The Weed Agency (15 page)

Two weeks later, Humphrey had requested another meeting with Inspector General Palmer. The deluge of records continued
unabated, and Office of the Inspector General staffers now grimly joked they were preparing to build an Ark.

Humphrey attempted to stride confidently into Palmer’s office, but found the door could not open the entire way, banging up against a stack of document boxes. Wilkins joined him this time, but instead of carrying his usual briefcase, Wilkins gingerly held a plastic carrying case with opaque sides. He offered Palmer’s secretary a thoroughly unconvincing smile, but she merely skeptically measured him and his mysterious case, wondering why he was handling it like it was a nuclear bomb.

“Mr. Palmer, I appreciate you taking the time to see me again,” Humphrey began as he settled into his chair, and pushed it, ever so slightly, about two inches further away from Palmer’s desk. “This is our assistant administrative director, Jack Wilkins. Let me begin with apologies; our last meeting took a much more combative tone than warranted. I failed to appreciate the diligence and drive you bring to your mission, and understand that in all of this, you’re merely doing your duty.”

“I appreciate that, Humphrey, and I have to say you’ve gone way beyond what I asked in turning over documentation,” Palmer nodded. “In fact, I don’t think we’re going to need—”

“Before you go any further, Mr. Palmer, permit me to offer a second apology, for assuming you were dismissing the importance of our work. Sometimes I forget how our efforts can seem so antiseptic, abstract, and difficult to grasp on memos and spreadsheets. People hear the ‘Agency of Invasive Species’ and picture space aliens or giant plant-monsters, or …” Humphrey paused, and watched Palmer’s eyes closely. “Or plagues of locusts.”

“I cannot imagine why someone would associate you with plagues,” Palmer said with a straight face.

“I wanted you to see our work with your own eyes, to appreciate our need to get out into the field,” Humphrey
continued, getting the confirmation he had sought. “Jack has brought you a most vivid example of some of our recent important work, dealing with the crops of the Midwest. You see, up to one billion dollars in crops are lost each year from the Western corn rootworm—”

Wilkins carefully unlocked the latch and opened the lid—and a slew of black-and-yellow beetles crawled within, several attaching themselves to the lid and then starting to drop to the floor and desk.

Palmer pushed himself back in a distinctly unmasculine fashion upon the sight of the bugs.

“What … are those things and why did you just put them on my desk?!” Palmer asked, failing to hide the tension in his voice.

“I’m sorry, I’ll get them back in here, it’s just they’re … you know, small, and pretty fast, and—damn—hang on, I’ll get that guy,” Wilkins removed rubber gloves and attempted to grab the bugs, failing to put the lid on quick enough to keep a few more from crawling out onto the desk.

“
Diabrotica virgifera virgifera
, scourge of the Corn Belt,” Humphrey said, trying to keep his voice even but not-so-subtly inching away from them. He put a picture of the bug magnified a thousand times onto the desk; up close, the mandibles, horns, and spiky legs resembled the radioactive giant ants of the 1950s sci-fi Cold War nuclear monster thriller
Them!

“That’s fine, Humphrey, I don’t need them on my desk!” Palmer said, grabbing a paper and starting to roll it up for a swat.

“Do be careful, Mr. Palmer, I understand these beetles can be aggressive when they feel provoked or threatened, with stings and bites,” Humphrey cautioned, inching back again. It wasn’t really true, Humphrey knew; the bugs were harmless to humans, but Palmer appeared to be rapidly succumbing to a medical condition technically diagnosed as the heebie-jeebies.

“Now, in the crate marked 3A-6B, you’ll find a series of records involving our travel to Chicago, Illinois, and Kansas City, Missouri, in the aftermath of infestations of this particular species.” Humphrey looked around, trying to ignore the crawling beetles in front of him, noticing that a good half-dozen crates were taking up space in Palmer’s office. “Do you have those records handy?”

Humphrey, Wilkins, and Jamie had sent constant messages to Palmer lamenting that they had tried to send the files in reverse chronological order, but also sending them as they found them to avoid concerns that any particular documents were being withheld. To clarify which records were in which box, they devised an unnecessarily complicated alphanumeric system that left every box sounding like a droid from
Star Wars
. Palmer’s staff had found going through the files an enormous ordeal, often wondering how their life’s twists and turns had left them examining a photocopy of a receipt for a sandwich purchase from O’Hare Airport in 1992.

“Three what? Look, it’s going to take me a while to dig out—I’m sorry, you said these bugs bite when they feel provoked?”

“That’s what the literature says,” Wilkins shrugged, “but the odds of any of us having an allergic reaction are pretty small, as I understand it.”

Palmer shifted his chair as far back as it could go. “Allergic?”

“Yes, well, the beetle is particularly relevant to our battle against the weed menace, as it is also a common carrier of ragweed pollen—”

“I’m allergic to ragweed!” growled Palmer, eyes glaring.

He noticed one of the beetles crawling on the armrest of his chair, and Palmer leaped out, stumbling and throwing himself into an adjacent metal filing cabinet.

“GET THESE”—many more expletives—“OUT OF MY OFFICE NOW, HUMPHREY!”

