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| They're out there... |
Chapter Thirty-One
The subconscious mind is a wonderful thing, but…
The subconscious mind is a wonderful thing, but it does more than just give us our dreams, or at another level, regulate our heart, and our breathing.
It also wakes us up in the middle of the night with the word axolotl stuck in our conscious mind, whether we’re really interested or not.
Bru got up and put the kettle on, and while waiting for it to boil, he had a quick piss.
After that he made a pot of strong tea.
The bathroom was looking pretty grubby, so he took the spray cleaner and spent some time polishing the sink and the toilet. When that was done, it smelled a little fresher in there. He took a moment further to polish up the spotted old mirror, and used his damp washcloth to wipe up the specks of toothpaste from the floor around the sink. His old man sure wasn’t going to clean the bathroom.
He took the old washcloth to the head of the stairs and chucked it into the laundry room. Now his old man could spray a clean toilet when he peed. He puttered around very quietly. The old man’s snoring could be heard from a few feet away. His old man never closed the bedroom door anymore. He had his towel hanging over the top of it pretty much all the time. Bru made sure to put fresh hand-towels in place for them both.
‘Axolotl.’
In resignation, Bru took his tea down to his office-slash-bedroom, and then went back upstairs to get the relevant volumes of the encyclopedia. The word axolotl, and words like mudskipper, and salamander, danced in his head. On some vague and general principle which he couldn’t have articulated, he decided to begin at the back and work forwards. It was just like Fred Barnes told him, the one and only time they ever spoke.
‘Your mind tends to jump around a bit.’
‘That’s my greatest strength, you frickin’ dummy.’
***
Salamanders are amphibians of the genus salamandra, and are typical members of the family salamandridiae. They only inhabit water in their tadpole stage, and only return to water to deposit their eggs. They generally live in damp terrain, such as under stones, or at the base of tree trunks. They feed on worms, slugs, snails and other small creatures. In habits they are somewhat sluggish and shy.
The spotted land salamander, S. maculosa, common in Europe, is 15 to 20 cm long, (6 to 8 inches,) and is conspicuous with bright yellow patches on a blackish background.
The black salamander, S. atra, lives in the Alps and is viviparous. Other species are found in Spain, Italy, and in Asia. The genus salamandra is not represented in the U.S., where salamander is the common name erroneously given to members of the order Caudata, including the families Ambystomidae, Cryptobranchidae, Plethodontidae and Proteidae, and other members of the family Salamandridae, see also Axolotl, Hellbender, Mud Puppy, Newt.
***
The creatures Bru and Nibbles had observed were kind of a grey, blue-grey, with a darker mottling. His own recollection was of a massive head, with puny little forearms set well back on the body, and with the hind legs about double the mass of the front. As was often the case in the encyclopedia, there were no pictures of the animals, no tracks or footprints. No description of the feet. No depiction of how it ate. He remembered a long, eel-like tail. Over the course of several long winters, he’d read the thing about four times.
Maybe it was time to invest in a new, CD-based encyclopedia. Where would the money come from? He sighed in some despair whenever he thought of money.
So the little fuckers could live in the Alps?
“Newt.” He snorted, reaching for the next volume. “Like the little girl in Aliens, the popular film starring Sigourney Weaver.”
In the background, the TV softly burbled away. The nice thing about infomercials, is that they’re not incessantly interrupted by commercials.
“Ah, here we go. Newt, eft…”
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| What the fuck is an eft. |
Eft? What the fuck is an eft? Newts were usually about eight to ten centimetres in length. That didn’t jive with what he’d seen. He kept going, checking out the cross-references.
‘…at this time the larvae, which are reddish orange with black spots and are known as red efts, leave the water and spend the next few years on land…living under stones and logs in damp, wooded regions…the larva eventually return to water, develop adult coloration, and spend the rest of their lives in an aquatic habitat…’
Apparently they changed from bright red to green at this time.
“Well, that’s as interesting as all shit. But it really doesn’t help.”
Bru just sat there smoking and drinking tea and wishing like hell he had a joint. But, since he was trying to cut down, he hadn’t bought any recently. Quite frankly, the bag had run out with three weeks to go to the end of the month.
Unconsciously, he adopted the pose of a popular detective fiction character, Nero Wolfe. His lips were pursing up, and then going in, and out, and in, and out. Feet up on the left end of his computer desk, book on his lap, Bru was thinking furiously about many things, and about nothing at all.
He had a momentary flashback, from when he was about sixteen. His dad, feeling a little guilty perhaps, about leaving the boys home when he worked night shifts down at the plant, made a point of taking Bru out for a hamburger. Bru guessed he took Willy somewhere in turn. For some reason Big Frank raved about the cheeseburgers in the company cafeteria, and Bru wanted a driving lesson.
To a boy of Bru’s age, next came the ultimate humiliation. His old man called it a date, and just wouldn’t stop.
