- AN A-FRAME WITH FRONT GABLES. Outside: a chipped Hudson Commodore. It’s Florida, 1969. The dawn of Disney. The alligators are newly relocated to Lake Jesup. The palms sag with heat, the sun oppressive, the skies bluer than blue. The man works at a tackle shop—his father’s. The tackle shop is a gray wooden no-nothing veiled by ferns and mangroves. The walls have absorbed the smell of scales. On warm days, while the son restores fishing lures and the father sells stories and Colas, a breeze sweeps through the open door, carrying undertones of brine, rotting oranges, Mexican heather.
- The father is the old Florida type—the seen-it-all, served-abroad sort. He tells stories which may not be true but are entertaining. He plunges a hand into the bucket of bloodworms, cackling over some memory. He starts a story mid-story: And then, out of nowhere, we heard voices—from the trees, remember? He tells the same tales over and over. The father recalls the black bear that raided their campground, stole the spam; the bald eagle perched outside the shop, monstrous up close; or the time he accidentally ventured onto the Tarzanset at the artesian springs. He met a monkey there and named him Rocco. Customers cackle, say Good one. But he swears the wildest ones are true.
- They have lived in the A-frame for ten years. Before that: a condo in Eustis, a camper in Leesburg. And before that, a houseboat on St. John’s River. They were not the first to tame the river, but the father liked to believe they were. Before them had lived the Seminoles and the Timucua, Florida crackers and naturalists, masters and bounty hunters and trappers and slaves, all wanting something from the river. And before them: the Florida panther, black bear, the snakes that rule the wet prairie. Still, in the early mornings—as the herons needled the water—the river felt like theirs. Though their boat was ramshackle, the river was regal. The walls peeled white paint, but the sun burnished on the blue. Still. The river days were long-dying. Houses bloomed like wild irises onshore. Docks were scarce, fish scarcer. A highway was built leading from South Florida to Jacksonville. The father cursed the changes—the outside world creeping in. They left the river in ‘57. After them would live tourists and retired doctors and Midwesterners with a timeshare.
- This is a story the father hates, but tells often. It is a story he swears by—swears by the river gods and owl witches. By Yahweh, to cover his bases. He says he had a brother once, who was fed to the gators. This story only emerges at night, when the cicadas chafe and mosquitos net father and son, as they rock on the A-frame’s porch. They smell of fish and worms and whiskey. The father must be tired and very drunk to speak of the brother. When he does, there is no laughter in his voice. The son leans over his haunches and listens, silent. He has always been a quiet man—a hard life with little money, with tinny water, and a run-out mother had taught him this. But sometimes when he’s feeling brave, he challenges the story, says, Don’t you mean he was eaten by gators? But the father shakes his head. He scowls into the whiskey, says, Fed. They fed black babies to the gators. Live bait.
- The son does not want to work at a bait and tackle shop. He did not want to leave the houseboat (he was fifteen then), and he does not want to smell every hour, every day, of fish. He is lean, skilled at bowfishing, an amateur cartoonist. He obsesses about cleaning under his nails. He wants to design theme parks, but he knows nothing of what this entails. He has no formal education past twelfth grade—and even then, his reading is so-so. But he loves television. The golden thumbprint of the tackle shop is the tiny box set, which the father salvaged from the dump. (So he said. But the son suspects he stole it from the condo in Eustis.) On breaks, the son reads from the magazine rack about the Disney Jungle Cruise or the Aquatarium. He reads about the construction crews gutting woods and draining marshes, digging the Seven Seas Lagoon. And the influx of tourists is the father’s sole comfort amid all the madness—Fishing season’ll last all year, given they can’t tell a catfish from a cat!—the son dreams of working for Gatorland or Weeki Wachee Springs, or the Magic Kingdom, whose spires now grow over the Florida pines. He never tells this to the father.
- The story begins like this: the father’s father was a dredgeman in the Everglades, part of the coalition speared by Napoleon Bonaparte Broward. The coalition called for MEN WHO WANT WORK, MONEY, COMMUNITY, ADVENTURE! This was Florida in the 20s. Everyone needed money. In the swamp, the men shot herons. They camped around egret nests and waited for mama birds to settle before aiming. They sold feathers to make Everglade Hats. They pumped water like maids at a cistern. They befriended rum-runners and traded feathers or coon pelts for moonshine. And, while the father’s father was gone, the mother managed the houseboat on St. John’s River. She was a thick-boned, strong-wristed woman. She’d been born on the river, birthed her babies there without so much as a midwife. She had two young boys, who were less work than her husband. She would lose the youngest while her husband hacked away in South Florida.
