Green Boy (6 page)

I found myself knocked sideways, rolling, caught then by Annie's outstretched arm. All four of them had dived behind the outer row of boulders, taking me with them.

“Police!” Gwen hissed in my ear. “Keep behind the rock!”

“But Lou—!”

Bryn put his hand over my mouth and said in my ear, “We'll get Lou. Just watch.”

The two policemen, quick and intent, were running toward the rocks, toward Lou and the tree. We lost sight of them for a moment and then they reappeared on the edge of the outer circle of rocks, facing the ditch. They paused, uncertain, looking down at the sea of giant millipedes, piled still in mounds of shiny black coils. Even without movement, the sudden sight must have been awesomely nasty.

Lou was standing beside the tree, his hand on its trunk, watching them. One of them called to him. “Hey kid—you're in danger! Come on out of there!”

Lou shook his head. He waved to them, smiling. I couldn't believe how cool he was. Then he patted the trunk of the tree, almost as if he were telling it something, and he walked away from it, away from the men, toward the end of the inner group of rocks, facing us.

One of the men yelled at him again, and took out something that looked like a gun, but the other knocked his hand down. The first man put the gun away and began, reluctantly, to clamber down into the ditch toward the silent millipedes. The other followed him. And two things happened at once, very fast, so fast that I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

The instant both men were in the ditch, all the giant millipedes uncoiled, whipping their bodies straight, moving in absolute unison as if they were a school of fish. They seemed suddenly much bigger. Their snouty little heads were up, facing the two policemen. And both the men dropped like stones, and a second later, that strange isolated wind sprang up over the ditch, whirling the branches of the tree, blowing away from us, away from Lou.

The millipedes swarmed slowly but relentlessly over the two bodies, covering them, but I knew the men had been dead the moment they fell. I'd been hearing Grand's voice at the back of my memory, talking about the little black creatures we have at home.
“They don't sting—they don't need to. They give off this little whiff of cyanide gas that kills their enemies. . . .”

Not such a little whiff, when the millipedes became giants. And when the cyanide had killed the enemies, that wind had sprung up to blow it away from the friends.

The sound of the helicopter engines grew louder again. Lou looked up. He was such a small unlikely figure there, in his T-shirt and shorts and raggedy sneakers.
Overhead, the two helicopters were dropping out of the sky again toward us; they must have seen what had happened to the two policemen.

“Run, Lou!” I shouted desperately, though he couldn't have heard me.

He slid into the ditch and patted the nearest of the giant millipedes on its shiny black back, just as he had at first, and then rapped on it lightly with his knuckles. And just as before, the creature curled itself obediently into a tight circle, and so did the next, and the next. As soon as there were enough of them to make a pathway across the seething black mass, Lou ran toward us, jumping from one coil to the next as if they were stepping stones. Bryn and Math pulled him out of the ditch as soon as he was across.

“Quick!” We were all running back to the forest, as the helicopters dropped lower and lower.

But the police seemed less interested in us than in the tree, the small ancient tree among the rocks, that had sung to Lou. The two helicopters hovered low over it for a moment. Then from each of them a brilliant ray of light flicked out, focusing on it, and instantly the whole tree was in flames. Every inch of its black trunk and branches and roots was glowing orange, licked with white flame; and then the rays flashed again, reaching down around it, into the ditch.

Lou stopped in his track, looking back, and suddenly he was a seven-year-old again. He let out a high wail,
and Bryn scooped him up and carried him off under his big arm.

I kept glancing over my shoulder as I ran. Again and again those two rays of light, or laser, or whatever they were, stabbed down from the helicopters at the blazing tree. They were surely determined to finish it off. Or maybe they were simply using it to fry the millipedes.

We had reached the shelter of the edge of the forest, where the shadow began. Lou struggled down from under Bryn's arm, and took my hand. We turned to look back at the tree, with its two attackers hovering still, like great roaring armor-plated dragonflies. Beyond the flames you could see the tall steel-mesh fence rearing up, and in the distance the grey blur of the city, under the hazy sky.

