Alligator (16 page)

Suddenly he heard a shout. He couldn't tell where it was coming from or who had made it, but there was a shrillness to the sound that was piercing and chilling like a winter wind. Sam heard the shout again, and realized it was the voice of an old man. He strained to hear what the man was yelling, but the individual words were lost; only the sound was discernible. Then he saw Luke pushing through the tight knot of people. He was still calling out. This time Sam could hear what he said. He yelled, "Don't go."

Luke climbed onto the dock and stood in the glaring sun, his eyes glistening milky-white like marbles, his frail skeletal body was as wrinkled and brown and tough as alligator hide. He seemed older and more fragile than ever before.

"Hey, old man, you coming along?" screamed Archie Marris. But no one laughed. There was something frightening about Luke, and a tension was beginning to spread around them.

Luke didn't say anything for almost a minute. Instead, he stood straight and stiff, his head slightly cocked, as if he were listening to something or someone. A few of the men continued to talk among themselves, but Sam felt an urgency to their voices, and when Luke raised his voice to speak, their whispers quickly melted into utter silence.

"Don't go," Luke said, "listen to me." His voice echoed in the quiet. Sam had never heard three hundred people be that quiet. "I've lived a long time. I know the swamps better than any of you. You don't stand a chance against that alligator. He's too old and too tough. Nature is on his side, not yours. Take my advice, stay here where you belong. Stop now while you can. Don't you see? I can feel it. That ain't no gator you're courting. It's death."

Without waiting to see what kind of reaction his words might have, Luke stepped off the pier and into the crowd.

Nobody moved. For the first time in hours, the sound of the swamps reasserted itself. It was like listening to the core of the earth. The insistent buzz of an insect, the rattling of dry sawgrass as a snake slipped along the ground, the splash of a heron dipping into the water to devour a minnow, sounds they had heard every day of their lives seemed unfamiliar and frightening.

All at once, a terrific roar boomed through the quiet. It sounded like the center was collapsing and the whole earth was telescoping. Sam grabbed the gunwales of the skiff instinctively; then, realizing that it was only the Saurian starting up, he laughed at himself.

Rye sat on the high platform of his airboat, watching the startled crowd, delighted at the reaction he had caused. He lifted a bottle and tilted it to the shore in a carefree salute. It was impossible to tell if he had even heard Luke's warning.

"To the alligator!" yelled Rye, and suddenly the sound of the swamps was drowned out by the roar of engines.

The men headed out into the swamps, past the rows of decaying summer houses and trailer parks, the weed-infested gardens with ragged banana plants, wild hibiscus, and poinsettias that were slowly being choked off by strangler figs. All along the shore, wooden docks disintegrated slowly into the water. Everything was on stilts, moss-covered, rotting from dampness; even the people seemed to be rotting away. It was an endless line of old men sitting on busted folding chairs, reading day-old newspapers, their white, hairy legs stuck into the water, their trousers rolled, and fleshy wives, wearing faded housedresses and rollers in their hair, hanging laundry out to dry.

Even out on the water, the men could discern a parade of smells: a pastiche of bacon and eggs, coffee, beer, rotting fish, dead field mice, dirty underarms. They could hear the sounds of breakfast dishes being washed up, dogs scratching, mixed in with the music of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Perry Como, and the Lennon Sisters.

It was a string of decay, decomposition, disintegration, dissolution, breakup, corruption, and spoilage, a haven for mildew, mold, corrosion, erosion, and the ravages of time. The Everglades seemed like a cemetery for the South, a junkyard for Miami and all the other forward-looking modem cities of the Southland. It was the halfway station before the grave.

The Saurian led the way through the narrow channel. The skiffs followed behind, staying close enough to the airboat to feel they were all in the same party, but well out of its huge wake.

The Saurian was large for an airboat, but that wasn't saying much. It sat only four men, and wasn't much bigger than three skiffs put together. Even though it was the most luxurious airboat Everglades had ever seen, it still looked like little more than a motorized oil rig. The platform, made of fiberglass, gently sloped upward at the bow and the stem, like a rocking chair. At the front of the platform was a huge box which housed the gears and steering pole. Just behind it were the seats, four of them, supported on a lattice of steel bars so that they were three feet above the platform. At the back, encased in a huge steel cage which covered the entire width of the boat and reached several feet higher than the seats, was the enormous airplane propeller that powered the boat. The airboat was purely functional. There was nothing graceful or pleasing about the way it looked. There wasn't an inch of wasted space, no concessions to grace or form, no decorations, no coverings that weren't necessary to keep out the dirt. It was a skeleton of a boat, a framework of bones and nerves and connective tissue without the skin.

