"dropping in on paradise," by jim walke

Dropping in on

Paradise J i m W a l k e

From The Ampersand

Review, Vol. 3

T h e A m p e r s a n d R e v i e w V o l . 2

Dropping in on Paradise Jim Walke

Madge looked out over scum-green Strom

Thurmond Lake to the gated community across the way,

where her husband of thirty-nine years had shacked up

with that widow harlot. A band of red clay ran around the

shoreline like a bathtub ring fifty yards wide—former

lakebed, sheltered and cool for years, now shocked to find

itself exposed and cracking in the relentless sun. The lake

retreated every day during the worst drought on record, as

Atlanta sucked it out through pipes a hundred miles long.

The finger of bay that separated The Pines, where she

stood, from the harlot’s Paradise Lawns community grew

skinnier each week, and soon Madge would be able to

walk right across, if she wanted to, and follow Gil. He’d

make some stupid joke about parting the wed sea, and

she’d claw his face off.

Her gaze dropped from the lake to the window

ledge in front of her where a row of painted plates stood,

slathered with a pastel glop of perfect little houses and

villages. The wall next to the window dripped with antique

tools, haphazardly stapled in place like on those restaurant

walls. Americana. Americrappa. Forget about world peace

or AIDS or those starving children with the bulbous

stomachs on the television program, or marriage. The real

problem was knick-knacks. If people would clear the junk

and trash out of their lives, they could see clearly enough

to fix all those other things.

Eleanor Tatterlin had covered every surface in her


great room with garbage: collectibles from the vile home

shopping networks, seashells, projects from the craft

classes at the activity center and postcards and every type

of tourist trap nonsense from the places she and Walt had

visited in their years on the road. Eleanor and Walt were

RV people, or at least they had been until they settled here

at The Pines, three lots down and across the street from

the house that Madge and Gil had built.

Eleanor’s baby dolls were the worst. With their real

hair and tiny hands, they lined up like miniature convicts in

glass cages along one wall. Eleanor had the entire

collection trapped in those breathless cabinets: colored

babies and Mexican babies and Indian and Chinese and

blond and Swedish and Madge didn’t know what-all else.

Two dozen sets of glass eyes watched her every move in

that stuffy, cluttered room and it made Madge want to

scream.

Eleanor floated into the room with a tea tray. A

sugar bowl shaped like a donkey rode dead center.

“Is your air conditioning out?” Madge asked.

“Oh no,” Eleanor said, “not at all.”

“But it’s roasting in here.”

“Is it? I hadn’t noticed. Walt says I must have the

coldest feet in Georgia.”

Madge took the teacup Eleanor handed her. It

matched the sugar bowl.

Eleanor perked up. “Did you hear about the

alligator?”

“Which one?” Madge asked. The clay around the lake held

scars from the occasional tail-drag or claw marks of a

small alligator.

Eleanor fluttered to her feet and over to her desk. “I have

it here. You’ve got to see—a-ha!” She produced a sheet of


printer paper and waved it like a pompom as she hopped

back to the couch. A spry old bird, Eleanor, despite her

age. Sugar high, Madge decided, taking the paper from

her neighbor.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“An email from my grandson, Trevor,” Eleanor

answered.

What kind of name was Trevor? It sounded like

something you would buy to clean grout. She scanned the

tiny lines of font. In the center of the page was a picture,

like a Polaroid but printed right on the paper. It showed a

swimming alligator from above, taken from an airplane or

helicopter, Madge supposed. She looked closer.

“Is that—“

“An entire deer,” Eleanor said.

A slack brown mass clutched in the gator’s jaws

resolved itself into the shape of a doe, the head bobbing

on one side and the hindquarters trailing limp on the

other.

“That means the gator must be at least fourteen feet long,

it says.” Eleanor said.

The deer down here didn’t get as big as back in

Ohio, Madge thought.

Eleanor plucked the paper from her hands and

turned it over. Another picture on the back showed the

gator from farther away, a second shot with a bit of

shoreline visible.

“See?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s a big alligator,” Madge said, “very

interesting.”

“No,” Eleanor shook the paper in front of Madge’s

eyes, “that’s not why Trev sent it to me. Look in the

background.”


