Lucky kid. I got to hang out with alien insects. She got a piggyback ride.
Plans changed, right in the middle of the pizza.
We got company. It wasn’t Roy Ruskin, but the unexpected guests were almost as dangerous.
I’d forgotten my friend Ellen was coming back out to Paumanok Harbor on the weekend to spend more time with Martin, the science teacher. I’d forgotten it was Friday, besides.
She tried to call, Ellen said, but the answering machine didn’t pick up. I must have been on the phone with my mother or father and didn’t hear the call-waiting beep. So she and Martin decided to come by and see if I wanted to go out to dinner with them.
I pointed to the baby and the pizza, two easy outs. Piet offered them beers, though, so they sat down. Martin took a slice of pizza and a beer, but Ellen leaned close to me and whispered that she was embarrassed for intruding, but they’d thought Barry would be here.
“Not a chance,” I told her. “He lied about his name and his job and his reasons for being here.”
“But you have so much in common, your writing and all. And he’s gorgeous.”
So was Piet, in his own, better way. After sharing his beer, he ignored the company and concentrated on feeding Edie tiny slivers of pizza she could chew or gum. She loved it.
I hated having to explain about Barry to Ellen, one of my oldest friends, without telling her how threatening he was to Paumanok Harbor.
She shrugged. “This new guy isn’t half as hot.”
She’d never guess how hot.
“He’s real quiet, too, and not as friendly as Barry. He’s a fireman, for Pete’s sake. You have nothing in common with him.”
She’d never guess how much we shared, either, not that I cared. I forgot how much of a snob Ellen was, when it came to men. I tried to keep the sharpness out of my voice when I told her, “Barry was using us. Piet is helping.”
She should have noticed the pizza getting cold, Martin having another beer, the baby getting tired, and me getting snippy, but she didn’t. Or that I didn’t offer coffee or dessert.
Instead they got down to the real reason for the visit, not my company, not my pizza: Martin wanted my bugs.
“I know you were offering a reward for them,” he said. “I’ll double it.”
“I stopped doing that. They were getting hurt. People were getting hurt. You saw what happened to Barry when he swatted at one. Their, ah, bites are poisonous.”
“I can be careful. I have nets and jars in the car, along with thick gloves and a beekeeper’s head cover. If that works, I thought I’d bring my science class here to gather some. Word is they like your neighborhood.”
Ellen started to say how she’d bring a couple of her own honors science students next weekend, so they had the same experience.
Piet slammed his bottle down.
I shouted, “No.”
They both looked surprised. “Why not? They’re disturbing the village and causing fires.”
“They wouldn’t if people left them alone.” Speaking of leaving alone, Piet got up and took Edie away for her bath and pajamas. Feet of clay, fire boy, I muttered to myself.
Martin was adamant, enthused, excited. “But they are obviously a new species. Someone needs to do research on them. It’s a great opportunity for my students. Think of the discovery!”
“And think of you getting your name in some journal?”
Martin was oblivious, but Ellen got offended. “Willy, that’s mean. Science is all about uncovering new things. Why are you being so defensive anyway? They are beetles that could prove valuable.”
“Exactly. They are too valuable to endanger in any way.”
Ellen leaned forward. “But we wouldn’t want to harm them, just see how they can be used.”
I leaned back. “Used?”
Now Martin took over. “Think about it. Cheap cook fires for undeveloped countries, instead of chopping down every tree. Portable heat for cold climates. Why, it’s the renewable energy everyone’s been searching for. If we can breed them and harness their capability to create a spark, we can eliminate the dependency on foreign oil, on polluting coal, on nuclear reactors with disposal issues.”
Ellen added, “Once we establish their breeding habits and a suitable controlled environment, we can have an unlimited supply.”
Captive breeding in a laboratory? For the creatures who could make an aurora borealis? “You don’t know anything about the bugs!”
“I know they are neither flies nor bugs,” Martin said in condescending tones, while he reached for another bottle of beer.
“I know what they are. They are beetles, which have hard outer wings.” Except mine had gossamer wings. “They are still called fireflies or lightning bugs.”