As clumsy as an airboat looked, there was nothing better for taking the swamps. It skimmed over the surface; weeds, shallow water, even reasonably large logs meant nothing to it. And the seats were built so high that the sharp, five-foot-high sawgrass never got near the passengers.

Lee was at the helm. He had taken off his plaid cotton cowboy shirt and tied it around his waist, so he could throw it back on when they stopped onto a hummock. Even Lee, who was used to the swamp insects, wouldn't step ashore without the protection of a shirt and his heavy dungarees. Rye sat next to him. He hadn't taken his shirt off, but most of the buttons were open. Lee could see the coarse gray hairs among the mat of blond on his chest. Rye enjoyed the cool air rushing across his body. It knocked everything from his mind and relaxed his muscles like a good workout.

John and Maurice were sitting in the back, just in front of the propeller. Neither of them was enjoying himself. The seats were so high that Maurice felt that any moment he would fall off. He held tightly to his leather cushion, staring straight ahead. He didn't dare look down. John was trying to appear nonchalant, but his lips were pressed so tightly together that they were practically invisible.

When Rye turned around to hand back the bottle of Wild Turkey, he almost died laughing. "Jesus Christ!" he roared. "If you turkeys are scared at ten miles per hour, what the hell are you gonna do at fifty?"

John and Maurice stared straight ahead. They didn't want to think about that.

Ranged behind the Saurian, like baby chicks following their mother, were ten skiffs. Sam Pruett and Ben Ferguson were in the lead boat. They had rented it from Orville Levi, who had gotten it from God knows where. It was in pretty bad shape, and if Ben hadn't known something about motors they would probably still be back at the pier.

Sam and Ben passed a canteen of liquor between them. Sam was feeling good. His second thoughts were gone, as was all feeling in his legs. He held the canteen in one hand and waved to the people on shore with the other. Ben laughed to himself. In all his years of knowing Sam, he had never seen him drunk.

Sheriff Thompson and Archie Marris were running just behind them. Thompson was in the bow, and Marris was spread out across the entire stern. There was no question in anyone's mind that there was a severe weight problem in that skiff.

Thompson was washing a sandwich down with a beer when a small sardine fell at his feet. He picked it up by the tail and, through squinting, drunken eyes, tried to figure out what it was and where it came from.

"Hey," he said to Marris, "did you know there was sardine out here?"

"Only in cans," answered Marris.

Thompson held the sardine closer to his face. A droplet of oil plopped on his nose. He looked over at Ben and Sam, who were trying to keep back their laughter. Suddenly it was raining food, as Ben, Sam, Marris, and Thompson sent candy bars, pellets of bread, and even a few beer cans flying at one another. A little farther back, Ace Collier was riding with his friend D. W. Hendricks. D.W. was nineteen, a year older than Ace, and the son of the only grocer in town, which made him close to royalty in Ace's eyes. D.W. and Ace were drinking pre-mixed screwdrivers from D.W.'s father's store.

Ace's head was already spinning, and he was having a hard time keeping the boat in a straight line. It was zigzagging all through the water, and Ace was laughing so hard that he started to drool.

Orville Levi almost jumped out of the boat when Ace and D.W. came barreling toward him. It took Simon Long all his strength to keep him in. Everyone had thought Levi was crazy when he announced he was going out with Simon. They seemed such an unlikely pair. Levi was crazy like a fox. Simon was a fisherman, and probably the only man besides Lee who knew anything about the swamps.

Charlie O'Neill, who worked in Levi's gun shop, was in the next skiff. When Levi had heard that he was planning to go out, he had threatened him with everything, including a lynching. O'Neill had gone anyway, and he had taken the Franchi, too. He figured he'd take his chances. Albert Johnston rode with him. O'Neill knew Albert wouldn't be much help with the skiff, nor did he have a clue how to shoot a gun, but it all seemed worth it when O'Neill considered that he'd undoubtedly pack a hell of a picnic from his restaurant.

