commentfic ficfic fic -- 'Sawgrass'
Ruth made a ficlet here and then there was commentfic and then she set me up so perfectly I couldn't not write this, mixing Pevensies and TSGites and Florida in a most happymaking manner.
AND THUS I PRESENT TO YOU A FIC.
'Sawgrass'
Set in the TSG-verse, 1519 words
Eustace, Mary, Asim, Peter, a camera bag, an airboat, and the Florida Everglades.
FLORIDA, 1952.
“Go along then, Peter,” Mary called happily from the airboat, high and dry. Which was to say, not exactly. Dryness was a relative term here, where the air felt like dog’s breath and sweating profusely only added to the mess, but the point was that Mary was still safely in the boat and not muddy up to the knees.
Boats. It had to be boats, didn’t it? And mud. Boats and mud. And sawgrass, which lived up to its name, as two battered pairs of trousers showed. Not that the trousers mattered any longer, covered in marshy swamp muck as they were. Peter was going to burn the lot of it just as soon as he’d got back to civilization and begged Asim to procure some new clothing.
Another step. More bubbles. Peter untangled a length of rotting Spanish moss from his leg before putting it back in the mud.
One thing he’d give Asim over Ed: Asim was less likely to throw a few joke items into the mix. Why anybody needed a pair of leopard-spotted Y-fronts did not bear thinking about; Ed’s explanation was that it would guard Peter’s virtue just as ably as Fooh and Beehn hadn’t - because any woman seeing Peter in only that would laugh herself into a coma. Asim didn’t do things like that.
Though, one could only handle so much competence before one longed for a cheap costume-shop Elizabethan ruff tucked into the suitcase where the necktie ought to be. Shame that Ed hadn’t been able to come along this time, but whatever Susan had dragged him into in Russia sounded interesting: Rat and Crow business, thoroughly, and Peter hadn’t the heart to issue an order to the contrary. Not that he’d be obeyed, but occasionally it was worth the attempt.
The swamp hummed and creaked and sang: a thousand different animals bawled and buzzed and bellowed, and deep at the edge of Peter’s hearing was something else he couldn’t quite identify. He dismissed the thought and studied the bag.
“It’s not going to stop sinking just because you stare at it,” said Eustace the Un-Dragoned; Peter charitably assumed he was trying to be helpful. “That branch is sinking under it.”
With another sucking, slurping, schlorp, Peter’s left leg came free. His tightly-tied boots, US Army surplus, were wet inside and out but still on his feet. Thankful for small favors, Peter balanced on one leg like a wood stork and tried to determine where to step next.
It was his fault the camera bag had fallen. It really was, because Mary exclaiming with wild gesticulation had nothing to do with Eustace dodging out of the way, which had nothing to do with how Asim had been upset backwards over his seat, which had absolutely not jostled Peter to the edge of the boat railing, where Peter unfortunately had dropped the camera bag over the side.
Everything stopped dead when the bag hit the mud with a resounding splat: Eustace cowered, Mary froze in the air like a crazed scarecrow, and Asim calmly stared up from his undignified place on the boat’s floor, head between his knees.
“Ah,” Peter had said, his voice booming in the sudden quiet, and that was how he wound up knees-deep in the Florida Everglades. Clearly, the first to notice a mishap was the one at fault, as long as it was Peter.
Peter planted his leg, grabbed a cypress root, and leaned into a long, low stretch. His fingers brushed the bag’s strap.
“Almost got it!” Eustace called, helpfully.
“Very good, Peter, thank you,” Mary said, then turned back to Eustace. “And I am telling you, Polly was right to tell us not to come during breeding season. They’re much more aggressive then.”
Peter’s fingers coaxed the strap nearer.
“If they were in rut we’d be able to see the territorial displays,” Eustace countered. “Polly said they really were worth seeing. And we haven’t seen a thing at all, except for that turtle.” If it was not a reptile, Eustace was not interested. For the first two weeks he’d binged on insects - of which there were an alarming local variety, all of them fanged - and at this point only enormous angry crocodilians would do.
“Macrochelys temminckii is one of the largest freshwater turtles in the world, Eustace,” scolded Mary, “and you’d do well to show it some respect.”
Mary had been ecstatic at the sight of the thing. Of course she had: what the locals called an ‘alligator snapping turtle’ was enormous, thickly spined, and resembled nothing so much as the illegitimate offspring of a rhinoceros and a pangolin - one with a bad, bad hangover and the head of a dinosaur.
Peter finally caught hold of the strap and wrapped it twice around his wrist. He pulled the bag free and the swamp let go with a bubble.
