Dead of Night (32 page)

DDT is a potent carcinogenic, readily absorbed through the cell walls of pasture grasses, ripening vegetables, and herbaceous fish. It also seeped into our water systems. A generation of children grew up drinking DDT-laced milk and water and eating DDT-contaminated food. Unknown thousands of that generation are still suffering the effects. All because of an exotic moth.

Water hyacinth, a South American floating plant, and kudzu vine, from Japan, were other examples. Kudzu vine arrived by ship in the late 1800s to shade porches of Southern mansions. In the 1940s, government agricultural agents decided it was the ideal answer to erosion because it grows rapidly—up to a foot a day. Within a few years, the vine was suffocating farmlands and forests. It now blankets millions of acres. Hyacinth clogs millions of acres of waterways.

In Florida and neighboring states, there are too many examples of noxious exotics that breed, travel, and destroy, unhampered by natural checks: the Cuban tree frog, the walking catfish, several species of tropical fish, and, recently, the Indo-Pacific species of lionfish—dangerous because its spines are lethal.

Brazilian fire ants are some of the most vicious little bastards on Earth, and among the most ecologically destructive. The ant, named for its fiery bite, entered via ship through Mobile, Alabama, in the 1930s—the beginning of a long, slow nightmare. Fire ants sprout wings during their breeding cycle, can travel miles during mating flights, and hatch copious numbers of eggs.

The ant was soon killing local populations of native insects, whole colonies of ground-nesting birds, and infant mammals, as they ate their way into neighboring states. Ironically—and sadly—I’ve yet to hear of an environmental group that has aimed its financial or political guns at this biological cancer. Annually, fire ants destroy more indigenous species than the most heartless of developers.

I’ve done enough reading to know that plague and pestilence are not just words entombed in an ancient book. On the largest of scales, a balance between predator and prey is requisite if a biota is to function as a whole, because the health of the macrocosm is dependent on the health of all its living parts.

It is a fragile symbiosis. Predation is one of the few checks that prohibits one species from dominating, then destroying all others.

 

 

The only exotic on Dr. Shepherd’s list that didn’t seem an efficient choice as a bioweapon was the mamba. The species is too dangerous to handle, and snakes lay too few eggs to have much impact on a sizeable geographic area.

But then I gave it some thought. Decided maybe I was wrong.

In the African bush, only once had I seen a green mamba. Along with the taipan of Australia, it’s the scariest snake I’ve encountered. Confronting a mamba? Chilling.

The snake grows more than fourteen feet long. Over ground, some claim, it crawls faster than an Olympic sprinter can run—unlikely, but illustrative of the fear it creates. The grade school janitor said that the snake he killed had charged him. The janitor was lucky. He had a shotgun. I’d heard accounts of pissed-off mambas running down men from behind and biting them in the back. Maybe apocryphal, but the animal’s physical abilities are well documented.

The snake I’d encountered was face-to-face, and once was enough. When agitated, a mamba stands erect, a third of its body off the ground, so it’s at eye level. You and the snake, staring at each other, its face and jaws not much smaller than your own. Just before it strikes, a mamba shakes its head violently, flattening cobralike. It opens its mouth wide to show the black interior. The snake is olive gray to green, not black. The name comes from this attack display.

If a mamba wet-strikes a healthy adult, death is statistically certain if the victim doesn’t receive antivenom within half an hour. It is not a Hollywood death. Because of the megadose of neurotoxin, the victim dies slowly, clearheaded, but as a suffocating paraplegic. Its venom reserve is so massive that there are accounts of a single African mamba dropping through the roof of a house and killing as many as twelve inhabitants before crawling away.

So maybe it was a good choice as a bioweapon. Release a small number of mambas at places chosen to create the greatest possible public outrage: the Mall of the Americas; public schools. The terror factor would be enormous.

“Diabolical”—the right word.

The green mamba I’d encountered had behaved like an irritable, hyperactive teen. “Probably had a nest in the area,” one of the locals told me later. “Makes them fierce. Deadly mean.” The snake’s head swayed like a metronome, but its eyes never broke contact with mine. The eyes were convex scales on an organism covered with scales. They were a lucent gray-blue, as dead looking as keratin plates, yet they implied the irrelevance of all knowledge because they reflected all that could be genetically known: If it touched its mouth to me, my beating mammalian heart would stop.

