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  I had disappeared behind him, that’s where. Years ago, in an overheated wrestling room, I had practiced hand control and simple duck unders day after day, week after week, year after year. I had practiced the craft of grappling so relentlessly that I had pleased even our relentless perfectionist of a coach, a man named Gary Fries. Fries was a wrestling giant, all five feet seven inches of him, and he would not tolerate mediocrity.

  Thanks to that coach, I’ve never been in any physical confrontation in my life where I didn’t feel confident I was in control of the outcome. That doesn’t mean I have always won. I certainly have not. But I’ve always felt as if I could win if I picked my shots and made the right moves.

  Like now, as I came up behind Squires, saying into his ear, “You’ve got a big mouth, fat boy,” because now his anger could be used to my advantage. I wanted him so mad that he lost control. When the big man tried to pivot, I laddered my hands up his ribs to control his body position and leaned my head close to his shoulder blades so he couldn’t knock me cold with a wild elbow.

  When Squires realized he couldn’t maneuver free, he stuttered, “Hey . . . get your hands off me, asshole!” and tried, once again, to face me.

  I was ready because that’s exactly what I wanted him to do. I let Squires make half a turn and then stopped his momentum by ramming my head into his back as I grapevined my left ankle around his left shin. An instant later, I locked my hands around his waist and moved with him as he tried to wrestle free.

  Our backs were to the mangrove pond. With a quick glance, I confirmed that Tomlinson and the injured man weren’t directly behind us—it was a dangerous place to be if things went the way I planned. Then I used my legs to drive Squires away from the water. Instinctively, the man’s feet dug in, then his legs pumped as he tried to drive us both backward. Squires was taller, heavier and stronger than I. His energized mass soon overpowered my own.

  The timing was important. I waited a microsecond ... waited until I felt the subtle transition of momentum.

  When it felt right, I dropped my grip a few inches lower on the big man’s waist. I relocked my hands, bent my knees and then maximized Squires’s own momentum by lifting as I arched my back.

  I waited another microsecond ... and then I heaved with all my strength as we tumbled backward.

  In wrestling jargon, the move I’d executed was a suplex. As I arched backward, I used a two-handed throwing technique, not unlike a Scottish gamesman throwing a fifty-pound rock over a bar. In this case, though, the weight was closer to three hundred pounds. Squires had amassed considerable momentum, and it was his own momentum—not my strength—that sent him flying.

  I guessed he would land near the pond’s edge, which is why I had checked behind me before setting up the suplex. I couldn’t have guessed, however, that a man Squires’s size would sail beyond the bank and land on his shoulders in a massive explosion of water.

  I got to my feet, cleaning my hands on my jeans. I found the spotlight and aimed it at Squires’s face when he surfaced. He was disoriented and floundering. I watched him splash to vertical, as he spit water and swore. Mostly, he swore at me, ordering that I get that goddamn light out of his eyes.

  I told him, “Come up here and say that, fat boy,” and watched the man jam his feet toward the bottom, which is precisely what I hoped he would do.

  It was his second mistake of the night.

  For a few seconds, Squires stood tall in waist-deep water, as he struggled to find footing. Then he began to sink. The more he struggled, the more suction he created and the deeper he went into the muck.

  Squires wasn’t a wrestler, and he wasn’t much of a swimmer, either. He couldn’t manage the delicate hand strokes necessary to sustain positive buoyancy. Soon the man was so deeply mired in mud that he couldn’t move his legs. Water was rising toward his shoulders, and it scared him.

  “Goddamn it!” he shouted to the migrants watching. “Help me. Get a rope! Somebody go get a rope and pull me out of here.”

  Drowning was terrifying enough, but then another thought came into Squires’s mind. I could tell because of the wild look in his eyes as he glanced over his shoulder, yelling, “Hurry up, before that gator comes back! Does anybody have a gun? Someone break the window of my truck and grab the gun from the glove box. Shit! Hurry up!”

  Automatically, my right hand touched my sodden pocket to confirm the Kahr 9mm was still there. It was.