Madge glanced at the peninsula visible alongside

the swimming animal.

“The seventh hole,” Eleanor said. She pointed to

the feature as if Madge couldn’t see it very well herself.

“Walt says there’s always a stiff breeze on that one!”

Madge snatched up her cup and drank lukewarm

tea from the donkey’s tail.

The designer of the golf course at Paradise Lawns

had a perverted sense of humor, like the boys she had

dealt with for thirty years as a junior high school principal.

He’d put one hole at the very end of a narrow promontory

that jutted out into the lake, and wittily added a pair of

round bunkers along the shore. Hilarious. Still, it had to be

the Paradise Lawns’ course. What did they name it? The

Gloaming . . . sounded like a foot disease.

“It’s frightening, is what it is,” Eleanor breathlessly

continued. “The grandbabies are coming in two weeks,

and I don’t dare let them near the water.”

A silence fell, one of those pauses when Madge

knew she was expected to commiserate.

“They’re such dears,” she said, too late, and rose

from the couch.

“No more tea? Would you like to take some cookies

with you?”

Madge avoided looking around the room. The dolls

would be staring. “No, thank you. I can’t take anything

else.”

Madge walked the empty streets of their

neighborhood under a painful sun. She clutched the

Christmas gift from Eleanor, the excuse for today’s ordeal,

not daring to guess what tackiness lurked inside the box.

It looked as if it had been gift-wrapped by a machine.


The name of the place—The Pines—still reminded her of a

mental institution. “Not a retirement home,” the slick ads

had cooed, “but a gated waterfront community. Geriatric

nurse on site!” After they had built on their lot and moved

in, she and Gil had learned that there were gated

waterfront communities, and then there were gated

waterfront communities. The Pines squatted on the south

side of the bay, and when the Army Corps of Engineers

adjusted the water level (because it wasn’t really a lake at

all, Madge thought, but a reservoir) the churning of the

release sent all sorts of flotsam onto their shore:

waterlogged trees, tires, bottles, and once, memorably,

the body of a dead dog. Maybe gators didn’t like dog food.

With the recent drought the releases came every week,

and the bowels of Strom Thurmond churned up remnants

of the drowned valley below: a tractor seat and a windmill

head, a baby doll—not a clean and perfect one like

Eleanor’s small prisoners, but a beloved toy that a little girl

had dressed and kissed and dragged in the dirt—even

barbed wire. The locals whose land ended up underwater

apparently had not been thrilled with the idea of eminent

domain, and rifles had echoed in these low hills. Madge

had heard the stories from the people in town. The army

had had to come out on maneuvers to give the locals

something to think about. All forty years ago, but, after all,

these people still clung to a war that had been over a lot

longer than that.

Along with living in the lake’s backwash, the

inhabitants of The Pines also had to use the municipal golf

course up the shore and swim in a plain Olympic pool. On

the other side of the bay, Paradise Lawns had their

smirking, dirty-mind private course and waterfalls in the

pool and a sand beach, of course, and mansions sprawled


under mature trees. They had Gil, too, although a retired

machinist might not raise the property values as much as

the rest. They had their nativity scene with the light-up

Jesus. Paradise had to prove how modern they were, so

the Savior lay in his manger alongside Kwanzaa banners

and a menorah and flags for the University of Georgia

Bulldogs.

More than the houses and the location set them

apart from P. Lawns. Working people lived at the Pines.

They’d held honest jobs all their lives: factory workers and

drafters and machinists like Gil, even a plumber—blue-

collar workers who’d paid off their mortgages and voted

for union contracts and taken stock options at whatever

price they were offered. Then, at the end of it all, some

scrubbed young man in a suit showed how the stock had

grown into ridiculous numbers. Everyone said if it was

their money they would move down south where the snow

never fell, so that’s what Madge and Gil did. The Pines was

a slice of the Midwest in the historic south, the brochures

had said, but they had failed to mention the dazed

expressions that lasted for the first year, as people found

themselves far from home with nothing to do.

