The Butterflies of Grand Canyon

by Margaret Erhart

  Don Juan’s Hat

  The two ladies have a train to catch, and the chief park naturalist wishes to leave time for questions. His questions. In an unofficial capacity, of course. So he arrives early and sends word upstairs with the bellhop and waits outside the hotel in the car.

  Several minutes pass. Finally the bellhop returns. He’s a new boy, obviously, and Louis Schellbach can’t for the life of him understand why a respectable establishment like El Tovar puts its greenest employee at the gateway to its legendary hospitality. The young fellow sports wispy tufts of blond hair on cheeks and chin—he’s obviously not acquainted with a razor—and a bright dot of ketchup adorns his upper lip. He leans against the car, one arm draped across the roof, and ducks his head into the window on the driver’s side. His nose practically brushes Schellbach’s eyelid. “They’re doin’ their hair,” he says, grinning, and withdraws his person.

  The message itself is almost as disturbing as the messenger, for time is running out and with it the opportunity for clearing up some of the finer points of what’s come to be called the Dunhill Investigation. Too many Dunhills, as it turns out. The misses Clover and Jotter—or Cutter, or whoever she is—certainly got to the bottom of that. But as to this business of the dead man’s wife, and her connection to that nebulous entity called the Skłodowska Institute, the investigation seems to have fallen short. And though it occupies only a distant corner of Shellbach’s mind, which is occupied with so many other things, his wife Ethyl is consumed by it. Lowell Dunhill was sincere in his concern for his sister-in-law, according to Ethyl, but to what danger was she exposed? Schellbach believes it may all be simpler than anyone suspects. It wouldn’t be the first time a man has fallen in love with his brother’s wife and pushed his sibling over the edge to make room for his own desires.

  He pulls the car ahead into a parking place and reaches for his hat, which rides beside him on the passenger seat. He places it on his head at a jaunty angle, adjusting it in the rearview mirror. The Bogart of Grand Canyon, he smiles to himself—a far cry from old Don Juan Schellbach, but a happier and more honest man. He extricates himself from the car and walks the few steps to the edge of Grand Canyon, where he stands looking down into the visible heat, marveling at the miracle of summer. An afternoon storm is building to the north, fat gray clouds moving like buxom queens. He loves this country, its seasons and weathers, its rituals of wind, fire, and rain. Out in it he can forget the tangles of paperwork and park administration that more and more define his job and cause in him thoughts of retirement, of days spent fishing for bluegills in White Mountain lakes. Recently he has been plagued by his old bedfellow, insomnia. He wakes in the night, his thoughts churning, and slips from the bed without disturbing Ethyl. He tiptoes to his study and sits facing the window, facing the darkness beyond which lies, or seems to lie, his own death. The death of many things. The death of gentlemen, of that he is certain. The death of Renaissance men and scientists at the helm of the national parks. The death of free nature as the world becomes more anaesthetized and sanitized, everything rule bound, the old dirt roads succumbing to pavement, deer and elk preyed upon by sightseers too out of breath to leave their cars. He imagines it in twenty years, a Grand Canyon National Park of traffic jams and roadside hot dogs, the occasional visitor tottering to the edge to gasp at nature’s wonder. In thirty years perhaps there will be no need to come to the edge at all. Instead, a cushioned seat in a theater with a large screen, where the canyon stars in her own movie. The word technology comes to him, like a ghost clad in armor. In his lifetime he has seen the motorcar, the airplane, Boulder Dam. He has seen the atom bomb and two world wars. How easily the miracle of technology is tilted, bringing harm. Factories lure outdoor men indoors and promise freedom.

  On those sleepless nights he turns from the window, feeling frightened at that look into the future where his two boys must venture beyond his and Ethyl’s deaths, and to comfort himself he speaks to his hat, which rests on the desk in front of him. His dear old hat. Hat, he says (a fortune-teller addressing his crystal ball), I defer to you. You live in close proximity to my brain and know it better than I. But it occurs to me we are being left behind, that technology is leading us, that we have begun to lose its company and come instead under its control. Someday, in the lifetime of my boys, it will cease to mean mechanical parts governed by science in service to civilization. Instead, formulas and riddles decipherable to only a few. Where it goes, we’ll have to follow, like soldiers in another man’s army. It will rule our lives and subject our hearts to a loneliness, an isolation greater than you or I can imagine.

  “Mr. Schellbach?” says a voice, startling him out of his reverie. “Excuse me, but the train is here, and Lois and I are ready to say our good-byes.”

  “Certainly,” he replies, though certainty is the last thing he feels. “My car is at your service, Dr. Clover. Why don’t we load up and travel the short distance in style?”

  There is some confusion as to who will sit where. Dr. Clover finally takes her place beside him. He senses from her a weariness that was not present when he collected her and Mrs. Cutter from the train, and he guesses it is no small feat to leave one’s field of expertise and venture through the tangled woods of mystery solving. “You’re a clever detective,” he addresses her. “I hope we won’t be losing you to that nefarious profession.”

