Blackmail Earth

by Bill Evans

  “Come on, join us,” Dafoe called to the pair as he walked toward them. The taller one, sporting black braids and a brilliant sunflower tattoo that sprouted from under the shoulder strap of her fully filled tank top, called to Bayou and rubbed his ruff.

  Jenna drifted over, and Dafoe introduced Forensia as his “number-one farmhand.”

  “Your only one,” she quipped.

  “And Sang-mi is her friend,” Dafoe added.

  Forensia looked up from Bayou. “Hey, you really are Jenna Withers. You do the weather in the mornings.”

  “That’s right,” Sang-mi said with a Korean accent.

  “Guilty as charged,” Jenna said.

  “Well, you’re good at it.” Forensia shook her hand. “I mean, even before you almost landed on my boss, we always caught your first weather report of the day. Working on a farm and all you kind of have to.”

  “Forensia’s my chief troublemaker,” Dafoe said.

  “More like your chief slop hauler,” the young woman replied.

  “What’s up?” Dafoe asked her.

  “I left my pack by your computer and I’m going to need it for the weekend.”

  “And you wanted to meet Jenna?”

  “Could be that, too,” Forensia said good-naturedly.

  “Go on, grab your pack. You’re probably running off to a midnight meeting of your coven.”

  “It’s not a coven,” Forensia harrumphed playfully. Jenna sensed that this wasn’t the first time they’d had this exchange. “It’s a gathering, and we’re not officially witches.”

  “Not yet,” said Sang-mi in all seriousness.

  “Pagans,” Dafoe explained after the young women drove off and he and Jenna settled back on the veranda.

  “Really? They’ve been in the news enough lately. Do they know anything about that GreenSpirit woman, the one who’s landed Lilton in all that hot water?”

  “I asked them but they wouldn’t say much. I got the feeling that they like all the cloak-and-dagger stuff of having people think that GreenSpirit might be around here, but I really doubt it. Here?” He shrugged. “Reminds me of the Dylan rumors from twenty years ago: ‘Hey, Dylan’s renting a place up the Deben Valley.’ That sort of thing. Now it’s Paganism.”

  “Not your everyday belief system, at least not where I come from.”

  “Vermont? Are you kidding? There are lots of Pagans up there.”

  “Not when I was growing up.”

  “World’s changing, but I’m fine with them. They care about the land as much as I do. And despite the rumors in this little burg, they’re not sacrificing babies and goats.”

  “There’s actually talk like that?”

  “Oh, yeah, Forensia and Sang-mi aren’t the only Pagans around. There’s a bunch of others in their twenties, late teens, and new ones checking it out all the time. You take in a twenty-mile radius around here, and you’ll find quite a few of them living on small farms or in town. Some are even younger and still at home with their folks—who are freaking out, if the letters to the paper and what you hear around town mean anything.”

  “We’re not that far from the city; it’s hard to believe that people are getting so riled up about it.”

  “We’ve got more churches per capita in this county than anywhere else in the state, so this Pagan stuff is really stirring up the pot. There have been some harsh words thrown around. The sheriff even held a town hall meeting to try to calm everybody down. Which is amazing because I would have pegged him as somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. He’s got two teenage girls himself, and Forensia says they’ve been slipping away at night to go to their gatherings.”

  “What a place of intrigue. Who’d have thunk?” Jenna joked.

  “The thing is, I get a little worried about those two, especially Forensia. Religion can bring out the crazies, and I’ve tried to warn them to be careful, but Forensia’s attitude is ‘Screw them. I’m Pagan and I’m proud.’”

  “You’re not a Pagan, are you?” She could accept Paganism, even admire aspects of it; but she didn’t think she was ready for a Pagan boyfriend.

  He laughed heartily. “Me? God no.”

  “So you won’t be running off to some gathering on Sunday morning?”

  “I’ll be running to the cows, like I do every day, to worship at the udder altar.”

  “That was bad,” she said, but she was laughing, too.

  “I’m just not a joiner.”

  “Hold on there, you’re president of the Organic Dairymen’s Association.”

