Killafella Creek

by Taylor Brown

…. The boy watched the black current whisper through the exposed knees of the cypress trees. The boscoyos. It was getting dark. The sky was purpling in the west, the sun relinquishing its mean glare on the world.
….. Time.
….. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The swamp croaked and growled around him. Groaned and belched. That angry thriving. The tree beside his boat was bent toward the water, kowtowed. Bowing again, again. As if in yearning, worship. Then still. The only hint of violence was the quivering flecks of liquid that glistened on the black nylon baitline strung from the tree’s lowermost branch into the water. He’d set it yesterday, baited with rancid chicken. He took a breath and reached out to it. The nylon cord was electric in his hand. He imagined what lay submerged on the other end, yellow-toothed and prehistoric. Armored and tree-shaking.
….. He could not keep his heart from beating. This was it. His first. In his Daddy’s boat. With his Daddy’s gun. And his Daddy’s gator tags. No tails punched yet. None. He did the math again:
….. One hundred gator tags times six feet average times twenty-five dollars per foot equals fifteen thousand dollars.
….. He needed eighteen thousand. For the treatments. But close was close. And the nurses said there was a lady he could talk to about deferred billing. Gator season was thrity days long.
….. He tightened his grip on the line, refusing the impulse to wrap it round his hand. Too many hands were lost that way. Hands or fingers. He pulled.
….. The response was sudden, violent. He was yanked crashing to his elbows at the gunwales. His legs crumbling underneath him, his white rubber boots squeaking back and forth across the wet aluminum, no traction. Pinned. The line kept pulling. He wedged himself against the inner curve of the hull. The boat rolled sickeningly on its side, his world going black. Water. His tiny island of aluminum giving way. He watched the ocean of sky laze forever toward the Gulf, mirrored inches from his face. A silhouette crossed his vision, insect-like. Water-bug or helicopter, he didn’t know. Worms silvered the edges of his world. He felt sick.
….. He let go the line. The boat righted itself and he lay heaving in the vee’d bottom, where the catch should lay. These reptiles had been hunted nearly to extinction a century earlier, like the buffalo. Saurian beasts hunted for hide, for meat, for trophy. Now the killing was neatly regulated. Thirty days a year. And he needed more than three per day, every day.
….. He was still heaving when he heard a roar rising across the swamp. An airplane at low altitude, sounded like. He peeked over the side. An airboat was skimming fast up the canal. The pilot saw him and his arm pulled a lever. The flat hull slid sideways across the water, skipping slightly. It enlarged before him, approaching at a sly angle to its trajectory.
….. The pilot hailed him: “What for?”
….. The boy wiped the back of his nose.
….. “What for what?” he asked. That’s when he saw the man’s gun.
….. “What you fishing for?” asked the pilot.
….. The boy, Ty, glanced down at his Daddy’s rifle a quick moment. He stood straighter.
….. “I’m gatoring,” he said.
….. The man grinned. His smile was wrecked, like a mouth made with an ax.
….. “You one of them that baits them first?”
….. “Who don’t?”
….. The man smiled again and twitched the short-barreled carbine that hung from him on a three-point tactical sling. It had a high-cap banana clip and a collapsible stock.
….. “There’s some that tags them in open water,” he said.
….. Ty reached toward the rifle in his boat.
….. “I just got me this twenty-two – ”
….. The man stood quickly and leveled the rifle on him, but casual-like. From the hip.
….. “Nope,” he said. He talled himself on his tip-toes and looked down into the boy’s boat. “You got nothing. Not anymore you don’t.”
….. Ty froze, half-crouched.
….. “Pick it up by the barrel,” said the man.
….. He did.
….. “Drop it in the water,” he said.
….. “This my Daddy’s gun.”
….. “Like I give a shit. Drop it in.”
….. He did.
….. “Now what?”
….. “Now this.”
….. The man aimed the carbine at the floor of his own boat and let off five quick shots.
….. Ty ducked and looked out through his fingers.
….. The constellated punctures were bubbling. Already water was pooling around the man’s boots. He leaned backwards and grabbed a duffle from behind the pilot’s seat, not taking his eyes off the boy.
