“Nasty.” I reached for the little notebook I usually put in my pocket for such occasions, but found that I had forgotten it.
“Whatcha need?” Miles asked.
“I wanted to make some notes.”
He grabbed a notepad off the counter. It was nicely printed with the logo and motto USGS: SCIENCE FOR A CHANGING WORLD. “Thanks,” I said. I started to tear a page off of it.
“No, keep the whole pad,” Miles said. “We call that ‘outreach.’”
Waltrine said, “Yeah, they got money for fancy scratch pads, but not for doing science.”
Their bitterness was beginning to snag at me like gum under my shoes. I looked away.
My eyes came to rest on a large ledger notebook, the kind with permanently bound pages. It lay open at the end of the lab bench. It was full of carefully handwritten notes. “Oh, isn’t this great,” I said, admiring it. “A woman after my own heart, you still take your primary notes by hand.”
Waltrine lowered her lids halfway and raised her eyebrows. “That’s lab protocol. Original notes have to be hard copy, and in ink.” She flipped some pages. “That’s how we document things. Otherwise, it would be too easy for folks to kind of edit things, know what I mean?”
Guffey gave me a satisfied wink, as if to say, We be doin’ the work that answers the questions. He steered me back out into the hallway. We passed several large posters that depicted work being done for various projects underway at the center. There were plenty of air views of sand spits and coastal plains, some marked “before” and “after” relative to hurricane Andrew, the big killer of the 1990s.
“So this is the Coastal Marine Branch of the USGS,” I commented. “Is most of what’s done here coastal geology? I see a lot of views of shoreline processes, hurricane damage and such.”
Miles said, “It’s not a branch, it’s a program. Things got renamed a while back. ‘Division’ became ‘discipline.’ That makes everything more relavant, get it? That all came in with the downsizing and the outreach. Less science, more touchy-feely. But to answer your question, there are three centers to the program. This one, one in Menlo Park, California, and one in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. We all fight over one little pot of money.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Funding is the big thing.”
“Essackly. I tell you, trying to get people to take science seriously is a durn close to impossible if it doesn’t have an immediate and obvious dollar payoff for someone upstairs from you. I been trying to get this project adequately funded from the git-go, but I’ve run up against one stone wall after another. I can’t get a nickel out of the USGS here.”
“Why? Doesn’t dust raining down on your coast count as coastal geology?”
“Not really. They want something that affects real estate straight up, so’s the developers and taxpayers can line it up next to their property values. To hell with their health, or the health of the environment all around them. The USGS has a special fund for wild-ass cutting-edge ideas, but they say the project’s too far out there one day and too well-established the next. What they do do is pay my salary and give me the freedom to think my thoughts.”
“That’s a lot.”
“That’s a great lot. Yes, that is a great lot.”
“What exactly happened when you pitched it to the Center for Disease Control?”
“They’re set up to deal with crises. So if I prove there’s a problem, and hold it up to them like a red cape, they might see if they have a spare bull to charge at it. The military seems interested, but they prefer to do things in-house. The Department of Agriculture has its head in the sand and agribusiness doesn’t want us thinking our food is tainted. The EPA is so focused on smokestack emissions that they don’t want to know that half the particulates we inhale here in Florida come from Africa. The list goes on and on.”
I looked more carefully at one of the displays on the wall. “Do the hurricanes get funding?”
“Oh yeah. Plenty bucks for when and where’s it going to hit and such like. There you got developers gonna lose money and people gonna die right this minute if you don’t do something, much easier to grasp than the slow collapse of a whole ecosystem in the Caribbean. So we got lots of folks running around looking at what a good blow does to the shoreline sediments.”
“I mean currently. I hear that a storm delayed a space shuttle launch.”
“Yeah, that happens.” He gestured at a large satellite image of the Caribbean and put a finger down by the Yucatan peninsula. “The current hurricane is right about here now, kicking up some winds along the east coast, not much happening here on this side. But it could easily turn ninety degrees and head on up here.”
“The hurricanes are a problem for you, right? I noticed that boat you had at dockside beyond your house.”
