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Authors: Sarah Andrews

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Waltrine made a gesture like she was plucking a recalcitrant chicken. “Another one! I will not drive clear across Florida with a skeptic!”
Miles said, “Our sampling station is on the downwind end of the island because that is where our sampling station
attendant
lives. We are doing this with volunteers. It’s pretty hairy trying to do this with no funding, let me tell you! Now, if we could kiss butt like Chip Hiller …”
Waltrine screamed, “We would all have oral
herpes
!”
I glanced out the open office door. A few colleagues had gathered in the hallway, smiling, as if enjoying having ringside seats to an especially good fight. Evidently Waltrine’s outburst was not counted as a surprise.
Miles said, “Spoken like a true microbiologist, Waltrine. But give Em a chance. Take her along tomorrow. Y’all’ll get along like a couple hogs in the mud.”
Waltrine shrugged a shoulder. “Sure, if you say so.” She looked at me, her face suddenly back in control. “Can you be ready to go by eight? It’s a two and a half hour drive, and our meeting is at eleven.”
Miles sniggered. “Em, be sure to bring your crash helmet. Most people allow an hour or so longer than that.”
I was somewhat frazzled by the extremity of Waltrine’s outburst. I had heard plenty of foul language in my day, but hers had surprised me. I felt like something had just gotten past me here, just as the pathogens on the dust had gotten past Chip Hiller. No matter, I’d have a long car drive with Waltrine during which I could get to know her better and try to figure out what she was hiding in plain sight. “Okay,” I said, folding my list and putting it in my pocket where no one could stumble upon it accidentally and know what I was really up to. “I’ll be here.”
Back at Nancy’s, I took a quick swim to try to build up my tolerance to the idea of water, then went and found Tom.
He was back in the guesthouse, studying something on the screen of his notebook computer. He looked up at me over his half glasses as I came in and quickly folded the screen down flat so I couldn’t see it. Faye, who was lolling naked on the couch doing her impression of a streamlined Venus of Willendorf, batted her eyelashes and said, “You try being pregnant in summer sometime.” She looked tired.
I turned to Tom. “Lots to report.”
“Spill.”
“First I want to use your computer to look something up on the Internet.”
“It’s all yours,” he said, moving out of his chair.
I sat down and brought up a search engine, and tapped in CHIP HILLER. It took me a while to crack a location for him, because of course Chip was a nickname, but I kept at it and eventually dug him up through HILLER + DUST. His full name was Wilbert Higby Hiller (if it were me, I’d go for a nickname, too), and he had previously published from a small university, as Miles had said. Currently, he held the lofty title of Director and Chief Scientist, Royal Caribbean Institute of Atmospheric Science, and it gave an address in the Bahamas. The Web page for the institute seemed so
puffed up and nonspecific that I wondered if it really amounted to much. “How do you figure out who’s funding an institute?” I asked, now typing in BENJAMIN FARNSWORTH, the anthrax researcher Calvin Wheat had known, figuring to round out my list of names.
Tom grew impatient. He said, “Drat. This guy I can’t find.”
“His name is Ben Farnsworth, and he’s a microbiologist. I’m not finding anything on him in here.”
Tom said testily, “It would help to know what you’re looking for.”
“Okay, I’ll report. Well, there’s trouble in paradise. Miles Guffey is pissing off half the profession, and the other half are standing outside his door laying bets on who wins which rounds. He’s got a second microbiologist working for him, a woman named Waltrine Sweet who could cuss the bolts out of a battleship, and reading between the lines, she’s under some pressure to come up with positive results for her doctoral dissertation. There’s an antagonist named Chip Hiller in some other shop who’s kicking up a major turf war; he says Guffey’s ideas are hogwash. This Farnsworth guy knew Calvin Wheat at school. And I had lunch with the Center Chief, a woman who’s playing the feminist card as a way to get me off the project. And I’m tagging along with Waltrine tomorrow to see the NASA guys at Kennedy.”
Tom gave me a lips-only smile. “My, but you have been busy.”
“Better’n sitting around.”
Faye mumbled, “You’re going clear over to Kennedy? We should go to the Dali museum. It has better air-conditioning.”
Ignoring that, I asked, “You hear anything more from Jack?”
