NaNoWriMo: Day 7

The men had considered telling the sheriff that they had killed the gator, but it seemed a pointless venture. The charges had been dropped in the Harley Quitman case and Jerry had testified that a gator had attacked him. He was going to be lucky to keep his leg, but he would live. Leland and Rhodes went to see him at the hospital the morning after Buckley dispatched the gator while Buckley slept in one of the many guest rooms at Herlin Hall.

By late afternoon Buckley finally roused himself from his slumber and realized that Rhodes and Leland had still not returned from town. He assumed that they had stayed up at the hospital to celebrate the demise of the gator with Leland’s brother. Having neither a truck nor a license to drive one he walked down to the dock, got into the air boat and took off on the river. He’d been on this man’s land for too long it felt like. He needed to get out for a little while.

Buckley piloted the boat down the St. Johns River towards Dunn’s Creek and then into Crescent Lake where he finally docked at the Tangerine Cove Motel and Restaurant. He hadn’t wanted to eat any of Rhodes’ food and it didn’t seem like a stretch for him to boat 30 miles downriver to get a catfish dinner.

He ordered his food and a cherry coke. The waitress, a pretty young blonde who wasn’t sure whether or not to flirt with him or to be terrified of him, brought his food him a hesitant smile and left him to eat as he stared out over the lake at trees that made up Bunnell and Flagler County on the other side. Buckley, didn’t know what he was looking at, of course. He had know way of knowing just how close to the beach he was, other than the fact that he could faintly smell the salt air and the unusual amount of seagulls that congregated on the dock.

The only reason he’d come this far upstate via the rivers and estuaries was because he’d heard about the gator on the Res from a deputy who had been traveling through Putnam county the day before. He thought that the work would be worthwhile and it would be a welcome vacation from the troubles he’d been having with his mama.
            When Rhodes had asked about his mama, Buckley hadn’t really known what to say. To say she was a pack rat might have been insulting to pack rats. But he didn’t want to blame her and he didn’t feel like it was her fault. It was hard for her, having grown up in the depression, she was terrified that she was going to have to once again do without. She’d be damned if she ever had to go through that again. So, she’d manufactured a new kind of hell in her manufactured home that was over flowing with the discarded remnants of other people’s lives.

He had been telling the truth when he’d said she went to estate sales, but these estates weren’t the kind you think of when you think of estate sales. These were the last things of people who didn’t have a lot worth owning to begin with, and his mother took the last of everything that no one else wanted.

She had a pallet of size B batteries. She had 47 different unworn left shoes from the estate of a man who only had one leg. She had enough laundry detergent to last her until the next millennium. She had sausage gravy lined up in her hallway that went on for days. She had a collection of little porcelain dolls that were all named “Cynthia”. She didn’t know anyone named Cynthia. She had little silver spoons from every tourist attraction you could think of: Silver Springs, Busch Gardens, Cypress Gardens, Wild Waters, Disney World, Universal Studios, - and all the smaller ones too, like Ripley’s, Marineland, and Gatorworld. There were more than 100 of these spoons in a jar on the mantle of her trailer.

Try though he might, he could not convince her that these things did not belong to her and that she did not need them. At this point they were cluttering up her life to the point where he was worried about her health and her well being, but the woman would not listen to reason. Sometimes he just had to get away. And he knew that no gator was  a match for him. He was impermeable to nature. It was man that concerned him.

He didn’t care for being around Rhodes and Leland very much. They made him uncomfortable. They were too loud – too much. He wanted to help them but he didn’t feel like he could trust them. He certainly wasn’t going to tell them about his troubles with his mama. That was his own cross to bear. Still, he wished that he had someone he could talk to about it.

He thought of Stella from school and how she always seemed to know what to say to make him feel better. How her touch always seemed to calm him. It seemed so long since he’d seen Stella. She’d left and gone off to school almost four years ago now. He smiled, thinking of her studying to be a teacher. Maybe she’d come back and be a teacher on the Res.

Stella was not a Seminole although she looked it with her big brown eyes and long, wavy brown hair and that had always been part of the problem. His mother had liked her but she was never one of them. She was always just a little different. Underneath her dandy clothes she was just a shade too white*. Not that that ever bothered Buckley. He liked the way her hand felt in his. Her hand was so tiny and delicate and his was so big and hulking and yet they fit together perfectly. Unlike most other people, she was never afraid of him because of his size. She took the time to get to know him and to listen to him when he spoke. She saw him, and he had loved her for that.

He had thought at one point that she may have even loved him, but he realized when she left him for college that he’d been mistaken. He told her that he would move to where she was going, that the end of high school didn’t have to be the end, but through tear stained eyes she said that she had to move on with her life and that this had to be goodbye.

He had gone rigid and then limp. He kissed her forehead and then walked away and never spoke to her again, but how he wished he had handled it differently now. Not that he thought he could have handled it any differently, but he wished he had a friend to discuss his problems with his mother with. Stella would know what to do. She was so much smarter about these things.

$$$

Rhodes and Leland were having a good time with Jerry in the hospital. Being that he was on an epic cocktail of pain medications he was in excellent spirits.