The Butterflies of Grand Canyon

by Margaret Erhart

  It’s a good day for lycaenids—marine blues in abundance—and queens, drawn to seep willow and climbing milkweed. In an hour Euell collects three of everything he sees and heads upstream to swim in an eddy. He pulls off his T-shirt, looks around to make sure he’s alone, then kicks off his sweaty dungarees. He’s taken to not wearing underwear, and suddenly buck naked, aware of the sun’s heat and the hot wind’s arousing touch, he stands for a minute, feeling an intense pleasure in the day. The pleasure of the hunter and the physical, sensual pleasure of living in his own body.

  The water is warm and silty. He swims a few strokes downstream, against the pull of the eddy, then turns and lets the current carry him up again. He climbs out onto a flat rock and lies on his back, looking at the cliffs above him, the line where rock meets sky. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again a dragonfly, a green darner, has come to land on a seep willow branch by his left hand. He raises his hand slowly, millimeter by millimeter, until he’s almost there, then with a sudden sweep he closes his fingers around the creature and lets out a cry of happiness. “Anax junius!” He sits up, then springs to his feet, waving his hand in the air, and in this blessed state of unself-conscious joy he is spied by two women who have wandered from the landing in search of a swimming opportunity of their own.

  Hidden from view by a stand of arrowweed, Elzada Clover and Lois Cutter are surprised but unembarrassed by the nude young man, dancing on his rock. His Latin is perfectly clear to them, as is his utter satisfaction in having caught his prey with his naked hand. The rest of his nakedness, as far as Elzada is concerned, is his own business. But Lois can’t help but comment, “Why, he looks like Bill!”

  “Bill who?”

  “From the Nevills expedition.”

  “I thought you said you paid no attention to Bill Gibson’s looks.”

  “I didn’t much. But enough to know that this gentleman resembles him. Don’t you see the resemblance, Elzie?”

  “Only with his clothes off.”

  “Oh, pish! What would you know about Bill Gibson with his clothes off?”

  “I’ll tell you who he looks like. From the neck up, he looks like a young Lowell Dunhill.”

  Lois yawns and covers her mouth. “I never laid eyes on Lowell Dunhill. And neither did you. Not alive.”

  The ladies continue upstream unnoticed, take their clad swim, and return to the landing where half a dozen canyoneers are loading three cataract boats with the requisite gear for an expedition: canned goods, tents, bedrolls, cook pots, wash buckets, lanterns, life jackets, and several large jugs of whiskey. The young man who does or doesn’t resemble Lowell Dunhill is nowhere to be seen. A truck, apparently his, has vanished from the parking area as well.

  In the Belly of the Edith

  “What bothers me,” says Lois Jotter Cutter, who sits with her feet in a pan of warm water and Epsom salts, to which she has added a teaspoon of ginger, “is that two of the most brilliant men our civilization has recently produced should argue like children over something so mundane as the size of their gray matter.”

  “It wasn’t an argument,” Elzada points out. “It was a wager. And the gray matter in question wasn’t simply a bit of sludge in the skull cavity. It was what they’d lived their lives with: their brains.”

  “Which they’d temporarily lost the use of, quite obviously.”

  “No. They believed, or were perhaps parodying the belief held by others at the time, that a larger brain equaled a smarter man. Fashionable Victorian discrimination is what it was. Proof that big-noggined Caucasians were mentally superior to the darker races. To be posthumously more intelligent than your closest rival apparently meant a great deal to John Wesley Powell and Edward Cope. Why? I don’t know.”

  “They were underemployed!” cries Lois. “Too much time on their hands. They should have been put to work!”

  “Oh, I think they worked hard enough, probably for twenty men. As I see it, it wasn’t so much a contest of gray matter as a battle of egos. As old men near the end of their lives, they have less to fight with. Teeth and claws are gone. What’s left, dear girl, but language and self-importance?”

  “Good Lord, Elzie, what a dreary thought!”

  “But we aren’t old men and never will be. So cheer up, Mrs. Cutter. How are those feet of yours?”

  “Ruined.”

  “I’m not surprised. It was a great sight, though, to see you clambering up those Vermilion Cliffs.”

  “I wasn’t clambering, I was scampering.”

