They met on a Friday after work, the three men in their fifties. Mitch, the youngest, brought a heavy drum of yellow rope. James, the middle one, brought his old truck. Sawyer, the oldest, brought the same cheap twenty-four pack of supermarket beer he always did.
“We need an ice-chest,” Mitch said, getting into the truck.
Sawyer nodded. “Meant to bring one.”
“You two always say that,” said James.
They drained their cans, crushed them, and tossed them into the floorboard where the shifting mass clattered and rolled under their feet with every bump, the old beer smell mixing in the air with wide bands of pale cigarette smoke. This truck was more their place than anywhere else in the world.
They drove down into the swamp, the speakers in the doors shuddering with the static of distant radio stations, their windows rolled down. Mitch tried to change it to a PBS broadcast on the space station, but the other two called him a shit-ass and changed it back. While James drove, Sawyer and Mitch turned their spotlights out into the swamp. Alligator eyes glittered from the muddy banks and drifted in the moss-clotted waters.
The men parked their truck and got out, popping their backs and knuckles, nervous energy buzzing in their bones. Laughing and singing along with the music, they rushed the banks with their spotlights and dropped nooses around alligator snouts. They wound their ropes around trees while the animals thrashed, letting them buck and pant through their teeth, slitted eyes wide, and dragged them back to the truck.
They had little alligators, dog-sized alligators, and big alligators. They tied them down across the hood of the truck, tied a few across the top. They draped rope over the sides and artfully knotted alligators into slings along the back fenders. Little ones were strung up behind the tires like mud-flaps, and one was even tied across the dash, its tail hanging out the window.
Mitch rested his elbow on an alligator head while Sawyer tied it down. “You know,” he said, “it seem to me that this god is most likely some kind of a painter or sculptor or some such thing. An artist god.”
James heard him and walked around from the front of the truck, walking his gator like a dog. “And how did you come up with something like that?”
“Well, you think now. An artist makes something, spends a lot of time on it. It is not without beauty, but we often don’t have the clear reckoning of what it’s for, and truth is that it ain’t much good for anything. And then after the artist finishes, he moves right along and makes something else, don’t ever come back or think nothing of his old paintings no more.”
Sawyer belched. “I like it all right. It does explain the human condition of feeling alone, and the reason why so many prayers go unanswered.”
James shook his head and hoisted his alligator onto the hood. “You are some odd fuckers, the both of you. We’ll come up with something better than that.”
After loading the truck with alligators, their claws scrabbling on the old metal and throats chirping fearfully, the men got back in the truck and plowed down muddy back-roads, slamming through puddles and pits, thick black mud splashing over the truck so high that they had to pull the alligator tail inside and roll up their windows. The one dry gator rubbed his tail along their chests, listening to the sounds of his brothers outside.
Alligator tails swished back and forth, smearing the mud on the windshield, the truck’s body shaking from their movement. “I believe they like it,” Sawyer said.
“Oh, gators likes mud,” said Mitch. “It’s a fact of science.”
James held out his hand for another beer. “I’d feel right terrible if they didn’t.”
They buried the truck up to the doors in mud. James stood in front of the hood and dug around for his winch, shoving alligator legs out of the way, and tying the cable around an oak tree to pull them out with a great sucking sound, the gators opening their mouths to the air. Then, they pulled back onto the main road, the wind hardening the shell of mud on the alligators’ backs and making them sleep in their dirt cocoons.
Town was empty this late at night, but they found an automated car wash and put in a few dollars. “All they got’s cherry wax. I don’t even like cherries,” James said.
Sawyer shook his head. “Never understood how a man can not like a cherry. In any case, we muddied them, so we got to clean them.”
James pulled into the wash and the machines came alive, brushes and foaming jets falling onto the truck. The alligators woke up and made shrill throat-sounds, their claws clicking against the truck like a swarm of insects.
“Now, the problem,” James began, “with this artist theory is that it don’t take into account the whole scope and breadth of human religions, see? I think the god is more of an au-to-bo-dy-re-stor-er. Kind of man who takes your old beat-up shit-heap of a car and makes it into something that can win a car show, sells it to some rich fuck who don’t even drive the thing, and it rots in a garage somewhere for the rest of its life, or until his rich shit-for-brains son wrecks it trying to get out the driveway.”
“How exactly does that account for all that breadth and scope you mentioned?” Mitch asked him.
“Well, it’s a simple thing, ain’t it? The planet is a car. We done had religion after religion fix it up and drive it for a while, then we get another, and so on. Currently, we’re all fixed up, but we’re sitting in a showroom somewhere, waiting to be wrecked.”
“There’s all kinds of religions, though,” Sawyer said.
“Yeah, but only one of them is really with it at a time. Right now, it’s your protestants. Your others done had their chances.”
Mitch shook his head. “That sounds mighty eth-no-centric to me, you just leaving out all India and the Middle East like that.”
“You just give me some time,” said Sawyer. “I can top both of you.”
After pulling out of the car wash, they saw that the alligators had gone pale, all the green and roughness scrubbed off of them. Their skins were so tender from the blasts of mud and pressure-washing that they had gone pink and soft, moaning from the ropes cutting into their skin.
“Hell,” James said. “We can’t take them back to the river, not puny as this.”