….. “Take this,” he said. He tossed it into Ty’s boat.
….. “And this.” He tossed another. Another. “This one too.”
….. Three bags. Ty stared down at them. Then looked up. The man had shut down the motor. It was a small-block V8. The prop blades were carbon-fiber. The console had integrated GPS.
….. “That’s a nice boat you’re sinking.”
….. The man stepped up to the floundering front corner of his boat and stepped across into Ty’s. The little johnboat rocked with his weight. He turned and looked back a quick moment. Shrugged.
….. “Wasn’t mine,” he said.
….. “Whose was it?”
….. The man huffed. “Hell if I know.”
….. Just then Ty cocked his head. He’d heard something. Thunder? But no, the afternoon storms had come and gone.
….. A moment later the man cocked his own ear and looked skyward, north. “Persistent sons of bitches, ain’t they?”
….. “Who is?”
….. The man shouldered the carbine and popped five more shots into the aluminum hull of the doomed boat. The stern submerged first. The engine block hissed and steamed when the water struck it. The blackwater curled and swamped over everything, pulling it under inch by inch.
….. The thunder loomed, louder. A helicopter.
….. The man turned fully to him.
….. “I’m your Daddy now.”
….. Ty tried not to look at the gun, tried to look at the rest of him. He wore Carhartt overalls, grease-streaked, and a cut-off gray t-shirt, dark-stained at the pits. Green muddlings covered his arms, symbols unreadable. And there was his mouth, smiling, his teeth dark and malnourished in a gray beard.
….. “You ain’t my Daddy.”
….. The helicopter was closing in. The airboat was mostly sunk. The man unslung the carbine and stowed it away underneath the forward bulkhead. Then he reached into the bib of his overalls and pulled out a little black pistol. He nodded at it, at the boy, to show him what was what, and then he slid it back into his overalls. The trees began to shift and murmur, the water to tremble. The sound grew, grew. And then it was on them: a helicopter, blue and white, with a gold shield emblazoned on the fuselage. The cypress were twirling as if possessed, the sky a racket, the swampwater blasted outward in concentric rings, white-whipped. Ty could see the soles of the chopper pilot’s boots through the foot windows. Yellow diamonds in black rubber. He looked at where the airboat had been. Gone.
…. The man in his boat waved with one hand, a big smile. The other hand he slipped inside his bib.
….. “Wave,” he told Ty, still smiling. “Wave or I’ll put a bullet in your little gut.”
….. Ty did nothing, frozen.
….. “Do like your Daddy says,” said the man.
….. He waved. Finally. In a daze he did.
….. “That good,” said the man. “Just a man and his boy out fishin.”
….. The windshield of the chopper was blazed red by the dying sun. Ty tried to see the pilot’s face but couldn’t. He closed his eyes, his head tilted back. Strange shapes blossomed across his vision, many-colored. Spectral. The manmade wind whipped cooly underneath his chin, down his neck. And then it was gone. A retreating thunder.
….. He opened his eyes, and it seemed darker than before. The sun down. Bats flits sharp-winged across the violet sky, redeemed. He looked back at the man.
….. “What’s in the bags?”
….. The man stopped one nostril and blew. A thick, pale, worm-like clot floated on the surface of the water.
….. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
….. Drugs or money, Ty knew that much.
….. “How much it worth?”
….. The man stopped the other nostril and blew.
….. “Gimme your wallet.”
….. Ty fished in his pocket. Handed it over.
….. The man took it, smiled to himself. Undid the velcro.
….. “Where’s your license at?”
….. “I’m thirteen.”
….. The man pursed his lips. He scratched his beard and picked through the wallet’s contents.
….. “Hmm,” he said, holding up a laminated card. “Hammond County Public Library. Tyler Neil Thomspon.” He looked at Ty. “TNT, I like that.” He squinted back at the card. “Twenty-one Bull Creek Road. That where you live at?”
….. Ty nodded.
….. “You want me come by your house?”
….. “Not especially.”
….. “Where’s your Daddy at?”
….. “Sick.”
