Little Tiny Teeth Read Online Free PDF Page B

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-five-minute 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 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 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