Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  “Uh-huh. And we go by cores and drill cuttings from wells when we get ’em. We seldom get to know what’s underneath by direct experience, like quarries or canal-digging.”

  I stared out into the landscape, trying to see it as he did. I had to admit that there was something weirdly alluring about Florida. With its shifting clouds and subtle topography, it seemed to be playing the dance of the seven veils with me, drawing me inward, into its depths. Again the question arose in my mind: What did Florida have to do with African dust and the disappearance of the man that made my knees weak? I asked, “What’s at depth? I mean really deep. What’s beneath the limestone?”

  Scott made a dismissive gesture. “Part of Africa.”

  Bells went off. “Africa? Really?”

  “Yeah, during the rifting that created the Atlantic Ocean when Pangaea broke up.”

  Waltrine said, “Come again?”

  Scott said, “Pangaea, the supercontinent. Everything was one big land mass two hundred million years ago. You know, plate tectonics? The unifying theory of geology? Or don’t you biologists have to know that shit to understand the patterns of evolution?”

  Waltrine rolled her eloquent eyes. “Yes, dear heart, but please to speak the English, not the geo-nerd-ese.”

  Scott raised his hands, forming them into great curving plates, and used them to describe a sphere in midair. I stared intently at his hands, willing the understanding I craved to spring from them. He slid them together into the top third of a sphere. “My hands are the land masses. Triassic Period, two hundred million years ago, everything one big lump. First rifting split North America and Eurasia from South America, Africa, and the rest. The Atlantic Ocean began to form as seafloor spread both east and west from the rift that runs down the middle.” He shifted his hands around to demonstrate, great landmasses sliding on his invisible sphere.

  I said, “And you’re saying that a slice of western Africa sheared off and stayed on our side of the Atlantic.”

  “Yes.”

  Mimicking Scott, Waltrine drawled, “Y’all shitting me?” Scott crooned, “Waltrine, Waltrine, Waltrine … honeybun … would I pass you through my intestines?”

  The two kept up their banter for a while, but my mind had caught hold of a far land I had never visited. A piece of Africa is right here underneath this place that’s now being plagued by African dust? What is this, the wind trying to reunite the mother with the daughter?

  There was something unnervingly ethereal about the topic of dust. The ground seemed to be getting up and losing itself into the sky. The thought left me feeling lost and floating, as if the Earth had lost its gravity. That sensation in turn seemed disconcertingly aligned with Jack’s disappearance and rude reappearance, and the way I felt each time I thought of him.

  I forced myself to remember that gravity exerted its attraction even to objects as fine as dust, and that eventually those fine particles came down again, slowly, inexorably settling toward land and leaf and human alike, ready to fuel the ground with minerals, deliver its payload of disease and fertilizer, and clog human lungs.

  “Oh, shit,” Waltrine announced, jerking me from my reverie. “Tom, you passed the turnoff for 417.”

  He said, “This looked shorter on the map. I’m taking I-4 to the Beeline Highway.”

  “No, no, no, no. Oh, shit! You’ll see.”

  Oh, shit was right. As we passed through Orlando, we waded eyeball-deep into a different type of swamp, namely the traffic around a clot of theme parks—“the attractions,” Scott sneeringly called them. Traffic on the Interstate highway and all visible tributaries crawled even though it was the middle of the morning, nowhere near rush hour.

  “All this traffic is for Disney World?” Tom asked.

  “No, sadly not,” Scott said. “It’s also the home of Sea World, Magic Kingdom, Universal Studios Florida, and miscellaneous others. And you can see we got our hypnotic video billboards that form hazards to navigation, and we got every strip-mall-outlet extravaganza, five incarnations of each kind of burger chain, three of each taco stand, and about five hundred souvenir shops. And our rental cars full of seekers of prepackaged fun chugging ponderously by on their way from one dose of T-shirt shop poisoning and wallet fleecing to another.”

