It was Kurt’s opinion that his father’s laughter, more of a bellow really, should have been subject to stiff fines if not actual physical punishment—whipping perhaps.
At dinner Kurt asked, as casually as possible, if his father was aware of the wasp colony that was the subject of Dr. Harper’s interest.
“As a matter of fact,” his father said, “we are going there tomorrow. I have a hunch that the greatest concentration of Cyclosomia tantalus will be found in that same area.”
So delighted was Kurt by these words, that he felt expansive, oddly benevolent, and so—in an unprecedented display of interest—asked his father what a Cyclosomia tantalus was.
“A damned beautiful trap-door spider. Big fellows. Very striking patterns. Endangered species. I’d love to get them on video. Jesus, wouldn’t Wilson turn green with envy! I guess that would kick his Loxoceles out of the limelight for awhile.”
Kurt nodded his head as his father extolled the virtues of C. tantalus. “Eve,” Kurt thought (for poetry is addictive), “your eyes are like high-priced blue jewels.”
Dr. Harper was content to sit in the folding chair and let the wasps dart by at the level of his knees. They were such lordly creatures. They moved through the air like fighter jets, and when they alighted in the sand, their wings ticked with clockwork precision as though an elegant arrangement of tiny gears locked limb and thorax and wing into one smooth-functioning unit.
Competition in the insect world made the battle for survival amid higher animals look positively cozy by comparison. These large female wasps killed spiders to feed to their young. Think of it: predator against predator, like lions feeding on wolves. And the wasps had their own enemies: Small clouds of satellite flies would hover over a wasp returning to its burrow, hoping to deposit their young on the spider carcass. The larval satellite fly would then devour both spider and wasp eggs.
The battles that raged in this sandy quarter-mile of grassland affected Dr. Harper’s mood and made him feel a certain ruthlessness and satisfaction in his own accomplishments. He had done well and if, occasionally, it had been at the expense of his colleagues, then he was not about to apologize for obeying what was a first principle of existence. And if his fellow entomologists didn’t understand such things, then they had failed to learn the lessons of their profession.
“Hallooo!” a voice shouted, and Dr. Harper turned and squinted into the trees. A man in a pith helmet was standing at the edge of the trees and waving. Behind him two other figures stood.
“Good God,” Dr. Harper muttered. “It’s Gentry.”
Dear Janey—
Kurt and I have been reunited! Yes. And that karma thing I told you about is true. How else would fate have conspired—another great word, huh?—to bring us back together? You see, Kurt’s dad is studying a particular kind of trap-door spider that likes the same sort of sandy, open ground that Father’s wasps like. So Kurt’s dad just naturally had to come here. You can say that is just coincidence if you want to, but I know better.
Kurt is a dear. He wrote me a poem that is sooooo romantic. There is a river not far from here, and we go there for picnics and stuff. Last time we were there, these neon-green birds came and sat in the tree branches. It was awesome.
We are getting to know each other pretty well—wink, wink—but I haven’t sorted out all my feelings yet—like what about Mr. Mark “No Foreplay” Buckley back home? I will keep you posted. So far I have retained my virtue, but I’m pretty sure I am in love with Kurt.
This letter isn’t going anywhere. There aren’t any mailmen in these parts. So I will just add to it and send it when I can. Later.
Bob Gentry tossed off his drink, wiped the sweat from his forehead and said to his wife: “If that inbred New England bastard talks down his nose to me one more time, I’m gonna stick his head up his ass.”
“Dear,” Mrs. Gentry said, “I don’t know why you dislike Dr. Harper so much. Why, you two are colleagues. I would think that you would enjoy each other’s company.”
“Hah,” Gentry said, pouring himself another drink. “Did you see how he acted when we arrived? He acted like this was his goddam exclusive country club and who the fuck were we? I tell you, Harriet, the social insect crowd with their grants and their goddam theories and their goddam bee dances and petty head counts … there is something missing in those people and that’s what attracts them to fucking ants and bees. It’s a drone mentality.”
Mrs. Gentry, who had heard it all before, sighed. “Yes dear, I’m sure you’re right.”
