In the Land of Good Living Read online

  “That’s my grandson, who I adopted,” Dale said, nodding at the boy. “Dale McDonald the Third. Poor kid, he was born with cocaine in his system. My boy, he and his wife was on drugs. He’s the one who named him Dale McDonald the Third. Because he knew I’d take care of him, I figure. I built that tree house there for him. You boys ever seen a bear go up a tree? When they go up the tree, the bark just flies. It’s unreal how agile they are…”

  Which, now that I think about it, is probably why Dale turned down the other documentary crews—the real “reality” TV folks—but not us. Men like Dale would sooner embrace the heathen than the degenerate. And degenerate is no doubt how Dale sees the real “reality” folks. “Folks from L.A. wanting to show the country how they already think we are back in L.A.” was how he’d summed them up earlier. “Fake news,” he’d added.

  What he meant, I believe, is this: The real “reality” folks would’ve come and shot Carrabelle, yes. But then they would have selectively edited their footage so as to serve their vision of “reality.” Perhaps they would have portrayed Dale as a bloodthirsty rube, and his fellow townsfolk as swamp louts preoccupied with humping cypress knotholes when not criminally neglecting their children. Perhaps the “reality” folks wouldn’t have done this. Either way, whatever they chose to stitch together in the editing bay—that would’ve become the “reality” of Carrabelle for people not from or familiar with it.

  These folks have power, real power, to fabricate narratives about the world. And Dale with his practical knowledge—his common sense—will forever be at odds with the malleable “reality” encoded and presented by television, social media, all of it. This malleable “reality” (which, let’s be honest, is displacing Dale’s reality via every screen in the land) is largely a rhetorical achievement. “Reality” no longer refers to the natural world and its limits. “Reality” rejects preconditions. “Reality” is whatever people want it to be, and then say it is, individually and en masse, making it so.

  In this sense, the real “reality” folks and the stars they have produced really are a breed of artist. Credit where credit is due. What they fashion is their particular “reality,” crafted less out of verifiable truth than sheer, dogged will. On the Bravo TV network, on Instagram—on the campaign trail!—these artists work tirelessly on the details. The whole world beyond their heads becomes instrumental to their creation(s), self- and otherwise. All becomes material. And material can be altered as needed, can be worked over like clay, can be molded into artifice, can be transfigured into an artifact indistinguishable from what it is meant to represent.

  These artists, they act natural. And that is their art. The real “reality” artist is his own best fiction. His best fiction is his true self. One thing you could say about him—he’ll never be found guilty of insincerity! Or, for that matter, sincerity. In the end, “Kent” can no more be separated from Kent (were I one of these cretins) than lightning could be separated from its flashing.

  “You’re from My-ammuh, you said, ain’t that right?” Captain Dale asked me with a smile.

  “Yessir, that’s right,” I said.

  “I know you. I know what you’ll like.” Dale jogged into his house and returned with a plate piled high with golden-brown fritters.

  “This one, they didn’t want him by the school,” he said. “An old, old, old gator.”

  “You get to keep the meat off the nuisance ones?” Noah wondered. “The skins? No regulations on that?”

  “The easy way to do it—and they let me do it—I work with the Fish and Wildlife Commission, I gotta be careful”—Dale scarfed a fritter, then continued through his padded mouth—“the easy way to do it, they let me bait a hook, and hang a hook for ’em. Bait with fish, chicken—they like it rank. The worse it smells, the better off you are. And once you get ’em on a line, then they’re easy. Well, most of ’em are easy. Then I have a bang stick.”

  “And it never bothers you that you work for the government?” Glenn teased.

  “Bang stick’s a shotgun shell at the end of a stick, correct?” Noah asked, crossing his arms.

  “I use a .223,” Dale said. “See, with a shotgun, you get a big ol’ gator with a head that thick, you can blow a bone into your leg.”

  “Ahhhh,” Glenn and I said, as if that made perfect sense to us.

  “A .223, it’ll penetrate, since it’s a small projectile.”

  “And the skins, the meat…?” Glenn reminded.

  “My wife, she makes jewelry out of the gator scoops. The bumps on their back. Necklaces, earrings. Yessir, uh-huh, I get to keep ’em.”

