The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (23 page)

Tim, in a pained insect voice, said, “Take out your flashlights, slowly, and shine them right in his eyes … hurry, Jesus Christ.”

Wade, Rusty, and I turned our beams on and the gator sank to eyeballs and nostrils again. Then, from the bank beside us, Joey’s tardy light illuminated us all for the reptile to see.

“Turn it off, Joey!” I whispered. “You’re too far!” My knees were thudding each other underwater.

Tim passed his flashlight to Rusty, the beam still aimed at the eyes, and Rusty took it alongside his own light. Tim eased the blowgun from his shoulder and held it towards the gator, machete poised in the other hand.

“I’m going to try to … nudge him away,” Tim quavered. “If he comes at me—” he released a tortured breath, “—you all please … don’t let him kill me.”

He lowered the tip of the blowgun towards the gator’s submerged shoulder. Wade pressed back against me. The camouflaged tube entered the water. A membrane slid over the gatoreyes. Tim thrust the blowgun.

The creek exploded. The great armored tail raised a geyser. Tim slashed, screaming, and we clustered, shouted, floundered towards the bridge. Wade’s flashlight plunked, lit the grayish murk, winked out. I flung a water-heavy leg onto the bridge and pulled myself up, saw Tim struggling to climb with his blowgun and machete in hand, and I dragged him up too, at great cost to my hernia. Wade thumped down beside us. Rusty hurried over from the near bank where he’d fled, shoes packed in five pounds each of mud. Blundering towards us through the grass like a wounded hippo, Joey gasped, “Where is it? Where’d it go?”

A panther’s roar rumbled from across the island. I felt besieged by man-eating animals, a pioneer in the Georgia jungles.

“Oh my God,” Tim groaned, lying on his back. He repeated this over and over. Nobody was hurt.

We convalesced on the footbridge for ten minutes, rising from the waist in giddy terror at every natural sound.

“Well,” Rusty said, “we ain’t coming out the way we came in, that’s for damn sure.”

“He was more scared of us than we were of him,” Tim said.

“Then he’s probably dead of a heart attack,” Joey sneered.

I studied the heavens. The deeper I looked, the more stars revealed themselves, until the sky seemed composed of a grayish wash of smaller and smaller lights. A shooting star sparkled across the sky and everybody’s finger went up at once.

Then I said, “Do y’all reckon that gator escaped from its pen, or was it wild?”

“Wild,” Tim said. “But I wouldn’t feel any safer in the water with a tame one. Man-oh-man!”

“You can easily hold their mouths shut,” said Wade. “They bite down with hundreds of pounds of pressure, but they’ve only got about five pounds worth of opening pressure.”

“Well why didn’t you subdue him then?” Rusty said. From his tone, I knew he had his skeptical eyebrows raised.

“I didn’t think of it at the time,” said Wade. “I saw a guy do it at an alligator farm in Florida, though.”

“I can’t take all this in one night,” Joey said. “How about if I stay here on the bridge and keep a lookout for trouble.”

Tim said, “Joey, I want you to act like a tough guy, now. Just think, the next time some kid calls you a fatass you can remember that you confronted an eight-foot-long alligator in its element. That’ll give you the courage to smear him.”

Rusty insisted the gator was no more than five feet long. “Maybe less. Everything looks big to you because you’re so small,” he said.

“Listen, I’ve gotten straight A’s in Math for eight years and I say it was eight feet long. Can you prove it wasn’t?”

“I’m too tired to go on,” Joey whined. Secretly, I empathized. I felt slightly homesick and miserable myself. I missed my bed, but saying it would only make it worse. I didn’t dare think of Margie.

Tim said, “Everybody who thinks we should throw Joey to the river creatures, say ‘Aye.’“

It was unanimous. But we agreed to spare him if he stopped complaining.

What’s that?” I said, stopping on the trail. I heard a sort of magnified heartbeat through the trees.

“Calypso music,” Joey said. “Reggae. I think it’s coming from that same truck we saw earlier.”

“We’d better investigate,” said Tim.

We crept along the trail. When the woods began to thin out, we pocketed our flashlights and relied on the moon. We stopped at the trees’ end, trail’s exit.

The truck was parked at the edge of a field, near the pens for the farm animals and a barn. Out in the center of the field two figures sat in the grass while an oceanic rhythm and mumbly lyrics burbled from the truck. Smoke twisted in the moonlight above their heads, and a red dot floated between them, glowed, floated, then flared, lighting a bearded face and the long hair, shoulder, and bare back of a woman.

“They’re butt naked!” Tim said. “I think they are.”

“Smells like they’re smokin dope,” said Rusty.

I said, “It’s that guy Paul who showed us around the island.”

We moved closer, quailing at every snapped twig or crunched leaf, though surely the music overpowered our noise. A few feet from the truck, which screened us from the field, Tim dug a flat metal box from his pack. He pressed a button and it snapped
open into a pair of field glasses. He put them to his eyes and his mouth dropped open.

“She’s sexy as hell,” he whispered. “Who wants to rent my opera glasses? Fifty cents per minute.”

Rusty and Wade both snatched at the glasses. Rusty got them, looked, and said, “God almighty.” They took turns, exclaiming mildly. Wade, grinning, passed me the glasses. Mostly, they magnified the grainy haze and shadows, but whenever the nudists inhaled on the joint, I saw reddish details. Paul was muscled like a comic-book hero, his penis alert out of the lotus position. The woman was younger and had hair down to her waist, and she was rocking in time to the music. Her breasts weren’t much larger than Paul’s, but even in this gloom I saw that her nipples did a spectacular job of compensation. She was not entirely naked— she still wore panties. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I should be with Margie again.

