Mr. Alligator
By VICTORIA BULLIVANT
On the phone I tell Dad about a cemetery where people bury bodies under tree seeds. I imagine sprouts growing from my soft, mulchy guts; waking up as a branch, quivery and tall. Dad tells me that sounds like some hippy shit. When his time comes he’s planning to walk into the mountains to let mountain lions devour his flesh and skin and bone and the tattoo on his back: an H for my and his mother’s name inside a dog for his dog.
Dad used to hate the smashed lines of earthworms on the pavement after rain. He said it was unnatural. One wet afternoon when I was small and we still lived together, he took me outside to save the worms that crawled out onto the driveway from the slushy lawn. He told me to pick them up from largest to smallest, but I wanted to save the babies first. Dad asked if I knew what compromise meant. We picked up the baby worms first and the largest worms second and the medium-sized ones last, placing each in an orange bucket of dirt on the porch.
After Mom and I left a little later, Dad started rowing four hours a day. He grew thick-jawed and thick-muscled. He read books about mountains and mountain lions. He drew and redrew tattoos. He drew color-ins and faxed them to me. Dad still calls sometimes and tells me global warming is natural. The climate changed before man and it will change again, and again. Every time a climber dies on Mount Everest he lists the reasons passersby couldn’t intervene: oxygen, temperature, the fallibility of man against the tall White Mountain.
The next time Dad calls he tells me he’s on route to the hospital to have his chest sliced open. I tell him I love him and he’s a good father even though I don’t especially mean it. I don’t want him to die because I don’t want to fly across the world to meet strangers at his funeral.
They open his chest with big metal clamps. His yellowish heart beats like an inflating balloon. They put a plastic valve in his aorta and stitch him up with thick grey wire.
On the phone Dad tells me he’s a bionic man now. But across the pacific, his island is wintery and dark. He can’t row anymore. His muscles slide off him like the ice caps. He calls Mom late at night and she whispers into the phone for hours. He’s fine, she says, your father just doesn’t realize he’s old. I picture a mountain lion with a small plastic valve in its stomach and think two quiet things at once: 1. When his time comes, will he be strong enough to carry himself into the mountains? 2. If not, who will go with him?
When the rain stopped that evening, Dad and I dumped the orange bucket on the flat, pearly grass. The dark mulch was split with long pink worms, but none of them were moving.
That’s life, Dad said, and took me inside to bathe while Mom made pasta with red sauce. That night I dreamt of snakes longer than spaghetti and thicker than my wrist. They wrapped around my chest, and I woke up screaming. The door opened and a thin line of yellow light slid up and down Dad’s body like a contracting wound. He kneeled next to my bed and made all of my stuffed animals fight to death using weird voices until only Mr. Alligator was left. I am Mr. Alligator, ra la la, I am the winner, ra la la, he boasted, cart wheeling across the bed. Teary that Horsey had been knocked out in the final round, I hid under my covers and murmured for him to put all my animals back on the bed. Right, of course, Dad said, and, goodnight. When I woke up, the worm pile was gone.