  “Wearing yourself out is what you were doing. But wasn’t it lovely in the shade at the Lonely Dell. And what a crop of peaches!”

  “It reminded me of home,” says Lois wistfully.

  Elzada hesitates. “Maybe home is where you need to be.”

  “But our work isn’t done! The mystery isn’t solved!”

  “Perhaps there’s something more important than work, Mrs. Cutter.”

  Lois looks puzzled. “Why, Elzie. There’s never been before. And besides, what I’ve uncovered about the Skłodowska Institute . . . It’s intriguing, like watching a photograph develop in the mix. Slowly the picture grows. Owen Dunhill was the founder and only member.”

  “Owen you say. Not Lowell?”

  “It could be a pseudonym.”

  “Or a relative,” Elzada suggests. “But if he had any relatives, why didn’t they make a fuss about his disappearance?”

  “That’s another thing. The records only go as far as 1938.”

  “When Lowell Dunhill died. And after that?”

  “Nothing. The institute disappears.”

  A sizzle of fine, hard rain spatters the window, and shortly the two women leave the hotel, sharing an umbrella. They make their slow way through the village to mail a postcard to Ellsworth Kolb. Lois’s feet are puffy and sore, but she’s eager for the outing. They walk at a sloth’s pace. All of a sudden she stops and says, “Who won, Elzie?”

  “Who won what?”

  “The wager. Mr. Cope or Mr. Powell? You never got to the end of the story.”

  “Ah,” laughs Elzada. “It ended in death, of course, for Mr. Powell and Mr. Cope. And when all was measured and done with, the larger brain was Mr. Powell’s.”

  “And what did he win?”

  “The chance to be enshrined in the Smithsonian in a pickle jar.”

  “His brain?”

  “His brain.”

  The post office is a small stone building with window boxes of red geraniums. Elzada can’t help but think sweet alyssum or even plain old pansies might have been a better choice. So many of her experiments involve geraniums, she’s come to see them as the rats of the plant world. And besides, they smell of old bandages.

  Lois steps across the threshold, but Elzada puts a hand on her arm and draws her back. “Let’s wait,” she whispers.

  “In the rain?”

  “Stand under the umbrella.”

  Through a window Elzada sees a woman shaped like a rutabaga, arguing with the postmistress. She recognizes Ramona Stark, the clerk at the store. “Now Josefina’ll be here any minute, and you let her in, Edith! She’s enough worked up about this wedding! You let her in!”

  “I won’t, Ramona. Not after five. That’s one minute from now. She has one minute.”

  “The wedding’s in three days, Edith!”

  “That’s none of my business. If Mr. and Mrs. Delgadillo have waited this long to send out invitations, they can certainly wait until tomorrow at half past eight when I open.”

  “Don’t say it’s not your business, Edith! Of course it’s your business, and I’ll tell you why! That little girl—”

  “She’s hardly a little girl, Ramona. She’s twenty-three.”

  “The girl, Edith, the daughter, she’s—” Ramona Stark straightens up and pats her bulging belly.

  “She isn’t!”

  Ramona Stark nods solemnly.

  “Who did it?” whispers the postmistress.

  Ramona shakes he
r head. “A boy!”

  “I do understand that, Ramona. What boy?”

  “No idea!” She pokes a finger in the air. “Maybe you’ll find out and tell me!”

  “Well, isn’t his name on the wedding invitation?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no, Edith! The one who’s on the invitation, he’s the fella gonna marry her, that’s all I know!”

  With that, Ramona Stark turns and leaves the post office, brushing past the two ladies with a satisfied smile. She’s wearing what Elzada has heard referred to as a muumuu, which makes her look like she’s been swallowed by a pale blue balloon.

  The postmistress, Edith Chase, is a wrinkled prune of a woman with the pale, powdery skin of a government drone who spends her life indoors. She’s wearing what appears to be a tweed blazer in the middle of summer. She lacks the shopping gene, thinks Elzada. Edith Chase gazes skeptically at the two ladies and shrugs her narrow shoulders. “The U.S. Government would like me to close in less than one minute. What the government wants, the government gets. I serve the government.”

