by Barr, Nevada
The loggerheads, Anna knew from watching, washed up on the beach with all parts intact. Shrimpers plied their trade offshore. Turtles were caught in the nets and drowned. Schlessinger retrieved the skulls and brains, Anna guessed, for dissection and study.
The butchered roadkill was a little harder to explain. Maybe Schlessinger did eat it. Behind his house Anna had noticed a hog pen. Maybe they were the beneficiaries.
Rumors of varying morbidity and credibility dwindled down from these two provocative habits. The rumor Anna dearly hoped was true was that Schlessinger ate blood-fat ticks from the carcasses of the animals. “Pops ’em like M & M’s,” Guy Marshall, her crew boss on this venture, had assured her. That was something she wanted to see. The poetic justice of it tickled her.
Eccentricity made Schlessinger well suited to Cumberland Island National Seashore. Once a vacation home for the very rich, Cumberland had been privately owned until the 1970s. In the past fifty years, most of the flashier millionaires had moved to more fashionable addresses, leaving only a handful of moneyed and powerful families behind, but the ghost of those glory days remained in the crumbling mansions and burned-out relics.
In the early 1970s, eighteen thousand acres of the twenty-thousand-acre island was deeded over to the federal government to be preserved as a national park. Those who were less than charitable suggested the land had been given to the NPS more to keep the riffraff from buying up parcels the rich were tired of paying taxes on than to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein . . .”
Those selfsame cynics also intimated that the fire crew, of which Anna was part, had been bivouacked on Cumberland to soothe the nerves of those privileged few with the ear and purse strings of various congressmen.
Cumberland was in the midst of a drought. The palmetto that carpeted much of the island would burn hot and fast if ever ignited. It could be argued that the natural areas would benefit from such a cleansing by fire. But the palmetto grew up to some very influential doorsteps.
Whatever the politics, firefighters from the National Park Service had been housed on the island in a presuppression capacity for the past ten weeks. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, over the course of their three-week rotations, they wandered around racking up overtime in heavy boots and two derelict pumper trucks on the off chance something would happen.
So far the sum total of excitement had been the ongoing chemical warfare with Cumberland’s voracious tick population and the discovery in an inland slough of fourteen baby alligators still living at home with an impressive mom the locals called Maggie-Mary. Maggie hadn’t been seen in so many years, apocrypha added more to her length and girth than the mere passage of time could have managed.
And, tonight, the loggerheads. According to Marty they nested May through August. Usually they came up on the beaches at night, usually at high tide. The eggs incubated for eight weeks; then the little hatchlings clawed their way out of their protective graves and, with luck and the fierce intercession of Marty Schlessinger, found their way to the Atlantic Ocean.
Each new nest was recorded, protected, and timed. The next hatching was due in nine days. In a rare unguarded moment Marty had divulged this bit of information and Anna had pounced on it. When the baby loggerheads made their dangerous dash for the sea she wanted to be in the turtle vanguard.
“Eggs!” came a curt demand, and Anna was snapped out of her brown study. She dropped to one knee and presented Marty with the cap in an unconsciously courtly gesture.
One by one the biologist lifted out the treasure of turtle eggs and settled them into the sand. When they had been arranged to his liking, 147 eggs in all, he ordered Anna to stand back. With great care he refilled the hole and gently tamped it down. To Anna’s amazement he then collapsed, elbows and knees on the ground, and began flailing forearms and shins in frenzied arcs.
After half a minute of this he stood and smacked the sand from his trousers, looking as sane as anyone. “Loggerheads aren’t particular,” he explained. “They scuff over the areas with their flippers but don’t seem to feel a need to disguise the nest carefully.”
Marty handed Anna back the ball cap and she absentmindedly pulled it on her head. An unpleasant trickle of water and turtle slime crawled beneath her collar.
Up and down the beach, easily visible against the pale sand, the great shapes of the loggerheads moved with startling agility back toward the sea. Dark clusters of humanity, self-appointed guardian angels, cheered.
“Quiet!” Marty growled.
“Does the noise bother the turtles?” Anna asked.
“Of course it does,” the biologist snapped.