….. “Cancer.”
….. “Lymphoma.”
….. “At home.”
….. “The hospital.”
….. The man squinted at him, cocked his head.
….. “No,” he said, “I think he’s at home.”
….. Ty said nothing.
….. “I got a gift,” said the man. “Always had.”
….. “Yeah?”
….. “Yeah.”
….. The man retrieved his carbine and looped the sling over his shoulder. It sat high and diagonal against his chest like a commando’s.
….. “You any good at night-running?”
….. Ty noticed the tree still rocking slightly, no wind. He looked down at the duffles. He had seen this boat packed with twenty-plus king lizards, dead, their pale bellies glistening in the sun, their skull-shot seepage pooling redly round his boots. He thought of his father, in bed, on his back, so many tubes feeding liquid into him, sucking it out. His face white, his hair gone, his mouth stretched wide and black like a fish on a hook. Heaving. Ragged. Trophied by tumors, mindless to feed, to grow. And a numbness came over him, slowly but sure. A slow, dark flood.
….. “I asked you a question,” said the man. “You any good at-”
….. “Good enough,” said Ty. “You any good with that rifle?”
….. The man snorted. “What you think?”
….. Ty looked above them, saw the gathering darkness. He stood taller, straighter. “I think I got a big gator on the line, twelve foot maybe. Least you can is to help me pull it in.” He paused. “Seeing as how we’re just a father and son out fishing.”
….. “Fat chance.”
….. “What, you scared or something?”
….. “Hardly.”
….. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
….. The man hunched his shoulders under the weight of his weapon.
….. “Upstate,” he said. “And all I got to be scared of is whether I get these duffles where they need to go, when they need to get there.”
….. “That’s where?”
….. “Up Killafella Creek. Past Claude’s Trading Post.”
….. “Not easy without your GPS.”
….. The man’s face twisted, that sick mouth leering. He turned the carbine on him again. “But you’re gonna take me there, ain’t you?”
….. Ty let his jaw hang open. “I can’t believe you’re scared,” he said. He shook his head, theatrical. “Just can’t believe-”
….. The man stepped closer to him, too close. He extended the thick black barrel until it pressed against the boy’s abdomen, depressing the flesh just above his navel. He held it there a long moment, smiling.
….. “Get the line,” he said. “And be quick about it.”
….. Ty smiled, despite himself. He told himself that he was joyed to pull in a big one, a twelve-footer, a trophy for the skinner’s forklift. That that was all it was.
….. He turned to the baitline, shoulder to shoulder with the man, and took it in his palms. His grip was hard, no loops. He took a big breath and hauled back on the line, his boot propped firmly against the gunwale.
….. The gator exploded to life underneath them, challenged, the hook screaming in its gut. The boat lurched under their boots. Ty felt the nascent musculature of his back pop and sear against the effort. He lost his footing a moment and slammed to his knees, his arms pulled over the side. Under him the water bubbled and seethed like some medieval cauldron. He got back to standing. The stars were up, no moon. They bled in the vortex, writhing like glowworms. His lungs burned. Every part of him hurt.
….. The man was next to him, bent over the spectacle, breathing hard. His father’s old position. His face was white in the darkness. He jabbed the carbine’s barrel this way, that way, into the murk.
….. “Behind the eyes,” Ty told him. “Anywhere else you’ll just piss him off.”
….. “Where is he? Where is he?”
….. “He’s rolling.”
….. “Shit,” said the man. “Pull him up.”
….. The man’s finger was on the trigger, his eyes alight. Ty could feel how tense he was. How hungry. He let go the line with his right hand for a moment. It slipped into the pocket of his trousers and came up with his linerlock. Close against his leg he thumbed it open, slow, the blade extended with a click. His movements were strange to him, programatic. Mindless. He wanted to stop but could not. His right hand took the line high and hidden behind his hip. He laid the nylon cord across the serrated edge of the knife with his thumb and pulled.
