The Surf Guru (18 page)

“Not you?” Flaco asks. Age-browned scars are crosshatched into both his cheeks, severe reminders of some earlier war. Or perhaps this one. Who can remember?

Alvaro shakes his head. He has no interest in titles, in the burdens of formal command.

“In that case, I would like a hat,” Flaco says. “Something with a plume. I would have respected our general more if he had worn a hat with a plume.”

“We will find you a hat,” Alvaro promises. “With a plume. I will hunt the bird myself, once our mission is complete.”

Flaco stands straighter as the power takes hold. “A brightly colored bird,” he orders. “Preferably orange.”

“The most beautiful, orangest bird on the island. I swear to you.”

“And also, as I am the general, I demand a peek at your
novia
.”

Alvaro smiles. “This time it is a gift from me,” he says, unbuttoning his shirt pocket with one swift flick of the wrist. “But a good general knows he cannot just take. Like the other men, he must pay, or he must bet.”

The new general nods quickly, comes to him, takes hold of the photograph with greedy fingers and greedy eyes. He angles it back and forth in the sunlight that drains through the trees, as if he is trying to catch a glimpse of the girl from behind, as if he does not understand the laws of two dimensions.

Looking over the new general's shoulder, Alvaro notices a flaw on the surface of the photograph—a spot in the upper-left-hand corner where the image has no gloss. A daub of what might be the kid's dried spunk, marring the horizon behind the wave-slapped girl whose name he no longer remembers.

The kid! It is a shame he can only be killed once!

He snatches the photograph from the new general's hands. “Enough,” he says. “We have a mission.”

“We have a mission,” the new general echoes.

Alvaro runs his thumb along his knife to test the blade, opening a perfect, thin, shallow cut from which no blood leaks. And then they run.

 

 

The kid steps out from his hiding place and crosses the beach slowly, with neither stealth nor authority. He removes his shirt and boots, drops his gun in the sand. He is unashamed of his tenting trousers. When the girls spot him, their ball falls uncaught and drifts along the gentle shore break. They watch him closely as he wades out to them.

The water is warmer than he expects. He can feel tiny fish at his feet, tasting the salt from his toes. He holds his hands above his head, palms open and empty. It is, he hopes, a gesture of peace. “Ladies,” he says, and it is a difficult word, one that makes his tongue feel parched and clumsy. “Ladies,” he says again. “Please don't be afraid.”

They are silent. They goggle. The tallest and fairest-skinned girl folds her sun-pinked arms across her chest, as if she must shield from his gaze not just her small, pointed breasts but the ruffled pink fabric that covers them. And yet didn't another girl, the shortest, just now push herself higher in the next wave so that he could see more of her? Didn't she?

They do not speak. He wonders if they are not local, then realizes he is the one who is far from home. Do they understand his accent? Or has his tongue failed him? Or did he forget even to speak those words aloud? As he pushes himself deeper into the water, he hears shouts—male voices, from a boat he now sees moored off the tip of the cove. The men gesture, hustle about the deck, raise anchor, gun the engine.

“Are—?” he asks the girls, but gets no further. “But—” he says, trying again. Then: “I—”

The boat speeds toward them, trailing a violent wake. He tries to read the girls' smooth faces, but he cannot; their expressions offer him nothing he can understand. Will he be driven back into the jungle? Will he die, bullet-riddled, here in the shallows? Or taken in, fed and nursed, led to a bed? He closes his eyes and waits, listening to the motor's roar and the shouts and the breaking waves and the girls' pink silence. Arms high in the air, he delivers himself unto them, hoping.

Edited by Jonathan Parker Kingslee, Ph.D.
¹

Nineteen sixty-eight marks the centennial of the birth of Hartford Anderton Quilcock,
²
one of the true pioneer botanists of the American West, although it is unlikely that this event will be widely celebrated, or even noticed. Marginalized by the academic Establishment, Quilcock was generally ignored in the botanical literature of his times, with mentions of his name usually relegated to footnotes and nearly always paired with a pejorative. (Examples include: “irascible,” “foul-tempered,” “ceaselessly aggrieved,” “deranged,” “choleric,” “vulgar,” “disordered,” and “unstintingly opprobrious.”) Most contemporary texts ignore his work completely. To the extent that he is known today, it is not for his taxonomic efforts—which were extensive and serious, if not always accurate—but for his sensationally inappropriate “Profiles,” a series of vituperative attacks on his colleagues. Quilcock's Profiles are now the stuff of chatter at departmental cocktail parties, of lore passed around collecting-trip campfires—sometimes exaggerated, often misconstrued, and utterly unrecognized as the revealing historical and scientific documents they are. In part this is because few people have ever actually read them.

Quilcock intended to publish these profiles in an omnibus volume titled
Botanists in the Age of Quilcock: A Field Guide to Frauds, Fools, Thieves, and Demagogues
, but he failed to do so before his death in 1931. One suspects he delayed publication because he never viewed the series as complete, as there would always come some new affront to his botanical sensibilities, which would drive him back to his cluttered desk, poison pen in hand.

