Gator's Totem

The events in this story are true. Pulled from newspaper articles and official police reports, the facts have been presented as accurately as possible, considering the circumstances.

 

 July 22 1932 Bridgeport, Louisiana

Davis Trout entered the bank wearing a wool overcoat in the southern summer heat.  He was flanked by two men, both wearing the same type of coat and both sweating profusely, from a combination of nerves and the Louisiana humidity. The few patrons in the bank who noticed the three men enter knew something foul was about to happen.

Phil Lombard nudged his wife, and whispered, “Hide this,” as he handed her the fifteen dollars they had come to deposit into their bank account.  Just as his wife took the folded bills and pressed them in the underside of her belt, Davis Trout and his accomplices opened their coats and revealed the weapons hidden beneath.

“Up against the wall!” Davis Trout shouted.  He waved a Tommy Gun at the half-dozen patrons, his eyes glimmering with the promise of violence.  “Try anything and I’ll give it you!”

Earnest Lyle moved past Davis, his weapon of choice was the Smith and Wesson forty-five, and he held it out straight, like a dark finger of death, pointing the barrel at the teller behind the counter.

“You,” said Lyle, getting the teller’s full attention, “move a muscle I don’t tell you to move, and you eat a bullet, get me?”

The teller, a young man named George Sparrow, who was running the bank by himself while the manager was out to lunch, raised his hands and nodded fervently at the man pointing the pistol at him.  Later, when the police asked George to describe his assailant, all he could say was, “The man had the biggest gun I ever saw, and it was pointed right at me.  All I saw was that gun.”

George stuttered, “Y-yes, sir,” to Ernest Lyle.

“Good,” said Earnest, and tossed George a burlap sack that smelled of coffee.  That was the other thing George remembered.  The smell of coffee mixed with fear.  For the rest of George Sparrow’s life, he would never have another cup of coffee.  “Fill it up, and fill it up fast.”

The bank lobby grew quiet as George Sparrow filled the bag.  The half dozen patrons stood in a line against the wall with Davis Trout’s Tommy Gun fanning over them.

“Let’s hurry it up,” said the third man.  Terrence Johnson, a big man of dark complexion, wielded a BAR sub-machine gun.  When George Sparrow and the patrons were asked to describe him, their answers varied from, “He was a tall, broad shouldered fella with a dark complexion,” to “His hat was pulled so low, I couldn’t get a look,” to “He was the scariest looking man I ever did see.”

In fact, Terrence Johnson was a scary looking man.  He exuded an aura that made the patrons turn away, lest the violence that pulsated beneath his sharp blue suit be unleashed upon them with the muzzle of his sub-machine gun.

At Terrence Johnson’s urging, George Sparrow did hurry it up.  He went from drawer to drawer, with Earnest Lyle’s forty-five prodding him onward, and emptied stacks of money into the coffee scented burlap sack. 

“Don’t forget the safe,” said Davis Trout, turning his head only slightly, so he could keep an eye on his hostages.  He wore a slight smile.  All the witnesses would later agree, that Davis Trout seemed to be enjoying himself. 

Trout turned back to his hostages and singled out a young woman named Doris Veneer. Trout’s smile crawled across his face like an insect and became a lascivious grin, giving young Doris Veneer nightmares for the rest of her life. 

The words, too, which Davis Trout uttered to her on that day, stayed with her for decades, and ever after, when she would relate the tale of how the famous bank robber Davis Trout leered at her, his words fell from her lips like a ward to stay away evil. 

“Don’t worry, doll,” said Trout, “your eyes are to pretty to splattered against the wall.”

The robbery took less than ten minutes.  These men were practiced in their art. Professionals. Nobody who was in the Bridgeport National Bank that day would ever say otherwise.

The leader, they would come to find, was Davis Trout, though they didn’t know his name until the officer in charge informed them they had been held up by the famous bank robber from Chicago.  Over the last month, Davis Trout and his gang had robbed banks all over the country, and now he and his gang were in Louisiana.

“He won’t be for long,” Sheriff Roscoe Tollgate told the Bridgeport Gazette later that afternoon.  “Pretty soon, he’ll be in hell or the Big House.  You have my word on that, or my name isn’t Sheriff Roscoe Tollgate.”

