Flight Behavior (28 page)

“Yo, people, listen up,” she shouted at the crowd. “Thanks for your interest, but you’ve got the wrong house. You all need to go yell at Bear Turnbow. He lives down that way, less than half a mile. Follow your leader here, Vern. He’s got directions.”

Vern hoofed it off the porch and headed for his car, beckoning with one arm in the air. The kids folded their placards close to their bodies and filed toward their vehicles, obedient as collies. She saw one sign that said “Resist Authority!”

“Thank you!” several of the kids called out as they left.

“No problem,” she said, and went to fetch the family she’d hidden in the weeds.

O
nce Lupe and the kids were safely squared away in her living room, she walked out to the lab. The milking parlor had to be entered through an open section of the barn where Cub had engine parts strewn all over, a fact that embarrassed her not a little. She’d asked him to tidy things up, but men and barns were like a bucket of forks, tidy was no part of the equation. She pulled open the newly fitted laboratory door to find Ovid and Pete hard at work putting butterflies in the oven. She was worried about being late, but Ovid never seemed to take any notice of what time she came in. She took down her lab coat from the peg where she hung it every evening, wondering when it should be washed, and squashed on the rubber goggles that had to fit over her glasses. As distracting as a condom, and just as necessary, she supposed. Ovid really stressed the safety aspect.

On Monday they’d begun a lipid extraction experiment, beginning with one hundred live butterflies carried down the mountain in a cooler. Each was stuffed in its own wax envelope, weighed on the Mettler balance, and dried overnight in the scientific drying oven. So it was no joke, butterflies in the oven. Her tasks so far had been to number the envelopes and record all the weights in a special notebook, pre- and post-oven-drying. From there each brittle butterfly carcass went into its own test tube, tamped down with a little glass rod. She did the carcass crushing, which felt like breaking tiny butterfly bones, and Pete added petroleum ether to each tube. The reagent filled the lab with a faintly automotive smell, like a gas station from across the street, but according to Ovid it was far more flammable than gasoline. They worked under the newly installed oven hood, but even with the vents running, one match could send this place up in a flash and boom they would hear all the way to Cleary. Those were his words. It gave her chills to imagine it. All those children under one roof, next door.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said loudly, addressing her excuse not exactly to Dr. Byron but to the room. “I had to do some crowd control outside.”

Ovid and Pete were astonished to hear the details of her morning. She was surprised herself as she retold it. At the time it felt like a simple rectification rather than bravery per se, but she’d stood before a crowd of fifty people and told them to go bark up the correct tree. To command this kind of attention was a lifetime first for Dellarobia. Her normal audience was two, with a combined age of six, to what end she could never be sure. Back in school she’d presented things in a classroom, but that hardly counted. She didn’t count being on the news either. The audience might be huge, but they weren’t there at the time, and her words turned out to be immaterial. This morning, they’d listened.

Pete and Ovid had missed the whole show. The voices hadn’t carried back here to the barn. Of course, the windows were covered with plastic sheeting. Dellarobia recalled that this was once proposed by the government as a protection against terrorist attacks. Apparently it had about the same effect as sticking your fingers in your ears.

“Shoot,” she said suddenly. “I should have taken names. If those kids are so fired up about the butterflies, we could have signed them up for volunteer work.”

“Good idea!” Ovid looked at her brightly through his yellowed goggles, giving her a thumbs-up. His smile went through her like a hit of nicotine.

“Do you know what? I still could. I got the name of their club president. Zack Verkas. No, Vern Zakas.”

Dr. Byron nodded approval. She could see that his old generosity was still there, but was sometimes being held captive by despair, like a living thing held underwater. Today he seemed in a fine mood, wearing blue rubber gloves and using the pricey steel-toothed blender. Its fierce high buzz ascended in pitch like an eggbeater as the motor accelerated. The lab was noisy in general, which also could account for their having missed the protest. The shaker bath full of test tubes and warm water made a monotonous shush like a rocking chair. And the spinning centrifuge, if it wasn’t perfectly balanced, made a racket like tennis shoes in the dryer. It sat on its own special honeycomb mat so it wouldn’t vibrate itself right off the table.