An African mamba is among the few creatures on earth instinctually certain of its ascendancy. I hoped I’d never face another.

It crossed my mind that the people doing this were another form of exotic. There is nothing sinister about snakes, or sharks, or spiders. They are what they are, beautifully coded, the trophies of adaptation. But these people were purposeful; seditious exotics, no less poisonous than the creatures they’d smuggled into the U.S. So far, they’d operated without being discovered. Like the fecund-select creatures they were using, there was no predator to track them and intercede.

Until now.

I’d been given the assignment. My options included whatever extreme action I deemed appropriate.
Eternalize.

My license had been reissued.

I thought of Jobe Applebee, the little man who’d experienced too much chaos during his life. I thought of a good lady who once placed the imperatives of scientific method only after the love she had for her son, and husband. I thought of Tomlinson’s pain ... remembered the disgusting vision of guinea worm on the move.

Sitting in that hospital room, I sent a silent message to the perpetrators:
You are being tracked now.

I sat thinking dark thoughts, writing in my log, as I listened to Tomlinson, the cheerful drunk, hold court on the phone. He’d already called several island fishing guides—Jeth, Alex, Neville, Doug Fisher, and Dave Case among them. Next he dialed my cousin, Ransom.

When she answered, Laken and I listened to what was by now a familiar, one-sided conversation: “Guess who’s got a fish stuck up his willy. Yeah, it’s me. Who else? Nope. My penis. I’m not kidding. Seriously ...
a fish.
The little fiend went for a swim up the Sunshine Skyway. I’m in the hospital right now.

“No, I’m not drunk. I’m doing mainline morphine, which is like visiting an ol’ war buddy. Makes the wounds seem fun. They’ve got this special machine I plan to buy and keep aboard No
Más . . .
”

I watched Tomlinson tilt his head, listening to Ransom for what seemed like a long time, before he became insistent. “Yes ... I told you. They’re gonna do surgery in about half an hour. Listen to me closely: I ... HAVE ... A ... FISH ... UP ... MY ... DICK. Which means no live broadcast tomorrow. Sorry, no can do. In fact, I’ve gone to work with Doc on a special government project. Top secret ; can’t say. I’m his researcher and personal assistant. So we may have to tell our Zen students it’s recess time. Go play alone in their own heads for a few months ...”

He listened for several moments before raising his voice. “Lady, I’m surprised someone hasn’t dropped a house on you. They don’t make ruby slippers in size twelve?” He looked at me and wagged his eyebrows, enjoying himself. “I didn’t mention my new seafood special. If I wrap Zamboni in a bun, cover ’im with tartar sauce, is there a chance you might get a case of the Tomlinson munchies again? Just for old times’ sake? Doctor says he’ll be standing tall, right as rain, within a couple of days.”

I watched him grimace, then hold the phone away from his ear.

“Here,” he said, “your sister wants to talk to you.”

I took the phone. Waited quietly as Ransom added an epilogue to her heated rant. When she was done, I said, “Some of those words, I’m surprised you know. Some of them, don’t even know.”

In her singsong, Bahamian lilt, Ransom replied, “Oh. It’s you, my brother. Thought I was still talkin’ to that idiot business partner of mine. His Holiness, Mr. Two-Timing Tomlinson. Is what he said true? Does he really have a fish in his thingee?”

I told her, yes, he apparently had a fish in his thingee. “The doctor used a special scope to take a look. She thinks it’s a fish called a ‘candiru.’ ”

“ ‘Candy-roo’? With that skinny boy, I’m surprised it ain’t a damn moray. He say he doan want me to come up there, but I’m bringing my video guys anyway. We got our live broadcast tomorrow. I don’t care what that ganja bum say. Our students will be tuned in, all over the world. He not gonna cost me twenty, thirty thousand just ’cause he caught a fish.”

