Extinct (3 page)

Eddie leaned his wide body forward, caught a grip on the dam, and pulled them closer to the gap. In a moment he had wrapped the boat’s bow rope around a protruding branch and they came up onto the structure of small logs and limbs cemented together with mud. Luke tucked his rod and reel under his arm and pulled a half-eaten Snickers bar from the pocket of his overalls. Taking a step as he unwrapped the bar, he slipped and fell to his knee, nearly dumping his minnow bucket.

Eddie smiled out of a corner of his mouth. “You’re gettin’ clumsy in your old age,” he said. Eddie raised his arms out to his sides and, a cane fishing pole held in one hand and his minnow bucket in the other, mimicked moving along the top of the dam like a man on a tight wire.

“Did you fart?” Luke asked.

“Not in the last little bit.”

“What’s that smell then?”

“Somethin’ dead, I’d say.” His wide hips swaying, his arms still raised out to his sides as if for balance, Eddie continued on the tiptoes of his boots toward the thick trees growing in the darkness at the end of the dam.

Luke looked back at the water between the ends of the break. “I think I’ll just park myself here and try to catch me a big’un when they come through from the river.”

“Better chance they’re already feeding at the mouth of the creek,” Eddie said across his shoulder.

“Then I’ll catch me one when you scare ’em this way,” Luke said.

“Wanna bet who comes out with the most tonight, Mr. Silence?”

“A dollar.”

“Don’t be such a big spender, Luke.”

Luke didn’t hesitate. “Two dollars.”

“You’re on,” Eddie said as he stepped down to the soft ground at the end of the dam. He continued on with his arms raised, this time doing his balancing act alongside the slough, angled in a gentle arc toward the mouth of the small creek, a couple of hundred feet in the distance.

When a warm gust of air came through the trees, bringing with it a stronger smell of the terrible stench, he dropped his arms to his side, glanced once into the darkness between the tree trunks, and continued on toward the creek, leaving the prints of his wide boots behind him in the soil.

*   *   *

Carolyn’s mother, a diminutive woman with graying brown hair, quietly opened the door. Her husband’s large frame came around her into the room. Paul lay on his back, his breathing quiet and slow. The flattened pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint had fallen out of his hand and lay on the sheet.

Mr. Herald picked it up, placed it on the night table, and retraced his quiet steps to the door. Mrs. Herald closed it behind him.

In the living room she looked at her husband.

“It’s a normal reaction,” he said, “not wanting to let go of something Dustin gave him just before he went into the water.”

The telephone rang and he reached to the coffee table to answer it.

“Fred Herald,” he said, and then, “Hi, baby.” He mouthed silently to his wife,
It’s Carolyn.
“He’s asleep,” he said into the phone. He listened a moment and said, “It seemed like it took forever to get my bunch back home. If Dr. Hsiao hadn’t delivered half of them for me, I don’t believe I could have stood the time it took. I kept thinking how Paul was needing a man to talk to.”

Mrs. Herald shook her head at her husband’s words. “She’s wanting to hear he’s okay,” she said.

Her husband nodded. “He’s going to be fine,” he said into the receiver.

*   *   *

Alan sipped his coffee and glanced through the window once again. Then he looked toward Carolyn, speaking on the telephone at the bookcase across the living room.

“What, Daddy?” she said. With her question, her voice rose a little from the soft tone she had been using. “What did he say about it?” she asked.

She listened a moment. “I know, Daddy, but what did Paul say?”

As she listened this time, Alan saw her eyes turn toward his. She held her gaze on his for a moment, then turned back to the phone as she said, “In the morning, Mother and I’ll take him somewhere he likes—try to get his mind on something else for a little while anyway.” She smiled a little. “The bumper cars—he can drive them better than I can.”

A moment later she said, “’Bye. Love you.”

As she replaced the receiver, she caught her lip in her teeth. She looked across the living room as the doctor Barry had called stepped inside the house. He spoke to one of the highway patrolmen and followed him toward the hallway. As they disappeared toward the bedrooms, she kept staring in their direction. Then she caught her lip in her teeth again and looked toward the front door. Alan walked toward her.

