The Gardener of Eden

by David Downie

  James, continuing to stare south down the beach, rolled up his sleeves to catch the warm rays of sunshine slanting through the fog. The scene made him think of the baroque paintings he had seen in church, votive offerings showing the Virgin in clouds shot through by the Holy Spirit’s shafts of light. The surf sparkled now, alternately crashing and roaring then growing calm. The wind had dropped. The warmth of the afternoon sun and the sound of the waves were mesmerizing, the water twinkling and glinting then dark and dull. Through this dreamy haze something metallic on the tide line flickered and lolled in the waves, catching his eye. Pointing to it, James asked Beverley what she thought it might be.

  Staring hard, she shook her head. “Too far, I’m not sure . . .” She hesitated, uneasy. “It looks like that shopping cart from the supermarket again.”

  “That’s what I thought,” James said. “But it isn’t, there are no wheels and no handlebar in the back. There’s something white inside.”

  Taz lowered the phone, and turned to glance at the beach. “It’s a big crab pot,” he said. Pointing the phone, he clicked then zoomed and scanned the screen. “Definitely some kind of steel crab or lobster pot or an animal trap maybe,” he said, “with something white inside . . . but it’s all wrapped up in rusty wire . . . with a broken rope attached.” Suddenly remembering the drone, he tapped and tickled the screen and started the video again. “It’s coming,” he shouted, “there it is . . .”

  They saw what at first looked like a large bird merged with an octopus, a daddy longlegs, and a helicopter, its multiple rotors a blur of motion. The drone flew straight along the beach, slowed as if slamming on the air brakes, then veered directly overhead, whirring across the garden, its payload secured underneath, like a helicopter carrying construction material to an isolated site.

  “Quick,” Taz shouted, “let’s run up to the parking lot.”

  “Run?” Beverley asked. “I don’t run. You go on up there and deal with it. Bring the delivery down,” she added as an afterthought, shouting after him, “so James can finish the saw.”

  James leaned on the banister, watching the glinting object rocking on the beach, hit by waves. “It’s too big to be a crab pot,” he said. “I’m going down to see.”

  “Now, isn’t this just wonderful!” Beverley exclaimed, watching as Taz ran uphill and James, putting on his gardening gloves, descended the stairs like Peg-Leg Pete. “Boys will be boys, and boy, am I glad I never had one . . .”

  The drone was back in the air and on its way north before Taz could reach the parking lot. It whizzed overhead as James crossed the shale and loose sand and marched to the tide line. From her lookout atop the stairs, Beverley saw him approach the object, get one hand on it, then rush back as the rollers came in. He followed the waves out, grabbed the wires around what looked increasingly to Beverley like an animal trap, wrestling but giving up again as a new set of breakers crashed down, chasing him up the beach. He was on his third attempt when Taz returned clutching a padded envelope, glowing with triumph. Before he could gloat, Beverley pointed and said, “Go on down and give him a hand, will you? He’s going to get drowned if he’s not careful. Tell him to leave that darn thing alone and come back up, my French apple pie is waiting and I’m hungry for it.”

  Beverley thrust a pair of gardening gloves at Taz. He took them, handed her the envelope and his smartphone and timidly obeyed, climbing down the stairs like a cat crossing a puddle, then bounding like a baby camel across the sand to the water’s edge. Beverley shook her head, muttering, watching them wrestle the basket, or whatever it was, up to their knees in water, knocked down by waves, then up again and dragging the object across the beach above the high-tide line. A sudden sense of déjà vu, of a nightmare reenacting itself, seized her. How could she have not recognized that cage? Cupping her hands, she began to shout into the wind, then gave up, realizing it was pointless. Panicky and breathless, she clambered down the staircase and waddled over the beach to where they stood gasping, splayed out on the sand. Both were soaked, cut on their arms and legs and bleeding, their clothes torn by the rusty razor wire coiled around what was unquestionably a large, battered, steel animal trap encrusted with barnacles.

  “Oh my god,” Beverley said, sucking in her breath and covering her mouth. “What in god’s name is it?” She peered into the cage, screamed and fainted, dropping the envelope and phone and falling heavily on top of them.

