The Old Girl

Chapter 1: The Hoist

Russell Guidry woke at ten past two in the morning to the sound of somebody laying paste.

He knew that sound the way a shrimper knows the groan of his own winch. Forty years of it. The wet slap of a brush loaded too heavy. The soft push of a palm smoothing a strip flat. The small sucking kiss of paper lifted and set down again. It came across the dark yard from the den, the long tin-roofed warehouse behind the cottage where he built parade floats. For a moment, with the pain pills still thick in his blood, he thought it was 1985 and one of his crew was working late on a king's head.

Then he remembered what month it was.

February. Eleven days to Mardi Gras. Before February there had been January, and the one night in January he had not been able to get out of this bed.

He lay still and listened. Rain ticked on the roof. A pickup went by out on Fowl River Road, its tires hissing on the wet blacktop. Under all of it, patient and steady, came the slap, the smoothing, and the kiss.

"No, ma'am," Russell said to the ceiling. "Not tonight."

Getting up took a long time. The cancer had eaten forty pounds off him since Thanksgiving, and his legs felt borrowed from an older man. He found his boots by the bedroom door and did not bother with socks. He took the big flashlight off its nail and his rain jacket off its hook. From the cabinet under the kitchen sink he took the bucket he had mixed three weeks ago and never carried out. Flour and water and a little salt, gone sour now, with a grey skin on top. Under his arm he tucked a roll of the Press-Register, rubber-banded tight. He had been saving that newspaper all year for this.

On the back steps he stopped and looked at the trailer beside the den. Dark. Dustin went to bed early now. Sober people did. Russell thought about knocking on that tin door and did not. He had kept this from his son for thirty-one years. He was not going to hand it over in the rain at two in the morning in his boxer shorts.

The den door was unlocked.

He had locked it. He always locked it. He stood in the rain with his hand on the cold knob and told himself that pills made a man forget things. Then he pushed the door open and slapped the switch.

The work lights came up one bank at a time down the length of the building, buzzing, and the heads came up with them.

There were more than a hundred of them, and Russell had made every one. Kings with gold leaf on their beards. Jesters with bells painted on their caps. A Neptune twelve feet tall with a trident across his chest. Dragons and sea serpents and a pelican big enough to swallow a Volkswagen. Thirty years of moons with sleepy eyes. They sat on shelves and on pallets and hung from the rafters on cables, and every face was turned toward the center aisle, because that was how you stored them, so you could see what you had. Russell had walked this aisle every day of his working life. He had never once felt watched in here until the year his wife left.

The paste sounds had stopped when the lights came on.

He walked down the aisle with the bucket knocking against his knee. The air smelled the way it always smelled in rain, like wet cardboard and mildew and the sweet rot of old flour. Two space heaters glowed orange by the workbenches, where he had left them to keep the paste from going cold. In the heat the old heads ticked and crackled as their paper skins shifted. In the quiet it sounded like a room full of people breathing through their noses.

Halfway down, he passed the new queen.

Mothers of Legend, the Order of the Painted Dove had picked for their theme this year, and Russell had sketched them a Queen of the Carnival seated on a throne, eighteen feet tall at the crown. Right now she was a skeleton of welded rebar and chicken wire with a plywood platform for a lap. No face yet. No hands. Dustin and Clyde would finish her. He had told them so last week, in the voice he used when he meant it.

Above the aisle, hanging on the chain hoist from the center beam, was the alligator.

She was a mother gator, meant to crawl at the front of the queen's float with her babies riding on her back. Her head alone ran nine feet, from the bumps on her snout to the back of her skull. Steel armature, plywood jaw, chicken wire, eleven layers of paper, and eyes made from the bottoms of green glass jugs. He had hung her up there on Monday so he could work inside her jaw where nobody would see what he was doing. He had finished that work. It was the last job he had done for himself.

Russell walked under her without looking up and went on to the back stall.

The stall was built into the far corner of the den, a room inside the room, eight feet by twelve, with plank walls and its own door. He had put three locks on that door over the years. The padlock was lying on the concrete. The hasp it had hung from was still clamped in its shackle, and the four screws that had held the hasp to the wood were still in it, long and bright and bent. Around the empty holes, the wood of the door was split outward in white splinters.