“And what do you reckon we do with a truck-load of wimpy gators then?” Sawyer asked. “We can’t just leave them in the parking lot at the Wal-Mart.”
“We done left stranger things out there,” said Mitch.
The three watched the town lights play across the alligators’ slick backs, when they noticed that something strange was happening. The red and yellow lights of liquor stores, fast food restaurants, and pawn shops fell across the alligators and saturated their skins, soaking into them. They curled up in their ropes, their noses blunted. They were starting to become men.
“Do you see what the light is doing?” Sawyer asked. “Go drive around the titty bar.”
James turned off the main road and went out to the strip club, a haze of pink and green lights on the gravel parking lot. He looped the building until the alligators’ limbs had lengthened into legs and arms. They swore and shivered on the sides of the truck.
“If lights is what makes you a person,” James said, “then what were we in the dark of the womb?”
“You was a tadpole to begin with,” Mitch told him. “All your modern sciences agree on this point.”
Sawyer looked at the alligator on the dash: green, dry, and completely alone now. “I feel bad for this one.” His friends nodded.
They drove back to Sawyer’s house. He went inside and came out with several old pairs of jeans, plaid shirts, trucker hats, and a pile of old tennis shoes.
“You ever thrown a goddamned thing away?” James asked him.
Sawyer did not respond, but stroked the alligators’ new faces. “It’s a hell, being born,” he told them.
They cut the alligators loose, except for the one still tied to the dash, and watched them wrap their arms around themselves and huddle together in the yellow floodlights of the house. The three men tossed the clothes to them and watched the alligator-men put them on.
“I believe I have it,” Sawyer said. “When you look at the ratio of water to land on this planet, coupled with the seasonal pollen, it stands to reason that god is a distiller and this planet is a barrel of liquor.” His friends did not look convinced, so he continued, the alligators walking unsteadily on two legs around the truck. “We’re fermenting, see? Everything’s real lively right now, but one day we little yeasties will be done, everything in the barrel will die, and it will just be smooth whiskey.”
“I ain’t never much thought of myself as a yeast,” James said.
“Well I like it,” said Mitch. “I think it explains a lot.”
One of the alligator men adjusted his hat, and holding up his pants with one clawed hand, he approached the men.
“Is god really a distiller?” it asked.
“There is some disagreement on what the god is,” James said. “And on what all this is for. We never really get nowhere with it.”
Another alligator came forward. “Why did you do all that to us?” he asked.
Mitch shrugged. “We was drunk pretty good. We just do things sometimes.”
“Maybe that’s what god is,” the alligator said. “He just got drunk and whipped all this up one night. He don’t even know why.”
Sawyer looked at the others. “Well shit. That ain’t bad, is it?”
“From the mouths of gators,” James said.
“Or,” said another alligator, “maybe god is a great big alligator, and he made this muddy wet place to crawl down inside and get away from the sun.”
Mitch shook his head. “Most people’s conception of the almighty is in form like unto themselves. It’s hardly surprising a gator would conceive of a gator-god. I’m not sold on it, though.”
“Now who’s being eth-no-centric?” James asked. “I’d like a gator god, tell you the truth.”
“I like it,” said Sawyer.
“Well, it feels less depressing somehow than all that drunk god business. But if god’s a gator, what would that make us?”
“We are the lice in his scales,” one of the gators said, throwing his arms wide. The other one nodded, passing around cans of beer from the truck. Pretty soon, the gators drank them out. James tied the snout of the dash gator shut, put it on a thick leash of rope, and handed him over to his brothers. The three friends said goodbye, then, and left the alligator-men on the lawn to find their own way in the world.
The alligators went back into the sun the next day, but their bodies stayed small and pink. They kept their clothes and found factory work. They roomed together in a run-down apartment complex not far from the swamp, slipping out at night to drink beer on the bank and to try and woo old alligator lovers. They thought about their future. Should they buy better health insurance? Start a savings account? Try to go to college? Everything was new and complicated, the sounds of their old life buzzing just outside the windows.
The next weekend, the three friends met at a gas station after work. Mitch rolled a drum of yellow rope out of his car and put it into the back of James’s old truck. Sawyer walked out of the store with a twenty-four pack of beer under his arm. They leaned against the truck and took off their hats, rubbing their heads. The door opened, and one of the alligator-men walked out of the gas station carrying a Styrofoam cooler and a bag of ice.
The three friends looked at one another.
“Hey, man,” James said. “You want to come driving with us?”
The alligator hitched up his pants. “That sounds all right, I guess.”
“What’s your name?” Mitch asked him.
“I go by Rafael.”
Sawyer nodded. “Something amphibious about that name. I always did think so.”
“How’s that alligator doing?” Mitch asked. “The one that didn’t change.”
“He’s doing all right,” Rafael said. “We got to hide him from the landlord. But he stays in the bathtub mostly.”
The four of them packed into the truck and pulled out onto the road, a hot breeze rippling through the car, an icy can in each of their hands.
“I do like having a cooler,” Sawyer said.
“Rafael, you gators got anything new to say about god?” James asked.
Rafael took a drink and swallowed, his alligator throat jumping. “We been cooking up some things. You want to hear about it?”
The men nodded that they did and passed around a crushed pack of cigarettes. Rafael looked out the window toward the swamp, his tiny ears filling with the sounds of dragonflies and bullfrogs. He started telling them about the alligators’ gods.
