Prophecy (14 page)

Maggie laughed, not knowing what to say.

“Want to see her picture?”

“Yes,” Maggie said.

They were both taken off guard by his sudden familiarity, and sensed that there was something wrong. A quick glance at his living conditions told Rob more. The small glass and redwood enclosure was littered with rumpled clothes and overused magazines; empty food tins and discarded liquor bottles were stacked in a corner on the floor. And the air was thick with an overwhelming stench. It was an odor that Rob had smelled before. Uremia. An aroma that exudes from the skin pores of alcoholics who have consumed so much liquor that their livers are no longer filtering out bodily toxins. The man’s eyes were discolored, too. Another sign of liver ailment and alcoholism. The forest ranger was, mentally and physically, in a state of alcoholic deterioration.

As he rummaged through a littered bookshelf for the photograph, both Rob and Maggie saw that one of the ranger’s hands was wrapped with a makeshift bandage of rags and blood-soaked cotton. The color of the blood told Rob that the wound was fresh and, because of the unsanitary bandage, would soon be infected.

“What do you think?” the ranger asked as he found the photograph and held it out to them. It was aged and blurred, the woman in it hardly visible.

“That’s your wife?” Maggie asked.

“God bless her dead soul.”

“Very pretty.”

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“Not any more.”

Maggie couldn’t help laughing. “Probably not,” she said.

“No … not any more,” he said as he gazed at the picture.

A moment of silence passed, the man sadly replacing the photograph on the bookshelf.

“Mind if I get some pictures?” Rob asked.

“No, help yourself. You want me to smile?”

“Beg pardon?”

“For the pictures.”

Rob almost laughed. “Oh, uh … no, I just want to get some pictures of the trees.”

The ranger smiled, as though sharing some secret.

“I’ll just sit and wait here,” he said, moving to a rocking chair, “until you’re ready to question me.”

Rob glanced at him with uncertainty, then began to snap photos while Maggie browsed through the Uttered bookshelf, trying to find some way to keep herself occupied.

“So you people are from Washington,” the ranger said.

“Um-hm,” Rob replied. “Is that the Espee River over there?”

“Wouldn’t be no other.”

“So I guess that smokestack is the pulp mill.”

“You with the FBI?”

“The FBI?” Rob answered with surprise.

“Yeah. You with the FBI?”

“EPA.”

“FBI, EPA, it’s all the same.”

Rob smiled and shook his head, then attached a long-distance lens onto his camera and focused on the smokestack that rose above the trees on the shores of the distant Espee River. The pulp mill was much bigger than he’d expected. It looked like a huge factory. The metal pipes and holding tanks that snaked around it were all glistening and new.

“I figured you’d be up here soon,” the ranger said.

“Is that right?” Rob replied.

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“Gotta find out the facts, don’t we?”

“I guess we do.”

“Yes, sir. When people get murdered, that’s what we gotta do.”

Rob turned and looked at him; he saw that Maggie was doing the same.

“Don’t we?” the ranger said.

“What do you mean?” Rob asked.

“Them lumberjacks. The ones that got killed, I’m innocent, and I’m ready to answer anything you want to ask me.”

Rob and Maggie exchanged a glance. They had finally gotten the drift of the man’s confusing conversation.

“Whenever you’re ready to ask me something,” the ranger said, “I’ll be happy to answer. Already told the sheriff everything I know, but he didn’t seem to want to believe me.”

“No?”

“Said I was drunk. You think I’m drunk?”

“I don’t know,” Rob answered. “Are you?”

“I drink some, but I know what I saw.”

Maggie took an interest and sat on the arm of a chair near him. “What did you see?” she asked.

“I told him I’d take a lie detector, I’ll tell you the same damn thing.”

“I’ll believe you,” Maggie reassured. “What did you see?”

The ranger looked at her and smiled. “My voice sound strange to you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Does to me. Rattles in my head. Maybe it’s my ears, not my voice.”

Maggie was completely baffled.

“Maybe it’s my hand,” he said, holding up his bandaged hand.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked.

“Didn’t even know I was bit till I saw the blood.”

“Something bit you?”

The ranger nodded and pulled a crumpled piece of

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paper from his pocket. “You like poetry?” he asked. “I wrote me a poem.”

