Once, Solaris said to the Chinaman, “What kind of people buy this shit?”
Nguyen told him, “We sell to a few scientists who can’t get permits, men looking for cures for cancer, high blood pressure, whatever. Discover a drug that works, you’re rich forever. Like Dr. Stokes, when he lost his license and got run out of the U.S. That’s how I started with him. Just snakes at first, now everything.”
Otherwise, the Chinaman said, most of their clients were people so protected by their wealth that they enjoyed toying with danger.
“It’s why I know we’ll make money. Something that’s illegal and dangerous-it’s a way of showing off. One of the scorpions in that cage?” He’d pointed at scorpions with robotic tails as thick as the fat man’s thumb. “They cost us twenty cents, U.S. A penny if we hatch them from eggs, which we’ve been doing. Calcutta funeral scorpions-poisonous, but not as dangerous as people think. Because of the name, we can charge two or three hundred dollars a pair. Where else can collectors buy them?”
Speaking of “us” and “we” as if Solaris and his uncle were getting part of the profit instead of the wrinkled dollar bills the fat man stuffed into their hands at the end of the day.
“Komodo dragons? They kill a man by biting his stomach open, eating his guts. The rarest of rare. In Indonesia, we buy a dozen Komodo eggs for twenty dollars, ship them like gold for a thousand. If only three hatch? There’s a group of ranchers in Texas who buy all the Komodos I can deliver at fifty thousand cash, no questions as long as their veterinarian okays the animal.
“Man-children. They wear loincloths, carry torches at night, hunt the lizards with spears. Probably paint their faces and scream at the moon. Play caveman, then go home and enter their wives from behind. Who knows? They tell me dragon tail tastes like eagle squab.”
African mambas, the Chinaman said, were the most dangerous snakes on earth. They moved over the ground faster than a racehorse; grew more than five meters long. Australian death vipers were a better example, because of the name. For an adult female death viper, he could get five, ten thousand. If the female was gravid-“they’re live-bearers,” he explained-twice that.
“Both are listed among the ten most venomous snakes in the world,” he said. “It’s like a sports title. Deadly, so valuable. Understand what I’m telling you?”
Solaris was in charge of maintaining storage barns, procuring feed, keeping track of inventory. Also, he was big enough to scare anyone thinking about robbing the place.
The morning Snake Woman lured him into the barn for the first time, he’d copied the Chinaman’s writing onto a clipboard.
Sold to Dr. Desmond Stokes:
25 dozen African mamba eggs amp; hatchlings 10 death adders, 6 gravid females 25 pint containers of thick-tailed scorpion eggs amp; hatchlings 50-liter drum/parasites, West Africa 50-liter drum/mosquito larvae, Brazil 50-liter drum/sewage, East Africa 14 laboratory rats test-positive, cholera, Johannesburg
Cholera? Madre de Jesus. The things they ordered were always like that. Weird. Dangerous. Dirty.
What sort of research was that strange man doing? This was not like the pet store toys other clients wanted.
But God, the blond Russian, what a body. Solaris would think of her at night, his four younger brothers asleep in the same room, and try not to tremble.
The Chinaman wasn’t dumb. He caught on quick about what the two of them were doing alone in the tobacco barn.
“She’ll be the death of you,” the fat man said one afternoon, not laughing.
Solaris took it as a joke. “But that woman loves me so much, what a way to go!”
But the fat man was right.
2
Aside from a strange, shy message on an answering machine, the first words I heard Jobe Applebee speak were: “Please, don’t hit me again. My brain… you don’t understand. I can’t.”
The way he said it, “I can’t,” sounded touchingly childlike. This thirty-some-year-old man wasn’t begging. He was apologizing. Telling the blond woman who was beating him that he wanted to cooperate. He simply didn’t know how.
Only a minute or two before, I’d been standing on the porch of Applebee’s secluded island home on Lake Toho, Central Florida, in citrus, cattle, bass boat, and Disney country. I’d stood there feeling out of place, a little silly, looking up at all the dark gables and darker windows of the man’s solitary three-story. I would have guessed the place was empty but for a golf cart umbilicaled to a charger next to the porch.
Golf carts are standard transportation in Florida’s island communities. Drive them to the boat dock when leaving, drive them home upon return. The cart meant that Applebee probably was inside.
I didn’t know the man. Had never met him. I was there because I’d made a reluctant promise to his sister, a friend.
It was a promise I already regretted.
As I stood there trying to decide what to do, I grunted and I sighed, made the silly, adolescent sounds that a person utters when he’s about to continue some damn, silly task he doesn’t want to continue. I certainly did not want to do this, but, as Applebee’s sister pointed out, I am an ever-dependable pushover. I am Marion D. Ford, the amiable marine biologist, bookworm nerd, collector of sea creatures, and “wouldn’t hurt a flea, cheery sunset cohort who can’t say no to a pal.”
My friend’s words.
Finally, I stepped onto Applebee’s porch, went to the door.
There wasn’t a bell, so I leaned to knock… then stopped, knuckles poised, head tilted, listening to an unexpected sound. Stood for long seconds straining to identify an indistinct moaning. It was a noise that someone in pain might make. Or someone frightened. Or someone trying to pull a very bad joke.
This was no joke. The moaning was coming from the rear of the house.
Quietly, I tested the doorknob. Locked.
I waited, ears focused… heard it again: someone in pain.
Hurrying now, I swung over the porch railing and jogged to the rear of the house. That’s when I heard Applebee’s frightened, apologetic voice; heard him in person for the first time: “Please, don’t hit me again. My brain… you don’t understand. I can’t.”
Heard the words during a lull in the music that was being played loud, probably to cover the man’s pleading, and then his scream: “Stop, please. I can’t stand this!”
In bizarre contrast was the music, a Disney tune that even I recognized. Something about it being a small world after all.
The sound of a grown man begging detonates all the primitive caveman alarms. Terror has a distinctive pitch. We hear it through the base of the skull, not the auditory canal, and it’s interpreted as an electric prickle down the spine.
I waited until the music resumed, then began to move toward a set of French doors from which Applebee’s voice drifted. As I did, I fished a cellular phone out of my pocket, dialed 911. To the woman who answered, I whispered, “There’s a man being assaulted on an island, south of Orlando. Night’s Landing… no… Nightshade Landing. House number thirty-nine; owner’s name is Applebee. Dr. Jobe Applebee. Get a police boat or a chopper out here A-S-A-P. I’m going to try and help.”
I listened long enough to make certain she understood, then shoved the phone into my pocket.
There was a smaller porch at the rear entrance. I stepped up onto the deck, and pressed my face to the double glass doors. Through a space in the curtains, I saw the little man I knew to be Applebee-recognizable because he’s the identical twin of the sister who’d asked me to check on him.
Even with Applebee’s bloodied face, the likeness was unmistakable.
He was sitting on a chair in the dimly lighted space, dressed like an underpaid junior college professor: charcoal slacks, white shirt with a collar stiff enough to hold a clip-on tie. He was barefooted, which gave the peculiar impression that he was unclothed.
Men like Jobe Applebee do not go around without socks and shoes.