I had just turned twelve the summer that my father finally made the decision, the one that came as a result of years of us complaining about living in Tampa, a city that was choking us each in different ways, leaving each of us secretly and not-so-secretly longing to be in the wilds of southern Alabama. It was all of us who drove my father to make the obvious choice: he packed us all up, loaded the U-Haul, and moved our family to Chiefland, Florida.

I know, I know—we scratched our heads too.

Well, we didn’t exactly move to Chiefland. No, we moved to the, um, outskirts of Chiefland, maybe 15 or so miles from the city proper, to a little community called Fowler’s Bluff. Ok, that’s really not true either as, technically speaking, we didn’t even live in Fowler’s Bluff. That’s right. We. Didn’t. Even. Live. In. Fowler’s. Bluff.

Instead, we lived at the end a dirt road several miles from Fowler’s Bluff.

I think.

I mean, I know where we lived; the problem is that I’m really not so sure where, exactly, Fowler’s Bluff is.

You see, the meandering Suwannee makes its way back through the area, but outside of a few trailers scattered here and there, there was really nothing out that way but a general store, one with dirty wood floors, pickled pigs feet floating in jars next to the cash register, and a long stretch of creaky, wooden steps that led down to a dock on the river. All of that said, I suppose, cartographically speaking, the epicenter of Fowler’s Bluff was probably the mailbox out in front of the store, out in the parking lot, its postal blue having been grayed by the sun, dappled with rust and sun-dried bird droppings, leaving it recognizable only by virtue of its humped shape. But Fowler’s Bluff or not, that mailbox got nowhere near as much attention as that gas pump down on the dock from the general store.

The idea, I suppose, was that once you’d had filled your boat with gas (and then splashed some into the river, just for good measure), someone from the store would wander down and collect your money, then send you on your way. Curbside service like, but on the river. But more often than not, Toby, the proprietor of the store, would just holler down and ask folks to come up to the store to pay. And once they’d made it up those steps, they belonged to Toby.

Toby was a tall man, a big man, a loud man, an old man, even older than my parents, maybe even 50 or so, with a shaggy crop of grey hair that was long enough to spill from beneath his ever-present cap, falling towards his eyes, sweeping towards his shirt collar. I never saw him wearing anything other than overalls, a faded, armpit-stained t-shirt beneath, and boots. He looked like he’d lived on the river his entire life, like he’d smell like a dead animal, and for that reason alone, I always kept my distance from him—there was no reason to even chance getting the least little whiff of rivermanstink.

And when Toby wasn’t dawdling around the store, rearranging cold drinks in buckets of ice, dropping boiled eggs down into a jar filled with red-colored vinegar, or sucking the remains of a cheap beer from the bottom of an aluminum can, he was on the back porch of the store overlooking the river, in view of that gas pump, testing the limits of one of those old rocking chairs, telling tales with such exactitude that, even as a young kid, I knew he was nothing but a shitfarmer.

“In 1939, on August 17^th,” he’d say, the webbing of the chair crackling with his weight as he rocked, the bulk of him periodically leaning over to spit into whatever beer can seemed the emptiest, “it had rained for 12 days straight and I got tired of waiting, so I snuck out in my pappy’s boat with nothing but a cane pole, no bait, just a pole with a line and a hook, and I caught 17 bass that day, one of them weighing 8 pounds and 3 ounces. And when I paddled back in, I dragged a net and, by the time I got home, I‘d snagged 4 catfish too. And since I knew I’d be in for a whipping, I figured I ought to clean those fish before anyone saw that I’d made it back and so I did—I sat right there in that boat and cleaned those fish, and I had every single one of them cleaned and filleted in 32 minutes. And it’s a good thing because my sister had her baby that night and when all the folks came to visit, we had enough fish to feed everyone, all 26 of them. And so I didn’t get a whipping. But someday, I’ll take you to that spot where I caught those fish, in a spot where just last year I was saw a cottonmouth, had to have been 8 feet, maybe 8 feet and 2 inches long, weighed at least 25 pounds, and if you even catch half as many fish as I did that day my sister had her baby, I’ll buy you a beer.”

