by Adam Howe
I gave her an aw-shucks grin. “For a fella with a gimp hand,” I said, hoping maybe she’d kiss it better.
“Caught raiding someone’s cookie jar?” she said.
I was about to feed her my cut-myself-shaving line, when a smile teased those lips, and she said, “Or the honey pot?”
And right away she had me nailed.
To the goddamn cross.
Blushing like a schoolboy, before I could stammer out an answer—the pond seemed to explode, and I was drenched in a spray of stinking swamp water.
Lurching back in shock from the deck rail, I glanced down into the pond and saw a dinosaur devour my bloody handkerchief with a snap of its jaws.
The huge reptilian head submerged again in a seething froth of bubbles.
“What the Christ was that?”
“Oh …” drawled a voice behind me. “That’s just Big George.”
Croker was blocking my way back to the bar.
He’d removed his butcher’s apron. His silver neck chain dangled down the front of his bullish chest. The gold wedding rings chinked together like wind chimes. He squinted at the dame and me like a sniper sighting down his rifle.
“See you’ve met the missus?” he said.
For a moment I thought he meant the monster in the pond.
Then I said, “We haven’t been properly introduced.”
“Grace,” Croker said to his wife, “this here’s Mister Johnny Smith.”
He tipped me a wink.
“He’ll be playing pee-anna for us awhile.”
It took me a moment to register what he’d said; now that I knew what was lurking in the pond, I was more than a little keen to get off that rickety wooden deck. I dredged up my voice. “I will?”
Croker said. “Said you was lookin’ for work, didn’t you?”
I wasn’t so sure about that all of a sudden.
“Nice to meet you, Mister Smith,” Grace said, icy and flat.
“Call me John,” I said, smiling politely and extending my hand.
“You’ll call him Mister Smith,” Croker warned her, and I took my hand back without her shaking it.
Grace flicked her cigarette off the deck and it sizzled in the pond. Then she brushed past her husband and returned to the bar.
“Damn it, Grace!” Croker bellowed. “How many more times I gotta tell you not to do that? It messes with Big George’s digestion!”
He watched as she sashayed across the room. Hell, I watched too. I hated to see her leave, but I loved to watch her go. Grace was just the right name for her.
When she disappeared through a door behind the bar, Croker shook his head in exasperation, fondling the wedding rings adorning his neck chain.
I forced a chuckle. “Dames.” Gave a knowing roll of the eyes.
His head cranked towards me and I quickly changed the subject.
“I never knew gators could get that big,” I said. “Outside of fairytales.” The damn dragon was fifteen feet, easy. “You oughta have him measured for Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”
A grin slit Croker’s face and his chest puffed with pride.
“Yep,” he said, “Big George is a legend ‘round these parts.”
By implication, so was the man who had caught him.
Croker slung a beefy arm around my shoulder and led me back to the deck rail to show off his pet. We stood leaning against the rail, our moonlit reflections rippling on the pond. The gator surfaced like a submarine, bubbles frothing around the huge angular snout, erasing our reflections on the water. The protective film slid back from the gator’s eyes. It peered up at me with an ancient hunger. Croker’s hand squeezed the meat of my shoulder.
“I was just a young’un,” Croker said, “fishing for channel cat with my Pap when this big bastard broadsided us, flipped our boat, flung us both in the swamp. Pap managed to boost me up onto a tree branch—‘bout the only kindly thing that ole snake ever done for me—but not before Big George took my leg. Snapped it off right above the knee.” Croker rapped his knuckles against his left leg with a sound like a hollow tree.
“The leg,” Croker continued, “well, that was just an appetizer. Pap was the main course. Perched above the swamp on that tree branch, I took off my shirt, bound it tight around the stump of my leg, and then the rest of the night, and right the way through till dawn, I watched Big George play with his food till all that was left of my daddy was just ragged red chunks of meat snagged in his teeth.