I said, “That’s between you two. As of now, Lake and I plan on driving the Volkswagen back to Sanibel tonight. But just in case the surgery doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to, I’ve got a taxi on standby. A limo service—” I smiled at my son. “He thinks it’s cool. No matter what happens here, Lake’s flying out tomorrow.”

Ransom said that was fine. If I didn’t stay the night, she could bring Tomlinson home whenever he was discharged. “I thought you was leaving tomorrow, too. Going to Iowa. Does your sweetie pie, the pregnant jock, know you standin’ her up again?”

There’s an antagonism between Ransom and Dewey that I don’t understand. Never will.

I told her that I’d probably leave Monday. “But if there’re complications here, it’ll be okay. Dewey’ll understand.”

“Will she, now?”

“Of course.”

“You big, dumb, sweet boy. Do you realize every time that women in trouble, she come running to you? When there ain’t no more trouble, she’s like a hermit crab—leaves you behind like an old shell.”

“This time,” I said, “it’s different.”

I wondered if it were true.

As I handed the phone to Tomlinson, I felt my son looking at me, eyes assessing. When I’d told him about the limo, he’d shrugged, his expression tolerant. “Not a stretch limo?” His voice said he hoped it was.

“No. Just a car.”

We were alone in the hallway at the time. He’d given me a quick, private hug.

“I’ll get on the plane. Promise. You’re right—Mom wouldn’t let me come back.”

 

 

Turned out it was okay for me to arrive in Iowa a day or two late. Or a week late. Or a month late. Whatever I wanted.

Sort of.

After orderlies had wheeled Tomlinson into surgery, I walked outside and dialed Dewey’s number. I’d had so much trouble reaching her by phone lately, I was taken aback when she answered.

“Hello, Doc. How’re all the little fishes doing?”

Chilly. The undercurrent of sarcasm telling me, once again, I paid too much attention to my work, not enough to her.

I said, “It’s good to hear your voice. It’s been a hell of a couple of days. The nightmare variety.”

I told her about Frieda, and what had happened to Tomlinson. The icy tone warmed. But there was still an unmistakable reserve. I got the impression someone was with her, listening.

“That’s so sad! I met Frieda. I liked her. But what you say about Tomlinson can’t be—”

“It’s true,” I said. “He’s in surgery right now. Nothing serious—just uncommon. A parasitic fish from South America. His main worry was that he couldn’t perform. The urologist is a woman, really first-rate. She told him he’d get so much sympathy from the ladies that his tool would not only work, it’d have to work overtime.”

I expected to hear her laugh. Instead, she said, “I guess that’s to be expected. Tomlinson, yeah. Maybe most other guys I know, too. Doc?”—long pause—“He’s your pal. You need to be with him, so don’t worry about busting ass to fly up here.”

In a way, I was hurt. In a way, I was relieved.

I was in the hospital parking lot, security lights showing gray cars, black tires, a few empty spaces reserved for physicians, moths casting frantic shadows on asphalt. Stars up there beyond the glare, an ellipse of planets in line. Or would be in just three days. The winter solstice.

I began to pace.

“I’m not worried about it. I
want
to be there. I miss you. But I have to make sure Tomlinson’s okay, then—”

“I understand. Friends are important. You take it seriously—it’s one of the things people like about you. Marion Ford, the neighborhood rock. That’s why I’m saying, if you don’t make it for Christmas, it’s okay.”

In the background, I heard a woman’s voice say something that sounded like “Why don’t you just tell him—” before it was muffled, probably by Dewey’s hand.

Just those few words, I recognized who it was. I felt my stomach tighten, a sickening adrenaline flutter. It was a territorial response. Jealousy.

Speaking softly, I asked, “How long has Bets been there?”

Irritated, she replied, “Bets? Not that it’s any of your business, but what makes you think she’s here with—?”

I interrupted. “Dewey. Please don’t.”

Bets, as in Walda Bzantovski—Bets to her friends. I’d once counted myself among them. She was Romanian, an internationally known tennis icon who’d retired a while back but still traveled the world doing clinics, making public appearances—a jet-setter name and face familiar to people who watch TV and read sports magazines.