She’s tired of her bedroom and goes outside to look at the sky and think about Euell. He may at this moment be looking at the same sky. Well, of course it’s the same sky, but he may be looking at it and thinking about her. The idea makes her happy and sad at the same time. She wonders how she would feel if he weren’t Euell but the milkman. If he weren’t a park ranger but the Hotpoint repairman. If he were the same man in a different uniform, or a different man in the same uniform. She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know. The only thing she knows is that next week she will see him again, and until then she must do something to make the hours and days move along. She must make herself useful. Oliver has mentioned pinning butterflies. And there’s always more collecting to do, more racing across the earth with net in hand in hopeless pursuit of what she has learned to call lepidoptera. The tasks of her old life suddenly come to her like shackles: cooking, cleaning, sewing, feeding the dog. She’s almost forgotten the dog’s name. How extraordinary. She looks up at the stars and wonders why she never looked there for wisdom before. A mirror kingdom made of change and movement: old fires burning out, new fires flaring up. An entire world beyond the pull of Earth’s gravity. She hears a ringing and shakes her head to clear the sudden dizziness that thoughts of space evoke in her. The ringing continues. The telephone! she realizes. Could it possibly be Euell? Has he read her mind? She hurries inside, catches her breath, and lifts the receiver. “Hello?” Her voice sounds like a squeak. She feels like a mouse. “Hello?” she says again, sounding more like herself. On the other end Morris’s voice, ragged and blubbering: “Oh, Jane, is that you?”
“What on earth is the matter?”
“Oh, Jane, terrible news. Terrible, terrible.”
“What is it, Morris. Tell me.”
“Oh, Jane.”
“Morris.”
“I’m so glad it’s you.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Jane? It’s Martin.”
“Martin’s the dog, Morris.”
“He’s no longer, Jane.”
“I don’t follow you.”
There is a great gust of air and Morris covers the receiver. She can hear only faint snuffling sounds. He comes on again and says, “He’s dead, Jane. He died.”
“The dog died?”
“Martin.”
“Why, that’s terrible, Morris. Awful.”
“I know.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I know.” There is a silence and her husband says, “I’ll be there in a few days, Jane. I’m afraid I miss you.”
“A few days? Where?”
“There. With you.”
“Oh,” she says, and sits down heavily on a little stool beside the telephone table, kept there for events such as these.
The Same Shirt
“Pitons,” says Lois, emerging from the bathroom with a fresh batch of rollers in her hair. “That’s the word poor Mrs. Hedquist was searching for.”
“Pitons?” asks Elzada, looking up from her book.
“The things they pound into the rock.”
“Ah, yes. Though I’m not sure we need to think of her as poor Mrs. Hedquist.”
“No?” asks Lois, flopping onto her bed.
“No.”
Elzada turns back to her book and Lois laughs. “Is that all I get for an answer?” She props herself up on one elbow. “Really, Elzada. Have you nothing more to say?”
“On the contrary, Loie, I have an almost infinite number of things to say. I choose not to say them because not one of them is backed up by enough data to make it more than a random observation—a suspicion, if you will—and as we find ourselves in a situation fraught with rumor, gossip, and unsubstantiated suspicions, it seems pointless and perhaps unconscionable to add to the mess.” She removes her glasses, rubs her eyes ferociously. “I will say one thing. The sight of you with those prickly gadgets springing from your head is enough to turn me insomniac.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” pouts Lois, patting the rollers. “Have a little sympathy for those of us who weren’t born curly.”
“I just don’t know how you can sleep.”
“I sleep like a baby and you know it.”
Elzada does, of course, know it, but she has always found the rituals of beautification somewhat beyond her—or she beyond them. Why in the process of becoming a goddess did a woman have to look like a clown? Yet there were parallels in the plant world. The cacti’s unrivaled efficiency and delicacy always caused in her a tingle of reverent awe, but to most of the world they were cartoon characters, alien and ugly—until they flowered, when there was no mistaking their beauty.
It’s well past midnight by the time she closes her book, a Ngaio Marsh mystery that she has solved, she believes, though Marsh is almost always one step ahead of her. Elzada cannot trust her own sleuthing until she reads the last word on the last page, and even then she holds her breath, as if the book might come alive and stand up smartly and say: “Not yet! No! This is not the ending I choose for myself, not the fate I have in mind! Out of my way, reader—and writer too!” It’s a strange fantasy for a woman as practical as Elzada perceives herself to be, but there it is.
She prepares for bed, slipping on her pajamas in the dark. In the bathroom she brushes her teeth, pulls her lips this way and that in the mirror, checking for gum disease. Her hair catches her attention. She has never before considered the curliness of it, nor thought of it much at all. It is something that grows on her head, something she seldom has to fuss with. Up until this evening she was content to forget about it, but now, suddenly, she feels remiss, a clod, insensitive to the world of hair or the world of curliness, she’s not sure which. Lois has once again opened her eyes to what lies right before her—or more accurately, right on top of her. This is what friends do for one another: they forestall blindness.
A touching business, friendship, Elzada knows, as she climbs between the covers. And quite her stock-in-trade, though the so-called loftier pursuit of marriage eludes her. Loftier? Rubbish! It is, in fact, an economic arrangement as corrupt as any other, prone to falsification, mudslinging, bribery, and debt. It’s its own detective novel, with enough insoluble problems to keep Inspector Roderick Alleyn busy for a lifetime. If only he were here, she thinks. He could untangle the mess our old friend Emery has made. Or rather, he could sift through the mud and murk created by Lowell Dunhill’s body when it wed itself to the Colorado River thirteen years ago—a wedding not envisioned by Ranger Dunhill himself, if the evidence speaks true. For what would be the odds—and frankly the point—of a man shooting himself in the head before jumping to a second death in the river below? All Elzada knows is what she does not know: Why on earth would Emery Kolb decide to keep the body? And if not, how did it come to rest in his garage?
Her thoughts turn back to dinner and the admittedly plain but strangely provocative Mrs. Hedquist, with whom Elzada shared an odd and perhaps enlightening conversation. After the meal—the murderous pork roast followed by a delicious ginger cake—the party retreated to the living room where Mrs. Hedquist, looking tired and agitated, approached her. “May I share a word with you, Professor?”
“Of course,” replied Elzada, “but only on the condition you call me Elzada.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Hedquist, “I’ll certainly try.”
There followed a long silence. Mrs. Hedquist fussed with the top button of her shirt, which closely resembled Elzada’s own Oxford-cloth shirt, a style she’d come to appreciate in the field for its roominess and durability. She waited uncomfortably for the other woman to find her tongue and finally gave up and started the conversation herself. “We seem to be wearing the same shirt, Mrs. Hedquist.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say so. Yours is white and mine is yellow.”
“I was referring to the style. And the material.” She reached out and pinched the sleeve of the other woman’s shirt. “Yes, just the same. Oxford cloth. Some call it broadcloth. It’s a man’s shirt, of a ver
y fine quality I might add. The only way to tell the quality is to feel it.”
Mrs. Hedquist drew her arm away with a frown. Elzada sensed they had arrived at a conversational cul-de-sac and perhaps so much the better. She was weary. It was time for bed. She looked around the room for Lois, hoping to catch her eye, but she was deeply engaged with Mr. Schellbach, a charmed man if there ever was one.
“Professor!” said Mrs. Hedquist, her voice an urgent whisper. “There is one thing. It’s odd but I can’t seem to shake it from my mind, and now that you’ve brought up the shirts, well, it’s even odder, because now that I think about it, it’s your shirt that reminds me of him—”
“Of whom?”
“Of . . . of someone I once knew. He drowned, actually.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes. It was years ago.”
Thirteen, thought Elzada. Lowell Dunhill. How in the world . . . ?