“If you need to go on,” he said, “you should.”

“Julie said she wanted me to stay here for awhile.”

“She wants all of us to stay here,” he said. “She doesn’t want anything to change. But it already has.”

Carolyn looked directly into his eyes now. He thought she was going to ask him something, but she didn’t. “Paul’s already asleep,” she said. “I’ll see him in the morning.”

Then, almost as if the words flowed out of her without her meaning them to, she said, “Dr. Freeman, I feel guilty worrying about my own son. I should be thanking God he’s okay. But I keep wondering how this might affect a six-year-old’s mind. He thought of both of them almost like brothers. Dustin was at the house nearly every day and now he’s not going to be there any…” She took an audible breath. “I’m sorry. A mother worrying about—”

“That’s normal,” he said.

She looked strangely at him. “That’s what Daddy said.”

She stared at him a moment longer and then said, “Dustin gave Paul a pack of gum just before he went into the water. Daddy saw it when Paul took it out of his jeans before he climbed in bed—he went to sleep holding it.”

She waited now. Waiting for him to respond to her worry, as if she had nobody else to talk to. He looked at her wedding ring. He wondered where her husband was.

She still stared.

“He’ll be okay,” he said.

*   *   *

Eddie Fuller stared at his cork floating in the water, turning dark as a cloud passed across the face of the moon. He turned his face toward the beaver dam a couple of hundred feet around the curving arc of the slough. A tendril of steam curled off the water nearest the dam. The light grew dimmer. He had watched the late movies on TV the night before. Bertha had warned him what that did to his mind. He remembered the character in
Friday the 13th
slinking through the trees. He didn’t want to, but nobody was around to see him, so he glanced back across his shoulder into the dark trees behind him. Then he looked toward the dam again. His tongue washed his upper lip.

“Hey, Luke, caught any big’uns yet?”

He waited a few seconds, then raised his voice higher. “Hey, Luke, buddy, caught anything yet?”

Seconds passing and still no answer.

“Luke, you deaf or something?”

Still no answer.

“Luke, damn it. Quit fooling around.”

He brought his hand up to scratch the side of his face.

A moment later he stuck the butt of his pole in the soft soil and started around the curve of the slough toward the dam.

Nearing the rough structure, he caught the stench again. He had been upwind from it while he fished. He looked into the trees, then back to the dam. Luke must be sitting down. The moon was bright enough to see him standing.

“Hey, Luke, ole buddy?”

Eddie climbed up on the dam. A puzzled look crossed his face, then he frowned. “Hey, Luke, I’m not in the mood for no games.”

He walked a little way along the structure. The break in the thick tangle of branches and logs was easy to see now. The only place Luke could be and not be seen was sitting down over the edge of the break by the water.
Or taking a dump,
Eddie thought.

He glanced toward the trees on the far side of the slough. But Luke would’ve had to go through the water to get there.
If he had come back this way, I’d have already passed him.

“Luke, now damn it, you know I scare easy.” He was close to the break now, steeling himself for Luke suddenly springing up and growling at him.

He noticed something at the edge of the break.

Luke’s rod and reel.

He walked to it—and spotted Luke’s cap floating in the still water at the bottom of the break. His stomach tightened. Luke’s chest had been bothering him lately.

His brow now deeply creased, Eddie worked his way around the protruding branches and limbs to the bottom of the break and reached for Luke’s cap.

He didn’t know why, and he never had time to think it out, but, suddenly, he felt a cold sensation run down his back to thud at the bottom of his stomach.

Its great jaws agape, its cavernous maw red, the creature’s wide head thrust up through the surface in an explosion of water and seized him, lifting him off the edge of the break much as an alligator might snatch a rabbit off a floating log.

Eddie’s arm stuck out of the great, partly closed mouth. His hand opened, then closed, as the giant fish sank beneath the surface. The water boiled. Bubbles rose to the surface.

In a moment, the water was quiet again.

The small aluminum boat, its bow rope pulled loose from the dam by the buffeting of the water, drifted slowly out toward the middle of the channel, the rope trailing along the surface behind the craft.

