My granddad was the one who made the arrangements through some site on the Internet. He'd been known to make odd deals all his life. I liked the jovial old man, even if the rest of the family tried to keep their distance.
I am a cross country truck driver, though, and I stop if I am within 100 miles of the old homestead just over the Texas border from Oklahoma. Most people driving within a half-mile of the place would miss it, or if they saw anything, they'd think it was an old shed ready to fall down in the next big wind.
Granddad had been born in that shed -- or at least in the place below it. The shed had little more than a set of stairs that led into a lovely cedar-lined entry. The rest of the residence stretched out on both sides, and the windows were set in stone outcroppings.
Usually, you just didn't see the place, but today I had trouble getting up the drive because of the crates piled up along the way. It worried me more that they were all being kept wet by an elaborate set of hoses and sprinklers.
Granddad came out of nowhere, waving his hat to me as though I would just drive on by, despite that the driveway ended in a few more yards. I braked to a stop, and dust rose all around us.
I should have stayed in the truck and backed out. Instead, I climbed down into the heat and dust.
"Hey, boy! Thought you'd be along soon. Good thing. Got some shipments for you. Make us a fortune, they will!"
The dust had begun to settle, mostly on granddad and me. I didn't notice that so much, to be honest. The crates had started to draw my attention. They moved. They hissed.
"What in the name of God --" I said, my voice a bit higher than usual.
"Gators!" He all but shouted. I was sure I misunderstood. Made me a deal, boy." He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. I had been convinced for a couple decades that he didn't actually know my name. "Met this guy on a swap page. Sad business, his ma taking sick suddenly, and he couldn't transport the gators like he'd contracted."
"A ... yeah," I said and moved away from a particularly active crate. "Granddad, there are laws --"
"I got me them papers," he said. "Come on in."
I followed him down into the lair. He'd gotten a new computer and a larger screen. So while I went looking for information on transporting gators, granddad went and cooked us a couple steaks and taters. He also got out his homebrew, which probably explains why we got the trailer rearranged and loaded with crates before first light.
I had a shipment of pillows for Barstow, California. They were easy enough to move and shove back into the first third of the trailer. We stacked gators.
And then we headed for Ordinary, North Dakota.
No, I hadn't heard of it, either.
Granddad insisted on going with me. "You'll need help off-loading them, and if we get stuck somewhere, we might need to feed them."
Hell, it was October. We didn't have to worry about the weather in North Dakota this early in the year, right?
Actually, it was the ice storm in Kansas that nearly did us in -- well the first time. We had to get pulled out of the ditch, and the gators were a bit loud about being tossed around a bit. We got bags of cheeseburgers as we passed through Kansas City, and that quieted them down.
But the farther north we went, the worse the weather got. Even Granddad began to fidget by the time we reached the South Dakota Border. The snow fell in a light haze across the sky, but there were reports of worse heading northward. I also noted that far less traffic had started to come from that direction, and some of the vehicles were encased in snow and ice.
Granddad fell asleep.
I've been told that I remind people of granddad. I'm just as stubborn. I kept going.
It was luck alone that they hadn't closed down the Interstate somewhere along the way and trapped us, maybe somewhere without enough cheeseburgers. I only stopped once for the restrooms and checked on the gators. They were quiet. Too cold for them, probably, but not much I could do about that. I just tried to drive faster -- not too fast, but we didn't crawl along the road either.
I didn't count the cars and trucks in the ditches, either. I just kept my eyes on the road.
With Canada less than fifty miles away, I found the turnoff. Someone had scooped the road clear -- must have in the last few minutes -- and I had no trouble driving straight to Ordinary. On the edge of town, there was a vast square building with a flashing sign -- Extra-Ordinary. The plowed snow ended there, and a man came out of the door and waved us to a loading dock.
I backed in. Granddad and I climbed out and hurried into the building -- and into a jungle.
"Well damn," Granddad said as he looked around. "Reminds me of home."
"Going to draw a lot of tourists come spring," the man said. "Got the monkey's coming in a couple months. Want the gators settled first!"
So we unloaded the thirty crates. The man knew what he was doing. He used a pulley to cart each one up to a high slide and then opened one end and sent the stunned creatures down into the water. The slide stopped ten feet off the water, and even if they wanted to climb back and have words with us, they couldn't.
The man paid us $20,000 -- not really bad at all. I might look into the monkey shipment.
What could go wrong?
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