She should be afraid, she should turn around and run, she should climb the nearest tree. She did not. Instead, she simply walked right up to this baying hound and rubbed against his front legs. She knew the answer to his song, for if she could bay, her song would be the same.
Here.
Right here.
Ranger.
6
LIGHTNING IS NOT the only thing that strikes. On the very same night twenty-five years ago when that single blinding bolt struck the old loblolly pine beside the creek, there was a boy. A boy who prowled the mean streets of south Houston in the run-down neighborhoods next to the Ship Channel.
A boy who embraced the darkness, darkness filled with huge, gray wharf rats that scurried along the rafters beneath the tar-coated piers of the docks—scavengers; once he caught one in a crab trap and kept it there, hidden, watched it slowly die from hunger and thirst. Watched it while it twisted against the wooden slats of the trap, desperate in its hunger, fierce in its desperation.
Here was this boy whose father worked on the wharves, his shoulders broad and thick from loading and unloading the ships all day, who spent his free evenings at the Deep Channel Bar, a place that served only dockworkers and the women who served them, a man who drank the hard-edged vodka brought in from Russia and the bitter gin from England, who stumbled home, just as hard-edged and bitter as the vodka and gin.
This boy, a boy who sneered at kindness, even from his mother, his mother who loved flowers and birds.
When she finally left him and his hard-edged father, the boy never even missed her, his timid mother with her small garden behind the house, her pitiable birdbath that he had laced with rat poison one evening while she slept. The last time he saw her, she was holding the body of a bright red cardinal in her hands, so red it could have been blood. He laughed. Laughed at the bloodred feathers, dripping between her fingers, at her, his mother with the cardinal in her palms.
Beware this cruel boy, this boy of darkness.
This boy who had a name once, a real name, whose father, in a drunken rage, caught the boy’s face with the side of his fist and broke the bones in his left cheek, split the skin of that tender boy cheek and left a deep and ugly gash. The boy gasped in a blaze of pain. And the father hit him again, then fell to the floor, passed out at last.
Any other boy might have felt sorry for himself; he might have stood over his hideous father and wept. But not this boy. This boy stood in the shabby house where he grew up, took one look around, and glowered. Hatred, like sweat, coated his skin. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.
He picked up his father’s brand-new rifle and walked into the dark, damp streets of south Houston, his nose dripping, his right eye swollen shut, his jaw never able to close properly again. He walked. Past the docks, the ships with their flags from India and Liberia and Austria, their holds full of spicy curry, of baby monkeys poached from the jungles, of aged red wine in caskets made of ancient oak. Past the concrete warehouses and broken-down houses of the southeast end of Houston. His face burned. He walked. Past all that, past the ships, the refineries, the marshy bayous of the steaming city. Into the deep, dank forest, trees so dense they blocked the sky, kept the hated sun off his shattered face. A boy. On foot for three hundred miles, three hundred miles north of Houston. Disappeared into the woods, hung his real name, whatever it was, on a post oak tree, carved it there and never looked back, never used that name again.
Lightning struck a tree. A father struck his son. A boy struck out.
This boy, whose broken face now resembled the prehistoric fish that still swam in the muddy waters of the bayous, half fish, half alligator. A gar. The most vicious of the scale-and-fin crew. Beware his razor sharp teeth, his steel-trap jaws, his eyes that glow in the murky water.
Here then is a hard-edged bitter boy become a man known as Gar Face. For twenty-five years, while the old loblolly pine shed its branches and bark into the Little Sorrowful Creek and watched them drift toward the sea, Gar Face has roamed this hidden forest. Here, underneath the canopy of the watching willows and birches and ash. Over this past quarter century, the years have softened the old pine. Not so Gar Face. Do not cross his angry path. Do not.
7
AT FIRST THE hound was surprised. What was a cat doing here? In his yard? Oh yes, there were cats in the forest, he had seen their shadows at the edge of his vision. But none had ever entered his domain before, wouldn’t think of crossing the edge of the twenty-foot circle that was marked by his chain. He had warned them to stay back, just as he had warned the raccoons and the possums and the occasional snake. Stay back. This time, he just stood there while this cat walked right up to him.
