A Flash of Green (27 page)

“Claire? Is it something that Claire …”

“I can’t say any more than I’ve said already, Tom. Maybe Di is reacting a little more violently than he should. I don’t know. I’m sort of disappointed in him. You’d think it would make him mad enough to fight harder. But he’s getting out. It would make very choice gossip. And it would probably do us harm if he stayed on the team and it did get circulated. But it wouldn’t do us as much harm that way as this way. I’m going to try to talk to him tomorrow after he’s had a chance to sleep on it, but I don’t think it will do any good.” She waited a moment and then said, “Tom?”

She heard him sigh. “We’ll all have to work just that much harder. I can put in a little bit more money than I promised, but I promised just about all I can afford to begin with.”

“I can’t help out, I guess you know.”

“I know that, Katherine dear, of course. I was just thinking. Once we know the timing of the thing, when the date will be set for the public hearing, maybe we can arrange some kind of a rally and raise money that way. I have a feeling our regular membership is going to be … somewhat disappointing. I’ve been making a small telephone survey, sampling the membership list. It seems
as bad as the report I got from Jackie. It looks as if we can expect a fifty percent mortality in our old list. We’ll have to go after a lot of new members. Well, it’s a little late to be discussing organizational problems. And you have to work tomorrow. Thanks for what you’ve done, Katherine. I really appreciate it. It’s alarming, isn’t it, to realize they’d stoop so low.”

“Yes, it is.”

“We may have further losses. Depressing thought. Odd that our own neighbors should be so much more ruthless than those Lauderdale men were.”

As Kat went to bed she thought the sunburn and the worry combined would make sleep impossible. But she felt herself falling away as soon as the light was out.

Thirteen

ON THAT SUNDAY
, Borklund put a heavy load on Brian Haas, and hovered so close Jimmy Wing could not help him with it. Whenever Jimmy tried to take a piece of it, J.J. would appear and put him onto something else. At two-thirty, when Jimmy went out to lunch, he phoned the newsroom and got hold of Brian.

“How are you doing, Bri?”

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The points are dirty and there’s water in the gas. I keep cutting out, and the son of a bitch keeps running me uphill. I’d say he’s got a strong suspicion.”

“Will you make it?”

“I’m not even going to think about guessing. I’m taking the day in ten-minute chunks, and getting through one at a time. Thanks for what you’ve been trying to do.”

“I’ll be back in a little while to try some more.”

“Bring me a big coffee, black.”

“You should eat.”

“I better not try. A quart container if you can manage it.”

“Two pints if I can’t. Okay.”

As soon as Wing returned with the coffee, Borklund sent him to cover a call on a drowning. It had just come in. The photographer was there when he got there. The resuscitator people had just given up, and the young mother had been given a shot but it hadn’t taken effect yet. The crowd could hear her shrieking in the small house. Wing got the facts from the neighbors. It seemed slightly grotesque to use a whole ambulance for such a small body.

On his way back into town from Lakeview Village he thought how this could be simplified by the use of a mimeographed form. “The (two-, three-, four-) year-old child was playing in the back yard of (his, her) home and apparently wandered away from (his, her) (mother, father, sister, brother, playmates) and fell unnoticed into a nearby (drainage ditch, pond, lake, stream, swimming pool) and was discovered approximately —— minutes later, floating face down. Efforts to revive the child were not successful and (he, she) was pronounced dead at —— o’clock by Dr. ——.”

The purposeless death of a child is a horrible thing, he thought. If I unlock the little box labeled Empathy, I can even manage to squeeze a little water out of my eyes. But I have to work at it. We run about eight a year, and I have covered a lot of them, and somehow it has come to be the same child being drowned over and over, and I keep the little box closed. We could take one master picture, and always run it. When the small bodies are covered, they always look alike. It is always the same stricken mother, the same ambulance, the same pointless horror. Grief for a child is always mixed up with speculation about what it might have become. Yet, according to the odds, its life would most probably
have been dull, discontented and unsung. Once it is dead, nothing can be proven. All glorious speculation is valid. Had I drowned at age two, Sister Laura might sometimes look at the ruin of her own life and think of the small brother, thirty years gone, and say, “If he had only lived, life might have been different for all of us.” But I lived and nothing is different, and nothing is proven or disproven.

