by R. J. Blacks
“Dozens of alligators?” Fargo asks.
“About thirty. They claim they didn’t see them at first; it was dark. But when they went outside and started walking along the side of the building, they were attacked. The owner manages to get back into the restaurant, but his worker gets bit on the foot. Thirty gators! Is that possible?”
“This place backs up to a canal, right?”
“Yeah, you can see it through the window.”
“Are there gators out there now?” Fargo asks.
“Only the dead one,” Bolt says.
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Go right ahead.”
Fargo and Detective Bolt step outside and I follow close behind. They peer up and down the canal, but it’s dark and there’s not much to see. Police are everywhere, searching the water’s edge with flashlights, looking for clues.
“Did they find the missing victim?” Fargo asks.
“I’m afraid he’s history. We’ll look again tomorrow.”
I attempt to walk to the water’s edge to fill my sample bottles, but Fargo grabs my arm.
“Stay behind me. There might be gators out there.”
“I need samples,” I say.
“Then follow me.”
He approaches the canal, studies the sandy bank for a moment, and then tells me it’s safe. I stoop down, fill up my bottles, and return them to the lunch bag.
“What’s that for?” Detective Bolt bellows.
“School project,” Fargo says. “She needs water samples.”
“Oh, I see,” he says, losing interest. “Look, Fargo, I know it’s Christmas Eve and all. But two fatal attacks in one day? That’s more than a coincidence. Could someone or something be behind it?”
“Don’t know. Let me look around.”
“Yeah, do that, please. I need answers. I’m getting heat from the D.A. and I don’t know what to tell her.”
Fargo instructs me to get back into the building and I do what he says. I watch through a window as he strolls up and down the bank searching for clues. He stoops down several times shining his flashlight onto the ground and then at places where the canal washes up onto the bank. He does this for about ten minutes and then signals me to come outside. I meet up with him and we stroll over to Detective Bolt.
“John, take it from the top. Why was the guy at the water’s edge in the first place? Was he feeding the gators?”
“No, the owner is well aware of the laws against it and claims his worker wasn’t anywhere near the water. He says the guy was emptying garbage like he does every day at this time. He was just walking to the dumpster, the one in the parking lot, at the end of the building, like he’s done a thousand times before.
Then the owner and another worker hear a frantic call for help and rush out the back door. It’s really dark, and at first, they don’t perceive anything unusual. So the worker walks towards the dumpster alone, looking for the first guy. Then he yells out in pain. When the owner catches up to him, there’s a gator clamped to his foot. The worker is whacking the gator’s snout with a ladle, but the gator is undeterred. The owner tries to free the man, but it’s hopeless. He rushes back inside and tells his wife to call 911.
He returns with a spotlight and a butcher knife and sees gators everywhere. Fortunately, the police arrive in less than five minutes and start shooting at them. I guess the gunshots and the spotlights drove them away because when I got here the only gator I saw was the dead one.”
“So out of thirty gators, the cops were only able to kill one?” Fargo asks.
“Well it was dark, and the gators slipped into the water pretty quickly.”
“Excuse me for budding in, but you should probably be aware of something I heard,” I say.
“What is it?” Bolt asks.
“These attacks might not be entirely random.”
“What do you mean ‘not entirely random’?”
“I read a paper where researchers observed alligators stealthily observing their prey for up to a week before attacking. They now believe they have cognitive abilities far more complex than we ever imagined.”
“So you want me to tell the D.A. that alligators are smarter than we thought and now they’ve learned how to do coordinated attacks,” he says.
Fargo cuts in: “John, you can’t tell her that. If word gets out, people will over-react, start shooting at anything that moves in the water. You know what I’m talking about; we’ve both seen it before.”
“Okay then, how about I say it’s on account of an early mating season? Yeah... that’ll work. I’ll say the gators are edgy because of abnormal water temperatures. Climate change and all. Agreed?”
“I’m fine with that,” says Fargo.
“Me too,” I say.
“Alright then. I’ll put out a public service message warning the public to stay away from places where alligators are present and blame it all on the weather. The TV News loves stories about climate change.”
“John, mind if I take off? There’s really nothing more I can do here tonight,” Fargo says.
“No problem. Check with me tomorrow and I’ll bring you up to date.”
“Can I have the dead gator?” I ask.
“What do you want with a dead gator?” Fargo asks.
“Research.”
“John, okay if we take it?”
“Help yourself. What am I going to do with a dead gator?”
Fargo backs up the jeep and then gets a couple of police investigators help him load the three-hundred pound reptile into the back with its tail hanging over the tailgate. As he pulls out onto the main road, his curiosity gets the better of him.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asks.
“I need you to dissect it,” I say.
“You want ME to dissect it?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll show you what to do.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“You know how I feel about blood.”
“Maybe you should get used to it,” he says.