The Lawners still came over for cards and coffee, driving

their personalized golf carts around the lake path where

they weren’t supposed to and acting like they weren’t

putting on airs, or at least they used to come until a few

weeks ago. After a few golf carts had been vandalized and

one bridge game ended in a punch-throwing fight, the

visits had tapered off. Madge still had stains on her best

blouse from the cranberry punch.

The phone shrilled from inside the house. Madge pulled

the door open and slid into the air conditioning like a seal

into water, shivering at the points of cold where beads of


sweat lay between her breasts and trickled down her

ribcage. The phone kept on, and she snatched at it.

“What.”

The bank president sounded like a funeral home director,

with that tone as slick as casket satin. Gil had tried to

withdraw money from the accounts she’d frozen on the

day he’d left.

“Well, I don’t know who could do such a cruel thing,” she

said. Madge examined the cord as she wrapped it around

her hand, one curl over each knuckle. “My husband has

been dead for two weeks, and someone is trying to

impersonate him already.” She opened the refrigerator and

looked at the empty shelves. Swung it shut.

The oozy voice faltered and hitched at the news. When

she’d frozen the accounts she’d said Gil was missing, but

she liked the way the story had progressed. “And I don’t

even have a body to bury,” she said. Madge wondered if

she sounded authentic. She imagined what Eleanor would

sound like if Walt died. Probably like a car alarm. “No, the

body hasn’t been found,” she said. “They haven’t caught

the gator.”

Oily surprise.

“Oh yes, fifteen feet if it was an inch. A scaly old monster

took my husband right off the shore and back to her lair.

Her. That’s right. The females are always the ones you

have to watch. Vicious. Oh, I feel faint from talking about

it. Thank you for calling, and if that man comes in again

please arrest the S.O.B. Use one of those shock-prods on

him.”

Madge felt better after she got off the phone, but still not

hungry. She hadn’t shopped since he left. Everything she

did have left was healthy. For the first year, health had

been all there was to talk about with the neighbors.


Cancer, gout, sugar diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol:

the usual Pines topics of conversation, along with the

cures. Red wine, which Madge certainly saw some of them

embrace, and pomegranate juice and salmon oil, and

coffee enemas for the men’s troubles. If they ate right and

walked the same marked three-mile path every day they

would all live thirty more years in this place, playing

canasta with Eleanor and Walt and staring out over the

water.

“Let it go, Madge,” Gil had urged her, “Relax.” He loved

his Twinkies, and kept a box in the shop to tweak her.

She wandered into the living room and stood at the bay

window. It overlooked three houses across the street: two

Sundowner models and a Sea Breeze. Reservoir breeze,

maybe, eau de expired hound. Madge’s was a Southern

Retreat.

Between two of the houses she could see a slice of the

lakebed. A stick figure of a man walked out there,

stumbling over ridges and hardened lumps and the gator

tracks like fossil records. Henry Barnum, the fool, with his

metal detector, trying to earn himself a heat-stroke, even

in that ridiculous hat. The drought uncovered new

territory for him, an inch at a time.

For the first few days after Gil left, his cronies had

continued to come to the house in the afternoon. The men

showed up at the door like little boys running home when

the streetlights came on. They hung around the basement

looking lost, four other Midwestern men retired from blue-

collar jobs, scared stiff at the idea that one of their few

scheduled activities, namely drinking beer in her

basement, had disappeared with her husband. No one else

at The Pines had a basement. Gil had had to sweet-talk

the county commissioner into letting him dig this one


before their model home had gone up, and he’d slipped

him a wad of cash along with his line of bull. He’d gone on

and on about the miracle waterproofing they would use to

seal it so the high water table wouldn’t be a problem, but

the mold had begun to grow inside of six months, and if

not for the drought, the walls would be weeping.

Madge felt dry herself, desiccated and empty, but only at

night. During the day she kept busy. The house sparkled,

every item in its place, nothing decorative remaining but

whatever crap hid in the box from Eleanor. No Christmas

tree. Gil’s clothes had hit the Salvation Army dumpster by

two p.m. on the day he ran. She was working her way

through the last of his books: shop textbooks and old army

manuals from his time in Korea, stacks of metal-working

magazines. No fiction. Gil had hated fiction, until they

moved here. The harlot got him started on that, too, like

the sports.