As I looked, I realized that everything I saw was quivering. It was that shimmering of the air that we had seen before, a little and a long while ago. I thought at first it was the heat from the flames, but then I heard the sound that had come with it, that first time, the sound like the sighing of the wind through casuarina pines. It rose, and grew shrill, drowning out even the roar of the helicopters' engines. Perhaps it was the last message from the dying tree.

Lou clutched my hand very hard.

Then the sound dropped away.

There was no haze over the sky now; it was clear blue. A breeze was blowing round our bodies, and we were
breathing cooler air. Sunlight shone all around us, bouncing up from white sand and clear water. We were standing on Long Pond Cay, facing the flats, all shining and still with a tiny line of silver-top palms on the horizon. I could feel the seawater oozing into my sneakers. The wind breathed softly in the casuarina trees behind us, and under it was the slow rhythmic whisper of the sea.

The still water of the great inland lagoon before us was dimpled by the upturned tails of bonefish, flashing silver as they dug their noses into the muddy bottom, hunting for food. Small ripples walked across the surface, echoes of the waves out at sea. The tide was coming in.

W
hen we came home, to Grammie calling us to make ourselves clean and tidy for supper, I realized that we'd been gone only for that one suspended hour between the falling and the rising of the tide. However long our time in the Otherworld had seemed to us, it was barely sixty minutes of real time, the time of our own world. I felt dazed, as if I'd been deep asleep for a long time and hadn't properly woken up yet.

Lou was completely himself again, a bouncing hungry seven-year-old, flinging his arms round Grammie's broad waist as she stood at the kitchen counter slicing summer squash. She wiped her hand automatically on her apron and patted his curly black head.

“You had a good day, then?”

“Fine,” I said. “Saw a big eagle ray in the cut, coming back.”

The huge diamond-shaped fish had coasted lazily beneath our boat, flapping its spotted sides like wings.

“Good luck sign,” Grammie said cheerfully. “So long as you don't step on him.”

“Is Grand back?”

“He still in Nassau. Staying with his brother. They got appointments with Government.” She sighed, and reached for another squash. “Much good that going to do. You see anything happening over to Long Pond Cay?”

“No,” I said. I looked down at Lou, and he gave me a small private smile. I knew that if Grand had been home, I might at that moment have tried to tell him about everything that had happened. But not Grammie. She was far too practical. “Child, you got too much imagination,” she'd say.

And so I have, but that's not where the Otherworld came from.

I had trouble falling asleep that night. There were too many memories crowding through my head, too many sounds and sights and smells. And there was Lou, my different little brother who was in fact far more different than I could possibly have imagined.

I looked across at his bed, where this small skinny boy lay fast asleep, breathing quietly and evenly. “In
our world, he is magical, he is predestined,”
Annie had said.
“Only he can save this world.”

One thing was for sure. Sooner or later we would find ourselves in the Otherworld again. And then what would happen?

When Grand did come home, next day, he was fit to
be tied. The group of French and American developers calling themselves Sapphire Island had been making their plans for months, perhaps years. They had applied for all kinds of official permissions, perfectly legally, while nobody on our island had any idea of what was happening, and they'd been granted most of them. Pretty soon, they would begin making changes on Long Pond Cay.

They would destroy it, Grand said. He took me into town for the weekly shopping expedition at the market, where he bent the ear of anyone who would listen. There's only one big market, so everyone goes there sooner or later—and they all know Grand. He stood just outside the door, where there's a convenient patch of shade from the roof, and carried on to a group of his friends.

“It's criminal!” he said. “They buying our land! This the whole state of the islands, in a nutshell—of the whole Caribbean!”

“Tell it like it is, James!” said Jerry Salt from the liquor store. He's a tall man with muscles, and dreadlocks. He patted Grand on the back.

Grand fixed him with a cold eye. “You know Long Pond,” he said. “You and my boy went there all the time. It's all one system—beaches, land, sea, creeks, mangroves, sea grass, fish, birds—all one ecosystem. We all part of it. But it's Nature, it's got to be free to go its own way. That western shoreline changes shape every month. If these people try to fix it solid, the whole ecosystem going to die.”

