The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (45 page)

He starts to explain all of this, to apologize, but the two of them—like cutouts, cardboard characters in some terrible ’50s Aliens-Among-Us movie—just stand there staring at him. 

“I came because I wanted to see you,” he’s saying, but they don’t answer. “I wanted to see if McCulloughville was the same. I wanted to let you know that I think about you constantly, even if things have been pretty crazy and I haven’t had much chance to—” 

“Is that a tattoo on your arm, son?” his father asks sternly. 

Rick gets up. He’s got to leave. His father says more gently: “There’s a twenty-five-dollar savings bond . . . We found it in the attic the other day. If you need money, you could cash it.” 

“No,” Rick tells him. “I’d rather keep it here. You know, knowing it’s here . . . in the house where I grew up. . . .” Then his mother says: “You look terrible, Rick. You wouldn’t look so terrible if you got a haircut.” 

Rick is walking fast down the street, away from the house where he spent his childhood, turning once, despite himself, to wave at the two shadowy figures just inside the doorway. And then he’s free—free from this new horror—and we cut to: 

Rick returning to the Greyhound Bus Station, somewhere between McCulloughville, Year of Our Lord 1958, and southern California, 2005. And we fade to: 

Rick, at night, listening to his cell messages in the darkness of his apartment. If it’s dark, he doesn’t have to look at the bugs so much. There’s a message asking him to save San Francisco from bad Italian sopranos. A call informing him that UFOs posing as convenience stores are kidnapping citizens in New Jersey. A call about radioactive prostitutes in Chicago and one about little red crabs that have invaded a town in Florida. Dissolve to: 

Rick, the next day, trying to find the veteran’s outreach group—but it’s moved and no one knows where. 

That evening, Rick’s cell has only one message: A man representing the Mayor of Corkscrew, Florida, saying that he called yesterday and would appreciate it if Mr. Rowe would call him back. The man, very serious—somehow not laughing—keeps talking, and we hold on Rick’s eyes in the darkness—insectlike, faceted, despairing. “Do you have a fax or email, Mr. Rowe?” the voice asks. 

We see the horrific nightmare he has that night—a perfect amalgam of everything he’s gone through over the past few weeks: locusts, little kids spitting “tobacco,” Janie with thirteen children, his parents telling him, “Get a haircut—get a shave—you look like a bum.” And then: 

The sound of his cell chirping brings us out of the nightmare into the bleakness of his apartment. At least the insects have returned to the walls for the day. He struggles up, angry, ready to read the prankster the riot act if he can only get through the piles of dirty clothes and trophies to the cell in time. 

“Mr. Rowe?” 

“Now you listen to me—” 

“I know it’s early, Mr. Rowe, but we have a problem down here—” 

“If I ever find out who you are you—” 

“The crabs are
Gecarcoidea natalis,
a nonnative species introduced by accident twenty years ago, and we’re having a hard time containing them. We believe that you—given your experiences with
Melanoplus spretus
—may be able to help us. We’d be willing to pay your airfare and expenses—and a respectable consultant’s fee—if you’ll visit us for a week. Corkscrew is a gracious town and we can promise you our hospitality. . . .” 

Rick stops. Something about the voice. . . . 

The man, the Floridian accent sounding real, keeps on talking and Rick finally gets it:
It’s legit
—there’s a REAL town with a REAL problem down there in Florida somewhere.
And they want his help.
 

M
IDPOINT
 

O
R
H
OW
T
HIS
C
ALL
W
ILL
C
HANGE
R
ICK’S
L
IFE 

Rick is looking a whole lot older now—thirty-three, not twenty-three—but he’s been through a lot recently. And he’s right: This phone call is going to be important, though not in the way he imagines. 

