Lizard World (7 page)

      
“Lem! Wake up! Time to feed the goat -- and give junior here his slops.”

      
The prisoner, tied hand and foot and gagged as usual so he would shut the hell up, was sprawled in the seat opposite, his fatty legs apart, his fancy socks all muddy, that big can of his wedged between the tackle box and the hindquarters a the goat. Lemuel Lee got to his feet and grabbed the slops jar and the spoon. Why did he always have to be the one that did the feedin’?

      
“Okay, fatty, time fer yer yum-yum.”

      
Once again Smedlow winced as the duct tape was ripped off and the spoon came plunging in: but this time he was prepared -- and spat into the face of his assailant.

      
“Why you little!” said Lemuel Lee and cracked him in the forehead with the spoon.

      
The pain was sharp, but Smedlow was more incensed by the indignity. He tried to shout: but, once again, his mouth was stuffed and taped. That little weasel was a lot stronger than he looked. And the woman, too -- who was squinting malignantly while pushing down his shoulders -- had remarkably strong, crushing hands. If there was any hope for sympathy, it was from that wiry fellow they called Earl.

So Smedlow put on his most pitiful expression, sideglanced toward the prow and caught his eye.

      
“Mister, don’t you even think about escapin’. My brother Earl over there may act like an egghead fool, but when the cards is down, he’s family.”

      
Ordinarily Uncle Earl didn’t like to take no prisoners. But if it was true like Lem had told him that this city fella was another snoopin’ reporter, then you couldn’t be too careful. The less people knew, the better off they’d be. The old perfume factory had been a prison back durin’ the Rebellion (you could still see some a the places where Sherman’s men had scratched their names into the limestone) and most a those old cells was plenty strong enough to keep a nosy stranger from stirrin’ up more trouble for the family. So it was too bad that Lem was roughin’ him up a bit, but it wasn’t like the prick didn’t deserve it. That hangdog look a his wasn’t gonna get no sympathy from him. Uncle Earl turned away and threw his cigar stub into the river, listening to the cawing birds and watching the stream widen in the torpor of the night.

      
“Well, will you look at that!” he shouted, aiming the beam of his flashlight at a large white mass half-submerged in the algal waters of the opposite shore. Although the white mass was bobbing up and down, making waves that shook the boat even from this distance, by now the night was so dark that only the persistent scrutiny of the flashlight revealed the thrusting haunches and great tail of the albino beast.

      
“I don’t see nothin’,” began Lemuel Lee before Uncle Earl shushed him: “Look over there, dummy! Now keep your mouth shut. Kill the engine. Get the big net -- and we’ll coast in real slow.”

      
“Well, I’ll be damned,” whispered Aunt Ligeia. “That’s an Okeechobee White, ain’t it Earl? I heard stories. But I ain’t never seen one.”

      
By now the mosquitoes had become brave. Noticing, with nature’s unerring instinct for the helpless, that Smedlow’s hands were tied behind him, they no longer hovered or made shrill forays to his ears, but descended
en masse
upon his hands, arms, cheeks and earlobes. In desperation, he wriggled.

      
“Fatty’s rockin’ the boat,” complained Lemuel Lee. “You better sit still, mister, or I’ll smash you again.”

      
Now that the motor was off, there were no sounds except the lapping of the river and the splashing of the beast as they got near. They were twenty yards away before Smedlow saw the second alligator underneath the first -- a greenish snout just barely visible above the surface of the water. The larger beast -- perfectly white and at least fifteen feet in length -- was splashing so hard that the boat lurched, making the goat stumble, crushing its warmth against the side of Smedlow’s thigh. The air was thick with mosquitoes and a languorous perfume, a cloying sweetness like the smell of orange soda.

      
“You smell it, don’t you fatty? It’s that perfume that makes the gators wanna do it.”

      
“I said shut up,” said Uncle Earl.

      
Lemuel Lee glared like he was gonna talk back, but shut up like he was told and then went off to fetch the nooses and the net. When he got to the foredeck, Vergil was already loading the gun with sedative.

      
“Try not to waste that stuff,” he said.

      
But moments later Vergil had missed twice before he’d hit the albino in the leg and the smaller reptile in the tail. They began to swim, but Vergil noosed them both. Meanwhile, Lemuel Lee had thrown the net and now was pulling for all he was worth: the water roiled with thrashing jaws and splashing tails. Uncle Earl was strutting like a madman and spouting Scripture:

      
“Canst thou draw leviathan with a hook?” he shouted. “Or his tongue with a cord? Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.”

      
By the time the subdued beasts were entangled in the net and being pulled on board with the electric hoist, one bleary eye was looking out through the mesh.

      
“Damn! They’re still awake,” said Uncle Earl: “Better give ’em another dose.”

      
Smedlow pulled back his feet to avoid the puddle. For by now the large, dripping, groggy reptiles had been lowered on deck and securely tied with ropes. The woman (kneeling down so that her skirt rode up upon a massive calf) was poking -- first one and then the other -- with a remarkably dirty glass syringe.

      
Smedlow knew, by long experience, that many women -- even of the most fearsome and unyielding variety -- could be brought to heel by just the right quality of studious attention. After all, women of every stripe, from debutantes to dowagers, had sat with open mouth in his dentist chair and submitted to the keening of his drill. So now he did his best to counterfeit an expression of sudden and delighted admiration, as if this kneeling woman were -- not a jaundiced slattern with the buttocks of an ox -- but some mysterious beauty at a formal ball revealing a glimpse of elegant leg.

