Bright Segment (3 page)

“Dr.
Grantham!
”

He watched me for a moment and then laughed. It was the same laugh, the deep rumble, the flash of strong white teeth which I used to envy so much. His eyes opened after it and he leaned forward. “Better shut your mouth now, sonny.”

I had not realized it was open. I shut it and felt it with my fingers while I looked at him. He was in worn Levi’s and a faded shirt to which had been sewn four or five extra pockets and a sort of shoulder cape with its lower edge cut into a fringe in the buckskin style. His hair and beard were untrimmed. His hands seemed stiff with yellowish calluses in the palms, and they were indifferently clean. A broad strap hung over one shoulder and across his chest to support a large leather pouch. He was a far cry from Fortley Grantham, M.A., F.B.S., D.Sc., with lifetime tenure of the Pudley Chair in Botany at the Institute; yet there was no mistaking him.

“Big Horn!” he roared to the bartender. “Set ’em up here. This here’s a perfessor from back East an’ we’re goin’ to have a faculty
meetin’.” That’s how he pronounced it—“perfessor.” He dealt me a stunning thump on the left biceps. “Right, Chip?”

“Chip?” I looked behind me; there was no one there. And the bartender’s name obviously was Big Horn. It penetrated that he was calling
me
Chip. “You surely haven’t forgotten my name, Doctor.”

“I surely ain’t, Doctor,” he said mimicking my voice. He smiled engagingly. “Everybody’s got two names,” he explained, “the name they’s born with an’ the name I think they ought to have. The name you ought to have, now, it’s Chip. There’s a little crittur lives in an’ out of the rocks, sits up straight an’ looks surprised, holds up its two little paws, an’ lets its front teeth hang out. Chipmunk, they call it back East, though it’s a rock squirrel other places. Get me, Chip?”

I put both hands on the table and pressed my lips together. Big Horn arrived just then and put more whiskey down before me. I said coldly, “No, thank you.” Big Horn paid absolutely no attention to me, but walked away leaving the whiskey where it was.

“Come on, climb down. This ain’t the hallowed halls.”

“That is the one thing I’m sure of,” I said haughtily.

He shook his head in pity. He looked down at his glass and his eyebrows twitched. He made no attempt to say anything and I began to feel that perhaps I, not he, should be making the overtures. I said, for want of anything better, “I suppose ‘Big Horn’ is another of your appellations.”

He nodded. “To him it’s a sort of compliment.” He laughed. “Some people carry their vanity in the damnedest places.”

I felt I should not pursue this, somehow. He tilted his head and said, “You’re not jumpin’ salty because I call you Chip?”

“I don’t read a compliment into it.”

“Shucks, now, son—they’re real purty little animals!” He waved. “Drink up now, an’ warm yoreself. I’m not insultin’ you. You wouldn’t be wonderin’ about it if I did—I’d see to that. Don’t you understand, I was callin’ you Chip—privately, I mean—from the minute I saw you, years back.”

“I was beginning to think,” I said acidly, “that you had forgotten everything that happened before you came to Arizona.”

“Never fear, colleague,” he intoned in precisely the voice that
once boomed through the lecture halls. “I can still distinguish a rhizome from a tuber and a faculty tea from deep hypnosis.” Instantly he reverted to this appalling new self. “I got a handle too. They call me Buttons.”

“To what characteristic is that attributed?”

He looked at me admiringly. “I druther listen to that kind of talk than a thirsty muleskinner cussin’.” He pulled at the thongs that tied down the flap of his pouch, reached in, and tossed a handful of what seemed to be small desiccated mushrooms to me.

I picked one up, squeezed it, turned it over, smelled it. “Lophophora.”

“Good boy,” he said sincerely. “Know which one?”

“Williamsii, I think.”

“Sharp as a sidewinder’s front fang,” he said, giving me another of those buffets. “Hereabouts they’re mescal buttons.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh yes. So they call you Buttons. You—uh—are rather widely known in connection with this—uh—vegetable.”

He laughed. “I didn’t think a botanist ever used the word ‘vegetable.’ ”

I ignored this. I rose. “One moment, please. I think I can show you that you have a wider reputation in this matter than you realize.”

He made as if to stop me but did not. I went out to my burro. She was standing like a stone statue in the blazing sun, her upper lip just touching the surface of the water in the horse-trough, breathing water-vapor in patient ecstasy. I dug into my pack and wormed out the book. Inside again, I placed it carefully by Grantham’s glass.

