The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  “What’s wrong, Sharky?” she asked casually. “Something bothering you?”

  The dog’s answer was to startle her by leaping away. At the path, his body went rigid, his head up, his ears high, his nose forward, his left front leg lifted. He stopped growling, and it was then Bonnie Taylor heard the other, unfamiliar sound. It came out of the forest, a rustling susurration somehow inimical and threatening. She told herself quickly it was only a rustling of leaves, but there was no breeze and no motion as far as she could peer down the shadowed aisle outside the grove. Probably a snake, she decided. But not dangerous, or Elizabeth would have cautioned her. The woman turned calmly back to her blanket.

  Sharky did not come when she called again. She saw his ears quivering, straining. She heard the sound once more, louder and clearer now. It was a hissing that sent sudden electric chills up her spine. She had known coon-­hissing back home in Mississippi, but this was not the same. And the dog was acting crazily. He had begun to hop about, as if the ground was hot. He was bobbing his head, yipping and whining in a way that would have been called hysterical in a human.

  The sibilance was clearly coming closer. Bonnie jumped to her feet and hurried to collar Sharky. If there was some danger stirring such instinctual dread in the dog, she was not going to linger in the place. There might be animals in the woods Elizabeth had not thought to mention.

  At the same moment, she became aware of a strange odor, as if a foul-­smelling acid had been vaporized in the air nearby. Sharky had sensed it before she did! It was making him cower and cringe now, in a way she had never seen. The dog was pressing his shaking body against her legs, whining pitifully. She lifted his body to hug and comfort him, but to her shock, he bared his teeth, snapped at her, and raked her forearm with his claws.

  Crying out in surprise and pain, Bonnie dropped Sharky to the ground. “What’s got into you?” The dog faced her viciously. From the friendly, docile pet she had known, he became a snarling, ferocious-­looking beast. Seriously ­frightened, Bonnie backed away slowly. The beads of blood on her arm might be evoking some primitive instinct of attack. Dogs were descendants of wolves. With genuine alarm, Bonnie grabbed up the aluminum picnic box and held it in front of her breast for protection.

  But Sharky transformed again. With quick, rough barks of furious challenge, he launched himself away from Bonnie into the deep woods toward the hissing noise.

  Moments later, Bonnie was riveted by a change in Sharky’s barking. There was an abrupt high yelping, then a cry of acute agony. Bonnie shivered, trying to see the dog through the heavy growth. She stepped out of the grove gingerly. If there was an animal out there that could hurt Sharky, it could hurt her. But she had to know what had happened. The dog could simply have gotten into a patch of burrs, though that wouldn’t account for his erratic conduct earlier.

  One careful step after another led Bonnie Taylor along the umbrageous path that went toward the dump. The way was through great mounds of springy leaves, the residue of scores of Yarkie autumns, undisturbed through the years except by occasional deer and the smaller denizens of the woods, raccoons, muskrats and the like.

  Bonnie halted to listen. There was only silence now. Even the birds were quiet, she observed. No leaf rustled; there was no hissing sound, no dog noise, no motion anywhere that she could detect.

  Then she heard the whimpering, a gasping for breath. It sounded almost human, but it was Sharky, certainly, somewhere near. Bonnie took a determined step in the direction of the soft cries, only to be stopped by the loud hissing. It was like an angry warning, a command for her to stay back.

  With all her voice, Bonnie called, “Sharky! Sharky! Here, Sharky!” She bent for a fallen branch. Her mouth tightened with purpose. She would find Captain Johnson’s dog, and she would protect herself against whatever was lurking in the dark copses into which he had disappeared.

  Moving forward again, Bonnie kept looking about alertly, feeling an idiot, not knowing what kind of danger she should be anticipating, and whether it might come at her from in front, or the sides, or even from above. She swung her branch grimly, as if to show that she was not afraid, though she was quaking inwardly.

  Walking alone in the thickening woods, beginning to get a faint smell of the garbage stench, frightened of the mysterious hissing that stopped and started so disturbingly, Bonnie wanted desperately to turn back. She gritted her teeth harder. She’d be damned if she’d show yellow. The strange sibilant sound, she told herself firmly, was obviously just some kind of snake she was unfamiliar with, and Sharky had probably killed it by now.

