Night Vision (4 page)

Squires grabbed the girl’s arm and gave her a shake. “Get your duds on. You want to see your mama? We’ll get in my truck and go see her now.”

The man was lying again. Tula knew it. She could picture herself in the man’s vehicle, the two of them parked in some dark place where no one would hear her screams.

Tula switched to
Quiché
Mayan and continued chanting, “I was born to do this . . . I am not afraid . . . I was born to battle evil and smite the devil down . . . ,” as the man shook her so hard that her head snapped back, and then said, “Now! Let’s go! Stop your goddamn jabbering and—”

He didn’t finish. Squires’s words were interrupted by a wild, wailing scream, and he let go of the girl’s arms.

The man turned toward the sound, listening, then said to Tula as he went to the door, “I ain’t done with you,
chula
. Don’t you go nowhere!”

The screams came from a person who was terrified and in pain, the voice unrecognizable. But Tula knew instantly who the person was—it was Carlson, the old drunk with the good heart. The girl didn’t understand how she knew such things but she did.

Without toweling herself dry, Tula pulled on her jeans, a baggy T-shirt and stepped into her sandals. On the kitchen table, among mole sauce, sodden nachos and an ashtray, was a bottle of tequila. She grabbed the bottle, hesitated, found a flashlight, too, then stuffed a kitchen towel into the back of her pants and went running out the door.

Tula Choimha felt sure and determined, emulating the behavior of the Maiden, who spoke to her now from across the ages. The voice was strong in Tula’s head, instructions from a teenage girl who had lived a life of fearless purity six hundred years ago.

The Maiden’s voice told Tula to be quick, that she could save the life of her friend. And the girl obeyed, as she always did when under the loving direction of the Maiden of Lorraine.

Tula’s patron saint—Joan of Arc.

FOCUSING ON THE CRIES FOR HELP, IRAN AFTER TOMLINSON, NOT
gaining on him, through an area that consisted of maybe forty trailers packed tight into an area bordered by a low wire fence. Beyond the fence was a mangrove lake, where a crowd was gathering. The lake was fringed with coconut palms and a row of garbage dumpsters.

The place had probably been a homey Midwestern retreat back in the seventies, popular with Buckeyes who caravanned south each winter. But now smoldering cooking fires and a sewage stink communicated the demographic change and a modern economic despair.

Over his shoulder, Tomlinson yelled to me, “There’s someone in the water!” which I could already see. At first I thought we had stumbled onto a brawl, that the fight had tumbled into the pond.

But the man’s screams didn’t communicate rage. The sounds he made signaled terror, an alarm frequency that registers in the spine, not the brain. His howling pierced the gabble of men and women who were peeking from their trailers, yelling questions and expletives in Spanish, as a dozen or so of the braver residents—several of them children—ventured as a group, not running, toward the water’s edge.

In his poor Spanish, Tomlinson yelled, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?” as I ran past him, hollering in English, “Call nine-one-one. It’s a gator. A big one,” because I could see details now in the pearl haze of security poles that rimmed the park.

I could see the alligator’s tail, slashing water, an animated grayness edged with bony scutes that had not evolved since the days of stegosaurus. I could see the flailing arms of a man as he battled to stay above the surface of the water.

A likely scenario flashed into my mind: The man had stopped on the bank to urinate, or stare at what might have been a floating log—no one in their right mind would go for a swim in that cesspool—and the gator had snatched him.

It happens—not often in Florida—but it happens, and it had happened to a friend of mine only a few years before on Sanibel Island, where I live and run my small marine-specimen supply company. A good woman named Janie Melsek had been attacked while pruning bushes and she had died even though she had fought to the end, just as the man was fighting now. Even though in shock maybe he sensed that if the gator took him under, he would never surface again.

I hadn’t been there when a twelve-foot gator took Janie into the water. I hadn’t seen what had happened in the following minutes of terror. And things probably wouldn’t have turned out any differently if I had. But maybe, just maybe, it was the memory of Janie that caused me to push through the slow phalanx of onlookers, as I jettisoned billfold, cell phone, then pulled the Kahr pistol from my pocket and lunged feetfirst into the water, unprepared for the knee-deep sludge beneath.