  “God bless Google.” He laughed again. “But that’s it. You won’t find any pentacles hanging around my neck. What about you?”

  “I’m a scientist. I believe in the betterment of the species through evolution,” she said with feigned hauteur, then added more seriously, “although the species Homo sapiens has me a little worried of late.”

  “Here’s to our betterment.” He raised his glass, and Jenna followed suit.

  She canceled her reservation at the B&B, taking Dafoe up on his offer of a spare room. The arrangement felt comfortable and safe, and she luxuriated in waking to find her new beau priming the espresso maker.

  Before she left late on Sunday morning, they found themselves back in the kitchen, making out like a couple of teens. That’s certainly how her passion felt: fresh and alive—a great unknown all over again.

  She was tempted to go further, but told him that she wanted them both to get tested. Her words sounded breathless; and she held his hips firmly against hers, savoring the sweet pressure. When he started to speak, she put her finger on his lips and said, “No arguments, Mr. Dafoe Tillian.”

  “You worried?”

  “About you or me?” she asked.

  “Either.”

  “I’m not worried about me but fair is fair.”

  Still aroused, and still sorely tempted, she belted herself next to him in the pickup, feeling like a cowgirl as he drove her back to the train station with his arm wrapped around her shoulders.

  “Look,” she said, once she’d unbuckled to face him, “I don’t have a lot of time for games. That’s why I don’t waste my time dating much. But I like you, Dafoe. If you’re serious about getting to know me, call me again, or e-mail me”—she pecked his lips impulsively—“whatever you want, but be in touch. I’m putting it to you straight: I like you a lot. It’s in your court.”

  With that last word—verb as much as noun—she put her finger on his nose. For what reason, she had no earthly idea, but in the next instant he kissed it, and she was back in his arms till the train rolled in.

  She watched him on the platform, waving until he passed from view. She leaned back in her seat, sighing with delight. Our first weekend together. She told herself to hold on to these memories. So I can tell our kids someday.

  Aghast at what she’d thought—that sneaky unbidden words could arise from such an unknown place—she started leafing through a discarded section of the Sunday New York Times, finding little to engage her until she saw a story datelined “the Maldives,” covering the bombing two days earlier. When she skimmed down the column and spotted Rafan’s name, she almost cried out, but he was described as a survivor whose sister had been killed by the first blast.

  Basheera. Jenna had known her as a shy girl of thirteen, smart and funny in her quiet, mischievous way.

  Jenna thought of other terrorist attacks over the years, and all the times she’d sat in sad wonder, shaking her head over the enveloping tragedies; but this was unfathomable because the Maldives had always been so special. Not just to her. Not just because of the precious months she’d spent with Rafan ten years ago. The Maldives were special because the Maldives were paradise. And paradise had been brutally, ruthlessly bombed.

  The Times quoted Rafan: “My little sister died in my arms on the way to hospital. I heard the second bomb and saw the others dying, too.”

  Jenna pulled her BlackBerry from her bag. She’d kept it off all weekend, and now knew a
nother regret.

  Tons of calls, but there was the message she was hoping for: Rafan’s on Saturday morning. In a desperate voice, he’d pleaded with her to come, “Or send someone to do this story, or we’ll all drown in…” A pause, and she was sure he’d say “the sea,” that they’d all drown in the rising, frightening, murderous sea.

  But when he regained his voice, it was so heartbroken that his words could have been pitted with shrapnel: “… in blood.”

  We’ll all drown in blood. She said this to herself, head still shaking. And then her eyes pooled, salty and swelling like the waters of the world.

  CHAPTER 4

  Rafan turned from the row of fresh graves and the harsh glare of white headstones, and lowered his eyes to where Basheera lay buried. Yesterday, under the same strong sun, his little sister had been shrouded in a white cloth and placed on her right side to face Mecca. In accordance with Islamic practice, the other eleven victims of the bombing also rested with their eternal gaze on Islam’s holiest city, while their killers—men of renegade faith—took noisy credit for the carnage, promising more blood with every breath, and claiming that God Himself had anointed their mission.

