Gatorland Junction

“Lay thine hand upon [Leviathan], remember the battle forever, do it no more. Behold, the hope of him that meets Leviathan is in vain: shall not [he] be cast down even at the sight of him? None is so fierce that dare stir him up.” 

-Job 41:8-10, KJV

It was hot. It was one of those all-too-common days where, if the dewpoint and the humidity were high, the temperature would be unbearable, even with an added breeze. Outside chores were awful. As it was, there was so much water in the air that the “Feels Like” sensor on his built-in weather app said 98° F even though it was only 79°. He was drenched in sweat already and it would only get worse once the sun burned off the morning clouds.

He’d been working for Mitch Lawrence for about six months, since he first got out of prison. Back then, it had been cool outside and fairly dry. He didn’t mind the weather because two years on the inside had starved him of his natural need for sunlight and fresh air. As the year progressed from the holidays to June, though, Barry Folger had begun to understand that South Carolina, like Georgia and Florida and the other Deep South states, was unpleasant in the summer. Unpleasant didn’t even cover the facts. It was hell. He’d had a few days over the last week, as he sat in his apartment looking into the coming months in his mind where he actually considered calling Mitch and asking if there was something he could do inside, in the air conditioning. It would take a few minutes of internal debate, deciding he was ready to make the call, but then he would remember his promise and suck it up. It could always be worse he knew. He could still be on the inside.

Magnolia Meadows Rentals (a name Barry hated) was across highway 54 from Sun Clipper Apartments and Condominiums. His apartment, on the third tier of building H, looked over the intersection and right at the closed neighborhood of condos and very expensive apartments (far nicer than his and far more expensive). The Sun Clipper people were extremely well to do. They all drove Lexus SUVs or Audis and all dressed as though they were headed to a photo shoot for Vogue or Cosmo. All the females were like supermodels and all the males had well-developed pec and bicep muscles. Every couple had a labradoodle called Hank if male and Molly if female.

He knew this, because Sun Clipper was Mitch’s only account. It took two solid weeks to mow, trim and keep the surrounding swamp at bay and Mitch’s team, including Barry as lead mower, were primarily all guys hoping for and needing a second chance. It was in Mitch Lawrence’s personality to help and Barry was grateful. He didn’t care too much for the other guys. Lance Morgan, the pretty boy, was always trying to hit up the Sun Clipper females and rode around on his mower without a shirt or in a shirt with the sleeves ripped off. Darrell Killigan—”Big’Un” as they all called him—was more interested in scampering off somewhere to catch a few Z’s in the shade. Barry tried to keep them both on a leash and take the pressure off of Mitch, but, as always happened as a number two guy, Barry got the brunt of chewings out when the other two messed up.

Today, he was going to be working down at the retention ponds at the south end of the Sun Clipper complex. These deep cut ponds kept rainwater from flooding the neighborhood, especially around the condos on the outside loop, where the buildings bordered the swamplands. The planners had planted scrub pine and palms and other thick-growing brush to block the somewhat dismal view of the actual swamp and marsh. Past the border it was mostly saw grass and cat tails and dragonflies, but runoff had to go somewhere and the ponds caught the water and kept the area dryer. Great big fountain works sunk in the center of each pond supposedly kept the mosquitoes down and also acted as a deterrent for certain kinds of wildlife.

There were 9 ponds around the entire complex, but the four largest ones were on the southeast side, just past the main condo buildings and by the trash dumpsters and recycling bins. Because they were manmade, the ponds had steep sides, something that Barry wished he had been able to discuss with the engineers who had developed the plans. Steep sides were a deterrent to people going too close, but it made mowing the grass, which ran right to the water’s edge, very trying. Darrell K. was on Mitch’s bad side, because he’d accidentally run a zero turn mower right into the big pond, requiring Mitch to hire a crane truck to get it out. The mower was salvageable, but between the damage and the cost of the crane, Mitch was out a lot of money. It was also a bad way to start his gig at Sun Clipper, because that happened on the first day and he and Tom Jessup, the maintenance director of the complex had nearly thrown fists. All of that happened before Barry was released, but Mitch made it clear that Barry’s job was going to be figuring out a way to keep those pond banks mowed without drowning another mower.

“The problem is, if the grass starts to get tall, there will be gators. They’ll come over the earth wall from the swamp and camp out in the tall grass. They run after pets, kids, cranes and herons, especially this year,” Mitch said, “because of the drought, they’re moving and looking for water.” 