“I’ll call that boy this afternoon,” she promised, writing his name in tiny letters in a corner of her lab notebook while she still remembered it. “If the environment club wants to save the butterflies, you can give them something to do about it.”

“It sounds like you might be on their enemy list now,” Pete said. “Do you think you can get this guy to name names?” Pete was extracting the liquid from the test tubes of butterfly-petroleum-ether soup. He ran them through the centrifuge in batches, then carefully drew out each liquid sample with a pipette and squirted it into its own tiny aluminum pie pan. The pipette resembled the device Hester used for decorating cakes, though obviously it was more precise, and required countless disposable plastic tips, one for each sample. They went through a world of little dishes in this lab. Yesterday she had numbered all the aluminum pans, using an empty ballpoint pen to emboss the thin metal. Her handwriting was all over this place already. Today she was supposed to weigh each sample and record the weights in the lab book. The pans were already stacking up, thanks to her tardiness, so she got busy.

“Oh, he’ll give me names, he owes me,” she told Pete. Some of the tension that had flared between them during the interview had lingered, not as strong as the ether but still in the air. She was not Pete’s equal, obviously; she got that. She was trying to learn the boundaries. “He was horrified about protesting at the wrong address. You should have seen them. They just picked up their signs, apologized for the mixup, and headed over to yell at Hester and Bear. They even picked up their trash.”

“Kids around here are so polite,” Pete said, handing her the little pans one by one. She weighed each one and carried it over to the slide warmer, a long hot-plate affair with a thermometer taped to its side. They’d promised her it did not get hot enough to detonate the place. Needless to say, she passed her workdays now without smoking, having hit on the best ever strategy for quitting: fear of being blown to smithereens.

“It’s true,” Ovid agreed. “These kids don’t sound like the cheeky youngsters we see at Devary.”

She turned up the fan on the venting hood and adjusted the little pans evenly on the warm surface, like pancakes covering a griddle. After all the liquid evaporated she would weigh each pan again, and that was the fat content of a butterfly. It made her a little sad to think of all those dead ladies leaving behind their fat as a matter of public record. World’s Biggest Losers, for real.

“What are kids at Devary like, Bart Simpson?” she asked.

“Unfortunately less entertaining,” Ovid said. “I get e-mails from students informing me of the GPA required to maintain their fraternity status, or what have you, and advising me of how I am to contribute. They cc their parents.”

“This girl in my ecology class last year . . . ,” Pete said, pausing in his work, tilting his pipette sideways and leaning on the counter to face Dellarobia. She could see he was making an effort and appreciated that. “Okay,” he said, “true story. She bragged on Facebook about cheating on the midterm. Another student tipped me off, so I busted her, and she was furious. She filed a complaint saying I’d invaded her privacy.”

“Wow,” Dellarobia said. “We may not have much around here, but manners we’ve got. Some of the kids living down this road might steal your lawn mower out of your garage to buy Oxycontin, but they’d leave a note, you know? ‘Thank you ma’am. I apologize. Please hold me in your prayers.’ ”

Ovid and Pete both laughed, but she wasn’t kidding. Somewhere along the way between mud pies and sex ed, most kids of her acquaintance lost all courage on their own behalf. Even Preston, inventive as he was, was so serious already about not breaking rules. What would become of him when he had to fight for a place in the world against kids who thought they owned it already? Cordelia might manage; she was born defiant, as Dellarobia once had been. But that had won no favors in the long run either, it seemed. Certainly not with the powers that ruled her life, namely her in-laws.

She wondered whether those environment-club kids would have the nerve for this work. Saving butterflies seemed to kill butterflies like mad. They put them in the freezer alive and drew them out dead. Dr. Byron swore the end was quick and painless. He’d finished Tissuemizing and moved on now to the dissecting microscope, where he was splitting open a batch of females to see what they had going on inside. He wanted to see if they were in what he called diapause, the winter slowdown of normal migrating monarchs. He motioned her over now, pulling out a chair next to his.

