The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  They drank heartily, and took more. By common consent, they put off the mourning they still had to do for what they and Yarkie had lost. Now was the hour to refill the cup of their triumph and supremacy. The old man did not hesitate to brim up Elizabeth’s cup when she held it out again and again. Or Bonnie’s, or Hubbard’s, or the others’.

  They exchanged yarns that had the men slapping their thighs and calling out, “Whacking good!” In one story, Amos Tarbell used the word “mooncussin’” and had to explain it to Hubbard and Bonnie Taylor. Nowadays, it referred to nighttime scavenging on the beaches, people picking over the tide’s flotsam and jetsam; but its origin was out of a time when people swung lanterns on dark nights to mislead ships. The wrecks could then be plundered. The trick couldn’t work when the moon was out, so those nights the folks “cussed the light”—and now walking the beach with a lantern had become “mooncussin’.”

  Laughing now, Bonnie Taylor told how Elizabeth had fooled her into picking up a scallop, without warning her she’d get squirted. She knew about squirting clams, but not scallops.

  Elizabeth’s turn brought a poem for Peter Hubbard’s edification. It was one that had so tickled Elizabeth’s fancy she had memorized it from a book called “Cape Cod Pilot,” a Federal Writers Project back in 1937. It was attributed to an Eva Tappan of Yarmouth, and went:

  “We drove the Indians out of the land

  But a dire revenge the Red Men planned;

  For they fastened a name to every nook

  And every schoolboy with a spelling book

  Will live to toil till his hair turns gray

  Before he can spell them the proper way.”

  Ben Dorset contributed the way old-­timers confounded newcomers who tried to start lob­stering. The natives would smile while the interlopers baited their traps with cut-­up flounders, all correct. Then the old fellows would steal the lobster catch out of the traps and send them to the bottom with their concrete sinkers after removing the float. The newcomers never could find their traps again. “And,” he chuckled, “the way you could tell when they became old-­timers was when they started to do the same to the next batch of tenderfoot that came along to lobster their waters!”

  Russell Homer nodded knowledgeably. “You have to get up mighty early after your lobster. When the breeze whips up the whitecaps, you can hardly see your floats at all.” He grinned winningly. “I was always out when it was still ten-­eleven blankets cold!”

  Hubbard and Bonnie both looked at him with bemused smiles. “Ten-­eleven blankets cold”—what a graphic way to describe the temperature. It would be a refreshing note on the television weather reports!

  When the switchel was finished, it was time for the Task Force to break up. Separate groups formed with the goodnights. Elias Johnson and Stephen Scott considered how to bring the evacuees back to Yarkie, and which mainland officials to contact about the island’s deaths. Amos Tarbell and Ben Dorset discussed assigning the two fire trucks to a continuing patrol on High Ridge in case pockets of fire might still flare up. Peter Hubbard talked to Russell Homer about sailing him with his specimens to Chatham the next morning for a flight back to Cambridge; except for his report, his project on Yarkie was now completed.

  TWO

  After her bath, Elizabeth was slipping on her flannelette nightgown—smiling to herself that it was only “a four-­five blanket” night—when she heard the noise. It had not sounded in this house for a long time. Typing. Peter Hubbard at his report. The thought of his leaving in the morning was painful to her.

  On impulse, Elizabeth opened her door and went across the hall. In the days this house was built, her conduct would have been unthinkable, but these prim walls too had to accept modern ways.

  “If I’m not interrupting, I’d like to talk to you, Peter.”

  The man looked up from his papers and smiled. “I’m not typing too well with one hand, anyway. Come on in, Liz.” Standing shyly in the doorway with her black hair wetly plastered on her head she looked like a mermaid out of her element.

  And to Elizabeth, Peter Hubbard in his pajamas, seemed a sweet boy at bedtime rather than the Harvard instructor always in steady possession of himself.

  He asked amiably, “What do you want to talk about?”

  The woman said gravely, “I just took a long bath and a lot of questions kept bubbling into my head.”

  “Such as?”

  “If you’re too tired, we can talk tomorrow.”

