Night Vision

FIVE

When I heard the familiar voice yell, “Doc! Help me get this guy in!” I spun around to see Tomlinson’s silhouette only a few yards away, but that’s all I could see because someone onshore was blinding me with a powerful spotlight.

I waved my hand and yelled in Spanish, “Get that thing out of my eyes!”

But nothing happened. So I yelled louder, in English, adding, “You dumbass!” for emphasis.

For an instant, the light swung skyward, and I could see that Tomlinson had the injured man in a cross-chest carry, trying to swim him to shore. He was having trouble, though, because the guy was fighting him, swinging his fists, trying to get a solid elbow into my friend’s face. The man apparently thought the alligator still had him.

There was no telling how badly the guy was hurt, but he was obviously in shock. I swam closer, my head up, got a hand under the man’s arm and pulled his ear close to my lips, yelling in Spanish, “You’re safe! Stop fighting!”

I repeated it several times before his head rolled toward me, eyes wide, and he whispered, in English, “Am I dreaming this? Am I dead? This is a terrible dream if I’m not dead.”

Yes, he was in shock… a small man with a gaunt drunkard’s face that was a saprophytic gray in the glow of security lights. His voice was incongruous-he spoke with the rounded vowels of a Virginia gentleman.

I asked him, “What’s your name?”

He continued babbling, telling me, “I don’t know what happened! I walked down to look at something floating in the water. Next thing I know, something was dragging me in… like it was trying to squeeze the guts out of me. I heard something snap… something way inside my body.”

The man looked at me, eyes blinking, and I heard what he must have sounded like as a child when he asked, “Am I badly hurt? I don’t want to die, I really don’t.”

I replied, “Lay back. Get some air in your lungs. We’re taking you to shore.” I could see there was an open slash on the man’s forearm, and his legs looked as dead as wood, the way they floated on the surface.

As Tomlinson positioned himself to support the man’s other arm, he asked me, “Did you kill it?” meaning the alligator, and I could tell he hoped I hadn’t hurt the thing.

“Let’s get out of here before we catch a damn disease,” I told him. “Start swimming, I’ll keep his head up.”

Truth was, I still didn’t know if the gator was dead. Judging from the way the animal’s tail had periscoped to the surface, at least one of the bullets had done damage to the neuro system.

Either way, a wounded gator was the least of my worries. The most dangerous animals in Florida’s backwaters aren’t reptiles. They aren’t amphibians or fish. I was more concerned about microscopic animals that, as I knew too well, thrived in stagnant lakes like the one we were in.

The injured man might survive the wounds the gator had inflicted only to die from bacteria that lived in the animal’s mouth. Or from a single-celled protozoan that all the commotion had kicked free from the muck below.

The injured man wasn’t the only one at risk-Tomlinson and I were in danger, too. There are varieties of single-celled animals that don’t need an open wound to slip through a primate’s skin armor. The amoeba Naegleria can travel through a man’s nostrils, into the brain and cause an encephalitis that is deadly. It’s rare, but I knew from my professional journals that this same microscopic animal had killed at least four healthy young men in the last few years.

The water temperature of the pond felt warmer than the injured man’s flesh. It stunk of sulfur and garbage, and as Tomlinson and I began sidestroking toward shore my fingers noted the water’s protoplasmic density. The density was created by microbes and muck held in suspension.

It was a brackish water mangrove lake, not much larger than a baseball field, surrounded by a trailer population that probably used the place to dump all kinds of refuse-natural, man-made and chemical. It caused me to wonder why a quarter-ton alligator would choose such a stagnant, public place to live.

The probability was, the animal didn’t live here. More likely, the gator had been traveling cross-country-they often do during the spring mating season. My guess was, the thing had only recently arrived, stopping for a few nights to feed. If a gator that size had been a permanent resident, someone at the trailer park would have reported it to Florida Wildlife cops and demanded that the thing be removed.

Or would they?

I thought about it as we swam sidestroke, Tomlinson on one side of the injured man, me on the other.