Maggie looked at Rob. The conversation had gotten totally beyond her.

“What did bite your hand?” Rob asked as he packed up his camera.

The ranger ignored him, gesturing toward Maggie with the tattered piece of paper. “Go on. Take it. It all rhymes up. Everything rhymes.” Maggie hesitantly took it.

“Maybe you can put it out in Playboy magazine,” he said. Then he suddenly gasped with laughter, wheezing and coughing as he slapped his thigh. Maggie watched him with compassion. The man was plainly out of his mind.

“Mind if I look at that hand?” Rob asked. “I’m a doctor.”

“You are?” the ranger said with surprise.

“Uh-hm.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” He burst into laughter again.

Rob pulled up a stiff-backed chair in front of him, and opened the dressing on his wounded hand. It was an animal bite, the marks of sharp incisors clearly visible in the puffy flesh.

“What did this?” Rob asked.

“Him,” the ranger answered, nodding toward the corner. There, amid a pile of rubbish, lay the body of a dead cat. Maggie gasped at the sight of it and quickly shut her eyes.

“Died just last night,” the ranger said. “Bit me and then he died. Didn’t even know I was bit till I saw the blood.”

Rob rose and walked to the body of the dead cat. There was dried saliva around its mouth.

“Can we go?” Maggie asked quietly.

Rob knelt and picked up the dead cat. It was stiff, its body arched grotesquely, as though it had died in a back bend.

“Can I take this away for you?” Rob asked the ranger.

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“I don’t know why he turned on me,” the ranger said. There was sadness in his voice now. “I was always good to him.”

“I’d like to examine it.”

“We always ate dinner together,” the ranger continued. “He liked fish the best. Liked it cooked. Now, that’s some unusual cat … don’t you think?” His eyes began to glisten and he quickly turned away. Maggie watched him in silence, her eyes filled with sympathy.

“You ought to soak your hand in warm water,” Rob said.

The ranger nodded and began to weep. It was a pathetic sound, as though the act of crying caused him physical pain.

Rob gestured toward the door, but Maggie was reluctant to leave the man like this. Finally, she rose.

“We’ll be back, all right?” Maggie said to the ranger. “We’ll be back here before we leave.”

“Bury it deep, will you?” the ranger replied through his tears. “I don’t want that thing to eat it.”

Rob and Maggie exchanged a puzzled glance, then stepped outside.

They stood in momentary silence on the narrow porch, saddened by the misery that existed here.

A breeze had begun to blow, rippling the surface of the lake; the tattered piece of paper the forest ranger had given Maggie fluttered in her hand as she opened it and tried to decipher the childlike scrawl.

“Three … little … searchlines,” she said, reading quietly aloud.

“Searchlights,” Rob corrected as he gazed over her shoulder.

“Searchlights,” she continued, “burning bright. All went out in a turrible fight.” She paused, looking at Rob, then went on. “See him by the lake next day … big as a dragon … with wings that was … gray.”

The breeze came stronger; Maggie’s hair wafted into her face as she stared at the note, trying to make out the rest.

“That’s it?” Rob asked.

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“The rest is crossed out.”

Their eyes met, and neither spoke.

“Does it sound like something you’ve heard before?” Maggie asked.

Rob thought about it and shrugged.

“Big as a dragon?”

He slowly shook his head.

“It’s this man’s job to sit and stare out at this forest,” Maggie said. “You said so yourself. He’s supposed to be here night and day.”

Rob looked at her and smiled.

“This poem is about what he saw.”

“He’s blind drunk, Maggie. What he sees are hallucinations.”

“As big as a dragon? That’s what Isely said at the airport.”

“If you were that drunk, you’d see dragons, too.”

She thought about it and nodded. Then she grimaced with embarrassment, suddenly feeling foolish.

“This place is getting to you,” Rob said as he took her hand and started down.

“I’m afraid it is.”

“Let’s go fishing, huh? Let’s just mind our own business for a while.”

They climbed carefully down the narrow stairs, Rob securing Maggie with one hand, holding the stiffened carcass of the dead cat in the other. As they walked back through the forest, they smelled rain in the air. There was a rumble of thunder from a cloud bank hovering dark and low over the peaks of the distant mountains.

