“Oh,” Fanchon cried, “this is disgusting, is it dead?”

It took her a minute. She was coming down, yes, but this was a jolt, a hallucination in real time with scales and claws and teeth that made her heart seize. There was blood on her son’s chest, his legs, his arms. “Mom,” Corey was saying, “Mom, look!”

They were all on their feet now, except her—she was frozen there in the depths of the chaise, everything a horror all of a sudden, the blood, her son’s face, Richard, who was showing his teeth in a grimace that was a smile, a killer’s smile, and here was this animal the size of a beagle with an arrow thrust through the folds of its corrugated throat. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t speak. All she wanted was to be somewhere else.

“I killed it,” Corey said. “With the bow and arrow from the hotel.”

“What is it?” she heard herself ask, and it was as if she weren’t even in control of her own voice.

“An iguana. A big iguana, the granddaddy of them all.”

“We killed it,” Richard corrected. He was shorter than Corey, squatter, with a sharp thrust of nose and two glittering eyes the color of pea soup. “I stabbed my knife right through its head.” He held up the knife, rusted, chipped, brown with dried blood, in evidence.

“But why?” Alice asked in a thin voice. She was standing apart from the boys in a filmy Mexican wrap, the sun high over her and diminishing her shadow till all there was of it was a little puddle of shade no wider than her feet. She had a cigarette in one hand, a paperback book in the other. Her hair was piled up on her head, frizzy with the salt of the ocean that never seemed to wash out no matter how many showers you took.

“For meat,” Richard said.

“Because it’s dangerous,” Corey said in the same moment, talking over him. “Look at its claws.”

She looked. The thing was magnificently ugly, like a dragon, with a snake’s slickness and a scaly beard and hackles down its back. And claws, the big hooks of its claws.

Corey abruptly dropped his end of the arrow, which had been thrust through the thing like a skewer, and that forced Richard to drop his end too, so that the carcass fell at their feet and Corey went on in a breathless rush to tell them all how he and Richard had gone up along the stream in the jungle out back, hoping to catch fish, when they’d seen the iguana clinging to a tree trunk and how lucky they were to have brought the bow and arrows along in case of snakes. “Wasn’t that great?” he insisted, his voice leaping. “Wasn’t that smart of us?”