We’d been collecting only male horseshoe crabs, but now I stooped and leveraged a female out of the muck and put her aside. Then I used my fingers to dig down a few inches through the sand until I felt the familiar globular mass. Waited until the water had seeped away, then pointed at the clumps of greenish-gray eggs. I told her, “Each female lays thousands of eggs. Maybe tens of thousands, I’m not sure. See how she buried herself down in the mud? At least six inches, maybe even a foot. That’s so the eggs won’t get washed away before they hatch. It takes about six weeks from the time a male fertilizes them until the eggs are mature enough to-” I stopped talking, looking toward the Intracoastal Waterway, which was just a mile or so away. Something had caught my attention. I could see two yellow Mercury test boats speeding southward, outward-bound from the test center, traveling fast.
Were the boats slowing now?
I stood watching them, aware of how unlikely it would be for those same test boats to be targeted again as escape vehicles, yet automatically calculating how long it would take for me to get back to my skiff, where I had the Sig Sauer hidden away in the little bag I used to keep towels and my handheld VHF radio.
“What’s wrong with you, man? You look like you just see’d a ghost. Or maybe somebody walked over your grave. Or my grave.”
I didn’t respond. I watched until I was certain the boats weren’t slowing. Watched them continue down the channel-normal routing, normal driver behavior.
“You gone deaf, my brother? You hear what I ask?”
I turned slightly toward her as I said, “Huh? Sorry. I lost the thread. What was I talking about?”
Ransom had her hands on hips, staring at me. “Crabs. You was telling me about their eggs and stuff, but I don’t care nothing ’bout that no more. What I’m seeing right now, my brother, is you scared of something. Real scared.”
I bent, returned the female crab to her nest. Said, “Crabs… right, I was telling you about crabs. What most people don’t realize about horseshoe crabs is they’re more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to true crabs. They have no antenna, no elaborate or oversize mandibles. The spiked tail? It looks like a weapon, but it’s actually a leveraging device. They use it to right themselves if they get flipped over.”
She was still looking into my face. “There’s something you not telling me, man. Izzy and Clare, yeah, they two scary Rastamen, but it more than that. A man like you, them two not amount to much worry, so it somethin’ else. Somethin’ serious. What I see in your face just now, it scare me, too. It bad, man, it very bad. What going on in that heart of yours, my brother?”
Why did she keep pushing? I said, “You’re exaggerating. And misinterpreting. You want me to tell you about horseshoe crabs or not? I know they look simple, maybe not that interesting, but they’re really one of the great survival stories on earth. The crabs you’re carrying in your bucket right now are identical to fossilized crabs dug out of the Alps. Two hundred million years old, that’s how long they’ve lived unchanged-essentially perfectly designed animals. You don’t find that interesting?”
“It’s them Spanish men you’re scared of, isn’t it? Uh-huh, uh-huh, your eyes talkin’ to me now even though your mouth saying something else. What you call them… Colombians? The Colombians, they after you and you know it, but you ain’t saying nothing.”
I told her, “I’m talking away, but you’re not listening. You asked me why we’re collecting crabs that can’t be eaten, which is what I was getting at if you’d just listen. The thing about a horseshoe crab, they have a small amount of blue-colored blood, which is important to pharmaceutical companies. Research facilities, too. Their blood clots at the slightest contact with endotoxins, which are toxic byproducts of some bacteria. Endotoximia is a lethal form of blood poisoning, so what we’re doing is important work.”
“Blood poisoning, yeah, I know that a bad thing, but them Colombians, they something bad, too, which is what we should be discussin’. Why you don’t want me to help? Maybe I got some methods you don’t know nothin’ about.” She stepped to me and pulled the collar of my shirt open. “See here? Why you not wearing the gris-gris bag I give you? That good luck, man! Something else I can do for you, I can get some Goofer dust. Put a little on you, then pray over it every day for nine days. That and some blue stone mixed with amber and turpentine and salt to protect you from all harm. It very powerful. It what we call an Assault Obeah, a curse on your enemies.”
I was shaking my head, amused by the irony. Me talking research and technology, Ransom replying with archaic superstition: an illustration of the diversity of two islands, an example of similar genetics from diverse cultures.
She straightened my collar and leaned closer. “I tell you something true now, ’cause I can see you’re not a believer. That same Assault Obeah, I used it against Sinclair Benton. Nine days after my last prayer, that bad man was found dead in the same lake that kill my baby. I tol’ you about that evil place. We islanders saw vultures, knew Benton was missing and sent a couple tourists to check. There his big body was, face down, out there like he was tryin’ to find something.
“Sinclair drown in Horse Eatin’ Hole, a man who couldn’t swim a stroke in his life and had no reason to be at a place nobody on Cat Island have the courage to go near except my sweet brave Tucker. That how strong that spell is.”
I picked up my bucket and began to walk along the bar again. I was walking in ankle-deep water, at the demarcation of turtle grass and sand, and soon found a nice little pocket of sea anemones. It was in a slightly softer area where there were also dozens of nickel-sized siphon holes in the sand: a bed of angel-wing clams below.
I touched my middle finger to one of the holes. I could feel the angel-wing’s siphon jetting water as the clam dug deeper, effecting escape.
Ransom continued to follow. “What I don’t understand is, why you worried about them Colombians finding you way out here in the middle of the ocean? How they even know you’re out in your boat, man? It what tell me you’re very scared for a reason, ’cause you not the type to scare easy.”
The Colombians could have known because that morning, on the phone, I’d given Lindsey a precise rundown of my schedule. Told her where I would be and when I would be there. Would do the same thing tomorrow morning and the next day and the next.
It was something else I’d promised Hal Harrington.
To Ransom, I said, “You’re imagining things, again.”
That night, a little after midnight, Tomlinson came sneaking up the boardwalk to my house, exaggerating his careful steps in an attempt to be quiet, and thereby made even more noise than usual.
I heard Ransom’s happy giggle, the muffled lyric of voices, my cousin probably pretending that he’d surprised her.
There was not much chance of that, because I’d strung a hammock for her in the breezeway between the house and the lab. She’d told me she liked sleeping out there because she could look at the stars and hear the night sounds, plus the tin roof that connected the two little buildings kept the dew off her, so it was fine, just fine. Best place to sleep on Sanibel, she told me, and was probably right.
I was lying in bed reading The Windward Road, a classic by Archie Carr, the great Florida biologist, and listening to my shortwave, Radio Bogota. I had just heard a news reporter say in Spanish that Colombia’s military had suffered casualties in three days of heavy fighting against guerrillas. Fifty-four soldiers and police were dead, and a United States-built army helicopter had been downed by suspected rebel fire. Another seventeen were feared dead or taken prisoner by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC. According to the reporter, the rebels were reacting to a recent U.S. antidrug policy of interdiction by force. Some of the smaller producers were being put out of business.