Night Vision

by Randy Wayne White

  I tried not to sound like a self-satisfied jerk, but I bungled that, too.

  Now I felt like an even bigger ass as I let the woman pat my shoulder while she continued speaking to Paul. “In the article, he referenced a necropsy on a manatee that had died during a severe red tide. Wasn’t that at Dinkin’s Bay where you live, Doc? He was the first to make the association between dinoflagellates and toxicity in sea-dwelling mammals.”

  “How nice for Dr. Ford,” Paul said, ignoring me—not that I blamed the guy. I really didn’t, although he was pushing the limits when he added, “And let’s not forget that we also have Dr. Ford to thank for providing us with a dead alligator to work on this morning. Very, very thoughtful of you to kill such a beautiful animal. What did the police report say?”

  The man looked at a clipboard, before reading, “‘The alligator was subdued by four shots at point-blank range from a nine-millimeter Kahr handgun.’

  “Subdued,” the man continued, sarcasm creeping into his voice. “I guess that’s police jargon for slaughtered.”

  He looked up from the clipboard and spoke to the graduate student. “I’ve never understood why some men feel inadequate unless they’re carrying a gun. I’m not talking about you, of course, Dr. Ford,” he added, his sarcasm undisguised. “It’s the rednecks and hicks I’m referring to. The right-wing bumper-sticker types. I’m unfamiliar with handguns. Is a Kahr one of those famous pistols that heroes use in the movies? Maybe you’re carrying it now concealed somewhere in your pants. I bet Emily would love to see it.”

  I had been watching the woman’s face color, but the guy had finally crossed the line. She snapped, “Paul! Enough! Stop what you’re doing right now! Dr. Ford’s my guest, and I won’t allow you to—”

  The man cut her off, saying, “Your days of telling me what I can and can’t do are over, Milly dear. The courts took care of that, remember? It was your decision, not mine. And, frankly, I couldn’t be happier. Didn’t we come here to work? I have other things to do.”

  Which, from Marston, earned the man a chilly “Don’t we all have better things to do, Paul? You’re the one who insisted on coming along.”

  “I volunteered to help. And, of course”—for the first time the man looked directly at me—“I wanted to see why you were so determined to meet the famous Dr. Marion Ford. I thought maybe I’d understand once I saw him. But, sorry, I just don’t get what the fuss is all about.”

  I had taken a step back to remove myself from the conversation. Long ago, I learned not to participate in quarrels between lovers—particularly if I happened to be one of the lovers. So I stood there, feeling embarrassed for both people, as they argued, Drs. Paul and Emily, two intelligent people who had once been in love.

  It went on for a while. The barbs they exchanged exhibited a practiced familiarity that proved these two people had become expert at hurting each other. But it ended abruptly when the woman finally called a truce, saying, “Paul ... Paul, I’m sorry, Paul! I was wrong to let you come. It was mean of me. It was thoughtless, and I’m sorry. I truly am.”

  The man, Paul Marston, Ph.D., I would learn later, responded by throwing his apron and clipboard on the ground as he said, “Yes, your behavior has been very mean and thoughtless. For once we agree. And how refreshing to have you finally admit it, for a change.”

  Then the man turned, strode to his Subaru and drove away.

  “Damn it,” Emily said when he was gone. “I’m so sorry you two had to witness that. Paul isn’t like that. Not really. And neither am I. But we signed our divorce papers less than two weeks ago, so it’s an emotional time. I’d hoped we could continue our professional relationship, but clearly . . .”

  The woman allowed silence to trail off.

  The grad student, who had pretended to be busy organizing her camera gear, spoke for the first time, saying, “I think they both behaved like jerks, Dr. Marston. What is it about men?”

  It took me a moment to realize that the girl had included me. What the hell had I done besides allow myself to be used as a foil? Even so, I decided it was time to try to reverse the dark momentum on this pretty spring morning.

