Her attention returned to the box while she brought out a paper plate and a knife. “Are you asking if this fruit’s okay to eat? Looks okay . . . but there’s only one way to find out. Or is there something else on your mind?”
The hall wasn’t busy, but the occasional person strolled by. “Can we speak privately?” I asked.
We weren’t close friends in school, but Roberta winced as if it pained her to say no. When she began to explain the rules of a state-funded facility, I apologized and moved on. I told her about Kermit’s interest in historic Spanish rootstock, and shared the theory about fruit that originated in Asia perhaps being more resistant to insects that also came from Asia.
“I’ve heard the name before,” she said. “He’s respected in the industry, but the scientific types, the true brainiacs, tend to dismiss him as a private-sector cowboy. Typical. You wouldn’t believe some of the egos in this business. Hilarious, really, how vicious it can get. So I wait, ignore most of what’s said, and form my own opinion. You and Kermit must be pretty close, huh?” Roberta, who wore a wedding diamond, had noticed I did not.
“We just met,” I said. “Something I didn’t make clear is, this isn’t Kermit’s idea. A friend of mine, a marine biologist, he’s the one who came up with it. I just happened to pass it along. Maybe that was a mistake.”
Roberta took the possibility more seriously than I expected. “Really? Maybe it was. If there was a list of discoveries made by people outside their field, it would cover this room.” She gave it more thought while halving the orange. “I don’t know . . . it seems so simple—too simple, really. Beat an incurable disease by literally returning to the roots of the original tree. Here . . . let’s have a look.”
She slid the plate toward me, and used a pencil to point. “Aborted seeds are the first thing I look for. These little guys are plump and healthy as can be. This is the calyx button—it’s where the stem connects to the center column of the orange. Looks good; no yellow stain, which is typical of HLB. But the leaves have been infected. You saw for yourself. That tells me the disease hasn’t had time to affect the fruit—eighteen months is all it takes, which isn’t long. You said your great-grandpa planted the tree?”
“Almost a hundred years ago,” I said, “but that could be an exaggeration.”
“Hmm,” she said. “It’s possible. Either that or the fruit’s more resistant, for some reason. Which is very, very unlikely, Hannah. Still”—she sat back to clean her hands—“it’s an interesting angle.”
“I have some other friends, a retired couple. They felt the idea had probably already been tried and failed. But since you and I have known each other so long, they said why not wrangle a meeting and ask you personally?”
“Nope, this is the first I’ve heard of going back to the original rootstock,” the woman said, and rolled her eyes in a humorous way. “It’s a little too obvious for us highly trained experts. The more complex, the better—that’s academia for you. In Texas, a lab is trying to splice spinach DNA with citrus genomes . . . I’m serious, by the way . . . Others are infecting periwinkle flowers with HLB to see what happens, then experimenting with penicillin, and some cryptic biocide—I can’t pronounce the darn name. Here, we’re plodding along with a three-pronged approach: insecticides, supplements, and the equivalent of a dose of aspirin. It’s a technique developed by Maury Boyd, a guy literally fighting for his life. It’s not perfect. The combination helps, but everyone knows the industry is doomed if we don’t find a cure within the next few years.” She sighed, then shrugged and got to her feet. “I don’t think Spanish rootstock is the answer, but what the heck? I can ask around. Who are these friends of yours again?”
“Actually, they’re my clients—I’m a fishing guide now.”
“I remember that about you: you liked to fish. How’s it going, you in a business that’s traditionally all men?”
“I stay busy; do light tackle, mostly. My clients, the ones who said I should talk to you, they just retired from a company they started. One’s an attorney, the other’s a scientist, so I figure they know what they’re talking about.” I paused before adding, “They founded a company called Biotech International.”
Roberta’s eyes widened at the name—or the word Biotech. I’d done a Google search on the Gentrys. They had pioneered the field of biotechnology, so the name and the word were practically synonymous.
I liked her slow smile. It brought a devilish light to her eyes. “Look at you, Hannah Smith. I remember you as the quiet one in the back of the room; a varsity swimmer who played clarinet. What I should have remembered is, you got straight A’s. Biotech International—that’s as big as it gets.”
“One of the things I like about guiding,” I said, “is you never know who you’ll meet.”
“When they got on your boat, did you have any idea who they were?”
“Not until I picked a few wild grapefruits for them and then we started talking about citrus at lunch. The way their faces lit up, I could tell they’re already bored with retirement.”
“You’re serious about this.”
“I don’t know enough about it to be serious, but they seem serious enough. They’re paying a full day’s charter fee for every day I spend working on a project they’re considering.”
“My goodness . . .” She began packing her laptop. “Say—why don’t you ride with me to this grove near Arcadia? We can talk more on the way.”
The girl who’d once led Holstein cows into a show ring waited until we were in her pickup to say, “Anything we discuss in the office is proprietary, but we can talk freely now—this is my truck. Hannah, let me tell you something. If you get a patent on a bio technique that’s even close to something that works—even years from now—you could make millions. Trouble is”—she smiled, still wrestling with the concept—“it won’t.”