Rick takes the money the Mayor of Corkscrew has wired him and flies to Florida, feeling his oats, full of hope. He’s met at the airport by one of Mayor Delameter’s staff and driven to his hotel, the old but clean and dry Swamp Hotel in downtown Corkscrew. The next morning he’s out at the edge of town where Main Street runs along the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary and he’s surveying the marching battalions of
Gecarcoidea natalis
—little, red, forest-dwelling crabs about the size of your palm that are migrating, as they do each year—though not usually in such numbers—through the town, back to the swamp to breed . . . and taking their sweet time doing it. The Mayor and his staff are present. The local press is present. And so is a woman, early thirties, too, who doesn’t seem to fit this south Florida scene: She’s dressed somewhere between Banana Republic and L. L. Bean, attractive and confident but understated, and she stands off from the group with her arms crossed and an amusement on her face that he finds disturbing. No one bothers to introduce them, and Rick doesn’t ask who she is—though he can’t ignore her. 

“Well, what do you think, Mr. Rowe?” the Mayor asks. “What can we do about this little problem of ours? We can’t touch their breeding grounds in the swamp. They’re protected.” 

“What are their natural predators, Mayor?” Rick answers, giving it his best. 

“They don’t seem to have any, Mr. Rowe. Not enough to matter.” 

“That’s not possible,” Rick answers. “Every animal this size has—or once had or would have if you moved it somewhere else—a natural predator. That’s a basic scientific concept, Mayor.” 

The Mayor, his staff, the press, and the other citizens present look at each other and shrug. No one looks at the woman in Birkenstocks. 

“Coons,” someone says at last. 

Rick freezes. “What?” 

“Raccoons, Mr. Rowe,” the Mayor says. 

“Yeah,” someone else says, “I’ve seen coons eat them. They’ll eat crayfish, frogs, even a hefty turtle if they can get into one.” 

“There’s your solution, Mayor,” Rick says. 

Everyone looks at everyone else again. They’re willing to believe. They just need encouragement. 

“How much does a raccoon cost?” Rick asks. 

“Hell,” someone says, “you can probably get the Seminoles over at Pahokee to round up two hundred or three hundred of ’em for five bucks a head. Take ’em a couple of weeks maybe. They don’t have anything else to do.” 

“You’ll need more than that,” Rick says quickly. “And you’ll need them quicker.” 

“My sister’s brother,” someone else offers, “works for Water and Power in Baton Rouge. I’ll bet we could get a thousand in less than a week from the Cajuns. Cheaper, too.” 

The Mayor’s staff calculates and recalculates and at two thousand raccoons it’s going to cost the city somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000—transportation included—which is great. But suddenly someone is laughing and everyone turns. It’s the woman and she’s really enjoying it. 

“Mr. Rowe,” the Mayor says, and he’s not happy, “this is Dr. Field. Dr. Susan Field.” 

Susan Field, Rick learns, is an ecologist trained at the Woods Hole Institute in Massachusetts who’s lived in Corkscrew for five years. She’s laughing, he also learns, because the introduction of that many raccoons to the area would not only put a hundred native birds, by egg theft, on the endangered species list, but would destroy the tropical fish farms upon which twenty percent of the economy of Corkscrew County depends. “Remember how the ‘walking catfish’ hurt those farms in the early ’80s?” she says. The crabs may be an annoyance, she adds, but they don’t impact the local economy at all the way two thousand bandit-eyed predators would. 

Rick is devastated. 

All he can think to say is: 

“What do these crabs
want?”
 

“They seem, Mr. Rowe,” she tells him, while the Mayor and his staff glare with hostility, “to want to get back to their swamp and breed . . . and we happen to be in the way. They also like hanging out in town as they do it. . . .” 

“Parasites?” Rick says, trying anything. 

“Crab parasites don’t distinguish between arthropods,” she says. “We’d kill the crayfish and other crabs in the sanctuary. And you don’t kill crayfish in the South, Mr. Rowe.” 

“Topical pesticides?” 

“Our good Mayor tried that once,” Susan Field answers, smiling at Delameter, “despite objections from a humble ecologist from New England, and the federal government hit us with a fine in the six-figure area. That’s not science, Mr. Rowe, but it is politics.” 

