Goodbye Green and White
Sarah Zenk Blossom
_
Before I tell you about the road trip with the albino alligator, there are a few things you should know about me, and there are a few things you should know about Carl. Carl and I have been friends ever since he knocked out my left lateral incisor with his right elbow in fifth grade. I'm a dentist now, and Carl sells pot to high school kids. The things Carl and I have in common are guns, of which we both own several (though I prefer to conceal and carry while Carl prefers to store malfunctioning vestiges of the Civil War in the glass cases that flank his formal dining room), drugs, which Carl loves to take and I like to prescribe in moderation, and the Everglades Bar, which has a speckled linoleum floor and a popcorn machine.
You need to know that Carl is at the Everglades and that his girlfriend has thrown a gin and tonic on him and stolen his truck. You need to know that I am driving my BMW to the veterinarian because my wife's disheveled cat, Mr. Whiskers, has left slimy chunks of cat food in her shoes six times in the last three weeks.
I hear retching sounds in the back seat. “Don't you dare!” I yell at the cat. “Not in the Beemer!”
There are liquid sounds, then solid sounds, then liquid sounds again. There is a stench. In the rearview mirror, I see a string of goo slide off the cat's chin. I roll down my window and his too, hoping he’ll leap into oncoming traffic.
I’m nearing the Everglades and decide to pull in to look for a towel. “I’ll be right back. Keep your goo inside yourself,” I say to the hellcat. He looks at me and burps.
“Hi, Marco,” I say to the bartender. “I need to borrow a towel. That disgusting cat of Jen’s vomited all over my car.”
He shakes his head and hands me a couple of rags. “You getting rid of that thing soon?” Everybody at Everglades knows about Mr. Whiskers. I’ve been bitching about him for weeks.
“I hope so.” There is a toy monkey with a bobbling head sitting on the bar in front of Marco, and normally I would ask about it, but on this particular day, I am too upset by the goo all over the backseat of the car to get involved in anything else. Its eyes are slits, and it wears a mustard-colored hat. Its prehensile feet stand nonchalantly. I find it menacing.
“Carl’s here,” Marco tells me. He moves the monkey aside to wipe the surface of the bar, then moves it back to its original spot. “He’s out back having a smoke.”
Carl is always smoking.
“Thanks, Marco. I’ll find him.” I take the towels and head toward the parking lot.
Carl makes his way over to the Beemer, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He’s wearing torn jeans and a stained work shirt; his shaggy blond hair is sticking out in multiple directions. He's carrying a large navy blue duffel bag.
“Hey,” he says. He sets the duffel bag on the pavement, removes a lighter from the pocket of his shirt, and lights his cigarette. “Nice mess,” he adds, gesturing at the cat puke.
“Yeah.” I sop up the vomit. As I finish blotting, the cat looks up at me. He belches and spews greenish liquid all over the clean half of the back seat. He coughs, coughs harder, makes a hairball-hacking sound, and falls over.
“Cat?” I say. “Cat?” He is unresponsive. “Mr. Whiskers?”
“Is he dead?” Carl asks me.
The cat simultaneously pisses and shits.
“Mr. Whiskers,” I say to the cat. Suddenly, I am sad, and if Carl were not standing there with that cigarette in his mouth and that duffel bag beside him, tears would fall from my eyes, and I would be surprised by them. But they do not. Instead, I put more towels down on the piss and shit spots, and throw the cat on top of the towels. “Yes,” I say to Carl. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”
“Can I have a ride?” Carl says.
You need to know that Carl has had acid flashbacks in my car. Carl has thrown his clown shoes from the window of my car after a bad birthday party gig. Carl once borrowed my car and returned it filled with packing peanuts. Their tenacious static cling has become legendary. I'm still finding them.
I do not want to say yes.
“Yes,” I say, “but I need to take the carcass to the vet. Jen will want it cremated.”
“Sure, man, I don’t mind,” he says, loading his duffel bag into the trunk. “Can we stop and get some smokes first?”
I pull off the freeway at the next gas station and park alongside the building. I blot more vomit out of the seats while Carl goes inside. While I’m blotting, I decide to return patient calls. As I'm asking Rachel Stevens whether her molar is sensitive to hot or to cold, a car alarm goes off at one of the pumps.
“What did you say?” I ask Rachel. I walk to the rear of the building, which muffles the sound enough so that I can pretend that the noise is some kind of high-tech endodontic alarm in the office. Rachel seems unfazed. She tells me that the tooth throbs when she drinks cold water and tingles when she drinks hot tea. She hasn't eaten in days. It's an emergency.
Carl appears at the corner of the building. He sidles over to me, tugging on my sleeve. “Um, dude,” he says. I point to the phone, shushing him. “Dude,” he says, more urgently. I shush him again.
