Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  She wondered how much he knew of her miserable notoriety, the naked-ish picture, the suicide business. Her days swung between fury and humiliation, tethered on nights of permanent anxiety, as she waited for Cub to find out. She envisioned crash landings everywhere. Dr. Byron might be taking her on as a pity case. Or even as some kind of leverage against the family's logging plan. The lease he'd signed for this lab space gave Bear some breathing room, financially, and Dellarobia knew he and Hester were involved in some renegotiations with Money Tree. It was possible they could return the advance money and rescind the contract. They'd been given until March to come to terms. But as long as Bear could wipe out these scientists' reason for being here with a stroke of heavy machinery, she didn't trust him. That might be just the sucker punch that would make him feel big in this town again. And Hester wouldn't hold with that. In Dellarobia's in-law career she had never seen so much light between those two.

  "How much science in your background?" Dr. Byron asked.

  "Science?" She considered this. "None? Well, biology and stuff. High school."

  He looked surprised. "No college?"

  "No college. Sorry." She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like sunburn, or just kept blazing. She watched him fill in more lines on his form without comment. He didn't even look up at her. She tried not to flinch with each of Pete's explosive blasts overhead, like repeating rifle shots. Pete was using a construction-grade staple gun to secure giant sheets of plastic over every inch of the walls, for the sake of creating cleanable surfaces. She could see the domestic advantages of plastic sheeting, at least until her kids were grown. Now he was stretching it even across the rough wooden beams of the ceiling.

  "Even the ceiling gets covered?" she asked quietly.

  Dr. Byron's eyes went upward and then down again, like a man watching a pop-up fly ball. "There's no telling what could fall out of that ceiling," he said. "The number-one enemy of everything is dust."

  She'd heard theories in her time regarding the number-one enemy of everything, ranging from Osama bin Laden to premarital sex. The dust theory she liked. Here was a danger she seemed situated to control. Before the men unpacked their crates she had attacked the cement floor with practiced vigor using an industrial mop bucket they'd bought at the Walmart in Cleary, along with the plastic sheeting. And back before they arrived she'd spent a Sunday morning chipping out fossilized manure with a screwdriver and flat-bottomed shovel. She'd like to see some college ho do that.

  When Dr. Byron first mentioned this job on the phone, she'd thought he was posing it as a real possibility. Not the long shot it obviously was. She felt embarrassed now, as if caught out on a foray into the kind of false identity hijinks she and Dovey used to pull off in bars, pretending to work for Jane Goodall and the like. Ovid had changed. Gone away was the man who'd moonwalked at her Christmas party, the man with the eyetooth-wide smile. Replaced by a distracted would-be employer grimacing at her poor credentials. She wondered what had happened to darken his mood in the interim. A death in the family, a fight with his wife. Holidays were notorious for family crackups.

  Whatever the reason, he'd scarcely noticed she was working her tail off in here already, doing the heavy cleaning, to impress him as a volunteer before asking to upgrade her status. He just stood around looking vexed, listing problems in the making. January had taken a turn, the rain had turned to freezing, his instruments were temperamental. How were they going to heat the lab? He worried about controlling the humidity and temperature fluctuations, the flammable fumes. He was uncertain his chemical reagents could be properly stored here. Something called the NMR he decided to scrap altogether, and would have to send those samples back to New Mexico. There was so much to do, he kept saying. Dellarobia missed the man who'd once come to supper and charmed her clever son. She resented his new list of cares, wondering how they stacked up against, say, a foreclosure notice or a car breakdown you walked home from without any hope of repair. In her experience people had worries or they had tons of money, not both.

  "So, no college is a deal-breaker?" she asked. He seemed to have forgotten she was holding her breath here, turning blue. He continued to write for several more seconds. She could not imagine what that was about. He turned a page, looked up.

  "Not a deal-breaker, no. Mainly I'm looking for some maturity in this position."

  "Maturity," she repeated. "Meaning you're looking to hire an old person?"