  Taz leaped up, rolled her over, and hoisted her back onto her feet, while James, still out of breath, stared at the skull and bones in the trap, and the rusty saw blade jutting out of the galvanized mesh coiled in razor wire and trailing seaweed. “We’ve got to call the police,” he said, fumbling onto his hands and knees and crawling to get closer. He tried to reach through the mesh to touch the bones and determine if they were real. One was clearly a thighbone. “They might be plastic,” he said, tugging the severed rope attached to the cage. “It might be some sick hoax, I can’t tell unless we get the trap open.”

  “Don’t touch it!” Beverley screamed. “For god’s sake don’t.”

  Taz stared dumbly, then scooped up the phone off the sand and began taking pictures.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “Don’t do that, don’t call the police, are you out of your minds? Let’s get out of here, let someone else find it and report it. Let’s go before any of the guests look down and see us.”

  Taz and James glanced at each other, hesitating. “We’ve got to call,” James said, “it would be unethical not to. That could be what’s left of a human being.”

  Bending with difficulty and snatching up the envelope, Beverley regained her sangfroid. “I will call the police,” she said, “from the office. If it is a real skull, that person has been dead a long time and can wait.” She burrowed her hand in a pocket of her stretch pants, retrieving a set of car keys. “James, you drive my pickup to the emergency room before you both wake up and realize just how cut up you are. Now, don’t argue with me, you’re in shock. Taz knows the way, and he’s got GPS if he screws up, so go on, get going!”

  James moved ponderously away from the cage, pausing to do damage control up and down his body. A gash on his upper left forearm, where the razor wire had torn a small flap of skin away, looked like a raw filet. It was bleeding, but he could tell by feeling around that the wound was superficial. “Show me your leg,” he commanded, pulling up Taz’s overalls. “Not good,” he remarked. “That’s an artery.”

  “Damnation, he needs stitches, then,” Beverley wept. “I’ll be damned,” she added, “his first and only war wound.”

  “Stitches?” Taz asked, looking down and awakening to the reality of the situation, the blood trickling down his leg and pooling inside his sneakers. His cappuccino complexion went ashen. “I don’t have insurance . . .”

  “Go on,” Beverley ordered, pushing them toward the staircase, “before he keels over like I did, it’s either emergency or your family doctor’s office, Taz, you decide on the way.”

  “What’ll I tell him?” he blubbered.

  “Oh, hell’s bells,” she said, “tell them you got hurt in the garden, I’ve got insurance, it’s not a big deal. Say you were putting up a fence with James and got snagged in that barbed wire.” She paused as they reached the staircase, then snatched at the ripped leg of Taz’s overalls drenched in blood. Then she went for James’s bloody sweatshirt, but he backed away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Never mind,” she barked, “go on, take him to the emergency room, they probably won’t ask questions.”

  Beverley waited until the two of them had lumbered up the stairs and into the garden. She beetled back across the beach and, using the rope, tried to drag the cage to where the surf might wash it back out to sea . But she could not budge it. Cursing, she marched around the trap, raking with a piece of driftwood to wipe out footprints and the signs Taz and James had made where they had rested on the sand.

  Back at the shack, she dragged the coi
l of barbed wire out of the corner, dropped it in the garden near the door, and draped the snippet of Taz’s torn overalls on it. Then she found the blood-dotted paper towel James had used and left it on the workbench. “Out to sea and dropped by helicopter,” she whispered to herself, breaking a sweat. “Damn, damn, damn it!”

  Walking as fast as her thick legs would carry her, out of breath and coughing, Beverley banged violently on the door of her guests in the Honeysuckle Cottage and rousted them out in their bathrobes, saying she had been in the garden looking at the beach and had spotted a suspicious object, would they please come with her to see what it was? Her apoplectic expression and wheezing alarmed them, and after a moment of muttered complaint while they got dressed they followed her back to the beach.

