Alligator - Lisa Moore [3]
The camera keeps rolling because maybe the man, should he survive, will want to view the accident later.
Or maybe he will want it viewed by others.
There must be a school where they teach, don’t turn off the camera. Because the cameraman forgets to turn the camera off, though for long stretches the only thing in the frame is dirt.
For long stretches, it’s dirt and the toe of the cameraman’s boot. Veils of dirt float across the frame and a black boot scuffs in and out and there’s a jerk and the alligator and the man are back in the centre of things.
He is not dead, his legs are moving.
How long will it take?
And then there is a corridor. An empty corridor of white walls and tile and the colour bars.
Peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth. I rewind and watch and rewind and watch. I look for some reason to believe the man is still alive. If you watch for long enough you will see everything.
I watch until Madeleine comes home. She leans against the door frame with her arms folded under her chest. She tugs at her amber pendant, back and forth, on the chain. It’s the beginning of August and we’ve had weather in the high twenties for three weeks. Madeleine has a dewy look from the heat; she’s tanned and blousy and she’s getting ready to shoot the second half of a big feature film she’s working on.
He’s still alive, she says. He runs an alligator farm in Louisiana, an ecological reserve.
Loyola, she says.
She pushes herself off the door frame with one shoulder and goes into the kitchen and then I hear the frying pan. I hear cupboard doors and oil sizzling, glasses clinking. Madeleine will cook at midnight if she’s hungry.
She comes back out and stands and watches the footage with me.
Loyola somebody, she says. It’ll come to me. Nice guy.
She has a glass of vodka with ice and tonic and she works one toe behind the strap of her sandal and kicks it off. She hobbles over, still wearing one high heel, and drops into the leather couch and kicks off the other sandal too, and removes her rings. Big silver rings, with amber and turquoise, and they clink on the glass coffee table as she puts them down.
He lived through that, she says. Loyola Rosewood.
Madeleine’s entirely consumed with her new film. She acts like someone in a dream.
I rewind to the beginning. The man is strutting around the perimeter of the crowd again and his stomach is washboard ridges and his fists are by his hips and he has serious muscles. He has a proud, worn-out look. There is the silver balloon burning a hole in the sky, the kinetic halo of sunlight in the girl’s hair.
I had a thing with that guy, Madeleine says. An ice cube in her glass busts open.
The alligator guy?
We had a little thing.
FRANK
FRANK’S GOT THE windows open and the warm night breeze jostles the handful of forget-me-nots sitting in a Mason jar of yellowish water on the windowsill. A few petals move on the surface of the water like tiny boats on a still lake.The glass jar and the submerged flower stems are coated with silvery beads of air. There’s a housefly near the jar, bluish and iridescent, cocooned in a spider’s web and dust. The fly has been there, lying on the crackled paint of the windowsill, since Frank moved in a few months before Christmas, two days after his nineteenth birthday.
The breeze draws his door shut with a loud slam and he thinks about the girl, Colleen, sitting on a downtown doorstep eating a Popsicle. He’d seen her fling a handful of breadcrumbs from a paper bag, and the pigeons had dropped down from the trees and telephone wires. She was wearing a white undershirt and he could see one black shiny bra strap pressing into her tanned shoulder. Her bare arms were wrapped around her knees and the pigeons were strutting as close as they dared.
Frank had said about the weather, and she put her hand over her eyes to block the sun so she could see him, and the Popsicle stick wagged up and down