Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "Briefly? Unseasonable temperature shifts, droughts, a loss of synchronization between foragers and their host plants. Everything hinges on the climate."

  She blinked a couple of times. "Are we talking about global warming?"

  "Yes, we are."

  Tina made a downward wave at Everett to stop the camera, and bizarrely her own animation clicked off too, her face slack as she walked across the lab, maybe starting to feel homesick for her average flaming interstate wreck. Tina checked something on the camera, then walked back to her interview spot and spoke in a subdued voice. "The station has gotten about five hundred e-mails about these butterflies, almost all favorable. Is this really where you want to go with this segment? Because I think you're going to lose your audience."

  Ovid looked genuinely startled. "I am a scientist. Are you suggesting I change my answer to improve your ratings?"

  "Not at all," Tina said frostily. Her composure was losing its smooth edge. She had an irritable way of sucking her front teeth and exhaling through her nose that gave Dellarobia to know this woman probably did have children, after all. After looking down at the floor for a moment, Tina signaled Everett and lifted her features to greet the camera. "Dr. Byron, let's talk about global warming. Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening, and whether humans have a role."

  Ovid's eyebrows lifted in a familiar way, almost amused. "I'm afraid you have missed the boat, Tina. Even the most recalcitrant climate scientists agree now, the place is heating up. Pretty much every one of the lot. Unless some other outcome is written on the subject line of his paycheck."

  She raised her jaw slightly, an edgier look, and started over once again. Her stamina for replays was unbelievable. "Dr. Byron, let's talk about global warming. Many environmentalists contend that burning fuel puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."

  He pulled back his chin in such skeptical dismay he looked like a startled turtle. "They contend this? That burning carbon puts carbon in the air, this is a contention?" His voice notched up so severely it squeaked a little. "Tina, Tina. Think about what you are saying. All the coal that has ever been mined, that's carbon. All the oil wells, carbon, again! We have evaporated that into the air. What's in the world stays in the world, it does not go poof and disappear. It's called the conservation of matter. The question was settled well before the time of Sir Isaac Newton."

  Tina blinked once, twice. "Scientists tell us they can't predict the exact effects of global warming."

  "Correct. We tell you that, because we are more honest than other people. We know evidence will keep coming in. It does not mean we ignore the subject until further notice. We brush our teeth, for instance, even though we do not know exactly how many cavities we may be avoiding."

  "Well, a lot of people are just not convinced. We're here to get information."

  He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and showed his teeth in a grimace, the tip of his tongue just visible between his front teeth. When he finally looked at her again, this seemed to cause him actual pain. "If you were here to get information, Tina, you would not be standing in my laboratory telling me what scientists think."

  She opened her mouth, but he cut her off. "What scientists disagree on now, Tina, is how to express our shock. The glaciers that keep Asia's watersheds in business are going right away. Maybe one of your interns could Google that for you. The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?"

  Tina sucked her teeth, eyes wide. The effect was not flattering. "If this were Niagara Falls, I'd have a decent background," she said. "I can't do anything with this without a visual."

  Ovid's eyebrows pressed toward his hairline. "Intangible things are outside your range? Can't you people be a little imaginative?"

  Tina did not reply.

  "An election result!" he said, looking a little nuts. "A stock market! Those are intangibles. And yet you manage to cover them. Ad nauseam!"

  Tina tossed her hair ever so slightly and used a voice she had probably honed as a teenager. "Because people care."

  "You have a job to do, woman, and you are not doing it." Ovid's head dropped forward and his eyes narrowed, a posture that stunned Dellarobia. She'd never figured him for a schoolyard fighter. He took a step forward, leveling his finger like a blade toward her chest, inciting in Tina an equal and opposite step backward. "Fire is an excellent visual, Tina. So are hurricanes, and floods. The whole damn melting Arctic." They edged into the part of the lab where the stuff was piled from the portion they'd cleaned up. "How will you feel ten years from now, when a serious lot of the farms in the world don't have a damn rainy season anymore? And you were party to that?" Ovid's long finger seemed to move everything, pulling him forward, backing Tina around the table.