Well, I didn’t give a rip about a beer. Or fishing. Because, by then, I’d already discovered that a successful fishing trip always ended with the not-so-likeable task of cleaning the fish, and after the night I found an errant fish scale in my ear, flung there from the end of someone’s overzealous scraping, I’d opted out of that nastiness. Oh I still went fishing, but the phone always rang or the dog barked or I remembered my homework or something or other compelled me to leave the festivities just about the time the fish-cleaning began. Coincidences, perhaps.

But my father, cruel sonofabitch that he could be, accused me of dodging my responsibilities, not following through with the job once I enjoyed the thrill of fishing. And he waited until we were out on the boat one day, water, water everywhere, before he told me that I was either going to clean my own fish that evening or I would not be allowed to cast my line again. It didn’t seem fair to me, not in the least.

And he’d just finished saying all of this to me when I looked down at the fish, his fish, a big one, the one everyone had whooped and hollered about when he finally reeled it in, barely flopping around in the well, and I recognized that it was dying, it was really, really dying. I reached down and picked it up, its open mouth hosting my thumb, the rest of my hand cupping its fishchin, and I threw it back in the water. Yep—that’s right. I threw my father’s bass back in the water.

Now if you’re not sure how to bring on the wrath of a grown man, I know of two ways, the first being to fuck his best friend. But I was young then, so that wasn’t an option. I was also young enough to not exactly plan ahead—I hadn’t quite mastered considering the consequences of my actions, so it was a true surprise to me when I’d unwittingly and unintentionally stumbled upon the second best way to ruin a man’s day, to throw his fish back in the water. (I later learned that spooking the deer so that they didn’t “get hurt” by your daddy’s rifle was also unacceptable. Go figure.)

In an act of paternal generosity that was never again equaled by my father, he was gracious enough to allow me to ride back to shore that day. In the boat. He had threatened, of course, to tie a rope around my waist and dangle me off the back of the boat, trolling for alligators, but he didn’t. He said it was only because he’d just bought me some new shoes, the ones he’d yelled at me for wearing to go fishing, and he wanted to make sure he’d gotten his money’s worth out of them before, um, anything happened to me. But, he warned, the next time I ever grabbed a man’s fish, blah blah blah….by then, I’d already decided that fishing was nothing more than a boat ride where you had to be quiet and anything that required me to be quiet was absolutely, by definition, not fun.

Thus by the time I was standing at my father’s side, Toby’s dirty wooden floors beneath my feet, the sweat pooling in the small of my back, the flies lighting on my shoulders before buzzing my face, listening to story after not-so-truthful story of fishing trips that may or may not have actually taken place, I had absolutely no use for fishing. It. Was. Boring. And anyone who sat around and told stories about fishing was boring too.

All I really wanted, I was surprised to discover, was to play softball. I didn’t think I’d miss it, having spent so many hot afternoons chasing balls around vacant lots in South Tampa, jumping across ditches and dodging speeding cars, my repeated attempts to shag balls that some weenie-arm had flung three yards west of the my open and eagerly-awaiting glove. Stupid bitches—I really thought I was over them, over the game, couldn’t have cared less, until, of course, we’d moved away from they city, after I’d had a really good season, even made the All-Star team. Landing in Levy County had a strange effect on me, living in an area where there weren’t enough people to field a full team, let alone form a league and all of a sudden, all I wanted to do was play softball. And I let this be known. Well known. As was my way.

So my parents, likely motivated solely by the goal of getting a break from my incessant whining (and likely not to ensure that I reaped the benefit and accolades of being chosen for the post-season team), made arrangements with my best friend’s parents to send my ass back to Tampa to live with them, for however long it took to either shut me the hell up or to play in the All-Star tournament. Whichever took the longest. I dragged out my suitcase and started packing the day I got the news, in spite of the fact that I had weeks to wait to go, weeks and weeks to wait.

With time to kill while my parents were at work, the countdown for when I went back to Tampa ticking on far too slowly for my liking, I spent day after day with my brother, the two of us deserted squarely in the middle of nowhere. It shouldn’t have been so bad, I suppose; after all, we lived on the water and could swim any damn time we felt like it…as long as we remembered our father’s one caveat: someone had to sit on the dock and watch for alligators while the other swam. Alligators. Fucking alligators.

