Flight Behavior (26 page)

He seemed doubtful of her story. But it was true, and in Dellarobia’s opinion no more far-fetched than the tales he’d told her. Of newborn butterflies, for instance, somehow flying thousands of miles to a place they’d never seen, the land where their forefathers died. Life was just one big fat swarm of kids left to fend for themselves.

Dr. Byron uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, pressing his hands together between his knees and looking at her. For the first time in this interview he seemed totally present. “Is this typical of high schools in this area, what you are describing?”

“Well, I only went to the one.” She hesitated, reconsidering how much she ought to disclose. She thought of Dovey mocking her ratty T-shirt:
Be sure to wear that to your interview
. “I had some good teachers,” she began again, unconvincingly. “Well, okay, I had one, Mrs. Lake for English. She was about a hundred years old. It’s weird, it was like she came from some earlier time when people actually cared. I heard she had a stroke, though. Bless her heart. Probably one too many times hearing some kid conjugate ‘bring, brang, brung.’ ”

Ovid seemed unamused. “What about math?”

“Our high school had Math One and Math Two,” she said. “Coach Otis, baseball. Math Two was for the kids who were already solid with multiplication.”

His brow wrinkled formidably. “Is this true?”

“Is that, like, massively insufficient?”

“Two years of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus, and stats.” He rattled this off like a ritual prayer in an alien religion. “Nothing there sounds familiar?”

“You ought to try that out on Coach Otis. If you want to see a grown man cry.”

Dr. Byron actually seemed agitated. “What are these administrators thinking?” he asked. As if he had a dog in this race, Dellarobia thought. His children, if any, would get started on higher math in some upmarket kindergarten.

“They’re not thinking anything much,” she told him. “Sports. That’s huge, a kid can shine if he’s good at football or baseball. Probably get a job later on in the bank or something like that.”

“Well, but it’s criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?”

“I’d say you’re looking at it.” She crossed her arms, awaiting Dr. Byron’s verdict. Former Feathertown athletes had this town in their hands: the mayor, Jack Stell; Bobby Ogle; Ed Cameron at the bank, with whom she’d pleaded grace on her house loan. In his office that day they’d joked about their semester together in Mrs. Lake’s class, which Ed barely passed, and the football squad he led to state semifinals. People liked and trusted such men.

“Look, Dellarobia, I don’t want you to take this personally. But I’ve been wondering about this. I went to that school. Things were not what I expected.”

“Feathertown High?” She was startled, unable to picture any intersection between Dr. Ovid Byron and local culture. “When?”

“In December. I wanted to speak with the faculty about getting volunteers in the new semester. It’s a great chance for these kids. Exposure to field biology, data analysis, scientific method. If for no other reason, the college résumé. But I got nothing. The counselor asked if we were paying minimum wage.”

“Oh, kids in Feathertown wouldn’t know college-bound from a hole in the ground. They don’t need it for life around here. College is kind of irrelevant.”

His eyes went wide, as if she’d mentioned they boiled local children alive. His shock gave her a strange satisfaction she could not have explained. Insider status, maybe. She thought of Billy Ray Hatch, turned into a freak show on TV. Dovey said he was all over the Internet now too, with his
reckon
and
this winter been too mild to suit my coon dogs
. The world’s next big laugh of the moment. She’d like to hug that old man around his neck, and punch some cameraman in the kisser.

“Footballers teaching sports in place of science class,” Dr. Byron declared, “should not be legal. Are there no state standards or testing?”

“Oh, yes. We flunk those. We are dependable in that regard.”

“How can that persist?” He was studying her carefully, for irony she supposed, or some kind of storybook scrappiness. She’d already taken this interview to be a lost cause, but now she resisted. She didn’t want to lose on his rules.

“I’ll tell you how,” she said. “This state has cities on one end of it, and farms on the other. If they ever decided to send somebody out from the money end of things to check on us, they might slap down a fine or something.”

“And why do you suppose they don’t?”

She laughed. “They’re scared they’ll get kidnapped by the hillbillies like in that
Deliverance
movie.”

