Tea Kettle Island

One

2010-08-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

Derek Coulter was lying face-up on a weathered limestone wall, envisioning his leap. In high school he had not been good at gymnastics, but had mastered one vault, the simple one in which you placed your hands smack in the middle of the horse and threw your legs to one side. If you landed upright on the smelly blue mat you threw your arms smartly in the air. This was what he hoped for, except for the jubilant ending, a leap smooth and dignified — please, not klutzy, a misplaced hand leading to a face-plant on the International Orange rail, followed by an uncontrolled bloody-nosed descent.

He had been drinking beer and was drowsy. He closed his eyes. Subtropical sea air flowed over and around him. Well this was nice, a relatively quiet moment. The ringing in his ears was almost imperceptible.

Then an impulse caused him to open his eyes at exactly the instant another airplane a telephone-pole or so overhead glided past with its landing-gear dangling. He rolled left to watch, which hurt because he was naked, and rolling naked on weathered limestone hurts. Because he had been drinking, it didn’t hurt as much as it otherwise would have. The plane traveled the gap between Tea Kettle Island and the airport, going down, down, down, until blue smoke squirted from its tires, followed by the punching rumble of the reverse thrusters, which caused Derek’s ears to squawk.

Inside the jet people were feeling the tug of deceleration against their seatbelts.
Two weeks earlier, Derek had experienced that same sensation, staring out the window at the pretty pastel houses with their stepped, whitewashed roofs. No doubt a large number of those on board were honeymooners, holding hands, beaming, mouthing, “We’re here!” It was a white plane with a red maple leaf on the tail.

“Piss off,” Derek said, and rolled back, adding to the dents in his skin. “There are too many damn people in Bermuda already.”

"Cheerio," the Admiral called. He was old, but the kind of old referred to as “spry.” He had strange facial hair, a broad moustache that tapered sideways to connect with his sideburns so that the bottom half of his face seemed left behind. He was standing spraddle-legged at the stern of his motorized, forty-two-foot sloop. It was an extraordinary boat, constructed from genuine Bermuda cedar, with decks thickly lacquered and buffed to brilliance. All instruments and fittings were authentic brass pieces from the early 20th Century. A sharp-edged Union Jack fluttered behind from a diagonal pole. Miriam Villanueva, who had just disembarked, thought the sloop pretty, but that a speedboat with large outboard engines would have been more practical.

Adrian was the tall man standing next to her. He said, "Right, now let's get this show on the road, shall we?" He strode across the beach to the path that disappeared into the trees. He had taken the hurricane lantern, leaving Mimi to choose from the big pack, the cooler, and the tent. She rubbed her eyebrows, and then squatted to wrench her arms through the straps of the pack. She stood and centered the load without flipping over like a ladybug, but her first two steps sank her feet deep into the soft sand and she needed quickly to splay her legs to keep from pitching forward.

"Adrian!" she called, into his torn footprints, "Where are you going?" He was already out of earshot, making a beeline for the old house up by the rampart.

Derek’s first reaction to being prodded in the small of the back with a stick was to incorporate his pet cat, Roy, into his dream, in which he was lying on a grassy hillside, watching himself walk down into the grove of towering eucalyptus next to the biology building. Roy was trying to settle down on top of him, what he always tried to do.

He swatted at the stick without waking up. "Get lost, Roy," he said.

Roy clawed him again, this time at the base of his neck.

"Speak to me. Who are you?"

Well this was wrong. Roy was in many of his dreams, but never talked because that would have been cheating. Roy was not clever enough to cheat.

"You, wake up!”

Derek was jarred awake in purple light by his nemesis, the Berkeley eye-gouger, the bastard who had ruined his life, who had arrived on the island as he slept and now was brandishing a stick, trying to gouge the other eye. Fortunately, this time he was wearing wrap-around sunglasses. His mind cleared partially, enough for him to reach for the only weapon in sight, the last unopened can of beer. In high school he had been a pitcher on the baseball team. He had been pretty good at that.

The pack on Mimi’s back had become part of her. It couldn’t be shaken off. The straps bit into her shoulders and rubbed against her collar bones. With each step, the bottom of the frame banged the soft back of one or other knee, trying to topple her. She didn’t know exactly where she was going, or where Adrian was, but, expecting him to backtrack and meet her, continued laboring up the path, head down, wide-eyed for roots and rocks. Twice she was speared in the arms by very sharp-leaved plants she couldn’t see to avoid. She paused at a quarried limestone slab to prop the pack and wipe dampened strands from her eyes, and above her pulse heard Adrian shouting. At who, her? Bracing smooth heels against rough stone, she stood and wobbled to the top of the slope. She saw Adrian first, down on one knee, holding his head. Then she saw a second man, a naked man, jump down off a wall, holding something heavy, a pair of binoculars. He was about to swing them at Adrian. “Stop!” she yelled.

The beer can, after caroming off the stick-man’s head, went skittering across the rocks. It had sprung a leak and was spiraling out foam as it headed downhill. Derek froze. This person was not his nemesis. He had no clue who this person was. In addition, a short, dark-skinned young woman was lurching forward, yelling something. Inexplicably, she toppled backward. Something had grabbed her from behind.

Mimi freed one arm and then the other from the backpack. Ready to run, she shouted, "Adrian, what's going on?"

The stick-man was back upright, but had dropped his stick. Derek’s mind was ineffectively abuzz, the combined effects of adrenalin and alcohol and a sudden realization of pantslessness. He heard the beer can roll to a stop somewhere.

The stick-man ran to the young woman, held her arm and demanded of Derek, "Who the hell are you, and what are you doing on this island?" He was rubbing the side of his head.

Derek had leapt back atop the rampart and was doubled over against the darkening sky. He had his t-shirt, but the shorts were missing. "Where the hell are my pants? Where the hell are my pants?" he said. He yelled, "Would you please just back off till I find my pants?"

They backed off a little. "You're an American," said the stick-man.

Derek jumped down and approached, holding his t-shirt like a bull-fighter's cape. He felt the young woman's stare and stopped to hastily tie it around his waist. He said, "You are not allowed to be here. This is a nature preserve."

This information seemed briefly to confuse the newcomers and had the effect of calming things down. The stick-man and the young woman looked to each other and the woman shrugged. The stick-man said, "It's also an important historical site. I'm here to take charge of an archeological dig."

This claim held an unwelcome ring of believability. Crap. Derek asked, "On whose authority?"

"Look," said the stick-man. "I'm Dr. Adrian Lyon, Curator of New World Archeology at the Royal Ontario Museum."

Derek thought, These people are from Toronto. They were on that plane. He said, “You don’t sound Canadian. You sound British.”

“It doesn’t matter what I sound like. People like me work all over the world.”

“Yeah I know,” said Derek. “But you felt it necessary to point out that I was American. Did I hurt you? You seem upset.”

“You threw a can of beer at my head!”

“You came out of nowhere and jabbed me with a cedar branch. What was I supposed to do?”

“For one, you’re supposed to be wearing clothing.”

“I wasn’t expecting company.”

The young woman asked, "Ah--have you guys stopped fighting? Is this situation more-or-less okay now? ”

The men looked at her and said nothing.

“Good,” she said. She turned to leave.

Derek said, "Watch out for the Spanish bayonets, the yucca-plants with the spiky leaves."

She said, "I already know." She rubbed her arm and headed down the path. Her accent was partly, not entirely, Canadian.

Derek asked, "And she would be your assistant?"

"My doctoral student. She'll be the teaching assistant for our course."

"What course?"

"In addition to carrying out a dig on this island, we’re teaching a course on field archeology."

"No way. This is a nature preserve. You folks have landed on the wrong island.”

Adrian said, "We have not, but you seem to have. You’ll need to go back to your campsite, if you have one, and gather up your belongings, if you have any, and be prepared to be removed in the morning. This island is off limits to everyone except us."

Derek resumed the search for pants, walking along the shadow of the wall. They must have fallen off the other side. He looked at Adrian and said, "I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to be here. I have authority, from the Bermudian Fisheries Division. I’m a biologist, here to study an endangered species, the Bermuda rock lizard."

Adrian said, “There’s no such thing.”

“It’s a skink,” said Derek.

“A what?”

“A large family of lizards. Bermuda’s only endemic terrestrial species is the Bermuda rock lizard. This island is one of their last remaining habitats.” It was difficult to sound or feel convincing while not wearing pants .

“I’ve never seen them. I camped out on this island as a boy. There are no lizards.”

“There sure are. Anoles too.”

“Where are you from?” Adrian asked.

“University of California.”

“Which campus?”

Ha. He had fallen into the trap. “Berkeley.” This was a heavyweight answer. No Canadian institution could match that clout.

Adrian tilted his head and squinted at Derek. He said, "I'll consult with the Bermudian authorities first thing tomorrow to have them find you another island to do whatever it is you think you need to do here."

Derek said, “Wrong. Tomorrow I'll show you the lizards, and then I’ll get the Bermuda Fisheries Warden to take you and your students to another island. This archipelago is packed with crumbling old forts."

Adrian seemed about to say something, but then waved his hand. "We’re working here. We're losing light." He wheeled around and disappeared down the hill, into the palmettos.

“You owe me a beer,” Derek said. He walked to where the can had bled out and popped the top to drain whatever might be left. He then walked back to the rampart to toss it in with the others in his backpack. He found his flip-flops, and climbed onto the wall for one last look. It seemed his shorts had fallen into the sea and drowned.

The archeologist had been given a sufficient head start. Derek now followed down the darkening path. He almost tripped over a nylon bag, which had been discarded by the young woman, who was seated on the limestone slab a little farther along and seemed to be fiddling with her sandal strap. He was mistaken. She was pulling at the spine of a prickly pear stuck in her ankle. He had suffered similar injuries from the ground-hugging cactus. Once the spines penetrated the skin, any motion anchored them deeper. Like porcupine quills, they possessed recurved barbs, but were even more difficult to remove because the exposed shafts were short and smooth, providing almost nothing to grip. They hurt like hell. She glanced at him. Derek wordlessly strode past, but then felt ashamed. He backtracked and knelt in front of her, mindful of the hang of his shirt. "Let me help," he said.

"It’s a thorn. It won’t come out. I can't pull it hard enough." Her voice was taut.

"Hold your leg still, okay?" He clamped her ankle with his left hand and slid his sunglasses up into his hair. He pinched the shaft. "You have to rotate them.” A twist of his wrist and it was out.

"Ow!" she cried and pulled her leg away, which sent him tumbling. The apex of his tailbone bounced off a limestone cobble.

She drew her knee up and across herself to examine the wound. He hurriedly flipped his sunglasses back down. "That really hurt!" She poked at the minuscule bloodspot.

Derek stood to go.

She said, “Thank you.”

He said nothing and sidled away from her, mostly backwards. His left butt-cheek was in open air.

“I'm Mimi Villanueva. I'm a graduate student in archeology at the University of Toronto. Adrian is my supervisor." She extended her hand.

He stepped forward and shook her fingertips. Their softness made him aware of his own hand’s roughness. He said, "I'm Dr. Derek Coulter." He rarely referred to himself as "doctor" non-facetiously, but the archeologist had set the rule for this island. "I'm a biologist, a herpetologist, from California, here to study the endangered Bermuda rock lizard."

"Oh." She smiled. “That’s very interesting. You’re an academic too.” Her teeth were bright, even through sunglasses in what little twilight penetrated the canopy. She said, "You pulled a thorn out of me. Some day I'll have to pay you back." The teeth flashed again. She was hugging her knees.

"Some day, like maybe tomorrow, you could push your supervisor off a cliff."

The teeth disappeared. She said, hushed, "That’s just him. He's not always all that great with people. Forget about it."

Derek dearly wished for his pants. He said, "I want you to know I’m not generally a crazy naked person. Usually there’s nobody here, and it is hot, and so…” He continued, “I was asleep and he poked me in the neck with a stick. I was dreaming and I thought he was someone else, someone dangerous. I wasn’t even fully awake." He tugged modestly at the edge of his t-shirt, adjusting its hang.

She said, "Don't worry. It will make for a funny story some day." She added, "You shouldn’t be embarrassed, you have a nice body."

His face became hot. He was thankful it was almost dark.

“I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

"Well, goodnight," he said.

They heard footsteps. Derek stepped back from Mimi as Adrian came upon them, carrying the cooler. He looked at Derek, then at Mimi.

"I had a thorn stuck in my ankle," she said.

Adrian gave Derek a dirty look. Mimi gathered the tent and Adrian let her step past, and then gave Derek another dirty look before following her up the slope to the rampart.

The herpetologist reached down and his fingers found the ragged cobble that had injured his tailbone. He could see the pitch, high heater, but didn’t throw. He squeezed the stone hard until he had made a moonscape of the heel of his hand.

Adrian and Mimi weren't having much success erecting their new tent. There weren't enough poles, or pieces of rope were missing, or something. It didn't seem to have corners.

"Can there possibly be such a thing as a spherical tent?" asked Adrian.

She let him carry on fruitlessly for a while, and said, finally, "We can sleep under the stars tonight. It's nice out." She couldn't remember ever having seen so many stars. She spread her arms skyward and spun in a circle, causing the universe to spin the opposite way. She inflated the air mattress with a foot-pump while Adrian continued battling the tent half-heartedly, flipping it over and back slowly and staring at it and repeating this in the chance that its secrets might leak out. Mimi zipped the sleeping bags together, took off her clothes and burrowed into the fluffy, cool lining. "Oh Adriannn, Oh Professor Lyonnn..," she called, to lure him from the uncooperative Nylon and Gore-Tex blob.

He grudgingly gave up. He balled up the tent and hurled it into a clump of buttonwoods, and then looked down at her, in response to which she pulled the edge of the sleeping bag to her eyes and fluttered her lashes coyly. He removed his shoes and shorts and crawled into the sleeping bag.

She rolled astride him. “Hi there,” she said.

“No, not tonight,” he said.

“C’mon.”

“No, not tonight.”

She rocked on him, but got nothing. She sighed and rolled off. “What’s wrong? Show me where the beer can hit you on the head.” She attacked his scalp with both hands.

“Stop that.”

"Don't be mad." She tickled him.

"I want to sleep, Mimi." And then she was staring at his back.

"Adrian..."

He didn’t answer.

"You are not helping," she muttered in her first language.

"English," he said.

She waited until she was sure he was asleep before saying her prayers, which were not in English until she got to the end. "Good night," she said. She opened her eyes. A satellite was creeping across the sky. It winked at her, and it was gone.

At his camp at the other end of the little island, Derek plucked a pair of shorts from the clothesline he had strung between two ghost cedars and pulled them on. His hammock, slung between one of the old dead trees and a spike embedded in a mortared seam on the side of the redoubt, the most substantial stone defensive structure on the island, was swaying gently, beckoning. He rolled in. The sharp stick of the archeologist and the soft fingers of his student briefly fought each other in his head, but their argument dulled to irrelevance with the recollection that the big man would be here in the morning. The big man would make the intruders go away.

Then, as happened every night, Derek thought of what he feared was his future, of the place where he would be employed within half a year if something significantly more promising didn’t come along. His empty stomach hurt and he wished he had eaten a proper meal. He didn't want that job, but with his wife and her income gone, Derek couldn't wait around for something less like absolute hell. "Please God, no," he said to no one in particular.

Continued…

Map of Tea Kettle Island

Map of Tea Kettle Island

2010-08-09T13:55:00.000-07:00

Continued...

Two

2010-08-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

Two men were perched on the wall of the rampart. One was kicking the heel of a boot against the stone. The other was hunched forward expectantly, in danger of falling off. They were wearing identical blue waistcoats trimmed with red and fastened with shiny gilt buttons, straw hats embroidered with gold and encircled with rose-colored ribbons. They were soldiers. Unbeknownst to them, they had died a very long time ago.

Their names had been Robert Murchie and Reginald Chambers, and they had been British infantrymen, brought to Bermuda in 1712. Five years later they lost their lives on Tea Kettle Island during the ceremonial firing of one of the 12-pounders up on the redoubt, close to where Derek was presently asleep. The fateful cannon blast had been the third of a three-gun salute to celebrate the successful return of one of Bermuda's large fleet of privateers. Cannon-firing was a much-enjoyed ritual, carried out so often that the young colony was usually precariously low on gunpowder.

In early Bermuda there was little public money to replace aging cannons, and many were seriously salt-eaten or in other states of disrepair. Thus the guns tended to be far more dangerous to those firing them than to any potential foe. In fact, only once in Bermuda's long history were shore-mounted guns fired in anger, and no casualties resulted on either side. This occurred in 1613, when two Spanish ships, allegedly returning to dig up a cache of buried treasure, were repelled by two cannon shots from Castle Island, a short distance to the southwest of Tea Kettle.

On the other hand, injurious misfirings of cannon during practices and ceremonies were distressingly frequent, although usually not entailing as spectacular a loss of life as befell the Tea Kettle company. Had someone sat them down and explained what happened (there were to be opportunities to do so over the next few hundred years), Robert and Reginald might have admitted to part of the blame. It had not simply been the fault of the salt-eaten gun. The eve of their demise, both soldiers had consumed a significant quantity of rum in celebration of a recent, completely unexpected acquisition of wealth. As a result of their hangovers, which felt about as miserable in 1717 as they did 292 years later, their performances as gunners on the morning of their deaths hadn't been representative of their true abilities. Each made a serious error. Robert, whose job it was to put the touchstick to the vent to ignite the charge, neglected to check if Reginald, whose job it was to insert the charge and wadding and pack them in place, had fully extricated the ramrod. He hadn't. His shaky hands had slipped from the shaft on the third and final stroke, and the ramrod was left protruding from the muzzle of the rickety old gun like the handle of a lollipop. As Robert stood rigid, hungover and proud, one arm bent in salute to the victorious pirate ship, he heard Reginald say, "Oh dear..."

The gun went off.

The ramrod flew end-over-end, far above the bow of the vessel, trailing a helix of blue-black smoke. The privateers gaped in amazement, then cheered lustily as shards of corroded metal and bits of Robert and Reginald rained down, decorating the turquoise water with variously-sized red and white splashes.

Robert and Reginald hadn't enjoyed being Bermuda troopers. The pay was miserable and the job earned few favors from the grossly outnumbered Bermudian women, who considered soldiers stupid and boorish. Life on Tea Kettle Island was harsh and boring, with only goats, pigs, rabbits, other equally dispirited men, and Bermuda rock lizards for company. Robert and Reginald made life bearable for each other by speaking privately of a shared dream. They intended one day to buy a boat, a sleek, seaworthy sloop, and join the lucrative Turks Island salt trade that was making other Bermudians so very wealthy. Their dream might have come true, save for their dramatic deaths, because two days before being blown to smithereens a miracle happened. As they were quarrying out a pit near the center of the island to provide limestone blocks for yet another reinforcement of the rampart, the ground gave away, revealing a small cave. Inside, lo and behold, was buried treasure, consisting mostly of Spanish bullion. It was late in the day, and to hide their breathtaking secret from the others they back-filled the hole. After dark, they retrieved the weighty bounty and hid it on the island in a place where none of their mates would ever find it. Soon, they reckoned, after working out a few details, they would be free from this rock, free from Bermuda, free from lonely, womanless boredom.