You see, where we lived, the main river, the Suwannee, creeked off and circled a small island, an island that served as home for so many alligators that I’d risk underestimating if I even tried to guess a number, an island that sat just 100 feet or so off of our dock. And the gators were everywhere, sunning themselves on the bank of the island, gliding through the water just off our dock, bobbing up through the lily pads that grew just beyond our property line. They were like Camaros at a trailer park, visible everywhere you looked. And just about as ugly.

That said, as inviting as that water was, especially given the fact that, as Florida kids, it was our absolute, God-given right to swim in the summer, there was a daily acknowledgement on our part that there were lots and lots of things that could eat us if we weren’t paying attention. And, surprisingly enough, that tended to diminish the appeal of a dip in the water just a wee bit on most days.

And as a result, for a good bit of the time, we sat inside. With a tv antenna that had reception that quite effectively broadcast nothing but static, we had little else to do but read. The local paper. It was published only once a week and we usually had the entire thing memorized days before my father brought home the next edition. It didn’t take me long, however, to learn one thing: I was living near the watermelon capital of the world. The entire world.

I’d read it, right there in the paper.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, the watermelon festival, THE Watermelon Festival, was just around the corner, the culmination of which would be the crowning of the watermelon queen directly after the seed-spitting contest. I tried to envision it in my head, a young, fresh-faced beauty, her dress of woodgrain taffeta flowing to her ankles, her hair feathered and sprayed so as to, at every instant, appear windblown, her lightly freckled hands delicately holding her fair-skinned bosoms as she spat, with all her might, launching a single black-speckled seed into the air, as the crowds around her cheered. It was about the time I’d finally perfected that vision when my brother absolutely ruined it by pointing out that the seed-spitting contest and the beauty contest were, strangely enough, two different competitions. Which sucked. I still like my idea better.

Around that time, though, Dad came home one evening with exciting news—he knew a man who had a watermelon field, a real watermelon field! And, even better than that, as if knowing someone so very near royalty weren’t enough, this man needed help getting his watermelons in! And we were going to get to help!

It was glamorous, I thought, working in a watermelon field, in the watermelon capital of the world, so very close to the Watermelon Festival, and I wondered if the queen contestants would be there too, watching over their minions in the field. It only made sense.

But on that day we went to the field, I was shocked to discover that, no, there would be no taffeta-wearing beauties visiting us as we labored. And, in fact, it was, indeed, labor. Hot, dirty labor. Really hot, really dirty, really labor.

We worked from early that morning until we could barely move. Then we took a break. And then we went right back to work until we sat on the hard ground under a tree on the edge of the field, watching for rattlesnakes and hornets, and ate our lunches. And then we went right back into that field, a field where there was no shade, no breeze, no nothing. But dirt. And watermelons. And we worked until I was sure I was going to die. Which was right about the time I was thrown onto the back of the truck, the instant when I so very mistakenly thought I’d be whisked away to a better place, one where I’d meet the watermelon queen contestants, as surely they were somewhere nearby, a place with cold coke drinks, air conditioning, and maybe even a chocolate pie. But the reality was just a smidgeon south of my fantasies given that, once I landed on that truck, I was told quite adamantly that my job would be to catch the watermelons when they were tossed to me, and to keep my timing right or I’d get knocked “upside the head.” If I were to actually catch the watermelon, I was told, then I was to stack it in such a way so as to make sure that nobody got their feet trapped and/or crushed. Because that would hurt, I figured.

We loaded watermelons for hours and finally finished sometime around sundown. By then, I was delighted for two main reasons: the work was finally over and done and both of my feet were still intact. And I think the others had both of their feet too (although I can now admit that I really didn’t care).

We climbed down off of that truck and onto the back of a pickup, one which took us to the field owner’s house. Along the way, as the wind whipped my hair against the dirt on my face, I became lost in my thoughts of how I’d spend my earnings for the day, a day during which I’d seen one man lose a finger, two others fall to their knees and launch the contents of their entire intestinal system back to Mother Earth, and I’d been hit in the head by a tossed watermelon no less than five times. Which, by the way, didn’t feel so very good and I therefore don’t recommend it.

By the time we reached our destination, I’d decided on a new wardrobe, and, jumping down from the unfurled tailgate, I looked up and saw the farmer, his wallet open, coming towards me. Yes, a new wardrobe, one for the new school year, one that would help me reinvent myself as a country girl, no longer a big city kid—that’s how I’d spend my money.