He looked at it, at me, then picked it up. Holding it high, he moved his head back and his chin in with the gesture of a seaman forcing his horizoned eyes to help with threading a needle.

“Journal of the Botanical Sciences,” he read. “Catalogue, Volume Four, revised. 1910, huh? Right up to the minute. Oh bully.” He squinted. “Cactaceae. Phyla and genera reclassified. Hey, Big Horn,” he roared, “the perfessor here’s got reclassified genera.”

The bartender clucked sympathetically. Grantham leafed rapidly. “Nice. Nice.”

“We thought you’d like it. Look up lophophora.”

He did. Suddenly he grunted as if I had kneed him, and stabbed a horny forefinger onto the page. “ ‘Lophophora granthamii’ I’ll be Billy-be-damned! So they took note of old Grantham, did they?”

“They did. As I said, you are widely known in connection with peyotl.”

He chuckled. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he was vastly pleased.

“When you were sending back specimens and reports, you were of great value to us,” I pointed out. I coughed. “Something seems—ah—to have happened.”

He kept his eyes on the listing, wagging his big head delightedly. “Yup, yup,” he said. “Something happened.” He suddenly snapped the book closed and slid it across to me. “Last thing in the world I ever expected to see again.”

“I didn’t think you would, either,” I said bitterly. “Dr. Grantham—”

“Buttons,” he corrected.

“Dr. Grantham, I have traveled across this continent and through some of the most Godforsaken topography on Earth just to put this volume in your hands.”

He started. I think that he realized only then that I had sought him out, that this was no accident on a field trip.

“You didn’t!” He lifted his glass and tossed it to his lips, found it empty, looked around in a brief confusion, then reached and took mine. He wiped his mouth with the bristly back of his hand. “What in hell
for?
”

I tapped the book. “If I may speak frankly—”

“Fire away.”

“We felt that this might—uh—bring you back to your senses.”

“I got real healthy senses.”

“Dr. Grantham, you don’t understand. You—you—” I floundered, picked up my second whiskey and drank some of it. It made my eyes stream. My throat made a sort of death-rattle and suddenly I could breathe again. I could feel the whiskey sinking a tap-root down my esophagus while tendrils raced up and out to my earlobes where, budding, they began to heat.

“You left for a field trip and did not return. You were granted
your sabbatical year to cover this because of your prominence in the field and because of the excellence of the collections you sent back; specimens such as the peyotl now named for you. Then the specimens dwindled and ceased, the reports dwindled and ceased—and then nothing, nothing at all.”

He scratched his thick pelt of red-and-silver. “Reckon I just figured it didn’t matter much no more.”

“Didn’t matter?” I realized I squeaked, and then that my voice was high and nagging, but I no longer cared. “Don’t you realize that as long as you are alive you hold the Pudley Chair?”

I saw the glint in his eye and clutched his wrist. “If you shout out to that bartender that you have a Pudley Chair, I’ll—I’ll—” I whispered, but could not finish for the cannonade of rich laughter he sent up. I sat tense and furious, helpless to do or say anything until he finished. At last he wiped his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely, quite as if he were civilized. “You caught me off guard. I’m really sorry, Professor.”

“It’s all right,” I lied. “Doctor, I want that Chair if you don’t. I’ve worked hard for it. I’ve earned it. I—I
need
it.”

“Well gosh, son, go to it. It’s all yours.”

I had wanted to hear that for so long, I’d dreamed of it so much—and now, hearing it, I became furiously angry. “Why didn’t you resign?” I shouted. “That’s all you had to do, resign, put a two-cent stamp on an envelope, save me all this work, this worry—I nearly died with a hole in my canteen,” I wept, waving at the pottery kiln they call “outdoors” in this terrible land. “Two horses I killed, my work is waiting, my books, students—”

I found myself patting the table inarticulately, glaring into his astonished eyes. “Why?” I yelled. “Why, why, why—” I moaned.

He got up and came round the table and stood behind me. On my shoulders he put two huge warm hands like epaulets. “I didn’t know, son. I—damn it, I did know, I guess.” I hated myself for it, but my shoulders shook suddenly. He squeezed them. “I did know. I reckon I just didn’t care.”

He took his hands away and went back to his chair. He must have made a sign because Big Horn came back with more whiskey.