“Business,” I say. “Just a minute.”
“Dude,” Carl says. “This is important. There's an alligator in your car.”
I look at Carl. His eyes are wide.
“An alligator,” he repeats. “In your car.”
I say to Rachel, “I’ll have to call you back. There’s an alligator in my car.”
Before I end the call, I think I hear Rachel say, “I had to take twelve hundred milligrams of ibuprofen after the peanut butter sandwich,” or maybe it was, “But I don't have time for an alligator to be in your car,” or maybe even, “You're right, it feels just like being on ten thousand Ferris wheels with a gun to your head,” but I can't be sure.
I understand that she is confused, but I assume that she will assume that she has misheard me. She will, I hope, picture a small child who is gushing blood from the socket of his lateral incisor and realize that I have not said alligator and car, but rather emergency and office.
It’s massive, and it’s albino. It must be eight feet long. It must have a hundred teeth. All hundred are massive and pointed, and some have fur stuck between them.
“Dude,” Carl says again. “That albino alligator just ate Mr. Whiskers.”
“Holy shit,” I say. “How do I get it out?”
I stare at the alligator. Carl stares at the alligator. I stare at the alligator.
I look for a circus truck at the pumps. I look for an open sewer grate. I look at Carl. You need to know that the nearest zoo is forty-five miles away. There is a pond on the other side of the building, but it is mostly filled with candy wrappers and soda bottles. “Where did it come from?”
Carl shrugs.
“Is this a joke? It's not funny.”
Carl shakes his head. It is not a joke. An albino alligator is not like packing peanuts.
I have an idea.
“Go buy some beef jerky,” I tell Carl. “We’ll put it on the ground and maybe that’ll lure it out.”
“No!” Carl slams the car door, trapping the albino alligator inside my BMW. I swear it makes a squeaking sound as the car door forces its tail to double over. Carl is obviously in shock. I move to open the door. He closes it again. “Dude,” he says, “This thing is worth a lot of money.”
“So?” I say. “It’s in my car. I have work to do today. On a molar.”
“It’s albino,” he says, “and it’s huge. These things sell for ten grand when they’re babies. This one is probably worth, like, half a million dollars.”
“Where do you expect me to find a buyer?” I ask him. “I have several thousand dollars waiting for me at my office, and those teeth are human.”
“I know a guy,” he says.
“Yeah, right,” I say.
“No, really,” he says, lighting one of his cigarettes. “I know a guy in Vegas. He sells exotic pets. He’s got a guy in Dubai that collects albino reptiles.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “What the fuck am I gonna do with an alligator in my car, even if it’s albino and priceless and you know a guy all the way across the country who knows some other guy in Dubai? I have work to do. Real work. I'm not a crocodile dentist.”
Carl hands me the cigarette. “Smoke this,” he says. I throw his cigarette on the ground and grind it out. I don’t smoke. Not even when there's an alligator in my car.
Carl gives me a dirty look as he dials his phone.
“Amir,” Carl says, “If I brought you an albino alligator, how much would my cut be? Uh-huh… Eight feet. Seriously… no, I haven’t been drinking… no, I’m not exaggerating… okay, so a couple of beers… but it really is eight feet. I don’t know, it’s in my friend’s car. On its own... it just crawled in there. Seriously. No, I'm not. No, I don’t know if a zoo is missing one… No, I don’t know if a zoo is missing one. Uh-huh… that much? Really? Yeah, I know it’s big… not in the wild, you say?... So if we bring it to you, it’s worth how much to us? Okay, call your guy… we’ll wait.”
Carl hangs up the phone and looks at me. “He says albino reptiles can’t live in the wild. He says they die from sunburn. It’s a freak of nature.”
I say, “I’m not driving across the country to sell an alligator that belongs to a zoo,” but I know that if this job requires two people, I will be one of those people, because I cannot say no to Carl. I will tell my receptionist that I have contracted salmonella from a tainted jar of peanut butter.
Carl lights another cigarette, and we wait.
* * *
“Grab the snout,” Carl says. He plugs his non-phone ear, trying to block out the freeway noise. “What? Zip ties? Oh, a rope first? What kind of knot? How do I tie that? Never mind, my buddy will know. Okay, not too tight. Yeah, I know, we’ll try not to. Listen, Amir, we’ll be careful. Pheno-what? Phenobarbital? Where do we get that? Uh-huh… Eight feet, I’d say… I don’t know, I’m not a reptile expert… Is that a lot? What kind of needle? The biggest we can find? In the abdomen? What’s that? Oh, the stomach. Yes, Amir, we’ll make sure it’s in the muscle. Okay. We’ll be careful. Amir, I know it’s valuable. We’ll be careful. Yes, fresh meat, I got it, Amir. Yes, it’s air-conditioned, it’s a fucking BMW. I got it, we’ll be careful, man. Don’t stress so much. We’ll get Whitey to you…Whitey…it’s albino. Never mind. I got it, man.”
