Lizard World Read online

  That was why, after he picked up his paycheck, Lemuel Lee drove his pickup truck to the Magnolia diner and delivered the mortal remains a Caesar’s alligator wife. Rico, the cook (a smart little Cuban who knew how to shut the hell up) had been given forty dollars to spend: as usual, Lemuel Lee would give twenty bucks to Uncle Earl, leavin’ him and Rico twenty more to split:

  “Catch you later, man,” said Rico.

  “Keep cool, “ said Lemuel Lee.

  You’d think -- since it was payday and he had an extra ten dollars in his jeans -- that he’d be feelin’ good. But no, he was feelin’ mean enough to kick a cat.

  Was it the Komodo? Not likely. Fortunately, the operation had been a success and the Komodo (so Uncle Earl had told him) would be almost good as new for the Monday show. No sir, that wasn’t it: there was other problems that Lemuel Lee felt gnawin’ on his innards, makin’ him sad and testy, bringin’ him down. Ever since he’d lost his lucky snake-rattle keychain, he’d just been feelin’ worse and worse. Too bad, too. Cause ordinarily on Fridays, after he’d got paid, he’d drive into Fort Myers, go to the Bijou Adult Cinema, jack off, eat some popcorn, then after the show stop off for a six-pack and some Slimjims at the Seven-Eleven and keep drinkin’ until he got all the way back to the trailer -- usually around three or four in the morning. But today -- hell, he just wasn’t up to it.

  Feeling sad like this, he raced his truck back to Lizard World, screeched into the parking lot, slammed the door and moped back to the snake house -- where it was cool, dark, quiet and a man could think. Behind their panes a glass the rattlers, copperheads, vipers, coral snakes and pythons -- including Beelzebub, who was moving a lump a bunny down his middle -- were all quietly digesting. Lemuel Lee sighed, then took in a deep, cool breath of reptile. The fact was that he loved the snakes, loved the way they always seemed to be sleepin’ but could lash out like lightnin’ the moment their prey got near. In high school he’d put one in his math teacher’s mailbox. One a the things you had to remember was that you shouldn’t never let anyone get away with anything: because your honor was at stake and nothin’ was more important than a Frobey’s honor. This was what his daddy had taught him and Lemuel Lee had never forgotten it. “Love’s a fine thing, boy,” his daddy had told him, “but a good hate will warm your belly on a cold night. If someone fucks with you, you pay him back ten times worse -- not just so that he knows it but so that everyone he knows knows it. That way they’re gonna know what kind of man you are and they’re gonna show you respect.”

  Fact was, there was a lot a people at Lizard World who was beginnin’ to bug him. Take Uncle Earl’s secretary, for example: that big fat skank Lily listened in to all their phone calls and, chewin’ gum, always sat with her legs spread when Lemuel Lee came into the office, so that he was obliged either to look away or to study the obscenity of her crotch in bulgin’ blue jeans. Lemuel Lee didn’t think a woman had a right to look like Lily, especially the way she put her finger in her ear and inspected the wax and then looked at him as if he was givin’ her the eye. If a girl was a looker, that was one thing. But a dog like Lily, in Lemuel Lee’s opinion, was an affront to his ideal of womanhood.

  He clenched his jaw and smirked. He looked through the glass at two rattlers entwined on a slab of sandstone, a cactus, a photograph of sunset over the Grand Canyon, and three white eggs baskin’ beneath an infrared bulb. Yep, them babies would be out real soon. Little tongues dartin’ out like hellfire. Born with enough juice to kill a elephant. A baby rattler don’t have to take no shit.

  Lemuel Lee let out a deep sigh. He tapped twice on the glass of the horned viper’s cage, trying to get its attention. No such luck: the little critter just lay there coiled up on the sand as if it was too damned important to be bothered. He sighed again, held back his tears, then bit his lip: people didn’t take him seriously neither. Oh yeah, yeah, he’d seen the way they looked at him -- here at Lizard World, in the post office, even Crater and the guys at the gas station. They had taken him for a loser, down for the count, a zero. Lemuel Lee figured he was gonna show them, and every day the thought of his comeback, the revenge he would exact for the world’s blindness and ingratitude, grew warmer and dizzier like whiskey in his belly.