  Everett spoke up. "You're outside the shot."

  "You keep out of this!" Ovid shouted. Everett looked slapped. "You think this will only happen to Africa or Asia," he told Tina. "Someplace that is not your assignment."

  Tina suddenly held up one sideways hand as if she had a martial arts move up her sleeve. "Now you stop right there, buddy. I have two little boys adopted from Thailand."

  Ovid did not seem impressed. "And so that's it, you've done your duty? Now you can chart your career on the path of least resistance?"

  "You have no idea. Everybody thinks TV is so easy. This is work."

  "Convince me, Tina. You are letting a public relations firm write your scripts for you. The same outfit that spent a decade manufacturing doubts for you about the smoking-and-cancer contention. Do you people never learn? It's the same damned company, Tina, the Advancement of Sound Science. Look it up, why don't you. They went off the Philip Morris payroll and into the Exxon pocket."

  Tina's moment of anger turned out to be highly soluble in worry. She was backed up against the refrigerator now, eyeing an escape route. Ovid turned away from her abruptly and walked across the lab, unbuttoning his white coat. "You have no interest in real inquiry. You are doing a two-step with your sponsors." He began to pull off his lab coat before realizing he was wired up with the little microphone on the lapel and the gizmo in the pocket. He unclipped the lapel mike and looked around, possibly for a place to throw it. Finding no clear target, he faced Tina and held the clip to his mouth.

  "Here is my full statement. What you are doing is unconscionable. You're allowing the public to be duped by a bunch of damned liars."

  Tina raised both hands. "Like I could even use that word on TV."

  Ovid clipped the mike back on his lapel and managed a fair reconstruction of his normal grin, the full revelation of eyeteeth.

  "Sorry," he said. "You are allowing the public to be duped by a bunch of damned prevaricators."

  "O-kay," Tina said. "That's a wrap."

  Everett rolled up his cords in a flash. Tina already had her phone to her ear as they exited, her voice rising to a shrill pitch outside in the barn. The news Jeep was probably tearing up the highway before the stunned pall in the laboratory lifted. Preston and Cordie bore the wide-eyed, zipped-up expression children assume in the presence of unraveling adults. Dellarobia looked a bit like that herself, waiting for the return of some recognizable version of her boss. He was manically sorting through manila folders that had been shuffled in the fray, gathering things together.

  "Well. A fine disaster," he said finally, without looking up.

  "It wasn't so bad," Dellarobia said, feeling dumb as a cow.

  "I could have tried to work with her. You are always telling me that, work with people. Show them we're not the enemy. I know this was important. And I threw it."

  She realized he was loo
king around for his puffy green coat, which had fallen onto the floor near the refrigerator. Dellarobia fetched it up and handed it to him.

  "But everything you said is true. Technically. You didn't do anything wrong."

  "No," he agreed. "Except to make sure she will run over that cartridge with her vehicle. Repeatedly."

  "But that's her nickel," Dellarobia said. "That's everybody's loss. I'm actually sorry nobody will ever get to see that."

  "Yo, guys," Dovey said, holding up her phone. "Don't worry, I got it all. Posting it now. YouTube."

  13

  Mating Strategies

  "March fourth," Dellarobia said.

  "To where?" Preston asked.

  She laughed. "Not forward march. It's the fourth of March. Friday. Your birthday is in one exact week."

  Preston smiled broadly, though his spectacled gaze remained fixed on the road. They stood facing east, the direction from which the bus would come, along with the light of morning in its own good time.

  "I have such a big surprise for you, you won't believe it," she added, causing his smile to broaden and compress, as if containing a significant internal pressure. They watched the sun break over one of the stippled backs of the wooded hills that swam along the horizon. First it was a shapeless fire blazing through bare trees, quickly gaining the yolk of its sphere, and then they could not look at it directly.