“Where’s Kurt?” Gentry asked.
“I have no idea,” his wife said.
Gentry frowned. “Trying to get into that girl’s pants, if I know our Kurt,” Gentry muttered.
Mrs. Gentry said, “I’m sure you’re right, dear.”
The next morning, Gentry almost broke his neck tripping over the rope.
“What the fuck?” he roared. He stood up, brushed the yellow dust from his trousers, and looked around. “Harper,” he said. “Goddam Harper.”
He was right, of course.
“Yes,” Dr. Harper said when a red-faced Gentry tracked him down. “I’ve taken the liberty of roping off a section. I need to make a study of the wasp population, and I need to establish boundaries.”
“Your fucking ‘boundaries’ almost killed me. Didn’t it occur to you to warn people?” Gentry paused. “You know, you are kind of an asshole, Harper.”
Dr. Harper stiffened. He was tall—with a good six inches on Gentry—and now he looked down at the shorter man with an expression of cool disdain. “There was no one to warn when I arrived here,” Harper said. “I frankly did not expect a lot of tourists to arrive and despoil this site.”
“Tourists?”
“Perhaps you prefer ‘travel writer’ or ‘nature enthusiast.’ In any event, your arrival was not anticipated.”
“Maybe you haven’t anticipated eating that dustball under your nose.”
Gentry swung at Harper, who stepped back. Gentry missed and stumbled forward. Harper planted the palms of his hands on Gentry’s chest and shoved Gentry, who sat down heavily in the dust.
“Father!” Eve screamed, running across the field. “What’s going on?” As her father turned to address her, Gentry gathered himself into a crouch and rushed forward, catching the taller man below the knees and tackling him.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” Dr. Harper screamed.
As they rolled in the dirt, Eve screamed again. An unusual number of wasps seemed to buzz about, as though attracted to the brawling pair.
I think, Eve continued in her letter to her friend Janey, the wasps may have been interested in the outcome. After all, even one professor would feed a hell of a lot of baby wasps.
Anyway, Kurt and Mrs. Gentry heard the commotion, and together we separated them. But gosh, Janey, it’s all rotten luck. I wish they’d stop this feud. Things were going great with Kurt and me and now our parents say we aren’t to go near each other.
It’s not my fault they can’t get along. I’m not responsible for that. And neither is Kurt. Fortunately, Father is a heavy sleeper and Kurt says his dad gets loaded every night and would sleep through a firefight. So there’s hope.
It was actually pretty exciting creeping through the dark, hoping she wouldn’t step on a branch and wake her father. And it was dangerous too. Everyone knew that the worst sort of animals prowled at night. Some ravenous jungle carnivore might get her. She might step on a snake. This jungle had snakes so poisonous that they made an encounter with a cobra seem no worse than a bad sunburn—by comparison.
Eve’s heart beat loudly. Far off, a pack of dogs barked—only they weren’t dogs. Her father said they were monkeys. Nearer to hand, a weird bird—or maybe a frog—uttered a wheezy what-the-hell, what-the-hell.
And now she could hear the sound of the river.
“Kurt,” she whispered. “Kurt, where are you?”
“Eve,” Kurt whispered.
“Eek!”
Eve said, jumping. He could have reached out and touched her. He was that close.
He took her in his arms and kissed her. She kissed him back.
“Isn’t it awful,” Eve said, feeling dizzy with tragedy.
“It’s rotten,” Kurt said, sticking his tongue in her mouth.
“I love you,” Eve said.
“I also love you,” Kurt said. “I brought the blanket,” he added.
In the days that followed, Gentry found it wasn’t that difficult to avoid Harper. Indeed, if Gentry were careful, he could go a whole day without glimpsing that man’s gaunt, unpleasant form. The trick was not to look in the direction of the roped-off area.
I refuse to give him another thought, Gentry thought, and while that was the ideal rather than the actuality, Gentry did manage to get on with his work, that of observing the extraordinary Cyclosomia tantalus. And these large spiders were so enchanting, such fascinating companions, that they often made Gentry forget that anything else existed.
