Apparent Wind

by Dallas Murphy

“That’s a slow loris. It’s a variety of lemur from India and Sri Lanka. The dogs woke him up. He’s nocturnal. You’ll see tonight how slow he moves, like he’s underwater.”

  Tonight? Did that mean—? “How did he get here?”

  “There used to be a dirty little tourist-trap zoo down the road a ways. The scumbag who owned it went belly-up and just released his animals into the woods. Birds too. We have bananaquits, scarlet racemes, cockatiels. Oh, and there’s a couple howler monkeys and a marmoset. Lisa and I feed them and fix them up as best we can.”

  Rosalind and Lisa Up-the-Grove had also tended a pair of baboons until a cracker stopped his 4 × 4 out on Dragoon’s Hammock Highway and shot them both dead for the hell of it. Lisa had recognized the truck and laid for it next time by. She shot the cab full of bullet holes, but miraculously, the driver escaped with minor injuries, which depressed Lisa. Sheriff Plotner arrested the cracker for destruction of private property and hunting baboons on state land without a permit. Sheriff Plotner also had Up-the-Groves in his family tree.

  Doom was awed by the wildness of the scene, its exotic smells and sounds and unfucked-with quality. Eyes, some with oddly shaped pupils, peered from the trees and the bushes, from under the house and on the roof. Remove house, Jeep, road, bathing suits, and Doom and Rosalind might be an Upper Pleistocene couple watching joyfully the diversity and variety of their world.

  So far so good, Rosalind smiled to herself. His face didn’t change much, still mainly morose, but the wonder was apparent in his eyes. This was the crucial, often terminal, point in her relationships with men since Claudius died. She was careful always to bring them out here before things progressed too far. If her prospective lover walked gingerly on his toes to protect his Weejuns, bitched about the wet heat, worried about snakes, or, conversely, if he started prattling about murdering animals with hand-loaded ammo, the new romance would wither to acquaintanceship. “Want to see some alligators?”

  “You have alligators?”

  “They’re about the only indigenous creatures around here now.”

  Doom, the dogs, and the cats followed Rosalind around behind the house, down a sandy path toward a stand of hog cabbage and pop ash above which bald cypresses towered.

  “Watch out for snakes,” she said. “We should be wearing shoes.”

  “You don’t have any pull with the snakes?”

  They came upon a muddy depression, like a large cow-pasture pond, in the forest floor. Rosalind told him it had been dug by alligators perhaps a hundred years ago. Clots of duckweed smeared the tannin-dark water, and at first Doom noticed no alligators. He stepped down onto the muddy bank, crisscrossed with tail-swish marks, for a closer look. Primordial ooze squished sensually between his toes. Suddenly he saw noses and round black eyes pop the surface. Were they watching or smelling the approach of Homo sapiens?

  “Will they charge?”

  “No. I’ve seen the big males come roaring up the bank to chase the dogs, but it’s just show. Crocodiles tend to be aggressive, but American alligators are pretty slow and docile.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Eleven. It’s hot today. That’s why they’re in the water.” Rosalind explained that reptiles, alligators particularly, aren’t the loutish, primitive creatures that humans in their mammalian snobbishness depict. “Alligator metabolisms are so efficient, they only need four or five square meals a year.”

  “A year?”

  “Yeah, we’re gas guzzlers by comparison. Here they come.”

  Wakes spread in little vees behind their snouts, and the black surface roiled with languid tail strokes. Rosalind touched Doom’s shoulder as a sign to move back, and he didn’t need to be told twice, six-hundred-pound gators snaking his way. The Labs dropped their forequarters and put their chins between their paws like playful puppies hoping for a good chase. A ten-foot-long bull ambled up the bank and peered at them. The dogs, hyperactive mammalians, spun in excited circles. Doom thought he saw curiosity, not menace, in their movements.

  “Look at the babies!” exclaimed Doom.

  Quarter-scale miniatures of their elders, the babies hung back, half in, half out of the water, waiting to see. Nine adults slithered to the crest of the bank, where they perched motionlessly, jaws agape.

  “Maybe I can get them to bellow for you,” Rosalind said, preparing herself for something, firmly planting her bare feet in the sand. “I can’t always do it. Jim can get them to bellow every time.”

