Alligator (2 page)

Orrin's laugh had a strange, almost strangled sound to it. "You know what kind of price a gator that size can bring?"

Orrin's hand found the rifle. Making as little movement as possible, he raised it to his shoulder.

Dinks couldn't move. He wanted to grab the rifle from Orrin's hands and throw it into the water. Finally he managed a whisper: "There ain't no amount of money worth that."

Orrin laughed again. "Now just pole us real slow and quiet toward him, or the first bullet will be for you."

Orrin slipped the safety and trained his .22 on Dinks. The click of Orrin's rifle unnerved Dinks even more than the strange black shadow did. He picked up the pole and began pushing the skiff forward. He could see the alligator lying just below the surface, a massive hunched figure pinned in the beam of light.

Orrin steadied himself against the side of the skiff. He was a good shot, and the target certainly was big enough. He took aim and squeezed off a bullet. He could hear it crack across the water like the Fourth of July. He pulled again.

Before the second shot was even off, a terrible shriek pierced the night. The water began to boil and heave violently. The enormous hulk of the alligator broke the surface; he seemed almost to stand on his tail. Then he crashed back under the surface and submerged, creaking like an old ship.

Orrin and Dinks remained where they were, stunned. Finally Orrin picked up the flashlight and began searching the water for the alligator. He was sure he'd gotten him, so all that was left was the skinning. It wasn't going to be easy, he thought. An alligator that big would have a hide like steel.

Orrin played the light across the water, surprised at the calmness where just moments before there had been such churning. He couldn't find a trace of blood.

As the seconds passed, Orrin grew frantic. Everything was silent. It was as if the alligator had never been there at all.

"He's gone!" Orrin screamed. "The son of a bitch is gone!"

"Maybe we're lucky he is," answered Dinks. He let the breath out of his lungs and felt his muscles relax.

"Lucky? What's the matter with you? Lucky? Jesus! No wonder we ain't been doin' well lately." Orrin was hysterical.

"I'm carrying us out of here, Orrin." Dinks grabbed for the pole. "I ain't gonna let no crazy old man get me killed!"

"Like hell!" Orrin grabbed the pole from Dinks and, whirling it around, knocked him down into the bottom of the boat. Then he turned to the water and thrashed at it as if it had deprived him of his right. "Where are ya?" he screamed. "I know you're down there!"

Dinks didn't try to get up. He didn't dare move. For the first time, he realized that the taciturn old man, who chewed aspirins against the pain and, when he was willing to talk, told stories about the old times, had gone mad. The anger and pity he had felt for Orrin were replaced by a terrible foreboding.

An hour later, dawn came over the swamps wonderfully warm, splashing the sky with the reds and yellows of ripened fruit. Exhausted from splashing at sawgrass and pounding the water with the pole, Orrin sat still in the boat. Dinks tentatively touched the motor. Orrin didn't move. Dinks waited a moment, then started up the engine and turned them toward home.

Thick mists rose from the water and became patchy as the warm morning sun burned through. Above the mist, there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Dinks lit up a cigarette and relaxed for the first time in hours. He looked over at Orrin. If it hadn't been for the slight rise and fall of his chest, Dinks would have thought he was dead.

Dinks looked back out at the water. It too was calm. Perhaps Orrin's shot had killed the alligator; perhaps it had just scared him. Either way, there wasn't a sign of him. Dinks smiled. That was a close one, he thought as he took in the burning smoke with pleasure.

A few yards ahead, the calm water broke around what looked like a rock.

The cooling swamp water rippled across the back of the alligator, soothing the frantic agony of pain in his cracked brain-case. He moved slightly as the sound of the skiff and the smell of man began to set off an alarm in his murky brain. The muscles of his giant frame tensed as the alarm translated itself into a signal of danger.

Dinks was still chewing on his cigarette reflectively when his pole hit something hard under the water.

Suddenly everything exploded around Dinks. There was a violent shove as the alligator crashed blindly into the tiny skiff, and Dinks could feel himself being wrenched out of the boat and thrown into the air. The earth was gone for him. Water and sky became all mixed up in his mind. There was no pain, only surprise, cutting through his chest like a knife. A flash of light, electric red, seared his brain. Then he fell back to the water, puppetlike, with the strange cracking sound of his own bones in his ears.

