from the pen of icarus blake

Hemidactylum verdigris was first identified as an isolated hibernating colony uprooted by early spring construction in the northern Appalachian mountains.  The bright blue bellies and tails of the salamanders prompted the workers to assume they had hit a shallow copper vein until the copper began to drop tails and sluggishly scatter around the scoop of the backhoe.  The ecologist on site halted the construction and recognized the new species, but the binomial came from a herpetologist at Yale.  Only two other populations have surfaced since: one in Groton State Forest, and this one on a 3 acre plot soon to be an office park.

One of my orange flags lies flattened in the muddy basin of a bulldozer track.  A bright streak of blue twists in the rut, entrails ruptured through the dazzling blue of its smooth belly.  It’s stubby legs splay out on all sides.  I reset my flag and cradled the rictus body to my chest.  The foreman rolled his eyes when he saw me coming.

“Better not be another lizard,” the foreman growled between his teeth.

I closed my hand around the clammy body.  “One of the dozers rolled over a burrow.” I pointed with a twitch of my head, hard hat rattling.

“Did it die?” He spat yellow phlegm into the packed dirt.

“Yes.”  The salamander was sticking to my palm now, skin drying.

“One down, whatever to go.”  He dismissed me with a wave of his hand.

I kept up with him as he began to walk.  “You’re not taking this seriously.”

The foreman sneered beneath his yellowed mustache and spat thick tobacco spit into the mud.  “I ain’t falling behind for a useless lizard.”

Rubber and diesel filled the air.  The foreman hacked a cough.  I worried about the salamanders’ porous skin ulcerating in the smog.  

“They have to keep ten feet clear of the flags.  It’s federal regulation,” I insisted.

The foreman picked up his pace to lose me.  “I’ll tell ‘em.”

“It’s a protected species.  I’m just trying to do my job here.” I stumbled on an upraised ridge of mud.

“I got kids to feed,” the foreman wheeled, “I’ll tell the boys about your regulation, but I got better shit to do than worry about whatever worm the EPA decided needs special treatment today.”

I let him walk away.  He grabbed one of the backhoe drivers as I turned my back on the construction site.  A patch of poison ivy guarded the forest verge above a shallow depression, and I made my way to the flat boulder I’d taken to eating my lunch on.  I placed the body of H. verdigiris on a soft patch of moss beneath a tree.  It left dark flecks of blood on my hand.  I rinsed them in the creek that wound through a patch of ferns behind the rock, but the stains stuck.  The birds didn’t bother singing with the construction noise.

The young man with the pink helmet found me as I stepped back into the mud.  “Sorry about your flag,” he said, fidgeting with the zipper pull on his raincoat.

“I wish people would be more careful.” I watched a bulldozer roll back and forth across a flat plane of dirt and gravel.

“Yeah, I love salamanders,” the young man gave no indication that he had heard me, “these blue ones are really special.”

“Hemidactylum verdigris,” I recited their binomial like a hymn.

“Yeah, that,” he continued, “When I was a kid, we’d use waterdogs for fishing.  One time, I convinced my dad to let me keep one in a bucket in the garage.”

I grimaced.

“Yeah, grew some kind of fuzz and died.  Stunk like hell.” He giggled like he wasn’t describing the painful and drawn-out death of a tiger salamander.

I wasn’t listening anymore, staring into a pair of glassy eyes in the trees past the crudely cut dirt track that led back to the highway.  I tripped in a rut and when I looked back up, I couldn’t find them anymore.

*        *        *

The foreman planted his feet in front of me.  “You can go.”

“No I can’t.”  I shook mud off the spike of the flag and replaced it in my hip pouch.

“EPA said your worm isn’t special anymore.” The foreman spat between us.

I’d already pulled the flags marking the burrows, per this morning’s email.  Effective immediately, protections for species with uncertain numbers identified after 1970 were no longer in effect.  H. verdigris now classified as Least Concern on a technicality.  

“I know,” I told the foreman, “you’re still required to have an ecological consultant on site.”

“You just gonna sit around and be useless, then?” he demanded, bearing his yellow teeth at me.  The acrid construction smoke sat low in the humidity.

“There are other protected species in the area.”  I smoothed the flags in my pocket.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, another round of rain began falling in thick drops.  The trees rustled, drawing the foreman’s scathing glare.  I pushed past him and gazed out at the construction site. Small patches of green marked the habitat fragments.  An excavator backed over one with a scoop full of dirt.

I spotted a blue streak in the mud as it drove away.  I wasn’t supposed to, but I stooped to pick it up anyway.  The salamander curled up in my palm and stared up at me with eyes the color of tree bark.  I closed my fingers over it as I carried it to my rock, safely beyond the boundary of the construction zone.  I set it on the patch of moss where I had left the dead salamander the day before.  The body was gone.  The living salamander lifted its head to the sky, basking in the rain before crawling into a hollow beneath the leaf litter.

For a blissful moment, the construction noise dulled.  The massive engines idled, the buzzing warning call of a chickadee rising in its place.  The scream that followed was shrill enough to mistake for another bird call as it cut through my shield of trees.  I squinted to catch a glimpse of the accident, hoping someone had backed over the foreman.  A dark shape slithered past, skin smooth and shiny-wet.

It left a smooth trail in the mud where it passed.  I saw a mossy trunk rising in the center of the muddy plane as I approached the verge.  Ornate projections flowed from its sides like fruticose lichen on the damp side of a boulder.  It raised its crested head to the sky, its body undulating as it swallowed the legs hanging from its broad mouth.  The construction workers squawked like chickens caught in the coop with a fox.  

It lowered its body, propelling itself through the mud on a multiplicity of legs with four stubby toes.  Its mottled skin soaked up the downpour, sinuous body churning the construction site into a sticky mire.  The men fled, their steel-toed boots squelching as they sunk into the mud and forced a slow-motion flight.

The young man, his pink helmet nearly invisible beneath the thick rind of mud, screamed as the broad mouth swallowed his legs.  His cry rose in pitch as it bit down, snapping his legs with a sound like breaking branches.  The screaming stopped as it threw back its head and crushed his ribcage.  His hard hat knocked loose, splatting in the mud.  It pushed the last of him into its mouth with stubby forefeet.

The bulldozer revved.  I tore my eyes away.  The foreman struggled with the gear shift, eyes wild with fear.  Yellow saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth and stained his beard.  I stepped up into the cabin as it lurched past me.  He didn’t notice me until I had my hand on the gearshift, and sputtered in rage.

Another man suffocated beneath the dragon as it dropped back to the earth.  The foreman fought me for the gearshift, so I let him have it and locked my hands around his throat.  He struggled, pushing the gearshift back and forth as the machine sunk into the mud.  The foreman’s eyes went wide and bloodshot, his spittle mixing with the rain and running over my hands.  He finally relinquished the gearshift and clawed at my work gloves.  The bulldozer idled, the rain masking the slide of the dragon’s serpentine body.

The foreman’s struggling lessened, his muscles turning loose as I threw him from the cabin and into the maw that appeared to accept my offering.  The dragon bit down on him like a ripe peach.  The lump of his body passed down the long throat.  I wondered if the nicotine would upset its stomach.

The dragon rose to face me, eyes like dappled sunlight in an old growth forest.  Moss clung to its back: remnants of a long, hungry sleep.  I reached out to touch it, knowing it must be soft.  The roof of its mouth boasted concentric rows of teeth like hawthorns, gums stained red.  All I smelled was the rain and mud.  I wondered how much it needed to satisfy its hunger as the thorns pierced my raincoat.  My body burst beneath its jaws.

What a pleasure it is, to be of use.