The Butterfly Forest

TWENTY-SIX

My body wanted sleep. My mind wanted resolution. I could go down into the master berth, stretch out and try to drift off. But I knew sleep would be elusive, my thoughts returned to the forest and the girl’s gravesite. I sat on the couch in my salon, put my feet up on the old table and read. Max curled into the center of the couch, her breathing slow and steady behind closed eyes. After a half hour, I book-marked the end of a chapter, pulled my last Corona from the cooler and tried to ease out of the salon without waking Max.

One brown eye popped open. Then the other. Now both little brown eyes, confused, or maybe looking at me in some kind of doggie disbelief suggesting I was an incurable insomniac. She jumped from the couch, yawned and followed me to the cockpit. We climbed the steps to the fly bridge. She found her bed on the bench seat, and I found my nest in the captain’s chair. I sipped a beer, rested my feet up on the console and felt the cool sea breeze sweep across by face.

I played the conversations back in my mind from the gravesite with Detective Sandberg and also with the district forest ranger, Ed Crews. Sandberg making a reference to the girl’s broken neck. Crews talking about spotting vultures circling, and seeing a man, an ex con, perhaps a squatter, walking down one of the roads, looking like he was leaving the forest. Who was he? And did he snap the girl’s neck… or was it Soto… or somebody else? I sipped the beer and glanced over at Max sleeping.

Jupiter swayed a little as the incoming tide pushed the current, the ropes around the cleats moaning a midnight snore. The temperature was dropping, a mist beginning to rise over the bay waters. I looked up and watched a cloud cover the moon’s bright face, the light fading as if a dimmer switch was slowly turned off. Now the brightest light came from the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse.

I felt fatigue growing behind my eyes as I stared at the rotating beacon from the lighthouse. The lamp beamed its signal to ships out in the Atlantic. In this world of GPS navigation, the old lighthouse stood like a noble soldier offering a guiding light. But beyond the curvature of the earth, beyond the horizon, it was dark. And even if light from the aged tower could bend and reach its beam beyond the horizon, the dark was already there, waiting in a vast and infinite cloak of utter blackness. Dave was right about that.

Somewhere in the obscure shadows, I saw the featherless scarlet head of a turkey vulture. The bird stared back at me, the nostrils large and round. The immense black pupils in the center of the raptor’s yellow eyes looked beyond me as it flew. Its wings outstretched, suspended on the air currents that delivered the odor of a decaying body like veiled campfire smoke rising. A second and third bird joined the first in the circle of death, spirals growing closer as they descended.

The birds dropped to earth alighting next to an unearthed, shallow grave. They strutted, timid for a moment, then growing bolder, coming closer to the hole, the stench a command that the scavengers were powerless to resist. The largest of the three birds was the first one to stand at the edge of the grave. Its head was nothing but wrinkled pink skin, except for the fine, downy hair-like growth on its scalp and the white, curved beak. The bird turned its head to one side, the mustard-yellow eyes examining its feast, the stink of regurgitated field mice on its talons.

From behind a live oak, a large tree with gnarled bark and old carvings, two fairies darted toward the gravesite. They were larger than the scavengers, their wings like moving rainbows as they hovered over the hole in the earth. The vultures scurried backward, away from the grave. At a distance of a few feet, the vultures wailed like donkeys braying in protest of a dinner denied.

I awoke, my neck stiff from falling asleep in the captain’s chair. I looked at my watch: 4:17 in the morning. The mist had enveloped the marina, and I could no longer see the lighthouse. I could just see Max less than five feet from me.

“Let’s go find a real bed,” I said, gently lifting her. She grunted, her eyes blinking. We crawled into bed just as rain began to fall, its rhythm against Jupiter’s deck a welcome cadence as I closed my eyes. I pictured the old oak tree that the dream weaver had spun somewhere in my subconscious, the bark knotty and scarred. I willed the images from my mind, scratched Max behind her ears and hoped sleep would return without dreams from the edge of places I no longer tried to understand.