AllFreeNovel
Share Us
They spent the next fifteen minutes getting the large reptile taped down and inside the cage. When they both finally sat down on the riverbank, Baptiste asked once again, “So, who is she…this woman you’re going to give your right leg for?”
Gator was shaking his head. “It’s no one. That job I did for René recently…the woman there, I think her husband is abusing her.”
“Like how? Physical?”
“No, it didn’t look like that. More like emotional abuse.”
“How can you tell?”
“The way she was acting. The way he was talking to her. I know bullies…”
He thought back to when he was a child at school twenty-four years earlier. Gaston was a non-aggressive child. He just wanted to do his own thing and be left alone for others to do theirs. But there had been one big boy, Bruno…two years older than him…who seemed to take pleasure in tormenting younger students, especially those who were new to the school.
He decided to start picking on Gaston. Just pushing him in the corridors when he’d pass him…knocking his books out of his hands or stealing his drink or food.
Gaston had hoped it would go away if he ignored the boy, and he tried to avoid him whenever he could. But Bruno was like a fucking blowfly that would always hang around like a bad smell no matter what Gaston would do. Gaston tried talking to his father about it, but he was always either too busy, too drunk, or he just didn’t give a damn about the problems of his son when he said, “I’ve got too much other stuff on my mind to worry about schoolboy scuffles. Why don’t you just go and punch him in the head?”
So, he did. The very next day when Bruno started heading towards Gaston, getting ready to give him a shove, or push him up against the lockers, Gaston hit him right smack in the middle of his face. Bruno fell to the ground and was knocked unconscious as his head hit the floor. There was blood pouring out of his broken nose and some of the girls were freaking out and screaming. When the teacher came to see what all the fuss was about, she looked at Gaston, who was standing over Bruno, and asked, “Did you do this?” He nodded, and he thought he could see her grin before she said, “You’d better come with me to the principal’s office.” Another teacher had arrived, and he was attending to Bruno while all the other kids stood around, presumably wondering whether Gaston had killed the school bully or not. As Miss Pendleton led Gaston off to the principal’s office, and some of the other boys in his class patted him on the back, Gaston felt like he was king for the day.
After waiting thirty minutes for the principal, and then getting told he was expelled from school for a week and his parents were going to be called in to talk about his behavior, Gaston was sent on his way. He knew that knocking someone down would never build him up…at least that was what he had always been taught…but there were different rules for bullies and right now he felt ten feet tall.
When he got home, his maw was in the house with some other guy. They looked flustered and surprised to see Gaston, but his maw didn’t even ask why he was there. She just straightened out her clothes, which were all twisted up, and told him to go outside and play, and that’s what he did, heading back down to the river to the place he felt most connected.
Gaston didn’t have many friends. He was well-liked at school, but outside of there, his friends were the wildlife. It was there he found peace, just listening to the call of the wild. It wasn’t something he feared, even as a gator poked its snout above the black waters looking for its next meal. That wasn’t ever going to be Gaston. He’d always carry a stick to give them a tap and send them on their way if they got too close for comfort. Gaston loved gators the most. They looked big and scary, but he knew they were the ones scared of humans.
He didn’t like to think of anyone, or anything, being scared, but he guessed that sometimes it was needed for survival. He was sure Bruno wasn’t going to scare him again in a hurry, and hoped he would have learned his lesson with other people too. If not…Gaston was certain he would give him another smack in the head till he got the message.
Gaston started to wander back home as the sun was going down and it was getting dark. When he got back to the house his paw was home and he could hear his parents shouting and arguing…again. They did that often. When he was younger, he would run outside or if he couldn’t, he’d cover his ears or turn up his music to drown out their sounds. Now he just walked inside and said, “Hey, Paw. Hey, Maw,” and carried on through to his bedroom. They stopped and acted more civil to one another, but he wondered why they even bothered with all the shouting when the next minute they’d be lovey-dovey and sharing a bottle of Sazerac until they were drunk. One night when his maw and paw had fallen asleep in a drunken stupor Gaston had picked up a half-empty glass from the coffee table and taken a sip. He spat it back out before going into the bathroom and washing the taste out of his mouth with toothpaste.Why would they drink that horrible tasting stuff when there’s Coke in the refrigerator?