And I realized the value of my labor, the payoff for a day of hard work in the scorching Florida sun, when the fat fucker handed me a dirty, wadded-up ten dollar bill. After I jumped in his swimming pool to cool off, a swirl of dirt in my wake, I vowed to never work for him again. Ever.

Our father came soon thereafter and we rode home that evening in the family station wagon, the one that was so loud and so old and so ugly but so very, very cool (as long as we didn’t see anyone we knew), cool because we could sit in that back, rear-facing seat and see where we could stare out at the road behind us instead of in front of us, the white line appearing from beneath the car. And if the motion sickness that offered wasn’t enough, if the back window was working, we could talk our dad into letting it down so that the exhaust fumes could billow up into our faces as we hung our heads out. But that night, I didn’t crawl in the back, didn’t fight my brother for more room or a better position to lean out the window. Instead I just sprawled out on the middle seat, my head propped up on the handle of the car door, my eyes looking at the stars. All those fucking stars. We were in the middle of damn nowhere. Surrounded by nothing but watermelons. And alligators.

It would be a few months before I started school, a few months before I met the first murderer I’d ever know. No, not the I-read-about-him-in-the-paper kind of murderer, but the he-rode-my-schoolbus kind of murderer.

Ricky Haggerty. I think he was in the tenth grade, a lanky one who got on halfway towards school then sat by himself, his long legs slung across the seat towards the aisle, his reddish hair undecided as to whether it should be frizzy or just bumpy. He seemed nice enough though, even told me to wear my shirt unbuttoned a bit, maybe wear some make-up. Like his little sister.

She was in the same grade as me, had a round face with little brown eyes that were drawn smaller by her rather impassioned application of eyeliner, make-up that, even back then, just didn’t seem to look right. It would be years before I understood that that much makeup meant you had bad morals. Or were a movie star.

But Debbie, I think that was her name, explained to me on the bus one morning, as she outlined her eyes with a big, black crayon that immediately gave her the appearance of some alien-life form with two blinking slits for vision, that her daddy had carried her to town once, told her she could get herself any make-up she wanted when he dropped her off at the drugstore. She advised that I should get my daddy to do the very same thing because, once I got there, I’d see for myself that they had every color there you could ever want, as long as you wanted either brown, black or blue. And after much debating, I did, indeed, opt for the blue.

I’d worn it for a few weeks and most everyone but her brother had already noticed the change in my appearance. So one morning, I didn’t scramble for the back seat, my usual early morning effort to prove both my coolness and my maturity beyond my years, but instead, I sat towards the middle of the bus, a seat or two behind where Ricky usually sat, my shirt unbuttoned just a little.

It hurt a bit when the bus slowed down at the end of the dirt road where he and his sister usually got on and neither one of them was there. The bus driver had already started to open the door, but then she said softly, “Oh that’s right,” and slammed the doors shut and sped down the road.

I was in English class before I got the whole story, or as much of it as I’d ever get, when the girls behind me whispered that he’d shot his mother over some pain pills. Shot her dead, right there in the house, in front of his sister, and then ran outside into the woods. They’d found him a few hours later but I don’t know anything beyond that. I never saw either one of them again. And I didn’t hear much about them either because, about the same time, someone in my class had discovered that the other new girl was a Mormon, so instead of solving a murder, we thought our time was better spent trying to figure out if and how much she loved Jesus. Never got to the bottom of that one either.

Looking back, though, Ricky Haggerty shooting his momma should’ve been a defining moment in my childhood. But it wasn’t. I remember it happening, knew it clearly qualified as one of those “Not Supposed to Happen” kinds of things, but hell, I was already so far out of my element that it seemed to be just another day.

If I had a defining moment, an instant from that time in my life that has stayed with me and affected me, I can without a doubt say that it happened earlier in the summer, long before the evening when Ricky Haggerty grabbed a shotgun and pointed it at his momma.

