Nightlife with Insects

Fiction by Robert Michael Pyle

I am an entomologist. Specifically, I am an economic entomologist--what some call a "nozzlehead." I work for American Cyanimid, looking for better ways to kill cockroaches and Colorado potato beetles. I started out by loving bugs and chasing butterflies, like any kid. But somewhere along the line my focus became spraying poison on them. Now, insects are the enemy. I was on my way to the Entomological Society of America meeting, which is to the nozzleheads what the Jackson Hole Rendezvous was to mountain men. It happened to be held this year in Las Vegas, just before Christmas, of all times and places. But this is my tribe, such as it is; so I left home and flew, for Christ's sake, to Las Vegas.

As the plane banked over Las Vegas, the straight edges of the lights on the desert floor reminded me of the ribbons on the packages I'd managed to wrap before I left town. Straight bright lines...then blank--nothing. Just the black. And here and there a spot of light with nothing whatsoever around it. Completely self-sufficient, or so it looked. I wondered what the story was around those lonely lights.

I thought of the fuss kicked up by one young guy that afternoon, when the stewardess asked him to shut his shade during the movie. He insisted that he'd booked a window seat specifically to watch the landscape, not some dumb movie he could see anywhere. She finally gave up, but he took a lot of glares from the people around him.

When the earphones clicked, cutting into my Willie Nelson and promising some sort of pronounce-ment, I listened up for the point of interest. "Uh, hello. folks. This is the captain. We hope we've put on a real good flight for you up here tonight. Those of you on the left-hand side of the plane will soon be getting a knock-out view of downtown Las Vegas and The Strip. Be sure to watch for the Luxor...twelve lasers, 6,000 watts each, coming right out of the top of the pyramid." That's when the lines of lights appeared, inside of which everything was eye-shattering bright; outside, just black. The plane banked, and a brilliant light shot across the wing.

I looked away and rubbed my eyes. Across the aisle sat the kid who'd acted up over the window shade earlier. A little too fresh-faced, fuzzy around the gills, skinny and unsure of himself. I remembered he had trouble getting his insect net through security. Like he was going to hijack the plane with a butterfly net. Now he was pasted to the window, as if his nose was frozen to it, like a kid I once knew who'd taken a dare and stuck his nose to a cold hydrant. I wondered what he saw out there that grabbed him. When the seat belt light came on and he had to turn away, his face kept a kind of smeared look, like he'd looked into something he wasn't ever supposed to see. Somehow, it bugged me.

Once at the Hilton, I slept poorly. After college, I worked for an exterminator until my old butterfly dreams metamorphosed into nightly romps with roaches and rotenone, termites and chlordane. Now I don't dream at all.

The meeting was a meeting, no more, no less. Hundreds of talks on subjects such as "Pumpkin phenology and its effect on susceptibility to bacterial wilt," "Management of melon thrips," and "Impact of green manure, crop rotations, and trap crop on soybean cyst nematodes and arthro-pods." There were the real slay and spray heavy-hitters: "Progress in the registration of biopesticides: an industry perspective," and even a little natural history, such as "European earwig as a predator of red-legged earth mite in Victoria." There were posters and parties, luncheons and banquets, and slides, slides, slides. I gave my eight-minute talk on the venerable potato beetle (Progress in the Battle Against) on the first day. The next four were for amusement.

I saw plenty of guys I knew, and a few women. I'd run into them in the elevators of the Hilton, by the pool, or cruising the slots, eyeing the poker. "So, do you still like bugs? Are you having fun?" I asked one or two familiar faces. They shook their heads like I was nuts at the first question, and just looked blank at the second, so I stopped.

I brightened up when I learned that Elvis had done 547 consecutive shows there. Of course he wasn't there anymore, except in a framed photograph on the wall showing him in a hard hat with a construction boss, looking at blueprints.