  “You relax me,” he smiled. “Go on.”

  “My question isn’t relaxing,” she said. “Do you really think all the roaches were back in that nest?”

  “No. I’ve said there are bound to be strays. The volunteer firemen are watching, and they have the dry ice . . .”

  “Aren’t the strays just as dangerous?”

  “No,” he said again. “Without the central brain, they’re just bugs, Liz. They’re big and nasty and they can do some damage, but not in the organized way they did before.”

  “Won’t they start another nest?”

  The scientist regarded her doubtful expression soberly. “Not likely. This phenomenon was the result of a very unique combination of environmental and evolutionary forces. The odds are way against a repetition. We did destroy all the brain cells—that’s the important thing.” He added firmly. “Even if there should be a phylogenetic thrust again, it would take years and years.”

  “So you really don’t see any more danger?”

  “Isolated incidents, maybe. A general problem, no.”

  “The people here owe you a great deal, Peter.”

  “I’m glad your father sent me over.”

  “So am I.” Elizabeth Carr looked at the man, her eyes clear windows. “I want to go back with you tomorrow,” she said straightfowardly. It sounded as she hoped it would—honest, not bold; truthful, not brash.

  He responded in kind. “I want you to, Liz. But your grandfather needs you here right now. This has been awfully rough on him.”

  “I know,” Elizabeth squinted. “Peter, can you please put out that light?” The desk gooseneck was shining directly into her face. Hubbard obliged. The room sank into its shadows, illuminated only by the small lamp next to the double bed. Elizabeth Carr was standing between the lamp and Hubbard’s eyes. The man grinned like a schoolboy. “I can see right through your nightgown, you know.”

  Her ingrained impulse was to duck, but her smiling eyes invited the man to enjoy her. “What do you see?” she openly teased.

  He laughed back, “All the way to Chatham.”

  “Chatham? I thought biologists knew female anatomy.”

  “The difference between anatomy and life is amazing . . .” Hubbard got up from the desk, took a step toward Elizabeth, and stopped. “You had better go back to your room.”

  Elizabeth let her answer come from the rum in the switchels she had drunk. Giddily she whirled around, and her nightdress tightened around her body. “I feel wonderful!—Why do I frighten you?” She stopped so close to Hubbard she could feel his breath on her cheek. “I do frighten you, don’t I, Peter?”

  He said huskily, “Because I’ve been falling in love with you.”

  “That’s not frightening, that’s supercaledi­cious-­whatever!” She followed him in her bare feet as he moved prudently away.

  He answered, “You have had too many whatever you call those drinks.”

  “So do I think so! And I’m glad!” With one soft motion, Elizabeth went into the man’s arms and was kissing him passionately on the lips. When she felt his answering embrace, she was sure beyond all doubt of her destiny with this man. Leaning her head against his chest, she murmured, “Peter, I have been in love with you for so terribly, terribly long.” She reached up to stroke his face. Now he did need a shave. She enjoyed the sandpapery sensation, his skin real and masculine with the promise of his own passion.

  He bent his head to her. “I have loved you for too short.”

  She gave him her lip
s without restraint. Their tongues played wetly in each other’s mouth as they freed their hunger for their love.

  Her hand went of its own accord to the hardness she felt rising against her body. Her moistness down there was as wet as her mouth, sweet with his kisses. She wanted, was glad at, his fingers seeking her other wetness gently, strokingly. She parted her legs a little to his hand. In a little while they turned together to the bed.

  She lifted her nightgown off over her head and watched with a pounding heart his eyes take in all of her body and its heat.

  He shed his pajamas and stood naked before her, with his aroused sex lifting to her own ardent gaze.

  They were both panting when they lay back on the soft quilt. Elizabeth breathed against his cheek, then his mouth was on her nipple. The electricity of his tongue on her erotic flesh shot through Elizabeth’s nerves to her center. It was an unexpected, galvanizing shock that arched her back and brought her thighs wide open for him. She had “made it” before, but she never felt anything like this torrent of sensation.