  “Nefarious, Mr. Schellbach? If so, a necessary evil. It certainly leads one into unsavory places. But so does digging in the ground, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Especially if you don’t like earthworms,” adds Mrs. Cutter from the backseat.

  “Eventually you’ll come upon something that frightens you,” continues Dr. Clover. “It may be an earthworm or an amulet. In our case it was fratricide.”

  “And something else,” says Mrs. Cutter, leaning forward. “Tell him, Elzie.”

  “The Skłodowska Institute. Have you heard of it, Mr. Schellbach?”

  “Yes, Ethyl is quite involved in that.”

  “Not involved,” Mrs. Cutter puts in. “Involvement wasn’t voluntary. It was the brother, Owen’s, brainchild, and he had a very sick brain.”

  “It turns out that anyone can have an institute,” says Dr. Clover. “You just give it a name and there it is. It’s handy. It makes it easier to acquire illegal or controlled substances. Owen Dunhill wrote a charter and recorded it with Los Angeles County, and those records are public. If you’re willing to live in the library, as Lois was, you can find them.”

  “The purpose of the institute was research,” says Mrs. Cutter, “but Mr. Dunhill never indicated what kind of research he was doing. He couldn’t have. He would have been arrested. It was Elzada who read between the lines.”

  “By reading the lines themselves.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Schellbach. His chest feels tight with anticipation.

  “Madame Curie has long been a heroine of mine,” says Dr. Clover. “I enjoy reading about her and in fact am reading an excellent biography at the moment.”

  “Dr. Clover, our time is short and I’ll have to encourage you to come quickly to the point.”

  “I do understand, Mr. Schellbach. What I’m getting at is my discovery, in the pages of my book, that Madame Marie Curie was born Maria Skłodowska. The Skłodowska Institute that took her name was an affront to all she stood for as a researcher and human being. Its intent was diabolical, to say the least. Owen Dunhill was a brilliant but warped individual. He was interested, as are many of the agile minds of our time, in the effects of radiation on human beings. He had access to a laboratory, apparently, and experimented on human subjects, most of them from the lower rungs of the social ladder, who responded positively to his promise of food and lodging. One of these subjects eventually became his wife, a kind of slave, I imagine, and soon enough he released the others and worked solely with her. Her grasp of English was poor and her education nonexistent. We can deduce from Lowell’s descriptions of her, told in confidence to an i
ndividual here at the park, that she suffered from radiation poisoning. She herself had no idea her husband was exposing her to high doses of an experimental substance—”

  “But why?”

  “As far as we can tell, in order to satisfy his own curiosity. He seemed to have no scientific credentials or to care much for them. If he left a record of his research, the data have never been found. He was a madman, Mr. Schellbach, a most persuasive sociopath. His brother, Lowell, was the only person who tried to stop him—with words for many years, then finally with a bullet. The latter, as you know, accomplished this end.”

  The chief park naturalist steers the car into the parking area beside the train. His heart is pounding. He has a feeling his wife is the source of much of the information he’s just received, though he does not wish to ask. In the early days she and Lowell Dunhill went on long walks together, whenever the ranger wished to unburden his heart. Schellbach always assumed that heart to be full of Dotty Hedquist, but now he’s not so sure. Possibly Ethyl tried to tell him what she herself had been told, but he had been busy, always too busy, to listen. He’d preferred the late-night company of his hat, and he’d failed her.

  He cannot shake the heavy feeling but dutifully gets out of the car. He opens Mrs. Cutter’s door. Dr. Clover has already freed herself. He tries to carry their bags to the train but they’ll have none of it. “It’s only a few steps!” laughs Mrs. Cutter. She boards with a toss of her head and turns to wave. Dr. Clover stands with him for a moment. He is unsure what is required of him and starts to say something, but she puts a hand on his wrist. “We solved the mystery, Mr. Schellbach, but we may not have warded off the scandal. Who knows? If revenue goes up, those in charge of the coffers may plant a skeleton in someone else’s garage. Maybe yours,” she says with a smile.

  She climbs aboard the train and he watches until the last car rumbles out of sight. She’s right, of course. He’ll have to be on the lookout for such a thing.

  Limax Maximus

  Euell packs with great care, as if it were a month of travel and not just a picnic. He tries to imagine what foods she likes. All he can come up with is liverwurst. But does she like liverwurst? He can’t remember. His mind travels back to the day they met in Babbitt’s, quite by accident. They spoke at some length about liverwurst, but she never revealed her position on it. Suddenly he worries about this. Her guarded nature troubles him. But it attracts him as well. Those glimpses of her bodily hunger. Those are blissful moments for Ranger Wigglesworth. He decides not to risk the liverwurst and instead buys a loaf of sliced white bread, two tomatoes, and a roasted chicken. For dessert, a pound cake and a sack of oranges in case Jane is secretive about eating sweets. He hopes she’s not.

  What to wear is his next dilemma. He would like to look neat and clean, yet a little wanton. A little chafed and weather beaten. A devil-may-care man at home in the outdoors. He wants, at all costs, to avoid looking official, yet he’d like to exude the confidence and competence he feels when he’s in uniform. He settles on a pair of faded dungarees and a rust-colored short-sleeved shirt with black buttons. He’s given a good deal of thought to buttons since his last encounter with Jane, and he hopes she’s thought along the same lines and reached the same conclusions.

  At a quarter to eight in the morning he stands in the shade outside his house, waiting for her. The day is already hot, and the sweat gathers at the small of his back. He finds it hard to stay still and walks around in a circle, kicking at pinecones. He stretches his arms above his head, trying in vain to relieve the pressure in his chest and throat. At eight o’clock he goes inside and sits at the kitchen table and tries to drink a cup of cold coffee left over from breakfast. He checks his pack to make sure he hasn’t forgotten anything—knives and forks, a clean sheet that will have to serve as a tablecloth, a pillow for afterward, and the book, of course, Pilsbry’s Land Mollusca of North America. He hears a car and goes outside again, but it isn’t Jane. At eight thirty he realizes she isn’t coming.

  At first the thought frees him in a sudden, surprising way. What a fool he’s been! What was he thinking, asking a married woman to come away with him in her brother-in-law’s car, the day after she sent her husband home on the train? He retreats inside and hasn’t the heart to unpack the food and put it away. He flops on the bed, feeling agitated and exhausted, and something else he can’t quite put a name to. Finally it comes to him: he’s lonely. A great cavern has opened up inside him. He closes his eyes and sees a line of dwarves. He hears them singing a dreary tune. The beams of their lanterns cut the cavern’s darkness in a sharp, unpleasant way. Finally they stop on a high ledge and one by one turn to the wall and start swinging their picks. He feels the blows—stinging bursts of pain, as if he’s drunk too much lemonade, then a dull ache around his heart as the dwarves resort to sledgehammers, crushing the wall and rolling the rubble aside. What are they after, for God’s sake? Gems? Crystals? Euell can’t imagine. They throw away their hammers and beat at the rock with their bare hands, their great, ugly bodies lifting off the ground with the effort. Their leader, a fellow with long, coarse orange hair and beard, wearing a grimy tunic, calls out something in dwarf language and one by one they line up again. One by one, starting at the back of the line and using their picks as anchors, they throw themselves off the ledge. Soundlessly. There is no thump as they hit bottom. Their leader goes last, and he carries his lantern with him as he falls. Its light grows dimmer and dimmer until finally Euell can only make out a yellow glow, followed by a faint shattering sound, then a burst of flame rises from below, and a buffet of warm air.

  He wakes with a start. Jane is covering him with a blanket. She smiles in a distant, distracted way. He feels strangely calm and moves his legs to make room for her. She sits down and the bed creaks noisily, which seems to embarrass her.

  “You were shivering and talking in your sleep.”

  “I’m too hot now.”

  “I wonder if you have a fever.”

  He takes her hand and puts it on his forehead. She laughs nervously and closes her eyes. She turns her palm up and presses the back of her hand to his temple. Her knuckles feel cool and hard. “Normal,” she tells him, and gets up and moves about the room, resting her hands on the back of the chair, trailing her fingers across the kitchen table, touching each object, each surface in his house, as if she is there to rent or buy. She stands in the doorway, her back to the bed. Her blouse is pale blue. She’s wearing a white skirt. “You know, I was here once before. You were away, but Hugh was here.” A jolt of jealousy runs through his limbs. Is this what she intends? But she turns and smiles at him. “He isn’t very tidy, Hugh.”

  “No,” says Euell. “No, he’s a pig. My friend, but a pig.”

  “I’m sorry for being late. And out of sorts. And . . . nervous. I’ve been . . . I’ve so looked forward to our outing. Do you still want to go? If you don’t, I can—”

  “Of course,” says Euell, leaping out of bed. “Of course I do. I’m ready to go. I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I had everything packed and I waited outside . . .” He takes a breath. “I guess I just gave up. I had the strangest dream, Jane. About dwarves.”

  “Dwarves? How horrible.”

  “A lot of people like dwarves.”

  “Like them? How could they? They’re short and burly and they scowl a lot.”

  Euell laughs. He scoops up his pack with the picnic things, and without thinking, he takes her arm. He leads her out of the house to the car, Oliver Hedquist’s giant Chevrolet, which makes him feel like a dwarf himself. A tiny skull—Peromyscus eremicus, a cactus mouse—hangs on a string from the rearview mirror. He opens the door on the passenger side and waits for her to climb in, but she is of another mind. “Oh, I think I’d better drive. It’s Oliver’s car and . . . I think I’ll drive. You can tell me where to go,” she adds cheerily, as if he’s a little boy in need of entertainment.