“I haven’t seen that one.”

She leaned forward. “May I ask a personal question? What country did you grow up in?”

He matched her posture, both hands on his knees. “The United States of America. Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands.”

“Whoa. America has islands? Besides Hawaii, I mean.”

“America has quite a few in fact, in several oceans. Saint Thomas is a protectorate, which is really a glorified colony. We pay taxes, but nobody comes out from the money end of things, as you say, to keep our schools up to date.”

She nodded, checking him for irony or scrappiness, she supposed. It made sense of this man, to picture him stalking butterflies on a golden shore and wowing the teachers in some little one-room school. “And here you are anyway,” she said, “doctor of all the sciences, Harvard and everything. But see, there’s not room at the top for everybody. Most of us have to walk around in our sleep, accepting our underprivileged condition.”

“You may be overstating the case,” he said, and left it at that. As if she were a child. She had taken things too far, of course. But she felt anger rising, some things still left unsaid. Dr. Byron flipped through what looked like a lot of pages on his clipboard. He had asked to borrow a clock for the lab, and she’d brought out the only one she had, a big wind-up alarm thing shaped like a chicken that Preston had used for learning to tell time. The ridiculous object sat ticking off seconds on a table nearby, measuring out the remainder of her tenure here among the well educated. A machine next to the clock was labeled
SARTORIUS
, which made her think of
sartorial
, a vocabulary word from long, long ago.
Of or pertaining to the tailor’s trade.
What was getting sewn up here?

“I think you can take care of all the rest of this paperwork,” he said at last. “I think you will do fine. Our main concern is to get things going quickly, because we have so little time. A matter of weeks. Maybe not even that.”

“Thank you. Wow, thanks very much.” In other words, he was in a bind, and she would suffice. He stood up and gave her a quick handshake, handing over the clipboard, looking not at all thrilled. He indicated she should sit tight and finish filling out the forms. His impatience made no sense. He was acting like a man who’d been told he had only weeks to live. She wondered if he had spoken to Bear at all about the logging plan.

“Let me just ask,” she said cautiously, “what is your main worry, time-wise?”

He clicked his pen, looked at it, put it in his pocket, and then sat down again, looking her directly in the eye. “My main worry, time-wise, is that a winter storm could arrive here tomorrow and kill every butterfly on that mountain.”

She was so startled that any possible reply left her head. Even the assault-weapon cadence of Pete’s staple gun faltered for a moment, it seemed. How could they put all this effort into such a precarious scenario? That the butterflies could be wiped out, completely apart from the logging she hoped to forestall, was inconceivable.

“The temperature at which a wet monarch will freeze to death,” he said very slowly, as in,
Don’t make me repeat this
, “is minus four degrees centigrade.”

“Okay,” she said. As in,
I’m listening
.

“That is an inevitable event, for this latitude. The mid-twenties, Fahrenheit. The forest might shield them to some extent, where the canopy is closed. Large trees are protective; the trunks create a thermal environment like big water bottles. That’s why you see them covering the trunks. Maybe it’s why they ended up in that stand of old conifers for their roosting site when they went off track. These firs are similar to the Mexican oyamels
,
in terms of chemistry. We have no idea of the cues involved. But to protect them from the kind of winter they will have here, that forest is far from adequate.”

“So what normally happens to them, when it goes below freezing?” she asked.

“Normally they are in the Transverse Neovolcanic Belt of Mexico, at a latitude of nineteen degrees north. Where winter as you know it is not an issue.”

“So these butterflies would all die off, when it gets bad, and then what? Their eggs would hatch out in the spring?”

“Monarchs don’t lay eggs in winter. This is something I think you know.”

“You’re right, I did know that. Sorry. Technically a tropical guy, just visiting.”

“They are obliged to survive the winter in adult form. Even for these individuals with aberrant migratory flight behavior, the reproduction is hardwired. Like ours. If we somehow were tricked into going to live among cattle, we could not give birth to calves or feed them on grass.”

“I understand.”