Tom shook his head. “Tell me more about your time with Miles Guffey.”
“Oh, we tossed around some ideas about what part of the pie I might work on. I was appalled by how much there
is to do. I wandered around there, talking to all the different experts that have a piece of the game, each one of them giving a little time to Guffey off the meter, because their time’s really paid for by other projects. The scope of the dust project is huge—trying to document what-all’s coming over here in those dust clouds, and exactly where some of it’s coming from and going to. They have high arsenic levels in the cisterns out on the islands, for instance, and that can’t be explained unless it’s coming from the dust. So where’s that at? Are the winds carrying away the spoils piles from mining operations? And we’re talking the cradle of humanity here: Africa has mines that go back several millennia, piles of crud all over the place, and even today’s mines aren’t operated by the standards of environmental safety we have here in the U.S. And then there’s the fact that most peoples who live there are living hand-to-mouth. One person I spoke to said that their idea of solid waste management is to pile up the camel dung and human feces right where the wind will pick it up and carry it off toward us, and do you know what they do with plastic bags and spent tires? They pile them up and burn them. She said the air quality in Mali, for instance, where ninety percent of the population lives on two percent of the land, right along the banks of the Niger River, is so bad, so full of petrochemicals and their daughter products, that she got a ripping sinus infection when she went over there to set up a sampling station.”
Tom smiled sweetly. “This is what I love about you, Em. You’re a regular sponge for pertinent information.”
I couldn’t help but preen slightly over that compliment. When it came down to cases, I really did want Tom’s approval. “Thanks. So that’s what I did, I tried to find out where the political bodies were buried, but I also learned what I could that would apply to that idea of approaching the project like a crime scene. Clearly one of the crimes is against nature: We’ve gone and put too many people in a very dry place, and they’re having a hard go of it. So they drain the lakes and rivers for irrigation, leaving a big pan
of silt that’s charged with whatever mine drainage and so forth might have fed into it. Then they drive some goats out into the remaining vegetative cover and tear it up, and more soil—with its load of raw sewage and any other germs and spores that might be hanging around—gets sucked up by the wind.”
Tom said, “So we humans are again despoiling our own nest.”
I pondered that. “Yeah … but it’s not that simple, Tom. We’re not separate from nature. So the crime is against ourselves,
and
nature has a hand in it, by the bare facts of climate change over the past ten or fifteen millennia. I don’t know … it just seems that there are a few more terms in the equation than just ‘we screwed up.’” I sighed, frustrated by the sense that there was a thread hanging in the middle of the logic picture. “And then there’s this whole anthrax bit.”
Tom spoke softly. “About which Miles Guffey has been screaming for years.”
I looked sharply at him. “You mean you’ve know about him right along?”
Tom’s eyes had grown dark with something akin to sympathy, an unusually candid look coming from him. “Yes. You’ll recall that while I still worked for the FBI, I made it my business to know as much as I could about threats to homeland security. Everything from simple tricks like loading a bunch of fertilizer and fuel oil into a rental truck and blowing up a government center in Oklahoma to the more sophisticated stunts, like the threat posed by weapons-grade anthrax. Talk about pissing in our own nest: It was our guys who developed the supervirulent strains. Then we were stupid enough to sell some of them to our so-called friends. But it takes sophistication to know how to handle it without getting hoisted by your own petard. So yes, I made it a point to keep track of smart people who take an interest in anthrax.”
I let the knowledge that Tom had known all about Miles
Guffey trickle down through my mental sponge and see what it grabbed hold of.
Tom spoke again. “I want to go to Kennedy with you tomorrow.”
That surprised me. “You taking time to be a tourist?”
He avoided my question by asking another one. “What’s this Waltrine character driving?”
“A government vehicle, no doubt.”
Tom winced at the memory of driving such stripped-down models. “Tell her I’ll drive her there in regal comfort. Faye, will Nancy loan us a car?”
“Anything as long as it’s a Mercedes,” she sighed. “And
if
the air-conditioning is working, if you want me to come.”
I said, “I’ll have to check this all out with Waltrine. Rumor has it she drives like she’s shot from a gun, so I’ll give her a call and suggest we get an earlier start than she’s planned on. We have to be there at eleven.”