We cover a couple of miles and he doesn’t say a word. It appears he’s deep in thought, but I have a stake in this so I feel compelled to break the silence.
“Are you going to tell me what you saw back there?”
“It’s nothing,” he says.
“It can’t be nothing or you wouldn’t be thinking about it.”
“How do you know I’m thinking about it?” he asks.
“Because you just admitted it.”
“Alright... and this is confidential by the way... I saw some tracks with eight toes, and they were big.”
“How many do they normally have?”
“Five. The strange part was... it looked like the smaller gators were grouping around the big one.”
“The leader?”
“Alligators don’t have leaders. Yes, large males have harems. But the females don’t exactly follow them around. They just hang out in pools of water and the dominant male shields them from other males.”
“But don’t they attack in groups?”
“It only seems that way because they’re opportunists. If a gator gets some prey, the others sneak in hoping to steal part of it. It’s every one for themselves.”
“So what’s bothering you?” I ask.
“I’m seeing the same tracks and the same behavior as this morning.”
“Why is that a problem?”
“That was fifty miles from here. To cover that distance undetected in less than a day would require extraordinary planning and coordination. There would be no time for mistakes. That gator would have to know every lake, every stream, every canal, and every culvert between here and there. It would require a photographic memory.”
“And you don’t believe alligators have sufficient mental capacity to do that.”
“Look, I respect your education, your theories, and whatever else you do, but I live with these creatures every day. I know where they live, what they eat, how they behave, and even how they th
ink. There’s a simple explanation for this. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure it out.”
“Okay, sorry, didn’t mean to offend. I was only trying to look at it from all angles.”
“Tell me then; what do you propose?”
“What I’m alluding to is this: The eight toes may be a relatively insignificant manifestation of a far greater internal transformation.”
“Can you put that in English?”
“What I’m saying is there might be something major going on with the brain of the eight-toed alligator, something that has caused modifications to its instinctive natural behavior.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The fact that only one gator was shot. And he was clamped onto a man’s foot making him an easy target. Alligators are not known for being skittish. They’re not easily spooked. It appears to me, when the police cruisers showed up, the gators were tipped off they were in imminent danger. Remember, it was dark. I think the only thing the cops saw were the tails of the gators slipping under the water.”
“And the eight-toed one tipped them off.”
“Could be.”
“Because of changes to its brain?”
“There’s a natural tendency in nature for animals to gain intelligence over time. Survival drives it. But it could also be external,” I say.
“External?”
“Didn’t you say the water started to change after they built the factory to make pesticides?
“That was thirty years ago.”
“Well, these things take time. The effect might be incremental, over many years.”
“How would that affect the gators?”
“Certain drugs are known to affect intelligence. Ritalin is one of them. It’s normally used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder, but also has the potential to enhance mental ability.”
“You’re saying the water has Ritalin in it?” he asks.
“It doesn’t have to be Ritalin. Something could be leaking from that factory that has the same effect on wildlife as Ritalin has on humans. No one has studied this because no company will fund it.”
“Both the senator and the EPA said the plant was clean.”
“Maybe it was, at one time. When was the last time anyone tested the water?”
“Twelve years ago.”
“A lot can happen in twelve years,” I say.
I peer out the windshield and into the dark road ahead, my mind drifting, and then, Fargo breaks the silence.
“There’s an Indian legend about an eight-toed alligator?”
“What’s it about.”
“It speaks of death, an omen.”
“And you think it applies here?”
“My mother was convinced it was true.”
“I do see a pattern,” I say.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“There’s an old saying, ‘Bad things happen in threes.’”
“Go on.”
“Well, the first incident was eighty miles away, the second, thirty miles. The next one might be close to home.”
Fargo glares at me and I perceive his mind going a million miles an hour, and then he scoffs: “That’s ridiculous. It’s superstition, just silly superstition.”
Neither of us says a word the rest of the trip and then he pulls into his driveway and parks the Jeep. We stroll to the house, enter, and approach Will who’s sitting on the couch watching TV. He turns to greet us.
“What’s up?”
“Help me get this gator out of the jeep,” Fargo says.
“A live one?”
“No, he’s dead.”
“Before you do that, can you set me up a table outside,” I say. “I need a place to sterilize the gator before we do anything with it.”
Fargo turns on the outside spotlights, stacks a dozen cinder blocks on the ground, and then puts some eight-foot planks across them forming a platform about two-feet high. I cover the top with a clean plastic sheet giving it a nice smooth surface.
He and Will drag the gator from the jeep and place it on the platform. I hose the gator down with cold water and brush it vigorously to wash off any contamination and then spray a mild concentration of bleach over the entire back. After a few minutes, I rinse it off with distilled water.
“I need you to put on these rubber gloves and a surgical face mask. Are you okay with that?”
“Sure,” he says, and puts them on.
I hand Fargo a brand new scalpel and instruct him on what he needs to do.
