The Beautiful Ones
Don Zancanella
I grew up in a working-class suburb of Denver with a mother who was a functioning alcoholic and a father who sold office supplies and was frequently on the road. I dropped out of school at sixteen and started supporting myself. Most of the time I worked as a day laborer at construction sites. I dug holes and carried lumber. I pushed wheelbarrows. I loaded and unloaded trucks.
At age twenty-four, in May of 1976, I was hired to work in the health department of a small town in the mountains. My job would be to help exterminate the mosquitoes that appeared every summer and caused tourists to complain. I’d never heard of such a trade and wondered what I’d be expected to do.
My boss was a civil servant named Albert Rudd and my only co-worker a college girl named Audrey. Some years later I, too, would attend college, but at the time it seemed unlikely. I had little money, no ambition, and would scarcely have known how to apply.
The work turned out to be both more interesting and more routine than I anticipated. Every morning Audrey and I drove a pickup truck to the irrigated hayfields on the ranches west of town. Once we were well into them, we pulled over and used a tin cup fastened to a length of broomstick to collect a sample of water from one of the many stagnant pools. Then we counted the mosquito larvae swimming in the cup. Using those numbers, Rudd could estimate the severity of the coming outbreak—how many mosquitoes this season would produce and how soon they would migrate toward town. The larvae were peculiar creatures, tiny Y-shaped worms with what appeared to be an eye on one end.
The best part of the job was the setting. The hayfields were an intense emerald green, the mountains rose up grandly on all sides, and the birdsong, from red-winged blackbirds, yellow-headed blackbirds, longspurs, and even the occasional bobolink, was always a delight. I especially liked hearing meadowlarks, their flutelike warble distinguishing them from the other birds.
Some days we finished our mosquito work early. Then we were assigned additional tasks. Since it was a small town, the concept of “health department” was loosely defined. We tested the chlorine levels of motel swimming pools. We inspected restaurants for cleanliness (but rarely issued citations). And if three or four sheep happened to wander down Main Street, we chased them back into the foothills so they could rejoin their flock.
Despite coming from different backgrounds, Audrey and I got on well. She was studying biology at the university in Boulder and had what I considered hippie characteristics—an airy way of talking, peasant blouses, Joni Mitchell hair. I assumed, without any supporting evidence, that she was merely going through a phase and would end up a suburban housewife. For her part, she seemed intrigued by the fact that I had no plans. No dreams about the future or expectations of a career. A typical exchange touching on these matters went something like this:
“What are you going to do when summer’s over?”
“Maybe Rudd will keep me on. If not, I’ll find something else.”
“So you’ll just drift from job to job?”
“Drift? I guess so. If that’s what you want to call it.”
“Cool. I wish I was that free. People should do what turns them on.”
I ought to explain some of the social dynamics at play in small towns in the American West at that time. The ’60s had come and gone, leaving behind a certain disarray. Young people like Audrey tended to adopt the attitudes of the counterculture. Everything was groovy, even high school dropouts who unloaded trucks. As for me, I viewed the clothes, the music, the politics, and the changing sexual mores of the time as little more than rich kids showing off. Of course, there was also Vietnam, which meant guys like me were fodder for the war machine, but I’d been lucky enough to score a high number in the draft lottery. Therefore, I was not a veteran, not a hippie, not a protestor, but simply a working stiff.
I once turned the tables and asked Audrey about her aspirations—what did she hope to do and be?
“It’s kind of silly. My major is biology, but what I’d really like to do is illustrate children’s books.”
Like mosquito extermination, this was a profession I hadn’t heard of. “You can make a living doing that?”
“Oh yes,” she said, “but I need to figure out how to break in. I like drawing pictures. Animals dressed in clothes, especially mice and bears.”
When we’d been on the job for about a month, Audrey and I walked into our daily meeting with Rudd and were surprised to find that another employee had been hired. His name was Eric, his father was an attorney, and he too was home from college—in his case, a prestigious school back East. It seemed obvious he’d gotten the job not because we truly needed help but because his father had arranged it. I didn’t care. That was how things worked. So the next morning all three of us were in the pickup, shoulder-to-shoulder, driving out to the fields.