I could hear his cornbread baritone with drippings: "Looks mighty fine, Sir. Thank-you-very-much." There was a big bronze statue of The King in the lobby, near the fake snowy village electric train Christmas montage. It was impressive, but looked about as much like Elvis as I do and I'm six-foot-tall, 168 pounds, skinny and balding. I wondered which would be the greater trial: performing 547 drugged-up shows in Las Vegas, or attending 99 papers on soybean pests?

I saw the kid again on Sunday afternoon, when the whole thing was winding down. I was heading back to my room for a nap before the final session on "Integrated Pest Manage-ment in Idaho Potato Fields," passing through the casino floor, when I noticed a disturbance. I circled around for a look, and there was the boy, surrounded by a clot of gamblers in their turquoise pants suits and sport coats of many esters. Some of the women were screaming, and a man or two wielded rolls of quarters like blackjacks, while dancing gingerly backwards. Someone shrieked "Scorpion!" It seemed late for the cold-blooded critter; it must have come in out of the frost, taken refuge behind a warm slot, and crawled out, disturbed, perhaps by a jackpot.

In the epicenter, on the drink-stained, ash-grayed carpet, crouched my boy, engaged face-to-face with his first scorpion. Security drew their guns and ordered everyone back so they could kill the marauding arachnid. But he just let it crawl on to his hand -- to more screams and a bona fide faint -- and slipped it into an Altoid box. The crowd parted for him like ants around a moth-ball as he walked toward the doors and the desert strip beyond. Then they breathed, applauded, and went back to their tireless banditry. But the kid... his mouth had been open. He was taking it in, the novel animal, the folk's response, like he took in everything.

I staggered up the next morning for a field trip. A swarming hive of meeting escapees, we drove to Red Rock Canyon west of town. The buses crossed the last line of streetlights and broke into the desert, but now it was brown and olive and red, instead of black and light. At the canyon we walked in the clear, neonless air of the ruddy sandstone slots in the desert. I wanted to buy a few postcards and take a pee in the visitors' center, but it was closed because of the federal budget impasse. So I sidled down a draw among Joshua trees and yucca to recycle my coffee. Watching for trapdoor spider holes and shivering, waiting, ready to go back, I was looking down, when a flash of color caught my eyes. It was a bright scarf, blowing in a light breeze.

I looked, and there he was again: the lad with the open eyes. He'd been on the other bus apparently. In a light jean jacket, stocking cap and tartan scarf, he was wandering up an arroyo that seemed to lead all the way into the red sandstone fins in the distance. He seemed electrically tuned in to everything around him, following the flight of finches and sniffing at the yucca pods. It sort of pissed me off. Made me think of another kid, prowling a crick in Iowa, watching for vital signs among the weedy fields of winter.

I remembered a paper on the weevil fauna of the locules of yucca pods, and picked one open myself. There weren't many beetles at this time of year, but the pods had an almost sticky smoothness to them, a sweet smell like an abandoned beehive, and they left a nectar-like taste on the tongue. When you pulled them apart, the seeds were lined up inside--black fertile ones and yellow infertile--just like a pile of poker chips on a green felt table.

An arm slipped through mine as Elizabeth, a sharp dipterist from Fresno, came up beside me. She too had been watching the boy. "So what do you think?" she asked. "A future entomologist?" Elizabeth and I had shared a pleasant time back in Indy in 84, but then she'd married a hymenopterist. "God help him," I said. Sunset descended about as gaudy as The Strip, but a hell of a lot more ephemeral. We'd all repaired to town to find one of those famous cheap Las Vegas meals ($3.99 for a complete New York steak dinner) and a peremptory cruise of The Strip.

I had arrived back from the field trip with a guy from Dow Elanco, a couple from Purdue, and a woman from the Ohio Department of Ag, as well as Elizabeth. We had that steak dinner and decided that you get what you pay for, or less, even in Las Vegas. Especially in Las Vegas. Then we set out on foot to settle the grease and experience The Strip in scientific fashion, examining each monster casino in turn.