Maybe not, I decided. I remembered Tomlinson telling me that the only thing park residents feared more than law enforcement was their own landlord.

That made sense, combined with what I knew about the people who lived in places like Red Citrus. I had spent enough time in Central America, and had lived long enough in Florida, to learn not to underestimate the tenacity of the descendants of the Maya and Aztec. They could endure just about anything with a stoic calm that was all but impossible to read, and just as impossible not to respect.

People like this could live their lives, day by day, next door to an aggressive gator, or next door to a crazed neighbor, and never say a word in protest. Living under the radar meant surviving quietly no matter what.

We were drawing close to shore. The injured man had stopped fighting, but the muscles of his arms remained contracted, his breathing was rapid. To Tomlinson I said, “When we get to the bank, don’t try to stand. The bottom’s like quicksand.”

He asked me, “Do you have shoes on?”

I said, “I was just thinking the same thing. There’s probably broken bottles and all kinds of crap on the bottom. We’re going to need some help.”

To the injured man I said, “What’s your name? Can you talk?”

The man groaned, and said again, “Please tell me I’m dreaming this. What happened to my legs? I can’t feel my legs.”

I thought, Uh-oh, and squeezed his arm to reassure him as I looked toward shore. I could see shapes and shadows of several dozen people watching us. But I couldn’t see clearly because my glasses were hanging around my neck on fishing line, and also because the spotlight was blinding me again.

In Spanish I yelled, “Take the light away from that person, I can’t see! Shine it on the ground. We need some help. Four or five people, hold hands and make a chain so we can pull this man out. But don’t come in the water. Stay out of the water!”

I could see people moving toward the bank, including the man who was carrying the spotlight, a huge silhouette capped by blond curls and shoulders in a muscle T-shirt.

It was the landlord. Had to be.

I called to him in English, “Get that goddamn light out of my eyes! I’m not going to tell you again.”

In reply, I heard a surly Southern twang shout, “What’d you just say to me, asshole?”

The drawl was unmistakably redneck Florida.

Trying to keep it reasonable, I told him, “You’re blinding me. We’ve got an injured man here!”

I saw the man quicken his pace and heard him bellow, “You don’t give the orders around here, you do-gooder son of a bitch! I give the orders! Now, get your ass out of my goddamn lake. You’re trespassing! What the hell you doin’, trespassing in my lake?”

I glanced at Tomlinson. His face was orchid white in the harsh light, and he rolled his eyes. “The landlord,” he replied. “He’s the jerk I told you about. Something Squires. He’s a mama’s boy. She’s the one with all the property.”

Tomlinson had described the guy as all grits and redneck bullshit, plus a full helping of steroids. It matched with what I was hearing.

The water was so shallow now that I was using my left hand to crab us over the bottom, the muck gelatinous between my fingers. It was frustrating. I had no idea how badly that man was hurt, but I knew we couldn’t waste time getting him out of the water and treating his wounds. It was impossible to hurry, though. Try to stand, we’d sink to our waists in slime.

“Did you call nine-one-one?” I asked Tomlinson. I couldn’t look directly into the spotlight, the thing was too bright, so I was using peripheral vision to keep track of Squires as he descended on us, pushing people out of the way. I noticed that the men who had been attempting to form a human chain scattered from his path.

“We should be hearing sirens by now,” Tomlinson replied, “or maybe not. It was only about five minutes ago that I called. But they’ll be here.” Then he surprised me by calling out in a cheery voice, “Hey! Hey, Tulo, it’s me! Tell some of the men we need help getting out of here. We need about five people!”

Tomlinson used the masculine form of the name, but I realized he was yelling to the teenage girl he had mentioned, the girl we had come to help. Tula Choimha.

I saw a slim, luminous figure appear, backlit by the spotlight. The girl had a flashlight, which was pointed at her sandals, and something else in her hand. A bottle, it looked like.

To Tomlinson I said, “Watch the guy’s head-he might have a spinal injury.”