  “We’re here to mail a postcard,” says Elzada brightly. “It should take no longer than a minute.” She has a sudden, unwanted vision of the postmistress at home, eating an overdone omelet for dinner and drinking rum out of a jug.

  Edith Chase whacks her stamp pad and says, “You’re the professors, aren’t you? Friends of Mr. Kolb’s, right?”

  “We’re old friends.”

  She smiles oddly and leans forward across the counter. Her face is close to Elzada’s. It’s the color of fish flesh. “He hated me,” she hisses. “He has good reason to now, but back then he didn’t. If anyone got close to Ellsworth they had to reckon with Emery. But he’s in the thick of it, isn’t he? His chickens came home to roost.”

  “If you’re talking about what’s in his garage,” says Lois, “you won’t convince anyone he’s guilty.”

  “Guilty of what?” laughs the postmistress.

  “Of murder.”

  “I hope he’s above murder, but it’s hard to know with Emery. It’s not your average Joe keeps a skeleton in his garage.”

  “He didn’t keep it,” says Lois hotly. “He found it.”

  “He didn’t find it; he put it there. There’s no other logical explanation. If a man, a body, is hidden in a boat in a—”

  “Hidden? What do you mean, hidden?” Elzada interrupts. The temperature in the post office seems to have risen.

  “Stashed below the deck of the Edith.”

  Elzada nods. “His old boat. From the 1911 expedition. But how do you know that?”

  “Everyone knows it.”

  “It’s the first I’ve heard of it. Wrapped in a canvas sheet in a closet is what people say.”

  “Well, people are wrong. It was in the belly of the Edith, down in the dark where no one would ever know about it, no one but Emery himself.”

  “So let me get this straight,” says Lois. “Emery steals a smelly old body, puts it in his boat, and forgets about it for thirteen years. Then one day he wants to do a little work on the Edith and he finds a skeleton. ‘That’s odd,’ he thinks, ‘where did that come from?’ and he tells someone who tells someone, and the trouble begins.”

  “It makes him look innocent, doesn’t it?”

  “Without a brain in his head is more like it,” says Elzada.

  “Like Powell and Cope!” snorts Lois.

  “I take it you’ve never smelled a rotting corpse.” The postmistress smiles. “If a body is fresh, there’s little choice but to hide it on your own premises and keep the doors shut tight.”

  “I’ll remember that,” says Elzada, “but the problem is this: Mr. Emery Kolb was nowhere near the South Rim on the evening Mr. Dunhill’s body disappeared. He was on the river with us.”

  Edith Chase regards her carefully. “Of course you’d remember that detail, though few people do. In the end it means nothing.” She laughs abruptly. “That’s what accomplices are for.”

  “Well, we won’t keep you,” says Elzada, consulting her watch. “It’s one minute after five, and there’s no getting around the government. We’ve mailed our postcard, and now it’s home to our hotel. My friend Lois here has sore feet,” she adds, “and I’m in the middle of an excellent whodunit.”

  The postmistress scowls. “So you’re a mystery buff.”

  “Ngaio Marsh is my great weakness. Have you a weakness, Miss Chase?”

  The postmistress looks surprised. She picks a piece of lint from her sleeve and says coolly, “I’m a reader of romances.”

  The rain has stopped and the air is almost chilly as they make their way back to the hotel. Lois leans heavily on Elzada’s arm. “I know you’re pleased,” she says. “I think you’ve got another piece of the puzzle. What is it, Elzie?”

  “Did you notice I mentioned Mr. Dunhill by name?”

  “Yes, you said, ‘on the evening Mr. Dunhill’s body disappeared. ’ ”

  “That’s right. And our postmistress didn’t question the fact that it was Dunhill.”

  “Why should she? You don’t either.”

  “Ah, but everyone else in the village does. Because now they know the skeleton in Emery’s garage has a bullet hole in the base of the skull, which isn’t consistent with the fact that Lowell Dunhill drowned in the river.”

  “But he didn’t!” cries Lois. “We know that!”

  “Yes, but Edith Chase shouldn’t know that, should she? Only you and I and Emery and Amadeo knew it. And now Gavia Immer. How does Edith Chase know?”

