It’s an overcast afternoon in late September and I can feel a good case of the hot-liquor shits swell up inside me, and I hardly feel like fucking with the lizard today. I wish I were alone in my dark bed sleeping off the world as if it were only a temporary inconvenience like the glare of the pale new dawn.
None of this matters. I am crouched in front of a crowd of two dozen. My bowels, they twist. My forehead sweats. I clench my ass cheeks tight and the nature show I’m experiencing is so very different than the one the gawkers are seeing.
I tell the crowd that has gathered around Gator Willy’s Everglades Holiday Park Gator Show another fun fact as I hold the fourteen-and-a-half foot lizard’s jaws shut with two fingers: “The American Alligator’s jaws have at maximum 20 pounds of biting pressure when they try to open their jaws, but they have over 1,000 pounds of biting pressure when snapping their jaws shut.”
I demonstrate the following scientific fun-fact by placing my hand in the lizard’s mouth several times and pulling it out just short of him ripping my arm off. This always gets a rapt rise out of the crowd of gawkers. What a frenzy it always is—they simply can’t get enough of this shit. Cameras flash and camcorders zoom. There’s plenty of Whoa, crazy’s. This is routine, but today is a bad day, a day ill-suited for work.
***
My co-workers call me Jeb because it sounds more back-woods-ish. After I attended five semesters at the University of Florida, a student of zoology, I ended up in the Florida Everglades on an internship at a state-subsidized amusement park wildlife preserve. There’s hard-on-their-luck Natives, trailer-park trash, casinos, and severely agitated wildlife. I came here to take care of beasts, but I ended up impregnating one of the indigenous species. They—the tourists, senior citizens, gawkers—call me Gator Willy, my name according to the faded marquee. There’s a time and a place for everything, and I might as well forget my real name.
***
When I put on the Indian headdress and the alligator-tooth necklace that hang in the employee shitter, I am Gator Willy. Most people—influenced by the natural whims of their children—refer to me as the Alligator Man. I live less than a hundred feet from Gator Willy’s Everglades Holiday Park.
Scarlet, the mother of my daughter Xochitl, bangs loudly on my door. I brace my aching head and spit a loogie into an empty beer bottle by my bed. She lets herself in and looks at me with disdain.
“Pops wants to know why-the-fuck you’s not at work,” she berates me, “You’re an hour late.”
“Nobody missed me.”
“Like hell; there’s a dozen-or-so folks waiting on the show. Aint’ nobody else can do your job, so come on.”
I’m supposed to feel important. Because what if a dozen-or-so of these ingrates didn’t see a man wrestle an alligator on a Thursday afternoon?
I’ve lost another four-hundred at the Kissimmee Casino the night before, the cupboards are bare, the whiskey is drained, and the rent’s almost due. I toss on a set of smoke-drenched clothes, throw back a warm bedside beer, and pry myself from the sunken mattress.
“You stink,” Scarlet says.
“The lizards prefer it that way.”
“Smells like you were hanging out at a tire fire last night.”
“Get the fuck out,” I tell her, “I’m coming.”
As I stomp out the door onto the wobbly cinderblocks, my feet defying their intrinsic coordination, I find two teenage tourists in baggie shirts and flip-flops aiming a camcorder at my home.
“Look,” I hear one of them say, “a real trailer that hicks live in!”
“Bro, check out that dude—he looks meaner than The Rock.”
“Yo, Bro, let’s get out of here. I don’t want to smell the crystal meth that dude’s cooking.”
I growl like an animal, brush them off, and stumble to the park. Scarlet, besides being the mother of my daughter Xochitl, is the resident crazy-bird lady. She tends to at least 49 peacock—at last count—and although we pillage their eggs for food and stomp on the ones that are too far along, yes, there are actually 49 of them. A family, awaiting there megaphone call for the airboat ride, is intently videotaping her as she tends to the birds. She feeds the peacocks rejected pesticide-contaminated corn meal as children watch and mothers coo at her.