  It was then that Bonnie Taylor stepped sickeningly on the white body almost entirely buried in leaves that were stained crimson with blood. It was obvious that a thrashing battle had taken place. When she knelt to brush the leaves away, she found Sharky lying on his side. The dog’s coat was pocked with fresh blood. His legs were kicking in a palsy of animal pain. In Bonnie’s presence, his whimpering sounds became louder. He looked up at her with a piteous whine for help. Bonnie vomited. The dog had only empty sockets where his eyes had been.

  TWO

  “I couldn’t bring him back,” Bonnie wept in Elizabeth’s arms. “I wanted to, but I just couldn’t bear it! I’m so sorry.”

  Elizabeth Carr embraced her friend. “We understand, Bonnie.”

  “No, you don’t. You can’t imagine how horrible it was!”

  From his couch, Captain Elias Johnson asked, “Just his eyes, you say?”

  Bonnie sobbed, “I don’t know, Elias. He was bloody all over . . .”

  “No more now,” Elizabeth said firmly. She looked over at her grandfather. “I’m going down to the sheriff’s. If we’ve got rabid animals in the woods, Amos Tarlell needs to know.”

  A command from Johnson stopped his granddaughter at the door. “Slow down, Liz! It could have been birds, you know.”

  “Birds?” Both women repeated the word incredulously.

  The old man nodded. “Sharky might have found a nest. You get a herring gull mad, you’ll find how sharp and deep its bill can dig.” The captain heard the lack of conviction in his own voice, but he wanted time to think without Sheriff Amos Tarbell bolting around the island, upsetting people needlessly.

  Bonnie Taylor ventured, drying her cheeks, “There didn’t seem to be a nest or anything like that . . .”

  Elias Johnson held to his theory stubbornly. “We get snowy egrets that pass this way, too. They’ve got beaks can drill to China!”

  Elizabeth countered, “Egrets stay on the beach, don’t they?” She knew Yarkie Island birds quite as well as her grandfather did.

  “Might get a stray in the woods, maybe a sick one, which’d make it meaner.” The old man sucked his teeth. If Sharky was dead, nothing could bring him back. But he needed to know it was no mystery. There had to be a sensible explanation, and birds were probably it, from what Bonnie reported.

  Elizabeth voiced a new thought. “Were there any men up there?”

  Bonnie told them she had seen no one.

  Elizabeth prompted, “Those fellows who came across the ferry yesterday?” There had been an unkempt group of three “punks,” dressed outlandishly in Nazi caps, torn army pants, and ripped shirts. On the pier, they had eyed Elizabeth and Bonnie lewdly, making suggestive gestures the women had turned from with disgust.

  Bonnie shook her head, swallowing hard. It was too horrible even to contemplate that any man, no matter how brutish, would put out a dog’s eyes. What would he use? A sharpened branch? A walking stick? She fought to keep her stomach from turning over again.

  An urgent knocking on the front door interrupted the three. Captain Johnson called irascibly, “Come on in before you break the damn thing down! You know the door’s open!”

  A tall man of about twenty-­five entered in a hurry. The sea was in his lean, weathered face, with its black Portuguese eyes, long nose, and a heavy mustache that curved down on both sides of a strong mouth. Craig Soaras was the mate of Johnson’s fis
hing-­charter boat, the Jessica, and a childhood friend of Elizabeth. Children loved him. They tugged at his large mustache knowing its piratical fierceness masked warmth and shyness. They rode his back, they clung to his shoulders when he sailed them across to Chatham for the annual visiting circus.

  To Craig Soaras, the Jessica was like his own boat. To him, the long hours at sea passed in the best way a man could live his life—caring so ardently for what he did that he was scarcely aware of doing it. His sailing and fishing were no more “work” than breathing or eating, or lying on a beach watching fiddler crabs scuttling about and pipers dance on the wet sand with the ebb and flow of the waves.