Davis Trout smiled as he read aloud the words printed in the newspaper for his partners to hear.  They had made their escape, a clean getaway without even a chase or sign of a police car behind them.  Now, they were holed up in their hideout, a cabin deep in the Louisiana swamp.

Ernest Lyle and Terrence Johnson flanked Davis at a table set in the middle of the one room cabin.  They had stripped off their overcoats in the stifling heat and wore only undershirts and trousers as they sweat it out in the stifling humidity.  Sitting away from them, in a rocking chair against the wall, was an old woman, who stared out the window.  The men knew she was there, but something about her presence made the cabin feel as small as a coffin, and they averted their eyes from her small corner of the room.

As Trout read of their exploits from the newspaper, Lyle ran an oiled rag over the barrel of his forty-five.  A lit cigarette dangled from his mouth.  Johnson sat across from Lyle with his back to the wall.  He had a view through the windows and faced the door.  A pistol was laid out on the table in front of him, and his BAR sub-machine gun leaned on the wall behind him, within easy reach. 

A deck of cards lay splayed out across the table, but no one was interested in cards.

Davis laughed and slapped the paper down on the table.  He looked from one partner to the other, eager for their attention. Neither of them was interested.  They had been on the road with the infamous Davis Trout for a month and had long grown out of appeasing his thirst for attention. 

Trout, almost reluctantly, turned his eyes to the other person in the room.  The old woman, whose ancient, yellowed eyes looked out on the swamp through her window, unimpressed by the roomful of gangsters.

“How ‘bout you, grandma,” Davis prodded her.  “You think that old sheriff is going to catch up with us?”

“Leave Mama Rose alone, Trout,” Terrence Johnson growled.  Johnson was a quiet man by nature.  When he spoke, his words came out like churned gravel.

The old woman stared out the window, watching a slow ripple glide across the murky swamp outside.  Her dark, thin lips stretched across her deep wrinkled face in a lazy curve, and her skeletal hands fingered the bone necklaces she wore that reached down her emaciated torso and lay in her bony, rag covered lap.  A long moment passed before she spoke, and when she did speak, her voice coming out like the dust from an uncovered crypt, she did not bother to turn her eyes on the bank robbers.

“Never can tell what a gator gonna do,” Mama Rose said.  “Sometimes, they swim on by, like they don’t notice you.  Other times, they jaws clamp down and drag you to da depths and you ain’t never seen again.”

Davis laughed, looking at the old woman.  He turned to Terrence Johnson and said, “What’s she on about, Johnson?  That old woman makes me nervous when she starts talking like that.”

“You heard what she said,” said Terrance.  He had begun to roll a cigarette and didn’t bother to look up from his work.  For him, rolling a cigarette was something of a ritual.  Something once started, could not be interrupted.

Davis turned back to the old woman.  “What are you on about, grandma?  I don’t have time for your riddles.  Speak plain or don’t speak at all.  You saying I’m the alligator, or this here sheriff is?”  His eyes fell to the totem at the bottom of her necklaces.  Through her thin working fingers, Trout could see the shape of a clawed hand.  “What is that you’re playing with, grandma?  Some kind of mambo jambo?”

The old woman turned away from the window to gaze upon Trout.  She taunted Trout with smile, and said, “’dis the claw of the gator.” She raised the claw, it’s shriveled mummified skin dull in the frail light of the cabin and pointed its razor-sharp talons toward Davis Trout.     

“Gator know if he a gator or not,” the old woman said.  She shook her head slowly. “Gator don’t have to ask.”

Davis stared at the old woman, his eyes creased into slits.  The old woman lowered the claw and turned her attention back out the window, to whatever lurked in the swamp.

“Bah,” Davis huffed.  He waved the old woman away with a hand, as if she were nothing more than a foul odor.  “You’re talking nonsense, grandma.  You been alone in this swamp too long.  Where’d you find this old woman, Johnson?  The funny papers?”

Terrence Johnson’s eyes moved and his fingers, thick and dark as cigars, halted their work.  Ernest Lyle saw the look on Terrence Johnson’s face.  Lyle had seen that look before.  He smiled and continued wiping the oil cloth over his pistol, though he shifted to the side a bit, ready to bound out of the way.