  Waltrine snarled, “You’re waxing poetic in your old age, Scottie.”

  Tom set his jaw in his own brooding version of road rage. “Serving up pleasure in place of happiness, isn’t that what Faye would say, Em? Hmm?”

  Scott slouched down in his seat. “It was a nice place to grow up, before all this,” he muttered.

  I asked no questions. I didn’t want to know more. I grew up in a place where I could not see the next ranch, let alone stare in the neighbor’s living room window. If this was Jack’s hometown, I could understand why he’d left.

  We turned at last onto Route 528, the Beeline Highway, which passed abruptly into fifty miles of land equally as unpopulated as Orlando had been overpopulated. I noticed that, once again, water stood about the bases of the trees beyond the edge of the road. I saw egrets rowing gracefully through the air. The paucity of human development was almost spooky after the crush of Orlando. The swamps ended again as abruptly as they had begun, and we found ourselves at a dense fringe of human development along the coast. Our journey ended as we came across a causeway bridge over a long narrow body of water full of wading birds. Ahead, I could see hummocky dune topography covered with yet another vegetative group.

  “That’s palmettos, live oaks, and sea grape there,” Scott informed me, ignoring the human overprint. “Beach assemblage. You can see the prevailing wind direction by the way the trees have twisted. We’re on Merritt Island now. It’s part of a barrier island complex composed of fossil beach ridges. The longshore current and wave action carry the sand to us from the north. The ultimate source is the Appalachians. Just seaward of us, it forms a huge cusp called Cape Canaveral.”

  Cape Canaveral? We were at Cape Canaveral? Somehow, in all the stress and hurry and stimulation of the past twenty-four hours, this fact had failed to register in my overheated brain: Kennedy meant Kennedy Space Center, and that was at Cape Canaveral. Now I saw a cluster of rockets—real, honest-to-gosh rockets—tethered to the ground on display. This was the place from which Alan Shepard had ridden the first Redstone rocket into space. This was where the Eagle had lifted on its trip to the moon. Now we hurtled past a space shuttle and solid booster array that were mounted quite close to the road. I was glued to the windshield like a squashed gnat, gawking, twisting, trying to get a look at the fabulous chunk of history that was sliding past, this chunk of my childhood, this treasure trove of heroism and a huge part of what I, as an American, could feel indelibly proud.

  “That was the visitor center,” Scott drawled. “Y’all want the office center, down here a bit farther.”

  “I’d like to see those rockets,” I said faintly.

  Tom said, “You and I may be back another day, Em.”

  I unglued my face from the window and exchanged glances with him. His tone told me that something was definitely up, and my guts told me it had to do with whatever had brought him across Florida today. Something to do with Jack.

  Scott said, “I’ve been here to see launches. It’s the coolest thing you can imagine, much better than watching it on TV. And landings, those are cool, too. Here comes this big bird, and right next to it, a little T-38, flying observation.” A soft smile had spread across his face. “I wanted to be an astronaut,” he said, speaking to himself as much as to me. “I wanted to be the first geologist on Mars.”

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Marriage. Kids. It doesn’t work if your spouse is not behind it.”

  We passed through a security check. Tom informed the guard that he was dropping the three of us off and then intended to visit a friend for cocoa, or something like that, and needed clearance to get back in to pick us up at two. That arranged, Tom dropped us off, and we were met
by a couple of men who weren’t wearing pocket protectors but looked like they felt naked without them.

  After looking pointedly at their digital wristwatches, the men showed us in through a rabbit warren of hallways and offices to a meeting room. Waltrine compensated for being late by digging into them fast and hard, pushing her program, and they spent their time sulking back all cave-chested in their seats like they had forgotten to get in line when the spines were handed out. Waltrine explained the need for specific evidence that could only be gotten by gathering dust high above ground level. Number One kept pushing his glasses up his nose and clearing his throat. He harped on the special talents of a certain satellite that was good at reading dust and threw around a bunch of acronyms, but was evasive about the possibility of collecting actual samples. Number Two seemed to have precious little to say to us. Waltrine stated that having data from their flights would ground their satellite data in reality. She kept asking to speak directly to the pilots who flew the missions. Number One kept saying that requests like that had to go through channels.