  Jim? Who’s Jim? “Who’s Jim?”

  “He’s a friend of mine from the university. He’s a crocodilian expert.”

  Aww, shit, thought Doom. He wouldn’t stand a chance against a crocodilian expert.

  Rosalind cupped her hands around her mouth and began to squeak high in her throat. The trilling squeaks became deep guttural grunts, one after another, her abdominal muscles pulsing with each grunt, and she ended the call with a sound like a French horn at its lowest register. She stopped and waited. The alligators watched silently for a while, their faces fixed in dreamy smiles.

  It began with the big bull. He puffed out the soft skin under his chin and switched his tail back and forth in the mud. The others, one by one, imitated him. Then they began to bellow and rumble in unison. Several slapped their heads on the ground, and the sound of their bellowing, rumbling, and slapping echoed around the pines.

  Doom was astonished, even as he was a little worried about this Jim person. “Why do they do that?” Doom asked when they had stopped.

  “There’s a lot of theories, but nobody knows for sure. Sometimes they do it when an airplane goes over, sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Maybe just for fun.”

  The dogs heard another sound, stopped spinning, and listened. When they began to bark, Rosalind told them to shut up so she could hear, too. Doom listened. Even the alligators seemed to listen. A powerful engine was approaching.

  As Doom, Rosalind, and the Labs came around the rear of the house, a gangly man in his twenties was dismounting from his coal-black Norton Commander. He wore black leathers but no helmet. The young man’s hair was pulled abruptly back from his forehead and tied with a colorful roller-skate lace into a ponytail. His nose was long, and it came to a fine feminine point. His smile, at Rosalind, vanished when he spotted Doom.

  “Hi, Snack,” said Rosalind.

  Snack pointed at Doom and said, “Hey, I seen this guy—”

  “This is Doom Loomis,” said Rosalind. “Doom, this is Snack Broadnax.”

  “Where did you see me?”

  “At the Snowy Egret—right before it blew!”

  “Blew?” asked Rosalind. “You mean that gas leak?” News of the explosion had of course made the front page, where Sheriff Plotner was quoted as saying that it looked “like a gas leak, plain and simple.”

  “Gas leak, bullshit, plain and simple. And this guy was there!”

  “You must have been there, too,” Doom pointed out.

  “Yep, I was, but I didn’t swipe nothin’ out the guy’s van.” He turned to Rosalind: “But this sharpie did.”

  “What’s going on here?” Rosalind demanded.

  Doom explained that the place that blew up, Tamarind Financial Group, was probably a front for Perfection Park.

  “What the hell is Perfection Park?”

  “Could we talk about it later?”

  “I think we better talk about it now.”

  Doom explained the Perfection Park proposal, and Rosalind’s face went red with outrage. “Don’t worry, it’s just some fraud my father cooked up.”

  “What have you got to do with it?”

  Doom thought it unwise to tell her he owned the proposed site of the Colonel A.C. Broadnax Hall of Flowers at this particular time. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Bullshit! Loomis was hooked up with my old man somehow.”

  “That’s right, he was trying to swindle him, but now my father’s dead, so why don’t we just forget it.”

  “Yeah, well, I pro
tect my sister-in-law from sharpies like you.”

  “Never mind that,” said Rosalind. “Does your father mean to build Perfection Park?”

  “Well…I don’t know. He talks a lot about it.”

  “Then he must be stopped,” Rosalind declared.

  Snack said, “Stopped?…I don’t think anybody’s ever stopped my old man. From anything.”

  “Snack, your father is a fucking lunatic.”

  Snack blinked twice, slowly, like a loris at dawn. “Do you really think so?”

  “Just look what he did to your brother!”

  “…Yeah.”

  GATORS

  Both of them?” said Big Al Broadnax. “This punk Loomis and my own flesh and blood, Sennacherib?”

  “Yep, out at the Rock place. I saw them just now,” said Sheriff Plotner, hat in hand. His gray shirt was dark with sweat. It was hotter in this phony silk garden than out in the pineys. He still had sand spurs and other prickly shit in his pants cuffs from skulking around out there, spying on his own kin. He couldn’t tell if this old fart appreciated it or not.

