Code Red

by Janie Chodosh

  Clem gets up, but I stay seated. “Actually, I have one more thing I’d like to ask.”

  She checks her watch with a pointed sigh. “Okay, but it’ll have to be short.”

  “I’m looking for someone who’s missing.”

  She laughs. “UpsideDown isn’t in the business of locating missing persons. I’m not sure I can help you there.”

  “I’m looking for a guy named Rudy,” I say, ignoring her. “He works for a farmer named Ernie Fuentes. I think you know him.” Holly glances from Clem to me, raised eyebrows. “I’m a friend of his girlfriend’s. He disappeared. You were one of the last people to see him Saturday night, so I thought you might know something about where he is.”

  “I have no idea where he is,” she says, folding her arms. “We had a business meeting the other night. What he did after that has nothing to do with me. Maybe he took a trip. I have no idea. Now, it’s late. I really do have to get to work.” This time she walks to the door and holds it open. As we’re leaving, she gives a small, ironic smile and says, “Good luck with your school paper.” I hear the quotations around “school paper” in her voice.

  “What do you think?” Clem asks once she’s closed the door and we’re alone on the concrete.

  “About Holly or about my boss?”

  “Both.”

  “I think Holly knows something, and I think I have some investigating to do.”

  Twenty

  When I get to work I hunt up Esha and find her armed with a stack of papers at the copy machine. I’m embarrassed about the personal info dump yesterday, but I still have the question about jimson weed. If I keep the question professional, about plants, I don’t have to tell her my reason for asking.

  “Hey, can I ask you a question?” I say. She nods, distracted by her copying task, which is perfect since maybe distraction means she won’t wonder why I’m asking about liquid gold. “Jonah told me that you studied Brugmansia, and he told me about Dr. Richmond sequencing the plant, so I thought you might have an answer to something I’ve been wondering.”

  “I’ll do my best.” She puts a paper on the glass without looking at me. Her focus on this other task gives me confidence to go on.

  “I found out about the plant jimson weed, and how it’s really similar to Brugmansia, and that it grows all over the place here, so do you think someone could be using jimson weed to make liquid gold?” I hold my breath, hoping she won’t ask why I want to know.

  “Why do you want to know that?” she asks turning from the copier to me.

  Crap. “The police officer I talked to the night Mari went to the hospital said that liquid gold is coming in cheaper now,” I say with a sigh. “And they don’t know why because it used to be so expensive and—”

  “I can understand why you’re worried about all of this with what happened to your sister,” she interrupts. “But, Faith, this really isn’t something for you to be involved with. This is a police matter.”

  “I know,” I say quickly. “And I’ll leave it for the police. I’m just really curious about this one thing and then I’ll let it go. I promise.”

  Something flitters across her face, an emotion I can’t read. Interest? Curiosity? Or maybe it’s disgust. Maybe she knows I’m a junkie’s kid—easy information to find out about me with everything that happened to my mom. Now I’m worried she thinks I’m doing drugs.

  “It’s possible,” she says before I can assure her I’m not. She pushes the copy button and the machine whirs into action. “Like you said, the plants are very similar. They’re both in the nightshade family, but they’re in a different genus, so even though they both have toxic alkaloids, there’d be a lot of variation. Still, I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  I quickly thank her, not wanting to prolong the topic, and am about to scurry off when she surprises me and says, “I was telling Sonya what a fast learner you are and how you’d like to go and see the GMO chiles, get a feel for the project. She’s heading up there this afternoon. I think you’re far enough ahead with lab work to spend a day in the field. It’s a gorgeous day, too. What do you think?”

  “Sure,” I say, relieved at the change of topic and also eager to go up to Ernie’s farm and see if I can find anything out about Rudy. Not just that, but Holly’s perspective on GMOs gives me a few questions that I can ask Dr. Richmond while we’re driving. The more I learn, the more confused I get. Every scientist has some angle, an interest or a starting point, so does that mean everyone brings a bias with them to whatever research they do? Is there even such a thing as unbiased truth in science? If there is, how do you know when you hear it unless you take the time to study and listen to both sides?

