Transcript

Man Eaters · I Believe

0:04
SPEAKER_04: The mess.
0:05
SPEAKER_04: Mid rats.
0:08
SPEAKER_04: He came in a couple minutes early, he ate fast at a table that became a hospital bed for the wounded, and then he cleared his tray and dishes and moved into the narrow passage, with the pipes running low overhead, ducking his head around them, up the metal stairs to starboard, a couple of minutes with the sea before the watch.
0:24
SPEAKER_04: The deck was nearly empty.
0:25
SPEAKER_04: In a few minutes the others would join him, shadowed faces moving through the dark.
0:29
SPEAKER_04: He stood at the rail to watch the sea under the dark sky.
0:33
SPEAKER_04: Clouds, stars.
0:35
SPEAKER_04: The wake ran out like a long trail behind the ship, two glittering edges.
0:40
SPEAKER_04: In the morning he would commune with the sea again, and the wake would have a bright spine where the sun shone along it, further and further, until the sea stopped being water and became sky.
0:49
SPEAKER_04: Forward of him, a younger sailor stood the rail, eyes on the water, a phone cord running from his chest into the dark.
0:56
SPEAKER_04: The boy would relieve him.
0:57
SPEAKER_04: Then the watch.
0:59
SPEAKER_04: Below him the ship hummed, scopes and gauges and green light on men's faces.
1:03
SPEAKER_04: Up here there was only his eyes and the water.
1:06
SPEAKER_04: He watched for the thing that would come out of the trail in the dark that the machines could not catch.
1:10
SPEAKER_04: And when he saw it, he would call it down the wire to a man he could not see.
1:14
SPEAKER_04: He knew the man would answer.
1:16
SPEAKER_04: Nothing came for hour after hour.
1:18
SPEAKER_04: You stood there for a thousand nights so that you would be there on the one night it did.
1:22
SPEAKER_04: No thanks for the thousand.
1:24
SPEAKER_04: No one would know about the one.
1:26
SPEAKER_04: The wind crossed the swell and laid white caps on water.
1:29
SPEAKER_04: He smelt salt in the air.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: I'm Joel Douglas, and I believe in America.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining me.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: Act one.
1:52
SPEAKER_02: The brush did not care that he had left or that he had come home.
1:56
SPEAKER_02: It just was gray and low and thick, mesquite and black brush and cenizo that flowered purple after the rain, but was not purple now.
2:04
SPEAKER_02: The ground under it, white dust that stayed on his boots.
2:08
SPEAKER_02: Nothing in the country was soft.
2:10
SPEAKER_02: The cat claw reached out and took his sleeve.
2:13
SPEAKER_02: He stopped and worked the thorn loose and then went on.
2:17
SPEAKER_02: By mid morning the heat had settled in.
2:19
SPEAKER_02: Akarakara sat the fence post and watched him.
2:23
SPEAKER_02: To the south, the river and past the river more of the same.
2:26
SPEAKER_02: He had stood the watch a long way from here.
2:29
SPEAKER_02: He had thought about this ground and what it would mean to come back.
2:33
SPEAKER_02: Now he was on it hot and full of hooks, and he was glad to be here.
2:38
SPEAKER_02: His father was at the pens.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: He never asked the boy to help him do a job he could do himself, which was nearly everything.
2:46
SPEAKER_02: He did not ask how long the boy was home.
2:49
SPEAKER_02: He did not look up from the gate he was wiring shut.
2:54
SPEAKER_04: A plane flew overhead, low.
2:56
SPEAKER_04: Cow's calf is off in the Tasagillo, the old man said.
3:01
SPEAKER_04: She's bawling for it.
3:03
SPEAKER_04: They found it in thick brush, in the only shade for a quarter mile, lying down.
3:08
SPEAKER_04: It was small and it did not get up.
3:10
SPEAKER_04: The sun went down on one knee in the white dust and saw the navel in the wound.
3:15
SPEAKER_04: Wet and dark and moving, he knew.
3:17
SPEAKER_04: The wound was full of them, packed in tight and working deeper, head down, feeding, and the smell came up off it, sweet and wrong, and turned his stomach.
3:26
SPEAKER_04: He did not pull back.
3:27
SPEAKER_04: He looked at the small animal and the small mouths in it.
3:30
SPEAKER_04: He held the phone over the navel of the calf and took the picture and did not look at it.
