Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  “Anyway,” he said, brighter, “we might yet have a chance to meet up at Gothic.”

  “Really?” Noni’s magnetic eyes and lips flickered at the news.

  “Well, it’s a long shot, but maybe. Winchester himself goes there most years, you know; he and Jane have a cabin near the Freulichs’. He’s said I might be able to come out too, if my project is well in hand and relates at all to the habitats out there. And if I have some grant support and the committee’s blessing. Lots of ifs.”

  “Great, James! But what project could you do out there?”

  “It’s not in hand. But, relevantly, I have to go feed the roaches now. Want to come? You never have, you know.”

  “Um. Well, sure, why not? Lovely encore to a lovely evening.”

  “Now who’s sarcastic? But, good! You’ll love ’em, believe me.”

  Maples dangled their yellow tassels in the fresh spring air as the couple walked up Prospect Avenue, passed a walled cemetery of great age, and moved on toward the lab. Perhaps that May air enhanced the scent of Noni’s Polynesian hair, but Mead was intoxicated by it. Yet as they arrived outside the roach room, its own odor reasserted itself, and Noni’s wrinkled nose seconded the impression. She gritted her teeth as Mead opened and closed the heavy outer door. “It’s so dark, James—can we have a light on?”

  “No—whatever you do, don’t touch the light switch! That would wreck the photoperiod and phototaxis experiments we have in progress, and I would be very unpopular. Here, we have to use this darkroom safety light for the roach work. I could have fed them by daylight, but as you know, I’m observing their nocturnal activity. Well, here they are. Noni, meet my friends. Roaches, this is Noni.”

  “Oh, James—I mean—God . . . I knew they were big, but . . .” Noni stepped back half a step. “They are vast!”

  “Big bugs,” Mead concurred. “Except that as George insists, they are not bugs, which are strictly only members of the order Heteroptera. They’re big blattids.” He pulled back the lid of one container, and a score of two-inch mega-roaches scuttled about the cage. “But finally,” he said, “rather mouselike and kind of cute. Imagine the sheen of soft pelage instead of hard chitin, and you have a lovable little furry instead of a hateful brown bug. Nor are they cockroaches . . .”

  “Oh, James, I know all that . . . don’t forget, I’ve taken Winchester’s entomology class too. I just managed to be absent for the roach room field trips.”

  “All the better that you’re doing it now, then, with your own personal guide. So you probably also know that roaches do little actual harm, serve as powerful research subjects, have survived many millions of years of evolution virtually unchanged, and therefore may be regarded as some of earth’s most successful creatures.”

  “You’ve learned that spiel well, James. Has the prof tested you on it?”

  “Nah, just practicing for the dreaded Griffin. But you know, these animals have personalities all their own. I think the great size of Blaberus giganteus just makes it easier to relate to them one on one, you know?”

  “Mmmm. I see what you mean . . . sorta. I think I could really warm up to these guys. It’s just the combination of their heft and all those scratching tarsi and rustling wings against the plastic. That, and the smell. Does that get to you?”

  “To paraphrase George, ‘what smell?’ No, I forget about it. But I finally figured out what it reminds me of.”

  “Do tell! For my part, I get notes of rotten apple and a tincture of burnt oatmeal.”

  “Not far off. When I was a boy, my folks used to take my brothers and me to Denver for the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo. I remember that when we got near the Denver Coliseum, there was a red-and-white-checked grain tower for the Ralston Purina Company. The malty, sort of molasses-and-sawdust smell that came out of there, mixing with the manure reek of the stockyards across the tracks, made a perfume not entirely unlike that of our friends here. Now, every time I get a whiff, I see that checkerboard dog food tower in my mind’s eye.”

  “Nice. So evocative, smells.” Mead nudged her hair with his nose. “So,” she asked, “have you convinced His Nemesisness yet that roaches are peachy?”

  “Heck, no. I’d love to lure him in here to see what I’m doing with them, and then leave and shut the door. But I’ll never get him anywhere near.”

  “Cruel, but suitable. Nice to imagine, anyway.”