  Course he knew that first he had to build up a head a steam, or else there wouldn’t be enough power in the engine when the Day a Judgement finally came. Now that he was a soldier, Lemuel Lee understood that. But it used to be he’d blow off at just about anything. One day, for example, after a whole busload a tourists had walked out on one a his gator shows and Lemuel Lee had started to holler and break things like he was a crazy man, his Uncle Earl told him he was gonna have to “shape up or ship out.” That was the first time Lemuel got himself a six-pack a beer and went off into the woods to shoot deer. “When I’m feelin’ bad,” he told the other militia guys afterward, “there ain’t nothin like nailin’ one a them suckers. Unless you’re figurin’ on eatin’ veggies for the rest of your life, some critter’s gonna have to die and, hell, why not get some fun out of it?” That was a turnin’ point in Lemuel Lee’s life. That was a turnin’ point because he’d learned to discipline his anger. That was the real reason he’d joined up with the militia and got his official tattoo -- and started to slick his hair back and wear a bolo tie. Yep, now Lemuel Lee was feelin’ a whole lot more positive about his future. Now, whenever he was feelin’ bad, Lemuel Lee just kept nice and quiet: “Guess Bambi’s gonna have to pay for that one,” he’d tell himself.

  Lemuel Lee had written his autobiographical horror novel, Creep, for a correspondence school writing course which he’d seen advertised in the back pages of Modern Plumbing Magazine, one of the many interesting and informative magazines on the table in the beauty salon where he used to have a job sweepin’ hair. Of course he wasn’t really interested in becomin’ a beautician, like he’d told ’em, although he was certain that he could do a goddamn good job of it if he tried. Oh, it was true that he had wanted, briefly, to become a beautician, but that was before a certain celebrity whose name will not be mentioned had hung up on him after Lemuel Lee had taken the trouble of gettin’ her home phone number and offerin’ her a haircut, perm and facial free a charge. Lemuel Lee understood very well that genius was often mocked or ignored, but the point was that you just couldn’t let people get away with treatin’ you wrong. He had driven four days and three sleepless nights all the way to Hollywood to put a snake in that celebrity’s mailbox and Lemuel Lee had been gratified to see that this itty bit of mischief had made it to the six o’clock news. But anyway, by the time he’d begun sweepin’ up in the Mirror-Mirror hair salon, he’d given up the idea of becomin’ a beautician and was on to better things.

  Lemuel Lee had heard a lot about inspiration, but when it really comes to you, well, that’s somethin’ else again. The first time it had happened was when he was sittin’ on the john at the Magnolia diner: he’d just taken out his pen and started to scribble stuff on the wall, stuff that other folks could read and enjoy when they was sittin’ there like him. It had given him a real feelin’ of accomplishment to do that and for a week or so after that he kept hangin’ around the john, just to see if folks was appreciatin’ his work. Then one day, ten miles away in a gas station in Beauregard, he’d found that someone had stolen his rhyme and written it right next to the toilet. It didn’t make him sore none, just kinda proud to know that his poetry was gettin’ famous. That was when he found the correspondence-school writing course and decided to get serious about his art. Hell, he hadn’t really even made anything up, just told a couple of lies the way he always did. But the lies, at least most a them, wasn’t in the book but in the letter he’d sent to the school tellin’ them all about himself.

  But in the book mostly he had told the truth, except that he’d stretched it just a bit to make it a little more interesting. For example, he’d told the truth about puttin’ the snake in that celebrity’s mailbox -- except it wasn’t true she’d died from it. All that stuff about
kidnappin’ Darlene Frummer, the cashier at Woolworths with the big jugs, wasn’t true neither but just what he’d planned to do if he hadn’t been caught peepin’ in her window. It was true that Billy Angel, his hero, had done a lot a stuff he himself wouldn’t have dared to do. Nonetheless, Billy wasn’t make-believe neither, but a real-live dead guy whose name he’d found on an old stone in the Beauregard graveyard. People might laugh at him, but Lemuel Lee wasn’t ashamed to admit that he had a real feeling about Billy Angel. Channelin’, like UFO’s, was a real fact that most people just wasn’t strong enough to face.

