by Paul Doiron
“The females are usually bigger than the males.”
“Here’s a fun fact for you, Warden Mike,” Buster Lee said, taking a tentative step down the bank. “Female pythons can produce offspring without even mating. I’m not shitting you. Look it up. The process is called facultative parthenogenesis. Lots of human females would sign up for that deal, I would wager.”
“Do you want me to go down there with you?” Stacey asked, speaking fast in her eagerness.
“It’s easier for one person to grab the head,” he said. “Just be ready to pounce on her coils before she can wrap them around my neck.”
I had never been content being a bystander. “What can I do?”
“Spectate.”
I watched as Buster slid down the muddy embankment into the edge of the water, maybe two yards behind the snake’s pale head. The ghostly creature seemed not to register the man’s approach at all. I was beginning to think he moved with a certain unexpected grace for a person of his girth. Then he took a step forward, lost his footing, and fell face-first into the brown water. The splash caused the snake to awaken, and faster than seemed possible, it ducked into the undergrowth.
Buster sprang up from the drink to grab desperately at the tail. His fedora and headlamp had disappeared. Despite how wet he was, he managed to get a grip. The python—brought up short—whipped around with its pale mouth wide and bit him on the face. Buster gave a whimper, stumbled, and half disappeared beneath the surface, which the snake was now churning to a coffee froth.
I knew constrictors did this: used their backward-curving teeth to secure a hold on prey—or, also presumably, an attacker—but I hadn’t expected this one to act like a monster out of a horror movie, and neither did the two biologists.
“Buster!” Stacey jumped down to help.
The python’s distended jaws had fastened on his nose and chin. Gushing blood showed red in my flashlight beam. The coils wrapped around Buster’s arm, chest, and throat were as thick around as my thigh.
Stacey tried to pull the snake free, but her efforts only seemed to cause the serpent to latch onto Buster all the harder. I considered shooting it, but there was no way to fire a round through the head that didn’t risk hitting the man. What I would have given for a canister of pepper spray.
Then I remembered. I reached into my pocket and found the small bottle. I leaped clear off the bank and went into the water up to my chest.
Blood pumped rhythmically through Buster Lee’s fingers as he gripped the triangular skull. The fight had torn tatters in the python’s bluish hide. It looked like a zombie serpent.
As Buster muttered and moaned, I directed my pump dispenser of bug repellent at the snake’s squeezed-shut eyes. The poisonous liquid just ran off harmlessly. Then I caught a flash of pinkish white: the corner of the python’s mouth. I sprayed the exposed tissue with a shot of 100 percent diethyltoluamide: commonly known as DEET.
And just like that, Buster was free.
To his credit, the herpetologist continued to fight the thrashing, half-poisoned animal. He closed a hand around the throat below its jaws. Between the two of them, they wrestled the enormous serpent up the bank.
“Get the bag,” Stacey said.
I used the overhanging vines to pull myself out of the sloshing water. Then, on hands and knees, I crawled across the soaked grass to grab the burlap sack. I couldn’t imagine how a hundred pounds of serpentine muscle could fit inside it. Somehow they managed the feat.
Half-blind with blood, Buster knotted the top so the snake couldn’t escape. The sack pulsed like the gullet of a waterbird that had just swallowed a living fish. The wounded man then collapsed to the ground with a hand over his face.
“I believe I may need medical assistance.”
Stacey turned, blinding me with the headlamp she wore. “There’s a first aid kit in my Rover, behind the passenger seat. Grab it for me.”
As I took off down the trail, I remembered a similar incident years ago in which it had been Stacey who had been injured by an attacking animal. In that case, it had been a feral boar in the foothills of southwestern Maine.
It took me five minutes to return with supplies. I found Stacey clutching a handkerchief to her friend’s face. He might have been wearing a red mask.
“Never had that happen before.” His voice betrayed the genuine fear he was feeling. “Are you sure my nose is still attached?”
“Let’s have a look.”
I was struck by her calmness. Stacey had never been one to keep her cool.
In the focused light of her headlamp, I could see that Buster’s nose was ragged but intact. The python’s teeth had missed the major veins and arteries in his neck, fortunately, but his sun-reddened face was mangled and would require surgery to repair.
“How maimed am I?” he asked.
“Mildly,” said Stacey, squeezing his hand. “You’re mildly maimed.”
Buster blinked at me through blood-crusted lashes. “What did you spray into her mouth, anyway?”
“DEET.”
“No wonder she sounds like she swallowed a gallon of bleach.”
The snake thumped in its cloth prison. The sound made my heart hurt. The loud bird—a barn owl, I now believed it to be—screamed again from the darkness of the cypresses.
5
Mist rose from the crushed clamshells and drifted through my headlights as I turned in to the lot outside the ranger station. I climbed out of the Land Rover and stood there in the unbroken heat, listening to the night noises. The frogs were making deep, resonant grunts like an orchestra consisting entirely of tiny bassoons.
A minute later, the top-heavy Ford Expedition swung in beside the Rover. Stacey opened the driver’s door. Beside her sat Buster. His huge bristling face was bandaged from his lips to his hairline. The gauze was spotted with blood. But he was smoking a cigarette.
