Gator on the Loose! (11 page)

From down below, Razi shouted, “Look at my flashlight, everybody. It’s jumping!”

“What are you people looking at?” Grandma said. “Haven’t you ever heard of an alligator sanctuary before?”

Keisha, Daddy and Grandma could not agree on who missed the sign for the highway turnoff to Interstate 94. They pulled off at Vicksburg, bumped to a stop at a roadside stand and bought two quarts of strawberries. The woman who sold them the berries pointed her finger and said, “Just take that road till you can’t take it no more, turn right and look for the alligator sign.”

Though Razi had begged, Mama said she could not endure her son’s energy and forty-three alligators in the same field, even if there was a sturdy fence. She consoled Razi by agreeing to go with Mr. and Mrs. Sanders, the twins and a very large beach umbrella to Millennium Park, where Razi could chase the seagulls to his heart’s content and Mama didn’t have to worry about his losing any limbs.

“Look, Daddy, the sign says Athens … right!”

Mr. Carter swung the truck to the right, and Keisha and Grandma each took a side of the road to watch.

“Cow … cow … barn …,” Grandma reported.

“Farm … farm … barn … field …,” Keisha answered back. “Look!”

A big hand-painted sign read
LIVE ALLIGATORS ON DISPLAY
!

Daddy turned in and parked his truck in the shade of a huge semi from Wisconsin, with a sign on the side that read
SUPPLYING CHEESE CURDS TO THE NATION
.

The sun was so high overhead that they almost didn’t have shadows. Keisha put her hands up to shade her eyes. Grandma began rummaging through her bag for some sort of sun protection. She found nothing.

Grandma looked up at the sky as if it had done something wrong. “I thought we’d be indoors,” she said. “Hmmmm … maybe in the gift shop.” Grandma took Keisha’s arm and began dragging her in the direction of a long, low building.

She yanked open the screen door and a little string of bells flew toward them, just missing Grandma’s head. Inside, it was dark and cool, and that made Grandma calm down a little. She kept moving in a straight line toward a bank of aquariums filled with turtles and snakes.

“Would you like to feed our bearded dragon from Australia?”

Keisha was almost as tall as the lady who spoke, and because of that, she found herself face to face with a very large white lizard. The lizard clung to the lady’s shirt. She held out a palmful of dandelion heads.

“I’m Carmen Critchlow,” she said. “Welcome to our reptile display and gift shop.”

“That’s no alligator,” Grandma said, squinting in the low light.

Carmen laughed. “No, no. He’s a lizard … from Australia. Alligators aren’t the only reptiles that people no longer want around.”

Carmen had a deep voice and sparkly dark eyes. Keisha took a dandelion head, put it on her flat palm and held out her hand so that the lizard could see it. She watched his eye rotate in the direction of the fuzzy yellow flower, and then, in an instant, his neck grew long and twisted so that his head was over the flower. Keisha felt a slight pressure and the flower head was gone.

“Impressive.” Grandma leaned in for a better look. “We could use him in our front yard.”

“Yes.” Carmen laughed again and stroked the back of the white lizard. “Everyone says that. We should rent him out.”

Carmen returned the bearded dragon to his tank. “Have you been out to see the alligators yet?”

“My grandma wanted to ask about sunblock. My dad’s out back. We brought you another alligator.”

“You must be Keisha!”

“And I’m Alice,” Grandma said, pumping Carmen’s
hand. “We spoke on the phone. I don’t see any sunblock around here.”

“We don’t sell it, but I had some here somewhere. There’s not much left….” Carmen reached beneath the counter and pulled out a wrinkled tube.

“That’s okay,” Keisha said. “I can squeeze out enough.”

“I’ll have Daddy put it on,” she told Grandma, taking a few steps toward the door. “Thank you, Carmen.”

“I can’t be out in that sun without protection. Maybe while you’re out there boiling, I’ll look for a little something for Razi,” Grandma said. “Did we bring the credit card?”