Carl hangs up the phone. “We have to go pick up 20-gram liquid doses of phenobarb,” he tells me. “Amir will have his vet phone in a prescription to a vet around here.” I look at him like he’s crazy, which he is. “It’s cold-blooded,” he explains. “It metabolizes slowly.”
“Whitey?” I repeat.
“Yes,” Carl says. “It fits him.”
* * *
We have managed to secure a rope around the gator's snout and limbs, due mostly to the fact that the gator now has its tail jammed with what seems to be an unnatural curvature into the right rear footwell. Carl has audaciously placed a string of zip ties around its snout and pulled them snug, but not too snug, as Amir has instructed. Now, we must jab a needle into its abdomen. Carl insists that dental school has prepared me to administer the injection of phenobarbital, but I am certain that Carl knows very little about dental school.
“Hold it down,” I tell Carl. “I can’t find the muscle when it’s squirming.”
“I’m trying,” he says. “Just get the needle – fuck!”
The gator flails violently; Carl’s arm starts dripping blood as I stab him.
“Sorry, Carl,” I say. “Just hold the fucker and then we’ll take care of it.”
I manage to jab the needle into the gator before Carl gets woozy.
“Isn’t Whitey cute?” Carl asks me as he and the gator fall asleep in unison.
“Can’t we call him something else?” I plead. Carl doesn’t hear me. We’re off to Las Vegas so we can get rid of the reptile. I feel a little sick.
* * *
The sun’s gone down, and Carl’s still drooling on himself. “I wanna stop for flapjacks,” he says.
“They’re called pancakes, Carl.”
“With syrup,” he says. “Lots of syrup.” Carl is lying in a nest of candy wrappers, and now he wants more sugar.
You need to know that I have covered sixteen of Carl's twenty-eight teeth in porcelain crowns, and of those sixteen, three are filled with gutta percha, eugenol, and zinc oxide instead of nerve tissue. All of this, free of charge, and now he wants syrup.
“Syrup. Sure. We should probably feed the gator soon.” I realize that now is the time to get a straight answer from Carl. “What's in the duffel bag?”
“Coke,” Carl says. “Lots of beautiful, white coke. And money. Can we stop for flapjacks?”
* * *
Alabama. I set the Piggly-Wiggly bags next to the car, and the gator thrashes as it smells the meat inside them. Its tail slides back and forth against Carl's seat, leaving muddy streaks.
“Are there flapjacks in there?” Carl asks me. He slurps up the river of spittle that is collecting at the corner of his mouth. His eyes get wide.
“No, Carl, but I did bring you some English muffins.”
“Mmm, flapjacks,” he says, tearing open the cellophane.
I let him stuff a few bites into his mouth. Then I grab him and yell, “IT’S TIME TO FEED THE GATOR, CARL.”
“Man,” he says, “You don’t have to be so rough about it.” I reckon that, despite the sedative, Carl's adrenaline is pumping sufficiently to allow him to function.
“Untie his mouth while I get the steaks ready,” I say.
* * *
Louisiana. We successfully feed the gator two bags of sirloin and place a third in a cooler in the trunk. The car now contains cat goo, rotting blood, cigarette smoke, candy wrappers, gator piss and shit, and English muffin crumbs. We roll down our windows. I find a couple of packing peanuts stuck to mine.
* * *
Texas panhandle. We re-sedate the gator. I do not re-sedate Carl.
All three of us sleep, the gator with its spooky white-pink eyes open, Carl waking every few hours to gator-thrashing against the back of his seat, and me with my hand on my .45, in case I need to put down a rebellion initiated by either of them.
“Carl, do you know why Marco had that monkey?”
“What monkey?”
Before I can tell him about its prehensile feet, he is snoring again.
* * *
New Mexico. You need to know that before Carl had the acid flashback in the car, there were trips to the beach on mushrooms, trips to the mall on marijuana, and trips to the convenience store after bar close, and on many of these occasions, I had to blot Carl's vomit out of the seats.
I return from a piss break at the rest area to find Carl standing next to the car, gazing lovingly at the gator. He tells me, wild-eyed, how fantastic this road trip is turning out to be.
Of course Carl got into the coke. He can’t help himself.
“Isn’t Whitey great? Man, this alligator shit is the best. Hey, you know how you were saying we should name him something else? I just realized why. That’s like… it’s a… what did you call it?”