“I’m sure it felt very respected when you had Peter throw that cloth over its mouth so you could measure the plastron,” said Eustace. “The hissing, I’m sure, was a sign of gratitude.”
“No, the hissing was because it felt threatened and wanted to bite our faces off,” Mary said cheerfully. “Magnificent threat display once we let it go, wasn’t that?”
“I’d no idea they could dent aluminum,” Eustace agreed.
The thing to do, if you are Mary and/or Eustace, having measured an enormous and angry snapping turtle whose species is named after an alligator, is to dump it with a splat back into the mud and then poke it with a tentpole. Of course. Of course. Peter sighed and slung the camera bag over his shoulder.
“Right, I’m coming back,” Peter said. He slurped and squished and squelched, as around him the swamp squawked and hummed and gurgled.
“A proper alligator, now, not a turtle, would have taken the pole from you,” Eustace said. “I know they’re rare, but I’d no idea they were this rare.”
“We’ve done what we could,” Mary soothed, and true, they had. Eustace had surprised everybody by working well undercover and arranging to purchase an illegal shipment of baby alligators destined for the pet trade. Peter and Asim had no trouble at all breaking into the facility and removing the crates under the darkness of night. It said something about the hardiness of the species that all twelve specimens had survived Mary’s hell-bent-for-leather drive through the barrier islands and back to civilization. The thrilled herpetologists who’d taken custody of the baby gators had thanked them with the reptiles’ weight in rotgut: gallons of proper Cracker moonshine, one hundred and thirty proof, which they assured their English visitors was a recipe dating back to before what they called the War Between The States.
If the Confederates had felt like that come morning, Peter remembered thinking, no wonder they lost.
“I still should like to see a proper adult, in the wild,” Eustace said.
“As would I,” Mary said. “We’ll just have to keep looking, won’t we?”
We shall do no such thing, Peter wanted to say: instead we shall - we meaning himself, and possibly Asim; Mary and Eustace could do as they damn well pleased. At the very least, Peter himself had no further desire than to return to that hotel, with the astonishing new air-conditioning machines that made it feel like April in Perthshire when it was really July in Plantation.
At this point, thought Peter, wading back to the boat - which had drifted a good distance while he was retrieving the camera bag - he’d even be willing to detour up to that spiritualist camp they’d heard stories about. Castle something, wasn’t it? Castle Day? It didn’t matter. Spiritualists probably liked to be dry, and they probably liked indoor plumbing, and they might even have some of those air-conditioning machines.
“Peter!” Asim shouted, sharp with warning, and Peter found himself grabbed by the belt and pulled back to the side of the boat. Asim hung over the side, his beard nearly trailing in the water, and Mary and Eustace were holding his legs to keep him from going overboard.
“Carefully now,” Mary said.
“I don’t think it’s spotted us,” Eustace said.
“It has to know we’re here,” Mary argued.
“I don’t doubt that,” Eustace said. “But it’s likely more afraid of us than we are of it - which would make it afraid at all, since we’re not.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Peter, panicked, realizing exactly what they were talking about. He looked around, but could only see cypress trunks.
“Carefully,” Asim told Peter, and helped the younger man scrabble back into the boat.
“Brilliant,” Eustace said. “That’s got its attention, it’s coming over for a look.”
“Peter, hand me the camera,” Mary said.
“Camera?” Peter asked faintly. He looked at the deck, the benches, the old metal ammunition crates - also military-surplus; they were reused as water-tight containers for all manner of things - and the railing.
In his haste to retrieve Peter, it seemed Asim had missed something vital.
Silence fell again, except for the subsonic hum, almost too low for human ears to detect, of a bull gator wondering what’d got into its territory.
“Perhaps it is time to deploy that net you’ve been hiding, Mary,” said Asim.
End.
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NOTES BECAUSE I AM ME.
1. The spiritualist camp is a small town called Cassadaga. ‘Tis a silly place.
2. Alligator snapping turtles are scary as all hell. Huge, too.
3. Sawgrass hurts.
4. Eustace would have had to buy a whole new trunk to bring back all his new insect specimens. Especially if they visited in the summer.
5. Air conditioning was fairly new, then.
6. Alligators were hunted to near extinction, and only listed as an endangered species in 1967, which is well after this story. At the time, they would have been rare.
7. Alligator breeding season is generally March to May, and you really do want to avoid, because while wild gators are generally uninterested in humans, rut makes them snappish.
8. Y-fronts: a British colloquialism for briefs. I do not know whether this term was in common use in 1952, but let's pretend it was.