Chapter 29: Zau dwells upon the past
Zau, sitting in his green and yellow robe upon the deck of his chûn, remembered the sound of a banjo. In the late 1940’s he’d heard of the monster alligators of Louisiana, and having tired of being a family dragon, at least for a while, had booked passage to the southern United States. He’d booked into the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, then set about looking for a discrete guide into the interior of the vast and swampy state.
He found a reputable guide with a disreputable gambling habit which had left him with a bad debt problem. All-in-all, a combination of attributes which Zau could exploit. In the hotel restaurant, they had an execrable imitation of tea while discussing where they might find the largest of these swamp leviathans. It would be a week’s journey, first by train than by boat.
Zau settled the guide’s debts directly with his debtors, gave the man enough to outfit the trip, but held back the majority of the fee to keep him honest. They agreed to depart in a week. Zau settled in to enjoy this bawdy young city.
He dined at Galatoire’s, an excellent meal of whitefish basted in a fig remoulade, then descended upon one of the city’s many brothels, rampaging through women and men. When he awoke the next day, he discovered he had engaged a companion, a dusky woman who claimed to be an actress, claimed again to be from the Lisle commune of France. She was likely just another local runaway of mixed blood, but she had a charming lack of inhibition and a delight in all of the pleasures of the flesh regardless of race, sex, position or accessories. He decided to keep her for a while.
As he explored this foreign city, he smelled a foreign magic as well, one of possession and mingled religions, one of chanting, wailing and loss of self. It was familiar enough. He’d seen variants of it in a hundred places. Unstructured, unsophisticated, weak. He disdained it, didn’t bother to investigate.
The appointed morning of departure came, the brothels and restaurants were richer for this exotic and wealthy man from the far east, and the dusky actress accompanied him on his trip into the bowels of Louisiana in search of a fitting trial.
The train was no more or less interesting than trains in the Orient, simply full of paler people. The trip in any event was short, less than a day before they disembarked, took a car to a wharf and watched as the various supplies were taken aboard the waiting boat. He’d been expecting something bigger, at least something requiring a boatswain, but the ambit of this boat was barely more than his true form, the sole cabin less than ample. Still, no smaller than the cabin where he’d spoken the night away with Caboto centuries before, and the litheness of the purported actress enabled them to find ways to while away the time.
They made their way deeper and deeper into the swamps. On the third day, they rested at a shoddy hotel of sorts, a rotting swamp bar, a dynamo providing flickering lights. The entertainment was a man playing a banjo, which reminded him of nothing so much as a badly tuned and misplayed qínqín. That, the local lotus plants so reminiscent of those he knew in China and the local white liquor made him somewhat maudlin. He sat staring into space, the sound of this foreign banjo washing over him, thinking of the beauty of his new daughter Qi, a miracle at this stage of his life. Then, not one to dwell in melancholy, he shook it off, devoured a platter of crayfish and soft shell crab, took the actress to the musty room and shook the walls to the twanging sounds still coming from the bar.
The next morning they continued, saw many large swimming forms, but the guide assured Zau that the largest was yet to come, perhaps prolonging the anticipation, perhaps merely careful to ensure his future payment would be forthcoming. They tossed peanuts and cashews into their mouths as they slowly wound their way further into the swamp, moss dangling from trees shedding water on them as it hit the frame over the deck. The actress was beginning to get frightened, the gloom of the swamp, the floating logs which started and swam away.
Finally, through a cloud of biting insects and hanging vines, they moved slowly into a great internal gyre of the swamp, a slowly rotating, fetid and suffocating mass of mud, water and floating plants. They had arrived at the last sighting of the great alligator that the guide had promised him.
A goat, brought for this purpose, was tossed into the water. The boat was backed away as the animal thrashed in the water, bleating in panic, unable to find solid footing for its cloven hooves. They watched as the animal swam in circles, watched as it shredded the floating plants, watched as it frothed the water, watched as an impossibly large reptile sped toward it from nowhere, opened yawning jaws, made it disappear magically underwater, roiling red foam where it had been.
The light fading, they anchored at the edge of gyre, careful to not make noises which would wake the ire of this denizen of the swamps.
Finally, Zau could no longer hold himself in check. He shed his human form, rampaged through the guide, the actress, the pilot and the deckhand, shredding them, tossed them overboard bleeding and struggling. The boards of the craft groaned under his weight as he coiled there, waiting.
Then the beast emerged. And Zau stooped upon it, thrashed with it in the mud and water of the fetid swamp. And closed his jaws upon its neck, buried his fangs deep, shook it like a rag, severed its spine.
He spent a day lolling in the warm water, feeding on the corpse of the giant reptile as well as the bodies of the actress, the guide and the hired help. He swam downstream, retracing his steps, smaller predators rapidly gliding away from him. He found a huge catfish lounging under a bank, killed and ate half of it. He dined on egrets and flamingoes, flatfish and turtles. Then, a few days later, emerged beneath a pier in New Orleans, shook his vast form into that of a human once again, returned to his hotel.
He spent a few more days enjoying the restaurants and fleshpots, then unwound his journey home, the giant alligator long digested, merely another inadequate monster he’d tested himself against and bested.