The first day the men had shown up, she’d served them

flat diet pop, and party mix, but the second day she’d just

let them sit down there in the dark oil-smell that reminded

them of back home. One by one they’d drifted away, back

to their own wives, except Henry.

Henry had no wife waiting for him, only a tropical fish tank

and a shortwave radio set. Henry had stayed on after the

other men left that day, and clumped up the stairs to find

Madge in the kitchen. He’d stood there behind her, getting

grease on her tile floor as she washed clean dishes straight

out of the cupboard, him twisting his ridiculous hat in

hands like bags of gristle.

“Your slab is solid but it’s got divots, Madge.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He’d indicated the basement with a duck of his

chin. “Your concrete,” he said, “it’s got grooves in the


surface. Too hot the day they poured it, maybe.”

Henry’s years of construction labor meant that he

knew his concrete, but Madge had toyed with the idea of

telling him the real reason for the scars in the floor.

“Madge, I was sorry to hear,” the man went on.

“Gil’s a fool.”

“I can agree with that.”

“If there’s anything—” he’d said.

“Thank you, Henry,” Madge had said. “Now leave.”

He had mumbled a goodbye and backed out the kitchen

door.

After Gil left, when he had flown the coop and run off to

Paradise Lawns to be with that tramp, leaving Madge only

a note that said as little as his vows all those years ago,

his metal-working machines in the basement had begun to

move by themselves. Madge knew they did. She could feel

it—the slope-domed head of the drill press sliding through

the dark beneath their bedroom and the squat width of the

milling machine and the lathe circling, circling. Like

dinosaurs, relics of another age unevolved and slow, the

machines wandered the musty confines of the basement

and left their sliding tracks on the concrete.

Gil had always said he could fix anything with those

machines: old cars, boilers, or the huge stamping

machines at the Jeep plant. If a metal part broke or wore

out, Gil could take measurements down to the size of a

gnat’s eyebrow, choose the right kind of steel for the job

and make a new one. She’d watched him in the basement

back home in Ohio, trimming stock to size with the end

cutter, milling slots and shaping it with the lathe, revealing

curves and arcs where there used to be only sharp edges.

But those skills weren’t needed any more, so the machines

and Gil had both retired. He refused to send them to the


scrap yard or donate them to the high school shop, so a

good chunk of their money went into shipping the half-ton

monsters down here and renting the crane to set them in

place on the slab, along with all of his metal stock: tool

steel, high-carbon alloy for milling, pipes and blocks of pig

iron and long, slender rods of aluminum. The machines

had gone in first, arranged the same way as they’d been

back home in Ohio, then the house had been built over

them, like a mausoleum, so Gil could be buried with his

friends.

Now that he was gone, they moved. The machines

returned to their places by the time morning came, but

she could still tell. When Madge passed among them with

her broom and dustpan, the light from the one high

window sat on them at the wrong angle.

To tell the truth, Gil had lost interest in the

machines before he’d gone. While Madge had stayed home

and read every book in the house waiting for him, Gil had

joined a sailing club and had taken up golf and tennis. He

had no idea how ridiculous he looked out there—his thick

Polish frame like a rectangle in short pants. He’d talk with

Henry and the other lost boys in the basement, in-between

jaunts with the fools from Paradise, but he’d barely touch

his tools. When he did fire up the machines, the things he

made weren’t useful: candlesticks shaped like sparkplugs,

and amorphous shapes in angles and cuts that wound

around and didn’t seem to end. It felt like she had saved

for decades to buy something no longer made. The loss

made her hot and tired and dry.

In the two weeks since he’d been gone, Madge had

found the only way to get some sleep was to appease the

machines. She would get up and switch them on and let

them run, and then engage the lathe to watch it spin. An


hour satisfied them, and they would let her rest. After a

few nights of running them empty, she had picked up a

piece of stock and put it in the milling machine, locking it

down with the t-bolts the way Gil had done a hundred

thousand times. Madge felt a shiver when the cutting head

came in contact with the metal for the first time, and

watched, rapt, as it made neat grooves across the oiled

surface, the shavings spiraling away and down to pile

around her slippers. She could feel the start of something

being built. Not from the parts she made—they were

haphazard, and, she knew, a bit crazy—but inside her.