Coincidentally, the treasure they had found was the cache the Spaniards had returned to claim in 1613, leading to Bermuda's one and only instance of hostile cannon-fire.

But now, almost three centuries after their obliteration, they were still on the island, without a boat, and unaware the world had changed substantially. They were puzzled over the disappearance of the other soldiers. The rest of the company had vanished without a trace some time ago, a few hours or days or weeks. They couldn't be sure. Time seemed to have come all unbuttoned.

In addition, the island had become inhabited by spirits. Several times during the past few hours, days, or weeks — they couldn't be sure — they had seen a solitary figure appearing and dissolving in different places throughout the island. He was an unclothed man with unkempt hair who sometimes could be seen scraping in the leaves, and sometimes could be heard digging holes. He had been seen at the water tank too, which made them nervous. Whenever one of the soldiers called to him, he jerked upright, wiggled his fingers into his ears, and vanished into the thick blue air. Instead of eyes, the specter had a shiny band of brass across his face.

And now, just a few minutes or hours or days ago, Reginald had seen a beautiful girl, dusky and dark-haired, unlike any girl he'd seen before. She was dressed like a boy in knee breeches and shirtsleeves. When Reginald first saw her, she was standing in the middle of the clearing, rocking up and down on one foot. Then she turned and faced Reg and started pulling off her clothes, right in front of his jiggling eyeballs. As he gawked in fear and excitement, without saying anything she vanished too.

So Robert and Reginald sat waiting, hoping the girl would reappear. They were sincerely alarmed at the presence of spirits, but it had been a long time since either of them had seen a girl (it had been 292 years, but seemed like weeks or months), and they were willing to risk a scare for the chance of viewing the beautiful apparition.

Continued…

Three

2010-08-07T18:56:00.000-07:00

Derek shook a fist at the kiskadees and yelled, "Shut up!" Every morning these birds perched on a branch eight feet above his head, and jolted him awake with their maniacal screams. They invaded his nightmare, become part of it, made it worse, and left him knotted and jangled in his hammock.

They looked down on him with predatory dinosaur eyes, and then swooped into the palmettos.

He tumbled to the ground and fumbled with the little propane stove, pausing in the middle of this to find his watch. Exactly two minutes later than yesterday, and four from the day before. How tightly were these birds wired to the sun? Once the flame was ignited and set, he stood and strained to listen for friendly drone of Michael Spencer's Boston Whaler. As the kettle heated, he hiked to the point, the tip of the teapot spout, and crouched on the highest crag. The morning air was pleasant, humid but cool, and it calmed him until he remembered the night before. He glared back over the island at the elevated rampart where the archeologists were probably still asleep.

Tropicbirds were flying long arcs above the ocean, chuckling, celebrating the new day.

“Stop being happy,” he said. “There is nothing to be happy about.”

With no sign of Michael, he returned to his camp. The kettle was singing. He reduced the flame and then couldn’t decide what to make for breakfast. Instant coffee, and…cookies. They were weird cookies, cream-filled imitation Oreos from the UK. The humidity had made them squishy, which by chance made them more palatable. He ate three, and then, appalled at himself for how his diet had deteriorated, took an apple from the cooler and ate it as quickly as possible.

He walked to the shore and hurled the core into the sea. That’s when the sound of the boat rounding St. David's Head was carried in on the breeze. Derek ran back to his campsite to grab the garbage bag.

The big man shifted the engine to neutral and hurled the anchor back-handed, frisbee-style and blind. Maybe five years older than Derek, Michael had pommel-horse shoulders and upper arms thicker than Derek's, or anyone else's, thighs. He reversed to the rocks, where Derek sat with feet dangling inches above the water, and cut the engine. The anchor chain continued to feed over the bow in a rapid, musical clatter. Stretching out, Derek deflected the stern to the side with the soles of his tennis shoes, having learned a few things about boats. There had been embarrassing mishaps on previous visits when he had tried to push aside the engine-cowling with his hands. Once he had pitched headfirst into the boat. Another time, misjudging the complicated momentum of the bouncing craft, he folded like a cardboard box and allowed the engine to scrape noisily against the rocks. That’s when Michael had said, “You’re from California. There is an ocean there, right?”

Derek replied, “There’s a lot of desert there too. Ichthyologists do ocean. Folks like me do desert.”

Michael leapt ashore gracefully with stern line in hand. He tied an unrepeatable knot around a small spire among the mishmash of wave-eaten limestone and the boat settled alongside, squeaking gently on plastic bumpers. The Bermudian reached to shake Derek’s hand. He always did, and it usually hurt. “You look good,” he said. “How are things?” Before Derek could answer, he dropped back into the boat with unusual lightness — he weighed at least two hundred and eighty pounds Derek guessed — and started handing up supplies. Today he brought the usual assortment of fruit, cheese and luncheon meats, plus bread, cartoned milk, canned goods and bottled water. There was a new gas canister for the stove, three bags of ice for Derek's cooler, and, mercifully, a palate of beer. Derek handed him the garbage, neatly bundled and clanking with the sound of crushed cans. He said, "You know, I like this arrangement, I give you garbage, you give me beer."

Michael laughed. "The necessities of life." He tossed the bag into the bow, and said, "A couple more things." He reached into the binnacle and pulled out a black walkie talkie with a short, flexible antenna. "A phone," he said. Then he lifted a long, brown vinyl case from the floor of the boat. Derek could see it contained a rifle.

"A gun?"

Michael leapt back ashore. "For you," he said. Then something caught his eye, far up on the rampart. He lifted his binoculars. Like Derek, Michael usually had binoculars strung about his neck.

Derek looked too. It was Adrian Lyon, scowling down from atop the highest remaining wall of the old stone house. His hands were on his hips and he was wearing a floppy cloth hat.

"Who's that? Did you know there was someone here?" Michael waved, but the figure remained motionless until the hat blew off. Then it started yelling at someone not visible from the shore.

Derek answered, "We have a problem." He was happier now that the cavalry had arrived, armed.

"If that fellow isn't careful, he'll split his skull,” said Michael. "Do you know who he is?"

"We met yesterday — last night. He's an archeologist from Canada, from England actually. He says he's here to do a dig and teach a field course."

Michael did a double-take of surprise. “Are you sure?”

“That’s what he told me.”

“I don’t think so,” said Michael. “Apart from Fisheries, the only person allowed on this rock is you.”

“He has a graduate student with him. A girl called Mimi.”
"I know nothing of this. I'd better go have a chat." Michael started toward the path. “Coming?”

“Do you need me to?”

“No.”

“Then I’d rather not.”

“You didn’t hit it off with him.”

“He’s an asshole.”

Michael said, “An English asshole. In Bermuda. Imagine that.”

After Michael departed, Derek unzipped the rifle bag. The gun was a single-shot .22 with a telescopic sight. He took it out and raised it to his shoulder. He found a tree-top. The magnification was at least twice that of his binoculars. He lowered the gun and popped open the bolt. He snapped the bolt closed. He put the rifle back in the bag and zipped it shut.

He carried the supplies to his campsite, three trips, back and forth. He was packing ice around the meat and cheese when Michael appeared.

"Derek-boy, correct diagnosis.”

“How so?”

“Asshole."

"Beer?" Derek pointed to the palate. It was not yet 7:30.

Michael seemed to consider it, then shook his head. "It looks as though you're going to have company for a while."

"No way.”

"Apparently they're here under the auspices of the Bermuda Historical Society. It's legit. I'm sorry, I never thought to ask if the historical folks might be doing anything on this island this summer. I don’t believe they've ever done any work here before.”

"They're going to be here for how long? How many? They can't possibly stay here." Among other things, Derek was thinking about sanitation. He had set aside one corner of the palmetto grove, one of the quarried areas, for himself, where every morning he went about his business and buried the evidence with his little collapsible infantryman's spade. The island with its limited surface area was too small to support a larger population without modern washrooms. He definitely didn't want to be stepping around human waste and soiled toilet paper while working his traplines.

"It shouldn’t be too bad," Michael replied, picking up the walkie talkie. "The students will only be here during the day. They'll be boarding with Morris Ashburner in Tucker's Town. He's Mr. Lyon's uncle, apparently.” He added, “Another piece of work."

"You know him?"

"He's well-known. Everyone calls him 'the Admiral.'"

"The Admiral?"

"He was in the Royal Navy. He's probably involved in this somehow beyond just housing the students. I don't trust the man. I've had run-ins with him. I'll try to find out what he's up to."

Derek said, "Lyon told me he'd have me removed to another island. Can he do that?"

"Oh no. He can't."

"Can the Admiral?"

"I doubt it. Fisheries is higher up the tree than the historical society. We are a governmental department. They are not." Derek brightened. "So don't worry, you can stay, and if they start pestering you or interfering with your research, give me a call. Now you've got a radio. Don't use it too much. The batteries won't last. I'd prefer if you'd check in with me every night at 9 PM. My code-name is 'Fisheries Two.'"

"Fisheries Two," Derek repeated. He liked how the radio looked in his hand. "Who's Fisheries One?"

            "There isn't one. I choose not to use it. It would sound conceited."
            Derek looked up. "It would sound conceited?"
            "We're like that here, Derek. On a small rock, you don't want to put on airs. There's a second radio on the charger at home. Every time I visit I'll trade with you so you'll always have fresh batteries."

"Great," said Derek. "And why the gun?"

"For you. I want you to do me a favor."

"Oh?"

Michael took a box of cartridges from his pocket and plunked it into Derek's hand. Then he looked at his watch. "There's a lot to do today. Fishpot patrol." He started walking away. "Evie and I'll come over late this afternoon. We'll bring supper. It'll be fun."

Derek asked, "Do you want me to shoot the archeologist?"

Michael roared at this hilarious idea. “I probably do, but don’t, okay? If you shoot someone it will mean endless paperwork for me. Let’s try to keep things peaceful.”

"Okay," said Derek.

"I'll tell you tonight," said Michael, farther away.

"Okay," said Derek.

"Nice girl he's got up there, a real little sweetie." Then, as he disappeared down the hill among the trees, Derek heard him yell enthusiastically, "Fine bottom! Very fine indeed!"

Derek had not seen her bottom. He had been too intent on covering his own. He was still holding the rifle and cartridges as the engine coughed to life. He hid the gun and ammunition in his tent as Michael drove away, and then fixed himself another cup of coffee.

Continued…

Four

2010-08-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

Mimi set up the tent single-handedly by following the directions printed on the side of the bag. She went inside and changed into a bathing suit, blue, two-piece, constructed of very small triangles connected by strings. Until now it had been solely a bedroom accessory. Adrian was seated on a plastic cooler, his back against the rampart in a shady corner, tapping away on a laptop.

Carefully she tiptoed across to him. She was not being stealthy. The exposed surface of this island consisted of a series of tilted limestone plates, whose angled knife-edges protruded from the ground every few inches.

She said, “Put that away and come for a swim.”

“Not now. I have to finish this chapter by Friday.”

“Your battery won’t last.”

“It will if I’m not interrupted.”

She sighed, spun around and tiptoed a way. She turned to see if he was looking. He wasn’t. She continued across the treacherous landscape. All the promotional pictures of Bermuda showed pink beaches. They didn’t warn about the sharp parts. She took a towel from a bag and went to a spot where it was easy to scale the wall, thanks to paired foot-holes that had been excavated in the distant past. She thought of the soldiers who had stepped here three hundred years ago. She even knew some of their names, because they had carved them deeply into the rock in remarkably elegant script. They must have had a lot of spare time.

Much of the far side of the rampart was sheer cliff, 40 feet down to the water. She walked to where the seaward slope was more gradual, more hillside than cliff until near the bottom, where it dropped away quickly. Here more excavation had been done, stairs that descended to a little ribbon of beach. She picked her way down carefully. The sand felt good after all that stone. She entered the water and waded out up to her knees.

The heat, the humid air, and water as warm as a bathtub caused her to think of home, her first home, on the other side of the world, where she and her sister had learned to swim. She touched the water and tasted her fingertips. It had been a long time since she had been in salt water. She remembered being about four or five, riding on the back of a man, a man who came and went in her early years. Her arms were around his neck as he swam out from shore into deep water. He sang and laughed as he swam. They called him “Tito.” Uncle. Tito Romeo. Her mother denied it, but Mimi suspected that Tito Romeo was her father. She had not seen him since they emigrated.

She stepped forward into deeper water, watching the bottom, making sure it was sand, not rock. She remembered warnings about stonefish. Were there stonefish in Bermuda? The water rose up around her, compressing and lifting her. She found herself breathing rapidly, sweeping her arms and kicking her legs faster than was necessary. “Calm down,” she said to herself. “You’re from an ocean island. You know this.” She found her form and swam out, but not far. There would be plenty of time to swim.

Stepping back into air, her buoyancy draining away, also called back childhood, long days on beaches on whichever island Tito Romeo landed his boat, but there was also a difference. Philippine sand had been grey and gritty. Tea Kettle Island sand was very fine, almost icing sugar, and beige, not really pink. It stuck to her skin, gradually scuffing off as she climbed, step by step, until she was at the top. She scrambled onto the rampart through a cannon port where she had left her towel neatly folded. It wasn’t there. Now it was 30 feet away along the top of the rampart, still neatly folded. Adrian remained far across in his corner, head down, typing. She leapt up and walked to her towel, glancing from the corner of her eye at the dense forest that fringed the downhill border of the former fort. Anyone could be hiding in there, watching, crouched among the tall palmetto trees and the bushes that grew between them. She wondered if someone, if the American with his binoculars was watching, had moved the towel so he could get a good long look. She picked it up, flicked it open and wrapped it around her waist, but then changed her mind, unwrapped it and leaned way over to dry her hair. If he wanted to look, he could. She had seen more of him. Fair is fair. She then strolled along the curve of the rampart, dropping down into and then climbing back out of each cannon port along the way. She stopped above Adrian and said to him, “Was the American biologist up here?”

Adrian looked. “Where? He shouldn’t be here. I’m pretty sure we agreed to that.”

She pointed across the site. “Over there, by that far stretch of the wall?”

“I didn’t see him. But from this vantage point I probably would have missed him unless he ventured far out from the path and ran around in a circle or committed some other insanity. God, I hope he has his clothes on by now. Besides, I’m pretty focused on this.” He meant his book chapter.

She folded the towel into a square and sat cross-legged. She was silent for a while, watching a pair of longtails dance in the wind. She looked down at Adrian. He had been crunching away at his chapter since the big black guy was here more than an hour ago. The big man had basically scolded Adrian, and Adrian was not one to take a scolding well. When he was upset, he busied himself with work. He was obsessively revising a file that probably didn’t need it. He needed a different distraction. She moved to the edge of the wall to stretch out a leg and muss his hair with her foot.

“Would you please cut that out?”

She shifted further forward, almost slipping off, and tried to stick her toe in his ear. That would be different.

He grabbed her ankle.

“Ow!” She pulled it back. “You hurt the sore spot.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

“Come up here. I want to show you something.”

“What?”

“What you haven’t seen enough of lately.”

Derek would take the day off. He deserved a break in this place that thousands of people spent millions of dollars each year to visit, certainly not to work in the hot sun, reeking of sardines. He would relax the first half of the morning and later stealthily check out the archeologists. Caught by the appeal of intrigue, he had accepted Michael's suspicion that there was something not quite right about their presence. He also wanted to get another look at the "real little sweetie." Furthermore, he had no longing to continue his behavioral experiments, which so far had been disappointing.

Using stiff plastic sheeting, he had built six enclosures at the edge of the palmetto grove. He captured rock lizards using the simplest of pit-fall traps — plastic one-liter soft drink bottles with the neck and top two inches sawed off, inserted into holes dug with his collapsible infantryman’s spade — baited with the most foul-smelling thing Michael could find at the local grocer, New Brunswick sardines in tomato paste. He ran experiments to see how the lizards established territories. Do big ones chase off small ones? Do residents chase off newcomers? He varied the numbers of males and females, of residents and non-residents, of big and little ones. He did numerous combinations and permutations, expecting to see behaviors similar to American skinks, in which males were very territorial and would wrestle enthusiastically, given the opportunity. Who won the bouts depended on who was bigger, or more experienced, or had stronger jaws, or was there first, or already had a harem, or some combination of these.

But what had happened during his first eleven days of experiments with the Bermuda rock lizards?

Nothing. The lizards refused to confront each other, no matter who was placed with whom. In fact, they huddled together like scared children, blinking their big black eyes. They didn't even flick their tongues to check the identities of their enclosure-mates. Large and small, old and young, male and female, stranger and neighbor, they cringed en masse, watching Derek. This was not what Derek wanted to see, because in scientific terms it constituted a lack of results, an absence of data. It was impossible to describe aggressive behavior when there wasn't any. No matter what question Derek could ask, the answer was "No," or "Nothing," or "Not applicable."

His experiments were not only unproductive; they were disconcerting. The cowering skinks made him feel he had become an unwilling guard at a concentration camp. One by one he took the inmates back to the spots on the island where they had been captured and watched them slither away.

So he returned to the spout, the highest ground along the northern perimeter, carrying picnic supplies, water, and binoculars. Below him the island was a large bowl containing a fragrant, wildly-tossed salad of shaggy palmettos, compact, shiny-leafed olivewoods, musky, scrubby sage, and dry, sprawling buttonwoods. Interspersed among these were the prickly pears and Spanish bayonets, and the bleached, contorted skeletons of the extinct cedar forest. Somewhere on the far rim were the archeologists, out of sight, almost out of mind.

He spent the morning dozing lightly, on and off, flushing away tinnitus with the slosh and hiss of gentle summer waves on the rocks below. Several times between half-dreams he opened his eyes a crack to view, unfocused, tropicbirds flying above turquoise water. He had, the day of his arrival, decided that these birds, the "longtails," were the most beautiful animals he had ever seen. Tirelessly circling, flapping fast, they gleamed platinum-white above, with the foreign blue of the sea reflected on their sleek bellies. As if to prove they were a deluxe species, far above base-model seabird, they sported black dazzle-painting — stripes through their eyes, and diagonal slashes across the tops of their wings and back. When they swooped or turned sharply, their most striking feature was fully displayed. The tapered tail would fan, and two extravagantly long middle feathers, as long as the birds themselves, would waver like flashing sword-blades.