  He’d finished writin’ Creep on a hot summer night, sweatin’ like a goddamn pig on his back porch while mosquitoes the size a crop-dusters raised huge welts all over his body, cause during the act of composition he never wore nothin’ but his jockey shorts. Sittin’ in his BVD’s like that was good for the ideas, cause it made him feel closer to the deep sweat and sap of things. Another thing that was good for the ideas, he’d found, was to use his genuine army surplus binoculars. You’d be surprised by the kinds a things you see when you look into people’s windows. Binoculars, they’re a whole lot safer than climbin’ up a drainpipe the way he’d done with Darlene Frummer, and they’re almost just as good: one night, for example, when he was stuck for ideas, he’d seen Zeke Snider’s wife, the teacher, foolin’ around in her bra and panties with one of her ninth graders. That was good for a whole chapter, especially after he’d thrown in all that stuff about chains and leather.

  Chapter VII.

  In which an Okeechobee White is captured

  and the Dentist is taken to his prison.

  Nowadays, since it was smack dab in the middle of the swamp, almost nobody went to the old perfume factory, except if you was huntin’ gators or you was in high school and wanted to find a place to screw. Lemuel Lee himself had gone there for both reasons -- once, when he was sixteen, with Taffy Clapp, drinkin’ beer and doin’ it on a blanket in the old furnace room where the juice vats was kept (mostly like big old rusty bathtubs, they was), but him and Taffy was bit so bad by mosquitoes and she was so scared by the cottonmouths that even a girl like Taffy wouldn’t take his money when he asked her to go back. So now mostly he went there on business, for the gators and the snakes -- cause besides supplyin’ his Uncle Earl’s place, there was the pet shops and the diners and the buyers who was talent scouts for pocketbooks and shoes.

  Ever since old Caesar’s alligator wife had made the ultimate sacrifice so as the Komodo could have a brain and snowbird brats could have a treat, Lemuel Lee had been lookin’ to find a new wife for Caesar’s harem. That was why today he’d gone to the wharf where the boat was kept and gassed it up and loaded on all the supplies like Uncle Earl had told him -- the nets, the nooses, the sedative, the goat, the ho-hos and bologna sandwiches, the flashlights, the rifle just in case they needed it, and the precious six boxes a White Owl cigars which they couldn’t never forget to bring whenever they paid a visit to Old Hattie. Somethin’ about cigar smoke always soothed Lemuel Lee’s nerves the day after he’d had one a his horsefly episodes. That was why right now, turnin’ his head back and forth to make sure that Uncle Earl wasn’t watchin’, he was reachin’ under the tarpaulin and openin’ a box. Quickly he grabbled a handful and shoved them in his pocket.

  “Sure looks like she’s all ready now,” he shouted.

  “Well, shove off then, you little jackass” said Uncle Earl, feeling damned pissed off that he’d allowed himself to be bullied into this little expedition. That nephew a his was a certifiable idiot. But worse than that, his sister Ligeia was up to somethin’: there was no question about that. Always gripin’ about her damn kidney. Always beggin’ for a transplant. But when she started doin’ his laundry and makin’ those nauseating pigs’ feet, that was somethin’ to worry about. Earl spat once into the river just to show who was boss. Then he went to see that the goat was securely tethered and that the tarpaulin over the provisions was tied securely on the foredeck. Finally he lit his cigar and reluctantly took a seat beside his pain-in-the-ass sister while that good-for-nothin’ Vergil, looking dazed and sneaky as he always did, stood at the wheel guiding the boat among the overhanging wisteria and wild magnolia that nearly choked the passage of the narrow river. Earl could see up ahead that the branches were so dense that the boat would have to shove them apart. Secretly he felt a deep affection for this thwarted, slimy stream. The Sagawummy River was too weak and skinny to make it onto a bona fide map, but it had the staying power of a spiteful dwarf and reached its tiny arm all the way down to the teeming crotch of the great Florida swamp.

  “You two morons’ll run us aground if we can’t see what’s up ahead,” he shouted.