“A slur,” I say, “a derogatory slur.”
“Right,” Carl says, lighting a cigarette. “Thanks for getting me English muffins, man. Those were awesome. Almost as good as flapjacks. Hey, are you ready to go yet? Look at the gator! He’s so fucking great!”
“Carl,” I grab him by his shirt and slam him up against the car. The cigarette falls from his hand. The gator thrashes, protesting the impact Carl’s body makes against the car. “There is an alligator in the back of my car. This is not the time for fucking around. Don't fucking touch the coke anymore.”
“It's my coke,” Carl says. I do not release my hold. I stare at him. I do not blink. My eyes are slits like the monkey's. “I’ve known you forever, man,” he finally whimpers.
“I don’t fucking care. Don’t touch the coke. And stop calling the gator Whitey. It’s embarrassing.”
“Okay, man, okay,” Carl promises. “Let’s just go.”
* * *
Las Vegas. The gator isn’t sedated anymore and is starting to fidget in the back seat.
“Thank God we’re here,” Carl says. “Now we can relax.”
“No, Carl,” I correct him. “We can’t relax until Amir hands us the cash. We’ve got to watch the gator.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Carl says. “I want clean clothes and a real meal.”
You need to know that Carl dropped out of high school, then community college, then trade school, then college. Carl cannot make it through an entire episode of South Park. Carl has no business transporting exotic reptiles with billions of teeth. That, apparently, is why I am here. Isn't it? Because of all the teeth?
We pull into Amir’s long driveway. His guards wave us through as they see the albino alligator trussed up in the backseat. They are expecting us. We park the car in the garage.
I say, “I’m going out to pick up fresh clothes for both of us. I’ll be back in an hour. You wait here with the gator, and don’t touch the bag in the trunk.”
“Why not? It's my bag.”
I roll my eyes. “Don’t pull that shit with me. Just don’t touch it. And watch the gator. I’ll be back soon with your change of clothes. Then we can give him a little more phenobarb, get the rest of the steaks out of the trunk, and feed him.”
“We should probably just feed him now. He seems hungry.”
“He’ll be fine,” I say. “They go for days in the wild without food. I have to make some business calls. I'm supposed to have salmonella, remember? Just wait here, and we’ll take care of it when I get back.”
* * *
After running errands, I grab the shopping bags containing our new clothes and go outside to hail a cab. “Summerlin,” I say to the driver. Amir’s jet should be landing right about now. We’ve got an hour or two until we can transfer the gator. I hope Carl hasn’t gotten into the coke again.
The cabbie stops in front of Amir’s estate. The gardener is mowing; the pool boy is skimming; Carl should be in the garage, tending the car. I go around back to let myself in. “Carl?”
I rest my hand on my .45. “Carl?” I say again, entering the garage. I flip the light switch. I peer into the rear window of the car.
There are claw marks all the way through the back seat. There is a mountain of fluffy stuffing and white powder covering what’s visible of the tail. The tail is still: too still. Deadly still.
Now, all I’ve got left is an albino alligator corpse full of cat guts, certified Angus beef, half-digested cocaine, and bile-soaked hundred-dollar bills. What’s more, I'm pretty sure it’s festering in the trunk of my BMW.
I open the trunk to verify my hypothesis. The gator's spooky eyes are open, and its mouth is filled with white powder. The powder is variegated with bloody streaks, and a few crumpled bills litter the scene. There is already a stench, of course, but now it will get worse.
I slam the trunk closed and sit on it, resting my shoes on the bumper. I rest my head in my hands. I am sure that, by now, Rachel Stevens either has seen another dentist or has resorted to drinking Anbesol with her morning coffee.
There are packing peanuts stuck to my shoes.
“Whitey!” Carl’s voice rings through the silent garage. “Time for dinner!”
“You’re too late, Carl,” I say, lifting my head. I stand to face him. “Whitey’s already eaten.”
He stops. He has no idea about the backseat and the dead alligator and the bag in the trunk. His eyes are wide as he stares at me. Slowly, he lowers his gaze to the car. He understands. He does not speak.
I think about Rachel's tooth. I think about the ashes I am going to find so that I can pretend that they used to be Mr. Whiskers. I think about the packing peanuts. I think about the salmonella I have contracted.
“Carl,” I say. I think about the .45. I think about Carl's blood spurting from his blown-open chest wall and aortic arch, the chambers of his heart pumping as they attempt to fill his emptying body. I think about the lifeless tail. I think about the clown shoes. I think about the monkey with its slit-eyes. I am still frightened of it.
Finally, I say, “Let's go to the Everglades. But first, I need to find some ashes. Do you mind?”
“Nah, man, I don't mind,” Carl says. “Can we stop and get some smokes first?”
