Extinct (2 page)

A hundred yards farther, he turned off the pavement onto the graveled area at the front of a wide, one-story concrete-block building. A van sat next to his Jeep parked close to the big, block letters
AMERICAN AQUACULTURE, INC.
, painted in red across the building’s front.

To the side of the entrance a wooden sign proclaimed in bright orange letters:

Dr. Ho Hsiao

Dr. Alan Freeman

Proprietors

As Alan passed the sign he knocked on the wood. He felt stickiness and looked at his knuckles, now brightly illuminated with round spots of orange.

Mrs. Hsiao, a small woman of fifty with coal-black hair hanging down the back of her print dress to her waist, sat behind her desk in the reception area.

“Ho touched up the sign again,” he said, reaching to the desk to pull a tissue from a box of Kleenex.

She smiled as she looked at his knuckles. “He thinks he was an artist in his former life. Your aunt called. She wanted you to call her as soon as you came back.”

He wiped as much of the paint from his skin as he could, dropped the Kleenex in the wastebasket at the side of the desk, and reached for the telephone. “Whose van is that outside?”

“A Mr. Herald. He called Ho yesterday and asked if he could bring some boys from a local boxing team over to view an aquaculture operation. Ho is back there practicing the speech on them he’s giving to the Chamber tonight.”

His aunt’s line was busy. He replaced the receiver. “I’m going to take a quick shower.”

As he walked across the hall toward the rest room and showers, he looked down the hallway past the open, double doors at its far end. Ho stood just inside the wide rear area of the building with his back to the doorway. His thin body clad in a white, knee-length lab coat, his long hair hanging against his shoulders, he leaned forward on the side of the fingerling tank, a container closely resembling a child’s wading pool with sides three feet high. Beyond the far side of the tank a dozen boys of widely varying heights seemed to be paying close attention to his words. Alan walked toward the door.

“Water cover seventy percent of world,” Ho was saying. “People in past always think it inexhaustible supply of food.” He raised his long finger. “But, as I tell you while ago, most sought-after food species in oceans decline two, three percent a year. Population grow more than that each year. Soon not only most sought-after species but all food species begin to decline. If this so, then nature’s balance in seas as we know it not stay the same. To not let that happen, big aquaculture must be world’s future. Grow fish in controlled environment for eating, leave fish in oceans to people for fun catching—if not catch too many.”

As Ho stopped his words he smiled broadly. “So that it. How you like speech?”

The boys, most of them wearing dark windbreakers with
BILOXI BOXING CLUB
arched in white block letters across their backs and appearing to range in age from around ten or eleven to their early teens, remained silent.

“Questions?”

The deep voice came from Mr. Herald. A large man, he stood off to the boys’ side. His gray hair unruly, and dressed only casually in a short-sleeved pullover hanging out over a pair of faded khakis, he nevertheless presented an impressive appearance with his erect posture and taut arms that belied his age.

Two of the younger white boys on the team wiggled to the front of the mostly black youths to get a better look inside the tank’s light-green waters, bubbling with oxygen and swarming with the inch-long baby fish.

“What about you, San-hi?” Mr. Herald asked, looking at one of the oldest boys in the group, a thin Vietnamese with shoulder-length coal-black hair.

“He explained it fine,” the boy answered.

“Armon?” Mr. Herald said.

A stocky black youth about the same age as San-hi said, “Got it all here in my mind.”

“Any you others?” Mr. Herald asked.

A boy at the rear of the group looked behind him at the half-dozen larger tanks spread out across the concrete floor, each of them six feet high and twice as big around as the fingerling tank. Conveyor belts rumbled as they angled over the rims of the tanks, lifting a shiny-looking coating from the water and carrying it to a garbage-dumpster-sized container against a far wall. “What’s that stuff?” the boy asked.

“Algae and fish droppings,” Ho said. “We recycle for fertilizer—nothing go to waste. When we build new facility, we send droppings and old water to pond where plants grow. Plants make food and same time filter droppings from water where water come back clean to tanks. Called hydroponics—and save money for not having to buy more water.” Ho smiled broadly again.

“Anybody else?” Mr. Herald asked.