“But different, larger, out of season, burning stuff, which is all the more reason to gather some up and examine them, to see how they create heat and fire.”
I was horrified. “They don’t make fires unless they’re hurt! You’d be torturing innocent creatures!”
Martin dismissed my argument with a tutting sound. “To serve mankind. That’s what we do, what we’ve always done.”
Ellen looked at the sausage on the pizza. “You eat meat, don’t you? And fish and chicken.”
Not anymore, I didn’t.
“We wear wool and leather. Where do you think they come from if not innocent creatures. It’s the way of the world.”
I was an instant vegetarian. And I’d wear—yeck—polyester if I had to.
Martin’s face turned red, and the comb-over came loose as he insisted: “You cannot withhold such a discovery from the world, from science. Just think, if we’re the first to study them, we’ll be famous. Why, we can patent them.”
If I were drawing Martin, I’d put dollar signs in his eyes. “But they—” How could I say they were from another world? “They communicate.”
Martin went tut-tut again. I wanted to smack his patronizing puss. “We know certain insects communicate with each other, but that’s limited to finding mates and food. They have no intelligence.”
My insects—beetles—did! More than these two imbeciles hiding greed in the name of science. “You’ve seen them, Ellen, at the fireworks, how they formed patterns and pictures.”
“I saw abnormally big and bright lightning bugs gather in a swarm and mimic some of the rockets.”
“What if they weren’t imitating what they saw, but planning new designs? What if they have the intelligence of a dolphin? We don’t eat them, do we?”
“Some people do, hungry people. And our government has been known to train them as weapons bearers or weapons detectors. To say nothing of how many are captured for marine shows. Because they are intelligent and can be trained to perform. For people.”
“And these are just beetles, Willy,” my former friend Ellen said. “You hate all bugs. Remember how you left the dorm when a wasp made its nest outside our window? And screamed every time a daddy longlegs got in the shower?”
“These are different, and you cannot have them.” I got up, indicating the conversation was over. And our friendship, too. How did I miss her coldhearted, calculating ways? By not seeing so much of her since she moved to Connecticut.
Martin smirked. “How will you stop us?”
“I’ll stop you from here. This is private property, and you are not welcome.”
Ellen gasped. “What’s got into you, Willy? You’re acting crazy. I bet it’s the fireman. He wants to keep them for himself, doesn’t he?”
“He puts out fires, he doesn’t start them. I think you should leave.”
Martin was determined to seek his fame and fortune. “Then I’ll have to organize a school trip out to the salt marshes. I hear the beetles have been seen there.”
I was on safer, muddier ground here. “No, that’s swamp gas.”
He didn’t believe me. “Then they’ll study swamp gas.”
“No, it’s too dangerous. The smell there is overwhelming. The police,
the Harbor Patrol, and the Bay Constable have the entire area shut down anyway.”
“Not anymore they don’t. They’re all too busy beating the bushes for Roy Ruskin. And I’ll equip the kids with face masks.”
“You’ll do no such thing. I’ll explain to Aunt Jasmine.” His boss. “She’ll never give permission for you to take a kid out there.”
He knew I could do it.
“We’ll stay here, then. I’ll park at the end of your road—on the public right-of-way—and wait for them to come. You can’t stop me.”
Piet came back without Elladaire. “No one wants to stop you. I can use the help patrolling the block. The police think Ruskin might show up here.” He jerked a thumb toward the stairs. “That’s his kid I just put to bed. The man’s dangerous.”
Martin and Ellen looked at each other, then at the door.
“Besides,” Piet went on, “you’re too late to have any claim on the fireflies. They’ve already been sent to a government lab in Virginia. I am certain they’ll be rushed to the endangered species list.”
Not as fast as Martin, if DUE decided to act on his threat.
I could smile again. “Yes, Martin, why don’t you keep guard with Piet? Ellen, you can stay here to protect the baby if her father comes. That way you’ll both see the fireflies if they show up.”
