The snow blew in their teeth. State dug in. A feeble distant cheer went up from the invisible stands. And then, with Number 95 falling on him like an avalanche, Diderot fumbled, and State recovered. Two plays later, and with eight seconds left on the clock, they took the ball into the end zone to make it 55–0, and only the point-after attempt stood between Caledonia and the unforgivable, unutterable debasement of a second straight 56–0 drubbing. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot extricated himself from the snowbank where Number 95 had left him and crept stiff-legged back to the line of scrimmage, where he would now assume the defensive role.
There was one hope, and one hope only, in that blasted naked dead cinder of a world that Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot and his hapless teammates unwillingly inhabited, and that was for one man among them to reach deep down inside himself and distill all his essence — all his wits, all his heart and the full power of his honed young musculature — into a single last-ditch attempt to block that kick. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot looked into the frightened faces of his teammates as they heaved for breath in the defensive huddle and knew he was that man. “I’m going to block the kick,” he said, and his voice sounded strange in his own ears. “I’m coming in from the right side and I’m going to block the kick.” Moss’s eyes were glazed. DuBoy was on the sidelines, vomiting in his helmet. No one said a word.
State lined up. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete took a deep breath. The ball was snapped, the lines crashed with a grunt and moan, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot launched himself at the kicker like the space shuttle coming in for a landing, and suddenly — miracle of miracles! — he felt the hard cold pellet of the ball glancing off the bandaged nubs of his fingers. A shout went up, and as he fell, as he slammed rib-first into the frozen ground, he watched the ball squirt up in the air and fall back into the arms of the kicker as if it were attached to a string, and then, unbelieving, he watched the kicker tuck the ball and sprint unmolested across the goal line for the two-point conversion.
If it weren’t for Moss, they might never have found him. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot just lay there where he’d fallen, the snow drifting silently round him, and he lay there long after the teams had left the field and the stands stood empty under a canopy of snow. There, in the dirt, the steady drift of snow gleaming against the exposed skin of his calves and slowly obliterating the number on the back of his jersey, he had a vision of the future. He saw himself working at some tedious, spirit-crushing job for which his Phys. Ed. training could never have prepared him, saw himself sunk in fat like his father, a pale plain wife and two grublike children at his side, no eighty-yard runs or blocked points to look back on through a false scrim of nostalgia, no glory and no defeat.
No defeat. It was a concept that seemed all at once to congeal in his tired brain, and as Moss called out his name and the snow beat down, he tried hard, with all his concentration, to hold it there.
TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN
THE THING WAS, we had a little problem with the insect vector there, and believe me, your tamer stuff, your Malathion and pyre-thrum and the rest of the so-called environmentally safe products didn’t begin to make a dent in it, not a dent, I mean it was utterly useless — we might as well have been spraying with Chanel Number 5 for all the good it did. And you’ve got to realize these people were literally covered with insects day and night — and the fact that they hardly wore any clothes just compounded the problem. Picture if you can, gentlemen, a naked little two-year-old boy so black with flies and mosquitoes it looks like he’s wearing long johns, or the young mother so racked with the malarial shakes she can’t even lift a diet Coke to her lips — it was pathetic, just pathetic, like something out of the Dark Ages.…Well, anyway, the decision was made to go with DDT. In the short term. Just to get the situation under control, you understand.
Yes, that’s right, Senator, DDT: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.
Yes, I’m well aware of that fact, sir. But just because we banned it domestically, under pressure from the birdwatching contingent and the hopheads down at the EPA, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the rest of the world — especially the developing world — is about to jump on the bandwagon. And that’s the key word here, Senator: developing. You’ve got to realize this is Borneo we’re talking about here, not Port Townsend or Enumclaw. These people don’t know from square one about sanitation, disease control, pest eradication — or even personal hygiene, if you want to come right down to it. It rains a hundred and twenty inches a year, minimum. They dig up roots in the jungle. They’ve still got headhunters along the Rajang River, for god’s sake.
And please don’t forget they asked us to come in there, practically begged us — and not only the World Health Organization, but the Sultan of Brunei and the government in Sarawak too. We did what we could to accommodate them and reach our objective in the shortest period of time and by the most direct and effective means. We went to the air. Obviously. And no one could have foreseen the consequences, no one, not even if we’d gone out and generated a hundred environmental-impact statements — it was just one of those things, a freak occurrence, and there’s no defense against that. Not that I know of, anyway….
Caterpillars? Yes, Senator, that’s correct. That was the first sign: caterpillars.
But let me backtrack a minute here. You see, out in the bush they have these roofs made of thatched palm leaves — you’ll see them in the towns too, even in Bintulu or Brunei — and they’re really pretty effective, you’d be surprised. A hundred and twenty inches of rain, they’ve got to figure a way to keep it out of the hut, and for centuries, this was it. Palm leaves. Well, it was about a month after we sprayed for the final time and I’m sitting at my desk in the trailer thinking about the drainage project at Kuching, enjoying the fact that for the first time in maybe a year I’m not smearing mosquitoes all over the back of my neck, when there’s a knock at the door. It’s this elderly gentleman, tattooed from head to toe, dressed only in a pair of running shorts — they love those shorts, by the way, the shiny material and the tight machine-stitching, the whole country, men and women and children, they can’t get enough of them.…Anyway, he’s the headman of the local village and he’s very excited, something about the roofs—atop, they call them. That’s all he can say, atop, atap, over and over again.
It’s raining, of course. It’s always raining. So I shrug into my rain slicker, start up the 4X4 and go have a look. Sure enough, all the atap roofs are collapsing, not only in his village, but throughout the target area. The people are all huddled there in their running shorts, looking pretty miserable, and one after another the roofs keep falling in, it’s bewildering, and gradually I realize the headman’s diatribe has begun to feature a new term I was unfamiliar with at the time — the word for caterpillar, as it turns out, in the Iban dialect. But who was to make the connection between three passes with the crop duster and all these staved-in roofs?