  Muslims murdering Muslims. Rafan shook a fist at the burning sky.

  They would have murdered him, too, if he’d been seconds slower walking down that crowded street. If he hadn’t tried to carry his dying sister to hospital. If he hadn’t hurried.

  If … if … if … An army of ifs had marched him to the borderlands of life and death, and spared him the miserable instrument of their choosing.

  He sank to his knees. The newly settled dirt received him softly, and he tried to pray, as he’d tried at the burial with seven men beside him, all of them staring into her open grave. None of them had known Basheera well. For her sake he’d cast prayers to heaven, trying to reel in grace, forgiveness, hope. But his eyes had returned unsoothed to this fresh wound in the earth.

  Basheera’s three dearest friends, fellow teachers at the English Language School in Malé, were not permitted at her gravesite, for “Allah has cursed women who frequent graves for visitation,” a quote attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. It gave rise in many locales to the rule barring women, made and enforced by men, to spare them the emotions of wives, sisters, daughters.

  Basheera would have hated the ceremony, so male and mannerly, though she might have laughed, as she had many times, at the irony of her life as a Muslim woman: torn by her faith, troubled yet true—and scorned by extremists whose anger stifled debate and silenced dissent.

  Do you know you killed one of your enemies? Rafan had wanted to scream yesterday as dirt darkened the shroud that covered Basheera. She hated what you do. What you say. But to shout would have granted them a greater victory, and he never would have done that.

  Instead, he would defy them—and honor his sister—under the quiet cover of darkness. He would usher Fatima, Musnah, and Senada—the dark-eyed, dark-haired married woman whom he loved dearly—to Basheera’s grave. The three women, all friends of his sister’s, planned to scatter petals of the pink rose, her favorite flower.

  No one guarded the cemetery. No one would stop them when night came. Even prying stubborn eyes had to sleep.

  * * *

  Hours away, on the small island of Dhiggaru, Adnan took his first clumsy steps in a pair of black flippers. Like a seal on a beach, he thought. He turned to look at his impressions in the sand, so big he could have been a giant. Or a monster?

  Just nine steps to the water. That’s all. The strip of sand had narrowed and trees had fallen. They’d washed away, or languished in the gentle surf, shifting side to side with the thrust and parry of the sea.

  Parvez had loaned him the mask, snorkel, and fins. “You must see for yourself,” he’d said.

  “But I know about it.”

  “See it,” the religious leader had insisted. “Touch it. It is not only sand that disappears. The reef is dying.”

  The warm water swirled around Adnan’s legs; but in the distance the ocean appeared flat and still, reflecting the sun’s blinding rays like a mirror.

  He rinsed the mask before he put it on, and swam with his eyes on the ocean bottom, watching the scalloped sand slowly recede as the water deepened. He’d swum with sea turtles as a boy, when his fears of sharks had lessened and he’d chanced the dark blue waters far from shore, once shadowing a turtle as large as himself. The creature had glided fathoms below him, fins lifting and falling in unison, effortless as palm fronds in a breeze. For many minutes he’d trailed the turtle, mesmerized by a hard shell so alive in the soft embrace of sea. He’d felt buoyant and free, unfettered by land or air or need.

  The turtle swam away, and the spell was broken. Adnan had treaded water and looked to shore, so distant that it had been almost impossible to see. Yet he’d been filled not with the immensity of the ocean—his speck of life on the blank face of water—but with the vastness of the universe itself, for that’s what he’d known in his absolute isolation: the endless unraveling hand of God.

  Only the memory remained—not the overriding sense of the divine—as he swam the last few meters to the coral reef, white and lifeless as sand, killed by an invisible gas that spilled from the sky and formed a deadly ocean acid.

  “They have played God with our world,” Parvez had said when he’d handed Adnan the snorkeling gear. “They took all of creation in their hands and squeezed it like a lime until no more juice ran into their bowls.”

