Little Tiny Teeth (3 page)

By this time, Frank was completely paralyzed, able only to move his eyes. Apparently his frantic activity had hastened the circulation of the poison. He died in my arms.

Using the failing strength I had left, I again made for the boat, where I started up the engine and arrived in Iquitos that evening.

Once there, I made a full report to the police and waited for five days at our base hotel in the faint hope that I might have been wrong about my companions having perished, that I might have mistaken paralysis for death, and that either or both of them had somehow survived and would show up. Needless to say, neither of them did.

If you require further information, I would be glad to provide it.

In closing, I would like to thank you for your prompt initial payment. I wish you the best of luck with the seeds, and I look forward to accepting your kind invitation to visit the Gunung Jerai plantations to see the new plantings for myself.

Sincerely yours,

Arden Scofield

Iowa City, Iowa, Thirty Years Later: November 2006

What with pitchers of beer at not much more than half price and hot buffalo wings at ten for a buck, Brothers on a Wednesday night was not the best place in the world, or even in Iowa City, for quiet, sober reflection. The place was jammed with students – the university campus was a scant block away – and the noise level was enough to rattle the windows up and down Dubuque Street.

Nevertheless, quiet, sober reflection was exactly what Tim Loeffler, a graduate student in the University of Iowa’s prestigious Ethnobotanical Institute, was shooting for. Unfortunately, the “quiet” part had been out of the question from the start, and the “sober” part was beginning to get away from him, inasmuch as he and his four buddies were working on their third pitcher of Bud. But with his friends now taking their turns at the nearby foosball table, he was able to more or less collect his thoughts and sort through what was bothering him.

He’d gotten cold feet; that was it in a nutshell. When he’d first heard about the upcoming Amazon cruise and learned that none of his fellow grad students had signed up, he’d jumped at the chance. Almost a full week in the wilds under the direction of his major professor, Arden Scofield, with no other students competing for Scofield’s attention; it would be a heaven-sent chance to get on his good side, and – at long last – to get his Ph. D. dissertation topic approved, maybe right then and there. The other two members of his committee – Maggie Gray and Dr. Gus Slivovitz – had signed off on it six months ago. Only Scofield had held back his approval, merrily sending him back to the drawing board each time Tim had submitted it to him, always with one niggling, incredibly time-consuming “suggestion” or other. And the ironic thing was, Tim had taken on the miserable topic specifically to please Scofield, who went in for such subjects: “Agrobiodiversity conservation relating to consumer-driven strategies as they pertain to chick pea cultivation in the central Midwestern United States.” Just looking at the title practically put him to sleep, and here he’d been laboring on the wretched thing for almost three years, with no end in sight as long as Scofield kept waffling.

But this was it; he’d had it. Three years of classes and three more years slaving over the damn dissertation were enough. It was now or never. He’d been offered a fantastic postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Botanical Museum – Harvard, for God’s sake, the grand-daddy of ethnobotany! – scheduled to begin the next academic year, the catch being, of course, that he had to be a bona fide postdoc himself to accept it. His coursework, comprehensive exams, and language requirements had been gotten out of the way long ago. All that remained now was Scofield’s squiggle of a signature on the title page, and he was determined to get it from him before the trip was over. There would never be a better opportunity.

So why the cold feet? Because it had finally dawned on him that a big part of his problem with Scofield – or more accurately, Scofield’s problem with him – was that the man simply didn’t like him, had never liked him. Who knew why? Maybe Scofield, who loved center stage and thought he was the greatest lecturer on God’s green earth, didn’t like him because Tim had once or twice inadvertently stepped on his punch lines. (It was hard not to when you were hearing them for the tenth time.) Or maybe Scofield, underneath the hail-fellow-jolly-well-met act, disapproved of Tim’s interest in ethnopharmacology. Tim’s original choice for a dissertation topic had been an examination of the preparation and use of hallucinogenic plant extracts among the Indians of Southern Ecuador – now that was something he really could have gotten his head into. But at the idea, Scofield’s caterpillar eyebrows had come together, he had stuck his pipe in his mouth, and he’d made one of his friendly, phony, well-now-let’s-you-and-I-think-this-through-together faces that meant anything but. Cravenly, Tim had caved in and accepted the agrobiodiversity topic the moment Scofield suggested it. He had even more cravenly thanked him for it, though his heart had been plummeting.