A particularly large spider, grey with blue markings, had come to hold a special place in his heart. He called this spider Alexander and spent many hours studying him.
Alexander was an older spider, and cautious. He would spend hours beneath his trap door, the lid just barely raised, and anything out of the ordinary would cause the door to slam shut and remain so for many hours—an entire day on two occasions.
Gentry longed for a better look at this specimen, and so set about providing a variety of insects for Alexander. It was no small task winning the spider’s confidence, but Gentry—like all entomologists—was a patient man.
In time, Alexander would emerge halfway from his burrow at Gentry’s approach. No doubt the spider could recognize his provider’s footfalls.
Gentry had only to drop a beetle on the ground, and Alexander was out of his burrow, upon the arthropod, and gone again in the blink of an eye.
This was still unsatisfactory, and Gentry devised a plan for keeping Alexander in the open. Later the professor was to savagely reproach himself for not heeding an internal voice that, even then, suggested that there was something ignoble in abusing the spider’s trust.
But science is a cruel master, and Gentry had to obey. Taking a piece of thread, he tied one of the beetle’s legs to a large nail.
“Hello, Alexander,” he said, approaching the spider who, as usual, offered a view of spined mandibles and forelegs from under his plug of sod. Gentry leaned down and thrust the nail into the ground, then sat back. Alexander launched himself from beneath his trap door, grabbed the beetle, and was stopped dead in his race back to his burrow by the thread attached to nail and beetle.
What a magnificent specimen, Gentry thought.
And then, almost casually, tragedy struck. A giant, yellow wasp, one of the many that had become such a part of the scenery that Gentry had easily forgotten them, landed on Alexander and stung him.
“God,” Gentry screamed, and he reached forward and whacked the insect off Alexander’s back. The wasp struggled to regain its balance, and Gentry crushed it under a boot. “Aaaaaah,” he said.
“Alexander …” he said, turning back to the spider.
But it was too late. The wasp’s powerful toxin had already done its work, and Alexander was on his back, his legs drawn up in a final convulsion—for all the world like a severed fist.
“Are you all right, dear?” his wife asked him that night. He could not answer and instead drank more heavily than usual.
“Murderer,” he thought, reproaching himself. Alexander had had a reason for his haste. The poor fellow had been surrounded by assassins.
Gentry cursed himself for being so blind. He had known that Dr. Harper’s damnable wasps preyed on spiders.
Later that night, Mrs. Gentry, noting her husband’s black mood and frenzied drinking, repeated the question: “Are you all right, dear?”
Gentry replied. “He thinks he can just run roughshod over us. Well, he can’t.”
It was damned perplexing. Dr. Harper didn’t know what to make of it. He dissected another of the dead wasps. This one had been missing a part of its head. There were predators that preyed on these wasps—robber flies among them—but he hadn’t observed any in the area.
Two days before he had begun finding the bodies. Often they were in the process of being dismembered by ants, so it was difficult to establish what sort of injury had initially killed them. Maybe it was some sort of internal parasite. If so, Dr. Harper had found no trace of it, no clue.
That very evening, he discovered the cause. Feeling disheartened, he had left the field in the afternoon, around three perhaps, and retired to his tent to sleep. But he could not sleep in the heat of the day, and the mystery of the dying wasps troubled him. He rose and returned to the field and there, as bold as any Times Square hooker on a slow night, stood the despicable Gentry, air rifle in hand, blithely firing away at the wasps. Even as Harper watched, a wasp that had just landed on a sandy mound was neatly decapitated to the accompaniment of the gun’s softly innocent phutt!
“What do you think you are doing!” Harper shouted.
Gentry jumped, turned and regarded Harper. The merest ghost of guilt departed from the fat man’s features, and he smiled evilly. “Popping the little bastards,” he said. “Sending them to hell.”
Dr. Harper roared and launched himself at the fat man.
By the time you get this it will be nothing but a catalog of horrors. We may all be dead in which case I guess you will never get this letter.