“That,” Croker said, “was the longest night of my life …
“A fishing crew found me the next day. They chased off Big George with rifles. Had to prise my fingers off the branch to get me down outta that tree. I was damn near drip-dried of blood, half-crazed from what I’d seen. Doc Culpepper told my momma he wasn’t sure I’d pull through. But even then I was a stubborn sonofabitch, and I healed over time. Soon as I could, I went back to the swamp and went a-huntin’ for Big George. Wasn’t easy. Took me many a year. Me an’ George had us a grand ole game of cat and mouse, never sure which of us was bein’ the cat and which of us was bein’ the mouse. But I caught him in the end …
“Didn’t I, George?”
Croker gazed down at the gator. The gator gazed back at him. The way they were looking at each other, I wondered if the two of ‘em needed a moment alone together.
“In the end,” Croker said, “all it took was the right bait.”
My mouth went dry. “What bait was that?”
Croker clapped me on the shoulder and laughed. “Aw, you don’t have to worry ‘bout that, Smitty. Big George is penned in real good here, see. ‘Sides, now I know you play pee-anna so good, you’ll be giving the place a touch of class.”
I forced myself to laugh along with him, but I wasn’t really sure what the hell I was laughing about.
“I’m surprised you didn’t just kill the damn thing,” I said.
Croker looked appalled. “Kill Big George? The hell I’d do that for?”
“For what it did to your …” I paused. Unable to detect any grief for his father, I said, “Your leg.”
Croker waved his hand dismissively.
“The night I spent up in that tree,” Croker said, “slowly bleedin’ out, looking down at Big George, Big George sniffin’ the air, looking up at me …” He shook his head. “I been married four times—God help me—but I’ve never knowed an understanding like it … We’re like kin, Big George and me.”
As if on cue, the gator submerged, Croker gave another chuckle, and I watched Grace’s cigarette bobbing on the chop, the butt ringed red with her lipstick.
4.
Later that night after closing, Croker took me to his office behind the bar.
It was little more than a stockroom furnished with a desk, a leather recliner behind the desk, and a hard wooden chair for visitors that numbed my ass just to look at it. On the wall above the desk was a crudely drawn painting. More Looney Tunes than the Louvre, it depicted a jolly old fisherman, bearded and fat as a hillbilly Santa Claus, casting his line into the river. Baited on the hook was a Negro child, caricatured to resemble a monkey. Standing upright in the river was an alligator wearing a dinner napkin around his neck, clutching a knife and fork, salivating as the child sailed towards his cavernous maw. The painting was titled ‘Gator Bait.’ I shuddered to recall what Croker had said about “the right bait.”
Sinking down into his recliner, Croker gestured for me to sit. The wooden chair was positioned on a ratty oval rug. I tried to move it closer to the desk, but it wouldn’t budge; seemed to be nailed to the floor, the chair and rug both. Croker was waiting impatiently for me to sit, so I took a pew, and I couldn’t help noticing the way the floorboards creaked and sagged beneath my weight.
Croker grinned at me around his cigar stub. He reached behind the desk, his hands disappearing from view. I heard the snap of buckles; leather straps being loosened. Then his hands reappeared and he tossed his wooden leg down onto the desk and gave a grateful moan.
&n
bsp; “My dawgs are barkin’ today,” Croker said, massaging his stump. “Even the dawg Big George took.” He nodded at my mauled mitt. “That’s something you’ll get used to, Smitty. ‘Specially when it rains.” I hid my hand self-consciously. “I’ll have Doc Culpepper take a look at that paw for you, when the ole souse sobers up tomorrow. Speakin’ of which …”
He fetched a jar of hooch and two grubby glasses, filled them both and then handed me the cleaner of the two, which wasn’t saying much. As I leaned forwards to take the glass, the chair creaked beneath me, the floorboards wobbled like a diving board, and I flinched as Big George thrashed excitedly in his pond. Was it just my imagination, or did it sound like the gator was waiting directly below where I sat? The way Croker was smiling, I knew it wasn’t my imagination. I gulped down the hooch to try and quiet my nerves.
“What exactly are you running from, Smith?” He emphasized the phony name.
I played dumb. “Who says I’m running from anything?”