So, Barry decided to look online and see what solutions he could find. It hadn’t taken long. One of the first videos was of a man somewhere in Louisiana with steep pond banks who used an older mower with the deck set low and rigged a rope and pulley system on the back of his pickup. The man had a rope coiled in his hand. When he pulled on it, it disengaged a lock and the mower, which was hooked to ropes coming out of the back of the pickup, started to roll down the hill. When the man moved toward the side of the truck, the mower went toward the edge of the water, when he pulled it back, the mower came up. It was a pretty good solution and Barry was sure he could find all the supplies in one of the tool sheds. He went to a swap meet downtown and found two beat up Briggs and Stratton mowers for fifty bucks each. He bought them, and fixed them both up and got them running. He replaced their blades, and when he had them loaded in the work truck, he brought them to Mitch to share his idea.

Each of the four ponds were kidney shaped, and two of them had high borders—manmade ridges—along the side of the property that sat against the tree barrier between the houses and the swampy lowlands. He couldn’t park the truck on that narrow ridge, but he managed by using a few of the tall pines and his pulley system and stood on one of the cement drainage structures to get the steepest banks done. It took all day, and was a lot of work, but Barry was strong, and he was used to patiently getting through each work day. It was better than being on the inside he constantly reminded himself. The drainage system was pretty clever, too. It was designed so that, if it rained a lot, the water would rise in the pond and flood out into the swamp rather than backing up into the neighborhood. There were two, two foot diameter pipes in each system, so even if one got blocked, it would still function.

Darrell Big'Un told him on his first day that the complex maintenance guys had to crawl in those pipes each month to remove debris from screens intended to keep alligators from using them as convenient transit to the ponds. Barry had not believed the man. Putting screens across those pipes would cause storm debris to clog and back up. That was a design failure he believed even engineers would avoid. The ridge was too high for the water to rise over safely, so it would then flow back into the parking lots and eventually the condos, defeating the entire purpose of the ponds. The idea was fairly sound in principle if not practice. He realized that, other than keeping the grass short and those pipes clear of large debris, there was no way to keep the gators out of the ponds. They would find a way to get in.

He had seen several smaller alligators, sunning themselves on hot days on the steep sides or chilling in the water grass that grew along the waters edge. They would immediately scoot into the pond if they felt threatened and Barry believed that they were, for the most part, harmless, if left alone.

The gator that was basking on the ridge side of the largest pond as Barry pulled up this morning was not small. Barry thought, though he was half a football field away on the parking lot side of the oblong pond, that it looked to be four or five feet long at least and very wide in the body; maybe three feet at the fattest part. In the grey of late morning, the lizard appeared black rather than green. He knew that it would get nervous when he started the mowers, and either slide into the water, or scramble over the ridge and into the tree line to the swamp. That's what they usually did.

Barry, no fool when it came to threatening creatures, whether they were human or lizard (and inside, it had been sometimes hard to tell the difference), gave the gator a wide berth and started on the near side of the pond. He backed up the white pickup with the pulley gear and mowers in it, and started setting up. It was already hot and he stopped several times to drink water and Gatorade from the cooler he kept in the cab. He could hear Darrell’s whining trimmer and saw Lance zooming around on the zero turn rider out near the entrance. He turned his focus back to his business and began doing one or two strips of grass at a time. Within an hour, he had the near side of the pond banks done. He moved the truck and continued to work going clockwise first, and then anti clockwise. The gator still rested to his left across the water.

As the day passed, the sky grew sullen. Heavy clouds lowered on the horizon past the tall pines and palms. The air grew thicker and heavier with moisture. The sounds of his coworkers died away as they beat it back to the trucks to load up and head back to Mitch's three-bay garage to wait out the storms. Glancing at his watch and then back up at the sky, Barry decided to finish the last stretch; the ten yards between himself and that big gator. The rain would start soon, but it wouldn't stop him finishing just this pond. A few more passes, then cleaning up his rig and driving to HQ and a late lunch could all happen before the storm arrived. Thirty minutes tops. The storm was not that close yet, anyway. There was no thunder, no fat warning drops, no stiff convection wind. 

With each slow swipe of the mower, Barry got closer to where the gator lay, stubbornly refusing to move. He gradually got as far around to the left as he could, letting gravity carry the mower to the water’s edge and then drawing it back up, carefully, with the guide line and the pulley system. When the first gentle rumble of thunder echoed overhead, Barry decided to call it quits, figuring about ten minutes to clean up all the rope and disconnect the pulleys and load the mowers into the back of the truck. The furthest mower was about ten feet from the gator, which continued to stay right where it had been. 