Eric, even more than Audrey, seemed like the very model of a post-’60s college student. He smoked pot often, had a Frank Zappa mustache and long black hair, and quoted from books like Charles Reich’s The Greening of America and Carlos Castaneda’s guides to peyote knowledge. Although the books sounded intriguing, back then I wasn’t much of a reader and didn’t seek them out.
In late June, the mosquitoes began evolving from larvae into adults. We were in one of the hayfields on a sunlit morning when Audrey said, “Hey, I just got bit.” This new information was reported back to Rudd, and from that moment on, our job changed. After encircling the town with “canister traps”—one at the high school, two at the golf course, four along the highway south of town—we started collecting data on the presence of airborne mosquitoes, blood-sucking creatures whose primary objective was to find a tourist to bite.
Although I missed going out to the hayfields, I continued to enjoy the work. It was never physically demanding, certainly not in the way my job as a common laborer had been, and Eric and Audrey weren’t unpleasant to be around. Eric was studying history with the intention of going to law school. He liked showing off his knowledge of politics and current events. One day it was the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the next, Jimmy Carter’s chances of beating Gerald Ford. Audrey liked music and was always going on about some group I’d never heard of, some album she’d recently bought.
Rudd seemed pleased that he’d managed to hire two well-educated young people to be part of his summer crew. It was as if he believed Audrey and Eric’s youthful sophistication reflected well on him. In his late forties and recently divorced, Rudd had never done anything other than administer a government department of limited significance in a small tourist town. Yet now two of his three employees were bringing him dispatches from a new and exhilarating world.
To me, it seemed odd that a man Rudd’s age would be so impressed by college students. They certainly didn’t admire him in return. Eric, especially, seemed dismissive of everything Rudd said. But one day Eric made a surprising admission: He’d been spending evenings at Rudd’s house. He explained that he and “Al” sat in the garage and drank beer, watched TV on an old black-and-white set, and worked on small projects such as rewiring a lamp or painting a bench. “He’s starved for conversation,” Eric said. “He hates it when I leave.”
“Freaky,” Audrey said. “You’re actually hanging out with him?”
“I’m curious how his mind works. I’ve been introducing him to stoner humor. George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, that sort of thing. I have to explain some of the jokes, but he’s starting to dig it.”
“Freaky,” Audrey said again.
I knew almost nothing about stoner humor and wasn’t sure why anyone would be interested in how Rudd’s mind worked. But I was intrigued by Eric’s need to insert himself into situations that shouldn’t have been any of his business. One of his favorite sayings was “I like to fuck with things.” My instinct was the opposite—to keep to myself.
Then one day Rudd told us the time had come for pesticides. We would, he said, “deploy them on two fronts.” In town, we were going to drive up and down the alleys at dusk, spraying malathion from an atomizer bolted to the bed of the truck. Out in the hayfields, where a second hatch was likely, stronger chemicals would be applied from the air by crop dusters brought in from Kansas, the kind used to spray fields of corn.
Around that time Eric said we should take a canoe trip. A weekend float, just the three of us. Canoeing wasn’t something I’d have done with co-workers on previous jobs. Those hard men would have laughed at such a pointless pursuit. But I felt flattered to be included and readily agreed.
Eric and Audrey picked me up on Saturday morning, an aluminum canoe attached to the roof of the car. As we drove toward the river, Eric started talking about Rudd again, reporting that the two of them had not only been studying stoner humor, but also been getting stoned.
“I’ll bet he’s hilarious when he’s high,” Audrey said.
“Not as much as you’d think.”
“What does he talk about?”
“Mosquitoes,” Eric said with a comic shrug.
Audrey groaned, and I laughed.
“And then he falls asleep.”
A note here on mind-altering substances: Back then, the young and better educated used marijuana as well as peyote and LSD, while older people and those with less education stuck to alcohol or, if that wasn’t adequate, speed (the word “meth” was never used). At least that’s how it was in small towns out west. I myself did a bit of everything, but in moderation, because I’d seen what could happen when someone lacked restraint. I was surprised to learn that Rudd was using any substance other than alcohol, but in those years just about anyone, under the right circumstances, could be convinced to try something new—especially when in the company of a person they wanted to impress.
