Alligator Park (28 page)

“Thought today was your off
day,” he says.

“It is, but I’ve got some new
samples to test.”

“Well then, you’ll like this.
Ever hear of HPLC-MS?”

“High Performance Liquid
Chromatography Mass Spectrometry,” I say.

“Very good. I see you’re up
on the latest.”

“I tried to get one for the
university, but they balked at the expense.”

“Follow me,” he says, and
takes me over to a machine next to a large wooden crate. “It’s an MSQ 9000 EVO
with Triple Quadrupole sensitivity,” he says, with a gleam in his eye.

“When did you get that?”

“Came in yesterday, after you
left.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Wanted it to be a surprise.
I’ve needed one for years; finally got the financing.”

“It’s nice.”

“Let’s try it on one of your
samples.”

I reach into the bag and give
him a specimen jar.

“The important thing is
sample preparation,” he says. “We do that with Cryogenic Milling, to clean up
the extracted sample. Then we inject it here.”

He takes a hypodermic needle
to transfer a tiny amount of liquid into the machine. A few seconds later the
LCD display lights up with the analysis.

“It’s so fast,” I say.

“This machine does hours of
work in minutes. It’ll pay for itself in less than a year.”

I look over the analysis and
see things I never imagined.

“Wow, it separates out the
isomers. A mass spectrometer can’t do that.”

“Exactly why you need it.
Without
this kind of sensitivity, you’ll never find
what you’re looking for.”

“And you’ll let
me use it?”

“That’s what it’s
here for. The agribusiness is evolving. They want more in less time. Without
this machine, I can’t compete. I’d be out of business in a year.”

“I can’t wait to
try it.”

“Be my guest.
I’ve got some reports to write. Call me if you need anything,” he says, and
then strolls back to his office.

I line up the
twelve specimen jars on the table and then spend the morning getting familiar
with all the nuances of the machine. For lunch, I munch on some candy bars to
save time, but the afternoon is slipping by so I pick up the pace a bit and
start working on the samples, just as Doug had instructed me. After the first
run, I realize the amount of data the machine spits out is overwhelming, too
much to analyze in one sitting, so instead, I elect to save it all to a flash
drive so I can review it later on my laptop in the comfort of my bedroom.
Although the machine is indeed fast, it takes the entire afternoon to prepare
the samples, run them through, and then download to my drive. I finish the last
one just minutes before five o’clock when Doug normally closes shop for the
day. He wanders up to me.

“How’s it going,”
he says.

“I’m done.”

“Find anything
earthshattering?”

“It’s all in
here,” I say, showing him the flash drive. “But I need time to analyze the
data. I should have something on Monday.”

“Great, have a
nice weekend,” he says, and shuts down the machine. I follow him to the front
office and he turns off the lights, sets the alarm, and then we exit. The sun
is low on the horizon and the security lights have already come on, but it’s
not quite dark yet. I stroll to my car, get inside, and place the handgun on
the seat, next to my thigh. I drive out the dirt road through endless
pastureland with Doug right behind me and then, at the turn, head back to
Fargo’s place.

When I arrive,
Will and Fargo are eating dinner. I grab a plate and sit down to join them.
Since opening the restaurant, our dinners have always been fabulous due to the
large amount of leftover food and this meal is no exception. We now have two
regular cooks and they relieve me of the responsibility of managing the daily
meals. It gives me the time I need to think about my future and prepare my
paper for publication.

“How’d it go?”
Fargo asks, as I fill up my plate with leftovers.

“Quite well,
actually. I have a lot of good data to go through.”

“When will you
know?”

“Soon, hopefully
by Monday.”

“Any problems
with Damon?”

“No, not a
thing.”

“Good. Let’s hope
it stays that way.”

The table goes
quiet for a few minutes.

“Any alligator
attacks?” I ask.

“No. The public
service ads are working. People are staying away from dangerous areas.”

I turn my
attention to Will.

“How’s Juanita?”

“She has a class
tonight, or I’d be with her.”

“Anything new
with the restaurant?”

“Not really. The
hired help is doing a good job and we’re making decent money.”

With nothing else
to talk about, we all concentrate on our meals for a few moments and then I
break the silence with a question I’ve been dying to ask.

“Fargo, just
wondering; have you known Doug long?”

“All my life. Why
do you ask?”

“Nothing
really... just in case he asks me to dinner or something... not that I’m
interested in him.

“Oh yes you are.”

“I am not! I just
wanted to know if he was trustworthy.”

“Well, forget it.
He’s married... has five kids.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, doesn’t go
anywhere without her. Totally devoted to his family.”

I feel my face
getting red with embarrassment.

“Okay, you don’t
have to make an issue of it.”

“Who’s making an
issue? You brought it up.”

“I was thinking
strictly business. You know how it is; sometimes you have to work late... “

“And he might
invite you to dinner?”

