…toward some man…
Gator, make it stop.
He shook his head. Gotta fight her battles for her. That turd she married sure wouldn’t. And besides, he needed Jimmy to make the plan work. And he needed Cassie to keep her mouth shut. And, who knows, maybe she’d actually spotted something out of line with this new guy.
Due diligence dictated that he go see.
He was Cassie’s twin, born eighteen minutes after her. He always joked, half serious, about that. He always thought he should have been first.
Not born really, more like hatched.
He had seen this show on the Discovery Channel about how baby alligators get born in a swamp, and the trick was not getting devoured by their daddy. By the time he was a junior in high school, he had no doubts that he was living in his own private Everglades set down in the middle of the glacial lake country of northwestern Minnesota. He had come to view his father as a reptile subspecies of the Bodine strain of jack-pine savage white trash. Mom was no help at all; hell, she was outa the same stagnant pool, the old man’s first cousin.
So the main challenge for him and his sister right from the start was how to survive their parents.
In fact his father, Irv Bodine, looked like an alligator. He was thick in the trunk and stubby in the arms and legs. He was glint-eyed, scaly, and always lying in wait with his long snout half submerged in a slop of cheap whiskey. And Mom never even put up a fight. She just went along until she was so leached out by the booze she resembled a shrieking caged swamp bird, bouncing off the walls.
It came as no surprise to the neighbors, to the teachers, or to the sheriff when their branch of the Bodine family went all to hell. It happened in October, the night of a hard frost; with half the hay left to rot in the fields, with Irv’s machine tools sprouting orange whiskers of rust amid the cobwebs in his repair shop. A colony of rats had taken over the sprawling tractor junkyard behind the shop.
Junior year in high school. Before he got the gator tat on his arm. Back when he was just Morgun, Morg for short.
Morg came home from his after-school job at Luchta’s Garage in town, heard the feeder calves bellowing, starving in the barn, went in the house, and smelled more gas than usual. And not the gas in the coffee cans on the mud porch where Irv had tractor parts soaking. This was propane, in the kitchen. He went in and saw a bread pan full of raw meatloaf sitting on the kitchen table. His mom’s thick fingerprints still squished in the red mush. He saw the oven door open. And he saw the box of Blue Tip matches for lighting the pilot, just sitting there on top of the stove. Which was as far as his mother got with supper before she wandered into the living room and passed out drunk on the couch with raw hamburger smeared on her fingers.
Then he heard the racket down the hall; Cassie screaming, the shower going. And he just knew. Knew before he kicked open the door-the old man still had enough bar whiskey prod going for him to corner Cassie in the shower again.
But this time he’d gone too far. Usually when he got to drinking and started feeling up his daughter, he kept his clothes on. Not tonight. There, in the steam from the shower clouding the tiny bathroom, he saw the old man grappling with Cassie in this mist, saw he had his overalls down around his knees as he bent her dripping wet over the sink.
“Ain’t you slippery,” the old man was howling and giggling over and over. He was trying to hold her steady with one burly hand and aim his business with the other.
There was the shower gushing, there was the smell of gas, mildew, mold, whiskey breath. And there was this single lightbulb over the cabinet above the sink. Just the bare bulb, no shade on it. This cheap little chain jiggling down from the commotion. The weird split image of them there in front of him and coming at him again from another direction in the mirror. In the raw light Morg saw the old man’s spit sprayed among the water droplets on Cassie’s squirming back muscles. Gas, water, the mirror, and these raised blisters dotted with tiny bubbles. Maybe it was seeing the tiny air bubbles popping in the spit that set him off.
Set him off so he finally reached in through the years of this bullshit that had been going on since Cass started wearing a bra. He grabbed a fistful of his father’s greasy hair and slammed his head down on the hot water faucet. Irv collapsed into a fetal butt-mooning heap at their feet, out cold.
She had turned and clung to him. And it was him in the mirror now with Cassie as she hugged him and cried, “Make it stop.”
“I will.”
He watched the shock drain from her eyes and get replaced by a hot mindless idle, like she had a runaway motor chugging deep in her guts that, once it got turned on, just kept going and going…maybe some jealousy mixed in there.
Maybe a lot.
And they were still holding on to each other past the point where she should be thinking about standing there naked. And Morg was caught up for a few seconds remembering the really interesting way they said it in the Bible, talking about the temptations of flesh and blood.
Cleave.
Sharp knives. Room-temperature raw meat out there on Mom’s lax fingers. Pictures like that coming to his head.
And Cassie, eyes wide open; mouth open; her tongue moving in there arched up, this soft red question mark…like it had been the hot July afternoon last year, standing barefoot in the cowshit of the loafing shed behind the barn when she lured him into making her virginity stop…
The shower and the gas and the naked light and Cassie still all wet and first trembling then melting against him and the old man’s head shifting on the warped linoleum floor and beginning to snore between their feet.
And she said, like real perplexed, “Ain’t our fault that the two best-looking people in the eleventh grade have the same last name.”
He’d been halfway there, again, till she said that. Then she totally sobered him up with her follow-up line, tonguing the words into his ear: “You were first at something, remember.”
It was just possible her head was so empty because her brain had crawled down into her mouth, where it took up residence in her sucky tongue. It was enough baggage having Cassie permanently in your life as a sister. You’d have to be completely nuts to complicate it by doing the doggie in the bathroom with the shower running and the old man snoring on the floor.
Morg could have a weak moment, but he was not nuts.
It was plenty just to feel the cannibal gene slither up and load in his blood. It didn’t have to go off, not at the exact moment. Cassie was the perpetual rain-check girl. Count on her to stay wet.
But she was right about one thing. It had to stop.
So he yanked a towel off the hook on the back of the door, covered her, and said, “You ain’t thinking too clearly right now. Get dressed. We’re getting out of here, over to Nygard’s.”
She studied him, and it wasn’t so much that the moment passed. More like she slowly folded it up and tucked it in her pocket. Except she was out of pockets right then. “You smell gas?” she asked as she carefully stepped over the snoring heap on the floor.
“Yeah. Stay away from the kitchen. Use the back door. Go out to the barn and feed the damn calves. Sounds like they’re starving.”
They didn’t take anything with them when they left and went over to the Nygards’ house, because when they usually showed up-because Irv and Mellie Bodine got themselves outrageously drunk-they never brought anything. But the last thing Morg did, after he made sure no windows were open, was close the door tight behind him.
And not turn off the gas.
It was like that gas was meant to be, and Morg wasn’t going to interfere with destiny. Uh-uh, not him. And the stove was working off a fresh tank, because he’d hooked it in two days ago.
No one was surprised when the sheriff went out the next morning and found the Bodines with their lungs soaked with propane and their blood testing off the chart with alcohol. The medical examiner and the
