The marshes. A tidal pool snaked through the back of the Carrington big house and along the golf course passing the old plantation estate and eventually wending away to the intercoastal waterway that separated Cypress Point Plantation island from the other barrier islands. These marsh streams that lined the golf courses are where the alligators nested.
Robby could never forget that time when he and Carrington were young and they played a round with Coach Cal, a very deliberate, no shitting, serious golfer. Carrington rode alone in his cart, Robby joined up with Coach Cal. You play with Coach Cal, you’d better get your ass in the cart seat before Coach Cal did because before your butt cheeks hit the cushion, he’d release the brake and jerk the cart forward.
There was that time when Robby hooked his ball off the tee, just barely hooked it to the right in the direction of a small pond. The ball drifted and Robby said, “Oh shit,” and Coach Cal said, “That’s wet.” Though it was out of sight two-hundred seventy-five yards away, Robby figured it might’ve just missed the pond and landed up on the water bank.
As they approached the pond in the carts, Carrington shouted out from his cart, “Look!” Robby looked at where Carrington was pointing, in the direction of Rob’s drive, where he saw a small thin dark shape ease out of the pond water up onto the bank. As he and Coach Cal neared the pond, Robby could see his white ball suddenly disappear.
“I think a gator just took my ball,” Robby softly, but loud enough for Coach Cal to hear.
“Bullshit,” Coach Cal sneered. “A gator didn’t eat your ball.”
But as the carts whirred around the pond, sure enough, a family of five gators, some big, most small, walked out of the water slowly to observe the golfers motoring their way. The smallest of the gators turned and looked at the carts and Robby snorted his Gatorade drink over the front of the cart, spraying some of the pale green liquid on Coach Cal’s shorts.
“I’ll be damned,” Coach Cal said as he slowed down. The little gator couldn’t close its jaws. There was a white golf ball trapped between its teeth.
Robby wondered if that same gator had migrated closer to the shore, through these connecting pathways of streams and marshes, to mate with other gators (did they remain faithful to just one or did they perhaps eat their mates?) birthed or fathered a new brood and lurked on these banks near Carrington’s house? Was the same one that ate his golf ball the one that chomped on Rodney Monroe’s leg, and now the very same that swam past his view while standing on the veranda in the back of Carrington’s house?
He had followed his friend this far. His old friend, as Carrington would say it. Did he say it to everybody? “Listen, my old friend.” Sometimes he would say it when it wasn’t a friend at all. Did he say it to the lawyers? To Venable? Listen, my old friend, meaning, listen you fucker? He followed him from the beach to the boardwalk, the two alone. Mateen working, servants gone home. Cynthia, who knows where? In Charleston, perhaps. He followed him sun-baked and hot and soused from hitting the cycle from beer to tequila to whiskey to rum.
How far would he follow? Or was he leading his old friend on? Robby followed along with the plan, jokingly at first, then feigning seriousness as Carrington became concerned that Robby wasn’t serious enough.
Carrington had a plan and though he was essentially extorting Robby to play a part in it, Robby found himself amused by it all. Carrington talked as he walked from the garage through the palmettos behind the house to the back porch leading to his home office.
“This Friday night presents me with the perfect chance,” Carrington said. So soon? Robby thought. “Cynthia’s throwing a big gathering out on the beach pavilion for her arts school. There are going to be fireworks.”
Robby saw the darkness inside the house before the motion lights burst on, shielding his eyes. Otherwise there was stillness. Still, he was surprised that Carrington was speaking of his so-called secret plan so audaciously without regard to whether anyway was in earshot.
“I’ll create a scene beforehand and be forced to leave the party. During the fireworks, which are gonna last twenty minutes, you leave the beach party without anybody noticing and come around to the house. It’ll be empty, except for me.”
As they stepped up from the tough grass to the wooden deck of the back veranda that surrounded the house, Carrington pointed out into the water. Robby could see only one of them at first, then saw the other, lazing in the bushes by the water’s edge. Jesus H. Close to the veranda. Too close.
“Watch these steps and the alligators in the bushes. ‘Chomp’ and “Snap’ the kids around here call them. They are hungry boys.”
Pausing for a moment on the steps Robby shook his head as Carrington steamrolled on up the steps. Carrington had a remote in his hand which he pressed with his thumb that made an audible unlocking sound on the doors, evidently disengaging a security system. Carrington then turned the handle and pushed through the door and the curtains.