He snorted. “Not much you can do once a storm gets going. Them things can turn any which-away, you never know where they’s gonna make landfall until it’s too late to move a boat. You can’t outrun it. Florida is a big place, but it’s flat as a pancake, and anywhere the wind blows, it just blows and blows. So I just lash everything down and hope.” He gave the satellite image a little tap right on St. Petersburg.
My eye riveted on the image, taking in all the blue water that surrounded the big, flat peninsula on which I had somehow found myself. Not for the first time, I wondered just what had really brought me here.
My lunch with Olivia Rodríguez Garcia brought a series of odd surprises. First, she did not take me to Chattaway’s, or, for that matter, to any other place in St. Petersburg. Instead, she drove across the vast expanse of Tampa Bay—the elevated causeway must have been almost ten miles long, with water and nothing else on either side—to Tampa itself (St. Petersburg is on a neck of land that forms the western side of the bay, and Tampa forms the east). She drove like a seared bat and made idle chitchat as we rocketed along. I went with the flow as best I could, all the time wondering what her agenda was in inviting me to lunch.
Once off the causeway into Tampa, she turned north and maneuvered us around until we pulled up in front of a place called Mambo’s Cafeé. It was a small place with one row of booths and tables. At the sight of the owners, a husband and wife team, Olivia broke into rapid, elegantly enunciated Spanish that was full of idioms and contractions I could not follow. After quick hugs and what sounded like rounds of “Hi there” and “How’s the family,” she turned and introduced me. Then she said, “You are wondering why I brought you so far for a simple little meal, no?”
“I am wondering, yes.”
She smiled. “Food is important. We women must stick together, celebrate over food. We have much to reclaim from the way our grandmothers, and our grandmothers’ grandmothers, did business. We do our work differently from men: We understand working together.” She gave me an expansive smile and opened her hands upward, presenting the restaurant to me. “So I bring you here. This is the food of my grandmother’s grandmothers.”
I thought of what I had heard the evening before, that the women in hunter-gatherer societies provided the grand majority of the nutrition, and I smiled in spite of my wariness.
She said, “Please, have anything you want. I remember too well being a graduate student and worrying about money. This is on me.”
I said, “Thank you, Dr. Garcia.”
She smiled a motherly smile, odd considering that she could not have been more than a decade my senior. “Please don’t be so formal. We do not call each other ‘doctor’ at the USGS, or we’d be at it all day. Besides, in Latin culture the paternal surname—what you would call me in America—is the first of my last names, Rodríguez. Garcia is the maternal surname, and is not usually used here. My middle name is Carmen. So, Olivia Carmen Rodríguez Garcia. My family calls me ‘Puru,’ but you may call me Olivia until we know each other much better.” She gave me a wink.
I’m afraid I gaped at her, wondering, Why is this woman sucking up to me? But I played along with it, partly because on the money
side of things she was right, I was an inch from penniless. “Well, okay, uh—Olivia, what do you recommend ?” Trying to meet her halfway with the cultural thing, I tried it again in Spanish. “¿Que es bueno aqui?”
“Ah, que bien, senñorita. I recommend la pechuga de pollo a la parilla. And here, you must have los tostones, y para beber, un jugo de mango.” She pronounced mango idiosyncratically, with the emphasis on the o.
“Is this a Cuban restaurant?” I asked.
She drew herself up with mock affrontedness. “¿ Cubano? No! Es Puertorriquenño!”
She helped me choose from the cafeteria line and we sat down at a table. She gestured at each item on my tray. “Mira: Grilled chicken breast, seasoned with adobo, the best you’ll ever eat this side of my mother’s. White rice (arroz blanco), red beans (habichuelas coloras) seasoned with sofrito, y plaintains (tostones), very crispy.” She made a sweeping gesture with both hands. “Todo es Puertorriquenño.”
The way she was cutting from English to Spanish and back was beginning to make me feel a little swimmy. I smiled weakly at my hostess–Center Chief and found her observing me frankly, with no attempt to cover her intent. Tentatively, I said, “Your idioms are quite different from what I hear back in the Rockies.”
