Alligator - Lisa Moore [92]
Might as well let her sleep in the trailer, he thought. She was young and she reminded him of when he and Meg got married and he thought he might tell her about the Queen Elizabeth impersonator.
She wanted to see the reserve.
After supper, he kicked open the door of the trailer and light came through the lime green curtains that were sun-faded and she looked green in the light. He had an airboat and he said he would take her out in the morning when he had to collect eggs, before the regular tours started. Then, if she wouldn’t mind, he’d like to give her some money and get her on a plane and send her home.
It didn’t seem right to him, a girl her age, wandering around when her mother didn’t know where she was. He showed her the phone and he told her he would be much obliged if she’d call her mother that night and never mind about the charges.
He explained about the ecological reserve and how he was putting the babies back in the swamp.
She asked if they were dangerous and she immediately burned bright red because of his face.
He said he’d seen them swallow a few dogs, and an old woman in Florida with a lawn mower had been attacked. But people felt it was the lawn mower that agitated the gator and if she hadn’t gone near it with the noise the attack wouldn’t have happened.
He said, If you keep your head out of their jaws you do pretty well.
They like marshmallows, he said.
MADELEINE
WHEN SHE THINKS of her childhood home she thinks of Beverly playing piano for all she’s worth. Madeleine watching the snow through the window on the landing; she was almost a teenager. The window was beaded with water droplets, and beyond, lazy, fat snowflakes fell and lifted in the wind. A Sunday-evening dimness crept from all the corners of the house, mingling with the smell of boiling cabbage and the pies. Partridge berries. In the Sunday late afternoons of her childhood she liked to sit on the landing of the stairs and hear everyone moving through the house. She just sat on the worn Persian runner and listened to Beverly play.
Mrs. McCarthy, the housekeeper, had skinned the rabbits on the kitchen counter. Her knuckles whitening as she ripped the fur from flesh. The purplish flesh wrapped over tiny bones lined with skeins of yellow fat. Five rabbits in the sink, cold water splashing over them.
The cleaver came down and a paw fell off the cutting board. Madeleine put it in the pocket of her dress.
Mrs. McCarthy smoothed her chapped, red hands over her apron and lifted the kettle off the stove. A comb hung by a strand of wrinkled hair from her loose braid, her face was mottled.
That Sunday they’d gone to the Basilica for five o’clock mass, Father Dunphy raised the Eucharist. Something flew from one perch to another in the rafters. Christ’s red glass robes lit up with sunlight, the white of his downcast eye, his hand, the blood. The choir sang, Mrs. Hill’s high-pitched trill above everyone else. Mrs. Hill had arranged the turkey tea, two hundred paper plates with tiny pieces of fruit cocktail in green jelly and the beet-coloured scoops of potato, dry turkey, and a pearly grey slice of processed ham rolled around a raw carrot stick.
In the dark living room, Beverly digs notes out of the piano, playing it as hard as she can. The low notes send a vibration through the wooden spindles of the stair rail. A flood of light hits the glass, a passing car, and each drop gets full of burning white. The shimmer leaps from drop to drop. Beverly hits a discordant note but she recovers; she’s a skater racing across the pond and the tip of her skate hooks, her heart, her red mitts — what was it? Mozart? — but she regains her balance and she sails on, the last few notes like the sweep of the headlights illuminating all, catching, lastly, the cut-crystal decanter on the side table, busting it open