  Promptly at noon, the daring duo glanced at their watches and excused themselves, saying they’d be back after lunch, but pointedly did not ask us to join them. Waltrine, Scott, and I found the cafeteria and munched in silence, Waltrine chewing more and more forcefully as the hour ground on.

  As we returned to the conference room, Scott said, “This dog ain’t gonna hunt. I wonder what went wrong.”

  “It’s always something,” said Waltrine, quickening her pace. “I tell you, this place is just another government shrine to the triumph of bureaucracy over stated goals. They’re so busy hanging onto their precious balls that they can’t get a hand loose to open the purse strings, let alone do meaningful science. Bunch of technofreaks.”

  The gang of two arrived back ten minutes late and informed us that they would have to end our meeting early. Fifteen minutes before two, after trying every last angle she could to persuade these two men that they should be turning handsprings of joy over the dust project, Waltrine looked like she was going to explode. “Well, if you can’t get any action, then why don’t we talk to Lucy?” she said finally, infusing her voice with casual familiarity, as if talking about a personal friend.

  Number One said, “Who?”

  Waltrine said, “Didn’t anyone tell you that one of your astronauts on the current launch is a geologist with an interest in desert sediments? She’s very interested in this project.”

  Number Two suddenly smirked and found his voice. “We’ve heard nothing from any of our astronauts about your project. Besides, the current flight has been delayed. Didn’t anyone tell you? The shuttle was rolled back due to the hurricane. It’s not rescheduled until …” He tapped at his computer. “Ah. Five days from now. I’m sure she’s quite busy with other mission requirements.”

  Scott winced on Waltrine’s behalf. Our meeting was over.

  Scott and I got to spend fifteen minutes watching Waltrine fume about “Fucking Miles” not keeping her informed. “He said he’d gotten through to her. He said she had our proposal. Said she was on it.”

  Tom finally pulled up in the Mercedes. “Sorry to be late,” he grumbled. Apparently, his meeting had not gone well, either.

  Waltrine addressed Tom with a syrupy sweet voice. “I hope your day was good, Tom who is late, because mine certainly was a waste of time. These pinheads have no stroke upstairs. They don’t have the imagination to do anything that doesn’t come out of some damned memo, or perhaps the NASA book of games for boys with no fucking brains. But did they tell me that? No, they didn’t have the balls to tell me that over the fucking phone, they had to let me drag my ass all the way across this swamp-infested peninsula so I could see for myself how tiny their pathetic little testicles are! Shit, I’d need my fucking microscope to see something that small!”

  Tom gave Waltrine a look of deep respect.

  We all got into the car and headed west, back the way we had come. I again glimpsed the alluring rocket garden and space-shuttle display, the beach ridges, the backridge waterway, and the various forms of swamps, pinewoods, sand dunes, billboards, and entrances to theme parks. The afternoon downpour caught us at Disney Junction, which is a highway exit built solely for the use of Disney World. As we crawled along nearly blinded by the torrent, I numbly witnessed the apparition of Mickey Mouse’s ears, which indeed could be seen over the curvature of the Earth: They formed one unmistakable, wildly curved head-and-ears-shaped power pole in a string of high-tension power lines that crossed the terrain. The best news about the return trip was that we caught the Highway 417 cutoff, so even with the rain slowdown, the trip took under three hours door-to-door. We were all silent for most of the trip.

  I was tired and preoccupied, wondering if Jack had looked out upon the scenery I was now seeing. Had he brought girlfriends out to the beach at Cape Canaveral? Had he avoided the trackless regions of the swamps, or explored them? As the miles and hours rolled past and the silence sank deeper within the car, I found myself alone in my thoughts, and my longing for Jack came back on me with such intensity that I found myself fighting back tears. The wave of sensation washed over me again and again, and I felt lost on an ocean, uncertain if what I was feeling was love or a colossal sense of loss.

