Not that Hartley didn’t experience other inklings, other thoughts. He felt pervadingly alone, an ant crossing a gymnasium floor. He recalled the rare look his son had given him the first time Bobby understood why his father was called a war hero. Also the soldier could picture his victory, cue cards floating on the surface of a pool, powerlines shorting out and everything going up like the slow lightning of tracer fire. Yet these other inklings were no more than inklings. Wing shots at something glimpsed once and then out of sight. By and large Hartley was going on nothing but the grapple-hook-swing of action itself. He didn’t think. For miles of forced march it seemed as if Hartley wasn’t there at all. Whenever he felt his mind beginning to slow, grow foggy again, he did up another joint.
Until…Hartley forced his head through a particularly dense section of vines and brush and so came down face-first within an inch of standing gray water. The surface stank of pupae and limestone. He held his position a while. His mudsmeared face became visible, crossed here and there by water striders, in the rank pool before him. Then Hartley, maybe, sensed something. He looked over his right shoulder. Not ten feet away a solitary alligator lay sunning itself on a strip of flattened grass.
Hartley froze. His head out over the water, his body trapped in sawtoothed vines, he saw himself as perfect prey. And the alligator’s eye was open. Hartley couldn’t miss it, a yellow and pink smudge of goo. The pupil was a black chip. Hartley kept still through a feast of mosquitos, kept still while the scars on his lower back numbly repeated one word of pain over and over. He ignored even the massive bees. These tickled the back of his ear, going in and out of some fragrant orchid or honeysuckle behind him.
Just when Hartley went up on his palms, began to move, he couldn’t say. But he started to pull his long trunk forward, forward by inches with one eye on the reptile the whole way, until he got his boots under him and could squat carefully, finally, on the edge of limestone over the water. His head was hot but clear. The gator hadn’t come for him yet. Hartley flexed his ankles, risked turning a couple degrees on the balls of his feet. No response.
Instinctively or from soldier’s habit, he sized up the beast.
The blunt snout, the blunt tail thicker than the body where they joined. The inward pinch between tail and snout, just behind the blunted cone of the skull. Christ Jesus, an alligator was ugly. The color effects were sick, snotgreen with diarrhetic yellows and browns. Under the mouth sagged an awful bulk of jowls. Vivid teeth protruded from the lower jaw over the upper lip like the sneer of a mongoloid. The legs were pudgy as a baby’s. Then all the way to the back, beneath the enormous tail, Hartley saw the bloody half-head of what must have been a swamp dog. Indeed there were traces of blood, and shitty bits of stuck hair, up and down the gator’s rough length. The teeth also bore a stain. Meantime that clouded eye stared Hartley’s way and never blinked. A baby’s legs and an old man’s eye. The alligator was a stained bag of diseases, stitched together from wrinkles and stones. Hartley wasn’t sure when he began moving towards the animal.
He paused after a couple stalking half-steps and laid out a thick line of his cocaine. On the back of his hand, the stuff felt icy and wonderful against his mosquito bites. Hartley snorted and then saw plainly what he must do. This creature was the thing he’d been after since coming down here. The shooting site he couldn’t visit, the questions he couldn’t ask Garbeau, the deals everyone wanted to make and he could never get free of — this was the horny soul of them all. Beyond this, Hartley couldn’t think. He eased forward another step, another half-step. Impossible to move without the saw grass rasping against his fatigues. Impossible not to set off insects, popping up comically or buzzing away at slow speed, every time he covered another few inches of ground. Yet Hartley pressed on. With each pause, each new trace of gator’s blood smell, he felt more positive. The grappling hook was already caught in that ridged and cracked hide. Hartley himself was already deep in enemy territory. When he straightened his knees, his shadow reached the animal’s belly. He waited out another insect uproar. He turned and his shadow fell across the vulnerable pinch of jowl and backbone that was the neck. He stood fully upright now, savoring the meaty stink. He saw how, blackened by shade, the alligator looked ancient and brittle as some fossil washed up in a storm. And then Hartley sneezed.
He sneezed twice. The second time was louder and more wracking than the first. The explosion emptied his head, left his senses reeling with dispersed cocaine.
The next thing he was aware of were some tiny swamp pansies between his knees. After that, the reptile’s gummed and staring eye. Farther away, he saw a beetle with red horns fish out a tick from behind the dead dog’s lip.
Slowly, very frightened, Hartley hauled himself upright once more. An agonizing rise, as if he had a rachet binding his neck to his ankles. But once on his feet he turned and headed into the swamp water. In his mind there was no question. If he could sneeze in the gator’s ear, if he could drop senseless for who knows how many dopey moments almost eyeball to eyeball with it — then what was the point? He hadn’t come this far to cuddle up with a teddy bear. Was Hartley no better than another insect, like the beetles under the tail or the dragonflies teasing the snout? The water, in the water now, that was more what he needed. The heat actually stung him, weakened his calves like when he took steam at the officer’s club. His boots sank to the straps in sludge. When the water reached his genitals, Hartley thought: I’m not a kid any more. He wasn’t some teenage draftee with a teenage wife, married before bootcamp and sent overseas before he knew what an orgasm was. No. These days Hartley saw under the wallpaper. He’d reupped, done his time in OCS, made captain, all with the private understanding that he’d get another crack at it. Now in water up to his waist, his feet trapped in mud, the muscles in his legs slack and tickled by invisible fish, his upper body tangled in gnats and mosquitos like a dead tree in vines, Hartley turned to face the alligator. Once more he took in that mongoloid sneer, those wino eyes. He began to splash.
He used his fists, they were louder. He used his entire body, a wildman boogaloo. In his mind’s eye he saw two down-home grunts who had done an insane dance out on the Cu Chi perimeter. Hot water streamed down his face. He began to scream. No words yet, no sense, nothing but grunts and howls growing louder and going deeper down his throat with each jerk of his hips and clenched stomach. In no time the hams of his hands burned from the pounding. And Hartley bit them, bit them to draw blood. To draw blood and have that juice draw the beast. Then with the salty taste on his teeth actual words started to come: Freak, slope bitch, dink freak asshole racist trash meat. Hartley’s cap dropped and sank. His long pants pockets seemed to be filling with silt. Against the walls of his mind now were flashing pictures from last spring, a stockade riot at Devens, prisoners cracking guards with two-by-fours as they tried to bust out. Still the words came, bitch freak bastard ape. Solid words that never echoed in the muggy swamp air. The screaming went on till the soldier suffered the raw scrapes of three days’ smoking, screaming with mouth wide open till he got an insect in there, some spread-wing creature that felt like stiff paper against the tongue, so that Hartley choked and coughed weakly but kept on splashing as best he could. The alligator lay where it was. Throughout, it lay where it was and didn’t move.