Flight Behavior

She’d heard theories in her time regarding the number-one enemy of everything, ranging from Osama bin Laden to premarital sex. The dust theory she liked. Here was a danger she seemed situated to control. Before the men unpacked their crates she had attacked the cement floor with practiced vigor using an industrial mop bucket they’d bought at the Walmart in Cleary, along with the plastic sheeting. And back before they arrived she’d spent a Sunday morning chipping out fossilized manure with a screwdriver and flat-bottomed shovel. She’d like to see some college ho do that.

When Dr. Byron first mentioned this job on the phone, she’d thought he was posing it as a real possibility. Not the long shot it obviously was. She felt embarrassed now, as if caught out on a foray into the kind of false identity hijinks she and Dovey used to pull off in bars, pretending to work for Jane Goodall and the like. Ovid had changed. Gone away was the man who’d moonwalked at her Christmas party, the man with the eyetooth-wide smile. Replaced by a distracted would-be employer grimacing at her poor credentials. She wondered what had happened to darken his mood in the interim. A death in the family, a fight with his wife. Holidays were notorious for family crackups.

Whatever the reason, he’d scarcely noticed she was working her tail off in here already, doing the heavy cleaning, to impress him as a volunteer before asking to upgrade her status. He just stood around looking vexed, listing problems in the making. January had taken a turn, the rain had turned to freezing, his instruments were temperamental. How were they going to heat the lab? He worried about controlling the humidity and temperature fluctuations, the flammable fumes. He was uncertain his chemical reagents could be properly stored here. Something called the NMR he decided to scrap altogether, and would have to send those samples back to New Mexico. There was so much to do, he kept saying. Dellarobia missed the man who’d once come to supper and charmed her clever son. She resented his new list of cares, wondering how they stacked up against, say, a foreclosure notice or a car breakdown you walked home from without any hope of repair. In her experience people had worries or they had tons of money, not both.

“So, no college is a deal-breaker?” she asked. He seemed to have forgotten she was holding her breath here, turning blue. He continued to write for several more seconds. She could not imagine what that was about. He turned a page, looked up.

“Not a deal-breaker, no. Mainly I’m looking for some maturity in this position.”

“Maturity,” she repeated. “Meaning you’re looking to hire an old person?”

He almost smiled. “Responsible, I should have said. When the place is hopping with student volunteers, it can be overwhelming. Sometimes I feel like that old woman in the shoe, you know? How does that one go?”

“So many children she didn’t know what to do, yes sir I do know. Who are these kids, and what all will they be doing?”

He swatted a hand at the empty room, his momentary lightness gone. “So much, I can’t even tell you. Cardenolide fingerprinting maybe, lipid analysis for sure, that’s where we’ll start. I can train you to do a lot of the routine work on that.”

She felt simultaneous hope and defeat. I can train you to lightbulb candlewax drainpipe. The man was speaking in tongues. “Lipids are food, right? Some kind of fat.”

“Fat, yes. We’ll see whether these butterflies fattened up prior to overwintering. Usually they travel light during the migration and then pack away a lot of lipid stores just before they roost for the winter. We want to see if they are behaving as a normal migratory population, even though this is not a normal place for migrants to go. I am also concerned about how their physiology is responding to the cold weather. And we still don’t have a full habitat assessment. Monitoring the site, recording all the data from our iButtons. It’s a whole lot of busywork.”

Was she hired, then? And did he think she had the faintest idea what he was talking about? Her panic must have been obvious. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to throw you to the lions.”

“Okay,” she said slowly, noting that some other placement was implied.

“We should be getting a lot of help here soon. The college in Cleary will probably send us biology students for internships, and we’re tapping other options.” He set the clipboard on his knee, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and leaned back, relaxing a little. Those hands, the ultra-long fingers and pale palms, she’d noticed the first time they met. “We’ll train these kids and put them on the simple things. Data entry, body counts, doing parasite counts under the scope. But training them all from the ground up, it costs a lot of time, you know? It’s time we just don’t have.”

“So this position would involve supervising college kids?”

“Pete and I will handle the internships. Oh, I should mention, other researchers will be coming through. From Cornell and Florida, maybe Australia.” She wondered if he could be joking: How many famous scientists would fit in a milking parlor?

“But I’m talking about the day-to-day, you know?” Dr. Byron went on. “The simple, routine stuff. It means logging a lot of hours. We’re looking for some volunteers who can come in after school. High school kids.”

Now she did laugh. “You mean doing science on purpose, on their own time? Good luck with that one. Maybe when it comes out as a video game.”

He clicked his tongue dismissively. “Volunteerism is a very big part of our effort. Monarch Watch, Journey North, these are national networks of kids mostly, with their teachers, doing class projects. Rearing and tagging butterflies, tracking, and so on. They help us plot arrivals and departures, on the Internet.” He tilted his head toward Pete. “Probably half my graduate students got their start as kids doing monarch projects.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but really? These are kids and schoolteachers going outside to study nature stuff?”

“Tell me, Dellarobia. What did you do in science class?”

“In high school? Our science teacher was the basketball coach, if you want to know. Coach Bishop. He hated biology about twenty percent more than the kids did. He’d leave the girls doing study sheets while he took the boys to the gym to shoot hoops.”

“How is that possible?”

“How? He’d take a vote, usually. ‘Who says we shoot hoops today?’ Obviously no girl would vote against it. You’d never get another date in your life.”