Often the birds flew in pairs, wings beating synchronously, one just above and behind the other, almost riding its tail. They called intermittently, with voices a bubbled mixture of mirth and anger, rising and falling with the breeze. Sometimes, when they came close to Derek on his crag, it seemed they were calling to him, or laughing at him.

After several hours with the birds, hungry and almost contented, Derek's attention was drawn to the far end of the island, up to the rim of the bowl, the rampart. As if another person’s strong hands had taken hold of his binoculars and jammed them to his eyes, to show him what he really needed to see, which is to say “the very fine bottom,” he found himself witness to a very unwelcome sight, and ten times nearer than had he viewed it unaided.

"Hell!" he exclaimed. Thoughts of lunch and longtails plunged into the sea. He ran back to his tent and dug within his backpack for his notebook. He tore out the first empty page, pulled off the pen cap with his teeth, and then scribbled,

Dear Roy:

I hate hate HATE HATE HATE archeologists.

Unimaginable to Derek, below Adrian and Mimi on the rampart, a blue-tailed baby rock lizard had made its first, feckless emergence from the crevice where it had hatched and snuggled for a week with its weary mother, one of three born to that old girl. It crawled up toward the warming sun and rounded the top of the wall, surfacing a scant three inches from Adrian's nose. Eyes closed, neither Mimi nor Adrian saw the baby skink. The little lizard saw them, however, and reflexively, brainlessly, leapt backward. It fluttered to the water and landed with the tiniest of splashes, like a noodle slipping from a spoon into a bowl of broth. It floated motionless, then was sucked down the pharynx of a hogfish where it was drowned, ground, and swallowed with merciful swiftness.

Continued…

Five

2010-08-05T19:02:00.000-07:00

As promised, Michael and Evie visited late in the afternoon. From his lookout, Derek focused on a third person in the whaler, pink and pale next to the brownness of the Spencers, a white woman doing her best to hold onto a straw hat as the boat bellied through the chop. The Air Canada descended. Evie and the woman cringed within its shadow, then recovered to watch it glide to the runway. Michael stood at the binnacle as stalwart as a dock-piling with the sun on his teeth.

Derek attempted to neaten his hair. He didn't have a mirror because mirrors were his enemies, so groomed by casting his shadow onto a flat vertical surface and massaging his head until its outline was more-or-less smooth and symmetrical. Late in the day, the best surface on the island was the back wall of the water tank. He was making minor adjustments as Michael cut the engine and the bow-wave spewed through the rocks. When Derek arrived at the shore, Michael was in the midst of his well-rehearsed ballet with anchor and line. Derek re-enacted the role of boat-deflector without hurting or embarrassing himself in front of the expanded audience. To signify the end of the performance, the men shook hands enthusiastically.

The white woman was Sally Pettibone, an American friend of Evie who worked with her at an insurance brokerage firm in Hamilton. She looked to be in her late twenties, with short, reddish-brown hair. Although tall and slender, she seemed cute and girlish in a flowery sun dress, which showed she had freckles just about everywhere. She was from Atlanta.

Evie was last from the whaler and stepped ashore casually, as though daydreaming. She was a large woman, a perfect match for Michael, slightly darker-skinned and with a full-mouthed, high-cheeked face. Derek was not expecting her to hug him, and said, "Whgg," when she did. He had met her only once before, and she had frightened him with a cold, suspicious stare. Her scent was powerful, coconuts and jasmine.

Derek excused himself and rushed back to the water tank, a low stone building with a sloped roof, slightly smaller than a one-car garage. It was built overtop a square, quarried pit about eight feet deep, in the sunken middle of the island. It collected rain water passively, a flow channeled by the water catchment, the stained and cracked paved hillside stretching from the tank up to the redoubt, where Derek had set up his camp. Overflow openings at ground level allowed partial exchange of the volume during every storm, but to Derek the water still tasted like three hundred years of twigs and dead spiders. He drank twentieth-century bottled water, brought every other day by Michael Spencer, tapped from springs in France, or Canada, or the high Sierras of California. He was grateful for the tank, however. Its ample, though questionably pure, supply was suitable for showering and shaving, and he showered frequently to cope with Bermuda's punishing midsummer heat.

He had tied a yellow nylon rope to a rusted metal loop that someone had hammered into the doorjamb eons ago. The rope trailed down and became invisible within black water that had fallen from the sky a century before Derek's great-great-great-grandparents were born. Hand-over-hand he hauled up a large white plastic pail that had been rolling around on the beach several days earlier. Around the base he had manufactured square perforations with his Swiss Army knife. It was no longer useful as a container of liquids, except when the liquids were within aluminum cans. The cold at the bottom of this tank was a puzzle. Although the air outside was pushing ninety, the water couldn't have been warmer than fifty, which seemed to defy any physical law Derek could recall. He did not care a great deal. A lot could be ignored or forgiven for cold beer. He thumped the door shut with his elbow, then gazed above the palmettos to the rampart where there was no sign of the fornicating archeologists. He hoped it would stay that way.

By the time he returned to the beach, the women had stripped to their bathing suits. Evie's was a purple one-piece. Sally wore a gold and black-striped bikini. It was more female flesh than Derek had viewed in some time, and he hesitated before stepping onto the sand. Michael saw, and laughed.

They sat on spread towels, drinking beer, talking of usual things: the weather - how hot it was, the water - how pretty it was, and what they had done that day. The most interesting story, until later when Derek related what he had observed through binoculars, was from Michael, about what had happened during fishpot patrol. Fishpots were wire cages similar to lobster traps, and until the late 1980s had been in wide use in Bermuda. They were baited with scraps of fish or crab and lowered among the reefs, their positions marked with floating buoys. Because of the high number and dreadful efficiency of the traps, even when lost or abandoned, over several decades the nearshore fish-life became seriously depleted. In 1990 fish pots were banned, and by 1993 a great improvement in the numbers of large reef fish had been observed. Although everyone knew fishpots were no longer legal, unscrupulous or desperate fishermen continued to drop a few. One of Michael's responsibilities was to remove them. He would cruise the three hundred square miles of the Bermudian platform, scanning the waves for the tell-tale buoys. Cheating fishermen used much less conspicuous markers than in the old days, but Michael had a knack for spotting them.

This day, working the reefs north of Pembroke Parish, he noticed a cunning little marker, small and grey, sticking out of the water only an inch or two. He cut the engine as he neared, and drifted. Without a gaff, he leaned far out. Clamping on with both hands he experienced one of life's little jokes. His fingers were wrapped around the dorsal fin of a snoozing 18-foot tiger shark. He knew it was 18 feet long, he said, because it was one foot longer than his Whaler. The shark flicked its tail. Too surprised to let go, Michael was pulled halfway from the boat. He teetered on the gunwale for a few seconds, then slid overboard. Surfacing quickly with his back to the Whaler, he watched a ton-and-a-half of teeth, cartilage and muscle glide past three feet away, taking a look. "Funny things, those tiger sharks," he said. "It's rather easy to become someone's lunch in Bermuda." He laughed.

Evie said, "That’s not funny, Michael."

"Oh, Love, there's really no danger, you know," he said. "I'm too tough and chewy for one of those boys." He laughed again.

"Things happen," said Evie, "even to Fisheries Wardens."

Sally Pettibone exclaimed, "Let's go swimming!" She grabbed Evie's hand and dragged her down the beach. Derek was amazed at the non sequitur. Sally obviously had no concept at all of the repercussions of having your legs chomped off by a tiger shark.

Michael said, "Nice girl, don't you think?"

He thought a bit. "Thank you for coming, I needed some pleasant company."

"So, you haven't made up with the professor yet?"

"Oh. No. I think not." He added, "You wouldn't believe what I saw him and his so-called student doing today."

"I would believe it," said Michael. "Where were they doing it?"

"On the rampart. Right where anyone drifting in on a plane could get an eyeful."

“Ho-ho, this island,” said Michael.

Derek said, "No, really, it wasn't right. It was definitely not right. It was wrong, for so many reasons."

They looked at the women seated far out in the shallows. Only their heads were showing. Fragments of words and laughter bounced across the surface to the beach. Michael said, "So, tell me about your incident with Dr. Lyon."

Derek related the story, negleting to mention he had been naked during the most dramatic part.

Michael told Derek how Adrian had treated him that morning. The archeologist had almost immediately threatened him with arrest for trespassing, trying to pass himself off as a government official. Then Michael, who this day as usual had not been wearing a Fisheries uniform, showed Adrian his identification, and in Michael's words, "Read him the Riot Act." Adrian became sullen and brusque, but agreed not to bother the herpetologist.

"Why was he so rude to you?" asked Derek.

"I don't know. Because he's a very rude man?"

"Like his uncle?"

Michael shook his head. "The Admiral's not rude, not obviously. He's oily and dangerous, like a snake."

Derek refrained from pointing out that snakes were not oily and that very few were dangerous.

Michael said, "The Admiral isn't a decent human being. He's contrary to everything you and I stand for." He raised his beer at Derek, who wasn't sure exactly what he, let alone Michael, stood for. He was willing to believe that Michael stood for good things. "I've had set-tos with him a few times."

"About what?"

Michael explained that because so little natural habitat remained in Bermuda, only crumbs really, the Bermuda Nature Foundation, of which Michael was a director, attempted to convince people with extensive properties to bequeath to the organization all or part of their estates. Michael was always highly interested in obtaining waterfront properties in order to re-establish the rare mangrove or nearshore reef habitats. Convincing land-owners to donate property was difficult, he said, because the Foundation was in competition with real estate speculators who could exert a lot of financial pressure. The Admiral was one of the most aggressive speculators in Bermuda.

"I understand," said Derek. "I'm ashamed to say that my brother is like that."

"But there's more to what bothers me about the Admiral. Financial pressure is one thing, but we've had dedicated, environmentally-minded people abruptly change their minds and sell to that old fiend."

Derek didn't get it.

"He strong-arms them," Michael said.

"Really?"

"He's a demon. He would've fit in beautifully when Bermuda was run by privateers." Then with the palm of his hand he flattened an empty, undented can endwise against his thigh.

Derek knew from repeated experimentation that you could stand endwise on an empty,undented beer can without it failing. He said, “Um, you were going to tell me about the gun?"

"Yes." Michael gripped the two ends of the accordioned can and pulled it back out to most of its original length. He set it down gently, but it fell over. "I want you to shoot the kiskadees."

"Why? Apart from them being noisy and waking me up every morning, what's wrong with the kiskadees?"

Michael told Derek about kiskadees. He said that although attractive birds, and appealing in an irascible sort of way, they were an introduced species that destroyed and displaced native wildlife. "In particular," Michael said, "they eat baby rock lizards."

"Really?" Derek was not strong on Bermudian ornithology. Although he had tried to bone up on the little country's wildlife prior to this trip, there was still a lot he didn’t know. He hadn't been aware that kiskadees were foreigners, introduced in the 1950s to control cockroaches.

Michael nodded. "They may be the worst enemies of the rock lizards." He said that kiskadees were intelligent birds, able to learn where the hatchling rock lizards emerged, from rock faces or stones walls, and there would perch patiently, gobbling up hatchlings one at a time as if they were candy. Adult lizards were too big, but the babies were perfectly snack-sized and totally naive, with no defense against aerial attacks. A single pair of kiskadees on Tea Kettle Island could clear away an entire year's hatchlings.

Derek had captured forty-seven rock lizards. Only three had been hatchlings from the previous two years. This was wrong. At least twenty percent should have been from last year.

"That cannot keep happening," said Michael, "elseways, no more rock lizards on this island. The poor old mothers can't keep pumping out eggs for much longer. Sometimes I wonder if any new lizards have joined the breeding population in the past five years."

"So they should be shot," said Derek.

"Yes," said Michael. "I wish they could all be shot, throughout Bermuda, but it wouldn't be possible. And not at all popular either, I reckon. People like them."

"There are only two birds here," said Derek. "I keep seeing the same two, every morning, in the same tree. You could probably clear them away tomorrow."

"Yes, but if you get rid of them, two more will fly over from St. David's to replace them within a day or so. The resident pair keeps the others off the island, but if they disappear, another pair arrives almost immediately.

"That's one reason I was so happy to receive your email. It was a minor miracle to me. I've been wanting someone to do a methodical, daily eradication of kiskadees on this island. There's no money to hire someone for that."

"I understand," said Derek, "but I really don't want to shoot them. I don't like killing animals. Any kind of animals."

Michael said. "You're not being sensible. You're no vegetarian — where does your meat come from?"

"I don't kill it," said Derek. "I buy it. I think of it as a substance, not a creature. I probably would be a vegetarian if I had to kill animals myself."

"What if something were attacking your children? Wouldn't you defend them?"

"I don't intend to have any."

"Your family?"

"I don't really have any," he replied, which was almost true.

"Me?" Michael smiled.

"Okay." Michael had embarrassed him sufficiently. "I understand. I know they should be shot."

"So you'll do it."

"I'll try," he said.

“You do know how to use a gun safely.”

"Yes," said Derek. He had received extensive education in the safe use and care of firearms from his uncle and cousins, and had always enjoyed shooting. He liked the smell of the gun and the heat of it, and the penetrating penny-whistle produced by blowing across the spent shell casings. But he had never been a hunter. He preferred to shoot tin cans, weather vanes, mailboxes and road signs — inanimate things. Vandalism was acceptable. Killing was not.

Michael had more instructions: "Best to keep the rifle hidden when the archeologists are here — it might raise a stir. It might not even be legal for you to have it. I decided not to ask. I recommend trying to get the birds early in the morning, when they're easiest to find, when they do their territorial calls. Go easy on the bullets please. They're difficult to obtain here, and expensive."

Derek punched a series of sugar-cookie circles in the sand with a can. Michael watched. "All right,” he said. “I might as well focus my efforts on conservation. My experiments aren't going well." He explained what had happened and what hadn't happened. He had observed no aggressive behavior among the rock lizards. They seemed almost to comfort each other.

Michael nodded happily. "They're very gentle.”

"They're more than gentle. There's something eerie about them. They don’t behave right. They don’t do anything to each other. It’s like they’re waiting for me to do something awful to them, and they’ve given up hope." He lamented being unable to find a way to salvage his experiments. "It's frustrating to come so far for so few results." He said that career advancement was very important, now that other aspects of his life had fallen to pieces. Being a scientist was something he could still take pride in.

“Science is good, but you have to have other things. You need balance. You need someone to share your life with. That’s the most important thing.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I had that covered. It didn’t pan out.”

“Perhaps being a scientist got in the way.”

“That was definitely part of it.”

“Get some romance back in your life is my advice. That’s where the greatest discoveries are. It’s the greatest mystery, and the most fun.”

“Science can be fun, when it works out.”

“I like my job, even love it sometimes,” said Michael. “But I adore my wife.” Then he said, "I feel it was a lucky thing you sent that email. You can help save the skinks, and vice versa."

“What do you mean?”

The big man hesitated. "What I should have said was, here, have another beer," and he handed Derek a fresh can.

From beneath the log behind them, a rapid sequence of mouse-like squeaks erupted. Two male Jamaican anoles skittered up, the smaller bleeding from beneath a torn flap of neck-skin. It squeaked again, then sprang into the vegetation bordering the beach.

"Now these animals," Michael laughed, "are decidedly ungentle. They're pugnacious little blokes."

On seeing Michael and Derek, the victorious male did a series of jerky push-ups from the crest of the log. Then it flared and retracted its fiery dewlap. Michael shook his can, and sprayed the lizard off the log.

The women sloshed ashore, giggling. Evie crossed the sand and circled Michael. She quickly doubled over to fling water from her hair down his back. He screamed and pulled her onto himself. They wrestled until Evie's wet skin was breaded with sand. She broke free and ran back to the water, with Michael hot after her. They frolicked in the waves, leaving Derek and Sally alone to talk, which he had been dreading.

Sally began. "They're such a nice couple."

"Yes, they are." He was unable to think of a way to elaborate on how nice the Spencers were.

"I hear you're recently divorced."

Derek opened his eyes wide, which she couldn't see through his sunglasses. "I will be soon. It takes some time for things to work through. Legal stuff."

"I suppose so. Sorry to hear it."

"Thanks. It's difficult, but I'm starting to think it's all for the best," he lied, hoping that would end this line of conversation. Derek had not drunk anywhere near enough to let the whole sad story spill out. It had spilled out numerous times to numerous listeners, but a certain degree of drunkenness had been required, which had not yet been reached. Plus, it hadn’t taken him long to figure out why the Spencers had brought Sally. He was curious how much they had told her about him, and was unsure how much he'd told them about himself. He decided to turn the tables. "Are you married?" he asked, knowing she wasn't.

"Me?" she said. "No. I was engaged a couple of years ago, but I called it off."

Derek said, "Well, it's probably better that way than to find out five years later it won't work."

"I suppose so."

The conversation limped along, until Sally asked, “Have you seen much of Bermuda?”

“The airport, and this island mostly. Michael drove me around a bit the first day, to his office and some other places.”

“You must see more than that. It would be a shame to come to this gorgeous country and not see more. If you can get yourself ashore, I can meet you and show you around.”

“Well, maybe a break from my work would be a good thing. I guess a day away wouldn’t hurt.” His answer was more of an attempt to say the right thing than an expression of interest.

Having worn each other out, the Spencers staggered onto the beach, panting. Evie said, "Hey, my man, start the barbecue."

Michael said, “Whatever you say."

They barbecued hot dogs and chicken on the beach and drank more beer and told funny stories about people Derek didn't know. Michael and Evie talked about their five-year-old daughter, Anna. Sally talked about not wanting to return to America. She was to be transferred back to Atlanta soon.

They fell silent and watched a towering cumulo-nimbus that was catching the orange and pink of the sunset. Michael was sitting against the cedar log the lizards had fought over, his arms around Evie, whose head was on his chest. Derek was near them, also against the log. He was arranging empty cans in the sand, designing a pavilion for a new World's Fair. Sally was in front, facing away, lying stomach-down with her chin on crossed wrists like a child watching television from the floor. She suddenly turned.

"Hi there!" a happy voice called.

The others craned their necks over the log. Mimi was standing on the fringe of the beach in an emerald-green bathing suit. Her hair was shining wet, stuck to her neck and shoulders. Something was bunched in her extended hand. She said, "Ah, Derek, here’s what you left behind last night," and walked around the log. She unfolded the shorts in front of his uncomprehending face, and then, as if to emphasize where they belonged, dropped them onto his lap. "See ya," she said. She danced back into the forest, but not before turning to wave at the unfamiliar women. Her magnesium teeth beamed the same pink and orange as the sky.

Derek dimly held up the shorts for all to see, to incriminate himself as much as possible.

