Some of these depot pictures I planned as reading pieces, time exposures with secrets. There were bushes and trees and shadows, and I hoped they would appear as tropical landscapes, quaintly pretty coastal scenes. Then, only after the viewer started reading them would he see twelve black sentinels, some as stumps and some as trees; chickens, footprints, shacks; clutter that wasn’t flowers; potash dust, dead white, that wasn’t sand. Not a statement — no summary — but details leading onward to a jigsaw of episodes until everything that had looked familiar was strange. I used quaint arrangements to reveal depths of disturbance.
But I had sucked all the light out of it and after a while could not see it to save my life. Boca Grande didn’t exist anymore: it was in my camera.
“This is for you, Maude,” said Hornette as we got into the car. She gave me a candy bar she’d bought in town.
Harvey turned the car south, along a swampy road where reaching vines had yanked down the Burma Shave signs. I said, “Aren’t you going to have one yourself?”
“I got to take care of my teeth,” she said. She smiled nicely at me. “For my act. Sometimes I hang by them, see.”
She looked a bit embarrassed. It was the first reference she had made to her circus act.
Harvey said, “Circus folk got to look after their bodies. If you don’t you can get killed. It ain’t easy, down here in winter quarters. You get rusty. But Hornette, she looks after her body, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. And I had noticed how at Mrs. Fritts’s they didn’t smoke and drank only Doctor Pepper and cherryade and went to bed early. “But what if you want to have children?” I said. “What happens to your act then?”
Hornette giggled and Harvey almost busted a gut.
“Why, this here’s my little sister!” said Harvey, and he reached under her and pinched her bum.
Hearing that, and knowing they slept in the same room, probably the same bed — why not? — I grew melancholy and remembered Orlando. I envied them their happiness until I realized I was doing this for him. At the end of all this picture-taking lay Orlando.
“Where are we headed?” I said.
“Gator farm,” said Harvey. “You never seen nothing like it.”
I said, “But this is all fantastic. It’s wild. No one’s in charge here.” and I thought: Those water lilies aren’t getting paid by Jack Guggenheim to gleam, so why should I?
“You can show them Yankees what a wild old place this is,” said Harvey. “They won’t believe their eyes.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Beautiful looking,” he said, driving slowly and regarding the swamp. “But people go in there for a weenie roast and you never see them again. It swallows you up. Don’t it, Hornette?”
Hornette was saying “It sure is” and “It sure does” when I steered the conversation to Carney. They both went quiet and sort of exchanged glances without looking at each other.
Finally, Harvey said, “That Carney’s the worst.”
“That’s what everyone says, but how do you know?”
“He’s a shareholder. He’s bigger than Millsaps himself. But he’s a whole lot meaner.”
Hornette pushed her knees together and seemed to sulk.
“He’s putting up a tent,” I said. “In his yard. It’s one hell of a big tent.”
“That’ll be for the Pig Dinner,” said Harvey, but his expression betrayed nothing. Pig Dinner? I thought he might say more. He didn’t. A few miles further he pulled in beside a painted shed and said, “Here we is.”
The rain had been here and passed on leaving puddles and damp silk over everything. A muddy Indian — a Miccosukee of the Creek Nation — splashed over to us and while Harvey bargained with him I went with Hornette for a look at the alligators. Big and small, they were submerged to their nostrils in a filthy pool. They were watched over by some Indian children in rags who looked away when I did them. Harvey joined us and said, “You choose one, Maude. It’s your treat. Pick a fat one.”
They were well made, with thick seams and rivets and stitches and plates, and dragon spikes on their tails. I chose a likely one, and the children slipped ropes around its snout and dragged it into a shallow slimy pit where a Miccosukee stood in his underdrawers.
“What’s he going to do?”
“Rassle it,” said Harvey. “Look at them bubulous eyes.”
The Miccosukee kicked it in the belly and danced around it in the mud until the alligator lowered his head and came at him. Dodging the jaws, the Indian got down beside it and flipped it over like a log: it resisted for a second, then trembled and clutched the Indian gently in its glove-like feet. There was no strength in its shimmying or even the flop of its fat tail. The Indian grunted and changed his grip. He was not wrestling the alligator but simply punishing it with his greater cunning, and this was what I wished to show in my picture — the unequal struggle: the crusted mud on the Indian’s back making him look like a hideous reptile, and the cracked white belly-flesh of the alligator, and the loose skin at its throat, the human pouches of its defenseless underside.
If Harvey hadn’t encouraged me I would not have taken the picture. But he saw it as his favor to me. I could not disappoint him. I felt terrible taking those pictures, for the Indian had seen my camera and he started overdoing it, tormenting the exhausted creature, and I thought: I didn’t come all this way for people to pose for me.
The pictures were fakes, they dignified the Indian, they gave him a dragon slayer’s drama. If I’d had the nerve I would have taken a picture of the alligator slithering headlong in terror back to the safety of its pool, or the Indian sticking his muddy claws out for Harvey’s five bucks.
“What I’d like to see,” said Harvey in the Nash again, “is some old gator eat one of them rasslers.”
“That’s more like it,” I said. “What about Carney instead of an Indian?”
“Then we’d be out of a job,” said Harvey.
“That’s what I want to be,” said Hornette. “Out of a job.”
Harvey glared at her and said, “Shut it, honey.”
“I’m told he’s a patron of the arts,” I said.
“If arts means hell-raising, he’s a patron all right,” said Harvey. He parked at a roadside stand. “Want an ice cream?”
Hornette and I stayed in the car while Harvey went for the cones. I wanted to know more, but didn’t know where to begin. Like the others at Mrs. Fritts’s they were not very bright, and yet their combination of good will and guilelessness made them appear more mysterious than they really were, as if they were hiding something. Simple good humor can look like the ultimate pretense.
“No one likes Carney,” I said, groping for an angle.
Hornette shook her head.
“The Pig Dinner,” I said. “What in hell’s the Pig Dinner?”
“It’s coming up.”
“Ever been to it?”
“Honey,” said Hornette, “we’re it!”
“Tell me then.”
“You never seen nothing like it,” she said. “There ain’t nothing like it.”
“That’s what Harvey said about the alligators, and I didn’t think much of them.”
“This is worse than the gators. I couldn’t tell you about that Pig Dinner if I wanted to. There ain’t words for it, or if there is I don’t know them.”
“Indescribable?”
“You said it.”
“Just the thing for my friend here.” I patted the Speed Graphic on my lap.
Hornette closed her eyes and said “Yipe!”