  Five o’clock found us up to our eye sockets in Tampa rush-hour traffic. Five-thirty put us in St. Petersburg at the USGS. At six P.M., I was sitting by the pool at Nancy Wallace’s with a long-necked beer in one hand and a handful of corn chips in the other. I turned to Tom. “So. What went wrong when you went to have cocoa with your friend?”

  Tom took a long pull on his own beer and stared into space. “Cocoa is a town.”

  “Oh. So then, you visited a friend there?”

  Tom said nothing for perhaps half a minute, then, “No. Our friend was not there.”

  I had my beer halfway to my lips and stopped. “Are we talking about Jack?”

  Tom said nothing.

  I slammed my beer down on the teak end table to my right and jumped to my feet. “Send me a telegraph when you’re ready to talk, Tom,” I said, and, with long, angry strides, headed for the house.

  “Wait,” he said. He sounded sad.

  I turned back toward him, fists balled. “Make it good, Tom.”

  “I was looking for something Jack told me about.”

  “What?”

  “Something … pretty dangerous.”

  “What?”

  He stared at the floor.

  My willingness to wait and trust Tom had vanished. Seething mad, I sassed, “Is it bigger than a bread box?”

  Tom gave me a dirty look, but the anger in it quickly faded.

  Suddenly, I realized that Tom’s silence on the return trip had come not from his usual introspection, but from intense preoccupation. I forced myself to exhale. “Let’s not play twenty questions, Tom. Jack’s overdue. Time to give.”

  He sat leaning forward in the low chair, his head hanging, holding the cold bottle to his forehead as if to relieve a fever. His lips writhed like he was fighting off tears. For the first time in my acquaintance with him, he seemed inadequate and rather pitiful.

  I said, “You gave him forty-eight hours. That deadline passed three hours ago. So why are you just sitting there?”

  “I couldn’t find it,” he said.

  “Find what?”

  “On his map. It wasn’t there. I couldn’t even see a damned mark in the sand!” He stood up abruptly. He began to pace. “Hell, it wasn’t much of a map. What was I thinking? I can’t believe this! I let him go without first making him take me there and show me where the damned thing is!”

  A surge of fear began to work its way up my spine. What thing? “Tom, show me the map, okay? I’m a geologist, remember? I have special training in reading such things.”

  He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket, stared at it a while.

  I took it from his hand. I unfolded it. There, in Jack’s narrow handwriting
slanting here and there as if applied from varying angles, all capital letters, was a jumble of notes quickly drawn, with just a few lines to indicate geographic features. Notations identified a few structures and geographical locations, like COCOA, ATLANTIC AVENUE, HOLIDAY INN, and STORM SWASH. Tom was correct, it was a pathetically crude map, but it had feeling to it, a sense of intent and geometry that drew me inward. I searched for an indication of orientation, and found a quickly scrawled N next to an arrow pointing toward the top of the page. I unfolded a bent corner, and found a little scribble shaped like the space shuttle. Suddenly, I knew that two of the lines marked the intercoastal waterway and a third the Atlantic shore, and that the kink in the shoreline to the east of the little shuttle must be Cape Canaveral itself. And, next to a rough box drawn in what must be the sand, a notation that turned my bowels to ice: SAM-7 BURIED HERE.

  My arms sagged to my side. SAM stood for “Surface to Air Missile,” with which one solitary man could shoot down an aircraft, even a shuttle. And a SAM-7 was not one of ours.

  – 18 –

  Lucy sat at her desk watching the digital clock pulse the seconds, willing the time to pass more quickly. On her desk lay the proposal from the man at the USGS, asking her help with a project on desert dust. With a dull ache, she realized that she had failed to follow up on it, just as many things seemed to be slipping from her of late.