  “The experiments, actually, are going better than I expected. The roaches are very tractable and easily observed.”

  “Do you think there’s a thesis in it? And are there big roaches in Colorado?”

  “A double negatory on that, Good Buddy, as the truckers say. And another: no grant money in sight. Besides, I want to get out of the lab and into the habitat. I’m really a field man, you know.”

  “As a confirmed field woman, I surely see your point. In fact, it is my earnest hope that when we are both out, standing in our respective fields, we will be able to find a soft, flat meadow in between—with a few bushes for cover.”

  Mead yaffled and squirmed. “Ooh, such a thought,” he said, and then, “but in the meantime, I’ll make do trysting with my sweet nocturnal charges. However, a sad task looms.”

  “What’s that?” Noni too wriggled at the imagery she had wrought, and she grew eager to trade the roach room for her bedroom in Branford College.

  “See this cageful? They’ve gotta be liquidated, having been spoiled for other trials by my experiments. We need the room.”

  “Sad! That won’t be easy for you, with the none-too-scientific attachment you’ve made. Can’t they at least be pickled for dissection in 101?”

  “Maybe, but there’s quite an overstock already. I keep trying to think of a way to keep them from being killed to no purpose. I suppose I could send them home to Mom.”

  “Just to lighten the relationship—yes, that should help. Well, whatever you do, just don’t bring them to bed, okay? A sexy itinerant is one thing, and roaches are fine in their place, which is here, but . . .”

  “No worry there, love. I’ve no intention of sharing you with either the esteemed blattids or that randy rambler tonight. And, having raised the question yourself, and it being late late late, how about relieving the loneliness in my tower tonight? You’ve never yet graced my chilly chamber, so howzabout one more first?”

  “Well . . . will you read me to sleep with your research notes?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then.”

  15

  Groans and sighs escaped from the bleak stairwell of Kline Tower as Mead ascended toward Frank Griffin’s lair, skipping the elevator to delay the inevitable. All sides of all floors looked alike but for different cartoons, calligraphed nameplates, and taped-up graven images of idols affixed to brick walls and windows of TAs’ doors in a vain attempt to humanize the place. Only the growth chambers, with their green shades, looked alive, and those were questionable, containing mostly tobacco plants. “Handy subjects for research,” mumbled the investigators, cashing their grant checks from Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds. Mead, no smoker, sneered, then remembered a weekend outing with Noni when he’d admired the handsome long barns up the Connecticut River valley. Upon learning that they existed for drying a premium local tobacco crop used for cigar wrappers, he’d put it down to one more of life’s little paradoxes. Here was another: how architects designing a house for the study of life could come up with such a lifeless pile as this.

  He reached 1107 and knocked. A fuzzy-headed, skinny technician of no obvious gender or social graces turned on its stool, asked, “Um?” then pointed to an inner chamber. James echoed “Um” and went in. Frank Griffin didn’t rise. Reclined in a vinyl-covered swivel chair, he rotated several degrees toward the door in sole recognition of Mead’s arrival. His round, sparsely haired brow, fiercely dilating nostrils, and fixed sneer (or was it a leer?) greeted the visitor as a pit bull might welcome a kitten.

  Pointing
with his cranial crest, the don indicated a hard seat for the young scholar. “Mead,” he said; just “Mead.” James felt apprehension, but he was no more intimidated than a bull by a rodeo clown, and in fact his opinion of the grants committee chairman dropped even lower, given his absence of common manners. Over the next few minutes that opinion rose to “clever fellow” and dropped to “conceited bigot,” making several stops along the way as Griffin entered his soliloquy (you couldn’t call it a conversation) into the afternoon’s wilting archive.

  “So you see, Mead, I haven’t published all these papers and symposia, garnered my grants, and achieved my rank by playing nursemaid to nature boys and girls” (bloated ass, Mead thought). “I know you think I am on your case, but I assure you, I bear you no ill will. Believe me, Mead—if you want to act as chambermaid to those disgusting vermin for the rest of your academic career, such as it is, that’s your concern. But I genuinely have your scientific future in mind, as well as the reputation of the Yale biology degree, when I say that you’d do well to fit into the program, stick to the mold, and toe the course” (malapropping twit). “Count on this: you’ll thank me for it in the end.”