  "Today smells like the time when the lambs get born," he said.

  "It does. Like spring." She closed her eyes and inhaled. "What is that, dirt?"

  They stood together drawing in the day through their noses. At length Preston said, "I think it's worms. And baby grass."

  "Yeah, you're right. So. Do you want to see the lambs getting born this year, when they come?"

  Preston nodded firmly.

  "You could help other ways, you know. You wouldn't have to be there right when they're coming out."

  "I want to see them get born," he said.

  She was not afraid for him to see the writhing, fluid-soaked arrival of life, but also knew he might see death instead. That was the risk. "You might have to stay home from school," she warned. "When a ewe starts going into her labors, you have to stay with her. We'll call Miss Rose. She'll let you be excused."

  "We're allowed to know about it," Preston said.

  "About what?"

  "Babies getting born from their mothers."

  "Is that right?"

  "Yeah. Isaac Frye's big sister did a baby on the toilet."

  "Oh gosh, Preston. How did that come up?"

  He shrugged. "It's okay. He made some of the girls cry, but Miss Rose made him stop it, and then she talked to us. About the family life."

  Once again Dellarobia had to salute the spirited Miss Rose. "And you're okay with all that, for the time being?" she asked

  He shrugged again. "Yeah."

  It was hard not to press the question of Isaac Frye's sister, whose misery Dellarobia could imagine all too well, unfortunately. Another pregnant teenager sliding the loose broken latch on a bathroom stall, trying to stave off the unyielding future. She wondered if it was really born in the bathroom. And if it lived. Preston would never imagine his own family was forged through events hardly more graceful than these.

  They watched the sun paint pink light across the belly of every cloud in the eastern sky. Preston suddenly pointed up into the middle distance. "Look."

  A pair of monarchs fluttered together above the road. A surprising sight so early in the day, and not ordinary flight, but a persistent buffeting of one against the other. The pair moved up and down as if trapped in a vertical column of air. Eventually they locked together and dropped on the road, flapping. Soon they disconnected and rose again, returning to their aerial tango.

  "Are they fighting?" Preston asked. "Or is that family life?"

  A question for the ages. "I'm not sure," she said.

  In a moment she added, "Wow. You know what?"

  "What?"

  "They might be coming out of their long winter's nap. Dr. Byron's been telling me to watch for this. If they wake up and start trying to mate, that's really good news for the monarchs. And you spotted it, Preston. You were the first one."

  They watched the spiraling duo move up their path as if drawn along by invisible threads. If this was a pair, if they mated, if the female lifted her sights and went out to the vernal hills to secure the right unfurling leaf. If, then.

  "Dr. Byron says the males go a little bit crazy," she confided. "They'll start going after anything that moves, trying to grab hold."

  "How come?" Preston asked.

  "You know. Girlfriend stuff. Smooching!" She grabbed Preston and planted kisses all over his head, against his roaring grunts. Then let him go.

  Both the butterflies fell into the road again, very close to where they stood, and for a moment the two insects lay stunned, open-winged. Then the one crawled slowly atop the other and they flopped around a bit. Preston and Dellarobia crept close enough to see the underneath partner, female presumably, stretch out her long black abdomen in a taut, expectant way. She's the one with the stiffy, Dellarobia thought, keeping that one to herself. The guy on top was using his abdomen more like an elephant's trunk, probing the tip around, feeling for its target. The search seemed to take a long time, and was weirdly erotic. Enough for Dellarobia to have reservations about crouching in the road watching an act of copulation with her kindergartner. Who was riveted.

  "Gaa," he said quietly when the clasp connected. There was no mistaking the plug in the socket, both members stiffened with a visible energy. For a moment they all froze, mother and son, butterfly and mate. The male began to flap, still linked, trying for liftoff. His helpful wife folded her wings and consented to be dragged as he pulled their weight a wobbly few feet above the road, then dropped. Then lifted again.