“How cute—look at the baby,” a lady says to her hyperactive kids who are busy swinging swamp sticks at one another.
Scarlet hams it up, putting on a real show. She talks to the absolutely-fucking-adorable birds and kittens. As far as I know, she really thinks they understand her. “Hey, meeper, don’t you wanna’ meep, meep? Go with your new mama. Meep for Mama.”
The orphaned peacock, sure to die amongst the ravenous swamp beasts that inhabit the Everglades, finds itself at mercy of a juvenile tomcat.
“Get back, you mean old cat,” Scarlet futilely commands, “You’re just a baby, too, and babies don’t hurt babies.”
She tosses more kernels onto the soot-stained pavement and shoos the cat away as the family squeals in delight. Although they feel they have witnessed one of nature’s true acts of compassion, the orphaned baby peacock will be dead by morning; its bones clean of any remaining flesh, feathers littered with no regard.
“Hey Scarlet,” I tell her as I casually stroll by, her back hunched over the pavement, “your tramp stamp is showing.”
“You shut up, Jeb. You better get your butt on down to the office. Pops is waiting on you.”
***
I stumble into the shitter, hang the necklace on my bare chest, and sit on the commode as my stomach slowly veers toward a violent eruption. I think about the numbers, spinning in a blur, and just then a loud pounding resonates through the make-shift plywood door.
“Jeb,” that old yellow-toothed rank-breathed overall-wearing bastard Pops hollers at me, “They’s all waiting on you to get down there with that gator, some of them almost an hour.”
I try to appeal. “Chill out—my guts are filled to the brim with hot whiskey—just a minute.”
“We don’t have no minute; folks been waiting damn near an hour. Now get out here, you damn drunkard fool!”
It’s show time. Nothing has worked. I need time, another warm beer—from experience I know I could hunch over then—elbows and knees—and make it. Pops beats on the door again and curses me. I pull up my shorts and open the door. He’s there waiting, a mean glare in his eyes. He thrusts the Indian headdress at me. “Now get on.”
As I walk down the steps to the pit, there they are with their camcorders and expensive digital cameras eating fried alligator bites, which are just microwaved Grade-D chicken nuggets composed of factory-minced laying hens. The gawkers, they stand with their hands on their wallets mobbing the souvenir stand purchasing overpriced replica dream catcher earrings and Indian arrowheads we pay reservation bums to carve for a dollar apiece and toss into a bucket. They tell their children to hush because all of this is so educational. And there is Jaws, a 950-pound beast that wants nothing to do with me. More gawkers arrive off a freshly docked airboat tour.
“Look, Mommy!” a little girl squeals, “It’s the Alligator Man!”
I rush into the pen and grab the lizard by his tail, dragging him to the front of the observation area. I figure I only have so long until my guts burst. “Alright, folks, I’m not technically going to wrestle any alligators today, but what I am going to do is show you some traditional tricks and techniques the Seminole Indians used to capturing alligators with only their bare hands.”
The lizard is unruly after being awakened from his afternoon nap. He slashes his tail and jerks his neck. I work my way through the initial motions. I stick my hand in his mouth, pull it out to the side of his peripheral vision, and let his jaw slam shut with a noisy suction pop. An alligator has 80 – 88 teeth, I tell them. I don’t tell them that half of Jaws’ teeth have been removed with pliers. An alligator can hear a splash in the water up to a quarter-mile-away. “Like sonar,” some smart-ass quips, trying to impress. “Yes, like sonar,” I reply.
Now the part they love, restraining the gator. “The way the Indians would catch an alligator was simple, but only two things made this possible: the alligator’s limited eyesight and the weakened opening pressure of his jaw. You need—–“
Some jerk-off interrupts me, “Excuse me, sir, but could you slow down. I just want to make sure everybody here gets this.”