“Mama Rose known my family a long time, Trout,” Johnson said.  “She the one we call on when something need to be done.”

“You call on her, huh,” Davis Trout said, his voice a nervous agitation.  “Well, when I need the floor swept, or the dishes done, I know where to go.”

Terrence Johnson put his rolled cigarette between his thick lips.  “She do work no one else can do.”

Davis Trout turned, studying the old woman, who looked like nothing more than a skeleton wrapped in rags.  “What kind of work do you do, grandma?”  Trout smiled.  “Maybe, you’d like to hire on with me and the boys.  Put you to work cracking safes.  How’d you like that, grandma?”

“You best show some respect to Mama Rose, Trout,” Johnson warned.  “She a voodoo woman. She talk to the spirits.”

Trout turned to Johnson, his smile widened, laughter escaping like sweat through his pours.  “No kidding.  A voodoo woman.  Well, grandma, now I know we got work for you.” 

Trout went to the table and grabbed the newspaper, brandishing it toward the old woman.  “How about you put a curse on that sheriff for us, grandma?  Make it so the good Sheriff Tollgate don’t ever find us.  Curse him so his pecker rots off and make him go blind.  You’d do that for us, wouldn’t you, grandma? You do that, and I we’ll cut you in on a share of the take, won’t we boys?”

 “That’s enough, Trout,” Johnson said from the table.  He watched Davis Trout with those dark eyes that had so terrified the patrons of the Bridgeport National Bank.  Dark orbs, full of menace, made even more so by the calmness residing in his statuesque face.  “You show respect for Mama Rose. She let us in her house. She didn’t have to.  Remember that.”

Trout smiled his wide foolish grin.  “Oh, come on Johnson.  I’m just having some fun with her.  Isn’t that right, grandma? We’re just having some fun together.”

Trout placed a hand on the old woman’s rounded shoulder and smiled down at her. 

“Tell him, grandma.  Tell your boy we’re just having some fun together.”

The old woman looked away from the window and up into Davis Trout’s face.  Her eyes were like large marbles and Davis Trout could see his reflection within their black depths.  His smile fell away, like a sand castle run over by a wave.  The old woman’s eyes made Davis Trout feel cold, even in the stifling heat of the cabin, and he drew his hand away like he had touched something hot.

“You a fool,” the old woman said as she glared at Trout with those dark eyes.  She turned to Johnson.  “You should not have come here, boy.  Brought these bad men with you.  I told you when you was a boy, not to come back here.  You was always a bad man.  Now, you brought bad men with you.” She turned to Trout and said, “Da spirits like you.  Da spirits like all bad men. They say they want to keep you.”  She raised the claw again, and pointed it at each of the gangsters in turn, and said to Johnson, “They want to keep you,” then to Lyle, “and you,” and as she brought to the claw to bear on Davis Trout, the old woman smiled, a dark smile that sucked in the light of the room, and said, “and especially you, Davis Trout.  You they want da most.”

Davis Trout glared at the old woman for a long moment, the claw raised in front of him.  He shook his head and turned to Johnson.  He said, “I’m telling you, Johnson, you shut this old woman up.  I don’t like what she’s saying and she’s making me nervous.  You shut her up.”

Trout paced across the small cabin, his eyes flickering towards Mama Rose from the other side of the small enclosure, and to the claw she held in her lap, wrapped in the thin fingers of her hand.

Earnest Lyle broke the silence that had fallen by racking the action on his forty-five.  All eyes turned to him.  Except for Mama Rose’s.  Her eyes stayed on Davis Trout for a long moment before she turned again to stare out the window.  She rubbed the talisman at the end of her long necklace and smiled.

 “I’m ready to split,” said Ernest Lyle.  He stood up from the table, slipping his pistol into the shoulder harness he wore.  “Let’s divvy it up, Trout.  I’m tired of sweating it out in this shack with two bums and a crazy woman. I’ll take my chances elsewhere.”

Davis Trout stiffened. “You got somewhere else to be, Lyle?”

