“Can’t say I do.”
Cromer sniffed to show his contempt. “Didn’t think you would somehow. Even them so-called experts up in Jacksonville with their fancy college degrees don’t know nothin’ about mimics. Nobody knows more about mimics than I do, and one of these days…” He broke off, his narrow face taut with sudden belligerence, and took a long drink of whisky.
“You’re going to show them a thing or two, are you, Professor?” Massick prompted. “Make them all sit up and take notice?”
Cromer glanced at the bedroom door, then selected two pale blue butterflies from the table and held them out on the palm of his hand. “Whaddaya say about them? Same or different?”
Massick eyed the closed door thoughtfully before turning his attention to the insects. “They look the same to me.”
“Want to bet on it?”
“I’m not a gambling man.”
“Just as well—you’da lost your money,” Cromer said triumphantly. “This one on the left has a kinda blue glaze all over his wings and the birds leave him alone because he don’t taste good. This other feller does taste good to birds, so he fools them by copyin’ the same blue, but he does it by mixin’ in blue bits and white bits on his wings. Of course, you need one of them microscopes to see it proper. I’m goin’ to get me one of them microscopes real soon.”
“Very interesting,” Massick said, abstracted, noticing for the first time that the door to the room he had presumed to be a bedroom was secured by a farmhouse-type latch and that the latch was held down by a twist of wire. Was it possible, he wondered, that Cromer had something valuable hidden away? It was difficult to imagine what the shabby recluse might have, but it was a well-known fact that elderly people who lived in conditions of abject poverty often had large sums of money tucked into mattresses and under floorboards. In any case, there would be no harm in investigating the matter while he was actually on the premises. Deciding that no immediate action was required, he continued sipping whisky and pretending to listen to Cromer’s rambling discourse on entomology.
The little man appeared to have an extensive though informal knowledge of his subject which he dispensed in an anecdotal folksy style, with frequent references to Seminole legends, but his words were becoming so slurred that it was almost impossible to follow his meaning at times. The practice of mimicry among insects, fish and animals seemed to fascinate him and he kept returning to it obsessively, drinking all the while, his face and clamped-down ears growing progressively redder as the level in his bottle went down.
“You ought to go easy on that stuff,” Massick told him with some amusement. “I don’t want to put you to bed.”
“I can handle it.” Cromer stood up, swaying even though he was holding the edge of the table, and gazed at Massick with solemn blue eyes. “I gotta consult the head of the family.”
He lurched to the outer door and disappeared through it into the night, already fumbling with his trouser zip. Massick waited a few seconds, stood up and was surprised to discover that he too was unsteady on his feet. He had forgotten that exhaustion and hunger would enhance the effects of the liquor he had consumed. Blinking to clear his vision, he crossed the room to the locked door, pulled the wire away from the latch and dropped it on the floor. He opened the door, took one step into the room beyond and froze in mid-stride, his jaw sagging in surprise.
There was a young woman lying on the narrow bed, her body covered by a single sheet.
At the sound of Massick’s entrance she raised herself on one elbow—a strangely languid movement, as though she was weakened by illness—and he saw that she had smooth, swarthy skin and black hair. His impression that she was an Indian was strengthened by the fact that she had three dots tattooed in a triangle on her forehead, although he had never seen that particular marking before. She stared at him in silence for a moment, showing no signs of alarm, and began to smile. Her teeth were white, forming a flawless crescent.
“I’m sorry,” Massick said. “I didn’t know…” He backed out of the room, pulling the door closed, trying to understand why the sight of the woman had been so disconcerting. Was it the sheer unexpectedness of her presence in Cromer’s bedroom? Was it that the circumstances suggested she was being held captive? Massick picked up his bottle, gulped some whisky and was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when the answer to his questions stole quietly into his mind. She had looked at him—and had smiled.
He could not remember a single occasion in the twenty-odd years of his adult life on which a woman had set eyes on him for the first time and had reacted by smiling. As a youth he had spent hours before the mirror trying to decide what it was about his appearance that made all the girls in his age group avoid his eyes and refuse point blank to date him. There had been a two year period in which he had done his best to conform to the same image as the sexually successful young men in the neighbourhood—trying to put a twinkle into the slate pellets that were his eyes, trying to smile when every muscle in his face wanted to scowl, trying to crack jokes, to be lean-hipped, to be a good dancer—but the net result had been that the girls had shunned him more assiduously than before. After that he had simply begun taking them, whether they liked it or not. And none of them had liked it.
Over the years Massick had grown accustomed to the arrangement, so much so that he found real stimulation in the sudden look of mingled terror and disgust on a woman’s face as she realised what was going to happen to her. Underneath it all, however, imprisoned far down in buried layers of his mind-body complex, there still lived a boyish Joe Massick who yearned for another kind of encounter, one in which there was gentleness in place of force, gladness in place of revulsion, in which soft arms welcomed as the world flowed out and away until there was nothing to see anywhere except eyes that shone with a special warm lustre and lips that smiled…
“That’s better,” Cromer said, coming in through the screen door. He went straight to his chair at the table, executed a lateral shuffle which showed he was quite drunk, and sat down before the assortment of insects and plastic boxes.
Massick returned to his own seat and gazed at Cromer with speculative eyes. Was it possible that the little man, in spite of his scrawny and dried-up appearance, had a taste for hot-blooded Indian girls? The notion inspired Massick with a sharp pang of jealousy. He had seen enough of the girl’s body to know that she was strong-breasted, lush, ripe—and that she would be totally wasted on a miserable old stick like Cromer. If anybody was to bed down with her that night it ought to be Joe Massick, because he was the one who had been going through hell and needed relief from the tensions that racked his body, he was the one who had the size and strength to give the chick what she deserved, and because he was in that kind of a mood. Besides, she had smiled at him…
“The Calusas was the ones who knew this swamp,” Cromer was muttering, staring down at a moth in its tiny crystal coffin. “They were here long before the Seminoles ever even seen the place, and they knew all about it, that’s for sure…knew when the nymphs was turnin’ into imagos…knew when it was time to pull up stakes and move on.”
“You’re a wily old bird, aren’t you?” Massick said. “You’ve got this place stocked up with everything you need.”
“Hear them cicadas out there?” Cromer, apparently unaware that Massick had spoken, nodded towards the black rectangle of the door. “Seventeen years they live under the ground, gettin’ ready to come up and breed. It stands to reason there must be other critturs that takes longer—maybe thirty years, maybe fifty, maybe even a …”