….. Half the length of line fell slack, hanging from the bait-tree like a dead snake. The man was too preoccupied to notice. Ty gripped the remaining line with both hands. The gator was crazed, furious, rolling in lightless depth as it would to kill a beaver or a muskrat or a man, trying vainly to drown the rancid chicken with the stainless, treble-hooked teeth that had come alive inside its own belly.
….. Ty pulled again, again, again, each time a few inches closer. The air was coming through his teeth ragged and wet. His biceps were quivering, tiny oblong balloons that looked like they might burst. Veins, provoked by violence, zigzagged his arms like the anatomy of an animal entirely separate from himself.
….. This part was always harder than you remembered, than you thought it would be. Just a degree short of all you could take. Then harder.
….. “Get the spotlight,” he said. “Front seat locker.”
….. The man looked at him.
….. “Hurry,” said Ty. “He’s getting close.”
….. The man began crawling toward the front of the boat, tripping here and there, his hands searching before him like a blind man’s.
….. Ty held the line tight against the edge of the boat and anchored it with his boot. He made a foot-wide loop at the end of the line. He hitched it closed, a slipknot. His fingers fumbled at the knot, his tendons sluggish, his forearms gorged with too much blood and labor.
….. The man reappeared next to him.
….. “I got it,” he said, breathless. Ty looked at him. His face seemed younger, triumphant, even happy, as if he’d done them a great service. Ty looked away.
….. The man switched on the spotlight. A white cone of light boomed outward from their boat, the water below them illuminated like the site of some miracle, the world beyond them utterly dark.
….. Ty hauled hard on the line and a shadow appeared underneath the boat, monstrous and dragon-tailed, a creature from another history. A narrative not their own. He hauled hard again, and here came the creature’s head. It burst from the murk hissing and snapping, vengeful, like the birth of something evil. It was three feet from the boat.
….. “Shoot him,” Ty said.
….. “Take the spotlight,” said the man. He did.
….. The man shouldered the carbine and tried to take aim. The gator was writhing on the line this way, that way, throwing itself into an S-shape one way and then the other. The enormous mandibular muscles working the jaws with an audible pop, pop, pop. The man shook his head to himself and lowered the weapon from his shoulder and braced himself on the edge of the boat with one hand and extended the barrel nearer his target with the other, aiming one-handed like many gator hunters did, trying to hit the quarter-sized spot soft spot at the animal’s brainstem.
….. Ty, braced against the line, looked down upon the man as if from a great height. The open noose hung at his side. It rubbed against his leg. Under the spotlight’s beam he watched a pale sliver of flesh reveal itself at the base of the man’s skull, between his hair and collar. Past that the rifle, the gator. The jaws yawned wide underneath them. There were the crooked rows of snaggled teeth, the yellow-scummed tongue, the black gullet to a whole other world.
….. He pictured what would happen: slipping the noose over the man’s head and the knot slamming home and the gator pulling him overboard, the body disappearing quickly into the opaque water, the screams gurgling instantly to silence. He would have to drop the spotlight to fit the noose. He could not help but picture it lighting him up from the floor of the boat, his selfhood white-lit in its brilliance like some angel of death, of life. He wasn’t sure which.
….. He told himself this was no different than the killing of a gator, a marsh hen, a whitetail buck. What was a man but animal? He needed those duffles in the floor of the boat. He needed their treasure. For his father he did.
….. Below him the jaws popped shut, and the light was reflected double-orbed in those yellow serpent eyes, the pupils narrowed to the merest slit. Nothing human in them. Not even faintly. The man extended the carbine’s barrel toward that spot between the eyes.
….. Ty suddenly let go of everything, baitline and spotlight. The nylon whipped straight out of through his hand, burning the palm. The spotlight splashed into the water, emanating a yellow orb of light beneath the surface. Smaller, smaller. Then gone.
….. The man looked at him, blinking, his nightvision compromised.
….. “What the hell?” he said.
….. Ty stood there empty-handed, his palms silver-lit under the risen moon.
….. “I don’t know,” he said. “The baitline, it slipped I guess. I dropped the spotlight making a grab for it.”
….. The man huffed.
….. “Your loss, I reckon.”
….. “Yeah,” said Ty. “Mine.”