They stood inside the darkened office, arrayed differently than the office at the Inn. More like an executive’s office from the 1950s, clubby with full red leather chairs, bookcases, golf trophies, portraits of Scottish links. Carrington grabbed the back of his desk chair, a winged-back hard leather chair.
“I’ll be sitting right here, boozed up, tranquil, relaxed, and waiting for you here in the dark. You’ll see your way all right, from the nightlights and this desk lamp,” Carrington said and he clicked on the green shaded lamp that cast a subtle yellow light. “I want you to use this,” Carrington said and he held up with his hands an orange and green scarf with an insignia that Robby knew instantly.
“The Hurricanes?” Robby laughed. A University of Miami bandana, like you might tie around a sporting Labrador’s throat that leaps for tossed Frisbees in the park.
“Use this,” Carrington said.
“For what?”
“Tie it around my neck. I won’t put up a struggle.”
Robby laughed. But he played along. “I choke you? That’s your plan? I choke you with a bandana from our school? How’s that gonna look like an accident?”
“I’m not finished,” Carrington spoke quietly.
“That’ll connect me to it easy. It’s a symbol that connects us! My hands all over it.”
“Your hands could be on anything. So are mine, so are Cynthia’s, Mateen’s and the cleaning lady’s. Everybody. The fact that it’s something from us, from our past, makes it too strange to mean anything, and anyway, I’m not finished.”
“You’ve got choke marks on your neck.”
“There won’t be a neck.”
“There won’t be a...what?”
Carrington fingered Robby to follow him through the curtains and back out the glass door to the deck overlooking the marsh and the alligators. Carrington then stopped and stood with his hands on the rail top and he looked out over the water. “When I’m gone, drag me out of the chair and over to the deck here, through the doorway, and push me through this railing.” Then Carrington pretended to shove his shoulder against the rail to demonstrate. He stood up and wiggled the rail to show Robby that it was already weakened. “Crash me on it hard, really hard so the wood snaps.”
He pointed down below, the deck jutted out slightly over the water bank and the gators in the bushes. Robby looked down below with caution.
“What if the gators aren’t below?”
“They won’t be far. And if they aren’t in sight in the immediate area, you call them over to you like this.” Carrington leaned far over the rail without touching it and called suddenly out with a guttural, throaty sound...an alligator call, a cross between a frog’s ribbit and a pig’s snort.
Robby couldn’t hold back his amusement. “I make an alligator call?”
“Yeah, look.”
The gators sure enough lifted themselves up and crawled out of the water. Carrington pointed in the darkness across the water to the opposite bank. “There. See?” Two other shapes lifted into the water, visible in the moonlight breaking through the gap in the clouds. Gators from the golf course across the footbridge swimming in the stream in response to the call. Robby shook his head in wonder. “It’s a call from a baby gator in distress. They bite on that every time.”
“What happens if somebody hears me?”
“You’ve got a huge party going on across the way on the beach. The house will be empty, like it is now, I’ll make certain of it. Otherwise it’s off. You see anybody, or if I see anybody. We call it off. But man, the fireworks will be blasting, blasting so close that nobody will hear anything else.”
“Alligators. You get eaten by alligators?”
“They’ll do the job to mask the cause of death. I won’t have drugs in the system, only drink. It’ll look like an accident, pure and simple. The wood broke and I fell in, cracked my head, knocked out drunk, and ripped to shreds. Ask Rodney Monroe. Those boys don’t leave behind much of anything they bite. Locals will consider my death just desserts.”
“This is too much. Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“Who would jump in there like that? Would you? Jesu. Can you imagine being alive? No way. I’ve got to be dead already.”
Carrington held out the Miami Hurricanes bandana to Robby. Robby chuckled and shook his head again, the only reaction he could manage, but looking at Carrington’s eyes changed him.
“I’ll be dead, Rob. I won’t feel it. You need to hear me on this. Think. You’re the only one who can do this for me. Yeah, for me. The only one who has my trust. You’ll be saving me. From pain and torment. And you have a reason now. A reason for yourself that isn't about helping me. More than one reason actually. My troubles will be over. And my friend, so will yours.”
The insanity of it. The bizarre occurrences of Robby’s life had led him to this: the most bizarre and twisted moment of all the moments he ever experienced.
“I took your place once,” Carrington said. “Now. You’ll take mine.”
He hesitated but for a moment or more. Then Robby snatched the bandana from Carrington. He fingered it. He shook his head.
He stuffed it into the front pocket of his golf shorts.
(Read Chapters Seventeen and Nineteen of Blacksmith's Girl.)