She laughed easily. “I imagine so. It is as if you were comparing an American English speaker with one raised in Britain. Or South Africa. Or Australia. Very different sound to it. And here in Florida we have more than the one Spanish. We have the Cuban, as you supposed, as well as the Puerto Rican.”
“How do they differ? Give me a for instance.”
“Oh! You can always tell a Puerto Rican, because we say ‘mira.’ A Cuban would say, ‘oye.’” She smiled, like it was a saucy little joke between just us two.
I tucked this away, thankful for something small and concise to think about in the middle of the growing miasma of feelings and impressions that had begun to ball up since I had gotten in the car with Olivia Rodríguez Garcia … or since I had arrived in Florida … hell, since I had gone to bed with Jack Sampler. A nice, intellectual examination of a difference in word usage was about my speed right then. Mira meant “look;” oye meant “listen,” one small but significant difference in the way the two peoples caught each others’ attention. “And I suppose the cuisines are different as well?” I took a bite of my red beans. They were delicious.
“Sí. Red beans. Habichuelas coloras. In Cuba, they would be frijoles negros. En tu parte del paiz, tu dices, ‘frijoles,’ ¿verdad? Lo mismo en Cuba. Tu arroz es blanco. En Cuba, amarillo. Come on, eat!” She tapped the edge of my plate with her fork and gestured that I use mine to shovel some food into my mouth.
I put my elbows on the edge of the table and put my face in my hands. I was feeling almost faint.
“Something the matter?” she inquired, not sounding convincingly concerned.
I shook my head. “Probably the heat getting to me. Or the humidity. It gets hot back in Utah, but it’s a dry heat.” I was beginning to feel like I was pouring through the tiles in the floor, all liquid and flowing, totally lacking in spine. What the hell was I doing talking about the weather?
“You’re sure it’s nothing else?”
I looked up. She was examining me again. I decided that I did not enjoy being examined. “Sure. There’s plenty going on,” I said, images of Jack all disheveled flashing through my head, chased quickly by Miles Guffey’s rubbery smile. Both were shot full of holes by Olivia Rodríguez Garcia’s gratuitous kindnesses. “But maybe we could get there faster if you tell me what I can do for you. I don’t mean to be rude, but surely you have something on your mind.”
Olivia nodded decisively. “Yes, yes. Business. Certainly. Eat, and I will tell you.” She gave my dish another whack with her fork. When she saw me pick up mine and take a stab at my chicken, she said, “You are thinking of working with Miles Guffey on his dust project. I am the Center Chief. It is my job to keep things running smoothly.” She turned her attention to her dish and began to pick around among the beans.
I chewed and swallowed some delicious meat, then said, “Okay, let me guess: Dr. Guffey has his ways of making things go unsmoothly.”
Olivia nodded. “I see you understand. This makes things easier. And by the way, it is not Dr. Guffey. He has only a bachelor’s degree.”
I blinked in amazement.
“Yes,” Olivia continued. “It is surprising. But this is how the Survey used to be. Bright people would come on straight out of college, and the Survey would train them, bring them along, almost an apprentice system. Heaven knows it hardly pays any better than that!” She laughed at her own joke.
“Well, he sure is highly regarded.”
She nodded and stabbed into her rice. “Yes, yes. Miles has a way of involving people in his work, and that’s good, but …”
“But he’s trying to shake things up with the public to get some funding.”
“Sí … I thought I should explain a few things about the way work is done at the Survey. Help you fit in better.” She glanced up at me.
So this was all about going along to get along, and bringing me all the way onto her ethnic turf was symbolic. I did the emotional math: Miles Guffey had pissed her off. He was bringing needed publicity to the USGS, but at the same time ignoring rules in order to get funding for his project. This made him a management nightmare. She had to answer to the chain of command over her head. He had to get funding, or his idea would stay an idea and never make it to fully fledged theory status, let alone proven fact. I was from outside the system and therefore a resource each of them could try to co-opt. “I’m all ears,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. More than anything, I wanted to slap my hands over my ears and hide under the table. I hated politics with a passion. “So tell me, just what is the funding picture at the USGS?”
