Creature Discomforts

got caught in one of those. It had to do with food supplements. There was some disgusting yellow powder you were supposed to mix with water and drink for breakfast, and cookies that tasted like gravel. Anyway, somebody recruited her to be a distributor for all this stuff, and supposedly, her main job was to recruit other distributors. That was how she was supposed to make money, getting commissions from the people she recruited. Only, to get started, she had to buy this humongous inventory, which she was stupid enough to do, and then she couldn’t talk anybody into distributing it for her, and she was stock with the whole mess.”
    “Effie,” Gabrielle said, “does this have anything to do with anything?”
    “It does, you know,” said Quint, eyeing Wally and Opal.
    At the clambake, I remembered, Opal’s hairdo—the long brown-and-gray hair swept into a ponytail on the crown of her head—had looked jarringly childish on a woman in her mid fifties or so. Now the ponytail seemed no more than a sensible way to keep her hair from interfering as she cut brush on a stone trail. She wore jeans, a faded blue sweatshirt, rough pigskin gloves, wool socks, and hiking boots. The sensible work clothes, combined with the exercise-induced pinkness of her face, made her look prettier than she’d appeared the previous evening. A pair of loppers hung from her right hand.
    “Quint! Why are you looking at me like that?” Opal demanded. “To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never even eaten a health food supplement in my life. The whole idea that I would get swept up into some pyramid scheme to distribute food supplements is preposterous.”
    “Food supplements have nothing to do with it,” Quint said. “Forget food supplements. That was just an example. The content is immaterial.”
    “I should hope so,” Wally said pompously. “You won’t catch any of us selling any of those powders. Or cookies! Do we look like Girl Scouts?” He guffawed. No one else did. At the clambake, poking at the coals and rocks and, as Gabrielle had phrased it, murdering lobsters, Wally had been in his element. Today, he stood out as the only physically unfit person on the trail crew. His round, almost hairless head dripped with sweat; his face was deep red and squishy looking, like a baked apple. His yellow polo shirt was soaked, and his big, soft gut poured over the waistband of a pair of khaki shorts. His bare arms and legs were as puny as most of the saplings that lay in the brush pile.
    “The point Effie was beginning to make,” Quint continued, “was about pyramid schemes. In this case, the content isn’t food supplements. It’s land grabbing and property development.”
    “Exactly who are you accusing of land grabbing?” Opal shrieked, incensed. “That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard!” She pointed the loppers at Quint. “Every piece of property Wally and I have acquired we have bought m a perfectly legal, ethical way, and we are far and away the most responsible developers on this island. Land grabbing! I don’t like the sound of that one bit, Quint!”
    “Land grabbing.” Gabrielle repeated it, as if practicing a foreign word. “Land grabbing. I’m not sure I know what means.” She looked down at the bichon in her arms almost as if she expected Molly to explain the term.
    Effie hastened to supply a definition. “It means rushing in to snatch up land from people who don’t understand what it’s really worth or what you intend to do with it.” After only a moment’s hesitation, she added, with victory in her voice, “Like Wally and Opal moving in to grab Norman Axelrod’s land so they can desecrate it with awful condominiums that will pollute the Beamon Reservation!” Opal opened her mouth, but Wally spoke first. “Land grabbing suggests deliberate misrepresentation about the purpose the land is being bought for. In case no one here realizes it, some of the worst offenders in that regard are conservation groups.”
    “Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Effie charged. “How could anyone not want land to be preserved?”
    “Conservation groups,” Wally informed her, “do not, contrary to popular opinion, hold on to all the land they buy. Among other things, they resell it to the government, which can then sell it again, or they sell it directly or indirectly to developers, and that’s a fact. Furthermore, some property owners want their land developed.”
    “Norman Axelrod, for example,” Opal