Whale Season by N. M. Kelby Page B

teeth and a long red tongue. Varnished it until it was rock hard.
    It was, certainly, an entrance gate like no other. Leaned a little to the right.
    â€œThat sure do look pretty,” Po said and tried to mean it.
    Over the alligator’s huge gaping mouth a sign read, “You pays your money, you takes your chances.”
    And the tourist attraction was born. Three days later, so was Leon.
    And so, for many years, a steady stream of visitors lined up two deep and walked into the gigantic gator grin to see Pettit’s All-Stars. The alligators themselves were huge and hungry behind the peeling fence. “Quite a sight,” proclaimed the one-line listing in Florida’s official tour book. And it was. Every now and then something from Lettie’s sunken house would make its way to the surface—a wedding photo or Po’s old teddy bear—and the gators would rush toward it roaring and focused. Visitors would “ooh” and “ah.”
    But the star attraction of Pettit’s was Miss Pearl, “The Amazing One-Ton Wonder.” Pearl was toothless and too lazy to be mean. Older than anyone could remember. When Lettie saw the docile alligator, she tied a straw hat around its head. The hat had a band of pink daisies, the price tag still hanging from it.
    â€œShe looks just like Minnie Pearl,” Lettie laughed.
    â€œYou sure are a looker, Miss Pearl,” Po said and itched her scaly chin as if she were an old fat tabby, Moon Pie–
eyed, and low to the ground.
    Miss Pearl just yawned.
    After that, four times a day, at 10 A.M. , noon, 2 and
4 P.M. , Po, in a cheesecake-tight swimsuit, leaned over the fence and shook a whole chicken in front of Miss Pearl’s gigantic face. “What you say, Miss Pearl?” she’d ask. “Can you say ‘howdy’?”
    The other alligators seemed to look away in shame as Po would shake the chicken hard and the plucked bird would shimmy from left to right as if doing the Peppermint Twist. “Let’s hear a ‘howdy’ for the good ole folks, Miss Pearl,” Po would say, praline sweet.
    And, four times a day, the enormous alligator who had never been to the Grand Ole Opry would rub up against Po like a fat spoiled cat and wail an unearthly high pitched wail. It was a wail that sometimes, under the unrelenting subtropical sun, sounded like the Nashville star, but most days just sounded as if the alligator had a one-ton case of indigestion from swallowing all those chickens without chewing first.
    â€œAmazing, isn’t it?” Po would ask the crowd, then smile. Back then Mama Po was an angel in Spandex: creamy-skinned and Esther Williams slim. No matter what she’d say, all the men would clap. The women, reluctant and slightly green-eyed with envy, would nod and cluck.
    But when the new highway was finished, visitors didn’t have to drive near Whale Harbor anymore. Didn’t come to whale watch. The Ferris wheel rusted in place. Vandals took apart the merry-go-round, bit by bit, chewing away at it like field mice. At the zoo, the snakes just slipped away.
    Lettie died that season. Leon was only twelve years old when it happened. He was teetering in that limbo between childhood and manhood. His body, an odd giant. He came home from school one day and found Lettie in the ticket booth, her blue eyes, skyless. Her hand was still holding a ticket, waiting for the visitors who never seemed to come anymore. Lettie had been dead for hours. Nobody noticed except for the flies.
    After that, Po and Leon often went hungry, feeding the gators instead of themselves. “Them snowbirds will be back,” Po said. “Nobody can forget Miss Pearl.”
    After two winters, it became obvious that the visitors weren’t coming back to Whale Harbor. Not now. Not ever. Po applied for food stamps. The All-Stars were scheduled to be skinned, sold for shoes. Leon tried hard not to cry.
    â€œGot to be done,