“Look at this,” he said, waiting while she removed her cumbersome goggles to look in the scope. The goggles left a raccoon ring around her eyes, of which she felt conscious now. “Do you see that?” he asked.

“What am I looking for?”

“Little white pellets. Those are spermatophores, one from each male that mated with her. The little sac is called the bursa, where she stores them.”

“I do see,” Dellarobia said, determined not to blush. The little lady had been around.

“That’s the first one I’ve found that was mated, in more than two dozen dissections. Nearly all of them are in diapause.”

She was close enough to Ovid to smell his aftershave, despite the general ambience of explosive reagents. Since the day she started working in close proximity, the sight of him in his white coat had stirred her unexpectedly. That crisp collar against his dark skin, some kind of wash-and-wear fabric. He was becoming his earlier self. They’d had a crisis, midweek, and he was wonderful about it. The power went off, leaving them in darkness with all those churning machines coasting to a halt, and she’d called in the outage only to learn the problem was her bill. They’d been so stretched after Christmas, so many bills coming in at once, she’d assumed the power company would give them a month’s grace. Having forgotten grace was already on the table since November, carved down to the bones. The humiliation of telling Pete and Ovid could have been the worst day of her life, but he was overly kind, insisting it was his mistake, he’d overlooked all the current these machines would be drawing off the same meter as the house. He’d sat next to her with his personal credit card while she went through the power company’s phone menu in tears, trying to get through to some real person and explain there was more at stake here than just some family in the dark.

She was unsure now whether he’d dismissed her from the microscope. Ovid was fiddling with rectangular glass slides in a slotted box. “I know Pete needs you back,” he said a little absently, pulling out one slide after another and holding it up to the window, closing one eye to peer through. “Our Pete is never satisfied without a lovely assistant at his elbow. But I want to show you just one more thing. Ah. Here.” He fitted the slide under the microscope’s flat metal elbows, clamping it to the platform. “As soon as we finish the lipids, I am going to put you on O-E counts. This is interesting. Have a look.”

She fiddled with the focus, and it jumped up in 3-D: a strange collage of ridged, transparent ovals that overlapped slightly like roof shingles. These were the scales that covered a butterfly’s wings, he said, magnified times three hundred. Nestled among the scales she saw smaller, darker shapes like water beetles, and these, he told her, were the parasites. OE for short. He would write down the whole name for her later, it was easier to learn that way. This was a prepared slide he used for teaching, but they would start looking for these parasites on the monarchs. Infestations were associated with butterfly populations that did not succeed in making normal migrations.

“So parasites could be the cause of them coming here instead of Mexico?”

“The cause,” he said with a rueful smile, tilting his head, and suddenly there he was, the man who’d sat at her kitchen table. He must be everyone’s favorite professor. “Cause,” he said, “is not the same as correlation. Do you know what I mean by that?”

She smiled an eager novice’s smile. “No.”

“Families that take foreign vacations also tend to own more televisions than those that do not. Is that second television causing families to be more adventurous?”

“No, that would be the cash flow.”

“Probably, yes. Something else is the cause of both. Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast?”

“No. Certain things just go together.”

“And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.”

“I get that. Like, crows flying over the field will cause it to snow tomorrow. My mother-in-law always says that, and I’m thinking, no way. Maybe it’s a storm front or something that makes both things happen, but the crows move first.”

“And there you are, Dellarobia. Ahead of half of my college students.”

“And all journalists,” Pete piped up from across the room.

“Some journalists,” Ovid said. “I’m afraid he is right.”

“New proof!” Pete shouted. “Facebook use lowers kids’ grades! Breast implants boost suicide rates! Smiling increases longevity!”

“Many journalists,” Ovid said.

Correlation, cause. She would write the words in the corner of her lab notebook, which was starting to fill with small, encrypted notes to herself.