Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (47 page)

“Angelita can help no one. Angelita is dead.”

“She can still help. A
part
of her can help.”

The mother squinted at Julian in confusion—until a look of horrified recognition began to spread across her face like gangrene.

Julian saw it. Seconds were critical now; he plunged ahead.

“We want your permission to remove your daughter’s kidneys. The doctors want to transplant them—place them—into the little girl who is sick. This can save her life.”

The father turned again to his wife and mother. There was a flurry of Spanish between them:
“Angelita … los doctores … sus riñones … trasplante.”

The old woman groaned.

The father stumbled back as though he had been punched in the gut.

“Is this why Angelita is dead?” he said. “Did the doctors even try to save her?”

“Mr. Juarez, of course they did. The doctors here did everything in their power to—”

The father charged forward, jerked the file folder from under Julian’s arm, and handed it back to him. “The girl in the hospital,” he said. “What color is she?”

“Mr. Juarez, it makes absolutely no difference—”

“What color is she?”

Julian fumbled open the folder and ran a finger down the first page, focusing on nothing at all. He knew the answer before he opened the folder.

“The little girl … this particular little girl … seems to be of Caucasian descent.”

“Anglo!” the father spluttered. “Angelita is dead so an Anglo can live!”

“Mr. Juarez, this has nothing to do with race—nothing whatsoever.” Julian listened to the sound of his own words. The harder he protested, the more hollow the words seemed to sound.

“Mr. Juarez, listen to me. Angelita is dead. She feels nothing.”

“I feel! I feel!”

“You have the power to save a little girl’s life.”

“And you! You had the power to save my little girl’s life!”

“Mr. Juarez, try to think of the other girl’s family.”

The father stared at Julian in amazement. “My Angelita is dead less than one hour. You come to me and say, ‘Please! Give me her
riñones!
We will cut her open! And then you ask me to think of
another
little girl? Get out! Get out of here!”

Julian turned silently to the door and stepped out. As it closed behind him, he looked one last time at the family of Angelita Juarez, a little girl whose perfect little kidneys, through a series of chemical changes, would soon be reduced to two lumps of decomposing waste.

Waste.

Angelita was dead—and so was the little girl across town.

North Carolina State University, May 2003

Nick Polchak stood with his nose less than twelve inches from the blackboard, his right hand waving a stick of chalk like a conductor’s baton. From time to time he stopped abruptly, and the chalk would tap out a hypnotic staccato; then he would suddenly arch away from the blackboard, study his most recent series of scratchings, make a few quick edits with his left hand, and begin again. He spoke directly to the blackboard, as though students might somehow be trapped behind it. In fact, they were behind him, fighting off heat-induced slumber and cursing the fate that had forced them to take General Entomology during a summer session while more fortunate classmates were right now stretching out on the sands at Myrtle Beach.

“While all bugs are insects, not all insects are bugs,” Nick confided to the blackboard. “True bugs belong to the suborder Heteroptera; these include lace bugs, squash bugs, chinch bugs, red bugs, water bugs. The tips of their wings are membranous, but only the tips—insects with entirely membranous wings belong to the suborder Homoptera, which includes cicadas, treehoppers, aphids, and lantern flies. Both orders, of course, are characterized by sucking mouthparts—”

“Dr. Polchak,” a weary voice interrupted, “will this be on the final?”

The chalk stopped tapping. Nick turned slowly and looked over the class as if he were shocked to discover someone sitting behind him.

“Who said that?”

The soft shuffling of papers and shifting of bodies abruptly stopped; all eyes turned to the blackboard. Nick Polchak was a legend among students at NC State. He was a professor who had been censured by his own department so many times that he had achieved an almost mythical status. Nick was a forensic entomologist in a department of horticulturalists and livestock specialists, a man whose private research on human decomposition had spawned a dozen campus legends about missing undergraduates and shallow graves deep in the Carolina woods. But the best-known thing about Nick Polchak, the thing that every student knew about, was his eyes. Nick wore the largest, thickest glasses anyone had ever seen, and they made his chestnut eyes appear enormous. But it was more than size—it was the way the eyes moved. They floated and darted like synchronized hummingbirds; they scanned and penetrated like orbiting probes; they disappeared completely when Nick closed his eyes, then suddenly reappeared twice as imposing as they were just a moment ago.

Nick’s entomology courses were among the most popular on campus. Everyone wanted a chance to look at him—but no one wanted Nick to look back; those eyes were just too much to bear. Whenever Nick turned from the blackboard—an event that was mercifully rare—every head was bowed and every pen was busy. Everyone knew that Nick Polchak loved insects more than anything in the world. He was the Bug Man—and someone just asked the Bug Man if bugs would be on the final exam.

A young man in the second row, squeezing himself down into the recesses of his writing desk, looked up to see twin moons rise in the sky above him.

“It seems a bit
premature,
” Nick said, “to be asking in the first week of a course whether ‘this will be on the final.’ It shows tremendous …
foresight.
”

Nick blinked, and the brown moons vanished—then they flashed open again, even larger than before.

“What you’re really asking me is whether
this”—
he gestured to the blackboard—“is worth
knowing.
” Nick cocked his head to one side and studied the young man’s face as though he were searching for those sucking mouthparts. “Insects comprise the largest class in the animal world,” he said. “Ninety-five percent
of all animal species are insects. There are about a million known species; there may be
thirty
million more waiting to be discovered. They are distributed from the polar regions to the rain forests, from snowfields in the Himalayas to abandoned mines a mile underground. They flourish in the hottest deserts, on the surface of the ocean, in thermal springs—even in pools of petroleum. The smallest insect is less than a hundredth of an inch long; there is a kind of tarantula that weighs a quarter of a pound and measures eleven inches toe to toe. It has fangs an inch long. It eats
birds.
Is any of this worth knowing?

