Fearless

by Lauren Gilley

  “This is home,” Ava said as she passed through. “We’ll put our bags in my room.”

  “It’s nice.”

  Not even a third as nice as the mini mansion where his parents lived in Georgia. “Thanks.”

  She led him through the small but cozy family room, down the hall and to her bedroom. It was the way she’d left it five years ago, its old familiar self every Christmas and summer when she’d come home. Mint green walls, sunny yellow comforter and white pillows. Her bedframe was a rich dark hardwood, an old family heirloom that squeaked – she’d had it tested in that department. Matching dressing table and dresser framed one corner, the closet door the other. Above her bed, a watercolor painting of a blooming spring meadow had always soothed her to sleep. The nightstand bore a lamp with beaded shade, a clock radio, and a small ceramic jewelry box she’d made in the eleventh grade.

  Ronnie stopped at the end of the bed, hands going in his pockets. He opened his mouth to speak, and Ava beat him to the punch.

  “You don’t have to say it’s nice. It’s just my room, and it’s nothing special.”

  He sighed. “Shit, Ava, what–”

  “Nothing.” She pushed down the handle of her rolling suitcase and went to her closet, pushing the accordion door back harder than she needed to.

  She heard him step up behind her, his loafers making soft noises against the carpet. “Look–”

  A knock at the back door, rapid-fire and insistent.

  Ronnie stayed behind as she walked to answer it, for which she was thankful. Out of usual caution, she peeked through the kitchen window to see who was standing on the patio. Her father had raised no dummy when it came to being careful.

  For the first time since hearing that New Orleans was in town, she grinned and meant it. Ava flipped the locks and pulled the door wide, just in time to catch Leah Cook’s crushing hug.

  “Aavvaaaaa!” Leah shrieked, bouncing on her toes.

  Ava laughed. “I take it Mom called you.”

  “Yes!” As quickly as she’d attacked, Leah retreated, pushing back, and smacked Ava lightly across the arm. “Which you were supposed to do the second you rolled across the city limit line.”

  “I was distracted,” she defended, and laughed again at her friend’s mock outrage.

  Leah, very tiny and South Korean, looked like a little anime doll on almost every occasion. She favored bright colors and flamboyant hairstyles. The adopted daughter of a local coffee shop owner, she almost smelled like Arabica beans and bounced off the walls like she was made from them.

  Today, she was in a hot pink miniskirt, black tights, chunky heeled sandals, and a white t-shirt with WTF stamped across the chest. Her hair was full of bright blue streaks and was pulled into two high pigtails, the ends hanging down past her shoulders.

  Leah’s eyes flipped wide; her mouth formed a little O. “Distracted…as in…” She leaned in close and dropped her voice, “Lord have Mercy, you were distracted?”

  “No.” When would people stop saying his name out loud? Each time was a tiny gunshot through her heart. “There’s just a lot going on. The party and everything.”

  Leah rolled her eyes, stepped the rest of the way into the house and heeled the door shut. “God, this party. Everyone in the city knows the Lean Dogs prez is stepping down at this point. I don’t know how it didn’t make the papers.”

  “Everyone knows?” Ava bit her lip. “That could be bad…”

  “Oh, don’t be paranoid.” Leah dragged out a stool at the breakfast bar and climbed onto it. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Um…just you saying that guarantees something will happen.”

  “So?” Leah shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I thought you were all Writer Girl now.”

  “Yeah, but this is my family.”

  Leah ignored her, was instead wrestling something from her bag. “Here. I printed it out; I want you to sign it for me, in case it’s worth something one of these days.”

  It was a printed copy of the online mag that had run her short story. Leah set it on the counter and smoothed it with one magenta-nailed hand. On the crinkled cover, Ava spotted her name in tiny black typeface: A.R. Teague, under the title of her piece, “Falling.”

  “No one would give you a nickel for my signature,” she said.

  Leah, rummaging through her purse for a pen, glanced up with a vicious scowl. “Yes they would. I would.”

  “You and my mother.” Ava sighed and leaned forward to prop her elbows on the counter.

  “Hey.” The pen – a purple Sharpie – landed on the counter with a click and Leah put on her best bossy pose, hands on her slender hips. “You’ve wanted to get published since we were four, Ava, and now you are, and you’re acting like it’s not a big deal.”