  No one moved except for a frail, luminous figure that I recognized. It was the teenage girl Tomlinson had been calling to, Tula. I watched her step free of the crowd, then walk toward me, her eyes indicating Squires as she said in English, “Do you think he might drown?”

  I replied, “That’s up to him. If he keeps air in his lungs, he’ll stop sinking.”

  I watched the girl, impressed by her articulate English, but more impressed by the way she carried herself and the respect park residents accorded her. When she spoke, even the men watching her went silent.

  “Will the animal come back?” she asked me. “Did you kill it?”

  I was moving toward the injured man and Tomlinson as I told her, “I wounded it, maybe. I don’t know,” and was tempted to ask, Why are you worried about that jerk?

  I listened to the girl tell me, “I used your telephone to call the emergency number. Or maybe it was his.”

  She glanced at Tomlinson, who was on his knees in the water, cradling the injured man, and then explained, “The angry propietario told the emergency police not to come. But they are coming now.”

  The angry propietario was Squires. Apparently, the girl had heard him cancel Tomlinson’s 911 call. How else could she have known?

  In Spanish, I said to people milling in the shadows, “We need three or four men to help get the injured man out of the water. I think his spine is hurt. We have to take care not to move his head. We need towels and ice and disinfectant ... and a board of some type for him to lie on. Plywood would work.”

  As I spoke, I had to raise my voice to be heard above Squires, who was now raging, “Why aren’t you people moving? Goddamn it, I need a rope! And one of you bastards fetch my gun! How’d you little shits like to be homeless again? I’ll call the feds on your sorry asses if you don’t move now!”

  The man was panicking in his rage, his attention focused on shadows behind him where the gator might be lurking. As long as he kept his lungs inflated, the muck wouldn’t overpower his own buoyancy. But now, I guessed, Squires was hyperventilating, and in real danger. I was considering going in after him myself when the girl called in loud Spanish, “Do what the landlord says. Get a rope, but not his gun! Help him! Would God want you to allow a helpless man to drown?”

  God allowed helpless men to drown daily, but her words got people moving. A couple of guys went jogging toward the trailers, while others moved toward Tomlinson, awaiting instructions. As I approached the bank, I told the men to stay close, we’d need them soon. I was also searching the ground, looking for my shirt, because I wanted to clean my glasses.

  Beside me, Tula said, “Use this,” and handed me a towel, which she pulled from the back of her jeans. “He’s my friend,” she added, indicating the injured man. “His name is Carlson, and he has a good heart. When you get him out of the water, I will pray. Will you help me pray to heal his wounds?”

  The girl’s syntax was odd, I noticed, whether she spoke in English or Spanish. It was formal in an old-fashioned way, which made no sense for someone her age.

  Carlson was listening from only a few feet away. He was semiconscious, looking up at the girl, a sleepy, dazed smile on his face.

  I said, “My friend will be glad to help you pray. Won’t you, Tomlinson?” and handed the towel back to the girl before I told one of the men to hang on to my feet when I gave him the word. Then I got down on my hands and knees and crawled to the water.

  It wasn’t difficult to lift Carlson ashore. He was all bone and skin, couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and forty pounds.
Once we had him on the slick grass, we maneuvered a piece of plywood under him, then sledded him to higher ground.

  Through the entire process, I held the man’s head steady. From the way he’d described the cracking sound “deep inside him,” I guessed the gator had broken his spine. I didn’t want to turn a paraplegic into a quadriplegic.

  Tula comforted the man as we moved him. She stroked his head, told him he would recover quickly, and also chanted what I guessed to be a prayer in her native language. I can speak only enough Quiché Maya to thank the person who brings me a beer, so I had no idea what the girl was saying.

  When we had Carlson safely away from the water, I checked his injuries. His forearm showed puncture marks, as did his waist and buttocks, but the bleeding wasn’t bad.

  His legs, though, had a pasty, dead look that suggested I’d been right about the broken spine. As I took note of the wounds, Tula tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’ll hold his head while you use this.” She was holding a bottle of cheap tequila, waiting for me to take it.