Most readers will be surprised to find my name listed as editor of the project, since my late father, Philip St. John Kingslee, was the target of Quilcock's most impassioned attacks and most virulent animosity.
³
Further, my mother, the late and much-beloved Anna Sophia Parker—a talented but under-appreciated botanist in her own right—was briefly and unhappily married to Quilcock in her youth. So: how did this man's papers—and thus his legacy—become my responsibility?

Unbeknownst to me or my father, my mother had remained a trusted figure in Quilcock's increasingly sad, difficult, and isolated life. It was only after her own passing three years ago that I discovered she had been the executrix of his estate and writings, as well as the curator of the remains of his personal collection of herbarium samples.
⁴
All of this she stored in the remote mountain cabin to which she retreated after she divorced my father and quit the academic life. In her will, she expressed her hope that I would publish the papers once everyone about whom Quilcock had written—including herself—was dead.

Understand, reader, that this is an obligation I never sought to take on. Obviously my father would disapprove; one imagines him straightening in his chair and puffing on his pipe, silently but disdainfully, refusing even to dignify the topic at hand with speech.
⁵
My mother made her wishes clear, though, and I have spent the past three years im-mersing myself in Quilcock's work, reading through the entire corpus of his writings; his field notes; correspondence by, to, and about him; and contemporaneous news reports of his time; as well as giving close examination to his herbarium sheets, both those that have been kept properly in the Kingslee Herbarium at Mulholland and those from his private collection, which came to my mother in a grievous state of deterioration and which she had tried, with limited success, to restore.
⁶
I have compiled and annotated Quilcock's profiles with the goal of showing that their author was no mere crank, but rather a scrupulous and dedicated man of science, albeit a remarkably disagreeable one.

 

 

Before I turn to Quilcock's infamous Profiles, let me present a brief sketch of the man himself. He was born on September 22, 1868, in Dawson County, Nebraska, according to church records. Little else is known about his childhood, as he went to great lengths to conceal the details of his humble origins. One might speculate, perhaps, that he toiled on a family farm, driven hard by a foul-tempered taskmaster of a father, and that he fled this life as quickly as he could, eager to re-invent himself.

Our first record of him as a young adult comes from the payroll logs of the Murchison & Reno Railroad, which shows that he signed on in Omaha and shuttled to the west coast and back for several months—all the while marveling at the expanses of frontier land, with their vast and unstudied inventories of flora. He appears to have been dismissed for insubordination and put off the train in Carbondale, Colorado. For the next few years he worked menial jobs in the area, each just long enough to finance his next excursion into the wilds of the western states.

His entry into the world of formal botanical scholarship came as he was working as a handyman at the Strater Hotel in Durango in early May 1892. The legendary Aeneas Scottwell-Scott and his field team spent a night at the hotel en route to collecting in Arizona's Verde Valley, and Quilcock seized the opportunity. “New boy attached himself to us quite forcefully in Durango,” Scottwell-Scott wrote. “Possibly a halfwit, but eager to please & thus useful. One hopes he doesn't eat or talk much.”
⁷
By the end of their journey, though, Quilcock had demonstrated both competence and motivation; he was attentive, careful in his treatment of collected materials, and strikingly knowledgeable for a self-taught botanist. Scottwell-Scott himself was an up-by-the-bootstraps sort of fellow, and he may well have seen Quilcock as a younger version of himself—his initial comment about the lad's sense (or lack thereof) notwithstanding.

Quilcock apprenticed himself to Scottwell-Scott for the next decade, traveling and collecting extensively with him, preparing his samples, and assisting him in publishing his findings, which would be among the most important of the man's illustrious career.
⁸
Quilcock was utterly devoted to his mentor, and he would come to adopt many of the older man's mannerisms, speech patterns, and habits of dress,
⁹
his pugilistic tendencies and indifference to hygiene, and—most important—his species concept and his approach to taxonomical change. Quilcock took extreme umbrage whenever any element of Scottwell-Scott's taxonomical work was questioned—let alone corrected, as it was in more than a few cases. Indeed, he reacted more violently to such affronts than he did to challenges to his own work (which, admittedly, tended to arise more commonly). Whether or not Scottwell-Scott returned an equivalent devotion to his as-sistant is unclear—but, one suspects, unlikely, as mentors are usually reluctant to allow their protégés to emerge from their long shadows.
^10
11

The following pages contain selections from the 462 profiles Quilcock wrote for
Botanists in the Age of Quilcock
.
¹²
They are presented chronologically in the order that Quilcock wrote them. I hope, reader, that you will find this work informative, that you will be as taken with their author's rebellious spirit as I have been, and that my annotations will offer illuminating context.
¹³

—JONATHAN PARKER KINGSLEE, PH.D.
August 4 , 1968
Ventura, Calif.