As near as Anna could tell, anything less serious than a shark with a bullhorn went largely ignored by these phlegmatic reptiles. She cheered with the others, but silently lest she set Schlessinger off.
“Want to come back to the fire dorm for a beer?” Anna asked on impulse.
“Never touch the stuff,” Schlessinger replied.
“Me neither,” Anna said, to see if it still felt like a lie.
“Recovering alcoholic?”
Anna said nothing.
“That’s BS,” the biologist declared. “I don’t drink because I don’t need it.”
Any warm fuzzy feelings the turtles had engendered in Anna evaporated.
Marty Schlessinger turned and stalked toward the black curtain of inland foliage. Anna fell in step beside him, simply because they were headed for the same place. On their daily circuits of the island the firefighters customarily drove the trucks down the beach in one direction, and kept to the dirt lanes on the island’s interior on the other. In deference to the turtles, all night travels were confined to the inland roads. One such track ended in a sandy spur a quarter-mile north of where the egg laying was concentrated.
Volunteers, rangers, and the rest of fire crew had started back in the direction of the parked vehicles as Anna and Marty reached their destination. Schlessinger began rearranging boxes, a broom, and two new-looking shovels on the back of a battered all-terrain vehicle he used to get around the island.
An obnoxious, if infectious, hooting laugh cut through the lesser sounds and was answered by what Anna could only describe as a snarl, or as close to a snarl as a beast without claws and fangs can come.
“That man’s on my Better Off Dead list,” Marty Schlessinger said. “Mitch Hanson has no more business here than Hitler at a bar mitzvah.”
“Maybe he likes turtles,” Anna said, just to see what kind of reaction she’d get.
Schlessinger snorted and Anna was impressed at the range and accuracy of his animal sounds. “Hah,” Marty said as if translating. “Maybe he thought we were serving Jack Daniel’s.” He stabbed his shovel into the sand. The handle quivered like the shaft of a harpoon.
For several seconds Anna watched as the biologist slammed around pieces of equipment. Wet, pale brown braids smacked against his bare arms and he made low-pitched grumbling noises as if he was carrying on a heated conversation with his familiars.
Anna lounged against the fender of one of the rusting green trucks they’d inherited from the crew they had replaced. Along with the salt scent of the sea and the fecund perfume of the jungle, a faint sickly-sweet odor made it to her nostrils.
Her flashlight lay on the seat of the truck. She retrieved it and combed the ground with its yellowing beam till she found what she was looking for. Pushed partially off the road several yards from the rear wheels of Marty Schlessinger’s ATV was the carcass of a young raccoon. From the looks of it, it hadn’t been dead long. Scavengers had yet to disembowel it. Whether it had been struck by a vehicle or had died of natural causes, Anna couldn’t tell. She played the light over the little corpse invitingly but Schlessinger didn’t give it so much as a glance.
The others approached. Schlessinger fired up his four-wheeler and gutted the night with the noise of his departure.
Anna sighed and clicked off the light. Evid
ently Marty wasn’t going to eat so much as a tick tonight. She shrugged in the darkness. It was always good to have something to look forward to.
CHAPTER Two
GUY MARSHALL, A man in his late forties with a chiseled face, no hair to speak of, and the body of a rodeo cowboy—lean and strong and stove up in one knee—a walked in from the beach. The moon reflected off his pate, casting a deep shadow over his eyes.
Anna and the rest of the crew had dressed for the occasion in lightweight clothing and tennis shoes. Marshall wore regulation firefighting regalia: lemon-yellow shirt, olive drab pants of fire-retardant Nomex, and heavy lug-soled, lace-up, leather boots. He’d been wearing them for so many years he probably thought they were comfortable.
Marshall was crew boss in charge of the abbreviated presuppression crew: Anna and three men, one from Gulf Islands, one from Cape Hatteras, and one from the Natchez Trace Parkway. Fire crews were drawn from a well of red-carded rangers—those with the training who could also pass the physical. The call went out to the national parks. District rangers let go whomever they could best spare—or whomever had a favor coming or whined the loudest. Fire details, especially one as cushy as presuppression on Cumberland Island, were much sought after. Twenty-one twelve-hour days with time and a half for overtime plus per diem rounded out one’s pay-check nicely.
