by The Web(Lit)
One of her hands rolled tight.
"I didn't really chicken out," she said.
"Though that would have been rational."
She looked at me. I nodded.
'I probably would've been stupid enough to go up even though I had bad feelings about it. But this time... he got mad at me, called me a... I just said to heck with it and walked away."
She moved her face nearer to mine. Close enough to kiss but there was nothing seductive about it.
"Even so, I still probably would've relented. But he wouldn't let up... as I was walking through that bamboo I heard the plane engine start up and almost ran back. But instead I kept going. To the beach. Found a nice spot on the rocks and sat down and stared at the ocean. I was feeling pretty relaxed when I heard it."
Our noses were nearly touching. Her breath was stale.
"I miss him," she said, as if finding it hard to believe.
"You're with someone for a long time... I told his mother she could bury him in New Jersey near his father. We never made any plans for that kind of thing he was forty-eight. When I get back we'll have some kind of service."
I nodded again.
She noticed a stain on her shirt and frowned.
"My ticket out of Guam isn't for another two weeks. I guess I should say that I can't wait to get back, but the truth is, what's waiting for me?
I might as well stay and finish up my work."
Wetting her finger with her tongue, she rubbed the stain.
"That sounds cold to you, doesn't it?"
Whatever helps you through it."
"My work helps me. Coming here's the final leg of a three-year study why throw it away?"
She backed away and drew herself up.
"Enough blubbering.
Back to the old laptop."
It was just before five. I strolled to the rose garden and watched through the boughs of a pine tree as the men in the mowers painted broad stripes in the lawn. I thought about sudden death.
The cat woman White worms.
Anne Marie Valdos killed to be eaten.
Routine medical cases collected during a thirty-year practice.
Some routine.
I was probably making too much of it. After all, I'd initiated the conversation about the Valdos murder.
Though it had been Moreland who'd brought over the autopsy photos, sparing no detail.
Maybe the old man had a strong stomach and assumed I did too.
He'd implied as much during the tour of the bug zoo.
Research on predators.
I recalled the animation with which he'd discussed the history of cannibalism.
Not exactly your simple country doctor.
Milo had thought him spacey. Joked about Frankenstein monsters.
Milo was a self-admitted sultan of cynicism, but he was also a trained detective, his hunches more often right than wrong...
Neurotic, Delaware. Bunked down in Eden, getting paid handsomely to do a dream job and you just can't cope.
I returned to the house but couldn't get the cat woman out of my mind.
Her ordeal. Bound to a chair while her husband made love to another woman. The final scream...
Such cruelty.
Maybe that was it.
Over the years, Moreland had seen too much cruelty.
Radiation poisoning, the hopeless deterioration of the Bikini islanders.
The cat woman Joseph Cristobal. The cargo cult leader.
Absorbing the pain the way sensitive people often do.
Confronting his helplessness but able to forget about it during dark hours in the bug zoo. His lab. His own private paradise.
Now, watching Aruk deteriorate nearing the end of his own life his defenses had been shaken.
He needed to make sense of the cruelty.
Needed someone to share it with.
15. That night at dinner, there were five places set.
Jo was last to come down. She wore a white blouse and a dark skirt; her face looked fresh and her hair was shiny and combed out.
"Go on with the small talk." She sat and unfolded her napkin.
"Grapefruit, one of my favorites."
The talk hadn't been small: Moreland giving a detailed lecture on the history of colonization. He'd seemed to lose his train of thought a couple of times.
Now there was silence, as Jo peered at the serrated edge of her grapefruit spoon. She cut a section from the fruit, and the rest of us picked up our utensils.
Moreland reached for a roll and spread it with apple butter.
He closed his eyes and chewed.
"Dad?" said Pam.
His eyes opened and he looked around the table, as if trying to locate the sound.
"Yes, dear?"
"You were talking about the Spanish."
"Ah, yes, machismo's finest hour. What gave the conquistadores a unique approach was the combination of risk taking and a strong religious commitment. When you believe you have God on your side, anything's possible. Hormones and God are unbeatable."
He nibbled on the roll.
"Then, of course, there was the easy funding: outright theft, in the name of heaven. Senor Columbus's journeys were funded with the plunder of the Inquisition."
"Hormones, religion, and money," said Pam very softly. That just about sums up the world, doesn't it."