“Do you want me to follow you to the hospital?” I asked as she stepped out of the vehicle.
“There’s no need for the two of us to wait around there.” She waggled a key loose from her key ring. “Why don’t you go clean up at my house? I don’t know how long I’ll be. But maybe you can catch a few winks, and I’ll be home in time to take you to breakfast.”
The idea of showering at my ex-girlfriend’s felt like a betrayal of Dani.
Stacey noticed my hesitancy. “I won’t even be there, Mike. I’m sure Danielle will understand.”
At first, her use of Dani’s full name seemed like a jab, but there was no mockery in her tone.
Buster called from the Expedition, “I’m still bleeding here!”
“His injuries look worse than they are,” she said in a whisper.
“When did you get certified as an EMT?” I asked.
“Stevens!”
“Buster’s really a sweetheart if you get to know him.”
“So’s my wolf dog, but I’m careful not to get too close when he shows his teeth.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me goodbye. The kiss was light but on the lips.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, my GPS announced that I had arrived in Everglades City. Stacey’s rented house stood on elevated pilings to protect it from storm surges. It had a low, pyramidal roof, designed to minimize the impact of hurricane-force winds.
At first glance, the interior also looked like Florida distilled to its essence. Rattan furniture, tile flooring, potted palms. But mementos of Maine peeked out from the shelves. I recognized a box turtle shell I had found on patrol. And there was the edition of Audubon’s Birds of America; we had bought it from an antiquarian bookseller on a rainy afternoon Down East.
On the walls hung Stacey’s framed photographs of Maine animals: a moose and her calf, a lynx on a snowy road, an osprey perched with a fish atop a snag. These same pictures had decorated the house we’d shared for close to two years. She wasn’t a great photographer, but she knew how to creep up on wild animals before they spotted her.
&n
bsp; Her finest photograph, though, was a black-and-white portrait she had taken of her father.
Charley Stevens looked sideways at the camera, his big chin raised, laugh wrinkles cutting lines in his weathered skin. His thick white hair stood up as if, seconds before, he had run one of his strong hands through it. His expression was one of faux suspicion.
No wonder she missed him. I did, too, in that moment.
I showered as fast as I could, marveling at the dozens of mosquito bites I had sustained in such a short time. Afterward, I stood before the mirror while the steam lifted from the edges of the glass. I hadn’t expected these feelings.
I needed to leave.
Stacey had texted me from the hospital with an update. Buster was receiving stitches on his nose and jaw for the snakebite. The copious blood had made the wounds appear worse than they were, as she had deduced.
I texted back that I was glad for the good news. I thanked her for the use of her shower. I didn’t tell her that I would be gone before she returned home.
After I’d dressed, I sat down at her kitchen table with a pen and a notepad, trying to find the right words to justify my graceless departure.
Again I thanked Stacey for her hospitality but said that I needed to head back to Miami lest unforeseen circumstances cause me to miss yet another plane. It wasn’t the whole truth, nor was it a lie. After a long, silent debate with myself, I signed the note with love.
I had just put down the pen when my phone rang. Stacey’s mother, Ora, smiled up at me from the lighted screen. She had snow-white hair, pale green eyes, and was, honestly, the most beautiful older woman I had ever seen. The coincidence of Ora calling here and now made me shiver. Then I realized it was after midnight, well past her usual bedtime, and I became even more worried.
“Ora?”
“Mike, where are you?”
“Still in Florida. I have a morning flight back to Maine. Has something happened to Charley?” It was the only reason I could imagine for her calling me that late.
“You haven’t heard from him?”
“No, why?”
“He’s gone off without a word of explanation.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s disappeared. I have no idea where or why. Mike, I don’t think he wants me to know where he went.”
6
Five hours later, I boarded an Airbus A321 bound for Portland, Maine. I had sped east across the Everglades and arrived at the Miami airport as the rising sun was prying open a crack between the gray sky and the gray ocean.
I took my seat beside the window and gazed out at the acres of interlocking tarmac strips. Boat-tailed grackles glided down to peck for insects in the grass islands between the taxiways.
I texted Dani to tell her I’d made my flight. I had one hell of a story to share upon my return to Maine. “It involves a Burmese python,” I wrote.
And Stacey.
After we’d taken off, I removed my briefcase from under the seat and retrieved the notes I had taken of my conversation with Ora Stevens. When you become a law enforcement officer, your academy instructors stress the importance of making careful records of important conversations, but it’s a lesson you only learn for real when a defense attorney gets one of your arrests thrown out because you were sloppy with your note-taking. I spread the pages across the tray table.
* * *
“When was the last time you saw him?” I’d asked Ora.
“Yesterday morning. He woke me as he was getting dressed in the dark, but I fell back asleep.”
“How many hours ago specifically was that?”
She paused to count. “Forty-one?”
To civilians, this might have seemed a long time to wait before reporting her septuagenarian husband missing. But Charley had been a game warden for decades, and long absences from home had been a part of their life together. Fatal collisions between moose and cars, search-and-rescue missions, and hunts for armed fugitives happened at all hours. But he was retired now and had been for a while, and even in his active-duty days, he wouldn’t have left home without giving his wife a full explanation.
