alligator bait

Bret

Bret grew up watching the giant swamp gators of South Florida. He watched them swim, their mottled green backs just visible beneath the murky water. He watched them blink, eyelids moving sideways, more alien than dinosaur. He watched them snap at things that got too close, their jaws unhitching to show rows of white teeth, sporadically placed. Bret watched them for a long time before he started killing them.

At first, he set traps throughout the swamp. Ropes and chains with spikes and levers. It worked for a while and Bret was able to catch a few small gators that he sold to some offbeat locals. The redneck down the other side of town who used the meat to make jerky, a wealthy relator who liked to dress homes with gator trophies that he told his clients were gifts from the Florida humane society, a tiny old woman who would take just about any part of the animal Bret could offer, paid well, and never uttered more than a “see you next week”. The usual suspects. With time, the gators smartened up and Bret was forced to buy his first gun.

He got it off his estranged father, who charged high but didn’t bother with permits. Bret didn't’ realize the seller he’d been messaging with on Facebook had been his dad until he stepped into the man’s middle-class cookie-cutter and saw a framed photo of himself as a newborn, being cradled in the arms of a much lovelier version of his mother. He started at the picture for a beat too long, wondering what it was the man told himself and his new family; how he was able to explain both the presence of the photograph and his own absence from it. Bret’s father cleared his throat, cutting Bret an unfriendly glance before tossing him the rifle. Bret gave him a roll of hundred-dollar bills before thrusting the gun in a gym bag and trudging back to his truck, his boots leaving swamp mud on the man’s white runner.

For some time, Bret could shoot the gators from the outer edges of the water. He had a good eye and an even better hand. But it did not take long for the gators to smarten once again, and they began keeping away from the banks. Bret was drawn deeper and deeper into the swamp. He learned to listen, to move without making so much as a ripple in the water. He was bested only once, when a large female gator caught ahold of his torso, just below the belt, and chomped down so hard, Bret went blind.

He shot his rifle wildly before stumbling back to shore and pulling down his pants in a desperate effort to confirm that he still had a dick. Bret vomited at the sight of the wound, a crimson gash that started just below his belly button and reached midway down his left ass-cheek. It was muddied with swamp gunk and bleeding sporadically, like a faucet put together by an underqualified plumber. Bret continued to vomit and stumble all the way back to his truck before heaving himself in and driving out of the woods and to the nearest hospital, his vision going dark all the while.

Bret told the PA who cleaned his wound and tied his stitches that he was bitten by an alligator after stupidly wading into the swamp to fish for bass. He told his girlfriend, Gemma, the same story, though she was much less inclined to believe it. Gemma knew that Bret didn't fish, had never been taught and didn’t own so much as a single rod. He could’ve come up with a better lie but truthfully, it didn’t matter if Gemma believed him because by this time, Bret suspected she already knew how he made his money. Bret also suspected that she didn’t care.

The wound was brutal to heal, and Bret had to hover while taking a shit for two weeks. When he got back into the swamp nearly a month later, his hunting methods became malicious. Bret started using his hands, dragging the gators through the water with a tightly knotted rope before wringing their necks on the shore. He got stronger, lifting weights at South Florida Central High where Gemma would sneak him into the weight room through an emergency exit right before third period. Bret hadn’t finished high school himself, having dropped out when he was sixteen. He’d never been good with books or numbers, but he knew people and he knew gators. That seemed to be enough to get him by.

The better Bret got at catching gators, the more prestigious his client list became. The contact book in his burner phone grew longer and longer as his connections began sending him to other buyers. Foreign men who spoke very little English would come down to the woods, where Bret loaded an inconspicuous tarp covered mound into their cars and accepted a small manilla envelope in return. Bret watched them drive away before slinking back towards the swamp. He did not know what these anonymous buyers did with the alligators they bought, though he was terribly curious. He fantasized about putting a camera in one of the corpses before wrapping it up, though he knew, were the device discovered, the consequences would be fatal.

After his first big sale, Bret bought a little trailer and drove it into the woods, parking it about a mile from the swamp. He took a trip uptown to one of those fancy furniture stores where the salespeople follow you around with their hands folded behind their backs. Bret got himself a brown leather couch and a recliner to match, threw them in the bed of his truck, and drove them all the way back into the woods. The pieces took up almost his entire place, but he felt real proud every time he looked at them.

Bret kept a gator for himself once, carefully removing the skin from the body and leaving it out to dry in the sun. He tried to make a small clutch, having some elaborate fantasy of Gemma bringing it to her senior homecoming dance with Bret wrapped up in her other arm. He was able to fashion a crude sort of pouch, one that resembled something like a small pillowcase, and decided to scrap the idea. He did manage to make a stiff wrist cuff that he was too nervous to wear into town, lest he give himself away.

For their first anniversary, Bret gave Gemma an alligator tooth that he drilled a hole into and strung a thin piece of black leather through. She had held it up to the light, inspecting it before tying it around her neck. The string was too long and fell down her back, going past the length of her hair and sticking out awkwardly. She took it off, gave Bret a kiss on the cheek, and said, “I’ll put it with the one I already have.” When Gemma opened the small heart-shaped porcelain box she kept on her nightstand, Bret saw another gator tooth, bigger than the one he had given her and so smooth, that Bret was sure it had been sanded down by a man far stronger and tougher than himself.