After a time I said, with difficulty, “All the way out here I hated you, understand that? I’m not—I don’t—I mean, I never hated anything before, I lived with books and people who talk quietly and—and scholastic honors … Damn it, Dr. Grantham, I admired and respected you, you understand? If you’d stayed at the Institute for the next fifty years, then for fifty years I’d’ve been happy with it. I admired the Chair and the man who was in it, things were the way they should be. Well, if you didn’t want to stay, good. If you didn’t want the Chair, good. But if you care so little about it—and I respect your judgment—you understand?”

“Oh gosh yes. Shut up awhile. Drink some whiskey. You’re going to bust yourself up again.”

We sat quietly for a time. At length he said, “I didn’t care. I admit it. Not for the Institute nor the Chair nor you. I should’ve cared about you, or anyone else who wanted it as bad as you do. I’m sorry. I’m real sorry. I got—involved. Other things came to be important.”

“Peyotl. Selling drugs to the Indians,” I snarled. “You’ve probably got a nice little heap of dust salted away!”

The most extraordinary series of expressions chased each other across his face. I think if the first one—blind fury—had stayed, I’d have been dead in the next twelve seconds.

“I don’t have any money,” he said gently. “Just enough for a stake every once in a while, so I can—” He stared out at the yellow-white glare. Then, as if he had not left an unfinished sentence, he murmured, “Peyotl. Professor, you know better than to equate these buttons with opium and hashish. Listen, right near here, in the seventeenth century, there used to be a mission called Santo de Jesús Peyotes. Sort of looks as if the Spanish priests thought pretty well of it, hm? Listen,” he said urgently, “Uncle Sam brought suit against an Indian by the name of Nah-qua-tah-tuck, because Uncle’s mails had been used to ship peyotl around. When the defense witnesses were through testifying about how peyotl-eaters quit drinking, went back to their wives, and began to work hard; when a sky pilot name of Prescott testified about his weekly services where he served the stuff to his parish, and they were the most God-fearing parish in the Territories, why, Uncle Sam just packed up and went right back home.”

I knew something of the forensics of the alkaloid mescaline. I said, “Well and good, but you haven’t told me how you—how you could—”

“Easy, ea—sy,” he soothed, and just in time too. “Chip, you’re the injured party, for sure. I wish I could—well, make up for it, part way.”

“Perhaps we’d just better not talk about it.”

“No, wait.” He studied me. “Chip, I’m going to tell you about it. I’m going to tell you how a man like me could do what he’s done, how he could find something more important than all the Institutes running. But—”

I waited.

“—I don’t expect you to believe it. Want to hear it anyway? It’s the truth.”

I thought about it. If I left him now, the Chair waiting for me, my personal and academic futures assured—wouldn’t that content me?

It wouldn’t, I answered myself. Because Grantham wouldn’t return or resign. I’d lost two years, almost. I should know why I’d lost them. I
had
to know. I’d lost them because Grantham was callous and didn’t care; or because Grantham was crazy; or because of something much bigger “than all the Institutes running.” Which?

“Tell me, then.”

He hesitated, then rose. “I will.” He thumped his chest, and it sounded like the grumble you hear sometimes after heat lightning. “But I’ll tell it my way. Come on.”

“Where?”

He tossed a thumb toward the west. “The forest.”

The “forest” was the heavy growth of Draconaenoideae I’d seen down in the valley. It was quite a haul and I was still tired, but I got up anyway. Grantham gave me an approving look. He went outside and unstrapped my pack from the burro. “We’ll let Big Horn hold this.” He took it inside and emerged a moment later.

“Why don’t you leave your pouch?”

Grantham twinkled. “They call me Buttons, remember? I never leave this anywhere.”

We walked for nearly an hour in silence. The yucca appeared along the trail in ones and twos, then in clusters and clumps with spaces between. Their presence seemed to affect Grantham in some way. He began to walk with his head up, instead of fixing his eyes on the path, and his mind God knows where.

“See there?” he said once. He pointed to what was left of a shack, weed-grown and ruined. I nodded but he had nothing more to offer.

A little later, as we passed a fine specimen of melocactus, the spiny “barrel,” Grantham murmured, “It’s easy to fall under the spell of the cacti. You know. It caught you a thousand miles away from here. Ever smell the cereus blooming at night, Chip? Ever wonder what makes the Turk’s-head wear a fez? Why can’t a chinch-bug make cochineal out of anything but nopal? And why the spines, why? When most of ’em would be safe from everyone and everything even sliced up with gravy on …”