For the ten-thousandth time he mentally kicked himself for not choosing Maggie Gray as his major prof. Maggie, despite that hard-shelled, sarcastic bitchiness of hers, was not only a hell of a lot easier to get along with (“Call me Maggie,” she’d told him the first time he’d met her. “Call me Arden” was something he was still waiting to hear and probably never would), but Maggie, unlike Scofield, had a strong interest in ethnopharmacology herself and would have welcomed his Ecuadorian project as a thesis subject. But no, he’d leaped at the chance to get the famous Scofield as his major professor, imagining all the good it would do him in his career.

What a laugh. And the really irritating part of it was, everybody knew that the supposedly straight-arrow Scofield himself was a damned druggie, or near enough to it to make no difference. His everyday tea of choice after dinner was known to be something called Mate Celillo, which he claimed was an ordinary Bolivian mate – a popular tea, often recommended for altitude sickness and stomach problems, and made from coca leaves from which the addictive alkaloids had been removed. He drank it, so he claimed, because of its digestive properties and because it was a soothing way to end the day and thus helped him sleep. But Tim, who had his suspicions, had once swiped a couple of his tea bags and tried it, and he’d been a lot more than soothed. For an hour or so there had been a wonderfully relaxing, extremely pleasant sense of floating and well-being, and then, without seeing it coming, he’d suddenly plummeted into a deep, nine-hour sleep – in his chair, while watching television. Despite a little morning-after letdown – nothing new there – it had been a great trip, and Tim had made several efforts to locate some of the stuff on his own, but so far, no luck.

Getting back to Scofield, maybe the problem was that the guy just didn’t like his face, or his nose, or the shape of his ears – just a matter of chemistry, at bottom unexplainable and irreversible. Well, if so, it went both ways by now; he could hardly look at Scofield without feeling his stomach turn over. But whatever it was, it was there, all right, and earlier tonight, when he and his pals had been talking about it, one of them had raised a pertinent point: “If he just plain doesn’t like you after three years of knowing you, what makes you think that being around him twenty-four hours a day is going to make him like you any more?”

It was a reasonable question, and Tim was worried. He couldn’t imagine coming out of this detesting Scofield any less than before, so why should it work the other way around? The thing was, he was never at his best around the guy – clumsy and stupid, saying the wrong thing, usually overly obsequious, but sometimes (the wrong times, inevitably) overly assertive, even blundering. His meetings with Scofield invariably left him feeling hollow and sick to his stomach. What if he picked the wrong time to present him with the latest incarnation of the dissertation? What if Scofield turned it down yet again?

Well, if that happened, that was the end of it. Enough of his life had been wasted. He would throw in the towel. With his master’s degree he could certainly teach botany at a junior college, or maybe get some kind of job with a company that made herbal products or natural nutrients or something. But goodbye, “Dr.” Loeffler; farewell, Harvard; so long, big-time research.

He gave his head a shake and poured another glass from the pitcher. What the hell, the die was cast, he couldn’t get out of it now, and maybe that was a good thing, all things considered. One way or another, he was headed for a life-altering experience on the Amazon. By the time it was over he would know exactly where he stood, and that was a feeling he hadn’t had for a long time.

A little over three blocks away, in her office on the third floor of the darkened biology building on the University of Iowa campus, Assistant Professor Margaret – Maggie – Gray was also pondering the life-altering possibilities of the upcoming Amazon cruise with Arden Scofield.

One thing was crystal clear. She had no future in the Ethnobotanical Institute or its parent, the Department of Biological Sciences. Once again her promotion to associate professor had not come through. That amounted to a not-so-subtle way of telling her to find another job someplace, because she certainly had no future at UI, especially considering the new, cost-driven plan to cut back Institute faculty next year and fold it into Biological Sciences, with no formal status of its own. There would be funds for only one faculty member in ethnobotany, instead of the current three, and she had no illusions about who that was going to be. She and Gus Slivovitz were history, or soon would be. Gus, seeing the handwriting on the wall, had already applied to and been accepted at some wretched agricultural school in Mississippi, or maybe one of those other equally dreadful states down there… Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma… which, if we were going to be painfully honest about it, was about where Gus had belonged all along.