Keisha wasn’t sure, but she didn’t want to say no. How wonderful if Grandma would forget about her and shop! She stepped outside and ran toward the fenced-in area behind the gift shop. This was where the alligators would be.

Their enclosure was in a big flat place with woods on one side and a cornfield on the other. At the far end of the enclosure was a tall fence. Keisha saw Daddy backing up his truck. It disappeared behind the tall fence. That must be the place where Pumpkin-Petunia was being taken.

A row of children and a few adults stood in another area looking over a three-foot fence. The fence poles were strong two-by-fours crossed with wire. As Keisha got closer, she could see there were two fences, about three feet apart. That meant children couldn’t put their arms through the fence and reach the alligators.

A tall, tanned man holding a broom handle came out from behind the fence and approached the crowd that had gathered. Keisha wondered if he was David Critchlow. To get to the front of the pen, he had to walk around a pond about half the size of the city pool. The pond was lined with some kind of black fabric that was held down every few feet with used tires.

That’s when Keisha saw the alligators. Dozens of pairs of eyes and nostrils were bobbing in the water. With all her alligator knowledge, Keisha had never seen alligators do this. They seemed happy to her, floaty, like clouds.

Instead of coming to the front of the enclosure, the man walked slowly around the edge of the pond, stepping over alligators and examining big-leaved plants lined up in black pots, which Keisha thought he must be ready to plant in the ground soon. As he moved a coil of hose, one of the larger alligators in the pond
suddenly raised its head high in the air and brought it down—
smack!
—on the surface of the water.

“What was
that?”
asked a boy in a blue baseball cap. His mama pulled him toward her as if the alligator were about to launch itself over the fence.

“Mister, will you give it another piece of charcoal?” A little girl in a playsuit, even younger than Razi, was pointing at the alligators. She looked afraid and fascinated at the same time.

The man laughed. “All in good time. And it’s David, by the way. I like that a lot better than ‘mister.’ We’re just getting a new recruit in the back, and I wanted to make sure we had the pen ready.

“That head slap you saw just now was one of seven vocalizations we know that alligators make. As far as I can tell, that one is closest to a teenager’s whoop and holler.”

As David took up his position by the fence opposite the crowd of onlookers, Keisha watched the alligators in the water and all around him. They seemed to move a little closer to him…. It was as if they hadn’t noticed him before and now they started to pay attention.

“You see, every time I come into the enclosure, I need the alligators to see me doing other things. It wouldn’t be very good for them
or
for me if they just associated me with food.”

“Put another rock on his tongue. Pleeeease!”

Daddy came up behind Keisha and grabbed her shoulders. “Mission accomplished,” he whispered in her ear.

“Can I see her before we leave?” Keisha whispered back.

Daddy glanced up at David. “I think so,” he said.

“All right, all right,” David said. He held up something in his hand. It did look like a piece of brown charcoal.

“Not many people know that Purina Mills makes a food that is the perfect blend of vitamins, minerals and fiber for alligators. This is pretty much what we feed our group here. Unless they do something
really
big in training. Then they get a frozen rat or a quail.”

“I didn’t know you could train alligators,” an older lady in a very OL pair of elastic-waist pants said.

“Oh, you can train alligators. You just have to know what their limits are.”

While David was speaking, Keisha noticed a medium-sized alligator stepping slowly toward him. At first, it put its head on one of David’s big wader boots. Then it curled its body in a half circle just behind David. Was this David’s special alligator? Keisha wondered. The one that was most like his pet?

“Are you training them for the circus?” the little boy wanted to know.

“No, no, nothing like that.” Though the alligator was behind him, David seemed to know it was there, because when it opened its mouth and let out a hiss, David turned and poked the back of its neck with the broom handle.

Before anyone could stop him, the boy put his feet in the rungs of the first fence and began to climb. “Why are you hitting him? Don’t do that.”