It was after five before he was able to give any attention to the problem of Mrs. Doris Rowell, she of the white Dutch bob, the academic baritone, the tennis shoes, the faded cotton dresses on the fat soft sexless body.

He reviewed what he knew about her. She had lived on Sandy Key, down near Turk’s Pass for at least twenty years. She’d bought an ugly old stucco house down there when houses and land were very cheap. She lived alone, had owned a succession of very old cars, was an amateur naturalist, a savage conservationist. When the paper had some special research problem involving marine animals or plant life, bird life, indigenous trees and plants, Doris Rowell was the logical one to ask. If she did not have the information, she knew where and how to find it. Usually she had the information.

He drove down to see her. When he parked beside the house she came to the entrance to the shed in the side yard and stared at him as he walked toward her. She wore vast faded khaki trousers, a man’s shirt, a baseball cap.

“From the paper,” she said. “What is it this time? I’m busy. You’ll have to talk while I’m finishing something, Mr. Wing.”

He followed her into the shed. It was stiflingly hot. Lights hung over two large fish tanks in the back end of the shed. The water exchange system was bubbling. There were fingerling sheepshead in both tanks, about twenty in each. She was mixing some kind of fluid on a work bench near the tanks.

“What are you doing, Mrs. Rowell?”

“Are you making polite sounds with your mouth or do you want to know?”

“I’m naturally nosy. It helps when you’re a reporter.”

“I suppose so. These are
Archosargus probatocephalus
. I’m checking the relation of salinity to growth rate. That’s the control tank on the right. I’ve got a control pen in the bay too. Proctor, of the University of Southern California, published a paper on the same experiment, using a somewhat similar fish, but a labroid fish, the
Primelometopon pulchrum
. I didn’t like his conclusions. This is in the second month, but now I see perhaps he was correct.”

“Will you publish your results?”

She turned and stared at him stonily. “Where? How? I’m a layman.”

“Then why bother?”

“Are you trying to irritate me? I bother because it is knowledge. I bother because I am curious and I want to know. Why did you come here?”

“Just for a little general conversation about Grassy Bay.”

“I have no time for general conversations.”

“If I’m going to sneak any conservationist propaganda into the paper, which means running contrary to policy, I ought to have a little solid stuff to play with, don’t you think?”

“Will facts have anything to do with what will happen?”

“A lot of people would like to think so.”

She stared at him for a moment. “I can give you fifteen minutes. We will sit on the porch. I’ve been on my feet since six o’clock this morning.”

He followed her to the porch of the house. She sat in a wicker chair and stared at him for a moment. “To start with a general statement, filling the bay would be a criminal act. It will take away forever something which cannot be replaced or restored.
Depth, temperature, tide flow, composition of the bottom, all combine to make this bay unique. We have shallow-water species here which are not found anywhere else along this coast.”

“I have to argue the other side of it, Mrs. Rowell, not because I believe it, but just to present the usual arguments on the other side. Isn’t this uniqueness important only to a few marine biologists?”

“It is important to the sum total of human knowledge. We know painfully little about the world we live in. This is a living laboratory. Each new environmental fact is important to mankind, no matter how trivial it might seem to a banker or a newspaper reporter. You are where you are
because of
science, not in spite of it. A star and a snail are of equal importance.”

“But when snails get in the way of man, they get eliminated. Hasn’t it always been that way?”

“Always?” She stared at him incredulously. “For a million years, Mr. Wing, man shared this planet with other living things. The ecology was in balance. Now we are in a very short time of natural history when we have a plague of men.”

“A plague?”

