Never Agitate An Alligator

Never Agitate an Alligator

Raymond Duncan

Copyright © 2015 Raymond Duncan

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This book is dedicated to John Mills Nabers, my best boyhood friend—and to Iyla and Miri, my grandchildren who introduced me to the joys of a grandparent.

Acknowledgments

These tales of Florida boyhood adventures owe much to my best childhood friend, John Mills Nabers. John Mills lived in Windermere, a small town surrounded by the Butler chain of lakes not far from Orlando. To help bring our Windermere adventures back to life, John Mills reconnected me with past buddies like Whit Chase and Tommy Darden. Whit’s family owned 1,300 acres of orange groves adjacent to Windermere where we kids used to play. They later became a gated golf community where Tiger Woods once lived.

A deep debt of gratitude goes to my friend from college years, English Professor Robert Jones, who brought his editing skills to bear on the manuscript’s loose ends. Others who deserve my sincere thanks for reading its early drafts are Roger Eibl and Abby DeVuyst. Laura Hoerner did the artwork. Jane Tracy, Heidi Williamson and Matthew Donofrio of Orlando’s Public Library helped to research and verify the facts and background to these stories.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One: The Face In The Window

Chapter Two: Magic Flying Carpet

Chapter Three: Never Agitate an Alligator

Chapter Four: Smoking Outhouse

Chapter Five: Charles Atlas Will Make Your Muscles Bulge

Chapter Six: A Song for the Local

Chapter Seven: The Astonishing Daisy Red Ryder BB Gun Shoot Out

Chapter Eight: The Famous Electric Outlet Experiment

Chapter Nine: The Amazing Marble Shooting Contest

Chapter Ten: Bridge Over Troubled Water

Chapter Eleven: The Chicken Fryers Money-Making Business Scheme

Chapter Twelve: How Not to Ride a Bicycle

Chapter Thirteen: The Man Who Drowned

Chapter Fourteen: New Year’s Fire Ball Fight

Chapter Fifteen: Bubble Gum Girl Friend

Chapter Sixteen: Scars that Tell a Daring Tale

Chapter Seventeen: The Epic Red Ant/ Black Ant Battle

Postscript

Leaving Florida

Farewell Florida: Hello California

Introduction

My Florida adventures began when my father moved our family of four from Oakdale, California, to Opa Locka, Florida, during World War II. Dad bought a house next to a Naval Air Station where training in dive-bombing and torpedo launching took place. After a two-year stay in Opa Locka where my father worked as an electrician, we moved to Hollister because he saw an opportunity to buy a gas station. Hollister at that time consisted of a few poorly kept buildings and a sawmill. We lived in a ram-shackle place with outhouse and a hand-operated water pump on the back porch.

Following Hollister came a variety of short-term moves, none of which improved our living situation. However, in December 1946 we moved to Windermere, which was a Christmas present I will always cherish. In Windermere my life changed for the better, because that’s where I met a kid who became my best childhood friend.

In the summer of 1948, we left Windermere and moved six more times through Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming and then wound up back in Gainesville, Florida—all within a year of leaving Windermere.

In the summer of 1950 we returned to California.

ARRIVING IN WINDERMERE

Chapter One

The Face In The Window

I remember like it was yesterday. On a Saturday afternoon in the week before Christmas, 1946, my family of four drove on the narrow two-lane asphalt road into the Florida Village of Windermere. Our beat-up black 1940 sedan towed a dilapidated open trailer stacked with cheap furniture tied down with white clothesline rope. We passed over a worn out wooden bridge above a narrow canal connecting two lakes, the thumping across the bridge’s trembling wooden beams vibrating so much my teeth rattled. I was gazing down at the tall bamboo and banana trees below when my father announced, Welcome to Windermere, folks.

My father’s tone had a familiar ring. In recent months, he’d announced, Welcome to Gainesville, Welcome to East Palatka, Welcome to Hollister, and Welcome to Opa Locka. We moved a lot. This was Florida Move Number Five since 1945. I was thinking at the time I could care less where we unpacked the furniture that night. Any place would be better than the trailer house parked behind a gas station we’d left back in Gainesville. There we used the gas station’s restrooms as our personal bathroom. As a fifth grader in the elementary school three blocks away, I wouldn’t dare bring a friend home.