Faye gasped, “Eleven?” Then she looked at her husband through her eyelashes and sang, “To-om, it’s a hundred and fifty
miles
to Kennedy. Three hours minimum, and that’s if you go ballistic and manage to catapult yourself over all the traffic in Orlando.”
“Orlando?” I said. “Isn’t that where Jack’s mother lives? Maybe we should stop and see her.”
Tom shook his head. “Not a good idea, Em. Don’t you think Jack would want to be the one to introduce you?”
Faye continued whining about the early hour. “You don’t really want to get up that
early,
do you?”
I said, “What’s going on, Faye? You didn’t seem to mind getting up early yesterday.”
“That was for flying.” Suddenly she sat up. “Hey! Do you want to
fly
over there?”
Tom shook his head. “I need a car when I get there.” Faye pursed her lips coquettishly. “We could rent one at the airport over there … . Come on, I came down here to party, and you two are being a couple of workaholics.”
Tom said, “No, flying’s no good. I want to talk to this
Waltrine Sweet, then take a little dogleg and look at another location.”
“Oh, bother,” said Faye. “Chasing other women already, and I’m not even tacked down with a squalling infant yet. What kind of bomb are you going to save for my postpartum depression?” She arched her back and stretched, rolling her growing breasts and full-moon belly with sensuous grace. It was quite a show: She’d been out sunbathing, so her body was nicely browned and liberally oiled, and her pregnancy had turned her nipples big and brown, and there was a lovely brown stripe running right down the center of her roundness. Clearly pregnancy agreed with her, and I hoped that the griping was a gratuitous bid for extra attention while she kicked back and enjoyed herself liberally. But I wasn’t sure. She seemed to be rocking between long naps and spates of pushing herself too hard, by turns giving into the pregnancy and then defying her growing dependency on Tom.
Tom smiled, eyeing his bride with lascivious pride. “I keep trying to tell you, Faye, that you look better to me with every new ounce of baby fat.”
I stood up. “I think I’ll go phone Waltrine,” I said, and hustled out the door before things could get to where they were quickly going.
I phoned Waltrine. She was happy enough to accept Tom’s offer to drive when I told her she’d be riding in a Mercedes Benz, but she did first inquire about the quality of the sound system, chasing her question with a simple statement: “I like good boogie.” She also informed me that a geologist from Florida’s state geological survey—not to be confused with the U.S. Geological Survey, which was federal—would be coming with us. He had busted a spring in his state vehicle while rocketing out of a quarry carrying too heavy a load of high-quality calcite crystals that had “accidentally” fallen into the back of his vehicle. He thought he’d come along to look after the state’s interests in the space program while he waited for the spring to be repaired.
When she discovered that there would be that many people in the car, Faye opted out, saying she had an appointment with a chaise lounge and a bottle of suntan oil.
That night, when the insomnia set in, I turned to Miles Guffey’s contribution to my reading stash, a slim trade paperback entitled,
The Garden of Their Desires: Desertification and Culture in World History.
It echoed Tom’s words regarding the importance of the equality of women to the health of a culture, drawing a correlation between the drying climate, the subjugation of women, and the growth of patriarchal societies that thrived on raiding and wars as a means of acquiring resources. I finally drifted off
to sleep, my mind a jumble of thoughts that whirled at the edge of connecting the steaming Floridian night, desert dust, terrorism, and my missing lover.
 
 
Eight-thirty the next morning found us cruising along on Interstate 4 east of Tampa in a light green, late-model Mercedes 500L listening to some excellent blues on the CD player. Waltrine sat up front with Tom playing disc jockey, and I sat in back with a terribly blond gentleman in blue jeans named Scott Thomas, who was entertaining us with a running travelogue of the scenery we were passing, geologist-style. “We’re rising over a series of terraces,” he was saying, referring to a geological term for stairsteps in the terrain.
“What terraces?” I inquired, glancing about for any break in the topography and seeing none. The ground was monotonously flat. “Am I looking in the right place?”
Scott made a smooth swipe with his hand. “I’m talking about old wave-cut terraces, paleoshorelines. They’re subtle, just a few feet rise over many miles, but they’re there. It takes a special eye.”
I laughed. “I guess so.”