Madge felt her parts being replaced and remade from the

inside, into something cold and tight and heavy. The last

three nights it had been all she could do to climb the stairs

before dawn, and they had creaked under her weight.

Metal has a grain to it. Not like wood, those long

fibers reaching for the sky. Metal remembers when it used

to be liquid, arcing white hot into molds, the grain spinning

and curling back on itself like ice. Hot-rolled metal is

rough, scaly to the touch but fast and cheap to make. It

has hard spots, though, whorls of grain that will dull a cut

or even leave a hole in the work or fracture completely.

Quality metal is rolled out cold, like revenge.

A shy knock fell on the door, soft as feathers, but she still

almost jumped straight out of her stockings. How long had

she been standing at the front window? The clock showed

five. She crossed to the door and pulled the curtain aside

to find a floppy hat. Oh dear. Madge rested her head

against the cool frame of the door before opening it.

“What?”

Henry fumbled with the metal detector slung under

one arm and still tried to tip that ridiculous hat.

“Madge,” he said by way of greeting, “I wonder if I


might borrow your hose.”

“You don’t have a hose, Henry?”

He shrugged, and the sunburn getting a hold on his

wattled neck darkened to crimson.

Madge nodded her head at the green coils next to

the stoop and came out a few steps to watch. He set the

metal detector carefully out of the way.

On the edge of the lawn, Henry had spread his

loot: a cooking pot, bits of webbing with hooks attached, a

helmet and a small shovel blade, and a box the size of a

toaster with a handle on top, all of it coated in muck.

“Found these a hundred feet out from shore,” he

said as he wrangled the hot vinyl hose. “Must have been

under ten, twelve feet of water. Likely they thought it

would never be found.”

“They?” Madge asked. “The farmers?”

“Could be,” he said, turning the weak stream of

water on the pile, “if they was in the army.”

Drab green paint began to show through on the

box, and yellow stenciled lettering. Henry nodded.

“Ammo box,” he said. “Fifty caliber. Third one that

turned up, so far this week.”

“They left bullets in the lake?” Madge asked. The

tight knots in her chest were getting hot. How dare they?

People lived here.

“We used to keep all sorts of things in these,” Henry said.

“One I found was empty, and the other had some mush

that looked like it used to be paper. Some GI’s love

letters, maybe.”

He dropped the hose to pry at one of the lids with a

jackknife. The seals yielded to his work, and Henry opened

it. The knots in Madge’s chest released when she saw the

six round noses poking out, like a half-dozen huge eggs


packed in jelly. They looked the same as they did in Gil’s

army manual. Madge felt a thrill. She knew now what she

was building, and the new parts inside her clicked to

attention, fell into place and began to move.

“Give them to me,” she said.

“Madge, I got to . . .” He twisted as he looked from

the ammo box to her. “These’re—“

“Dummies,” Madge said, “test rounds.” Her mind

raced. “Harmless. They’re for training. You know Gil led a

mortar-team in Korea. He has some just like that. Leave

them with me and go home, Henry.”

He stuttered and bobbed, the hose at his feet still

spewing precious water over her step. Madge stepped in

close, put her hand on the loose, spotted skin of his wrist,

and repeated herself.

“Go home.”

He hesitated once more. Madge felt like she was

going to scream if she couldn’t get them inside and safe.

She knew why Henry hung around. Junior high boys, all of

them. She screwed up her courage and leaned forward to

lay a smack directly on his leathery lips. The harlot wasn’t

the only one who could do it. His breath smelled like his

cheap cigars made of rope.

Henry looked faint, but he still tried. “Madge, you

got to let it—“

She put a finger on his lips to shush him, hard, and

felt his dentures move.

“Home. Now.” This time she used her school

principal voice. Combined with the kiss he didn’t stand a

chance. She watched Henry’s figure shrink as he trudged

down the street toward his Shiloh, and then she shut off

the hose and took the ammo box across the threshold and

down the stairs, holding it as carefully as a newborn.