The hiss and roar of the water surrounded him. It was almost as loud as the scream of the alligator itself. Pieces of wood from the boat floated all around him, and the body of Orrin bumped past in the turbulence. The massive form of the alligator, its tail swinging crazily like an out-of-control axe, its jaws snapping and crunching like a pile driver, bore down on him.

He screamed, "Holy Christ! Lord!"

The alligator lurched forward and crunched into his soft flesh, clamping onto him with massive jaws. Dinks could no longer feel his bones crunch like toothpicks, or see his blood, which swirled into the water in warm, thick spurts. The alligator pulled Dinks's body down, below the surface of the boiling water and into the slime. Water and blood flowed back into Dinks's nostrils and mouth and filled his lungs with choking death.

On the surface of the water, Orrin floated, lifeless. His head had been smashed in by the side of the boat; his old heart had been exploded by the weight of fear. The bloody water lapped at him, making his dead body twitch.

There was a shock on the surface. The massive crooked head of the alligator reemerged, pieces of flesh still clinging to the conical, knife-sharp teeth. The alligator roared, almost languorously, and turned toward Orrin. He watched passively as Orrin's body floated and bumped through the water. A violent tremor traveled the length of his body. The alligator howled and lunged forward. He clamped onto Orrin's body, plucking him from the debris-strewn surface and pulling him far down into the bloody undertow.

The murky swamp water calmed over them, until all that was left was a small whirlpool in the black, obliterating water.

Sam Pruett was a man who was used to dealing with the concrete. He was a lawyer, and through both training and inclination kept his mind as neat as a file cabinet. A short, stocky, bald-headed man with a pockmarked face and intelligent, deep-set eyes, Sam seemed to look right through everything, right down to the comprehensible center of the globe. As cornerstones of his existence were two beliefs. The first was that the world was a well-ordered place, and the second was that every inexplicable event had a perfectly understandable cause; all that was needed to see it was a little logic. When God appeared before Sam Pruett, it was in long judicial robes. In his forty-five years, Sam Pruett had seen nothing to contradict his view of the world until the morning that he was called to Sheriff Thompson's office.

It wasn't much after seven P.M. when Sam received the call from Ben Ferguson asking him to come over to the sheriff's office immediately. Ben was abrupt and mysterious when Sam asked what was so important that it couldn't wait.

Red early-evening light was streaming through the windows in Sheriff Thompson's office. Sam saw that the curtains had been removed and lay on the floor, covering something. Ben Ferguson was there, and Orville Levi, as well as Thompson. Simon Long was locked up in the cell, and Sam could see he was drunk.

"What's going on?" he asked irritably.

"Take a look." Sheriff Thompson inclined his head toward the curtains.

Sam walked over and lifted up an edge of the cloth. At first all he was aware of was a terrible odor. It was an inhuman odor, and, at the same time, human in a way one didn't like to think about. It was a smell of sea and land, millions of years of rot and decay. It was the smell of death. The blood-red evening light fell on something large and round. It took Sam awhile to understand what he was seeing. It was Dinks's head; thousands of ants were crawling across his green-white leering face and through his matted hair.

Sam fell back as if he had received a blow to his stomach. He looked from Thompson to Ben to Levi, but they were not looking at him. Finally he asked, "Who did it?"

"Not who, what," answered Thompson quietly. He stared out the window at the sunset.

Sam walked over to Thompson's desk and leaned against it, grateful for the support it gave him.

Thompson continued to watch the setting sun as he said, "There are two bodies, Orrin Bodges and Dinks Collier. Simon Long found them, and from what he told me and what I was able to see—" Thompson broke off and turned to the three men. "I'm afraid we're going to have to look at the bodies closely. There are puncture marks and ton limbs that no man could have made."

"Hell," said Ben, "Simon's drunk; you aren't gonna listen to him."

Thompson shuddered. "I gave him the bottle and locked him up to keep him quiet. I had to drink half the bcttle myself to screw up the nerve to bring in those bodies."

"Puncture marks?" questioned Sam. He was becoming intrigued.