  “There’s a lesson for ladies everywhere,” I said to them both. “The male of the species is equipped with a prick for reasons that exceed the demands of basic human reproduction.” I looked at Marston. “If you come up with an explanation, I’d like to be among the first to hear it.”

  I was hoping to see a pair of smiles. It took the grad student a moment—maybe we both shared the same physical awareness of Emily Marston.

  Finally, though, the girl gave in.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was saying to Emily, “I’m particularly interested in seeing what’s in the animal’s stomach.”

  She was wearing a digital headset. She nodded and said, “An animal this age, you never know what you’re going to find.” She nodded again to the grad student as a cue, touched the POWER button on the mini-recorder, selected a knife and then began dictating as she started the necropsy.

  “The specimen is an adult male alligator. Length and weight have already been noted. Scutes at”—she was looking at the ridges on the animal’s back—“scutes seven and ten show distinctive scarring, but I judge it to earlier injuries. There is no evidence the animal has ever been tagged or documented. We’ll begin by making a standard Y-cut from the animal’s sternum to its cloaca.”

  The woman looked at me, adding as an aside, “There’s no scalpel big enough for something like this. So I use a Gerber Gator Serrator. Really. That’s the name of the knife. I found it at some outdoors store and couldn’t resist.”

  The tool in her hand looked like an oversized pocketknife, and it was sharp. I watched her saw through the dense scale work of the gator’s belly as the grad student moved to a better angle with her video camera.

  Marston was good. She worked with speed and a minimum of wasted effort. I watched her remove and weigh, in precise order, the animal’s heart, its liver and other vital organs, before she said, “Next we open the stomach. As I told Dr. Ford, you never know what you’re going to find, particularly with an animal this age.”

  She looked at the grad student with concern before adding, “How are you doing? I know, the smell can be tough to deal with. Are you okay?”

  The student had gone a little pale. “Maybe if I get a bottle of water,” she said, “that might help. Mind if we take a short break?”

  With Marston’s permission, the girl hurried off to the shade, where there was an Igloo filled with ice and drinks.

  The smell of the alligator didn’t bother me. I found it heavy and distinctive. There was a musky sweetness that reminded me of the way a fresh tarpon smells—a delicate, vital odor that was mixed with an acidity that I presumed to be cavity fluids and blood.

  I said, “Do you mind if I use that extra pair of gloves and help you with the stomach when you get it open?”

  “Sure,” the woman replied. “You sound more than casually interested. Are you looking for something in particular? Last night . . . the person the gator attacked, he didn’t lose any—”

  “No,” I said. “The man still has all his parts. Just puncture wounds.”

  She was nodding. “That’s what I thought or the police would have insisted on being here. Or EMTs would’ve opened the belly last night.”

  I said, “What I’d expect to find is the stomach empty. Or almost empty. We’re only, what, a month or so away from their dormant season?”

  “The last real cold front was in January,” Marston corrected me. “This animal has certainly eaten since then.”

  “Even so,” I said, snapping on a surgical glove, “he had to be pretty hungry to attack a full-grown man. Not only that, he came back and tried to attack a second man, even though I had already wounded the thing. What I’m interested in finding is those rocks I’ve read about. The ones you find in a gator’s belly. Gastroliths? I’ve never seen one.”

  “How’s the man doing?” the woman as
ked, meaning Carlson. “I haven’t heard anything since last night. In fact, I’d love for you to tell me the whole story sometime—if you ever have time. I’ve been studying alligators for seven years and I can’t imagine anyone jumping into the water at night and wrestling around with something this size. I certainly wouldn’t have tried it. That takes a very unusual man, in my opinion.”

  I caught the friendly implications. I also sensed that the woman was providing me with an opening to ask her out. It was in the airy way she said it—something I would act upon but later. In reply, I told her I hadn’t gotten an update on Carlson and turned the conversation back to gastroliths.

  “We still don’t know for certain that alligators swallow rocks for ballast,” the woman told me, sounding more relaxed and in charge now. “But I can’t think of any other reason they’d bother. In an animal this size, I would expect to find quite a few. They don’t look like much until you clean off the patina. But then some of them can be quite interesting.”