  “What were they doing?”

  “Talking.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Plotting, probably. Against him. His last surviving issue, a turncoat to the Broadnax name, openly plotting with this punk Loomis. “Is this punk Loomis porking Claudius’s wife?”

  “Not while I was watchin’.”

  “I’ll evict her,” pronounced Big Al.

  “Ah, well now, sir, we’d have a problem with that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t own it.”

  “Don’t own what?”

  “Her land.”

  “I gave that lot to Claudius for Christmas or some such stinking day.”

  “No, sir, that land’s been in the Rock family since pioneer days.”

  “Don’t talk to me about pioneer days! Me! I was a fucking pioneer!”

  “Yes, sir, I know it—”

  “Then I’ll tell my Jews to buy the land and pioneer that slut’s cunny right off it!”

  “Can’t do that, sir.”

  “Why not!”

  “She donated it to the state.”

  Now, there was a difficult concept for Big Al to grasp. Donated? Nobody donated land. Land was all a man had in this life. Claudius had always been a rebel—marrying a crazy recluse like this Cross Creek cunt proved that—but Big Al always thought he could tame Claudius down. Now Claudius was dead, and Sennacherib had left him, too, gone over to the opposition, as good as dead. It was damn near more than a man could bear. “Let’s arrest her.”

  “What for?” the sheriff asked.

  “That’s your department—think!…She keeps alligators, don’t she?”

  “She’s got a whole raft of animals out there.”

  “Well, ain’t that illegal?”

  “What?”

  “Keeping fucking alligators!”

  “Sure, if she had them in a zoo, that would be one thing. Can’t do that without permits and authorizations. But she don’t. It’s just there happens to be a gator slough on her premises. See, in the eyes of the law it’s all a matter of enclosure. There ain’t none.” The old fart didn’t have an appreciative bone in his entire wasted body. Just like the Denny Loomis murder. He, Sheriff Plotner, didn’t get so much as a thank-you-kindly for covering it up.

  Alligators? Alligators gave Big Al an idea. “Send Lucas in on your way out, Sheriff.” Plotner stunk bad enough to wilt silk hydrangeas.

  SEX AND DEATH

  Prison had not scarred Doom Loomis!

  Afterward, naked, Rosalind slipped like a con’s epiphany out from under the mosquito netting and walked to a wicker rocking chair beneath the big rear window. Doom peered through the net, not missing a wiggle in her lanky stride across the room. Rosalind’s house had no internal walls, so from the bed Doom could see diffuse theatrical moonlight fall over her body. But Rosalind had something on her mind.

  “I liked that,” Rosalind said evenly, crossing her legs.

  “Me too,” said Doom, putting it mildly.

  “And I like you. I’d like to get to know you better, but we need to talk.”

  “Perfection Park?”

  “Yes.”

  Doom joined her, and they sat in twin rockers. Rosalind pivoted hers for knee-to-knee talking. Doom felt like covering himself, perhaps with the lacy white doily from the rocker arm. Women were lucky in that respect—they didn’t go all fleshy and vulnerable after.

  “If you’re planning to profit from it, then I don’t want you under my mosquito netting ever again.”

  “I want nothing to do with Perfection Park.”

  “But I feel you have something to do with it.”

  He had no choice but to explain his father’s fine-print prowess and how at his father’s death from any cause, Doom acquired control of the dummy corporations that collectively owned Omnium Settlement. “Anyway, Perfection Park is nothing but a dog-and-pony show my father put together to bilk Big Al Broadnax out of his investment money. It’s smoke. I’ll show you the video. It’s ridiculous.”

  “So wait, your father stole Omnium Settlement from Big Al and willed it to you?”

  “Basically.”

  “Doom, that means—that means Big Al killed your father!”

  “We shouldn’t leap to a lot of conclusions—”

  “He drowned, right? Accidentally?”

  “Right.”

  “According to who?”

  “Sheriff Plotner.” Doom could see it coming—

  “Big Al owns Plotner!”

  The evening’s lovely interlude was taking a turn for the depressing. “Would you be interested in a sailing trip? We could go to the Bahamas…or maybe Newfoundland.”

  “Newfoundland?”

  “I don’t want any more phony things, Rosalind. I’d like to stick to real things.”