“Maybe,” Lyle snorted.  “Maybe not. Either way, it don’t concern you.  I’m moving on, see.  This game’s run it’s course.”

Trout sneered.  “It’s over when I say it’s over, Lyle.  And I say we’ve only just started.  There’s plenty more banks to hit. You’re letting this old woman’s craziness get to you, is all.”

Terrence Johnson crushed out the cigarette and said, “I’m out, too, Trout.  We’ve pushed our luck far enough.  It’s time to split the money and part ways, while we still can.”

“You’re turning yellow on me, too, are you?”  He turned towards the old woman.  “On account of what grandma is saying over here?”

“I ain’t yellow,” Johnson said, his deep voice smooth and confident.  “And it ain’t because of Mama Rose. I know when it’s time to move on, is all.  You can take it as you want.”

Davis Trout gave them an admonished look.  “Well, boys, if that’s how you feel after all we’ve accomplished together, that’s fine by me.  I sure wish you’d change your minds, though.  I’ve got a good feeling about his gang.  I hate to see it break up so soon when I feel like we just got started.”

“No, Trout,” said Lyle.  “When I say I’m through, it means I’m through.  No hard feelings, but a man knows when it’s time to move on.”

“Same goes for me,” said Terrence Johnson.  “No hard feelings, Trout.”

“Oh, sure,” Trout said.  “If that’s the way you fellas feel then there ain’t no changing your minds.  I’ll go out and get the bags.  We can settle up right here and now.”

“No funny business, Trout.”  Johnson’s large hand gripped the pistol shoved into the front of his pants.

Trout smiled lop-sided grin.  “Of course not, fellas,” he said, sounding hurt.  “I may be a killer and a crook, but first and foremost, I’m a man of my word.”  Trout turned and went to the cabin’s door.  He put a hand on the latch and turned back to his partners.  “You fellas aren’t the only ones tired of cooking in this swamp, you know.  I’m as ready as either one of you to get back to civilization.”  His eyes fell once again on the old woman.  “A man can’t breathe in this heat.”

The old woman exploded with laughter.  Her mad cackle drew all three men’s eyes.  She laughed long and hard and beat her thin fingered hand against the armrest of the rocking chair.

“What’s she on about,” Davis Trout said, his smile gone as he kept his hand on the door.

Terrence Johnson shrugged. 

“What are you one about, grandma,” Trout demanded of the old woman.

Mama Rose’s laughter trailed off, like water from a faucet.  She raised her eyes to Davis Trout and turned her thin neck to include Lyle and Johnson in her answer.  “None of you will leave this swamp.  You come here to hide but you wake da spirits.  You wake da spirits and they hungry for bad men.  You bad men.  All a you.  Even you, my grandson,” she said to Terrence Johnson.  “You will join da spirits because they lonely for bad men. Bad men like they used to be bad men.  I seen it and it shall be.”  She laughed again.

Davis Trout turned away from the old woman and looked at Terrence Johnson. Johnson’s hard face could have been carved from stone.  “Your grandma has some manners, Johnson. Tell her next time she has a vision, keep it to herself.”

Johnson looked away from the old woman and said, “Do well to listen to Mama Rose, Trout.  She sees things, and they happen.  I’ve seen it before.”

“Bah,” Trout said, waving Johnson’s warning away and opening the door.  “You boys wait here.  I’ll be back.”

“Remember, Trout,” said Lyle, unperturbed by the old woman’s continued laughter, “no funny business.”  He patted his holstered forty-five with his hand.  “I’d hate for our partnership to end with hostilities. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Davis Trout said, leaving the shack.  “Just keep that old woman quiet.”

Davis Trout went out to the Buick parked in front of the cabin.  Inside the cabin, Earnest Lyle stepped into the doorway to watch Trout.  “I don’t trust him,” he said over his shoulder to Johnson. 

Johnson didn’t hear.  He was looking at Mama Rose, his face gone pale of color. 

“Even me, Mama Rose?”

The old woman turned to Johnson.  “You brought these men here, to Mama Rose’s home.”  She shook her head back and forth.  “You should have known better than to bring bad men here. I told you, boy.  I told you long time ago, to leave and not come back. Dis what you get.”