Dad smiled, picked up the brown paper sack resting between his legs and took a big gulp from the bottle inside. His sunburned left arm rested on the ledge of the open car door window, and with the bottle in his right hand up to his lips, he steered the car with his left knee. Dad referred to the bottle in the brown paper sack as his medicine.

That’s when my mother, Francis, asked, How many people live here?

About two hundred, Dad said.

Which made sense. We hadn’t passed a single car in the last half hour, and there were few houses, stores or people in sight. I did notice a railroad track running along the right side of the road we were on, and there was a railroad bridge over the canal right across from the car bridge we’d crossed that got my attention. I resolved right then and there that both bridges were perfect places to sit and drop a hook and line down in the canal. Fishing around here looks real good, I said as stunning blue bay came into sight off to our right.

I was nuts for fishing, and Florida was known as Fishing Paradise. That’s what I was thinking as I swallowed a handful of Uncle Tom’s Peanuts from the little cellophane packet and downed a gulp of Royal Crown Cola Dad had bought at a gas station back down the road. My sister Linda, four years younger than me, sat quietly, staring out the window, taking it all in, munching on her peanuts.

There’s plenty of large mouth bass here, he said. Windermere is smack in the middle of a chain of seven lakes connected by canals.

Linda suddenly leaned forward in the back seat and asked Dad a pretty serious question, one I’d been thinking about too. Where are we going live? she said. It better not be another trailer. Not that she could do anything about it. But that was Linda. She had a big mouth for a skinny six year old.

Her left arm was draped over Jerry, our floppy-eared red hound dog. His pink slobber-covered tongue lolled over his soft wet lower lip. Jerry did not seem altogether pleased about this trip, I thought. His saucer-size brown eyes, suspicious as all get out, darted around like a prison convict planning his escape. He was panting to beat the band.

A minute or two later, Dad turned right off the asphalt road onto a narrow packed white sand road. We’re going to live right down here, Miss Wisenheimer, he said.

Is it a real house this time, or another trailer? Linda asked, poised to take another slug of Royal Crown Cola.

It’s for sure a real house, Sweetie. Rooms and everything. Even a garage, Dad said.

Linda sat back and smiled, which made me smile too. I was thinking how good it would feel to live in a real house again.

It’s got a bunch of orange and grapefruit trees too, Dad said.

Can we pick them right off the tree and eat them? I asked.

Of course. Dad downshifted the Ford to slow down. We can sell a bunch too. Extra money. After all, this is orange grove country, kids.

Which was not what you’d call stunning information, given the rows of deep green trees thick with plump oranges all spread out up and down the white sand road.

We could use some extra income, Mom said, her voice crisp.

We pulled into the sand driveway of a small blue house on the corner. With its dark silver-colored tin roof, it was perched on concrete blocks about a foot off the ground, its blue paint badly chipped. Two other small houses sat across the sand road, each with a wood front porch with two or three rocking chairs.

Here we are. Dad turned off the ignition, took a swig of medicine, opened the door and slid out.

Just as I opened my back seat car door Jerry knocked me aside, deposited a streak of wet slobber on my bare right arm and took off down the road like a fire truck on a five-alarm fire—in Florida talk, he was hauling buggy.

Where’s he going? Mom asked.

He doesn’t like it here, Linda said. But he’ll come back.

The more important question was the one I asked. Is the toilet inside?

Of course, Dad said. Running water too.

Good news, I thought, thinking back to our Gainesville house trailer behind the gas station.

Out of the car, Jerry kicking up sand in the distance, Dad led the way to our new home’s back door. Come inside everybody, he said. Let’s have a look around.

Inside we got the cook’s tour—which is how our moves worked. Whenever we shifted from one town to another, Dad would go out first to find a place for us to live—something like an Indian Scout in the Wild West.