- A dull heat day. The air: water-heavy. The son has been spiraling line for three hours straight—all the while, imagining his own ride. Like a Jungle Cruise, but Southern Style—a raft boat or steamboat or jon boat. The father is sitting on the styrofoam ice chest and has begun a story that no one hears—not even the white-haired couple in knee-high waders, who are eager but ignorant about fishing. The son’s thoughts of the river cruise are interrupted by the door chime. A woman enters with an alligator on a leash. Her sandals smack the dusty floor. She wears a white button-up and frayed, mudded jeans. Her gator wears sunglasses. The father slides from the ice chest, cries, Get that thing out of here. The woman says he’s friendly. His name is Walter. But Walter is six feet long, and the father’s brother was fed to a gator, so Walter needs to go. The son watches behind the counter as the woman shouts back, then stoops and strokes her gator before the two waddle outside.
- The father crosses his heart, spits and says he remembers the way it happened, the very details. But the story shifts every time, slightly different. In one version: he was in privy, shitting into the river bank when he heard his mother scream, and he ran (him being only five or so) naked and messy onto the deck. In another: his mother sent him searching. She said, Where’s your brother? And he said, How’m I supposed to know? He went looking and never found him. Learned later he’d toddled upon a gator haunt and trapping crew. In still another: the father came across the scene himself. This is the version he tells the least. He swats at the mosquitos, as though begging them to listen. He waits for the frogs to lull, his son to be still. Then: They’d tied him to a rope, sitting on a log. He cried and pawed at the water, just what they wanted. And when the gators came—two or three, I’d say—the men shot true, but he was already under the water. He drowned right there in front of me.
- They rarely saw gators on the river. When they did, the beasts were peaceful. They lounged in the sun. They paddled, snout-up. What the son and his father did see were mounds on the banks, ridges of buried mollusks, bones, shells. The remnants of many thousands of years. People who lived and died, were forgotten. The new houses with their adobe walls and red tile roofs invaded ever nearer to the ancient sites along the banks. During the years they spent floating on the shallow tannin water, the son watched Florida evolve around him. The spectacle—the magic—was right there in the water.
- Later, after the truth came out, the father says the trappers offered his mother $2 in exchange for the baby, and though she cried and howled and ran to the police—who did nothing—she took the $2, then wrote to her husband who, coincidentally, never came back.
- A green house with a rusted chain-link fence. Outside: a dented red truck. A sign that reads: Walt And Me, Come and See, He’s Six Foot Three, No Pictures Please! This is where the son discovers his father on a foggy Monday morning, upon waking to an empty A-frame. The son parks his Commodore, strolls out, hands in his jeans. The father stands at the fence, throwing tiny stones at Walter, who lives in a blue plastic kiddie pool. The gator hisses. He is a beautiful gator—his ribbed back is speckled yellow, his toes claw at the soil. What in God’s name are you doing? says the son, who’d been driving for an hour. What God’re you referencing? the father says. He throws another stone. The son glances at the paint-peeled door. Imagines a police call, his father pegged for trespassing—animal cruelty. Let’s go, says the son. He places a hand on the father’s shoulder. But the father shrieks, in a voice dangerously loud, You don’t know the half of it. You don’t know what I saw. A light flickers inside the house. This is when the gator begins to climb the fence. Father and son are too stunned to move at first—then, as the gator’s head crests the fence line, his barrel snout nears them, they leap toward the Commodore, leave hillocks of sand as they drive home.
- Time splashes and churns. Months pass. Walt Disney World opens, and Florida becomes a tourist epicenter. Traffic ebbs and flows in the tackle shop. Every day, the man sells bloodworms by the pound. He demonstrates how to cast the belly-weighted lures. He marinates the bait, checks the stock, explains the curve and cut of the hooks. He cannot live like this. He knows that some day—soon, perhaps—he will leave and not come back. He will go to the theme parks, and probably hate them, too. He will go to the river and wish everything would be as it was, but it won’t be, of course, because that’s how rivers are. But for now, he sells bait. His father closes off like a mollusk. His memories, a hidden pearl. The stories start mid-story, and then they start at the end, and then they stop. He sits on the ice chest and drinks Cola—or whiskey from Cola bottles—half the day. The other half he drives the Commodore back to the river. As light dapples the surface in a blinding helix, he stands in waders and watches the sun, watches the water for any sign of life.
CIERA HORTON MCELROY is a short story writer and communications consultant. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from AGNI, Iron Horse Literary Review, Little Fiction, and Lumina among others. She is a graduate of the University of Central Florida MFA program and is represented by Folio Literary Management. For more info, visit www.cieramcelroy.com
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