Davis Trout opened the Buick’s trunk.  What was inside brought a smile to his face.  Two suitcases and several burlap sacks full of money, stolen from banks that ranged from Chicago to the bayou.  What brought the smile to his face, however was what lay next to the stolen money.  His Thompson sub-machine gun.  

He turned to the cabin, where Ernest Lyle stood in the doorway.  “Hey, Ernie,” he said, “why don’t come help me with these bags?”

Lyle spit onto the ground in front of the cabin and gave Trout a nod.  He stepped forward from the doorway and Davis leaned into the trunk. 

“I’m coming,” said Lyle, then stopped as Trout came up with the Thompson.  Lyle reached for his pistol. 

The rat-a-tat of the Thompson filled the swamp with thunder. Bullets tore into Ernest Lyle’s body.  Lyle fell, with the sound of Davis Trout’s laughter filling his ears, and then died on the ground in front of the old woman’s cabin.

Inside the cabin, Terrence Johnson looked at the old woman.  She smiled at him.  A big, broad smile that showed one gold tooth amidst a mouth of rotten and missing teeth.

She raised the gator totem, and said, “Go on, grandson. Go to meet your fate like we all must.”

He turned away and went for the BAR machine gun resting against the wall.  He reached for it and turned to find Davis Trout standing in the doorway, smoke trailing from the barrel of the Thompson and a smile on the bank robber’s face. 

“Nuh-uh-uh, big fella,” said Davis Trout.  “Drop it.”

Johnson looked at Trout.  There was no hatred on Johnson’s face.  No animosity at this betrayal.  Only the calm acceptance of Mama Rose’s vision reflected in Johnson’s dark face.  He raised the BAR, knowing he had little chance of beating Davis Trout.

Trout squeezed the Thompson’s trigger and bullets flew.  Johnson fell against the wall, his BAR sub-machine gun tight in his grip, but useless.  He slid down, leaving a trail of blood behind him, his eyes wide and open, glaring at Davis Trout.

Trout stepped forward.  He said, “Sorry it had to be this way, chum, but no one and I mean no one walks out on Davis Trout.”

Johnson tried to say something.  He turned to Mama Rose, who sat calmly in her rocking chair, and tried to speak again.  Nothing came but air and a mouthful of blood.

Trout finished Johnson off with another squeeze of the trigger.  The big man’s body toppled over and he was done.

Trout looked at the dead man and giggled like a child left alone in a candy store.  There was laughter behind him and he turned to the old woman sitting in her chair.

“Don’t worry, grandma,” he said, his smile gone, replaced by a look of absolute menace, “I didn’t forget about you. Now, you’ll see who the alligator is.”

The old woman smiled at Davis Trout.  A smile he felt down to his bones.  “No,” she said.   “You no gator. You a fish and the swamp is going to eat you.”  Her laughter made Davis Trout remember what fear felt like.

He squeezed the trigger on his Thompson and was answered with the dry click of an empty magazine.

He huffed a forced smile and said, “Looks like it’s your lucky day, grandma.”

“It no luck,” Mama Rose said.  Her laughter was gone, but the deep wrinkles set in the old woman’s face showed a smile.  “It da spirits.”

“Have it your way,” said Davis Trout.  Trout reached into his pocket and produced a coin. “Here’s a nickel, grandma.  Clean up this mess.”  He tossed the coin and it landed at Mama Rose’s feet with a plunk.

He turned, not giving a second look to the dead man on the floor or the old woman in the chair.  He went outside, stepped over the dead form of Ernest Lyle, and opened the Buick’s door.  Mama Rose’s laughter followed him from inside the cabin.  He tossed the Thompson inside the Buick and climbed in after it.  He started up the V-8 engine and pulled away, putting the cabin and the dead men behind him, like so many other scenes of violence and murder he had been a part of, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.

Over the roar of the Buick’s engine, the mad cackling of the old woman followed him.  Seemed to grow louder.  His eyes shot to the rearview mirror where he saw the reflection of the old woman standing in the doorway of the cabin. 

He shifted the Buick into high gear, and said to himself, “Crazy old dame.  I should have finished the job on you.”