My pal replied, “Then maybe I should stay in the water with him until the paramedics arrive.”

I was thinking about the killer microbes, not the alligator, when I replied, “No, we’ve got to get him out of here. You, too.”

“Dude,” Tomlinson muttered, “I don’t even want to ask what that tone of yours means.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You think the gator might come back?”

I said, “I’ll climb up the bank, and we’ll try to pull him out without moving his head. These people aren’t going to help, they’re afraid. Oh… and for God’s sake, don’t even try talking to that landlord. You’ll just make him madder. Let me do the talking.”

Tomlinson’s attention remained on the girl, mine on Squires, who was still shouting threats at us and not slowing as he lumbered toward the water. I knew we had to hurry, but it would be worse to misjudge the situation. Steroid drunks, like pit bulls, are an unpredictable demographic. If the guy was as furious as he sounded, anything could happen.

I laced my fingers into the knee-high weeds that grew along the bank and pulled myself out of the water, hand over hand, trying to time it right. Friends sometimes chide me about my obsessive attention to detail and my hyperawareness of my surroundings-particularly if the environment is populated with strangers.

Sometimes, I am tempted to reply, “I’m still alive, aren’t I?” but never do.

Fortunately, my hyperwariness paid off. Again.

Just as I was getting to my feet, blue jeans muddy, a slimy mess, Squires appeared. He took a quick jump step, grabbed me by the left arm and stabbed the huge light into my face as I stood. He was screaming, “Can you see any better now, you son of a bitch! Who do you think you are, coming ’round here, giving orders!”

I pushed the light-a military Golight, I realized-out of my eyes and tried to back away, but the man’s hand was like a vise. In an easy voice, I said to him, “Calm down, Squires. We have a guy who needs medical attention.”

It didn’t help. “Screw you!” the man yelled, his breath hot in my face. “Who the hell died and made you boss, you goddamn do-gooder prick? You’re giving me orders?”

I kept my voice even. “When the police arrive, what are they going to think when I tell them you tried to stop us from saving this man’s life?”

Squires was trembling, he was so mad. He roared, “You’re not telling the cops nothin’, asshole! How you gonna talk to anybody after I snap your damn head off and use it to feed my gator?”

His gator? It was an unexpected thing to hear, but it told me something.

I was gauging the man’s size and his balance. He was about sixfive, six-six, probably two-eighty, but weight-room muscle is among the most common cloaks of male insecurity. To test his balance, I rolled my left arm free of his grip. At the same time, I gave him a push with the fingers of my right hand. It wasn’t an obvious push. It was more of a blocking gesture, but he didn’t handle it well.

Clumsy people have a difficult time with simultaneous hand movements, and this guy was clumsy. The little push turned his entire body a few wobbly degrees to the left. It was all the opening I needed, but I didn’t take it.

Now was not the time for a brawl. Besides, Tomlinson and I needed this guy’s cooperation if we were going to save the injured man. The illegals who lived in the park weren’t going to risk helping us-not if their blustering bully of a landlord disapproved. And I couldn’t blame them. They had to live here. I didn’t.

I squared my body to Squires’s, and said, “This is my last try to be reasonable. We’ve got an injured man and we intend to help him. Get out of our way and behave like an adult.”

That’s all it took. Squires screamed at me, “Or you’ll do what?” and he jammed the light toward my face again.

I had no choice, I ducked under the light and then drop-stepped beneath the landlord’s extended right arm. From the sound of surprise he made, the move was the equivalent of a disappearing act. Where had I gone?

I had disappeared behind him, that’s where. Years ago, in an overheated wrestling room, I had practiced hand control and simple duck unders day after day, week after week, year after year. I had practiced the craft of grappling so relentlessly that I had pleased even our relentless perfectionist of a coach, a man named Gary Fries. Fries was a wrestling giant, all five feet seven inches of him, and he would not tolerate mediocrity.

Thanks to that coach, I’ve never been in any physical confrontation in my life where I didn’t feel confident I was in control of the outcome. That doesn’t mean I have always won. I certainly have not. But I’ve always felt as if I could win if I picked my shots and made the right moves.