"Like they were made by teeth," said Thompson.

The three men looked at one another. Thompson walked over to his desk and opened a book. "Large conical teeth that were close to an inch in diameter. The shape of them was familiar. Just like these." Thompson pointed to a picture of an alligator, and traced his finger over the outline of its teeth.

"Impossible," said Sam. "Alligators don't attack men."

"What about that woman last year in Lauderdale?" asked Ben.

"That was just one in a million," snapped Sam. He wasn't quite sure why he was getting angry.

"The point is," said Thompson, "it did happen, didn't it?"

"Yeah, it happened. But that was just one woman alone. Here there were two men, and they both carried shotguns. No alligator could take that on."

"No alligator we know of," said Thompson, "but what about a big one?"

Sam laughed outright. "A giant alligator? Jesus Christ, Thompson!"

"There were other things, too. Chunks were torn off the bodies, just pulled clean off. You know how an alligator kills? They grab ahold of their prey with their jaws and drag it underwater till it drowns. Then, when it's stopped moving, the gator comes back up and, still holding on with his teeth, he tosses the body back and forth till he's worked off a good chunk of flesh."

"How big do you figure this gator to be?" asked Orville Levi, a nervous, dapper little man with a face like a ferret's. The men looked around, surprised. He had remained so silent that they had forgotten he was there.

"Nineteen, twenty feet," answered Thompson.

"Would you care to run that by me again," said Sam with a smirk.

"Judging from the size of the teeth marks, he'd have to be that big."

Sam shook his head in annoyance. "I don't know about you, but I stopped listening to ghost stories when I was thirteen. I think we better have a look at these bodies right now." He walked over and pulled back the curtains.

Sam fought the urge to pull away and forced himself to inspect the bodies more closely. After the first glance, they were no longer so horrifying. They looked unreal, as if they'd been carved out of wax. Their skin was smooth and white from the hours in the water and lack of blood. The whorls of hair on their bodies were coarse and brittle, so very black against the unreal pallor that they seemed to be pasted on.

Their limbs were contorted in impossible positions. Every bone in their bodies must have been broken. Sam could see the teeth marks that Thompson was talking about, and the huge areas of torn flesh. But there was nothing frightening or disgusting about these signs of their death struggle, because there was nothing about the bodies that was any longer human. To imagine that what lay before him had once walked, talked, eaten, and made love seemed impossible. That was the most horrifying part of it to Sam. Not that the two men had been killed, not even that they might have been killed by a twenty-foot rogue alligator—and Sam was beginning to admit the possibility that they had—but that, once dead, it was as if they had never existed at all. He felt an almost uncontrollable urge to laugh.

"Believe me now?" asked Thompson.

"Does anyone else know about this?" asked Levi. It took a moment for the three men to break away from looking at the bodies and turn to him.

"No," answered Thompson. "Just us four and Simon over there. I made him promise not to say anything. I'm not sure we can trust him. That's why I got him drunk. I figured we could let him out while he was still hung-over and no one would believe a word he said."

"I saw it, and I still don't believe it," said Ben.

"I don't think we have the right to keep it to ourselves," said Sam. "I personally don't think there's a twenty-foot alligator slinking through our waterways—there's probably another explanation for it—but we just don't have the right to keep it to ourselves."

"I agree with Sam," said Levi. "An incident like this hits the papers; you know what would happen?"

"Yeah, a panic," said Thompson.

"Wrong," said Levi. "Well, maybe a little one, but here's the thing—an incident like this could cause a boom."

"I don't get you," said Ben, but he had a terrible feeling that he did.

"Tourists—hundreds, maybe thousands of them. 'Come see the killer alligator' and all that kind of crap." Sam was looking at Levi with horror. Levi took it for interest. "See, Sam here agrees."

"You make me sick."

"Oh yeah?" Levi tried to push his way over to Sam, but Thompson stood in front of him and held him back. It wasn't difficult. Levi was not a fighting man.

"For once I pull rank," Thompson said when he had subdued Levi. "I'm the sheriff, and I say we keep this under wraps. I don't want any of you talkin' to no one and starting a panic here. It's a quiet town, and I intend to keep it that way, understand?"