At 9 a.m. on Saturday, there’s a knock on the door.  Actually, three different sets of knocks – the first two that I ignore and the third that I blearily answer to find CJ standing there in his unshaven glory, dressed in cargo shorts and a stained white Florida Panthers t-shirt. His right hand is on the handle of a wheeled Coleman cooler.

“Hey, CJ – what’s up?” Then, abruptly, “Hey – what the hell?”  He has a rifle in his left hand. “Relax. Air gun. Perfectly legal. I actually called the cops today and they told me it was fine.  ‘Just make sure you’re shooting down and not at anything up in a tree’ the guy said to me.” 

 “Why?   

CJ pulls out his phone and turns the screen toward me. “Florida law says the iguanas got to go. Invasive species. So – let’s go do our part.  

My expression is skeptical.

“Dude, they are overrunning this place.” At that point, there’s a pop from an air gun stands out from the hum of a lawn mower in the background. “Damn – we’re missing out.”

I sigh. “Give me a second.”  I go my closet, put on shorts and a polo shirt, grab my air rifle and head out the door.

We walk down to the canal and take up a position near the left bank, sitting in lawn chairs with the cooler between us, our location mostly shaded by a couple of palm trees.   By ten, even in the shade we’re starting to sweat so we pull out Buds from the cooler and each pop open a can. And wait.

It takes about half an hour for the first one to descend from a tree across the canal and walk obliviously toward my yard. CJ puts his beer down and watches him closely, his finger tapping the chair handle in excitement. Tantalizing, it hesitated a moment before crossing the roughly estimated line where my neighbor’s lawn stops and mine begins.

CJ puts his Bud down and picks up his Umarex. He aims through the scope but stops when he sees another coming up behind the first.

“Wait for that one,” he whispers and rests the gun across his lap.

They move slowly across the property line, ignoring us as they move onto the canal bank, a few yards from the water. One is young, smaller and green, but the other is old, gray, large, slow and solemn. 

CJ nods for me to take the smaller one while he aims at the other.

Both are resting obliviously, warming themselves in the sun. 

“One, two, three,” CJ whispers and we fire.

The small one is spooked and moves just as I pull the trigger. CJ hits his target right below the left eye. The old iguana flops over on his side and twitches. CJ jumps up, sprints over and finishes it off with another shot to the head. The twitching abruptly stops.

“Damn – that was nice!” he says with a big grin on his face as he raises his left hand. “High five!”

I high-five him but keep looking at the dead iguana. CJ pulls out his phone and takes pictures of it from a few angles then grabs it up by the tail and drags it over to the rocks by the culvert where the vultures will no doubt be arriving as soon as we leave.

We sit back down and wait. CJ keeps reliving the kill as he drinks. “Did you see the stupid son of a bitch?” he asks at least three times.

By one in the afternoon, no others have appeared and it’s starting to get boring, and a little creepy with the carcass of the gray one watching us with his one intact eye as he bakes in sun.

“Well, seems like that’s it,” I say to him.

“Are you kidding?  How many times are you going to be asked to shoot stuff?  You can go but I ain’t leavin’ yet.”

“I don’t know – it seems kind of lame.  These things don’t have a chance.”

“They shouldn’t even ‘be” here at all.”

And so I stay – and more do come as the afternoon progresses, walking mindlessly into the trap.  Even though they really don’t belong here, it’s kind of pathetic to see the young following the older ones’ mistaken ways.

CJ is gleeful and kills two more before we quit, but I never do hit any.

Instead, I spend the time getting drunk in the heat, and missing because I’m aiming too high.