“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 on the far side of the street and squatted beside the creepers and considered their situation.
Wilson got in Buddy’s back pocket and pulled the smokes out and found that though the package was damp from the water, a couple of cigarettes were dry enough to smoke. He gave one to Jake and took the other for himself. He got a match from Buddy’s shirt pocket and struck it on a creeper, but it was too damp to light.
“Here,” Jake said, and produced a lighter. “I stole this from my old man in case I ever got any cigarettes. It works most of the time.” Jake clicked it repeatedly and finally it sparked well enough to light. They lit up.
“We knock on the door, his mom is gonna be mad,” Jake said. “Us bringing home Buddy and an alligator, and Buddy wearing them shoes.”
“Yeah,” Wilson said. “You know, she don’t know he went off with us. We could put him in the yard. Maybe she’ll think the gator attacked him there.”
“What for,” Jake said, “them shoes? He recognized his aunt or something?” He began laughing at his own joke, but if Wilson got it he didn’t give a sign. He seemed to be thinking. Jake quit laughing, scratched his head and looked off down the street. He tried to smoke his cigarette in a manful manner.
“Gators come up in yards and eat dogs now and then,” Wilson said after a long silence. “We could leave him, and if his mama don’t believe a gator jumped him, that’ll be all right. The figuring of it will be a town mystery. Nobody would ever know what happened. Those niggers won’t be talking. And if they do, they don’t know us from anybody else anyway. We all look alike to them.”
“I was Buddy,” Jake said, “that’s the way I’d want it if I had a couple friends involved.”
“Yeah, well,” Wilson said, “I don’t know I really liked him so much.”
Jake thought about that. “He was all right. I bet he wasn’t going to get that Chevy though.”
“If he did,” Wilson said, “there wouldn’t have been a motor in it, I can promise you that. And I bet he never got any pussy neither.”
They pulled the creepers across the road and tipped gator and Buddy onto the ground in front of the porch steps.
“That’ll have to do,” Wilson whispered.
Wilson crept up on the porch and over to the window, looked through a crack in the curtain and into the living room. Buddy’s sister lay on the couch asleep, her mouth open, her huge belly bobbing up and down as she breathed. A half-destroyed bag of Cheetos lay beside the couch. The TV light flickered over her like saintly fire.
Jake came up on the porch and took a look.
“Maybe if she lost some pounds and fixed her hair different,” he said.
“Maybe if she was somebody else,” Wilson said.
They sat on the porch steps in the dark and finished smoking their cigarettes, watching the faint glow of the television through the curtain, listening to the tinny sound of a late night talk show.
When Jake finished his smoke, he pulled the alligator shoes off Buddy and checked them against the soles of his own shoes. “I think these dudes will fit me. We can’t leave ‘em on him. His mama sees them, she might not consent to bury him.”