More thunder. Barry moved carefully but quickly. As he moved toward the furthest mower to unhook it from its lines, he heard something that didn’t register as thunder, but still sent a shiver through him. It wasn’t a sound that he had heard before. It hit him in a part of his mind that had been awakened and honed while he was in prison—the sound of a predatory threat. 

Morton Fennstone named the alligator in his ‘backyard’ Morty Jr. The creature crawled out of the underbrush and palms just behind his condo for the first time about two months ago. Morty Sr. was sitting on his back porch (the upper one) when he heard something moving around near the edge of the wild area. He went inside, down the steps as quickly as his aging knees allowed, and went out onto the lower deck just off his kitchen. The lizard was maybe three feet long, but was still quite narrow along its body. A youngster. He looked at it for a long time, just laying there doing whatever gators do. Morty was quietly relieved that Milly, his shitzhu, had gone across the great rainbow bridge in the sky. She would have made an ideal treat for Morty Jr.

The creature looked for all the world like one of those fake animals—what had his grandson Jesse called it? An animaltronic? It didn’t seem real. But, being a slightly bored old man, a reality that he fully acknowledged, he shouted over the back rail to the creature and gave it its name and went inside to see what he had that he could give a gator. 

Gazing into his fancy fridge, he saw some take out containers, some celery and a half-empty jar of mustard. Nothing suitable. So he got his phone and once he navigated the always difficult process of opening the damned thing, he looked up what alligators like to eat. He watched some engaging content on feeding them raw chickens and then he scrolled to a video of a man with a thick—perhaps Cajun—accent talking about giving them marshmallows.

“Der’s nuttin dey like more’n dem mar shmallow, no!,” the man said, and then proceeded to dump an entire bag of Sta-Puft marshmallows in the water, and watched with something approaching admiration as about twenty gators bobbed up around the fanboat. “Hoo, day love dem mar shamallow, dey do,” the man exclaimed before the video went dark. Morty stowed his phone by his recliner and went into the cabinet where he kept his own bag of “mar shmallow”, as the Cajun man called them, and neatly cut it open. He fetched out a handful and went back out to the deck. The gator was gone. He tossed a few down where the lizard had been. Mrs. Jessup next door came out then and was lighting some of her stinky candles so she could do her stretches without being attacked by the state insect and he quietly said, “Come back, Morty Jr. Plenty more where that came from!” He then disappeared inside before Mrs. Jessup started talking to him about her love of stretching. He would have almost rather had a leg caught in the gator’s mouth and been dragged into the swamp than talk to her.

Over the next few weeks, Morty kept a bag of marshmallows handy on both levels of back deck. If he saw or thought he saw evidence of Morty Jr., he tossed a few down. He never actually saw Morty Jr. eat a marshmallow, but they always wound up gone, so Morty assumed that maybe another critter came along and the gator got it instead. Either way, he was feeding a gator which he knew was a big no no, but he didn’t really care too much, because they wouldn’t be able to prove it. Gators hung around down at the retention ponds all the time, he knew. People would crowd around and take pictures with their phones. Now and then, they would even wander a little too close to the water’s edge with their little dogs and snap selfies where gators had been seen. Morty reckoned they would eventually get what they deserved for being stupid when a big one leapt out of the murky water and snatched their little dog or them back into the green depths. He understood that this was not a nice thought, but he was getting so tired of the ridiculous fancy children, as he thought of them, who lived their pathetically pointless lives in the Sun Clipper complex. He little knew how much he and Barry Folger, the man mowing the lawn out front of his condo, agreed on that particular point.

Morty Jr. started hanging around more and more. His neighbors had taken notice and of course, Mrs. Jessup called the super and begged them to do something about it. Whether she told the main office that it was Morty who was feeding the lizard, he didn’t know and hoped not, but he doubted that anyone could prove it. 

Almost as if it knew that Morty Sr. meant a tasty snack, the gator slid out of the low brush and palms behind his condo and up toward the building. Morty panicked a bit, then. It was early enough that others could be on their back decks (upper or lower) and call when they saw Morty Jr. That would be bad. So, somewhat nonsensically he understood later, he started to wave his arm at the creature, hanging over the rail and shouting “shoo” at the prehistoric denizen of the swamp. As he gestured wildly, his life alert bracelet slid over his liverspotted hand and landed a foot away from the alligator's toothy mouth.