He looked down at her, this small calico cat, purring now, and he knew through and through. Here was someone who had found him all alone. Here was someone who walked right up to him and rubbed against his sturdy front legs, stood on her hind legs and licked his silky ears, who touched his brown nose with her small pink one. At long last, after so many years of being tied up in this corner, chained to a post, here was someone who understood his song.
8
THIS PINEY WOODS forest in far East Texas is wet and steamy. Take a step and your footprint will fill with water. Look up and you will barely see the sky, only small blue puzzle pieces, blocked by the ancient trees. It is hidden, this place, and so are its denizens.
Watch out for its sluggish bayous and tumbling creeks. There are oxbows and fens that make small lakes here and there. Beware the vipers, the rattlers and corals, the copperheads, the venomous crew. Then there are the nonpoisonous varieties, the black snakes, the corn snakes, the rat snakes. Even though they are not toxic, they can still pack a bite.
In these waters there are also snapping turtles, box turtles, sawback turtles, that have lived here for well over a hundred years, old centenarians, and bullfrogs whose songs make the needles on the pines rattle.
Crawdads scoot backward in the gumbo-like water of the bayous.
But the rulers of these swampy glens are the alligators. They swim just below the surface, the same color as the water, brown-gray, their backs resemble a floating tree.
Nothing scares an alligator, especially the alligators of the Bayou Tartine, the large stream that flows to the west of the Little Sorrowful Creek. It flows through the heart of these forgotten woods. Halfway down the Bayou Tartine, the land drops off in a channel, which creates just enough room for a little bayou, the Petite Tartine. It makes a semicircle and rejoins its big sister, and all the land between is marsh and swamp and quicksand.
Do not go into that land between the Bayou Tartine and its little sister, Petite Tartine. Do not step into that shivery place. Do not let it gobble you up. Stay away from the Tartine sisters.
9
GAR FACE, FROM his ratty old pirogue, first saw the beast while he floated down the Bayou Tartine. He trapped and skinned a lot of animals, beavers, foxes, rabbits, even an occasional skunk. But it was alligators that called to him. It was alligators, the soft skin of their bellies, the piercing beams from their yellow eyes, eyes that looked directly at him, alligators. When he looked into the eyes of other animals, all he saw was fear and panic. Not so the gators. They feared no one, not a single soul.
Gar Face cared little for the deer and wild hogs and raccoons that he shot and killed every day. But the gators were a different matter.
Now here he was, just before dawn, just as the light began to weave its way between the limbs of the towering trees, a soggy predawn morning, when the air was so wet it felt as though he needed gills to breathe, when the humidity clung to him like a second skin, that gray morning of unbearable sticky stillness. Gar Face pushed against the pole as he stood in his flat-bottomed pirogue, a kerosene lantern hanging from the bow. Just as he passed the Petite Tartine, he looked over his shoulder and rubbed his eyes.
Had he just seen what he thought he saw? The black rum that he had drunk the night before still lingered behind his eyes. The night had been
long, too long.
“Couldn’t be,” he said out loud. “Only place gators grow that big’s in Africa.” He looked back over his shoulder, then grabbed the lantern and held it out over the water, but all he saw was a pair of eddies, twin whirlpools swirling on the glassy surface. He shrugged and dipped his pole again. Then shook his head. Only something enormous, sinking fast, could cause whirlpools that far apart. The eddies were at least a hundred feet from one to the other. Was there a beast a hundred feet long, sinking to the bottom of the Bayou Tartine?
Gar Face felt the hair on his arms stand up. The vein in his neck pulsed. The word “respect” floated in the thick and heavy air surrounding him. Respect buzzed in his ears, like a thousand hungry mosquitoes. He swatted at his face and neck, but couldn’t shoo away the hissing sound the word made on his tongue. Respect. He swallowed the word whole and licked his lips.