  She was right. With the grad student filming, Emily slit the animal’s stomach lining, then held it open as I fished my hands in. At first, I thought there was nothing to find. But then, closer to the intestines, I found several hard, globular objects. I removed one that was about the size of a baseball and handed it to Emily. She appeared pleased.

  “This is one of the larger gastroliths I’ve seen,” she told me as she used the knife to scrape part of it clean.

  I used a paper towel on my glasses, then knelt beside her to see. I’m not a geologist, but there was no mistaking the crystalline facets of the rock, soon glittering in the morning sunlight. It was a chunk of gypsum.

  Marston caught the significance immediately.

  “This is very strange finding a stone like this,” she said softly, studying the thing.

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  The grad student had zoomed in on the rock. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” the girl said. “It’s pretty—sort of. But what’s so special about a rock?”

  Emily asked me, “You found this animal in a pond on San Carlos Island, right? It’s really is quite surprising.”

  I told her it was a brackish lake, only a few miles from Fort Myers Beach, before telling the grad student, “In Florida, the only gypsum I know of comes from the highland regions in the north and central parts of the state. Alligators travel, I understand that. But is it possible this thing could have crossed a hundred miles of swamps, then crawled through cities, across highways, this far on its own?”

  The woman was thinking about it, lips pursed. She was wearing safety goggles, and I liked the nerdy dissimilarities of her elegant jaw, the sweep of autumn-shaded hair. Only a male biologist is capable of undressing a woman with his eyes and then completing the fantasy by projecting how she would look naked, sprawled on white sheets, all the while kneeling on a tarp beneath buzzing flies, his hands slick with gastric fluids.

  That’s exactly what I was doing. But then my conscience intervened by reminding me that this woman had been divorced for only a couple of weeks. No matter how confident Emily Marston appeared, she was vulnerable, probably an easy target for just about any decent-looking, unprincipled jerk who came along. Although I am, admittedly, an occasional jerk, I do embrace the conceit that I am a jerk with at least a few principles.

  I listened to the woman say, “If the gastrolith was a lot smaller, and when you consider how old this animal must be, I wouldn’t have a problem with the distance. Over a period of thirty or forty years, yes, it could have traveled a hundred miles on its own. But my guess is, only a large alligator would ingest a rock this size, which suggests to me that someone may have transported the animal—”

  The grad student, still filming, interrupted, saying, “Maybe a dump truck hauled a load of gravel to the beach. You know, from around Lake Okeechobee, as fill or something. That would explain a chunk of gypsum being this close to the Gulf of Mexico.”

  I smiled at the girl, pleased by her quick reasoning, and I told her exactly that as I fished my hands into the gator’s stomach again.

  I removed several more gastroliths. Then I found a chunk of what appeared to be a turtle skull. Then several more bones, bleached white from acid, that were not so easily identified.

  Not at first, anyway. It wasn’t until I had placed the bones on the tarp in an orderly fashion that I began to suspect what we had just found. Collectively, they resembled the delicate flange of a primate’s hand—not necessarily a human hand, because feral monkeys are common in Florida

  I became more certain they were primate bones when I added a radius bone and pieces of what might have been metacarpal bones.

  “My God,” Marston said, voice soft, “I think we need to call the police. This isn’t fresh, obviously. It has to have been in the gator’s stomach for at least a few months, but even so ...”

  I told the woman, “Wait. There’s something else.”

  I had been holding my breath while I felt around in the animal’s stomach and started breathing again as I leaned into the stomach, then placed yet another bone on the tarp.

  This one was unmistakable. The grad student stumbled for a moment, almost dropped the camera, but then she leaned to zoom in on what we all could identify.

  It was a wedding ring. Cheap and brassy, but set with a minuscule stone that may or may not have been a diamond The ring had been crushed, probably by the gator’s teeth, so that it was crimped into the bone of what had once been a human finger.

