Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

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 welcomed 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 Tim had made several efforts to locate some of the stuff on his own, but so far, no luck.

Getting back to Scofield, maybe the problem was that the guy just didn’t like his face, or his nose, or the shape of his ears – just a matter of chemistry, at bottom unexplainable and irreversible. Well, if so, it went both ways by now; he could hardly look at Scofield without feeling his stomach turn over. But whatever it was, it was there, all right, and earlier tonight, when he and his pals had been talking about it, one of them had raised a pertinent point: “If he just plain doesn’t like you after three years of knowing you, what makes you think that being around him twenty-four hours a day is going to make him like you any more?”

It was a reasonable question, and Tim was worried. He couldn’t imagine coming out of this detesting Scofield any less than before, so why should it work the other way around? The thing was, he was never at his best around the guy – clumsy and stupid, saying the wrong thing, usually overly obsequious, but sometimes (the wrong times, inevitably) overly assertive, even blundering. His meetings with Scofield invariably left him feeling hollow and sick to his stomach. What if he picked the wrong time to present him with the latest incarnation of the dissertation? What if Scofield turned it down yet again?

Well, if that happened, that was the end of it. Enough of his life had been wasted. He would throw in the towel. With his master’s degree he could certainly teach botany at a junior college, or maybe get some kind of job with a company that made herbal products or natural nutrients or something. But goodbye, “Dr.” Loeffler; farewell, Harvard; so long, big-time research.

He gave his head a shake and poured another glass from the pitcher. What the hell, the die was cast, he couldn’t get out of it now, and maybe that was a good thing, all things considered. One way or another, he was headed for a life-altering experience on the Amazon. By the time it was over he would know exactly where he stood, and that was a feeling he hadn’t had for a long time.

A little over three blocks away, in her office on the third floor of the darkened biology building on the University of Iowa campus, Assistant Professor Margaret – Maggie – Gray was also pondering the life-altering possibilities of the upcoming Amazon cruise with Arden Scofield.

One thing was crystal clear. She had no future in the Ethnobotanical Institute or its parent, the Department of Biological Sciences. Once again her promotion to associate professor had not come through. That amounted to a not-so-subtle way of telling her to find another job someplace, because she certainly had no future at UI, especially considering the new, cost-driven plan to cut back Institute faculty next year and fold it into Biological Sciences, with no formal status of its own. There would be funds for only one faculty member in ethnobotany, instead of the current three, and she had no illusions about who that was going to be. She and Gus Slivovitz were history, or soon would be. Gus, seeing the handwriting on the wall, had already applied to and been accepted at some wretched agricultural school in Mississippi, or maybe one of those other equally dreadful states down there… Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma… which, if we were going to be painfully honest about it, was about where Gus had belonged all along.

Looking out over the lamplit, shadowed campus walkways from her desk, sipping tawny port from a tumbler, she was in a downcast frame of mind and deep in self-recrimination. She was thinking bitterly of how much good her Ph. D. had done her. All that work, and where had it gotten her? At thirty-nine she was still an assistant professor with a reputation (well-earned) as an acid-tongued, going-nowhere, old spinster with no life outside the lab. And the sacrifices she’d made, the wrong turns in the road! If she’d gone to Los Angeles with Curt all those years ago instead of insisting on hurrying back to finish her oh-so-important coursework at Cornell, maybe now she’d have a life.

She swallowed the rest of the port and, grim-faced (she’d feel like hell in the morning), poured two inches more. Make that three. What the hell. Her past was all water under the bridge; nothing to be done about it now. It was her future she had to think about.

And Arden Scofield, unlikely as it seemed, held the key to it. In addition to Arden’s professorship – his full professorship – at UI, he was a more-or-less permanent part-time prof at the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva in Peru, where he supervised an extension program for local farmers. That university was creating a new position of full professor of medical ethnobotany the following year, and according to Arden, he had already recommended Maggie; the job was as good as hers if she wanted it. She didn’t doubt that this was true. A recommendation from the great, the celebrated Arden Scofield would be sure to carry a lot of weight. Besides, the job was made for her. Medical ethnobotany – the study of how indigenous peoples use local plants for curative purposes – was her area of expertise, and the closest thing she had to a consuming interest… her one interest, really; she had published several well-received papers on it (and still no associate professorship!). So all that remained was for her to go down with Arden to Tingo Maria, where the school was located, and have Arden introduce her to some of the administrators.

And that was the plan. She would come along on the Amazon cruise, paying her own way, but assisting Arden as needed. That part of it was quite appealing, really. She had done her graduate fieldwork on the Rio Orinoco in Venezuela fifteen years ago and had made several subsequent trips there, but this one would be to the great Amazon Basin itself. She would do some collecting – a lot of collecting – and she was eager for the chance to sit down with local shamans and curanderos. These “uneducated,” unworldly Indian healers, carrying in their heads the results of thousands of years of experimentation with barks, roots, leaves, and flowers, were the world’s first and best medical ethnobotanists.