Orient (9 page)

Over to his left, Ted whistled as he shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack of Camel Lights. It was Ted’s outdoors-only indulgence, another strike against him in the potential-future-surrogate-father department. Bryan looked around and realized that his feet were leading him far right when he had asked them to head straight. He corrected his movement and returned to the group.

Alistair had grabbed hold of Chip’s stomach, clawing it like a bowling ball. “If we want meat today, it’s all right here,” he said, shaking Chip’s lard.

Chip smacked the hand away, then overcompensated with a tilt of his chin. “Go on, take a good handful,” he said. “That’s what a man feels like. None of this waxing and dieting and
an-oh-rectum nerv-oh-sa
that killed off the dinosaurs and the Indians. I’ll tell you what will ruin white men. Not greenhouse gases or warming oceans or cigarettes. It’s vanity, plain and simple. It’s weakening you, Alistair. Those eyebrows of yours sure are getting thin. I could swear they used to meet above your nose, didn’t they?”

Alistair fingered the space between his eyebrows, and looked to Bryan for support. “Well, then your wife will make it through the next Ice Age A-OK,” he said after a pause. “What a relief when the next superior beings find Barbara squatting on an ice floe, and all of their books will show what white women once looked like, a bit like you but meaner and with a hairier back.”

“Yep, sounds like white women to me,” Ted agreed, relishing the fact that he didn’t belong to one. He carefully snuffed the half-smoked cigarette on his boot and collected the butt in his pocket.

“Bryan, did you see Beth Shepherd at your picnic?” Alistair asked him. “I’d give a deer to spend a minute between those tits. I could see her nipples poking through her dress.”

“Like she’d let you,” Chip replied. “She’s got an Armenian ogre for a husband.”

“He’s an artist,” Alistair said, dangling a limp wrist.

Bryan laughed along with the barbs, but he resisted trading any himself. He never spoke ill of a family member, never swapped sexual fantasies about local women like Beth Shepherd, and never commented on people’s weight or money troubles. That was the greasy talk of feeble men. Bryan was proud of the fact that he took care of his own body, twenty minutes on his basement rowing machine every night to make up for Pam’s indulgent use of butter. Unlike Ted or Alistair or Chip, he also had a real secret life that wasn’t the stuff of backslapping fantasy. He had cheated on Pam with three different women since the car crash four years ago, although cheating after twenty years of marriage and one near-death experience seemed like the wrong description for those tidy, dispassionate rendezvous. They were testing grounds for his own virility, a simple compromise a man made in an otherwise successful career as husband and father.

To Bryan, these dalliances hardly seemed like cheating because there was no love involved. Bryan would do anything for Pam: risk his life for her, hold her at night when she cried, anything. But the truth of what a person needed in order to feel human wasn’t always something you could discover by asking the people who knew him best. The answer was in the moments he went missing from his life, the quiet corners in the day that were his alone; because they were secret, because those precious seconds were so carefully counted and stored, they were his.

Still, the muscles in his neck tightened at times, flares from Bryan’s conscience causing him to wonder if he was really any better than his hunting partners after all. Maybe he was worse.

Alistair pointed to a herd of deer clipping through the marsh grasses, shooting single-file over the hillcrest that sloped down to the beach. Five doe were running as if spooked, each one a feasting prize if brought to earth.

“Why are they bolting?” Ted wondered.

“It’s not rut yet. They can’t be fleeing a buck,” Chip said as he followed them with his finger. The deer scrambled through the state park grounds and into the flatter grasses of private property, where licensed hunting was not allowed.

“Let’s follow them,” Alistair suggested.

Bryan shook his head. Tagging a doe on private property was illegal. And there was another reason he didn’t want to be seen on that property: he and Ted, as senior members of the historical board, were quietly negotiating to purchase it in hopes of preserving it from development, protecting it from an invasion of condos or golf-course greens. Looking past the ridge where the deer had come, beyond the tall grasses and planks where osprey built their branching nests, he could see the churning blue waters of the Sound, the swirling currents of Plum Gut, and, beyond the water, the faint coastline of Plum Island.