Morty cursed. There was nothing for it, though, he knew. He would have to go get it. He went back into his house and through the kitchen and out the garage, walking all the way to the end of the row and then going around behind. He was suddenly filled with something approaching terror, now as he sloshed through the saturated bermudagrass behind the building. Marsha and Ted O’Grady from New York were sitting on their back deck playing a board game. They were the only people in the whole row that Morty actually liked, being that they were from the same part of the world as he was. They waved and Ted invited Morty to a cookout over by the pools later. Morty just waved, hoping to stumble across his bracelet before he stumbled across Morty Jr. As he went along, his heart rate creeped up and he felt tightness in his neck and shoulder. 

He chalked it up to his recliner, which was cheap and not very comfortable. Arthritis, he thought as he walked along the back of the row. Just by the edge of the swamp, Morty saw Morty Jr. It was just laying there, beady yellow eyes just gazing at nothing. And there, a few feet in front of its snout, his life alert bracelet, gleaming in the hazy light. The pressure and tension in his neck grew more intense, as he stopped a few yards short of the creature. 

At first, Morty thought it was thunder that had shuddered across the sky, but then he realized exactly what it had been as his ears roared and his vision swirled. The tightness in his shoulder and neck moved over into his chest. A shockwave of pain arced across him, and he dropped to his weak knees. Morty Jr. made a deep, seething hissing sound, as its namesake collapsed face first into the wet grass and mud, already dead. Marsha O’Grady screamed Ted’s name and then yelled at Morty, but it was too late. Ted started to jump heroically over the rail and down into the grass, but Marsha stopped him.

By the time the paramedics had arrived—record time, because they were stationed in an office right there in Sun Clipper main building—Morty was being dragged into the trees by Morty Jr. It took animal control and several herpetologist grad students from the university to move Morty Jr. thirty miles down stream, closer to the coast and well away from humans. Although his arm was pulled out of socket, and his hand ruined by the large, jangly teeth of the gator, Morton Fennstone was not badly mutilated, at least by the gator. His cardiovascular system, however, was a different story.

Had animal control or the Sun Clipper super, or his maintenance staff devoted to dealing with wildlife or the herpetologists followed the path that Morty Jr. had made during his many visits, they would have seen something eye-opening and fearful enough to call in more help. Barry Folger might have been happy to know about it, too.

Morty had been dead for about six weeks, his adventures with the gator having taken place in early June, just as the heat was skyrocketing. Barry, like everyone at Sun Clipper, was aware of the situation, since it was the talk of the complex and the region for a long time after. The ninety-two year old bachelor, a bit of a crank, but nice enough, had made friends with a gator and wound up getting too close. A mistake that too many people made too often, mistaking the placid, slow moving lizards for petting zoo animals.

For much of the spring and into mid-July, it did not rain. Mitch had worried a bit, because in sections of the complex, the grass had turned winter brown. The air was arid for this close to the coast. Day after day, week after week, no rain fell and the usual moist quality of the air felt dry and brittle. It was still hot, but just not humid. The water level of the retention ponds dropped so low that the fountain pumps could be clearly seen. 

What no one seemed to think about or notice, was that, because their habitat was drying out, alligators in the lowlands behind Sun Clipper and all the other complexes in the area, were climbing over the ridge walls and sliding down into the shallow depths of retention ponds to hunt cranes and herons and other water birds. Several times, residents called the super horrified that their favorite blue heron or an elegant white crane were snatched into the water. With Morty fresh on everyone’s mind, paranoia about dogs and little kids was running high. 

The gator that lay on the side of the pond where Barry Folger was cleaning up his mowing rig, had not only come over the ridge from the straggling woods to hunt, but to raise her clutch of eggs.

As the loud machine vibrated the ground, her simple, reptilian brain responded as it would have to any threat to her young ones. Deep in the instinct-driven mind of the gator, a primordial switch flipped. She would gladly give her life to protect her unhatched young. Gators rarely killed just for the sake of it, being opportunistic hunters, preferring to catch prey at unawares, but when their young were involved, mother gators had been known to challenge creatures far larger than themselves, blindly biting, wrestling and dragging cows, tractor tires, even in one case a metal transport container, if it got too close to the babies.