  He almost smiled. "Responsible, I should have said. When the place is hopping with student volunteers, it can be overwhelming. Sometimes I feel like that old woman in the shoe, you know? How does that one go?"

  "So many children she didn't know what to do, yes sir I do know. Who are these kids, and what all will they be doing?"

  He swatted a hand at the empty room, his momentary lightness gone. "So much, I can't even tell you. Cardenolide fingerprinting maybe, lipid analysis for sure, that's where we'll start. I can train you to do a lot of the routine work on that."

  She felt simultaneous hope and defeat. I can train you to lightbulb candlewax drainpipe. The man was speaking in tongues. "Lipids are food, right? Some kind of fat."

  "Fat, yes. We'll see whether these butterflies fattened up prior to overwintering. Usually they travel light during the migration and then pack away a lot of lipid stores just before they roost for the winter. We want to see if they are behaving as a normal migratory population, even though this is not a normal place for migrants to go. I am also concerned about how their physiology is responding to the cold weather. And we still don't have a full habitat assessment. Monitoring the site, recording all the data from our iButtons. It's a whole lot of busywork."

  Was she hired, then? And did he think she had the faintest idea what he was talking about? Her panic must have been obvious. "Don't worry," he said. "I'm not going to throw you to the lions."

  "Okay," she said slowly, noting that some other placement was implied.

  "We should be getting a lot of help here soon. The college in Cleary will probably send us biology students for internships, and we're tapping other options." He set the clipboard on his knee, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and leaned back, relaxing a little. Those hands, the ultra-long fingers and pale palms, she'd noticed the first time they met. "We'll train these kids and put them on the simple things. Data entry, body counts, doing parasite counts under the scope. But training them all from the ground up, it costs a lot of time, you know? It's time we just don't have."

  "So this position would involve supervising college kids?"

  "Pete and I will handle the internships. Oh, I should mention, other researchers will be coming through. From Cornell and Florida, maybe Australia." She wondered if he could be joking: How many famous scientists would fit in a milking parlor?

  "But I'm talking about the day-to-day, you know?" Dr. Byron went on. "The simple, routine stuff. It means logging a lot of hours. We're looking for some volunteers who can come in after school. High school kids."

  Now she did laugh. "You mean doing science on purpose, on their own time? Good luck with that one. Maybe when it comes out as a video game."

  He clicked his tongue dismissively. "Volunteerism is a very big part of our effort. Monarch Watch, Journey North, these are national networks of kids mostly, with their teachers, doing class projects. Rearing and tagging butterflies, tracking, and so on. They help us plot arrivals and departures, on the Internet." He tilted his head toward Pete. "Probably half my graduate students got their start as kids doing monarch projects."

  "I'm sorry," she said, "but really? These are kids and schoolteachers going outside to study nature stuff?"

  "Tell me, Dellarobia. What did you do in science class?"

  "In high school? Our science teacher was the basketball coach, if you want to know. Coach Bishop. He hated biology about twenty percent more than the kids did. He'd leave the girls doing study sheets while he took the boys to the gym to shoot hoops."

 
"How is that possible?"

  "How? He'd take a vote, usually. 'Who says we shoot hoops today?' Obviously no girl would vote against it. You'd never get another date in your life."

  He seemed doubtful of her story. But it was true, and in Dellarobia's opinion no more far-fetched than the tales he'd told her. Of newborn butterflies, for instance, somehow flying thousands of miles to a place they'd never seen, the land where their forefathers died. Life was just one big fat swarm of kids left to fend for themselves.

  Dr. Byron uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, pressing his hands together between his knees and looking at her. For the first time in this interview he seemed totally present. "Is this typical of high schools in this area, what you are describing?"

