Why I Hate Alligators - JohnD

We headed out from Orlando, just Joey and I. Joey was driving his 1965 Chevy pickup. It was more beat up than he was, which is saying a lot.

We were moving down the freeway with the truck vibrating and otherwise making much more noise than seemed necessary. Joey had the radio on. It’s the damnedest thing; he always had the radio on in that truck. I have no idea where the speakers were. The radio was always pretty loud, though, and the static was significant. With the noise the truck made, you couldn’t discern much of anything that was coming from that damned radio. It just ended up being a tremendous distraction.

Then Joey would talk the whole time anyway. Of course, he had to talk very loud to talk over the din. A good deal of the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Once in while, I’d tune into what he was saying. Sometimes he was talking about sports, sometimes women, sometimes an impossible construction task that he had to come to the rescue of because everyone else was too stupid to handle it.

We had another thirty-five minutes till we got to the construction site and I was damned sleepy. The truth is Joey’s story telling could put anyone to sleep even in that bouncy, vibrating, rattling death machine of a vehicle.

I had my sunglasses on, so I figured he wouldn’t notice if I closed my eyes. Besides, he never looked at me to make eye contact or anything like that.

I started to drift off as he droned on about the construction job of yesteryear in Tallahassee. I was in a half asleep, half awake state. The radio was floating into my dream world and that damned bouncing, rattling, and talking all combined to create quite a nightmare.

We were in an airplane that had hit freakish turbulence, or something; maybe an engine was out. Whatever it was, we were going down. “Damn it! We’re going down!” The airplane was heading straight for a body of water. “I’m going to die,” I thought. “I’m going to die.” Bam! We hit the water hard.

“Steve, you better wake up!” I heard Joey say with a considerable amount of strain in his voice.

I opened my eyes to see that the truck was sinking into a swamp. The mucky water was rising relatively quickly up the windshield.

“I fell asleep,” Joey said, in way of explanation, as he frantically rolled down his window and water came rushing into the truck. He then reached over and opened the glove box. “I better grab this.” He pulled out a 38 revolver.

Well, I was a little groggy, but I was enraged, too, and frightened, and confused, and cold, and wet and getting wetter.

“Come on Steve!” Joey said in an agitated tone. “We better start swimming!” He then tried climbing out the window, but it was quite a challenge since the water was flowing in with a lot of force. As Joey fought against the tidal wave, an alligator started swimming in through the window. Somehow, Joey escaped the alligator’s gnashing teeth as he shot it three times, splattering blood, brains, and guts into the small space in the cab that wasn’t already filled with water.

Some of the alligator blood got into my left eye and the eye closed reflexively. Through my right eye, I could see that the water line outside the truck had reached the top of the windshield cutting off the last rays of direct sunlight. However, the cab was still dimly lit since the sunlight was having some success penetrating the swamp water. In that lighting, the blood splatter was rather artistic, in a kind of disturbing way.

I suppose I was in a state of denial because I shouldn't have been paying attention to the aesthetic qualities of alligator-blood splatter. I should probably have been paying attention to the fact that even though that alligator was extremely dead, Joey was still fighting it because the water flowing into the cab was trying to bring the alligator in with it. The alligator was about eight feet long, which doesn't really sound that big. All the same, when an alligator is being jammed into the cab of a truck with the force of a tsunami, eight feet is quite big. There Joey was, contorting his body all about, pushing that dead alligator back with both hands as water kept rushing in all around it.

"YOUR window damn it! YOUR window!" Joey screamed. Then he followed it with a stream of profanities. I was definitely panicking because all I could say was, "What window? I have a window?" I was picturing windows in my apartment and I was thinking, "Well, they're not really MY windows; they belong to whoever owns the apartment complex."

Subconsciously, I had already lifted myself out of my seat toward the cab ceiling since the water inside the cab had risen quite a ways above the dashboard. There was about a foot of space left that wasn’t filled with water. At that moment, I guess my subconscious was obsessed with the notion of breathable air. Thank goodness my subconscious was still working because my conscious was not.

It was 7:15AM, and it was a real bad start to the day. Let me tell you, it only got worse. But, for the most part, that sums up why I hate alligators.


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