matter of fact, it stank so bad, you could smell me comin' for miles. Still, I had some good old times, and that's the truth. Did I ever tell you about the joke Hamilton, Marris, and Ben played on me?"

"I don't think so," said Maurice.

Rye sat down on the rusty water pipe and tried once again to picture the rotted-out shack where he had spent his first seventeen years. It came back to him in flashes, bits and pieces of a room or the porch or the pump. Never the whole, but enough to make him smile with recognition.

After a while, he said, "I guess I must have been fourteen or so. Me, Marris, Ben, and Hamilton ran together. We stirred up some pretty good trouble, too. Hamilton was the leader, and he was a crazy bastard. To tell you the truth, I think the reason we ran with him was because we all were a bit scared not to. Also because of his knife. Hamilton had this knife with a mother-of-pearl handle and all kinds of worked silver on it. Jesus, ain't it funny how you remember things?

"Well, there we were, fourteen, and by Christ just dyin' to make it with a woman. Hamilton was the first to go. And after him Ben, then Marris. At least, that's what they said. So the only one left was me.

"Well, one day, Hamilton comes up to me in front of school and says he's arranged the whole thing with Mrs. Shorter, this crazy lady who lived at the edge of town, and she was expecting me that night.

"I don't know how I got through school that day; all I could do was think about night, so that the sweat was runnin' off of me. But I didn't want to whack off in the bathroom or anything and waste it.

"Finally nine o'clock came, and I snuck out of the cabin and through town till I come to this clump of bushes outside Mrs. Shorter's house. The house was all dark except for her bedroom. The shade was down, but I could see her outline against it, and she was undressing. Well, I just crouched there for a good five minutes. I'd been thinkin' about havin' a woman so long, and there it was. But goddamn it if I wasn't scared to death.

"Finally I got myself up, shakin' like a leaf, practically blubbering, and go runnin' up to the house. The door was open a crack, so I sneaked in. She said, 'That you honey?', real sexy and low. I looked up, and there she was in a slip, standing in the shadows with her arms outstretched. Next thing I know, I'm hanging on to her and trying to push my sweaty hand onto one of her tits. When all of a sudden all the lights go on, and there's Ben and Marris laughin' their fool heads off. Hamilton is laughin' the hardest, 'cause it's him dressed up in the slip, with two balloons stuffed in it for breasts.

"Well, there was nothin' to do but laugh, but to tell the truth, I was good and angry.

"Then Hamilton turned real serious. He looked at me and said, 'You fairy. You know what we do with fairies?' He whispered something to Ben and Marris, and all of a sudden they all started comin' at me real slow and menacing. Well, I'm still smarting from being made an asshole by them, so I pick up a chair and throw it. That gets Hamilton real angry. 'Get him,' he screamed. Ben and Marris grab me, and Hamilton pulls his knife and yells, 'Tie him up.'

"When they got me trussed like the turkey that I was, Hamilton starts smilin' and says, 'Whitman, I'm gonna take your balls.' Ben and Marris turned white. I could see they didn't want no part of this, but they was too much in awe of Hamilton to say nothing. So they started laughing to cover up. But Hamilton just kept comin' at me with that knife of his. He shoved it right near my throat. 'Marris,' he yelled, 'unbutton this faggot's fly.'

"That stopped Marris cold. He looked over at Hamilton, not moving a muscle. So Hamilton shouted at him, 'Come on, Marris, or I'll think you're a faggot, too.' And with that, Marris started to cry. Well, Hamilton turned on Ben then. Poor Ben, he was so scared I could see him shaking, but he was more scared of Hamilton than he was of anything else. He walked up to me real slow; there were tears in his eyes. Then he kneeled down in front of me and started unbuttoning me.

"'Pull down his pants,' yelled Hamilton. And Ben did it. By this time, he was cryin' too. Me, I still figured it was all a joke, and I was just plain pissed. I tried to pull off the ropes and take a punch at Hamilton, but they were too tight, and I figured I'd have to wait till they'd finished making a monkey of me.

"Then Hamilton, he came over to me and put out his hand. Jesus Christ, that crazy guy put his hand on me. I screamed so loud, it was a wonder the whole town didn't hear it.

