“Would you mind telling me who you are?” she asked him.
The guy had long black sideburns, a style Dellarobia associated with 1970s movies featuring people wearing horrible clothes, though in other respects he looked pretty okay. Skinny jeans, parka, horn-rimmed glasses. He carried a folder under one arm and seemed out of breath, as if he’d been jogging. “How about you tell me who you are?” he replied.
“Okay. You’re on my porch. I’m the person that lives here with my husband and kids. Now you.”
He took a step back, nearly pitching himself backward off the edge of the small porch. Her hunch was correct; he’d taken her for a middle-schooler. He looked her over, reassessing what was under that raincoat, then opened his red folder and flipped madly through some papers. “Burley Turnbow? That couldn’t possibly be you, right?”
She waited a beat. “The name I was looking for was yours.”
“Oh, sorry. Vern Zakas. I’m president of the environment club at CCC. Nice to meet you.” He extended his hand, and she shook it. The community college. It figured.
“Nice to meet you,” she said. “What’s your business with Burley Turnbow?”
He glanced at the crowd. “Okay. We’re protesting cutting down all the trees in the butterfly place. Anywho-dot-com listed this as the residence of Burley Turnbow, the guy that’s logging up there, trying to kill all the butterflies.”
She pushed back the hood of her raincoat for a better command of the situation, seeing a second flash of surprise as Vern Zakas registered her as an adult female. And the Butterfly Venus, maybe that too, but mortification had its place, and this was not it. “You don’t completely have your story straight,” she told Vern. “I hate to tell you this, but you’ve even got the wrong Burley Turnbow. Believe it or not, there’s two. It’s the father, Burley Senior, you’d want to speak to. He doesn’t live here.”
“Oh, Christ, I am so sorry,” said Vern. “Somebody messed up.” He looked back at his papers as if the fault lay there, the same way people will turn and glare at a sidewalk after they’ve stumbled over nothing.
“No worries,” Dellarobia said. “Look, here’s what you want to do. Keep going down this road, that direction, about the length of a football field, and you’re going to see their gravel drive on the right. There’s a ring of whitewashed stones around the mailbox and this great big planter box shaped like a swan. Really ugly. You can’t miss it.”
The kids on her lawn stared at her, holding their placards at half-mast in the drizzle. They were a wary-looking bunch, the hoods of their damp parkas zipped close around their faces and their eyes wide, as if standing on a stranger’s lawn were way out at the tippy edge of their comfort zone. Their signs were not very impressive. They’d scrawled their demands in such thin marking-pen letters you couldn’t even read them from ten feet away. These kids had an anger-deficit problem.
“Yo, people, listen up,” she shouted at the crowd. “Thanks for your interest, but you’ve got the wrong house. You all need to go yell at Bear Turnbow. He lives down that way, less than half a mile. Follow your leader here, Vern. He’s got directions.”
Vern hoofed it off the porch and headed for his car, beckoning with one arm in the air. The kids folded their placards close to their bodies and filed toward their vehicles, obedient as collies. She saw one sign that said “Resist Authority!”
“Thank you!” several of the kids called out as they left.
“No problem,” she said, and went to fetch the family she’d hidden in the weeds.
Once Lupe and the kids were safely squared away in her living room, she walked out to the lab. The milking parlor had to be entered through an open section of the barn where Cub had engine parts strewn all over, a fact that embarrassed her not a little. She’d asked him to tidy things up, but men and barns were like a bucket of forks, tidy was no part of the equation. She pulled open the newly fitted laboratory door to find Ovid and Pete hard at work putting butterflies in the oven. She was worried about being late, but Ovid never seemed to take any notice of what time she came in. She took down her lab coat from the peg where she hung it every evening, wondering when it should be washed, and squashed on the rubber goggles that had to fit over her glasses. As distracting as a condom, and just as necessary, she supposed. Ovid really stressed the safety aspect.
On Monday they’d begun a lipid extraction experiment, beginning with one hundred live butterflies carried down the mountain in a cooler. Each was stuffed in its own wax envelope, weighed on the Mettler balance, and dried overnight in the scientific drying oven. So it was no joke, butterflies in the oven. Her tasks so far had been to number the envelopes and record all the weights in a special notebook, pre- and post-oven-drying. From there each brittle butterfly carcass went into its own test tube, tamped down with a little glass rod. She did the carcass crushing, which felt like breaking tiny butterfly bones, and Pete added petroleum ether to each tube. The reagent filled the lab with a faintly automotive smell, like a gas station from across the street, but according to Ovid it was far more flammable than gasoline. They worked under the newly installed oven hood, but even with the vents running, one match could send this place up in a flash and boom they would hear all the way to Cleary. Those were his words. It gave her chills to imagine it. All those children under one roof, next door.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said loudly, addressing her excuse not exactly to Dr. Byron but to the room. “I had to do some crowd control outside.”
Ovid and Pete were astonished to hear the details of her morning. She was surprised herself as she retold it. At the time it felt like a simple rectification rather than bravery per se, but she’d stood before a crowd of fifty people and told them to go bark up the correct tree. To command this kind of attention was a lifetime first for Dellarobia. Her normal audience was two, with a combined age of six, to what end she could never be sure. Back in school she’d presented things in a classroom, but that hardly counted. She didn’t count being on the news either. The audience might be huge, but they weren’t there at the time, and her words turned out to be immaterial. This morning, they’d listened.
Pete and Ovid had missed the whole show. The voices hadn’t carried back here to the barn. Of course, the windows were covered with plastic sheeting. Dellarobia recalled that this was once proposed by the government as a protection against terrorist attacks. Apparently it had about the same effect as sticking your fingers in your ears.