Piet sighed, but he nodded. They wouldn’t see anything burning that night. And he wasn’t getting lucky.
CHAPTER 25
THEY LEFT. I KNEW THEY WOULD, the sniveling cowards. What I didn’t know was if they’d stay gone, or continue their “research” in other ways. Like trapping the beetles from his boat, or creeping back to my yard under the cover of the trees. Chances are those two selfish sadists saw nothing wrong with using beagles for brain-damage experiments.
I called Aunt Jas, telling her of her science teacher’s plans to have kids mutilate the bugs to see what happened. She sounded as upset as I felt. Not for the beetles but for the repercussions from the rest of the swarm. If they communicated, which I knew they did, we’d be toast, literally. She said she’d call the school board and the principal tomorrow to discuss policy. They stopped dissecting live frogs years ago. Now they’d stop Martin from maiming insects. Everyone knew that animal cruelty in children often presaged adult violent behavior. Paumanok Harbor should not be desensitizing its kids to the pain of anyone. They shouldn’t be endangering the kids by exposing them to stagnant swamps or unexplained phenomenon. She never liked Martin anyway.
Meanwhile Piet called the police chief. Good citizen that he was, he reported that Martin Armbruster’d just had three beers—Piet’s beers—in less than an hour, while he planned on capturing enough fireflies to burn down the school. Chief Haversmith said he’d take care of it. A failed breathalyzer test could put Martin in the drunk tank for the night. By tomorrow his boat wouldn’t start, so the teacher couldn’t spend the weekend looking for bugs on the shore.
“How do you know his boat won’t start?”
“I’m sending a man to make sure.”
“You take the law kind of casually around here, don’t you?”
“Hell no, we’re dead serious about keeping the peace. A schoolteacher BUI, that’s Boating Under the Influence, would be a bad example for our kids, besides. We’re spread pretty thin, though. You see anything your way?”
Piet wouldn’t look at me. I wore baggy sweatpants and one of my father’s old shirts. “Nothing to get excited about. Damn it.”
Little Red wanted to go out, but all I could think of was Roy Ruskin lurking in the bushes with a can of kerosene. Or Barry hiding behind a tree with a camera. Or Martin and Ellen creeping back up the street with butterfly nets.
Martin was a greedy, self-important, pompous hypocrite. I was more disappointed in my friend Ellen than in any local science teacher. “Teacher!” I shouted toward Piet. Little Red snapped at my flip-flop. I ignored him. “My father was right.Almost. He didn’t mean a preacher, or a creature. That prig Martin is the danger!”
One of the dangers. If he was the source of my father’s unease, though, that meant Mama, the creature I feared, wasn’t a threat. Not to me, anyway. That’s the way my father’s talent worked.
That meant I could go look for her myself. Were those pigs sprouting wings yet? I was having a hard enough time facing the backyard by myself now that the sun had set.
Piet took Elladaire in a baby backpack on rounds of the neighborhood. She didn’t wake up, not even when he leaned over to kiss me good-bye and good hunting.
I did not want him to find Roy Ruskin. For all we knew, Roy had a gun or a knife or a hatchet or—I reined in my imagination. Roy liked using fire, which made Piet invincible. I just said, “Stay safe.”
I went outside around the house with a flashlight and another pile of drawing supplies. I held up a blank black scratchboard first, not a mark on it. “Dark skies,” I said aloud, but hoped I sent a mental image across the ether. For about the umpteenth time, I wished I were a telepath. Nah. With my luck, I’d only get to talk to dead people. Talking to blazing beetles had to be better. You are the Visualizer, I told myself. So visualize what you want.
“No shooting stars, no fireworks.” But how to show the absence of something? I waved the black board over my head, like an airplane traffic handler.
My arms got sore. Then my neck got stiff from looking up. “And no rings around the moon, either. People will notice. Come on, guys, but fly down low where you can’t be spotted from any distance.”