"Yup, they're shorts all right," said Evie. She was sitting on her heels, awaiting an explanation.

He lowered the shorts and said nothing. A warm finger had entered his left ear canal, and the ringing became shrill.

Michael leaned and punched his shoulder. It was a congratulatory gesture, meant to agitate Evie.

It succeeded. She poked him in the stomach with a stiff finger. "Michael!"

Sally looked to Evie and said, "Lone-ly?"

Continued…

Six

2010-08-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

Derek awoke with a mild headache. Again, the kiskadees were his alarm clock, shrieking their namesake song, "KIS-ka-DÉEE - KIS-ka-DÉEE - KIS-ka-DÉEE!" They were overhead, the same branch as always, screaming their fool heads off in tandem. They could have shat on him as he slept.

He tipped from the hammock and scurried into the tent. The curious birds halted their chorus and watched. From where they sat, he was no more threatening than a dairy cow or golf cart. They resumed singing while he moved beneath the nylon shell. Nothing in their experiences had trained them to recognize the cold click of a rifle bolt being pulled open, or the quieter clack of it being eased shut overtop a live round. When Derek crawled from the tent commando-style, with the gun resting in the crooks of his elbows, they were throwing their heads back for another verse of their cockamamie song.

He crouched and pulled back the firing pin. That tiny click also gave them no warning. It might as well have been the sound of an infant rock lizard poking its egg-tooth into the world. He swivelled the rifle back and forth on his shoulder, searching with the telescopic sight, which was meant for targets five times this distance. The dead branches of the cedar whirled through the field of view until, finally, one of the lemon-yellow bellies flashed past. Derek backtracked and found it. He raised the cross hairs slightly, to rest them upon the shining black eye. The bird cocked its head as if to say, "Now what?"

He adjusted the gun accordingly, held his breath, and slowly squeezed the trigger. The bullet bored a tunnel exactly twenty-two one-hundredths of an inch in diameter through the skull, in one orbit and out the other, taking both eyes and much of the brain with it. There was not much there to stop it, or even slow it. The skull of a kiskadee was no more substantial than a blown-glass Christmas tree ornament. The bird dropped like an empty cigarette packet as its startled mate squawked and swooped into the palmetto grove.

The decisiveness of the shot surprised Derek too. He didn't feel fully awake. He yanked back the bolt. The brass shell-casing sprang free and landed on top of his foot. He picked it up and saw tiny wisps of smoke milling about inside. Similar wisps crept from the exposed chamber of the rifle, which smelled sulphurous and oily and great. He set the shell against his lower lip and blew across the opening. This time he stopped immediately. His ears could no longer tolerate that old, penetrating, penny-whistle sound.
He lay down the gun and walked to the bird. In his hand the body was almost weightless. It was perfect, apart from the scarlet beads where the eyes had been. After zipping the rifle into its case, he sealed the body in a plastic bag and buried it beneath ice in the cooler. A few minutes later, while eating his breakfast of oatmeal and dried apricots, he heard the low putter of an unfamiliar boat in the notch of the island. He dropped his plate, grabbed his binoculars, hurried to the spout, and from behind a dense clump of buttonwoods observed the arrival. It was the Admiral, he guessed, bringing the rest of the archeologists, the students. Adrian and Mimi were waiting on the rocks beyond the beach. Adrian had his hands on his hips.

“Asshole.” said Derek.

Mimi was more animated, with hands lying atop opposite forearms, then fluttering about, pointing, swishing at invisible insects, then pushing hair back over her ears.

Derek was relieved that there weren't many newcomers. It looked like only five students, two male, two female, one indeterminate. There was the Admiral too, a grey-haired man who remained on the boat, handing off supplies, waving and shouting at everyone else.

Derek shifted his binoculars up to the rampart. Two more were there, men on the wall of the old house, standing dark against the brightening sky. "When did they get here?" the herpetologist said aloud. One of them pointed at the students, causing Derek to scan back down. When he looked again at the house, the men were gone. He watched the entrance to the path from the palmettos, expecting them to emerge near where Adrian was standing. He gave up waiting and shifted to the students.

Mimi waved at her charges as they clutched the sides of the small skiff used to ferry them and their supplies from sloop to shore. Adrian was watching, critically, and she remembered his annoying instruction, "First make them respect you, then let them like you." He said it was particularly important to keep a healthy distance from students on a field course, where there would be many unforeseeable variables, many potential dangers. To hell with that; she’d do what she always did. They would respect her because they would like her. For something to do, she took attendance, a list that could have been written on a cocktail napkin with a tube of lipstick.

There were two male students: Stew was tall and thin and wore a bandanna on his head and four or five twisted leather bracelets on one wrist. He had long hair hanging past his shoulders, and a goofy grin. Brian was shorter and more powerfully built, with large pectoral muscles. He looked solid and reliable.

There were two females: Shana and Molly. Shana was blond and athletic-looking, maybe a swimmer or basketball player. Molly was Chinese, even shorter than Mimi, and resembled an owl behind round, black-rimmed glasses. Mimi smiled at her, the only person in the boat wearing a life jacket.

The fifth was Joanne, short and thick-bodied. She was blond too, with hair tied in plaits pulled either forward or backward — it was difficult to tell — and glued to her head. She had small, squinty eyes and a lipless mouth down-turned at the corners. Stew and Brian were watching her warily from the opposite end of the skiff.

After the students disembarked and introductions were made all around, the Admiral directed his antique craft toward open water. "Cheerio!" they heard him call.

"Cheerio?" said Stew.

"Right, you lot!" Adrian began barking orders and loading them down with shovels, trowels, a wheel barrow, sieves, bags, brushes, and boxes of all sizes. They spent half an hour marching to the rampart and back.

The students sat cross-legged on the ground, hot and perspiring and eager to start this adventure. Adrian was giving a rundown of the role of Tea Kettle Island in Bermuda's history. He was pacing along a section of the rampart, sweeping his arm grandly back and forth across the narrow breadth of the tiny country as he talked. He had begun with the island itself, indicating the features of greatest interest to most visitors, the weathered grey ruins of British military fortifications. The first fort had been constructed early in the seventeenth century, but had been altered and reinforced several times during the following two centuries. By the time the island was abandoned after the War of 1812, the defenses consisted of a massive hexagonal redoubt with embrasures for 6 guns at the opposite corner of the island from where they sat, and a rampart running along the tops of the western cliffs, crowned by a thick stone wall with places for six more guns.

Adrian talked loudly and dramatically as he walked from ruin to ruin while the students, seated in the middle of the small, crumbled compound, spun on their rumps to watch. Mimi was encouraged. Here was good-old, charismatic Adrian again. Finally. Since arriving in Bermuda he had been very difficult to deal with, either temperamental or remote. The athletic-looking blond girl seemed entranced. Mimi smiled to herself.

The professor placed a hand on the wall of the old stone house in which the officers had lived. It was a two-story structure, approximately fifteen feet square, now lacking second floor and roof. Beyond that, he scuffed a boot along the dilapidated wall of the cramped stone barracks partially dug into the rock. Here, conscripts had sweltered. There was also a heap of blocks, the cookhouse, with an old, charred oven carved into a quarried rock face behind it, and the remains of an outhouse with a sluiceway cut through the wall of the rampart to provide direct drainage to the water below.

Dr. Lyon gestured to the low-lying, overgrown middle of the island and explained that somewhere in the jungle were rock quarries, from whence came the rock for the buildings, walls, powder magazines, and the slope-roofed water-storage tank, which they had walked past on the way up from the boat.

The professor explained that the Tea Kettle fort had been constructed to protect the eastern entrance to Castle Harbour, the southern gateway to Old Bermuda. It was one of a series of small forts built along the southeastern coast of the colony, intended to ward off the Spanish, the French, the Spanish plus the French, and much later on, the Americans. He had the students stand on the wall of the rampart to picture it. It took a degree of imagination, because the entrance to the harbor the island had once protected no longer existed. In 1941, prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, when England had been at war with Germany for two years and the Royal Navy desperately needed ships for convoy escorts, Great Britain received 50 World War I-vintage warships from America in return for 99 years' use of hundreds of acres of prime Bermudian real estate, consisting mostly of Longbird, Cooper's and St. David's islands, but also including smaller outlying islands. The Americans reshaped much of the countryside and filled many of the gaps between islands with material dredged from the bottom of Castle Harbour to construct a naval air station, which now served as Bermuda's commercial airport.

One of the gaps filled was the channel between Cooper's and St. David's Islands, the strip of water the Tea Kettle fort had guarded for two hundred years. Since 1941, the fort had guarded a beach, and beyond that, the eastern end of the airport and a NASA downrange tracking station.

Mimi did not climb onto the wall. She sat quietly on the cooler, writing on small cardboard tags with a black pen. TKI BDA 117, TKI BDA 118, and so on, listening carefully to Adrian's posh pronunciations, noticing how he said words like "cannon fire" and "embrasure" and "powder magazine," and wished she could speak half as elegantly, without the accidental emission of Filipino pronunciations, substitutions of "p's" for "F" sounds, and "d's" or "t's" for "th's." Her mispronunciations annoyed her, and could be problematical during public speaking. Hearing herself slip, she would stop cold, unsure whether to try again the bungled word or keep going, and then, as she continued, her mind wouldn't stop hearing the error she'd made and her words would tumble out in fast Filipino bunches with more of the incorrect pronunciations sticking to them like lint balls. She hated what people thought of her accent. They thought it was cute.

Adrian and the students descended from the wall and, while the professor continued to lecture, the undergraduates resumed their seats on the rocks near the pretty teaching assistant. Mimi didn't say anything until Adrian got to the part about the role of Bermuda in the War of 1812. He related how the Bermudian-based British forces sailed across the western Atlantic, up Chesapeake Bay, then marched on Washington where they burned the White House.

"Cool!" said Stew.

The others smiled, enjoying the poke at their scary southern neighbors.

Adrian continued, "This, of course, was in revenge for the destruction of..."

The students stared dully, not recognizing a cue to hazard an answer.

So Mimi responded, "York, which is now Toronto."

Mimi loved Toronto, her adopted city, and Fort York, its ancient defense, which still existed as a tourist attraction near the waterfront. It had been accurately restored to its 1812 layout, save for the elevated six-laned Gardiner Expressway now crossing its south-west corner.

She began working at the fort at age sixteen after responding to an advertisement for summer employment, and continued on, working weekends and during the summers, until the end of her first undergraduate year at the University of Toronto. In the cook-house, in period-garb, she demonstrated bread-baking, tallow candle-dipping and other early nineteenth-century domestic skills to tourists and student groups. During breaks she watched the other presentations and soon could criticize and correct the mistakes of the newer recruits. If noted historians visited the fort, she would track them down and interrogate them about aspects of the fort or city related to their areas of expertise. Within a short time she was hugely more knowledgeable of the early history of Toronto than the vast majority of its natives. She took pleasure and pride in this. When she was explaining early Toronto to visitors at the fort, she was not an immigrant. This was her place.

Mimi met Adrian Lyon when, as a newly cross-appointed professor, he accompanied a group of university students to Fort York. After she had finished her demonstration he thanked her and spoke at length about life in York before the war, about the infrastructure, fires, church, drunken brawls, disease, and someone who died after being bitten by a rabid fox. He spoke clearly and surely, as if he were reading paragraphs from a beautifully written text book. She hadn’t known his name, but two years later as a university student recognized him immediately at the first lecture of his undergraduate course that dealt with the history of Upper Canada. She loved the material. At the end of term he asked her to consider taking a job as a summer assistant.

Over that summer, gradually, slowly, they found themselves becoming entwined in a relationship that, although not illegal, was considered by most, including Adrian, as improper. "The flesh is weak," he said.

"We shouldn’t be doing this?" she asked. "I don’t want you to get into trouble."

"We really shouldn’t do this," he said.

“But we haven’t really done it yet.”

After which they did.

"It’s not of great importance to me what people say," he said. "I have a job that cannot be taken away for something as mutual and genuine as this. What worries me is what they’ll think of you. They’ll make it all tawdry. You won’t be respected and your successes will always be questioned."

"I guess you’re right, we shouldn’t do it," she said, placing her hands on the sides of his face and mushing her mouth against his.

But now Adrian was glaring at her for interrupting the flow of his speech and stealing the punchline.

"Oops," she grinned. The students were revived. They smiled back at her. By saying "Oops," she had made them like her.

On and on went Adrian, and Mimi kept quiet. The students were unable to absorb any more. Their thimbly short-term memories were filled to overflowing and the lecture had become punishment. Adrian was a superb lecturer, a perfect wind-up professor, with the sole flaw a tendency to talk until students got up to leave for their next classes. The five students on Tea Kettle Island had nowhere to go. All had been taking notes at the start, but had long since stopped. Most were now surveying the grey, grainy soil around the buildings and beneath them, curious what surprises it contained. Molly surreptitiously worked on a pencil sketch of the old house. Eventually Adrian got to the rules of the island: when they would take breaks, when they would eat, how many liters of substrate they would be expected to process each day, how they would be graded for the course. Finally, he uttered the greatest understatement heard on Tea Kettle Island since Reginald Chambers said, "Oh dear," a split second before he and Robert Murchie disintegrated. Adrian said, "We're not alone here." He was thinking of Derek. "There is an American Californian herpetologist presently on this island, who claims to be doing some sort of research." The students didn’t know what a herpetologist was and looked back and forth at each other.

Adrian seemed to be trying to give the impression that Derek was just shy of axe-murderer. He described him as having a violent temper, having attacked him on their arrival, and instructed the students, should they encounter him, say nothing, and immediately walk away, but then tried to comfort the students — who by this point were picturing a madman lurking in the palmettos below — with assurances that he and the Admiral were doing their best to have him removed from the island very soon.

Mimi was about to say, "Oh, he's not that bad," but saw in a dart of Adrian's eyes that he wanted her to keep quiet. She returned to writing on the tags.

Continued…

Seven

2010-08-03T21:45:00.000-07:00

Derek resumed trapping as the new arrivals endured their introductory lecture. He collected and measured twelve rock lizards from the eastern edge of the palmetto grove and checked them for missing toes, evidence their tails had been broken and regenerated, and other traumas. He painted their backsides with garish combinations of nail polish to facilitate fast recognition the next time he caught them. Many were repeat captures. Despite their age and experience, they were unable to learn the consequences of taking the bait. It was demanding, sweaty, stinky work, involving a lot of digging, squatting, and swatting at flies. He moved in a foul-smelling cloud of sardine oil, a substance he couldn't avoid spilling on his clothes and notepad. His sunglasses were continually sliding down his slippery nose, to be smudged with grimy fingers when pushed back up. Eventually he put them aside, opting to blunder through the brush with his damaged eye almost closed to the glare. As he worked, the widowed kiskadee flew from tree-top to tree-top, searching frantically for its mate, who was lying in state beneath Derek's brick of cheddar. It stopped, only briefly, to snap up a baby rock lizard that was gamboling across the papery carpet of fallen bay grape leaves along the shore.

During his lunch break, Derek's latest letter to Roy blew across his campsite. He gave chase and trapped it under his shoe, and after brushing away the imprint of the tread, slipped it into his tent.

What the letter said:

Dear Roy.

I was convinced to do something I would never think of or desire to do on my own. There is a bird slowly rotting in my cooler. All my junior marksman trophies in my childhood bedroom in California now haunt me, for they celebrate the training I had that makes it easy to kill.

There is a second one, and it no longer has a mate, to which I can relate. I will put it out of its sadness, and then I hope I never have to load the gun again.

I dreamt about the bridge again last night, there it is, out the window. Go look! You can see it, watch the sun go down behind it, 13 miles away, but seems much closer.

Be a good boy. I hope Ida is brushing you and remembers to give you your malt,

DLC

He hoped he would remember to give it to Michael the following morning, because it was important to keep the letters flowing home. If he let them pile up, he doubted he would continue writing them. He assumed that at some point, once he had written enough, he would have worked things out enough, bored himself enough with his own dourness, to break free of what gripped him. Then he would be able to move on.

He thought of the students, who were supposed to return to the main island every night. If he spoke to Mimi about it, would she ask one of them to mail the letter for him? He didn't think it an unreasonable request. Moreover, if he went over there for this almost legitimate reason, it would provide an excuse to get an up-close look at the bunch of them. He came up with a plan, its goal to annoy Adrian, and mildly unsettle the students.. He didn't want them to think they were free to wander over to this end of the island.

He trapped and painted four more new captures that afternoon, all advanced adults. Had they been mammals, they would have had bowed legs, thick, lumpy bodies, and grizzled muzzles. The sky was almost cloudless, the sea was a mirror, and the air lay heavy and moist at eighty-seven degrees. It was brutal weather for humans, but the elderly rock lizards and rambunctious Jamaican anoles were loving it. The floor of the palmetto grove and creviced walls of the ruins were frenzied with juiced-up reptiles. At four o’clock he detected the putter of the Admiral’s approach.

Brian, Shana, Molly, and Joanne were passing the water tank when Adrian's madman erupted from the forest. He was lean and stubble-faced with messy, sun-streaked hair and a dirty red t-shirt ripped at the collar. On the front was a rattlesnake woven in and out the eye sockets of a human skull. He was also wearing army boots, big shorts with bulging pockets, and filthy wrap-around sunglasses. There was a hint of an odor about him, something like fish, but worse. "Hey!" he said.

Molly dropped her armful of bags and a heavy shovel. Shana shrieked. Brian backed into a Spanish bayonet and speared himself in a few places, but to his credit made no sound. Joanne narrowed her eyes and contracted her neck muscles.

Shana blurted, "You scared us!"

Derek demanded, "Where's Mimi?" The students hesitated. They were instinctively protective of her.

Brian finally spoke, "She's still up at the fort."

Derek hadn't planned for this, her absence. He had wanted a twenty-second exchange, during which he wouldn't need explain anything, simply appear scary, and nuts, and say, "Mail this, please." The possibility of a lag had not been considered. The students were funny, sort of sweet, really, like quails, especially the Chinese girl. With one hand he flipped the letter back and forth between the thumb and fore-finger of the other, unsure how to maintain this caricature. He scratched his head.

The students took advantage of his uncertainty to reorganize into a defensive formation, Brian guarding Shana, Joanne in front of Molly.

Stew was coming from behind, with his head down and earphones cranked to maximum. He blundered into Derek, who yelled. Stew stopped, clueless, with tinny noises leaking from the sides of his head. Behind him were Mimi, carrying a box, and Adrian with a clipboard beneath his arm. On seeing Derek the professor swore quietly to himself, and then said, tiredly, "I would prefer that you not harass my students."

Derek adapted quickly to the changed situation. “I was about to explain the rules of this island.”

"Rules?" said Mimi.