Big Frank got the idea he would take the boy for a hamburger at work. It was seven-thirty on a warm summer’s evening. Bru was a big lad, about six-foot-four or six-foot-five inches tall by this time, and it was cheap and everything. As Chuck drove down Viaduct Street, over the bridge that crossed the tracks leading to the St. Irene Tunnel, his old man rolled down the window and took a deep breath.
“Smell that. That’s the smell of money, son.”
A sulphurous, rotten-egg smell permeated the air and fogged up the sky. A yellow haze stained the horizon all around them. Like hot rubber. Tire smoke. After growing up in the Depression and WW II, Big Frank had never wanted anything other than to be a working man. He did very well for himself. You have to admit, the man had achieved his goal. Inside of his own head, he was a rich man. Bru smiled at the thought of his dad, who was indeed a pretty fortunate guy, sitting there expounding in the deserted cafeteria.
His dad, with his steel-toed, ankle-length, zip-sided shoes, his blue polyester work pants, the shirt that he was so proud of, where he cut the sleeves off and re-seamed them by hand, the one with paint spots all over it. That home-made vest with shirt-type pockets up high, with their fake pearl buttons, was Big Frank’s distinctive trademark.
The way his dad walked into the big, hollow and empty dining hall, probably capable of holding eight hundred people at a weekday lunch hour, invoking his famous line, for which he was known far and wide, People of Earth, I bring you greetings, to the amusement of the cleaning ladies.
They giggled behind the counter as well, looking up at the tall skinny kid, as Big Frank handed them two overtime meal tickets. He had saved them up after some sixteen-hour days last weekend.
Bru smiled in fond memory.
He suddenly recalled a girl with long black hair working behind the counter.
“Fuck.”
That was almost thirty years ago.
There was nothing wrong with the long-term memory banks.
But the whole incident said a lot about his old man, that’s for sure.
Always in the background of their daily lives, there was that smell. You got used to it, so that you never noticed it except when you went away for a while. Like when you went to visit friends in some other city. On your way home, when you got to within about twenty kilometres of town, the aroma came back, and then you recognized the smell of the place. Bru totally understood, that in his old man’s mind, that smell said, Home.
‘Home is where you pay the bills.’
It was the smell of money.
“Yes. And that smell goes a long way…”
Bru thought and thought and thought.
At last it was time. He got around to the word of the day, Axolotl.
Here we are:
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| The subconcsious mind is a wonderful thing. |
‘…common name for the aquatic larval form of the yellow-spotted brown salamander Ambystoma Mexicanum, found in Mexico and the western U.S. Not all axolotls develop into salamanders. Those inhabiting Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco near Mexico City do not metamorphose. They retain their gills, undeveloped legs, and finned tails, and increase in length to about 25 to 30 centimetres, (about 10-12 inches.)’
‘They attain sexual maturity in tadpole form. The Mexican axolotls have developed this adaptation under environmental pressure. The surrounding country became too dry and too barren to sustain amphibious animals. The lakes provide cool, well-aerated water, good shelter, and an abundance of insect and small animal life for their food.’
‘Until 1865 scientists considered the Mexican axolotls a distinct species, seeing no connection between it and siredon mexicanum, but that year a number of Mexican axolotls on exhibition in an aquarium in Paris lost their gills and changed into regular salamanders.’
Later experimentation proved that adding thyroid extracts to the water induces or hastens metamorphosis of tank-kept Mexican salamanders. Apparently the water in those lakes was iodine-rich.
“Interesting.” Said Brubaker, no more enlightened than when he set out.
His subconscious mind, with fresh data to chew on, would lead him no further.
Brubaker was a thorough-going type of guy, with a pit-bull tenacity that had served him well in his years of feuding with the provincial government. To survive, to persist, to be the last man standing on the battlefield, was the key to victory. He had outlived a couple of Community and Social Services Cabinet Ministers, if truth be told.
‘Bastards.’
In lieu of a better source, he went back to the books.
A species of salamander in Japan grows to a length of five feet, one in China to nearly three and a half feet. The hellbender of eastern North America attains a length of two and a half feet. Salamanders have moist skins, five fingers and five toes. Apparently the marbled salamander, dicamptodon ensatus, a species of the Pacific giant salamander, could produce vocal utterances.
“So they talk, do they?” He made a vocal utterance of his own as he read.
‘Because of their inability to defend themselves, it is not surprising that some species of salamanders have completely adapted to subterranean caves that contain water. Such cave inhabitants lack pigment in the skin and look white or faintly pinkish. Their eyes are usually degenerate, which is only to be expected of an animal living in total darkness.’
While the salamanders in general had no poison fangs, no sharp teeth or claws, the animal was described as grabbing prey, ‘viciously,’ and swallowing it, with ‘great rapidity.’
Apparently the author fed his pet about once a week.
