Little Tiny Teeth (4 page)

And what about the town, Tingo Maria? Arden, who lived down there for a good part of every year, had talked it up, but Arden was the kind of person who didn’t much care or even notice where he lived. Maggie did. When she had Googled the city to get some other points of view, the descriptions hadn’t done much for her spirits. “Tropical, hot, and wet,” “a tatty, ugly town,” “the drug-trafficking capital of Peru,” “the saddest kind of ‘modern,’ ramshackle South American town, cobbled together out of nothing in 1938, and already rusting to pieces.” Not a lot to draw her there.

On the other hand, what did she have in Iowa City?

“Ouch.”

Mel Pulaski gingerly peeled the Band-Aid – well it wasn’t a Band-Aid, it was a lump of cotton held on by a scrap of masking tape; the Providence County Health Department was making a point about its dissatisfaction with its current budget – from his beefy upper arm.

Standing at the bathroom counter in his undershirt, he checked the swollen, reddened site of his tetanus booster shot in the mirror and gingerly touched it with a finger. “Ooh.”

At the twin sink beside him, his wife Dolly, in the flannel nightgown she’d taken to wearing lately, was applying a squib of toothpaste to her brush. “That last shot’s bothering you, isn’t it?”

“Oh, a little bit. It’s the only one that has.”

“No, it isn’t. Your arm hurt for a couple of days after the one for yellow fever.”

“True.”

“And you didn’t feel that great while you were taking the typhoid pills. I had to nurse you for two days.”

“Yeah, that’s right, I forgot. That was not fun. Ah well, such is the life of the freelance writer. Danger, sacrifice, and adventure abound at every turn.”

“I still don’t understand why you’re so keen to go on this trip,” Dolly mumbled around her toothbrush. “I don’t see the point.”

“Well, for one thing, EcoAdventure Travel is paying me three thousand bucks for an article on it, and another five hundred for photos, which will cover the cost and then some.”

“Not-much-some, when you figure in the cost of all those immunizations.”

“Okay, then,” Mel said reasonably. “There’s the fact that Arden Scofield will be on it, and I’ve got some ideas for another book we can do together. I think he’s going to be interested.”

A few months earlier he had concluded a yearlong ghostwriting association with Scofield on an autobiographical narrative, Potions, Poisons, and Piranhas: A Plant-hunter’s Odyssey. It hadn’t been that hard either. Scofield had a pretty good way with words himself, and he’d led an exciting, interesting life; he just hadn’t wanted to take the time to organize the material and do the grunt work that went with rewriting and editing.

Dolly snorted. “‘Do together.’ You practically wrote that whole damned book for him, and he’s going to get all the credit.”

Big, strong, slow, and mellow, a onetime linebacker with the Minnesota Vikings, Mel Pulaski was a hard man to get into an argument, even when Dolly seemed to be spoiling for one, which had been happening a lot lately. Well, he understood why. She was forty-seven. It was the dreaded Change of Life, and she was having a hard time with it, psychologically as well as physically. It didn’t help that she was five years older than he was, something that was clearly starting to bother her a lot more than it did him. Mel had stopped telling her that the age difference didn’t matter, because when he did it only ticked her off even more.

“Well, he’s the expert, honey,” he said. “He’s the only reason anybody would buy the book. Me, I’m just a hired hack. Anyway, who cares about the credit? We got fifteen thousand bucks for what probably amounted to maybe two months’ work altogether. That’s a pretty good paycheck in my line of work.”

“I thought you couldn’t stand him.”

“I never said I couldn’t stand him. I said he was a phony, posturing pissant of a prima donna.” He grinned. “But for another fifteen grand I guess I can stand him a little longer. Pass me the floss, will you, babe?”

Unsmiling, Dolly passed it, rinsed her toothbrush, and put it back in the rack. “Fifteen thousand. And how much is he going to get?”

