Stories (2011) (25 page)

"He caught on fire," Jake offered suddenly,
"and we tried to put his head out, and he got hit by a truck, knocked in
the river, and the gator got him . . . We seen him twitch a little a while back
. . . The fella, Buddy, not the gator, I mean."

"Them's nerves," the black man said. "You
better dig a hole for this man-jack, skin that ole gator out and sell his hide.
They bring a right smart price sometimes. You could probably get something for
them shoes too, ifn they clean up good."

"We need you to help us load him up into your pickup
and take him home," Jake said.

"You ain't putting that motherfucker in my
pickup;" the black man said. "I don't want no doings with you honkey
motherfuckers. They'll be claiming I sicked that gator on him."

"That's silly," Wilson said. "You're acting
like a fool."

"Uh-huh," said the black man, "and I'm gonna
go on acting like one here in my house."

He went briskly up the porch steps, closed the door and
turned out the light. A latch was thrown.

Wilson began to yell. He used the word nigger indiscriminately.
He ran up on the porch and pounded on the door. He cussed a lot.

Doors of houses down the way opened up and people moved onto
their front porches like shadows, looked at where the noise was coming from.

Jake, standing there in the yard with his fence post, looked
like a man with a gun. The gator and Buddy could have been the body of their
neighbor. The shadows watched Jake and listened to Wilson yell a moment, then
went back inside.

"Goddamn you," Wilson yelled. "Come on out of
there so I can whip your ass, you hear me? I'll whip your black ass."

"You come on in here, cocksucker," came the black
man's voice from the other side of the door. "Come on in, you think you
can. You do, you'll be trying to shit you some twelve gauge shot, that's what
you'll be trying to do."

At mention of the twelve gauge, Wilson felt a certain calm
descend on him. He began to acquire perspective. "We're leaving," he
said to the door. "Right now." He backed off the porch. He spoke
softly so only Jake could hear: "Boogie motherfucker."

"What we gonna do now?" Jake said. He sounded
tired. All the juice had gone out of him.

"I reckon," Wilson said, "we got to get Buddy
and the gator on over to his house."

"I don't think we can carry him that far," Jake
said. "My back is hurting already."

Wilson looked at the junk beside the house. "Wait a
minute." He went over to the junk pile and got three shop creepers out
from under the tarp and found some hanks of rope. He used the rope to tie the
creepers together, end to end. When he looked up, Jake was standing beside him,
still holding the fence post. "You go on and stay by Buddy," Wilson
said. "Turn your back too long, them niggers will be all over them
shoes."

Jake went back to his former position.

Wilson collected several short pieces of rope and a twist of
wire and tied them together and hooked the results to one of the creepers and
used it as a handle. He pulled his contraption around front by Buddy and the
gator. "Help me put 'em on there," he said.

They lifted the gator onto the creepers. He fit with only
his tail overlapping. Buddy hung to the side, off the creepers, causing them to
tilt.

"That won't work," Jake said.

"Well, here now," Wilson said, and he got Buddy by
the legs and turned him. The head and neck were real flexible, like they were
made of chewing gum. He was able to lay Buddy straight out in front of the
gator. "Now we can pull the gator down a bit, drag all of its tail. That
way we got 'em both on there."

When they got the gator and Buddy arranged, Wilson doubled
the rope and began pulling. At first it was slow going, but after a moment they
got out in the road and the creepers gained momentum and squeaked right along.
Jake used his fence post to punch at the edges of the creepers when they swung
out of line.

An ancient, one-eyed Cocker Spaniel with a foot missing came
out and sat at the edge of the road and watched them pass. He barked once when
the alligator's tail dragged by in the dirt behind the creepers, then he went
and got under a porch.

They squeaked on until they passed the house where Sally
lived. They stopped across from it for a breather and to listen. They didn't
hear anyone screaming and they didn't hear any beatings going on.

They started up again, kept at it until they came to Buddy's
street. It was deadly quiet, and the moon had been lost behind a cloud and
everything was dark.