“So they lay eggs, hatch into tadpoles, go through metamorphosis and then move onto land.” Bru, deep in thought. “These guys are so limited, yet as a step in the evolutionary chain…these guys crawled up out of the primeval ooze and they’re our common ancestors. Lizards, toads, frogs, snakes, sometimes can re-grow a broken tail, or re-generate a missing limb.”
He thought for a while.
“Those salamanders in Mexico, that’s not an evolutionary adaptation. It’s a temporary, environmental one.”
Hmn. Hmn. Hmn…
“One of the reasons for obesity in North America is the growth hormones in the Big Burgers.” He told himself. “What if a fuckin’ salamander got a good dose of female hormones, or a dose of sudden-growth hormone?”
‘Endocrine disruptors.’
The critters might guard the eggs, which were laid in a dark, moist place.
Nowadays, young girls seemed to be developing breasts at a younger age. Or was that just the imagination? They also dressed differently. More young boys with ‘man-breasts’ these days, was that female hormones in the milk? In the hamburger? When a dairy cow, doped-up its whole life to improve and extend milk production outlived its usefulness, it was sent to the meat packers and turned into hamburger.
He knew all about the beef industry and hamburger. Slippery McCougall once had this insane notion that he could raise beef cattle for hamburger…never have to work, never have to steal, again. According to him, you didn’t even need a farm. You just bought calves and took them to a feedlot operator. Slip had offered Bru a chance to get in on the ground floor. But Chuck rejected this great and wonderful opportunity, to Slip’s derision.
Slip never did it either.
Maybe he was looking for investment capital when he tried to get Chuck involved?
(Another mystery solved. –ed.)
Something that might cause a big cat to avoid a water source, might just cause a full-blown genetic mutation in a bunch of salamander eggs. Something that might lead to cancer, skin problems, or unusual fertility patterns in higher life forms. More fully evolved or advanced forms, more complex forms. It might just cause the salamanders to evolve. To adapt in a big hurry. Say instead of half a million years, how about fifty or a hundred years? And when you considered that barely five to ten percent of forest cover remained, leaving only pockets of habitat, then the animals would tend to be isolated populations. In the agricultural monocultures of Lennox County, higher predators were rare, rumored mountain lions notwithstanding. The human body was ninety-eight percent water. So was a fish—but fish live directly in the water, while humans only drank it and bathed in it. Salamander eggs were laid in still, warm, shallow water.
The higher the temperature, the quicker the chemical reaction occurred. He seemed to recall that from somewhere.
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| What the fuck you looking at... |
‘With a little too much inbreeding,’ those salamanders might get pretty big, when he took global warming into consideration. They were seeing a longer spring and fall season lately, and milder winters as well. Bru was certainly no scientist, but he was trying to take everything into account. This included his own limited knowledge. While the picture was disturbing, there were too many unknowns. It was still inconclusive.
‘The hellbender, Cryptobranchis alleganiensis, is of the order Urodela. Sometimes called the alligator, the water dog or mud puppy. Unlike the true mud puppy which it resembles, it has internal gills and wrinkles on the sides of the body. Reaching a length of 61 cm (24 inches,) the animal is grey or dark brown. Head and body are flattened, and the tail is laterally compressed for swimming. Hellbenders are common in the Ohio River and its tributaries.’
‘The female lays up to four hundred eggs under a stone in August or September. In the six weeks before they hatch, she may eat many of them. The male guards the eggs but may also become cannibalistic. The closest relative to the hellbender is the giant salamander, Megalobatrachus japonicus, which can reach a length of five feet and is eaten in the Orient.’
“That’s good to know.” Poor Bru, mind jumping all over the place. “Huh…”
He sighed deeply, and prepared for a nap.
“We’re a couple of hundred miles from the Ohio, but at least they’re big enough, and invasive species are nothing new.”
Bru lived in a world of pigweed and purple loosestrife, zebra mussels, gobies, and other introduced species. In fact the grass carp, presently infesting the Mississippi River, was expected to break out into the Great Lakes at any minute, in spite of electrified barriers at Chicago designed to prevent it.
So the mystery was solved, at least for tonight.
The television was babbling softly to itself on its stand. He went over and turned up the noise. It was yet another documentary on WW II, Dogfights or something. There was some big fat old lady being interviewed, and then, as if in a time machine, the picture cut and faded to a candid seaside snapshot of her in about 1942.
“Holy frijoles. She was really something in her younger days.”
He went out and looked up at the stars.
The medium is the message, a little voice said in his brain.
Why me?
Why me?
Why in the hell he of all people was chosen for this, he simply couldn’t comprehend.
Brubaker yawned uncontrollably.
Yes, but why fight it?
He turned and headed for bed.
END
Images. Louis. He steals them from the internet. Also, giant salamander.
Louis has books and stories on iTunes. He also has some art on ArtPal.
Thank you for reading.
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