Only a fool would fail to respect a beast like that. Respect. A word he had never had any truck with. Respect. It crawled down his back like a rat. He reached around as if to catch it, then held his empty hand in front of his hideous face. Respect. He wanted it.
As he poled his boat along, a fine mist began to come down, bringing with it a small amount of coolness. I’ll be back, he thought. Then he turned toward his tilting house. “Yes, I’ll be back.” This time he said it out loud, as if to seal the deal. He shoved the pole into the mud.
We are all of us composed of cells, cells that join together and fuse to make blood and skin and bones, but at the root of all these are needs. Gar Face’s needs were simple. He satisfied them with basic things like food and water and shelter and a nightly bottle of something hard-edged and bitter, gin or vodka or rum, rum that eased him through the night and into the early morning. But as he made his way to the tilting house, he could feel the cells in his body gathering up into a tangled mass of yearning, yearning for something stronger than liquor. Respect. The yearning dug at him, dug into his very core, formed an ache, like a fist in his solar plexus, hard and unyielding, but it was an ache he liked. He clung to it.
He would get that alligator. The Alligator King. Or he would die trying. He dug his pole into the thick brown water and the rain began to fall.
10
RANGER. THAT WAS the hound’s name. He loved the calico cat straightaway. But he knew he had to alert her to the danger she was in. He pointed out the pelts of foxes and muskrats and mink nailed to the front porch railing, the skins of alligators and rattlesnakes that lay beside them on the slats of the porch. It was Gar Face, he said, the man who kept this old hound chained. Gar Face.
“If he finds you . . . ,” Ranger said, and he looked over both shoulders . . . but he couldn’t finish. Gar Face was mean. And then there was the rifle that he carried with him always. The Rifle.
Ranger knew about the rifle. Long ago, how many years he couldn’t say, he had gone along with Gar Face when he hunted, had run by his side, watched when he aimed the gun and shot the raccoons and the white-tailed deer. And then there was the night, that awful night, when Ranger cornered a bobcat, a beast with glowing eyes. Ranger bayed, bayed his victory song, but just as Gar Face aimed at the cat, had the creature in his crosshairs, Ranger sensed that something was wrong. He moved, and Gar Face shot Ranger instead.
There had been no apologies on the part of the man, just a swift kick in the side from his steel-toed boot, a kick that burned as hot as the bullet lodged in his leg.
“You stupid dog!” the man had snarled.
Then he left Ranger and staggered home, leaving the dog to limp after him, and later chained him to the post, useful only as an alarm, as a hound who bayed when animals came too close, a dog trapped in a twenty-foot circle. That’s what Ranger had become, nothing more.
The wound in his leg eventually closed, but the bullet was still lodged there, a daily reminder, yes. But it wasn’t the bullet so much as the chain that ate into him, the chain that bound him to the porch post, bound him to the man.
Ranger knew that a small cat would be doomed in the hands of Gar Face. He might use her for target practice with his old rifle, the one he kept strapped across his back. He might use her as alligator bait, tie her to a rope and set her by the water, by the swamp where the alligators floated unseen, just below the surface of the brown, stagnant water of the Bayou Tartine, alligators who would snap a small cat in half with a single bite. Gar Face might do anything.
“But I have nowhere else to go,” said the calico cat. And even though Ranger knew he should make her leave, he also knew that after so many years of being alone, of being chained to the post, he couldn’t stand the thought of her going. He shook his head so that his long ears flapped against both sides of his neck.
“Then you must keep out of sight of Gar Face,” he said. And together they curled up in the dark space beneath the porch. The Underneath. The dark and holy Underneath.
Whenever there is a breeze in the old forest, you might, for a moment, realize that the trees are singing. There, on the wind, are the voices of sugarberry and juniper and maple, all telling you about this hound, this true-blue hound, tied to a post. They have been watching him all these years, listening to his song, and if he knew what the trees were singing, it might be about how he found a friend.