As I was saying, “To solve the dilemma they would use their chin as the third hand by restraining the alligator’s jaws between their chin and their chest while tying them shut with their two free hands. Now I’m only going to do this once for photo purposes so if you miss your shot, there’s no retakes.”
I pin the lizards jaws under my chin and extend my arms far out to the sides. I hold this pose for several seconds, the lizard growing restless. The gawkers Oo and Ah as the cameras flash and the lizard bucks at my chest and face. “Now that I have him restrained, I can tie his mouth shut and take him home to my mother-in-law.” The crowd always laughs for this joke no matter how many times I tell it.
Crouched in front of the crowd, I feel the hot fluid explode in my pants, warming my body. I keep my composure and move on to my final demonstration, putting the lizard to sleep by applying pressure from my thumbs to his three sets of eyelids. Once the lizard has passed out, I wiggle his limp legs to exhibit his suddenly docile nature.
“When provoked, the alligators that inhabit these swamps can pose a dangerous threat to mankind, but as you see, when properly handled any beast can be tamed. You’ve all heard that story that if you can flip an alligator on his back and rub his belly he falls asleep. Well, apparently it works on me, too. The reason this works is because the weight of a gator’s own body cuts off the flow of blood to his brain.”
Several members of the crowd begin to glance about for the source of the rank odor. I imagine it being blamed on one of the children. I plan to wait in the pen until they leave, but the ever-moronic and much-dreaded finale still lies ahead: the Q and A session. A woman sniffs into a baby stroller and peels back a screaming infant’s diaper.
A fat man wearing a Panama Jack hat starts the Q and A session off in a formidable manner. “Yes, I saw a National Geographic Explorer program on man-eating sharks.” Several eyebrows rise. “The program said that sharks have a protective skin that is rough to the touch like sandpaper. Is it true that alligators have this feature as well?”
A cross-eyed-looking kid waves his arm in the air indicating he also has a well-thought-out question. I call on him next. “What’s that smell?” he asks. “Did the crocodile go dookie?”
Another kid chimes in: “Yeah, it stinks bad, like someone crapped their pants!!!”
Several embarrassed parents attempt to shush their children and regain order as an immature chorus of giggles overcomes the young gawkers.
The bile on my legs begins to congeal as I wince my ass cheeks, trying to hold back another piping-hot burst. I grapple my stomach and lay bullshit. “Gators are known to secrete a natural hormone when in a state of fear that smells naturally unpleasant to other members of the animal kingdom.”
“Like a porcupine or a ferret,” a wife quips, hoping to enlighten the rest of the gawkers.
“No,” I reply, “more like C. s. osceola, known more commonly as the Floridian Snapping Turtle.”
I take advantage of the uncomfortable silence and cut the session short. “Since I have answered most of your questions, my time with you has run out. If I could, I would like to direct your attention to my associate Scarlet, who is a full-blooded Seminole Indian and is offering authentic Indian arrowheads and one-of-a-kind alligator souvenirs for a nominal fee, and, folks; if you haven’t tried Gator Willie’s authentic Cajun-fried Gator Nuggets, I must tell you they are de-lish-us.”
I watch as the crowd files toward the souvenir stand to try on dream-catcher earrings and poke each other with alligator-claw back scratchers. I pick up my sunglasses, slip my feet into my flip-flops, and take a cigarette from my pack of American Spirits. Once the crowd dissipates, I return to the crapper and hose myself off. I wrap a towel around my waist and follow a luring smell into the mess hall. Kookie, the designated Everglades Park utility personnel, is tending a large vat of boiling liquid.
“Ah-low,” he greets in his backwoods accent.
“Turtle soup again . . .” I say, not so much asking.
“Yep. Tourist season winding on down. It’s all we got.”
“Is it all we got?” I ask, arching my brow. I hand Kookie a soiled two-dollar-bill and he holds it to the light and smiles.
“Thought you were saving these up for the kid?” Kookie asks.
“I’ll get more. . . I can always get more.”