  Now the man panted anxiously to the captain, “Can we talk alone, Elias!”

  Knowing these men, Elizabeth quickly led Bonnie out, but she could not help wondering what needed to be private between them.

  In the living room, Craig moved quickly to the captain’s side. Johnson paid hard attention. Craig wasn’t a man easily upset, and he was sure blowing a conch now.

  “Elias, I was around the north side going for bluefish—” Soaras couldn’t help interrupting himself with a fisher­man’s enthusiasm. “Caught a nice one, twenty-­seven pounds!”

  “Fair . . .” Elias Johnson teased and waited to hear about the worry he saw in the man’s eyes. Had the price of their fuel gone up again?

  He was told more than he ever bargained for.

  “I was opposite the dump, off the rocks there, when I saw Russell Homer waving at me from the bulldozer, where he was spreading some new soil on the garbage. He was signaling with his shirt, seemed like some kind of trouble. I rowed on in. Russ came zigzagging down the beach; I figured he was dodging mosquitos or something.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “For me to get him out of the dump on the boat.”

  “Didn’t he have his jalopy there like always?”

  “Yes, but it was full of—rats.”

  “Rats?—What the hell!”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Since when is Russ afraid of a couple of measly rats?”

  “Hundreds of them! I saw them myself! Something loco is happening at the dump, Elias! Weird and awful. I got Russ on board and watched with my glasses. Like he told me, I saw rats jumping up out of the garbage there as if they were damn birds! And dropping back dead!”

  Elias Johnson rubbed his nose, thinking hard. “We put new poison out there last week,” he said, “the way those Public Health people told us, to keep the vermin from getting used to one kind. Must be killing the rats now . . .”

  Craig Soaras clenched his leathery fists. “That wasn’t any poison, Elias! Those rats were dead from having their eyes put out! I saw it plain as day!”

  The captain’s head snapped up. “What?” Eyes gone! Like Sharky’s?

  Craig scowled. “What in the name of the saints could do a thing like that? Hundreds of those rats, every one without eyes!”

  The captain rubbed his nose harder. It sure as hell wasn’t any herring gulls. And even he had known his talk of egrets was phony. Something here just damned didn’t add up. He’d heard every crazy damn thing in his life, at sea and ashore, but never anything like this.

  Craig added, “That’s not all. Seems like the rats are going nuts. They thrash around like something’s driving them wild. I could hear them squealing all the way to the boat. They flop around, like dizzy, climb on each other, gash at each other—and then drop dead like that!” He snapped his calloused fingers. “You think it’s rabies?”

  “Where’s Russell?”

  “I dropped him off to tell Amos. If those crazy rats head for town, this island is in for a helluva mess.”

  The old man stood up vigorously, disregarding the pain in his foot. “Let’s get to Amos ourselves, Craig. Pronto!” As he followed his mate out of the house, Elias Johnson muttered to himself with new understanding. Rats! Yes, rats crazed by the new poison might go for the dog’s eyes. So that’s what had happened to poor Sharky! Lucky that Bonnie had got away with a whole skin. People had better stay out of the woods for a while! Russell Homer had better stay off the dump, for that matter, until they learned what the hell was happening out there.

  Hobbling to the town hall downhill on Main Street, Elias Johnson took in the quietness of the harbor below. The Atlantic was lying low today. Didn’t fool anyone on Yarkie Island. It would probably storm tomorrow, but meantime the people were enjoying the spell of good weather. Too dry for the woods, but on every Yarkie beach this noon young and old were having a good time, swimming carefree, sunning themselves, picnicking.

  His own plan for the island was already formed in Johnson’s clicking mind. Decision One: He would phone his son-­in-­law at Harvard and explain about the new poisons causing rat trouble at the dump. Richard Carr could hurry one of his assistants to Yarkie to check it out. No doubt they could correct the problem with their modern chemicals. Decision Two: The sheriff’s office would officially announce that the woods were being sprayed. Starting at once. Everyone had to keep out. That would give the Harvard fellow the time he needed.