She let out a seething sound, as the loud thing vibrated close to the tall grass on the sloping bank of the pond. The thing receded and she turned abruptly, opening her mouth and hissing in short bursts to continue to frighten it away. Then, suddenly, the thing came back, moving fast and dashing at the edge of the water. She moved forward in a jerking lunge.

The hiss sounded for all the world like the radiator in his grandmother’s kitchen, back when Barry had been quite small. There was a phasing sound to it, which made it seem otherworldly. The old Briggs and Stratton mower had kicked off, perhaps out of fuel and between that, the sound the large gator was making and the sudden crack of thunder overhead, he let go of the guide rope of his pulley system and the mower rolled down the bank and the front wheels splashed into the water. The gator’s hiss rose into a stertorous, almost popping sound, and it moved in a very threatening way toward the edge of the water near where it lay.

Barry swore and grabbed the rope and started to draw the mower back up the slope as the first fat drops of rain fell. It was only three in the afternoon, but the cloud cover was so thick that the street lights came on and the world took on an eerie bluish twilight. As he pulled, the mower’s back flap caught in the wet earth and raised the deck up in a wheelie. He let it back down and then pulled more conservatively, but it bogged down again. He foolishly attempted to yank the rope, but this just caused the mower to flip up and slam over on its side. “Goddamnit!” he shouted. More thunder now.

He moved carefully to the  mower, his eyes scanning the other side of the pond, hoping that the large gator had not finally slid into the water. She had not. In the gloom, he could see her wide body and curving tail, just a few yards from where the mower had splashed into the water. The air stopped moving, the sound of cicadas ceased. Orange lightning arced overhead followed by a massive, concussive blast of thunder and then the rain poured down in thick, hateful sheets.

Under other conditions, she would have gone to hunker down in the tall grass near where her eggs were. Food scarcity, ancient mindless instinct and the severity of the heat had moved her here close to the water for the safety of her young. During usual years, a storm this bad would have been enough to get her to scuttle to a den. The danger lurking a few feet away, however, changed things. She instinctively sought the water as the rain poured down. She understood in a primeval way that the roiling surface of the water would obscure her and give her the advantage against the thing that wanted to kill and eat her babies. 

She slid down, and went to the bottom, putting herself between the thing and the eggs. The sky lit up for a moment and though her vision was primitive, she could see the shape of the thing at the edge of the water. She moved closer to it, preparing.

Barry was soaked. He had flipped the mower back on its wheels, but the wet ground was preventing him from getting enough purchase to move it. His boots were digging into the tan mud, and twice he had slipped to his knees. A quiet, calm part of his brain nurtured during his time inside, told him that he needed to get into the truck cab, that the storm would pass and that, once the light returned he could fetch the mower. The more irrational part of his mind—had he known it, the part that put him on the inside to begin with—was weirdly determined to save the old mower and keep from looking a fool like Darrell, the world’s most idiotic lawn mower man.

As he fought to regain his feet, he fell and slid down the rain-soaked bank and up to his shins into the pond water. The steep-sided banks seemed to funnel him deeper as he struggled to regain his feet and get to the truck. Gleaming in the wet glare from the street lights, he could see his truck, an island of relative safety, ten yards up the bank and away from the black water. He dug his fingers into the saturated ground, and pulled himself toward the truck, fighting and slogging against the rain, his waterlogged boots and the angle of the bank. He pulled himself free of the water and was about to try to stand again, when something latched hold of his foot and flipped him over onto his back like he was no more than a straw-filled scarecrow. He felt his ankle wrench and creak and knew that it was broken, though the pain hadn’t made the trip to his brain. He coughed as the rain smashed down on his face and the calm part of his mind wondered distractedly if a man could drown from heavy rain.

He raised his head, looking down the length of his body toward the offending boot and saw the dark, gleaming silhouette of an ancient horror dragging him into the water. He flailed his arms, reaching for anything he could grab to pull himself away from this nightmare. Then, he kicked at the thing with his left foot, hoping it would dislodge long enough for him to scramble away. Again, lightning flashed across the sky and he saw, illuminated in just a second, the adrenaline slowed image of an alligator with his foot in its toothy mouth. It jerked him toward the water again, and he screamed as the pain of his broken ankle finally lit up his nervous system. He heard the scream escape his chest and he suddenly understood the deadly seriousness of his predicament. 