From the inside.

Russell set down the bucket.

The door stood open about a foot. Through the gap he could see the hem of the canvas tarp. He had sewn that tarp himself, back when Clinton was president, out of two old boat covers. It had always reached the floor. Now the hem was torn, a long ragged rip up one side, and beneath it, coming out of the stall and onto the concrete of the den, were streaks. Long grey streaks, wide as a hand, curving and overlapping, still shining wet. They looked as if something heavy had been dragged across the floor. Or had dragged itself.

The streaks went past his boots and down the aisle the way he had come.

He turned the flashlight that way, though the work lights were on and he did not need it. The grey streaks ran under the alligator, past the skeleton of the queen, and in among the shelves of old heads, and there they stopped. Or he lost them. There was a lot of shadow down among the shelves.

"I know," Russell said. His voice came out thin. "I know I missed it. I was sick, girl. I'm here now. I brought you your supper."

Nothing moved.

He crouched, slow, his knees popping, and peeled the skin off the paste and laid a strip of newspaper in it. His hands were shaking. He was going to have to go into the stall and do the work by flashlight. He did not know if she was in there or out here. In thirty-one years, she had never been out here.

Something above him clicked.

He knew that sound too. The chain hoist had a pawl that dropped into a toothed wheel to hold the load. When you wanted to lower something, you pulled the hand chain, and the pawl lifted, and the wheel turned. Click, click, click, slow and measured, one tooth at a time. Somebody was working the hand chain.

Russell looked up.

The mother gator's head hung right over him, turning gently on her hook the way they did when the load shifted. Her green glass eyes caught the work lights. Her painted teeth were each as long as his forearm. On the far side of her, up on the catwalk that ran along the center beam, where nobody had walked since Dustin was a teenager, something was crouched with both hands on the hoist chain.

He could not see it well. The gator was in the way. He saw a shape the grey of wet newspaper, hunched and narrow. He saw long fingers with too many joints in them. He saw that it had no face at all, only a smooth paper oval, blank as an egg, tipped down toward him with what looked very much like interest.

Then it let go of the chain.

The pawl must already have been lifted out of the teeth, because the chain did not click anymore. It whined. The wheel spun. Russell had time to take one step backward. He had time to think, very clearly, of his daughter at eleven years old, holding her arm against her chest in this building with the blood running out between her fingers, looking up at him and asking, *Is Mama going to be okay?*

The gator's lower jaw hit him first, across the shoulders and the back of the neck, and drove him face-down onto the concrete. He heard his collarbone go like a green stick. Then the rest of the head came down on top of the jaw, eight hundred pounds of steel and plywood and paper. He felt his ribs fold in on the left side one after another, a row of dull wet snaps. The air went out of him and did not come back in.

He lay with his cheek on the floor. He could not move his arms. Very close to his eye was a puddle of sour paste where the bucket had tipped. He tried to breathe, and something in his chest grated, and the pain went white.

In the corner of his eye, the grey shape came down off the catwalk. It did not climb down. It poured, almost, from the beam to a shelf to the floor, and landed with a soft heavy sound like a wet sack of laundry. He heard it cross the floor toward him. He heard the slow drag of it, and the little kisses where it peeled up off the concrete with each step.

It stopped beside his face. He could see its feet now. They were wrapped in newspaper, layer on layer, the edges curling. On the top of one foot he could read part of a headline from a January long ago. Under the paper, where it had torn at the toes, there was something brown and dry and tight, like the skin of a smoked ham.

A hand came down and touched his cheek. Cold. Wet. It patted him twice, gently, the way you pat a child who is falling asleep. When it lifted away, it left a smear of paste on his face.

Russell tried to say her name. What came out was blood.

The feet turned and went away down the aisle, dragging, kissing. After a while the den was quiet except for the heaters and the ticking of a hundred painted heads breathing through their noses in the heat.

Dustin found him at six-fifteen, when he came over to make the coffee.