Alligator - Lisa Moore [89]
She picked up the portable phone and gave it a little shake. She put it back down on the napkin and ate the fillet of fish in three fast mouthfuls, hardly chewing.
LOYOLA
YOU LIVE HERE by yourself ? Colleen asked. He was cooking crawdads for her because she’d never had them before. A giant pot boiling on the stove and big piles of steam floating into the light over the fridge. He had put out candles.
She’d come up the walk at the end of the day and paused to read the Closed sign that hung on a string. She cupped her hands around her eyes and put her forehead to the screen and she saw him sitting behind the counter.
The sunlight was behind her and it shot through the screen door, under her arms and in her hair. She had on a skirt and the sun came through it and he saw the outline of her legs, which were long and shapely. She paused and read the sign and she came in anyway. The door slammed behind her and there was something familiar.
He knew this kind of girl, he’d grown up in the swamps, spent his life around alligators and tourists. He was prepared for a vast range of behaviour.
I keep my own company, he said. He shook the crawdads out into a bowl and put them down on the table.
His wife had left eight months after the accident. She had nursed him through the roughest part. He’d got an infection and it made him delirious and he became violent and babyish by turns for a week and his wife was told to prepare for the worst.
But on the seventh day the fever broke and he began to get better, although he never fully recovered.
His wife had said he wasn’t the man she’d married.
You’re not the same man, Loyola, she said.
She had heaved her suitcase into the back of her Chevy Impala, a car that had once been baby blue but had become so sun-faded it was almost colourless except for the rust, like scabs on the fenders.
The girl had her hands in the back pockets of her skirt and she was looking at the framed pictures on the wall. She was looking at the picture of him with his arm around President Bush, standing near the airboat. He had taken the president on a tour of the reserve and he liked the man and he found himself agreeing with his decisions in Iraq. Since the accident he sometimes had fits and they left him anxious and he had developed a second sight.
He had seen the girl coming down the path moments before she appeared. He had been totting up figures and he felt her presence and could even intuit the colour of her hair and that she wore a blouse of Indian cotton with two glass beads hanging on red threads near the neck.
Do you get lonely? the girl asked.
You’re full of questions, he said.
His wife’s car had been blotched with swampy shadow, the sun already warm. The slam of her door was a damp slam. The engine sounded phlegmy when she started it up, the back tires sent up a splash of mud and the car was stuck. Then she turned off the car and sat unmoving, looking out the side window, thinking hard.
She sat like that and the blue heron that lives in the swamp flew over her and it was bluer than usual, a feral blue, and even at a moment like that the beauty of the bird confused him, knocked him off-course.
His wife got out of the car and her heels sank in the mud, which was funny but also part of the reason she was leaving or the whole reason. Her heels sank in the mud and she just turned around