Gator Girl
Cari Scribner


When she was here, my mother told me to make wishes whenever we passed a hay truck. She said it was good luck, so I stayed on the lookout.
 
Flyaway hay littering the streets of our town was the first sign of the arrival of the county fair. Late July, when sidewalk tar blistered and everyone's kitchen window air conditioners were whining and leaking, village crews hauled hay up to the fairgrounds and tossed it into barn stalls. After that, the animals were moved in for judging, and the kids wheeled in cots to sleep next to their cows. We didn't live on a farm, and never had a sheep or goat or even a rabbit to show, but we went to the fair every summer and stared at the backsides of horses and counted the blue ribbons won by our neighbors.
 
The amusement rides, gaudy and rusty, arrived overnight in pieces on 18-wheelers. They were assembled under floodlights by carnies and local men looking to make a quick buck for beer money. By morning, the rickety roller coaster jutted into the skyline, next to the double Ferris Wheel which trapped riders in cages and spun them upside down. The rides were run by leather-faced carnival workers who spat at the heels of high school girls strolling by on the arms of basketball captains.
 
When I was young, some July nights my friend Noreen would sleep over at my house. We’d listen to my parents drive off to the fair to see the demolition derby. When my parents tiptoed in to check on us, near sunrise, they smelled like the fair, diesel, wet straw and burned cotton candy.
 
Nor and I still went up to the fair most days it was in town. We worked nights at Rowdy’s Bar and neither of us could sleep during the day. Nor was taking care of her baby, and as for me, I had my own reason for the daytime insomnia.
 
Noreen liked to walk around the fairgrounds to try to get the baby to quiet down. She’d married Buddy Reichert right out of high school. The baby came next, like a present you thought you wanted until you got it, and then there was no return policy. At least that’s how I saw it. But Nor covered the baby’s head with kisses, spoke gibberish to it and said it smelled like milk and powder.
 
You couldn’t see much of the baby except the back of its old man little bald head. Noreen carried the baby in a huge bandana tied like a kangaroo pouch across her chest. Once in a while she asked me if I wanted to hold it, but that kid seemed to whine an awful lot, so I passed.  Politely, I hope.
 
Under the sweltering summer sun, Nor and I walked the midway, watching carnival workers hawk their games as they tried to entice people to take a shot at the out-of-reach basketball hoop or bust balloons with a handful of dull-tipped darts. Purple and black teddy bears and big-headed Bart Simpsons sweating in plastic bags dangled overhead in the booths, wearing wilted cardboard signs declaring them a "Jumbo Prize." For most games, you had to make a lot of shots to win a jumbo prize, and if you won, the damn thing smelled like dust and the water that ran from a twisted hose on the midway. We knew this because Buddy won the occasional stuffed animal for Nor, then carried it around the rest of the day on his shoulders as if he was balancing a toddler.
 
Here’s why I couldn’t sleep: my mother had taken off three years earlier when I was 15. Poof. She was gone. Hard to drop off to la-la land when someone you loved had gone MIA.  
 
 “Maybe she’s run off to join the carnival,” my father used to say. It was his sad, sad, sad feeble joke.
 
For years, I imagined her in one of the fair tents selling cowboy hats and leather belts with silver buckles in the shape of stallions, but I gave up on that a long time ago.
 
“Domestic life has me trapped,” my mother told me, over and over as I was growing up.  
 
I was cooking my father franks and beans for supper by age 7, doing laundry by 8. I didn’t mind being the homemaker. It made me feel almost important, as if I could make our life less terrible for my mother.
 
Some nights, my mother didn’t come home after her shift at the factory. It took my father and me several days before we knew she was really gone, forever gone. She was known around town to be a runaway; no one found it out of the ordinary or asked a lot of questions. But my father never knew what happened, and he still stumbled around the house like a lost child no matter how hard I tried to take care of him.
 
 Animal acts were big features at the fair. One year, three Swedish fishermen got in a glass tank and swam with two Tiger Sharks. They said if even a drop of blood got into the water, and the sharks caught the scent, the men would be torn to pieces. People went every day to see if the swimmers would get eaten. There’s no training sharks, the fishermen said, they always had the killer instinct.
 
