Just Holler Bloody Murder

Before she can think how else to defend herself, someone’s reached the top of the stairs and is yelling her name. “Callahan, are you up here?” Her body goes limp in relief, though his familiar voice holds an uncharacteristic tone of urgency. He’s already jerking a door handle when, still clutching the butcher knife, she walks out into the living room. “Hurry, Callahan. I really need to talk to you.”

She slips the knife under a potted fern on an end table and does hurry to open the door, the thudding of her heart receding to a mild arrhythmia because, mercifully, it’s not Juby but Pepper Dade standing there, sane and solid as a bridge support.

“Thank God, you’re here,” he says when she opens the door.

Thank God you are.

Callahan’s so relieved she has to stifle an urge to hug him. “C’mon in.” She’s surprised at his appearance. He’s unshaven, the blonde stubble on his face appealing in a scruffy terrier way. He’s wearing a washed-out pair of jeans that are frayed at the seams and a shapeless gray tee shirt. He’s not wearing his glasses, so his eyes, a pensive pale blue today, are more prominent in his face. Even his naturally relaxed body appears taut. “What’s up, Pepper?”

“Francie and Honey are shopping.” He raises both hands in a gesture of frustration. “Shopping on the one day of the year when I need them! And Wallace and Vi are in town at a funeral.” His face is pink from the exertion of running up the stairs, and his chest is still heaving. “I feel like Rocky twelve rounds into an Apollo fight. As if enough hasn’t already happened, I’ve got another crisis.” He turns away from her, back toward the stairs. “You coming, Harry?”

Harry Applegate, red-faced and wide-eyed, appears at the top of her steps, then pauses and openly gawks at the view. “Man, would you take a look at that gator.”

Following his gaze, Callahan’s glad to see that Albert and several smaller alligators have reappeared on the pond. Pepper goes to Harry, drapes a friendly arm around his shoulders, and steers him purposefully toward Callahan.

“We call the big one Albert,” Callahan tells the little boy. She points to the next largest gator, lying in Albert’s shadow on the pond’s sandy bank. “That’s Tipper. She’s huge for a female. We named her that the year Al Gore ran for president…”

“Hate to be the one to interrupt fascinating local color,” Pepper says, “but right now, I’ve got a crisis of gargantuan proportions on my hands.” He nods toward the back of the boy, who’s now headed to the far edge of the porch for a better vantage point on the gators, the heels of his tennis shoes blinking with embedded lights. “Harry and his mama found Robbie Pasquini in a bad way about fifteen minutes ago.” The sides of Pepper’s mouth twitch like he’s fighting for control. “Flat on his back, Callahan, at the bottom of the steps of their house. It looks like he fell the full two flights and had been there a while. He’s hurt bad. After I got 911, I called Cole because I truly don’t know whether this is foul play or not. Harry’s mama, Annie, is a nurse, so she’ll ride with Robbie on the helicopter and stay with him till we find Irene.”

The whop, whop, whop of an approaching whirlybird is now audible over the inland waterway. It’s headed toward the west side of the island, where Pepper had a landing pad built only weeks before. “They’ll medevac him right out, but nobody’s here to take care of Harry while I go across to pick up Cole.”

Callahan interrupts Pepper this time. “Robbie’s still alive, then?”

“He’s real bloody.” Harry’s raspy voice issues this report without his turning around or taking his eyes off the alligators. “And his teeth are sticking out of his chin.”

Pepper raises an eyebrow at the graphic description, nods a serious yes to her question, and follows it with a tentative shrug that says, I don’t know how much longer he’ll be alive. He turns toward the stairs. “I’ll get back as soon as I can, but it may take us a while. Thanks, Callahan.”

Pepper’s already disappeared into the stairwell before Callahan fully realizes she’s been co-opted into babysitting. She hears the slap of his leather moccasins receding down the stairs, the sound of her door rolling shut, the squeal of the backup signal on his golf cart, and then he’s gone.

So, it wasn’t Sir Galahad coming to rescue me from Juby. Instead of being liberated, I now have the additional responsibility of taking care of this sweaty, jug-eared little boy when I don’t know how to protect myself from Juby, let alone Harry.

Resigned but not pleased, she sighs and walks to Harry, who seems so mesmerized by this proximity to the gators that he’s frozen in space. Once she reaches him, she just stands there beside him, completely at a loss about what to do with a nine-year-old boy.

You have to feed and water them a lot.

She knows that much from observing her friends’ and neighbors’ male children.

He smells like something washed up from the sea and left on the sand too long.

At least, she can go downstairs and get her cell phone. Since she heard Pepper open the door when he came and close it when he left, she knows that Juby hasn’t had a chance to sneak into her house. So far.

“Are you Pepper’s girlfriend or something?” Harry’s random inquiry takes her by surprise.

“Pepper’s girlfriend?” She cocks her head to look at him suspiciously. “What would make you think a thing like that?”

“I was just wondering.” He lifts his shoulders with the smile of an innocent. “You guys act like it, is all.”

“Well, no. I’m not.” She can’t think of how else to defend herself from the charge, so she picks up her field glasses from the table and places the strap over Harry’s head. “Here, you can get even closer with these. I’ve got to run downstairs and get something, and I’ll be right back. Then, we’ll have something cool to drink and get better acquainted. I understand you know a lot about nature.”