Olivia glanced skyward. “We have been on hard times since the self-imposed RIF—reduction in force—of the 1990s. There was bloodshed there. I came on board after that, so I am not part of that fight. But it had to be done. Congress was looking for an agency to cut, and we were vulnerable, because the public did not know what we did for them. And we were top-heavy: Over ninety percent of the budget went to salaries; there was no money to fund projects whatsoever. So something had to go. Now, we are more stable, but we still have a very limited funding picture unless we take in project money from other federal agencies, or even from private-sector grants. We are increasingly like a university department, or a consulting company, where people fight for the small pieces of pie.”
“But I am outside that picture,” I said cautiously. “I am a graduate student. I cost little or nothing. So why are you concerned about me?”
Olivia lowered her eyelids halfway and cleared her throat, her meal forgotten. “It is because of the nature of the specific project.” She ticked items off on her fingers as she went. “First, African dust does not fall—pardon the pun—within our mandate. Second, even if it did, we have many projects far more critical in nature, and perhaps you would find many of them more interesting as well. Third, while Miles has managed to get quite a lot of publicity for his dust, he has very few facts at his disposal, which means that his dust may in fact be—and now I make the ironic play on words—all wet. Again you might be better served to consider another project, if only to be taken seriously as a scientist.”
I shot my eyebrows up. I was quite certain that what I was hearing lay far outside the usual welcome-aboard pep talk.
Olivia put out a hand to shush me, then pointed a finger and waggled it at me. “I can see your surprise. I am speaking very candidly, no? I see in you a lot of myself, and I am concerned. As Center Chief, my responsibilities are many and varied. I have a lot of people to serve and hundreds of issues to juggle, and I must not show preferential treatment. But, as a woman working in a man’s profession, I will damned well look out for other women if I please. It was not easy for me to get where I am, as you can imagine.”
I blinked. I
t was the first time I had heard one woman scientist say anything like this to another. Embarrassed, moved, and unprepared to receive such a kindness or discern it from manipulation, if that was what this was, I changed the subject. “And then there is the matter of Calvin Wheat.”
Olivia gave a quick nod. “Yes. Where is he? And what does this mean? And I am concerned that Miles is using this disappearance of one of his workers to promote his project. Really, this is the limit! Controversy, as I said. Not good in a budding career. Ahora, fifthly,” she went back to counting on her fingers, then threw her hands up in a gesture of frustration. “¡Ayi! Mira, has Miles mentioned Chip Hiller’s work?”
“Uh, no … .”
“Of course not. Miles will lead you to believe that he is the inventor of the African dust idea, but in fact it was Chip Hiller who first looked at this dust. And of course, the phenomenon is nothing new. We have iron-rich dust forming the bulk of the soil horizon on coral islands throughout the Atlantic, and the Pacific, for that matter. It is part of the history of our planet. It is where our planet came from! Ashes to ashes, dust to …” She trailed off dramatically, as if suddenly aware that she was raving, but I caught a glint in her eyes, as if she was watching to see what impact her words were having on me.
I cleared my throat and said nothing. We stared at each other a while. I let my thoughts drift to Jack, and to the longings and curiosity that had brought me to Florida in the first place. I felt that odd tug at my heart, and was, somehow, reminded by it that I had not come here as much to earn a degree as to find out how and why my lover had flown off into a cloud of dust. Finally I said, with the full irony of utter sincerity, “I thank you for your concern. I have never known a fellow scientist to go to bat for me to quite this extent. I am floored.”
Olivia kept her gaze on me. “It is nothing,” she murmured.
I watched her attack her grilled chicken with force and precision, wondering if she thought of me any differently from the meat on her plate. In that moment, I decided that I would indeed work on Miles Guffey’s project, but not as a groveling graduate student massaging the dry dust of data under the tutelage of a master. No, I would attack the project solely and precisely as a crime scene, because it was now clear to me that, in one way or another, it was exactly that.
Killer Dust Page 13
