by Aaron Elkins
A little over three blocks away, in her office on the third floor of the darkened biology building on the University of Iowa campus, Assistant Professor Margaret — Maggie — Gray was also pondering the life-altering possibilities of the upcoming Amazon cruise with Arden Scofield.
One thing was crystal clear. She had no future in the Ethnobotanical Institute or its parent, the Department of Biological Sciences. Once again her promotion to associate professor had not come through. That amounted to a not-so-subtle way of telling her to find another job someplace, because she certainly had no future at UI, especially considering the new, cost-driven plan to cut back Institute faculty next year and fold it into Biological Sciences, with no formal status of its own. There would be funds for only one faculty member in ethnobotany, instead of the current three, and she had no illusions about who that was going to be. She and Gus Slivovitz were history, or soon would be. Gus, seeing the handwriting on the wall, had already applied to and been accepted at some wretched agricultural school in Mississippi, or maybe one of those other equally dreadful states down there… Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma… which, if we were going to be painfully honest about it, was about where Gus had belonged all along.
Looking out over the lamplit, shadowed campus walkways from her desk, sipping tawny port from a tumbler, she was in a downcast frame of mind and deep in self-recrimination. She was thinking bitterly of how much good her Ph.D. had done her. All that work, and where had it gotten her? At thirty-nine she was still an assistant professor with a reputation (well-earned) as an acid-tongued, going-nowhere, old spinster with no life outside the lab. And the sacrifices she’d made, the wrong turns in the road! If she’d gone to Los Angeles with Curt all those years ago instead of insisting on hurrying back to finish her oh-so-important coursework at Cornell, maybe now she’d have a life.
She swallowed the rest of the port and, grim-faced (she’d feel like hell in the morning), poured two inches more. Make that three. What the hell. Her past was all water under the bridge; nothing to be done about it now. It was her future she had to think about.
And Arden Scofield, unlikely as it seemed, held the key to it. In addition to Arden’s professorship — his full professorship — at UI, he was a more-or-less permanent part-time prof at the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva in Peru, where he supervised an extension program for local farmers. That university was creating a new position of full professor of medical ethnobotany the following year, and according to Arden, he had already recommended Maggie; the job was as good as hers if she wanted it. She didn’t doubt that this was true. A recommendation from the great, the celebrated Arden Scofield would be sure to carry a lot of weight. Besides, the job was made for her. Medical ethnobotany — the study of how indigenous peoples use local plants for curative purposes — was her area of expertise, and the closest thing she had to a consuming interest… her one interest, really; she had published several well-received papers on it (and still no associate professorship!). So all that remained was for her to go down with Arden to Tingo Maria, where the school was located, and have Arden introduce her to some of the administrators.
And that was the plan. She would come along on the Amazon cruise, paying her own way, but assisting Arden as needed. That part of it was quite appealing, really. She had done her graduate fieldwork on the Rio Orinoco in Venezuela fifteen years ago and had made several subsequent trips there, but this one would be to the great Amazon Basin itself. She would do some collecting — a lot of collecting — and she was eager for the chance to sit down with local shamans and curanderos. These “uneducated,” unworldly Indian healers, carrying in their heads the results of thousands of years of experimentation with barks, roots, leaves, and flowers, were the world’s first and best medical ethnobotanists.
So many medically useful herbs and drugs had already come out of Amazon Indian healing practices: analgesics, astringents, expectorants, hypnotics, steroids, antiseptics, antipyretics, anaesthetics. Even their poisons — their neurotoxins and paralytics — had turned out to have enormous potential benefit. D-tubocurarine, an extract of curare, was a blessed muscle relaxant that had transformed surgery. Rotenone, the safest biodegradable insecticide in the world, had first been extracted from plant materials used by Amazonian Indians as fish poisons. What untold treasures were still locked up in the minds of those mysterious jungle scientists awaiting discovery? Cures for AIDS? Alzheimer’s? Cancer? Delve into their ancient lore, and you unlock the gate to the greatest storehouse of natural medicine in the world. But time was running short. They were a vanishing breed, these old shamans, and no one was taking their place. It was an opportunity she wouldn’t have missed under any circumstances.
After the cruise was over (and this was the part that had her grumbling to herself between sips), she would fly on with Arden to Tingo Maria to discuss the details of the appointment: responsibilities, lab facilities, accommodations, and so on. Then, assuming she was interested, in a little less than a year she would fly to Tingo Maria again, but this time on a one-way ticket.
The question was: did she want to? Her Spanish was rusty, but with a year to work on it, that was no problem; it had been one of her two qualifying languages for the Ph.D. And the salary was attractive, more than she was getting at UI, plus all kinds of great perks. Beyond that, it would be a distinct and not inconsiderable pleasure to outrank Arden, technically a mere adjunct professor, in the faculty hierarchy. But, Jesus Christ, the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva? The National Agrarian University of the Jungle? How appealing was that?