Moreland stared at her for a second. A worried parental stare that he ended abruptly by shifting his attention to his bread.
"In toto, a force to be reckoned with, the Spanish. They came to the Pacific in the sixteenth century, set about trying to do precisely what they'd done in-' He stopped and looked across the terrace. Gladys had come out of the house.
"I'm not sure we're ready for the next course, dear."
"There's a phone call, Dr. Moreland."
"A medical call?"
No, sir."
Well, then, please take a message."
"It's Captain Ewing, sir."
Moreland's stooped frame jerked forward, then he straightened.
"How curious. Please excuse me."
After he was gone, Pam said, "This is the first we've heard from Ewing in months. I spoke to him once over the phone. What a sour man."
I repeated what Dennis had told me about Ewing's being exiled for the sex scandal.
'Yes, I heard that, too."
Jo said, "He's crating and shipping Lyman like luggage."
Pam paled.
"I'm sorry, Jo."
Jo dabbed at her lips.
"Government is like junior high. Your status depends upon whom you're able to persecute."
"Maybe Dad can work something out with them."
"I doubt it," said Jo.
"I think they shipped him already."
"Your connections don't help?" said Robin.
"What connections?"
"Working at the Defense Department."
Jo's bosom heaved and she let out a bark like laugh.
"Thousands of people work at the Defense Department. It's not exactly as if I'm the Secretary of Defense."
"I just thought-' "I'm nothing] said Jo.
"Lowly G-12 nerds don't count."
She stabbed the grapefruit, turned the spoon, freeing the last bits of pulp.
More silence, heavier, oppressive. Geckos racing along the rail would have been welcome, but they were keeping a low profile tonight.
Pam said, "Gladys made lamb. It looks great."
Moreland came back out, a loping skeleton.
"An invitation. To all of us. Dinner at the base, tomorrow night.
Casual formal. I shall wear a tie."
That night, I awoke at two in the morning and was unable to fall back asleep. As I got out of bed Robin turned away from me. I slipped into some shorts and a shirt and she rolled back.
Vokay, honey?"
"Think I'll just get up for a while," I whispered.
She managed to mumble, "Restless?"
"A little."
&
nbsp; If her head was clear enough, she was thinking: Some things never change.
I bent and kissed her ear softly.
"Maybe I'll take a little walk."
'... not too late."
I covered her shoulders, pocketed the room key, and slipped out of the bedroom. As I passed Spike's crate, he snored a greeting.
"Nighty-night, handsome."
My bare feet were silent on the landing carpet. The stairs were sturdy, not a creak.
Down in the entry, the stone floor was cool and welcome as summer lemonade. All the lights were off and the island silence saturated the house. I opened the front door and stepped outside.
The moon was ice-white and the sky pulsed with stars. Starlight frosted the trees and the fountain, turning the spatter to glycerine, giving life to the gargoyle roof tiles.
I walked to the gates. They were open and I looked down the long, sloping road, matte-black till it hit the onyx of the ocean.
Something moved along the grass at the road's edge.
Something else skittered in response.
I turned back, fully awake now. Maybe I'd look over a few more charts. I headed for my bungalow, then stopped when I heard a door shut.
Footsteps from the rear of the house. The back door, leading from the kitchen to the gravel paths.
Slow, deliberate footseps. They ceased. Continued.
Someone came out into the open and stood looking up at the sky.
Moreland's unmistakable silhouette.
Not wanting to talk to him or anyone else I retreated into the shadows and watched as he descended the path, landing thirty feet in front of me.
Something clunked in his hand. A doctor's bag.
Same clothes he'd worn at dinner plus a shapeless cardigan sweater. He headed for the outbuildings, passed my bungalow, and continued past Robin's.
Stopping at his office.
At the door, he put the bag down, fumbled in his pocket, finally found the key but had some trouble inserting it in the lock. Starlight filtered through trees slashed his face diagonally, highlighting a cucumber of nose, the deep pouches columning his downturned mouth.
The door swung open. He picked up his bag and entered.
The door closed silently.
The lights went on, then off. The room stayed dark.
16. The following morning brought cooler air and cotton-swab clouds drifting from the east.
"Rain," said Gladys, as she poured our coffee.
"Five or six days."
The clouds were translucent and filmy, not a hint of moisture.