Before I tell you about the road trip with the albino alligator, there are a few things you should know about me, and there are a few things you should know about Carl. Carl and I have been friends ever since he knocked out my left lateral incisor with his right elbow in fifth grade. I'm a dentist now, and Carl sells pot to high school kids. The things Carl and I have in common are guns, of which we both own several (though I prefer to conceal and carry while Carl prefers to store malfunctioning vestiges of the Civil War in the glass cases that flank his formal dining room), drugs, which Carl loves to take and I like to prescribe in moderation, and the Everglades Bar, which has a speckled linoleum floor and a popcorn machine.
You need to know that Carl is at the Everglades and that his girlfriend has thrown a gin and tonic on him and stolen his truck. You need to know that I am driving my BMW to the veterinarian because my wife's disheveled cat, Mr. Whiskers, has left slimy chunks of cat food in her shoes six times in the last three weeks.
I hear retching sounds in the back seat. “Don't you dare!” I yell at the cat. “Not in the Beemer!”
There are liquid sounds, then solid sounds, then liquid sounds again. There is a stench. In the rearview mirror, I see a string of goo slide off the cat's chin. I roll down my window and his too, hoping he’ll leap into oncoming traffic.
I’m nearing the Everglades and decide to pull in to look for a towel. “I’ll be right back. Keep your goo inside yourself,” I say to the hellcat. He looks at me and burps.
“Hi, Marco,” I say to the bartender. “I need to borrow a towel. That disgusting cat of Jen’s vomited all over my car.”
He shakes his head and hands me a couple of rags. “You getting rid of that thing soon?” Everybody at Everglades knows about Mr. Whiskers. I’ve been bitching about him for weeks.
“I hope so.” There is a toy monkey with a bobbling head sitting on the bar in front of Marco, and normally I would ask about it, but on this particular day, I am too upset by the goo all over the backseat of the car to get involved in anything else. Its eyes are slits, and it wears a mustard-colored hat. Its prehensile feet stand nonchalantly. I find it menacing.
“Carl’s here,” Marco tells me. He moves the monkey aside to wipe the surface of the bar, then moves it back to its original spot. “He’s out back having a smoke.”
Carl is always smoking.
“Thanks, Marco. I’ll find him.” I take the towels and head toward the parking lot.
Carl makes his way over to the Beemer, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He’s wearing torn jeans and a stained work shirt; his shaggy blond hair is sticking out in multiple directions. He's carrying a large navy blue duffel bag.
“Hey,” he says. He sets the duffel bag on the pavement, removes a lighter from the pocket of his shirt, and lights his cigarette. “Nice mess,” he adds, gesturing at the cat puke.
“Yeah.” I sop up the vomit. As I finish blotting, the cat looks up at me. He belches and spews greenish liquid all over the clean half of the back seat. He coughs, coughs harder, makes a hairball-hacking sound, and falls over.
“Cat?” I say. “Cat?” He is unresponsive. “Mr. Whiskers?”
“Is he dead?” Carl asks me.
The cat simultaneously pisses and shits.
“Mr. Whiskers,” I say to the cat. Suddenly, I am sad, and if Carl were not standing there with that cigarette in his mouth and that duffel bag beside him, tears would fall from my eyes, and I would be surprised by them. But they do not. Instead, I put more towels down on the piss and shit spots, and throw the cat on top of the towels. “Yes,” I say to Carl. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”
“Can I have a ride?” Carl says.
You need to know that Carl has had acid flashbacks in my car. Carl has thrown his clown shoes from the window of my car after a bad birthday party gig. Carl once borrowed my car and returned it filled with packing peanuts. Their tenacious static cling has become legendary. I'm still finding them.
I do not want to say yes.
“Yes,” I say, “but I need to take the carcass to the vet. Jen will want it cremated.”
“Sure, man, I don’t mind,” he says, loading his duffel bag into the trunk. “Can we stop and get some smokes first?”
I pull off the freeway at the next gas station and park alongside the building. I blot more vomit out of the seats while Carl goes inside. While I’m blotting, I decide to return patient calls. As I'm asking Rachel Stevens whether her molar is sensitive to hot or to cold, a car alarm goes off at one of the pumps.
“What did you say?” I ask Rachel. I walk to the rear of the building, which muffles the sound enough so that I can pretend that the noise is some kind of high-tech endodontic alarm in the office. Rachel seems unfazed. She tells me that the tooth throbs when she drinks cold water and tingles when she drinks hot tea. She hasn't eaten in days. It's an emergency.
Carl appears at the corner of the building. He sidles over to me, tugging on my sleeve. “Um, dude,” he says. I point to the phone, shushing him. “Dude,” he says, more urgently. I shush him again.