Jumping into the lake was like dropping into a vat of glue. My ankles were anchored instantly in muck, so my momentum caused me to slam forward, bent at the waist, face submerged, until I floundered to the surface and fought my way back to vertical.

The man was near the middle of the lake, only thirty yards away, screaming, “Help me! Grab my hand, I’m dying!” so maybe he’d gotten a look at me as I pried one slow right leg from the mud, losing my shoe, and then struggled to pull my left foot free. To do it, I needed both hands, so I pocketed the pistol and went to work trying to break the suction.

Behind me, someone had a flashlight, and he painted the pond until he found the alligator. I’d been right. It was a big one: four or five hundred pounds of reptile on a feed, creating a froth of lichens and trash that washed past me in waves. It was a male. Had to be. Female gators seldom grow beyond ten feet and two hundred pounds.

The animal had its back arched, head high, and I could see that it had a frail-sized man crossways in its jaws, the man’s buttocks and pelvis locked between rows of teeth that angled into a reptilian grin.

The alligator’s eyes glowed ember orange; the man’s face was a flag of white, and, for an instant, his eyes locked onto mine just before the animal slung its tail and rolled, taking him under, then bringing him back to the surface, the animal’s eyes not so bright now because the angle had changed but the man still sideways in the thing’s mouth.

Because the gator had him by the hips, the roll—a death roll, gator hunters call it—had not snapped his spine.

“
Please.
Take my hand!” The man coughed the words, stretching his arm toward me, his voice pleading as if trying to convince me it would be okay.

I wasn’t convinced. I am neither stupid nor particularly brave. But I also know enough about animal behavior to feel sure that I wasn’t being mindlessly heroic. There are certain predators—alligators, sharks and killer bees among them—that, once their sensory apparatus has locked onto a specific target, ancillary targets cease to exist.

I have swam at night among feeding sharks so fixated on a whale carcass that my dive partners and I had nothing to fear. I once watched an Australian croc wrestle a feral hog into the water while an infant blackbuck antelope—a much easier target—drank peacefully within easy reach.

This alligator might worry that I wanted to steal the meal it had taken. But it wouldn’t abandon a meal in its teeth to waste its time attacking me, additional prey.

I hoped.

I ducked beneath the water, dug at the muck until my left shoe popped free and then I surfaced as someone belly flopped into the pond next to me and began thrashing the water, racing toward the gator.

It was Tomlinson.

I pushed off after him, swimming hard, my head up, focusing on the bright, blurry horror ahead. I passed my friend after only a few strokes, watching as the gator turned and began ruddering toward the far shore.

The man’s screams became whistled sobs, similar in pitch to the trumpeting of nearby peacocks, dark shapes that dropped from bushes and sprinted toward the shadows. Behind me, I heard a woman yell in Spanish, “Call for help, someone call the police!” but then heard a male voice hush the woman, saying, “Are you insane? Not the police!”

The gator appeared to be in no hurry now. The animal knew we were in the water—gators possess acute hearing and the night vision of owls—but it didn’t seem to care. Even so, it traveled deceptively fast over the bottom, and I was halfway across the lake before I was finally close to enough to make a grab for the thing. Before I did, I rolled onto my side long enough to find the pistol.

I took a couple of more strokes to catch up and then lunged to get what I hoped was a solid grip on the animal’s tail. I expected the gator to slash its head toward me, a hardwired crocodilian response. For a few seconds, though, the thing continued swimming, pulling me along—me, an insignificant weight—but then its slow reptilian brain translated the information, and the animal exploded, its tail almost snapping my arm from the socket.

Because I expected the gator to swing its jaws toward me, I ducked beneath the surface, feeling a clawed foot graze my ear. I sculled deeper until my toes touched bottom, took a look toward the surface—it was like being submerged in tar—then swam a couple of yards underwater before angling up, hoping I didn’t guess wrong and reappear within reach of the animal’s teeth.