"They pick up the water as they go," she said, offering the bread basket.
"Sucking it up from the ocean. Do you like whole wheat?"
"Sure."
"Dr. Bill does too, but a lotta people don't. One time he had me bake rolls for the kids at school. They didn't eat too many."
She tugged the corner of the yellow tablecloth. We were the only ones at breakfast.
"Kids like the soft stuff. We used to get lots of white bread on the supply boats. Now, when we get anything, it's stale. Were you planning on swimming again?"
"Yes."
"Well, don't be fooled by those clouds: be sure to put on sunscreen. You got the nice olive skin, ma'am, but the doctor here, with those pretty blue eyes, he could burn."
Robin smiled.
"I'" take good care of him."
"Men think they're tough, but they need to be taken care of.
How about some nice fresh-squeezed juice?"
At the lagoon, the fish were quick learners, approaching for a handout but swimming away quickly when we had nothing to give them. Robin managed to get one large, late coming pink-and-yellow wrasse to nibble at her fingers. Then it too realized she was all show, and it shot away to a high mound of coral, where it snaked through a hole and disappeared.
She followed, head turning constantly, her eye for detail in full play. When she stopped, paddled in place, and waved me over, I joined her.
A tiny bald head floated in the crack. Chinless. Gray-brown skull. Oversized eyes bright with intelligence.
A baby octopus, legs as thin and flaccid as boiled spaghetti.
It kept staring, finally retreated, slithering into a crevice, turning impossibly small.
We pressed closer.
It squirted ink in our faces.
I laughed, got water in my tube, and had to tread water to clear it. The surface of the water was a clean metal plate. The beach was empty.
I went under again, tagging along with a school of yellow surgeonfish, watching the bony, sharp protrusions under their pectoral fins pivot at the sense of threat, feeling the calmness of their blank, black stares.
Paradise.
We were back at the house by two. Jo's door was closed and an untouched lunch tray sat on the floor nearby. I imagined her tapping her keyboard in hopes of blunting her grief.
Studying the wind. Something too vast to control.
Moreland, on the other hand, delighted in manipulating nature's small variables. Had he once harbored grand plans for the island? Was his own grief what had kept him up last night, sitting in the dark?
I worked. No medical oddities, no gore, and the only untimely death I found was a young woman with ovarian cancer.
Another two cartons, more routine. Then the name of a drowning victim caught my eye.
Pierre Laurent, a twenty-four-year-old sailor lost in a squall near the Mariana Trench. The body had been returned to Aruk, and Moreland had certified the death, making note of the eighteen-year-old widow, four months pregnant with Aruk's future police chief.
Right below, Dennis's birth chart. A ten-pound baby, healthy.
Two more hours of tedium.
I liked that.
Just as I was heading for the back room to fetch yet another box, Ben knocked and came in.
"Base just called. Navy copter's picking you up in an hour on South Beach."
"V.I.P treatment?"
"It's either that or they send down a big ship or rowboats." He took in the clutter of my desk and I thought I saw disapproval.
"Need anything by way of supplies?"
"No thanks. Are you coming tonight?"
"Nope. One hour, you'll all be leaving from here together."
He started to leave and I said, "Hold on, I'll walk back with you."
He shrugged and we left together.
"{ow're the vaccinations coming along?" I said.
"All finished till next year."
"Tough job?"
"Not really. It's for their own good."
"You had a real rhythm going, yesterday."
That's me," he said.
"Natural rhythm."
The taste in my mouth matched his expression. We walked in silence toward the big house.
As we neared the fountain, he said, "Sorry, that was out of line. I'm not like that... What I mean is, race isn't a big thing to me."
"Me neither; forget it."
"Guess I'm bushed. The baby was up all night."
"How old?"
"Six months."
"Boy or girl?"
"Girl. All of them slept great except her. Sorry. I mean it."
"No problem. Dr. Bill said the dinner was formal casual. What does that mean, tux jacket and jeans?"
His smile was grateful.
"Who knows? Typical military, give out rules without explaining them. You serve any time?"
"No," I said.
"After a month in the Guard I knew it wasn't for me, but no choice by then. I told them I was interested in medicine, so they put me in a hospital on Maui, pulling sea urchin spines out of toes. Never even hit the water. I love the ocean."
"Do you dive?"