Kookie lifts a soup cup from the rack and pulls a bottle of Heaven Hill Kentucky Straight Bourbon from the pantry. He fills the cup and hands it to me.
“Hot dang,” he says, “look at them old bags under your eyes. Rough night?”
I spit a loogie on the floor and smile. “Lost again.”
I can do this all day. It’s all been said before, not that there’s anything new or intelligent to talk about—we just talk.
“How come you never win much?” Kookie asks.
“Because I aint’ trying to win much—I’m trying to win a whole fucking lot. The quicker and bigger, the better. I figure a thirty-five-to-one roulette score on a week’s savings and I can get the fuck out of here as quick as I can pack my things.”
“What’s your strategy?”
“I always put it all on five.”
“What makes it five?”
“To represent every suck-ass shit-filled year I’ve spent in this stank-ass swamp. “
I take a hearty slurp at the soup cup and Kookie tells me I better go see Pops, who’s been waiting for me out back.
“Turtles. . . .” I say, not so much asking.
“I reckon so.”
Pops greets me, smoking a cigar, leaned against the pen where we keep the snappers. “Where the hell you been?”
“Shit my pants,” I say.
“You shit your fucking pants?”
“Shit ‘em good.”
“What in the hell is wrong with you, Jeb?”
“If I recall, you instructed me to pinch one off and get the fuck to work.”
“Goddamn it, Jeb, quit being funny. You’re going to have to learn to take care of yourself. There aint’ no use crying over spilled shit. These turtles aint’ gonna slip on out of their own shells and start swimming in soup.”
I grab the snow shovel we use for handling the turtles, slip on a thick pair of work boots, and survey the pen. As I look down, there is a chorus of snaps from their strong beak-like jaws. The turtles already know. I survey the water looking for the largest one. He snaps his head out of the water and submerges. From the snapper’s weight of nearly 40 pounds and the girth of his shell and markings, he should be in his mid-twenties, the same as me. I jab the shovel into the water and flip his shell. The water thrashes and the snaps hasten. I flip the turtle onto the concrete decking and restrain him with my foot. He lies on his backas I pin him down and raise the shovel above the tender belly of his shell. I watch for a minute, his fat legs floundering with their jagged talons, his great reptilian tail slashing about. One snap could easily clean the meat of a finger. The snapper manages to wrap his long neck more than halfway around and across his shell to gain a grip of my shoe, ripping the laces as he defecates and secretes a pungent musk.
“It’s no use, little fella’,” I say, looking down,“You can shit and raise as much of a stink as you want, but they got us both right where they want us.”
I crack the shell and return to the mess hall. Kookie is pouring dry red sherry into the boiling vat filled with bay leaves, thyme, and whole cloves. The carrots and celery are already chopped. A pleasant aroma fills the air as we share another cup of bourbon.
***
Tuesdays and Sundays are my nights with Xochitl. We play Super Mario Brothers on an old 8-bit Nintendo that I picked up from the pawn shop. The games remind me of the childhood I once had. We jump over pits and stomp on turtles. Xochitl is nice. She doesn’t like to hurt the animals. I feed her soup out of a make-shift tinfoil bowl Kookie was nice enough to wrap for me.
“Why do we eat turtles?” she asks me.
“I don’t know,” I say, “because they live in the swamp and we do, too.”
“Nah-ah, turtles don’t bother us,” she says, looking up at me with her mother’s almond-colored eyes, “They live in a shell.”
I’m silent. It’s times like this that I try to think of encouraging things to say. I knock delicately on the top of her head. “You’ve got a shell, too!”
“Nah-ah,” she says giggling, “you live in a shell.”
***
As the weeks go on, I return to the casino. The wheel whirls around and around. I listen to its soothing rhythm of clicks as the ball spins slowly and winds down. The waitresses, they ask me what I want to drink.
“Whiskey,” I always tells them.
“Whiskey and what?” they almost always ask.