“Business,” I say. “Just a minute.”
“Dude,” Carl says. “This is important. There's an alligator in your car.”
I look at Carl. His eyes are wide.
“An alligator,” he repeats. “In your car.”
I say to Rachel, “I’ll have to call you back. There’s an alligator in my car.”
Before I end the call, I think I hear Rachel say, “I had to take twelve hundred milligrams of ibuprofen after the peanut butter sandwich,” or maybe it was, “But I don't have time for an alligator to be in your car,” or maybe even, “You're right, it feels just like being on ten thousand Ferris wheels with a gun to your head,” but I can't be sure.
I understand that she is confused, but I assume that she will assume that she has misheard me. She will, I hope, picture a small child who is gushing blood from the socket of his lateral incisor and realize that I have not said alligator and car, but rather emergency and office.
It’s massive, and it’s albino. It must be eight feet long. It must have a hundred teeth. All hundred are massive and pointed, and some have fur stuck between them.
“Dude,” Carl says again. “That albino alligator just ate Mr. Whiskers.”
“Holy shit,” I say. “How do I get it out?”
I stare at the alligator. Carl stares at the alligator. I stare at the alligator.
I look for a circus truck at the pumps. I look for an open sewer grate. I look at Carl. You need to know that the nearest zoo is forty-five miles away. There is a pond on the other side of the building, but it is mostly filled with candy wrappers and soda bottles. “Where did it come from?”
Carl shrugs.
“Is this a joke? It's not funny.”
Carl shakes his head. It is not a joke. An albino alligator is not like packing peanuts.
I have an idea.
“Go buy some beef jerky,” I tell Carl. “We’ll put it on the ground and maybe that’ll lure it out.”
“No!” Carl slams the car door, trapping the albino alligator inside my BMW. I swear it makes a squeaking sound as the car door forces its tail to double over. Carl is obviously in shock. I move to open the door. He closes it again. “Dude,” he says, “This thing is worth a lot of money.”
“So?” I say. “It’s in my car. I have work to do today. On a molar.”
“It’s albino,” he says, “and it’s huge. These things sell for ten grand when they’re babies. This one is probably worth, like, half a million dollars.”
“Where do you expect me to find a buyer?” I ask him. “I have several thousand dollars waiting for me at my office, and those teeth are human.”
“I know a guy,” he says.
“Yeah, right,” I say.
“No, really,” he says, lighting one of his cigarettes. “I know a guy in Vegas. He sells exotic pets. He’s got a guy in Dubai that collects albino reptiles.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “What the fuck am I gonna do with an alligator in my car, even if it’s albino and priceless and you know a guy all the way across the country who knows some other guy in Dubai? I have work to do. Real work. I'm not a crocodile dentist.”
Carl hands me the cigarette. “Smoke this,” he says. I throw his cigarette on the ground and grind it out. I don’t smoke. Not even when there's an alligator in my car.
Carl gives me a dirty look as he dials his phone.
“Amir,” Carl says, “If I brought you an albino alligator, how much would my cut be? Uh-huh… Eight feet. Seriously… no, I haven’t been drinking… no, I’m not exaggerating… okay, so a couple of beers… but it really is eight feet. I don’t know, it’s in my friend’s car. On its own... it just crawled in there. Seriously. No, I'm not. No, I don’t know if a zoo is missing one… No, I don’t know if a zoo is missing one. Uh-huh… that much? Really? Yeah, I know it’s big… not in the wild, you say?... So if we bring it to you, it’s worth how much to us? Okay, call your guy… we’ll wait.”
Carl hangs up the phone and looks at me. “He says albino reptiles can’t live in the wild. He says they die from sunburn. It’s a freak of nature.”
I say, “I’m not driving across the country to sell an alligator that belongs to a zoo,” but I know that if this job requires two people, I will be one of those people, because I cannot say no to Carl. I will tell my receptionist that I have contracted salmonella from a tainted jar of peanut butter.
Carl lights another cigarette, and we wait.
* * *
“Grab the snout,” Carl says. He plugs his non-phone ear, trying to block out the freeway noise. “What? Zip ties? Oh, a rope first? What kind of knot? How do I tie that? Never mind, my buddy will know. Okay, not too tight. Yeah, I know, we’ll try not to. Listen, Amir, we’ll be careful. Pheno-what? Phenobarbital? Where do we get that? Uh-huh… Eight feet, I’d say… I don’t know, I’m not a reptile expert… Is that a lot? What kind of needle? The biggest we can find? In the abdomen? What’s that? Oh, the stomach. Yes, Amir, we’ll make sure it’s in the muscle. Okay. We’ll be careful. Amir, I know it’s valuable. We’ll be careful. Yes, fresh meat, I got it, Amir. Yes, it’s air-conditioned, it’s a fucking BMW. I got it, we’ll be careful, man. Don’t stress so much. We’ll get Whitey to you…Whitey…it’s albino. Never mind. I got it, man.”