***

….. It took them the better part of an hour to reach Killafella Creek. It had an original French name, but nobody called it that. A rare coral snake had killed a man there, and the name had been a sort of twisted joke on the jingle that helped people distinguish the highly venomous coral snake by its colored bands: “Red and yella, killafella.” This opposed to the harmless Louisiana milk snake: “Red and black, friend of Jack.”
….. Ty had been on these waters nearly every day for as long as he could remember. Gigging frogs by moonlight, shooting marsh hens and duck, hunting gators. With his father. Always with him.
….. A long wraith clouded the moon, like smoke, and he was happy for the darkness. The black. He could lose himself in it. Could be not the thing he was, the thing he had become, the lowest sort of coward who could not do an ugly thing for his kin. For his very father. He wanted to be nothing, in the dark. Lost. He feared daybreak and longed to draw out the night: these hours before the full light of his failings, his cowardice, would be stripped naked to bare. Before he would be with his father again, in his room, with his many tubes and pills. His treatments terminated; no one to pay. Just him and his father. A good man’s spirit paying up.
….. They rounded a crook in the creek and the orange light of a distant boatdock came into view. Ty knew the one. An expensive, well-built floating dock with unblemished pontoons; frequently, he and his father, and others too, had wondered who could afford such a thing out here, nowhere, especially since no house nor fishing camp could be seen to justify it.
….. Now he knew.
….. “Stay here with the boat,” the man told him. He was hitching the line to the nearest cleat.
….. “Or what?” Ty asked him.
….. The man stood up straight from the cleat and adjusted the carbine against his chest.
….. “Twenty-one Bull Creek Road,” he said.
….. Ty began handing him the duffle bags.
….. He waited. The motor chugged unhappily behind him. He had one hand on the tiller throttle, but did not twist. Through the trees along the bank he could just barely make out a dark SUV, the huge chrome blossoms of the wheels glinting dully in the scarce light of the moon, the stars.
….. Minutes later the man came back down the dock, bagless, his boots clopping loudly on the wooden slats. He stopped at the edge of the dock. Slowly, he began reaching into the bib of his overalls. Ty panicked. His grip tightened on the throttle, but the boat was still moored to the dock. How could he be so stupid? He dove over the side. The blackness enveloped him, inky and thick and warm. He kicked and clawed as far and as deep as he could, waiting for the steaming rounds to butcher him underneath the surface, his blood clouding him strangely and slow.
….. His hands touched bottom. He turned his head upward and opened his eyes. No moon, no stars. The scarcest glow of manmade lamps puddling across the surface. Is this what a gator would see? He waited as long as he could, long seconds, clutching roots and bottom-reeds against his own buoyancy. His vision began to go starry. His insides to scream. He wanted oblivion but was not meant for this place. No, his body screamed. No. Not here, like this. He kicked suddenly for the surface, the oxygen madness too much. His head broke free. He swallowed all the air he could, redeemed if for a moment. He waited to be shot. It was so dark; death could be little different. The mildest transition. Instant. But there was nothing, no shot. He turned to look.
….. The man was still standing on the dock, silhouetted in the dim orange cone of the nearest light. Not a gun in his hand. Something else. And he was laughing. Just laughing.
….. He tossed something into the boat.
….. “Gift,” he said. “For your Daddy.”
….. He began to walk back up the dock.
….. Ty swam back to the boat. He locked his elbows over the side and hauled himself up to where he could see. On the elevated seat, his father’s seat, sat two stacks of bills wrapped in white tape.
….. His eyes widened. “Jesus,” he whispered.
….. The man turned and glanced over his shoulder a moment, as if called or thanked. He was grinning, and his mouth had lost that sick leer. It was just pitiful now. Busted and ugly. But his eyes, those were bright.

####

Taylor Brown’s short fiction has appeared in CutBank, Thuglit, Pindeldyboz, storySouth, Porchlight, The Dead Mule, The Liars’ League, and The Press 53 Open Awards and Press 53 Spotlight anthologies. His story “Rider” received the 2009 Montana Prize in Fiction. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and his website is http://www.taylorbrownfiction.com.