Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  Franklin laughed his phlegmy laugh. He leaned forward, held out the lighter and the pipe. “Here you go, Appleseed. Have yourself a hit.”

  Seede eyeballed the pipe. He eyeballed Franklin.

  And then Seede’s pager went off—a shrill beeping that pierced the stillness of the darkened room.

  22

  By midday the heat had become ever more merciless. The sun leaned down oppressively upon the Rio Pulgas, steaming the brown river into a muddy broth. We were headed cautiously upstream in the little motor launch, myself at the helm, the antique one-lunger sputtering along at a measured pace. The banks of the river were hemmed in with bamboo and pandanus; behind that were seemingly endless hectares of giant spreading trees and tropical palms of all varieties. Parrots and other brilliant birds winged and chattered here and there; a colony of nests hung from the topmost branches of a great Santa Maria tree, set at a dizzying height to protect the eggs from the profusion of snakes and lizards and carnivorous rodents that dwelt below.

  The lush beauty did little, however, to offset conditions that could only be described in terms of Dante’s inferno: the sweat streaming from our faces; the soupy air increasingly hard to breathe; the enervation and general heaviness of limbs; the stinging swarms of mosquitoes, botlas flies, and Tabanidae that rendered our bodies and our faces covered with itching bumps. In addition, there was Stuke’s malady, some sort of mysterious spider or insect bite that left his face bloated to twice its normal size. One thing was eminently clear: this awful tributary was aptly named—River of Small Biting Insects, indeed.

  But we were closer now than ever to the promise of the Lost City; we forged ahead with little regard for our personal well-being. As I have long experienced, no great discovery comes without its personal price, its pound of flesh. A story without hardship is no story at all—if it is comfort and ease you seek, I bid you stay home by the fire. As we continued farther and farther upriver, we noticed that the waters were increasingly strewn with obstacles—rocks, sandbars, roots, gigantic mahogany trees carried downstream by the floods in the wet season. The current was strong. With the two dugouts in tow, navigation was ever more difficult. While my nerves were stretched to the breaking, I showed no signs of it. Mine was the face of the stoic; I was, after all, the leader of this expedition, motley though it was, its physical and spiritual center. Bobbie sat at my side, jaw set, fingers intertwined prayerfully on her lap. Stuke lay sprawled in the bow, useless after a double dose of laudanum. Ambrose had charge of the second dugout—being the larger, it held most of our stores.

  Eventually we came to a bend in the river. Two fallen trees had left only a narrow passage in between. With much effort I managed to steer the launch through the channel without incident; the first dugout followed closely behind. We would not have the same luck with the second.

  As it approached the channel between the two submerged trees, the second, larger dugout canoe impacted upon something beneath the water. An awful scraping sound was heard; the dugout lurched sideways, causing its stern to catch the current and swing about wildly. With a sickening crack, it struck a submerged tree and rolled over. Ambrose, the Carib boys, and most of our stores splashed into the turgid waters.

  It was nearly sunset by the time we called to a halt our attempts at salvage. Owing to a fear of what they described as waterborne snakes and flesh-eating fish—and dragons and unicorns, as well, no doubt; from where I stood on the slippery clay banks, there was no evidence of any such—the effort by our crew was less than sterling. In the end the preponderance of our food and supplies was lost.

  Frustrated and exhausted, feeling once again the curse of the heavens upon my head, the piteous laugher of Fate, I sat down on a log to collect my thoughts. If it is true what they say, that progress comes only through extreme hardship, then surely I was on the right road. Across the river, the sun was beginning to disappear below the canopy of trees. I took a deep breath and gathered myself, tried to remember my blessings. Over the years of my wanderings, far from the trappings of culture and civilization, the momentous spectacle of the setting sun has always provided succor to me. Just as the Parisians have their Louvre, the Madrileños their Prado, I have always looked to the western sky at sunset—a breathtaking canvas that changes from day to day, one perfect masterpiece following the next in endless succession. Whatever Time and Fate delivered to my feet, whatever hardships, whatever travails, I have always trusted, at the end of a long and difficult day, that Mother Nature would comfort me with her glories.