  “It’s not.” Ava felt like a shit for saying it, but the words left her mouth anyway. “It’s just a small publication; I didn’t get paid; only about a hundred people will see it–”

  “It’s your first gig!” Leah said. “Don’t take this the wrong way – but get over yourself.”

  Ava grinned. “I missed you.”

  “I know you did. No one in Athens would keep your feet nailed down on the ground.” She lifted her nose to a superior angle. “Lucky for you, you won’t have to brave grad school without me.”

  “Lucky for me,” Ava repeated, smiling, shaking her head.

  Leah sobered a fraction and dropped her voice. “Seriously, though, you haven’t had any more trouble with your old boy, have you? He’s not in town for the…”

  Ava nodded.

  “Oh, he is. Damn.” Her smooth black brows tucked together over her almond eyes. “Well, but you can’t have…”

  “Run into him? Back at the clubhouse.”

  “Shit.” She made a face. “And I’m guessing you’re…”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Right. Obviously.”

  “Honestly, why does everyone think I’m going to fall to pieces?”

  Leah’s nose scrunched up like a little button in a comical show of regret. “Because you kind of did. More than once.”

  “That was years ago.” But her heart grabbed like it had been yesterday. Her palms grew damp and her chest tightened and Ava wondered if anyone ever truly conquered that kind of heartbreak, or if it settled in a person’s bones and flared up at a moment’s notice when the afflicted party came in contact with the original pathogen again. A disease – that’s what it had been like. Not love, but a corrosive sickness. “I’ve moved on,” she said, like she meant it.

  Leah’s brows rose as if to say really? “I thought you were bringing a new guy with you.”

  “She did.”

  Ava nearly leapt from her skin at the sound of Ronnie’s voice from the entry behind her. The sting of guilt heated her face. Three times now in the last hour, she’d forgotten he existed.

  Leah sat, gaping, and Ava hoped her own expression was less bewildered as she turned to face her boyfriend. “Did you get all set up?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He’d traded his polo shirt for a plain blue t-shirt, his khakis for jeans; he still wore the loafers. Ava knew he didn’t own a single pair of boots.

  He looked at Leah and smiled politely. “Hi. I’m Ronnie.”

  “Leah,” she answered, sounding dazed.

  “Ronnie,” Ava said, “Leah’s my best friend from back in elementary school. We grew up together.”

  “That’s great.” Another polite smile graced his beautiful face, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Where’s the restroom?”

  “Oh, I’ll show you–”

  “You can just tell me.”

  “Oh.” Now she’d done it. She hadn’t ever seen him like this, all closed off and disinterested. Three was the magic number: a man could only be removed from the equation so many times before he started to shut down. “It’s across the hall from my room.”

  He nodded and retreated, loafers scuffing against the bright orange Mexican tile. A moment later, th
ey heard the bathroom door close.

  “I think you screwed up,” Leah said.

  “Yeah,” Ava agreed. “I think I did.”

  “Oh well.” The unbound magazine pages were thrust across the counter, the Sharpie perched on the cover. “Here. Sign it.”

  Three

  “You don’t belong in the swamp. None of us do.”

  Sometimes, usually in the wee hours, when he’d saturated his liver with Johnnie Walker and his mind was playing tricks on his senses as sleep swept up to consume him, he thought he heard his grandmother’s voice. “God, he lets us pass through Her, lets us take what we need to live from Her. But she is too wild and strong a beast for any of us to own. Never forget that. Never forget how small you are, Felix. When a man starts thinking he can control the beast, that’s when She swallows him whole. No one remembers his name; he ain’t nothin’ but bleached bone washing up amongst the reeds, bits of him deep in the belly of a gator somewhere along the slimy bottom.”

