meat.
“I don’t know if he’s alive or not,” Wilson said. “Maybe if we could get him out of its mouth, we could tell more.”
Jake tried to wedge the fence post into the gator’s mouth, but that didn’t work. It was as if the great jaw was locked with a key.
They watched carefully, but Buddy didn’t show any more signs of life.
“I know,” Wilson said. “We’ll carry him and the gator up to the road, find a house and get some help.”
The gator was long and heavy. The best they could do was get hold of its tail and pull it and Buddy along. Jake managed this with the fence post under his arm. He didn’t trust the gator and wouldn’t give it up.
They went across an acre of grass and came to a barbed wire fence that bordered the street where Buddy had been hit by the dump truck. The bridge was in sight.
They let go of the gator and climbed through the wire. Jake used the fence post to lift up the bottom strand, and Wilson got hold of the gator’s tail and tugged the beast under, along with Buddy.
Pulling the gator and Buddy alongside the road, they watched for house lights. They went past the church on the opposite side of the road and turned left where the dump truck had turned right and backfired. They went alongside the street there, occasionally allowing the alligator and Buddy to weave over into the street itself. It was hard work steering a gator and its lunch.
They finally came to a row of houses. The first one had an old Ford pickup parked out beside it and lots of junk piled in the yard. Lawn mowers, oily rope, overturned freezers, wheels, fishing reels and line, bicycle parts, and a busted commode. A tarp had been pulled half-heartedly over a tall stack of old shop creepers. There was a light on behind one window. The rest of the houses were dark.
Jake and Wilson let go of the gator in the front yard, and Wilson went up on the porch, knocked on the door, stepped off the porch and waited.
Briefly thereafter, the door opened a crack and a man called out, “Who’s out there? Don’t you know it’s bed time?”
“We seen your light on,” Wilson said.
“I was in the shitter. You trying to sell me a brush or a book or something this time of night, I won’t be in no good temper about it. I’m not through shitting either.”
“We got a man hurt here,” Wilson said. “A gator bit him.”
There was a long moment of quiet. “What you want me to do? I don’t know nothin’ about no gator bites. I don’t even know who you are. You might be with the Ku Kluxers.”
“He’s…he’s kind of hung up with the gator,” Wilson said.
“Just a minute,” said the voice.
Moments later a short, fat black man came out. He was shirtless and barefooted, wearing overalls with the straps off his shoulders, dangling at his waist. He had a ball bat in his hand. He came down the steps and looked at Wilson and Jake carefully, as if expecting them to spring. “You stand away from me with the fence post, hear?” he said. Jake took a step back and this seemed to satisfy the man. He took a look at the gator and Buddy.
He went back up the porch and reached inside the door and turned on the porch light. A child’s face stuck through the crack in the door, said, “What’s out there, Papa?”
“You get your ass in that house, or I’ll kick it,” the black man said. The face disappeared.
The black man came off the porch again, looked at the gator and Buddy again, walked around them a couple times, poked the gator with the ball bat, poked Buddy too.
He looked at Jake and Wilson. “Shit,” he said. “You peckerwoods is crazy. That motherfucker’s dead. He’s dead enough for two men. He’s deader than I ever seen anybody.”
“He caught on fire,” Jake offered suddenly, “and we tried to put his head out, and he got hit by a truck, knocked in the river, and the gator got him… We seen him twitch a little a while back… The fella, Buddy, not the gator, I mean.”
“Them’s nerves,” the black man said. “You better dig a hole for this man-jack, skin that ole gator out and sell his hide. They bring a right smart price sometimes. You could probably get something for them shoes too, if’n they clean up good.”
“We need you to help us load him up into your pickup and take him home,” Jake said.
“You ain’t putting that motherfucker in my pickup,” the black man said. “I don’t want no doings with you honkey motherfuckers. They’ll be claiming I sicked that gator on him.”
“That’s silly,” Wilson said. “You’re acting like a fool.”
“Uh-huh,” said the black man, “and I’m gonna go on acting like one here in my house.”
He went briskly up the porch steps, closed the door and turned out the light. A latch was thrown.
Wilson began to yell. He used the word nigger indiscriminately. He ran up on the porch and pounded on the door. He cussed a lot.
Doors of houses down the way opened up and people moved onto their front porches like shadows, looked at where the noise was coming from.
Jake, standing there in the yard with his fence post, looked like a man with a gun. The gator and Buddy could have been the body of their neighbor. The shadows watched Jake and listened to Wilson yell a moment, then went back inside.
“Goddamn you,” Wilson yelled. “Come on out of there so I can whip your ass, you hear me? I’ll whip your black ass.”
“You come on in here, cocksucker,” came the black man’s voice from the other side of the door. “Come on in, you think you can. You do, you’ll be trying to shit you some twelve gauge shot, that’s what you’ll be trying to do.”
At the mention of the twelve gauge, Wilson felt a certain calm descend on him. He began to acquire perspective. “We’re leaving,” he said to the door. “Right now.” He backed off the porch. He spoke softly so only Jake could hear: “Boogie motherfucker.”
“What we gonna do now?” Jake said. He sounded tired. All the juice had gone out of him.
“I reckon,” Wilson said, “we got to get Buddy and the gator on over to his house.”
“I don’t think we can carry him that far,” Jake said. “My back is hurting already.”
Wilson looked at the junk beside the house. “Wait a minute.” He went over to the junk pile and got three shop creepers out from under the tarp and found some hanks of rope. He used the rope to tie the creepers together, end to end. When he looked up, Jake was standing beside him, still holding the fence post. “You go on and stay by Buddy,” Wilson said. “Turn your back too long, them niggers will be all over them shoes.”
Jake went back to his former position.
Wilson collected several short pieces of rope and a twist of wire and tied them together and hooked the results to one of the creepers and used it as a handle. He pulled his contraption around front by Buddy and the gator. “Help me put ‘em on there,” he said.
They lifted the gator onto the creeper. He fit with only his tail overlapping. Buddy hung to the side, off the creepers, causing them to tilt.
“That won’t work,” Jake said.
“Well, here now,” Wilson said, and he got Buddy by the legs and turned him. The head and neck were real flexible, like they were made of chewing gum. He was able to lay Buddy straight out in front of the gator. “Now we can pull the gator down a bit, drag all of its tail. That way we got ‘em both on there.”
When they got the gator and Buddy arranged, Wilson doubled the rope and began pulling. At first it was slow going, but after a moment they got out in the road and the creepers gained momentum and squeaked right along. Jake used his fence post to punch at the edges of the creepers when they swung out of line.
An ancient, one-eyed cocker spaniel with a foot missing, came out and sat at the edge of the road and watched them pass. He barked once when the alligator’s tail dragged by in the dirt behind the creepers, then he went and got under a porch.
They squeaked on until they passed the house where Sally lived. They stopped across from it for a breather and to listen. They didn’t hear anyone screaming and they didn’t hear any beating going on.
They started up again, kept at it until they came to Buddy’s street. It was deadly quiet, and the moon had been lost behind a cloud and everything was dark.
At Buddy’s house, the silver light of the TV strobed behind the living room curtains. Wilson and Jake stopped