Like now, as I came up behind Squires, saying into his ear, “You’ve got a big mouth, fat boy,” because now his anger could be used to my advantage. I wanted him so mad that he lost control. When the big man tried to pivot, I laddered my hands up his ribs to control his body position and leaned my head close to his shoulder blades so he couldn’t knock me cold with a wild elbow.

When Squires realized he couldn’t maneuver free, he stuttered, “Hey… get your hands off me, asshole!” and tried, once again, to face me.

I was ready because that’s exactly what I wanted him to do. I let Squires make half a turn and then stopped his momentum by ramming my head into his back as I grapevined my left ankle around his left shin. An instant later, I locked my hands around his waist and moved with him as he tried to wrestle free.

Our backs were to the mangrove pond. With a quick glance, I confirmed that Tomlinson and the injured man weren’t directly behind us-it was a dangerous place to be if things went the way I planned. Then I used my legs to drive Squires away from the water. Instinctively, the man’s feet dug in, then his legs pumped as he tried to drive us both backward. Squires was taller, heavier and stronger than I. His energized mass soon overpowered my own.

The timing was important. I waited a microsecond… waited until I felt the subtle transition of momentum.

When it felt right, I dropped my grip a few inches lower on the big man’s waist. I relocked my hands, bent my knees and then maximized Squires’s own momentum by lifting as I arched my back.

I waited another microsecond… and then I heaved with all my strength as we tumbled backward.

In wrestling jargon, the move I’d executed was a suplex. As I arched backward, I used a two-handed throwing technique, not unlike a Scottish gamesman throwing a fifty-pound rock over a bar. In this case, though, the weight was closer to three hundred pounds. Squires had amassed considerable momentum, and it was his own momentum-not my strength-that sent him flying.

I guessed he would land near the pond’s edge, which is why I had checked behind me before setting up the suplex. I couldn’t have guessed, however, that a man Squires’s size would sail beyond the bank and land on his shoulders in a massive explosion of water.

I got to my feet, cleaning my hands on my jeans. I found the spotlight and aimed it at Squires’s face when he surfaced. He was disoriented and floundering. I watched him splash to vertical, as he spit water and swore. Mostly, he swore at me, ordering that I get that goddamn light out of his eyes.

I told him, “Come up here and say that, fat boy,” and watched the man jam his feet toward the bottom, which is precisely what I hoped he would do.

It was his second mistake of the night.

For a few seconds, Squires stood tall in waist-deep water, as he struggled to find footing. Then he began to sink. The more he struggled, the more suction he created and the deeper he went into the muck.

Squires wasn’t a wrestler, and he wasn’t much of a swimmer, either. He couldn’t manage the delicate hand strokes necessary to sustain positive buoyancy. Soon the man was so deeply mired in mud that he couldn’t move his legs. Water was rising toward his shoulders, and it scared him.

“Goddamn it!” he shouted to the migrants watching. “Help me. Get a rope! Somebody go get a rope and pull me out of here.”

Drowning was terrifying enough, but then another thought came into Squires’s mind. I could tell because of the wild look in his eyes as he glanced over his shoulder, yelling, “Hurry up, before that gator comes back! Does anybody have a gun? Someone break the window of my truck and grab the gun from the glove box. Shit! Hurry up!”

Automatically, my right hand touched my sodden pocket to confirm the Kahr 9mm was still there. It was.

No one moved except for a frail, luminous figure that I recognized. It was the teenage girl Tomlinson had been calling to, Tula. I watched her step free of the crowd, then walk toward me, her eyes indicating Squires as she said in English, “Do you think he might drown?”

I replied, “That’s up to him. If he keeps air in his lungs, he’ll stop sinking.”

I watched the girl, impressed by her articulate English, but more impressed by the way she carried herself and the respect park residents accorded her. When she spoke, even the men watching her went silent.