And though I had lately smoked marijuana and spent the night with a girl, I was somehow disappointed to see Paul behaving the same way. I’d admired him, a big impressive man and champion of wilderness. I preferred my heroes to be nobler than me. Sexuality still worried me as much as it made me excited. I have never stopped being shocked that respectable people with jobs and families would peel their clothes off and indulge in the mutual friction which in public would get them arrested. I handed the binoculars to Joey.

As Joey watched in close-up, the couple finished smoking and leaned into a long writhing kiss, her hair swinging forward, his hands rising to her breasts, and then her head dipped down into his lap and began to rise and fall. He leaned over her and began rubbing her ass.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Rusty said and took the glasses from Joey.

We stared for a minute in fascinated agony, ashamed to look at one another. I felt I had a tennis ball jammed in my pants.

“Let’s go,” Tim said. “I’m sick of watching other guys have what I want.”

“Hold it a second,” said Rusty. “This ain’t somethin you can see just anytime.”

“Give me my field glasses, damn it. Let’s go let that cat out while these two are occupied.”

We walked stiffly around the field’s perimeter, blending against the trees, and found the continuation of the trail. In two minutes we were up on the viewing platform over the bobcat pen. It seemed we’d gotten there too quickly. I didn’t feel ready.

“We’ll never feel ready,” Tim said. “We just have to do it anyway. Now, find me a wildcat.” He put the field glasses to his face.

We turned on our lights (except Wade, who’d drowned his) and swept their beams through the enclosed woods. I was tense and had to make myself stop clenching my teeth too hard. I lifted my beam up into the large oak tree, to the claw-scoured limb where we’d seen a bobcat on the field trip. I traced the limb back and forth with light and was about to look elsewhere when I imagined that a bulge on the limb was a cat, decided it wasn’t, then saw it raise its head. “Found one,” I whispered, holding him in the light. He blinked.

“I see it!” Joey said.

“Joey sees it,” Wade mocked, but he was grinning up at it too.

Tim loaded a dart into the mouthpiece. He inhaled, put his lips to it, then pulled away. “Wait! wait, damn. I almost ruined everything. If I dart that bobcat in the tree, he’ll either fall and break his neck or else he’ll go to sleep up there and we’ll have hell getting him down.”

Rusty turned his flashlight onto a bush to the left of us and squinted. “I thought I saw one in here a minute ago.” Rusty waved the light a little. “See? Ain’t that a pair of cat eyes?”

Two glints floated in the leaves, caught light like marbles.

“Yeah,” said Wade. “It just moved.”

“Eureka,” said Tim. “I’ll simply estimate where the rump is and put him under.”

We lined up along the railing above the fence. Rusty, Joey, Wade, and I jacklighted the hidden bobcat. Tim took a breath and aimed, then jerked back like it had stung him.

“Wait a second,” he said, frowning. He spit, rubbed his eyes, and shook out each hand, shifting the weapon. He sighed, then lifted the blowgun and readied himself again. He filled his cheeks. He stared at the bush, not breathing.

Tim’s cheeks hollowed with a hiss. The bush shook violently and a cat sprang from each side of it, one slipping straight into an adjacent bush, the other pouncing and snarling up along the chicken-wire fence, a yellow dart-cone stuck to its haunch.

The cat leapt into the hollowed-out front of a stump. Tim lowered the blowgun and leaned limply against the railing. “Perfect shot,” he said. “I can’t begin to tell you how hard that was on me.”

“Now what?” Joey asked.

“We get things ready while we wait for the drug to take hold. Wade, let’s hang that rope, man.”

After several tosses Wade got the rope over the nearest limb of the oak tree, but we couldn’t retrieve the dangling end, even using the blowgun to hook it, in order to fasten it. The bobcat in the tree paced and growled. Finally we pulled the rope back and tied it to the railing so that it hung down inside the fence.

“Nothing ever works out as spectacular as you want it,” Tim said, yanking to test the knot. “It’s not Robin Hood, but I guess it’ll work. We’ll leave the rope here to convince them we really did it.”

“What about fingerprints?” Joey asked.

“I don’t think they can take fingerprints off this rope. I wore gloves when I made the notes.”

“Anyhow,” Rusty said, “our fingerprints ain’t on file.”

“But if they suspected us,” I said, “then they might take our fingerprints.”

“So what?” Rusty said. “This ain’t mass murder. It’s about the same as stealin the mascot from the enemy football team.”

Tim said, “We’ll shift that critter to the outside, go deliver the notes, and bust a window, then get drunk and watch the sun come up in my backyard.”

Tim, wearing leather work gloves, stapled a note to the railing, a patchwork of letters and words sliced out of newspapers. He put one foot over the rail and rested it on the top of the fence, gripped the rope, paused, and stepped back onto the deck. “Wade, since you’re biggest, you go on down first. I want to see what those other cats do. Take my machete.” He unsheathed it and gave it to Wade. “I’ll keep you covered with the blowgun.”

Wade hopped over and slid down the rope. He stood and turned in a circle and looked up at us, white eyes in a leafy face, and shrugged.

Tim laid down the blowgun. “Now for the easy part,” he said, and slipped down the rope and landed in a crouch, swashbuckler style. He threw his hands onto his hips and looked around, tried to spit but only produced the noise. His dad’s fatigue shirt hung on him like a cape, and his hair waved around the shadowy pen like a flag of surrender. “You all keep your lights trained on those other cats until we’re out of here. Rusty, we’ll hand him up to you.”

I lit the treed bobcat pacing angrily on his limb. He slowed, tail switching. Joey, unable to discover the third cat, played his light around the habitat like a prison guard spotlighting from a tower.