Alligator (26 page)

The rain rushed down the windshield and the duck pond was stirred up and brown. A swan lifted its impossibly large white wings against a sudden wind and was blown across the pond with such dramatic force that Beverly felt her milk spurt through her nipples in a great gush. The raw silk jacket was stained forever.

Three years ago, Beverly had run into Helen French in the bakery section of Dominion on Ropewalk Lane. Colleen had turned fourteen and Beverly was picking up a birthday cake. She had been standing with her arms folded tightly over her chest, tapping her foot on the tiles while the girl behind the counter worked a squeeze bag of pink icing through a plastic nozzle. That morning someone had defaced Beverly’s home with shaving cream.

Helen gave Beverly a light smack on the arm and Beverly had been startled by the touch. She had been frightened by the graffiti on her windows — but when she saw Helen she was overjoyed.

Helen, who had given birth to six children, and her husband had taken up with a woman from the mainland, and there had followed a commission from Saudi Arabia for a tablecloth. An Arabian prince of some sort wanted Helen’s work throughout his palace. Helen had gone to the desert; there had been a picture of her in the
Telegram
waving from the back of a camel, wearing a safari hat. And here she was in Dominion, clutching a zucchini.

Hadn’t Helen remarried? The young girl behind the cake counter was biting her bottom lip in concentration. Beverly saw her lift the plastic nozzle with a flourish when she had made the letter
n
in
Colleen
.

Helen said, My God, Beverly, I heard. I’m so sorry.

It had been unexpected, to have David’s death mentioned like this, early on a Saturday morning in the supermarket. Beverly had picked up two lobsters for a special birthday dinner and she saw one of the lobsters in her cart tentatively raise a claw with its green elastic band, and lower it, as if exhausted. She had always left David the job of dropping the live, moving lobsters into boiling water. She’d felt a tingling through her scalp that might have been the start of tears.

The girl had placed the cake in a box and was taping the sides.

It doesn’t get any easier, Beverly had said. She had admitted this to absolutely no one before and she covered her mouth with her hand. Grief was on the outer rim of human experience. She had been on that rim for too long and now they had sprayed her house with shaving cream. Someone was threatening her daughter, she was sure that’s what the graffiti was about. They were threatening a fourteen-year-old girl who had lost her father. A threat or an insult devised to make Colleen unsure of herself. The girl behind the counter was writing the price of the cake on the box with a Magic Marker — she held the cap in her teeth — Beverly had felt such an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, that Helen had understood, had made her say in the middle of the supermarket that yes it was hard, it was hard — she was so brimming with gratitude that she had ended up ordering seven custom-made doilies for every available surface in her new home.

Helen, I must have them, she’d said.

There was steam rising from the cod. Colleen will phone from an outdoor booth. Beverly knows this suddenly and unequivocally. Some gas station — she’s probably hitchhiking — on the side of an eight-lane highway. Rural Louisiana, her last message said.

The flake of the cod was quivering on the tines of her fork. There was a wine-coloured vein, thin as a strand of hair, visible in the translucent fish. Beverly had been dieting for six months. She had given up alcohol and sugar. She had given up butter on her toast. The diet meant she was hungry all the time.

The fish wasn’t cooked. It should have been whiter. The phone will ring as soon as she puts the fish in her mouth.

Colleen is walking across the parking lot toward a bank of phone booths, Beverly can see her plainly. The phone booth will be hot from the sun and smell of cigarette smoke and a faint tinge of urine or spilled beer. Colleen’s skirt will bell with the warm Louisiana breeze.

Beverly had left the house early on Colleen’s fourteenth birthday to pick up the cake. The cake would be a surprise. She’d started the car before she saw. Then she saw. The front of the house was still in the shade. She turned off the car and got out and shut the car door as quietly as she could. Each of the four panes of glass in the bay window had a letter sprayed on it spelling
slut
. S-L-U-T. White globs had dropped into her rhododendron bush and had scattered across the lawn.