“Will the animal come back?” she asked me. “Did you kill it?”

I was moving toward the injured man and Tomlinson as I told her, “I wounded it, maybe. I don’t know,” and was tempted to ask, Why are you worried about that jerk?

I listened to the girl tell me, “I used your telephone to call the emergency number. Or maybe it was his.”

She glanced at Tomlinson, who was on his knees in the water, cradling the injured man, and then explained, “The angry propietario told the emergency police not to come. But they are coming now.”

The angry propietario was Squires. Apparently, the girl had heard him cancel Tomlinson’s 911 call. How else could she have known?

In Spanish, I said to people milling in the shadows, “We need three or four men to help get the injured man out of the water. I think his spine is hurt. We have to take care not to move his head. We need towels and ice and disinfectant… and a board of some type for him to lie on. Plywood would work.”

As I spoke, I had to raise my voice to be heard above Squires, who was now raging, “Why aren’t you people moving? Goddamn it, I need a rope! And one of you bastards fetch my gun! How’d you little shits like to be homeless again? I’ll call the feds on your sorry asses if you don’t move now!”

The man was panicking in his rage, his attention focused on shadows behind him where the gator might be lurking. As long as he kept his lungs inflated, the muck wouldn’t overpower his own buoyancy. But now, I guessed, Squires was hyperventilating, and in real danger. I was considering going in after him myself when the girl called in loud Spanish, “Do what the landlord says. Get a rope, but not his gun! Help him! Would God want you to allow a helpless man to drown?”

God allowed helpless men to drown daily, but her words got people moving. A couple of guys went jogging toward the trailers, while others moved toward Tomlinson, awaiting instructions. As I approached the bank, I told the men to stay close, we’d need them soon. I was also searching the ground, looking for my shirt, because I wanted to clean my glasses.

Beside me, Tula said, “Use this,” and handed me a towel, which she pulled from the back of her jeans. “He’s my friend,” she added, indicating the injured man. “His name is Carlson, and he has a good heart. When you get him out of the water, I will pray. Will you help me pray to heal his wounds?”

The girl’s syntax was odd, I noticed, whether she spoke in English or Spanish. It was formal in an old-fashioned way, which made no sense for someone her age.

Carlson was listening from only a few feet away. He was semiconscious, looking up at the girl, a sleepy, dazed smile on his face.

I said, “My friend will be glad to help you pray. Won’t you, Tomlinson?” and handed the towel back to the girl before I told one of the men to hang on to my feet when I gave him the word. Then I got down on my hands and knees and crawled to the water.

It wasn’t difficult to lift Carlson ashore. He was all bone and skin, couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and forty pounds. Once we had him on the slick grass, we maneuvered a piece of plywood under him, then sledded him to higher ground.

Through the entire process, I held the man’s head steady. From the way he’d described the cracking sound “deep inside him,” I guessed the gator had broken his spine. I didn’t want to turn a paraplegic into a quadriplegic.

Tula comforted the man as we moved him. She stroked his head, told him he would recover quickly, and also chanted what I guessed to be a prayer in her native language. I can speak only enough Quiche Maya to thank the person who brings me a beer, so I had no idea what the girl was saying.

When we had Carlson safely away from the water, I checked his injuries. His forearm showed puncture marks, as did his waist and buttocks, but the bleeding wasn’t bad.

His legs, though, had a pasty, dead look that suggested I’d been right about the broken spine. As I took note of the wounds, Tula tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’ll hold his head while you use this.” She was holding a bottle of cheap tequila, waiting for me to take it.

Tomlinson had found his sandals and seemed to be looking for something else but stopped long enough to grab the bottle and take a long swig.

“It’s not for drinking,” the girl told him, her tone communicating disapproval. “It’s to clean your wounds.”

“That’s exactly how I’m using it,” Tomlinson replied, then took another long belt, before he said to her, “Tula, while we work on your friend, would you do me a favor? Ask around and find out who has our billfolds. I found the phones, but our billfolds are gone.”