      
“This one’s got good glands,” she said, suddenly aware of his persistent gaze and reaching beneath the tail to explore the cloaca of the huge albino.

      
“Well, there she is!” said Uncle Earl.

      
At first glance Smedlow only saw the sphinxes and -- on the lintel above and between them -- the words

Serpent of the Nile Company

Elixirs and Fine Perfumes

just barely legible above a rotting door ahead of them. The brick walls of the factory were crumbling so that it was possible to see inside into a vast room of weeds and rusted tubs. There was also an immense ruined chimney in there and a hill of bottles glimmering in the moonlight. A cornerstone, nearly overcome by vines, read 1846. Small lizards darted about among the debris.

      
“Yer gonna be spendin’ a long time here, ace,” said Lemuel Lee, who had already tied the boat up to a sapling and stacked the cigar boxes on the muddy shore. “Besides the gators, mister, we got six different types a reptiles here that’ll kill you in one way or another. We got moccasins and diamondbacks, corals and canebrakes, copperheads and pygmies. Some a the cells here is filled with ’em and they wouldn’t like nothin’ better than to sink their fangs into a juicy fatty. If you try to run, they’ll get ya -- or the quicksand will. That big can a yours will pull you down like a lead sinker. You can wave yer paws and scream till yer blue an’ no one’s gonna care. Now I know you mighta been some kinda big deal back where you come from, but right here, pal, you ain’t no more than cattle. If we wanna take yer meat, then that’s what we’re gonna do. So it ain’t no use blubberin’. Just listen good to what I tell you, cause I’m the only friend you got.”

      
There was a sudden howling sound -- and it wasn’t the wind. It came in bursts of agony like the death cries of an injured animal, an inhuman rhapsody of horrified bellowing. Just as suddenly it stopped and was followed by a series of staccato screeches like the chattering of monkeys. The goat, now grazing among the ruins, lifted its head and bleated.

      
“Look! Here comes Hattie,” said Aunt Ligeia.

      
A bent-over figure, waving her cane, shaking her head spasmod-ically as if she were electrified, had opened the rotting door between the sphinxes and was now hobbling toward them. Smedlow was distressed to see that her bathrobe was loose enough to expose a shrivelled dug. The moonlight was so bright that he could see that her curlers were pink, her bobby socks were green, and that she wore sneakers.

      
This remarkably ancient creature had very bad, almost perfectly brown teeth and one brown eye -- while the other was a startling blue. She reminded Smedlow of pictures he had seen of unwrapped mummies with leathery skin pulled tight over protruding cheekbones. From earliest childhood, when he had been forced to kiss the lips of a mustached great-aunt who saved her spittle and smelled of Vaporub, Smedlow had retained an unconquerable aversion toward the very old. Now, as this one held a bony hand to her mouth (overjoyed, no doubt by the munificent gift of cigars), he felt a sudden fear that she might touch him. As it was, however, she merely seized on her booty and conducted them across the rubble to her shack.

      
“You put glass in that window since I been here,” said Lemuel Lee.

      
The dirt floor was littered with cigar butts. Flies studded the amber ribbons of flypaper hanging from the rafters. A glance took in the shelves of canned food, the striped mattress, the kerosene lamps and the gold-framed photograph of Rudolph Valentino. An old Spanish helmet, turned upside down and splattered with wax, held a burnt-out candle.

      
“Mister,” said Aunt Ligeia, “this swamp’s got things in it you fancy folks don’t know nothin’ about. Take old Hattie here, for example. She don’t talk much. But she’s a hun’red and seventy-five if she’s a year. And folks say that English fella was nigh two hundred by the time him, Mosher and Hezekiah built this factory. It’s gator juice that does it. You can use every ounce of a gator, mister.”

      
Oh God no, thought Smedlow, feeling suddenly nauseated, if what this slattern said was true, then this singularly repulsive crone was old enough to remember President Lincoln. But did he really want to live forever if it meant he had to look like her? And was Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth no more than the scent glands of a lovesick reptile?

      
By now Old Hattie had opened a cigar box and was lighting up a stogie. There was a look on her face of beatific stupor.

      
“And you got ten whole boxes of those, Hattie,” said Aunt Ligeia, who couldn’t help noticing that now, once again, that fancyman fatty was staring at her leg. Hell, she hadn’t had a man since Aldo Scalzi, the barber in Beaureard, had died of complications from a bypass. She had to admit that she was getting pretty tired of bondage videos and muscle magazines and that she sighed for the days when she and Aldo would retire to the backroom of his barbershop and she would whoop his fanny with a wire brush.

      
“You can untie his hands now, Lem. He ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

      
Smedlow felt a sudden burst of hope. For, sullenly, that hateful Lem started yanking at the ropes, making sure to pull them tighter before reluctantly removing them completely.

      
“Well, don’t you try nothin’, mister,” he said, thrusting a flashlight into Smedlow’s hand and shoving him out the shack door and onto the refuse heap outside.

      
Smedlow found himself stumbling through the vast, unroofed room of rusty tubs and rubble. Now that he was among the ruins, he could hear that the howling had resumed. It was softer than before, a low and sustained moan punctuated by periodic, louder, angrier bursts of what he thought might be gurgling, incoherent attempts at obscenity. The broken walls of the perfume factory frowned above him as the goat stood grazing in the moonlight. The others were following behind him and that Lem would kick him if he didn’t hurry.