I’d never been in a canoe, but Eric had the sort of knowledge of outdoor activities only money can buy. He’d skied the more exclusive Colorado resorts, gone on mountaineering treks with his older brothers, and been taught to canoe by a professional guide.
“So we won’t drown?” Audrey said.
“Just paddle when I say paddle. You know how to swim, right?”
The plan was to float all day, spend the night in a canyon Eric was familiar with, and finish on Sunday afternoon. Once we were on the water, I could see why people enjoyed it. We passed sandstone cliffs and groves of willows and gnarled cottonwoods, then navigated some modest rapids, the kind that made us laugh rather than gasp in fear. A bird Eric identified as a kingfisher pierced the surface of the water and came up with a minnow, while from somewhere up in the trees, a meadowlark trilled. A muskrat swam beside us and a pair of mule deer stood on the bank, looking for a moment as though they might bolt before deciding we weren’t a threat and watching us glide past.
I motioned toward the deer and said, “Audrey, you should draw them.”
She looked embarrassed. “Maybe I will.”
At dusk we pulled into a small beach at the foot of a soaring rock face. There, we rolled out our sleeping bags, roasted hot dogs over an open fire, and smoked a couple of joints.
I sensed that Eric and Audrey wished they were alone. At times they lowered their voices, sharing things they didn’t want me to hear. Late that night, while I was staring up at the great swath of stars overhead, I heard them having vigorous sex. I wasn’t surprised. I’d known from the beginning Audrey would find Eric difficult to resist. I remember thinking Eric must have had plenty of sex, because of who he was and simply because of the times. How often had I heard the term “free love” during the last few years? I worried about Audrey—in my experience, those with charisma tended to be opportunists—but I wasn’t about to interfere. When they finally stopped, it got quiet, and I fell asleep to the sound of the river rushing by.
After we returned from our trip, the extermination campaign commenced. I was the first one to spend an evening spraying the town. Rudd met me at the city motor pool and taught me what to do. First came the water, fifty gallons into a stainless-steel tank. Then the poison, eight ounces of what looked like maple syrup, carefully drizzled in. Finally, he fired up the little engine that powered the sprayer attached to the back of the truck. “Time to kill some mosquitoes,” he said.
Beginning in a neighborhood on the north end of town, I drove slowly down the alleys, a white plume of insecticide unfurling behind me to hang in the summer air. What I hadn’t anticipated were the throngs of children galloping after the truck, laughing and shouting as they immersed themselves in the fog. Although Rudd never said the chemicals we were using posed a danger to humans, spraying seven-year-olds seemed unwise. But my understanding of work at that point in my life was that you did as you were told for as long as you were being paid. To put it another way, I assumed it was Rudd’s job to read the fine print on the malathion can, not mine.
When I mentioned the children to Audrey and Eric, Audrey said, “Yuck. That’s terrible. The least we could do is block off the alleys. Eric, you should talk to Al.” He nodded but I didn’t think he’d follow through. At that time, there wasn’t as much concern about toxic chemicals as there is today. I’d heard of Silent Spring but hadn’t read it. The EPA had only recently been created. The horrors of Agent Orange had yet to come to light, and Bhopal was ten years off.
Early in July a second hatch began. We discovered it when Rudd sent us out to the hayfields to do a routine check. Only seconds after we exited the truck, great clouds of mosquitoes appeared and began their assault. Glancing at one another in horror, we retreated into the cab and spent the next five minutes slapping at the ones that had followed us inside. I pitied the animals, the cattle and coyotes, the badgers and sheep, none of them with a truck to hide in. On our way back, we saw a pair of horses running and tossing their heads, tails flicking wildly, being driven mad. A little further on, a single cow stood dejectedly while dozens of mosquitoes feasted where the blood was closest to the surface: inside each ear and around the rim of each eye. The poor beast was being tormented and there was nothing she could do.
Back at Rudd’s office we told him what we’d found. He leapt to his feet and began to pace. “Goddamn it. The crop dusters aren’t coming until the fifteenth. I didn’t think we’d need them so soon.”
“Can’t you reschedule?” Eric asked.
“Yes, but maybe it’s too early. We need to spray at the peak. Is this the peak? Oh Jesus. What if there’s a third hatch?”