Scott said, “Sea level hasn’t always been where it is now. Back in Miocene or Pliocene time, it was up 300 feet, and all but a few square miles of Florida was underwater. Imagine just a couple little islands between us and the east coast, and another one way up north, almost into Georgia?” he said, falling into the Southerner’s habit of making statements sound like questions. “That was all there was of peninsular Florida sticking out of the ocean. But there were still-stands in sea level as the sea came in and went out, so the waves worked a little harder at some of the elevations’ cutting terraces.”
I laughed. “This is indeed subtle. The only breaks in topography I can see are the freeway ramps leading up to bridges.”
Scott said, “Yeah, we get a lot of flat jokes poked at us.”
Waltrine turned in her seat and looked at us. “When my daddy heard I was moving to St. Petersburg, he said, ‘Honey, on a clear day you can stand on the hood of your car and see Jacksonville.’”
“Ha, ha, ha,” Scott enunciated, deadpan. “Oh, quick, Waltrine, looky up ahead by Orlando there: Can you see Mickey Mouse’s ears? Oh, wait, I forgot we’ve got a hundred miles to go yet. We’ve got to allow for the curvature of the Earth.”
Waltrine said, “Hasn’t anyone explained to you that the Earth is flat? Of course, nothing is as flat as Florida.” She swung around and pantomimed panning the horizon with a sailor’s spyglass. “Oh, isn’t that cute! I can see Mickey’s little bitty asshole, too.”
“Why, Waltrine, I hadn’t taken you for a Flat Earther.”
“I take my membership in the Flat Earth Society very seriously. Tomorrow I intend to testify in front of Congress against evolution. So beam me up, will you, Scottie?”
Scott said, “With pleasure will I put a beam in you, O goddess of my heart,’cause there’s nothing flat about
you
!”
Waltrine stuck out her chest and pouted. “Discrimination ! Sexual harassment! I’m a-gonna sue you, big fellah!”
“
Rowf!
”
“
Meow!
”
Tom glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.
I said, “Rock-head humor meets the biologist’s avid interest in sex and feces, Tom. You’ll get used to us.”
“You rock jockeys are so
earthy
,” Waltrine drawled.
“Bite me,” Scott countered, then fell back into his travelogue as if no diversion from purely intellectual pursuit had occurred. “So now we’re getting into the sand dunes,” he said.
“Sand dunes?” I inquired. “Where?”
He pointed to the barely undulating topography that now stretched away from both sides of the road beneath a ragged forest of scrubby pine trees. “All through there,” he said.
“I don’t see any sand dunes. I can see that it’s not quite as billiard-table flat as everything else I’ve seen so far, but you call those
dunes
?”
“Well, they’re very
old
sand dunes. Pleistocene. Completely grown over.”
“Oh, so you mean the soil is very sandy, because at one point there were dunes, but now it’s all worn down and covered with trees.”
“Yeah. But not just any trees. Those are scrub pines and turkey oaks, and other plants that thrive on relatively sterile sands from the old dunes.”
“Subtle, like you say.”
“Yeah, Florida is all about subtlety.”
I asked, “What’s beneath the fossil sort-of dunes?”
Scott answered, “Right here? Phosphatic sands and clays of the Hawthorne Group, say about a hundred feet, and below that, thousands of feet of limestones and dolostones.”
“And what about the rest of the state?”
“Mostly limestone. We do a lot of limestone h’yar. Some limey sandstones. Some sandy limestones. It’s really cool.”
“But flat,” I said.
Waltrine said, “You’ve got to
love
flat.”
Scott raised one eyebrow one millimeter and said, “Opposites attract.”
I said, “I hear that all that limestone is riddled with holes. Like a huge concrete sponge.”
Scott chuckled. “Never thought of it like that. But yeah, that rock’s full of water, all right. Some wonderful aquifers. The springs are fantastic. Excellent diving.”
Tom broke into the conversation. “So you’re into scuba?”
My ears pricked up, wondering where he was trying to steer the conversation.
Scott said, “Sure. I love to dive. I like diving the sinkholes best.”
“Sinkholes?” Waltrine snorted. “You talking sweet nothings again?”