  ***

  After lunch I slide into the passenger seat of Dr. Richmond’s truck. With her strong hands and short hair tucked under a baseball cap, she has the vibe of a woman who could birth a baby in a barn, then leap up to split wood and milk the cows. She drives with aggressive confidence, not swearing or honking at the guy hogging two lanes as Mom would’ve done, or waiting patiently and turning on music to lower the stress level as Aunt T does, but weaving between lanes, slowing for nobody.

  “So I have a question,” I say, deciding not to waste any time and diving right into what Holly told me.

  “I have an answer,” Dr. Richmond answers lightly.

  “I was talking to Holly Redding at UpsideDown! this morning.” Dr. Richmond’s gaze slides over to me when I mention Holly’s name. “She told me that GMO corn and soybeans are directly responsible for the decline of monarch butterflies. I was wondering what you think.”

  “I’m not sure that Holly and I agree on this issue or any issues, for that matter, concerning GMOs,” she replies, as she taps the blinker and cuts a quick left onto a smaller road. “Certainly monarchs are declining, and we need to find a solution. There’s no debate about that, but their habitat is declining too, and the fact is their population has been going down for fifty years, since long before the introduction of GM crops. Farming is farming, and milkweed, unfortunately, is a weed. In traditional agriculture, herbicides have always been used and, quite honestly, the ones used before Glyphosate were a lot more toxic.” She stops at a red light and taps a ragged fingernail on the steering wheel. “I think the solution to the monarch situation isn’t to banish GMOs, as many would suggest, but to build corridors of milkweed and to conserve habitat.”

  “And what about the GMO chile?” I ask as the light changes and she starts up again. “Holly said you’re not going to undo three billion years of evolution and think you’re going to create something that can fool an insect.”

  “Holly might have a lot of opinions, but I’ve been studying this plant for a long time.” She keeps the tone professional, but I hear the bite in her voice.

  “So how does it work?” I ask, realizing that the inner-workings of the technology, the actual genetic basis of the engineering, are what fascinate me most.

  “The chile is basically a chemical factory—the hot taste and the color are two molecules you’re familiar with. Nowadays we can potentially trick the plant into making many different molecules.”

  “And that’s what you’ve done?” I ask as we pass a sprawling casino set against red rock cliffs. “Trick the plant?”

  “In terms of stopping the beet leafhopper, I believe so, yes. I found one biological pathway that was similar to a pathway that I knew about in another plant. I’ve spent the last two years working on the chile, adding a few biochemical steps, so I could get the plant to make a molecule that’s similar to a known family of insecticides. The end product of that pathway stands a good chance of being a candidate to kill this nasty insect. The chiles have already passed approval from the EPA and USDA. We’re in the final stages of FDA testing.”

  I think of Dr. Richmond losing funding and Holly’s implications that she could cut corners. I shouldn’t bring it up, but I do anyway
. “I heard you lost some funding. Will that affect the project?”

  “Of course!” she says sharply. “The timing is terrible. You have no idea how much the FDA testing cost us. But I’m not just a scientist, Faith. I’m a businesswoman. And businesswomen grow their businesses. SCPG is going to survive and I’m going to get this product to market. I’ll work as hard as I need to and do whatever it takes. I won’t let my people down.” She swerves to miss an ambitious dog, whose chase-and-catch search instinct recognizes the moving vehicle as prey.

  Red hills marked by mounds of piñon and juniper form a backdrop to the twisting road and towering cottonwood trees. I roll down the window and inhale the washed, clean scent of the air, the sweet scent of sage. We take a left onto a dirt road and drive down a long driveway bordered by irrigated fields. Green chiles dangle off rows of knee-high plants. A man wearing a blue baseball cap and jeans who’s been kneeling in one of the rows stands up and waves.

  Dr. Richmond returns the wave and pulls up in front of a small house on the far side of one of the fields. The blue-capped guy and a deliriously happy, oddly mismatched mutt—ears like a beagle, legs like a corgi (Borgi? Ceagle?)—come to the car to greet us.