3:34
SPEAKER_04: Screwworm, the old man said.
3:36
SPEAKER_04: Then he said, We'll doctor it and went for the truck.
3:40
SPEAKER_04: He cleaned it and picked them out and dressed it.
3:42
SPEAKER_04: The rider came up the road in the heat of the afternoon while they were still at it.
3:48
SPEAKER_02: Horses could go where you could not take a truck, and the rider wore leather to the knee against the thorns.
3:54
SPEAKER_02: He came this way every week, working the river and the ranches along it, looking at what crossed and what strayed.
4:01
SPEAKER_02: The watch.
4:02
SPEAKER_02: He looked down at the calf and at the navel they had cleaned, and his face changed, and he asked to see the picture.
4:09
SPEAKER_02: And the son gave him the phone.
4:11
SPEAKER_02: The rider looked at it a long moment, then he made his calls quiet, off to the side.
4:18
SPEAKER_02: He had hoped he would not have to.
4:20
SPEAKER_02: Got word last week to watch the river hard, he said.
4:24
SPEAKER_02: Somebody south of here saw something.
4:27
SPEAKER_02: He took some larvae from the dust.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: After that it moved fast.
4:31
SPEAKER_02: The sample went somewhere far north the old man had never seen.
4:34
SPEAKER_02: And then more planes.
4:36
SPEAKER_02: They came over low in the early morning, day after day, working a pattern above the brush, and the sun stood out in the white dust and watched.
4:45
SPEAKER_02: He knew what they were carrying, flies, sterile.
4:49
SPEAKER_02: They would drop them out over the country by the millions so that the ones already here would breed to nothing and burn out.
4:54
SPEAKER_02: The cure and the sickness were the same bug, one barren and dropped from the sky onto the other.
4:59
SPEAKER_02: The sun went back to the calf.
5:03
SPEAKER_04: It lived.
5:04
SPEAKER_04: First they fed it with bottles, and then it got up on the fourth day and went to the cow.
5:08
SPEAKER_04: The wound dried and began to close.
5:11
SPEAKER_04: By the end of the week it ran from him along the fence, and the old man watched it and was satisfied.
5:17
SPEAKER_04: All that, the old man said that evening on the porch.
5:21
SPEAKER_04: Government flying airplanes around, dropping bugs out of an airplane, over one calf.
5:26
SPEAKER_04: He drank his coffee.
5:27
SPEAKER_04: And the calf's fine.
5:29
SPEAKER_04: Hell, I doctored a hundred calves in my life and never needed the government to help me do it.
5:34
SPEAKER_04: You never saw one before, the son said.
5:37
SPEAKER_04: Never had to.
5:38
SPEAKER_04: He finished the pot into his cup.
5:40
SPEAKER_04: Man depends on a thing he can't see and can't fix.
5:43
SPEAKER_04: He's not a free man anymore.
5:45
SPEAKER_04: He's just waiting on somebody else to keep doing him a favor.
5:48
SPEAKER_04: He drank.
5:49
SPEAKER_04: I never wanted to be that man.
5:51
SPEAKER_04: You're not wrong, the son said.
5:53
SPEAKER_04: The day they quit, we're in trouble.
5:55
SPEAKER_04: He watched the calf along the fence.
5:57
SPEAKER_04: But the day they quit isn't this day.
5:59
SPEAKER_04: This day the calf's alive because a man in Panama didn't quit.
6:03
SPEAKER_04: And a pilot you'll never meet didn't.
6:05
SPEAKER_04: The most you and I could do tonight was clean a wound.
6:08
SPEAKER_04: The rest of it we can't do.
6:10
SPEAKER_04: The old man thought about that and judged it foolish.
6:13
SPEAKER_04: Hell of a thing, he said.
6:15
SPEAKER_04: Spend a man's taxes on something that don't happen.
6:18
SPEAKER_04: He finished his coffee and went into bed.
6:21
SPEAKER_04: The sun stayed out on the porch.
6:22
SPEAKER_04: He had stood a great many watches full of things that did not happen.
6:26
SPEAKER_04: He knew what they cost and who paid for them.
6:28
SPEAKER_04: The cost wasn't money.
6:29
SPEAKER_04: It was that a man who never stood the watch got to believe his whole life that there had never been anything out there in the dark at all.
6:42
SPEAKER_03: Act one and a quarter.