He sped out on the narrow dirt road that cut through the swamp, where willow trees canopied the sky with branches covered in Spanish moss.  The road was unfamiliar to Trout.  Johnson had brought them here, because he knew the area, but Trout had paid attention.  “Hell, it wasn’t hard,” Trout said aloud to himself, feeling a nervous twitch in his spine.  “Just one road most of the way.  Get to the highway, and we’ll be a dandy.”

Davis Trout drove on, a dark cloud of dust settling in the wake of the Buick.  The sun had dipped just beyond the tree tops, and darkness began to infiltrate the swamp.  Davis Trout took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the sweat pouring down his forehead. “You will never leave this swamp alive,” Mama Rose had said.  “None of you.”

“That old woman got you rattled, is all, Trout,” he said to himself, breaking the silence inside the Buick.  “Don’t let it bother you, boy. You showed her who the gator was. Showed them all.”

The road was longer than Trout remembered, and the old woman’s words became more than just something Trout could laugh off.  They repeated in his mind.  “You’ll never leave this swamp.”

“Damn, the old broad,” he said.  “Get out of my head!”

Trout pressed the pedal to the floor, and the Buick roared through the dark, unfamiliar country.  He took the curves going ninety and felt the heavy Buick lift and slide as he shifted gears.  “No one traps, Davis Trout!”

A smile broke on his sweating face when he saw an opening through the trees ahead.  He slammed the breaks and slid to a stop at a crossroads.  He looked to the left and to the right, and dug deep to remember which way they had come, sweat pouring down his face.

“Oh, you old windbag,” he said, “you got me doubting myself, yes you do, but it don’t matter.  I’m Davis Trout, and nobody pulls a fast one on Davis Trout.”

He went left, for no reason other than he was tired of following the same road.  “There’s no way we were on that one road for so long,” he said to himself in the darkness of the Buick.  “There’s no way.”

The road went on and on, and the darkness of the swamp beyond the Buick’s headlights was impenetrable.  “If I ever see you again, you won’t be so lucky, grandma,” he said a few times, to ease the nerves that had become needles pricking the back of his neck. 

He began to hear noises outside the windows.  Strange, unidentifiable noises that came from deep within the swamp.  Gurgling sounds.  Screeching sounds.  First one, then another, until soon the sounds of nightfall within the swamp had become a cacophony of imagined horrors lurking beyond his vision.

Trout’s nervous, twitching eyes spotted a beacon of light ahead.  He sped towards it, having no other way to go, and slowed down as he approached it’s growing intensity.  He pulled the Buick along side the light, and found it to be a torch illuminating the outside of a cabin.

“It couldn’t be,” he said, as he slowed to stop, his disbelieving eyes falling on old woman’s cabin.  Laughter, sharp cackling laughter, brought Davis Trout’s wide eyes towards the doorway.  The old woman stood alone in a halo of light emanating from the torchlight.  The gleam of her single gold tooth filled Trout’s mind and body with anger.  “That’s it, grandma!” he shouted from inside the Buick.  “You want to see what a gator can do, you stay right there!”

Trout reached for the Thompson next to him.  He brought the sub-machine gun up and pulled the rack, checking to see that it was loaded.  A broad smile stretched across his face and he looked back towards the old woman.  “We’ll see who’s laughing now, grandma!”

Trout got out of the Buick and took several steps towards the old woman. Her laughter faded into the darkness of the swamp and silence encroached upon them like a predator. 

“You’re not laughing now, are you, grandma?” Trout said.

The old woman stood still.  Her hand clung to the totem draped from her neck.  “I told you, you’d never leave dis swamp,” she said, her voice dark as charcoal.  She raised the totem from her chest and pointed its talons at Davis Trout.  “Da gator going to get you.”

“You’re wrong, grandma,” Trout said, the Thompson aimed towards the old woman.  “I am the gator.”

Trout squeezed the Thompson’s trigger. He bit his bottom lip as the machine-gun spat fire and bullets, the flash of the muzzle masking his face with the shadow of death.  Sprayed the woman and the cabin with his Tommy Gun like it were a hose.  Bullets tore across the night and into the cabin, shattering the windows and splintering the walls.  They ricocheted off the iron stove inside and off pots and pans and zinged out into the nothingness.  Bullets tore at the old woman’s dress and shawl, shredding them into loose ribbons the draped from her like a mummy’s rags.

