Stan stood at the edge of his property, by the lake's edge. The sight was familiar, yet he barely recognized it. The drought was bad, just about as bad as he'd ever seen. The lake had receded so much his old wooden dock was completely out of water. Underneath it, the ash colored muck of the lakebed was dry and quilted with cracks, and scraggly weeds grew where the cast of his fishing line once fell. He hadn't spent much time at the lake lately. Since Lynnie had left for college he'd poured himself into work, spending his time at the office. But the warmth of the new spring, and the amber glow of the late afternoon, had brought him out today.
A gray ring of dried lakebed, several yards wide, circled the shrinking lake, which seemed to be dying like a decaying grapefruit. Yet all around there was wildlife in the bustle of early spring. Grackles hunting for bugs swooped and landed on the bright green lily pads. To the right, in the tall weeds, several red-winged blackbirds, the first Stan had seen this spring, flitted about. And not far off a pair of gallinules called to each other as they swam near the shore.
Stan was walking to the end of the dock when he heard the croaking, a deep bellowing sound that echoed around the lake. He stopped and looked around, then he heard the croak again, the unmistakable deep-toned roar of a male alligator. Usually there weren't gators in the lake. In the fourteen years he'd lived there he'd seen only three or four. It wasn't a very large lake. It was too small for skiing, but it was big enough for Stan to putter around fishing in his john boat and trolling motor. When Lynnie was little he'd swim across it while she stood at the end of the dock clapping and cheering him on. The first time he swam it Lynnie was only four. It was right after they bought the house, shortly after he'd married her mother.
He met Brenda at a bar in Lutz where she waited tables. On their first date they ate fried catfish on a Sunday afternoon, and Lynnie came along. Brenda was young, twenty-three to Stan's thirty. She came down from Tennessee on vacation when she was eighteen and never returned. Lynnette was born a year later. Brenda had soft curls of light red hair, and so did Lynnie. Stan fell in love with them both. They bought the house with the long back yard on the North Tampa lake, and lived there for two years before Brenda left. He got a call at his office one day from Lynnie's school; no one had picked her up from kindergarten. She left him a note: "You're better with her than I am," was all it said. For years he waited, numbly, for her to come back.
Stan heard the croaking again and followed the shoreline with his eyes looking for signs of a gator hole in the vegetation, but he couldn't spot any. He walked up the dock, intending to get the binoculars from the peg where they hung in the back porch, when Judith called to him. She lived next to him. The house next door had been just like his — a three-bedroom ranch style built thirty years ago. Judith and her husband bought it a little over a year ago, and never even moved in. They razed it to the ground and built a sprawling new house on the large lot. It was happening often in the area. Raw waterfront property was at a premium, so people bought tear-downs. Judith's was the fourth new house on the lake.
"Stan, what's new with you? We hardly see you at all anymore." She smiled a bright orange-lipstick smile. It annoyed him that she sounded as if they were old friends when they barely knew each other. She had a perfect tanning salon tan he thought looked unnatural, and when she spoke she waved around her hands with her long store-bought nails. He thought she was downright frightful.
"Not much new," Stan said. He scratched his eyebrow with the back of his thumbnail, a nervous habit that surfaced around people with whom he didn't want to speak. It gave him time to think of something to say. "There's a gator in the lake though."
"You've seen it? How big?"
"Haven't seen it, just heard it croaking. It's mating season."
"Couldn't that be dangerous?"
"I'm sure that gator's more afraid of you than you are of him."
"I'll keep an eye out." Judith said. "You'll let me know if you see it, won't you?"
The first time the phone rang the following evening, it startled Stan. It just didn't ring as often since Lynnie was away.
"It's Judith, I've seen it." she said.
"Seen what?"
"The alligator of course. I saw it just now, it's big, really big, at least five feet long." She sounded out of breath, as if she'd run up from the lake.
"Actually, that's not all that big as gators go." Stan said.
"Well, what are we going to do about it?" asked Judith.
"Do? There's nothing to do. The drought's dried up a lot of lakes. This fellow is just scouting out a new one, calling for a mate. If he doesn't find one he'll move along."
"What about in the meantime?"
"In the meantime nothing, Judith, that gator isn't gonna chase you up the yard and bite your leg."
Judith, with an exasperated sigh, hung up. The second time the phone rang it was Lynnie.
"Hey Stan, Stan the man. How's it going Daddy?"
He asked her about classes, and friends, and dorm life; she'd wanted an apartment, he'd insisted on a dorm her first year. He wanted the conversation to last, yet it embarrassed him that he missed her. He missed coming home to her, actually missed the head-banging music from her bedroom, and the way she burst through the door calling "Stan, Stan, Stan the man" in greeting the way she'd done since second grade when she'd learned a jingle in social studies as part of a mock election. "Stan, Stan, he's our man. If he can't do it nobody can."
"So everything's good, honey?"
"Yeah Dad, everything's good, everything except chemistry. Chemistry sucks, just like it sucked in high school, but I'll survive. So how about you? Are you poking around the house, or are you getting out?"
"I'm fine, I'm getting out."
"Yeah, I bet. In the truck and to the office is not getting out. Did you ask that lady out?"
"What lady?"
