Lizard World (14 page)

      
“IS THERE A WAY OUT?” repeated Smedlow, but Darrell’s head was now cocked to one side, his ear pressed to the muzzle of the large rat sitting on his shoulder. A grin of concentrated depravity, such as one would expect from a creature drawing pictures in a public lavatory, slowly overtook his toothless mouth.

      
“M-mister Bob here,” he said at last, “he, he was tellin’ me that, well, he don’t mind, no he don’t mind at all if you was, well, you know . . . to take a feel a some a them frilly . . .
panties
. . . .
Some a them panties,
” he whispered, “
is real silky
.”

      
“A WAY OUT? IS THERE A WAY OUT?”

      
Apparently only now grasping the significance of the question, Darrell thrust out his hand -- and lowered his head as if avoiding a mortal blow. Terror cowered in his one blue eye.

      
“Oh -- oh, now mister, you, you don’t wanna . . . you don’t wanna . . . go . . . DOWN THERE!”

      
“Down
where
?” said Smedlow.

      
“Oh no, m-mister, no . . . no, the waterworks is a . . . is a . . .
real
BAD PLACE. Mosher Poe, Old Mosher, he’ll . . . No, you don’t wanna go . . . down THERE.”

Chapter II.

In which friendship is tested.

In the
cavernous chamber below them, barely visible above the surface of a stagnant canal, six filmy eyes floated in an algal scum. But upon the stone ramp leading upward to the landing from the water’s depths, another bloated alligator was fully visible -- except where a reptilian tail, wrinkled human back and mass of matted hair lay sprawled in sleep on top of it.

      
“The waterworks,” whispered Darrell, “is where old Mosher comes . . . a-courtin’ . . . to his womenfolk. Earl . . . he calls it . . . the bedroom of Leviathan.”

      
Hunks of rotting meat, among which Smedlow was not slow to recognize the jawbones and horns of a departed goat, littered the blood-smeared floor. Uncertain of their purpose, he pointed where nets and ropes and huge rusted pulleys hung from rusted hooks above the water’s edge.

      
“Oh, that there,” answered Darrell, tugging at his sleeve, “is
where they hauled in all the gators before they was milked . . . now . . .
now how’s about, you and me, we go back . . . to see about them . . .
panties
?”

      
“THE
    
WAY
    
OUT?” said Smedlow with exaggerated slowness as if he were speaking to an outright moron.

      
“Oh now, mister, you don’t wanna --”

      
“The way out?” persisted Smedlow.

      
“There,” said Darrell miserably, his black fingernail pointing to the far corner where green muck gurgled out beneath the teeth of an iron portcullis.

As
often happened to him in moments of unusual stress, Smedlow now became aware that his heart was pounding wildly, his underarms were flooding, and that he was beginning to gasp for breath -- all familiar elements of his body’s habitual betrayal. This was all the worse because the time for deliberate action was obviously at hand:
there was, after all, no way of knowing how long the creatures down below would stay harmlessly asleep.

      
Terrified of dislodging a rock or that the sudden gasping of asthmatic panic would wake the sleeping monsters on the floor below, he lowered himself down with cautious fingers, his socked toes feeling blindly for footholds between the rough-hewn boulders of the cellar wall.

  
   
Stepping down onto the cellar floor, his foot crunched something wet and vile. An inquisitive rat, pausing for a moment from his feast, squeaked at his arrrival. But otherwise silence reigned in the twilit chamber -- except, that is, for the open-mouthed snoring of the reptile-man.

      
That repulsive old monster lay sprawled upon his consort dead ahead, his human cheeks and eyelids blanketed by flies, his green-scaled tail traversing the rump of his reptilian cow, before dipping down into the green scum of the algal water. There, floating snouts and eyes crowded in the foreground, leaving the farthest reaches of the channel at least apparently free of menace. Still, the very idea of plunging into that water was enough to make him think of turning back. Otherwise, he would actually have to swim under that portcullis.

      
Almost by themselves, his feet began to walk forward. Unfortunately, nothing prepared him for the old gent’s indescribable odor, nor for the close-up look at the place where the unsavory whiteness of his tummy gave way to the reptilian scaling of prodigious green genitalia. In an agony of slow motion, trying not to gasp for breath, Smedlow tiptoed past among rats and rotting meat.

      
He had managed to walk maybe twenty yards beyond the sleeping creatures, almost to the dusky corner of the cellar where the portcullis hung by heavy chains and thick algae slurped out beneath its rusted teeth, when he heard something drop behind him. Of course he had never expected that Darrell would be stupid enough to follow him.

      
What he saw in that fateful split second was the fallen lantern, the waking creatures and Darrell beside them, his hand outstretched, his mouth contorted in a horrified plea for help:

      
“MISTER!”

      
Despite all his unhappy summers at Camp Tecumseh, Smedlow had never really learned to dive, a fact which was the source of annually renewed humiliation. Because a camper who could not dive was doomed to remain a Minnow and because every summer last year’s Minnows graduated into Trouts, in time he had become simply the largest, fattest Minnow in the pond -- subjected to the misery of jeers, belly-flopping, and water-up-the-nose which he tried in vain to alleviate by the false bravado of cannonballs. Therefore at this moment Smedlow didn’t dive.