"Yes, Ms. Villanueva, there are rules, devised by me, the senior representative of the human species on this island."

“Uh, I think he’s more senior that you,” said Stew, who had turned down the volume." He was pointing at Adrian.

"Wrong, he isn’t! And quiet!" Derek admonished. "It's very simple. You must do everything possible not to interfere with my biological research. I'm doing an important study of the Bermuda rock lizard."

Adrian said, "Let's go, everyone, no time for this. On we go." The students bent to gather the items scattered at their feet. Molly attempted to pick up the shovel, but its thick, slippery shaft escaped from her hand and the blade clanked onto the steel toe of Derek's boot. Her frightened hand hung in the air.

Derek snatched up the shovel and shook it at those preparing to walk away. “A minute! Then you may go."

Joanne made a throaty sound.

Mimi said, "Derek, we have to go." Her head was cocked to the side. She was smiling.

He said, "All I ask is that you stay away from this side of the island, on the other side of this water tank." He tapped it with the handle of Molly's shovel.

The students nodded.

"And — of all things, be very careful with your drink containers. Never leave an open bottle or can lying on the ground. The rock lizards will crawl inside, and will bake to death in the sun."

Several of the archeologists, including Mimi, glanced left and right.

"You haven't seen any yet?" Derek was genuinely surprised. He'd expected that among so many pairs of eyes, at least one would have seen a skink on the rampart, especially on such a hot day. Although he had not yet collected at the rampart, Derek suspected it to be one of the population strong-holds of the island.

"Nope," said Stew.

"No," said Shana. "What do they look like?"

"No one has seen them," said Adrian. "I'm really starting to wonder what nonsense you're really here for. There are no 'rock lizards.'"

"I saw one," Molly said. "It was black, with an orange face," she said, "on the stone wall."

Derek turned to the timid girl. "Good!" he said. He momentarily forgot himself and sounded friendly and sane. "You saw one. You saw one of the rarest animals in the world." This concept caught the imagination of the students.

"The rarest animal in the world?" said Brian, "Wow."

Adrian said, impatiently, "Fine, Derek, no drink containers. In return, you must agree to stay away from our side of the island, and not interfere with our dig. Good bye." He made a weak pretense at marching away, but stopped several paces along when it was clear no one was in step.

"I promise not to interfere with the dig," Derek said to Mimi. "That's simple professional courtesy. But I'll go anywhere I have to on the island to study the lizards. I won't interfere with your work, don't worry." It was then he realized that Adrian and Mimi were preparing to leave with the students. "Who's staying here tonight?" he asked her. "Are the other two spending the night instead?"

"What other two?" said Mimi.

"The two with the straw hats?"

"What are you talking about? This is it. This is all of us."

Derek found himself wondering if his own expression matched the confusion on the faces in front of him. Then he remembered the letter, which he had inadvertently wrapped around the handle of Molly's shovel. "Mimi," he said. He was aggressively ignoring Adrian, "could you mail this for me please?" He presented her with the warped, stained envelope.

"No problem," she said.

Molly reached carefully for the shovel, but Derek pulled it back. "No-no. You've enough to carry already." He tossed the tool in Adrian’s direction without looking at him. It clattered on the rocks. A Delta Airlines 737 screamed overhead, causing all but Derek to duck. "Dinner time!" he called, and he crashed crazily back into the trees. Thirty or forty seconds of branches snapping and leaf-litter being trampled followed, becoming fainter and fainter, then silence.

"Get a load of that," said Stew.

Joanne murmured, "He is insane."

Mimi read the address on the letter, a “Roy Elgato, Esq.," Grizzly Peak Blvd., Berkeley, California.

Adrian backtracked to read over her shoulder. "Leave that here. Let him find his own postal service."

Mimi replied, "It's no trouble. I think it's best to keep him happy if we can. Simple professional courtesy." She tucked the letter in her pocket.

Derek clumped to his campsite, pleased with himself. As the sloop putted away, he showered and prepared supper. Macaroni and sausage bits.

Afterwards he walked with an unopened beer in his hand to the rampart. Sure enough, no one was there. No men in straw hats. Four shallow rectangular trenches had been started next to the collapsed barracks, their borders neatly marked off with string stretched between eight-inch nails hammered into the ground. Nails had also been hammered into the sides of the remaining walls of the barracks, at what looked like one-meter intervals, and a matrix of string had been wound among them too. There was a tripod of two-by-fours with a large, square, wooden-framed sieve hanging beneath it, and a small cone of sifted grey soil had sprouted on the ground below.

Without knowing much about archeology, Derek had to admit it looked as though these people knew what they were doing. He would inform Michael.

On the way back, Derek paused in front of the limestone slab where he had removed the cactus spine from Mimi's ankle. He opened the beer and slurped as he wondered how her ankle was doing, if it was healing properly, or if maybe it was a little inflamed and itchy, needing a touch of Polysporin. He should have asked her, in front of Adrian, in front of all of them. Everyone would then have known they had been intimate, in a way, and Adrian would have seethed. Derek regretted the missed opportunity and decided it wasn't easy to feign lunacy and be crafty at the same time. He continued walking.

As he passed the water tank he replayed the encounter with the students, picturing the startled faces. He wondered what Mimi would tell them about him on the boat ride back. Then he wondered why he had wondered about her. In a flash of self-recognition he realized that after Mimi had arrived at the tank, he'd been paying increasingly less attention to the students and more and more attention to her, more than was required to ignore Adrian successfully. Oh well, he thought, she’s pretty.

He dragged his air mattress from his tent, and lay down. He stretched his arms and legs as far as possible, and moaned at the pleasurable pain. He was glad to be alone again.

She had a nice smile. In daylight her teeth were so white they were almost blue. He had noticed that the edges of her incisors were translucent, and, as she spoke, or laughed, it was able to see through them the movements of her tongue.

He didn’t need company, especially non-scientists. Archeology is not a science.

And very dark brown eyes, almost black, that darted back and forth as she talked.

Now he didn’t have to feel he needed permission to go to the rampart to watch the sunset, which he planned on doing this evening.

She was a small woman, he guessed maybe five feet, tops, and she couldn't weigh a hundred pounds. She was not voluptuous. In fact, there was an almost boyish quality to her neck and shoulders, but he had finally had a good look, and as Michael had reported, she had a fine bottom.

And the fewer people at any given time, the less risk to the rock lizards.

She had an immediate appeal, something to do with her posture possibly, which made her seem self-assured, but also potentially vulnerable, a very attractive combination. It was her hands, maybe. She stood with arms crossed, but her hands were open, palms upward on opposite forearms, not tucked beneath the elbows. When listening, her turned her face slightly to one side, but remained engaged, looking at you almost impishly as if she were waiting for you, inspiring you, to say something clever. Then when she spoke, her lips would part with a tiny, clean pop, and she would talk animatedly with fluttering hands.

And the sanitation issue. That was lessened too.

“Good,” he said. They were off his island.

He was in trouble, a parachutist with a bale of shredded bed sheets on his back, one hundred feet out the door of the plane.

At nine PM he radioed Michael. "Just checking in," he said. "I'm here alone, everything seems okay."

"Roger," said Michael.

"I think they're real archeologists."

"Say again?"

Derek knew the explanation could wait. "One thing, there were two other people here this morning. Over."

"Who were they? Over," said Michael.

"I don't know -- they were far away. Two men in blue jackets and straw hats, over." Derek found radio syntax cumbersome and silly.

"Uh - repeat, over."

"Two men in blue jackets and straw hats, over."

"Are you sure, over?"

"Yes, why, over?"

"How odd. I'll see you tomorrow, Derek-boy. Over."

"I'll be here, over."

"Good night, over and out."

"Over and out."

Continued…

Eight

2010-08-02T16:14:00.000-07:00

The students ate their breakfasts at a single long table on the veranda, which ran the length of the south side of the Admiral's home, facing the endless ocean view indicative of extreme wealth. The Admiral, Adrian, and Mimi ate inside in the dining room, and surveyed them through French doors.

"A curious collection," said the Admiral, "especially that one." He nodded at Joanne, who was alone at one end of the table, stabbing her pancakes as though she hated them. Not as though she didn't enjoy eating them, but as though she literally hated them and wanted them to suffer.

"We had to take whatever signed up," said Adrian. "Anyway, they all seem keen, and they worked hard yesterday, didn't they Mimi?"

“Yes,” she said, “they were pretty good.” She set down her tea cup and dabbed her mouth with the linen napkin.

“And you’ll have to work hard too, to make sure they stay focused,” the Admiral said.

Mimi looked to Adrian for explanation. He said nothing. “Sure,” she said.

The Admiral then asked, “Mimi, would you mind giving us a few minutes? I have to speak with Adrian.”

She stepped out onto the veranda and closed the door.

“Hi Mimi,” said Shana. “What’s the plan?”

She shrugged. “You’ll have to ask the professor. I’ve just been kicked out of the grown-ups room.”

“Why?” said Brian.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s all right,” said Stew. “We’re way more fun to hang with. The Skipper is several levels above weird.

“Don’t call him that. Have some respect,” said Joanne.

“But there’s always weirder still.”

“What does that mean?”

The door opened, and Cora, the Admiral’s housekeeper, stepped out. She said, “Is everyone finished?” and reached to collect the plates, starting with Joanne.

“Let me help,” said Mimi.

“No thank you,” said Cora.

“I don’t mind,” said Mimi.

“No. Ito ang aking trabaho. Thank you.”

“Okay, sorry.”

Cora scowled at Mimi and left with the plates.

“If looks could kill,” said Stew.

“What did she say?” asked Shana.

“She kind of told me to mind my own business.”

“That seems a bit harsh,” said Shana.

“She’s like what, his servant?” asked Brian.

“Housekeeper," said Shana. ‘Servant’ is derogatory”.

Mimi said, “She’s an overseas worker. I didn’t know there were any in Bermuda. I guess they’re everywhere there are rich people.”

“Where’s she from?” asked Brian.

“Same place as me.”

A gentle gust ruffled the edge of the plastic table cloth and carried a pair of longtails close to the house. They separated and fought back out over the water, chuckling back and forth.

Molly said, "It's nice here, isn't it?"

The others looked at Molly. It was the first thing she had said all day.

Derek had been awakened before dawn by another nightmare, a new but not dissimilar version of a recurring topic: life in the world of his new job. He was at Everman College in Blair, Nebraska, what was in store six months after his return from Bermuda. He dreaded it as he would an appointment for necessary yet likely unsurvivable surgery. Although he had never been to Blair, or Nebraska, or anywhere near there, the place was becoming horrifically familiar to him in his dreams. Everything was flat and beige, except for the people, who were grey and burly. They spoke in incomprehensible mumbles. The dreams always ended with Derek tumbling off something, a set of warped planks meant as stairs, or a part of a nonsensical barn with enormous gulfs between floor boards, or the curiously convex bed of a pickup truck on which he had no reason to be riding. After the fall, he would lie confused, unreasonably terrified, suffocating in dry, loose dirt, an endless dustbowl filling his open mouth and unclosable eye.

He had received rejection letters from dozens of other universities and colleges during the previous year. We don't want you. We don't need you. The problem was, he was told—if he was told anything—was that he didn't have enough experience. A meager doctorate meant next to nothing in modern academia, which was flooded with unplaced PhDs, many with multiple post-docs. Doctor Derek Coulter was a rosy-cheeked babe compared to the hundreds of other wrinkling, greying, embittered, and impoverished souls applying for the same openings. He rarely ranked within the top fifty, except at Everman College, a private liberal arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, where by some misfortune he seemed to have been first choice. He hadn't even been asked for an interview.

Doctor Patricia Lawson, Chairman of the Department of Mathematics, Religion and Sciences at the college, wrote Derek. She said he sounded perfectly suited to their small but proud institution, enrollment six hundred and fifty. Derek was appalled. He had no desire whatsoever to go there, to a tiny institution where biological sciences were somehow melded to mathematics and religion. He had submitted an application without carefully reading the advertisement, which had been easy enough to do, requiring only that he readdress the same email he had readdressed and sent dozens of times before. Nebraska! Derek had never been farther inland than Reno. He liked living near the coast, with its rolling hills and sun and fog and ebb and flow of multi-colored humanity. Derek fervently did not want to move to Nebraska. It would be skull-numbingly bland for a Californian, wouldn't it? He had asked a Nebraskan-born grad student at Berkeley what it was like, and if he would ever want to go back there after living in California. The student's reply had been, "Lots o' folks love it there." Then there was a pause. "Not me, though."

It would be as quiet as a mausoleum. Derek doubted the sounds of rustling cornstalks and drying mud would amount to anything. It would be nothing compared to the ringing in his ears.

He dropped from his hammock and stumbled to the spout. He spoke at the pale blue gathering itself over the arc of the horizon. "Come on, come on, come on up, sun," he said. At times like this, bereft of any sense of security, Derek longed for his cat, who was useless in any practical way but was at least a warm body to hug. Roy was staying with kooky old Ida, the upstairs neighbor, which was a concern in itself now that Derek thought about it. He could easily imagine she had forgotten his instructions and let him out. Roy was a housecat who never went outside. He could have been kidnapped by a homeless crack-head, who sold him to a disreputable zoological supplies dealer for cocaine money. At this moment Roy could be floating belly-up and slit open in a tank of formaldehyde somewhere, triple-injected with red and blue and yellow latex. Derek hugged himself.

The sun grudgingly rose and Derek's fears for Roy, and by connection himself, subsided. He wobbled back to his campsite and immediately dozed off, slumped against the time-tested wall of the redoubt, safe from the most powerful weapons the eighteenth century could throw at him.

Michael kicked him kindly. "Hey mate, wake-up."

Derek jerked awake and recognized the sunny face of his provider. As they shook hands in celebration of their mutual existence, Derek was hauled to his feet, which surprised him enough to make him almost fall over. "Oh Michael, I had another rough night. Lots of wild dreams. I'm a hopeless nutcase, I think."

"Why you belong here,” said Michael. "Any luck with the kiskadees?"

"What? Oh, yes. I got one." Derek flung open the lid of the cooler and pulled a dripping plastic bag from the ice.

"Did you open it?"

"The bird?"

"To see what it ate recently."

"No. I'll get my dissecting kit." He ducked into the tent and returned with a little plastic case. He removed a pair of sharp scissors and handed them to Michael, who was gently tossing the kiskadee in his hand like a bag of gold dust.

"Where's the wound?" he asked. The head of the bird was damp, and matted feathers obscured the entrances to the little tunnel Derek had made.

Derek took the bird and held it by the neck, up to the sun. Light shone through, eye-hole to eye-hole.

"Whoa, did you mean to do that?"

Derek shrugged.

Michael poked one blade of the scissors into the body cavity and sawed the bird from cloaca to bill. The ribs and breast bone crackled. He handed the scissors back, smearing Derek's fingers with half-coagulated blood and yellow down.

Derek could smell the blood. It was putrid.

Michael parted the bird lengthwise with his thumbs like a dinner roll, revealing the compactly looped gut, the large, purple-brown liver, and the gizzard, which was tough and rubbery, like a grape-sized lacrosse ball. He took the scissors again and snipped further forward, beyond the flimsy proventriculus, through the dark red meat of the flight muscles and then the tough furcula, almost to the crop. He cut the esophagus as far into the throat as the scissors would reach, the intestine just anterior to the cloaca, and several filmy mesenteries. With the flats of the blades he lifted the entire digestive tract free and stretched it out on a rock, where he snipped it open, end-to-end. The intestine contained unrecognizable goo. The gizzard was filled with the spiny, stick-like legs of cockroaches.

He opened the proventriculus. "Here you go," he said. "Too bad you didn't shoot him sooner." He gingerly pulled free the corkscrewed, partially masticated body of a baby rock lizard. He dropped it into Derek's hand, on top of the drying blood of the bird that had eaten it.

Derek rolled the little lizard back and forth in his palm. Its dead eyes were sucked back into its head. He let it fall to the ground, then crouched and touched it gently. "I never killed a vertebrate before, you know," he said. He returned his attention to the blood between his fingers. "I was always very proud of that, even though my cousins would make fun of me. They thought I was a wimp."

Michael said nothing. He had noticed Derek's eye almost immediately but had not asked about it, because he knew it was none of his business and that Derek was trying hard to keep it hidden. He had mentioned it to Evie, who told him, yes, it was none of his business. But now, overcome with curiosity and wondering if the damage to Derek's face had something to do with Derek being such a hopeless nutcase, he said, "Forgive me for asking, but what happened to your eye?"

Derek immediately pushed his sunglasses back up his nose. "Sorry, I don't like talking about it." He turned away. He didn't want to be evasive toward his new friend, but found discussing his eye very difficult. It reminded him of what he now looked like, what he had once looked like, and the problems he and his wife had experienced because of it. He had half-expected Michael to say something sooner or later, because the eye was difficult to miss. It resembled a runny, half-poached egg dropped into a muddy heel-print. Much of the upper lid was missing and the tear duct was badly torn, causing the eye to weep almost continuously. The eyeball also was damaged. The cornea was misshapen and the top half of the iris had been sheared away. After arriving home from the hospital, dismayed at how little the surgeons had achieved, Derek ran around the house, removing all mirrors.

Laura didn't get off so easily. It was there first thing in the morning and was what greeted her when she returned from work. She couldn't escape the eye. What frustrated her most was that much of the damage could have been repaired if not for Derek's useless anger. A plastic surgeon explained that although the eye could never be returned exactly to its previous appearance or to full function, most of the cosmetic damage could be reversed through tissue grafts and prosthetic additions to the upper lid and tear duct. He said that with the proper contact lens, shaped to fit the irregularities of the cornea, the problems with light glare from the torn iris could be reduced.

The reason Derek didn't submit to the surgery was not, as he would claim, because they couldn't afford it — although it was true that the company from which Derek had purchased his medical insurance would not pay. (The company informed him he would not be compensated for plastic surgery; cosmetic surgery was not covered by his graduate student health plan.) The coverage the policy provided was so minimal, in fact, that Derek and Laura had gone into debt from the basic emergency treatment that had restored partial vision and made it possible for Derek to lean forward without his eyeball bulging from the remaining portion of the lid. The insurance company, located far from California, in Fairfax, Virginia, "to be as impersonal as possible," Derek claimed, would only pay eighty percent of the expenses, unless the bill exceeded one hundred thousand dollars, in which case it would reimburse all costs. Derek scoffed that it was nearly impossible to require so much treatment and still be alive.