I didn’t. Instead, I collided with something bony and breathing as I surfaced. The gator’s belly, I thought at first. But then I heard a wailing profanity—the voice familiar—and realized I had banged into Tomlinson, who assumed he was being attacked from beneath.

My friend, I could see, had both hands locked on the gator’s tail and was being dragged. The animal was swimming faster now, probably convinced we were competing gators, employing harassment, hoping it would drop its prey. It’s a common gambit in the animal world, so the thing was trying to get into shallow water before dealing with us.

As I started swimming after them, I heard Tomlinson yell a garbled sentence, words that sounded like “You just scared the piss out of me! Do something, Doc!”

I planned to do something, even though I had no plan. I considered risking a shot at the animal’s flank, but there were too many people around, and the slug would skip if it hit the water. No ... I had to get closer.

It took longer than expected. Despite the gator carrying a man in its jaws and a second man clinging to its tail, I still had trouble catching the animal because I was palming the pistol in my right hand. A pound of polymer and steel is not an efficient fin.

Finally, though, I was close enough to throw my left arm over the animal’s back, which wasn’t easy because the creature was twice my size. The gator bucked its head at me in warning, its hard belly spasmed, but it kept going. I felt around until I had what I thought was a good grip on the far ridge of scutes, hoping the thing would continue swimming long enough for me to get my right hand up. Next, I would position the pistol flat against the bony ridge behind the gator’s right eye.

Alligators have tiny brains, little more than a bulbous junction of nerve cells. However, their heads and jaws are also covered with thousands of bead-sized nodules that serve as remarkably sensitive pressure detectors. That’s why a gator can sense a lapping dog, or the splash of a child, from a hundred yards away. Even if the bullet missed the brain, the shock might cause the animal to release its prey and dive or swim for safety.

As I pushed the pistol barrel hard against the gator’s head, though, the thing rolled again. I was on the animal’s right side. It slapped its tail and rolled to the left. The movement was as abrupt as the slamming of a steel trap, and I was vaulted over the animal, into the air, and lost my grip as I hit the water.

When I surfaced, I had no idea where Tomlinson was. But I knew the gator still had its prey because I could hear the man coughing water and I could see his dangling legs only a yard away in the flashlight’s beam.

I had come up just behind and to the left of the gator’s snout. Close enough to see the animal’s bulging right eye, its pupil dilated within gelatinous tissue that cast an orange glow.

The gator saw me. No doubt about it, and I wasn’t surprised when the thing slowed and swung toward me, opening its jaws, then slinging its head to release its prey, now fixated on me. It had been harassed enough. In the animal’s mind, I was attempting to steal its meal. It had decided to fight.

I grabbed the man’s leg with my left hand and pulled, trying to help him roll free but also using the resistance to lever myself close enough to throw my right arm over the animal’s back. The gator shook its head again, maybe having difficulty tearing its teeth from the man’s clothing, which provided me with the extra second I needed to get a grip on the reptilian neck with my left hand.

As its tail hammered the water, spinning toward me, I wrestled myself atop the gator long enough to steady the pistol barrel flush behind its right eye. My hold was tenuous, the positioning wasn’t perfect, but I was adrenaline-buzzed and scared. I didn’t hesitate. I fired two quick shots, the report of the pistol heavy and flat, muffled by the animal’s keratin skin.

There was a convulsive, watery explosion that threw me backward. When I surfaced, the gator’s tail was vertical, slashing the air like a wrecking crane, and I had to scull backward to keep from being hit. A moment later, the animal rolled to the surface, still thrashing, and then submerged abruptly in a boil of bubbles and muddy detritus from the bottom.

I wasn’t sure if I’d killed the thing or not. Alligators sink when dead, but they also submerge if they’re wounded or feel threatened. If the bullets had done only minor damage, then the gator could be drifting to the bottom right now, tracking my vibrations as it regrouped. I didn’t relish the possibility. To me, a known quantity, however perilous the situation, is much preferred to a vague unknown.

As I turned to search for Tomlinson, I hollered, “Where is he? Did he go under?” meaning the injured man.

I received an answer in the form of another scream. It was a shredded plea in English, the frail man hollering, “Help me! The animal has me again!”