"The bookstore lady."
"No."
"So call her already," Lynnie said.
The bookstore lady was Janice, and Stan had met her months ago at Barnes and Noble, in the magazine section. He'd begun to go there every couple of weeks to read the magazines since Harold's Barbershop had closed.
Harold had kept a veritable library of magazines for the customers. Stan usually went to his twice-a-month appointments early to chat with Harold and read through Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Esquire, Popular Mechanics — he even had Scientific American, a gift subscription from a university professor who frequented the shop. When the strip mall that housed the barbershop sold a year ago, Harold retired. The mall was torn down, and replaced with an air-conditioned mini-storage place. Stan wondered why these places were so prevalent these days when they didn't use to exist at all. Did people have more stuff worthy of storing now? He had a secret theory about these places. He believed there were so many of them in Florida because of the retirees. They moved south with all their northern stuff, all the clutter of their working lives, all the memories that wouldn't fit into their condos — that's where it all went, into air-conditioned mini-storage. Now Stan had his hair cut by Yvonne who washed his hair with green apple shampoo, called him Sugar, and offered only People magazines to read.
Saturday morning Stan arose early. He'd left his bedroom windows opened and his curtains pulled back to enjoy the coolness of the spring night. He'd fallen asleep to the din of frogs and crickets, and awakened to the early morning clatter of birds. Before April ended, the temperatures would be in the eighties, and the only sound coming through his closed windows then would be the droning whir of the heat pump. Stan walked down to the lake like an errant camper with an aluminum beach chair dangling purse-like from the crook of one elbow, his hand grasping a coffee thermos. The other hand balanced a rake slung over his shoulder, and tucked into the back of his shorts was the morning's paper. The morning fog, not yet burned off, lingered above the water like steam rising from a simmering pot. Stan set up his chair by the lake's edge to drink his coffee and read the paper, but he merely skimmed the headlines with little interest. His attention drifted to the blackbirds in the cattails, to the anhinga perched on a nearby tree drying its wings, when he heard the deep guttural croak. It was still around, Stan thought; he looked around but couldn't spot it.
He gave up on the newspaper and, using the sharp pronged rake, began uprooting the weeds that grew where the lawn ended and the land sloped down to meet what had been the water's edge. It was the beach area to one side of the dock that he'd cleared years ago for Lynnie. Now the soft, gray sand was packed hard like dried clay, and was matted over with a tangle of weeds. Cleaning the beach was something he and Lynnie usually did together, a spring cleaning ritual. The water receded during the dry winter months, and they cleared the weeds and raked the dry sand before the summer rains came. But it had barely rained last summer, and the effects of the drought on the beach and the lake were pronounced. With Lynnie gone, Stan felt the whole natural cycle was off kilter.
"So call her already," she'd said about Janice. Maybe he would. There had been women after Brenda, not soon after, but eventually. After he stopped expecting her to return, after he and Lynnie fell into a rhythm together, after he could think of Brenda and feel gratitude that she'd left him Lynnie instead of resentment that she'd deserted him.
He dug the rake into the weeds and tugged. It didn't take much effort to pull the thin roots from the packed sand. He tugged at large patches of dried algae, and peeled them like hair off a scalp, leaving the sand exposed. By now the sun had burned off the morning dampness, and he felt its heat on his shirtless back. Stan intended to clear the beach just past where the usual water line would be. It was an act of faith — the rains would come. His efforts provided instant gratification, like mowing the lawn; you can see where you've been; you know where you're going. He raked systematically, lost in thought, until his meditation was interrupted by Judith.
She ran from her yard, waving and calling to him.
"Didn't you hear me?" She stood at the foot of his dock, looking down at him, one hand on her waist, the other around a pair of sleekly thin double-o-sevenish binoculars she wore around her neck like designer jewelry. "There it is!" she said pointing at the lake.
He looked in the direction to which she pointed, shielding his eyes from the resplendent glare of the water. Toward the eastern side of the lake, about twenty feet from shore, he could make out the floating log shape of the alligator.
"Yeah, I heard him this morning, guess the fellow is still trying to get lucky." Stan wiped the sweat off his face with his forearm.
"Well come Monday morning his luck is running out."
"What do you mean?"
"I called Fish and Wildlife Services. They gave me the names of trappers. They told me if it was over four feet long and a nuisance, I can have it taken away. I'll have to pay of course, money well spent."
"That gator's not a nuisance. I told you, its habitat has changed. It's not hurting anybody; it's just trying to live. Maybe he'll decide it likes the lake and stay, or maybe when he's ready he'll move on."
"I'll do what I think I need to do," Judith said.
"Screw you," said Stan. He threw the rake towards the dock and walked into the water. When he was knee deep, he took a breath that filled his lungs, dove in and started swimming. From the dock he heard Judith yelling after him. Stan was certain the gator would keep its distance. He kept his eyes on the other shore, and knew that if he kept putting one arm over the other, he'd make it to the other side.
Aracelis Gonzalez Asendorf was born in Cuba and grew up in Florida. Her stories have appeared in the journal Sunscripts and in the anthology 100 Percent Pure Florida Fiction. She lives in Tampa with her husband and children (on a small lake with a seasonally resident alligator).
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2002.