The night was cold and we walked fast, up one side down the other. We saw the volcano erupt at the Mirage, gawked at the giant Aku Aku heads with purple and green laser eyes at the Tropicana. We watched the pirate ships battle at Treasure Island. Quickly we walked through the Excalibur, a pastel castle nightmare from the Wizard of Id on acid. Then there was that goddamn pyramid, the one with the overachieving lightbulb on top. It was called the Luxor and the guy from Dow said he'd seen it before and it would blow our minds. Outside, he made us stand in mist from the fountains while they built up enough spray for a hologram of King Tut to be projected into it. Then he led us, like some host, in between the paws of a sphinx the size of a Midwest Chrysler dealership. Then we were inside with some 2,000 rooms over our heads and the River Nile snaking around us. Rather, the Colorado River, diverted into the mist and the Nile and the 2,000 toilets. A scow drifted through a tunnel on the Nile and we waved. Overhead, dozens of palms hung static. A sign said they were each imported live from Egypt, then "treated" against disease and other problems. In other words, they were dead. The dull green fronds had a bogus fuzz to them, and the trunks had holes drilled in where missing fronds could be replaced. Shaking her head, Elizabeth cracked that this might suggest a new direction for economic entomology: pest protection through crop embalming.

Elizabeth and I had an ice cream that was real enough while waiting for the others to visit King Tut's tomb and cruise the Nile. The Purdue kids, came back from the tomb ("Just like the real thing!" they gushed.) and wanted to visit the Virtual Land arcade. But then the other two emerged from the Nile ride eager for a breather after the ancient air in the bowels of the pyramid. So we left the Luxor, but as we did I caught the glazed eyes of a kid trapped in Virtual Land. I was struck that he was about the same age and not too different from the other fella who'd been haunting my peripheral vision all week; but this kid was three steps from reality of any kind.

Back in the cold air, we walked an overpass above cruising limos, El Caminos, and low riders and found ourselves outside the Tropicana, a jungle theme casino. Elizabeth wanted to go in and see the parrots, bushbabies and white tigers advertised. Their cages lined a long hall with glass walls, but the creatures had been put to bed elsewhere. We were about to leave when I spotted a cylindrical aquarium, within which three large eels clung and lurked around the base of their stone-celled habitat. Each thick eel was different in pattern, but not color. One was banded, one blotched, one striped in rich, royal purple and white glowing from the black light they always put in these tanks as if normal colors aren't good enough. I would have wanted to touch them, to stroke those purple robes, if I hadn't remembered from the Disney channel what moray teeth and attitudes are like. The others had gone on, but I lingered.

Those eels were the first living things I'd seen in the whole damn city, aside from entomologists and gamblers, many of whom were questionable, bearing much the same fixative fuzz as those palms along the Nile. I wondered if it was growing on me yet. This lack of life, in a place where we had all assembled to talk endlessly about the largest group of living things in the world. I inched around the tank to get a different view. On the other side, I bumped into someone who'd been standing in the shadows. It was the kid naturalist. "Excuse me." I said, "Neat eels, eh?"

"Genus Muraena," he said. "I don't know the species." And he circled back around, like the eel slithering around its algae-crusted castle. Trust young Darwin, I thought, to find the only real creatures in never-never land. I almost spoke to him again, to ask who he was, and where he was from, but he seemed thoroughly rapt in his eels.

I caught up with my bunch outside. They'd met up with some more entomologists, still wearing their nametags. Some wanted to go see the volcano erupt again, others had a hard-on for the robots in Bacchus's fountain at Caesars Palace, still others wanted to go home to bed. After we split up, I drifted over to the MGM Grand for a doleful drink by myself. I'd always had a thing for the pubescent Judy Garland and there was supposed to be a Wizard of Oz theme inside.

As I entered the maw of the nine-story MGM lion, an angular deco rebuttal to the smooth, arrogant sphinx across the street and up the block, I saw that Elizabeth had fallen in stride beside me. "Hi," she said. "I didn't really want to go back. Mind if I come with you?"

