A chorus of howls rang out. Irritated, Gerry opened the window. “Shut up,” he shouted.
Below, students backed away from the van.
“McQueen better not be getting into my evidence,” Gerry said.
He lifted his eyebrows and mimed the sharpening of a knife.
“I’m going to perform a little autopsy,” he said, in a braggy, conspiratorial way.
“So — those are your dogs?” I asked.
“If you can get McQueen to shut up,” Gerry said, “then they all shut up.”
“McQueen?”
“You know, Steve McQueen from The Great Escape,” Gerry said. “McQueen’s my stud. Can’t breed him fast enough. This batch is headed to the airport right now.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Fast enough for what?”
“What planet are you on, Hanky? You haven’t heard of Impossible Journey?”
“Is that a movie?” I shook my head. “Didn’t they turn the theater into a gun range?”
Gerry couldn’t tell if I was joking or what.
“You’ve never been to the outlet mall?” Gerry asked. He was gesturing all over the place. “There’s a brand-new multiplex out there. Impossible Journey is showing on half the screens. My ex — old lady’s kids are crazy for this movie. It opens with a circus plane crashing in Canada, and these little dogs have to make it all the way back to Orlando. But an evil French fur-trapper catches the dogs and makes them drag this miniature sled piled high with traps and icy with blood. All these Pomeranians have are their tattered and burned circus uniforms to keep them warm. I’m telling you, when the little ones see those sad stripes and polka dots, they bawl their eyes out. I bought a dozen of these dogs through the mail the next day. Right away, I sold four to the ex — old lady. Covered my costs and — bang! — I’m in with the kids again.”
Gerry went on and on about his Pomeranian mill, but I was in a daze. I know you can’t unthrow a spear, but in my mind, I was running the lawns and streets of Parkton, racing across intersections and tennis courts, in the open door of the library, running through stacks of books before leaping out an open window, running until I ran up the steps of the courthouse, into the rotunda, where I hoped to catch my own spear.
“Hey, are you listening?” Gerry asked.
I had to sit down.
Gerry came up and patted me on the cheek. “Lighten up, Hanky,” he said, smiling. “I didn’t mean to pull your chain about the old days. Me and Sheriff Dan just want you to explain this.”
Gerry took out a napkin and handed it to me. On it was drawn a horizon line. Below the line was a circle, the sun of the underworld. Above it was a set of antlers, pointing down.
I slumped in my high-back chair, a row of The Depletionists staring at me.
“Sheriff Dan just wants to know if this thingy on the napkin is Indian.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“It’s an Indian symbol, right?”
I shook my head. “You mean, is its origin Native American?”
“A simple yes will do,” Gerry said, then leaned forward, smiling. “I can’t discuss a case in progress, but…” He mouthed, Gangs.
Gangs? I mouthed back.
“An Indian gang. There’ve been other signs. Beer runs. Vandalism. Some serious joy-rides. All the trouble you’d expect with this new Indian casino.”
I sat there, shaking my head I don’t believe it, Gerry nodding Believe it.
“Well, I’ve got all I need here,” Gerry said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Just hold on here.”
“Gotta go,” he answered, sharpening an imaginary knife again. “Lunchtime.”
Gerry turned to leave. He began climbing through the boxes that blocked the exit. But then a thought seemed to strike him. He looked back at me. “Hey, before, when I said ‘autopsy’—you didn’t think I was going to do an autopsy on a person, did you?”
“No, no,” I assured him.
He was standing on a box of pluvial-silt studies from local late-Pleistocene lakes. It gave him the stature of a full-sized man. He asked, “Then what did you think I was talking about?”
I had to think fast. “I thought it was a metaphor,” I said.
Gerry cocked his head. “Right,” he said, “a metaphor.”
* * *
Because of an interdisciplinary program in place at the university, my department forced me to teach an occasional class in a related field. I was currently instructing Pop Culture, a course I interpreted as “popular culture through the ages.” We were doing a unit on mid-glaciation lithic figures of the proto-Inuit, and things weren’t going so well. Gerry had rattled me a little, so my lecture was off, and before dissension set in, I decided to show some slides.
The projector’s rotary tray dropped fertility figure after fertility figure into the light, and I did not narrate the stories behind images I hoped would speak for themselves. On the screen flashed a palm-sized female idol, all breasts and buttocks and belly, the ivory worn dark from rubbing. Next flashed a blackened birthing totem that had, at some point in the last twelve thousand years, been burned. Then came the image of a kneeling woman, etched in obsidian, her almond eyes lowered in contemplation of her swollen abdomen.
At this same time, three days a week, Trudy taught her Arc-Intro across the hall from me. We both conducted class with our doors open, and though the wooden floors in this building had been replaced with carpet, and the plaster ceiling was now acoustic tile, I occasionally made out bits of her lecture, noted the tone of her voice when her teaching grew passionate, heard when her students chuckled at her jokes.
As the frames silently clicked forward, I began pacing, keeping an ear tuned for Trudy while timeless female forms lit my room in their advance and retreat. The projector was on auto-repeat.
“Notice how sexuality and maternity are captured in the same image,” I said to my students when they’d seen enough images to note patterns. “Also observe,” I continued, “how small they are. This is personal, portable, perhaps even mass-produced art. This is the art of a people on the move, a people who, in only a few centuries, traversed three thousand miles of Siberian and Aleutian coastline before populating North America by shooting the gauntlet through the two largest glaciers of the late Pleistocene. Now, that’s an impossible journey,” I added, trying to sound hip.
“How come the carvings didn’t get more realistic?” a student asked, a young man in back.
It was hard for me to keep their names straight.
“They’re more difficult to make than you think,” I said. “But what’s important here is the conservation of culture. These people had a belief system that worked, and their art expressed those beliefs. Experimentation in art happens when old systems of meaning fail and new forms are needed.”
I paused in the light, the pink marble of a sleep goddess projected on my chest.
This young man cleared his throat and spoke again.
“I understand what you’re saying, Dr. Hannah, about their beliefs staying the same. I just think they’d get better at carving. You’re always saying those people are no different than us. Well, I’m a music major, and after the fiddle became popular, we had the Stradivarius within a hundred years.”
Another voice came from the back of the class, an older man’s. “What Brad’s talking about is simple progress,” he said.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m Brad’s father,” he said.
I went over and turned on the lights. “How long have you been here?”