  So Lemuel Lee switched on the searchlight, since it was gettin’ to be sunset, and shambled to the back of the boat so as he could nap, but be close enough if the prisoner or the goat started actin’ up. He closed his eyes and sighed. He knew that he was outa sorts on account a his mysterious condition. Whenever he had that horsefly dream, it always left him like this the day after -- feelin’ tired and sort a delicate. The funny thing about that dream was how it always started out the same -- how it hurt at first to have the wings sprout and felt strange to look through them eyes, like he was lookin’ through a hundred TV sets all at once. Of course the first few times it had happened, he hadn’t noticed much. But then when he’d seen how tuckered out he was on the day after he’d been flyin’ in his dreams, it had struck him all at once that maybe what Old Hattie had told him about shapeshiftin’ might deserve a closer look. And after a while, it had got so that he could control it. He would fly up above his body while he was sleepin’ there on his bed in his BVD’s and he would buzz around lookin for an open window. And one night, just as an experiment, he’d flown into Uncle Earl’s kitchen and seen a penny lyin’ on the table. Well, as soon as he woke up, he’d rushed to Uncle Earl’s house -- and when he saw that same damn penny lyin’ on the kitchen table in the mornin’ daylight, then he knew sure as hell that it was true. So next time that horsefly dream happened again, well, he just flew all the way to Darlene Frummer’s house, squeezed his wings in through a broken screen -- and seen her lyin’ in her Double-D cups on the bed. But of course he was just a horsefly then and couldn’t do a goddamn thing. But still it was good to know you had the gift -- and goddamn useful if you was meant to be a soldier.

  “Lem! Wake up! Time to feed the goat -- and give junior here his slops.”

  The prisoner, tied hand and foot and gagged as usual so he would shut the hell up, was sprawled in the seat opposite, his fatty legs apart, his fancy socks all muddy, that big can of his wedged between the tackle box and the hindquarters a the goat. Lemuel Lee got to his feet and grabbed the slops jar and the spoon. Why did he always have to be the one that did the feedin’?

  “Okay, fatty, time fer yer yum-yum.”

  Once again Smedlow winced as the duct tape was ripped off and the spoon came plunging in: but this time he was prepared -- and spat into the face of his assailant.

  “Why you little!” said Lemuel Lee and cracked him in the forehead with the spoon.

  The pain was sharp, but Smedlow was more incensed by the indignity. He tried to shout: but, once again, his mouth was stuffed and taped. That little weasel was a lot stronger than he looked. And the woman, too -- who was squinting malignantly while pushing down his shoulders -- had remarkably strong, crushing hands. If there was any hope for sympathy, it was from that wiry fellow they called Earl.

  So Smedlow put on his most pitiful expression, sideglanced toward the prow and caught his eye.

  “Mister, don’t you even think about escapin’. My brother Earl over there may act like an egghead fool, but when the cards is down, he’s family.”

  Ordinarily Uncle Earl didn’t like to take no prisoners. But if it was true like Lem had told him that this city fella was another snoopin’ reporter, then you couldn’t be too careful. The less people knew, the better off they’d be. The old perfume fac
tory had been a prison back durin’ the Rebellion (you could still see some a the places where Sherman’s men had scratched their names into the limestone) and most a those old cells was plenty strong enough to keep a nosy stranger from stirrin’ up more trouble for the family. So it was too bad that Lem was roughin’ him up a bit, but it wasn’t like the prick didn’t deserve it. That hangdog look a his wasn’t gonna get no sympathy from him. Uncle Earl turned away and threw his cigar stub into the river, listening to the cawing birds and watching the stream widen in the torpor of the night.

  “Well, will you look at that!” he shouted, aiming the beam of his flashlight at a large white mass half-submerged in the algal waters of the opposite shore. Although the white mass was bobbing up and down, making waves that shook the boat even from this distance, by now the night was so dark that only the persistent scrutiny of the flashlight revealed the thrusting haunches and great tail of the albino beast.

  “I don’t see nothin’,” began Lemuel Lee before Uncle Earl shushed him: “Look over there, dummy! Now keep your mouth shut. Kill the engine. Get the big net -- and we’ll coast in real slow.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” whispered Aunt Ligeia. “That’s an Okeechobee White, ain’t it Earl? I heard stories. But I ain’t never seen one.”

  By now the mosquitoes had become brave. Noticing, with nature’s unerring instinct for the helpless, that Smedlow’s hands were tied behind him, they no longer hovered or made shrill forays to his ears, but descended en masse upon his hands, arms, cheeks and earlobes. In desperation, he wriggled.