“He’s a name, sweetie; I’m not. It’s his life the book’s about, not mine. And don’t forget, my name is going to be on the cover right up there with his. That’s not going to hurt my career.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Dolly said. And then, a moment later, as a muttered afterthought: “What career?”

Mel sighed. The moods were worst at night. In the morning she’d shyly and sincerely apologize and say she didn’t know what had gotten into her, and surely he knew she hadn’t meant it (which he did). And things would go smoothly until the next night, or maybe the one after that.

Mel had been doing a lot of Web research on menopause. Among the things he’d learned was that it typically lasted anywhere from six to thirteen years. He just prayed Dolly’s was the six-year variety.

A seasoned underground commuter, Duayne V. Osterhout knew precisely where to stand on the platform of the cavernlike Smithsonian Metro station in order to be first through the rear doors of the second car, from which he would have a clear shot at his preferred corner seat, wedged in by the window. As usual he had arrived in time for the 5:23 P.M. Orange Line train to West Falls Church, in order, not to take it, but to be there when the passengers boarded, so that he could assume his place on the platform the moment the doors slid closed and thus be in position for the 5:37. He did not consider a fourteen-minute wait a high price to pay for a comfortable seat, with no sweating straphangers leaning over him, during the twenty-five-minute ride to Virginia. At this time in the evening on a weekday, planning was essential if he didn’t want to stand most of the way home.

When the platform lights began blinking to signal the imminent arrival of the train, a man with a backpack – a little old to be traveling with a backpack in Duayne’s opinion – more or less unthinkingly bulled his way to the front of the crowd that had now collected behind Duayne. (Duayne was not the only one who knew precisely where to stand so that the doors opened directly in front of him, but he was one of the few who was willing to wait from the departure of one train to the arrival of the next.)

“Excuse me, sir,” Duayne said. “I believe I was here first. So were these other people.” His heart was thumping, but there were times when you had to stand up for what was right. Otherwise you invited anarchy, the kind of thing to be found on the New York City subway system.

The man stared malignly at him. “Well, excuse me, buddy. I didn’t see no sign that said you could reserve a place to stand.” But when Duayne unflinchingly returned the stare, the man said, “Ah, the hell with it,” and moved off.

“Thank you, sir!” the woman behind Duayne said to him as the doors opened, and Duayne strode to his accustomed seat feeling bold and beneficent.

He took from under his arm his copy of the day’s Post, but instead of slipping on his glasses to read it, he stared out the window at the lights whizzing by as the train left the station, and then at the pulsing black of the tunnel walls. Even after the adrenaline rush from his encounter had receded, he continued to stare unseeing at the darkness. He was thinking about the Amazon River.

He was also thinking, as he often did, about bugs.

Unlike the other members of Arden Scofield’s Amazon expedition, Duayne Osterhout was not an ethnobotanist or even a botanist. He was that even rarer bird, an ethnoentomologist. As the senior research scientist in the Housing and Structural Section of the Urban Entomology Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture, he was an authority on the extraordinary creatures referred to as “pests” by the uneducated general population: silverfish, beetles, ants, and the like. In particular, he was a much-published expert on that miracle of propagation, survival, and resourcefulness, Periplaneta americana, the common American cockroach, and its many cousins.

It was Duayne’s not-so-secret shame that in all his forty-eight years he had never set foot in the tropics, from whence almost all insects had originally come. Never had he gloried in the sight of a Blaberus giganteus, its carapace gleaming brown and gold in the equatorial sunshine; never had he stood among giant jungle plants, eye to eye to eye, or rather eye to metallic, antlerlike mandibles, with a Cyclommatus pulchellus. It was not a conscious decision that had kept him from seeing firsthand the insect marvels of the southern hemisphere, it was simply that he hadn’t gotten around to it. He’d gotten married before he was out of graduate school, and then his work had consumed him, along with the raising of a family of three. Life had gotten in the way, that’s all. Besides that, his wife Lea wasn’t much of a traveler aside from luxury cruising, and she wasn’t very keen on his going anywhere without her. And – let’s be honest about it – he hadn’t ever gotten up his resolve enough to press the matter.

