It was the kind of drown-in-your-sweat August day where there’s swamp down in front of you, but the sky and the air all around is swamp too, so you can’t tell that the swamp down there is a different thing completely and not a place where people should go. We were on the swamp dock having a contest of who can throw the wildest thing at the gator, which is really a contest of how brave are you, and how stupid, and how mean is this gator? Thing had a big ugly body like snail slime in the water. Down in that rippling gray water below the dock we couldn’t hardly see it except for the eyes.

I was thinking about what I might be able to sling off when Corey lobbed one of his shoes at its head and then lobbed the other, saying it would be easier to come up with some excuse for how he’d lost both shoes rather than just the one. Ben threw a hockey puck and it hit the water right next to the gator and the creature twitched. Everyone hollered when it flinched and Ben groaned about only having the one puck and not a whole slew. While they screamed, I looked up at the rolling gray clouds above us, how they drip-dripped on the dock and our misty heads, but didn’t drip enough that we would snap out of the drowned-summer stupor we were in and realize that we weren’t actually swamp creatures who belonged around this gator, but just Charlie, a handful of my friends, and Lucky Girl the brown lizard that Ben kept in his pocket. 

Tanner said he was getting bored. He lived just back from the edge of the swamp, next to this girl Margie that we all kind of liked, so he told us to hang tight and ran out and back with all of his notebooks from the school year. Wasn’t using them now in deep summer, hardly used them anyway, so there was nothing to do but tear out the pages and hurl wads at the gator, launch paper airplanes from the railing, set loose a flurry of shredded algebra equations. 

“Snow in Florida!” we screamed, “Look at that, you old fucker!” Still that old fucker just sat there and looked at us. We knew he was an old fucker because Tanner’s dad said so, said he had been hanging around that bridge for over fifteen years so we’d better not go down there and mess around. We often went down to mess around.

I could see its eyes moving up to mine, its big hulking feet curling in the mud. Come on kid, it seemed to say, in a familiar, slime-sticky voice. Gimme something better. I shoved a few fingers in my pocket, pulled out a clump of Laffy Taffys for the boys to toss. They were a treat from Mom, on account of Granddaddy died a few weeks ago and she was worried I might go berserk if I didn’t have a little sugar to purge the crazy. I hadn’t eaten a lick of it.

🩸

Granddaddy was a mean old bastard, used to spit meanness sideways at me when Mom wasn’t looking. He had the bent-over shoulders from janitizing at the high school for something like fifty or a thousand years, before he left the trailer and moved in with us. Nasty kid, he’d hiss, you’re a little brat, Charlie. Mom said once that he was bitter from the work, from the spitball-missile kids who’d pretend they couldn’t see him as he slithered through the hallway with his trashcan on wheels, looking right through him like he wasn’t even real. Tough luck for his sorry ass, I thought—I knew for sure that he was real and was the worse off for it. When he wasn’t seething at me, he pushed Mom around in that honey-sick voice like she was his dog. And this in her own house.

She’d ‘a been a good woman if that father of yours hadn’t knocked her up and run off, he’d say to me. Made sure I knew Mom was about to finish high school when I came unbidden and ruined the whole game—I unfurled like a popcorn kernel in her belly, her older boyfriend skittered off to god-knows-where, and at the same damn time a sinkhole took out half the senior parking lot while Granddaddy was washing the windows. The sinkhole didn’t kill him, but it was a last-straw situation given everything else, turned him from grumpy to bananas. Swamp’s gonna swallow us all up one ‘a these days, he’d mutter, over and over. We can’t slip the swamp. 

I wore a spick-span suit to the old man’s funeral, though I ditched the tie for the reception at home. Nobody at the funeral wanted to talk to Charlie the kid, not with their attention so easily diverted by Mom in the tight black dress and the strip of grass out back where they thought she couldn’t see them smoking. I hung out in the corner under Mom’s GED diploma, and nobody talked to me except for Margie, who came by with her dad—a high school teacher who knew Granddaddy off and on. But Margie was only there because they had to drive straight to soccer practice after. Only thirteen and already gunning for some big-time sports scholarship, that girl.

After she left and I got back to sulking, a man I’d never seen before wearing tall gray boots slipped me a dollar to nab a top-of-the-line brew from the fridge in our garage. Knew Granddaddy well, he must have, to know that’s where the top-of-the-line brews got stored and also that my mom had a strict nobody-but-family-in-the-garage rule, on account of that’s where we kept the junk. 

I came back with the beer and couldn’t stop staring at the look of this old fellow, whose boots wrapped around his calves nearly up to his knees. Shiny too, slick-looking like water would bounce right off them. Mr. Boots, as I named him in my head, leaned down and opened his mouth and I got a whiff of gnarly fish-vinegar breath. 