“Whiskey and whiskey,” I forever respond, “whiskey on the whiskey.”
And sometimes, just sometimes, they come back.
None of this matters. I am crouched in front of a crowd of two dozen. My bowels, they twist. My forehead sweats. I clench my ass cheeks tight and the nature show I’m experiencing is so very different than the one the gawkers are seeing.
I tell the crowd that has gathered around Gator Willy’s Everglades Holiday Park Gator Show another fun fact as I hold the fourteen-and-a-half foot lizard’s jaws shut with two fingers: “The American Alligator’s jaws have at maximum 20 pounds of biting pressure when they try to open their jaws, but they have over 1,000 pounds of biting pressure when snapping their jaws shut.”
I demonstrate the following scientific fun-fact by placing my hand in the lizard’s mouth several times and pulling it out just short of him ripping my arm off. This always gets a rapt rise out of the crowd of gawkers. What a frenzy it always is—they simply can’t get enough of this shit. Cameras flash and camcorders zoom. There’s plenty of Whoa, crazy’s. This is routine, but today is a bad day, a day ill-suited for work.
***
My co-workers call me Jeb because it sounds more back-woods-ish. After I attended five semesters at the University of Florida, a student of zoology, I ended up in the Florida Everglades on an internship at a state-subsidized amusement park wildlife preserve. There’s hard-on-their-luck Natives, trailer-park trash, casinos, and severely agitated wildlife. I came here to take care of beasts, but I ended up impregnating one of the indigenous species. They—the tourists, senior citizens, gawkers—call me Gator Willy, my name according to the faded marquee. There’s a time and a place for everything, and I might as well forget my real name.
***
When I put on the Indian headdress and the alligator-tooth necklace that hang in the employee shitter, I am Gator Willy. Most people—influenced by the natural whims of their children—refer to me as the Alligator Man. I live less than a hundred feet from Gator Willy’s Everglades Holiday Park.
Scarlet, the mother of my daughter Xochitl, bangs loudly on my door. I brace my aching head and spit a loogie into an empty beer bottle by my bed. She lets herself in and looks at me with disdain.
“Pops wants to know why-the-fuck you’s not at work,” she berates me, “You’re an hour late.”
“Nobody missed me.”
“Like hell; there’s a dozen-or-so folks waiting on the show. Aint’ nobody else can do your job, so come on.”
I’m supposed to feel important. Because what if a dozen-or-so of these ingrates didn’t see a man wrestle an alligator on a Thursday afternoon?
I’ve lost another four-hundred at the Kissimmee Casino the night before, the cupboards are bare, the whiskey is drained, and the rent’s almost due. I toss on a set of smoke-drenched clothes, throw back a warm bedside beer, and pry myself from the sunken mattress.
“You stink,” Scarlet says.
“The lizards prefer it that way.”
“Smells like you were hanging out at a tire fire last night.”
“Get the fuck out,” I tell her, “I’m coming.”
As I stomp out the door onto the wobbly cinderblocks, my feet defying their intrinsic coordination, I find two teenage tourists in baggie shirts and flip-flops aiming a camcorder at my home.
“Look,” I hear one of them say, “a real trailer that hicks live in!”
“Bro, check out that dude—he looks meaner than The Rock.”
“Yo, Bro, let’s get out of here. I don’t want to smell the crystal meth that dude’s cooking.”
I growl like an animal, brush them off, and stumble to the park. Scarlet, besides being the mother of my daughter Xochitl, is the resident crazy-bird lady. She tends to at least 49 peacock—at last count—and although we pillage their eggs for food and stomp on the ones that are too far along, yes, there are actually 49 of them. A family, awaiting there megaphone call for the airboat ride, is intently videotaping her as she tends to the birds. She feeds the peacocks rejected pesticide-contaminated corn meal as children watch and mothers coo at her.
“How cute—look at the baby,” a lady says to her hyperactive kids who are busy swinging swamp sticks at one another.