  Dale shook his bang stick at us. He told us to check its heft and balance.

  “Don’t need a license for that!” he gloated while we handled it inexpertly.

  “We could absolutely use one of these on the road,” Glenn said, waving and thrusting the rod.

  “Whoever’s pushing Thunder could hold it like a lance,” Noah agreed.

  “I used to be a gun dealer,” Dale continued. “Believe me, I know. Frankly, I was surprised the government conceded on this, of all things.

  “Anyway, et up. You know, My-ammuh, that you can’t get this down where you’re from!” Dale turned to the camera. “Can’t eat any gator that comes out of a canal in Miami-Dade or Broward County, because of the lead poisoning. So, enjoy. I got an idea where to take you boys next.”

  We tried to make a perceptible dent in the pyramid of fritters. Dale brought his truck around. Glenn set up the camera stabilizer in the front seat; Dale poured the remaining fritters into four red Solo cups, which he placed in holders around the cab. He pulled us away from his property, and the four of us waved to his grandson-cum-adopted-son as he tear-assed up a tree like the bear Dale had described.

  “So, Dale,” Glenn said, squinting into his viewfinder, throttling the focus. “You never did tell us how you got into alligator wrangling.”

  “Saw an ad in the paper!” he exclaimed. “Now, I’d poached some gators, back when I was frogging. I’d poached a tail or two, uh-huh. They know, when they hire you, that if you don’t mind messing with gators, that means you’ve messed with ’em before.”

  This led Dale to exposit on the history of the alligator in Florida. “Used to be an endangered species, you know,” he told the camera. “They were hunted in Florida just the same as the bison on the Great Plains. Yessir. In the late 1800s, what they’d do is, tens of thousands of alligator hides, they’d roll ’em up and pack ’em in wooden barrels, you know, send ’em to tanneries in the Northeast or even Japan. Then the skins’d ship back to Florida and get solt to tourists.”

  “Talk about free trade!” Glenn said.

  “Yessir!” Dale agreed, plucking a fritter from the cup in the center console. He winked at the camera. “They put up hunting restrictions in the 1900s, but that hardly did nothing. By the 1960s, you couldn’t see a gator by day. It was like they were terrified, holed up. State finally banned hunting ’em in ’62. Then of course the federal government came in and protected them in the early ’70s, uh-huh. The population rebounded re-markably. I believe it was ’87 when they took ’em off the endangered species list. But, you know, they track that by alligator density. Not by total numbers. Nobody knows how many alligators there used to be. From what I’ve heard, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one.”

  Dale turned off at a break in the piney bulwark. He parked next to a dredged pond. “There’s a little one that’s still in there,” Dale warned. “Worst he’ll do is probably bite a toe. Little ones got puppy teeth, you understand. The big one, though—it hissed at the gentleman owns this property. Which means he wants it gone. Which means, because he’s over four feet, he’ll have to be destroyed.”

  “How do you know he’s a nuisance gator?” Glenn asked on behalf of the camera.

  “Because the gentleman reported him!” Dale smiled
. “And that makes him a nuisance. If you got an alligator in your yard and you don’t want him there? Then he’s a nuisance, and you can have him removed.” He popped a fritter, winked again.

  “How’d that sound?” Dale wondered. “That sound all right?”

  “Sounded great, Dale,” I said.

  We hopped out onto the sodden grass surrounding the pond. A larger man in overalls came running up to us. “They won’t let the people—they hissin’ at people!” he pleaded. This man gestured toward the jet-black water dotted with lily pads. “Baby’s still in there somewhere,” he said. He showed us to a dry culvert at the edge of the property. “Big momma’s in there.”

  Dale nodded, rubbed his chin. He got down on one knee, slapped the side of the culvert. He listened to the alligator shifting inside.

  “Semper fi,” Dale addressed Noah, “go get me my catch pole, and my gaff hook, and the lines out of my truck. We’re gonna try for the baby first.”

  We gathered round the pond. Glenn orbited it like a satellite, recording. “It’s no different than fishing,” Dale said, tying a large metal hook to a line. “You don’t always get them when you go.”