  She’d been Cherokee, as frail, leathered and wrinkled as a week-old raisin, her hair thin white ribbons down her bony back, her gnarled fingers trembling as she threaded her woven baskets together, one sun-dried stalk of reed grass at a time. She’d been from Georgia, originally, and married a French Canadian who’d been passing through on his way to the gulf. She’d talked of her former beauty, of how handsome her pale, blonde, retiring Frenchman had been. With only two teeth left in her head, she sipped tin mugs of broth and watered moonshine round the clock, as she sat and worked on the porch of their tar paper shack where it perched at the water’s edge, in a deserted, stagnant clearing. A break in the canopy of laced oak limbs poured molten, humid sunlight down onto the water’s glimmering brown surface; steam rose, day and night, choking their yard, peeling thick strips of the tar paper, baking mildew in flaky patches along the porch boards. Gnats, flies, and mosquitoes teemed in competing clouds, their droning a constant sad soundtrack to the plop of frogs into the water, and the deep-throated groaning of the alligators as they basked on the far bank.

  He returned there more than he wanted to, to that shack in the swamp, with its lawn of weeds and wildflowers, the rusted out Ford, the rutted drive that flooded with every rain, the outhouse, reeking of shit, swarming with flies, filled with the hissing of the snakes that fed on the rats in the refuse down below that awful wooden perch. He returned to his grandmother spitting tobacco juice and predicting when the next storm would come barreling in over the tree canopy.

  He returned to Daddy’s voice: “Get your ass a’movin’, Felix! Let’s go!” Daddy was never happier than when they were loading up the boat first thing in the morning to go check the lines. He got that big grin that split his tan face nearly in two, his gapped teeth flashing, yellow and stained along the gums from the tobacco. He whistled and sang to himself, old French songs that sounded bawdy even if Mercy didn’t know the words.

  The old bateau with its patched bottom and the outboard Evinrude that gleamed like a shiny humpbacked beetle at the stern, Daddy’s one financial splurge. “You don’t want a bad motor,” he always said. “Good way to get stuck out in the bayou.”

  Mercy could still recall – when the drink was in him and he hovered under dense clouds of consciousness – the thump of the aluminum lunchbox and thermos settling down in the bow. He remembered the jangle of the fishing poles they took every time, to catch themselves dinner on the way back. The soft thunk of the gunstock where it touched down across the seat. That was his responsibility, that old Ruger 10/22 that he cleaned after every trip out, wiping it down by kerosene lantern in the shack’s tiny kitchen. Daddy had taught him to shoot it; it didn’t kick hard, so his ten-year-old shoulder could support the stock when it went off. He could control the long barrel. In the last two years, his finger had become familiar with the trigger. That Ruger .22, he thought, when he looked back on it, had been like his first lover. The first thing in all his life that had amplified him in some way, projected a stronger version of himself into the air, until he heard the low-level buzzing of his real self and his amplified self struggling to merge, as the atoms tried to cleave to one another and create a whole new conglomerate boy. Not a boy, a man. That gun had been the first thing to touch his hands and make a man out of him.

  Daddy, so quiet and drawn through most of the week, transformed on line-checking days. He was up frying bacon and eggs and hash in the kitchen, the greasy smells flooding the shack, bringing Mercy up out of bed by his nose. They ate by lantern light, left a covered plate in the oven for Gram, then loaded the bateau in the mist-swirled dawn. It was eerie and beautiful, that time of morning on the swamp. The singing frogs and crickets, the chattering birds, the indigo tree trucks with their gray beards of moss, all shadows and monster-shapes against the pearlescent water and its shifting, endless waves of mist and steam. With lunch, ball caps, thermoses of coffee and water, the rods, reels, and rifle, they climbed into the bateau and the Evinrude started with a snort and a belch of white smoke.

  As they whipped along down the black highways of water, the swamp breathed around them. It inhaled and exhaled; like they traveled through the belly of some dark and fearsome beast, it seemed to expand around them, great lungs working. The swamp was a wicked, unforgiving mistress, but Daddy knew all the safest pathways; he could find their way home using the stars. He remembered markers that Mercy could never keep track of. He navigated the bayou with awe-inspiring grace. “I don’t fight it,” he explained. “I’m good to her and She’s good to me.”

  Just as the sun was scaling the tree tops, and the steam was thinning, they reached the first of the lines. Mercy saw, by the bowing of the branch to which it was hooked, and the way the strong length of rope disappeared down into the water in a straight tight line, that the bait – a whole chicken carcass concealing the hook – had been taken. A gator awaited them on the bottom, and hopefully, he was a big one.