Floyd and Lloyd Simmons, sixty-year-old twins who owned the local junkyard and lived in a trailer on the premises, rode together. They did everything together, which was convenient, since nobody in town had to spend time worrying which was which.

In the next boat was Tucker Cox, the pharmacist, and Lump Abner, who had been sheriff before Thompson. Both men were closing in bn sixty faster than they liked to think about, and though neither of them said it, they weren't sure how long they'd stay out with the rest.

Mike Sears, a tall, muscular blond, who was the town stud, and Ted Smallwood, a slight, somewhat sickly boy who partnered a semi with Mike, were next. They were amusing themselves by throwing empty beer cans at the people on shore.

Nobody from Everglades had ever seen the men in the last two skiffs before, so they were figured to be foreigners. Actually, two of the men were barbers from Naples, Florida, and the other two owned a used-car lot on the AIA.

The Saurian pulled out of the channel and into the river, leaving behind the jumble of houses and people as it entered the mouth of the jungle.

The river was still a wonder to Lee. Every few miles, a tar-paper shack crumbled on the moist banks. For the most part, however, the land was virgin, just as it must have been centuries ago, when the Calusa and Seminole fished and hunted, bred and died along its shores.

Sawgrass, barbed and brutal, jutted out of the soft, muddy earth like sharp knives. Live oak, mahogany, gumbo limbo grew thick along the banks, casting cool shadows out onto the river. Cypress domes towered over the other trees, their tops stuck out of the rest of the foliage like giraffes.

Every inch of the land was alive with wildlife. Crabs scurried around the black soil, cockroachlike; craggy turtles sunned themselves on pitted limestone rocks; huge herons, cormorants, and pelicans stood on wooden buoys, scanning the water for fish. Otters and rat snakes, gators bugs and frogs, spiders and ground hogs, Cape Sable sparrows and mosquitoes vied among themselves for what little space was left by the thick tangle of vegetation.

Lee felt the spray kicked up by the caged propeller against his face. It made him feel fresh and clean and very relaxed. He pulled a map out of the supply box and handed it back to Rye. "We'll take the river as far as it goes, then cut around Mormon's Island to Devil's Point." He had to shout over the motor to be heard.

"What's there?" Rye yelled back.

"That's where they found the bodies. My guess is his den's somewhere around there."

"I ain't payin' for guesses."

Lee shrugged impassively. He knew the way to handle Rye was not by anger; Rye was used to anger. What he wasn't used to was being ignored. It was a potent weapon.

Rye was disappointed that he didn't get a rise out of Lee; he enjoyed turmoil. "Tell me, Boone," he yelled, "what happens when we find this den, if we find it?"

"We wait for the gator," answered Lee.

"Well, just suppose the gator's decided to skip town?" Rye's voice was thick with sarcasm.

"Don't happen," answered Lee. "A gator builds himself a nest when he's young and sticks by it. He just keeps adding to it as he grows bigger. It ain't like one of your tract houses. That gator's probably been living in the same spot for fifty years."

Lee pointed to a small mound of dried grass and sticks huddled against the river bank. "That's a gator den," he shouted.

"I know what a gator den looks like," snapped Rye.

Lee snickered. "Well, then, you'll know you're lookin' in the wrong direction."

Lee drew the Saurian up close to the mound. Growing between the sawgrass and rotting compost of leaves and twigs was a fine blue grass. He reached down and pulled some of the grass out of the soft earth. "This is pickerel grass," he said, handing the clump back to Maurice. "You can always tell a gator den by this grass. It's the only place it grows."

"Why's that?" asked Maurice.

"Gator shit." Lee looked over at Rye as if the shit he was talking about were sitting next to him. "Ain't that a fact, Mr. Whitman?"

It took John enormous self-control not to laugh. He had never seen anyone get the better of Rye. The fact that it was some backwoods hippie who was half Rye's age added to his enjoyment. He could see Rye casting a murderous look at the back of Lee's neck, and felt jealous of Lee for the power he had.

By mid-morning, the sun was hot and full on the men. The air shimmered with light and moisture, and the Saurian's wake sparkled in tiny points of light that were almost blinding. Orchids speckled the ground with their impossible hues, and huge cypresses cast cooling shadows.