Alligator - Lisa Moore [103]
He had watched her walk down a dirt path with a ridge of shiny grass down the centre and the branches of the alder trees met over her head and the light through the trees was green and full of clouds of golden mosquitoes. Her dress was wet he could see the straps of her bra and underwear. He had seen the red dress waver and flush beneath the water. She had been swimming near the sandy bottom and she came up for breath and went down again.
FRANK
THERE IS A monstrous chasm between being alive and being dead, two very distinct states; and the trick is always to be alive.
He would remain alive until he saw Colleen again because he wanted his money back. He thought about having sex with her and he wanted that to happen again even though she had stolen his money and he made a ball of himself and he flung that ball at the window.
There are blisters all over his body and his face is raw and the blanket hurts him because the wool has rough fibres that rub against his burns, but he doesn’t stay conscious long. He is being rocked gently, and sometimes he knows it’s a ship but mostly he has no idea where he is. A naked light bulb swings gently above him. He loses consciousness and regains it and sometimes he sees the two Russians and he wants the girl back, whoever she was, he wants the girl.
COLLEEN
I AM WRAPPED in a blanket and the guy is shouting at me and I’m shivering all over and my teeth are chattering. The way it started was he cut the engine and let me listen to the sound of the males. There were several males and they were making a vibration in their throats like engines, like lust, a calling out to the females; it makes the hairs on your arms stand up, and the surface of the water vibrates. The water was like glass and then beads of water rose up, bounced up off the surface, just as if rain were falling down but the water was falling up. Little beads of water dancing all over the surface and a strange warbling noise like a metal filling when you touch it against tinfoil, like finger-nails on a chalkboard, like the pulley of a clothesline. This is how the males attract the females.
We saw a few slide off the banks and Loyola said about the scars some of the old ones have because they can scrap at this time of year fighting for the females. He cut the engine and the sun was coming up and we just floated a little after flying over the surface of the water in his airboat, hitting bumps of air and lifting and knocking spray all over the place and getting flicked with mud and water. We saw the blue heron he said has been in the swamp for years and it was standing on a stump that was sticking right out of the water, all the twisty branches of the trees and the hanging green moss were reflected in the muck green water and he said, Did you call your mother? and I didn’t answer him.
The heron flapped its big giant awkward wings and it flew up and became graceful. Then Loyola putt-putted over to a little island, a hill, big enough for one tree, in the middle of the swamp and he showed me the alligator nest, which was a pile of twigs and grass and a hole dug into the earth and he said about insulating the eggs and how many he might find there. He got down on his knees and he was knocking the twigs back, just to check.
He was out of the boat and he had a stick and the mother was gone off and I stepped out of the boat to get on the bit of ground where he was. I had one foot on the boat and one on shore and the boat eased away from me and I thought there was land under me but there wasn’t.
The water was deep and I screamed and I could feel weeds clinging to my jeans and he hauled the boat in and I tried to get onto the little island of mud he was on but the land kept giving way under me and he jumped into the boat and I saw an alligator slide off the shore.
I had not seen it before and then I saw it. I thought I saw it. A shape that sank almost below the surface,