  ELEVEN

  The most extraordinary event of the last thirty-six hours was not the discovery of the feral hog trap but Beverley’s shocking revelation. It is why I have decided to bury this and my other legal pads and compromising documents, in case the RV is searched. The bloodstain on the hand-drawn garden map, now displayed in clear view in Beverley’s office, marks the approximate location of the plastic container filled with sealed ziplock bags holding these pads. I had been digging there earlier, on the edge of the rose garden and the old graveyard, worried I might unearth a tombstone or skeleton, and though lugubrious, it seemed the least suspicious spot. But it is pointless noting these details: Anyone reading this entry will have found the pads and documents, god knows when, how, or why.

  Let me try to arrange things in chronological order before I begin to forget. It will be essential to remember and justify every action going forward and backward in time. Sooner or later, an accounting will be demanded.

  Driving Beverley’s pickup with Taz in the front passenger seat, I had no trouble finding the hospital—it was in the same gloomy 1960s breeze-block and curtain-wall buildings in East Carverville, though glassy annexes and a new bungalow-style wing have been added, reflecting the relative prosperity or penury of the periods in which they were built. Taz was coming out of shock and realizing he was in pain. He and I entered the emergency room together. While we must have looked thoroughly bloodied, torn, and pale, no one seemed to take notice, neither the staff nor the others waiting their turn for attention.

  For a dying, half-abandoned timber town miles from the nearest city or interstate, the emergency room struck me as unnaturally busy. What I guessed were several road accident victims lay on gurneys screaming and writhing, their disfigured bodies and faces covered with gore, their flesh torn and, in one case, badly burned. Why were they parked in the entrance, surrounded by armed guards, and not inside operating rooms being treated? I did not know at the time. I found out only later that a bus filled with a reforestation crew had collided on Highway 12 with a truck carrying farmworkers. The emergency services were overwhelmed.

  Arrayed on wooden benches in the hallway was a Court of Miracles out of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. But why be coy? Hugo would not have recognized them. These were desperate, poor, bedraggled men, women, and children, their skin various shades of brown, black, yellow, or red. I surmised they were uninsured illegal immigrants, farmhands, pipeline workers, and drifters, with a few reservation residents among them. Native Americans once ran fishing boats out of Yono Harbor. I knew a few of them way back when, but beyond them I never saw a person of color on the streets of Carverville in my youth, and had not seen anything but Caucasians during this, my current visit. So, I was taken by surprise. Where had they come from?

  Whether they were obtuse and malevolent or merely overwhelmed and exhausted I couldn’t say, but the nurses, doctors, and orderlies on duty made it clear we would have to wait, triage was ongoing and noncritical patients were non-priorities, even one with a partially severed artery. Someone pushed a pile of papers at me and told me to fill them in. Another asked if we were insured and where we lived and who we were. I purposely allowed the blood to trickle from my arm onto the counter, and I tried but failed to get some gauze from a nurse to bind up Taz’s gashed leg. Snatching out several tissues from a dispenser, I mopped at his blood and dumped the tissues on the counter to make my point. The staff reacted with hostility and said they would call security if I persisted. A pair of them glanced up at a camera and nodded, signaling someone behind the scenes. Angry and worried, I led Taz out of the hospital back to the pickup and drove off.

  “Where’s the doctor’s office?” I asked, not meaning to sound so harsh.

  Taz mumbled an address I could not understand and then fainted, falling forward and hitting his head on the windshield. I shook him by the shoulder and made him repeat what he’d said. “I don’t have insurance,” he added in a pathetic voice.

  “If you bleed to death you won’t need it,” I said, again too harshly, but my arm was throbbing, and I, too, was in pain. “We’re going to your family doctor and I need his name and address.” This seemed to wake the boy up. Using his smartphone, he guided us to a new section of town southeast of the bypass, to a complex of modern shingle-sided buildings near the Seaside Mall, where Dr. Dewey, a gerontologist, has his office.