“Did you know that ants and termites alone make up 20 percent of the entire animal biomass of our planet? Did you know that one out of every four animals on earth is a beetle? Your little town of Raleigh has a population of what—a quarter of a million? There may be two million insects in a single acre of land. Insects eat more plants than all the other creatures on earth. Without insects, we would be living in an ecological nightmare—mountains of rotting organic matter everywhere. Without insects, half the other animal species on earth would probably perish—yours included. My species rules this world; you are a member of an annoying minority group. When you ask me if this is worth knowing, you’re asking me if life
itself
is worth knowing.”

Nick studied the young man’s face. Like all undergraduates, he knew how to look suitably repentant; it was one of their most basic survival skills. This one looked like a cocker spaniel that got caught peeing on the rug. He was sorry—so
very
sorry—that even phys ed majors like him had a three-hour science requirement.

Nick let out a sigh. “Let me bring it down to your level,” he said. “The kissing bugs of Central and South America can consume twelve times their body weight in blood. That’s the equivalent of a Sigma Chi drinking two hundred gallons of beer at one party.”

The entire class let out a cheer.

Nick turned back to the blackboard. “I should never have turned around,” he said. But before he could return to his private lecture, another student, sensing the opportunity, spoke up.

“Dr. Polchak, what are your office hours? I can never find you.”

“My office is here in Gardner Hall, room 323. Knock on my door; if I answer, those are my office hours. If you really need to whine about something, talk to me after class.”

“But I can never
catch
you after class. Am I supposed to talk to your back while you’re running down the hall toward your lab?”

Nick nodded. “That works for me. Now can we get back to this? I’ve got a lot of material to cover. And
yes,
” he said with a nod in the direction of the cocker spaniel, “this
will
be on the final. The only thing I will not require you people to remember is
useless
knowledge—and in case you’re wondering, there is no such thing as useless knowledge.”

But as the classroom quieted once again, an unusual sound drifted forward from the back of the room. Heads began to slowly turn—Nick’s last of all. There, spread-eagled atop a cool, black laboratory island, was a student fast asleep. He lay on his back, mouth open, with a little pool of spittle beside his face.

A piece of chalk snapped in two.

“Did I ever tell you,” Nick said slowly, “about a case I had several years ago? It was in Colorado, in an area near a meatprocessing plant. The men who worked there carried an unusual type of knife, something like a boning knife, and they were very adept with it.”

As he spoke, Nick started back through the classroom toward the sleeping student.

“They found one of their employees in the bottom of a nearby ravine with his gut sliced open. The body had been there for several days. After seventy-two hours, forensic entomology is the most reliable way to determine postmortem interval, so the local medical examiner asked me to come in before they moved the body.”

As Nick passed each row of students, he gestured for them to follow.

“I could see the body from the top of the ravine, lying in an opening between some small trees. It looked as if they had painted a chalk line around the body, like they do to mark the placement when a body is finally removed—only the body was still there. When I got closer, I realized what it was. The long gut wound had allowed a massive maggot infestation in the abdomen, and
the maggots had completed their third instar—they had eaten all they could hold, and they were leaving the body, looking for a safe place to pupate. There were so many maggots exiting all at once that they formed a white outline, slowly moving outward toward the trees.”

Nick was standing over the lab table now with the rest of the class gathered silently around. He spoke quietly, glaring down at the oblivious student. Nick opened a drawer and removed a scalpel and a pair of forceps. With the forceps he gently lifted the boy’s shirt near each button, and with a quick flip of the scalpel sent each button tapping across the table. Now he used the forceps to peel back the shirt, leaving the bare chest and abdomen exposed. The student brushed an imaginary fly from his nose, licked his lips, and let out a long, moaning snore.

“I examined the abdomen. The wound stretched from the breastbone to the groin—just the kind of incision a man would make who’s used to gutting Herefords. The maggot mass was enormous, the largest I’ve ever seen. I wanted to measure the temperature at the core of the mass. I slid in a probe—it was almost 120 degrees at the center! But maggots can’t regulate their own body temperature, and that’s about the point where thermal death occurs, so the maggots were circulating away from the core as fast as they could. The cooler ones were wriggling their way toward the center while the overheated ones were struggling to get out, venting their excess heat on the surface like tiny radiators. It was amazing! The entire mass looked like a pot of boiling ziti.

“Then all of a sudden, I felt something land in my hair. I brushed it off without thinking about it—then it happened again. Then something hit my arm … then my back. Finally, something landed on my neck, wriggled for a minute, and rolled down my back. I looked up …”

Nick stood beside the boy’s head, leaning ever closer as he spoke. He held the gleaming scalpel directly in front of his face, and the volume of his voice began to slowly rise.

“When maggots flee a body, they instinctively look for a drier place to pupate. To a maggot, dry means high, so they climb anything they can find: a rock, a bush—even a tree. Thousands of maggots had inched their way up the surrounding trees, crawled
out to the tips of the lowest branches, and now they were dropping off. It was raining maggots, and they were landing on my neck and rolling down my back. And there’s only ONE thing in the WORLD that I HATE more than MAGGOTS DOWN MY BACK …”

The boy’s eyes popped open. Two great brown meteors crashed down on him, mere inches from impact, led by the flash of surgical steel.