In one quick move, Daddy lifted the boy off the fence and set him next to his mother. David tipped his hat in appreciation.

“I’m not hitting him. I’m correcting him. That’s a sensitive area, and they don’t like that, just as I don’t like to be hissed at.”

Alligators were very cute, but Keisha thought she might not like having a congregation of them all around her. Right now, David had at least two dozen behind him. Most were in the pond, a few were in muddy wallows around the pond’s edge and more were using that slow half crawl that brought them closer and closer until they settled around his feet.

“But they like you,” the little girl said. “Look, they’re all coming closer.”

“Correction. They like this.” David held up the piece of alligator food.

Twisting his cap backward, the little boy kicked at the fence. “What do you train them for, then?”

“Well, as they get bigger, we want to be able to move them.” David pointed to the other side of the field. “In August, we’ll be putting them in their winter enclosure at night. It’s hard to make an alligator move if he doesn’t want to.”

“So you can say ‘come,’ just like I do to my dog?”

“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than training a dog because alligators don’t respond to language as well as dogs do. But with some hard work, S-P-O-T here”—David used his broom handle to point to an alligator standing off to the side—“has been trained to come forward for his treat.”

Keisha glanced around at the little crowd that had grown to five, maybe six children her brother’s age. No one yelled out the name Spot as Razi would have done.

Suddenly Grandma was behind her, rustling a big paper bag. Keisha had been thinking about using her allowance to buy Razi a plastic poison dart frog, but it looked like maybe Grandma had it covered.

“Spot, come,” David said. Nothing happened.

David leaned over so that he was closer to the alligator that must be Spot. How could he tell them apart? “Spot, come!”

Suddenly Spot lifted his body off the ground. With four or five quick steps, he was at David’s feet. He opened his mouth.

David tossed the alligator chow into the back of his mouth. At the moment Spot’s piece of alligator chow disappeared, three other alligators opened their mouths and hissed.

“Watch out!” Grandma squeezed Keisha’s shoulder hard. “You’re about to be gator chow, David!”

David straightened. “They’re like little kids pounding on the table. They want me to know they’re ready, too.”

“Well, in my neighborhood, that’s a fighting noise.”

“You can’t judge alligators by the way you think,” David told Grandma. “These guys”—he circled his broom handle all around him—“they’re just frogs with teeth.”

Big teeth, Keisha thought. Lots and lots of them.

A tractor sputtered by on the road, and a couple of the bigger “frogs with teeth” arched their necks so that their heads were up out of the water. Then they commenced to bellow. It was such a powerful noise, in addition to the tractor, which was doing a pretty good job making a powerful noise itself, that the children looked uncertain. Some covered their ears.

“This is worse than the motocross,” said the boy in the blue baseball cap, pressing his hands to his ears.

David shouted over the noise, “It’s just instinctive. They are responding to the noise as if there are other alligators in the area. They do that sometimes with tractors, motorcycles…. You should hear what they do when it thunders.”

The children didn’t look too happy about this possibility.

“Okay, so should we get a big one out here? Look out at the pond. You see lots of heads over there. Which one is the biggest?”

David waited as the children jostled and pointed. It was generally agreed that the alligator in the center of the pond, the one that floated with most of its back showing as well as its eyes and nose, was the biggest.

“You’re right! Claudius is our biggest alligator, but he used to be much bigger. He came from a zoo where he was in a very small pen. No one exercised him. They just fed him. He was four hundred pounds. He was so fat he couldn’t walk. He just scooted over the ground. We had to put him on a diet. Any guesses on what is alligator diet food?”

Suggestions bubbled up from the group around the enclosure. “Lettuce? Birdseed?”

David formed a zero with his fingers. “Nothing. No food for nine months. As you might imagine, he didn’t like us very much. We made him waddle around for some exercise, but no food. He’s much better now. A trim three hundred pounds. So get your cameras ready. I’m going to call Claudius.”