When he was gone, Eric mocked him: “Is this the peak? Is this the peak? Oh Jesus! What if there’s a third hatch?” Although Audrey and I laughed, it seemed unfair to make fun of him, a man of no special talents trapped in a thankless job. But Rudd would probably have considered such ridicule a small price to pay for Eric’s attention. No doubt he had made similar trade-offs in the past.
A few days later it became obvious that spraying from the truck was no longer sufficient. Although the weather was beautiful, people stopped taking walks in the evening, restaurant patios were deserted, and if you did go outside, you inhaled a mosquito with every other breath. Eric reported that Rudd had stopped getting stoned: “He sits in an old green chair and drinks himself into a stupor.”
“Then what do you do?” Audrey asked.
“Sometimes I look around his house. Do you know what I found?”
“Tell me.”
“Not one interesting thing. No books, no music, no secrets. It’s like a museum exhibit built to show how a man with no imagination lives.”
Once again, I thought Eric was being harsh. Maybe I sympathized with Rudd because, except for my age, I resembled him more than I resembled Eric and Audrey. I wondered what Eric said about me when I wasn’t around. Probably things I wouldn’t want to hear.
After a week of anguish, Rudd decided he could wait no longer and called for the planes. Because of the severity of the outbreak, he canceled the small crop dusters from Kansas and ordered two DC-3s—large aircraft originally built to transport military cargo. They would fly in from Montana where they were used to drop slurry on forest fires.
When the planes arrived, we drove to the small airstrip west of town to inspect them. I’d never seen Rudd so delighted. He said, “Look at those fat bastards. The harder they are, the bigger they fall.” Apparently this was a line from some comedy routine Eric had shared with him because Rudd glanced in Eric’s direction as if making sure he’d said it right. Audrey shook her head like a parent embarrassed by a child.
Soon one of the pilots appeared. He slapped at a mosquito and said, “Looks like we’re just in time.”
Rudd nodded and adopted a professional tone. “These are impressive machines.”
“Yes indeed. They were used in Korea. Also ’Nam. Real workhorses. We can treat an area the size of five hundred football fields between sunrise and noon.”
As we left the airstrip, Rudd explained that the poison we would be using was called cliocitricide—sold under the brand name Vyntroxal—a much more potent product than the one we’d been spraying in town. Four ounces of concentrate to every hundred gallons of water. Once the planes were in flight, our job would be to help them navigate by driving our truck to predetermined locations beside the hayfields so the pilots would have something to aim toward. “You should probably stay in the cab,” Rudd told us. “This stuff is approved for human contact but it’s best to play it safe.” Having watched the children run after the truck, I was surprised to hear him mention safety. Maybe Eric had spoken to him after all.
We returned to the airstrip at six the next morning. As Audrey and I watched, Rudd and Eric pulled on black rubber gloves and began filling the planes’ enormous tanks with water and poison. This time it was Eric who called the planes fat bastards, and Rudd was soon laughing so hard he had to stop to catch his breath. I wondered for a moment if they were stoned or drunk, but decided it was only Eric being Eric and Rudd being Rudd.
At one point Audrey said, “Do you think we should help?”
I almost said yes. Instead I said, “I’m staying out of it.”
At last, the lids were screwed on the tanks and the planes started their engines. Rudd remained at the airport while we drove to the hayfields and positioned the truck at the far western edge.
The planes had flown off to the east and now came directly at us, straight out of the morning sun. When they released the insecticide, it was genuinely beautiful—millions of brilliant golden particles, a sparkling mist, drifting slowly down. The particles fell on our truck and on the cattle and the horses and the hay and the standing water in the irrigated fields. And on the mosquitoes, larvae as well as airborne adults, exactly according to plan.
Each time the planes flew over, we moved the truck a tenth of a mile to provide a target for the next pass. Although we did as Rudd suggested and remained in the cab, the smell of the poison was everywhere. I could feel it entering my lungs.
By noon it was over, just as the pilot promised. If the Vyntroxal was as effective as advertised, maybe there’d be no more mosquitoes and we’d spend the remainder of the summer checking the chlorine in swimming pools and telling restaurants they were clean. It even occurred to me that I might be out of a job. Audrey was having different thoughts: “I can’t wait to take a shower and wash my clothes.”
