Gwen, in Green

After the hot job, George swam in the clear pond. He had picked up a face mask and a pair of flippers. He would dive for what seemed to Gwen to be an endless period, and then surface, puffing and blowing, calling out to her that she should see. It was hot, in the high eighties. There was no breeze. Gwen allowed herself to be coaxed into the water, wading out gingerly. The edge of the pond was covered by tall, straight grass which grew a few inches into the shallow water. There, the grass was replaced by a soft, pulpy growth which seemed to cover the bottom and, underfoot, was slick.

“Yuk,” Gwen said, stepping gingerly. She fell forward, swam with an awkward crawl stroke. She was not a water baby. George dived, came up under her, and pinched her on the rump. She squealed and turned toward the shore, gained shallow water, and made faces as she waded through the slimy vegetation. “It feels as if you might step on a snake at any moment,” she said.

“I think that’s one reason why the pond is so clear,” George said, his face mask pushed up on his forehead. “The bottom is covered with it. Out in the deep parts it grows three feet high.”

“Yeech,” Gwen said.

“But the water is warm, isn’t it?” George said.

“Warm enough.”

“Cheaper than a swimming pool, too.”

“You can have it. It feels like worms.”

“Tell you what, I’ll clear a little beach for you. Cut out the grass so we’ll have just nice, white sand, and then cut the stuff off the bottom out for a ways.”

“I sort of like it the way it is,” Gwen said.

“But not to swim in.”

“You can swim enough for me.”

“Party pooper,” he said, splashing her.

While George swam and dived, she picked her way gingerly around the margin of the pond. At the low end, near the low, damp, marshy area, she made a discovery. She squatted, making a pleased sound. The plant which had attracted her attention was unlike anything she’d ever seen. Several pulpy, pale green stems supported bright red, teeth-­lined maws. “George,” she called.

He swam slowly toward her.

An ant was crawling on the plant. It stopped and started, climbed a stem, seemed excited, dashed into the red area. It crawled over a tiny, black, hairlike protrusion in the field of red. In the blink of an eye, the plant moved, jaws closing, enfolding the ant inside.

“Yeah,” George said, kneeling beside her. “Venus-­flytrap. How about that?”

“It just ate an ant,” Gwen said wonderingly.

“The law of survival,” George said.

There was a colony of them in the low, boggy area. Dozens. Each had multiple traps. George caught ants and dropped them into the traps. When the ant struck one of the trigger hairs, the trap snapped shut in about a half second.

“It’s the oddest thing I’ve ever seen,” Gwen said. Reading about it, she discovered that she was not the first to be impressed by the Venus-­flytrap. It had been amazing botanists since its discovery in 1760. Charles Darwin called it the “most wonderful” plant in the world. An old National Geographic article, dug out of the library’s collection, explained how to keep the plant indoors. Gwen, having spent portions of several days observing the plants, decided to risk moving a few. She carefully dug out coned earth sections, the flytraps atop, and transplanted them into a large planter filled with the acid, boggy soil. The plants thrived. George captured house flies and fed the plants. An active fly could escape before the trap closed. George pulled off wings to slow the insects.

“Ugg,” Gwen said, the first time he did it. “You’re that sort of lad.”

“Better I should poison them with fly spray or squash them with a swatter?” George watched a trap close on a struggling fly. “Buddhist,” he said idly. “They’re your flesh-­eating monsters.”

“Wouldn’t it be great,” he said later, “if they grew to tremendous size? Make a great science fiction movie. Huge, man-­eating plants. A scantily clad beauty being engulfed in the closing red maw. Tarzan to the rescue, fighting with his muscles bulging to rescue the gal.”

Gwen fed ants to the flytraps.

“Poor ants,” George teased, remembering how she’d shuddered at his pulling the wings off flies.

“Poor plants,” Gwen said, with seriousness. “The soil is poor, not at all suited to them. They have to have the basic protein from the insects to supplement what they can get from the poor soil. Where they came from they didn’t need to be carnivorous.”

“What?” George said, looking at her.

“What what?” she asked, musing over the plants.

“You said where they came from they didn’t need to be carnivorous. Way I heard it, they’re native to a small area of the North Carolina coast.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, still bemused. “Did I say that?”

“You did.”

“Hummm. Just the idlings of an idle mind, I guess.”