Even so, at a stoplight she asked, “Do you think there’s a chance I could actually meet Dr. Gentry and her husband?”
• • •
All my life I’ve lived in Florida, but had never seen oranges processed from start to finish. The owner of the grove was too busy to show me around, and Roberta was too busy doing her job, so I was assigned a guide—when he wasn’t busy. Fine with me. It gave me room to piece together things on my own—and also phone Mrs. Gentry to tell her the progress I was making.
The northwest section of the grove—because it was the windward corner, I suspected—had been withered by disease. This left twenty acres of fruit to pick, and several crews were going at it as if they were in a race. In a way, they were. Oranges don’t continue to ripen when they hit the ground, they rot. February is peak season. It was profit now . . . or never.
Two-man teams, with red canvas bags over their shoulders or strapped to their belts, hustled a ladder from tree to tree. One man climbed and picked; the other picked, too, while steadying the ladder. When their bags were full, it was a race to semitruck-sized containers at the end of a row. Amid the catcalls and laughter was the combustion hum of open-cab vehicles called goats. (My guide didn’t know why.) These were equipped with a large hydraulic scoop that operated like a mechanical arm. The scoops transferred fruit from the containers into waiting open-bed trucks, and off the trucks roared to a nearby processing plant.
As I watched, strolling among the fragrant rows, I noted that each laden tree was connected near the roots to various tubes and sensor wires, not unlike a patient in a hospital’s intensive care unit. The grove owner was, indeed, fighting for his economic life.
Citrus trees, at peak sweetness, are also in full bloom. The color contrast of heavy-hanging oranges among blossoms of orchid white was pleasant. The tangy scent first reminded me of orange blossom honey . . . then of the perfume Shalimar. Automatically, I thought of the boathouse, and Kermit. His friendly face and brown eyes floated around in my mind until I saw Roberta striding toward me. It was not the first time
since we’d arrived. About every fifteen minutes she had reappeared to continue a back-and-forth argument going on in her head.
I didn’t understand what she was talking about but had listened with a feigned intensity as if I did:
Spanish rootstock couldn’t possibly make a difference for one simple reason: it no longer existed. On the other hand . . . many citrus varieties were nucellar. This meant they might produce clone seedlings. Clone seedlings might be virtually identical to trees first sprouted five hundred years ago.
In the space of one conversation, the woman had gone full circle, first dashing my hopes, then fanning them to life. Now here she was again, determined to impeach her previous conclusion.
“Okay, okay, here’s another problem. Not all citrus varieties are nucellar. Some are zygotic—two entirely different things. Their seedlings are produced sexually through pollination, so they inherit genetic material from both parent trees. With me so far?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, though I was sure—I had no idea what she was getting at.
“But here’s what really throws a wrench into the mix: zygotic and nucellar citrus embryos can occur in the very same seed. Isn’t that crazy?”
I conceded, “Which is bad news, I guess. Okay, that much I understand.”
“No! What I’m saying is, your biologist friend might be right. If—and this is one heck of a big if—if seedlings from the original Spanish stock still exist, they could only be found in a spot so remote that there is zero chance of cross-pollination.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. “You’re telling me what you call feral citrus—oranges or grapefruit I find on islands that were once farmed—they are definitely not the same as the original Spanish citrus. Is that right?”
“Zero chance,” she said. “That doesn’t mean older rootstock isn’t heartier. It’s worth checking into. But, aside from a few feral trees, face it, Florida’s too populated for a genetically pure ancestor of those trees to survive.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “I might know just the place. My uncle and I picked oranges there years ago—if I can find the spot again. It won’t be easy. He never used a GPS, or even a chart.”
“Not so fast,” Roberta countered. “One”—she held up a finger to keep count—“I don’t think it’s possible the original stock hasn’t been genetically altered in some way no matter how remote. Two, aside from the samples you brought, there’s no reason to believe older sour rootstock is more resistant to the disease. We’ve got nothing to compare the samples to. That’s the tragedy. Know why? Because after the last big hurricane, some idiots in Tallahassee decided all the old citrus had to be destroyed—including our oldest pioneer trees.”
“Roberta, hold on,” I said. “I feel like I’m in a Ping-Pong match here. The Gentrys want me to see this thing through, and I will—unless you tell me it’s pointless.”
“Oh, but I didn’t! What gave you that impression?”
I had to smile at the look of innocence on her face. How in the world could I possibly be so confused?
I said, “When the weather improves, I plan on trailering my skiff to Marco Island and do some exploring from there.”
“In the Keys or Florida Bay?”
“At the edge of the Everglades,” I said, intentionally evasive.
“I understand why you can’t be too specific—and I’m not asking—but you need to watch yourself, Hannah. You wouldn’t go alone, would you?”
“It’s a rare day I don’t spend time on the water on my boat alone,” I replied. “Are you offering to go with me?”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the Everglades. I know a couple of rangers and they say the snake population down there has gone insane. They’ve seen pythons, even some anacondas, that could swallow a man whole.”