As he’d gotten older, his maw and paw seemed to get drunk more often. He wondered why. They would fight, then drink, then laugh, then sleep. They were always going to parties and coming home drunk, but at least they were happy…and while they did that, he got to see Sylvie more and more until one day his maw told him, Sylvie wasn’t coming back.
His maw was alreadythree sheets to the wind, as his paw would say, when he asked her why. His maw passed out before he could get more out of her, so he couldn't tell if she was spinning him a line and just trying to ruffle his feathers like she always did. His maw had a knack for getting under his skin. He never knew why she did it…but Sylvie had suggested it was because she couldn’t do the same to his paw.
When he’d asked Sylvie why his maw was like that, she just shrugged, like she didn’t know the answer to that one either.
Gaston had planned to confront his paw about Sylvie’s sudden disappearance, but fate had a different plan. His old man had landed in the hospital with injuries from a so-called freak accident at work. When Gaston and his maw went to the hospital, his paw was so banged up that Gaston couldn't bring himself to ask about Sylvie.
Days turned into weeks, and Gaston’s paw slowly but surely recovered from his injuries. But by the time he was released from the hospital, Gaston had given up any hope of finding out what happened to Sylvie. She was gone from his life, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
Gaston’s world shattered when he first heard the news that Sylvie wouldn’t be coming back. A lump formed in his throat, and his eyes burned with tears threatening to spill over. But his paw had always told him that boys didn’t cry. So, he took his rage and frustration outside, grabbing the closest stick he could find and storming off towards the river.
He beat the first cypress tree he came upon with all his might, watching as the Spanish moss rained down around him. And just when he thought he couldn't take any more, a pine snake, four feet long and angry as hell, tumbled down onto his head and slithered down to the ground. For a moment, Gaston felt a twinge of guilt for disturbing the snake’s peace.
But he didn’t have time for that. Instead, he tossed his stick aside and scooped up the snake, holding it up to the tree until it wrapped itself around a branch.
As Gaston trudged along the riverbank, his mind was a chaotic mess, and his lungs felt like they were being crushed by an invisible hand that had reached inside the hole Sylvie’s leaving had left in his chest…a gaping wound he couldn’t imagine would ever heal.
He tried to suck in air, but it felt like he was drowning on dry land. His head swam with a million questions, each more painful than the last.Why did she leave? Was it something I said? Did she even care about me at all?
Gaston was scared of life without Sylvie. He didn’t scare easily. The only thing he was really scared of, before today, was the Rougarou. He didn’t know…or didn’t let himself believe…that it wasn’t even real.
There were as many different descriptions of the Rougarou as there were stories of it prowling the shadowy, scariest swamps and marshes of Louisiana. All the voodoo magic in the whole of the state couldn’t keep you safe if it came looking.
Gaston was searching around for another stick, thinking about the way people treated one another and how the Rougarou chose its prey, when the turbulence in the water behind him caused him to spin around on the spot and fall to the ground in the soft mud. The alligator went for his leg, and he didn’t quite pull it back far enough before he felt its jaws clamp down on his boot. Gaston used the vise grip of the gator’s jaw on his boot to help pull himself forward and he punched it on the snout like he was hitting Bruno in the nose back at school. The blow to the sensitive area on the head of the big reptile caused it to let go of him and slide back down into the water.
“Yes!” Gaston shouted. He wasn’t scared now…he was excited. He jumped up to standing and fist-pumped before yelling, “Gaston the gator hunter.” In that instant, the creature most people were most afraid of where he lived had snapped him out of his fear of living.
He found another stick and as he walked along the riverbank, Gaston felt a faint glimmer of hope flicker to life inside him. The air in his lungs came a little easier, and he started to realize that he was lucky to have even had someone as special as Sylvie in his life.