The grease had the same smell as the machines in

the basement, like a factory asleep. Cosmoline, the M2

mortar manual called it, good for years and not water-

soluble. Cancerous as hell, of course. She could blow

herself to kingdom come this afternoon, or get the Big C in

twenty years. Madge dipped one hand into the thick

grease and took hold of a shell. It came out with a sucking

sound, the coating oozing through her fingers and dripping

off the fins at the base of the round. They stabilized it in

flight. Maybe Madge could make herself a set. She set it

on the bench and admired it, the body like a little rocket or

one of those hand-held bombs dropped from bi-planes in

World War I.

Gil had never talked much about Korea, except to

curse the cold and any Asian he thought had cheated him,

including every foreign automaker, but while he’d played in

the sun and she’d sat alone indoors, reading for days on

end, his army manuals had spoken volumes. Mortars are

the simplest, most elegant weapons on the battlefield. The

shells have explosives at both ends, a small one on the

bottom to launch it and a larger warhead on top. They

drop down a tight tube, sixty millimeters wide, until they

reach the bottom where all hell breaks loose. A firing pin

at the bottom of the tube detonates the propellant and the

expanding gases hurtle the shell back up the cylinder,

flinging it into the air in a long arc to drop on the head of

the enemy, where the main charge detonates. Indirect

fire.

All six of them were HE, according to the shape

and color: high explosive. Not dummies. Not dumb at all.

She wiped the glistening film from them with a shop towel,

and curled them protectively into her arms. Her eggs,

dormant for forty years and now dug up, lost and now


found. The machines watched, and held their breaths.

“Not moving now, are you?” Madge asked.

The metal stock was slick under her hands. It

clanked in the racks as she browsed, stroking each piece in

turn until she found what she needed. Steel alloy pipe,

cold-rolled for a uniform grain and greater strength, two

and a half inches in diameter—too wide by a few

millimeters but the closest she had. Good enough for

government work, as Gil liked to say.

The end-cutter spun to life when she triggered the

power, the carbide blade spinning into a blur. Madge

slipped safety goggles on, checked her measurements for

the third time—twenty-seven inches just like the M2—and

smoothly eased the carriage along its tracks so the blade

bit into the surface of the pipe. It sang under her fingers,

the high-quality metal vibrating as Madge circumcised one

end. She adjusted the carriage and finished her cut, then

killed the power with the big red slap-switch. The blade

spun down and stopped right on the line she’d marked.

Journeyman work, Gil would have called it, his highest

praise for a novice.

The shining pipe in her hands would be a home for

the thick shells, a place for them to slide in, and, if they

were still alive, a place for them to be born. The thought

stirred her, and Madge took off her shop apron and

goggles in a daze and went upstairs to take a hot shower

with no worries about being disturbed. No machines

moving tonight. They were in on it. Those machines were

workers as much as any one of the people put out to

pasture at the The Pines, and like any good worker all they

wanted was to be useful.

The firing pin would the hard part, Madge thought, as she

soaped her body. It required a raised nipple on the inside


of the end cap, to penetrate the fuse and launch the shell.

A threaded post in the center of the cap with a counter-

sunk nut over the top would work; she’d seen something

like it in an article in Tool & Die. The steam covered the

mirror and when she got out to dry she saw only a

shapeless mass in the fog. Some would wipe it off, but

Madge didn’t want to see herself. Or put streaks on the

mirror.

Dark had fallen while she showered, time drawing

down like the lake, a finite resource.

The end-cap formed under her chapped, dry hands

as she dressed the metal and tapped it on the milling

machine and threaded it solidly to one end of the tube. It

felt like she had piped into a pool of years that were not

hers, the collective skill of all the people sitting around The

Pines this evening watching sitcoms, all that useful

knowledge atrophying in the southern heat. Madge felt

herself unfolding, expanding along with the metal.

Now she needed a frame. The manual showed a heavy

baseplate and bipod with a complicated traverse and

elevation aiming system that was far out of the reach of

her skills, but she could TIG weld the pipe to the bag cart

Gil had bought her to play golf, as if she would take up his

stupid game along with him. The aiming would have to be

done on the fly. A little trigonometry goes a long way—

over a mile if the propellant hadn’t deteriorated; so said

the manual.

