Alligator - Lisa Moore [94]
I knelt down near the fence and looked into the eye of a giant alligator that was very near the fence. The alligator did not move and did not move. I saw myself kneeling in its eye and I was tiny and fragile-looking in a long velvet tunnel and I wasn’t ever coming back from there. Then the animal turned and waddled over the hard-packed, cracked mud and algae. Its tail swung with lazy muscular swishes. Then it sank into the water and glided out of sight. He told me to get my fingers off the fence.
FRANK
FOUR BOYS ON skateboards appeared to float momentarily on the crest of a hill on Gower Street and then gathered speed.
Their arms hung by their sides, they wore baggy jeans and bright polyester hockey shirts. They came down the hill accompanied by a growing rumble and just before they smacked into an oncoming refrigerated truck advertising meat, all four jumped and the skateboards leapt from beneath their feet into their hands and it was exactly as though they had never been on them.
They waited on the curb for a break in the traffic, then strolled across the street and one called after Frank. There were quick pulses of lightning followed by a distant crack.
On the other side of the street the boys dropped the skate-boards with a clatter and stepped onto them again. Their bodies dipped and rose three times as they kicked themselves up to speed, then they followed each other in lazy, swerving paths around the corner of Prescott Street and out of sight.
Kevin Nolan was leaning on a door frame sucking hard on a cigarette. Frank realized with a peculiar clarity, heightened, it seemed, by the smell of ozone, that he would ask Kevin for the money he needed and that Kevin would give it to him.
It meant he would have to endure Kevin’s company for perhaps an hour, then outright ask for the money, and it meant the end of the fragile, important friendship the two young men had nursed since they were five.
Come in and have a cup of tea, Frank, Kevin said.
There was a narrow hallway that led to a cramped kitchen smelling faintly of mould. Kevin took out a frying pan, looked at it closely, and then tapped it twice against the counter dislodging a shower of mouse shit onto a waiting piece of newspaper. He put the pan under a running faucet and wiped it carefully with the bottom of his T-shirt. He tipped it into the light until he was satisfied the pan was clean.
He waved the pan toward a kitchen chair and Frank sat down. There were several marijuana plants hanging from the ceiling in macramé holders, and more on a table by a window that looked out onto a small backyard. Kevin’s T-shirt had a picture of a skeleton holding a beer can in the bones of his hand.
I’m doing small machine repair up to the technical college, Kevin said. There’s nothing I don’t know about photocopiers.
It was Kevin who had got Frank the part-time job at the photocopy place.
He dumped a half-bag of frozen fries into a saucepan on the back burner. The saucepan roared up, spitting boiling fat.
Kevin took a step back and then reached over the stove holding his shirt close to his stomach to hit a button on the fan. He had the waxy complexion of an insomniac, an open cold sore on his upper lip, and the dark eye sockets of a heavy pot smoker.
A rapacious vitality kept some part of his body always tapping, he made weird noises, softly whispered expulsions of air that mimicked machine-gun bursts or the feedback of amplifiers, kapow kapow kapow kapow, yeah, uh huh, yeah, va-voom, all the while slapping his thigh with both hands and Frank felt sorry he had come inside.
Kevin was thoroughly unlovable with his Adam’s apple raw from a recent shave, the home-done tattoo of a skull peeking out from behind a torn heart, and, most painful to witness, his baldly searching look. He sold hash but was discreet with his money and might have become an IT specialist — he had a vicious intelligence and was intuitive with computers — except for bouts of depression that kept