6:46
SPEAKER_03: Moscow, February.
6:48
SPEAKER_03: The cold came through the wall behind him.
6:50
SPEAKER_03: Someone in Washington had cabled a small question.
6:53
SPEAKER_03: Why do the men across the way behave as they do?
6:56
SPEAKER_03: He sat down to answer it.
6:58
SPEAKER_03: He filled one page and started another.
7:01
SPEAKER_03: The thing across the way did not hate them over this quarrel or that.
7:05
SPEAKER_03: Not the kind of quarrel men settle and forget.
7:08
SPEAKER_03: It hunted an enemy because it needed one.
7:11
SPEAKER_03: Take the enemy away and it would find another.
7:13
SPEAKER_03: Because without an enemy, it could not explain itself to its own people.
7:18
SPEAKER_03: He saw, wrote it down.
7:21
SPEAKER_03: The answer ran too long for the wire.
7:23
SPEAKER_03: He broke it into five parts and sent them through one after another.
7:28
SPEAKER_03: The clerk worked the key deep into the night.
7:31
SPEAKER_03: Moscow to Washington, piece by piece.
7:34
SPEAKER_03: He did not know if anyone would read it the way he meant it.
7:37
SPEAKER_03: He sent it anyway and went to bed.
7:40
SPEAKER_03: He said we could not beat the thing head on.
7:43
SPEAKER_03: The trying would break us.
7:45
SPEAKER_03: He said we should stand at every place it tried to widen.
7:49
SPEAKER_03: Hold there.
7:50
SPEAKER_03: Wait.
7:51
SPEAKER_03: Let it spend itself against its own nature.
7:54
SPEAKER_03: The thing carried the seed of its own ruin and would rot from the inside if we only denied it room.
8:00
SPEAKER_03: Men on the far side had to hold too.
8:02
SPEAKER_03: They needed roads and radios and law.
8:05
SPEAKER_03: They needed officers who would answer when called, and clerks who would send the message, and pilots who would fly the route.
8:13
SPEAKER_03: They needed men who could see the thing when it came.
8:16
SPEAKER_03: We could not be their backbone forever.
8:18
SPEAKER_03: But we could bring tools and money and time, and we could leave them able to hold their own ground.
8:24
SPEAKER_03: He could not prove it, and that was the trouble.
8:28
SPEAKER_03: Hold and wait looked like weakness to good men, and good men told him so.
8:33
SPEAKER_03: He could read the enemy one way, and they could read it another, and no one could open the thing up and see who was right.
8:40
SPEAKER_03: He held it on faith and argued it the rest of his life and never got to be sure.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: Far south, another man chased an insect, and the insect gave him the proof the other man never got.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: He could not poison the screwworm off the land.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: It bred faster than he could kill it.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: It bore him no malice, it was hungry, and it would never stop being hungry.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: So he stopped trying to kill the ones in front of him.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: He took hold of one thread, even though other men laughed at it.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: The female mates only once in her life.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: He reared the flies by the thousand, fed them gamma rays until they could not breed, turned them loose to find the wild ones.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: The wild female spent her one mating on a barren male.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Her young never came.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: The next brood came fewer, the one after that thinner still.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: The thing emptied itself out of a country without a shot, not from a blow of force, but from its own breeding turned against it.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: He tried it first on a small island two miles off Florida.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: He dropped the barren flies by the thousand and watched the count fall.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: Then, the count quit falling.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: The island sat two miles out and the mated females flew back across the water faster than the barren males could empty them.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: So close, it didn't take.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: The line had a far side he did not hold, and the fly walked back across it from the country next door.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: So he looked for ground with no country next door.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: He found it forty miles out in the warm sea.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: He flew the same barren flies down from Orlando, packed in paper bags, and ran the same lines a mile wide over the brush week after week.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: This time, the count fell and kept falling.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Four generations of it.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: Then, one morning he read the trap and nothing answered.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: He read it again before he believed it.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: Here was the proof the other man died wanting.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: Hold the line, deny the thing room, and it ruins itself from the inside.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Neither man knew the other.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: Neither knew their idea was the same, or that it would come back seventy years later, a thousand miles north, over a calf neither would live to see.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: Act two The River.
10:59
SPEAKER_02: He liked to be early so he didn't have to rush.