“I watch the cycles in the bay. For a few years everything will be favorable for certain species. It will become very numerous. It will dwindle the numbers of the other animals who share the same space, eat the same food. Then there will be too many of them. The climatic factors will change. The huge numbers will be reduced. The other species will come back. In this split second of time in which we are living, things have been too favorable for man. With science he has suppressed too many natural enemies. He is too numerous. He is poisoning the air and waters of the earth. He is breeding beyond reason. He is devouring the earth and the other creatures thereon. But it will come to an end, of course. Man has a longer cycle than do the small creatures. Geometric
growth is insupportable. During this growth cycle it is the business of thinking people to protect and conserve the other forms of life, so when the cycle is reversed, the ecology will not be too badly distorted. A hundred generations from now, that bay might be supplying food for a mainland village just as it did thirty generations ago.”

“That’s a point of view so … so broad it takes my breath away.”

“It’s a scientific point of view, Mr. Wing.”

“That would mean you anticipate a defeat of … civilization, of everything we stand for?”

“My dear Mr. Wing, the only victory is existence, and the only defeat is extermination. When a species cannot survive, it is defeated. We must keep mankind from making the planet unsuitable for existence without technology. In the criminal campaign against fire ants in this country, the poisoners have slain an estimated five thousand tons of small birds.
Tons
, Mr. Wing. Thirty to forty million in specific areas. Believe me, I am not snuffling over what happened to the dear, dear little songbirds. This is not a situation where sentimentality is applicable. This was nonselective elimination, taking the healthy and sick, the predators and sapsuckers, destroying not only that generation but all possible subsequent ones from that conglomerate of basic strains. It is a thoughtless ecological abomination, Mr. Wing. It is like rubbing out one factor in a vastly complex equation. Due to the interrelationship of bird life, insect life and plant fertilization, the known characteristics of that area will change. To what? We do not know. We only know it will be different. I recognize a deity of interrelationships, of checks and balances and dependencies. Acts such as this are like spitting in the face of God. It is a dangerous temerity, Mr. Wing. It is, in its essence, stupidity, nonknowing, the most precarious condition of man. Filling this bay is a
part of the same pattern of throwing away everything you do not understand.”

“I can see that you have some very … strong opinions.”

“I concern myself with facts, not opinions.”

“You seem to be able to get some very noted scientists to come down here and speak out in favor of leaving the bay alone.”

She shrugged. “They understand these things. I conduct a large correspondence. I help field crews when I can. They give me little research tasks. There is a little money sometimes. It helps.”

“Where did you get your training, Mrs. Rowell?”

“I read. I study. I work. I think. I observe.”

“You call yourself a layman. I assume that means you have no formal training in these fields of knowledge.”

“That is the definition of the term, is it not?”

“That bothers me a little, how a layman can acquire such an objective viewpoint. Maybe some of your basic premises are wrong. How could you be able to tell?”

Her thick brown face turned pale, particularly around the mouth. “You are insolent, Mr. Wing. You should have more respect!”

“For what? Because you dabble in science?”

“Dabble! I had my doctorate before you …”

“You have a degree?”

Her agitation disappeared quickly. “Forgive me. It is just a manner of speaking. I have awarded myself various degrees, as a game, a joke.”

“I see. I’ve often wondered about that slight accent you have, Mrs. Rowell.”

“I have given you three minutes more than I promised. Please telephone me the next time to find out if I am busy.”

“But you are always busy, aren’t you?”

“Extremely.”

She glanced back to the shed and disappeared into it without a backward glance or word of parting. He got into the car and headed thoughtfully back toward the city. There was something invincibly professorial about Mrs. Doris Rowell, something of the attitude of the professional lecturer, plus the austere philosophy of the trained scientist. He had heard no gossip about her, no rumors. She was thought of as merely a very strange and rather difficult woman. For the first time he had begun to wonder where she had come from.

When he had done a series of features on Palm County history, one of his more reliable sources for the Sandy Key area had been Aunt Middy Britt. She lived with one of her sons, a man of sixty, next door to the old Britt fishhouse on the mainland just below the Hoyt Marina. It was still the finest place in the area to buy smoked mullet.