“These insects have been led astray, for whatever reason. But breeding and egg-laying are still impossible for them until spring, when the milkweeds emerge.”

“So if they die here, they die.”

“That’s right,” he said.

She despised this account, the butterflies led astray. She’d preferred the version of the story in which her mountain attracted its visitors through benevolence, not some hidden treachery. “And the other monarchs . . . ,” she began, unsure what she meant to ask. “The ones in Mexico are still doing okay.”

“What we’re finding in Mexico this year is a catastrophically diminished population in the Neovolcanics. They had unbelievable storms and flooding last spring, which may or may not have something to do with this. We have been waiting all winter for better reports. A lot of people are there now searching the forests for relocated roosts. Higher up the mountain, is what we assumed. But the report is nothing.”

She tried to assimilate this news while her brain crashed with thoughts of the Mexican mudslide, the smashed and twisted cars, houses lifted from their moorings, floating downstream. A secret she had thought she was keeping from him.

“The report is nothing,” she repeated. “You mean the butterflies aren’t there.”

“Not in the ordinary numbers. This is not yet public information, so I ask you to keep it private. Not that anyone hereabouts is likely to be very interested.”

The insult was unnecessary. She felt accosted. “So what are you saying? That these butterflies here—”

“That this roosting colony is a significant proportion of the entire North American monarch butterfly population.”

“Most of the ones that
exist
?”

“Most of the migratory population, yes,” he said. “In terms of genetic viability, reproductive viability, what we have here is nearly the whole lot.”

Like Job, in the Bible, she thought. All his children gathered in one place for a wedding when a great wind rose and collapsed the roof upon them. All hope and future lost in a day. Of all sad stories, that parable was meant to be the saddest, a loss to make a man fall down on the ash heap and meet his maker or else run to the arms of darkness. She wondered if Ovid Byron knew the story of Job.

“So why does it even matter what you do here?” She looked at the laboratory in a different way. Mission control of a boggling heartbreak. “I’m sorry to ask. But, you know what I’m saying?”

He avoided meeting her eye. “We should be physicians, or some kind of superheroes saving the patient with special powers. That’s what people want.”

She didn’t reply, wondering if he was right about that. Probably it was true. People resisted hearing the details of a problem, even when it was something personal, like their own cancer. What they wanted was the fix.

“We are only scientists,” he said. “Maybe foolish ones. Normally it would take years to do what we are trying to accomplish here in a few weeks. We are seeing . . .” He paused. She followed his gaze to the plastic-covered window, a filmy rectangle of light and nothing more. Whatever he saw, it was not there.

“We are seeing a bizarre alteration of a previously stable pattern,” he said finally. “A continental ecosystem breaking down. Most likely, this is due to climate change. Really I can tell you I’m sure of that. Climate change has disrupted this system. For the scientific record, we want to get to the bottom of that as best we can, before events of this winter destroy a beautiful species and the chain of evidence we might use for tracking its demise. It’s not a happy scenario.”

What came to her mind on the spot was one of Cub’s shows on Spike TV,
1000 Ways to Die
. People thrived on unhappy scenarios. In this case it was just the one way, freezing to death, and millions of unfortunates. She stilled her mind, trying to embrace this sadness Dr. Byron had asked her to understand.

“One of God’s creatures of this world, meeting its End of Days,” she said after a quiet minute. Not words of science, she knew that, but it was a truth she could feel. The forest of flame that had lifted her despair, the migratory pulse that had rocked in the arms of a continent for all time: these fell like stones in her heart. This was the bad news he’d received over the holiday. The one thing most beloved to him was dying. Not a death in the family, then, but maybe as serious as that. He’d chased this life for all his years; it had brought him this distance, his complicated system. She had only begun to know it. Now began the steps of grief. It would pass through this world like that baby in its pelt of red fur, while most people paid no attention.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He looked away abruptly from those words, a gesture that gave her to know she might be needed here. Ovid was choking up. She spoke quickly to give him some cover. “I didn’t know it was that bad. I want to help out here, I’m glad to.”