  "Mom!" Preston howled. The bus had appeared over the hill. She sent him out of the road and prepared to flag down the bus if necessary. But the butterfly lovers achieved liftoff, taking their business up into the big maple. She retreated to the shoulder.

  "Okay, buddy." She stood a few paces from her son, giving him his dignity. "Make sure you learn stuff today."

  "I will," he vowed, awaiting the driver's signal before he charged across the road to climb aboard. Dellarobia always found the blaze of alternate-flashing school-bus lights a little surreal, coming and going through the veil of morning darkness. The hiss of released brakes gave way to the throaty diesel grumble, and her son was off to the world once more, leaving her dumbly bereft, unsettled by the morning's several surprises.

  She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and tried to move her mind into the day. If this was the end of diapause for the monarchs, that was huge. Ovid would be keen to do dissections, or if more sacrifice was unbearable, to palpate live females for the sperm packets that proved they were mating. She felt impatient with news she could not share. He was gone today. She didn't have a phone number, except the one from which he'd first called her back in December, presumably from his house in New Mexico. No way could she call there. Very early this morning she'd heard his vehicle pull out, for parts unknown. He'd only said he would be gone all day. Some kind of interview seemed likely, given the way the Ovid-and-Tina video had gone viral. On Thursday Dovey had texted hourly updates on the number of views: hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands. Whatever qualms people had about scientists, they were thrilled to watch one rip into an ice-queen newscaster of some repute. Ovid was chagrined when he finally watched it himself, and Dellarobia felt for him; she knew that awful exposure. But he at least had put his turn at fame to good use. He'd been truthful. The first of his words Dovey had captured were "This is what science looks like," and that's what she tagged the post. She said it came up ninth on the list now, when you Googled "science."

  Dellarobia reentered her house feeling guilty without cause as she met Cub's skeptical gaze. Not an unusual feeling. "Going to work in your pajama pants?" he asked.

>   "Nope. Dr. Byron's gone someplace today." He had urged her to take the day off too, she had put in many an extra hour. But the prospect of a workless morning didn't excite her. She hung up her coat in the hallway and came into the kitchen. Cub had just unsnapped Cordelia's terry-cloth bib and was wiping the oatmeal off her face.

  "Cordie's not going to Lupe's, then?" The plane of his brow lifted in surprise.

  Dellarobia filled and refilled her coffee mug a few times with hot water from the tap, and shook it out. It wasted hot water, but her mug always got so chilled by the bus wait, it would spoil a second cup if she didn't warm it up. "Sorry I didn't mention that. I was debating whether I should go in anyway. There's still stuff to do in the lab, without him around."

  Cub made a game of dabbing Cordelia's cheeks and nose while she tried to smack his hand. Eventually they called a truce, and he lifted her out of the high chair. "Well, I'm going over to Mother's," he said, rolling down the sleeves of his flannel shirt and brushing oatmeal off the front. "She's got a load of stuff she wants me to haul over to the church for the town ministry."

  Dellarobia took a gratifying swallow of scalding coffee and leaned back against the counter. "You know what? I've got a bunch of Preston's outgrown pants I could give them." The town ministry was a free food pantry for Feathertown's needy, now expanding to offer clothing and winter coats, child sizes needed especially. For those who found themselves even below the Second Time Around bracket. "What's Hester giving away?" she asked.

  Cub shrugged, a gesture identical to the one his son had offered her ten minutes earlier. "Some of her canned goods, I guess. But she wants me to take my truck to haul over that old chifforobe upstairs. They're needing places to hang up all the coats."

  Dellarobia was still trying on the prospect of being a donor. She always took the kids' clothes back for the minuscule trade-in discount. Now that she thought about it, she couldn't recall having given anything away, ever. Not for charity, per se. "You mean that giant wardrobe in your old room?" she asked. "That thing's a beast."

  "Well, Mother decided it needs to go to the ministry," Cub said.

  "How about I go with you to help," Dellarobia offered unexpectedly. She and Cub had things to talk about.