At Buddy's house, the silver light of the TV strobed behind
the living room curtains. Wilson and Jake stopped on the far side of the street
and squatted beside the creepers and considered their situation.

Wilson got in Buddy's back pocket and pulled the smokes out
and found that though the package was damp from the water, a couple of
cigarettes were dry enough to smoke. He gave one to Jake and took the other for
himself. He got a match from Buddy's shirt pocket and struck it on a creeper,
but it was too damp to light.

"Here," Jake said, and produced a lighter. "I
stole this from my old man in case I ever got any cigarettes. It works most of
the time." Jake clicked it repeatedly and finally it sparked well enough
to light. They lit up.

"We knock on the door, his mom is gonna be mad,"
Jake said. "Us bringing home Buddy and an alligator, and Buddy wearing
them shoes."

"Yeah," Wilson said. "You know, she don't
know he went off with us. We could put him in the yard. Maybe she'll think the
gator attacked him there."

"What for," Jake said, "them shoes? He
recognized his aunt or something?" He began laughing at his own joke, but
if Wilson got it he didn't give a sign. He seemed to be thinking. Jake quit
laughing, scratched his head and looked off down the street. He tried to smoke
his cigarette in a manful manner.

"Gators come up in yards and eat dogs now and
then," Wilson said after a long silence. "We could leave him, and if
his Mama don't believe a gator jumped him, that'll be all right. The figuring
of it will be a town mystery. Nobody would ever know what happened. Those
niggers won't be talking. And if they do, they don't know us from anybody else
anyway. We all look alike to them."

"I was Buddy," Jake said, "that's the way I'd
want it if I had a couple friends involved."

"Yeah, well," Wilson said, "I don't know I
really liked him so much."

Jake thought about that. "He was all right. I bet he
wasn't going to get that Chevy though."

"If he did," Wilson said, "there wouldn't
have been no motor in it, I can promise you that. And I bet he never got any
pussy neither."

They pulled the creepers across the road and tipped gator
and Buddy onto the ground in front of the porch steps.

"That'll have to do," Wilson whispered.

Wilson crept up on the porch and over to the window, looked
through a crack in the curtain and into the living room. Buddy's sister lay on
the couch asleep, her mouth open, her huge belly bobbing up and down as she
breathed. A half-destroyed bag of Cheetos lay beside the couch. The TV light
flickered over her like saintly fire.

Jake came up on the porch and took a look.

"Maybe if she lost some pounds and fixed her hair
different," he said.

"Maybe if she was somebody else," Wilson said.

They sat on the porch steps in the dark and finished smoking
their cigarettes, watching the faint glow of the television through the
curtain, listening to the tinny sound of a late night talk show.

When Jake finished his smoke, he pulled the alligator shoes
off Buddy and checked them against the soles of his own shoes. "I think
these dudes will fit me. We can't leave 'em on him. His Mama sees them, she
might not consent to bury him."

He and Wilson left out of there then, pulling the creepers after
them.

Not far down the road, they pushed the creepers off in a
ditch and continued, Jake carrying the shoes under his arm. "These are all
right," he said. "I might can get some pussy wearing these kind of
shoes. My Mama don't care if I wear things like this."

"Hell, she don't care if you cut your head off,"
Wilson said.

"That's the way I see it," Jake said.

When Ellen came to the moonlit mountain curve, her thoughts,
which had been adrift with her problems, grounded, and she was suddenly aware
that she was driving much too fast. The sign said
CURVE: 30 MPH
, and she
was doing fifty.

She knew too that slamming on the brakes was the wrong move,
so she optioned to keep her speed and fight the curve and make it, and she
thought she could.

The moonlight was strong, so visibility was high, and she
knew her Chevy was in good shape, easy to handle, and she was a good driver.

But as she negotiated the curve a blue Buick seemed to grow
out of the ground in front of her. It was parked on the shoulder of the road,
at the peak of the curve, its nose sticking out a foot too far, its rear end
against the moon-wet, silver railing that separated the curve from a
mountainous plunge.