When none of the boys responded, he turned and reached toward a tall stack of slim, white Styrofoam cartons on a metal folding chair behind him. Lifting the cartons and balancing them against his wide chest, he nodded across his shoulder toward the open, double doorway at the rear of the building.

The boys stepped toward him and started stripping him of his load. “Easy, men,” he said. “Out in back to eat. Don’t let any of the trash end up in the bay.”

In a moment the boys, each with a carton, were hurrying toward the doors. Mr. Herald looked at Ho. “Thank you for your presentation, doctor. They don’t often say much, but they’re listening.” Then he followed the team from the building. Ho walked toward Alan.

“I do good horse and dog show, Alan?”

Alan smiled at his friend’s misquoting of the saying. “It’s dog and pony show, Ho.”

“What different?”

The wall telephone at the side of the door leading toward the front offices rang. A few seconds later, it buzzed. Alan stepped to it and lifted the receiver to his ear. “Uh-huh?”

“It’s your aunt,” Mrs. Hsiao said. “Line one.”

He pushed the button. “You’re feeling guilty because you haven’t invited me to dinner this week,” he said, and smiled.

His aunt didn’t come back with her usual fast words.

“Alan, I just saw on TV—Julie’s boy drowned.”

CHAPTER 3

Alan looped his tie around his neck and tied it, using his elbows to guide his Jeep along the narrow blacktop passing in front of a mixture of old and new houses backed up against the Pascagoula River. Julie and Barry’s home, an older one-story brick, was near the end of the street, next to a newer two-story stucco contemporary. Two Jackson County Sheriff’s Department cruisers and a yellow Toyota with an empty boat trailer behind it sat off the side of the road. Alan parked behind the trailer, lifted his sports coat from the seat beside him, and walked toward the house.

An older woman answered the front door.

“I’m Alan Freeman, a friend of Barry and Julie.”

“They’re down at the riverbank, Mr. Freeman. They haven’t found the bodies yet.”

*   *   *

The place where the boys had gone into the water was along a wooded stretch of river where no houses backed up to the bank. Out in the center of the channel the Sheriff’s Department’s Flotilla Search and Rescue Team pulled grappling hooks behind an eighteen-foot aluminum boat. The Biloxi Fire Department’s Marine Unit had come from Harrison County to join in the search with their seventeen-foot Mako. A young couple Alan guessed to be the parents of the boy who had been with Dustin stood near the water, their arms around each other as they stared toward the boats. Farther up the bank, a dozen people who lived along the river silently watched the search. He spotted Julie’s long blond hair. She and Barry stood close together back in the trees. Julie was shaking her head and crying softly while Barry, his face ashen, tried to comfort her. Standing next to them was a tanned brunette wearing a short-sleeved pullover and loose-fitting shorts; her bare legs were tight and very feminine. Alan thought there was something familiar about her. As he drew closer, she looked at him, holding her stare for a moment, then looked back at Julie and Barry.

Then Barry’s eyes met his. Dressed in the blue trousers and gray shirt of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, where he had served for fifteen years, Barry was a lean, strong man with chiseled features and swept-back blond hair, a man normally commanding respect by his very appearance, but who now looked suddenly frail. As Alan stopped next to him, Julie, tears running down her cheeks, shook her head slowly back and forth. “We’ve lost Dustin, Alan,” she said. Her hands came up clasped and trembling in front of her chest.

Feeling a great sadness for her, Alan took her gently into his arms. She laid the side of her face against his chest. “What are we going to do now?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said, knowing how hollow the words sounded, but not knowing what else to say. He could feel her hands moving against his shirt. The brunette looked at him. Then at a murmur rising from the onlookers, she turned her face toward the river.

The rope trailing the Mako had tightened. The fireman at the rear of the boat started pulling it in as the other man in the craft leaned over him to help. Julie turned toward Barry’s arms. The deputies in the aluminum boat stared toward the Mako.

In seconds, the boat had been pulled backward where the rope ran straight down into the water. The fireman continued to pull it in.

A greenish black shape …

And a slime-coated Christmas tree broke the surface.

Julie started sobbing loudly.