  Tomlinson had found his sandals and seemed to be looking for something else but stopped long enough to grab the bottle and take a long swig.

  “It’s not for drinking,” the girl told him, her tone communicating disapproval. “It’s to clean your wounds.”

  “That’s exactly how I’m using it,” Tomlinson replied, then took another long belt, before he said to her, “Tula, while we work on your friend, would you do me a favor? Ask around and find out who has our billfolds. I found the phones, but our billfolds are gone.”

  But then he told her, “Never mind,” as a man approached, billfolds in hand.

  Tomlinson thanked the man, saying, “Muchas gracias, compadre,” but I could tell that something was wrong as he opened his billfold, then mine.

  Tula stared at him for a moment before saying, “Your money is gone. I can see it in your face.”

  The girl turned toward the water, where Squires was struggling to reach a rope some men were trying to throw him. “He has your money. The propietario. No one but him would have robbed you.”

  In the peripheral glow of the Golight, I looked at the girl closely for the first time. She had a cereal-bowl haircut, and a lean angularity that didn’t mesh with the compact body type I associate with Mayan women. Yet there was nothing masculine about her. She was boyish enough to pass for a boy, but her demeanor, while commanding, was asexual. In the truck, Tomlinson had said something that sounded strange at the time but now made sense. He had said, “She’s an adolescent girl, not a female,” which described her perfectly.

  Thirteen-year-old Tula Choimha, I decided, was a child who handled herself like an adult. It was unusual, but probably less uncommon in girls than boys. Besides, the girl had spent the last few years living on her own, without family, which had no doubt contributed to her maturity.

  “They’re coming to help you,” Tula whispered into Carlson’s ear as she gauged the direction of distant sirens. She took the bottle of tequila from Tomlinson, soaked the towel with liquor, then dropped to her knees and began to wash the puncture wounds on Carlson’s arm and then his buttocks, unconcerned that I had pulled the man’s pants down to access his injuries.

  “I can’t feel my legs,” the man told her again. He had said it several times in the last minutes, his reaction ping-ponging between horror and shock.

  “Your legs are healing,” I heard the girl tell him, her right hand gripping a necklace she wore. “Your wounds are healing now. You must have faith.”

  I watched her pause, head tilted, and the rhythm of her voice changed. She told him, “Our strength comes from faith. But our faith is sometimes eaten away by little things that God hates. If we lack faith, though there be a million of us, we will be beaten back and die.”

  I exchanged looks with Tomlinson, wondering if he, too, suspected her singsong syntax suggested that the girl was reciting something she had memorized.

  My friend was nodding his approval. Personally, I felt a chill. To me, the robotic passion of the devoutly religious is disturbing. Too often it is a flag of surrender to fear and the exigencies of life. Maybe my assessment is unfair, but I associate religious fervor with pathology. Tomlinson, of course, does not.

  “Squeeze my hand and put your faith in God,” Tula whispered to the man, as she scrubbed at the puncture wounds on his buttocks. “Remember the godliness that you possessed as a child? It will return to you. God will make your body whole again.”

  Someone had brought a Coleman lantern, so I switched off the Golight and placed it on the ground. I was looking through my billfold, seeing that someone had rearranged my IDs and credit cards, seeing that all my cash had been taken, as I also watched the girl pour more tequila on Carlson’s wounds, then scrub harder with the bloody towel.

  “Do you feel this, patron?” she asked him. “Can your legs feel the heat of God, trying to enter?”

  Once again, Tomlinson and I exchanged looks, as Carlson’s eyes widened, and he said, “Maybe . . . maybe I can . . . I’m not sure . . . but something’s happening. Wait . . . yes! I do feel it. Yes, my skin is burning! I can feel your hands, Tula!”

  “They are not my hands, patron,” Tula told him, not surprised. “It’s the warmth of God’s love you feel. He is in your body now. He has traveled from my body into your legs.”

  The man’s face contorted into tears, and I watched him move one pale foot, then the other.

  Carlson was crying, “Tula, you’re right! I can feel my legs!”