"The next thing I knew, they were all laughing and yukking it up again. I tell you, we all laughed so hard, half of us wet our pants."

"You laughed?" asked Maurice.

"Sure. It was just a bunch of kids having a joke."

"It doesn't sound funny to me."

"Shows you what you know," said Rye. "That was the funniest goddamned thing that ever happened to me. But I'm tellin' you all this for a reason."

"What's that?" asked Maurice.

"That incident was the last time anyone ever made a monkey out of me. No one else ever got away with nothing after that. Including you."

Maurice didn't know whether he wanted to punch Rye's face or burst into tears. He had always considered Rye his best friend—he would have done anything for him—and now Rye didn't trust him.

Rye caught a glimpse of Maurice's face and laughed. "Hey, what's the matter, can't you take a joke?"

Maurice smiled back at him and pretended he had known all along that Rye was kidding. But Rye hadn't been kidding, and Maurice knew it. He felt that this lapse in trust was a failure on his part.

Sam Pruett sat in his office over Levi's Dry Goods Store and looked at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with law books and the neat gray file cabinets filled with files. He tried to feel his usual pride in his huge mahogany desk, his pictures of his wife, the ivory letter opener and marble pen stand. But it didn't work. His mind kept drifting back to five days ago, when Ben had called him over to Sheriff Thompson's to look at the mangled bodies of Dinks and Orrin Bodges. Ever since then, Sam had changed, the whole town had changed.

News of Rye's expedition had spread across the town fast. Johnny Max over at Western Union said that Rye had ordered an airboat from Naples. Ben Ferguson had quipped that it was probably fitted out with everything including radar and torpedoes. Orville Levi, when he offered the one-thousand-dollar reward as a publicity stunt, never figured anyone would really have the nerve to go after the gator. Now he was getting nervous and calling Sam every hour to try to find a loophole in the offer.

All this talk about a gator hunt was beginning to make Sam Pruett nervous. It was also, if Sam were to be honest with himself, beginning to intrigue him.

Sam was still trying to figure out why he was intrigued as a huge camper with Georgia plates pulled up to the Rod and Gun and crashed into a Corvette from Miami. But even the noise and commotion of the accident interrupted his thoughts only momentarily.

The problem, he decided, was he hadn't wanted, really wanted, something in ten years. Oh, sure, he'd taken a fancy to things like a plate of French fries or a car stereo, but that was hardly the same. Put in that light, it did make his fascination with the alligator something of a mystery.

Ben Ferguson was always a bit crazy, so his going on a half-assed hunt made sense in its own way, but Sam had always been the mature one.

Sam decided that could be the whole problem. When you start settling down at twenty, by the time you're forty-six you're so settled, you have to look up just to see the front lawn. Still, he was a reasonable man, and he ought to have more sense than to even contemplate going out in the swamps after some half-baked lizard.

Sam laughed as he pictured himself going out into the swamps: the sweat running down his pockmarked face; his almost bald head with its band of slicked-down black hair bobbing among the sawgrass; his stocky body and round little paunch pressing through the dense undergrowth. It was impossible.

Relieved at having come to this conclusion, he took out the Fowler brief and began reading. He had scanned a whole page before realizing he hadn't absorbed a word.

His mind was revolving around and around like a tire caught in the snow. Why shouldn't he go, he wondered. After all, when a man got to be his age, he started regretting all the things he had wanted to do but never had the nerve to try. Take, for instance, jello. There was a time when all he could think about was doing it in a big pool of partially gelled imitation raspberry. Now, if he'd have been smart, he would have just gone to Hendricks's, bought twenty or twenty-five packages of the stuff, filled up the bathtub, dumped in ten pounds of ice, and waited till it set. But he couldn't even buy it. Jesus, like he thought Hendricks's would know anyone who bought twenty-five packages of imitation raspberry was a pervert. To top it off, he was worried about what his wife, Lizzie, would think. Little had he known then about the pimple-faced delivery boy she was getting it on with, while pretending to be stocking the bomb shelter. It took them five years just to make a dent in the Lipton's soup.