  Adnan had listened. Now he placed his hand on the coral. Dead. He’d never known that a reef could feel so devoid of life, but this one did. The silent heartbeat of the ocean’s hardest growth had vanished. He remembered an admonition of his youth—“Don’t touch the reef”—because human contact killed it, but Parvez had told him that you can’t kill the dead, and Parvez was right. Adnan could touch this reef for hours and he’d never harm it because … you can’t kill the dead. Parvez had pointed to the resort islands, where tourists stayed in sprawling beach bungalows. “You can only give them rest. Let them dream. Let them sleep. We are coming.”

  * * *

  Starlit, Rafan crept alongside Fatima, Musnah, and Senada to within whispering distance of the cemetery.

  “Wait behind there.” He pointed to two towering palms that rose inches from each other.

  The three women in headscarves crouched down. Rafan took a steadying breath and walked to the entrance. An Islamic inscription had been chiseled into the arch centuries ago: ALLAH GIVES LIFE, AND ALLAH TAKES IT AWAY.

  He headed directly to where Basheera’s body salted the earth with minerals and blood. He did not sink down, as he had earlier that day. Instead, he listened with the ears of a sentry as his eyes studied the commanding stillness, looking for those who would condemn him and the three women by the palms.

  Slowly, he walked back to the gate, hanging his head as a bereaved man. But he was still searching for what he did not want to find.

  * * *

  Adnan had stopped snorkeling more than a decade ago, when the reefs began to die. He’d been sickened by the disappearance of batfish, with their bold stripes and wing-shaped bodies; and the loss of speckled green puffer fish with their long, snoutlike faces, bulgy eyes, and professorial airs. So many whimsical species—angelfish and triggerfish and the grumpy-looking grouper—had vanished as quickly, it seemed, as the tiny tessellated schools that had darted away in flashes of yellow, pink, blue, and orange.

  Only this whiteness remained. This blankness. Adnan touched the coral again. White was the color of death. Not black.

  Swimming over the reef, he peered down into the small caverns where moray eels once lurked, evil-looking and sly, and nattily attired parrot fish had nibbled contentedly on algae. The emptiness shocked him.

  He circled back over the reef to swim to shore. He would tell Parvez what he had seen: nothing. The blank white face of nothing.

  A shadow passed so swiftly on his left that it didn’t register fully. Then he turne
d and saw that the shadow had a body fifteen feet long and a mouth that could crush his skull.

  * * *

  Fatima, Musnah, and Senada stepped away from the palms. None of them spoke, but Rafan saw light in Senada’s moist eyes, and thankfulness. Basheera had been at Senada’s side when she gave birth to a stillborn son; and his little sister, who had always been the quiet one, had stood up to Senada’s husband when he had screamed at his grieving wife, “Murderer. Murderer.”

  To be out at night with Rafan and two women was dangerous for Senada. Not so much for Fatima and Musnah: As single women, they did not have threats to fear in their homes. Only threats from those who might be spying on the cemetery.

  “You are sure no one is there?” asked Senada, half a head taller than the other two.

  “I am sure,” Rafan said, though certainty was never possible with so many followers of Allah searching for the sins of others.

  They did not pass under the arch. Rafan walked them along the perimeter, four hunched, hurrying figures moving through starlight and shadows until he turned and led them to Basheera’s grave. The women gathered side by side. Rafan stepped back to keep watch.

  A murmur of prayer arose. Rafan’s surveillance revealed not a trace of movement in the cemetery. A stillness as absolute as death.

  Fatima, Musnah, and Senada reached into a woven bag and released handfuls of lush pink petals. They glittered and floated to Basheera’s grave like the snow the women had never seen. A blanket, luminous and pure, covered the freshly dug earth.

  * * *

  Adnan stared at the massive tiger shark and tried to tread water with the slightest movement possible, torso and legs dangling in the water like bait from the great hook of heaven. Dozens of shark species lived in the seas around the Maldives, most no more threatening than a squid, but tiger sharks attacked swimmers, divers, even boats.

  This one swam so close that Adnan felt water shift against his stomach. Then the shark moved on.