The crew boss threw one leg across the seat of the ATV he’d claimed for his own and shot a thin stream of tobacco juice into the sand. In the moonlight it looked like an ink blot on white paper.
A seal balancing a ball on its nose, Anna thought, looking at the impromptu Rorschach. She made a mental note to ask her sister when next she called what sort of incipient madness that might indicate.
Laughter wafted up from the beach; the throaty laugh of the interpretive ranger who lived on the island, echoed by the barklike guffaw of a member of the fire crew and the booming hoot that had so incensed Marty Schlessinger.
“They’re all crazier’n bedbugs,” Guy said without ran-cor, and ejected another stream of tobacco juice neatly over the handlebars. “Watching a bunch of turtles bury eggs has got ’em all lit up like the Fourth of July. I’d hate to see ’em in a hen yard. They’d think they died and went to heaven. Takes all kinds, I guess. Look at museum curators. The Park Service’s got a whole passel of ’em. What do they do? Sit around and watch old shit get older.”
“We could have stayed back at the dorm and watched Under Siege Two,” Anna reminded him. On the island there were only two available videos, Under Siege II and Fire Weather: A Meteorologist’s View.
“Like I always say, turtles is damn good entertainment,” Guy drawled.
What was left of Marshall’s hair was steel-gray and cropped close in a horseshoe that extended from ear to ear just above his collar. He pulled a comb from his hip pocket and carefully ran it through the back and sides. “Reliving my glory days,” he said when he caught Anna watching.
For a minute or two they waited without speaking as the others made their way across the dunes. Flashlights had been summarily banned by Schlessinger. Light disoriented the turtles—not only when they came ashore to nest but when the babies hatched. Theory had it that when turtles as a species were young, man had not yet discovered fire, let alone electricity. Temperature dictated that the hatchlings emerge from their sand incubators at night. Instinct told them to creep toward the lights on the horizon, the stars over the sea that would be home.
With electric lights and beachfront condos, baby turtles were often confused, crawling inland toward the false stars and dying.
At present the moon made flashlights unnecessary and Anna reveled in the gentle southern night. Ten p.m. and it was still over eighty degrees. Even with the drought, the air was humid. Anna’s hair curled and her fingernails grew. After so long in the high desert of southern Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, she felt like a raisin turning back into a grape.
Near the ocean there was always a slight breeze—enough to cool the sweat and make the air feel alive. Overhead it played through the tinder-dry leaves of the live oaks, producing a delicate clatter, a sweet counterpoint to the throbbing shush of waves against the shore.
The open space between the tree line and the sea suited Anna. As in the wide country of the Southwest, the eye could roll out to the distance, the soul expand into the great spaces. Back in the dense woods she didn’t breathe as easily. There the air scarcely moved and the clatter was like ticks dropping from the vegetation in search of new homes with better-stocked larders.
Like the hero in a drawing room comedy, Dijon Smith entered laughing. “Oooeee, I wish I had balls the size of a ghost crab’s,” he said. “Those little suckers aren’t afraid of anything.” Anna knew what he meant. The little crustaceans, the biggest not-more than ten inches from claw to claw, would stand on their back legs and challenge the ton-and-a-half pumper trucks as they drove down the beach.
Dijon’s dark skin soaked up the moonlight till he looked a shadow of himself. In a cliché Anna would never give voice to, all she could see were the whites of his eyes and his flashing teeth.
At twenty-two, Dijon was the baby of the bunch by nearly ten years and complained good-naturedly about being stuck in the retirement home for aging firefighters. Under the spreading branches of a live oak, Smith jumped up, caught hold of a limb, and began chinning himself with an irritating effortlessness.
“That’s knocking ticks down on you,” Guy warned.
“Shit! No lie?” Dijon dropped and began brushing off his shoulders and arms. “Don’t tell me that, man. I hate those little mother—” A glance at Anna. “Buggers.”