“Me,” he growled, a flash of fire in his eyes. “Son, do me the courtesy of not mistaking me for one of them fools out there. Any man plays the peeanna as good as you, oughta be leading a band in the city someplace, not singing for his supper in a swamp tonk. Now I’ll ask you again: what are you running from? And more to the point: what kinda trouble can I expect by hiring you on?”
I thought it prudent to stretch the truth.
“Mister Croker—” I said.
“Horace,” he reminded me.
“It’s nothing that’ll come back to you,” I assured him. “Just a big misunderstanding about a gambling debt.”
I couldn’t tell if he bought it or not.
“Just so long as we’re clear,” he said, “it’s a delicate operation I’m running here.”
He raised his glass and sloshed the hooch around inside it.
“Any man rocks the boat, he’s going overboard.”
Or below deck, I thought.
“I understand,” I said.
Croker nodded. “Good enough.”
He picked up his wooden leg and beat it on the desk like a giant drumstick. “Gracie!” Footsteps scuttled downstairs. Grace skulked inside the office. I found myself sitting up a little straighter in my chair. “Fix up the spare room for Mister Smith,” Croker told her, slurring his words. He was gesticulating drunkenly with his wooden leg. She glanced at me, and her gaze must’ve lingered longer than he liked, because Croker clubbed the limb in his palm, looking like he wanted to paddle her ass with it. Grace flinched at the slapping sound, gave a servile nod.
She started backing from the room—but as she pulled the door closed she shot me another glance that shivered down my spine like footsteps on the grave.
And that right there should’ve warned me of the trouble to come.
* * *
The room wasn’t much, but it was more than I had. A cot that looked like a torture rack, with a wafer-thin mattress and a rock for a pillow; a washbasin and a shaving mirror next to the lamp on the nightstand. The window looked out on the hills, where Croker’s whiskey still fires glowered in the night like red devil eyes. He was running a delicate operation, alright. Had to be making money hand over fist.
“Is everything to your liking, Mister Smith?”
I turned towards the voice.
Grace lingered in the doorway, her hourglass figure haloed by the light of the hall like an angel outside the pearly white gates. But there was nothing angelic about the glint in her eye as she asked me, “Will you be wanting anything else?”
I swallowed hard. “Not right now.”
She smiled like she knew it wouldn’t be long, and then she shut the door behind her, trapping me in the room with the lingering scent of her perfume. I splashed my face with water from the washbasin, reminding myself—in case my missing fingers weren’t enough—that I was sworn off dames for life.
* * *
That dead of night, I snapped awake to the sound of booming drums. For a moment I had no idea where I was. Heart pounding to the drumbeat, I bolted upright. The bed was quaking beneath me like the end of the world. Fumbling to light the lamp on the nightstand, my stumps prodded the edge of the cabinet. Pain bolted up my arm and I let out a yelp. Then I realized the drumbeat was the headboard of Croker’s bed thumping against the thin wall of our neighboring rooms as he rutted his wife. Boom, boom, boom. Croker was snorting like a hog with his snout in the trough; Grace was yipping like a small dog being kicked. Boom, boom, boom.
Sinking back down on the bed, I curled my pillow around my head, which succeeded in muffling the noise but didn’t stop the bed from bucking like a bull. It felt like Croker was having his way with both Grace and me. Climbing from bed, I went downstairs and salvaged a cigarette from the ashtrays piled at the end of the bar.
Then I went outside to smoke on the gallery deck while I waited for Croker to finish up. He did—eventually—I had to admire the man’s stamina. He climaxed with a bellowing cry that roared like thunder. Moments later his snores joined the chorus of frogs croaking in the night. I hoped this wouldn’t be a nightly occurrence. (It would be.)
I finished my cigarette and went to ditch the butt. Warily approaching the deck rail, I peered down into the pond. There was no sign of Big George. All I saw was my reflection, shimmering on the inky black surface. I was about to flick away my butt when Grace appeared suddenly in the window behind me, hovering above my shoulder like an angel. An angel? Maybe that was wishful thinking.