Scarlet hams it up, putting on a real show. She talks to the absolutely-fucking-adorable birds and kittens. As far as I know, she really thinks they understand her. “Hey, meeper, don’t you wanna’ meep, meep? Go with your new mama. Meep for Mama.”
The orphaned peacock, sure to die amongst the ravenous swamp beasts that inhabit the Everglades, finds itself at mercy of a juvenile tomcat.
“Get back, you mean old cat,” Scarlet futilely commands, “You’re just a baby, too, and babies don’t hurt babies.”
She tosses more kernels onto the soot-stained pavement and shoos the cat away as the family squeals in delight. Although they feel they have witnessed one of nature’s true acts of compassion, the orphaned baby peacock will be dead by morning; its bones clean of any remaining flesh, feathers littered with no regard.
“Hey Scarlet,” I tell her as I casually stroll by, her back hunched over the pavement, “your tramp stamp is showing.”
“You shut up, Jeb. You better get your butt on down to the office. Pops is waiting on you.”
***
I stumble into the shitter, hang the necklace on my bare chest, and sit on the commode as my stomach slowly veers toward a violent eruption. I think about the numbers, spinning in a blur, and just then a loud pounding resonates through the make-shift plywood door.
“Jeb,” that old yellow-toothed rank-breathed overall-wearing bastard Pops hollers at me, “They’s all waiting on you to get down there with that gator, some of them almost an hour.”
I try to appeal. “Chill out—my guts are filled to the brim with hot whiskey—just a minute.”
“We don’t have no minute; folks been waiting damn near an hour. Now get out here, you damn drunkard fool!”
It’s show time. Nothing has worked. I need time, another warm beer—from experience I know I could hunch over then—elbows and knees—and make it. Pops beats on the door again and curses me. I pull up my shorts and open the door. He’s there waiting, a mean glare in his eyes. He thrusts the Indian headdress at me. “Now get on.”
As I walk down the steps to the pit, there they are with their camcorders and expensive digital cameras eating fried alligator bites, which are just microwaved Grade-D chicken nuggets composed of factory-minced laying hens. The gawkers, they stand with their hands on their wallets mobbing the souvenir stand purchasing overpriced replica dream catcher earrings and Indian arrowheads we pay reservation bums to carve for a dollar apiece and toss into a bucket. They tell their children to hush because all of this is so educational. And there is Jaws, a 950-pound beast that wants nothing to do with me. More gawkers arrive off a freshly docked airboat tour.
“Look, Mommy!” a little girl squeals, “It’s the Alligator Man!”
I rush into the pen and grab the lizard by his tail, dragging him to the front of the observation area. I figure I only have so long until my guts burst. “Alright, folks, I’m not technically going to wrestle any alligators today, but what I am going to do is show you some traditional tricks and techniques the Seminole Indians used to capturing alligators with only their bare hands.”
The lizard is unruly after being awakened from his afternoon nap. He slashes his tail and jerks his neck. I work my way through the initial motions. I stick my hand in his mouth, pull it out to the side of his peripheral vision, and let his jaw slam shut with a noisy suction pop. An alligator has 80 – 88 teeth, I tell them. I don’t tell them that half of Jaws’ teeth have been removed with pliers. An alligator can hear a splash in the water up to a quarter-mile-away. “Like sonar,” some smart-ass quips, trying to impress. “Yes, like sonar,” I reply.
Now the part they love, restraining the gator. “The way the Indians would catch an alligator was simple, but only two things made this possible: the alligator’s limited eyesight and the weakened opening pressure of his jaw. You need—–“
Some jerk-off interrupts me, “Excuse me, sir, but could you slow down. I just want to make sure everybody here gets this.”
As I was saying, “To solve the dilemma they would use their chin as the third hand by restraining the alligator’s jaws between their chin and their chest while tying them shut with their two free hands. Now I’m only going to do this once for photo purposes so if you miss your shot, there’s no retakes.”