Laura had found a way around the company's stinginess, a source of funds, but Derek would not accept it. He was furious that Laura had contacted his nearest living relative, his brother, Peter, a Manhattan investment banker. They hadn't lived together since before their parents' deaths, which happened while Peter was a freshman at Cornell. He had continued his education while Derek remained with his aunt and uncle and cousins in California's Central Valley, near Davis. During those years, Peter tried to help Derek from across the continent by sending brotherly advice about life — what a twenty-something could know about it — especially regarding his favorite subject, money. He visited often at first, but over the years, as his life became more complicated and he married, and divorced, and married again, the time between visits increased and the duration of visits decreased, until he stopped going back. By that time, Derek was a parentless teenager looking for something to resent. He chose Peter's neglect, demonstrated by his lack of interest in his development as a biologist. Derek believed Peter had sold him out. He had chosen money over him.

Peter informed Laura he would pay for whatever treatment Derek needed. Derek refused, having given up entirely on his brother a few years earlier after a phone call in which Peter had yelled at him to “Grow up, stop playing with animals, and get a real job!”

Laura pleaded with him, to the point of tears.

"No!" he yelled, "I want none of his money! Ever!" He chose to live with an eye that was a source of shame and sorrow, that he wouldn't look at or let others see — except for Laura, who didn't want to see it. "I'm learning to live with it," he would say, which wasn't true. He was learning to not live with it.

Laura had always loved his eyes. They had been what made her fall in love with him and, she knew, were what made other people like and trust Derek almost immediately. Laura had many times called them, "puppy eyes," as she cooed at him, when she was in love with him. He preferred to think of them as "unique," or "interesting," because the pale brown irises contained very surprising golden spots. "Please Derek!" Laura pleaded. "Do it for me! I want your old eyes back! I want the old you back!"

Michael waved his hands in apology, which Derek couldn't see. "I'm sorry, very sorry, I shouldn't have asked," he said, angry with himself. He changed the subject. "What were you talking about on the radio last night, something about two men?"

Derek turned to face him. "What happens if you get badly hurt here?"

"Uh, we take you to the hospital. What do you think?"

"Who pays hospital bills?"

"For you, a foreigner, you should have visitor's insurance."

"Yes, I do, but who pays if you're Bermudian?"

"We have health insurance."

"How does it work?"

"We pay premiums through our work. It's deducted from our wages, one way or another." Michael explained that it depended whether you worked for the government, a small company, a large corporation, or were self-employed. He said there were various group plans for all sorts of employees.

"Is it expensive?"

"People complain, but no, it's not really expensive, not by American standards."

"What if you're unemployed, or unemployable? What if you can't pay anything?"

"You still get treatment," said Michael. "The government pays for it."

"Universal coverage, for everyone, rich or poor?"

"I suppose so, but there's only so much we can do here. We're a small country, the size of a small city, really."

"But if need be they'll airlift you out? To Boston or London or Atlanta or somewhere?"

Michael nodded.

"And everyone is treated the same?"

"What's all this about?"

Derek sighed. "Civilization. Bermuda is very civilized.”

“A few might argue with that.”

Derek said, "Oh, you asked about the men."

Michael stifled a laugh. Derek's mind was a revolving door. "Yes, I did," he said.

"They were up there." Derek pointed across the island to the top of the old house. "They were standing up there, watching the archeologists arrive. I thought they were part of the group, but I never saw them again.

Michael was at a loss.

Derek speculated, "Maybe they landed at the stairs behind the rampart and went back down the same way. That's the only thing I can figure."

"Were they wearing swim gear?"

"No, they were fully-clothed. Wearing straw hats."

"Were they soaking wet?"

"No."

"If they came by boat, they would have had to anchor offshore. There’s no landing on that side. They would have had to wade ashore. Did you hear a boat?"

"No, but sometimes you can't hear an engine if the wind is from the east, right?"

“The wind, when there was any, was westerly all through yesterday.”

“Well, I have hearing difficulties anyway.” He started massaging his ears. And then he started massaging them violently, as if trying to rub them off his head.

Michael touched his arm to make him stop. “Derek,” he said.

“What?”

The air behind Michael was rudely split by the shriek of a kiskadee. Michael twisted to spot it, and turning back, glimpsed Derek diving into the tent. He erupted back out almost immediately, ramming a cartridge into the rifle, already focused on the bird, which was perched on a wispy upper branch of one of the casuarinas. "Don't move, Michael," he said.

Michael froze. "Hold your breath," Derek said, and dropped the stock of the gun onto the broad, padded shoulder, “and you may want to plug your ear.” It was a shot Derek had perfected in California, using an opened car door to assist in eye-holing weather cocks. The kiskadee was surfing on the young, flexible branch, bobbing and swaying in the wind. Michael watched its movement and the corresponding minute oscillations of the rifle barrel.

The gun fired and the kiskadee's head spat blood and feathers. The bird folded and fell, lifeless. Its body rolled downhill and disappeared among dry bay grape leaves.

“Holy!” Michael exclaimed, bumping off the gun. He turned to see Derek yank back the bolt, which sent the shell flying. The boy seemed engrossed with the smoke leaking from the chamber. He then shoved the gun into Michael’s hand and walked to where the bird had landed.

Michael looked at the gun, and at Derek, and at the gun.

Derek walked back dangling the bird by a leg. He stopped on the apron of the water catchment. Blood dripped onto the concrete and flowed downhill toward the water tank. In the heat of the day it would not get far, would dry to a stain, which would eventually turn to dust.

The bleeding stopped.

“Good. It’s done now,” said Derek. He dropped the bird and stuck his fingers in his ears.

Continued…

Nine

2010-08-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

After making sure the rifle was safely zipped back into its case and deposited within the tent, Michael left Derek, who had finally stopped doing disturbing things to his ears. For now, there were no more kiskadees on Tea Kettle Island, no need for Derek to be tormenting himself over killing them , Michael thought, as he sped across Castle Harbour toward the Fisheries Office at Coney Island). Michael had been sincere in suggesting Derek come ashore for a break. He believed the boy needed to get away from the lizards, from the gun, and from his lonesome self. At least Michael now knew something of Derek's puzzle, had clues to mull over and talk to Evie about, to figure out why Derek was so erratic, why he could so easily switch from cheerful and engaging to distressed and withdrawn.

He wanted to help, believing that he would be at fault if Derek's time here didn't in some way ease at least some of his troubles. He was responsible for this boy. How would he be able to live with himself should anything unfortunate happen to him, which was always a possibility out on the rugged little island? His concerns, rekindled this morning by Derek's odd behavior, were rooted in a secret about Derek that Michael had told no one, not even Evie, about why Derek was in Bermuda.

Michael had been dishonest a year earlier after he received a cc of an email sent to the Fisheries Division. It had been opened and read by many in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Parks, but until Michael read it, no one knew how to respond to it. No one wanted to take responsibility. The email was from a graduate student at the University of California.

Director

Bermuda Department of Natural Resources,

or equivalent department

Bermuda

Dear Sir or Madam:

I will very soon be completing my PhD at the University of California. My dissertation deals with the social interactions within the lizard genus Plestiodon, commonly known as skinks. I have studied most of the species of skink in North America, but one that I have been unable to observe alive is the Bermuda skink, Plestiodon longirostris. I am curious about this species, because unlike all others in which males are much larger than females, males and females of the Bermuda skink are almost indistinguishable. If possible, I would like to visit Bermuda and observe individuals of this species to test if their intersexual similarity is related to a unique social system. I would hope to carry out experiments in which adult males are housed together in large enclosures for observations of aggression. All would be released at the locality where they were captured within three days of capture. I expect that none would be harmed. Experiments would strictly follow animal care protocols set by relevant Bermudian authorities and those of the University of California, which are among the most stringent in North America.

I would like to add that I have a strong personal aversion to harming or killing animals in the name of science, for research or for museum collections.

I hope to visit Bermuda this coming year, perhaps with my wife, finances permitting (there is a very good chance I might receive a grant for such a study). Should this come to fruition, could you recommend how or if this study might be accomplished and somewhere we could stay relatively inexpensively, hopefully near a population of skinks?

Thank you in advance for any advice or information.

Sincerely,

Derek L. Coulter

Michael was different from the others who read the email. For one thing, he knew what a Bermuda skink was and where to find one.

He hesitated before answering, because he couldn't understand why this young man wanted to study the rock lizards. He googled him. The Berkeley page showed his picture. Yellow-haired white boy, skinny, baby-faced. He had fourteen publications, five of which were substantial single-authored papers, a respectable record in a world of umpteem-authored three-pagers. Here was an imminent graduate, seemingly with his research completed, ostensibly with little to gain by studying an esoteric aspect of the life history of a barely-known species on the verge of extinction. The proposed work was not going to add significantly to his qualifications, much less earn him a job, if that was his motivation. And Michael suspected that Derek's intended research in Bermuda would be at the very best a challenge. Aggression? From years of casual observations of rock lizards, Michael was certain that the little creatures would never express aggression to each other the way Derek expected, if at all. Derek's behavioral experiments would be fruitless. In terms of his research, it would be a complete waste of time and money for him to journey to Bermuda. But instead of explaining this in his letter of reply, Michael whole-heartedly encouraged him to come and told him that he and his wife could stay on Tea Kettle Island. It had been a nonsensical act. Now, for the first time, he doubted himself.

He recalled staring at Derek’s image on his computer screen and feeling that this boy should come here for a reason other than studying lizards. He remembered wanting the unknown Californian to come. There would be little harm in it, he believed. If nothing else, the young biologist and his wife would have a nice vacation together, which perhaps they needed. Here was a potential new friend, appearing via the internet out of the blue. Michael tended to trust gut feelings. He also remembered being charmed by Derek's specification he would not want to harm or collect any of the lizards. It had seemed sanctimonious, but also amusingly ingenuous. When Derek eventually showed up, solitary and close to penury, sunglasses plastered to his face, Michael was reminded of the peculiarity of the situation and wondered at Derek's motives — and his own. The Californian didn't seem to have been fishing for a cheap vacation for himself and his wife, which had been Evie's unwaveringly cynical contention. His wifeless arrival showed he had wanted to come here to work.

Now, having witnessed a sample of Derek's ongoing turmoil and feeling partly to blame for it, the Fisheries Warden found himself doubting his impulses of a year ago. "What was I thinking?" he said aloud. He was looking behind at the churning wake of his boat, which stretched in a fading, broadening ribbon out of the harbour and back to Tea Kettle Island. "Why did I do this?"

The Admiral said, "So, Caliban should be up the other way?" He was pointing at the path to the redoubt.

"I expect he's there," Adrian replied.

"Splendid. Come along, you lot." The Admiral made beckoning motions. "Let's go find the bogey man."

The students were bewildered that the Admiral had not returned to his boat and sailed away, but massed behind him obediently.

"I'll wait here," Mimi said. She sat on the cooler. She wanted nothing to do with whatever the Admiral intended and was angry with Adrian for going along with his uncle’s stupidity. "Wait till Michael, the Warden, finds out about this," she said. "You'll see what a clever idea this was." Stew's iPod was protruding from the top of his knapsack on the ground beside her. She pulled it out and slid the buds into her ears. "Oh, come on, Miriam," Adrian coaxed, attempting but failing to sound engaging, aware that uncle and students were watching and waiting, twenty yards away.

She turned up the volume until his voice faded into the background.

"Hey cool, Mimi's listening to my mix," Stew said proudly.

Adrian said something to the part in Mimi's hair the others couldn't hear.

She walked her legs around to the far side of the cooler.

Adrian said something else. His hands were pleading.

She placed one thigh across the other and tweaked a tiny, egg-shaped burr from the lace of her running shoe. She flicked it aside and looked out to sea.

Adrian glanced back at the expectant faces behind, and then again at the stubborn young woman in front. He was getting tired of this. He dropped his head briefly, then puffed himself up and marched off to join the others. He announced importantly, "Mimi will stay and guard the gear!" then hurried past the students — who were not so gullible to believe anything was in danger of being stolen by anyone — to catch up with the Admiral, who had tired of the little drama and was enthusiastically approaching his victim.

As Adrian trotted up beside, the Admiral gave him a withering look.

"She's in one of her moods," said Adrian.

Deep in the palmetto grove, Derek buried the evidence, which included the last of his present supply of toilet paper. Uncharacteristically at peace with the visible universe, he stepped onto the path leading to the redoubt. A large male Jamaican anole appeared from the opposite side of a ghost cedar, four feet above the ground. When it saw the human, it flared its dewlap and performed three push-ups. Derek scoffed, and as an afterthought took a half-hearted swipe with his spade. He hadn't expected to hit the lizard, but one of the side-effects of his damaged vision was compromised depth perception. The anole may have been similarly afflicted. It landed in the middle of the path, almost bisected at mid-body, twisted grotesquely around its still-intact spinal column. There were spasmodic twitches of hind limbs and tail, then nothing. Derek stared, disbelieving. The carcass was turning from green to brown as the neural messages charging chromatophores in the skin fizzled out one by one.

"Oh God," he said, "I didn't mean to do that — did I?" He reached forward to prod the sad little corpse, to flick it into the covering vegetation, but something in the guts caught his eye. He bent and carefully tugged at a delicate, sky-blue structure that didn't belong in there. From the body emerged another freshly-consumed baby rock lizard.

"Shit!" he gasped, "These things eat them too!" He kicked the anole into the undergrowth.

The implications of anole predation on baby rock lizards were very serious. It was no wonder there were no young individuals in this population or anywhere in Bermuda. There were thousands of Jamaican anoles on Tea Kettle Island alone. They bred very rapidly, much faster than rock lizards, and were very agile, able to run swiftly on any surface, even the undersides of leaves. Although adult male anoles were no larger than adult skinks, there was an important difference: the heads of male anoles were proportionally much more massive, which allowed the more aggressive species to take relatively large prey. If a hungry male anole saw an infant rock lizard, the little skink was as good as dead. Tea Kettle Island had been the last place in Bermuda colonized by the anoles, about ten years earlier according to Michael. Derek understood: now that the anoles were plentiful here too, there was almost no hope for survival of the rock lizard. As the remaining adults aged and their gonads withered, they would produce fewer and fewer offspring, who would be eaten more and more quickly. No one knew the lifespan of a rock lizard, but best guesses put it at about ten years. How many breeding seasons could possibly remain before no more were born? Five? Four? Three?

And how to get rid of the anoles on this island? There were too many to shoot without poisoning the environment with lead and probably inadvertently bringing down an airliner. All the killing it would require. What sort of person could stand it? He doubted there was an efficient means to trap them, because they weren't attracted to non-living bait, and could easily climb from the crude pit-falls the hapless skinks found completely escape-proof.

He tucked the tiny, blue-tailed body into the breast pocket of his shirt, intending to preserve it in formalin. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Derek saw another anole also taunting him with push-ups. He again swung the spade, and with the flat of the blade whacked the lizard against the side of a palmetto. It fell, twitching, so he scooped it and hurled it against the ground. It lay still, but for good measure he stomped its skull. And then he saw another, eyeing him from the arched axil of a palmetto leaf in front of a cedar trunk, too far away to be clubbed. Derek held the spade like a throwing axe and let it fly, knowing before it left his hand it would follow the linear trajectory in his mind's eye. The lizard was sheared from its perch and skewered spectacularly against the cedar, several feet above the ground.

A massive slaughter was underway. The herpetologist whacked and slashed and stomped like the madman he had earlier pretended to be, his violence fueled by his disgust at his own actions. He was able to convert the frustration and anger over what he was compelled to do into rage, into vengeance against the aggressive, invading lizards. He did well, breaking new ground in the lengthy and revolting history of human destruction of other creatures. Instead of using proven, conventional means -- shooting, poisoning, or burning -- he was dealing death with his collapsible infantryman's spade, the sawed-off shotgun of excavating tools. After fifteen minutes, he stood sweating profusely at the spot the massacre had begun, above a mound of lizard gore. More anoles skittered nervously through the understory, but Derek turned away, his limit reached. His fury had soured to revulsion and remorse.

After a shake of his head to reorient, to recalibrate, he decided it would be wise to dissect his victims to determine if others had recently consumed baby skinks. He created two rosettes, seven bodies each, tails overlapping. He would suspend them from pinched tail-tips to avoid bloodying his hands. Blood itself didn't bother him, but he was loathe to get it on his palms or in between his fingers, a frightening reminder he had once felt his own blood as he lay on the sidewalk, holding his ruptured eye against his face. He clamped the spade beneath one armpit with the blade extending forward. It bobbed as he walked, throwing red droplets onto his legs. Additional spatters landed from the mangled clusters dripping at his sides, but his hands were clean.

Mimi turned off the iPod. Stew’s music hurt her ears. Frustrated with herself for lacking the confidence to shame Adrian and the Admiral into leaving the herpetologist alone, she began toting equipment up to the dig, wanting at least to be useful, unlike the rest of them.

On the way back from her first load she felt the sun's heat soaking into her black hair, a further frustration, because she had left her hat on the boat. She wouldn't be able to endure a full day without it. She rubbed her eyebrows in irritation and stared at the silent sloop moored fifty meters offshore, whose little skiff was bumping suggestively against the rocks at her feet. She untied its rope and stepped in. Although she had never before rowed anything, she managed an almost straight course and thus was pleased with herself until she reached her target, where she discovered that stopping a boat was more difficult than making it go. The skiff bounced off its mothership's hull, but before it deflected very far Mimi was able to reach up and grab the small metal ladder hooked like a drinking straw over the stern. She pulled on it and in doing so shifted the skiff, rooted to her feet by the rubber soles of her shoes. With the line of the skiff in one hand she raised a foot to the lowest rung and, as her body moved forward, the skiff moved backward, out from beneath her other foot. She had not expected this equal and opposite reaction, which also yanked away the line she had been holding too loosely. "Oh, no," she cried at the small craft as it drifted. She dangled her free leg in an attempt to snare it, to no avail. The skiff was headed back to the shore.

Adrian and his uncle would have a reason to criticize her, for setting the skiff adrift and stranding herself on the sloop. She could imagine Adrian's sarcasm, how he would remind her of this mistake for days. "Hell," she said. She thought of swimming after it, but the embarrassment of being soaking-wet would be no better than being marooned on the sloop. With nothing else to do but wait for the humiliation, she went below to find her hat.

Derek emerged from the palmettos to find the Admiral, Adrian, and the students inspecting his campsite. He was instantly re-enraged, with anole-crushing adrenalin not yet entirely gone from his blood. He rushed forward with the spade projecting like a jousting lance. The handle jiggled loose and the heavy blade swung to clip his right kneecap, causing him to release the tool. The clank of metal against water catchment alerted the Admiral, who wheeled to face him. The old man narrowed his eyes and put his hands on his hips.

So did Adrian.

So did Joanne.

The others didn't know what to do and were ashamed at being caught in the midst of someone else's personal belongings. They had broken an agreement made yesterday with the mentally unbalanced herpetologist without knowing why.

