Whale Season by N. M. Kelby Page A

from Cicero to Miami, Rose taped their nest egg to the bottom of the bed so no one would find it.
    And no one did. Of course, now it doesn’t really matter. The Levis won’t need it anymore.
    But Leon doesn’t know this. All he knows is that he’s tired. So he tries to fall asleep and dream of Mama Po and the old days when he was a boy, like Cal. Tries to dream of the magic of Whale Harbor; tries to dream of a time when his life was simple and good and he was happy.
    But it’s a little difficult. His right hand itches as if on fire. Right means “money.”

Chapter 7

    W hen Leon was a boy, Whale Harbor used to be a town devoted to fun. Used to be the streets smelled of blue snow cones. The sun shone caramel corn. Buddy’s Snake Petting Zoo sat next to the Whale Harbor Municipal Go-Cart Park, and the famed Ishmael & Son’s Whale Watching Charters. The town had its own Ferris wheel. The merry-go-round was open year-round.
    Back then Pettit’s All-Star Alligator Farm was the main attraction. Leon’s grandmother, Lettie Pettit, opened the place in 1960, right after Hurricane Donna. Operating a tourist attraction was never what the steel-spined woman had in mind, but she would later say it was divine destiny. And on some level she was entirely right.
    Donna was the worst hurricane Florida had ever seen. Its eye was twenty-one miles wide. Winds sustained at 180 mph, gusts clocked in at 200.
    â€œSounded like the hooves of a thousand horses,” Lettie later said. “Like the horses of Armageddon.”
    Hurricane Donna changed everything for most in this small town. Seventy-five were killed. The oyster beds were ruined. Houses were tossed like dice.
    And Pettit’s All-Star Alligator Farm was born.
    Lettie had no choice. Her house had completely vanished; a sinkhole swallowed it whole. There was just a small deep lake where the pink clapboard used to be.
    When she saw the destruction, she stared at the murky water, the thin layer of green algae, and the occasional bubble that rose from it, and said nothing. The only thing that remained of what was once her home was a rambling white fence and its gate that nearly shut tight.
    When she finally spoke, “God’s will,” she said, and the words sounded more like a cough, rough and low. It was clear that everything was lost except for the Pontiac she and her daughter, Po, drove to the shelter with.
    â€œAt least we got some place to sleep,” Po said quietly. She was just seventeen years old and eight months pregnant. The father was long gone. She looked on the verge of tears.
    â€œThis sorrow is not part of our bones,” Lettie told her daughter. “It’s just looking for a place to rest a while.”
    And then Lettie, who was an oysterman’s widow from a long line of oystermen’s widows, did the only thing she could do, a thing she did well—she made do.
    She and Po drove into the next town and bought five pounds of chicken necks and fishing line. Then, armed with the necks and fast footwork, the women lured more than a dozen gators from a nearby creek into the sinkhole that was once their house. Slammed the gate behind each one. Tied it tight.
    Once the alligators, or “All-Stars” as Lettie had begun to call them, were rounded up she bought two hammers, a truckload of lumber, a case of varnish, fourteen sacks of flour, six gallons of green paint and one of red. Two straw hats to ward off sunstroke. Lettie had a plan.
    â€œAnd a plan,” she told Po, “is more than most people have.”
    Even though she had no idea of how to create a top-rate tourist attraction, Lettie knew one thing for sure—it needed an entrance gate that could not be forgotten, something that grabbed attention and created a sense of wonder and excitement. So, using the All-Stars as models, the Pettit women fashioned themselves a twelve-foot-high alligator head, complete with an assortment of pointy