  I’d say hello, but I’m too busy noticing something else.

  Two of the fields are separated from the rest by barbed wire, and standing at the edge of the barbed wire is a guy whose neck makes the cottonwood trunks look like twigs. Strapped around his woody torso is a gun.

  Blue Cap follows my gaze. “Don’t mind him,” he tells me. “You can never be too careful.” (Of what, he doesn’t say.) And then, as if an armed man patrolling a chile field is as normal as a tractor in a sea of Midwestern wheat, he smiles and says, “I’m Ernie. Welcome to my farm.”

  Twenty-one

  “So do all the farmers around here have guards or are you special?” I ask, safely hunkered in the truck while Dr. Richmond gets out.

  Ernie takes off his cap and mops his brow with the back of his hand. “No,” he says, with a little laugh. “I guess I’m special.”

  I don’t find this answer exactly comforting. Who exactly is this Farmer Ernie guy, living miles from the nearest town with an armed guard patrolling his fields? Does he run some kind of survivalist cult? Is there a coven of women and children bunkered down somewhere, believing he’s the messiah? Are they all going to drink the Kool-Aid?

  I study the slump of Ernie’s shoulders as he leans one hand on the truck and talks to Dr. Richmond. He doesn’t look like the crazy cult type, but then again people never look crazy until after they do something crazy, like go on a shooting spree at a mall and we all say we should’ve known; he had that look. But this guy, he just looks old. Tired. Like he really loves his dog. I decide it’s safe to untether myself from the truck.

  I step outside and shield my eyes. There’s a retina-burning brightness to the sun, a vapor-wicking quality to the air. I lick my lips, but the breeze quickly steals even this tiny bit of moisture, and almost instantly, I feel like a dried-out husk of some formerly juicy fruit. I mosey to the back of the truck where Dr. Richmond and Ernie, accompanied by Happy Mutt, are dragging out boots and boxes.

  “Why don’t you start off with Ernie?” she says to me, apparently used to the whole guard thing, as she slips off her sandals and sticks her bare feet into the rubber boots with a succulent slurping sound. “He’ll give you a tour of the farm. I’ll get started with my work in the field, and we can meet back here in a little while.”

  “Sure,” I say, focusing back on my actual reason for coming—so I could talk to Ernie and see if he knows anything about Rudy.

  As Dr. Richmond heads off to the fields, Ernie turns to me. “Sonya says you want to know about the chiles and her work up here,” he says, that same singsong quality in his speech I’ve heard in locals since arriving in New Mexico, drawn-out vowels and a rise on last syllables as if every sentence is a question.

  I shove my hands in my pockets. As I watch Dr. Richmond disappear into the field, I realize it’s not only Rudy I want to know about. It’s this whole GMO chile thing. Everywhere I turn, someone has something to say about it. I’ll bet Ernie has an opinion, too. “So, how’d Dr. Richmond choose your farm for her project?”

  “Nobody else wanted her,” he says with a shrug and starts to walk. I follow him, along with Happy Mutt, who trots beside us with a dangling tongue and wagging tail.

  “But you agreed? Why?” I ask as we pass an acequia, a narrow irrigation ditch, and I listen to birds arguing in a tree, the rumble of distant thunder. It’s amazing what sky can do for land, changing the colors of the hills from pink to brown to orange with only the clouds as a filter.

  “As a service to all the farmers around here. Everyone’s worried. Farming isn’t what it used to be.” He keeps his eyes on the fields, but his gaze has a distant unfocused look. “It’s not easy to make a living anymore, and we’ve been farming these chiles in my family for three generations.” He stops in the shade of a cottonwood tree that shelters a small adobe house from the heat. I swat a fly from my arm. “Our relationship with food’s important, no? It’s our Earth. We have to treat it with respect. I want my workers to be treated with respect, too, but it’s not that easy. I can’t pay them good anymore. I don’t like anybody to go home after working on a farm and not feed their family.” He pauses and waves to a man out in the field dressed in a long-sleeved cotton shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. The man waves back. They shout a few words in Spanish that make Ernie shake his head, then he starts talking to me again. “We used to have jobs for about two thousand people in this valley. Those numbers have dropped way down.”