Carl hangs up the phone. “We have to go pick up 20-gram liquid doses of phenobarb,” he tells me. “Amir will have his vet phone in a prescription to a vet around here.” I look at him like he’s crazy, which he is. “It’s cold-blooded,” he explains. “It metabolizes slowly.”
“Whitey?” I repeat.
“Yes,” Carl says. “It fits him.”
* * *
We have managed to secure a rope around the gator's snout and limbs, due mostly to the fact that the gator now has its tail jammed with what seems to be an unnatural curvature into the right rear footwell. Carl has audaciously placed a string of zip ties around its snout and pulled them snug, but not too snug, as Amir has instructed. Now, we must jab a needle into its abdomen. Carl insists that dental school has prepared me to administer the injection of phenobarbital, but I am certain that Carl knows very little about dental school.
“Hold it down,” I tell Carl. “I can’t find the muscle when it’s squirming.”
“I’m trying,” he says. “Just get the needle – fuck!”
The gator flails violently; Carl’s arm starts dripping blood as I stab him.
“Sorry, Carl,” I say. “Just hold the fucker and then we’ll take care of it.”
I manage to jab the needle into the gator before Carl gets woozy.
“Isn’t Whitey cute?” Carl asks me as he and the gator fall asleep in unison.
“Can’t we call him something else?” I plead. Carl doesn’t hear me. We’re off to Las Vegas so we can get rid of the reptile. I feel a little sick.
* * *
The sun’s gone down, and Carl’s still drooling on himself. “I wanna stop for flapjacks,” he says.
“They’re called pancakes, Carl.”
“With syrup,” he says. “Lots of syrup.” Carl is lying in a nest of candy wrappers, and now he wants more sugar.
You need to know that I have covered sixteen of Carl's twenty-eight teeth in porcelain crowns, and of those sixteen, three are filled with gutta percha, eugenol, and zinc oxide instead of nerve tissue. All of this, free of charge, and now he wants syrup.
“Syrup. Sure. We should probably feed the gator soon.” I realize that now is the time to get a straight answer from Carl. “What's in the duffel bag?”
“Coke,” Carl says. “Lots of beautiful, white coke. And money. Can we stop for flapjacks?”
* * *
Alabama. I set the Piggly-Wiggly bags next to the car, and the gator thrashes as it smells the meat inside them. Its tail slides back and forth against Carl's seat, leaving muddy streaks.
“Are there flapjacks in there?” Carl asks me. He slurps up the river of spittle that is collecting at the corner of his mouth. His eyes get wide.
“No, Carl, but I did bring you some English muffins.”
“Mmm, flapjacks,” he says, tearing open the cellophane.
I let him stuff a few bites into his mouth. Then I grab him and yell, “IT’S TIME TO FEED THE GATOR, CARL.”
“Man,” he says, “You don’t have to be so rough about it.” I reckon that, despite the sedative, Carl's adrenaline is pumping sufficiently to allow him to function.
“Untie his mouth while I get the steaks ready,” I say.
* * *
Louisiana. We successfully feed the gator two bags of sirloin and place a third in a cooler in the trunk. The car now contains cat goo, rotting blood, cigarette smoke, candy wrappers, gator piss and shit, and English muffin crumbs. We roll down our windows. I find a couple of packing peanuts stuck to mine.
* * *
Texas panhandle. We re-sedate the gator. I do not re-sedate Carl.
All three of us sleep, the gator with its spooky white-pink eyes open, Carl waking every few hours to gator-thrashing against the back of his seat, and me with my hand on my .45, in case I need to put down a rebellion initiated by either of them.
“Carl, do you know why Marco had that monkey?”
“What monkey?”
Before I can tell him about its prehensile feet, he is snoring again.
* * *
New Mexico. You need to know that before Carl had the acid flashback in the car, there were trips to the beach on mushrooms, trips to the mall on marijuana, and trips to the convenience store after bar close, and on many of these occasions, I had to blot Carl's vomit out of the seats.
I return from a piss break at the rest area to find Carl standing next to the car, gazing lovingly at the gator. He tells me, wild-eyed, how fantastic this road trip is turning out to be.
Of course Carl got into the coke. He can’t help himself.
“Isn’t Whitey great? Man, this alligator shit is the best. Hey, you know how you were saying we should name him something else? I just realized why. That’s like… it’s a… what did you call it?”
“A slur,” I say, “a derogatory slur.”
