Alligator - Lisa Moore [91]
He should have known the event required decorum. If he had respected the inherent power of the ritual it might have stuck.
They were just nineteen and eighteen, not even pregnant.
But maybe even the guy with the Queen Elizabeth dress and the crown and the giant corseted gut could not sully the event of their marriage.
Maybe it hadn’t been sullied at all. Perhaps they had been at their purest then. They were too young for sacred.
He saw in this girl, Colleen, a similar kind of sadness; the same dark thing his wife had.
Do you always wear your cowboy hat at the table? she said. She had taken a swig of her beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He removed the hat and laid it on the table between them.
It was as though all the ugliness in the world affected these women, he thought. They had no way to turn it off. They felt everything. They wanted to save everything. That was it; they wanted to save everything.
The alligator farm was dense with green light and the smell was virile, like sex itself, but he was alone. He had made a miscalculation with that alligator. Or maybe that one animal was a rogue, or it was as simple as the drop of sweat that had done him in.
Eight months in hospital and he was not the same afterwards.
There had been infection in the brain and he had trouble with simple things for a long while afterwards. He couldn’t tell the time. His vision was blurred. The fits started.
The sacred had busted out of them; it had a kind of deafness, it spilled in his inner ear and made the room tilt.
The sight of the Impala bouncing backwards over the rutted road: it could not be repeated, or contained, or understood. It was an altar and a wordless story because he’d never really spoken of it. He lost his purchase when his wife left.
He became sensitive about his appearance. And he forgot he had an appearance. The leather cowboy hat was an example. How he had come to a place in his life where he would wear such a thing was a mystery. The events that had led him into a souvenir shop in Mobile and drew him to the rack of hats were absolutely lost to him. But the crown had darkened with oil from his scalp and he was never without the hat. He remembered standing in a shopping mall confronted by a bin of white underwear and coming to understand the absurdity of the bin and the underwear and of being unattached.
He lifted weights in the evening listening to Bjork or Lucinda Williams or Thelonious Monk. He attended to the reservation and the alligators and the tourists.
What he did: he attached himself to an idea. The idea was to make money. He had no need for money other than the action of making it. There is in the making of money a propelling forward. Energy is exerted and boardrooms come into being. They form themselves seconds before you open the door and there they are when you open the door and if they are in Houston the walls are glass and there are seven or eight men in suits and a blast of sun that eradicates history.
Money moves by instinct, he’d found. It will lie still and then it will move. He found he could keep in his head the trajectories of futures as easily as he could make his breakfast in the morning.
His sister called from the hospital in Houston when she was delivering her second child, moaning through the call, telling him again and again how much it hurt and how much she loved him and would he come for a visit and he sat in the house by himself with the phone to his ear and tears streaming down his face and nodding his head silently. But he found he did not like to leave the reserve. He had the tourists to deal with and the alligators and premonitions about investments and that was enough.
His sister called one day to say she’d heard Meg, his ex-wife, was singing in Nashville. For several weeks he slept with a waitress who worked in a bar sixty miles away. But after a while he couldn’t bring himself to drive that far every weekend.
The girl who showed up was from Canada and she had hitchhiked from