  They’ve reached the steps of the hotel, and looking up at the impressive edifice Elzada says, “I must admit, malicious intent is something for which the study of plants has left me unprepared. Every year I suggest to my department a course in plant psychopathology, a study of all the ways a good plant can go bad. Don’t you think it would inject a bit of humor into poor old academia and expand some minds in the process? Everyone knows the Venus flytrap, Loie, but what about the other villains that sting and paralyze their pollinators or trap them in goo? And parasites are always scheming to alter the behavior of their host. Who’s to say a mild-mannered currant bush might not suddenly sprout horns and a tail, or a cliff rose turn inky black and venomous?”

  “Oh come, Elzie,” Lois protests. “That’s fiction, not science.”

  “And don’t you think mutation narrows the gap between the two?”

  They climb the steps and Elzada says, “Have you ever noticed there’s not a guest room in this hotel that looks out over the canyon?”

  “How very odd.”

  “It was designed that way, to get people out of their rooms.”

  The Monarch Census

  Oliver Hedquist is losing patience with his brother-in-law, Morris. First the bee sting, then a series of irregular bowel movements have kept the man in bed—Oliver’s bed—for three days, and each day he insists that in one more he’ll be fit to go ‘awandering,’ as he calls it. Meanwhile the Cyllopsis pyracmon nabokovi are three days closer to their inevitable mortal fates and he, Oliver Hedquist, hasn’t had the opportunity to wrap his net around a single one of them.

  He is confident there is a solution. After a light supper of chipped beef on toast, he retreats to his study and sits before his old friend, his desk, drumming his fingers on the ink-stained oak. While there is no real reason to wait for Morris’s recovery, he feels obligated to honor his brother-in-law’s interest, feigned or not, in joining the outing to Santa Maria Spring. Yet he gets the distinct feeling that the man, having gone to bed, may never get up again. An inconvenience, for one thing, as it forces Oliver to sleep on the living room sofa, a faithful old relic to be sure, but uncomfortable as the day is long. He is quite sure Morris has no idea what torture it is to an entomologist to note the passing of each summer day—each summer hour—in which no attempt is made to capture invertebrates. Morris’s line of business is different in that way. Any day is a good day for life insurance.

  Perhaps Dotty should speak
to him. Or Jane. No, not Jane. There seems to be too much freight in the married situation at the moment. No need to add a boxcar carrying a circus elephant. Oliver himself would give the man a good talking to, but he doesn’t want to excite ugly feelings between them. He’s a houseguest after all, and Dotty’s only brother, and Jane’s husband. Jane is a houseguest too, he realizes, though he hasn’t thought of her in those terms since the day she came to roost in the spare bedroom.

  The clamor of the telephone interrupts his thoughts. Dotty knocks on his door and pokes her head in. “It’s for you, Oliver. Good heavens, why are you sitting in the dark?”

  “It’s no more dark in here than I’m General Dwight D. Eisenhower,” he replies.

  “That woman,” she snorts, “has the most childish hair.”

  “What woman?”

  “That Mamie Eisenhower, his wife. Now come to the telephone, please. It’s his excellency, Dr. Bryant.”

  In the eleven years he’s served as superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, H. C. Bryant has never learned to be comfortable with the wives. Oliver suspects he’s cowed by their efficiency, as are so many of his sex. He himself has often wondered why Ethyl Schellbach isn’t running the park. He’s had more than a few frank talks with Ethyl, and recently become aware of her great gift for managing information. She’s masterful at putting one at ease at times when one should be most alarmed. Besides, with Ethyl running the park, H. C. would be free to pursue his very worthwhile avocation: chasing butterflies.

  He lifts the receiver and Bryant cuts to the heart of the matter, bypassing pleasantries. He’d like to borrow one man and one net for a week or two of training, starting immediately. Could Hedquist recommend an individual interested in the monarch census, preferably a mature volunteer?

  “Must this individual be experienced?” asks Oliver.

  “No no!” says Bryant cheerfully. “Absolutely no experience necessary. He’ll have all the training he needs by census time. That’s why we start early. It would be useful, however, if he knew how to make his own lunch and that kind of thing. So many of our older volunteers have been undertrained, domes tically, and to be away from their wives for regular stretches of time . . . Well, frankly, it does them good, Hedquist, but when it comes to foraging and all that . . .”