Derek was speechless. Indignant rage tended to render him ineffectual and flustered, and put him in greater danger of getting himself injured than had he not sensed that his integrity was under assault. His hands shook, scattering red droplets in a lawn-fertilizing pattern. The dead baby skink in his breast pocket had bled down the front of his shirt and its blood had blended with his perspiration to produce a heart-shot wound. The Californian was far more frightening than the persona he had devised for his first encounter with the students. They were thoroughly shocked, and four of the five seemed eager to leave, but the Admiral acted as though pleased to see him. He smiled, and said, "Helloo," like a child predator. "You must be the biologist." With exaggerated posturing he made it clear he was looking at the mutilated anoles. "I see you've been hard at work, killing our native wildlife. Is this why you're really here, to make a jolly fine collection for your university of rare Bermudian animals?"

Derek wouldn't play along, not at first. He was working on quelling his anger and hoping for a relatively controlled and dignified way to demand that these people leave. It was at least a relief that Mimi wasn't with them. He wouldn't have wanted her to see him suddenly so unsure — and bloodied, like a butcher. As he surveyed the group from behind the safety of his sunglasses, a finger rapidly jabbed within his left ear and the thin whistling tone dropped an octave and doubled in intensity. The asymmetry of sound made him wince and involuntarily jerk his head to the side. To counteract the unbalanced noise he gritted his teeth and growled from the opposite corner of his mouth.

The Admiral was surprised by the reaction, but not deterred. "Well, Dr.... What is your name?"

Derek could see more of what he had already observed in Adrian in this old man. He was patronizing and arrogant. Then Derek recalled he had no reason to fear him or pay him undue respect. There was nothing the Admiral could do to him, Michael had said, and Derek believed Michael completely. The comment about the dead lizards had bothered him briefly, rekindled his guilt, but he brushed aside those feelings and focused on the present annoyance. He had a legitimate reason for being on this island, for doing what he was doing, and felt no need to explain anything to any layperson, wealth or nationality or former military rank notwithstanding. Derek was almost disappointed in a way. This was Michael's "demon?" The Admiral was bandy-legged, about sixty years old, with thin gray hair combed straight back and a ridiculous moustache that halved his face. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, blue shorts, matching knee-socks and shiny black shoes. What remained of Derek’s adrenalin returned to its corner and sat with a towel around its neck and Derek's hands stopped shaking. But then he heard himself growling. He stopped, and said calmly, "You probably know my name. What difference does it make? Why are you here?"

The Admiral, still smiling, said, "Now, now, no need to be hostile."

Derek began to be drawn in. "I'm not being hostile, I don't think. I'm much different from this when I'm hostile, aren't I Adrian?" He rotated his head slightly to shift the insect-stare of his metallic visor directly onto Adrian, who threw his hands in the air.

The Admiral said, "You know, Doctor...Coulter? I have always found it somewhat impolite, and well, perhaps even cowardly, not to make eye-contact during conversation. Would you mind removing your sunglasses so we may continue in a more civilized manner? If you pardon my saying so, they really are the most dreadful things. It's like talking to a large housefly." He chuckled at his own small joke. The Admiral had recognized the psychological advantage provided by the glasses and wanted to remove it. He didn't understand that the sunglasses served a purpose beyond protecting Derek's eyes from the bright Bermudian sun.

Derek bristled and the lizards plopped to the ground. He crouched and reached for the spade. "You'd better all go," he said. His confidence faded and his voice reflected this. Obviously there was an unpleasant reason for the archeologists' presence. It was not merely a casual exploration of the island. Despite Adrian's agreement with Michael, a conspiracy had been organized. Derek said, "You have no reason to be in this part of the island." He pointed the bloody blade at the students, who seemed the most vulnerable component of the group. They clumped together naturally, like soap bubbles. He fanned the air in front of them, and said, "Go on now, GO! You know you shouldn't be here! Leave!"

They were startled at having suddenly been included in the conversation, as if they'd been watching a play that had unexpectedly called for audience participation. They made uncertain steps toward the path, then looked back at Adrian, who looked at the Admiral.

Derek saw the chain reaction and laughed derisively. He cut short the return message with a vertical swipe. "LEAVE!" he yelled. "Get out of here!"

The Admiral boomed back, "NOBODY move!" The students bumped into each other, then readjusted themselves. The Admiral approached Derek, but halted as the American assumed a dramatic, two-handed broadsword posture with the spade.

"Get away from me," Derek said, rigidly.

"What's wrong?" the Admiral hissed, "Afraid of an old man, are you?"

Derek did nothing, paralyzed by an unfortunate upwelling of childhood memories, of being bullied by his cousins, who had been larger and more rambunctious and — unlike Derek and Peter — close together in age, thus life-long, experienced tussling partners. Derek's one effective tactic had been to curl into a ball like an armadillo. His cousins would give up when they realized he wouldn't fight back, that he was no fun, leaving nothing but hard parts, elbows, knees, and head on which to crack their knuckles. In addition, Derek suspected that even though twice his age and funny-looking, the Admiral was not to be taken lightly as a combatant. Derek was no match for a professional soldier of any age, even with a lizard-slaying device in his hands.

The Admiral stepped closer still, until his crisp, white shirtfront was in danger of becoming stained on the bloody apex. "Well, Doctor? What are you going to do to make us leave?"

Derek didn't dare touch the old man, whose stale breath hit his face, and desperately didn't want to form a defensive ball in front of the students or Adrian — who would tell her. He just wanted them all to go away and leave him alone, what he would yell at his cousins to do. His arms were tiring and he was shaking again.

The sky was split in two by an MD-11 blasting overhead, obliterating Derek's plaintive words, "Just go away?" Everyone except Derek and the Admiral looked up and so missed the first move. The Admiral attempted to snatch the sunglasses, and with anyone else would have succeeded, but Derek protected his sunglasses more ardently than most men protected their testicles. He instinctively ducked and spun, deflecting the lunging Admiral with his right shoulder. The Admiral grunted and toppled onto his prey, who was very rapidly transforming into an spade-toting armadillo. Straddling Derek, the Admiral stubbornly continued reaching for the sunglasses with both hands, alternately over left and right shoulders, an open posture that left a clear path between the handle of the spade and the old sea-farer's testicles, which hadn't been protected very carefully for some years. The Armadillo was about to strike back.

The students heard a "thok," like a heavy ladle falling into a vat of pudding, and the Admiral immediately ceased grappling and slid down Derek's back. Derek stood quickly, shedding his attacker like a heavy winter coat. The old man lay among the lizard corpses with hands between his thighs, and moaned quietly as tears crowded his eyes, preparing to abandon ship. Shana and Molly gasped. Adrian rushed to his uncle.

"Whoa, two minutes for butt-ending!" said Stew in delighted amazement.

"Maybe five minutes," said Brian.

"That was completely uncalled for!" Adrian shouted from beside his stricken uncle.

Derek was pacing back and forth, left and right, waving the spade, frightening most of the students, who backed away. Joanne didn't move. Derek pointed the tool at the men, still down on the rock among the flat and flatter anoles. "Stay away from this end of the island!" He'd been hit in the nose by one of the Admiral's futile swipes and was bleeding. As yet unaware of the injury he turned to the students. Shana had her fingertips in her mouth. Molly was mortified. Stew was standing with his hands in his pockets. Brian was scratching himself. "Good one," he said to Derek, respectfully.

"Go," Derek said.

"Bye," said Stew, who left, followed by all but Joanne, whose face was screwed up like a fist. Derek could only watch as she charged and slammed into him. The spade clattered off uselessly to one side. "Holy shit!" he wheezed as he landed on his back. Pressing protective eyewear to face, he struggled to his feet while she pummelled him blindly. Her punches were solid but inaccurate, most hitting his forearms or the sides of his skull, very much like the blows from his cousins, but more forceful. Leaning away, Derek thrust a foot into her abdomen in an ungainly but partially effective karate manoeuver, then fled to the wall of the redoubt as she tumbled. She rebounded quickly and pursued him with arms windmilling. He braced himself against the stonework and kept her at bay with an extended leg, until Brian and Adrian arrived to subdue her. They dragged her away as she continued to spit and grunt and leer at Derek.

"Enough! ENOUGH!" Adrian yelled. He led his uncle and students back to the shore.

Alone and in relative silence, Derek walked slowly and sorely to the trampled remains of the anoles. Most were as two-dimensional as autumn leaves on a rain-soaked roadway. The little rock lizard had fallen from his pocket and lay among them, also flattened, useless as a specimen. He limped back to the side of the redoubt and was suddenly overwhelmed. His knees folded and he sat, then removed his sunglasses and placed a hand over his sorry left eye. He started to sob, but stopped almost immediately, startled by the goose-like noise in his throat.

He heard footfalls returning and slipped his sunglasses onto his face, which hurt. It was the skinny, long-haired one, approaching quickly. "What the hell do you want?" Derek demanded.

The student stopped. His face fell. "Uh, Mimi is missing. I was wondering if you knew where she was," he said, quietly.

"How the FUCK would I know?"

"Sorry to bother you," said the student. He turned and hurried away.

Derek watched him go, then swatted himself in the head, an easy and familiar action. He was angry at himself for yelling at the kid, the friendliest-looking of the bunch. He stood to scoop up a pebble and in frustration bounced it against the side of the redoubt. He saw that again there was blood on his hands.

How could the girl be "missing?" Rubbing palms against hips, he set off after the student, keeping a distance until reaching the water tank. He stopped and peered around the corner. The path continued on another fifty yards to the landing area, where the student had just arrived and, Derek supposed, was telling the straggled others of his lack of success in finding her.

Then he heard her voice. It sounded as if she was in the water. Those on shore were looking out and the good-looking blond girl yelled, "There she is, on the boat, Mimi!" Derek hustled around the back of the tank to the other corner, from which he could see the sloop through gaps in a bay grape tree.

Mimi waved to the shore. "Hey!" she called. "Someone hit me!" She was rubbing the back of her head.

"Someone hit you?" Adrian replied, “Who?"

Mimi said, "I don't know."

Adrian shouted, "How did you get out there without the skiff?"

"I took the skiff," she answered, “It got away from me, and floated back over there."

"And re-tied itself to the shore?"

"What?"

"Mimi, please don't fool around. How did you get there?"

She rubbed her head again. "Did you hear what I said? Someone came onto the boat when I was down in the cabin, and when I came out, he hit me!"

"Who?"

"I didn't see. A man, I think, but it was from behind!"

Derek felt a flash of comprehension and a chill. There were others on the island, and one of them had bopped Mimi on the head. It must have been one of the two he'd seen when the students arrived. Where could they be now? Nine acres of rock didn't provide a lot of room to hide, and Derek covered virtually all of it in his daily rounds. They would have to be moving constantly to stay out of his sight, which didn't seem possible.

He heard Adrian order, "You two, go get Mimi." Then from behind the first corner he spied the beefy boy and the blond girl boarding the skiff, with terrifying advice from the old demon.

The archeologists' crisis was over, but the herpetologist was ill at ease. He walked back to his campsite slowly, warily, pondering the danger of being unaccompanied on an island in the presence of men who stole up easily and quickly — who could be violent. Derek realized he would probably never be able to hear them coming.

Continued…

Ten

2010-07-31T14:42:00.000-07:00

The best he could without a mirror, Derek washed and disinfected the scrapes and assessed the non-bleeding damage. The tops of his ears was sore from the Admiral's vain attempts to yank away his glasses, he had a fattened lower lip, courtesy of the fists of the strange, violent girl, and the bridge of his nose hurt when he pressed on it, possibly cracked. He dreaded what he must look like. Unbelievably, things seemed to be getting worse.

Too agitated to work and too angry to sit still, he paced the top wall of the redoubt with reckless leaps across the narrow outer cuts of the embrasures. He was debating whether to let today's incident slide, or request of Michael that the archeologists be evicted. Step, step, leap. A slip in one direction would cause yet further minor injury; a slip the other way might mean a fatal tumble into the sea, where the larger fragments of Robert and Reginald had landed. This would be somewhat ironic.

It wasn’t an easy decision. On the positive side, having the archeologists removed would mean the end of Adrian Lyon, his insane uncle, and the nasty woman who attacked him. On the negative side, it would ensure he would be lonely except for Michael's visits, and maybe also in danger from the two mystery-men, if they came back. That they had assaulted Mimi was to say the least, puzzling, and to say the most, worrying.

He had thought of her again. He wondered if he really wanted Mimi to leave. He pitied the soldiers who had once been isolated on this island for weeks or months at a time, without even a glimpse of a woman. He sat down to think more clearly, without the distraction of concentrating on not falling to his death, and observed his shadow superimposed on the discarded spade. Nearby were the mashed corpses, fourteen anoles and one baby rock lizard, none salvageable. He jumped down and pushed them onto the spade with a stick, then catapulted the conglomerated muck into the sea.

What a versatile tool this is, he mused. He found his Swiss Army knife, another versatile tool, and cut a series of shallow notches into the shaft on the left side, upward from the metal collar that held the blade in place. He cut fourteen, representing the anoles. Then he cut a single notch on the opposite side to represent the baby rock lizard. Then he cut a second for the rock lizard eaten by the kiskadee. Then he turned back to the left side and cut two more for the kiskadees he had shot. Finally, he cut two very small notches, scarcely bigger than pin-pricks.

He watched the circling pairs of tropicbirds, which made him drowsy. After a short snooze on the rocks he awoke, stiff, sore, and imprinted on the damaged side of his face with the rough texture of limestone, which did nothing to improve his features.

That evening, long after the Admiral had retrieved the students and the sun had descended onto the lumpy mattress of mainland Bermuda, Derek finished his supper and cast a longing look at a bottle of dark Bermudian rum that thoughtful Michael had given him. He knew Adrian and Mimi had remained on the island, because he had watched the departure of the archeologists. He remained undecided on the eviction issue, but was leaning toward inaction. He didn't want to punish the four decent students for what the others had done. There was the other reason, too, the real reason. Nigh two weeks alone on the tiny island had played havoc with what remained of Derek's common sense. A soft hand had disconnected a fistful of plugs. Shining teeth had gnawed through bundles of color-coded, insulated wires. The Californian herpetologist was a tiny speck, living on a tiny speck, in the middle of an enormous ocean covering much of a planet that was yet again, little more than a tiny speck. No wonder the rock lizards were in trouble. They were only seven inches long. Very tiny, all things considered.

He decided to go talk to professor and graduate student in hopes of engendering a more friendly arrangement than had developed so far, and then maybe also discuss the problem of the mystery-men. But what if he came upon them as they were a second time fornicating on the rampart? Could it only be the second time? It would kill him, seeing her with Adrian again.

"To hell with it," he said, speaking aloud like a hopeless nutcase. "I must deal with this." He would stride on over under the guise of making a friendly truce — or of demanding an apology — whichever Adrian deserved, depending on his reaction. Whatever would happen, would happen.

Mimi stamped on the can. It squirted from beneath her shoe and clattered down the slope. Derek came from the shadows and stomped it flat.

“Oh, hi!” she said.

“Hi,” he said. Then he paused, and seemed confused about where he was. The sunset was reflecting off on his sunglasses. It made it hard to read him. He was dressed nicer than before, in a pale shirt with a collar and dark shorts, tennis shoes without socks. He said, “Ah, I want to talk with Adrian.”

“He’s on the wall, smoking a stupid pipe,” she said. They looked. The archeologist was on the rampart, silhouetted against the sunset, smoking a stupid pipe.

“Thank you,” he said. He walked past her. He was holding a bottle.

“I was flattening the cans to make sure the lizards wouldn’t get caught inside,” she said.

Derek turned. “Good.” He opened his mouth as if to say something else, but then bent to one side and stuck his finger in his ear. “Damn,” he muttered. Then he continued on to Adrian.

She followed. Well this held promise, unless Derek planned to throw the bottle at Adrian’s head. The American hopped up on the wall three feet from Adrian and placed the bottle between them.

Adrian looked at the bottle, then at Derek. He asked, "What are you doing at our end?"

"A gift," Derek said. "I want to smooth the waters." He added, " — and remember, please, this is not your 'end.' I go wherever the lizards are. I promise, I won't harm anything here. I have no reason to."

Adrian picked up the bottle. "I don't drink," he said, and handed it back.

Great, he was screwing things up already. Mimi said, “Since when?” She reached up for the bottle, and read the label. It was rum. She said, "We have some Coke to mix with this."

Adrian was tapping his pipe. He said, "No, Mimi. We have a lot of planning to do. I have a lot to explain before tomorrow."

She ignored him. He still didn’t get it. They had to make friends with Derek, especially after today, before Derek told the big man what had happened. She took plastic cups from a bag and a two-liter Coke bottle from their cooler. She had drunk rum and Coke before, but had no clue of the correct ratio. She figured it would be better to have too much rum rather than not enough. “Thank you for bringing this, Derek,” she said. She stared at Adrian and made a rigid, nodding motion. It meant, Smarten up.

Adrian rolled his eyes. He pantomimed reading his watch, a non-digital model nearly invisible in the feeble light.

Mimi lifted three full cups onto the wall, and then reached to Adrian’s arm to anchor her as she clambered up.

He pulled it away. "Ow, my sunburn!"

She fell back to the ground, barely managing to land on her feet. "How many times did I tell you to put on some sun-screen? Four? Five? Even I use sun-screen.” She stepped over to Derek. “Would you help me up?" He leaned to extend his arm. She grabbed his wrist. His hand clamped around hers, and he pulled. Her sticky sneaker soles allowed her to scoot up to the top. She sat between the men. She handed out the cups, took a sip from her own, and said, “Yikes. Too much I guess.”

“Ugh,” said Adrian. “Is there any Coke in here?”

Derek took a big gulp. “It’s perfect,” he said. He drank some more. “Okay, not perfect.”

Adrian said, “So, really, Derek. The purpose for your visit.”

Mimi said, “Adrian…”

“Three things,” said Derek. “First of all, how is your dig going? Find anything good yet?"

Adrian narrowed his eyes. “Why would a herpetologist care?”

Derek said, “Because it’s interesting? Isn’t it? Isn’t that kind of the point?”

Adrian was slow in responding. Mimi knew he suspected bullshit.

"Nothing so far," said Adrian. "It's a slow, meticulous process."

"But you've already dug a lot. A couple of the pits are quite deep." He pointed at the ruined barracks. "Have you found any coins or anything?"

"No," Adrian said. "It's not like looking between chesterfield cushions."

“In California we have old guys in Speedos with metal detectors. They find Rolexes and other cool stuff. You should add one of them to your team.”

“Yes, we should have thought of that,” said Adrian.

“I don’t think he was being serious,” Mimi said.

“Sure I was,” said Derek.

“You were not.” Again, because of his glasses, she couldn’t read him. She thought of something that would draw him out a bit. She said, "Maybe you can help us with the bones."

