A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “Will you publish your results?”

  She turned and stared at him stonily. “Where? How? I’m a layman.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “Are you trying to irritate me? I bother because it is knowledge. I bother because I am curious and I want to know. Why did you come here?”

  “Just for a little general conversation about Grassy Bay.”

  “I have no time for general conversations.”

  “If I’m going to sneak any conservationist propaganda into the paper, which means running contrary to policy, I ought to have a little solid stuff to play with, don’t you think?”

  “Will facts have anything to do with what will happen?”

  “A lot of people would like to think so.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “I can give you fifteen minutes. We will sit on the porch. I’ve been on my feet since six o’clock this morning.”

  He followed her to the porch of the house. She sat in a wicker chair and stared at him for a moment. “To start with a general statement, filling the bay would be a criminal act. It will take away forever something which cannot be replaced or restored. Depth, temperature, tide flow, composition of the bottom, all combine to make this bay unique. We have shallow-water species here which are not found anywhere else along this coast.”

  “I have to argue the other side of it, Mrs. Rowell, not because I believe it, but just to present the usual arguments on the other side. Isn’t this uniqueness important only to a few marine biologists?”

  “It is important to the sum total of human knowledge. We know painfully little about the world we live in. This is a living laboratory. Each new environmental fact is important to mankind, no matter how trivial it might seem to a banker or a newspaper reporter. You are where you are because of science, not in spite of it. A star and a snail are of equal importance.”

  “But when snails get in the way of man, they get eliminated. Hasn’t it always been that way?”

  “Always?” She stared at him incredulously. “For a million years, Mr. Wing, man shared this planet with other living things. The ecology was in balance. Now we are in a very short time of natural history when we have a plague of men.”

  “A plague?”

  “I watch the cycles in the bay. For a few years everything will be favorable for certain species. It will become very numerous. It will dwindle the numbers of the other animals who share the same space, eat the same food. Then there will be too many of them. The climatic factors will change. The huge numbers will be reduced. The other species will come back. In this split second of time in which we are living, things have been too favorable for man. With science he has suppressed too many natural enemies. He is too numerous. He is poisoning the air and waters of the earth. He is breeding beyond reason. He is devouring the earth and the other creatures thereon. But it will come to an end, of course. Man has a longer cycle than do the small creatures. Geometric growth is insupportable. During this growth cycle it is the business of thinking people to protect and conserve the other forms of life, so when the cycle is reversed, the ecology will not be too badly distorted. A hundred generations from now, that bay might be supplying food for a mainland village just as it did thirty generations ago.”

  “That’s a point of view so … so broad it takes my breath away.”

  “It’s a scientific point of view, Mr. Wing.”

  “That would mean you anticipate a defeat of … civilization, of everything we stand for?”

  “My dear Mr. Wing, the only victory is existence, and the only defeat is extermination. When a species cannot survive, it is defeated. We must keep mankind from making the planet unsuitable for existence without technology. In the criminal campaign against fire ants in this country, the poisoners have slain an estimated five thousand tons of small birds. Tons, Mr. Wing. Thirty to forty million in specific areas. Believe me, I am not snuffling over what happened to the dear, dear little songbirds. This is not a situation where sentimentality is applicable. This was nonselective elimination, taking the healthy and sick, the predators and sapsuckers, destroying not only that generation but all possible subsequent ones from that conglomerate of basic strains. It is a thoughtless ecological abomination, Mr. Wing. It is like rubbing out one factor in a vastly complex equation. Due to the interrelationship of bird life, insect life and plant fertilization, the known characteristics of that area will change. To what? We do not know. We only know it will be different. I recognize a deity of interrelationships, of checks and balances and dependencies. Acts such as this are like spitting in the face of God. It is a dangerous temerity, Mr. Wing. It is, in its essence, stupidity, nonknowing, the most precarious condition of man. Filling this bay is a part of the same pattern of throwing away everything you do not understand.”

  “I can see that you have some very … strong opinions.”

  “I concern myself with facts, not opinions.”

  “You seem to be able to get some very noted scientists to come down here and speak out in favor of leaving the bay alone.”

  She shrugged. “They understand these things. I conduct a large correspondence. I help field crews when I can. They give me little research tasks. There is a little money sometimes. It helps.”

  “Where did you get your training, Mrs. Rowell?”

  “I read. I study. I work. I think. I observe.”

  “You call yourself a layman. I assume that means you have no formal training in these fields of knowledge.”

  “That is the definition of the term, is it not?”

  “That bothers me a little, how a layman can acquire such an objective viewpoint. Maybe some of your basic premises are wrong. How could you be able to tell?”

  Her thick brown face turned pale, particularly around the mouth. “You are insolent, Mr. Wing. You should have more respect!”

  “For what? Because you dabble in science?”

  “Dabble! I had my doctorate before you …”

  “You have a degree?”

  Her agitation disappeared quickly. “Forgive me. It is just a manner of speaking. I have awarded myself various degrees, as a game, a joke.”

  “I see. I’ve often wondered about that slight accent you have, Mrs. Rowell.”

  “I have given you three minutes more than I promised. Please telephone me the next time to find out if I am busy.”