She was gazing off into the distance. Her eyes were dewy with tears. Her lips smeared with blood. Her long blonde hair dangled down off her shoulders and veiled her breasts like gossamer. As she stared out over the swamp, I held my breath and watched her—
Until the cigarette butt singed my fingers and I dropped it with a hiss of pain. Grace heard the noise and looked down and saw me looking up at her. A drop of blood dripped from her lip, spattering her breasts as she smiled at me. Then she was gone, and as my cigarette sizzled out in the pond, I wondered if she’d even been there at all.
I turned back towards the pond, perhaps hoping she would reappear.
But this time all I saw was Big George, the moonlight reflecting off his eyes as he grinned at me.
5.
Despite my concerns—about Croker, about Grace, about Grace and me, not to mention Big George—I settled into life at The Grinnin’ Gator with remarkable ease. The twenty bucks Croker paid me each week helped. That was no small spuds for a city gig, let alone a backwater tonk in the willywags. It was plenty enough to get me back on my feet, if not buy me new fingers. If I had any sense I would have saved up some scratch and hit the road just as soon as I could.
But I didn’t.
Besides, the money wasn’t the only reason I stayed.
True to his word, Croker arranged for Doc Culpepper to tend to my hand. He was the Croker family physician, and looked about old enough to have delivered Croker’s great-granddaddy, if not the baby Jesus. He’d treated young Horace when the boy lost his leg to Big George, even carved Croker’s wooden peg himself, although given the shoddy carpentry, I wasn’t sure that was anything to crow about.
The old buzzard gave me some shots, some pain pills, and some stinking salve to slather on my stumps; he checked my progress, changed my bandages every couple few days; even prescribed some advice I was too dumb to take.
We were perched at the bar. Croker was arranging a rum-run to the city, his voice booming through the closed office door as if he didn’t trust the telephone to carry his message. Grace was readying the place for opening, humming to herself as she scattered fresh sawdust on the floor. Recognizing the melody as the ragtime I’d been playing the previous night, I made a mental note to play it again, if it pleased her. One pretty gal is all the audience any musician needs.
“Something wrong with your eyes, too?” Doc Culpepper said, as he examined my hand.
I didn’t follow.
“There will be,” he said, “Croker catches you
eyein’ his wife like that.”
I hadn’t been aware I was. “Like what?”
“Like a hungry dog outside a butcher’s window.”
I laughed and told the old fool I was sworn off dames for life.
Within a month, the stumps of my fingers were healing over nicely.
The scabs had crumbled away to reveal shiny pink layers of new skin. My hand wasn’t pretty to look at—it resembled a lobster claw—but lucky for me I could still play. Nowhere near my best, but way better than anything these hicks had ever heard. It amused me to think, if they’d just cast their prejudices aside, they could have gone to any juke joint in dark town, been enjoying music like this for years.
I played a short set every night, and a longer one weekends, when the place would be ram-packed with rowdies. Croker billed me to the crowd as ‘Smitty Three Fingers.’ The sonofabitch. “From the city,” he’d tell folks. Like The Grinnin’ Gator was moving up in the world. He told me to keep the nigger music to a minimum, or at least to mix it up with a few Southern standards, but I could tell he dug my sound. I’d often see him tapping his wooden leg, waggling his cigar between his lips like a conductor’s baton leading the orchestra.
When she wasn’t slaving behind the slab, Grace would sit in the bar and listen to me play. I’d position my glass on top of the piano so I could see her reflection.
There was no harm in looking, I reckoned; no harm at all, had I left it at looking.
People came to The Grinnin’ Gator for the liquor and the girls, and sure, once word got around, for the music too; but they kept coming back for Big George.
Croker fed his pet every weekend.
The crowd would gather on the deck like rubes around a carny barker as Croker leaned back against that rickety wooden rail and gave them his spiel.
Clutching some doomed critter by the scruff of the neck, he’d tell the crowd just as he told me, “I was just a young’un, fishing for channel cat with my Pap when this big bastard broadsided us, flipped our boat, flung us both in the swamp …”
And after Big George closed the show, Croker would lead the crowd back inside for another round of drinks, and I’d play a jazzy rendition of The Alligator Crawl.