Gemma

Gemma only started dating Bret after she lost her virginity to him on her sixteenth birthday. He was not highly regarded at school, in fact, the opposite was true. Many boys dropped out of South Florida Central their sophomore year, but Bret hadn’t faded away with the rest because rumor had it, he’d boned everyone’s least favorite math teacher, Mrs. Fiede, in the storage room where the science department kept the formaldehyde-soaked frogs their students dissected in the spring. Gemma didn’t think this was true, not because he told her otherwise, in fact, she’d never even asked him about it, but because Bret hated math, and he wasn’t one to cherry-pick. She actually suspected that Bret had been a virgin when they met, partially because he was so softspoken, but mostly because he was bad at sex.

About two months into their relationship, Bret pulled Gemma’s shirt off during a half-hearted make out sesh and she saw that he had dried blood beneath his stubby fingernails. She began fantasizing that he was a killer, that he left Gemma’s house to stalk young women in the night, bringing them back to his truck only to glide a smooth knife along their throats, releasing beautiful crimson waterfalls across their breasts. She could only entertain this delusion because she was certain that it was not true. Bret was soft - her father never missed the opportunity to remind her of it - and he was terrible at picking up women.

Still, Gemma was curious. One day, she resolved to follow Bret back to his place. He’d still been living with his mother at the time and never invited Gemma over. Gemma knew very little of Bret’s family except that his mother was quite cruel and had formerly been a prostitute. She tailed Bret, who had decided to walk to her house that day, and grew wary when he opted not to take the path to his mother’s house, but instead, turned towards the woods. Gemma hesitantly followed as Bret trekked deeper and deeper into the trees, until the ground started to grow muddy and slick beneath her feet.

She was met with the stench before anything else and it was so foul that for a moment, Gemma’s stomach sank with the realization that Bret might be a killer after all. When Gemma tilted her head up towards the trees, it was not a woman’s body she saw hanging over her, but two alligator corpses. The first was completely dried up, a husk with a gaping hole in its torso where its guts had been ripped out. The second was still bleeding, a steady drip, drip, drip could just barely be heard beneath the hum of the summer cicadas as a trickle of crimson hit the muddied ground.

Gemma lost sight of Bret, who had already slinked off further into the swamp. She approached the bleeding alligator and crouched down to be eye level with its mouth. Then, Gemma pried open its jaw, reaching her hand inside and grabbing ahold of one of its larger front teeth. She pulled at the tooth, yanking and twisting with so much force that her feet began to slip through the muddy grass. When it came loose, Gemma fell, getting the swamp all over her backside. She held the tooth up to her eyes, examining the flakes of flesh and blood that had come out with it. Then, without thinking, Gemma popped the tooth into her mouth and began to suck – stroking it with her tongue until it was perfectly clean. She sucked on it often from that point on, even bringing it to school with her. While it was in her mouth, she thought of Bre. She wondered, when it came to the two of them, which one was the husk, and which was still bleeding.

She had a pretty good idea of what Bret was up to, trapping and selling alligators in the secrecy of the secluded swamp in the woods. Her suspicions were confirmed when she found is burner phone and scrolled through it, coming upon an extensive contact list full of people with names like “Smith” and “Bob”. About six months into their relationship, Bret winced when Gemma unbuttoned his pants, and she noticed a long strip of gauze taped haphazardly across his lower body. When she peeled it back, she was riveted by the sight of an enormous wound that extended across half of Brett’s ass, to just above his dick. Gemma took the rest of the gauze off hurriedly before throwing herself at Brett with unprecedented enthusiasm.

Gemma liked to think about Bret wrangling gators. She savored the image of him waist deep in muddied water, a rope in one hand and an alligator neck in the other. She began helping him sneak into the school gym before free period so that he could lift weights while everyone else either smoked or studied under the bleachers.

Gemma wasn’t very popular or well liked, having only two friends – Ari and Vanessa – who functioned more as a duo that would sometimes let Gemma in on their lunchtime mall trips, but would never invite her to their Saturday sleepovers. Gemma was highly regarded however, mostly because she was beautiful, and partially because her parents were upper middle class. When it began circulating that Gemma was going steady with Bret Casey, the trailer park high school dropout that fucked everyone’s least favorite teacher and lived with his whore mom in the swamp, her status plummeted. She fantasized about starting a rumor that Bret was trapping and selling gators, that he carried a gun in his belt and sold lizard leather to cartel men.

But truthfully, it didn’t matter what Gemma’s peers at South Florida Central whispered while her back was turned. They were not going to graduate to do great things, though some might get out, might move to Orlando or Tallahassee where they would rent an overpriced apartment and brave the humidity to walk through the parking lots of their dead-end office jobs. Gemma would go to cosmetology school and cut hair, Bret would get caught and go to prison. Or maybe they would stay in the swamp forever, living off of dried gator meat and letting the mosquitoes snip at their skin until they were both bled dry.