A lone glass stood in the sink. I sniffed it — bourbon — and tipped it up so the ring of liquor that had settled in the bottom ran toward my lips. The bourbon rang in my teeth, finding all the old fillings and the sites of a couple cavities to come. I knew about bourbon — it was part of the reason I was never invited on the lecture circuit anymore. Another couple sips, and it would start to gruff your voice. Then it would muss your hair, pull your shirttails out, and finally settle into your real soft spots — ego, adolescent urges, and the fear that at any moment your fraud would be discovered. In my case, this all translated into a talent for boring people, unintentionally belittling them, and failing to get laid.
After The Depletionists came out, I was invited to speak at all the big universities, places where I pulled up in a classic Corvette, greeted everyone like chums, then lectured endlessly about the against-all-odds drive of the lone scientist and the self-sacrifice of the maverick fossil-hunter — anything but the six years I’d spent in a library researching the book. Naturally, there’d follow the reception: I was the one eating all the shrimp, copyrighting my wit, and saucing my talk with me. Even now, as I stood at my sink, the thought of the two graduate students I managed to sleep with sent me looking for a drink.
I found the bottle, three fingers gone, in the cupboard, and though I was no longer much of a drinker, I poured myself a glass, examining its smoky color through the swirls of my father’s fingerprints. I’d bought the bottle years ago, on a whim really, not long after Peabody left. I had this notion that he’d begin to miss me and sometime soon invite me down to fish under that warm Florida sun. After we’d rigged our poles and thrown the first cast, I imagined pulling this bourbon from my pack. Old Man Peabody and I would have a high time of it: sipping from the bottle in turn, arguing anthropological theory until night came on, and as the stars rose, maybe pulling out cigars.
I dropped a couple cubes of ice in the bourbon, then added a splash of water. I leaned against the counter, noticing how Janis’ houseplants were drooping from their hanging pots, thinking there was something particularly suspicious about the way my father was excited to attend a university function even I had forgotten — he could already barely stand them when Janis was around. After I considered it, though, I figured Dad would feel right at home in the savanna of a university-sponsored social event, a watering hole where the sheepish wolfed the liquor and the catty dogged the meek.
A copper watering can sat at the end of the counter, and I picked it up. I held the can under the faucet, felt it take on weight. Normally, I’d just slop a little water on each plant, never enough to drip down to the carpet, trying to get the whole thing over with before the fertilizer turned my fingers blue. Tonight, though, I played some Latin jazz, then turned the shower on full-blast, leaving the curtain open to steam the house.
Moving from pot to pot, I watered each plant till blue fluid ran from its weep holes to a bucket below. Then I began misting the plants, dabbing the dust off their leaves in rhythm with the music. As I sipped my bourbon, I began examining the plastic tags tucked into the soil of each pot. Here were the care instructions for Perisporus clavinerum: plant in southern subtemperate conditions under canopied light, allowing room for wandering roots. Genopedia cordoba, native of Bolivia, needed pumice for drainage, potash for alkalinity, and, for optimal pollination, I should plant near a colony of kissing bats.
I studied the raised veins of Genopedia cordoba, felt the bristly hairs that frosted its tiny blossoms, each one smeared with amber pollen, thick as resin, that stained my fingers the yellow-brown of nicotine. Somewhere in the world, a bat was seeking out this bloom — I pictured a dark rain forest, warm fruit drooping, bright birds asleep, their colors muddied by night, and I tried to hear the navigational singing of a bat I could not see or feel. It sounded near.
I’d always seen these plants as ferns and ivy, as interchangeable creepy things of the dentist’s-office variety. I never looked past the ironic artificiality of growing them here in South Dakota, where they wouldn’t last a minute without climate control, constant care, and their precious blue food. But suddenly I saw something miraculous in their journey. They’d evolved in the Cenozoic era, in the long isolation before South America crashed into North, and then they’d made the rest of the migration by jumbo jet, five thousand miles in a Federal Express evening, simply because someone desired them.
In the year before she began to decline, Janis became obsessed with these plants, and now I saw them as she would — as snapshots of jungles and mountains she would never see, as souvenirs from a journey she wouldn’t get to take. In the face of fate, when people see a last opportunity to change their lives, Janis didn’t fly to Mexico or climb Mount Fuji. She wanted to be near us, to continue her life as it was — working as a court stenographer, inventing home improvements she and Dad could tackle together, reading books at my excavation sites in the afternoon light.
In the shower, I began wondering what I’d do if I knew the end was coming, if I was about to fall into a lake of concrete. Junior would be an orphan — the university would simply forklift my research into the shredding bin. Soon, my book would be as dated as the Hall of Man. And, of course, if I slipped through the Missouri ice or was mauled by a breeder hog, there’d be people in this world who’d never even know I was gone — my mother, Peabody. To them, I’d always be the first chapter of a book they set aside and never finished.
I toweled off and dressed. By the time I’d snapped the ends of my shirt cuffs through the arms of a sportcoat, I was thinking about legacies, mulling over what a sad inheritance Peabody’s Hall of Man was. I splashed on too much aftershave, and the sting somehow made me think of Trudy. In the mirror, my hair had started slimming to a widow’s peak, the lines on my forehead seemed a little deeper, but I was still young. I downed the last of my watery bourbon, then picked up the phone.
I dialed Trudy’s number. I needed to tell her about the discovery of Keno, but when the line connected and her phone rang, I knew I would first ask her to help me update the Hall of Man. Perhaps she could chair a committee for student input on the renovation. It was a chance to change history, as all the students saw it, and a chance to change Peabody, for those who never knew him. Her line rang and rang.
I quietly flossed my teeth, then made my way down the frozen steps to the van.
The motor was slow to warm, and I waited in the dark, windows whited over, with only the dim yellow glow of the dash lights for company. Keno could change everything, I thought. The human clock would be set back a couple thousand years. My phone would start ringing. There’d be a profile in Anthro Today, another book, and I might even ride Keno’s back out onto the lecture circuit again.
When the defroster had thawed two small circles in the windshield, I made out a snow-coated raccoon in my headlights. He was balanced on the lip of the garbage Dumpster, scavenging a meal from our trash, some of which was scattered on the ground below — a cellophane wrapper, aluminum foil, oil-stained paper plates. Bon appétit, I said and dropped the van into reverse. The raccoon’s ears swiveled; then its yellow eyes came to bear on me. A shimmy of snow lifted from its fur as it ducked from view.