  Sex swept over her and sent her spinning in a riptide of a discovered ocean without end. Her body surged like a breaking wave itself, a curling spume and lacy foam of sheer, breath-­catching delight. Peter Hubbard’s sex pressed between her legs and she spread herself wider, welcoming, wanting, lusting for him now. She felt Peter Hubbard enter her body. He was full and strong and straight. She uttered one small cry which gave way in a moment to a gasp of ecstasy.

  She held him fast inside of her as the deck of her life listed in the sudden storm of emotions she had never sailed before. She clung to him harder as her body became a skimming craft on swelling seas. She rose and fell, bobbed and turned and wheeled and heeled. She was a ship running before the wind of love; she was its sails; he was its keel. She was a bird; he was its wings.

  Then suddenly she was the wind itself, and scudding clouds filled up with thunder and with the lightning he was charging up in her, and charging up in her. Until she could contain it no longer. Like a storm sky she split, the thunder crashed out of her and the burst of her orgasm shook the world.

  They came crashing to release together, both riven to the core. Then the tempest passed, easing, easing at last to let their hearts clear and quiet in the fading wind, quieted to deep-breathing in a sleepy peace in each other’s arms.

  Elizabeth Carr woke later and stirred against Peter Hubbard. He tightened his hold on her warm flesh. “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  He rubbed his eyes like someone coming out of a dream. He looked at her with eyes that could not believe Elizabeth Carr was lying beside him. He stated, “You have to go in to Bonnie.”

  “No.” She lifted herself on an elbow. “She guesses where I am, Peter. She knows how I’ve felt about you.” Sudden tears spilled out. “Poor Bonnie. She was truly falling in love with Craig Soaras, I know.”

  “I guessed,” he nodded slowly.

  It came to Elizabeth Carr in that moment how right it was for her to have come to Peter Hubbard’s bed. Bonnie had lost the lifetime of happiness she might have known—lost it so suddenly, so meaninglessly, so uselessly.

  Elizabeth counted the blessings of her own discovered love, not stolen like Bonnie’s.

  It came to Elizabeth Carr that what she felt was what men and women in wartime had known. With death all around, you grasp what you can of life. She and Peter had been in a war together; they could have been killed as wantonly as Wanda Lindstrom, as Craig Soaras, she could as easily be as bereaved as Bonnie. She understood what had given her the courage to cross the hall.

  But it was not a time for thinking. Peter was pulling her nakedness to his own ready body, wonderfully importunate again.

  THREE

  In the morning, Elizabeth knew again why she loved and respected her grandfather as she did. He was passing in the hall when she came out of Peter Hubbard’s room in her nightgown. He let no question show in his eyes and his greeting was an unstrained, casual “Good morning, Liz.” When Elizabeth stood on tiptoe to kiss his leathery cheek, he added with an approving chuckle, “I want the wedding right here, in this house!”

  Larking, Elizabeth pretended innocence. “What on earth are you talking about, Elias?”

  He winked. “A nose that can smell weather off to Greenland can smell a wedding cake baking in its own kitchen.”

  “The biggest cake we can find!” It was Peter Hubbard, dressed and smiling. He was carrying the flask with the roaches to be brought to the Harvard laboratories.

  Elias Johnson said in the same breath, “Congratulations, and if you’re going to drop that goshdarn jar, Peter, wait till you’re back in Cambridge, will you?”

  Elizabeth uttered a small cry of disbelief. “Peter! Look at the way those roaches are all huddled in the right hand corner! It’s as if they’re still getting signals from somewhere!”

  The scientist’s eyes followed hers, but he remained calm. “Good observation, Liz. But I’d say this is just a habit pattern now, an imprint. They couldn’t be getting signals from the nest after the way we burned it out.”

  “Might some pheromone signals still be in the air?”

  “That’s possible, but doubtful by now, I’d say.”

  Elias Johnson’s eyes lost their merriment. He said with immediate concern, “Peter, those bugs are aiming smack in the direction of that scurvy cave!”

  Hubbard rotated the flask. His own expression revealed a moment of trepidation when the roaches skittered immediately to the opposite side. But he spoke his conviction, “I double-­checked the nest before we left, you know that. The brain is absolutely gone. At worst, Elizabeth may be right about a scent still in the atmosphere.”