She packed the shells back into the ammo can,

clean now as the day they were made and wrapped in her

best white tablecloth wound round their bodies. The tube

stood firm in its rolling frame as she bumped it up the

stairs, to stand next to the door like a portable umbrella

stand.


Eleanor’s gift caught her eye, still sitting on the kitchen

counter by the phone. Madge hesitated. A kitchen knife,

a wedding present from all those years ago, sharpened so

many times that the blade curved in rather than out from

the handle, helped her slit the paper and tape without

tearing it. She opened the box just enough to catch a

glimpse of the hair before slapping it shut. Golden blonde,

silky like hers had been once. Eleanor had given her one

of her dolls. Madge left the box on the table, the doll still

and quiet in the safe, dark confines.

She struggled outdoors with her load. Spring

peepers filled the air with plaintive noise. Frogs on

Christmas Eve, if nothing else, told Madge she was in the

wrong place. She wrangled her cart around to roll

properly, closed and locked her door and picked up the

ammo can. The handle dug into her fingers, the shells

heavier than they’d been on the trip up from the

basement, as if they didn’t want to go.

Down the center of the street she went, a war

widow, the wheels of the cart clicking as they spun. The

air hung as damp as the inside of a lung. She swerved off

onto the walking trail that led down to the lake. When she

reached the end of the path, Madge aimed herself straight

at the glimmer of the Kwanza-tivity display at Paradise

Lawns, and stepped out onto the former lake, army base,

farm.

She fished her flashlight out of a pocket, one of the dozens

Gil had given her over the years, and twisted the switch.

The circle of light, so bright inside the house, was

swallowed by the night. She aimed it at the ground in

front of her feet, hand wrapped around the lens to hide

the light from any nosy neighbors. The clay reached up to

trip her, and she focused on keeping the cart upright as its


rubber wheels bounced and lunged over the uneven

surface. Sixty paces out the lap of water began, a

susurration at the edge of her hearing. Madge stumbled

over a trench dug into the surface. The light revealed a

channel in the clay three feet wide with claw scars at the

sides. Water shone at the bottom of the fresh drag marks.

A monster roamed the lakebed in the dark.

Madge’s heart pounded as she cast her light along the trail

of the beast. Its eyes would shine in the flashlight’s beam,

she knew. Her eyes, she was sure it was a female. Who

but an older woman would flaunt herself so shamelessly?

Green or yellow eyes? She couldn’t remember, but saw

nothing glowing, regardless.

The softer clay churned up by the passage of the animal

would make a perfect base for the mortar. She set down

the ammo box, pressing it into place so it stayed upright.

When she turned to look back toward shore, the lamppost

at the end of the path seemed miles away.

Once more, Madge probed the darkness with her little

light. Alligators hissed, she remembered, like steam

escaping, when they were angry. Scorn, maybe, Madge

thought, or fear. What would it be like to be the largest

predator remaining, knowing that you were doomed,

watching familiar surroundings be replaced with driveways

and golf courses while the water drained away?

If she could only make it through tonight. Tomorrow she

would be locked up. Or blown up. Possibly eaten.

The gator might be waiting for her to get close enough.

Her feet came down on the ridged surface of the clay as

she moved around to set up the mortar, and each step felt

like it had landed on the hide of the gator. She had a good

idea what would happen if she stepped on it: her leg torn

off, or she’d be dragged whole into the water like that doe.


Red, that’s it, gator eyes shine red.

The fear was still there, so cold and clammy that she

forgot about the shells for a moment, but there was

something else she felt now. Pity, or at least empathy. She

was the last big one left. Madge turned her back and got

to work setting up her mortar. The wheels sank an inch or

two into the clay as she leaned her weight on the cart and

settled it into place. The tube’s snout rested in the crotch

of the cart, aimed skyward.

She had pre-measured the angle, and marked the tube

with a notch for each degree of elevation. No way around

it, the aiming was going to be rough. Madge would have to

let fly with the first of her precious shells, then adjust

based on where it fell.

Most of her idle minutes had been filled with images of

geysering explosions. She had seen, in her mind’s eye, the

harlot’s house leveled to a heap of faux marble, the lake

path destroyed and the blasphemous nativity blown to

hell, all but baby Jesus, of course, smiling amidst the

smoking wreckage, but late in the evening the perfect

target had come to her.