  "Well, I only went to the one." She hesitated, reconsidering how much she ought to disclose. She thought of Dovey mocking her ratty T-shirt: Be sure to wear that to your interview. "I had some good teachers," she began again, unconvincingly. "Well, okay, I had one, Mrs. Lake for English. She was about a hundred years old. It's weird, it was like she came from some earlier time when people actually cared. I heard she had a stroke, though. Bless her heart. Probably one too many times hearing some kid conjugate 'bring, brang, brung.' "

  Ovid seemed unamused. "What about math?"

  "Our high school had Math One and Math Two," she said. "Coach Otis, baseball. Math Two was for the kids who were already solid with multiplication."

  His brow wrinkled formidably. "Is this true?"

  "Is that, like, massively insufficient?"

  "Two years of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus, and stats." He rattled this off like a ritual prayer in an alien religion. "Nothing there sounds familiar?"

  "You ought to try that out on Coach Otis. If you want to see a grown man cry."

  Dr. Byron actually seemed agitated. "What are these administrators thinking?" he asked. As if he had a dog in this race, Dellarobia thought. His children, if any, would get started on higher math in some upmarket kindergarten.

  "They're not thinking anything much," she told him. "Sports. That's huge, a kid can shine if he's good at football or baseball. Probably get a job later on in the bank or something like that."

  "Well, but it's criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?"

  "I'd say you're looking at it." She crossed her arms, awaiting Dr. Byron's verdict. Former Feathertown athletes had this town in their hands: the mayor, Jack Stell; Bobby Ogle; Ed Cameron at the bank, with whom she'd pleaded grace on her house loan. In his office that day they'd joked about their semester together in Mrs. Lake's class, which Ed barely passed, and the football squad he led to state semifinals. People liked and trusted such men.

  "Look, Dellarobia, I don't want you to take this personally. But I've been wondering about this. I went to that school. Things were not what I expected."

  "Feathertown High?" She was startled, unable to picture any intersection between Dr. Ovid Byron and local culture. "When?"

  "In December. I wanted to speak with the faculty about getting volunteers in the new semester. It's a great chance for these kids. Exposure to field biology, data analysis, scientific method. If for no other reason, the college resume. But I got nothing. The counselor asked if we were paying minimum wage."

  "Oh, kids in Feathertown wouldn't know college-bound from a hole in the ground. They don't need it for life around here. College is kind of irrelevant."

  His eyes went wide, as if she'd mentioned they boiled local children alive. His shock gave her a strange satisfaction she could not have explained. Insider status, maybe. She thought of Billy Ray Hatch, turned into a freak show on TV. Dovey said he was all over the Internet now too, with his reckon and this winter been too mild to suit my coon dogs. The world's next big laugh of the moment. She'd like to hug that old man around his neck, and punch some cameraman in the kisser.

  "Footballers teaching sports in place of science class," Dr. Byron declared, "should not be legal. Are there no state standards or testing?"

  "Oh, yes. We flunk those. We are dependable in that regard."

  "How can that persist?" He was studying her carefully, for irony she supposed, or some kind of storybook scrappiness. She'd already taken this interview to be a lost cause, but now she resisted. She didn't want to lose on his rules.

  "I'll tell you how," she said. "This state has cities on one end of it, and farms on the other. If they ever decided to send somebody out from the money end of things to check on us, they might slap down a fine or something."

  "And why do you suppose they don't?"

  She laughed. "They're scared they'll get kidnapped by the hillbillies like in that Deliverance movie."

  "I haven't seen that one."

  She leaned forward. "May I ask a personal question? What country did you grow up in?"

  He matched her posture, both hands on his knees. "The United States of America. Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands."

  "Whoa. America has islands? Besides Hawaii, I mean."

  "America has quite a few in fact, in several oceans. Saint Thomas is a protectorate, which is really a glorified colony. We pay taxes, but nobody comes out from the money end of things, as you say, to keep our schools up to date."

  She nodded, checking him for irony or scrappiness, she supposed. It made sense of this man, to picture him stalking butterflies on a golden shore and wowing the teachers in some little one-room school. "And here you are anyway," she said, "doctor of all the sciences, Harvard and everything. But see, there's not room at the top for everybody. Most of us have to walk around in our sleep, accepting our underprivileged condition."

