|
|
|
El Diablo's Blues (cont.) 3. It had started when Russell Sanders lost three fingers and damn near bled to death. Letting his hand dangle in the water as his canoe drifted alongside the riverbank at dusk, it had seemed to Russell that the laws of physics, as he understood them, had been suddenly revoked. The greenish brown water had exploded upward, as a large tree trunk of some sort lunged toward his hand. When he jerked the hand back, blood was spurting from it. As his startle reflex faded, and he realized he'd been bitten by a gator (had anybody ever seen a gator this far inland? he'd never heard of even one) he used his good hand to paddle-jab the damn thing, when a fluid swipe of tail flipped the canoe, and landed Russell in the shallow water. He began running, splashing, screaming toward the weeds, long strings of his blood dark on the river's surface. The beast was just turning from the boat toward the man as Russ hauled himself onto terra firma. He saw the gator charge, roaring and snapping. The roar was surprising (he'd always assumed gators were silent), loud as a truck, and the snapping jaws sounded like a door slamming. With not much margin for error, Russ scampered atop a stone wall along the edge of the old Pendarvis Plantation's summerhouse, and tied the hand off with his belt, screaming for help all the while, trapped. He kept looking down at the huge and terrifying reality of reeking, huffing gator, then turning toward the Pendarvis summerhouse-- careful of his balance-- and crying out for help. Some time passed before it began to dawn on him that no one was going to come, that his choices were fast narrowing down to waiting out the gator, which he didn't think he could do, or making a run for it, which he didn't think would work. Russ sat there, soaked and bleeding and so terrified that it didn't occur to him for twenty minutes or so that he could simply hop down from the wall safely on the other side. Of course, panic makes you stupid, and he'd lost some blood. No one was at the summerhouse, but somehow the exhausted, dizzy man staggered all the way to the main house. There, he interrupted the evening toddies of one of the region's finest old families. The old man himself took charge, getting Russ a towel and a bottle and calling the operator to have her send somebody out. The Pendarvis family was horrified to hear the bleeding man's story as he held his hand in a clean, dry towel and sipped Wild Turkey, waiting for the ambulance. Just as he was losing consciousness, he was vaguely aware of a voice: "Come to think of it, several of the dogs have strayed off lately." |
|
About a week later, Mary Lewis watched in horror as her toy poodle was torn open and dragged squealing beneath the surface. Reports drifted in from as far as seventeen miles away that people had seen the gator. One evening a little girl near Gantrytown was about to splash into a swimming hole from a tire swing when she spotted the phenomenon known as eyeshine: the eerie glow of a gator's reflective eyes peering up from darkening water. She held onto the rope. She said it looked like Satan staring up at her, and people started calling our monster El Diablo. Cat turnover was on the rise. Eldridge Coleman was passing through some marsh on a boar hunt when he saw El Diablo crunch down three turtles, shells and all, like M&Ms. There was something primordial about it all. Mythic, maybe. Wolves and Grizzlies and even Tigers have mostly learned to avoid humans, but El Diablo was, essentially, a dinosaur: a prehistoric creature with a walnut- sized brain in a body that probably weighed more than a quarter-ton. Forty thousand years before Java Man, there were animals that had learned to watch for eyeshine. Now our little town had a reptile Machiavelli with a belly full of poodle bones and cat fur, and it stirred something in our hard-wiring. Nature red in tooth and claw, all of that. I had a recurring dream at that time, remarkable in its tactile realism. In the dream I would be reaching into shallow water after two shiny stones, realizing too late my mistake. The moment would stretch, as my fingers Brailled the scaly ridges of skin, until El Diablo roared out of the water and fear would jolt me awake in a panicky sweat. Still sometimes. |
4.
Alligators live a long time. To be the size he was, El Diablo may have been as old as
fifty or sixty when he set out north and maybe west and relocated here for whatever his
reasons were (theories abounded), and for a long time nobody got even close to stopping
him. But in the wee hours after prom night, when Laurice and Jimmy went down to
Orion Pond with a bottle and a blanket to watch the sunrise (that was their story and they
were sticking to it), El Diablo charged up out of the muddy shallows toward them. They
scrambled up the bank, Laurice screaming like a Polanski at a Manson Family reunion,
and her caterwauling woke her Daddy, my Uncle Hayden, who grabbed an old .410
shotgun and came running faster than you'd expect a man his size could manage. I think
he had it halfway in mind to shoot Jimmy (the .410 would've been plenty powerful for
that), and Laurice's unbuttoned blouse might've sealed Jimmy's fate. But there was El
Diablo kicking up a fuss at the water's edge, and Uncle Hayden fired a couple of rounds
toward the gator, which hissed and slithered quickly back under the water. Nobody was
sure how badly hurt the monster was, and for a long time we all half-expected to hear
from El Diablo again. We didn't until those bones damn near drowned my little niece
Kelly five summers ago. Looking back now on some of the creature's behavior--it's weird
for a gator that's not protecting young to be blitzkrieging out of the water after people--it
seems obvious enough that El Diablo may well have been La Diabla. Before you start
thinking sequel, though, it's also obvious that with no mother around, any young would've
surely got eaten up by coons and birds and your bigger varieties of fish.
My cigarette flares against this weak early light. Edgar Allan comes tromping up out of the brush to sniff and lap at the water's edge. The truth of it is I miss El Diablo and was sorry to see his skeleton. He was our monster and I had always kind of hoped he had gone on to terrorize other people and animals elsewhere. He was a magnet for my fears when I was a child, and for a long time it was his ionic force that kept me from having to think about the thousand other ways death stalks us all, in its infinite forms. The way time will win. The thing I've been working up to tell you is this: Kelly died of leukemia last year, after a long series of treatments and remissions and heartbreaks. Her brother David wasn't around much when she was going through it. Some time back he moved to Seattle, where he is some kind of hotshot computer guy. He's successful and tattooed and single, and I gather he more or less wreaks havoc on the women who populate the espresso bars and piercing parlors of the Great Northwest. Russell Sanders can't play the banjo without those fingers, but he couldn't play for shit before, either. My cousin Laurice lives in Fayetteville now, and we're not in close touch. Me? I'm spending my forties still trying to orient, get my bearings. I lived in L.A. for a while and always felt it was wrong for the sun to set into the ocean. Backwards, you know? I want moorings, landmarks. In Austin, the river was thirty-eight streets down from where I lived. Now I'm back down here in the sticks, and I've been thinking about all the monsters that have always been lurking below every surface, since before men could make fire. The early morning fog lifts gentle. Orion Pond is stocked with ghosts and stories and blues which time will soon enough wash away and dump down in the Gulf of Mexico. I stand here at dawn, staring into dark water, watching for eyeshine.
Jeff Knight lives in Austin, Texas with his two kids, Dylan and Cassidy, plus Leia the dog and Ringo the cat. His day job is writing scripts for an educational software company. His fiction, poems, essays, and music criticism have appeared in many publications, including Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Austin Chronicle, and The Austin American-Statesman.
| Home | Back | More fiction |