And what about the town, Tingo Maria? Arden, who lived down there for a good part of every year, had talked it up, but Arden was the kind of person who didn’t much care or even notice where he lived. Maggie did. When she had Googled the city to get some other points of view, the descriptions hadn’t done much for her spirits. “Tropical, hot, and wet,” “a tatty, ugly town,” “the drug-trafficking capital of Peru,” “the saddest kind of ‘modern,’ ramshackle South American town, cobbled together out of nothing in 1938, and already rusting to pieces.” Not a lot to draw her there.
On the other hand, what did she have in Iowa City?
“OUCH.”
Mel Pulaski gingerly peeled the Band-Aid — well it wasn’t a Band-Aid, it was a lump of cotton held on by a scrap of masking tape; the Providence County Health Department was making a point about its dissatisfaction with its current budget — from his beefy upper arm.
Standing at the bathroom counter in his undershirt, he checked the swollen, reddened site of his tetanus booster shot in the mirror and gingerly touched it with a finger. “Ooh.”
At the twin sink beside him, his wife Dolly, in the flannel nightgown she’d taken to wearing lately, was applying a squib of toothpaste to her brush. “That last shot’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
“Oh, a little bit. It’s the only one that has.”
“No, it isn’t. Your arm hurt for a couple of days after the one for yellow fever.”
“True.”
“And you didn’t feel that great while you were taking the typhoid pills. I had to nurse you for two days.”
“Yeah, that’s right, I forgot. That was not fun. Ah well, such is the life of the freelance writer. Danger, sacrifice, and adventure abound at every turn.”
“I still don’t understand why you’re so keen to go on this trip,” Dolly mumbled around her toothbrush. “I don’t see the point.”
“Well, for one thing, EcoAdventure Travel is paying me three thousand bucks for an article on it, and another five hundred for photos, which will cover the cost and then some.”
“Not-much-some, when you figure in the cost of all those immunizations.”
“Okay, then,” Mel said reasonably. “There’s the fact that Arden Scofield will be on it, and I’ve got some ideas for another book we can do together. I think he’s going to be interested.”
A few months earlier he had concluded a yearlong ghostwriting association with Sc
ofield on an autobiographical narrative, Potions, Poisons, and Piranhas: A Plant-hunter’s Odyssey. It hadn’t been that hard either. Scofield had a pretty good way with words himself, and he’d led an exciting, interesting life; he just hadn’t wanted to take the time to organize the material and do the grunt work that went with rewriting and editing.
Dolly snorted. “‘Do together.’ You practically wrote that whole damned book for him, and he’s going to get all the credit.”
Big, strong, slow, and mellow, a onetime linebacker with the Minnesota Vikings, Mel Pulaski was a hard man to get into an argument, even when Dolly seemed to be spoiling for one, which had been happening a lot lately. Well, he understood why. She was forty-seven. It was the dreaded Change of Life, and she was having a hard time with it, psychologically as well as physically. It didn’t help that she was five years older than he was, something that was clearly starting to bother her a lot more than it did him. Mel had stopped telling her that the age difference didn’t matter, because when he did it only ticked her off even more.
“Well, he’s the expert, honey,” he said. “He’s the only reason anybody would buy the book. Me, I’m just a hired hack. Anyway, who cares about the credit? We got fifteen thousand bucks for what probably amounted to maybe two months’ work altogether. That’s a pretty good paycheck in my line of work.”
“I thought you couldn’t stand him.”
“I never said I couldn’t stand him. I said he was a phony, posturing pissant of a prima donna.” He grinned. “But for another fifteen grand I guess I can stand him a little longer. Pass me the floss, will you, babe?”
Unsmiling, Dolly passed it, rinsed her toothbrush, and put it back in the rack. “Fifteen thousand. And how much is he going to get?”
“He’s a name, sweetie; I’m not. It’s his life the book’s about, not mine. And don’t forget, my name is going to be on the cover right up there with his. That’s not going to hurt my career.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Dolly said. And then, a moment later, as a muttered afterthought: “What career?”
Mel sighed. The moods were worst at night. In the morning she’d shyly and sincerely apologize and say she didn’t know what had gotten into her, and surely he knew she hadn’t meant it (which he did). And things would go smoothly until the next night, or maybe the one after that.
Mel had been doing a lot of Web research on menopause. Among the things he’d learned was that it typically lasted anywhere from six to thirteen years. He just prayed Dolly’s was the six-year variety.
A seasoned underground commuter, Duayne V. Osterhout knew precisely where to stand on the platform of the cavernlike Smithsonian Metro station in order to be first through the rear doors of the second car, from which he would have a clear shot at his preferred corner seat, wedged in by the window. As usual he had arrived in time for the 5:23 P.M. Orange Line train to West Falls Church, in order, not to take it, but to be there when the passengers boarded, so that he could assume his place on the platform the moment the doors slid closed and thus be in position for the 5:37. He did not consider a fourteen-minute wait a high price to pay for a comfortable seat, with no sweating straphangers leaning over him, during the twenty-five-minute ride to Virginia. At this time in the evening on a weekday, planning was essential if he didn’t want to stand most of the way home.