Inside, we wandered down the yellow Brick Road. At intervals there were dioramas from the movie, like stations of the cross in a Catholic church: Dorothy with her three henchmen; the Wicked Witch of the West with her awful flying monkeys; the Wizard in his hot-air balloon. Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Toto looked right off the screen, but Dorothy looked about as much like Elvis as she did Judy. I said that her mannequin and that bronze of Elvis back at the Hilton ought to run off to Kansas together, and Elizabeth laughed politely.

Inside the circle of scenes reared the Emerald City of Oz, represented by an arrangement of tall green polygonal "crystals," lit from within. Walking around it we found a bar, with a seating area and a tiny dance floor, and a band playing Gypsy Kings stuff and other covers. It was inevitable that Elizabeth and I would have a drink. She had a grasshopper and I got a Scotch. We sat watching the band and what appeared to be a cascade of emeralds flowing down the face of the city into the shiny pool of the dance floor. I felt my cynicism beginning to soften in a solution of Cutty Sark and song, like a beetle's elytra in glycerin. I was looking at Elizabeth, a nice person and not unhandsome, and was beginning to imagine a replay of Indy. It hadn't been bad. Then Elizabeth adjusted her glasses and said, "Dance with me." No one else was dancing. In fact, the whole place, with its 5,005 rooms and theme park out back, seemed nearly deserted. There was a steady soft clangor from the slot machines, but not one in five was occupied. The bar was sparse and the dance floor empty. The band soldiered on: three guys in purple zoot suits who would rather be anywhere else.

But when we arrived on the dance floor, the band began to revive, like cryptobiontic animalcules that lie dormant until water and sunlight strike them. The exaggerated collars of their suits seem to perk up, along with the tempo. The pocked, handsome leader called for a snappy one and took up a sax. The guitarist and drummer were right with him. They wailed like so many katydids singing in a sticky Midwestern night.

A statuesque blonde from the audience left her table and approached the stage. The sax player helped her up and handed her a microphone. Her tight purple suit-jacket and short skirt were almost the same hue as the musicians' zoot suits, the same reddish-purple as the eelskins, and it stretched just about as taut and supple. They did a rocker, and I noticed that the singer wore nothing beneath her jacket. There were living things in this town, after all.

It hardly seemed to be the same band. Other couples materialized and we spun like whirling swarm flies in courtship. The dark, striped wood floor was so small that everyone had to dance close, bumping into each other. All during a slow version of "Misty," the group dance kept up, thighs sawing against one another like stridulating crickets.

In the morning, as I waited next to Elvis for the airport van, I thought over the night before. It hadn't been clear what Elizabeth and I were going to do. As we'd walked back to the Hilton, we'd passed newsstands full of color catalogs for prostitutes with photo-graphs and telephone numbers, like some sort of field guide. We stopped and flipped through them for a few minutes, laughing nervously, maybe thinking they would be a turn-on. But they had the opposite effect. "Are you happy, Liz?" I asked as we passed the blank-faced sphinx again.

Photo:Las Vegas News Bureau

"Oh, you know," she said, looking up at the laser pulsing into the dull sky. "Adequate." Later, in the lobby, she asked, "How about you?" I was about to answer when the elevator came, the doors opened and there he was. The Kid. Only he wasn't alone. Riding with him was one of the student delegates to the convention, a young woman from Davis who'd given a paper on rare insect extinction. The two of them were attached anteriorly, by the lips. I got the same impression of total absorption he'd given off at the airplane window, in the arroyo, with the scorpion and eels. The door shut again, and he was gone. Neither of us had made a move to get in there with them. "So," said Elizabeth when we got on the next elevator. "Our young man found more here than scorpions and yuccas." "Or maybe, " I said, "it's all the same thing." "How do you mean?" " A sense of wonder," I said. When we reached Elizabeth's floor she held the elevator door open and looked up at me compliantly or maybe it was just wearily. We both had early flights. "Sleep well," I said. She smiled, nodded and gave me a peck. "See you in Gainesville," she said, and let the

Robert Michael Pyle is the author of Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide.