Little Tiny Teeth

didn’t know what had gotten into her, and surely he knew she hadn’t meant it (which he did). And things would go smoothly until the next night, or maybe the one after that.

Mel had been doing a lot of Web research on menopause. Among

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the things he’d learned was that it typically lasted anywhere from six to thirteen years. He just prayed Dolly’s was the six-year variety.

Aseasoned underground commuter, Duayne V. Osterhout knew precisely where to stand on the platform of the cavernlike Smithsonian Metro station in order to be first through the rear doors of the second car, from which he would have a clear shot at his preferred corner seat, wedged in by the window. As usual he had arrived in time for the 5:23 P.M. Orange Line train to West Falls Church, in order, not to take it, but to be there when the passengers boarded, so that he could assume his place on the platform the moment the doors slid closed and thus be in position for the 5:37. He did not consider a fourteen-minute wait a high price to pay for a comfortable seat, with no sweating straphangers leaning over him, during the twenty-fiveminute ride to Virginia. At this time in the evening on a weekday, planning was essential if he didn’t want to stand most of the way home.

When the platform lights began blinking to signal the imminent arrival of the train, a man with a backpack—a little old to be traveling with a backpack in Duayne’s opinion—more or less unthinkingly bulled his way to the front of the crowd that had now collected behind Duayne. (Duayne was not the only one who knew precisely where to stand so that the doors opened directly in front of him, but he was one of the few who was willing to wait from the departure of one train to the arrival of the next.)

“Excuse me, sir,” Duayne said. “I believe I was here first. So were these other people.” His heart was thumping, but there were times when you had to stand up for what was right. Otherwise you invited

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anarchy, the kind of thing to be found on the New York City subway system.

The man stared malignly at him. “Well, excuse me, buddy. I didn’t see no sign that said you could reserve a place to stand.” But when Duayne unflinchingly returned the stare, the man said, “Ah, the hell with it,” and moved off.

“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

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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—

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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.