  But now, looking to the horizon of treetops, I saw something different than expected—a daunting, blue-black mass of clouds.

  Within minutes, the deluge was upon us.

  The rain finally abated at about 2:30 a.m. We were soaked to the bone in the pitch dark; the insects treated themselves to a new round of feasting. We weathered the night as best we could, unable to get a fire started, huddled together for warmth, wrapped in the few sodden blankets that we had managed to salvage from the river. Ambrose and I shared one of the blankets; Bobbie took the other with Stuke, having volunteered to nurse the hapless watercolorist through his fevers—or so I believed at the time. Looking back, with the clear vision of hindsight, I can see now that this innocent and difficult evening—with all of us victim to the kind of hardship that bends the will—was the genesis of the supreme heartache to come.

  The next day, when dawn broke, we stared hollow- eyed at one another: bitten from head to foot, covered in clay, we were a sight to behold, players in a tale of horror. In addition to the countless mosquito and other bug bites, all of us suffered from peculiar ulcerated sores, at the center of which could be seen emerging, like infant Galápagos turtles from their buried nests, some type of small flying insect. After considerable deliberation, Ambrose postulated that we had been set upon by a species which had laid its eggs beneath our skin. Of course, the effects were devastating. Imagine your own dermis as an incubator for a tiny, winged bug. One small stroke of luck to be noted: among the few items recovered from the river was a one-liter bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Under the doctor’s direction, we spent the balance of the morning lancing egg sacs and cauterizing dermal eruptions.

  With that unsavory task completed, we discussed the situation among ourselves and decided, due to the increasingly difficult prospects for navigation, to abandon the dugouts and the motor launch and continue by foot, carrying on our backs what little of our kit we had salvaged.

  We pushed into the jungle, following a muddy track which appeared to parallel the river. So dense was the brush—a fiercely unwelcoming tangle of green scrub that encompassed the path like a tunnel—that the taller among us were forced to walk bent at the waist. There were thorns and stickers everywhere; we tried to keep as near as possible to the exact center of the wet and rutted path, lest our clothes and bodies be ripped and torn. One plant, a vine covered with hooked spicules, was capable of removing a square inch of skin at a rub. Worse were the spikes of the lancietta palm, two inches long. I will not here elaborate on the intricate spiderwebs that ensnarled, nor catalog the Brobdingnagian arachnids which inhabited them, thoughts of which still elicit, even as I write this many years later, an involuntary shudder. Nor will I mention the footprints on the trail—numerous and small, like children’s.

  As darkness fell, we hit a fork in the trail—which way to go? All of us were hungry and tired, pushed beyond the point of physical and mental exhaustion. Morale was low; the Caribs were near mutiny—it was no help that the rum had been lost in the river. Barely two days into our mission up the Rio Pulgas, we had already been visited by every sort of hardship one could imagine. Providentially, no one had died.

  Steeling myself against the crushing weight of self-doubt, I ordered the company to make camp. I had no idea which fork in the trail we should take. I had no idea how far we had to go or what dangers we faced ahead of us. All I knew was that we had no other choice but to continue forward. To go back now would surely seal the death of my
soul. I thought to myself—how much worse could it get?

  And then, as if on cue, a party of savage Indians emerged ghostlike from the tangled underbrush, carrying blowguns and bows and arrows with colorful quills. Their teeth were sharpened into fangs; their noses were pierced with long bits of bone. None of them were greater than four feet in height.

  We were at their mercy.

  23

  Seede strode with guilty urgency down the impossibly long central aisle of the newsroom of the Washington Herald, past row upon row of Formica-topped desks, each with its own identical two-line telephone and computer terminal. He carried his motorcycle helmet in one hand, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other. A copy of the morning’s four-star final—the paper of record, containing all of the night’s corrections and updates, as well as the latest sports scores—was folded under his arm. His navy surplus peacoat and hooded sweatshirt were unfastened, revealing a smart designer shirt and a skinny thrift-store tie—a nod, in spirit if not letter, to the Herald’s dress code, which mandated “attire appropriate for an unexpected interview with the president of the United States or other such dignitary.”