The next morning, Rudd sent us out to check our work. “You shouldn’t see any live ones. The larvae will be motionless, floating on top of the water. And the adults should be completely gone.”
As we drove toward the fields, Audrey said, “He seems pretty relaxed. Did you go over to his house last night?”
Eric shook his head. “No. He said he wanted to be alone.”
“I thought he’d be celebrating,” she said.
“He told me he was exhausted. He planned to go straight to bed.”
We reached the hayfields and got out. It was another fine summer morning. The absence of mosquitoes was immediately apparent. In recent days we’d been engulfed as soon as we exited the truck. Even when we’d covered ourselves in repellent, we’d had to fight them off. But it was as Rudd promised. We didn’t see a single one.
Audrey laughed in astonishment while I got the dipper and walked toward an irrigated field. I’d taken only a few steps when I began to feel uneasy. “Something’s different,” I said.
Audrey was standing still, eyes shut, hands at her sides. “The birds,” she said. “I can’t hear the birds.” No red-winged blackbirds, no barn swallows, no sparrows. No meadowlarks. Off in the distance, I could see a few cows. They looked normal, grazing as always. The air was cool and clear. But no birdsong. What had we done?
Eric looked stricken. When they’d been putting the poison in the tank, it had crossed my mind that he and Rudd weren’t paying attention. Yet I told myself they were measuring accurately, even while laughing and acting like clowns. They were just being foolish. Cheech and Chong. Stoner humor. No worse than any other humor. The truth was that excusing them was easier than getting involved. Even when Audrey asked me if we should help, I chose not to get involved.
Audrey pointed downward. A yellow-headed blackbird, the most brilliantly colored of all the hayfield species, lay dead in a shallow pool. She shook her head and began to cry.
We drove back to town in silence. Eric stared out the window and Audrey simply looked sad. When we got to the office, Rudd said, “See, what did I tell you? Not a mosquito in sight.” He was grinning, rocking in his office chair, looking pleased with himself.
But Audrey, her voice quaking, said, “Mr. Rudd, the insecticide got the birds too.”
He looked puzzled, then annoyed, and tried to fix it with a joke: “Well, as long as the ranchers are still standing…” When we didn’t laugh, he said, “The ranchers—the ranchers—I’m sure the cattle will be fine. There will be more birds before you know it. Was I right about the mosquitoes? They’re gone, aren’t they?” He stood then and began to pace, visibly agitated. “If you’re going to mourn a few birds, you might as well mourn the mosquitoes. They’re all animals, you know. Mosquitoes and birds and cows and horses too. Do you think only the beautiful ones matter? They all matter. I know you laugh at me. I know you mock me. You think you’re so fucking smart that you can decide which ones matter. Maybe you even think you matter and I don’t. Well, the joke is on you because sooner or later we all die. Everything dies.”
The next morning Eric told us he would be returning to school early. In the days before he left, the three of us talked about the event in a bewildered, defensive way: What the hell happened? How did it happen? It was an accident. Rudd should know better. Not my fault. They shouldn’t sell anything that strong. By the end of the week, Eric was gone.
On Monday, Audrey and I drove out to the hayfields again. The cattle were still grazing. A hawk rode the air currents, as if attempting to carve arcs into the definitive blue of the western sky. One lone meadowlark sat on a fencepost, singing its morning song. There should have been many more birds. There were always dozens. Some days hundreds. But that was all. The damage done was clear.
We also saw a couple of mosquitoes. “Of course,” Audrey said.
A few weeks later, the tourist season ended, the mosquito season ended, and Audrey went back to school. I didn’t stay much longer. The job had changed so that nearly all my time was spent inspecting restaurants, which meant ignoring minor violations or issuing citations and then wondering if the owner would punch me in the nose.
I thought I should learn a lesson from what happened. Don’t trust someone who likes to fuck with people. Don’t use industrial-strength poison when you’re stoned. I could hear Albert Rudd’s words—Well, the joke is on you because sooner or later we all die—and picture that yellow-headed bird. I tried telling myself it was only carelessness, only mosquitoes and birds. It wasn’t until years later that I read that to use the word “only” before the name of a living creature was to make a moral error of an especially grievous kind. And so, feeling as though I had been an accomplice to a crime I had no name for, I went looking for another job.