Had she been going an appropriate speed, missing the Buick
wouldn't have been a problem, but at her speed she was swinging too far right,
directly in line with it, and was forced, after all, to use her brakes. When
she did, the back wheels slid and the brakes groaned and the front of the Chevy
hit the Buick, and there was a sound like an explosion and then for a dizzy
instant she felt as if she were in the tumblers of a dryer.

Through the windshield came: Moonlight. Blackness. Moonlight.

One high bounce and a tight roll, and the Chevy came to rest
upright with the engine dead, the right side flush against the railing. Another
inch of jump or greater impact against the rail, and the Chevy would have gone
over.

Ellen felt a sharp pain in her leg and reached down to
discover that during the tumble she had banged it against something, probably
the gear shift, and had ripped her stocking and her flesh. Blood was trickling
into her shoe. Probing her leg cautiously with the tips of her fingers, she
determined the wound wasn't bad and that all other body parts were operative.

She unfastened her seat belt, and as a matter of habit,
located her purse and slipped its strap over her shoulder. She got out of the
Chevy feeling wobbly, eased around front of it and saw the hood and bumper and
roof were crumpled. A wisp of radiator steam hissed from beneath the wadded
hood, rose into the moonlight and dissolved.

She turned her attentions to the Buick. Its tail end was now
turned to her, and as she edged alongside it, she saw the front left side had
been badly damaged. Fearful of what she might see, she glanced inside.

The moonlight shone through the rear windshield bright as a
spotlight and revealed no one, but the back seat was slick with something dark and
wet and there was plenty of it. A foul scent seeped out of a partially rolled
down back window. It was a hot coppery smell that gnawed at her nostrils and
ached her stomach.

God, someone had been hurt. Maybe thrown free of the car, or
perhaps they had gotten out and crawled off. But when? She and the Chevy had
been airborne for only a moment, and she had gotten out of the vehicle instants
after it ceased to roll. Surely she would have seen someone get out of the
Buick, and if they had been thrown free by the collision, wouldn't at least one
of the Buick's doors be open? If it had whipped back and closed, it seemed
unlikely that it would be locked, and all the doors of the Buick were locked,
and all the glass was intact, and only on her side was it rolled down, and only
a crack. Enough for the smell of the blood to escape, not enough for a person
to slip through unless they were thin and flexible as a feather.

On the other side of the Buick, on the ground, between the
back door and the railing, there were drag marks and a thick swath of blood,
and another swath on the top of the railing; it glowed there in the moonlight
as if it were molasses laced with radioactivity.

Ellen moved cautiously to the railing and peered over.

No one lay mangled and bleeding and oozing their guts. The
ground was not as precarious there as she expected it. It was pebbly and sloped
out gradually and there was a trail going down it. The trail twisted slightly
and as it deepened the foliage grew denser on either side of it. Finally it
curlicued its way into the dark thicket of a forest below, and from the forest,
hot on the wind, came the strong turpentine tang of pines and something less
fresh and not as easily identifiable.

Now she saw someone moving down there, floating up from the
forest like an apparition; a white face split by silver -- braces, perhaps. She
could tell from the way this someone moved that it was a man. She watched as he
climbed the trail and came within examination range. He seemed to be surveying
her as carefully as she was surveying him.

Could this be the driver of the Buick?

As he came nearer Ellen discovered she could not identify
the expression he wore. It was neither joy or anger or fear or exhaustion or
pain. It was somehow all and none of these.

When he was ten feet away, still looking up, that same odd
expression on his face, she could hear him breathing. He was breathing with
exertion, but not to the extent she thought him tired or injured. It was the
sound of someone who had been about busy work.

She yelled down, "Are you injured?"

He turned his head quizzically, like a dog trying to make
sense of a command, and it occurred to Ellen that he might be knocked about in
the head enough to be disoriented.

"I'm the one who ran into your car," she said.
"Are you all right?"