It worked! Damn, I was good. Or else they were on their way anyhow. No matter, there they were, a carpet of diamonds a foot or so off the grass. They were far fewer than before, maybe thirty or forty, and I worried where the rest were. With Mama? Or in bottles somewhere, or out getting into more trouble? Either way, some had answered my call. Once more I felt familiar warmth. The temperature rose, but a sense of fellowship settled over me, too, the opposite of fear.
From what I’d learned about their world, every being of Unity was both a telepath and an empath. The luminaries must be trying to project that comfort to me, but I could not understand their unspoken mental language, only the sense that we were in this together.
That was it! Together! I got a white sheet of paper and a big marker and drew the symbols from my pendant, the one supposed to say “One life, One heart, I and Thou, One forever.” I held it up and tried to think the words Grant the Linguist had taught me. I said them aloud and in my head and tried to emote the intention, along with the inscription. That old bumper sticker, “Visualize world peace,” had nothing on my efforts.
The tiny lights rose up another foot, bobbed in synch, then settled down again. Was that a bow? An acknowledgment? Or part of their mating ritual? I had no way of knowing, but now that I had their attention, I tried again to explain the dangers of my world.
My second drawing showed men—one with a comb-over—chasing sparks with nets and bottles. “Danger, danger!”
The next had a good likeness of Roy, tattoos and shaved head and all, stomping on a bug, with fire spouting under his foot. “More danger!”
As fast as I could sketch, I held up another: Handsome Barry swatting at a bug. “Danger of too much publicity.” How could they understand that concept? I added more people, and more, standing on top of each other with cameras and nets and flashbulbs—No, they might think those were relatives. I flipped to a new page and put hordes of people on foot, in boats, heading toward the drainage ditches that made the marsh. Instead of trying to show water and grasses and muddy banks, I drew the grid they’d flashed for Piet and me.
The lantern beetles singed my mother’s lawn.
Fear? Anger? I couldn’t tell, only that the grass looked like a sloppy smokers’ break room. They didn’t set any fires, though. I was glad we were friends. “You see? Danger all around.”
They hovered closer to me. “No, not to me. To you. I cannot protect you from everyone. You have to leave.”
Mama in my head.
I kind of expected them to fly a formation showing the grid of ditches blocked somehow. Instead they flew closer to me. They were not threatening, but trying to communicate, I sensed. They must be as desperate to be understood as I was, but all I got was a feeling that the time was wrong.
“Wrong to talk to me? Wrong for Mama to leave? What could you or she be waiting for?”
Maybe they knew tonight was the wrong time to be in my backyard. I heard it then, what they must have seen or sensed: a car slowly pulling up the dirt road.
There was no time to call Piet to come extinguish the tiny flames. I held up the first black board. “Dark sky, dark sky!”
They clustered together, which made them more conspicuous.
“No, hide. Hide.” I didn’t have time to figure how to draw the concept of hiding, so I pulled my shirt over my head. “Hide.”
They strung themselves on a big scrub oak, like Christmas tree lights.
Hmm. Sometimes restaurants hung those tiny twinkle lights out to draw attention. Sometimes hostesses strung them up when they were having a fashionable summer lawn party. I heard the car door slam. No time. “Okay, we’ll be fashionable. But no fires! Decorations only.”
That’s what Officer Keys saw when he came around the front of my house with his flashlight. “Nice touch. My wife wants me to do that for the backyard next summer.”
“And they look nice for the holidays, too,” I said, “so you don’t have to take them down.” I wasn’t worried about lying to Eric Kenton. Truth detecting wasn’t his talent. Opening locks was, thus the nickname of Keys. They’d hired him onto the police force before he could put his gift to profitable but illegal use.
He directed his light around the yard, looking for whomever I’d been talking to, that led him to find me. He shined the light on my art supplies and shrugged. The whole town knew I was nuts enough for anything. Talking to myself and drawing outside in the dark were the least of my craziness. “The chief sent me to give you the all clear. He’s got your teacher friend under lock and key, yelling something fierce, but the judge doesn’t hold night court, so no one can set bail.”
Fire Works in the Hamptons : A Willow Tate Novel (9781101547649) Page 18