Alligator - Lisa Moore [90]
Kindness is the last thing to leave, he said. He put the bowls of melted butter on the table and a pot of boiled potatoes. He had some asparagus that he almost forgot.
Just dip them there crawdads in that there butter, he said. I don’t touch them myself.
Kindness shakes hands with disappointment at the door and they squeeze past each other, he thought. But kindness goes out like a match. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
There was something about Colleen reminded him of his ex-wife. She reminded him of the Impala and his wife’s guitar and the oily black coffee beans she preferred. The girl looked lit-up the way his wife had looked lit-up.
You got an appetite, girl, he said. He had given up eating and was just watching her. She dipped the crawdads in the butter and sucked the meat out and tossed the shells. She had butter on her chin and a thumbprint of butter on her cheek that showed up in the candlelight when she bent forward for her beer. He didn’t know if she was old enough to drink and he didn’t care.
This is the way it was with his wife: she was always funny and sexual. She was always in those jeans and she could cook and he liked to watch her shop. She haggled: bruised bananas, a dented toaster, she could work shopkeepers down and they ended up feeling flattered by the attention.
Sometimes when he was in the swamp collecting eggs she would spend the afternoon practising the guitar. She had taught herself classical, though what she sang in the bars was the raunchy twang of her childhood. By the time the stars were out he would come upon the trailer and the music would be dark and rolling and when he got inside she was distracted and hardly herself and he liked her that way.
I saw your wedding picture, Colleen said. He had forgotten about the wedding picture. He hadn’t looked at it in months, years, maybe. They’d been married by a cross-dressing Queen Elizabeth impersonator in Las Vegas and he felt that might have cursed them. They’d been brash and inattentive to the mystical in the occasion, he felt.
He wished he could be that way again.
His wife had told Queen Elizabeth she revered her new husband, and the word struck him as biblical.
He had begun putting his head between the jaws of alligators when he was eighteen. He knew the animals. He knew exactly how slow and fast they were. He knew how cold they were, and what their breath smelled like.
Queen Elizabeth had touched them both on their shoulders with her sceptre and tossed confetti. They weren’t thinking permanence because they were too young to imagine it.
They were thinking it but they had no idea what it meant.
What it meant was the trailer he had on the edge of the swamp and the house he’d built by hand and 112 alligators and the guy he kept on for the tours, the skins they sold and the freezer full of meat.
It had eventually meant he had nearly been mangled to death by one of the animals. He shot it afterwards, when he got out of the hospital, and had it skinned and hung the skin over the fireplace and his wife continued to sing in bars.
The girl got up from the table and he asked her to come closer and he wiped the butter off her cheek with his napkin.
He had touched her without a thought and their eyes met and he pushed back his chair with embarrassment, which he tried to cover up by taking his plate to the sink but the incident shook him a little and he smashed a glass and she got the broom, all of a sudden full of industry and questions about the housekeeping.
We were just kids, he said, because he saw the girl was standing in front of the wedding picture again. She was rubbing it gently with the cuff of her shirt.
She had the Impala and she began to get a following in the bars. She was writing her own material and people took notice.
He should have known that marriage vows were