Forty years underwater had destroyed the hinges holding

the lid of the ammo box, and when she swung it back this

time the lid came off in her hands. There they were: her

babies, six little soldiers ready to fight. She selected the

first one carefully—the scout—the bravest-looking shell as

her opening salvo. A glance back over her shoulder with

the light showed no eyes. It could still be close. What she

wouldn’t give to be in that wide, flat head for a moment,

watching the soft prey kneel and jabber and arrange the

device that smelled like death.

The sky began to lighten around the edges, which meant

dawn in less than an hour. Now was the time, before the


earliest duffers hit the course to avoid the heat of the day.

Madge’s fingers trembled as she slid the base of the tube

around to aim at where she thought the seventh hole

stuck out into the water. There might not be charges

potent enough in these shells to blow up the little

peninsula completely, but it would be wonderful to try. She

reached into the base of the shell, between its little fins,

and took hold of the fuse. It resisted her, and cold drops

of fear sweat broke out along her neck and upper lip.

What if they were corroded in place, so that she couldn’t

arm them? As fast as the thought appeared, it fled with

the click as the fuse gave a quarter-turn under her grip.

Armed. It was armed. She, Madge, was armed. It felt

wonderful, like lifting off in a plane or pulling away from

the dock in a powerful motorboat. Armed and dangerous.

“Here we go,” she told the gator hiding in the dark.

Hiss.

Madge slid the shell half-way into the mouth of the tube

and held it there. Pull your hands away quick, the manual

said, because the shell would be coming out at three

hundred miles an hour. Drop it, Madge, she thought,

willing her fingers to release. Let it slide down, feel the

charge go off and see the blur as it flies out the mouth of

the tube.

See the shell’s eye view: the dark shores of The Pines

dropping away, Madge left kneeling in the clay next to a

mortar as homemade as a batch of cookies, the dinosaur-

outline of the gator watching her from a few yards away.

Then the top of the arc at six hundred feet, wind

screaming by and the fins holding it straight and steady,

and the shell would tip over and begin to fall toward the

houses of Paradise Lawns. Over the nativity, past the

clubhouse and the front fairway, angling down onto its


target: the seventh hole. Boom.

Madge thought that she heard movement behind her, a

thousand-pound reptile sliding off to her left. Her arm

began to tremble with the effort of holding the shell

suspended at the mouth of the tube. The noise passed her

by, and she heard a splash as the gator slipped into the

water.

“Leave, then,” she said. In a flash, she knew that the

alligator was going to look after her own nest, her own

responsibilities.

Madge saw, in her imagination, the first shell hit right at

the base of the prick. She would drop the others in rapid

succession, the third round in the air before the second

hit. The blasts would cut the hole off from the shore, set it

free and leave only a little round island with the green and

the flag. Maybe it would break off and float away. She

could swim out to it. Madge had a vision of living out her

days on a floating island in Strom Thurmond lake, just she

and the other unevolved creatures: the gators, the lathe

and the drill press, all sunning themselves on the green.

Maybe her baby doll, too, out in the healthy sunshine.

A drop of rain touched the back of her hand. The first rain

in months. It pattered on the clay around her, soaking her

blouse. “Let it go, Madge,” she murmured.

Let it go. What Gil always said to her, in teasing and

exasperation. Let it go. She could see his face when he

said it.

Cramps crawled up and down her forearms and

sweat dripped into her eyes. Let it go. How many times

had she heard that in thirty-nine years of marriage. A

thousand? Ten thousand? He even put it on the note when

he left. Three words: Let it go. Not “let me go,” but it. The

marriage. Just let it fall to pieces. Forget all those years.


Let it go, Madge.

Let it go.

So she did.


Jim Walke is a writer, actor and cubicle monkey in the

mountains of Virginia. He's in the low-residency MFA

program at Queens University of Charlotte with a fine and

talented group of misfits. In his spare time he enjoys lying

in his hammock, and lying.

Read more at:

www.ampersand-books.com

"dropping in on paradise," by jim walke

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