Lurking Gators and Puckered Behinds

The little town where I grew up is located in the northwest corner of Louisiana, a part of the state not usually thought of as swampy. Perception matters little because a very swamp-like body of water known as Black Bayou exists less than a mile from my parent’s house.

Southern summers are always hot, northwest Louisiana no exception. I was a sophomore in college before my parents ever got an air conditioner and it always seemed more comfortable outside rather than in. We often wore our swim trunks beneath our jeans so we could go swimming and cool off whenever we were near water, almost anytime because lakes, ponds, streams and bayous abound near Vivian.

Black Bayou is a shallow body of water, usually not much deeper than ten feet. Like the name implies its surface is coffee-colored with visibility little more than a couple of inches. Giant cypress trees with bloated trunks line the bayous perimeter - in the water that is - and they resemble old women draped in shawls because of the Spanish moss hanging from their outstretched branches.

With algae and aquatic plants growing abundantly in the water, Black Bayou would probably not qualify as a prime swimming spot for someone from California or Florida but to us Louisiana boys it was like a dip in a tropical oasis. We would swim almost anywhere but it didn’t stop us from trying to frighten each other with tales of giant alligators and huge gars with rows of razor-sharp teeth.

One summer day my friends Billy and Ronnie and I went fishing on Black Bayou. The hot Louisiana sun sat directly overhead, cooking down on us as we sat, cane poles in hand, on the bayou’s bank,. Without even a nibble for the last hour, Billy suggested we quit fishing and go for a swim instead. We had an old wooden paddle boat so we pushed it toward deeper water and piled in.

“I know you two are probably afraid but when we get out to the middle I’m going to jump in head first and go all the way to the bottom,” Billy said.

“Who’s afraid?” Ronnie asked.

Billy had big ears that protruded straight out from the short brown hair on his head. Like Ronnie and me he was skinny as a rail, his face freckled from constant exposure to the sun. He was grinning, obviously pleased with the concerned reaction elicited by his insinuation of our bravery, or lack thereof.

“If you’re not afraid, you should be. There’s hollows down there twenty feet deep and that’s where the biggest gators and gars lurk.”

“Jump in,” I said. “We’re right behind you.”

Billy did just that, holding his nose and tumbling backwards out of the boat like we’d seen Lloyd Bridges do on the TV show Sea Hunt. Not wanting to step down into the water overgrown with aquatic vegetation, Ronnie and I followed his lead.

Billy was no braver than Ronnie and me but he was enjoying the macho display of daring he was trying to project. He was ten feet from the boat when he ducked his head beneath the bayou’s inky water and dove toward the bottom. Ronnie and I waited for him to surface, beginning to wonder as the seconds ticked away if he’d perhaps become trapped beneath a waterlogged stump, or some other submerged debris.

Like most everyone that spends lots of time in the water, Billy had a good set of lungs and nearly two minutes had passed before his skinny face and big ears came splashing up out of the water.

“Come on, you two. It’s great down there. I think I even grabbed hold of a big gator’s tail.”

Billy’s smiling smirk indicated he was having a good laugh at our expense. We weren’t worried about his daring-do behavior; we’d seen it all before. I was more concerned about the slimy tentacles of lime-green algae meandering through my toes in the warm water. It was then that Billy let out a bloodcurdling scream and began stroking toward the boat as fast as his skinny arms could move.

So absorbed at getting into the boat, he almost capsized it as he hurried out of the water. Ronnie and I assumed that it was just another trick to scare us. We’d both experienced his antics before and neither of us was going to bite this time around. We both stayed put, treading water while trying mostly unsuccessfully to keep our toes away from the icky plants caressing them. When Billy failed to stick his head up after five minutes, we decided to investigate.

Ronnie held one side of the boat as I crawled in, and I balanced the opposite side for him as he followed. Billy was sitting in the bottom of the boat, white as a sheep and wielding a paddle.

“Quit your act,” Ronnie said. “We’re not falling for it this time.”

Billy finally peeked up over the side of the boat and then dragged himself onto one of the plank-like seats. Without speaking, he pointed to a spot about ten feet from the boat. It took only a moment for Ronnie and me to see what he was pointing at.

A half-submerged tree protruded from the shallow water with two of the largest water moccasins I had ever seen were sunning on the branches. As we watched, a third snake swam past them, his ugly head cutting a periscope-like path as he moved steadily toward us. With no exchange of information other than our shared snake sighting, we grabbed our paddles and began stroking back toward shore.

Neither Ronnie nor I bothered smiling or razing Billy as we hiked down the lonely dirt road back to Vivian, our butts puckered, and the resultant tightening it caused making talking and any attempt at facial expressions virtually impossible.

Louisiana Mystery Writer