However, that had all changed now. Three days after their youngest daughter had left for college in Ohio last year, Lea had up and left him to move into some kind of socialist commune in upstate New York. Although it had been a shock at first, he had been astonished at how little difference it had made in the basics of his day-to-day life, and at how quickly he had been able to settle into a satisfying, fulfilling routine. It was as if he’d been living someone else’s life for the last twenty-five years.

It was his eldest daughter, Beth, who was responsible for his upcoming Amazon adventure. Beth had taken after her father from the start, with a gratifying interest in natural history, but somewhere along the way she’d moved from fauna to flora. Now she was a fledgling plant biologist with the National Science Foundation, but last year she’d still been finishing up her graduate work at Georgetown. Someone had told her about Arden Scofield’s botanical field expeditions to the Huallaga Valley near Tingo Maria, Peru, and she’d signed up. The trip she’d described had sounded so fascinating to Duayne – there had been so many amazing bugs! – that he had telephoned Scofield to apply for a place in the next expedition if there were any to spare. When Scofield told him that he was welcome, and that they would be exploring the mighty Amazon River itself this time, Duayne couldn’t have been more thrilled.

There was, however, an unexpected fly in the ointment. Only a few days ago, he had learned from his ex-wife that Scofield had made some persistent and highly improper advances to Beth during the expedition. She had held him off, of course, but the thought of it made Duayne’s blood boil. It wasn’t only because his own daughter had been the recipient of Scofield’s unsavory attentions, it was the very idea of a celebrated, mature scientist… a teacher… a figure of trust and authority, taking advantage of an innocent, starry-eyed student barely into her twenties – any innocent, young, starry-eyed student – who had been entrusted into his care. Duayne knew such men and despised them. Before the expedition was over, he planned to have a few sharp words with Scofield and give him what-for. You couldn’t let men like that simply think they had gotten away with it free and clear.

But for the moment, all that was secondary to the inextinguishable glow in his heart as he considered the great adventure to come.

The Amazon River! He whispered it to himself, just for the pleasure of forming the words as the train burrowed, deep and echoing, under the Potomac. The Amazon River!

Set in the sun-drenched coastal splendor of Cabo San Lucas on the Mexican Riviera is the elegantly rustic, eco-friendly Mandalay-Pacific Spa, where you will find the balance between body, mind, and soul that is the key to a wholesome, healthy, and energetic lifestyle. Mandalay-Pacific Spa helps you achieve this goal through the integration of the four vital elements of traditional holistic healing: Water, Fire, Earth, and Air. Our treatments, known since antiquity, will help you to achieve the perfect state of balance and harmony that our harried modern lifestyles cry out for.

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“Umm…” Julie Oliver stopped reading and slid the peach-colored, almond-scented flyer back across the table. “Are you sure you want me to go with you?” she asked doubtfully. “I don’t know, Marti, that doesn’t really sound like something I’d enjoy all that much.”

Marti Lau shook her head. “What, a week in Cabo with enough pampering to last a lifetime? Free transportation, free food, free everything? What’s not to like? And sunshine! Wouldn’t you like to see what color the sky is again?”

To clinch her point, she gestured out the window beside their table, which overlooked Puget Sound, or as much of it as could be seen on this typical early-November day in Seattle. A dismal, freezing mist hung low over the dull gray water, totally closing out everything more than a few hundred yards offshore. As they watched, a big, green-and-white state ferry slid slowly away from Colman Dock and disappeared almost immediately into the murk, looking forlorn and bedraggled and without a single passenger out on the open, wet deck.

“Well, why doesn’t John go with you?” Julie said, then turned to address Marti’s husband directly. “You’re the one who’s always grumping about the Seattle weather, John. I would have thought you’d love a chance to be in sunny Mexico for a week.”