“Miss the old man?” he asked.

“It’s hard for children to lose their grandfather,” I said, a real outsmart answer. Firstly I hadn’t actually said I missed the man, secondly I was not a child, being thirteen and several months past, so it wasn’t hard for me regardless.

“Certainly is,” said Mr. Boots. “Though I never knew my own.”

I didn’t much feel like talking to Mr. Boots in the crowded living room. Too many old people so the whole place reeked of must, not to mention the breath on this geezer. I nodded at him and hightailed it for Mom like she’d called me over. After everyone left, I saw that Mr. Boots had tracked mud all over the carpet. I knew it must have been him because nobody else had feet big enough to fit in those big slick boots and make those footprints.

🩸

The gator sniffed at the banana Laffy Taffy but didn’t bite, but when the grape dropped out of Corey’s hand the old bastard thrashed whip-like like someone had taken a bullet to his ass and snatched that candy right out of the air. We screamed, good God we screamed! I laughed like I’d been pricked with the point end of a feather, the wild-eyed gator staring right up at me while I laughed all bubbly like I had Jell-O slopping in my gut. Man, those gator eyes looked familiar. I felt a thought slip down from somewhere outside of me, wriggle down the ear canal into my brain. 

Here’s your shot to rid the soul! said the thought. I thought it sounded a lot like Granddaddy, but maybe that wasn’t right. But it did sound like someone and it reminded me again of the thing that had happened with Granddaddy and what I was supposed to do now because of it.

Ben had Lucky Girl the brown lizard in the front pocket of his shirt like always, little lizard with the big marshmallow eyes staring out at green swamp and the whole watercolor world. I had a keen urge just then to make Ben scream, to see his eyes go lightning-panic then crash like thunder in the throat. I felt Granddaddy’s hand overtop mine as I grabbed Lucky Girl and lobbed her right up, saw the little scraggle of limbs twisting in an arc as she whipped through the air right down into the gator’s open mouth.

🩸

Last week there was a melt-your-popsicle day when Mom was working the late hospital shift, so I was lying out in front of the house letting my body fat drip into the pavement and weeds while the sun went down. And who should walk up but Mr. Boots himself, still in those honking gray boots on this hottest of hot days so that his feet were probably liquid stink in there.

“You know, I visited your Granddaddy before he died,” he said. Still not bothering with hellos or introductions. “Saw him lying there in the paper robe and sock feet. Not his best showing, eh?” He smacked his fat lips, let the nasty breath hiss out.

I was too puddled to do much but look at him. Sweat was dripping down my crack and he was standing right in front of the sun so it wasn’t too easy to see his eyes. 

“I have something to tell you, and I’m guessing you won’t like it too much,” he said. “I knew your Granddaddy for a long time, saw his life in bits and pieces. He wasn’t a nice man, you know that. But he was crafty, down to the end. He got offered a little deal last time I saw him. A trade. He gets to live on a little bit—not all of him, of course, just a little bit—and all he had to trade for it was the remainder of his soul.” 

Now Mr. Boots was talking like he’d had one too many of the skunk-tail rolls Mom sometimes smoked, when she was beat-down-tired from the studying and the nurse stuff. She told me they were just special cigarettes like I didn’t already know what they were. 

“Okay,” I said, real slow like I was following. “What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, Charlie, a soul’s gotta have someplace to go, even if it’s just a little bit of that soul. Your Granddaddy picked you to hold onto it.”

I snorted, pig-style. 

“My Granddaddy wouldn’t pick me for squat.”

“You think what you like about it. I just wanted to make sure you knew. And that you knew that you can get rid of that little bit of soul, if you want to.”

“How’s that?” 

“Oh, you’ll know when the time comes. It’s just another simple trade, really.”

🩸

“What the fuck, Charlie!”

They were yelling at me, all of them looking at me crazy-eyed like I might pounce on them next. Ben was rigid like a just-dead body gripping the railing on the dock.

“Ease up, y’all!” I yelped, “It wasn’t out of meanness, I don’t even know why I did that!” 

I said this even though it wasn’t all the way honest or dishonest. Whatever Charlie had given old Lucky Girl that toss was not the Charlie I’d known all along, but a Charlie-and-Granddaddy fusion, some inner-gut blend holding the wheel. Charlie felt sick, Charlie didn’t want to throw Lucky Girl, but here I was standing on the dock having thrown her, no doubt about it. The gator wriggled, snake-eyed, below, yawning that big gray maw and still looking at us like he didn’t know why the game had stopped. Sour rose up sloppy in my throat but the voice in my head was still rattling around, ping-ponging off the medulla or whatever was in there. Not enough! Not enough! 