The family of campers, Travis Nelson and his wife and children, felt the first drops of rain and decided to pitch their tents and wait it out. It would delay their climb to the waterfall, but the uphill journey would be too difficult on saturated ground. They set up camp by the shores of Mary’s Lake, in the hope that the downpour would end by morning.

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But it did not. The cloud bank that had moved in hung over the wilderness basin like a permanent lid, sending down a seemingly inexhaustible supply of rain. Within two days, new buds had broken through the ground; the once bare branches of trees were lined with the light green felt of spring. The forest animals took shelter for the duration, accepting hunger with the instinctive knowledge that when the deluge ended, the ground would swell with plenty. The rain that was absorbed into a thirsty earth would hydrate dormant seeds, bringing sustenance to the small creatures that thrived on vegetation; they, in turn, would provide a food source for the meat eaters. The food chain that began with microscopic fungus ended with the largest predator; a bear that consumed a deer was eating acres of vegetation that had brought the deer to adulthood.

In the rain-and wind-whipped trees, the only figure that moved was that of Robert Vera. Maggie had became increasingly nervous with the confinement caused by the rain; he was eager to complete his work as soon as possible.

The brain histology he had conducted on the dead cat had been inconclusive. There was damage there, not unlike that of the raccoon, but the hours that had passed between the time the animal had died and when it was examined, had caused the brain cells to atrophy. It would require sophisticated equipment for proper analysis; as soon as the rain stopped, Rob would send some tissue samples, along with some from the raccoon, to the laboratory in Washington.

For now, there was little to do but trudge through the mud on the island, which was quickly becoming a swamp, and examine the changes caused by the rain.

As far as Rob’s ecological survey was concerned, the rain itself was providing important answers. The soil was clay-based and therefore absorbed an enormous amount of rain. If the trees were to come down, denying the soil the root system that hungrily sucked up excess water, the soil would become oversaturated.

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It would cause new seedlings to drown, and in ten years’ time the entire forest would become an ecological wasteland.

There were, of course, artificial ways to save the new seedlings. They could be cultivated separately, in a controlled environment, and replanted once they had become stable. If the Pitney Paper Mill were willing to make this kind of costly and time-consuming commitment, it could override the immediate effects. But promises were easy to make and impossible to police. The lumber company could agree, then fail to meet its obligation. The Environmental Protection Agency did not have the funds to undertake a constant watch.

Rob had read of the duplicity of the lumber companies. The publicity budget of a single lumber company was probably equal to what the Environmental Protection Agency survived on, and supported a full staff with, for an entire fiscal year. In terms of their respective messages reaching the public, the lumber companies had a clear edge. In television advertisements and brochures, they convinced the public that they were refoliating as fast as they were defoliating, but the simple mathematics would tell even a school-child that that was impossible. It takes fifty seconds to cut a tree. Fifty years or more to grow one.

As Rob trudged knee-deep in mud through the turbulent forest, he was awed by the power of the elements around him. It was little wonder that the Indians had assumed that lightning and thunder were sent down by the gods. Rob wondered if his own explanations were any better. Surely the perfection of the environmental system, from the respiration of the smallest insect to the motion of the planet itself, left a gap that scientific logic could not fill. Man himself was physically among the weakest and most vulnerable of the earth’s creatures; perhaps his analytical mind was no more than a defense mechanism, a bully that rose up to compensate.

Rob’s isolation in this new world had opened up

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resources in his mind that he was eager to probe. He wondered if man, in his most primitive condition, was not the predator but the prey. In prehistoric times, when saber-toothed tigers roamed the American forests, men must have been like rabbits, cowering in silence and fear. It was an established fact that the evidence of man’s cultural development, his cave paintings, his written language, began with the evidence of his campfires. Perhaps there was an important relationship there. If fire provided protection from the animals at night, it would have given primitive man the first opportunity to speak with his fellow man without the fear that the sounds he made would attract predators. If he hunted by day and hid by night, the fact of fire might have given him the first comfort to speculate, to dream, to let his mind roam. On the complicated and hazardous road to survival, perhaps it was something as sudden as the first controlled fire that allowed man’s mind to begin developing into the abstract and, ultimately, self-defeating mechanism that it was today.