Alligator - Lisa Moore [73]
He drove Isobel and the cat to Old Perlican, stopping at the beach for a soft-serve ice cream. He had reached over during the ride and put his hand on Isobel’s thigh and the cat hissed and pricked him with its claws and Isobel removed his hand. The idea of the fire had made her look less intense. He decided he liked her better this way, becalmed, pleasantly subdued. There had been too much pent up inside her to begin with. Whatever she was scared of, whatever she had wanted so much, all of that was over. She would just have to work the counter of a cosmetic boutique.
When they were driving past Northern Bay Sands she said she wanted to swim. She was tapping the window with her fingernail. He saw children with inflated air mattresses and towels and snorkels and he thought why not let her swim.
We can leave the cat, she said.
COLLEEN
WHEN I WAS a kid we went out in a glass-bottomed boat. This was a vacation in Barbados. My mother was wearing a white, semi-transparent blouse and orange bikini and a hat with a floppy brim. I was sitting with my feet on the warm glass and watching the fish flick past, orange and blue and red, transparent and silver. All these different kinds and coral and the sunlight refracted in the waves making lacy shadows on the white sandy bottom.
Mom was drinking from a coconut shell and she had already given me the little umbrella when something big and dark swam under us.
So dark and blurred it made me scream, but no one else had been looking down. I was the only one to have seen it. Back on the beach, in the brilliant sun, bartering for shell necklaces it was easy to believe I’d imagined it.
But the fish, I think it was a shark, has come back to me in dreams ever since. Not the glass-bottomed boat, or the way the sunlight pierced the weave of Mom’s hat, making white freckles of light all over her cheeks, or later that night sleeping between Mom and David. What I dream is falling over. Some part of me wants to fall over. In every dream I am about to fall over the side and be devoured by something.
When I asked Madeleine about the alligator footage she said the man had suffered brain damage. The teeth had punctured his skull in several places and infection set in. But he had recovered. Or pretty much recovered.
He runs an ecological reserve in Louisiana, Madeleine said. He farms alligators and puts them back in the wild.
MADELEINE
FORGET YOGA, SHE’S tried yoga. It feels like an iron clamp. Has she gone back to the doctor? She has not. Because (A) she has to finish this film and (B) she doesn’t want to go to the doctor because she made him sign the physical and (C) it doubles her over and (D) it’s indigestion.
You get an idea in your head. She wanted Newfoundland before Confederation because what kind of people were they? She remembers her mother’s housekeeper tearing the skin off rabbits in the kitchen sink.
She wanted an actress who could melt the emulsion, someone hard done by and fast. She wanted the horses from Austria.
For two weeks last winter she waited for the phone to ring about the bloody horses. She would glance at the phone and will it to ring. These Lipizzaners can bow down on one knee.
She had them come on a freighter as big as a stadium last winter and the freighter got stuck in the ice.
Things get stuck in the ice, she was told.
Men go over the sides of vessels on ropes with chainsaws tied to their backs. The ice lifts on giant swells; jagged tiles, weirdly green, lift on the crest of a wave and slide down the other side. Tropically