Bedlam and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

he knew the driver would never find him.
    What was Hartley doing in here? Maybe an hour had passed since he’d left the road; the sun was beyond its high mid-point. Siesta time, Hartley thought, and where he came from they didn’t have siestas. That should give him some advantage. He’d smeared mud on his face, partly to prevent his white skin from being seen and partly to keep off the incredible bugs. His neck was already misshapen with bites. His hands kept moving, slapping, moving. Despite the bugs however, this apparently was some drier patch of the ‘Glades, perhaps one of the Seminoles’ old hideaways. He’d gone this entire time without hitting any impassable stretches of river or lake. He seemed instead on an endless waterlogged plain, broken up by occasional cypress or crucified oaks and palms, but for the most part a monotonous trudge through nasty long grass with saw edges that cut the skin. He stumbled often. He recalled a statistic from yesterday’s tour: the Everglades occupy over 4000 square miles. Then what, he sometimes had to wonder, was he doing? Yet the answer always came to him at once, a grappling hook slung easily across the gap of hesitation, slung that much more easily because Hartley would never take a moment to gauge the depths. He would think only: I’ll get them . And he’d crash ahead.
    Not that Hartley didn’t experience other inklings, other thoughts. He felt pervadingly alone, an ant crossing a gymnasium floor. He recalled the rare look his son had given him the first time Bobby understood why his father was called a war hero. Also the soldier could picture his victory, cue cards floating on the surface of a pool, powerlines shorting out and everything going up like the slow lightning of tracer fire. Yet these other inklings were no more than inklings. Wing shots at something glimpsed once and then out of sight. By and large Hartley was going on nothing but the grapple-hook-swing of action itself. He didn’t think. For miles of forced march it seemed as if Hartley wasn’t there at all. Whenever he felt his mind beginning to slow, grow foggy again, he did up another joint.
    Until…Hartley forced his head through a particularly dense section of vines and brush and so came down face-first within an inch of standing gray water. The surface stank of pupae and limestone. He held his position a while. His mudsmeared face became visible, crossed here and there by water striders, in the rank pool before him. Then Hartley, maybe, sensed something. He looked over his right shoulder. Not ten feet away a solitary alligator lay sunning itself on a strip of flattened grass.
    Hartley froze. His head out over the water, his body trapped in sawtoothed vines, he saw himself as perfect prey. And the alligator’s eye was open. Hartley couldn’t miss it, a yellow and pink smudge of goo. The pupil was a black chip. Hartley kept still through a feast of mosquitos, kept still while the scars on his lower back numbly repeated one word of pain over and over. He ignored even the massive bees. These tickled the back of his ear, going in and out of some fragrant orchid or honeysuckle behind him.
    Just when Hartley went up on his palms, began to move, he couldn’t say. But he started to pull his long trunk forward, forward by inches with one eye on the reptile the whole way, until he got his boots under him and could squat carefully, finally, on the edge of limestone over the water. His head was hot but clear. The gator hadn’t come for him yet. Hartley flexed his ankles, risked turning a couple degrees on the balls of his feet. No response.
    Instinctively or from soldier’s habit, he sized up the beast.
    The blunt snout, the blunt tail thicker than the body where they joined. The inward pinch between tail and snout, just behind the blunted cone of the skull. Christ Jesus, an alligator was ugly. The color effects were sick, snotgreen with diarrhetic