  To accommodate a full-time roster of nearly nine hundred reporters and editors, the Herald’s newsroom occupied an immense space, one full acre spread over the fifth floors of three adjoining buildings. Seede had begun working at the paper at the tender age of twenty-two—freshly sprung from an abortive three-week attempt at law school—as a copyboy on the graveyard shift. Eleven months later, after reporting and writing, during his off hours, a series of front-page articles that prompted a Senate investigation into misdealings at the Department of Agriculture, he was promoted to reporter. For a time thereafter, Seede was the talk of the newsroom, a featured lunch guest in the publisher’s private dining room—the first male in twenty years to work his way up the ladder the old-fashioned way, sans internship or fancy j-school degree. That he had gotten the tip for the series while serving as a copyboy on the city desk—that he had taken down the details from a caller and kept it for himself, a gross violation of Herald policy—seemed only to enhance his standing.

  Now, however, after seven years at the esteemed daily, with its glut of industry icons and regional all-stars plucked from lesser papers around the nation, Seede was still a junior staffer. A walk-on player who’d made the varsity against all odds, his career had stalled. Neither ethnic enough to warrant special consideration (there were already enough Jews in the news biz) nor patrician enough to curry the embrace of the blue bloods and Ivy Leaguers who held sway over the Herald’s institutional culture, Seede was still subject to weekend, holiday, and night duty, emergency calls at any hour.

  Not that his work was subpar: over the last two months Seede had written thirteen front-page stories—more than one a week. All of them had been longish, quirky, well-written, self-generated features that inspired watercooler talk and radio call-in debates: a fourteen-year-old heroin addict; a high-priced callgirl who serviced clients on Capitol Hill, with a sidebar on a callboy; a suburban Fairfax woman who was forced by authorities to give up the menagerie she’d been raising in her backyard—a male lion, an Arabian stallion, a ram, and a male German shepherd; a weekend stay with a family of ten adopted children, all of them severely disabled. The one story with any real news value—about a promising high school basketball player who died of a crack overdose—had been optioned by a Hollywood producer. Seede had an agent, the handshake was done, the deal was in process. Even after splitting the money with the boy’s family, there was a large paycheck in his future, the amount of which would equal seventeen years of salary at his present rate. Rather than endearing him to his coworkers at the Herald, the movie deal only served to further alienate Seede, as if his wind-fall had been a betrayal of all the underpaid Ivy League staffers who’d eschewed the prospects of big money in order to practice their noble profession. Of course, many of them had trust funds.

  At eight in the morning the fifth floor was still deserted. Striding down the central aisle of the newsroom, Seede ventured a look to his right, toward editor country, at the heart of the vast room. Oddly, no one was yet on post.

  Relieved, annoyed, he slowed his pace. Who the hell paged me anyway?

  He hung a left down a secondary aisle, then a right, passing through the maze of desks, different colors for different sections—blue for National, green for Foreign, black for Metro, and so forth. Some of the staffers likened employment at the Herald to military service. There was much scurrying about and barking of orders, many layers of officer-editors, a cover-your-ass mentality, a long and distinct chain of command. Others compared it to a Big Eight accounting firm, a sweatshop, an Orwellian warehouse of clerks. Over the span of his tenure at the Herald—as his star dimmed, as his hairline receded, as his once-lauded craftiness and drive came to be seen as counterproductive to the greater good, as his ambitions turned toward something more literary than the yeoman hunt-and-peck of daily reportage—Seede had settled on his own mixed metaphor for employment at the Herald: a slave galleon where the prisoners manned keyboards instead of oars.

  At length Seede reached his own desk in the Metro section, off in a secluded corner, shielded from the view of his editors by a large support beam onto which were tacked the usual assortment of notices, cartoons, and in-house ads. Conveniently near a printer, a copier, and the restrooms, the area was shared by Seede with three others, none of whom would likely be in until ten, the regular start time for most staffers.