“Did he say anything about when he’d be back?”
“Not a word.”
“I assume you’ve tried calling his phone.”
“He doesn’t pick up, Mike. I keep getting his voice-mail box.”
I had never known Charley to forget his mobile phone or travel anywhere without it. Granted, cell coverage in Maine is worse than spotty. It is effectively nonexistent except around the larger population centers, but in extremis, we might use the GPS tracker in his phone to triangulate on his location.
“He didn’t leave a note?”
“Just a short one beside my coffee. Charley makes me a cup every morning the way I like. ‘I love you, Ora. I’ll be back as soon as I get a puzzle sorted out.’ He only uses my name when he’s deadly serious. Usually, as you know, he calls me Boss.”
The nickname was a term of affection no younger man could get away with calling his partner in this day and age.
“Did you hear his plane leave the dock?”
“That’s another thing. He didn’t take the Skyhawk. He took his old Ford.”
“Wait, he didn’t fly?”
“No.”
The old pilot was famous for never driving anywhere he could fly even if it was just down to Calais to pick up a chain saw blade from the hardware store. He’d park his Cessna floatplane in the St. Croix River while he ran errands. If Charley had taken his truck, a sap-green Ranger, he’d done so for one reason: because his ultimate destination was inaccessible by air.
“Ora, this next question is difficult. But have you noticed anything unusual about Charley’s state of mind?”
“He’s not showing signs of dementia.”
“I only ask because—”
“He’s getting older. We both are. But the answer to your question is no.”
“Have you reached out to anyone else?”
“You’re the closest thing he has to a son, Mike. If he didn’t tell you, I don’t know who he would have. Nick Francis, maybe.”
Nick was the retired chief of the Passamaquoddy Nation. Before that, he’d been the tribal police chief. And before that, he’d been a game warden who’d worked alongside Charley when they were both young officers, in an era when Native Americans in Down East Maine faced harassment and violence unthinkable to modern Americans.
“Can you call Nick and ask if he’s heard from Charley lately?”
“Yes, but I will have to tell him the truth, given the things they’ve been through together.”
“Hopefully, he’ll have some useful information. Let me backtrack a little. Did anything unusual happen the day before Charley left home?”
“We took the van down to Machias to catch some of the sea breeze and have pie at Helen’s. We ran into lots of people we know at the Dike—you know how social Charley is, how he always makes the rounds among the booths—and then we drove home. Come to think of it, he was awfully quiet on the drive back.”
The Dike was the local name for the wide Route 1 causeway that ran parallel to the Machias River and served as an embankment dam, keeping the Little River from undercutting the road. On pleasant days, antiques dealers and craftspeople set out tables along the side of the road, turning the causeway into a pop-up bazaar.
“Who did he talk to there?”
“I didn’t see. My chapter of Planned Parenthood was gathering signatures, and I covered a shift at the booth while Charley made his rounds.”
“But his change in mood happened after you left the Dike and were headed back to the lake?”
“I think that would be accurate.”
So he either spoke with someone in Machias or saw something there that rattled him. And that event was likely the cause of his decision to drive off without telling his wife where he was going.
“Did you see him talking with anyone in particular—someone who might have set him off?”
> “When we parked, he pointed out a table neither of us remembered seeing before. It looked like the dealer had some taxidermy and rusted old junk from the logging camps. You know how interested Charley is in North Woods history.”
“And he didn’t mention this dealer to you later? Maybe he made an offhand comment that struck you as strange.”
“No, but…”
“Go ahead.”
“I had the oddest sense he might have bought something from the man. He kept putting his hand in the pocket of his jacket.”
“Could it have been a gift for you?”
“That was what I’d suspected, but he was awfully quiet and serious when we got home. After supper, he asked my permission to go out to the boathouse to tinker on his plane. I was asleep when he finally came to bed. And then, as I said, he woke me at four o’clock, putting on his clothes in the dark. That’s early even for that bantam rooster.”
By now, I was deeply worried about my old friend. I was also conscious that I couldn’t disclose my fears to Ora when I was so far from home and in no position to take action.
“My flight to Portland leaves in five hours,” I had said. “If you hear anything from Charley or he comes home before I take off, call me. I’m pretty sure the plane doesn’t have Wi-Fi, but you can send me emails to read during my layover or when I return to Maine. In the meantime, I need you to make some calls and see if you can find the name of the junk dealer Charley spoke with at the Dike. I’ll need to stop at my house on the way north, but with luck, I can be at your place by midafternoon.”
“I’ll call around town. And, Mike,” she’d said. “Please don’t tell Stacey about her father being missing.”
7
When I landed in Maine, the flight attendant gave us the local time and temperature over the intercom. Somehow, it was hotter in Portland than it had been in Miami.
While we taxied, I turned my phone back on to receive cell signals and to submit the report I’d written on Wheelwright.
Dani had called to say she couldn’t wait to hear about my encounter with the python. She asked if Stacey had seemed happy. She added that she was going to be spending the day at the firearms qualification course at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy with the rest of her troop. Dani had always been a crack shot.