We’ll have to sweep it up, he said, giving Mom, not a big fan of brooms, a look, as we stood in the small living room.

Whoever lived here before must have left in a hurry, Mom said. She reached down and picked up a dusty copy of the Orlando Sentinel newspaper lying on the floor.

Didn’t you say they were evicted, Dad? I asked.

Right, Apparently three or four men shared this place. Didn’t pay their monthly rent, so they got kicked out. But this place will look great when we clean her up. A good broom and a few buckets of water, and she’ll be good as new.

Where’s my room? Linda said, turning her head this way and that.

Follow me, young lady, Dad said, stepping out of the living room.

It wasn’t long before we checked out my small bedroom. At last a real bedroom, I thought. A bedroom in a real house. I took a deep breath and savored the moment. My room was on the corner of the house just off the living room. It faced a scrub brush covered area across the sand road. As I peered out the bedroom’s one window, I could see a bay off in the distance behind the scrub brush. I learned later it was connected to Lake Butler. The window was just above where Dad said we could put my bed, the one he’d bought at a used furniture place back in Gainesville.

Don’t get any wild ideas about playing over there, Dad said,

I put my nose to the windowpane.

See those palmetto bushes and shrubs by the water? he added. It may look like a great place to explore. But that’s rattlesnake and alligator heaven. Dad’s voice sounded ominous. Big ones too, he said. Alligators eat kids.

Sounds like bullfrog heaven to me, I said.

Bullfrogs and alligators sound the same, Dad said. By now I had learned to receive such information with a degree of skepticism, but I nodded politely anyway.

We spent the next hours cleaning up the place and unloading most of the furniture in the trailer.

By ten p.m. that night, we all were beat from the day’s activities. Nobody had to convince me it was time to hit the sack. Linda was already out cold in her bedroom.

So I put on my red, white and blue boxer shorts with little American flags, and my white undershirt, and climbed into bed. There I lay on my back, arms behind my head, staring at the overhead window, reviewing the day’s events, thinking about fishing off that car bridge.

Moonlit clouds scudded across the sky outside. Bullfrogs and alligators grunted loudly in the swamp across the sand road. One heck of a party out there I thought. I loved the racket. How much better to be here in a real house listening to bull frogs and alligators than in the gas station trailer back in Gainesville listening to car traffic.

What a great place, I thought, with the big question lurking in the back of my mind about how long we could live here before Dad moved us again. I always worried about that, because it meant saying goodbye to new friends. A thought like that can get you down, so I shoved it to the back of my mind and concentrated instead on fishing.

But right about then, mixed with the bullfrogs and alligators chorus, I detected something different. Not a bullfrog. Something bigger. Much bigger. Ominous…coming closer. Right outside my bedroom. I swallowed hard, my imagination suddenly jacked up with thoughts of something about to get me.

My hands went all clammy, and a chill shot down my spine when it dawned on me what was outside my bedroom.

Footsteps.

I gasped and held my breath. Somebody was right outside my window!

The urge to jump out of bed and run like crazy to my parents’ bedroom sprang to life and prodded my back, but I simply could not move. I felt pinned to the mattress like a catfish nailed by its head to a plank—ready to be skinned.

Totally panicked, heart racing, I shut my eyes to tiny slits, fearing what I might see.

But I peeked anyway, and there it was! A Face! In my window. Peering in. I yanked the covers over my head and clenched my teeth so hard my jaw ached.

After a couple of seconds, I slowly peeked my eyes from under the bed covers. The Face was gone. But I knew it must be out there. Had it seen me? Was it going to get me?

What to do?

In my frantic search for an escape plan, I remembered having just read the latest comic book about Adventures of Plastic Man. It was right there on the floor beside my bed. Plastic Man! Yes, I thought, that’s it. Time to channel good old Plastic Man. What would he do in a situation like this? With this thought hope jumped in and sat down beside fear. Things were looking up.

One thing for sure. Plastic Man had this awesome ability to mold his rubber-like body into all kinds of shapes—whatever he wanted.

So I concentrated on what he’d do in this Face in the window situation. I instantly