  “How do you mean, sir?”

  “I mean this: stay in New Haven this summer. Demonstrate your idea of rigor. Do it with those foul cockroaches if you must—”

  “Not cockroaches, Professor. They’re—”

  “Bloody bugs! But do it. If you succeed in modest measure, and if you pass your qualifying exams next fall, then maybe—may-be—we’ll talk about funds for a turkey trot out to that putative ‘laboratory,’ that shabby set for a spaghetti western, that radicals’ playpen, next summer. Or I might be able to find you a suitable, if minor, project in my laboratory” (that’ll be the goddamned day that I die). “Of course, if I attain the chairmanship, I’ll have to drop your committee” (or drop dead, I don’t care, just get off).

  “Thank you anyway, Professor” (all to hell). “But were you aware that twenty percent of the papers in the latest issue of Evolution stemmed from research performed at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory?”

  “What, that nature lovers’ tabloid? I am not impressed, Mr. Mead. Nor, when one of its chief contributors, who does so-called research on flutterbies at your beloved Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory—a slander on the word!—appears on my television set and espouses doomsday, am I impressed. Some scientist! He hasn’t even enough faith in science to trust it to solve his pet ‘population problem’!”

  “But have you actually read Professor Freulich’s papers, or his book? And wasn’t it Thomas Malthus’s paper on population growth that inspired both Wallace and Darwin, independently, to come up with the mechanism of natural selection?”

  “Enough! I have papers to write, a lecture to prepare, a grants committee meeting, and serious students to advise, who know a ‘mechanism’ when they see one and could run hoops around any ecologist over in Osborn when it comes to natural selection. You butterfly boys are all alike—pinko sentimentalists. You’d rather seize the headlines, scare the populace, wreck the economy, and play ringmaster to roaches than do any useful biology.”

  Mead detected a shudder at the word roaches.

  “And I suggest that you, Mead, have larger lacunae in your scientific reading than I! Damned impertinent of you to suggest otherwise.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Insupportable! Even in these days of thugs and sluts in the colleges and declining standards of admission” (elitist conehead) “your presence here amazes me. Must’ve been some sort of regional recruitment quota. Oh, aren’t you from the border country? Maybe your mother is a Mexican” (did he really say that?). “And let me tell you about affirmative action . . .”

  Mead didn’t want to hear it, and he was running out of epithets, let alone the patience for being looked through and not heard. “Excuse me, sir,” (you scum-sucking toad—no, toads are cool—you scum-sucking scumbag) “I have a lecture at three. But I wish you would reconsider. I think a summer’s hard work at Gothic would greatly enhance my studies.”

  “Out, Mead.”

  “At least I’d like to invite you to visit the roach colony one of these evenings and see for yourself what we’re doing with them.”

  Griffin went pale.

  “Could you come up this evening? At about seven the larger males are at their most active, the glossy females are feeding, and the soft white nymphs are prolific these days. In fact, Professor Winchester considers our insects to be at their aesthetic best at this season.”

  “OUT! Come see me in September with manuscript in hand, significant statistics, specimen slides and SEM images, and a realistic plan for adequate research that will not unduly stretch your meager gifts . . . or else you can return to Arizona, where I am sure Geronimo U. would welcome your insolence, indolence, and insects. I hear they eat grasshoppers out there.”

  “New Mexico,” Mead muttered as he shut the door behind him, knowing it would leave Griffin’s room, its air conditioner fritzed, even hotter than he’d found it. He rode the elevator down, walked out of the banklike lobby and onto the Science Hill lawn. For some distance he pounded the turf, imagining Griffin beneath his heels with every step. Then he walked up to a particularly derivative gargoyle on the physics hall and snorted into its astonished face: “Goddamned entomophobic dork!”