  He slid the nick of the hook through the white flesh of a marshmallow. Anticipating our question, he said: “I use marshmallows because they float good. And I guarantee you somebody been feeding this baby human food in this pond. He’s gonna come for this mallow, yessir, just you watch.” Dale handed the line to Noah. “Spin it over your head like a lasso, Semper fi, and let ’er rip. But don’t pull on the first tug, now. Alligator this small, he’s got puppy teeth, real sharp. Let him sink those in there.”

  After a minute or two, the baby surfaced. It floated toward the marshmallow, seemingly without propelling itself. It hesitated. Then in one fluid motion, it bit into the mallow and dove for the bottom of the pond. Noah emitted a noise I did not know he was capable of emitting: a half-delighted, half-terrified castrato shriek.

  “Now pull on ’im!” Dale ordered. Noah gripped the line in two fists, spun his considerable bulk, and yanked with all of his strength. The juvenile alligator came flying out of the water, pinioning its legs as it sailed directly at us. We three amateurs dove out of its way.

  When I looked up, I saw Dale scrambling after the line as the gator beat its way across the property. He pulled up short, made an “awww, phooey” gesture. “You boys owe me a hook and some line,” he said.

  Dale returned to his truck, withdrew his bang stick from the bed, fitted it with a .223 round. “You did good, though. Little guy was under four foot, which means we’d’ve had to tape him up and release him anyway. You just hurried him along his way. Uh-huh.”

  Dale tried to give the bang stick to me, but I backed away. “I’m taking notes,” I explained, and withdrew my pen and pad from my pocket. “Guess it’s you again, Semper fi,” Dale concluded.

  He walked us to the culvert. “See, that’s where they’ll winter,” Dale said. “Like a cave.”

  The dusk had siphoned the last of the daylight. Glenn handed me a small spotlight, which I aimed into the pipe. A husky growl resounded in the black hole.

  “The fella wanted to wait until tomorrow,” Dale relayed with a snicker, “but I said, ‘Well, I got three fellas here, and they wanna film this!’ ”

  “How, uh, big would you say this one is, Dale?” Noah wondered, holding the bang stick across his chest.

  “This one? Only about six, seven foot,” Dale said.

  “Ah, ha, yes,” Noah said. “Only.”

  “You ever get nervous?” I asked Dale.

  He dropped to his haunches and curled a hand around the lip of the culvert. “I told you boys I only been doing this about ten years, didn’t I?” He laughed.

  “Guhhh…” Noah groaned, his gutturality almost harmonizing with what was rippling out of the pipe. He got into an athletic crouch, steadied the bang stick atop his right shoulder.

  “Now, My-ammuh, shine that light right in her eyes,” Dale ordered.

  I did as the man said. Two glowing ember-orbs appeared in the darkness. I thought that the pipe should be emanating heat, but the black was clammy. I withdrew my free hand from Noah’s other shoulder. I took out my notepad and pressed it against my thigh. Retreating into it, I scrawled eyes like struck matches at the bottom of a grave.

  “Steady, now, Semper fi,” Dale said. “Steady as she goes.”

  Noah slid the stick deeper into the culvert while turning his face oblique to it. “Oh, Jeezus,” he muttered.

  “That’s it!” Dale said, anticipation rising in his voice. “Little more now! Right there! Get ready to jab her! Both hands!”

  The alligator’s growl deepened. Noah’s “Guhhh” returned, and intensified. “Finish ’er!” Dale said.

  There was a flash, and a crack, and a sibilance like leaking air.

  —

  MILE 260 — Tallahassee

  A GROTESQUE PLACE

  We had to ditch Rolling Thunder. There was just no getting around it—Route 319 didn’t have a shoulder, and try as we might, we could not force shopping cart wheels through the roadside underbrush. So we found a relatively quiet thicket wherein we made Thunder comfortable. We laid her on her side, we draped her in mini American flags we’d bought at Walmart. We thanked her for her service. We played taps on our phones. And I, at least, had to keep from looking over my shoulder as we left her behind.

  Inside of three thousand feet, I knew I couldn’t hump my pack. A party blower’s honk of agony unfurled up my legs with every step. These roads are so hard, man, and my feet remain shredded. Anguish tickled my purple toenails like a master pianist.