“For business
purposes.”

“Yeah, right.
Heard that one before.”

“It happens
occasionally.”

“Maybe you want
it to happen... ”

“You know,
sometimes you can be a total ass,” I say, and then get up from the table, rush
to my bedroom, and slam the door. I hear him laugh from the other room, but as
I think about it, there was something in Fargo’s tone that was unmistakable.
Was it jealousy?

I plug the flash drive into my laptop, pull
up the program that analyzes the data, and then select the first sample, the
sample from the first alligator attack we encountered, the one where the girl
hid in the tree. I click on the button marked “Analyze” and watch the computer
plot out the results.

When the program is done, the
analysis is amazingly similar to a textbook example of what any researcher
would expect to find in typical groundwater. There’s the usual glyphosate,
atrazine, chlorpyrifos, metolachlor, and metam-sodium, all in concentrations
less than 0.1 mg per liter which is generally considered safe by the EPA.

And finally there’s
Farm-eXia. The concentration reads out at 1.0 mg per liter, ten times higher
than the rest, but well within the safe limits established by its manufacturer,
GWI. I had expected to find 10 to 20 mg per liter, levels the scientific
community believed would be destabilizing to aquatic life. But here I am, about
to announce to the public that Farm-eXia, the most widely used pesticide in the
world, is not as safe as everyone thinks, causes harm to wildlife, and doesn’t
break down in the environment as promised, and the evidence was not
cooperating.  What had gone wrong?

I rack my brain for a logical
explanation and then it hits me; the first sample was taken from a pretty
remote location, far away from any farmer’s runoff, so if those alligators had
ingested any contamination, they had probably got it from somewhere else. Of
course, that was it. No need to be concerned. The other samples will surely
give me the results I’m searching for.

I select the second sample
and run the analysis again, but the outcome is the same. I desperately click on
the third sample, the forth sample, and so on, until every one of the samples
has been analyzed. Interestingly, they all have roughly the same chemical
signature. None are showing the unusually high levels of contamination I
expected. What’s going on?

Fear explodes through my body
as the whole basis of my dissertation crashes down around me. Could my theories
and expectations be wrong? Could I be chasing a ghost? Could Dr. Haas have been
right all along? Nausea fills the pit of my stomach and I feel like I need a
drink.

I dash into the kitchen, grab
the wine bottle and a glass, and then attempt to sneak back to my bedroom.

“Drinking alone?” Will asks.

Oh damn. He would have to
notice. I nervously face him and try to downplay the whole incident.

“I’m just a little wound up.
I need something to calm me.”

“Something wrong?” he asks.

“It’s just that... well I was
so sure Farm-eXia was the culprit. I expected levels to be high, but they’re
not. I’ve failed.”

“Stop it. You haven’t failed.
There’s a perfectly good explanation out there. Have faith in yourself.”

“I can’t deal with it now. I
need a break.”

“Come here, sit with us.
We’ll share the pain. Let’s drink together.”

“It’s okay. I’ll manage.”

“Drinking alone is bad, the
first step towards dependency. If we drink together, it’s a proven fact; none
of us becomes alcoholics. Get what I mean?”

“Oh Will. You’re such a
philosopher.”

“It’s my training. Now, sit
with us and pass the wine.”

I join them in the living
room and we devour the remaining two bottles, passing the time with multiple
games of “Trivial Pursuit” until midnight.

The next morning, I keep
myself busy helping out at the restaurant, but the weekend passes depressingly
slow. I need to converse with Doug, who would understand my dilemma, and help
me find a way out.

... 

Monday arrives and I rush
over to my job at Semi-Environmental. I explain the situation to Doug and he
listens with interest.

“I think you need to
restructure your strategy,” he says.

“Restructure my strategy?”

“Sure. You expected to get 10
to 20 mg per liter. But you got 1. Base your conclusions around what you have.”

“But I’ve got nothing!”

“Not true. You’ve witnessed
strange behavior among aquatic wildlife: alligators, snakes, fish, and frogs to
name a few. You’ve measured the concentration of Farm-eXia in ground water as
being 1.0 mg per liter. How do you know that amount is safe?”

“That’s the official number.”

“But is it the right number?”

“You’re saying they fudged
the number?”

“Fudged may be too strong a
word. Let’s say they misinterpreted the data.”

“You want me to go up against
GWI, a multinational corporation, and show the world that 1.0 mg per liter, the
number they established, and the EPA accepted, is too high?”

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy.”

“It won’t be the first time
corporations have been proved wrong. Look what Nader did to GM when he wrote,
“Unsafe at Any Speed.”

“That was before my time.”

“Well, he singled out the
Chevy Corvair, which no one could argue against, and shamed an entire industry
to make safer cars. Interestingly, they despised doing it at first, but when
they realized customers wanted safer cars, and it was good for business, they
embraced it wholly, using ‘safety’ as a new selling feature. It can be done.”