I pin the lizards jaws under my chin and extend my arms far out to the sides. I hold this pose for several seconds, the lizard growing restless. The gawkers Oo and Ah as the cameras flash and the lizard bucks at my chest and face. “Now that I have him restrained, I can tie his mouth shut and take him home to my mother-in-law.” The crowd always laughs for this joke no matter how many times I tell it.
Crouched in front of the crowd, I feel the hot fluid explode in my pants, warming my body. I keep my composure and move on to my final demonstration, putting the lizard to sleep by applying pressure from my thumbs to his three sets of eyelids. Once the lizard has passed out, I wiggle his limp legs to exhibit his suddenly docile nature.
“When provoked, the alligators that inhabit these swamps can pose a dangerous threat to mankind, but as you see, when properly handled any beast can be tamed. You’ve all heard that story that if you can flip an alligator on his back and rub his belly he falls asleep. Well, apparently it works on me, too. The reason this works is because the weight of a gator’s own body cuts off the flow of blood to his brain.”
Several members of the crowd begin to glance about for the source of the rank odor. I imagine it being blamed on one of the children. I plan to wait in the pen until they leave, but the ever-moronic and much-dreaded finale still lies ahead: the Q and A session. A woman sniffs into a baby stroller and peels back a screaming infant’s diaper.
A fat man wearing a Panama Jack hat starts the Q and A session off in a formidable manner. “Yes, I saw a National Geographic Explorer program on man-eating sharks.” Several eyebrows rise. “The program said that sharks have a protective skin that is rough to the touch like sandpaper. Is it true that alligators have this feature as well?”
A cross-eyed-looking kid waves his arm in the air indicating he also has a well-thought-out question. I call on him next. “What’s that smell?” he asks. “Did the crocodile go dookie?”
Another kid chimes in: “Yeah, it stinks bad, like someone crapped their pants!!!”
Several embarrassed parents attempt to shush their children and regain order as an immature chorus of giggles overcomes the young gawkers.
The bile on my legs begins to congeal as I wince my ass cheeks, trying to hold back another piping-hot burst. I grapple my stomach and lay bullshit. “Gators are known to secrete a natural hormone when in a state of fear that smells naturally unpleasant to other members of the animal kingdom.”
“Like a porcupine or a ferret,” a wife quips, hoping to enlighten the rest of the gawkers.
“No,” I reply, “more like C. s. osceola, known more commonly as the Floridian Snapping Turtle.”
I take advantage of the uncomfortable silence and cut the session short. “Since I have answered most of your questions, my time with you has run out. If I could, I would like to direct your attention to my associate Scarlet, who is a full-blooded Seminole Indian and is offering authentic Indian arrowheads and one-of-a-kind alligator souvenirs for a nominal fee, and, folks; if you haven’t tried Gator Willie’s authentic Cajun-fried Gator Nuggets, I must tell you they are de-lish-us.”
I watch as the crowd files toward the souvenir stand to try on dream-catcher earrings and poke each other with alligator-claw back scratchers. I pick up my sunglasses, slip my feet into my flip-flops, and take a cigarette from my pack of American Spirits. Once the crowd dissipates, I return to the crapper and hose myself off. I wrap a towel around my waist and follow a luring smell into the mess hall. Kookie, the designated Everglades Park utility personnel, is tending a large vat of boiling liquid.
“Ah-low,” he greets in his backwoods accent.
“Turtle soup again . . .” I say, not so much asking.
“Yep. Tourist season winding on down. It’s all we got.”
“Is it all we got?” I ask, arching my brow. I hand Kookie a soiled two-dollar-bill and he holds it to the light and smiles.
“Thought you were saving these up for the kid?” Kookie asks.
“I’ll get more. . . I can always get more.”
Kookie lifts a soup cup from the rack and pulls a bottle of Heaven Hill Kentucky Straight Bourbon from the pantry. He fills the cup and hands it to me.