  “I’m feeling the romance again!” Glenn announced. “Feeling like I’m taking ownership of my awful decisions. It’s more mature this way. Having my awful decisions yoked to me.”

  Noah stopped to tighten his stomach harness. He burped something up.

  Thanks to the heat, a skim of sweat coated my body before the first mile was out. Each minute felt as if it had been spread thin against a rough surface, like butter on toast. I tried to think Bruce Chatwin-y thoughts, but I couldn’t strike one spark within the wet nest of my hair. Everything was given over to pain, the first and queenliest of sensations.

  We were still deep in the Panhandle. The wet-pulp odor of nearby paper mills weighted the air with the flavor of human grease. Refreshing scythe swooshes of passing traffic were rare. Much more common were high fences and Keep Out signs that fronted compounds set into the pines. The best way to describe the look of these boondock fortresses: Nouveau Dark Ages.

  “The universal thump,” Noah wheezed. “Lord hits serf. Serf hits wife. Wife slaps boy. Boy kicks dog. Round it fucking goes. Anybody we encounter here is gonna be just itching to pass that thump on to us.”

  By the time we reached a suitably remote spot to camp, I was too tired to wonder at the spilt salt stars above us. Nor could I contort my body into a position that quieted the pain in my feet and shins. Sitting up, I gingerly removed the hiking boots that I insisted on wearing for whatever reason. Archipelagoes of grub-white blisters ringed both feet. The blood under my big toenails had drained, but now those toenails appeared to be unmoored from their nail beds. They were opaque keratin plates. I pressed down on the right one, and clear amber discharge splurted out. I decided to see the operation through. The nail slid out like PEZ from a dispenser. It’d have to be shower sandals from here on, I decided.

  “We’re running up against the problem of not being able to spend any time in these places,” Glenn said the next day. He was checking his phone to see if Sopchoppy’s renowned worm grunters had responded to his Facebook message. “If people don’t get back to us immediately, it’s not like we can hang around waiting a day or two for them.”

  “Right,” Noah said. “We had a choice, and we chose this.”

  By the time we reach
ed the Sopchoppy general store, I had taken to leaning forward and wrapping my arms around myself, so as to transpose the burden of the bag. “You guys wait here,” I said. I entered the dilapidated concrete market. Very few supplies there—certainly no eggs, as chickens roamed freely about town. An elderly woman sweating through her Canadian tuxedo gaped at me from behind the register. “Please,” I asked her, “do you have any shopping carts you don’t want? Or that you’d sell?”

  “Ren!” the woman sang out, tilting an ear toward the back door. “We got any carts back there? Or you give ’em all away to your cousin last month?”

  An underdeveloped man shuffled in and affirmed that his cousin got the carts. He looked me up and down. Pity clouded his non-strabismic eye. “Sorry, we need the ones we got,” he said. “We got one out back with hoses in it, but it don’t move.” He bit his lip, dropped his gaze.

  “Well,” I sighed. “We all gotta die sometime, huh?” I moped out of the store, joined Glenn and Noah at the bench in front. The sudden flash of hope had left me more in darkness.

  After three minutes of silence, Noah said: “C’mon, man. You gotta do it.”

  We pulled ourselves to our feet. Bursting through the shop doors came the cashier. “We got an antique baby buggy, I forgot!” she announced. “If you want it!”

  “Oh, no,” Glenn said. “Oh, no no no.”

  The underdeveloped man wheeled the buggy around the corner. Thing looked as if it’d rolled unpushed out of an Edward Gorey panel. Four tall, thin, white wheels, dry and cracked, supported a scissor-frame chassis upon which a tapered box sat. The box was suggestive of an open coffin. Plush blue velvet covered its exterior; its interior was bare particleboard. It had a sinister velvet hood, too, and a white plastic handlebar with molded finger grooves.

  “This is either a new low or a new high,” Noah said.

  “This is perverse,” Glenn said.

  Into the pram I dropped my bag like a weighted sack into a lake. I took it for a test jog, giggling deliriously. Unlike those of a shopping cart, its wheels were fixed, so there was no torquing. The buggy was also light enough to pilot it with one hand.