Alligator - Lisa Moore [104]
And then he had me in the boat. He reached over the side and hauled me up, which, how he lifted me I don’t know. I lost a shoe and he was screaming how stupid I was how crazy and stupid and he stopped shouting and he got me a blanket and he was crying with his face all screwed up with rage, tears rolling down his cheeks, and then he just stood over me patting the blanket and he stared for thirty seconds or so and I said his name and he didn’t hear me and then he started shouting at me again. How stupid I was.
I said but there weren’t any alligators around. There weren’t any around, I screamed back at him and I was crying too, and when I said that there weren’t any alligators, there was a whack against the side of the boat.
The aluminum rang out like a gong and the suffocating humidity of the swamp held the reverberations of the aluminum and made the echo last and last.
Get off my farm, Loyola shouted. I said I would. He said, Get off my farm. I promised I would. You get, he said. I said, I promise. I want you out of here so fast, he said. He had flung an arm out, rigid, his sleeve was soaking, and a finger pointing back over the swamp in the direction of the farm, but I couldn’t see anything except trees and moss green water and algae. I want it to be I never laid eyes on you, he said. I said I was going. Don’t worry I was going. And I said I was sorry, I was sorry, I was sorry. But he sat down and he turned his back on me and he wouldn’t start up the boat for a long time.
FRANK
THE DOOR OF the room he was in crashed open and there was Valentin.
Where am I? he said. Valentin hauled him out of the bunk and punched Frank in the face and Frank felt his jaw break. He heard the bones break and it was a sound inside his head. He tried to move his teeth so the bottom ones were under the top ones and they would not go that way. It felt like a pedantic thing to insist upon, that the teeth align, under the circumstances. He was aware that he was having a small, private moment with his teeth in the middle of a larger argument, which was he’d probably end up dead.
That’s so you don’t open your mouth, Valentin said. Something was catching in Frank’s throat and he coughed it up and it was a tooth. Then Valentin punched him in the gut and Frank fell against the wall and Valentin kicked his head and Frank lost consciousness.
Frank came to hours later and focused on the cot he had been hauled out of. He thought he could drag himself up to the cot and he managed to grab the blankets and he pulled with all his might but the blankets and the pillow came down on top of him. He decided that would have to do because he could not move.
He lay there and listened and wished he could fall asleep or die and then he heard something and it sounded like a rat moving over the wooden shelf above his head. He heard the clatter of tiny claws and then stillness, then the clatter of tiny claws again and it sounded as if a rat was pondering which direction to take, where it might find food next, which was not possible, Frank decided. He decided it was not possible that there was a rat in the room and he fell asleep.
CAROL
SHE TIDIED UP her room for the police officers and made a pot of tea but they came with Tim Hortons coffees. One of the officers had been to the house before, when the Inuit boy committed suicide, and Carol mentioned that she remembered him and that they’d done a fine job that time and that the incident was a tragedy and she hadn’t felt right about the bed-sit ever since it happened.
She patted the couch, which had a crocheted throw of orange and lime green Phentex yarn that she’d made herself, and one of the officers sat down and she said about Frank’s hot-dog stand.
That boy was like clockwork, she said. Something awful has happened to him, I just know it.
If the