“Thank you, sir!” the woman behind Duayne said to him as the doors opened, and Duayne strode to his accustomed seat feeling bold and beneficent.
He took from under his arm his copy of the day’s Post, but instead of slipping on his glasses to read it, he stared out the window at the lights whizzing by as the train left the station, and then at the pulsing black of the tunnel walls. Even after the adrenaline rush from his encounter had receded, he continued to stare unseeing at the darkness. He was thinking about the Amazon River.
He was also thinking, as he often did, about bugs.
Unlike the other members of Arden Scofield’s Amazon expedition, Duayne Osterhout was not an ethnobotanist or even a botanist. He was that even rarer bird, an ethnoentomologist. As the senior research scientist in the Housing and Structural Section of the Urban Entomology Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture, he was an authority on the extraordinary creatures referred to as “pests” by the uneducated general population: silverfish, beetles, ants, and the like. In particular, he was a much-published expert on that miracle of propagation, survival, and resourcefulness, Periplaneta americana, the common American cockroach, and its many cousins.
It was Duayne’s not-so-secret shame that in all his forty-eight years he had never set foot in the tropics, from whence almost all insects had originally come. Never had he gloried in the sight of a Blaberus giganteus, its carapace gleaming brown and gold in the equatorial sunshine; never had he stood among giant jungle plants, eye to eye to eye, or rather eye to metallic, antlerlike mandibles, with a Cyclommatus pulchellus. It was not a conscious decision that had kept him from seeing firsthand the insect marvels of the southern hemisphere, it was simply that he hadn’t gotten around to it. He’d gotten married before he was out of graduate school, and then his work had consumed him, along with the raising of a family of three. Life had gotten in the way, that’s all. Besides that, his wife Lea wasn’t much of a traveler aside from luxury cruising, and she wasn’t very keen on his going anywhere without her. And – let’s be honest about it – he hadn’t ever gotten up his resolve enough to press the matter.
However, that had all changed now. Three days after their youngest daughter had left for college in Ohio last year, Lea had up and left him to move into some kind of socialist commune in upstate New York. Although it had been a shock at first, he had been astonished at how little difference it had made in the basics of his day-to-day life, and at how quickly he had been able to settle into a satisfying, fulfilling routine. It was as if he’d been living someone else’s life for the last twenty-five years.
It was his eldest daughter, Beth, who was responsible for his upcoming Amazon adventure. Beth had taken after her father from the start, with a gratifying interest in natural history, but somewhere along the way she’d moved from fauna to flora. Now she was a fledgling plant biologist with the National Science Foundation, but last year she’d still been finishing up her graduate work at Georgetown. Someone had told her about Arden Scofield’s botanical field expeditions to the Huallaga Valley near Tingo Maria, Peru, and she’d signed up. The trip she’d described had sounded so fascinating to Duayne – there had been so many amazing bugs! – that he had telephoned Scofield to apply for a place in the next expedition if there were any to spare. When Scofield told him that he was welcome, and that they would be exploring the mighty Amazon River itself this time, Duayne couldn’t have been more thrilled.
There was, however, an unexpected fly in the ointment. Only a few days ago, he had learned from his ex-wife that Scofield had made some persistent and highly improper advances to Beth during the expedition. She had held him off, of course, but the thought of it made Duayne’s blood boil. It wasn’t only because his own daughter had been the recipient of Scofield’s unsavory attentions, it was the very idea of a celebrated, mature scientist… a teacher… a figure of trust and authority, taking advantage of an innocent, starry-eyed student barely into her twenties – any innocent, young, starry-eyed student – who had been entrusted into his care. Duayne knew such men and despised them. Before the expedition was over, he planned to have a few sharp words with Scofield and give him what-for. You couldn’t let men like that simply think they had gotten away with it free and clear.
But for the moment, all that was secondary to the inextinguishable glow in his heart as he considered the great adventure to come.
The Amazon River! He whispered it to himself, just for the pleasure of forming the words as the train burrowed, deep and echoing, under the Potomac. The Amazon River!
TWO
Set in the sun-drenched coastal splendor of Cabo San Lucas on the Mexican Riviera is the elegantly rustic, eco-friendly Mandalay-Pacific Spa, where you will find the balance between body, mind, and soul that is the key to a wholesome, healthy, and energetic lifestyle. Mandalay-Pacific Spa helps you achieve this goal through the integration of the four vital elements of traditional holistic healing: Water, Fire, Earth, and Air. Our treatments, known since antiquity, will help you to achieve the perfect state of balance and harmony that our harried modern lifestyles cry out for.
During your relaxing, luxurious, seven-day winter holiday, you and your companion will experience the life-renewing pleasures of:
• Traditional Persian clay treatments that cleanse your body of physical, emotional, and spiritual toxicities. • Herbal body scrub/wraps that break up crystallized nodes and dissolve blocked energy. (Your choices include coffee bean scrub with crushed turnip wrap and grated coconut scrub with fresh papaya wrap.) • Antistress, aromatherapeutic foot massages using grape seed oil and lavender, clove, and lemon extracts. • Naturopathic facials that rejuvenate and revive through the application of yogurt-and-fresh-cucumber masks and deep-penetration limewater-and-sea-salt scrub. • Ayurvedic total-body massages employing charcoal and frankincense to…
“Umm…” Julie Oliver stopped reading and slid the peach-colored, almond-scented flyer back across the table. “Are you sure you want me to go with you?” she asked doubtfully. “I don’t know, Marti, that doesn’t really sound like something I’d enjoy all that much.”
Marti Lau shook her head. “What, a week in Cabo with enough pampering to last a lifetime? Free transportation, free food, free everything? What’s not to like? And sunshine! Wouldn’t you like to see what color the sky is again?”
To clinch her point, she gestured out the window beside their table, which overlooked Puget Sound, or as much of it as could be seen on this typical early-November day in Seattle. A dismal, freezing mist hung low over the dull gray water, totally closing out everything more than a few hundred yards offshore. As they watched, a big, green-and-white state ferry slid slowly away from Colman Dock and disappeared almost immediately into the murk, looking forlorn and bedraggled and without a single passenger out on the open, wet deck.
“Well, why doesn’t John go with you?” Julie said, then turned to address Marti’s husband directly. “You’re the one who’s always grumping about the Seattle weather, John. I would have thought you’d love a chance to be in sunny Mexico for a week.”
“Yeah, but not enough to sit still for getting scrubbed with a turnip,” John Lau said. “No, thanks, not my kind of thing.”
“Julie, I just don’t see what your problem is,” Marti said. “You already said you could get away.”
Julie nodded. She was a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park headquarters in Port Angeles, she was overdue for some vacation time, and November was a good month to take it. “I could, yes…”