"You’ve found bones?"

She put down her cup, slipped from the wall, walked a short distance to a cardboard box. She delved through a heap of partially-filled resealable plastic bags. "Here."

Adrian said, "Forget that. We'll leave those to the experts."

"Maybe Derek is an expert," she said, walking back. She put the bag on the wall, and said, “One of you please help me up.” This time Adrian reached for her. Mimi resumed her seat, and passed the bag to Derek. It contained about a quart of mostly small, brown bones that had been collected from the soil below one of the windows of the old house. She said, “It seems to be part of a food midden. Maybe you can tell us what the soldiers were eating."

"This is a waste of time," said Adrian. "He won't be able to see anything in this light, especially since he's still wearing his sunglasses.”

“That leads to my second question.” Derek pressed on the nosepiece of his sunglasses. “Why was your uncle trying to steal my sunglasses?”

Mimi said, “Uncle Morris tried to steal your sunglasses?” She had heard the story from Shana and Stew, but wanted to hear Derek’s version.

“He did,” said Derek. “Right off my face.” Then he leaned forward to dig around in a back pocket. He pulled out a small penlight. He clicked it on. It had a bright blue beam. He shook the bag to rearrange its contents.

"Be careful," said Adrian, "those samples are fragile."

"Why did the Admiral try to steal his sunglasses?" asked Mimi, to Adrian.

“I think he was trying to make a point.”

Derek replied, "That he's a psychopath?"

"If you're trying to smooth the waters, I would recommend that you not refer to my relatives as 'psychopaths'."

Derek handed the light to Mimi. She pointed it at the contents of the bag. "That's good," he said. He said to Adrian, “What did he want? He obviously wanted to pick a fight.”

Adrian said, “Your reaction was cowardly. You could have injured him seriously. He isn’t a young man.”

Derek dropped the bag onto his lap and said, “What is it about your family that makes it difficult to understand that assaulting a person might result in that person defending himself?” His voice rose. “Have you ever been unexpectedly assaulted by a stranger, to the point where you were seriously injured?”

The vehemence was startling. Mimi and Adrian glanced at each other.

And then Derek suddenly smacked himself on the head with the palm of his right hand. He repeated, “What the hell did he want?”

“He, I don’t know what he wanted. I think he wanted to make sure you weren’t interfering with us. He thought he was being helpful. He is a very impetuous personality... and he is, I suppose you could say, a little eccentric. But he means no harm."

Derek asked, "Has he ever killed anyone?"

"Jesus, what a question."

"I mean, even with something as impersonal as a heat-seeking missile, people who kill strangers for a living have got to be a bit more than a little eccentric, no?"

Adrian responded, "There are things that the soldiers of our countries must endure that you and I will never comprehend."

Derek said, "But so what? There are also things that the dry-cleaners of our countries must endure that you and I will never comprehend."

Mimi could not help but laugh out loud at that, then contained herself, saying, "Oh, sorry."

Adrian said, "I don’t know the details — he won’t talk about them — but I know from my mother that he went through hell in the Falklands conflict."

"So thirty or whatever years later he gets to beat me up and steal my sunglasses?"

"Oh, you’re exaggerating. It was a misunderstanding. I’m sure he regrets it."

"A misunderstanding? He came, he saw, he attacked."

"You weren’t being particularly hospitable — nor have you been since we arrived. What was that nonsense with the students yesterday? You were quite an ass."

Derek gulped down the rest of his rum.

Mimi said, “Hey guys, calm down. Things were almost going well for a while here.” She could tell Derek was angry. “Here, you can have my rum,” she said, pointing at her cup. He took it and drank .

“Okay, sorry,” said Derek. “But if this arrangement is going to work, I think it would be best for everyone if he stayed off the island."

Adrian said, to Mimi’s surprise, "I agree. I’ll see what I can do."

Derek said, “Thank you.”

Derek returned his attention to the bag and said, "It contains fish vertebrae mainly."

"We know that," said Adrian. "What kind of fish?"

"I can’t tell. You'd need a comparative collection. Make sure you buy some local fish at the markets before you leave, so your experts have some reference material."

"Yes," said Adrian. "It’s standard procedure."

Derek asked, "Do you know what this thick one is, above my finger?" He held the bag so that a short, stumpy bone was visible through the plastic.

Mimi asked, "It’s not a fish bone?"

"No, it’s from a mammal. I would guess it's a metacarpal, a distal forelimb bone, similar to a human hand bone, probably from a pig. They must have kept pigs on the island. That must have been fun for the lizards."

"Neat," said Mimi. “See? He is an expert, even in the dark with his sunglasses on.”

“Fine,” said Adrian. “Come back tomorrow when the students are here and go through as many bags as you want.”

Mimi smiled at Adrian. Things were working out.

Derek handed the bag back to Mimi. "It could be quite a story," he said, "a record of all the species that have been destroyed since humans arrived, and now, as a sad addition, you and your students are here, witness to the last days of another species — the Bermuda rock lizard."

Adrian asked, "Why are you so obsessively concerned with these lizards?"

"I don’t know," said Derek.

"It’s not healthy."

Mimi said, "I think the students would be very interested in this, and they'd appreciate the help with their samples."

"I'm bored a lot of the time anyway, and it gets pretty lonely," he said. "I've been here two weeks, with only short visits from Michael Spencer to keep me company. It might be fun to work together to get a complete history of this island, zoological as well as human."

Mimi looked to Adrian.

“Sure, fine," he said. “I have no problem with that.”

Michael Spencer is a bit scary," said Mimi. “He’s huge.”

Derek laughed. “He’s not scary. He’s a teddy-bear.”

She shouldn’t have said anything about Michael. The mention of him irritated Adrian. "Excuse us, Derek, but I have to ask you to leave, now. We really are busy. Please take the rest of the rum with you."

“Hang on, I have a third question, for Mimi,” said Derek. He asked, “Why was one of the students looking for you? The long-haired one told me you were missing."

"Not this," said Adrian.

Mimi gave a run-down of what had happened. She said, “It all started when I porgot, forgot my hat.” She described how she had rowed to the sloop, found the skiff was difficult to control, that it got away from her, and that after she finally found her hat — it had been knocked onto the floor, under a table — and came back out of the cabin, someone hit her over the back of the head. "Here," she leaned forward and took Derek's hand. "Feel this," she said. She took his hand and pressed his fingertips through her hair to a small egg behind her right ear.

"Huh!" he exclaimed, and yanked his hand away, as if it burned to touch her. She looked at him, puzzled, and then continued her story. She tumbled back into the cabin and the door slammed behind her. Afraid, she locked it, then, after waiting a while, cautiously opened a window and called for help, "but everyone was still with you," she said to Derek. "And then in a while I heard voices and saw everyone, so I came out."

Derek said, “The morning your students arrived, there were two men up there, on the house, looking down at you. That’s what I was talking about before. I saw them from the spout, but then where did they go? Where was their boat?”

Adrian said, “Crazy story time is over. Thanks Derek for coming by. I’ll keep my uncle off the island and we’ll let you know if we find any coins.”

Derek pushed a button on his watch that caused a little blue window to show on his sunglasses. He said, “In about seven minutes the ocean is going to become an orgy of light.”

Mimi said, “What?”

“You should come and see this, said Derek. “The fireworms, Odontosyllis."

"What's that?" asked Mimi.

He explained that, once a month, three days and fifty-six minutes after the full moon, the fireworms swam from the their sandy burrows in the shallows to the surface, where they engaged in suicidal sex.

"What?" she laughed.

Adrian sighed in exasperation.

"They break apart and squirt their gametes into the water," said Derek.

"Really? How big are they?" She was picturing exploding dew worms.

"Small," said Derek, "but the reason they're worth seeing is that they fluoresce. They glow. They find each other that way. The summer months have the most spectacular shows."

"That's amazing. Let's go."

Adrian held her wrist. "Miriam, we didn’t come here to watch worms. Honestly, we have plans to make. I have to explain something to you, about the course."

She pulled away. "I'll be right back. I'm not in Bermuda every day you know. I want to see this." She dropped to the ground. She wanted him to come. She didn’t want him to come. She would give him the choice. "Come and see it. Come and see it with me."

Continued…

Eleven

2010-07-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

As they headed toward the path, Derek asked, “Don’t you find it too hot to sleep in that tent? Especially since you put it there, so close to the rampart. The rock will radiate heat all night. It would be better set somewhere that isn’t in full sun all day.” He added, “If you can find somewhere halfway level.”

Mimi asked, “Where did you put your tent?”

“I found a spot with a bit of actual soil that gets shade later in the day. It’s still pretty warm, so usually I sleep in my hammock, which is quite pleasant, unless the air is still and the no-see-ums are biting.” They descended into the palmetto forest. Derek asked, “Don’t you think it’s odd that your boyfriend is letting you stroll off in the dark with a crazy man to look for exploding worms?”

She didn’t answer right away, as though she were trying to come up with another explanation for the single tent. There wasn’t one. She said, “He checked you out online. It turns out you are who you say you are, just another boring biologist. I guess that means you’re harmless.”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her into the middle of the path.

She froze. “What are you doing?”

“You were about to walk into this.” He reached and flicked the leaf of a Spanish bayonet. “Let me turn my light back on.”

As they continued, he said, “I’m boring?”

“Those were Adrian’s words.”

“I’ll try to be more interesting.”

“Oh, you’re interesting enough.”

They arrived at the rocky ledge in the teapot notch where Michael would land his boat. Water was sloshing gently among the crags. Mimi said, “I’m sorry about the incident with the Admiral.”

“It’s okay as long as he stays away.”

“You might want to know, the students thought you were awesome, most of them.”

“Why?”

“They don’t like him, except for Joanne, who was the one who attacked you afterwards. I’m sorry about that too.”

“She was worse than the Admiral. What’s her story?”

Mimi said, “I haven’t figured her out yet.”

Derek clicked off his penlight and checked his watch. "It should be any second now," he said, and then, almost immediately, "There!" A fluorescent green dot had appeared on the surface fifteen feet away, twisting and bobbing in the wavelets. Within a few seconds it was joined by a second, more brightly-glowing speck.

"What's happening? asked Mimi. "Is that what they are? The green lights?"

"Just wait," said Derek. Another surfaced much closer, a tiny fluorescent curlicue spinning just offshore, near her feet, spewing a ghostly smoky trail. "That's a female," said Derek. "Now keep watching it."

A whitish spark appeared from below, brighter than the green-glowing female. It spiraled upward, seeming to follow the movement of the first worm. In a brilliant flash it hit the female just below the surface, and both lights went out.

"Hey — what happened?" Mimi jumped. "What are they doing?"

Derek was excited too. He'd never seen this before, only read about it. "Worm sex," he said. "The bright speck is the male.”

"Here's another," she said, pointing at a female a yard to the right. Almost instantly a spark rose to it too, and they disappeared in a joint-flash.

"Whoo!" she yelled. "This is great!” She jiggled his elbow. “Find another one!"

"There's one." He pointed with his light several feet the other way. They both cried, "Whoo!" as the male spark flew at the female. Another green female appeared directly below them, which Derek caught in the beam of his flashlight.

"Oooh, so that's what they are?" The twitching worm was bluish-white, small, the size of a cashew nut, and unexpectedly repulsive, like a maggot. "They're not very pretty," she said, and laughing, added, "We shouldn't see them as they really are. Give them back their privacy."

Derek turned out the light.

Over the next few minutes, worm sex exploded throughout the nearshore waters. Mimi and Derek cheered as glowing females and their brilliant mates performed. There were hundreds, if not thousands. The sea had become littered with flashing cats' eyes. Then suddenly, like a fireworks display, it ended.

"That's all till next month," said Derek.

"They only have sex once a month?" She laughed.

"Yeah, and it kills them too." Then he gripped the sides of his head. "Umm," he said. His right ear this time. The ringing was unusually penetrating and dizzying. He let the flashlight slip from his hand. It bounced off the rocks, into the water. "Damn," he said.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed about the light, but Derek was paying no attention to his flashlight. He was hitting himself.

"What are you doing, what's wrong?" She asked the obvious question. "Why are you hitting yourself?"

"Ringing in my ears," he said, through clenched teeth. "For eight months I've had ringing in my ears. Sometimes it’s really…bad." He sat and propped his forehead on his kneecaps, cupping and uncupping his ears with his hands. "Oh God," he said, "make it go away." He held his head, and was still. Finally, his hands dropped to his sides. "There, it's a bit better."

Mimi had been squatting a few feet away, watching. She was glad that whatever had struck him had subsided, and moved closer, changing her posture, hugging herself behind her thighs, with the side of her face on her knees. After waiting to make sure he was okay, she asked quietly, "Do you believe in God?"

He jumped, as though he'd forgotten she was there. But it was the surprising question. He tilted his face to the sky, then at her. "No. I don't think so, not really. Not the way maybe you do."

"What do you mean?"

"This is enough God for me." He swept an arm over the water and back over the island. "This island, the rock lizards, the birds, the ocean, the planet. I don't yet understand it, or even what I mean exactly, but I feel it's all that really matters. I hope to understand it some day. Before it's all gone."

She had expected a simpler answer. "You're not a Christian?"

“No. I'm a zoologist. Why do you ask?"

"You seemed to be praying a minute ago, but I wasn't sure if you really meant it."

"What?"

"About your ears, I guess."

"Do you think it would help?"

"It couldn't hurt."

“I doubt it would help. A radio signal needs a receiver.”
Water flush with gametes sloshed within the wave-washed spires at their feet.

“I pray,” she said.

“Does it ever accomplish anything?”

“Maybe, sometimes. But I don’t usually ask for anything. For me it’s more like a conversation, even though he doesn’t answer back.”

“So it’s like writing letters to a cat.”

She laughed, “No, it’s not like writing letters to a cat!”

He asked, “Who taught you how to pray?”

“I forget. My mom, or the nuns, or both. I was raised Catholic.” And then, as an explanation or excuse, with a shrug, “I’m from the Philippines.”

He was good at differentiating among Asian accents and faces and names. He had known she was from the Philippines before he pulled the spine from her ankle.

“Most Filipinos are Catholic,” she explained, “because of the Spanish.”

“Yo se, Senorita Villanueva.”

“Smart guy." She play-slapped his arm with the back of her hand.

He thought of asking her, What did the Filipinos believe in before the Spanish got there? but he suspected she wouldn't know, and the thought of her struggling for an answer bothered him. He was sitting less than a leg-width from her, watching her watch the circles of starlight reflecting off the jouncing surface of the water. His heart was punching his ribs. Finally he breathed, "Well, for sure now the worms are done."

Mimi came to life, a matchstick bursting to flame. "Thank you little worms," she sang. "I hope you have a lot of babies!" She put her hand on his shoulder and boosted herself up. She touched him easily. His brain was filing these little instances of contact. The handshake, the elbow jiggle, the little slap, his fingertips pressed through her hair against the bump on her head—that one had been way too much of her to feel all at once. He had drunk from her cup. He had grabbed her arm in the dark. A spark in his gut was set swimming frantically, wanting to fight its way to the surface, to the welcoming green target. The confusion of the day had not yet ended.

And more. She held his elbow like a blind person as they walked the path to the rampart under the thin light of the stars. Briefly, her hair swept along his forearm. He couldn't stand it. The fireworm was going to explode.

"Really," she asked, "how can you see at night with your sunglasses on?

"It's not all that dark. You get used to it."

"Do you always wear them?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

He now had a new answer, but couldn’t spit it out. Because you shouldn't see me as I really am. “It’s a long story.”

"Will you tell me some time?"

“Some time,” he said. They had stopped just shy of the clearing that sloped up to the wall.

"Well, Good night," he said. It hurt profoundly that she was now about to go sleep with Adrian Lyon.

"Good night. I'll say a prayer for your ears."

He bit his tongue. "Thank you." Her heel rotated on the limestone. He couldn't let her go, not yet. "Mimi?"

"Mm?"

"I couldn't explain what I meant about God, when you asked."

"That's okay. Religion's a personal thing."

"Let me try again?"

She said nothing and her hand remained on his arm. He said, "I think if there's a god, it isn't a conscious being, not something that can be accessed by prayer, not something that cares about us in particular, or anything. I think instead it's all of this — all the living things, and the bonds among them. And it's a good thing. A goodness. I think maybe it's why I'm a biologist, because I feel the pull of it and the goodness of it." Her eyes were watching him, black circles surrounded by white. Beneath her hand was a growing electrolytic dampness. "There are times when everything else is going wrong, and I come to a place like this, surrounded by nature, and it helps,"

"To escape from your problems?"

"No, not quite. It's more as if I'm going to something, to a real thing, compared to which the other things in my life, good and bad, are completely irrelevant. There are instances when I feel it and I suddenly feel completely insignificant, but at the same time as important or as powerful as anyone or anything else. It makes me feel that somewhere in the surrounding natural world is something very strong, something comforting, and I feel I'm not alone, that I belong. Do you know what I mean?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think so." She seemed to ponder this. "I don't think it's God, whatever it is."

He pressed fingertips to his forehead. "Okay, try this. Think about what you just saw, the fantastic beginnings of the lives of thousands of creatures that half an hour ago you didn't even know existed. Wasn't that great? Wasn't that the best thing you've seen in a very long time?"

"It was neat."

"More," he said. "Wasn't there a real power in it? Couldn't you almost feel it? The magic of it, how it came out of nothing, how it drove itself, and how for a few minutes you were part of it? How you were in it?" Her hand fell away as he became more animated. He thought he heard her lips part, but didn't see her teeth because his eyes were closed. "And think about how the air here feels when it blows up off the water and you breathe it deep into your lungs. And think about the longtailed birds, of how fantastic they are, and how they laugh when they fly, and how their voices are carried to you on the wind, even when they're almost too far out over the water for you to see."

"It's nice," she said.

"And it's always in wild places like this, that city people never see. Like this island. Other places I've felt it are in the redwood forests, and the Mojave Desert, when a storm is coming."

She asked, quietly, "Did you come here, for this — whatever it is you mean? Is it because of your ears?"

He wasn't sure, but tried to explain, "I didn't think it through all that much. I... My life changed this year, and I was going to cancel this trip. But then I decided to come anyway." He shrugged. "And what I was talking about doesn't seem to be happening much, at least not very clearly. It's become messed up, with the mystery-men and everything."

"Us, you mean."

"Yes," he said.
Her teeth shone very briefly, and, as he watched to see if they would reappear, he was pinched on the biceps of his right arm.

"You are definitely not boring. I better go, bye." Her hand dropped and her silhouette was headed toward the light of the lantern where Adrian sat reading.

"Oh, God," Derek whispered, scarcely opening his mouth lest the blazing spark come flying out.

Continued…