I thought he was trying to be funny or something.
“Of course you’re joking,” I said. “We can’t do anything without authorization.”
“Nobody owns history,” he said. “There’s no monopoly on the past.”
“But someone owns this property.”
“Keno needs us,” Eggers said, as if that were all there was to it.
“This is tribal land.” I explained. “We have to get permission from the state Antiquities Board, the lieutenant governor, and the Bureau of Land Management, which operates under Federal Land Trust law. Then there’s the Tribal Council, and even if we get their permission, we have to find a judge who’ll grant us an exemption from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.”
Eggers looked unimpressed. “I’m gonna start digging tomorrow,” he said.
There was something both childlike and heroic in his obstinacy. He almost made me believe it was possible to dig in full view of all the authorities, in the middle of a South Dakota winter, exposed to ice storms and white-outs. On the horizon right now, a brooder of a storm was cooking — fat clouds ass-scooted toward us, pushing gusts of wind that groped their way through stands of trees, coaxing snow from limbs and stealing it back to the sky.
“So you’re just going to set up shop right here?” I asked him. “You don’t think anyone’s going to walk out of that casino and ask questions?”
Eggers didn’t have an answer.
“Look,” I said, stomping the snow, “the ground is frozen solid. You couldn’t dig here if you wanted. Even when it thaws, you’ll be dealing with serious mud till spring. Trust me, son, you’re in no rush. By the time you’re done applying for a dozen permits, you’ll be thankful for the extra time. Then there’s a fleet of funding grants to be written. Have you stopped to think how expensive this will be?”
“I have a plan, Dr. Hannah,” he said, “one that doesn’t need money or permits or judges. All it needs is you and Trudy.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” I asked. “How will you authenticate the find? You can’t get published without proper excavation method. You’ve got to keep meticulous records to pass peer review. You have to win the esteem of your colleagues if you hope to sell your book and speak at the top universities. Anything less, and you can kiss the lecture circuit goodbye.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Eggers fired back. He stomped the ground himself. “Will you hear me out?”
I looked into the approaching clouds.
The storm was rolling in faster than I’d thought. Its leading edge was beginning to sweep by us, lifting as much powder as it dropped, driving old snow chips that pricked your face. Locks of Eggers’ bison fur stood sideways. My boots now sang with cold.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s hear it.”
Eggers waved an arm, as if to erase an imaginary slate between us.
“This has never been done before. We excavate with Paleolithic technology.”
He studied my face for a reaction, but I had none; I was caught completely off guard.
“We grid the site with homemade string,” he continued, “and we dig with stone tools. Our maps and site sketches — all charcoal. We cut our own measuring sticks and carve our own spades. Tonight, I’ll light some fires to get the ground thawing. Tomorrow, I’ll sharpen a couple bifaces and flint an extra adze. Wait till I show you the screens I’ve been weaving. Instead of using gravity to sift dry dirt through the air, we submerge the screens in the creek here, and let the water dissolve away the strata. If we cancel a few classes, I figure we can do the whole thing in a few weeks.”
I had to admit that digging with stone technology was sort of brilliant. Old Man Peabody would have kicked his heels at the challenge. There was just one problem.
“It’s illegal, Eggers. It’s against the law to remove these things.”
Here he beamed large, snow dusting his sparse beard.
“Oh, but that’s the beauty,” he said. “We’re gonna put it all back.”
“Eggers, don’t even say things like that. Talk like that could cost you your reputation, your whole future.”
“Reputation? This isn’t about reputation, Dr. Hannah. I’m not in this to become a star. My future doesn’t include driving a macho car and lusting after students.”
“That was uncalled for.”
Eggers said: “Paleo-anthropology is about shining the light of inquiry into the darkness of prehistory, about unearthing the truth of who we are.”
Of course, those were my words he was quoting.
He stared at me, waiting for a response.
“That trick won’t work this time,” I said. “This is different. Other scholars need our research, and they need to be able to trust it. Even a rumor of you tainting a site like this would finish your career.”
“I don’t care what anybody says,” Eggers told me. “Think about it, Dr. Hannah. You, me, and Trudy. No red tape, no money, no attention. Just the joy of discovery, of hearing Keno’s story. We put everything back, and if you want to get your name in the paper, then you’re welcome to dig him up later.”
Finally, the real snow began to fall, the kind that was in for the long haul. It flurried our field, making the casino vanish behind weighty, billowing tracts of white. The flakes fell like reams of paper, confident as propaganda fliers. I imagined these snowy leaves as the now worthless pages of every Clovis article we could debunk with Keno. I put my hand out, the flakes falling sure and steady as outdated books from the shelves of libraries.
“Stop this,” I said. “Stop it. There is a system, and the system exists to prevent grave-robbing. We invented the red tape, Eggers, we did, the scholars, to stop grave-robbers.”
Eggers didn’t reply.
“I won’t go along with this,” I told him. “If Keno’s for real, he’s been sleeping for a dozen millennia. He can snooze another couple months.”
“That new casino breaks ground in a couple of months,” Eggers said.
In the distance rose a muted roar, a dull clapping that made Eggers stop and listen. Slowly we began to make out the cracking blades of a helicopter, swooping in low and fast from the east. It thumped heavy in the damp snow, the sound growing sharper as it neared. I figured it was just some high roller choppering into the casino, or maybe Club Fed receiving a new batch of white-collar criminals, but Eggers couldn’t stop scanning the snow-dumbed sky.
When the pitching blades whacked violently above, I, too, craned my neck back and squinted to catch sight of it. With a shock, the helicopter broke from the clouds, swinging round and past us, showing the green-black of its belly, and only when it had flashed on toward town could you hear the roar of its jet turbines.
“Shit,” Eggers said. “My parents are here.”
Chapter Three
A note from Dad was waiting on my kitchen counter.
“Pooped from ice fishing,” it said, “but meet you later at the Parents Weekend mixer. Might be a few minutes late, so don’t tizzy your feathers. Your dear old dad.”
The keys to the ’Vette were still missing from their peg on the wall, a sign that Dad’s activities from the previous night — silver dollars and song requests, ice buckets and aphrodisiacs — would truck on into this one.
I’d hung Janis’ portrait over the key peg, so he’d have to look her in the eye every time he took the car. The photo was taken on the day we surprised her with a cat to replace Roamy. It was a handsome, broad-headed Burmese that would in a matter of days spray every piece of plastic in the house, pull down a half-dozen birds from the feeder, and make a latrine of the shower stall. Janis had spent several nights searching the farm roads for Roamy, and in the photo, her eyes still seemed focused on the horizon, so the arrival of this cat was a too-sudden conclusion to the last holdout of hope in her expression. What could be had been tempered by what would do. At the time, a part of me was glad she finally knew how it felt. I’d hoped this feeling would transfer to my father, but he’d long since developed an immunity to that.