“What do you think about this cat business?” asked Martinez, to change the subject.
“A tactic to frighten us,” said Hurtado dismissively. “They must think we’re ignorant peasants frightened by magical animals. This suggests the Russians. Or Haitians. In any case, these chingadas are definitely the kind who won’t leave it alone, and so they’ll try for these other two pendejos we have and then we’ll have them. Isn’t that right, Ramon?”
El Silencio nodded, but naturally he said nothing at all.
Twelve
Onion sauce!” said Professor Cooksey. “Oh, bother! Oh, blow!”
Jenny looked up from her microscope and blinked. “Excuse me?”
Cooksey glared at her and said “Onion sauce!” again and grasped a handful of the yellow legal pages, reprints, and printouts that covered his desk in drifts, and threw them up at the ceiling. She stared at him.
“I feel like Mr. Mole,” he said. “This wretched paper and the atmosphere around this house. It’s not to be borne.”
Jenny knew what he meant. After the second killing, Rupert had become paranoid, or more paranoid than usual, although he said, often and loud, that they didn’t knowfor certain that Moie was involved in any violence and that the Forest Planet Alliance had always been vociferously against any hint of ecoterrorism, and if the police were to become involved, the forces of exploitation would be delighted to smear their good name. Therefore, Jenny saw, in a strange way the recent association with Moie was to be made a nonevent. Rupert had ordered the property scoured to remove any trace that Moie might have left behind and had ordered the elimination of any illegal substances. Scotty’s marijuana plants had been uprooted and mulched and carried off the property by dead of night, smoking paraphernalia had been deep-sixed, and the library and computers had been scrubbed of anything that would have offended a troop of Mormon Girl Scouts. Luna had stopped talking to anyone but Scotty, and that only in short angry bursts. Scotty’s normally morose mien had entered the outer suburbs of clinical depression, and since he was largely responsible for the physical maintenance of the property, the grounds had lately acquired a seedy look, like a man with a bad haircut and a three-day beard. No one had mentioned calling the police.
“Who’s Mr. Mole?” Jenny asked.
“Mr. Mole. In The Wind in the Willows?” He observed her blank stare. “You don’t mean to tell me you’ve never read The Wind in the Willows?”
“I haven’t read anything, Cooksey,” she replied with an irritated sigh. “I’m illiterate.”
“Nonsense! Didn’t anyone ever read to you?”
“I don’t think so. Places I grew up they mainly stuck us in front of the TV.”
“Well, that’s a shame. And I intend to repair the lack instantly. This minute.”
With which he rose from his chair and darted to a bookshelf, where he took down a thin yellow clothbound volume, much worn.
“Here it is, and we won’t read it here, oh no. Tell me, do you like boats?”
“I don’t know. I never been in one.”
“Never been…never been in a boat? I call that child abuse. My girl, there is, and I quote, ‘there is nothing — absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ That’s in this, too.” He waved the little book. “I tell you what, let’s utterly abandon our fusty academic labors, and this depressing and toxically earnest milieu, and head for the water. Are you game?”
She gave him one of her frank and shining smiles and a little shrug. “Whatever,” she said.
They took the old Mercedes, and a foam cooler full of beer and chips and sandwich stuff, which they sneaked from the silent kitchen like children stealing late-night contraband. Cooksey also brought a large stained rucksack full of various clanking gear, so that, he said, they could consider it a scientific expedition and not mere disgraceful lazing about.
They drove for an hour or so down the narrow road through the Everglades until they arrived in Flamingo. Cooksey knew a man who rented out wood-and-canvas Old Town canoes so that, Cooksey said, they would not have to use an aluminum abomination, like paddling a boiler shop, and they did rent a sixteen-footer and carried it down a launch ramp, and Jenny sat in the prow, with all their gear behind her, and Cooksey put a foot in the craft and pushed off gracefully. They paddled across Whitewater Bay, a vast sheet of what looked like ruffled pale gray silk dotted with dark mangrove islands, that showed as the sort of silhouettes used in stage musicals to suggest tropic climes. It was easy paddling, with a stiff breeze behind them.
On the other side of the bay Cooksey steered them to a little beach composed of billions of tiny shells, part of a small island that the state had designated a campsite. This was Wedge Point, he said, and time for lunch. There was a cleared area ringed with cocoloba and poisonwood trees and one large tree bearing green fruit, which Cooksey said was lignum vitae. They spread their blanket in the shade of this tree and ate their sandwiches and drank two beers each. Then Cooksey leaned against the trunk of the lignum vitae tree and gestured for her to sit down next to him. He had the book out and she leaned against the trunk next to him and he read her The Wind in the Willows. She listened openmouthed, like a child. At some deep level she understood why he was doing this, that he was giving her something she should have had as a small girl, a simple thing, being out in nature with a man she trusted, having a story read to her, a story about nature and animals. He was curing her, in a way, and also curing himself, she understood that, too. He wasn’t being entirely selfless, but she didn’t know from what illness he suffered.
At a certain point in the reading, she said, “I don’t get this part. Who is this guy with the horns playing the music?”
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn? Well, I think it’s meant to be Pan. He’s not dead to the animals, at least in this story. He’s their lord.”
“Like a god?”
“More like the spirit of nature itself. He’s shown in Greek art as a faun with a set of reed pipes and furry legs and hooves. His shout makes us mad. It’s where we get the word panic. Apparently he plays no more. It was a famous story; Plutarch reports it in his essay about why the ancient oracles failed. A ship was passing the island of Paxos and the pilot heard his name called and then a mighty voice shouted out ‘Great Pan is dead.’ And then he heard the sound of weeping. It happened just around the time of the Nativity, so the early Christians believed it was a symbol for the end of the pagan world. You have absolutely no idea of what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No.”
He laughed, not unkindly, and said, “Then let us return to Rat and Mole.” Which they did, but he made her read the last chapter herself, and she found that she could actually do it, with a little help. After that, they went around the little campsite, putting out sticky traps, and Cooksey darted about with his butterfly net grabbing flying creatures from the air. While he did that, he talked about the fall of Rome. Jenny knew Rome only as a type of movie and had believed that it was all made up, like Conan andStar Wars. She was fascinated to learn that a civilization could collapse without nukes or robots like in Terminator and wanted to know why.
“There are many theories,” said Cooksey in response to her question, “and any number of great thick books on the subject. Some blame Christianity for sapping the fighting spirit of the empire. Others say that the riches from the conquests destroyed the small farmers who provided the strength of the legions. The empire started to hire troops from outside the empire to defend it and they weren’t as good as the Romans had been. There’s even a theory that lead in their water pipes made them stupid and crazy.”
“What do you think?”
He laughed. “My thoughts are valueless-I’m no historian. But my old dad was a pretty fair amateur, we spent a good deal of time poking around Roman ruins. He thought they just got tired. People get tired of life and so do civilizations. They didn’t believe in their gods anymore, and their political system was dead, just a gang fight among generals, and thousands of foreigners were pouring through their borders, and they couldn’t be bothered to keep them out because they needed them, you see, to protect them from the even worse foreigners. So they pulled the legions back from the frontiers and everything sort of melted away, the schools closed, the books were used to start fires, and people forgot how to read and so on. And the buildings and roads crumbled because no one remembered how to fix them, and there was no money anyway and no trade.”