*   *   *

By that night, still nothing, though a pair of divers had been down and two more rescue craft had joined the search. Spaced a few feet apart, the four boats moved in slow formation along the center of the channel pulling ropes disappearing into the water behind their sterns. Occasionally, a man at the bow of one of the boats would flash a light through the tall marsh grass along the far side of the river. A small aluminum boat coming up the river slowed and moved to the far side of the channel to give the boats pulling the grappling hooks plenty of room.

Eddie Fuller, his squat body hunched at the bow of the small boat, tugged at the neck of his coveralls and shook his head.

“Somebody’s not coming home no more,” he said.

The thinner man holding the outboard motor’s steering arm said, “Makes you want to sit closer to the middle of the boat, don’t it?”

They moved slowly past the other craft.

*   *   *

As the small boat cleared the dragging area and resumed its speed, Alan, sipping from a cup of coffee as he looked out a window at the rear of Barry and Julie’s living room, turned his eyes back toward the deputies and firemen. He sensed the brunette stop beside him.

She had changed into a skirt and blouse. “Barry asked me to thank you for helping get Julie back here,” she said. She glanced past a group of highway patrolmen talking at the center of the room to the hall leading to the bedrooms. “She’s doing better now, but she doesn’t want him to leave her alone.”

Her face came back to his. “I’m sorry, I’m Carolyn Haines.”

“Alan Freeman.”

She nodded. “I’ve seen you on WLOX talking about aquaculture. My father’s the one who coaches the younger members of the boxing team. The ones who came by today.”

He now realized that what had looked familiar to him was her father’s face in hers: her high cheekbones, the shape of her chin widening back smoothly toward her hair, even her dark eyes.

“Julie told me you two used to date,” she said.

He nodded. “I’ve known her since high school.” He raised the cup of coffee toward his mouth, but stopped it before it reached his lips. Using the cup as a pointer, he gestured toward the kitchen. “They just brewed a fresh pot, if you would like me to get you a cup.”

She shook her head. “No, thank you. I’m going to have to leave. I need to check on Paul. My son,” she added.

Alan had already heard the boy’s name from the older woman in the kitchen. Paul had been with the boys when they went into the river. Carolyn, living four houses up the street, had heard Paul’s dog barking and came down to the water. She had called 911 and then came here. The older woman had seen her as she stood at the front door, hesitating, her hands at the sides of her face as she tried to gain the courage to ring the doorbell. She had sent Paul to his grandmother’s house so he wouldn’t be present when the bodies were carried from the river.

Now Carolyn glanced at the patrolmen again.

“They have you blocked in?” Alan asked.

“They’re about ready to leave, I think.” She looked toward the window. Seeming to speak to herself as much as to him she said, “With them still lying there under the water … I’d be in worse shape than Julie.”

When she looked back at him, she forced a polite smile. “I’m glad to have met you. I know Daddy really appreciated your letting the boys come by.” Then, without waiting for him to respond, she turned toward the patrolmen. As she neared them, Barry stepped into the entrance to the hallway and called her name, and she changed directions, angling across the carpet toward him.

Alan watched them until they disappeared down the hallway, then turned back to the window.

A thick cloud had moved across the moon, casting the river in dim shadow. The boats were out of sight, but an occasional flash of light reflected off the water and came through the trees to his right.

Back to his left, the river ran into complete darkness.

TWO MILES FARTHER UP THE PASCAGOULA RIVER—10:00
P.M.

The outboard motor cut off and the small aluminum boat glided though the dark toward the wide gap in the beaver dam. Eddie Fuller shook his head in dismay. “Some son of a bitch blew it,” he said. It made him mad as hell. The fish that had been trapped in the slough behind the dam had first eaten up all the little bugs and decaying matter, then had eaten up each other until there was nothing left in the slough but some of the biggest fish he had ever caught. “And now some son of a bitch do that,” he repeated. “Who was the dam bothering anyway but the fish this far back on the river?”

At Eddie’s words, Luke scratched at the gray stubble on his protruding chin and pushed his bill cap back on his head. “Sure enough. Jes’ my luck. ’Course if it weren’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have none a’tall.”