“Hot dang,” he says, “look at them old bags under your eyes. Rough night?”
I spit a loogie on the floor and smile. “Lost again.”
I can do this all day. It’s all been said before, not that there’s anything new or intelligent to talk about—we just talk.
“How come you never win much?” Kookie asks.
“Because I aint’ trying to win much—I’m trying to win a whole fucking lot. The quicker and bigger, the better. I figure a thirty-five-to-one roulette score on a week’s savings and I can get the fuck out of here as quick as I can pack my things.”
“What’s your strategy?”
“I always put it all on five.”
“What makes it five?”
“To represent every suck-ass shit-filled year I’ve spent in this stank-ass swamp. “
I take a hearty slurp at the soup cup and Kookie tells me I better go see Pops, who’s been waiting for me out back.
“Turtles. . . .” I say, not so much asking.
“I reckon so.”
Pops greets me, smoking a cigar, leaned against the pen where we keep the snappers. “Where the hell you been?”
“Shit my pants,” I say.
“You shit your fucking pants?”
“Shit ‘em good.”
“What in the hell is wrong with you, Jeb?”
“If I recall, you instructed me to pinch one off and get the fuck to work.”
“Goddamn it, Jeb, quit being funny. You’re going to have to learn to take care of yourself. There aint’ no use crying over spilled shit. These turtles aint’ gonna slip on out of their own shells and start swimming in soup.”
I grab the snow shovel we use for handling the turtles, slip on a thick pair of work boots, and survey the pen. As I look down, there is a chorus of snaps from their strong beak-like jaws. The turtles already know. I survey the water looking for the largest one. He snaps his head out of the water and submerges. From the snapper’s weight of nearly 40 pounds and the girth of his shell and markings, he should be in his mid-twenties, the same as me. I jab the shovel into the water and flip his shell. The water thrashes and the snaps hasten. I flip the turtle onto the concrete decking and restrain him with my foot. He lies on his backas I pin him down and raise the shovel above the tender belly of his shell. I watch for a minute, his fat legs floundering with their jagged talons, his great reptilian tail slashing about. One snap could easily clean the meat of a finger. The snapper manages to wrap his long neck more than halfway around and across his shell to gain a grip of my shoe, ripping the laces as he defecates and secretes a pungent musk.
“It’s no use, little fella’,” I say, looking down,“You can shit and raise as much of a stink as you want, but they got us both right where they want us.”
I crack the shell and return to the mess hall. Kookie is pouring dry red sherry into the boiling vat filled with bay leaves, thyme, and whole cloves. The carrots and celery are already chopped. A pleasant aroma fills the air as we share another cup of bourbon.
***
Tuesdays and Sundays are my nights with Xochitl. We play Super Mario Brothers on an old 8-bit Nintendo that I picked up from the pawn shop. The games remind me of the childhood I once had. We jump over pits and stomp on turtles. Xochitl is nice. She doesn’t like to hurt the animals. I feed her soup out of a make-shift tinfoil bowl Kookie was nice enough to wrap for me.
“Why do we eat turtles?” she asks me.
“I don’t know,” I say, “because they live in the swamp and we do, too.”
“Nah-ah, turtles don’t bother us,” she says, looking up at me with her mother’s almond-colored eyes, “They live in a shell.”
I’m silent. It’s times like this that I try to think of encouraging things to say. I knock delicately on the top of her head. “You’ve got a shell, too!”
“Nah-ah,” she says giggling, “you live in a shell.”
***
As the weeks go on, I return to the casino. The wheel whirls around and around. I listen to its soothing rhythm of clicks as the ball spins slowly and winds down. The waitresses, they ask me what I want to drink.
“Whiskey,” I always tells them.
“Whiskey and what?” they almost always ask.
“Whiskey and whiskey,” I forever respond, “whiskey on the whiskey.”
And sometimes, just sometimes, they come back.
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