  Maybe Richard Carr would come over himself, with Jessica, if she wasn’t too busy. With Elizabeth already on the island, they could have a nice family reunion. There was a silver lining even to the clouds over the village dump. The captain smiled faintly to himself as he limped up the brick steps under the sheriff’s sign. To the familiar faces greeting him on the hilly street, he turned an unrevealing, unworried smile—old Elias Johnson just going about one of his ordinary chores as Yarkie selectman.

  The only unfamiliar note on the street was the “punks” about whom Elizabeth had remarked earlier. The three were not only ragged, they were literally dirty, and they seemed to take pride in their offensiveness as they lounged in front of Elvira Soaras’ Cafe near the pier. Their eyes were insolent, following people who passed by as if daring anyone to comment or protest.

  One of the men stirred. “It’s getting hot, man. Let’s hit the beach we found yesterday!”

  The others nodded. Swaggering abreast, the three moved along Main Street, heading up the hill toward High Ridge. Purposely they gave no way, so that everyone approaching had to step into the gutter to let them pass. They laughed aloud at the discomfort they imposed. “Bunch of hicks,” one sneered. “Some pretty chicks,” another added. “Fuck ’em later,” their companion urged impatiently. “I want to wrap one up!”

  He was talking about the marijuana they had in their jeans, of course.

  THREE

  Across the island, on Yarkie’s east shore, Reed Brockshaw was waving his two children out of the ocean. “Chow time, kids!” Six-­year-­old Kim and nine-­year-­old David came splashing and giggling out of the slapping waves in the noon sun. They shook themselves like puppy dogs and pounded up the sand to Doreen Brockshaw, waiting for them with large bath towels. Her embrace was fierce in its intensity. It was almost a year since fire—an ever-­present island hazard—had consumed the house Reed had built. Only the man’s heroism had saved the children. Before the volunteer trucks arrived, he had plunged heedlessly through the wall of flame. Miraculously, none had suffered more than minor burns.

  It was a miracle Doreen Brockshaw daily held in her mind beneath her long red hair. Each morning she went quietly down to the kitchen at dawn. In her white nightgown she brushed her hair back, lifted her green eyes to the coming day and sent up the meditations of her thankful heart.

  Reed Brockshaw once came upon his wife in her praying. He withdrew silently, comprehending her need to be private in this. It was a measure of the couple’s devotion that no words were needed. Reed and Doreen Brockshaw had an other-­century marriage appropriate to an old-­fashioned island.

  Reed himself had sailed with Elias Johnson on many charters but now he was working as a carpenter on a marina being built by another selectman of the island, Stephen Scott. Reed missed the ocean trips, but the land pay was better, and building his new house was costing more
than even he had planned for.

  Doreen was saying, “We need more firewood, kids.” Reed had carefully built the small cooking fire on the side of the dunes away from the forest. The trees came close to the shore at this spot, and he knew they were tinder. He half rose to go himself, but remembered his father’s saying: Shared chores mean shared family. The Yarkie way. In the winter they called gathering firewood “going wooding.” Let David and Kim go wooding now.

  Something made the father turn to look after the two small figures stamping gaily into the trees. On impulse he got to his feet and started to follow.

  His wife laughed at him. “Don’t be such a fusspot, Reed. We know every inch of this place and there isn’t a blessed thing in there that can hurt them.”

  Brockshaw didn’t answer his wife, and he didn’t stop. Doreen held her peace. She knew the constant anxiety for the children her husband harbored. If her own answer was her morning prayers, his was this special vigilance. He was tactful, she appreciated. She didn’t think the children were aware how closely he kept them in view.

  In the forest, David, as the older child, took charge. He pointed to a thicket on the right, in the direction of the distant village dump. “You go that way,” he commanded his sister. He himself had spotted a pile of broken branches on the opposite side and intended to gather its riches alone.

  The little girl went obediently into the thick copse, though she could see nothing but the crowding bushes. She had trouble getting through even with her small and agile body, but she was intent on bringing back as much wood as any old officious brother. Kim dropped to her knees and wiggled on. She heard her father calling and flattened herself in the leaves so he would not spy her.