  "You may be overstating the case," he said, and left it at that. As if she were a child. She had taken things too far, of course. But she felt anger rising, some things still left unsaid. Dr. Byron flipped through what looked like a lot of pages on his clipboard. He had asked to borrow a clock for the lab, and she'd brought out the only one she had, a big wind-up alarm thing shaped like a chicken that Preston had used for learning to tell time. The ridiculous object sat ticking off seconds on a table nearby, measuring out the remainder of her tenure here among the well educated. A machine next to the clock was labeled SARTORIUS, which made her think of sartorial, a vocabulary word from long, long ago. Of or pertaining to the tailor's trade. What was getting sewn up here?

  "I think you can take care of all the rest of this paperwork," he said at last. "I think you will do fine. Our main concern is to get things going quickly, because we have so little time. A matter of weeks. Maybe not even that."

  "Thank you. Wow, thanks very much." In other words, he was in a bind, and she would suffice. He stood up and gave her a quick handshake, handing over the clipboard, looking not at all thrilled. He indicated she should sit tight and finish filling out the forms. His impatience made no sense. He was acting like a man who'd been told he had only weeks to live. She wondered if he had spoken to Bear at all about the logging plan.

  "Let me just ask," she said cautiously, "what is your main worry, time-wise?"

  He clicked his pen, looked at it, put it in his pocket, and then sat down again, looking her directly in the eye. "My main worry, time-wise, is that a winter storm could arrive here tomorrow and kill every butterfly on that mountain."

  She was so startled that any possible reply left her head. Even the assault-weapon cadence of Pete's staple gun faltered for a moment, it seemed. How could they put all this effort into such a precarious scenario? That the butterflies could be wiped out, completely apart from the logging she hoped to forestall, was inconceivable.

  "The temperature at which a wet monarch will freeze to death," he said very slowly, as in, Don't make me repeat this, "is minus four degrees centigrade."

  "Okay," she said. As in, I'm listening.

  "That is an inevitable event, for this latitude. The mid-twenties, Fahrenheit. The forest might shield them to
some extent, where the canopy is closed. Large trees are protective; the trunks create a thermal environment like big water bottles. That's why you see them covering the trunks. Maybe it's why they ended up in that stand of old conifers for their roosting site when they went off track. These firs are similar to the Mexican oyamels, in terms of chemistry. We have no idea of the cues involved. But to protect them from the kind of winter they will have here, that forest is far from adequate."

  "So what normally happens to them, when it goes below freezing?" she asked.

  "Normally they are in the Transverse Neovolcanic Belt of Mexico, at a latitude of nineteen degrees north. Where winter as you know it is not an issue."

  "So these butterflies would all die off, when it gets bad, and then what? Their eggs would hatch out in the spring?"

  "Monarchs don't lay eggs in winter. This is something I think you know."

  "You're right, I did know that. Sorry. Technically a tropical guy, just visiting."

  "They are obliged to survive the winter in adult form. Even for these individuals with aberrant migratory flight behavior, the reproduction is hardwired. Like ours. If we somehow were tricked into going to live among cattle, we could not give birth to calves or feed them on grass."

  "I understand."

  "These insects have been led astray, for whatever reason. But breeding and egg-laying are still impossible for them until spring, when the milkweeds emerge."

  "So if they die here, they die."

  "That's right," he said.

  She despised this account, the butterflies led astray. She'd preferred the version of the story in which her mountain attracted its visitors through benevolence, not some hidden treachery. "And the other monarchs . . . ," she began, unsure what she meant to ask. "The ones in Mexico are still doing okay."

  "What we're finding in Mexico this year is a catastrophically diminished population in the Neovolcanics. They had unbelievable storms and flooding last spring, which may or may not have something to do with this. We have been waiting all winter for better reports. A lot of people are there now searching the forests for relocated roosts. Higher up the mountain, is what we assumed. But the report is nothing."