  “But you are always busy, aren’t you?”

  “Extremely.”

  She glanced back to the shed and disappeared into it without a backward glance or word of parting. He got into the car and headed thoughtfully back toward the city. There was something invincibly professorial about Mrs. Doris Rowell, something of the attitude of the professional lecturer, plus the austere philosophy of the trained scientist. He had heard no gossip about her, no rumors. She was thought of as merely a very strange and rather difficult woman. For the first time he had begun to wonder where she had come from.

  When he had done a series of features on Palm County history, one of his more reliable sources for the Sandy Key area had been Aunt Middy Britt. She lived with one of her sons, a man of sixty, next door to the old Britt fishhouse on the mainland just below the Hoyt Marina. It was still the finest place in the area to buy smoked mullet.

  Aunt Middy was dozing in her rocking chair on the shady old screened porch. He looked through the screen at her and coughed. Her eyes opened quickly and she began to rock. “Blessed Jesus, I tole you every last thing I know, and some that I didn’t. But come in anyway, Jimmy, and set. Pretty sunset coming acrosst the bay now, isn’t it?”

  He sat with her and talked for a little while and finally said, “What about that Mrs. Doris Rowell, Aunt Middy?”

  “Oh, her in the Faskett place way down the key? It set empty eight year ’fore she bought it. No history in her, boy. She’s a come-lately. Nineteen and forty it was. These sorry teeth are getting loose on me again.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Someplace north, where they all co
me from. Way it looks around here, it must be getting mighty empty up there. I wouldn’t have no idea what special place it was she come from.”

  “Didn’t people wonder about her when she first came down, a woman all alone?”

  “Guess they did. Let me take myself back now. She wasn’t too bad of a looking woman when she came down. There was talk she was a widow woman. Wasn’t friendly. Nobody seen much of her the first year. Stayed in that house. Must have spent her time eating. Every time you’d see her, she was bigger. End of a year she was the size of a house. Then she was busying herself with plants and bugs and fishes, and the first hell she started to raise was on account of the size mesh in the nets around here, and she’s been raising hell about all that kind of stuff ever since.”

  “But you’ve no idea why she came here, or what she used to do?”

  “Jimmy, it’s hard to keep up any interest in somebody strictly minds her own business most of the time. Smart woman, I guess. When the snooks got sick in the creeks that time, all rusty red around the gills and hundreds of big ones dying, she was the one traced it down. The Florida State folks took the credit, but Miz Rowell was the one actual found out. Forty-six, it was, back when snooks was a good money fish before the damn fools named it a game fish.”

  “Would anybody know any more about her than you do?”

  “There’s people know more about everything in the world than I do. I kept telling you that when you were writing up all the old settlers. Let me think, now. There was somebody around here knowed her before she came down. Or knew about her or something. Used to go visit with her, I think. Now who was that? Memory’s as loose as my sorry teeth, boy. Hmmm. Wait now! Ernie Willihan, it was. He was fresh out of college, teaching in the high school. Ernie would be in his forties now. Aida Willihan’s boy. She’s dead now, God rest her sweet soul. She raised that boy single-handed, and did her best by him. Sent him to school way up north someplace, Minnesota, I think it was. Of course he got a scholarship and he worked too, but Aida had to do a lot of scratching, then didn’t live long enough to see him hardly started in life. Never saw a grandchild. And a wicked old woman like me gets to see a full dozen of her grandchildren’s children so far and’ll probably see more. You must know Ernie Willihan, Jimmy.”

  “I remember him all right. Where’d he go?”

  “Oh, he’s doing just fine. He got out of teaching, and he’s up in St. Pete in some kind of scientific company he’s a partner in. He was a science teacher in the high school. Now, if a person had to find out more about Miz Rowell, I guess that would be where he’d have to go. Why you so interested in her, boy?”

  “Oh, Borklund wants to run a series of features on Palm County characters. He made up a list. I’m starting with the tough ones. She won’t talk about herself. You’re on the list too.”

  “Who else is on it?”

  “You just wait and read the paper.”

  “Maybe she won’t talk because she’s hiding something.”

  “If I find that out, I’ll have to take her off the list.”

  “Look how red that sun is going down, will you? Maybe we’ll get to make a wish.”

  “You mean a flash of green? That’s tourist talk, Aunt Middy.”

  “I seen it once, boy.”

  “You what?”