  He stowed his helmet beneath the desk, removed his coat and sweatshirt and draped them, still coupled, over the back of his chair. On top of the desk, he now noticed, was a box wrapped in plain brown paper, addressed by hand in block letters. It appeared to be a proper piece of mail, stamped and cancelled, yet it had no return address, a detail that gave him pause. Last year, in reaction to a feature he’d written about a poor black family’s Thanksgiving dinner, Seede had received a shoebox containing hundreds of cockroaches, many of them still alive. After a story about a gay couple’s battle with AIDS, he received a large rat in a Tupperware container. It had been dead for some time. There were maggots.

  Seede picked up the box gingerly. It was heavy, probably five pounds. The contents inside shifted a bit with movement. He sniffed the top, pressed his ear to the side, listened. Hearing nothing, he set it down on the desktop.

  He raised his ankle-high, Dr. Martens boot and placed it on the seat of his chair. Strapped to his calf was an eight-inch throwing knife, a skill he’d picked up a few years back while training with Navy Seals for a series. He used the knife to cut the shipping tape, returned it to the hi-tech scabbard with a securing click.

  Inside the box was another box, this one gift wrapped with festive holiday paper, a snowy Christmas scene. Inside he found a round tin container. It had a card taped to the top: Season’s Greetings from the Fraternal Order of Police.

  Mixed nuts. Neatly separated into pie-wedge sections of cashews, Brazils, almonds, white pistachios. And three additional sections of spiced pecans in different flavors, Seede’s favorite. He popped one into his mouth.

  “There you are!”

  A voice from behind, exasperated: the tidewater drawl of Seede’s immediate supervisor, William “Buddy” McCarthy.

  Seede spun around to face him. “Have a nut,” he said, offering the tin. “Compliments of the FOP.”

  At forty-eight McCarthy bore more than a passing resemblance to Humpty Dumpty—ovoid torso, arms and legs like sticks. Once upon a time he’d been the celebrated young second in command of a midsize daily in Wilmington, Delaware. Having dreamed his whole life of working someday at the Herald—one of the top dailies in the world—McCarthy had agreed to come on board in the lowly position of assistant Virginia editor, having every confidence he’d work back up the ladder in no time. Eighteen years later, he had a wife and four boys, a house in the suburbs, an excellent package of salary and benefits. And he was assistant city editor, a lateral move, slightly upward owin
g to the primacy of city over suburbs. In seven more years he’d be eligible for an early buyout.

  McCarthy pushed back the rumpled sleeve of his sport coat and checked his cheap digital watch, worn with the face inside his wrist. “I paged you fifty-one minutes ago,” he informed Seede. “What took so long?”

  “It’s hard to find a working pay phone,” Seede said, not untruthfully. While lying was a cardinal sin—and a firing offense—in the newsroom, creative use of language was a staple. One of his city-side colleagues had just done an exposé on the sorry state of the town’s pay telephones. It was a fact that a working pay phone was hard to find. It was also a fact that Seede hadn’t attempted to find one. “I figured it was quicker to come straight in.”

  “Where were you?”

  Seede looked at him searchingly. “I’m pretty sure my shift doesn’t begin until seven tonight.”

  “Unless otherwise directed,” McCarthy quoted.

  “Well, here I am. Direct.”

  Buddy McCarthy stared at him cockeyed. He had fourteen reporters in his platoon; with each of them he shared a unique, dysfunctional, codependent relationship. Seede was up to something, he was sure—he just couldn’t put his finger on it. He held up a copy of the overnight memo. “What do you know about this bust on Fourteenth Street?”

  “Bust on Fourteenth Street?”

  “Isn’t that your beat?”

  “There were probably three dozen or more busts out there last night”—scatting, buying time, searching his gray matter for details—“the cops were out in force. Seasonal crackdown. They do it every year. As a matter of fact”—popping a spiced pecan into his mouth—“I heard from one of my sources about this new—”