The imagery she used, and the question I was about to pose, required me to maintain a brave front. “The place I have in mind isn’t a saw grass area,” I said. “It’s more to the west; a backcountry, brackish area where mangroves begin at the edge of the Gulf. Or—I’m thinking out loud here—we could tow my skiff and use my bigger boat as a sort of base camp. I live on a thirty-seven-foot Marlow I restored myself. It’s really nice inside; plenty of room to sleep two. We could take our time; do an overnight, and anchor off somewhere where the bugs wouldn’t be too bad.”
It took the woman a moment. “We?”
“I hope so.”
“You’re inviting me? I don’t know what to say.”
“I’d invite your husband, too,” I said, “but my boat doesn’t have that kind of privacy. We need someone who understands citrus, and I’m convinced I don’t qualify. I spoke to the Gentrys a few minutes ago. They’re all for it. I doubt if we’ll make a cent, but you and I would split whatever—”
“Wait . . . you told Dr. Gentry about me? She said it was okay?” Roberta was flattered, this woman who worked in a small government office with a view of tomato fields on the outskirts of tiny Immokalee.
“I call her Mrs. Gentry. She’s already read a couple of your research papers.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. What do you think?”
“I’d love to. Of course I would. It’s not about the money, although, lord knows, we could use it. But I only get weekends off. How many days would we be gone?”
“Depends on my memory,” I replied. “It could take a while. The area I have in mind, there’re more mangroves than water, so it might be slow-going in a boat. We can work around your schedule, but it would be nice to have at least three days. Otherwise, there’d be a lot of driving back and forth.”
“I’ve already used up my vacation time,” Roberta said, and sounded genuinely disappointed. A little later, she added a couple of more reasons she couldn’t go, including lessons of some sort she taught on Sundays.
This seemed to settle the matter.
We went to a nearby processing plant. A foreman equipped us with hard hats, safety glasses, and ID badges. Inside was a noisy assembly line of stainless steel rollers, pumps, and pasteurizing vats, from which exited a robotic battalion of juice cartons, all streaming toward destinations around the world. The building was gymnasium-sized and smelled of Christmas cookies and orange cake.
We left hungry. A short drive away was Mary Margaret’s Tea and Biscuit in the old downtown area of Arcadia. The nineteenth-century name matched the décor. I ordered an orange scone, and was sipping hot lemon-lavender tea, when I happened to mention the biologist Marion Ford, who owned a seaplane.
“A plane like his would be ideal for narrowing down the search area,” I said, “but the timing’s bad. He left on a trip yesterday. No idea when he’ll be back. You’ve never met such a man, when it comes to disappearing.”
The long silence that followed caused me to look across the table at Roberta. She was staring at me in mild disbelief. “You said there wasn’t much water where you’re going.”
“There’s not. But if the tide’s right, there would be enough to land, I suppose.”
“Could you afford it?”
“To what, buy a plane?”
“No, rent one for a day. Planes aren’t cheap, but I’d be willing to split the fuel just to keep my hours up. As it is, it’s a struggle to log enough time to keep my instructor’s license. That’s what I teach Sundays—flying—to kids in 4-H.”
I remembered the photo in her office. “That’s nice, giving back to an organization that helped us both, but I don’t mean a crop duster. We’d need a plane with floats.”
In reply to the woman’s matter-of-fact nod, I asked, “Are you telling me you can fly a seaplane?”
We left three days later, a Friday morning; packed everything we could possibly need into a Cessna with pontoons—except one simple item.
That item might have helped save Roberta’s life.
TWELVE
From a small plane, Marco Island is a mosaic of green fairways and ivory condos that line the beach until the Gulf of Mexico floods inland, making the land uninhabitable. A thousand square hectares of wilderness lie beyond—a vast delta of saw grass and mangroves that separates Miami, on the east coast, from Naples, one hundred miles to the west.
After we had been flying low over swamp for ten minutes, a dappled orange blur grabbed my attention. Roberta circled back. The area seemed about right, so we landed. What appeared to be wild citrus trees might have been dead mangrove leaves. Sacrificial leaves, the yellow ones are called, for it is the tree’s way of venting salt—or so some believe.
I was sitting on a pontoon, my feet in the water, and explaining this when Roberta, my new partner, said, “Dang it. I went off and left my machete. You didn’t happen to bring an extra, did you?” She was standing next to me, pawing through her bag, which was in the rear of the plane.
“You won’t need it as long as you have gloves,” I assured her. This was said with the unruffled optimism that is typical of children, and the dangerously naïve. It had been years since I’d been to this isolated spot—if it was the right spot—so I could not fathom how the area had changed, nor what awaited us. We were alone, miles from the nearest boat channel or road, denied even the comfort of a horizon. Here, the sky was choked to darkness by a screen of foliage that, aside from a strip of water, tolerated no swift escape.
“I’ll go first,” I said, and slipped off the pontoon into the water. I expected to sink into muck. I didn’t, for Roberta had found an ideal spot to beach the plane: a shell ramp that angled up to a shell ridge, where the burnished trunks of gumbo-limbo trees promised high ground. Within a few minutes of hiking around, I knew it was the wrong island, but that was okay. I’d been here before as a girl. There were some interesting things to see.
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