The Pomeranian that had been rooting for feces in the latrine’s foul snow raced up to Gerry and began springing in place, looking for a treat. Whatever it had wolfed down was gone, though flecks of matter speckled the tips of its ears and whiskers.
Old Man Peabody would have vomited at this sight. He couldn’t stand to see any contact between humans and dogs — he once nearly had a breathing attack when we passed a girl on the street whose face was being licked by a poodle. Peabody believed that all of humanity’s Old World diseases came from the domestication of animals, but in the New World, he was sure dogs were to blame for bringing humans into a thousand parasitic cycles: dogs’ coats were host to fleas, mites, ticks, chiggers, scabies, and lice, all of which made dog blood a medium for dozens of encephalitics and hemorrhagics, not to mention beauties like rabies, Borrelia, rickettsiae, and Chagas. Their eyes weep toxoplasmotic larvae by the million. Their mouths drip with cystozoans, and their anuses are home to flukes, proglottids, cysticerci, and of course the worms: tape, round, heart, pin, thread, seat, and hook.
Eggers tried to shoo the filthy cur with a giant mitten.
“That car?” I asked. “I hadn’t even noticed it. I didn’t even know it was there.”
Gerry pulled back the hood of his jacket. “Looks like our little Indian gang struck again, Hanky. Sheriff Dan thinks they may be running a chop shop.” Here Gerry made a little tomahawk chop with his hand.
“Maybe someone just had car trouble,” Trudy said. “And what makes you think it has anything to do with Native Americans?”
“The car’s been painted with well-known gang symbols,” Gerry said, shrugging.
Eggers added, “The hunter-gatherer ‘gang’ is the oldest social structure on earth. We all came from gangs.”
Trudy put her hands on her hips, making her shoulders broaden under the gray of her sweats. “Maybe a bunch of middle-aged white guys stole that car,” she said.
“Oh, no,” Gerry said, more than half offended. “The perpetrators who did this are cowards, I can assure you. I’ve seen their work before, miss. Innocent motorists don’t remove their license plates when they’re stranded. Innocent people have a healthy respect for carnivals and farm animals. Regular folks don’t go around fingerpainting with the blood of their victims.”
Trudy’s eyes went wide. Eggers froze, even though the Pomeranian called McQueen was leaving a trail of urine as he headed toward the lodge entrance.
Gerry went on: “I gave that hot rod a good once-over. Looks like those punks went for a joy ride until the transmission gave out. There’s a sock in the glove box stuffed to the stitches with condoms, so who knows what else they’re up to. Sheriff Dan’s got a couple boys from the South Dakota Bureau of Investigation coming in from Sioux Falls tomorrow. They’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Eggers cut McQueen off at the pass and was looking to give the lapdog a taste of buckskin. Gerry intervened. “Hey, careful with the Poms,” he said. “Those things have papers, you know. These here are purebreds.”
“Gerry,” I said, “can you call off the hounds already?”
Another darted into Eggers’ lodge and began rummaging around — it emerged crunching something that sounded suspiciously like a potato chip. That’s when Trudy noticed that a pair of Pomeranians were digging like mad in the matrix that held Keno. We heard her gasp and followed her eyes to a fury of paws that spit mud everywhere.
“That’s it,” Eggers said, and grabbed from the lodge his rodent stick, a savage piece of technology if ever I’ve seen one. Its shaft was cut from willow, so it was flexible enough to follow the curves of any rodent burrow. Its three-pointed tip was armed with sharpened bird bones. This Eggers rooted down every hole he passed, fishing around till he jabbed something — once I’d seen him pull up a trio of baby rabbits, hanging from the barbed gigs by their baggy skin.
Only when Eggers hefted the rodent stick did Gerry seem to realize what was happening. “Hey, hold it right there,” Gerry commanded. “Put that thing down.”
“Call your dogs,” Trudy told Gerry.
“Hold on,” Gerry said. “You can’t hurt those dogs. They’re already sold. We’re headed out to the airport right now.”
“He’ll do it,” Trudy said.
Gerry stopped. He cocked his head, seeming to notice, as if for the first time, that Eggers was dressed in animal skins. “What the hell is going on around here?” he asked. “What’s with the crazy getup?”
Nobody said anything. We all looked at Eggers, who lowered his rodent stick.
Gerry took a step closer to Eggers. “Just who the hell are you supposed to be?” Gerry looked at the cold firepits, the wallows of mud, all the stone tools lying everywhere. “What are you yahoos up to out here?”
I looked to Trudy, then Eggers.
“Well, it’s complicated,” Eggers said. “This is very scientific. What we’re doing here is… Well, it has to do with truth and discovery.”
“Yeah,” Trudy said. “And humanity.”
Eggers added, “We’re shining the light of inquiry into the darkness of prehistory.”
My words had never sounded so stupid.
Gerry turned to me. “What the hell are they talking about, Hanky?”
Suddenly, a sharp, pain-stricken yelp sounded at the edge of the field. We looked in time to see the bent-over trunk of a sapling spring upright from a snare. The motion pulled a cord of sinew that sent a Pomeranian high into the air, high above the tree. I cringed as the dog rounded the pinnacle of its arc, and I was already backpedaling before its fall was cut short by the snatching grip of a noose.
Gerry took a couple stunned steps toward the dangling Pomeranian, then broke into a run. Eggers dove inside his lodge, and for a moment there were only Trudy and I. She stood there, a true calm to her. She picked up a sack lying near the site and handed it to me. She made sure I held it, her hands clasped over mine. “Remember — we’re a team,” she said, then lifted the flap to join Eggers.
I headed off through the snow, carrying her sack, and, believe me, I was picking up the feet. I marched on, the casino looming larger and larger, the beeping of delivery trucks and the air-brake hiss of tour buses coming to me as I jammed my hands in my pockets and leaned into the deeper drifts. Why look back?
The giant marquee flashed the Thunderbird logo above a scrolling banner that had changed from “Welcome Parents” to “Welcome Meat Wholesalers.” I looked at the giant bird. Its wings flashed red, white, then blue, and its neon head swiveled left and right, nervously. There was no such bird as a thunderbird, really. It was a mythological creature that in Native American lore was the source of doom and destruction.
At the wire fence, I paused to let my bladder go, a piss so fantastic I saw sparkly yellow lights at the edge of my vision. I pissed the ice off a green-and-silver fence stake, beyond which was the snow angel I’d made after falling the night before. You could see Eggers’ footprints, and frosted in the snow was an empty highball glass.
Climbing over the culverts, I scrambled up to hardtop and came eye level with a frozen lake of dirty American cars. I couldn’t help looking back. I could see, far past the lodge where my larcenous students hid, a little man by a little tree, and I knew Gerry was cutting down his dog. Why don’t snow clouds ever swoop down when you need them? Out there was the scientific discovery of a lifetime, and instead of a full-scale excavation, all I could see were stains in the snow, students hiding under poached animal skins, and a man bent over his dog. Where was the cloud large enough to white out this scene, to obscure the havoc I had made?