For dinner that night I bought a half-dozen taco things from a street vendor. There was a Denny’s, of all things, down on the corner that I knew I would succumb to at some point, but not just then. Musicians wandered the streets in studded pants and monstrous sombreros. A few of them sang at me aggressively, then demanded money. I handed them a few bills, which it turned out (I calculated later) amounted to seventeen cents. They yelled at me and I took off running back to the hotel. I had the woman at the front desk go across the street to buy me a bottle of tequila. I was too scared to go into the bar alone, which made me feel pathetic—so pathetic that when the woman finally got back with my bottle, more cigarettes, and change, and offered to get me a glass, I refused, ready for the bottle. I hadn’t had a chance to drink alone in quite a while and it was actually appealing.
The next morning I awoke feeling more jittery than hung over. My mind was working and all I needed was a little coffee to make me feel good. At a café down the street I had a thick, milky coffee and a bowl of soup with a raw egg floating in it. I thought I’d ordered a pudding, but the soup was good. Taxis were zipping by on the street. I flagged one down and was soon heading for the Anthropological Museum.
Although I’d called a number of times from the hotel desk, I’d had no luck in finding Barry Buster. The first time, someone had put me on hold for twenty minutes, and I hung up. The second time, I spoke to a person who responded to every query with a loud and then louder “yes.” I said, “Do you know how I can get hold of Professor Barry Buster Parkinson?” and he said “Yes!” and I said “Great. I very much need to speak with him.” And the guy said, “Yes!” “Well can you connect me?” “Yes.” “Now?” “Yes.” “Do you speak English?” “Yes!” “I just flew in last night and, boy, are my wings tired.” “Yes.” And so on. The last person I spoke to was a woman who sounded both German and Mexican. She said that if I needed to speak to him, I better come in. Parkinson was headed for Chiapas that day, she didn’t know when, to track down some textile thing.
“I am not sure. Ask at the front desk,” and she hung up.
I got sidetracked outside the museum. There was a crazy exhibition of a sky dance. The dancers had their ankles twisted into ropes and were spinning around on a pole far above the ground. The dance looked dangerous. There was a hamburger stand just to the right of the crowd, which also looked dangerous. I watched the dancers orbiting high above my head, blocking the sun in turn, while eating my burger. When I finally made it into the museum the combination of burger, dance, and heat had washed out my complexion. I felt all right, but looked dangerously nauseated. When I told the young, uniformed woman, “I need to speak to Barry Buster Parkinson now!” she believed me. She scuttled out from behind the desk and gestured for me to follow her, first into an elevator and then through a labyrinthine series of corridors deep below the main rooms of the museum. I chased after her, feeling much like Alice pursuing the white rabbit. The box felt a good deal heavier than it had at the front desk and I entertained the thought that some transformation had taken place, that maybe what I was carrying was no longer a disconnected assortment of bones, but a small, crouching Plains Indian from the fifth century. Finally we reached an unassuming gray door.
“Parkinson’s office,” she said. She swung open the door without knocking. “Mr. Parkinson. You have a visitor.”
Parkinson was standing with his back to me at a tall table covered with books. “I’m sorry,” he said, without turning around. “I have a journey to make before sundown and I really can’t have any visitors.”
“Barry Buster, I’ll only take a minute of your time.”
He turned quickly, then took off his glasses and placed them back on. His black hair was longer than it had been and, although I found it hard to believe, he had lost weight. Never tall at five foot six, he looked positively elfin now that he was thinner. His eyes were the same fierce blue and I realized, to my surprise, that I was very happy to see him again. “Katherine,” he said.
I gave him a big hug. “You look terrible,” I said. “Don’t you eat?”
“Amoebic dysentery,” he replied. “Hazard of the trade, and, believe it or not, a status symbol.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “I just had a hamberguesa out in front. Do you think I’m doomed?”
“Yes. Most definitely, but nothing to do with the hamburger. What are you doing here?”
“I actually came to see you.”
“And I’m leaving in a few minutes. The roads south are treacherous and best traveled in daylight. And I still haven’t found the reference for an odd zigzagging border on a textile fragment, which is the whole reason for me making the trip. I think it was in a journal, but for some reason I remember the picture being in color, which doesn’t really support that theory…”
“Barry, I need you to look at something.”
“How long are you going to be in Mexico?”
I rattled the box. “It will just take a minute. I promise.”
“What have you got in there?”
I pulled out a femur and waved it at him.
“Bones?” Barry shrugged.
“A complete set,” I said. I pulled out the skull.
“Katherine, we are talking skeletal remains, not Limoges. I don’t think ‘set’ is the correct term. Nor do I think that I am the right person to look at them.”
“They came from New Mexico. You’re not interested at all?”
“Anasazi?”
“Ruins nearby are Anasazi.”
“Katherine, my specialty is pre-Columbian textiles and pottery. You know that.”
“Take a look,” I waved the femur seductively. “That scratch looks a bit odd to me. What causes a scratch like that?”
Barry Buster took the bone and weighed in his hands. “That scratch is nothing, but this, see?” He indicated the end of the bone. “The blunting there? That is suspicious.”
“What causes that?”
“We don’t know for sure, but similar blunting has been produced by using the bone as a pot stirrer.” Barry Buster stirred an imaginary pot, then handed the bone back to me.
I held up the skull. “Smashed in the back,” I said.
“And charred, to the naked eye. Maybe you do have something.”
“What does it mean?”
“The charring? You can cook the brains right in the cranium, which makes a handy bowl.” Barry Buster put the femur back in the box. He took the skull from me and looked deep into it’s eye sockets. “Probably got some story to tell us, don’t you,” he said. “Can you leave the bones with me?”
“I would love to leave the bones with you.”
“All right. After I come back from Chiapas, I have two weeks here to finalize things for the catalogue, then I’m heading to Arizona, where the exhibit’s kicking off. I’ll be there for a few weeks. One of my colleagues has done a good deal of work on skeletal remains from the prehistoric Southwest. I’ll ask him what he thinks.”
“Good enough.”
“We should get together sometime,” he said. “Are you back in school?”
“No,” I said, apologetically.