“Remove the brain and place it in this specimen jar. Make sure it doesn’t contact anything other than the inside of the jar or it will be contaminated.”
Will and I stand back to give Fargo some space as he makes an incision along the back of the head and then peels away the thick skin making an opening large enough to get his hand inside the skull.
“We’re lucky. The officer’s bullet only severed the spinal cord. The brain is intact,” he says, and then uses the scalpel to separate it from the surrounding tissue. He brings it out and drops it into a specimen jar. It’s about the size of a walnut.
“Okay, let’s get some muscle tissue now,” I say, and instruct him how to do that. He cuts out some tissue from the massive muscle alongside the jaw and then some from the legs. I explain to Fargo how I want him to expose the spine and then use a hypodermic needle to extract some spinal fluid. Finally he cuts away a small piece of the liver and the kidneys, and then I get him to take a blood sample from a main artery.
“Okay, that’s it,” I say, and then seal all the jars.
“What’s it for?” asks Fargo.
“I may need it later. For now, it goes in the freezer.”
“What about the meat?”
“It’s yours. Do what you wish.”
“Okay, we’ll have it for dinner, next week.”
“I never had alligator,” I say.
“Tastes like catfish.”
“Never had catfish.”
“Tastes kind of like snake.”
“Never had snake.”
“Ever had chicken?” he asks.
“Yes, of course.”
“It don’t taste like chicken.”
Will cuts in: “You’ve had lobster, right?”
“Sure.”
“It’s kind of like lobster and kind of like crab, but not exactly like either. Get what I’m saying?”
“Fine, whatever it tastes like, I’ll have some,” I say, and scurry back to the kitchen to place the jars in the freezer.
Fargo skins the alligator, butchers the meat, and places it in a large freezer he normally uses for fish. After cleaning up, he slips out the front door and returns with the pine cones I had collected for trimming the tree. They have a sparkling gold tint to them. We tie them to the tree in random locations and stand back to admire our work.
“Fantastic!” I say.
“Time to celebrate,” Fargo says, and then he opens the sea grape wine and pours out three glasses. He hands one to Will, one to me, and then holds the third glass up into the air.
“A toast.”
“A toast for what?” I say.
“A toast you find what you came for.”
“Well, with your help, I know I will.”
“I’ll drink to that,” says Will.
We finish off the wine and by nine-thirty I’m ready to crash. What a day it’s been. I can’t recall a single day when I’ve had more excitement, and that includes my college days. I bid everyone a good night and retreat to my bedroom. I slip on a nightshirt, crawl under the covers, and within minutes, I’m asleep.
CHAPTER 21
I lie in bed half awake, daylight streaming through my window. As my thoughts come together, I realize it’s Christmas. A cold snap had blown in during the night, and with no heat in the cabin, my room is cold. I snuggle under the covers savoring the warmth of the bed, putting off for as long as possible the inevitable, taking a shower in that chilly bathroom. But there’s a turkey to clean and fish t
o scale so I can’t waste time just lying around, even though I really feel like doing that right now. I mentally prepare myself for a long day in the kitchen and then dash into the shower and do what I have to do to get ready.
When I enter the kitchen, I see a large box on the table covered with the same colored ad pages we used to decorate the bucket under the Christmas tree. There’s a tag on it, a tag with my name on it. I pick up the box and rush to the porch. Fargo is in the clearing, plucking the bird. He turns to face me with a grin he can’t hide.
“Is this for me?” I ask.
“It’s from both of us.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get you guys anything.”
Will steps out the front door onto the porch.
“Go ahead, open it,” he says.
I sit down in one of the beach chairs and carefully remove the wrapping paper. Inside is an elegant brown box with the name ‘Seminole Sales’ imprinted on it. I lift off the top and inside is a two-piece outfit made of the finest deerskin I’ve ever seen. I pick up the top and hold it up against me.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Look, I’ve got to square with you,” Fargo says. “We had intended to give it to our mother, but never had the chance. It was too late. She passed soon after.”
“But it’s brand new,” Will adds. “And since you’re her size, we want you to have it.”
“Try it on,” Fargo says.
I rush to my bedroom and slip into the outfit. It fits perfectly. The skirt reaches to my ankles with frills along the bottom and the top has frills on the sleeves and along the neckline. There are red, blue, and brown Native American designs embroidered on both the skirt and the top. I put on the shell necklace and place a feather in my hair. Then I slip on the moccasins and return to the porch, modeling the outfit for them.
“You look great, like a princess,” Will says.
“I love it,” I say, and then give Will a hug and peck on the cheek. I scramble down the stairs, approach Fargo, and give him the same.
“I’ll always cherish it,” I say.
“I’m glad you like it,” he says, and then goes back to plucking the turkey.
Will saunters into the kitchen and I follow him in. He picks up the three fish and a large knife.
“I’ll take care of these,” he says, and then strolls out the door to clean the fish.