11
IT TAKES A long time for a hundred-foot alligator to grow. In this forgotten forest, one year turns into another, until centuries have passed. No one keeps records. No one but the trees. They do not count time in years. If they did, perhaps a thousand might have passed, maybe more, since the day the alligator emerged from his leathery egg, no longer than a man’s thumb, smaller than that. He could have become a snack for an egret or an osprey or a bald eagle. He could have been swallowed up by a larger gator. This is what happened to most of his sisters and brothers. But he was swift and cagey from the start. He discovered all the underwater caves, he found the darkest shadows for hiding from the sharp beaks of the large birds, the herons and cranes.
He avoided the other gators, the large ones, the small ones, even his own family. When he was small, he dined on insects, the mosquitoes and dragonflies that landed on the water’s surface. Later he found minnows and tadpoles. As the long years passed, he grew and grew, and so did his prey. He became adept at hunting all the water creatures, but he was also nimble on the soft, marshy ground, where he lurked in the mud, camouflaged by his thick and bumpy brownish green skin, the same shades as the water and the boggy land around it. Soon he feasted on marsh rabbits and squirrels, beavers and mink.
His patience was unlimited and his sense of smell was sharp. He knew when an animal was weak or injured, and he waited for it, tracked it down, and struck. Death was swift, for he did not bandy about in torture. He simply grabbed the victim by the throat, snapped its neck, and dragged it to the brown water. There, he spun it, once, twice, three times, and carried it to the bottom of the thick bayou and held it there. Later, the body waterlogged, the Alligator King finished it off.
Afterward he floated just beneath the surface of the water and napped, napped until it was time to dine again.
Any unsuspecting animal could become his dinner: a deer, a peccary, a fox. He was not discerning. Any animal, large or small, made a meal. He was the master of disguise, and he knew how to avoid the quicksand. He had watched many creatures sink out of sight in those shivery sands. But if they made it across the sand or if they somehow got free, he was there, waiting with his sharp teeth and his powerful jaws. Waiting.
Can an alligator live for a thousand years, maybe more? Who’s to say? And why not? In this deep, dark forest, this hidden-from-view forest, the gator is not the only ancient being. Certainly, there are trees here that have stood for longer. They are the ones who know the histories of all the species. If a tree can live for a thousand years or more, why not an alligator?
Before the man spotted him, only a few knew that the marshy land between the Bayou Tartine and the Petite Tartine was the secret lair of the Alligator King. Only the other
alligators and the trees, and the birds that flew overhead.
And one other.
The one who was trapped in the beautiful jar beneath the tall and dying loblolly pine. The Alligator King blinked his golden eyes and whispered, “Soon, my sister. Your time will come.” Then he sank beneath the muddy water.
Alone in her silent cell, Grandmother blinks. Perhaps the Alligator King is a thousand years old, but she, the creature in the jar, is older than that. Much.
12
GIVE US A bloodhound, a hound who is bred for the chase, for the hunt, for the full round moon to bay at. That is what Ranger was. A bloodhound. This breed is known for their acute sense of smell. They can hold their noses to the ground and find the toddler who has strayed from his back door, locate the fireman beneath the smoldering crumble of a building, discover the horse that has escaped from its pen.
Yes, the bloodhound is known for his sense of smell. But some, like Ranger, also have a keen sense of hearing. A dog who has been tied to the same place for so many years is familiar with all the sounds around him. He knew the chirring of the cicadas, the peeping of the tree frogs, the creak of the restless pines rooted into the deep red clay. He could identify the throaty growl of a mother raccoon when her cubs wander too far astray, and he knew the invisible whoosh of the great horned owl that slipped across the night sky right at dusk.
He was also acutely aware of the sound of the old pickup as it rumbled away from the yard in the evenings, and again when it moved toward the house the next morning. Once he heard the engine’s rumble in the distance, he knew exactly how long it would take for the truck to appear in the yard and how long he had to make sure that the calico was safely tucked beneath the house before Gar Face stepped out of the cab, the door squeaking open and then slamming shut.