She said it in a friendly voice, as if I was an outsider she wanted to include.
“If I could bring things back to life,” I told her, “I’d start with my old man here.”
She followed my gaze to Dad.
“Don’t you worry about him,” she said. “Don’t you worry.”
“Hey, are we going to eat or what?” Dad asked. “I’ll take the usual.”
When he said “the usual,” there was some sauce on it. Either he’d never eaten here before, or they were lovers. This woman pulled on a towel that was draped over her shoulder, then wiped her hands. She went into the kitchen, set something sizzling on the grill, and began fixing us two Virgin Marys while more coffee brewed. Before I knew it, we were knee-deep in breakfast, the real proof that something was up between these two. First came sausage links, seasoned with anise and sage, then home-style potatoes, fried in butter and rosemary, and finally eggs, salty and fried crisp at the edges, all flanked by triangles of toast.
I dusted my eggs with black pepper and dug in. There is nothing like the eggs of birds — yellow-white, quivering with flavor, and light as the nests they were plucked from. Eggers always boasted that a reptile egg is just as good. He even claimed to like that ring of brown oil around turtle yolks. That morning in the Lollygag, though, the black pepper on my eggs had started to creep me out. Those little bits seemed to shift and twitch on my plate, hopping in my peripheral vision. Soon my skin was crawling, and I tossed my napkin on the bar.
Dad was crunching the celery stick from his Virgin Mary.
“You ready to roll?” I asked. God, my armpits were burning.
“Something wrong with the food?” he asked.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Let’s just get out of here.”
I was still thinking we’d go fishing, maybe just sit around and not talk. We hadn’t played cards in a while. He used to love to play cards.
Dad shrugged. “I’m in no hurry.”
“Well, grab your coat,” I told him. “I can’t just leave you here.”
“You go on. I’ll finish watching my show.”
I looked up to the soundless television, where celebrities in strapless gowns were auctioning each other for charity.
“Look, I’m taking the van back, remember?”
Dad said, “We’ll do lunch later. How’s that sound?”
“Well, I’m not going to just leave you. I won’t do it.” I put my coat on and grabbed his off the stool. “Take it,” I told him. “Because I’m not going to abandon you here. You get some other son to do that. Find some other offspring for that shit job.”
This was when Dad was supposed to give me a winner smile and sweet-talk me with that salesman voice of his. But he didn’t. He just looked at me as if I was a curiosity. He took a nip of bacon. Whatever he was about to say would wound me, I felt it coming, and before that could happen, I dropped his coat on the floor and turned to leave.
When I reached the door, a voice came from deep within the kitchen:
“Nice to meet you. Professor.”
It was a sweet voice. I heard it over and over as I drove away — in my head the words were clear, but they seemed to come from far away.
* * *
Inside the Hall of Man, I set Keno’s ball on the autopsy gurney, just above his upturned hands, making Keno seem to shrug about his missing body. The phone in my office upstairs was ringing like mad, but I didn’t have the key and I didn’t care. The campus was deserted — was it a weekend, a holiday? — so that my phone was the only sound in the building, and I could hear its faint plea through the corridors, even in here.
I sat on my new silver stool, absently scratching at my crotch as I wheeled up and down the Hall of Man, Pleistocene glaciers advancing and retreating in the exhibits like some flipbook of history. Humans evolved and devolved with each shove of my feet. I’d push off one wall, and in a blur one hundred thousand years would pass, evidenced in the posture of a Clovis, reflected in the eye of a Cro-Magnon. Everywhere in these dioramas, I felt the hand of Peabody — in the blood-tinted authority of his cave paintings, in the way his depiction of a sunset over glaciers turned the ice below the color of watermelon meat, or the way runty dogs cowered, conniving, in the periphery of humanity. Peabody was the constant as millennia flew past. He was proof that people could transcend time, that no one was ever lost, if someone was left to tell your story.
I rolled back and forth until he was a presence in the room. Not that Peabody was standing there talking or anything. I just felt him, the way he cocked his head when you spoke, that indulgent smile he cast while he listened. I heard the rubber tip of his cane going cush, cush, as it helped him up stairs, saw his pediatrician’s hands turn a bone, carefully, as if there was only so much patience an artifact had before it got stubborn and fitful.
And then there was a faint, low sound in the room, much different from the stool’s casters, or the thud of my boots off the wall. I stopped rolling. “Peabody?” I whispered.
The lights hummed. Air circulated in the vents. I wheeled to the autopsy table, my eyes fixed on Keno’s ball. Leaning over the cold steel, I put my ear to the fossilized mud. At first, there was only a staticky sound. Then there was fluctuation, rhythm, like blood in your ears, and I began to hear what sounded like weather, elemental and faint, some ancient meteorology. There was wind buffeting, and the pepper of gust-driven snow. A human call came from this cloak of snow, an urgent whisper held in an eternity I saw as white. I closed my eyes. All was preservative-white, the white that spins forever inside a souvenir globe, the kind you give a kid who didn’t make the journey, who was left at home, and I didn’t need a translator to understand Keno’s lonesome tune.
The phone was still ringing when I left, and I knew where I must go. I dropped the van in gear and sidled out toward the casino. It was a perfect day for digging — the sky clear, the temp above zero — and as I passed grid after grid of snowed-over fields, I could imagine great finds under all of them. All the lost answers, all the missing pieces, were out there, I felt, waiting for me to find them. I looked for that black GTO when I coasted off the casino road. Then I remembered it was sitting at the bottom of the lake, rump to bumper with a Corvette, their dull headlights illuminating the petroglyphs above like some ancient drive-in movie.
I parked the van on the side of the road, and set out to dig. As I crossed the fields toward Keno, wind-driven ice crystals cut at my skin. Maybe I’d been rolling around a little too much in the Hall of Man, but I half expected to see herds of woolly camels hoofing up the snow in search of roots, or great teratorns circling the sky above. I followed the now worn path from the highway to Eggers’ mastodon-tusk lodge, squinting into the distance to catch sight of my team. Spades of mud flew from the excavation site, surely the work of Eggers’ arms, and a figure squatting, square-shouldered, her profile noble, was Trudy.
I stepped carefully through the detritus of humanity — old bones and burned sticks, camp scraps and lumpy latrinecicles — until I stood at the edge of the pit, now knee-deep in places.
I put my hands on my hips and addressed them: “Today, we are scientists.”
Eggers planted his makeshift spade and leaned on it. Trudy lowered her digging antler.
“Life is full of rituals in which people celebrate the living,” I continued. “Today, however, we commit to the dead. Today, we show allegiance to the missing. We declare that the departed matter, that the absent, the unaccounted, and the truant walk alike before science.”
My team fell silent while I surveyed the dig. The long shadow of a human was beginning to emerge. Various bones had been felt out and left in situ, and I cast my eyes upon the yellowed Pixy Stix of a Homo sapiens. Mentally, I tried to identify these fragments as those of a gravesite, a crime scene, a last stand, or a lost soul. I noted the flat back of what had to be a femur, knuckle pointing south. Did Keno die on her stomach? Would the Clovis bury her this way? Did they believe in the heavens or the underworld? Was showing your back to a god a sign of trust, as the Anasazi people believed, or an insult, as most cultures agreed?