  I was pleased to know that I had been wrong about the man’s broken spine. Shock, or a damaged nerve, might explain the temporary loss of feeling in Carlson’s legs. But my interest in an explanation was short-lived because nearby I heard a man yell in Spanish, “It is back. The alligator is back. Someone shine the light!”

  I swung the Golight toward the lake, where I saw a reptilian wake, and two bright red eyes riding low in the water.

  The huge gator, still alive, still determined to feed, was gliding toward the bodybuilder, who was already screaming for help.

  SIX

  SIRENS DESCENDING ON RED CITRUS RV PARK WAS BAD ENOUGH, but when Harris Squires saw red eyes breach the water’s surface, glowing twenty yards behind him, he felt a charge of panic beyond anything he had ever experienced, aware that he was about to lose one of his legs, maybe worse.

  Squires understood what those eyes meant because of all the nights he’d spent hunting in the Everglades or getting stoned and plinking away at gators in ponds that dotted his four hundred acres.

  Fifi was back. The biggest damn gator Squires had ever seen in his life was still alive, watching him, her eyes glowing in the light of a lantern that someone had brought so the two white guys could give first aid to that nosy old drunk, Carlson.

  Squires tried to scream, but his voice managed only a high-pitched yelp, as his legs and arms went into hyperflight, trying to free himself from the muck. It was like one of those sweaty damn nightmares he sometimes had when he stacked testosterone and Tren. Nightmares in which he’d try to run, or call for help, but his body was dead, unable to respond.

  Mired up to his thighs in mud produced the same sickening terror. He was desperate to run and he was trying . . . he even managed to get his right leg free. But then Squires felt a tearing pain in the back of his leg and realized he’d pulled a hamstring muscle.

  The pain brought his voice back, and he yelled to the cluster of men, only a few yards away on the bank, “The gator! The gator’s after me! Throw me that goddamn rope again!”

  Suddenly, someone on shore turned on the Golight. The dazzling beam confirmed that the gator was swimming toward him, and Squires felt like vomiting, he was so scared.

  Four times, the Mexicans had lobbed coils of clothesline to him. But each time the rope wasn’t strong enough, or the men weren’t strong enough, and the rope had broken or pulled free.

  This time, though, a Mexican with some brains had produced commercial-grade nylon w
ith a weight taped to the end. When he lobbed it, the coil went sailing over Squires’s head but landed close enough for him to grab the rope before it sank.

  As Squires looped the rope around his chest, he risked another glance over his shoulder, and there was Fifi, gliding closer. Her eyes were a ruby pendulum, swinging with every stroke of her tail.

  Squires whirled toward the bank and hollered, “Pull, you dumbasses! Don’t you see that goddamn gator? For God’s sake, pull!” He began to thrash with his arms, trying to help the men tractor him the few yards to safety.

  At first, there must have been a dozen Mexicans on the bank willing to help him after the Bible-freak girl had ordered them to do it. When the sirens became audible, however, half of the little cowards had gone scrambling. Now there were only four little men onshore, in jeans and ball caps, all hitched to the rope, and they leaned against Squires’s weight.

  “Pull! Get your asses moving!” Squires screamed. “Jesus Christ, she’s coming faster!”

  The first heave of the rope yanked Squires forward. Another heave flipped him onto his back so that his eyes were fixated on the alligator when his left shoe finally popped free of the mud and he began to float toward the bank.

  Now Squires’s mind returned to nightmare mode, and everything happened in terrible slow motion. He was flailing with his arms, screaming for the men to move faster, while sirens and lights converged overhead, filling his head with a chaos so overwhelming he could barely hear his own voice. The night sky echoed with throbbing lights that were the exact same piercing red as the alligator’s eyes.

  Fifi was so close now that Squires could see the black width of her head. The animal pushed a wall of water ahead of her that lifted his body as she closed on him, which caused Squires to roll his body into a fetal ball, preparing himself for what was going to happen next.

  “Get me out of here, goddamn you!” Squires voice broke as he pleaded, and he rolled to his stomach, unable to watch as the gator’s mouth opened to take him, the animal a massive darkness only a few yards away.