Bruce Cameron

Jun 03, 20150

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2010.

Back in the 1980s, my grandparents, Dick and Emily, moved to Florida because they wanted a better climate to argue in.

They had one of those relationships where they fought so much they couldn’t even agree on what they disagreed on.

Their little home in Florida was a few dozen yards from a boggy pond that kept trying to evolve into a swamp.

Dick liked to go down to the water’s edge and feed marshmallows to the small alligator who lived there, probably hoping that one day it would grow large enough that he could feed it Emily.

Emily would stand at the screen door and yell at him that he was going to be sent to prison for feeding wildlife, but when she called the DA’s office, they refused to run a sting operation on her husband even though she promised to testify.

I saw the alligator one time: It looked like a half-submerged suitcase.

My grandfather would toss the marshmallow into the water, and the thing would swim over to it so slowly the water never rippled, opening and closing its mouth without drama, then sit in the water and regard Dick with an unwinking lack of gratitude.

Dick named the alligator “Blanche.” Then one day Emily showed Dick a newspaper article claiming that when alligators lunged, they could move “as fast as a horse,” which I suppose might be true for the first half foot.

To my grandfather, though, it implied that one day Blanche would gallop after him and take him down before he could make it to the house, where Emily, seeing what was happening, would lock the back door.

So he stopped feeding Blanche.

Then he became concerned about that.

What was the alligator thinking, out there in those dark, marshmallow-less waters? What was Blanche plotting? Whom would the alligator blame for the sudden loss of its primary food supply? Why, Dick, of course; how could it know it was Emily’s fault for finding that article? My grandfather became afraid to get the newspaper from his driveway.

So Dick told Emily that if she wanted the paper, she’d have to get it herself.

As she headed out the front door, Dick would scurry to the back screen and yell in the direction of the swamp, “I see that you’re getting the newspaper from out in the front of the house!” but Blanche never took the hint.

On his birthday, he had an idea: He could drive to the pond! His Cadillac could outrun a horse any day.

Once he fed Blanche a few marshmallows, he would be back in the reptile’s good graces and could resume going to the grocery store without fear of being followed.

Dick grabbed a bag of marshmallows and got in his car.

Once he was at the pond, Dick had a problem: To throw the marshmallows, he would have to roll the window down, and then Blanche could easily climb in.

Well, not easily, Blanche was an alligator.

But any animal who could run as fast as a horse could probably jump as high as one.

The solution was to drive down even closer to the water, lower the window just enough for a marshmallow, and throw the alligator treats from inside the car through the crack in the window out onto the pond.

This proved impossible: The marshmallows kept bouncing off the glass.

Worse, Blanche had seen the activity and was headed over to check it out; Dick could see the thing’s evil eyes.

Panicked, he decided to pull the car forward and just dump the whole bag out the window, but in his excited state he stomped on the accelerator and shot into the water! He yelled at Emily to call a tow truck, but she refused on the grounds that he deserved to drown.

Fortunately, at about that time my mom called to wish her dad a happy birthday, and Emily was forced to admit that Dick couldn’t come to the phone because he was busy sinking his Cadillac in the swamp and being attacked by Blanche.

So my mom called the tow truck, from 1,000 miles away.

It was the last time Blanche got any marshmallows.

(Bruce Cameron has a website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.