She trotted through the gap in the hedge. She felt a great urgency. She had to get the word off the window before Colleen woke up. She didn’t want Colleen to know. She would protect her from this; it was important that she never have to face this kind of wickedness. Beverly thought of it as a wicked act. The dew on the grass made her stockings wet. One of her spiked heels wiggled beneath her. Beverly pressed against the rhododendron bush, stepping into the cedar chips at the base of the old tree, and reached in to scrape at the letter
S
. Half the letter came away in her hand. The shaving cream had developed an outer crust in the cool night air, but was spongy beneath the crust and when she squished it between her fingers the smell was sharply chemical and flowery. She leaned in toward the window, which was black in the shade of the eave, and saw the shaving cream had left a hard transparent line like the trail left on a sidewalk by a snail. She scratched at the trail with her fingernail and it broke up like peeling skin in a glittery brittle crust. She leaned in to wipe away what remained of the
S
and nearly screamed with fright. There on the other side of the glass was Colleen. She had got out of bed and come to the window. Their faces were so close they might have kissed.

She picked up the portable phone and gave it a little shake. She put it back down on the napkin and ate the fillet of fish in three fast mouthfuls, hardly chewing.

LOYOLA

Y
OU LIVE HERE
by yourself ? Colleen asked. He was cooking crawdads for her because she’d never had them before. A giant pot boiling on the stove and big piles of steam floating into the light over the fridge. He had put out candles.

She’d come up the walk at the end of the day and paused to read the
Closed
sign that hung on a string. She cupped her hands around her eyes and put her forehead to the screen and she saw him sitting behind the counter.

The sunlight was behind her and it shot through the screen door, under her arms and in her hair. She had on a skirt and the sun came through it and he saw the outline of her legs, which were long and shapely. She paused and read the sign and she came in anyway. The door slammed behind her and there was something familiar.

He knew this kind of girl, he’d grown up in the swamps, spent his life around alligators and tourists. He was prepared for a vast range of behaviour.

I keep my own company, he said. He shook the crawdads out into a bowl and put them down on the table.

His wife had left eight months after the accident. She had nursed him through the roughest part. He’d got an infection and it made him delirious and he became violent and babyish by turns for a week and his wife was told to prepare for the worst.

But on the seventh day the fever broke and he began to get better, although he never fully recovered.

His wife had said he wasn’t the man she’d married.

You’re not the same man, Loyola, she said.

She had heaved her suitcase into the back of her Chevy Impala, a car that had once been baby blue but had become so sun-faded it was almost colourless except for the rust, like scabs on the fenders.

The girl had her hands in the back pockets of her skirt and she was looking at the framed pictures on the wall. She was looking at the picture of him with his arm around President Bush, standing near the airboat. He had taken the president on a tour of the reserve and he liked the man and he found himself agreeing with his decisions in Iraq. Since the accident he sometimes had fits and they left him anxious and he had developed a second sight.

He had seen the girl coming down the path moments before she appeared. He had been totting up figures and he felt her presence and could even intuit the colour of her hair and that she wore a blouse of Indian cotton with two glass beads hanging on red threads near the neck.

Do you get lonely? the girl asked.

You’re full of questions, he said.

His wife’s car had been blotched with swampy shadow, the sun already warm. The slam of her door was a damp slam. The engine sounded phlegmy when she started it up, the back tires sent up a splash of mud and the car was stuck. Then she turned off the car and sat unmoving, looking out the side window, thinking hard.

She sat like that and the blue heron that lives in the swamp flew over her and it was bluer than usual, a feral blue, and even at a moment like that the beauty of the bird confused him, knocked him off-course.

His wife got out of the car and her heels sank in the mud, which was funny but also part of the reason she was leaving or the whole reason. Her heels sank in the mud and she just turned around and got back in the car and this time black smoke came from the spinning tires and you could smell the rubber but something caught and the car flew backwards and she drove off backwards the whole length of the driveway and then she jerked the car around and was gone.