Noreen and I liked the racing pigs best of all. The little pink runts were trained to race at a near-sprint for Oreos at the end of the oval track. They had names like Lady Hog-a, Brittany Spareribs, and Sponge Hog Pork Pants. At the end of the show, they brought out the Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, who trundled and nosed its way to the hay bales at the finish line, or got completely turned around and headed back to the starting gate.
 
The announcer at the pig races always encouraged the crowd to go hog wild cheering their favorites.

That year, the new act was alligator wrestling. The flyer showed “Swahili Bushmen” strong-arming enormous gators, pinning them to the ground while their tails thrashed in every direction, spraying water all over the audience in the first two rows.
 
Nor and I got in line early to see the show. Outside the tent, neon signs, air-brushed onto black canvas, showed gators with their teeth bared, ready to strike a helpless man holding a butterfly net. Inside the tent, it was false nighttime, lulling the baby to sleep. The buzz of fake crickets was piped in over the loudspeaker in efforts to make the tent seem like a forest.
 
Noreen and I sat in the bleachers in front of the shallow blue pool. When the crowd moved, so did the bleachers. Next to me, a woman opened a small Styrofoam cooler and handed her child a baloney sandwich.
 
"Bree, you don’t think the gators are treated bad, like those elephants in captivity, you know, the circus ones?" Noreen whispered as the lights dimmed. 
 
I had no idea but shook my head so Nor would be relieved. She was a worrier.
 
"I hope the gator wins," a nearby woman whispered, as if the show were an actual wrestling match. Man verses animal.
           
Two men appeared from a side door, stepping slowly into the alligator pool. They didn't look like Bushmen, and I doubted if they spoke Swahili. Their names were embroidered on their shirts, tucked into brown jeans. Gil opened a trap door and eased the alligator out of a small cage in one corner of the pool, nudging it with a long stick. It was about four feet long.
 
"That thing's wimpy," I said to Nor. "How can it be dangerous?"
 
Noreen shushed me.
 
"A gator will use its tail to hook you and pull you in towards its mouth," Sully said. "They're slow-footed; they run only about 10 miles per hour, but if you find one in your backyard, don't try to outrun it. This one weighs over 200 pounds. It could catch you and pin you down and you’d never escape."
 
I wanted to laugh at the men. As if we would ever find alligators in our backyards, instead of cows and goats and chickens.
 
Gil poked its back with the rounded stick, dancing around its wildly weaving tail.
 
Sully hoisted up the gator and carried it the stage. His arms were heaving with the weight of it. He held it to his chest, exposing the gator’s soft white underbelly. Slippery like a fish, the gator could have freed itself, but he only twisted around half-heartedly in Sully’s arms. Then Sully set it down and quickly sat on the alligator's back, clamping its jaws shut while people stood up to take pictures with their cell phones.
 
"That ain’t wrestling," someone yelled, as Sully stepped aside and let the gator slide back into the clear water.
 
After the show, people lined up along the side of the tent. For $20, they could have a Polaroid taken of their kids holding a 10-pound baby alligator that didn’t even know to thrash around to try to free itself. The larger show gator was its mother.
 
Noreen’s baby was starting to fuss, so she headed to the Horticulture Building to feed it a bottle in air-conditioned comfort.
 
“I’ll meet you there in a bit,” I told her. If she was feeding the baby, a diaper change would be next. I didn’t want to be there for that.
 
After the crowd dispersed, I stuck around to see what the men would do next. Sully waded back into the pool and let the mother gator out of its cage. It swam out uncertainly, small crooked legs dog-paddling, and when it got near him, Sully actually leaned down and stroked its back.
 
I walked over to the edge of the pool. “It’s sedated, isn’t it?”
 
“Of course she is, sweetheart,” he said, in a vaguely Western drawl he hadn’t used on stage. “You think we’d take a chance getting hurt, or hurting her? She’s a wild animal. She can’t be tamed.”
 
“A gator’s a gator, no changing that,” Gil said, coming out from the tarp behind the pool, drying off his wet, washed hair with a clean blue towel.
 
"Is it happy?"
 