“I do,” Harry’s big-toothed smile disarms her. “I’m pretty sure I’m right about you and Mr. Pepper, too. My mom’s always telling my dad what good instincts I have.”

He’s still standing with the glasses trained on Albert when she comes back up the stairs, mission accomplished. She drops the little cell phone in the front pocket of her denim shorts, determined not to be separated from it again. There’s a flash of white beyond the deck and the distinctive shriek of an osprey. “Look, Harry!”

He lowers the glasses in time to see the large, white-breasted bird fly by within feet of the porch. “Wow! That’s the closest I ever got to an osprey, even closer than yesterday. Did you know that they never get divorced after they get mated?”

“You’re absolutely right about that. They’re very faithful birds, much like Canada geese.” Callahan and Harry both stand silent, watching the bird till it soars into the distance, a circling speck over the impoundment. “It’s called monogamy, when you have only one mate.”

“I know.” Harry’s forehead lowers like she’s insulted his intelligence. “But a lot of people, like my brother Tom, who’s so dumb he calls cottage cheese ‘college cheese’ don’t understand scientific terms.”

“Speaking of your brothers, where are they?”

Harry’s left the edge of the porch, climbed into one of the green rockers, and is rocking vigorously. Both of his knees are skinned and covered in Batman Band-Aids, and his scrawny bare legs, extending out of baggy, green camping shorts, are covered with red welts from mosquito bites. “They’re at a swim meet,” Harry reports, rocking so far back in the chair that it tips precariously. He compensates with no sign of alarm, throwing his weight forward to rebalance the chair, and keeps talking. “They’re good at running and swimming and stuff like that. I’m good at spiders and snakes. Did you know that an adult water moccasin eats ten rats a month? People think snakes are bad, but we’d have a rodent-infested world if we didn’t have snakes around.”

As he talks on, Callahan’s eyes, like tongue to toothache, return again and again to that spot in the myrtles where she saw Juby.

“Aren’t those banana spiders?” Harry points to several large webs hanging from the rafters beyond the screens along the front of the house.

“They are.” She pulls her attention back. “And they’re fascinating.”

“Arachnids,” Harry says, casually scratching a mosquito bite on his wrist till it starts to bleed. He puts his mouth to the wound and sucks it clean.

“Arachnids, they are.” Callahan’s about to be impressed by this freckle-faced little naturalist.

“So, tell me more about ’em.” Harry leaves the rocker to insert himself into a basket-like chair that hangs from a rope on the ceiling.

The child’s in perpetual motion.

Using the tip of his toe on the floor as a lever, he twists the chair in a circle, winding it up. Then, he picks up the foot, and the chair flies into a frenetic, dizzying spin.

I hope those old ropes are up to the challenge.

The ropes hold, the chair slows, and Harry looks as if nothing has even happened. He sucks the blood off his wrist again and leans around the chair’s side to make eye contact with Callahan. “When are we gonna talk about those banana spiders?”

“Well…” She points to the spider nearest Harry. With its multicolored, many-jointed legs open, it’s bigger than a fifty-cent piece and distinctive because of its bright yellow lower abdomen. “They are also called golden silk spiders. A lot of people don’t like spiders, but they have a job to do just like snakes. I leave all their webs up here because they catch mosquitoes and flies. Their webs can be as big as five feet across, so that’s a pretty big fishing net if what you’re fishing for is bugs. This one’s an orb weaver. It builds a spiral web and spends its whole day out there, hanging upside down in it. You’re looking at the female. She’s lots bigger than the male. See those two littler spiders over there to her left? They’re males, fixing to fight for her favors. Spiders fall in love just like ospreys do.”

“Do they bite?” He’s moved to try out another rocker and is scratching a welt on his ear.

“Ospreys?”

“No, banana spiders.” Another scowl on Harry’s face.

This child’s so intense that he doesn’t like being misunderstood.

“Well, you know, most all spiders bite, but very few are poisonous, and these spiders aren’t aggressive. You’d have to hold them or squeeze them to…” Her eyes go to the pond. Albert has slid back into the water, and Tipper quickly follows.

“Whatcha looking at?”

And he’s super-observant.

He gets out of the chair and walks over to her, his moldy smell coming along with him.

Maybe those tennis shoes with lights can’t be dried, so they gradually mildew.

“My tarantula’s a boy,” he tells her conversationally. “You can tell because he has hairs on his legs.” The child throws out the fact, but his eyes are riveted on the disturbed water where the alligators have just disappeared.

He’s picking up on my alarm.

She decides to be honest with him.

He’s the kind of kid who will run into Juby sometime, anyway.

“There’s a man,” she says softly, “that’s been hanging around here today, and he’s a little scary.”

Harry pats her arm with a moist, chubby hand. “Does he look like Scarface?”

Callahan’s astounded.

Is the child a mind reader?

“Why, yes, but how did you know?”

“Because,” Harry says, his intense, raisin-brown eyes widening with authority, “that’s the very same guy I had to hide from yesterday when you kept trying to get me to come out, and I wouldn’t.”