“They can sense your body heat like heat-seeking missiles,” the crew boss said. “You shake their tree and they drop on you.”
“Ticks.” Dijon shuddered and did a little dance designed either to dislodge insects or get a laugh. With Dijon Smith it was hard to tell. Bending over at the waist, he fluttered his fingers through his close-cropped hair.
“Don’t flick them on me,” Anna griped, and jumped back. So convincing was the performance, she half believed he was acrawl with bloodsucking monsters.
Marshall slumped back on the ATV, feet over the handlebars, back against his day pack. Guy could get comfortable anywhere, a highly desirable attribute in a wildland firefighter. “Get your eggs all laid?” he asked.
“I haven’t gotten anything laid since we came to Cumbersome Isle,” Dijon returned. “Even those turtles are starting to look good. I’ve got to get out of here. I need sex and pizza. This sand and surf and tick shit is driving me out of my”—again the look at Anna—“frigging mind.”
Anna smiled in the dark. Misplaced as it was, she appreciated the sentiment and cleaned up her language around Smith to keep her credit good.
Al Magnus, Rick Spencer, Mitch Hanson, and Lynette Wagner washed up from the beach on a gust of chatter. Headlights and engine noise sliced the night as Anna buckled herself onto the bench seat of the pumper truck. Hanson had driven his government vehicle; Lynette rode with Dijon and Rick in a second truck as decrepit as the one Anna shared with Al.
Magnus was a short, stocky man somewhere in his thirties but exuding the ageless maturity of the devoted family man. While the ATV and the truck growled into the night, Al scraped out the bowl of his pipe, then banged it against the side of the truck. The smell of sea air and stale tobacco radiated from his clothing and the cab began to feel as homey as a country living room.
“No sense eating dust,” he explained. He tamped fresh tobacco in the bowl.
“Who’s that Mitch Hanson guy?” Anna asked in idle curiosity. “Marty seemed deeply aggrieved that he not only had the temerity to exist but the unmitigated gall to do it in his vicinity.”
Al finished the tamping and went through the lengthy ritual of lighting his pipe before he answered. An addiction to pipe tobacco gave the user an unearned air of deep and considered wisdom. When the pipe was drawing properly, he said: “Mitch isn’t a bad sort. He’s a
dozer operator with maintenance. Keeps the roads passable. An over-the-hill party boy. Double dipper. He’s pretty much retired twice but’s still on the payroll. Maybe that’s what’s getting to Marty.”
Anna nodded in the dark. Scattered throughout government services were retired military men pulling a full pension and a salary. Those who worked inspired jealousy. Those who coasted, hatred and contempt.
Evidently Hanson was in the latter category. Anna had seen him grading the inland lanes. Or, now that she thought about it, she’d seen his bulldozer. Either he was nowhere around or he was lounging in the shade gossiping with the locals. He looked to be fifty or thereabout. His belly confirmed the aging-party-animal motif; thirty extra pounds rounded out his face and middle.
The sight and sounds of the other vehicles faded. Al turned the key and fired up the engine. Inland the lanes were narrow, the palmetto close and thick. Stiff fingers of vegetation skritched along the sides of the truck. Despite the muggy heat, Anna rolled her window up. Without light she couldn’t defend herself against the whip of the fronds.
The road was washboarded and hosted deep ruts where streams carried rainfall from the interior. These seeming obstacles had no effect on Magnus and he roared along at a bone-rattling thirty miles per hour. In the beams of the headlights the lane unfurled, a twisting white ribbon through a tunnel of green. It put Anna in mind of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in Disneyland. She cinched her seat belt as tight as it would go and braced both feet against the dashboard.
“How’d you make out with Marty Schlessinger?” Al bawled over the racket of the truck. “Did he ask you to dinner?”
“Nope. I asked him over but he wasn’t in the mood to go slumming.”
“Too bad. Jimmy gave me a list of questions I’m supposed to ask him.” Jimmy was Al’s eight-year-old son. They talked almost every night. In a small office building about a mile from the dorm was a telephone fire crew had access to. Anna and Al were the only members who seemed to have anyone to call. Most evenings they flipped a coin to see who went first.