If he squinted, he could make out the white buildings on the island, the restricted government laboratories that were home to the U.S. Animal Disease Center. It was inside this distant compound, heavily protected by Homeland Security, that government scientists conducted research on animal pathogens. Plum Island hung off the coast of Orient in the vaporous haze of a mirage, but by the standards of local legend it was very real. There, government scientists conducted clandestine biological warfare experiments on live animals. For decades, stories had circulated that killing agents like anthrax were being cultivated there. It was widely believed by the residents of Orient that Lyme disease had been invented in those laboratories, created by the government to inflict on future enemies, and that the disease had been carried by wildlife across the water to the North Fork and the neighboring feeding grounds of Connecticut. It was biological warfare turned on its own citizens as they enjoyed their summer picnics and trips to the beach. When do the defense measures of a paranoid country become their own agents of self-destruction?

By some hardwired collective desire on the part of the year-rounders, the threat of living so close to such a dangerous landmark had been neutralized, dismissed as the lunatic talk of conspiracy theorists, fringe-literature writers, and fishermen with too much time to kill. Whenever the moon-eyed, antigovernment sort appeared by the carload in Orient wearing their
WE WANT ANSWERS
T-shirts, the locals dismissed their questions with a wave of their hands. “It’s all perfectly safe,” they insisted, until it was more like “IT’S ALL PERFECTLY SAFE!” An Orient year-rounder who openly questioned such home truths about Plum Island received cold shoulders and suspicious eyes.

Unlike most of the residents, Bryan had actually been to Plum Island. A few years ago, his security company had been awarded a short-term government contract to set motion detectors along its dock. He had taken the ferry over and was given a tour by armed officials of the management offices and the neighboring grounds. He had watched the deer amble through the grasses, the terrain of Plum Island so much like Orient but wilder, weed strewn and vacant of homes or service roads. “You let the deer run free?” he asked the official leading the tour, a man wearing a hard hat that made Bryan wonder what could fall on him out in the open. “We shoot them on sight,” the man replied, although the deer he saw were not taken down.

Bryan had signed a confidentiality agreement as thick as an almanac, and when he got back he said only, “Yeah, I went out there,” and placed his finger to his lips. He hadn’t seen the labs, or their notoriously efficient waste-management system, or even the ammunition room they purportedly maintained in case of terrorist attack. But the memory of those deer—which ran free on the island throughout the two weeks it took to rig the dock—troubled him when he returned home, a mile and a drip of salt water away from the facility. After that, he started using gloves when field-dressing his game and cooked his steaks until they were practically bricks of charcoal.

In theory, an island is a paradise of protection, guarded from human encroachment by its own geography. But any hunter knows that an island has pores too small for humans to slip through but large enough for animals to exploit. Deer swam. So did coyotes. They could paddle through the turbulent Plum Gut to hunt or graze on the island, collecting any mutant germ-warfare strain they came across, and carry it back to the mainland on the smallest follicle of skin. Birds flew easily from Orient to Plum. So did bats. Bryan couldn’t watch deer crowd his backyard, staring from his sliding door, without thinking of their fur as disease carriers, their heads and legs as warning skulls and crossbones. It would take only one of them, wet from the water, fat from Plum, to wipe away all life as he knew it.

He kneeled down to retrieve the arrow in the grass. His right hand missed by a foot, scooping up nothing. He concentrated on bringing his fingers over to where the arrow lay. A black dot lifted up from the island, as if it were an asteroid falling in reverse, but as it rose it tilted and became an army helicopter transporting government officials. It sped toward them over the Sound, and Bryan could hear its rotor blades ticking in the morning air. The sound of a helicopter overhead was the worst
blump ump ump
sound of all. He squeezed his eyes shut as the reverb invaded his ears, and stayed there, heart on knee, until the helicopter banked and drifted off.

“Is that Adam?” Alistair asked. Bryan hadn’t noticed the truck parked on the road just outside of the parkland. It was rusted and red and had
FIRE DEPT
painted in yellow across its side. A rack of antlers protruded from the open back. Bryan stood up and watched as Adam and two hunting partners emerged through the grasses, their faces painted in paisley smears of green and black. They all had infrared night-vision specs hanging around their necks, and one of them had an air horn hooked on his belt. The group had clearly been hunting for most of the night, right through the prohibited hours. They rested their crossbows on their shoulders. Even under the face paint, they looked tired and hungover. Bryan put his hands
on hips and shook his head. He had half a mind to report Adam to park patrol.

“You know night hunting’s not allowed,” he yelled.