It was a summer day, a day or two after I’d gotten back from Tampa. Gwenn and her parents had brought me back home and we’d spent the day, my brother, Gwenn and me, swimming in the river, our fathers standing on the dock, watching for alligators. They’d screamed at us to get out of the water repeatedly, sometimes because Gwenn’s ankle-biter had yapped so damn much that every alligator within the state limits had come dog-hunting, but just as often as not, our alcohol-infused fathers had screamed “GATOR!” for the sheer pleasure of watching the three of us nearly drown one another swimming furiously back to shore. “The slowest swimmer is guaranteed to be an amputee by sundown,” they warned repeatedly until, um, one of them, I swear it was an accident, fell. Off the dock. Into the water. And then they both went in the house, leaving the three of us outside. Alone. No adult supervision, sober or otherwise.

Well there was that old lady, the one who wore that huge, white sunbonnet, the one so big that it looked like it was trying to swallow her whole, headfirst. She’d stand on the bank, fishing, just around the bend of the river, maybe 80 yards away from our dock, her long cane pole an extension of her. We never saw her without it. And it was long, so long that we wondered how the weight of it didn’t topple her over every time she held it upright. But she needed it big because, the sweet little, frail little thing that she was would use that cane pole to whop the hell out of alligators if they swam too close to where she was. And they seemed to respect that. I’m pretty sure she was there that day.

We stood on the dock, arguing who would get to swim, who would stand on the dock and watch for gators, when my brother pointed towards the lily pads. “Gator,” he said.

Now my brother wasn’t beyond fucking with us, but back then it was fairly well established that my brother’s eyesight was so good he could spot a turd on a rabbit’s ass a football field away. And while my typical response was “Rabbit? I don’t even see a rabbit,” on that day, I saw what he saw: I saw the gator. In the lily pads. His head, his eyes, directed right towards us. And Gwenn saw it too.

I stood there, not moving, my eyes locked on the alligator, because even with his body submerged, I could tell he was big. And damn he seemed close. The next thing I remember was looking at my brother, the rifle levitating to the hollow formed between his arm and his body, and I saw him as he closed one eye. I looked back to the lily pads.

And even though I was standing right next to my brother, I can’t say that I remember it, not sure if I even heard the report of the rifle. I can’t say if the sound crackled through the pines, settled into the palms and was muted by the dirt. I don’t remember where the sun was or what the air smelled like or who or what or where. In that instant, I can only remember the alligator.

The shot hit him between his eyes, the ones that bulged just above the surface of the water. When it hit, he launched up from the water. And I don’t mean that his entire body surfaced, I mean he went into the air, head first, straight up, like Big Daddy had called him home and he was taking the shortcut.

He lingered in that position, his giant body completely above the water, his glistening underbelly facing our way, and then his head and tail swung violently to the left, towards the shore, and then, just as violently, they swung the other way. His tail had been above the water by a foot or so, his head at least nine feet farther up, but when his body splashed back to the surface, his feet hit the water first. And then his belly. And then the rest of him.

My brother, Gwenn and I, we were frozen.

But our beloved bird dog wasn’t. He was a Coyle, after all. Single-minded. Driven. And unlike the rest of the Coyles who chose screaming and hollering as our preferred pastime, Deacon’s most favorite thing in the entire world was to go get It. Whatever It was, he lived for going to get It. And if he heard a gun fire, that meant that It was out there for him to go get.

The image of that huge alligator, upright above the water, was still burned in my eyes, but something let me know that the spotted flash that was in front of me was my dog. My beloved dog. My stupid, stupid dog, charging across the grass, off the bank, into the water, and towards the lily pads, his legs churning frantically, splashing towards It.

I was only twelve, I know, but I’d been responsible for our pets for years. I’d fed them, bathed them, cared for them when they were sick, so I knew exactly what I needed to do when our prized birddog went into the water to retrieve a wounded alligator: I ran into the house, screaming and crying.

By the end of the day, the dog lived. The alligator didn’t. And while I have an image in my head of the lily pads, somewhere in their midst the body of the alligator floating belly-up, I don’t know if that’s my imagination or if it is an actual memory. I just can’t say for sure.

As for Gwenn and my brother, well, it’s like we’re still kids. Some days, I’d give them both to you. Even pay you to haul them off. But most days, those two are pretty special to me. I even imagine that, when I win the lottery, I’ll split it with them. Not equally, of course, but I’ll make sure we all have matching lava lamps or something. And we all still talk about that day and we all have the same distinct memory: an alligator in the air, above the Suwannee River, somewhere just outside of Fowler’s Bluff.