#TeaserTuesday: The Rookery

 

“This, boys,” Mercy said, “is the rookery. And it’s where Harlan Boyle is going to die a slow, painful death.”

 

~*~

 

It was his first year of proper hunting – of checking the traps, collecting the tags, and wielding the .22 alongside Remy – that Daddy first brought Mercy to this place. They’d just dropped the day’s catch at the depot, and the sun was already sinking, that pink-gold May twilight that was warm, but not yet oppressive, redolent of jasmine and honeysuckle, singing with crickets and peepers.

“Daddy, it’ll be dark soon,” Mercy cautioned, snugged next to Remy in the stern, beside the till, hands still smelling of gator, back of his neck prickling with nerves when Remy steered them away from home, and toward the deeper parts of the swamp where they rarely hunted.

“Mmhm,” Remy hummed. “That’s what spotlights are for.” He put his free arm, heavy with muscle, around Felix’s shoulders, and said, “I wanna show you something. Something good. Don’t be scared.”

He piloted them out, and out, until Felix could smell the salt of the ocean as strongly as he could smell the muck of home. Down narrower and narrower inlets and causeways and canals. He pointed out the ruins of what had never been anyone’s stone house. And as they emerged onto the lake, the sunset flared vivid as a forest fire through the lower rungs of the trees.

Felix gasped.  

The world was alive with birds.

The egrets and herons stood in thick clusters on the banks of the lake, necks stretched as they called and trilled to one another. Others flew from the lake to the island at its center, and on the island itself, the trees were decorated more ornately than any Christmas spruce, draped in garlands of snowy egrets, and blue herons, and shrieking gulls, and swooping kingfishers. The baby sandhill cranes, downy gray, still unable to fly, were making a swim for it. As Felix watched, he saw one disappear, snatched beneath the water.

The noise. It was chaos, and it was music, and Felix could feel it in his chest.

“This,” Remy said, arm squeezing tighter around him once he killed the engine, “is the rookery. This is where all the birds come to roost for the night.”

“Wow.”

“They’re safer together. It’s where they have their nests. When their chicks hatch, up in those trees, nothing can get to them. But…” He breathed a quiet laugh. “Did you see that one go under?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s safe for any bird that can fly. But anything that swims…”

“Gators?”

“There’s more gators under us right now than you could shake a stick at. The birdsong, it calls to them.”

Felix said a sad, silent prayer for the stolen chick. But his fascination was too great to mourn it; that was life, that was nature – and never had he seen nature so noisily, unexpectedly resplendent.

“See that sandbar there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where you’ll see them in the daylight. Sunning themselves.”

“All of them?”

“No.” Remy snorted a laugh. “Just a few at a time.”

“How many do you think there are? Total?”

“Oh, who’s to say? Not me. Hundreds, probably.”

“Well,” Felix said, as his pulse leaped. “It’s a pretty big lake.”

Remy chuckled. “It sure is, son.”

 

There are a lot of fictional spots in the Dartmoor universe, from Dartmoor itself, to Bell Bar, to Cook's Coffee. "Big Son" introduces another fictional spot...but one that's based on a real one. The rookery is based on the rookery I found in the woods behind my grandparents' house in Florida when I was kid, gators and all. 

The Gator Reasoning

I love when I come across a negative review for a book and it becomes apparent that this particular reader missed the point. Completely. They showed up thirty minutes late with Starbucks, and the point already has a two-hour head start going the other way. Sometimes they miss the point on purpose - or pretend to, because they want to drag down the book's ratings - but sometimes it's genuine. It can be hard to tell the difference, but in either case, it's always mind-boggling. 

When Golden Eagle came out, one reviewer pondered why I "kept talking about the Romanovs. Who gives a crap about the Romanovs?!" this person said. I was then forced to wonder: did this reader not realize that Alexei Romanov is one of the main protagonists of the series? I figure he cares about the Romanovs.  Because they're, you know, his murdered family. 

Years ago, someone reviewing Fearless complained that there was too much talk of alligators. "What's the point?" 

Since we're back in the heart of gator country with Lord Have Mercy, I thought it warranted a bit of discussion. 

That's the short, snarky answer, but a lot of thought - and research - went into Mercy's Swamp Thing, gator hunting streak, and I still think it's the best decision I've ever made with this series. 

I think of Mercy, Ghost, and Walsh as the core Lean Dogs. A triumvirate, if you will. They're the ones I use the most and who prove the most invaluable at every turn. As such, they all needed to be very distinctive. Mercy's past immediately sets him apart - in the series, and in the sub-genre of motorcycle club-themed romantic suspense as a whole. He's one of a kind, this murderously cheerful monster. 

Go a level deeper, and it's always my tactic to create a childhood for each character, and then use it as a framework for the clay finished sculpture of the adult character. He was a shy, thoughtful, homeschooled boy who loved poetry and his family. He was also someone who hunted for a living. But he and his daddy weren't perched in a deer stand: they were hunting an apex predator on its terms. Growing up, Mercy was someone with a great capacity for gentleness and sensitivity, but also someone who knew exactly how physically strong he was, and what he was capable of. Traits we've observed throughout the series. 

Then there's the gators themselves. Relics of prehistory that carry the mystique of dinosaurs; that in humans stir an ancient, fearful sort of reverence. They are old. They remember the swamp before the first man ever set foot in it, and you can't help but know that, looking at them, those golden eyes gliding unbothered through the duckweed. The gators represent a timelessness synonymous with the South itself, with haunted cities like New Orleans. 

And also, yes, it's a metaphor. For Mercy. For the threat that lies out of sight beneath the surface. For the monster that lay dormant inside him, unleashed by Oliver Landau, and the murders of Remy and Gram. A metaphor for the club itself, too: for the public front, and the private savagery. 

Doesn't the water look lovely? All garlanded in the reflections of the trees? But dip your toes beneath the surface, and snap. 

So, yeah. I talk about gators a lot. It's a metaphor, among other things.