  “What happened? Why’d those jobs disappear?” I ask as a herd of tiny insects gang up on my eyes.

  “Lots of reasons. There’s a virus that hurts the chile plants and brings down the yield. There’s nematodes. Root borers. And the worst of all, the leafhoppers. They can destroy a harvest in a few days, and not even the chemicals will kill them anymore. These chiles, they taste good even to bugs.”

  “So Dr. Richmond came to you and you trusted her? It sounds like a lot of other people didn’t,” I say, and eradicate a colony of insects with a swat of my hand, hopefully the chile eating kind.

  “I guess I’m not a lot of people, then, cause I figured I had to listen. What if she could save the chile? We could help families. Help the valley.” He sighs and gazes out over his fields. “But not everyone sees it that way. They say I’m making a super chile. What do they call it, a frank chile?”

  “Frankenfood chile.” I hold out my arms straight and walk like the Frankenstein monster, which gets a laugh out of Ernie. “Who doesn’t see it your way?”

  He wipes his brow again, streaking dirt across his forehead. “Lots of people. Some farmers. Some people in town. They say GMOs are bad, but I’m not trying to get those big companies out here to do whatever they do with their corn and the soybeans. I’m just trying to save my farm, help the people, you know?” A trickle of sweat traces a line down Ernie’s cheekbone. “We don’t all have to agree. We had a meeting. I said ‘Don’t be afraid of science.’ Some people could be reasoned with, others…” He stops talking and leans a hand against a tree.

  “Others what?” I press.

  “Others made threats.” He looks toward the house. I follow his gaze. A curtain flutters in the breeze. For a second I think I see a face in the window, but I blink and whoever was there is gone.

  “Who made the threats?” I say, keeping my eye on the house. “Other farmers?”

  Ernie twists a red bandanna in his hands and he picks up the pace. “This woman, Holly.”

  “Holly Redding?” I blurt, looking away from the house and back at Ernie. “Were there threats against you?”

  “She said she’d destroy our plants to get rid of our GMOs.” He looks nervous, as if somebody’s watching, listening in on what he says. “I told Doc about it,
and she said we needed to keep our fields safe. She took the threats serious. Now she pays to have a guard here. I wasn’t so sure at first. He makes some of the guys nervous, but her threats kept coming and I’ve gotta admit, I sleep better at night.”

  As we walk in Dr. Richmond’s direction, my mind reels—Holly’s threats, the guard, Rudy’s disappearance, the possibility he’s dealing liquid gold. Is there a connection between these things? I glance back at the house again and have the distinct feeling of being watched. Am I just paranoid, I wonder, picking up my pace, or is someone really there?

  When we reach the gate of Dr. Richmond’s test fields, Ernie stops. “Well,” he says, “that’s the tour. Would you like some lemonade?”

  I’m parched enough to guzzle the Rio Grande, but before anything else distracts me from asking about Rudy, I tell Ernie I have a question. “It’s about someone who works for you,” I say. “His name is Rudy. He seems to have vanished. I know his girlfriend. She’s worried sick. Have you seen him?”

  “Haven’t seen him for days,” Ernie says, digging his toe into the dirt.

  “Do you know where he might be?”

  “No idea.”

  “Okay,” I say, trying not to let it show how frustrated I am. “Did you know Holly came to his house and threatened him the night before he disappeared?”

  Ernie looks up for a second, and then down again. “Nope.”

  He tosses out the cactus of answers, all thorns and needles, no trace of his earlier softness. I can practically pluck the prickles from his words. I ask another question about Rudy, but instead of answering, he says, “How about that lemonade now?”

  He leads me through the gate and calls to the guard, a tall guy with pale-gray eyes, asking him to bring the drinks. The guard introduces himself as Tom and brings us each one of those giant Mickey Dees freebees with some Pixar character on it—cups that make him seem much less intimidating. We share the first lemonade, then another, and a third, all of which I gulp down.