*   *   *

Alan drove slowly along Interstate 10 on his way back into Biloxi. Across the median the eastbound lanes were crowded with traffic, vacationers on their way to Florida.

That’s where his parents had been going, he thought. He remembered his aunt shaking him awake with the news they had been killed in a car accident. He had been nine.

He remembered the terrible grief and instant loneliness, the men patting him on the head, some of the women hugging him, everybody saying how sorry they were. But he also remembered nobody thinking to ask a nine-year-old if he had any questions. Mixed in with his grief had been his wondering who but his parents loved him enough to take care of him with them gone, even such simple things as who was going to take him to school each morning—was he even going to be allowed to keep attending school? Thoughts that wouldn’t occur to an adult, but questions very important to him at that time. But he couldn’t ask anybody what he wondered—how could he be so selfish as to be worrying about himself when his parents had been the ones to suffer, he remembered thinking at the time.

Carolyn had said she was worried what might be going on in her son’s mind. Why didn’t she simply ask him?

And Alan wondered why he hadn’t told her that.

*   *   *

The bow rope trailed the small aluminum boat, drifting backward down the channel.

A long ripple behind the craft.

The massive head thrust up through the water. Water streaming in rivulets back around its black eyes, the head continued to rise until several feet of the great fish’s body hung suspended above the surface. With a twisting action, the head and wide upper body moved forward over the boat and came down hard, driving the craft under the surface with a great splash.

Two-foot waves crashed against the banks and rebounded toward the center of the channel.

The water slowly calmed.

Nothing could be seen but the wide channel stretching out endlessly into the dark.

Suddenly the boat shot halfway out of the water, splashed back against the surface, and drifted half-submerged and partly on its side down the river.

A moment later it began to gain speed, and moved rapidly along the center of the channel.

CHAPTER 4

BILOXI—THE NEXT MORNING

Mrs. Hsiao raised her face from her computer as Alan came inside the building.

“Have they found the boys?” she asked.

He shook his head no.

Her husband, his hair hanging against the shoulders of his plaid shirt, was speaking on her telephone. “Governor Childress,” he mouthed. He pointed toward the telephone on the empty desk to the far side of the area.

Alan reached for the receiver without going around behind the desk.

Ho said, “Governor, Alan’s on line now.”

“Dr. Freeman, how are you doing?”

“Fine, Governor. How’s the weather down there?”

“Hotter than hell. But as I was telling Dr. Hsiao, not as hot as it’s going to be if I don’t get some federal aid to help locate those damn Z-nets. They’re killing us. Especially between Miami and the Keys. We get rid of the foreign fishing vessels and then we learn how many of those damn nets they lost, down there God only knows where, their mouths gaped open, rolling around on the bottom, thousands of fish swimming into them every day. Just great damn killing machines. I’ve got our charter boats, all the sports fishermen, everybody and their kid brother bitching about the fishing declining.”

As Childress paused, Alan heard him take a deep breath, and then he spoke in a more settled voice. “Well, you don’t need to hear about my problems, doctor. I’m certain you have enough of your own. It’s only that I have a meeting with an environmental group in an hour. Wanted to be positive we still have ourselves a deal. Want to be able to announce some good news anyway.”

“You’ll have half a million fingerlings a month for release in your waters starting your way in thirty days.”

“Guaranteed?”

“Guaranteed.”

“I hope so. I’m going to hear in an hour that the state’s had dealings with other companies who weren’t able to live up to the terms of their contracts.”

“The others didn’t have Ho,” Alan said.

Ho smiled broadly at that.

“Okay,” the governor said. “Fine. Good. Only don’t let me down.”

As Alan replaced the telephone receiver, Ho smiled again. “Good to have more demand than product,” he said.

A moment later a serious expression replaced his smile. “Still find no more mature red snapper females available at any hatchery. How we produce so many babies we need with only one mother? Maybe she get tired.” His mouth moved toward the side of his thin face as he thought. “Maybe Chang in Los Angeles—he import live fish.” He reached for the telephone on his wife’s desk.