  To say we entered like a pair of bank robbers playing paintball may be overstating it, but we did unintentionally burst through the doors and stagger into the reception area, with Taz in a faint. That explains why the receptionist jumped up screaming. Naturally I apologized to her and the half-dozen elderly patients who, in dead silence, had been quietly reading out-of-date magazines. I couldn’t help noticing that one of them was Seventeen, an unlikely publication given the doctor’s specialty. Taz and I were sound and fury, and I understand why several of the nearly dead, despite reduced mobility, managed to struggle to their feet and back out toward the exit, one of them using a walker.

  “He’s had an accident,” I explained, “we tried the emergency room, but they’re swamped . . .”

  Luckily, the receptionist recognized Taz—he’s hard not to recognize. She reassured everyone, then led us into an examining room down a hallway, putting on disposable gloves, then tying a tourniquet around Taz’s thigh before trotting silently away to get the doctor.

  “Dewey” was a name I vaguely recognized, but he had not been in my class at Carverville High and seemed a lot younger than I in appearance. It turns out Dr. Jake Dewey, gerontologist, graduated three years after I did, so while technically we might have known each other when I was a senior and he was a freshman, I had no recollection of him and he clearly did not recognize me. His older brother, Jonathan, was a year ahead of me, I realized later, and I did remember him slightly. Apparently, Jonathan found a custodial job at the junior college and was still there, nearing retirement, with the high-sounding title of property manager. I also learned both brothers had known Taz’s grandmother for a number of years, and Jake had been her GP before he specialized, so she and Taz were “grandfathered” into his practice. Jake’s wife belongs to the club where Beverley and Taz’s grandmother play cards once a week.

  Imagine a tall, heavyset, benign, bespectacled man in his late fifties, with a ruddy complexion, small hairy hands, an unusually reedy, upbeat tenor voice, and that piebald look of thick salt-and-pepper hair so many people view as distinguished in a medical man or lawyer, yet suspicious on the head of an indigent.

  Above I used the word “technically” for a reason. It leads me into our somewhat stilted, telegraphic conversation, following quick handshakes and further apologies on my part for bursting in without an appointment. There were video cameras in the reception area and examining room, and security cameras outside in the parking lot. I have no way of accessing the data they recorded. But I do have the exact words spoken during the consultation, thanks to Taz. He had the presence of mind to record the episode with his smartphone. Given what I learned later, this might prove a godsend: It demonstrates we were not trying to hide anything. There is no video footage. The smartphone was in the pocket of his hoodie. I reproduce part of the dialogue here as follows. Presumably the rest
can be found on the server Taz used in the days following the incident to store photos, videos, texts, and telephone conversations related to it.

  “What has happened to you, Alexander?”

  “I—I guess I cut myself . . .”

  “Evidently, let’s take a look at that. . . . Hmmm, a nice laceration you have there, Alex. Let’s see, let me clean it up a little and see how deep it is . . . this might hurt a little . . . hmmm, yes, this might smart a little more, so make fists and grit your teeth and it’ll be over in a second. . . . Yes, it’s not that bad, but you did graze the anterior tibial artery, so I’m going to need to put in a few stitches. Ever had stitches, Alex?”

  “No, I never . . .”

  “Now, I’m calling my assistant, Nurse Jones, you know Jeanne, Alex, and we’ll take care of this in a minute.”

  Dewey left the room and returned with the nurse, who appeared with a tray on which a syringe, disinfectants, cotton fluff, and gauze flanked what looked to me like the kind of needles and thread used to sew up a turkey at Thanksgiving. She smiled at Taz and said hello and how sorry she was to see he’d had an accident. It was clear Taz was about to faint again, so I stood by him and patted his shoulder and said everything would be okay. I did not realize my arm wound was dripping blood. A few drops splashed on Taz’s shoulder and one hit the doctor’s hand. Meanwhile, at calf level, he and the nurse busied themselves with Taz.

  “Ah, it looks like you’re wounded, too,” Dewey said, wiping away the blood, and seeming to notice me for the first time, “mister, mister . . .”

  “James,” I said, “everyone calls me James.”

  “Nurse, once we’re through with Alex, let’s take a look at Mr. James’s arm there. He might be able to explain what happened. Some domestic accident perhaps, Alex, are you going to be all right?”

  “I’ll be all right, I think.”