  “Doom, I know Big Al. I was married to his son! Big Al is going to do this thing. It’s in his rotten genes. He’s going to make Perfection Park, and he’ll stop at nothing.”

  “He’s old, and these things take time. Maybe he’ll show good taste and have a massive brain hemorrhage.”

  “Big Al means to ruin Small Hope Bay. You own something wonderful—you have responsibilities.”

  “But Rosalind, I don’t really own Omnium. It’s all a cheap con. I’m sure you do know Big Al, but you don’t know my father.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?”

  How could he refuse her, naked, ardent? “I could make a few calls. Maybe I could at least find out who’s behind Tamarind Financial. But it’ll be my father. Would you be interested in doing that again?”

  Next morning Rosalind packed a picnic, and they went to meet Lisa out in her grove. On the way they stopped at the slough to watch crocodilians greet the new day. Doom put his arm around Rosalind’s shoulders while she identified each alligator by name and natural history, as one by one they slithered into the warmth of the sun. This was the real thing. This was what he had hoped for.

  Doom and Rosalind drove on sandy ruts deep into the forest. The trip felt exciting to Doom, like a small expedition into the unknown. Two hours of bumpy motoring in first gear and another hour of hot walking brought them to Dragoon’s Hammock.

  There the environment changed dramatically. The sunny, open forest of slash pines and palmetto thickets gave way in the course of a dozen strides to a seemingly impenetrable riot of vegetation. Rosalind showed him the way in. Live oaks festooned with air plants, poisonwood, tropical bustics, mastics, and gumbo-limbos reached greedily for the sunlight, while smaller trees—velvetseed, tetrazygia, wild coffee—flourished in the shade. Stout liana vines entwined them all. This environment was so foreign to Doom that he didn’t know how to observe it. This was not like the evergreen and hardwood forests of the North that Doom had come to know in prison. This was Tarzanesque jungle, moist, dark, and mysterious, in which D
oom’s sense of the whole was obscured by the close quarters. He sought, instead, to notice details. He and Rosalind watched a yellow tree snail, Liguus fasciatus ornatus, climb a royal-palm trunk, leaving a silvery wake glistening behind.

  They arrived at Lisa Up-the-Grove’s front step before Doom even saw her house. Actually, it was a shack, assembled decades before, seemingly from found lumber, stuck up on cypress-log stilts as if the rigors of pioneer times still obtained.

  “Lisa—” called Rosalind. Something avian cawed and cackled in response. “My father was born in this house. During the rainy season Lisa lives with me, but this is her home. Lisa’s weird.” Doom and Rosalind sat together in a wooden swing on Lisa Up-the-Grove’s screened porch and ate their picnic lunch, but Lisa didn’t return. Slapping bloody mosquitoes, they took a nature tour of the hammock, but still Lisa did not return.

  “Are you worried?” Doom asked.

  “No. But she is an eighty-year-old woman. I’ve sort of reconciled myself to finding her dead out here one day.”

  They headed back to Rosalind’s house, but before they saw the house, first Rosalind, then Doom, knew that something was wrong. In place of the familiar barks, caws, mews, clucks, and screeches, there was only silence. One of the Labs, Elsie, slunk like a cat along the rut.

  Rosalind stiffened.

  The other two dogs hunkered side by side in the palmettos, but the cats remained in deep cover.

  “Look—” said Doom. A tiny woman in a long, colorful dress stood at the edge of the alligator slough, her back to Rosalind’s approaching Jeep. A moment later the tiny woman heard the motor, spun, and leveled a handgun at the windshield.

  Doom ducked behind the dash, but Rosalind jumped down and ran to her grandmother. Doom unfolded himself and followed her to the edge of the slough…

  Blood mixed with duckweed undulated on the black water. Rosalind moaned deep in her chest. Like the leavings of a dreadful feast, naked alligator carcasses ringed the pool. The only skin remaining on their bodies was in pathetic patches on their feet just above the claws.

  “They killed them all,” said Lisa Up-the-Grove, and Doom saw her face for the first time. It was a mass of wrinkles, like a sun-withered apple. Tears ran a zigzag course down her folded cheeks. Rosalind hugged her close, then ran for her house.