  Mead headed over to the insect lab in search of Steve Manton, a forestry grad student from New Jersey who had fallen in love with insects. Mead knew that Steve would be wrapping up a lab practical exam. From halfway down the hall he heard Winchester’s sonorous voice. As Mead entered the lab, the prof was remarking on Manton’s mounting of a moth.

  “I can see, Mr. Manton,” he said, “that you have chosen to spread this noctuid in the ventral position. That is an interesting and unusual approach. I assume you’ve done so in order to more easily examine the tibial tufts of the tarsi?”

  “Uhhhh . . .” said Manton. “Oh God . . . you mean I mounted this thing upside down?” He hadn’t intended to set the specimen topsy-turvy, of that Mead was sure. Winchester knew it too, but there was none but the gentlest reproach in his quip. Manton heard only support. What a difference from Griffin, Mead thought as he stood in the doorway unobserved. It made him grateful all over again to be at Yale with Winchester.

  “Well, that wraps it up, Steve. You pass. Extra points for originality. What are your plans for the summer?”

  “Um, I don’t know yet, Professor W.” Manton spoke slowly, overenunciating. “I should help my dad. What? Oh, he’s a distributor for Schaefer. You’d think I could get a deal on the beer for my buddies, but it never worked out that way. There’s work for me if I want it, though.”

  “But?”

  “Well, you’ve got me pretty turned on to bugs.”

  “Oh, you have a particular fondness for the Heteroptera?”

  “And all the others. Anyway, too late, you already said I passed.”

  “I wish I could get you an assistant curatorship in the museum,” Winchester mused, ever alert for a willing preparer. “So many specimens . . . But I’ve got funding for only one over the summer, and James has that nailed down.”

  “That’s okay, Prof, thanks anyway. Jersey City’s not so bad.” Manton smiled wistfully at the thought, his broad, plastic mouth spreading so as to outstretch his sparse beginner’s beard.

  “Maybe I could take you on in the museum next fall,” Winchester continued. “If, that is, you would be amenable to suppressing your experimental leanings and to set Lepidoptera in the conventional manner.”

  Mead gave himself away with a laugh.

  “Eavesdropping, James? We have no secrets here, unless it’s Mr. Manton’s innovation.”

  “Hey, Jimbo, how ya doin’? Did you bring the beer?”

  “Heck, no—that’s supposed to be your department. Work on your dad, will you? But maybe I should have. It might help me forget a certain disagreeable figure whose name b
egins in Grif and ends in fin and goes nowhere nice in between.”

  “I’m sorry about that, James,” Winchester said.

  “What, the beer?”

  “No, the bear. I feared he would turn you down for support. I really had hoped to have you at Gothic this summer. Next year, perhaps, if our NSF grant comes through. You’ll enjoy it even more after a summer in balmy New Haven.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Remember, Charles Darwin was forced to remain in Plymouth harbor for months before the Beagle finally set sail on December 27, and even then it got stuck on a rock in the bay. His Griffin was the Irish Sea in winter. But he waited it out—and look what happened.” Winchester’s ginger-and-silver beard twitched at the great conclusion, and his blue eyes shone, as they did every time he spoke of Darwin.

  “Great,” James said. “But somehow ‘Connecticut roaches’ doesn’t have the same ring as ‘Galapagos finches.’ Are there any roaches there, by the way?”

  “Not as big as the tortoises. Yes, I suppose my little Darwinian allegory offers little solace for you, especially with Noni going to Gothic.”

  “I didn’t know you knew we were dating,” said Mead.

  Manton snorted.

  “Have you ever seen your face in her presence?” asked Winchester. “Or hers in yours? Lampyrids in your eyes.”

  Manton chuckled again at the reference to fireflies, then snatched it back when Mead failed to laugh.

  “Darwin suffered heart palpitations when confined to port for so long,” said George. “I hope that doesn’t happen to you, James!” Winchester was in a witty mood; it must have been the belly-up miller moth. “And remember,” he went on, his eyes wider, brighter, “even he had trouble living fully in the present toward the end of the Beagle junket. He couldn’t keep his mind off Shropshire and his beloved cousin and fiancée.”