“I’ll need,” Rick mumbles feebly, “to think about it. I’d like . . . to spend tomorrow looking at whatever reports . . . and other documents . . . you may have on the history of the problem, Mayor.” 

“Good idea, Mr. Rowe,” Susan Field says, still amused and very unwilling to let him off the hook. Why did he ever think this would work? 

He flees to his hotel room, sits on his bed, stares at the wall, and when night falls makes his way to a bar just outside of town, cap pulled down to hide his face. 

Then these things happen: 

Susan Field tracks him down at the bar. It’s a very small town, word travels, and he’s the only one with an L.A. Lakers cap. She even shows compassion. Rick isn’t yet drunk, but he’s certainly doing his best to drown his sorrows in Gator Piss Beer. She makes chat—telling him a little about herself, her graduate work in wetlands ecology, the politics of environmental issues in the South,
safe
things to talk about—and then she asks him about himself. He hides the truth; more accurately, he lies. He tells her about all of the heroic things he’s done since McCulloughville. It’s easy when you’re drunk. Polar bear infestation in Inuit villages and how he used inflatable seal decoys filled with laughing gas to subdue them. A Nessie-like plesiosaur (though smaller) in Vermont’s Lake Champlain, wreaking nocturnal havoc at two marinas, and how bagpipe music played on an old PA system helped him catch it. . . . 

She’s not easily fooled. She sees a man who’s in agony, and, though we won’t know why until our story’s through, she invites him back to her house for the night. “I’ve got an extra room,” she says. Rick brightens. An attractive woman inviting him back to her house for the night? Maybe he’s still got that Hero magic. Maybe Janie was wrong. Maybe his science isn’t so off. 

When they reach her house, an old Florida bungalow with endless verandahs, the bubble bursts and he discovers she’s got a ten-year-old son—Jacob—and it’s his room that Rick will share tonight. The room is a waking nightmare: It’s filled with insects. Insects mounted on pins, arranged neatly in drawers and glass cases, each with an information card. Insect mobiles hang from the ceiling. The wallpaper has insect designs. Large plastic models of insects sit on the dresser. Rick wants to scream. But the boy is entranced: This is Rick Rowe—the man who stopped the mutant
Melanoplus
in northern Nevada. The boy knows all of it, about
Melanoplus,
about Rick, and his eyes are wide with adoration. Rick should love this attention, but he doesn’t. He slips away to use the bathroom and as he does overhears Jacob whisper to his mother, “Don’t tell him, please, Mom.” She smiles. “I won’t. Not unless you want me to.” 

Susan retires to her bedroom early (“I’m an early riser—you two have fun.”) as the wimpy, chunky, bespectacled Jacob bombards him with questions and takes him on a tour of every species in the room. The tour lasts late into the night. 

Lying on the bottom bunk at last—Jacob’s heavy body asleep just above him—Rick, not surprisingly, has nightmares about insects. 

Rick remains in Corkscrew. He remains in Susan Field’s house, in fact. She insists, and the intensity of her insistence is a little scary. But he has no place else to go and there’s something real, something human in this little world with its bug-collecting ten-year-old, this female Ph.D. who teases Rick mercilessly but somehow affectionately, this town with its crab problem that seems not to be much of a problem after all. It feels, strangely, like home. 

He gets a job as a driver for a local water-bottle company and he learns who this woman really is. How Susan Field, still a graduate student at Woods Hole, came to study the ecosystem of the Corkscrew Swamp, wore her bug-proofed Birkenstocks and Baffin swamp boots dutifully, and on her very first day in town met Joshua Covington—liberal politician born somewhere in Florida (so he said), relocated here just before she arrived, ten years her senior, divorced, one son. How (though she’d never imagined herself a stepmother) she’d stayed, married him, and they’d spent half their honeymoon talking about ways to save the swamp. How Joshua Covington died in an auto accident three years later, how she was the only one Jacob had left, and how soon after, the chubby boy, who obviously loved her, took up bug-collecting.