I felt it—trucks tearing up the marsh grass, cattails being chopped down, palmettos flattened—long before I saw any glow rise over the tree line. I figured it had to be a battalion setting up for some kind of assault exercise or oil men clearing ground for a platform. I only hauled over there to make sure nothing got out of hand. Lights and yelling, just some standard human miscreance, until I got a good look at everything through the bushes. It was a big, cross-eyed dude making all the noise with a roped-up alligator draped over his shoulders. He had a microphone in one hand and a 2x4 in the other. I could definitely tell by the way he was hollering and bouncing around that the gator was in some serious trouble, so I marched into the scene without thinking any of it through. Before the crew could react, I snatched the alligator off the man’s shoulders and pitched the guy into the muddy lake, yapping and wailing and still going on about how nobody, not even some giant swamp monster, was gonna keep him from busting loose on somebody’s head come Friday night at the civic auditorium. Pretty soon after that I saw all the lights go off behind me and heard the trucks roll out. That gator finally woke up and slid off the bank into the water. And I enjoyed the hell out of the rest of my night with my back against a cypress tree, just grinning like a baby-faced hero