Other than her tail, which was a potent weapon against anything that tried to attack her from behind, or the occasional unwanted male suitor, the only thing she had to defend her eggs were her powerful jaws and her many teeth. She had gotten lucky with her first lunge and bite, catching hold of the thing’s flailing limb, and rolling over with it. If she could drag it into the water, she would twist with it in a spiraling deathroll, and then drag it to the bottom of the pond until it was saturated enough to eat. She wasn’t particularly hungry just now, having eaten recently, but this wasn’t about eating, but protecting. Her primitive brain flashed the chemical image over and over of her eggs. It was her primary purpose, a biological imperative older than even her species.

She broke her grip on the thing, intending on getting a better grip with another bite, and found her savage mouth closing on air and water only.

Barry Folger’s mind was jarred back into the moment by the swelling of pain in his ankle. He couldn’t see whether the gator had bitten his foot off, but he felt that it no longer had it in the vice-like grip. There was no time, he flipped himself over onto his stomach and clawed and scrabbled, trying to pull himself again, as before. He heard the nightmare inducing sound of the gator’s mouth closing on nothing at the same time that his hands touched and grasped the ropes for his mower system. Primitive joy, harsh, unruly, flowed through him as he pulled himself up toward the truck.

Almost halfway up, the rope burning and then cutting his palms and fingers, he heard the strange, otherworldly hissing and realized that the rain had slowed to a drizzle. In the suddenly quieter air, the sound the gator made was all the motivation he needed. 

Her attempt to catch the thing with a better clamping grip failed. Her instinct was to drop back into the water and go back to her eggs, but for some unknown reason, she ignored the cyclopean weight of her ancestry and lurched out of the water, propelling herself with her stout legs and massive sweeping tail in the direction where the thing had been. Reptile rage swelled into her as she lunged up the bank. It was the last thing she would ever do.

Barry Folger’s mind could never really connect to the events in such a way that they made sense. For several years after, he would wake in the deeps of the night, especially if it was storming outside, scrambling up a sodden hill away from the black water and the unseen thing with his foot in its mouth. 

The dream would end the way reality had ended, but for the finale, which his subconscious never seemed to capture. 

As he yanked himself toward the truck using the ropes from his pulley system, the gator lunged itself up out of the water, to his left, snapping, hissing, fiercely thrashing, a thing of hide and teeth and blind, lizard rage. Almost the second that their eyes met, Barry seeing his death reflected in the sullen, reptilian orbs of the primordial denizen of the swamps, the gator’s head exploded in a red shower of teeth, bone and leathery scales. Its body continued to thrash for several minutes, but Barry only knew this from what Mitch told him as he ejected a shell from his twelve gauge pump-action shotgun.

The storm cleared and thin daylight returned. The air was thick, muggy and filled with the scent of seared meat and blood mingled with the tang of ozone. Strange wisps of humidity wafted across the blacktop lanes of Sun Clipper. Barry's ears were ringing, his ankle was shrieking, his head was spinning. He was coated in the sick, pungent odor of wet mud and pond water. The day got warmer again. Thunder receded into the distance.

For six weeks, Barry sat at the card table at Mitch’s three-bay shop, reading fishing magazines and watching daytime cable. He ordered in food for the others, now including Sally Wainwright, a transfer student from Yorkshire, working on her herpetology degree and paying her tuition by working a trimmer along Barry's now obsolete enclosed retention ponds. The Sun Clipper maintenance guys had put up chain link fences around the entire four-pond system and also—thanks to Morty Fennstone and Morty Jr.—between the condos and apartments and the pine and palm woods. 

Three weeks after his ordeal, the Sun Clipper's dangerous areas had been enclosed or fenced out. In honor of his encounter, the maintenance crews hung a sign on the fence that warned of alligators in the area, beneath a larger, fancier sign in the script and colors of the complex that said, Gatorland Junction.

Barry was honored. One of the guys had cut the tail off the gator and made steaks, but he had not partaken, seeing as he had almost been a meal for that particular lizard. The reversal made him uneasy.

The entire affair was covered by worker's comp and Mitch gladly kept Barry on the team. In a few more weeks, the air would start to dry out and it would be time to blow leaves. Barry confidently asserted that he could use the zero-turn mower while Lance and Big'Un did the upright, two healthy legs work.

As the year shrank toward winter, seven tiny, chirping alligators with no mother to protect them, squiggled off into the depths of the biggest retention pond. Within three weeks, they were double their original hatch size. When the waters warmed and the sun came back out in spring, there would be seven large, and very hungry alligators in Gatorland Junction.