Looking out over the lamplit, shadowed campus walkways from her desk, sipping tawny port from a tumbler, she was in a downcast frame of mind and deep in self-recrimination. She was thinking bitterly of how much good her Ph. D. had done her. All that work, and where had it gotten her? At thirty-nine she was still an assistant professor with a reputation (well-earned) as an acid-tongued, going-nowhere, old spinster with no life outside the lab. And the sacrifices she’d made, the wrong turns in the road! If she’d gone to Los Angeles with Curt all those years ago instead of insisting on hurrying back to finish her oh-so-important coursework at Cornell, maybe now she’d have a life.

She swallowed the rest of the port and, grim-faced (she’d feel like hell in the morning), poured two inches more. Make that three. What the hell. Her past was all water under the bridge; nothing to be done about it now. It was her future she had to think about.

And Arden Scofield, unlikely as it seemed, held the key to it. In addition to Arden’s professorship – his full professorship – at UI, he was a more-or-less permanent part-time prof at the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva in Peru, where he supervised an extension program for local farmers. That university was creating a new position of full professor of medical ethnobotany the following year, and according to Arden, he had already recommended Maggie; the job was as good as hers if she wanted it. She didn’t doubt that this was true. A recommendation from the great, the celebrated Arden Scofield would be sure to carry a lot of weight. Besides, the job was made for her. Medical ethnobotany – the study of how indigenous peoples use local plants for curative purposes – was her area of expertise, and the closest thing she had to a consuming interest… her one interest, really; she had published several well-received papers on it (and still no associate professorship!). So all that remained was for her to go down with Arden to Tingo Maria, where the school was located, and have Arden introduce her to some of the administrators.

And that was the plan. She would come along on the Amazon cruise, paying her own way, but assisting Arden as needed. That part of it was quite appealing, really. She had done her graduate fieldwork on the Rio Orinoco in Venezuela fifteen years ago and had made several subsequent trips there, but this one would be to the great Amazon Basin itself. She would do some collecting – a lot of collecting – and she was eager for the chance to sit down with local shamans and curanderos. These “uneducated,” unworldly Indian healers, carrying in their heads the results of thousands of years of experimentation with barks, roots, leaves, and flowers, were the world’s first and best medical ethnobotanists.

So many medically useful herbs and drugs had already come out of Amazon Indian healing practices: analgesics, astringents, expectorants, hypnotics, steroids, antiseptics, antipyretics, anaesthetics. Even their poisons – their neurotoxins and paralytics – had turned out to have enormous potential benefit. D-tubocurarine, an extract of curare, was a blessed muscle relaxant that had transformed surgery. Rotenone, the safest biodegradable insecticide in the world, had first been extracted from plant materials used by Amazonian Indians as fish poisons. What untold treasures were still locked up in the minds of those mysterious jungle scientists awaiting discovery? Cures for AIDS? Alzheimer’s? Cancer? Delve into their ancient lore, and you unlock the gate to the greatest storehouse of natural medicine in the world. But time was running short. They were a vanishing breed, these old shamans, and no one was taking their place. It was an opportunity she wouldn’t have missed under any circumstances.

After the cruise was over (and this was the part that had her grumbling to herself between sips), she would fly on with Arden to Tingo Maria to discuss the details of the appointment: responsibilities, lab facilities, accommodations, and so on. Then, assuming she was interested, in a little less than a year she would fly to Tingo Maria again, but this time on a one-way ticket.

The question was: did she want to? Her Spanish was rusty, but with a year to work on it, that was no problem; it had been one of her two qualifying languages for the Ph. D. And the salary was attractive, more than she was getting at UI, plus all kinds of great perks. Beyond that, it would be a distinct and not inconsiderable pleasure to outrank Arden, technically a mere adjunct professor, in the faculty hierarchy. But, Jesus Christ, the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva? The National Agrarian University of the Jungle? How appealing was that?