  “A woman’s hand,” the female biologist said, and had to work hard to keep emotion out of her voice.

  “A woman’s ring, anyway,” I replied, holding the bone close to my eyes, seeing what might have been a bit of inscription. “The medical examiner will know.”

  At sunset, I was on my back porch, lathering beneath the outdoor shower, when I felt the vibration of unfamiliar footsteps. Tomlinson was in the house, probably guzzling the last of my beer. Plus, the snowshoe slap of his big bare feet is distinctive. It wasn’t him.

  The person approaching was decidedly female. Wearing hard-soled shoes, I guessed, possibly high heels.

  With a bar of soap, I attempted to cover what I could cover as I turned to see Emily Marston, although I didn’t recognize her at first. True, I wasn’t wearing my glasses. True, I only got a glimpse before the lady sputtered an apology, then ducked behind the corner of my house. Still, I did not associate the long glossy hair and a white tropical suit with the boot-wearing biologist I had worked with that morning.

  When I heard the woman call, “Sorry! I’m really . . . sorry,” I recognized the voice, though.

  My reaction was immediate and adolescent—which is to say, I did what most men would do under the circumstances. I made a quick visual survey of my personal equipment, hoping I had been enhanced, not diminished, by the sun-warmed water in the rain cistern overhead.

  First impressions are important. Particularly in the primate world, where proportions are emblematic.

  Not bad, I decided. Not bad at all. Yet I attempted to deepen my voice as I called to the lady, “The house is open, go on in. Make yourself at home. There’s a bottle of red wine, maybe some beer—if there’s any left.”

  She would discover, soon enough, that I had company.

  I reached for a towel, then my clothes, taking my time at first until I remembered that every minute I lingered was another minute that Emily Marston would be alone inside with Tomlinson.

  It was a risky combination. A divorcée on the rebound and my randy pal.

  Even sober, my boat-bum friend has the sexual discipline of a lovebug. By now, seven p.m., he was already a six-pack and a couple of joints into this balmy March evening. Stoned, there are no depths to which the man will not sink in hope of luring fresh prey to his sailboat and, at the very least, getting the lady’s bra off.

  As Tomlinson is fond of saying, “There are few experiences in life more satisfying than unveiling a pair of fresh breasts.”
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br />   Speaking of women as if they were festively wrapped presents—a metaphor that, for Tomlinson, made every new day a potential Christmas morning.

  As I came into the house, though, Emily was sitting primly at the galley table, looking elegant in a copper blouse and white linen jacket, while Tomlinson talked about the phenomenon we had witnessed the night before—the two dolphins we had seen charging out of the mangroves. That was probably a good thing because he had been obsessing about the Guatemalan girl, who had yet to reappear. He had called me earlier that day to report no luck and that he was coming back. I wasn’t sure what else to do, but we had decided to keep the problem running in the backs of our heads to see if something came up.

  “Sorry to show up uninvited, Doc,” Emily said as I knelt at the refrigerator, looking for a beer. “I should have yelled. Or rang the bell ... or something. But I did knock—”

  “I had my earbuds in,” Tomlinson explained, motioning to some kind of miniature device that played music. “I was listening to a new download. A four-hertz theta frequency, trying to get my head straight.”

  Emily looked at him, interested, as she continued speaking to me, saying, “So I walked around to the back of the house because I could hear someone humming—”

  Tomlinson interrupted, “Doc was humming?” as if he didn’t believe her.

  I said, “Isn’t that what people do when they shower? Sing, hum. I was showering.”

  Emily said, “Yes, you were,” sounding as if she approved, her eyes locking onto my eyes. “I hope you aren’t pissed—and you certainly shouldn’t be embarrassed. I was restless tonight—we had ourselves quite a day, didn’t we?”

  Yes, we had. Emily and I had spent all morning together, waiting for the county forensic team to arrive, and then most of the afternoon answering questions, first from the authorities and then from a couple of reporters.