  The scientist set the flask down carefully on a chest against the wall. The restless cockroaches looked even more grotesque seen between two priceless T’ang Dynasty bowls.

  The three humans eyed the insect survivors. Elizabeth accepted Peter Hubbard’s conclusion. Elias Johnson hesitated, uncertain, but had no choice. “Well,” he said gruffly, “if you city slickers are all going back to Cambridge today, we better get ourselves a move on.”

  FOUR

  While Elizabeth Carr was dressing, Captain Johnson and Peter Hubbard drove to the village. Johnson had to start the official wheels turning at the town hall. At the Jessica’s dock, Hubbard checked the now-­crated specimens he was taking. Ben Dorset stowed them on board for the crossing to Chatham. Hubbard was surprised to see Bonnie Taylor sitting quietly at the bow of the boat, taking in the bustling harbor. She didn’t turn to him, and he did not intrude, aware that the woman preferred being alone. Patience was her balm now.

  The man realized afresh how providential it was that he and Elizabeth Carr had met again, and would, God still willing, have their lifetimes together.

  Back at the Johnson house, Elizabeth, making her breakfast, was pleased to be alone, too. It came to her that she had scarcely had a moment to herself for the past four days. Could this be only the fifth morning since a carefree Bonnie had so gaily taken Sharky off for a picnic on High Ridge? The nightmare hours since would always seem an eternity to her, an interval out of normal life, like something heard that could not have been real, could not have been experienced.

  But it was real, of course. So many people bereft. And the awful, irrefutable evidence Peter was carrying for the scientific world to study and marvel at—while Yarkie mourned.

  Fragrant coffee was on the stove, eggs were frying in butter—a diet-­defying treat. Elizabeth was starving. She smiled smugly to herself—her hunger wasn’t due to the switchels of the night before, it was the voyage of love she had taken with the man she could claim now. As the omelette sent its mouth-­watering odors through the kitchen, Elizabeth thought with delight that making love with Peter would always be like their first magic last night, no matter how long they lived.

  Elizabeth wiped her plate clean with extra toast, and laughed at herself. If the bliss of sex with Peter did this to
her appetite, she would have to cut down on one or the other. It would be food! she promised herself fervently.

  After breakfast she wanted to walk, to walk by herself, to go along paths she had known so intimately as a child. She knew in her heart that though she would return for visits, this morning was her farewell to “grampa’s island.” Elizabeth started up the old dirt road leading from her grandfather’s house to High Ridge. As she went from the village up the curving incline, she heard birds singing again. Things were returning to normal. The trees, unfortunately, would take years, but there might even be an ecological silver lining, Elizabeth considered. With the old trees burned, new growth would have more room and encouragement to flourish.

  Meantime along her way there were the familiar and beloved old friends. There was the poverty grass, so named because it grew only in poor soil. It was usually found on the dunes, but there were patches of it here and there around the island, a welcoming mossy carpet of silver green. From nearby houses along the lanes she passed came the distinctive fragrance of boxwood. There was the crisp bayberry plant, too, its berries a gray-­green color that glistened to gold although the sky was cloudy again this morning.

  On the path, Elizabeth saw a beautiful conch shell. Some child must have dropped it, perhaps when the people had hurried to the evacuation ferries. She tried to shake that thought out of her head. They would be coming home soon, it would do no one any good to dwell on what had happened. Picking up the conch, Elizabeth smiled as it reminded her of the captain telling how he and his fellows had used these shells as horns when they were young fishermen out in dories blowing signals to the mother ship.

  The pink lavender of beach peas invited Elizabeth Carr, and among nearby junipers she made out a flower whose name she had loved best as a child—the “pearly everlasting.” She had thought that should be the name for the inside of oyster shells, which truly shone like pearls.

  On her left, Elizabeth recognized the very same blueberry bushes from which she had so often come home with a happily smeared face. The fleabane plant was across the lane, supposed to keep away fleas—which she, thankfully, had never acquired.