Scott said, “No, Waltrine, the limestone dissolves in the waters that percolate through the ground. Sometimes it makes a large cavity near the surface, and its roof collapses. One morning you get a little hole opening up on the surface, and then
wham
, it’s a hundred feet across by lunchtime. One up in Winter Park was 300 feet across and ninety feet deep. Now,
that
was a sinkhole. Ate an auto shop and four Porsches.”
Waltrine said, “No,
that
is sinful.”
Tom glanced at me in the rearview mirror as if asking for help guiding the conversation.
Making a guess at what he was driving at, I said, “I think Tom’s wondering about the impact of all the traffic we hear about in the news. Small-plane crashes and such.”
Scott snorted. “Oh, you’re talking about fishing for square grouper. When those drug planes go down in the ocean, or the go-fast boats have a little altercation with some sort of solid object out there, like maybe the Coast Guard, the bales of marijuana come floating ashore. Some beachcombers make a good living picking it up.”
Tom said, “I thought smuggling had slowed down a bit.”
Scott said, “No, if anything, it’s up. Ever since 9/11, the homeland security guys have had their hands full watching for terrorists, and they don’t have as much time and budget to spend on the dope smugglers.”
Tom asked, “Where is this mostly? Off the Gulf Coast?”
Scott shrugged. “Both coasts. Off the Gulf side it’s mostly planes going down, but off the Atlantic shore, it’s the go-fast boats from the Bahamas. They can make it in from one of the out islands in just over an hour. It’s nothing. Sometimes they put the load on a boat, set it on autopilot at high speed, and then jump overboard as the thing takes off. They swim back to their island, and the boat runs itself ashore on the barrier islands along the Atlantic coast. I suppose they have tracking devices on them and schedules so they can tell their pals on the mainland where to find them, but the idea is that with the value of the payload, the
boat is expendable, and if it’s intercepted, they’re off scot-free.”
“What if the boat hits someone’s house?” I asked.
“Most of the way up and down, there are no houses immediately on the waterfront,” Scott replied. “Y’all wouldn’t want to build there. Y’all’d get taken out by the first hurricane.”
I glanced at Tom. He was steering the car with his left hand and had his right arm draped across the back of the seat, the fingers relaxed, all just ho-hum casual. He had to already know the answers to these questions. So then, why was he asking them?
Scott’s attention was once again on the scenery outside the car. “Okay, now we’re getting into another whole topography.” He pulled out another map, this one delineating the geomorphic provinces of Florida, the whole state broken up into chunks marked “Gulf coastal plain,” “Ocala karst district,” and so forth. He tapped a finger on it. “We’re coming off the Lake Wales Ridge now.”
“A ridge?” I asked. “Where?”
Waltrine said, “You missed it, with that nosebleed you got from the high altitude.”
I peered out the window, trying to connect what he had showed me on the map to what I saw. I saw no ridge. The pine trees and turkey oaks had given over abruptly to a dense stand of lanky trees—cypresses, I think—growing out of standing water. The trees were covered—no, the word is
encrusted
—with other vegetation. It was a vast expanse of green on green on green, the variety of shapes and sizes of foliage absolutely bewildering; the ground, or should I say water, a forbidding obstacle course of roots and fallen logs. Shrugging off a chill of revulsion, I asked, “What’s with those trees? They look like they’ve grown green fur.”
“Epiphytes. Y’all never seen a swamp before, lady? But now, this is only one
type
of swamp. We have dozens of different kinds.”
The complex, looping swags of greenery whizzed past
at seventy miles per hour, or should I say, we whizzed past them. But as we cruised onward, and Scott chattered on and on about what lay underneath the scenery, I slowly developed an appreciation—or at least a glimmering—of what he was trying to show me. Florida was indeed flat by my standards—500 miles long and 150 miles wide, and precious little of it rising more than a hundred feet above sea level—but that did not mean that the land did not vary. Swamp gave way to pine forest, and pine forest to pasture, and each vegetation type followed the geology. Scott had learned to observe it all just as clearly as I could see the big outcrops that were the rule rather than the exception in my part of the country. I began to appreciate his way of observing, and was impressed by the depth of experience that must have made it possible for him to see what he saw. But that’s the game in geology: repeated observations adding up to the experience necessary to sort out what at first seems hopelessly jumbled, or in this case, cryptically flat. “So you do geology by what’s growing on it.”
“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?”

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