“I don’t know why I felt compelled to tell you,” continued Mrs. Hedquist. “I suppose the resemblance—oh, not physical, you look nothing like him, but in spirit, the spirit of adventure—it startled me. It got me thinking and I wanted to . . . well . . . mention it to you. I wondered, in fact, if you knew him.” She lowered her voice. “If that might be the reason you were here.”
“Mrs. Hedquist, I—”
“Now I don’t expect you to be able to answer that!” she cried, then smiled angelically. “But I did want you to know I was wondering.”
What Elzada cannot recall, as she lies in her bed at El Tovar, is whether or not the woman ever told her the name of the particular “someone she once knew.” She is quite sure she did not, which meant that she, Mrs. Hedquist, knew that she, Elzada, knew his name already. So the rumors Mr. Schellbach feared would fly, have flown, and somehow the not-so-innocent Mrs. Hedquist has made the connection between the skeleton in Emery Kolb’s garage and her unfortunate . . . lover. For how could he not have been her lover? Women like Mrs. Hedquist didn’t just start up conversations about someone they once knew, unless that someone was lodged in their heart as one longed for. As one missed. Elzada had felt the woman’s longing as she spoke. And yet, no stranger to longing herself, she knows it hardly exempts one from culpability. It isn’t only stage characters who feel the tug of passion and are driven by it to commit crimes unthinkable, even against the object of their desire.
“Ah well,” she sighs, squashing her pillow into a more manageable flatness. (The trouble with fancy hotels is they equate luxury with a lofty pillow, and she has always preferred to lay her head on flat ground.) There is no point in casting about for villains, not at this time of night. There are villains enough already, including herself and Emery. It’s Emery who holds the key. She must get him to talk. They have spoken on the telephone on two occasions, but he reveals nothing, remains stolid and stubbornly silent about the whole business. Frustrating man! Is there anyone to whom he will freely speak?
The answer is suddenly plain as day: his brother, of course! Ellsworth Kolb. Why hasn’t she thought of him? She will call him in the morning. He lives over in Los Angeles and could be here in a matter of hours. If the situation were explained to him, the grave consequences of Emery’s silence, he would surely come as quickly as possible.
The dratted pillow has regained its original shape, rising like a mound of bread dough. Elzada gives up and casts it aside. Some problems are simply beyond solving. But she feels she has solved a more important one tonight: the problem of how to coax language from Emery Kolb. The sooner he talks, the sooner she and Lois can go home, and the sooner they go home, the sooner she can get on with her studies and her books. She never thought she would wish to be away from Grand Canyon. Of course it isn’t the canyon she wishes to flee, but the terrible, sticky feeling of involvement in human drama, which is like slogging through deep wet underbrush when her heart lies with the cacti. Oh, the cacti! Opuntia basilaris, Opuntia chlorotica, Carnegiea gigantea, she recites, as if she were counting sheep. And soon enough the words lull her—Echinocactus polycephalus . . . , Mammillaria tetrancistra . . . , and her own Sclerocactus cloveriae—into a fine, dreamless sleep.
Clark Kent Calling
It is the first time Ranger Naturalist Euell Wigglesworth has considered taking a nap on the job, and he feels nervous. He wishes his friend Hugh were there to advise him. But if Hugh were there other things wouldn’t be, such as peace and quiet. The air would be filled with Hugh’s high-flown tales of der ring-do, for he has gotten himself into quite a bit of hot water recently, due to girls. Too many girls. Girls not exactly stolen or rescued but certainly borrowed and shared. It is something Euell was once in favor of and now wishes he hadn’t been. The excitement of it—Hugh’s excitement—fills the airwaves. It is surprising anyone on the planet can sleep.
For the first time in his life Euell has been doing poorly in the sleep department. All day his mind jumps around, and at night he lies down and closes his eyes and nothing happens—nothing faintly resembling sleep. He tells himself it’s Hugh’s fault, Hugh the Casanova, but in fact he knows it has nothing to do with the tempestuous love adventures of his friend—not really. It’s his own heart that needs arranging, like a roomful of chairs.