“They bringing in a dredge next week,” said Mr. Wells, who worked for the telephone company. “Gonna dredge the creek and the lagoon.”

I thought of that great peaceful stretch of water in the middle of Long Pond Cay, the lagoon where the bonefish drift in to feed on the changing tides, and chills went down my spine.

“Birds nest there,” Grand said. He thumped one hand into the palm of the other. “Young fish shelter there. Conch breed there. All that going to go, if they build a harbor, a hotel, a
casino! A
place just for people is no place at all.”

“Right on!” said Jerry Salt.

“Yeah!” said a couple of teenagers, but they were grinning and I didn't think they meant it.

A sunburned American with a blond ponytail said quietly, “Long Pond sure is a beautiful spot.” He wore raggedy shorts and a T-shirt. He was probably one of the boat people.

Grand pulled a piece of paper out of his little canvas briefcase. It was a notice he'd carefully printed out from his computer the night before. “I putting this up in the market—there's a meeting in the community center this Friday. Seven o'clock. We starting a petition to Government, to save the cay. Come! All of you come!”

They all nodded their heads, and we went into the market. It took a long time to get the groceries, because Grand started all over again, talking to everyone in there too.

Lou and I went to that meeting, partly because I begged Grammie to let us, and partly because Grand needed me to work the slide machine. I knew how to do that, from school, and Grand had all kinds of pictures of Long Pond Cay that he wanted to show. Photography was his hobby, and he'd been taking wonderful nature photographs for years, underwater as well as on land. They were really good slides, of everything and everybody that lived on the cay: terns, nighthawks, plovers, oystercatchers, kingbirds, our pair of ospreys; then under the sea: sharks, barracuda, rays, mullet, snapper, bonefish, crabs, shellfish—even the little round jellyfish that live on the shallow bottom, green-fringed with weed. Lou and I used to throw those jellyfish at each other when we were younger, when Grand wasn't looking.

The slides went on and on: palmetto, mangrove, buttonwood, bay cedar, sea grape, sea oats, seven-year apples, casuarina pines . . . lizards, hermit crabs . . . everything except people. No people lived on Long Pond Cay. Yet.

There were plenty of people at the meeting, though. Local people, from the high school headmaster and some clergymen, the doctor and the dentist, on down to ordinary folks like us, and a few retired Americans and English people who had houses on the island. There were a bunch of boat people from cruising yachts too, Americans and Canadians mostly, though this was summer and most of the boats come in winter and spring. The man
with the blond ponytail was there, in a clean shirt and pants this time. “Just want you to know that anything you want us to do, we'll do,” he said to Grand. “We come to these islands to get away from development, not to watch it eating up the wild places.”

He was a nice man, I think, and I could tell that Grand liked him, but it was this same blond American who was the cause of the trouble in the end, without intending it. The meeting started, and Grand gave a very persuasive talk, clicking his fingers at me whenever he wanted a slide changed. I managed to get them all in the right order at the right time, except at the very end, when I found them starting all over again from the beginning.

“No—someone else's turn now,” said Grand. Everyone laughed, and Mr. Ferguson our headmaster took over.

All the speeches said the same kind of thing, about how Long Pond Cay was a special untouched precious place, where birds and fish and all the other wild things were able to live free, all of them depending on each other. It was okay for people to walk on the beach, they said, and for the bonefishermen to come in their boats, because these people just stayed for a little while and then went away again. But if anything were to be built on Long Pond, even a few houses, the whole ecosystem would be changed. And if a huge development like Sapphire Island came there, digging out the shallow
lagoon and creeks and covering the sandy flats with concrete, the whole wilderness would die.

I knew just what they meant. I thought of walking barefoot with Lou over the soft mud-sand beside the lagoon, with mangrove shoots prickling between our toes, and silence all around us except for a few terns peeping, and the occasional small splash of a fish. And just for a moment, a picture of the endless grey city of the Otherworld flashed into my mind.