Alligator - Lisa Moore [0]
ALSO BY LISA MOORE
Degrees of Nakedness
Open
February
ALLIGATOR
LISA MOORE
A NOVEL
Copyright © 2005 Lisa Moore
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This edition published in 2009 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Ave., Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Moore, Lisa Lynne, 1964–
Alligator : a novel / Lisa Moore.
eISBN 978-0-88784-844-5
I. Title.
PS8576.O61444A64 2005 C813'.54 C2005-903742-3
Jacket design: Bill Douglas @ The Bang
Cover photograph: Getty Images/Geoff Du Feu
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund .
For Nan Love
COLLEEN
IT STARTS OFF there’s an alligator with its jaws open on a dirt road. The man’s back is bare and gleaming with sweat, and those trees they have, hanging with moss. The whole thing is overexposed. The sun is relentless. A crowd has gathered around the man and the alligator. There are kids in the front, a little girl with blond hair and a silver helium balloon tied to her wrist.
The balloon looks hot. For some reason the camera lingers on the balloon. Perhaps the cameraman has forgotten what he’s supposed to be doing. The balloon looks like a hole burned through the sky. There’s no wind, but the balloon jerks when the little girl shifts her weight. It jerks to the side and bobs and then settles, becomes still. There isn’t a cloud. The little girl’s blond hair is spread over her shoulders and bits of sunlight come through it and some of her hair is full of static and it stands up and the sun makes it buzz with light. The alligator footage was part of a training video about safety in nuclear power plants.
Some plant in Ontario.
My Aunt Madeleine made a lot of industrial training videos in the 1970s and 1980s. For a while safety videos were her bread and butter. She had a niche. I was watching Aunt Madeleine’s archival footage and came across a man who puts his head in an alligator’s mouth.
There’s something low-budget about the event. The man is strutting around, trying to rouse the crowd. He has a sheen and there are beads of sweat all over his back and he is trying to create anticipation. But he looks exhausted by the heat.
The alligator doesn’t move. It looks like a tree trunk in the middle of the road.
But it also looks untrustworthy. The way it stays still makes it look sly, though it may just be asleep. It’s probably asleep is what’s going on.
A shimmering curtain of heat rises from the dirt road and the man walks through it. This shimmer makes everything behind it look saturated with colour and blurred. The child with the balloon has a red dress that seems to lift and float over the person beside her, an elderly woman in a straw hat sitting in a lawn chair. Two walking canes rest against the woman’s knees. The aluminum frame of the chair looks like it would burn your skin.
Several people in the crowd are fanning themselves with pieces of paper that must be some sort of program.
The veil of heat is a warning, like what you might see in a crystal ball, of something bad.
Then there’s a cut.
I’ve also been downloading the beheadings off the Net. They are available. The wet concrete wall behind and a man in a black hood kneeling on a concrete floor next to what appears to be a drain, and a few people amble past the camera behind him, then