Randy White - Night Vision

As Harris Squires knew from years of hunting the Glades, big alligators died hard.

When I heard the familiar voice yell, “Doc! Help me get this guy in!” I spun around to see Tomlinson’s silhouette only a few yards away, but that’s all I could see because someone onshore was blinding me with a powerful spotlight.

I waved my hand and yelled in Spanish, “Get that thing out of my eyes!”

But nothing happened. So I yelled louder, in English, adding, “You dumbass!” for emphasis.

For an instant, the light swung skyward, and I could see that Tomlinson had the injured man in a cross-chest carry, trying to swim him to shore. He was having trouble, though, because the guy was fighting him, swinging his fists, trying to get a solid elbow into my friend’s face. The man apparently thought the alligator still had him.

There was no telling how badly the guy was hurt, but he was obviously in shock. I swam closer, my head up, got a hand under the man’s arm and pulled his ear close to my lips, yelling in Spanish, “You’re safe! Stop fighting!”

I repeated it several times before his head rolled toward me, eyes wide, and he whispered, in English, “Am I dreaming this? Am I dead? This is a terrible dream if I’m not dead.”

Yes, he was in shock… a small man with a gaunt drunkard’s face that was a saprophytic gray in the glow of security lights. His voice was incongruous-he spoke with the rounded vowels of a Virginia gentleman.

I asked him, “What’s your name?”

He continued babbling, telling me, “I don’t know what happened! I walked down to look at something floating in the water. Next thing I know, something was dragging me in… like it was trying to squeeze the guts out of me. I heard something snap… something way inside my body.”

The man looked at me, eyes blinking, and I heard what he must have sounded like as a child when he asked, “Am I badly hurt? I don’t want to die, I really don’t.”

I replied, “Lay back. Get some air in your lungs. We’re taking you to shore.” I could see there was an open slash on the man’s forearm, and his legs looked as dead as wood, the way they floated on the surface.

As Tomlinson positioned himself to support the man’s other arm, he asked me, “Did you kill it?” meaning the alligator, and I could tell he hoped I hadn’t hurt the thing.

“Let’s get out of here before we catch a damn disease,” I told him. “Start swimming, I’ll keep his head up.”

Truth was, I still didn’t know if the gator was dead. Judging from the way the animal’s tail had periscoped to the surface, at least one of the bullets had done damage to the neuro system.

Either way, a wounded gator was the least of my worries. The most dangerous animals in Florida’s backwaters aren’t reptiles. They aren’t amphibians or fish. I was more concerned about microscopic animals that, as I knew too well, thrived in stagnant lakes like the one we were in.

The injured man might survive the wounds the gator had inflicted only to die from bacteria that lived in the animal’s mouth. Or from a single-celled protozoan that all the commotion had kicked free from the muck below.

The injured man wasn’t the only one at risk-Tomlinson and I were in danger, too. There are varieties of single-celled animals that don’t need an open wound to slip through a primate’s skin armor. The amoeba Naegleria can travel through a man’s nostrils, into the brain and cause an encephalitis that is deadly. It’s rare, but I knew from my professional journals that this same microscopic animal had killed at least four healthy young men in the last few years.

The water temperature of the pond felt warmer than the injured man’s flesh. It stunk of sulfur and garbage, and as Tomlinson and I began sidestroking toward shore my fingers noted the water’s protoplasmic density. The density was created by microbes and muck held in suspension.

It was a brackish water mangrove lake, not much larger than a baseball field, surrounded by a trailer population that probably used the place to dump all kinds of refuse-natural, man-made and chemical. It caused me to wonder why a quarter-ton alligator would choose such a stagnant, public place to live.

The probability was, the animal didn’t live here. More likely, the gator had been traveling cross-country-they often do during the spring mating season. My guess was, the thing had only recently arrived, stopping for a few nights to feed. If a gator that size had been a permanent resident, someone at the trailer park would have reported it to Florida Wildlife cops and demanded that the thing be removed.

Or would they?

I thought about it as we swam sidestroke, Tomlinson on one side of the injured man, me on the other.

Maybe not, I decided. I remembered Tomlinson telling me that the only thing park residents feared more than law enforcement was their own landlord.

That made sense, combined with what I knew about the people who lived in places like Red Citrus. I had spent enough time in Central America, and had lived long enough in Florida, to learn not to underestimate the tenacity of the descendants of the Maya and Aztec. They could endure just about anything with a stoic calm that was all but impossible to read, and just as impossible not to respect.

People like this could live their lives, day by day, next door to an aggressive gator, or next door to a crazed neighbor, and never say a word in protest. Living under the radar meant surviving quietly no matter what.

We were drawing close to shore. The injured man had stopped fighting, but the muscles of his arms remained contracted, his breathing was rapid. To Tomlinson I said, “When we get to the bank, don’t try to stand. The bottom’s like quicksand.”

He asked me, “Do you have shoes on?”

I said, “I was just thinking the same thing. There’s probably broken bottles and all kinds of crap on the bottom. We’re going to need some help.”

To the injured man I said, “What’s your name? Can you talk?”

The man groaned, and said again, “Please tell me I’m dreaming this. What happened to my legs? I can’t feel my legs.”

I thought, Uh-oh, and squeezed his arm to reassure him as I looked toward shore. I could see shapes and shadows of several dozen people watching us. But I couldn’t see clearly because my glasses were hanging around my neck on fishing line, and also because the spotlight was blinding me again.

In Spanish I yelled, “Take the light away from that person, I can’t see! Shine it on the ground. We need some help. Four or five people, hold hands and make a chain so we can pull this man out. But don’t come in the water. Stay out of the water!”

I could see people moving toward the bank, including the man who was carrying the spotlight, a huge silhouette capped by blond curls and shoulders in a muscle T-shirt.

It was the landlord. Had to be.

I called to him in English, “Get that goddamn light out of my eyes! I’m not going to tell you again.”

In reply, I heard a surly Southern twang shout, “What’d you just say to me, asshole?”

The drawl was unmistakably redneck Florida.

Trying to keep it reasonable, I told him, “You’re blinding me. We’ve got an injured man here!”

I saw the man quicken his pace and heard him bellow, “You don’t give the orders around here, you do-gooder son of a bitch! I give the orders! Now, get your ass out of my goddamn lake. You’re trespassing! What the hell you doin’, trespassing in my lake?”

I glanced at Tomlinson. His face was orchid white in the harsh light, and he rolled his eyes. “The landlord,” he replied. “He’s the jerk I told you about. Something Squires. He’s a mama’s boy. She’s the one with all the property.”