Lizard World (4 page)

  
   
“Well, the brain’s been broke real good,” said Lemuel Lee, musing aloud. “But the chassis ain’t none too bad. Maybe she could be rewired.”

The
modern town of Sagawummy, built on the site of an old Motochichi Indian settlement and conveniently located just thirteen miles off of Alligator Alley, was graced with a full complement of up-to-date conveniences -- including a Jiffy Lube, a Pizza Hut, a Radio Shack and a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was also the world headquarters of Lizard World Incorporated. Lemuel Lee’s Uncle Earl owned Lizard World, the Flying Star gas station and the Beautyrest Motel where Lemuel Lee and everyone else went to get laid. Uncle Earl had the reputation of being a genius, since there wasn’t just about anything that he couldn’t fix. Although he was the richest man in town and had, at his own expense, once manufactured a genuine LP phonograph record entitled “Earl Frobey’s Greatest Hits,” he had lived in a state of perpetual depression and envy ever since his signed contract for a joint appearance on Ed Sullivan had vanished with the Big Bopper in the tragic mid-winter plane crash of 1959.

      
As Lemuel Lee walked into the office of the Flying Star gas station later that afternoon, Uncle Earl was sitting with his legs up on the desk, sighing and scratching his balls.

      
“Howdy,” said Lemuel Lee.

      
“Don’t howdy me you little sonuvabitch. I have a mind to kick my foot clear up your ass. Vergil told me all about it. You let our Komodo get kilt, didn’t ya?”

      
“She ain’t kilt, Uncle Earl. She’s broke real bad, but she ain’t kilt. I was thinkin’ maybe you could fix her.”

      
Uncle Earl scrunched up his eyes and chewed his gum in silence while Lemuel Lee took the opportunity to study Miss April, whose naked torso graced the calendar above his Uncle’s swivel chair.

      
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Uncle Earl at last. “It ain’t as simple as puttin’ a Buick engine in a Caddy.”

      
But later that afternoon they were back at the park, walking beneath the palm trees on the blacktop path leading past the snake house and the Garden of Eden to the huge, algal, blue-painted concrete pool where half a dozen alligators and four crocodiles dozed in the glare of the Florida sun. Lemuel Lee, tying a slipknot on his lasso, suddenly dropped the rope and pointed at Caesar -- the hundred-and-fifty-year-old half-ton bull alligator lying half-submerged with its snout up on the narrow beach of white sand.

      
“How the hell!” said Lemuel Lee, noticing Caesar’s missing eye and suddenly remembering the huge eyeball that Vergil had retrieved that morning from the drainpipe.

      
“If Ed Sullivan had given me a little bitty chance, “ said Uncle Earl, “I wouldn’t be having these problems. These fuckin’ gators -- worse than lawyers.”

      
“Hey there, Caesar,” said Lemuel Lee, now poking the old alligator with a bamboo pole, “which one a yer wives you been fightin’ with?”

      
Four of Caesar’s five alligator wives were, except for their snouts which protruded slightly above the surface of the water, entirely submerged in the turbid depths of the palm-fringed lagoon. Only one of the females was partly on dry land, lying snout to snout next to old Caesar in the shadow of the bullrushes that Uncle Earl had planted to embellish the park’s Biblical theme.

      
“That one’ll do just fine,” said Uncle Earl and before long Lemuel Lee had put the lasso around her neck, muzzled her and wrestled her into the wheelbarrow.

      
On the way back to the surgery Uncle Earl poked a hypodermic needle full of sedative into the gator’s neck and by the time they’d lifted her out of the wheelbarrow and onto one of the shiny aluminum operating tables, the large crocodilian was as dizzy as a drunk.

      
“Just leave her be,” said Uncle Earl. “She ain’t goin’ nowhere. Where you say the Komodo’s at?”

      
“Back in the Dragon’s Den, Uncle Earl.”

      
“Well, I’m gonna go give her a needle. Fifteen minutes, she’ll be drunk as a Swede. What about you, boy? You gonna stand there all day with your hands in your pockets? Go feed the python or somethin’.”

      
Sometimes Lemuel Lee had the feeling that his Uncle Earl didn’t take him seriously enough. Here he was, twenty-nine years old already, with a high school degree and a correspondence school certificate in TV repair and his Uncle Earl still treated him as if he didn’t have an ounce of sense. Some day, thought Lemuel Lee as he walked morosely toward the Snake house and then into the little door in the back marked “Personnel Only,” he’d leave Lizard World for good and become famous -- though he still couldn’t decide whether he was gonna be a TV star or have his horror books for sale in the drugstore.

      
Lemuel Lee knelt down, reached into the cardboard box beneath the sink, and by the nape of its neck pulled out a wriggling brown bunny. “Howdy little fella,” he said and walked across the room to the glass enclosure where Beelzebub, the twenty-five foot python, was coiled as inertly as a garden hose. As he dropped the bunny in the snakepit, he thought of all the thankless times he’d shoveled out the gator pens and conducted three shows a day at the Snake house. Some day he’d show Uncle Earl and then he’d be sorry. These were the sad thoughts Lemuel Lee was having as he watched the bunny hippety-hop ever closer to the drowsy python.

Back
at the surgery, the alligator and Komodo Monitor lay on adjacent operating tables while Uncle Earl stood nearby in his green mask and gown. Beside him, on a small table, his scalpels lay neatly lined up on a white cloth.