When the platform lights began blinking to signal the imminent arrival of the train, a man with a backpack — a little old to be traveling with a backpack in Duayne’s opinion — more or less unthinkingly bulled his way to the front of the crowd that had now collected behind Duayne. (Duayne was not the only one who knew precisely where to stand so that the doors opened directly in front of him, but he was one of the few who was willing to wait from the departure of one train to the arrival of the next.)
“Excuse me, sir,” Duayne said. “I believe I was here first. So were these other people.” His heart was thumping, but there were times when you had to stand up for what was right. Otherwise you invited anarchy, the kind of thing to be found on the New York City subway system.
The man stared malignly at him. “Well, excuse me, buddy. I didn’t see no sign that said you could reserve a place to stand.” But when Duayne unflinchingly returned the stare, the man said, “Ah, the hell with it,” and moved off.
“Thank you, sir!” the woman behind Duayne said to him as the doors opened, and Duayne strode to his accustomed seat feeling bold and beneficent.
He took from under his arm his copy of the day’s Post, but instead of slipping on his glasses to read it, he stared out the window at the lights whizzing by as the train left the station, and then at the pulsing black of the tunnel walls. Even after the adrenaline rush from his encounter had receded, he continued to stare unseeing at the darkness. He was thinking about the Amazon River.
He was also thinking, as he often did, about bugs.
Unlike the other members of Arden Scofield’s Amazon expedition, Duayne Osterhout was not an ethnobotanist or even a botanist. He was that even rarer bird, an ethnoentomologist. As the senior research scientist in the Housing and Structural Section of the Urban Entomology Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture, he was an authority on the extraordinary creatures referred to as “pests” by the uneducated general population: silverfish, beetles, ants, and the like. In particular, he was a much-published expert on that miracle of propagation, survival, and resourcefulness, Periplaneta americana, the common American cockroach, and its many cousins.
It was Duayne’s not-so-secret shame that in all his forty-eight years he had never set foot in the tropics, from whence almost all insects had originally come. Never had he gloried in the sight of a Blaberus giganteus, its carapace gleaming brown and gold in the equatorial sunshine; never had he stood among giant jungle plants, eye to eye to eye, or rather eye to metallic, antlerlike mandibles, with a Cyclommatus pulchellus. It was not a conscious decision that had kept him from seeing firsthand the insect marvels of the southern hemisphere, it was simply that he hadn’t gotten around to it. He’d gotten married before he was out of graduate school, and then his work had consumed him, along with the raising of a family of three. Life had gotten in the way, that’s all. Besides that, his wife Lea wasn’t much of a traveler aside from luxury cruising, and she wasn’t very keen on his going anywhere without her. And — let’s be honest about it — he hadn’t ever gotten up his resolve enough to press the matter.
However, that had all changed now. Three days after their youngest daughter had left for college in Ohio last year, Lea had up and left him to move into some kind of socialist commune in upstate New York. Although it had been a shock at first, he had been astonished at how little difference it had made in the basics of his day-to-day life, and at how quickly he had been able to settle into a satisfying, fulfilling routine. It was as if he’d been living someone else’s life for the last twenty-five years.
It was his eldest daughter, Beth, who was responsible for his upcoming Amazon adventure. Beth had taken after her father from the start, with a gratifying interest in natural history, but somewhere along the way she’d moved from fauna to flora. Now she was a fledgling plant biologist with the National Science Foundation, but last year she’d still been finishing up her graduate work at Georgetown. Someone had told her about Arden Scofield’s botanical field expeditions to the Huallaga Valley near Tingo Maria, Peru, and she’d signed up. The trip she’d described had sounded so fascinating to Duayne — there had been so many amazing bugs! — that he had telephoned Scofield to apply for a place in the next expedition if there were any to spare. When Scofield told him that he was welcome, and that they would be exploring the mighty Amazon River itself this time, Duayne couldn’t have been more thrilled.
There was, however, an unexpected fly in the ointment. Only a few days ago, he had learned from his ex-wife that Scofield had made some persistent and highly improper advances to Beth during the expedition. She had held him off, of course, but the thought of
it made Duayne’s blood boil. It wasn’t only because his own daughter had been the recipient of Scofield’s unsavory attentions, it was the very idea of a celebrated, mature scientist… a teacher… a figure of trust and authority, taking advantage of an innocent, starry-eyed student barely into her twenties — any innocent, young, starry-eyed student — who had been entrusted into his care. Duayne knew such men and despised them. Before the expedition was over, he planned to have a few sharp words with Scofield and give him what-for. You couldn’t let men like that simply think they had gotten away with it free and clear.
But for the moment, all that was secondary to the inextinguishable glow in his heart as he considered the great adventure to come.
The Amazon River! He whispered it to himself, just for the pleasure of forming the words as the train burrowed, deep and echoing, under the Potomac. The Amazon River!
TWO
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