  
   
He jumped.

Chapter III.

In which hope is born.

Already panicking
for breath, kicking wildly, holding his nose, he felt the sudden sickening fall, saw a glimpse of bloodshot
sky -- and then splashed down into the muck below. When at last he came up for air, the first thing he saw was a floating tire. The second thing he saw was a water-snake wending its way among floating Coke cans and green bubbles. The waterfall trickled from the prison above him, making more bubbles which drifted among the trunks of vine-choked
trees.

      
I’ll show those goddamn yokels, he thought. What pinheads, what idiots they were to mess with him! The euphoria of escape was only slightly diminished by the absence of dry ground, forcing him to wade out into the swamp despite the growing dark, the menace of mosquitoes and the constant threat of floating eyes. Birds hooted at him -- and a pallid moon peeped down through the leaves -- while he smacked at bugs and stumbled into deeper water.

      
Smedlow isn’t finished yet, he now told himself, resorting to the vocabulary of personal heroics (half propaganda, half pep rally) he often used when egging himself on to a particularly difficult task: you’ve just gotta outsmart the enemy, that’s all, never drop your guard. Warily he trudged on into the night, which the drifting of clouds across the moon made even darker, making it all the more difficult to watch for lurking eyes and snouts -- and to see which low-hanging boughs might offer him some refuge from attack. But so far he had only seen danger in the distance -- moonlit eyes glimmering in the mist -- and was beginning to feel confident that if he always waited for the moon to clear and always looked for trees he could climb, he could make sure the water ahead was safe before wading from one tree to the next.

      
“Www-wuff! Www-wuff!”

      
You gotta be kidding. A dog? A light (too bright and big to be a star) beamed through the mesh of distant boughs. Maybe some hick’s headlight -- or some kind of lousy little shack. His hopes suddenly soaring, Smedlow stopped wading, squinted, held his breath, and listened: splash, splash. And then he saw the two snouts swimming quickly toward him -- and the horror of reptilian eyes.

“Www-wuff!
Www-wuff!!” went Blitz again, knowing that that was what was expected of him and smelling something across the water which he knew, from experience, was human. The problem was that he also smelled the stink of gator, and it was this fact that now made Blitz whimper slightly, a high whinnying sound which he still couldn’t help himself from making, though he was careful quickly to amend by a bare-toothed, low-pitched “Gr-r-r-r-r.”

      
As the motor whirred and the foredeck jumped, the warm, moist wind brought Blitz another noseful of that scent -- tangy, salty, worthy of his drool. Blitz growled thoughtfully and sniffed again: oh yeah, that was a human smell, all right, a very scared, sweaty, human smell -- and though Blitz was smart enough not to mess with those particular humans who smacked his nose with a stick or kicked him in the belly with their boots when he’d done wrong (and who threw him a hunk of beef fat and patted his head when he’d done right), there was nothing in the world he liked better -- not even raising his leg against a barn door or sniffing at a fragrant tail -- than growling and biting at a human reeking with the smell of fear.

      
“You smell somethin’, don’t ya, fella?” said Lemuel Lee, turning the wheel hard to the right so they were heading toward the moonlit cove where Blitz’s nose was pointing -- and thinking that ole Blitz here was maybe, just maybe, the only real friend he had, seein’ as how everyone else didn’t do a goddamn thing but dump shit on him all day long. You’d think, wouldn’t ya, that after drivin’ three days straight to pick up that old English geezer -- just exactly like he’d been told -- that they’d maybe a given him one whole big hour so he could drink some brew and snooze awhile and watch TV, instead a orderin’ him out again lickety-split -- like it was really his fault that goddamn prisoner escaped. It wasn’t such a big damn rush to find him: there wasn’t no more than one way that was shallow and it wasn’t like he coulda gotten far. You’d think, instead a bustin’ his balls like that, they mighta cut him just a tiny bit a slack -- or maybe even actually
mighta
said “You done real good, Lem” for makin’ a round trip to the Big fuckin’ Apple and babysittin’ that snarlin’ old fart.” Now he wasn’t sayin’ that the geezer wasn’t havin’ his physical problems, like old folks do. And he wasn’t sayin’ that he wasn’t gonna do his bit to fix him up now that his parts was goin’ sour. But someone sure as hell coulda said thanks, cause babysittin’ the damn geezer (puttin’ up with his whinin’ and wipin’ up his goo) wasn’t exactly his idea a jolllies neither.

      
“Well, lookee here,” he said, the searchlight’s beam revealing, some fifty yards away, a prone plump figure on a bending bough -- above four eyes glimmering with primeval patience. Hot damn, he’d know that big keester anywhere!

      
“Gr-rrrrrr,” said Blitz, some dark recess of his mind remembering the day he was kicked like hell when he was just a little pup, when he he didn’t have his teeth and had to suck hind teat.

      
“Well, fella, looks like you an’ me is goin’ home to snooze,” said Lemuel Lee, throwing down his cigarette and pulling out the throttle, while Blitz hunched forward on the bouncing deck and exposed his yellow teeth. For though Blitz couldn’t make fancy talk and blow smoke like goddamn humans, it belonged to the economy of his sinews that there had to be some payback.