      
“You feed the python?”

      
“Yep,” grumbled Lemuel Lee.

      
“Cleverest of all the beasts of the field,” said Uncle Earl, who was always quoting Scripture.

Chapter III.

 
 
In which the dragon lives again.

As Uncle
Earl made his first incision between the eyeballs of the Komodo monitor, his memory drifted back to the hot August day in 1918 when he’d watched his daddy perform a similar operation involving a cottonmouth snake and a gila monster. It must have been a hundred degrees in the shade that day -- and the fact that he was watching his daddy perform surgery in a closed-up tent filled with elephant shit didn’t make things one whit better. Ever since that distant day, which was the day of his father’s great discovery, Uncle Earl had known that he, too, was favored with the gift.

      
Pushing down hard on the scalpel so it would cut through two inches of muscle, Uncle Earl finished the first cut at the left eyeball and then began a second cut at a right angle to the first. He knew that once he had a good flap, he could pull it back to the skull and get down to the real work.

      
“Gimme that small scalpel, willya boy?”

      
“Ain’t you gonna cut the gator, too?” said Lemuel Lee.

      
“Jes’ shut up and gimme the scalpel.”

      
That day in 1918 had been a breakthrough in medical history. Only a genius could have pulled off that kind of thing. No one except his daddy had been able to do it, which is why they’d laughed at him and called him a goddamn liar. No matter what everyone had said, Uncle Earl had seen it with his own eyes and remembered that Webbs’ Wonder of the World had lived a full three months, long enough to get them through until Fat Flora was signed up as a good replacement.

      
Uncle Earl’s daddy, Big Jake Frobey, had travelled as a veterinarian with the Webb Brothers’ Bigtop Circus. Not being a very big circus, Webb Brothers mostly set up at county fairs, where they offered lions, tigers, acrobats, freaks of nature and whores. When Uncle Earl’s father wasn’t delivering elephant babies or getting stinking drunk, he was usually hanging out with the freaks of nature, with whom he felt a special kinship. The fabulous Tucci Brothers, those poor twins attached at the trunk and sharing the same rectum, were Jake’s closest personal friends.
           
So when they died in the flu epidemic of 1918, Big Jake suffered a great personal loss. Uncle Earl remembered very well how his father had moped about for weeks, barely ever sleeping, nearly drinking himself to death. The strange thing was that Big Jake’s misfortune had also proved a blessing. Pushed into coming up with a new act, he’d been given an opportunity to discover the extraordinary talent that, until then, he simply hadn’t known he possessed. Many great inventions are born of necessity and Big Jake’s great discovery after the death of the Tucci Brothers was no exception.

      
Uncle Earl’s earliest memories were of his father’s animal experiments in the small, smelly veterinary tent pitched near the big top. Most of those experiments were dismal failures, of course, but that operation in 1918 had been one of those rare occasions when genius is allowed free access into nature’s forbidden temple.

Chapter IV.

In which the Dentist prepares for an extraction.

It must
have been the throbbing of his tooth which broke his dream -- but as soon as Smedlow opened his eyes to the blindfold, awoke to the recognition that his hands were bound behind him, his chest confined by ropes and his feet tied to the chair, the mere agony of his mouth was nothing compared to this perfect claustrophobia. He tried to scream at first -- but then started to gag on the stuffing in his mouth and could only manage a few inarticulate moans. Since he couldn’t draw air in through his mouth, he was forced to rely on his stuffed nose -- and could hardly move his chest to breathe. He was certain he’d go crazy. But now as he was managing to calm himself down, to get enough air and listen intently, there was only that occasional rustling sound and a lungful of nauseating odor.

      
Through his socks he could feel that the floor was cold like concrete but covered with something that crunched like hay. He felt certain that something was moving nearby. He stretched out his foot -- and encountered something pliant, moist, disturbingly warm. And what had happened to his shoes? He remembered, clearly enough, how he’d lost his way, crashed the car, hitched a ride in a truck with that hillbilly and that strange old bitch. But after that, he remembered . . . drowsiness, headache, nothing.

      
How many hours had he sat like this? By now his left nostril had closed completely and he could only bring air in through the right. His bladder was disturbingly full and it was only his regard for civilization that prevented him from wetting himself. It occurred to him that by now, back in New Jersey, the people at the nursing home would have discovered the theft and reported the missing map to the police.

      
Well Sir, at least they wouldn’t find him here. Through the blindfold, imperceptibly, the light began to grow and he was conscious, to his left, of the sound of a fly buzzing on a windowpane. At length a door creaked open. Nearby someone gathered phlegm and spat. Smedlow tried to scream through his gag, wildly tried to free his hands and feet from the ropes, but only managed to screech his chair sideways on the floor.

      
“You better cut that bellyachin, mister,” said a husky voice. “There ain’t nothin’ round to hear you ’cept mesqueeters, gators and a mess a coco palms.”

      
“Looks like our guest’s woke up with the sparrows,” said another voice.

      
Smedlow smelled strong body odor, felt the duct tape being ripped off of his mouth, the stuffing pulled out between his teeth. Gasping for air, he almost choked as the spoon came plunging in, depositing its load of nastiness. No sooner was the feeding done than the stuffing was thrust back, the duct tape reapplied.

      
“You got good kidneys, mister?” said the husky voice.