The whites of Adam Pruitt’s eyes bulged defiantly. “I don’t want to hear it,” he shouted. “There’s enough deer for all of us.” Adam and his two friends, who Bryan couldn’t identify underneath their makeup, marched toward them. They were a younger, thinner, more menacing version of Bryan’s heavyset, middle-aged posse, just a decade or so older than their own sons. Bryan had already given Adam this lecture twice this season.

“I’m serious, Adam. This isn’t a national park. You go hunting at night, scaring the deer out with your air horns, shooting at whatever moves. There are homes all around here. With children in them. One day you’re going to shoot a kid with one of your crossbows—which also aren’t legal, by the way—and you’re going to wonder why you didn’t listen to me.”

“Listen, Bryan.” Adam slid right up into the older man’s face. His skin smelled of liquor and his eyes were veined from lack of sleep. “When you get to be sheriff of Suffolk County I might be interested in your instructions. In the meantime, mind your own business.”

The truth was, Bryan didn’t hate Adam Pruitt. Adam was the head of Orient’s volunteer fire department, an empty title at best, since no house had burned in Orient since Bryan could remember, but he appreciated Adam’s commitment to the community. The real reason for the anger was only known to Bryan and Adam and lost on the other men. Three months ago, Adam had started planning to open his own local home-security business, a direct competitor to Bryan’s time-trusted company. They were now business rivals forced to act like neighbors.

“And I think you’re drunk on top of it,” Bryan managed, although he took a step back to defuse the encounter. It was an instinctive retreat that he regretted as soon as his feet regained their stillness. He was glad Tommy wasn’t here to watch his father bow before a younger man.

Bryan wiped the back of his hand over his lip in a tough, masculine motion, but one that also shielded his face in case Adam decided to throw a punch. He searched out the faces of his comrades, the ones not painted green and black against the soft blue dome of the sky. Ted, Alistair, and Chip stood by staring, scared and sympathetic, all of them looking like old men in their embarrassing camouflage suits. Bryan’s fingernails shook against the buttons of his jacket. He was an old man too, or getting there.

“This is bullshit. Tell him,” one of Adam’s buddies murmured as he relieved his shoulder of the crossbow. “What we found over there.”

Adam bobbed his head and, in a surprising show of civility, extended his hand. Bryan didn’t want to shake it, but he had little choice.

“We can agree to disagree,” Adam said, then lifted his finger and pointed to the hillcrest, inviting Bryan and the others to follow.

They trudged through the phragmites, thick and squirreling as the blades brushed against their faces, lethal with ticks. As they descended the slope to the wet, rocky sand of the beach, gnats and flies clouded the air. An odor of decay struck Bryan’s nose, and he pressed his hand over his mouth.

Lying on the beach, bubbling as the tide pulled back like a sheet, was something dead. At least it looked dead, if
dead
meant
once alive
. Larger than a dog, the size of a deer but with shorter, pudgier legs, the shape of a man but with the spinal crouch of an animal that moved on all fours, the thing sprawled on the shore. Its skin was hairless, icicle blue, and sand-caked, home to a colony of flies. Bryan saw it first and crinkled his lips. But the blast radius of its presence spread outward, and soon Chip and Alistair stiffened behind him, their noses and shoulders recoiling.

“What the hell is that?” Chip wailed.

“Whatever it is, it washed in with the tide.” Adam pointed to the Sound. Already an armada of sailboats rocked in the deeper channels. The water rolled in, slapping against the monster’s hide and wetting their boots.

“But what is it?” Chip repeated.

“What
isn’t
it?” one of Adam’s friends replied.

At first Bryan took one of its bloated hooves for a head, but when he looked more closely he noticed a snoutlike protrusion at its far tip, a mouth open like a rabid raccoon, with spiky yellow teeth growing out of spit-white gums. The thing looked like one of Theo’s childhood picture books that split in three panels, where each panel exhibited a different animal part. The game was either to get all the parts to fit a familiar image or to get them wildly wrong. The snout suggested a wild boar, the teeth a dog, its front claw reaching out, as if to pull itself back into the ocean, a badger. It looked like a creature from Bryan’s nightmares, and it wasn’t much of a leap to tilt his eyes from the cadaver, through the jagged band of the Sound, past the white ornament of the lighthouse, and reach the specter of an island where animals were tested for their mutant possibilities. When Bryan looked around, every man on the beach was gazing at the island.