American Tropic - By Thomas Sanchez Page 0,26

squeaky voice drops to a confidential tone. “Truth Dog, I’m reaching out my hand to you. Will you pray with me?”

“Whatever floats your boat. Okay.”

“You got my hand?”

“I got it. It’s sweaty.”

“We pray thee, Lord, to keep safe all your creatures great and small. Especially the witty bitty.”

“Maybe the Head Man up above will hear your prayer.”

“Oh, he will. He’s listening right now. He’s going to show you the light. Good-bye, brother.”

“Next caller. Go. I’m waiting.… I said, go.”

The baritone of a man’s belligerent voice slams through the silence. “I’m the vet who called before.”

“Welcome back, vet.”

“I saw bad shit in Nam. Shit that makes what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan look like a Disneyland ride. A famous photo was taken durin’ the Nam war. It showed a naked Vietnamese girl runnin’ up the road. Her village had been napalm-flamed by us. She was on fire. Blobs of smolderin’ napalm burnin’ off her skin. That stricken look on her face—fuck, man—that look! That was the look of innocence destroyed by our evil.”

“That’s it, show me the rage.”

“I was one of the guys napalming those Nam villages. I was nineteen years old. I still see that girl’s smolderin’ skin in my dreams, nearly half a century later. The smell of burnin’ flesh wakes me up every night.”

“The smell of rage.”

“I saw the same look that girl had in another photo more recently, when that oil well blew in the Gulf.”

“Deepwater Horizon blowout. Worst ecological disaster in American history. Total cover-up.”

“It was a photo of a pelican flounderin’ in a sea of oil. The bird’s body was drenched in brown slime, its wings stretched out, tryin’ to fly, but it couldn’t. Its eyes were huge with fear, like that girl’s eyes, that girl with her skin on fire runnin’ up the road. We’ve got to stand against innocents’ being slaughtered.”

“We’ve got to stand up to the war machine that runs on soul-sucking oil or our days are numbered.”

“That’s why I called before about the comin’ Permian Extinction Event. Next time I’ll call with proof that it’s all gonna blow sky-high.”

Seagulls swarm in the sky above Pat’s shrimping boat as it plows through heavy ocean swells far out at sea. The boat’s long-poled twenty-foot outriggers are winged out on both sides of the vessel, their unfurled dragnets roiling the water. Pat swings in one of the outriggers and cranks up its dripping net. The net breaks the surface of the water, weighted with a squirming catch of pink-shelled shrimp. Pat pulls the rip cord on the net as it swoops in over the deck. A small catch of briny shrimp drops from the net onto the deck. She yanks off her canvas captain’s cap and whacks it in frustration against her blue jeans. She whips around to her boat mate, standing next to her. The mate is shirtless, the sun-darkened skin of his broad upper torso swirled with wicked-looking interlocking tattoos. He hikes his tight jeans up and takes a boxer’s stance in his white rubber shrimper boots, expecting a punch from frustrated Pat as she shouts: “We’ve been out here for three days, and all I get is a twenty-buck load of pink bug-eyes! I can’t even pay my fuel with that!”

The mate cocks a hand over his eyes and squints at the sunlight’s glare on the ocean. “Looks like your luck is taking a turn.” He points to a bubbling break on the water’s surface. A pod of fast-moving dolphins leaps from the water into the air, their bodies twisting in muscular turns as they approach the side of the boat.

Pat claps her hands together. “Hallelujah, let’s get some bait for the longlines!” She runs into the pilothouse and races back out with a shotgun. She takes a position on the prow of the boat as the pod of dolphins nose-dive back beneath the water and disappear. She aims the shotgun at a calm spot in the water in front of the boat. She waits. The dolphins break through the surface of the calm spot in a gushing spray of saltwater; sunlight shimmers on their sleek, wet bodies arched high in the air. She fires a blast from the shotgun. Blood spews from one of the arched dolphins. The others dive from sight, leaving the dolphin with its side blown open floating on the sea close to the boat. Pat puts down the shotgun, grabs a long gaffing pole, and whams its steel hook-point into the floating dolphin. The mate short-gaffs