Little Tiny Teeth

hope that I might have been wrong about my companions having perished, that I might have mistaken paralysis for death, and that either or both of them had somehow survived and would show up. Needless to say, neither of them did.

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If you require further information, I would be glad to provide it.

In closing, I would like to thank you for your prompt initial payment. I wish you the best of luck with the seeds, and I look forward to accepting your kind invitation to visit the Gunung Jerai plantations to see the new plantings for myself.

Sincerely yours,

Arden Scofield

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ONE

Iowa City, Iowa, Thirty Years Later: November 2006

WHAT with pitchers of beer at not much more than half price and hot buffalo wings at ten for a buck, Brothers on a Wednesday night was not the best place in the world, or even in Iowa City, for quiet, sober reflection. The place was jammed with students—the university campus was a scant block away—and the noise level was enough to rattle the windows up and down Dubuque Street.

Nevertheless, quiet, sober reflection was exactly what Tim Loeffler, a graduate student in the University of Iowa’s prestigious Ethnobotanical Institute, was shooting for. Unfortunately, the “quiet” part had been out of the question from the start, and the “sober” part was beginning to get away from him, inasmuch as he and his four buddies were working on their third pitcher of Bud. But with his friends now taking their turns at the nearby foosball table, he was

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able to more or less collect his thoughts and sort through what was bothering him.

He’d gotten cold feet; that was it in a nutshell. When he’d first heard about the upcoming Amazon cruise and learned that none of his fellow grad students had signed up, he’d jumped at the chance. Almost a full week in the wilds under the direction of his major professor, Arden Scofield, with no other students competing for Scofield’s attention; it would be a heaven-sent chance to get on his good side, and—at long last—to get his Ph.D. dissertation topic approved, maybe right then and there. The other two members of his committee— Maggie Gray and Dr. Gus Slivovitz—had signed off on it six months ago. Only Scofield had held back his approval, merrily sending him back to the drawing board each time Tim had submitted it to him, always with one niggling, incredibly time-consuming “suggestion” or other. And the ironic thing was, Tim had taken on the miserable topic specifically to please Scofield, who went in for such subjects: “Agrobiodiversity conservation relating to consumer-driven strategies as they pertain to chick pea cultivation in the central Midwestern United States.” Just looking at the title practically put him to sleep, and here he’d been laboring on the wretched thing for almost three years, with no end in sight as long as Scofield kept waffling.

But this was it; he’d had it. Three years of classes and three more years slaving over the damn dissertation were enough. It was now or never. He’d been offered a fantastic postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Botanical Museum—Harvard, for God’s sake, the granddaddy of ethnobotany!—scheduled to begin the next academic year, the catch being, of course, that he had to be a bona fide postdoc himself to accept it. His coursework, comprehensive exams, and language requirements had been gotten out of the way long ago. All that re

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mained now was Scofield’s squiggle of a signature on the title page, and he was determined to get it from him before the trip was over. There would never be a better opportunity.

So why the cold feet? Because it had finally dawned on him that a big part of his problem with Scofield—or more accurately, Scofield’s problem with him—was that the man simply didn’t like him, had never liked him. Who knew why? Maybe Scofield, who loved center stage and thought he was the greatest lecturer on God’s green earth, didn’t like him because Tim had once or twice inadvertently stepped on his punch lines. (It was hard not to when you were hearing them for the tenth time.) Or maybe Scofield, underneath the hail-fellowjolly-well-met act, disapproved of Tim’s interest in ethnopharmacology. Tim’s original choice for a dissertation topic had been an examination of the preparation and use of hallucinogenic plant extracts among the Indians of Southern Ecuador— now that was something he really could have gotten his head into. But at the idea, Scofield’s caterpillar eyebrows had come together, he had stuck his pipe in his mouth, and he’d made one of his friendly, phony, well-now-let’s-you-and-I-thinkthis-through-together faces that meant anything but. Cravenly, Tim had caved in and accepted the agrobiodiversity topic the moment Scofield suggested it. He had even more cravenly thanked him for it, though his heart had been plummeting.

For the ten-thousandth time he mentally kicked himself for not choosing Maggie Gray as his major prof. Maggie, despite that hard-shelled, sarcastic bitchiness of hers, was not only a hell of a lot easier to get along with (“Call me Maggie,” she’d told him the first time he’d met her. “Call me Arden” was something he was still waiting to hear and probably never would), but Maggie, unlike Scofield, had a strong interest in ethnopharmacology herself and would have wel

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comed his Ecuadorian project as a thesis subject. But no, he’d leaped at the chance to get the famous Scofield as his major professor, imagining all the good it would do him in his career.

What a laugh. And the really irritating part of it was, everybody knew that the supposedly straight-arrow Scofield himself was a damned druggie, or near enough to it to make no difference. His everyday tea of choice after dinner was known to be something called Mate Celillo, which he claimed was an ordinary Bolivian mate—a popular tea, often recommended for altitude sickness and stomach problems, and made from coca leaves from which the addictive alkaloids had been removed. He drank it, so he claimed, because of its digestive properties and because it was a soothing way to end the day and thus helped him sleep. But Tim, who had his suspicions, had once swiped a couple of his tea bags and tried it, and he’d been a lot more than soothed. For an hour or so there had been a wonderfully relaxing, extremely pleasant sense of floating and well-being, and then, without seeing it coming, he’d suddenly plummeted into a deep, nine-hour sleep—in his chair, while watching television. Despite a little morning-after letdown—nothing new there—it had been a great trip, and