Snapper by Brian Kimberling Page A

When I had done that she asked me to open the passenger door for her too, and she walked around in the same strange chess piece pose, and climbed in without using her hands. I had never heard of a condition that pinned your arms to your chest. I had covered the seat in towels and blankets, because it was coated in ancient unidentifiable gunk.
    “I don’t wear a seat belt,” she said.
    “That’s good, ’cause the
Gypsy Moth
hasn’t got one anymore.”
    I shut her door and climbed in on my side, wondering where to begin.
    “Of course I agree with you completely,” she said as I started the engine. It caught on the fourth attempt. “They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd. But thank you for taking me to see them.”
    I glanced at her in profile. She was even lovelier, with a high forehead, a long pale neck, and lashes like arrows beneath her black brows. The fingers of her right hand clenched her left elbow, nothing about them obviously deficient.
    I drove to Nest 3 on the Wabash first to give us time to get acquainted, and I tried making jokes to put her at ease.
    “First time I heard the term
apex predator
I thought it was a car alarm or a video game,” I said.
    “You are exactly like your field notes,” she said.
    “There is some walking at the end of this drive. At all the nests, actually. It’s not really walking, it’s squelching. Will that be a problem?”
    “I’m looking forward to it,” she said. “My problem is that I have very limited control of my arms and hands. I am like a marionette at the mercy of a sadistic two-year-old.”
    “Why?”
    “Nerve damage. Every six months my doctor tries something new. It’s like an election. Nothing changes. Maybe some symptoms get rearranged. Mercifully my feet, knees, and hips are afflicted with only intense intermittent pain. Walking is not a problem.”
    Although I contracted Lyme disease later myself, it is treatable in its early stages. Hers, she said, had gone undetected for years. The kind and extent of nerve damage it can cause is not predictable or well understood.
    “My case is like chronic epilepsy of the arm,” she said.
    “Are you married? Do you live alone?”
    “I have a lot of plastic dishes.”
    At the nest I put her telescope on her tripod (“I can’t use binoculars,” she said), but before I had finished she spotted one of the blinds I had built at a vantage point.
    “What is
that
?” she said.
    I had lashed several sturdy sticks together with bungee cords between three thick branches of a tall cypress. It was makeshift, but safe. Perhaps makeshift is an understatement. It would have made a bald eagle blush. I explained.
    She turned and leveled her black brows at me.
    “You can invoice us for climbing equipment and protective gear,” she said.
    “It’s safe,” I said.
    “I insist.”
    On the way back to the
Gypsy Moth
she slipped in the mud. For an awful moment she lay on her back in dire convulsions, unclasped arms shaking violently from the shoulder, as though transplanted from an old crone, a parody of ecstasy she ended quickly by clutching her elbows again with difficulty. I helped her up by the shoulders. She blushed and looked down.
    “Don’t you dare get that mud on my truck,” I said, and at last, she laughed.
    At Nest 2 we examined small piles of rocks the archaeologists had made. I held them up where Dana could see them while she stood in her strange figurine stance, but we didn’t know what we were looking for. The settlement is thought to be four thousand years old, built by people so lost in time that we don’t know their name—they’re simply called the Caborn-Welborn culture after their discoverers.
    “Do you have a girlfriend?” said Dana.
    “No,” I said.
    “I think a Tarzan like yourself should have a little Jane,” she said.
    “You just made a joke,” I said.
    “I sometimes do.”
    “I’m more of a St. Francis,” I said. “Anyway, the girl who painted my