Trout held the trigger down until he heard the metal click of an empty magazine.  He stood in the yard, his Thompson smoking before him, and glared at the old woman who still stood in the doorway. 

“Never,” she said to him between bursts of laughter, “never leave this swamp!”

“It can’t be,” Trout said, his voice little more than a whisper.  “It can’t be!” he shouted at the old woman.  “I’ll show you!” he cursed, refusing to give in to the mad laughter exploding from the old woman’s mouth.  He dropped the Thompson to the ground and turned back to the Buick.  He stepped towards the car and stopped.  His blood turned cold and his eyes grew wide. 

Terrence Johnson and Ernest Lyle stood before him.  Trout began to speak, but his lips froze. Cold sweat dripped down his back as his eyes focused on his former partners’ bullet riddled bodies dripping with blood and puss. Their eyes gone vacant and flat.  They had the look of dead men. 

“Fellas,” Trout said, managing to find a voice within the dryness that had overtaken his mouth.  “Fellas, you know how it is,” he said, as Johnson and Lyle came towards him with stiff movements. 

Behind him, the old woman cackled. 

Trout stumbled backward as they inched closer.  His nose filled with the scent of rotten decay.

“Never going to leave dis swamp!” the old woman shouted.

Davis Trout fell backwards to the ground.  The zombified forms of Johnson and Lyle crept closer, a slow moan escaping their mouths like fumes.  Trout looked up at the old woman. 

“This is a gag,” he said, his voice pleading and filled with terror.  “Tell me it’s a gag!”

The old woman smiled.  “Never leave dis swamp,” she said.

The corpses lumbered forward. Davis Trout pulled himself off the ground.  He ran towards the darkness that filled swamp.  Johnson and Lyle came after him with slow stiff movements.  Trout ran on, his heart pounding inside his chest as tripped plunged into the warm stagnant water of the swamp.

He came up breathing hard and spitting water.  He turned to the bank where Johnson and Lyle stood, their bodies silhouetted by the moonlight.

“Come get you mugs!” he shouted at them defiantly.  He found his footing in the water and stood up to challenge the monstrosities.  “Come get me!”

Laughter filled his ears.  Behind the zombies, the old woman approached, her gold tooth gleaming, her totem held high. 

“They no come for you, bad man,” the old woman said.  “Da swamp will take you.”

“Come get me!” Trout shouted.  “I’m not running from anyone.  Either them or you, old woman!”

The old woman uttered a laugh that died quietly on the bank.  Trout heard a soft ripple of water behind him.  With slow trepidation, he turned, and faced the glittering eyes of an alligator coming swiftly for him.  Trout tried to move, but the mud of the swamp held him in place, as the alligator rose up before him, it’s jaws stretched wide to reveal it’s crooked, razor sharp teeth.

Trout screamed one last time and was silenced forever as the alligator closed its jaws around him pulled him below the murky water’s surface.  A slow ripple of water and a few bursting bubbles were all that marked Davis Trout’s grave.

The old woman laughed into the new emptiness of the swamp.

                                               

July 23 1932 Bridgeport, Louisiana

Sheriff Roscoe Tollgate stood with his two deputies, inspecting the Buick they found at the crossroads deep in the swamp.  He wiped the sweat from his face, and said, “Well, boys, what do you make of it?”

Deputy Bill Nestor said, “I don’t know, Sheriff.  The money’s all there in the trunk, but I don’t see no sign of Trout and his boys.  Like they plum disappeared.”

His other deputy, Buster Notter, chimed in, “It’s a strange one, isn’t it, Sheriff.  Doesn’t get much weirder than this.”

Sheriff Tollgate shoved his handkerchief into his back pocket and walked to the edge of the road.  He took a cigar from his pocket and lighted it.  He peered out past the willows and cypress, where the still waters lay murky and stagnant. After a long moment, he said, “It ain’t the first time this swamp swallowed up a man, boys.  Swallowed them up whole, it did.  It won’t be the last, or my name isn’t Sheriff Roscoe Tollgate.”

                                                The End