The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter Page B

the night, or it might get stolen.” He stepped in and stood for a second near the wicker couch then stepped out again, but for the moment that he was inside she felt the loneliness of the night and the slight impropriety of having asked him to come in and look—would he … ? No, he would not take it the wrong way, and she was a big woman, used to unconsciously assessing her ability to fend off physical attacks or advances … it was in her imagination, any hesitation on his part to leave—he left with perfect politeness, but the friendly good humour of their talk … had it almost been a kind of planning, together, of a possible life out there on the water in an old houseboat among the shrimp fishers? No, she told herself, it had not been that at all. But it had been fun—she hadn’t known then that trying on the hat and discussing the vagabond life would be the only real human conversation she’d enjoy the whole time she was on Sanibel. From the time Callum Tyree left her alone in the cottage, she would be utterly and essentially lonely. What a fool, coming by herself. She was a woman who did not know the first thing about her own temperament. Solitude? Why in the name of all that was alive on this earth—anhingas, orange flowers, shrimp fishermen—why had she imagined solitude was a thing she wanted?
    By her fourth day she had ridden all the bike paths and seen all she could bear of geriatric beachcomber couples tolerating each other in cold fury. Even the little beach where she could sit alone with the ospreys felt full of malevolence—she couldn’t blame the ospreys, on whose nesting grounds intruders continually encroached, but she did not want her eyes plucked out. There was an outfitting company that worked with the big wildlife reserve toward the northeastern part of the island, and you could rent a canoe and go around the mangroves, where there would be herons and brown pelicans and oyster beds and … she had not quite figured out the alligator situation—it was something she could ask the outfitters. The ospreys, menacing in their own way, had taken days to disturb her completely, whereas the tourists had done so in far less time. Maybe the herons and alligators or whatever lived in the mangroves … maybe they wouldn’t be so … The people she had left at home made their views known. The eldest daughter urged her to go deeply into the mangroves, to the most dangerous place possible. The youngest said, Don’t get et . Her mother shuddered in revulsion.
    The canoes were blue and made of scratched plastic. They looked like toys. It seemed unlikely that any outfitter would provide such canoes if there were real dangers out there. It would be like floating around in an elongated Frisbee. She had slid down the hill in Montreal’s Parc du Mont-Royal on a dollar-store toboggan more substantial than those canoes.
    â€œI noticed,” she told the person upstairs in the gift shop as she handed over her credit card, “on my bike, on one of the bridges … a sign that said do not feed the alligators, and I wondered …”
    â€œHmm …” thinly veiled scorn.
    â€œI mean I understand why no one should feed them—what I’m wondering about is, exactly how it works … I mean …”
    â€œJust look where you’re going. For one thing, you’re probably not going to get that close to one, but if you see one lying across the path …”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œAnd an alligator is not likely to consider you as food because you’re—for one thing—huge …”
    â€œWhat do alligators normally consider food?”
    No wonder the woman was looking at her that way. Why, Claire wondered, had seventeen years of formal education not implanted an image somewhere in her brain of an alligator eating something … She suddenly remembered that her brother Craig had camped in Orlando in his