“Absolutely, sir, but first I’d just like to point out that these insects are an example of why my senior staff may attend biological research conferences that don’t seem directly applicable to our effort against weeds. You see, today I wanted to ensure that the importance of our work is clarif—”

“OUT! NOW! HUMPHREY!” The inspector general’s eyeballs seemed disturbingly close to bulging out of their sockets.

“Of course, my friend,” Humphrey smiled. “Wilkins.” He looked a bit unnerved as one of the larger beetles began crawling across the desk toward him. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Wilkins!”

“Working on it!”

Finally the butterfly net dislodged itself from the satchel.

“DO YOU HEAR HISSING?”

The remainder of the meeting was … brief. Once the bugs had been netted and redeposited into the plastic crate, Palmer practically pushed them out the door.

“So, I trust your upcoming report—if any—will reflect the importance of the invasive species threats that we assess and mitigate?” Humphrey asked in a jovial tone that masked the men’s near–nervous breakdown after the Battle of the Bugs. “You’ll emphasize that while our travel and conference budget may seem high to the untrained eye, they represent a wise and necessary investment in the agency that is, after all, all that stands between us and these little buggers—”

“Oh, you’ve made that abundantly clear, Humphrey,” Palmer fumed, feeling the back of his neck, unsure if his periodic sensation of tiny little legs crawling on him was psychosomatic. “Listen, never bring anything with more than two legs into my office again. In fact, never come into my office again.”

“As you wish, Mr. Palmer, but know that my staff and I are always at your service,” Humphrey said with a beaming smile, quite confident that the Inspector General wanted nothing to do with Humphrey and his agency ever again.

They departed the office suite and stood outside the hallway. Humphrey could not quite stifle a smirk.

“Okay, it worked,” Wilkins admitted. “It worked terrifically, but I still think there had to be an easier way to get Palmer off our backs than renting a box of beetles and making me play Marlin Perkins to the mini-Mothras here.”

“Oh, Jack,” Humphrey chuckled, pressing the elevator button. “You’ve been with me long enough to understand my belief in the influential power of the sudden, unexpected, visceral reaction. We could have used tiny bugs, but I doubt that would have … stirred the heart of Palmer in the way we desired. He’ll probably never come near our office again!” He stifled a bit of louder laughter, then noticed Wilkins was looking at his plastic case quite intensely.

“What, are you growing attached to them now?”

Wilkins looked up at Humphrey with a look of barely repressed horror. “I’m pretty sure we left a bunch of them in there.”

The two exchanged an unnerved look, glanced back at the door to Palmer’s office suite and then at each other again.

“Let’s take the stairs.”

DECEMBER 1997

U.S. National Debt: $5.49 trillion

Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $146.9 million

Nick Bader’s wife, Anne, was not enjoying life as a congressional spouse.

They were packing up a portion of their house; she and their three children had decided to relocate from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to McLean, Virginia. Nick Bader found that every congressman lived in two places simultaneously, both in Washington and in their home district. Miss a vote and the opposition would claim you’re neglecting your duties; spend the weekends in Washington and you were accused of going native and forgetting the folks back home. Bader suspected that very few constituents really cared where he was; some folks just wanted something to complain about.

Anne Bader had been initially excited about public life—she spoke at a few campaign events, and when her husband won, she felt a quiet thrill that the people of this Pennsylvania congressional district seemed to see the greatness she saw in him. But within a year, she wanted the voters to go away and let her and their children live a normal life. Neighbors and acquaintances shared any and all complaints about government at any level, with the unspoken assumption that her husband would be able to do something about it. Every new friend had to be regarded with a certain unspoken suspicion; sudden acts of kindness often seemed to come with a subsequent request for a favor. Suddenly, every new friendly face had to be treated warily.

In 1996 Bader won reelection fairly handily, and Anne thought that the stressful transition to life in the public spotlight would ease. Nick Bader became a slightly less perpetually stressed husband and father, and his temperamental outbursts occurred less frequently, but she sensed a low-boil frustration within him.

That night, after all the packing, lying in bed in the dark and dreading the partial move the next day—the Baders intended to keep the house in Bucks County as his legal residence—Nick
Bader let out that frustration, in a quiet whisper rather than the burst of anger Anne expected.

“I’m not sure I’m ever going to do what I thought I was meant to do,” he said quietly. “A lot of days I feel like I’m talking to myself, or to an empty chamber. My bills go nowhere. I don’t feel like anybody really listens to me. We didn’t really cut much of anything our first year, didn’t happen the second year, and it’s not looking that good in this year or next,” he sighed.

“You’re fighting the good fight,” she said, brushing his head. “That’s all anyone can ask of you—including yourself.”

“At least Sisyphus managed to move the rock,” he continued. “Everyone who comes to Washington intending to cut the government comes with some other goal as well—defense, abortion, schools, whatever. And everyone who likes the government the way it is has gotten very, very skilled at figuring out how to get us to focus on the other stuff.”

“The first day I saw you at Princeton, you were wearing glasses and a leather jacket, and you were arguing with some College Republican about Nixon—something about …”

“Price controls,” Bader recalled with a smile. “I was trying to get that my-party-can-do-no-wrong dweeb—God, what was his name?—to grasp that our guy had just unilaterally decided that the government can freeze wages for everyone in the country.”

“Anyway, I kind of knew who you were, but I remember thinking—that guy’s going to get things done.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I still believe in that man.”

She went to sleep, and Nick Bader slept a bit better than he had the previous few nights.