11:01
SPEAKER_02: He could drive the truck, but he wouldn't find the cattle in the brush unless he was in the brush.
11:06
SPEAKER_02: He could drive the truck and park and walk, but that ended up with him as far from the truck as the barn.
11:11
SPEAKER_02: So he saddled the horse in the dark abay.
11:14
SPEAKER_02: He rode to the edge of the cenizo and waited for the light.
11:17
SPEAKER_02: No sense in pushing into somewhere he couldn't see.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: Then the sun and the brush and the heat with it.
11:23
SPEAKER_02: He knew the cattle would be near enough to the water and rode out to look.
11:27
SPEAKER_02: He worked through the cows and their calves one at a time, lifting tails, checking navel and ears and the soft places where a wound starts.
11:36
SPEAKER_02: Even a tick bite would be large enough for the man eater to lay her eggs.
11:40
SPEAKER_02: Last week he had spent twenty minutes chasing a calf through the brush to inspect a scratch no bigger than his thumbnail.
11:46
SPEAKER_02: He felt foolish afterward.
11:49
SPEAKER_02: He was glad to find nothing, but he did not trust it.
11:52
SPEAKER_02: He knew the thing came when you were not looking, and knew that tomorrow he would look again.
11:59
SPEAKER_04: The land ran south to the river, low and brown.
12:02
SPEAKER_04: Past it more brush went on into the other country where the thing had come up from.
12:05
SPEAKER_04: It lived down there and it was not going to stop.
12:08
SPEAKER_04: You could not kill it because the man-eater is hungry like anything else.
12:11
SPEAKER_04: What you did was hold it below a line and keep holding it, and the watch had no end.
12:15
SPEAKER_04: The plane came over while he sat the horse.
12:17
SPEAKER_04: It came low and worked its pattern.
12:19
SPEAKER_04: He watched it and knew what was falling out of it.
12:22
SPEAKER_04: The flies, barren by the millions, drifting down onto the brush to find the wild ones and leave no young.
12:28
SPEAKER_04: Some of these sterile flies came up from Panama, where the line had been held in the jungle longer than he had been alive, some from Mexico just across the brown water.
12:37
SPEAKER_04: He sat there and thought that the flies over his father's ground had crossed two borders to get there, made by men in other countries he would never meet, for a war his father did not believe was being fought.
12:48
SPEAKER_04: He thought that he had left the watch when he left the sea.
12:51
SPEAKER_04: He had only traded the water for the brush.
13:01
SPEAKER_02: Engines hum, boxes strapped down, cold coming off them to keep the flies dormant.
13:06
SPEAKER_02: They're the same boxes they drop north of here, but the crew doesn't think of that.
13:11
SPEAKER_02: They have flown the pattern for a while now.
13:13
SPEAKER_02: It's a good job, and the hours are steady.
13:15
SPEAKER_02: They fly it easy, talking about other things.
13:19
SPEAKER_02: None of them has ever seen the thing they fly to stop.
13:22
SPEAKER_02: The crew chief and his wife are expecting.
13:25
SPEAKER_02: The shower is today, back home.
13:27
SPEAKER_02: She is hoping for a girl.
13:29
SPEAKER_02: He's hoping for a healthy mother and a healthy baby, and tells her he doesn't need more than that.
13:35
SPEAKER_02: He means it.
13:36
SPEAKER_02: Below them the jungle is green and goes on green as far as the eye can see.
13:40
SPEAKER_02: The sun is up in full and lights up the river that runs through the trees, a bright spine on the water, the light running further and further until the green stops being land and becomes sky.
13:51
SPEAKER_02: It is a good morning, clear all the way.
13:55
SPEAKER_02: The shoot feeds.
13:57
SPEAKER_02: The flies go out cold into the warm air and wake as they fall, scattering, drifting down over the canopy, barren.
14:04
SPEAKER_02: These flies will have no offspring.
14:07
SPEAKER_02: The crew chief watches the load go out and thinks about the drive home and whether the icing will melt.
14:12
SPEAKER_02: The flies fall into the light over the jungle.
14:15
SPEAKER_02: No one below will ever know they came.
14:45
SPEAKER_05: Perfectly weighted on a thin piece of paper.
14:51
SPEAKER_05: Would it make any difference?
14:55
SPEAKER_05: Would it change for the better?
14:58
SPEAKER_05: If I wrote you a poem, if I posted a letter.