Oh Janey, it’s awful. We are at war. Father caught Dr. Gentry shooting the wasps! Yes. With an air rifle! Can you imagine! Anyway, Father got the gun away from Dr. Gentry and hit him with it. Gave him a good crack on the side of the head, and Dr. Gentry did not come around immediately.
Things are getting worse. Father feared that Dr. Gentry’s mental condition might lead to some sort of life-threatening reprisal, so Father acted while Dr. Gentry was still out.
Father has taken a number of spiders hostage. Yes. Father has this collecting vacuum gun. It looks a little like a dust buster, you know, one of those hand-held vacuum cleaners. It sucks bugs up and deposits them in a canister.
Father went all over the field finding the trap-door burrows and sucking up their contents. He presently has about ten spiders in jars.
Mrs. Gentry acts as the go-between in all this, carrying messages between Father and Dr. Gentry.
Father thinks I should search her before she enters our tent. “She isn’t exactly a neutral party,” he says, but I have refused to do any searches.
This is crazy, isn’t it, Janey? Kurt says that we should not let it affect our relationship, but I don’t know how it can fail to. I mean, I feel a little like a traitor when I slip off to see Kurt. But I do it.
What next?
It was quite possible, Gentry thought, that he was dying. The blow that Dr. Harper had dealt him had left Gentry altered. Perhaps, at this very moment, some slow drifting clot of blood was floating into the backwaters of his brain where it would detonate and scatter the thoughts and dreams and identity of Bob Gentry.
In any event, he felt weak, and was forced to retreat to his sleeping bag. This was an ignoble state of affairs, but he reminded himself that all great men had endured hardships.
“What?” he asked his wife, sitting up quickly and immediately regretting the impulse as a wave of nausea and vertigo engulfed him. “He has what?”
“Hostages,” his wife said. “I believe if you could just reassure him that you will not retaliate. He does say that it was an accident. He says he was trying to take the rifle away from you, that’s all.”
Gentry lay back. With some dignity, he said, “The blow was deliberate. There was malice aforethought, Harriet, and plenty. But forget that. My mind is still clouded. Are you telling me that that cretinous bastard is holding specimens of Cyclosomia hostage? What kind of madman are we dealing with? Cyclosomia tantalus is an endangered species!”
“Ye
s, dear,” Mrs. Gentry said. “Although I don’t think he would actually kill them. I mean, I believe he is frightened for his own personal safety.”
“He’s right to be,” Gentry grumbled. “I’m going to kill him.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” Mrs. Gentry said.
That night, Kurt and Eve commiserated in each other’s arms. “Our lives have been ruined by the stupidity of our elders,” Eve said.
“I love you,” Kurt said. He slid a hand down her back and under the elastic waistband of her jeans.
“I love you too,” Eve said. “But what are we going to do?”
The river gurgled and the monkeys barked, all unaware of human strife.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Kurt said. His hand was feeling sort of numb, as though it had fallen asleep. “And your dad and my dad aren’t the kind of people who budge. They are both as stubborn as mud turtles.”
“Then it’s up to us,” Eve said, breaking away. “Come on. And don’t make a sound.”
Her father had shown her where the trip wires were, the flashbulb triggers and trashcan deadfalls. “Step over this wire,” she told Kurt. Was this betrayal? she wondered.
The thought kept coming into her mind, and each time she methodically shooed it away. Someone had to act. Someone had to demonstrate some good faith.
Still, she felt terrible when she gazed at her father’s sleeping form before reaching past him and lifting the first of the jars from behind his head. She was, after all, his daughter, and there was no doubt that he would see this as the vilest treachery.
Moving with dreadful slowness, she passed the jars back to Kurt, who wrapped each one in a towel or t-shirt before easing it into the sack.
Once her father coughed in his sleep and muttered something. Eve’s heart stopped. She almost dropped the jar she was holding. But somehow she endured, and the last jar disappeared into the sack.
“I’ll come with you,” she whispered, when they were back in the night and well away from her father’s tent.
“No, better not,” Kurt said. “I’ll talk to him; I’ll tell Dad we want peace, and then come back and tell you how it went. Okay?”
The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories Page 4
