Alligators, and: Cleveland, Ohio

Alligators

How at the VFW bar, he rolled up his sleeves. Alligators curled around his wrists. Eighteen of them, he said. I just like them, I don’t know why.

How I saw one in the yard and told my ex-wife, Don’t go out there now.

How an alligator slides backward into its pond the way a ruined man slides into himself.

He fought off six of them with a pool cue. One of them cut me right here with a goddamn broken bottle.

An alligator slept on his forearm. One curled around his neck.

How their bellies flatten the grass they move through so you can follow their trails, how they sleep at the pond’s edge, hundreds of them along the shore—

Should of known. They come up behind you when you ain’t expecting it, hit you on the head with a beer bottle. And for what?

He was halfway drunk, his good eye focused on the row of bottles below the TV set.

I only laughed to keep him quiet.

I’d lost my job a few times recently, my wife was in Connecticut somewhere with my kid, and outside it was nighttime, cicadas lighting up the air with their racket.

You will maybe find arms or legs in its belly.

You will maybe find scratches around its eyes where she tried to fight it off.

You be good now, you hear? You drive safe. You watch your back. You hear?

Sometimes, one comes out at night and crawls along the sidewalks or stalks through the lawn. Sometimes, they’re in the swimming pool or your garage, sometimes they’re in your living room drinking, they’re in your kitchen waving around a broken beer bottle sometimes—

At first I couldn’t find my keys. Then I couldn’t unlock the door.

In the dark water, the black hearts keep beating.

Cleveland, Ohio

The last thing my father did was lie in bed.

A machine kept beeping. It stood by his feet and its screen glowed greenly.

The falling snow looked like insects swarming around the streetlamps.

I was afraid to turn on the light.

His hands had swollen and when he breathed, the liquid in his chest grew thick so the room filled with the sound of it and no one came,

the nurses wouldn’t drain his lungs, wouldn’t hold his hand or cut him open, the nurses stood in the doorway and shook their heads and smiled,

said, He’s asleep, he can’t feel a thing, and increased his dose

while far away the phone rang and rang and the sky above Cleveland filled with insects

and the machine at the foot of the bed considered my father

who was sleeping and would go on sleeping forever.

+

Years later, a dog had been barking happily all evening,

and now it was past midnight and the BI-LO glowed dimly behind the apartment buildings.

Someone had chained him to a post and he greeted the passing train, the buses that rumbled down West Twenty-Fifth Street,

that man walking toward the intersection who stopped as if to pet him, then, under the red light, aimed carefully and shot him in the head.

The dog whimpered

long past the time when the man turned the corner and the light turned green,

and from his balcony my neighbor tilted his bottle to the evening, said, Finally! and went inside for the night.

+

When he inhaled, I heard a sucking sound, followed by the long rattle of his exhalation

and across the hall a woman with her back to me held a child and sang all night

and whether the intravenous tubes extended into her or into her child I could not tell

and every room was bathed by the televisions and the green light of those machines awake at the ends of the beds

until I looked out the window and into the snow where years later a man would shoot a dog at the intersection of West Twenty-Fifth Street and Jay Avenue.

+

The dog was still whimpering, its legs twitching, and when I reached through the fence to pat him

he tapped his tail happily against the grass

and when I walked away, he whimpered, so I returned and it took that dog half an hour to die.

+

He is still barking into the very same night my father sleeps in now,

having made death, at least, a thing to be slipped into quietly and recalled as breathing

that slows and rattles as the nurse says, He is dreaming, he is comfortable, it won’t be long, and increases his dose

and I cannot know if he is dreaming or merely emptied,

and that woman wrapped in tubes holds her child and sings

and Cleveland spreads out around us, the Terminal Tower’s cold lights, the glowing green arrows up Carnegie Avenue, and the red arrows,

Shaker Heights, Beachwood Place buried in snow, the mall like a great machine blinking along the highway’s edge.