Kindness is the last thing to leave, he said. He put the bowls of melted butter on the table and a pot of boiled potatoes. He had some asparagus that he almost forgot.

Just dip them there crawdads in that there butter, he said. I don’t touch them myself.

Kindness shakes hands with disappointment at the door and they squeeze past each other, he thought. But kindness goes out like a match. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

There was something about Colleen reminded him of his ex-wife. She reminded him of the Impala and his wife’s guitar and the oily black coffee beans she preferred. The girl looked lit-up the way his wife had looked lit-up.

You got an appetite, girl, he said. He had given up eating and was just watching her. She dipped the crawdads in the butter and sucked the meat out and tossed the shells. She had butter on her chin and a thumbprint of butter on her cheek that showed up in the candlelight when she bent forward for her beer. He didn’t know if she was old enough to drink and he didn’t care.

This is the way it was with his wife: she was always funny and sexual. She was always in those jeans and she could cook and he liked to watch her shop. She haggled: bruised bananas, a dented toaster, she could work shopkeepers down and they ended up feeling flattered by the attention.

Sometimes when he was in the swamp collecting eggs she would spend the afternoon practising the guitar. She had taught herself classical, though what she sang in the bars was the raunchy twang of her childhood. By the time the stars were out he would come upon the trailer and the music would be dark and rolling and when he got inside she was distracted and hardly herself and he liked her that way.

I saw your wedding picture, Colleen said. He had forgotten about the wedding picture. He hadn’t looked at it in months, years, maybe. They’d been married by a cross-dressing Queen Elizabeth impersonator in Las Vegas and he felt that might have cursed them. They’d been brash and inattentive to the mystical in the occasion, he felt.

He wished he could be that way again.

His wife had told Queen Elizabeth she revered her new husband, and the word struck him as biblical.

He had begun putting his head between the jaws of alligators when he was eighteen. He knew the animals. He knew exactly how slow and fast they were. He knew how cold they were, and what their breath smelled like.

Queen Elizabeth had touched them both on their shoulders with her sceptre and tossed confetti. They weren’t thinking permanence because they were too young to imagine it.

They were thinking it but they had no idea what it meant.

What it meant was the trailer he had on the edge of the swamp and the house he’d built by hand and 112 alligators and the guy he kept on for the tours, the skins they sold and the freezer full of meat.

It had eventually meant he had nearly been mangled to death by one of the animals. He shot it afterwards, when he got out of the hospital, and had it skinned and hung the skin over the fireplace and his wife continued to sing in bars.

The girl got up from the table and he asked her to come closer and he wiped the butter off her cheek with his napkin.

He had touched her without a thought and their eyes met and he pushed back his chair with embarrassment, which he tried to cover up by taking his plate to the sink but the incident shook him a little and he smashed a glass and she got the broom, all of a sudden full of industry and questions about the housekeeping.

We were just kids, he said, because he saw the girl was standing in front of the wedding picture again. She was rubbing it gently with the cuff of her shirt.

She had the Impala and she began to get a following in the bars. She was writing her own material and people took notice.

He should have known that marriage vows were sacred and should have stayed away from the Queen Elizabeth impersonator.

He should have known the event required decorum. If he had respected the inherent power of the ritual it might have stuck.

They were just nineteen and eighteen, not even pregnant.

But maybe even the guy with the Queen Elizabeth dress and the crown and the giant corseted gut could not sully the event of their marriage.

Maybe it hadn’t been sullied at all. Perhaps they had been at their purest then. They were too young for sacred.

He saw in this girl, Colleen, a similar kind of sadness; the same dark thing his wife had.

Do you always wear your cowboy hat at the table? she said. She had taken a swig of her beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He removed the hat and laid it on the table between them.

It was as though all the ugliness in the world affected these women, he thought. They had no way to turn it off. They felt everything. They wanted to save everything. That was it; they wanted to save everything.