Knowingly, he asked, “How many transmissions do you own?”
The question struck a philosophical note in me. I thought of my Corvette at the bottom of the lake. Was it still mine? Wasn’t it now in the public domain, like Keno’s spear point or the bell Eggers found from Meriwether Lewis’ lost boat?
“Give me a minute, would you?” I asked him.
He smiled, then pulled out a notepad, jotted something down.
“Look,” I said, “what’s this about?”
“These fellows,” Sheriff Dan said, “came down from Sioux Falls to look at something. And now it’s missing.”
“Gone like something you love,” Gerry said through his teeth. “A little fellow you’ll never see again.”
Involuntarily I looked over to the stretching hoop next to Eggers’ lodge. On it, pulled tight with sinew, was a fresh pelt.
A radio squawked, and one of the men in yellow reached to his belt. Without looking, he clicked it off, then said, “Tell us about the moniker King of Spades.”
“Moniker?” I asked.
“You know,” he said, “a street name. Are you known to your acquaintances as the King of Spades?”
I knew what a moniker was, but before I had a chance to defend myself, the other one asked, “Do you have any tattoos?” He toed his boot through several stray baby-back ribs, inspecting them, while his partner began nosing around the site. “Do you like pork?” he asked me, though I was watching his sidekick pull back the flap of Eggers’ lodge — he winced at the smell, shone his flashlight around inside, and asked, “You’re sympathetic to the Indian way, aren’t you?” Together, the two of them bent to examine a frozen segment of feces. One popped on a rubber glove and picked it up. The frosty crust shined in the light. Very closely, they studied it.
The one wearing the glove pointed the turd toward me.
“Would you like to explain the fur in this object?” he asked.
Gerry looked horrified. “Lord, no,” he said. “Not Spark!”
“That fur’s not in,” I told them. “It’s on. Those little mutts were running everywhere. They were the ones rummaging through the latrine. We don’t do our business in camp. We’re scientists!”
“Who, exactly, is ‘we’?” Sheriff Dan asked.
Gerry was trembling with fury. “His name was Spark,” he said, “and he was a Pomeranian, not a mutt.”
“Look, Gerry—” I said, backing up.
“Pomeranians are an ancient and noble breed,” Gerry said, nearly stammering. “They were miniaturized by the Norse from Icelandic sledding dogs.”
With each step backward, Gerry came closer. I looked to Sheriff Dan for support, but he just shook his head. The duo from Sioux Falls was heading for the excavation pit. “You gentlemen can’t go over there,” I called to them.
Gerry reached up and poked me in the chest.
“Hey,” he said, “we’re talking about Pomeranians, here. As if you even care. I could loan you a couple videos on the topic, in case you’re ever curious about the animals you kill.”
A yellow blur flashed across the ditch. One of the men knelt in the mud and pulled out a pen that telescoped into a pointer or some kind of prod. Then his partner joined him, walkie-talkie in hand. “Looks like we’ve got some human remains,” he radioed in.
“You officers are going to have to go,” I called. “I’m not joking — there’s serious science going on here.”
Sheriff Dan tensed at the word “remains.” He lifted a hand to quiet Gerry, then took my shoulder. “I’ve got a thermos of coffee in the squad car,” he said to me. “What say we wait in the cruiser while these boys do their work.”
The look in his eye scared the crap out of me.
It was here that I felt my first climactic moment. Within Sheriff Dan’s calm voice of concern lurked a possible new life, one laden with shame and disgrace. In this other life, I was not a man of science but a fast-talking pilferer of antiquities. It is not until you’re old that you come to realize there’s no such thing as real climax at all — such cairns on life’s journey are only monuments to your thirst for drama, markers to guide the trailing nostalgia. But you can’t know that at the time. As Sheriff Dan offered me a cup of coffee, my spine glassed over. It would not be the last time I felt weak in the face of climax’s threatening illusion: soon the river would deliver to me teams of corpse-eating dogs, and within weeks, the time would come for me to hunt down the last Russian boy on earth.
I looked around. Everything was moving in slow motion. The men in yellow were kneeling in the mud. They went straight for that strange orb, their hands getting grubby with matrix, and then came that sucking sound as they pulled the orb from the muck.
“Do not touch that object,” I yelled, but it was too late.
Did I really shout that warning? Were my hands about to become “savage instruments,” as the judge later described them? Gerry reached for his cuffs. Sheriff Dan gave me that warm, parental smile, the one I was always a sucker for, while two men from Sioux Falls rapped the butt of a flashlight on a twelve-thousand-year-old grave offering, listening for anything that might rattle inside. It was as if I was there, and I wasn’t there. Something went quiet and still in me. My limbs felt ghostly. There was Eggers’ rodent stick, leaning against his lodge. Suddenly it was in my hands.
“Get away from Keno,” I warned them. “Return her ball to the pit.”
The four of them stared curiously at the long, willowy stick I was brandishing.
I jabbed the rodent stick in the air, its three sharp tips hissing, but none of them seemed afraid. Looking around, I realized there was no one, anywhere, to help me.
“I’ve seen these barbs driven into a badger,” I told them. “When they were jerked out, braids of intestines looped from the holes.”
That’s when everybody’s handcuffs came out, and they started closing on me.
Gerry advanced, shifting his cuffs from hand to hand like a switchblade, shaking them here and there to get me to strike.
“This one’s for Spark,” he said, and faked a charge.
Instead of flinching, I flashed that rodent stick, whistle-quick, near his face.
“I’m the dog killer, huh?” I told him. “I’m the bad guy? You’re the one who butchered a little girl’s hog. You, chief, are the one running a puppy mill. Breeding them in that school bus of yours. Shipping them in unheated containers.”
I saw Gerry wince and glance fearfully at Sheriff Dan, whose jaw tightened in determination, as if right then and there he’d put Gerry on the roll of ex-deputies.
In my peripheral vision, a man shrugged off his yellow parka. He began waving it to distract me while his partner slipped to my rear.
“Son,” Sheriff Dan said, “come, now, son.” With both hands, he cautioned me to drop the stick, though he could have been asking me to lie down, lie at the feet of what was to come. Nothing could have tempted me more.
This is what my life had come to. There were tears in my eyes.
“My students had nothing to do with this,” I yelled, then threw the stick and started running. I hadn’t gone ten steps before I felt something spring onto my back, little legs clamping my sides. A hand slipped round my throat, ending in a scissor-lock choke. Then my face hit the snow. The lights dimmed, and my vision went sparkly, as if a snowstorm were dropping layers of powder that covered everything — burying cars and hydrants, erasing hovels and headstones alike.
A voice, a disembodied whisper, reached me through the muffled cold, through my prickling, snow-filled ears. “Maybe you haven’t heard,” it said, “but I don’t live in a school bus anymore.”
* * *
By noon, the state of South Dakota had charged me with attempted assault of one of its officers, and a Seventh Circuit prosecutor from Omaha had phoned in a federal charge of grave-robbing — which had local “cult implications” that Sheriff Dan was looking into. The sheriff’s station was no larger than the Dairy Queen next door, and it was filled with several small booking desks, most of them empty. The deputies were out patrolling town in the pathological loop called law enforcement.