But then he told her, “Never mind,” as a man approached, billfolds in hand.

Tomlinson thanked the man, saying, “Muchas gracias, compadre,” but I could tell that something was wrong as he opened his billfold, then mine.

Tula stared at him for a moment before saying, “Your money is gone. I can see it in your face.”

The girl turned toward the water, where Squires was struggling to reach a rope some men were trying to throw him. “He has your money. The propietario. No one but him would have robbed you.”

In the peripheral glow of the Golight, I looked at the girl closely for the first time. She had a cereal-bowl haircut, and a lean angularity that didn’t mesh with the compact body type I associate with Mayan women. Yet there was nothing masculine about her. She was boyish enough to pass for a boy, but her demeanor, while commanding, was asexual. In the truck, Tomlinson had said something that sounded strange at the time but now made sense. He had said, “She’s an adolescent girl, not a female,” which described her perfectly.

Thirteen-year-old Tula Choimha, I decided, was a child who handled herself like an adult. It was unusual, but probably less uncommon in girls than boys. Besides, the girl had spent the last few years living on her own, without family, which had no doubt contributed to her maturity.

“They’re coming to help you,” Tula whispered into Carlson’s ear as she gauged the direction of distant sirens. She took the bottle of tequila from Tomlinson, soaked the towel with liquor, then dropped to her knees and began to wash the puncture wounds on Carlson’s arm and then his buttocks, unconcerned that I had pulled the man’s pants down to access his injuries.

“I can’t feel my legs,” the man told her again. He had said it several times in the last minutes, his reaction ping-ponging between horror and shock.

“Your legs are healing,” I heard the girl tell him, her right hand gripping a necklace she wore. “Your wounds are healing now. You must have faith.”

I watched her pause, head tilted, and the rhythm of her voice changed. She told him, “Our strength comes from faith. But our faith is sometimes eaten away by little things that God hates. If we lack faith, though there be a million of us, we will be beaten back and die.”

I exchanged looks with Tomlinson, wondering if he, too, suspected her singsong syntax suggested that the girl was reciting something she had memorized.

My friend was nodding his approval. Personally, I felt a chill. To me, the robotic passion of the devoutly religious is disturbing. Too often it is a flag of surrender to fear and the exigencies of life. Maybe my assessment is unfair, but I associate religious fervor with pathology. Tomlinson, of course, does not.

“Squeeze my hand and put your faith in God,” Tula whispered to the man, as she scrubbed at the puncture wounds on his buttocks. “Remember the godliness that you possessed as a child? It will return to you. God will make your body whole again.”

Someone had brought a Coleman lantern, so I switched off the Golight and placed it on the ground. I was looking through my billfold, seeing that someone had rearranged my IDs and credit cards, seeing that all my cash had been taken, as I also watched the girl pour more tequila on Carlson’s wounds, then scrub harder with the bloody towel.

“Do you feel this, patron?” she asked him. “Can your legs feel the heat of God, trying to enter?”

Once again, Tomlinson and I exchanged looks, as Carlson’s eyes widened, and he said, “Maybe… maybe I can… I’m not sure.. . but something’s happening. Wait… yes! I do feel it. Yes, my skin is burning! I can feel your hands, Tula!”

“They are not my hands, patron,” Tula told him, not surprised. “It’s the warmth of God’s love you feel. He is in your body now. He has traveled from my body into your legs.”

The man’s face contorted into tears, and I watched him move one pale foot, then the other.

Carlson was crying, “Tula, you’re right! I can feel my legs!”

I was pleased to know that I had been wrong about the man’s broken spine. Shock, or a damaged nerve, might explain the temporary loss of feeling in Carlson’s legs. But my interest in an explanation was short-lived because nearby I heard a man yell in Spanish, “It is back. The alligator is back. Someone shine the light!”

I swung the Golight toward the lake, where I saw a reptilian wake, and two bright red eyes riding low in the water.

The huge gator, still alive, still determined to feed, was gliding toward the bodybuilder, who was already screaming for help.