My battle plan rolls out in
my mind like an unfolding scroll. I will have to demonstrate, to a very
knowledgeable and hostile audience, how certain pesticide residues in blood and
tissue samples correlate to unusual aggression in affected wildlife. I will
have to go where no researcher has gone before.

“That’s an enormous
undertaking,” I say.

“Nothing worth doing is easy,”
he answers.

At noon, after my four hour
workday, I rush home and retrieve the frozen tissue and blood samples from that
deceased alligator we took home from the diner attack a few
weeks
before. I place them in the refrigerator so
they can thaw out for later analysis. I explain my situation to Fargo and he
gracefully agrees to take me to various isolated locations in and around the
swamp to get blood and tissue samples from various aquatic creatures.

Watching Fargo snag an
eight-foot alligator without injuring it is especially entertaining. He slips
underwater to avoid detection and then slides a loop around its mouth. A quick
tug and the gator becomes spasmodic, twirling around and around in an
instinctive ritual of self-preservation developed over 30 million years to
drown its victim and rip it apart for consumption. Fargo moves out of the way,
patiently keeping clear as the gator performs its death roll, waiting for the
alligator to wear itself out. Alligators are cold blooded, which is a highly
efficient system of food conversion—alligators can go a year without eating—but
there is one flaw; cold-blooded animals tire easily and Fargo was using this to
his advantage.

As soon as the animal tires,
he drags it up on land and wraps tape around its jaws. At this point the gator
is so exhausted it just lies there, but Fargo sits on its back as a precaution
as I perform a quick biopsy on muscle tissue behind its back legs and take a
blood sample. Fargo instructs me to get back into his Jeep and then releases the
animal. Within seconds it scampers into the water and disappears. I place the
blood and tissue samples in an ice chest for later analysis and then we proceed
to another location.

We spend pretty much the
whole afternoon gathering blood and tissue samples, and then, about 5:00 PM, I
ask Fargo to take me to an alligator farm where he knows the owner. I need to
get some control samples from alligators that have never had contact with water
containing agricultural runoff. Since their blood and tissue should be clean of
any contamination, it would provide evidence that the chemicals and toxins I
discover are not inherent in all alligators.

... 

The next day, I ask Doug if I
can postpone my work until Wednesday and start right in on my experiments and
he agrees. I run each sample through the MSQ 9000 EVO Liquid Chromatograph and
save the results to my flash drive. It takes practically the whole day, but by
closing time, I have all the data I need to begin my report.

I rush home, confine myself
to my bedroom, and begin analyzing the data. As I pour over the graphs and
printouts, a new strategy occurs to me. Instead of directly submitting my
dissertation for peer review and letting the corporate wolves devour it into
shreds, it would bolster my argument if I could elicit the cooperation of the
EPA and get them on my side. After all, they are there to protect the public
and should welcome a chance to exercise with impunity the mandate given to them
by Congress. And then, if corporate interests try to silence me, they would
have to take on the US Government and that would most certainly make the
evening news. They could run, but they couldn’t hide.

I gather my results and
carefully prepare a report showing how alligators and other aquatic creatures
in captivity—those from the alligator farm—had no trace of Farm-eXia in their
blood and exhibited no unusually aggressive behavior. But those in the wild had
inflated levels, and it was those alligators that initiated the deadly attacks
that annihilated two human beings. I then relate the story about the eight-toed
super-gator and how it appeared to be organizing other gators into bands that
would engage into coordinated attacks, behavior highly unusual for alligators
in the wild. I include eyewitness testimonies from game wardens and police
officers who had witnessed unusually aggressive alligator attacks against
tourists and incidences where gators were put down to protect the public. I
make it absolutely clear these are not isolated events of overly aggressive
alligators which have always occurred in the past, but instances where packs of
alligators were observed under the influence of the eight-toed super-gator,
conspiring to collectively encircle and pull down their game. I follow with the
conclusion that this behavior is highly irregular and not subject to normal natural
variances which are well documented. Furthermore, I reiterate that this
behavior was observed only in aquatic creatures that displayed high levels of
Farm-eXia in their system.

I end the report with a formal
request that the qualification phase of Farm-eXia be reopened with additional
emphasis on unusually aggressive behavior among reptiles and amphibians exposed
to the pesticide. As I type the final period on my report, I feel a great sense
of satisfaction and accomplishment. It has taken four months to get this far,
but I’m finally getting my story out.

The next morning, I hand my
report to Doug for his opinion. He takes it to his office, and over a cup of
coffee, reads the entire report paying particular attention to the graphs.

“Looks good,” he says.

“Do you think they’ll buy
it?” I ask.

“I don’t see why not. The
data clearly supports your conclusions. At the very least it should stimulate
them to take a hard look at their prior data and approvals.”

“So I should send it?”

“Go for it.”