He drives out to Kanabownits Spring where the large and velvety Speyeria atlantis schellbachi are flying in the meadow. Schellbach’s fritillary, the color of a Bengalese tiger. The hind wing sports a silver-spotted cocoa color on its underside. It’s one of the prettiest butterflies he can imagine. He parks his truck in the shade of the pines and goes to the spot where a week ago he sat with Jane. Now, as then, the air is full of nymphalids—brush-footed butterflies—tortoiseshells, painted ladies, and Schellbach’s fritillary among them. The same fallen log lies across the stream, the same grasses and sedges grow along its verdant, diminutive banks. The breeze is cool, the sun is hot, just as it was that day. But it’s far from the same. He feels a gap in his chest, like a missing lung. He thought he would lie down here in the comfort of his memories and go to sleep. That day, that long ago day last week, as he watched her run and dodge in the wake of Speyeria’s fluttering, feinting genius, he had come to feel this place was hers and his together. But it’s not. It’s a place of the past.
The stream too is a different stream, the water different water. He sits by it and does something he hasn’t done since he was a boy—he fashions a boat from an aspen leaf and sends it down the river. It runs through the first narrows and over a waterfall made of twigs and through a series of rapids with boulders the size of pebbles. He runs after it. It’s upright still. He promises himself if it stays upright he will call Jane. He will call her that evening from the telephone at the station.
No, he thinks, that would be folly. May the boat capsize. But how wonderful to hear her voice. He’d like to tell her the goshawks are flying. May the boat stay upright.
What is he thinking? A married woman. The Hedquists’ sister-in-law! May the boat capsize!
But Mr. and Mrs. Hedquist themselves insisted he eat with them, insisted he spend the night. They were quite insistent. May the boat stay upright.
Jane had been the only one to hesitate, come to think of it. May the boat capsize.
But her hesitation had vanished like the rain, out here chasing butterflies. He and Mr. Hedquist both seemed under her spell. May the boat stay upright.
And then, as the sun left the meadow and Mr. Hedquist announced he would go and see if his wife needed help boiling water and opening cans, they had had a little time together, and they sat by the stream, where Euell felt an almost irrepressible urge to press his lips against her skin. He would have settled for the skin of her elbow had it been offered. But it was not. May the boat capsize.
Instead he showed her how to tie a bowline, and the sight of her rather small hands going out of the hole, around the tree, and back into the hole nourished him all week. May the boat stay upright. He trots along the stream. May it stay upright and never capsize, never sink, never fail. The odds are against it.
If it survives this stretch there’ll be another and another and another, and even as he thinks this he sees it drop into a whirlpool the size of a soup bowl, and while it’s down and out of sight he knows what he wants, and without waiting to discover the fate of the leaf—it’s just a leaf!—he hurries back to his truck, and with the energy of a well-rested man, drives back to the station.
It proves a very busy afternoon. A group of Swedish tourists can’t find their vehicle, and Ranger Wigglesworth discovers it unharmed and, inexplicably, where they left it, at the North Kaibab trailhead. A man named Sayer and his wife, two British malacologists, come looking for Ranger Naturalist Warren Haas, who is AWOL. Admitting a rather sketchy knowledge of snails, Ranger Wigglesworth offers his services, but it seems the couple’s greatest need is in putting up their tent. There’s paperwork to do, then a short lull. Ranger Wigglesworth, becoming Euell again, gets himself a Coca-Cola and sits in the kitchen and thinks about Superman. All day long he feels like Superman. Every ranger does. But does he like that feeling? At night, and at times like this, relaxing with a caffeinated beverage intended to restore his humanity, he feels like Clark Kent. He’s always trusted Clark Kent, always felt Superman was lucky to have him. Without him, Superman would be a dull fellow indeed.
The Butterflies of Grand Canyon Page 13