That girl Margie, the one who lived by Tanner and the swamp, had a twin sister who lived with an aunt and went to a scary non-regular school, ‘cause she had stabbed a teacher with a mechanical pencil. We were standing off, me and the rest of the boys, when we heard shoes flopping on the dock. It was Margie’s sister, I think, or maybe Margie herself, a fishing rod slung over one muscle-knotted shoulder. Hard to tell which twin was which while they were both home for the summer. Even though I had just seen Margie at the funeral, I couldn’t tell at all which girl this was. Just a face looking at us funny, not sure what was going on here with all the yelling. No one said a word as she came down the dock, the boys all looked at their feet or toward the gray clouds, not sure where to move or what to do. We were sweating up a storm out there, in that humidity so bad it loosened the old bone glue so those fuckers went clatter-rattle in our bodies. I bet she could hear them, like dice about to be thrown.

🩸

The week before we went down to mess with the gator had been a shitshow. Poor Mom. Just lost her no-good—though she wouldn’t admit it, not to anybody—daddy, and then her little boy starts talking crazy because a piece of that man is swimming in his blood, bumping on bones. I didn’t believe Mr. Boots when he told me the crazy about Granddaddy picking me as his soul-house, but then I started hearing that dead fucker’s voice a little at a time, slinking around while I was trying to sleep or get things done. No-good little shit, Charlie. You’ll never amount to nothing. His words prickling in my throat and behind the ears. I thought if I swallowed too hard they would rip my throat ragged.

I think Mom could see it happening but didn’t know how to fix it so she kept quiet. Just gave me these looks like she’s worried I might fly the coop. Stupid Granddaddy, wouldn’t ever say straight that he took everything out on Mom, but of course he always did, even after dragging his ass to hell he still was—ravaging the wrinkles of her son’s brain so they both have to suffer, but he can keep his corpse hands clean. No, I’d never hurt my little girl! I bet he’d say, with one hand around her throat. Stupid old fucker. And here I was doing the same thing now, feeling those thoughts of his fire off the neurons and sparking out at Mom, like yelling and shit. 

I started thinking a lot about that sinkhole, the one that yawned up the parking lot at the high school after the idea of me popped on the scene. Nobody’d ever really fixed it, just dumped some loose gravel, put up a few orange cones. This was Granddaddy’s brain parasiting mine, it had to be. I’d never cared one speck about that hole, but suddenly I had dreams and dreams of it filling up with swamp water and overflowing, catching me up and washing me right down into the earth like a toilet flush. And there at the bottom of the hole was Mr. Boots, mouth widening bigger than those feet, bigger than me, swallowing me up, his teeth scraping at my arms as I went down.

🩸

Of course, Margie or Margie’s twin sister ended up down in the belly of the gator. It’s what we were all thinking as soon as she stepped on that dock and looked at me and saw the lunatic glint in my eye. Poor girl, just in the wrong place at the wrong time, didn’t do nothing wrong but get too close to Charlie and his mean old Granddaddy. I couldn’t say what happened for sure, just felt my stomach get stone-hard and my feet itching to thrash and move lightning-quick when she approached. The others were hollering, but of course they didn’t really do anything that mattered. Maybe they’ve got Granddaddies in their heads too, Granddaddies who held them back at the key moment as I grappled with Margie or Margie’s sister and shouldered her over the railing. Just some girl, I heard Granddaddy whisper as we heard the splash and the whipping water and the silence. Poor girl never even had time to scream, just right on down she went. The gator’s mouth opened so wide I got a blast of its breath—vinegar and fish rot.

I thought that was it. Soul for soul and all that. But even with the gator below surely having had his fill, I could still feel Granddaddy squirming inside me. The boys were backing away, Tanner had already taken off, surely to scream for his old man. They looked at me like I wasn’t a person, looked right through me to the swamp that was all around, swamp water and swamp sky, and now swamp Charlie too. I thought about Mr. Boots, and the sinkhole, and some last string in me gave way. 

It was gonna get me, one way or another. Soul all ragged with Granddaddy’s rough fingernails biting into the edges and the gator teeth halfway up my soul’s thigh. I could see straight down the gator’s throat, where the rest of Granddaddy was already stomach soup and where I would be one day, me and my offspring too. It would swallow me up, no doubt about it for old Charlie.

I knew then what I had known and not known when we came down to the dock to play the game of what can we throw at the gator. I had already thrown something down to it. I threw it the second I leaned over the railing to see those eyes in the gray body, rippling in the gray water, and felt Granddaddy’s voice ringing through me. I’d thrown it down in advance, before Lucky Girl and Margie or Margie’s sister. I threw it down the second I was born in this sinkhole, the floor already melting down beneath me. That old fucker with his big mean boots knew this game. He’d played it before.