"Is the alligator happy?" Sully said, looking me up and down. "She’s better off here than being a piece of luggage or some fancy shoes, right Gil? And who’s to say what happiness is. Is she happy? Is anyone?”
           
“Sully, he’s a deep thinker, always asking the big questions,” Gil said, wiping his damp palms on the thighs of his pants. “I have a better one – what’s your name, sweetheart?”
           
“Sabrina. Friends call me Bree.”
           
“Well, Bree, I’ll tell you, if you want a behind-the-scenes tour, c’mon out back, we’ll show you around. If you want to see more, that is,” Gil said, his voice a lazy drawl.
           
“You a party kind of girl?” Sully said, smiling.
 
Sully took off his trainer’s shirt and hung it over the back of a chair to dry. He had a small tattoo near the belt on his jeans; I couldn’t tell what it was against his tan skin, but I’m guessing gator.
           
When I followed Sully and Gil into the air-conditioned trailer, it was dim like the tent, the sun blocked out by dark red curtains. The guys had one of those squat half fridges completely filled with Busch beer. We popped open our cans as Sully rolled a tight joint.
 
“What’s there to do for fun around here?” Gil said, wiping the beer foam from his lips.
 
“Not a damn thing,” Sully snorted. “Only been here a couple days and I can see that for sure. Good thing we’re not hanging around here, right?”
 
I took a deep pull on the joint, nodding my head. “You got it. Sucks to be here.”
 
“Come with us, darling, we’ll give you a job workin’ with the gators,” Gil said, smiling and inching closer.
 
“Maybe she’s run off to join the carnival,” I pictured my father saying to his empty house.
 
Gil was the one who started up first, rubbing the back of my neck, which has always been a sweet spot.
 
When we sank onto the bed, it felt like warm water spilling over us, and more than the gator, maybe as much as my mother, I wanted to run wild, to get away from the place that was supposed to be home. A clean break. Leave behind my shit job, sleepless days, failing father, and even Nor and her swaddled lump of baby.
 
***
 
Noreen and Buddy took the baby to the pig races, but I went to the alligator wrestling show until the fair closed down, packed up and rolled out of town in the middle of the night. I wanted to see if the gator ever launched itself out of its dulled senses to challenge the men, if it had the strength or even the inclination to try and swim free.
 
“Wanta come party with us sweetheart?” Sully asked me after every show.
 
“No, thanks,” I said, swatting away flies.
 
“Aw, what do we gotta do, lay our hearts on the line?” Gil drawled.
 
I didn’t want their hearts, and sure as hell they didn’t want mine, bruised and numb as it was.
 
After six days and nights, the kids closed their dusty cots, rolled up their sleeping bags and trotted their tired animals out of the barns to head for home. Maybe they sent the cows out into the fields, maybe they shut them in stalls. Seemed like a crap life to me.
 
The carnies tossed the damp teddy bears into the back of the trailers. No one ever won them, they just got shuttled from one fair to the next, becoming more frayed and forlorn.
 
I didn’t hang around to say good-bye to Sully and Gil. There wasn’t much to be said.
 
I knew the gator was sedated, that her baby was handed off to other people for sweaty Polaroids, that Gil and Sully loved their jobs even though they were only pretending to be Bushmen. They probably picked up girls like me at every stop of the carnival circuit.  There was no training a wild animal, it was what it was and always would be.
 
There was no sign of lucky hay on the streets after the fair blew out of town. It was as if it had never been there at all.
           
My mother used to say I was a lot like her, something I hated to hear. After she left, I believed it with all my heart, but I couldn’t run, not even to join the carnival. 

About the Author:
As a freelance writer/journalist for more than 20 years, Cari has thousands of bylines in local, regional and national newspaper magazines, websites and blogs, including Bartleby Snopes, The Tishman Review, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She currently in a writing frenzy. Cari has a completed novel, MAGIC BABY, and is at work on a collection of short stories and a memoir, 6 CAROLINE. Cari gives a shout-out to Douglas Glover and James Lasdun for their tutelage in NYS Fiction Writers workshops, where GATOR GIRL had its inception. Cari lives in upstate NY, where, like any hardy New Yorker, she loves both the hot summers and the freezing winters.  

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