  “Now, don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you a true thing, boy. I’ll even tell you the year. Eighteen and ninety-eight, and I was a twenty-one-year-old girl, feeling older than I do right this minute. My daddy brought us kids on down to this piece of wild coast when I was ten. We were Foleys, you know, and that’s how the crick got named. We put up the homestead on a knoll just a quarter mile south of where we’re setting. But I told you all that before, how I lost a brother to the fever and a sister to a cotton-mouth snake. So I was twenty-one, married since fifteen to Josh Britt, and he’s dead now since nineteen and twenty-two, May ninth, hard to believe it’s so long. It was an August evening, and we were in the fever time again, when folks died. I had only two young then. I’d had three and lost the first to fever the year before. There wasn’t fifty of us in the whole settlement. Josh’s brother was down sick, and he was the one worked the boat with Josh. I had to leave my two with my sister and help Josh on the boat. We were food-fishing that day. My two were both fevered, and I was sick in my heart with worry, wondering if I was put on earth just to carry my young and watch them burn with the fever and die. I was two month along with my fourth, and I did a man’s work that day, helping pole that heavy old skiff and help Josh work the net until my back was broke in half and my hands like raw meat. We were poling back along the shore, coming home with less fish than was needed, and we could see the sun going down red like that, right out through Turk’s Pass. I was as low down in my spirits as a woman can get, and the night bugs were beginning to gather like a cloud around us. We rested from poling to brush away the bugs, and we watched that last crumb of sun go, and the whole west sky lit up with terrible great sheets of the brightest green you ever could see. ‘Make a wish!’ Josh yelled at me from the stern of the skiff. I wished, all right. There couldn’t ever be enough green for the wishes I had, boy. It didn’t last over ten or fifteen seconds. It was dark when we moored the skiff. The fever had eased for my young ones. Life worked better for me from then on, somehow. I raised six young out of twelve, four still living, and that was better than most in that time and place. I’ve seen children die and men killed and women broke, but I never got so low again in all my life as that one day on the net. So don’t say it’s tourist talk, Jimmy. I prayed to God my whole life, and in fairness I got to credit Him with doing good by me. But a flash of green is something you see. We didn’t see one tonight. You act like you need one, Jimmy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t set easy. You set like you got a knotted belly. You’re a man thinking of yourself too much and not liking it much. I had one son like that. He lived a mean small life because he wouldn’t do what I told him.”

  “What did you tell him, Aunt Middy?”

  “I kept telling him until he was past forty to go find himself a healthy young girl and get as many young off her as she was able to bring into the world.”

  “I’m married.”

  “To what? A sorry piece of flesh that’ll never know you again in this world, that they keep breathing just to prove they can do it when it would be God’s mercy to let her go. Any lawyer would know what to do about crossing that kind of marriage off the legal books. But it pleasures you more to go around acting tragical.”

  He shook his head. “How can you sit on this porch and know everything about everybody?”

  “People stop by and set and talk about things. You want a good young wife? You couldn’t get her right off, but in six months she’d be ready. Judy Barnsong, down to Everset, widow of Claude that just got hisself killed without a dime of insurance money. She’s twenty-three and got three young, bright as buttons. She’s pretty and healthy and even-tempered, and built good for having babies. She’s a good cook and she keeps a clean house. She’s got three years of high school, and she’d make you a proud wife, if you got sense enough to go after her.”

  “Aunt Middy, you are an astonishing woman.”

  “There’s been fine marriages arranged right here on this porch. You think about Judy Barnsong. You go sneak a look at her. She’s a worker and she’ll keep her looks. A ready-made family with more to come will keep you out of devilment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A man snaps at an old lady that way over a little thing like I said has got a bad conscience. You doing something you shouldn’t be doing, boy?”

  “I drink and smoke and stay out late.”

  “Never knew a whole man who didn’t. It’s in the breed.”

  He stood up to go and said, “What do you think about them filling up the bay?”

  “I’m eighty-four years old, and I’ve been watching the bay of an evening for seventy-four years. I’m not tire
d of looking at it. I just don’t know how I’ll be at looking at houses. I’ve got the feeling they won’t hold my interest.”

  He went down off the porch, walking slowly to his car. A bay boat was at the old fishhouse dock, and two men were shoveling mullet into hampers to carry them up to the fishhouse scales. The fish seemed to catch the silvery dusk light and gleam more brightly than anything else in the scene. The old coquina-rock smokehouse was in operation, and there was a drift of burning oak in the evening air, flavored with the slight pungency of the barbecue sauce which had been rubbed into the white meat of the hanging fish. Somewhere nearby a girl laughed and a saw whined through a board.

  Blessings on you, Mrs. Judy Barnsong, he thought. On your tidy house and fertile hips. I saw a little bit of what that marine engine did to your Claude when it slid forward into the front seat of the panel truck, and it was not anything I cared to look more closely at. But it left the face unimpaired, so you may safely have a viewing of the body. You’ll never know how a dry and dreary man considered you almost seriously for half of one moment. Perhaps you would have said yes quite readily, because you sound like a person who would sense the kind of need I have. But the lust is for a more complex widow, and it is a little past the time when I could have escaped gently into you, into your tidy house, amid your busy button-bright children, to mist your memories of Claude and cushion my awareness of many dark things.

  As he drove slowly toward town he remembered the sailor. Gloria had been missing for five days. They’d found her at that motel in Clewiston. They stopped the sailor as he was walking back there with a sack of hamburgs and a bottle of bourbon. The three of them had talked to the sailor out under the bright driveway lights. He was young, and at first he was defiant. He did not know how to handle being confronted by a deputy, a doctor and a husband. He thought it was some kind of a raid.

  “Listen,” he said, “all I did was I picked the broad up in Palm City. Okay? I was bumming to Montgomery, Alabama. I’m stationed in Key West and I got ten days. She has a car, this broad, and I changed my mind about going home. Okay?”