Eight

Jennifer sat on the floor of the fishpond just deep enough to allow her snorkel to clear the surface, with a coral rock on her lap to counter buoyancy. She had never thought about drowning herself before, but now, after what had happened, she let the idea linger in her mind. She wondered whether it would hurt a lot, whether it was fast, and realized that this was one more thing she didn’t know. Because she was stupid,hopelessly stupid, according to Luna during the tirade she had delivered after the discovery that Moie had vanished yet again. Like she could watch him every single fucking minute! And then Luna had told Rupert, practically ordered him, to get rid of her, and Rupert, instead of his usual mild peacemaking, had looked at Jenny with an expression on his face like that of a spoiled baby who’d just been denied a treat (and Jenny knew that look as well as anything), and he’d said, well, maybe, considering all this, it might be best if you started looking for another living arrangement. But really the worst thing was later when she was alone with Kevin, crying her eyes out, and he’d said, oh well, tough shit, babe, let me know where you end up. And when she said, I thought we were together I thought you loved me, he’d said, oh, yeah, I do, sure, we could still see each other and all. So then she had taken her sleeping bag and moved into Moie’s old shed and had slept there last night.

She held out her hand and fed bread filaments to a horde of jewel-like tetras and cichlids. She would miss this at least; maybe the fish would miss her, too. Did fish miss? Yet another bit of knowledge her stupid head did not contain. The bread gone, the tetras dispersed like flung sequins, and Jenny’s attention was drawn to a large oscar moving slowly in midwater in an erratic manner, like a plate stood on edge and wobbling. It had hurt itself, a common problem in the pool, for the fish were not accustomed to the razor-sharp edges of the coral rock from which the pool was made, coming as they did from an environment where nearly every solid object was coated with mud or soft algae. This Scotty had told her with some irritation, as it was the one feature of the pond he could not control. They sometimes moved quickly in their various mating rivalries and collided with coral and ripped their scales off. He said they should drain the thing and put in a soft porous liner, but this Rupert was unwilling to do, being a cheap bastard, according to Scotty. The oscar turned clumsily, and she saw that it had a red gash behind its little arm fin. She considered emerging and finding Scotty. He had a forty-gallon hospital tank for such cases, but before she could put this thought into action, the red-bellied piranha struck and ripped a ragged chunk out of the wounded fish, and then in an instant there were ten more piranha writhing in a cloud of blood and tissue. Then the piranha were gone, as was the oscar, except for some tiny specks, the center of a cloud of killifishes and tetras, cleaning up the scant remains.

Jenny was out of the water almost before she knew it, standing on the edge of the pool and shivering, although the sun was out already and warm. She stripped off her mask and wrapped a towel around her body. Well, that was out, no drowning, not in that pool, silly really, because what did you care if you were dead, but on the other hand, maybe they wouldknow you were trying to kill yourself, the struggling and all, and what if they decided to eat you while you were still alive? She shuddered, not from the air temperature, and almost ran to the green-roofed shed.

Professor Cooksey was there, rubbing his chin and staring at the ground. Jenny was not pleased to see him. He had offered no support during her condemnation, had looked at her in his usual blank manner, as if she were one of his bugs. But automatically, her gaze followed his to the ground.

“What’re you looking for?” she asked.

“Hm? Oh, nothing. But observe that footprint. Doesn’t it seem odd to you?”

She looked. The floor of the shed was soft earth, from the fall of years of potting soil and humus, and took prints well. This one was human, of a smallish bare foot, the toe and heel marks well defined. It was the only barefoot print on view, the others being shoe prints, either the lugged soles of Scotty’s Merrell shoes, her own cheap flip-flops, or Cooksey’s leather sandals.

“It’s Moie’s probably,” she said. “What’s wrong with it?”

He looked at her briefly and knelt to point. “Why, don’t you see? It’s much too deep. It’s deeper than Scotty’s here and far deeper than yours or mine, although I would have said that you and Moie were of a size. How much do you weigh?”

“I don’t know. About one twenty, one twenty-five.”

“Hm, and this print is yours, I take it, conveniently close by. Let’s see what we can make of this.” Cooksey took a small brass ruler from his shirt pocket, measured the depth of both prints, stood up, took a small leather-bound notebook from his pocket, and made some calculations. He frowned, mumbled, “No, no, you idiot, that can’t be right!” and resumed his scribbling. After some minutes he sighed and said, “Impossible, but there it is. According to these figures, Moie weighs two hundred and six kilos.”

“Is that a lot?”

“I should say so! It’s over four hundred and fifty pounds.”

Jenny said, “But he could have been carrying something heavy. Wouldn’t that make the dirt squash down more?”

Cooksey stared at her, and then a look appeared upon his face that she had never seen bestowed upon her in her life, a look of delight that had nothing whatever to do with her physical appearance. “By God, of course! What an imbecile I am! That’s what comes from doing this just for animals, who rarely haul any baggage. Well, my dear, you have just accomplished an act of scientific reasoning. Good for you!”

Jenny felt herself blushing from her breast to her hairline, smiling hard enough to make her mouth feel funny. Cooksey added, “Still, if we assume he’s around your size, and even accounting for the extra upper-body strength of men, that’s quite a load, well over three hundred pounds. And what could it have been? A boulder? An anvil? And look here, you can see it’s a normal walking footprint, the ball and toes digging into the earth more firmly than the heel. He’s not standing here heaving something up like a weight lifter. I ask you, could you or I snatch up three hundred pounds and trot off with it as if it were a parcel from the shop? No, and therein lies the mystery. In any case, you may wish to inquire why I was visiting here in the first place.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I am, ah, aware of your difficulties-I mean, being asked to leave-and I feel responsible in a way.” And here he related Moie’s problems with mass media, and what had transpired thereafter. “But if you really wish to stay here, I believe I can arrange something. I require an assistant. My specimens are an absolute brothel, and I barely have room to turn around in, as you may have observed. Um, and there’ll be a modest stipend from my grant, of course.”

Jenny did not know what a modest stipend was but did not admit it. “Yeah, but what about Rupert and Luna?”

“Jennifer, not to blow my trumpet, but I draw a great deal more water in this organization than our Luna. A word with Rupert and the thing is done. What do you say, then?”

“But…I mean, I don’tknow anything.”

“Yes. And therefore there is nothing to interfere with learning. I have my little ways, and the average graduate student is ordinarily not disposed to learn them. So-are we agreed?”

Nor are they as decorative, nor as full of fine animal spirits, he thought, but declined to say as she flung her arms around him and pressed her damp and marvelous body to his.

During the following week Jennifer found to her great surprise that the skills required of a research assistant were very like those she had learned in the succession of Iowa farmhouses and homes where she had been fostered. These included: moving heavy or bulky objects without getting hurt; not spilling things, or if you did by accident, cleaning them up quickly and efficiently; scrubbing walls, floors, and windows; putting things in stacks of the same kind and storing them in places where you could find them again; and doing everything you were told to do in a cheerful manner. Professor Cooksey was a good deal nicer than many of the foster moms and dads she had endured, always patient with her mistakes and never treating her like the retard she was. When the work was done, all the specimen boxes were neatly arranged on shelves (which Jennifer had put together with Scotty’s help), the scattered papers were put away in files, the journals were racked in green cardboard journal boxes with neat machine-printed labels on them, and an entire room, a former laundry, once filled with cartons, had been cleared, cleaned, and painted. The place now smelled of furniture polish more than tobacco smoke or formalin, and Jennifer was absurdly proud of it.