“Right,” Carl says, lighting a cigarette. “Thanks for getting me English muffins, man. Those were awesome. Almost as good as flapjacks. Hey, are you ready to go yet? Look at the gator! He’s so fucking great!”
“Carl,” I grab him by his shirt and slam him up against the car. The cigarette falls from his hand. The gator thrashes, protesting the impact Carl’s body makes against the car. “There is an alligator in the back of my car. This is not the time for fucking around. Don't fucking touch the coke anymore.”
“It's my coke,” Carl says. I do not release my hold. I stare at him. I do not blink. My eyes are slits like the monkey's. “I’ve known you forever, man,” he finally whimpers.
“I don’t fucking care. Don’t touch the coke. And stop calling the gator Whitey. It’s embarrassing.”
“Okay, man, okay,” Carl promises. “Let’s just go.”
* * *
Las Vegas. The gator isn’t sedated anymore and is starting to fidget in the back seat.
“Thank God we’re here,” Carl says. “Now we can relax.”
“No, Carl,” I correct him. “We can’t relax until Amir hands us the cash. We’ve got to watch the gator.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Carl says. “I want clean clothes and a real meal.”
You need to know that Carl dropped out of high school, then community college, then trade school, then college. Carl cannot make it through an entire episode of South Park. Carl has no business transporting exotic reptiles with billions of teeth. That, apparently, is why I am here. Isn't it? Because of all the teeth?
We pull into Amir’s long driveway. His guards wave us through as they see the albino alligator trussed up in the backseat. They are expecting us. We park the car in the garage.
I say, “I’m going out to pick up fresh clothes for both of us. I’ll be back in an hour. You wait here with the gator, and don’t touch the bag in the trunk.”
“Why not? It's my bag.”
I roll my eyes. “Don’t pull that shit with me. Just don’t touch it. And watch the gator. I’ll be back soon with your change of clothes. Then we can give him a little more phenobarb, get the rest of the steaks out of the trunk, and feed him.”
“We should probably just feed him now. He seems hungry.”
“He’ll be fine,” I say. “They go for days in the wild without food. I have to make some business calls. I'm supposed to have salmonella, remember? Just wait here, and we’ll take care of it when I get back.”
* * *
After running errands, I grab the shopping bags containing our new clothes and go outside to hail a cab. “Summerlin,” I say to the driver. Amir’s jet should be landing right about now. We’ve got an hour or two until we can transfer the gator. I hope Carl hasn’t gotten into the coke again.
The cabbie stops in front of Amir’s estate. The gardener is mowing; the pool boy is skimming; Carl should be in the garage, tending the car. I go around back to let myself in. “Carl?”
I rest my hand on my .45. “Carl?” I say again, entering the garage. I flip the light switch. I peer into the rear window of the car.
There are claw marks all the way through the back seat. There is a mountain of fluffy stuffing and white powder covering what’s visible of the tail. The tail is still: too still. Deadly still.
Now, all I’ve got left is an albino alligator corpse full of cat guts, certified Angus beef, half-digested cocaine, and bile-soaked hundred-dollar bills. What’s more, I'm pretty sure it’s festering in the trunk of my BMW.
I open the trunk to verify my hypothesis. The gator's spooky eyes are open, and its mouth is filled with white powder. The powder is variegated with bloody streaks, and a few crumpled bills litter the scene. There is already a stench, of course, but now it will get worse.
I slam the trunk closed and sit on it, resting my shoes on the bumper. I rest my head in my hands. I am sure that, by now, Rachel Stevens either has seen another dentist or has resorted to drinking Anbesol with her morning coffee.
There are packing peanuts stuck to my shoes.
“Whitey!” Carl’s voice rings through the silent garage. “Time for dinner!”
“You’re too late, Carl,” I say, lifting my head. I stand to face him. “Whitey’s already eaten.”
He stops. He has no idea about the backseat and the dead alligator and the bag in the trunk. His eyes are wide as he stares at me. Slowly, he lowers his gaze to the car. He understands. He does not speak.
I think about Rachel's tooth. I think about the ashes I am going to find so that I can pretend that they used to be Mr. Whiskers. I think about the packing peanuts. I think about the salmonella I have contracted.
“Carl,” I say. I think about the .45. I think about Carl's blood spurting from his blown-open chest wall and aortic arch, the chambers of his heart pumping as they attempt to fill his emptying body. I think about the lifeless tail. I think about the clown shoes. I think about the monkey with its slit-eyes. I am still frightened of it.
Finally, I say, “Let's go to the Everglades. But first, I need to find some ashes. Do you mind?”
“Nah, man, I don't mind,” Carl says. “Can we stop and get some smokes first?”