  Daddy piloted the bateau around in a smooth arc and shut off the motor, letting the small boat’s momentum carry it alongside the rope with a practiced expertise, the same way regular men might handle razors when they shaved their faces. The bateau rocked on the fleeting waves kicked up by the Evinrude’s wake, then went still, hovering on the black, glass surface of the water.

  “The gun,” Daddy said, and Mercy picked it up, hefted it to his shoulder and let the barrel trail down toward the water.

  So many times they’d done this, their bodies knowing the routines and rituals of it better than their minds. Daddy slipped on his leather gloves and leaned over the side, taking the rope in both hands. It was taut as a fresh guitar string; it vibrated when Daddy plucked it. His arms, red from the sun and laced with shiny white scars, gleamed with anxious perspiration, all wiry tendon and muscle over heavy bone, dusted with dark hair, horribly puckered and pockmarked in the places where gator teeth had sunk deep and ripped chunks of flesh. Strong arms. Strong hands. A truly invincible father. And never had Mercy admired him so greatly as in these moments when he wound the unbearably tight rope around his hands and started to pull. There was nothing so awesome or beautiful, in Mercy’s eyes, as the sight of his father pulling an eight foot gator up from the depths.

  “It’s a big one,” Daddy said, and the sweat popped out on his brow. His shirt clung to his chest as he gave another slow pull. “And he’s fighting it. He’s backed in under the reeds. You get ready now, Felix. You get that gun ready. The moment his head’s up, you get the bead, ya hear? I’m countin’ on you, son.”

  Mercy nodded. His breath backed up in his throat; his lungs swelled to bursting. He dug the butt of the rifle into his shoulder and laid his cheek on the stock, so he had the perfect view down the barrel, through the sights. Sometimes, he wasn’t so proud to admit, he said a little prayer right at this moment. A prayer that he’d hit his mark; a prayer that Daddy didn’t get bit again; a prayer that this was a big one, and not a sunken log, and that it’d bring them a pretty penny when they turned it in. His stomach growled, and he se
ttled his finger in next to the trigger. Roast, he thought. Not canned chicken, but it’d be a roast they had if this gator was as big as they thought.

  “Here we go,” Daddy said. And he gave the real pull, the deep one, where his shoulders worked like a winch and his back bowed and all the veins popped out on his arms and in his face. The rope started to come up, giving just a little. And then there were the bubbles, the little tiny ones that burst at the surface. “Yeah, here he comes, here he comes,” Daddy chanted, his own prayer. “Here he comes. Yeah. Come on, sucker. Show us your ugly–”

  Mercy saw the disturbance just beneath the surface. There was an almost imperceptible sound, like the gathering of breath. Now, he thought. Here he comes, here he comes. Underwater, he knew the gator’s long serrated tail dug down in the mud and whipped back and forth, strong as a propeller, sending him up, up…

  The water drew back; there came the rushing sound, the hiss, the froth, the great sucking of air as the water was pulled down and down by the sweeping speed of the gator as he made his launch up toward the side of the bateau.

  From the foam, fast as blinking, his scaled snout broke the surface, his shining ivory teeth, open jaws, long flat wedge head. He hissed and water slopped into his mouth as he lunged up toward Daddy.

  Bang. The .22 bucked and the gator’s headlong rush ended with a lurching thud against the side of the bateau. He went still, and then his body sank, bobbing back down into the water, his jaws frozen in an open-mouthed grimace.

  Mercy kept his gun trained, just in case, but he saw the neat hole behind the eyes, on the top of the head, and knew the first shot had done the trick.

  “That’s a way,” Daddy said. “That’s a good boy, Felix.”

  Together they dragged the weighty corpse up over the side of the boat, until its swamp-slimed scales slipped and it flopped over into the bottom of the bateau, belly-up. Its tail and claws twitched: death throes. It would twitch for hours, yet. That had scared Felix his first time out, sure that the gator would come back to life and swing around to chomp on his leg. But now, he climbed over the quivering head and settled into his perch in the bow, plucking up the coffee thermos and taking a swig. Daddy always put something in the coffee that made it extra warm on the way down, something that left his head pleasantly heavy and full of fuzz. He took three long swallows and passed it back; Daddy accepted it over the body.