“What happened to them?”
With his thumb and fingers, Sheriff Dan mimed a hypodermic injection. “We do things the civilized way around here,” he said. “We don’t set traps for little dogs. We don’t skin them warm and eat them. Law-abiding folk don’t fingerpaint with animal blood.”
Sheriff Dan passed a sealed plastic bag through the bars. It contained tampons, toothpaste, and a few other travel-sized toiletries from manufacturers I had never heard of.
“They’ll probably hold you in one of the state facilities after this,” he said. “We’ll be parting company. I doubt you’ve been to the lockdown in Sioux Falls, but I’ll give you this advice, and if Janis were here, she’d give the same: speak to none of the prisoners, and no matter what, never join one of those gangs.” He looked at his watch. “If you want to brush your teeth, you’ll be thankful for that coffee. Your lawyer’s here. It’s time to pull yourself together.”
After Sheriff Dan left, I brushed my teeth alone, spitting the green-brown foam on the floor. A tiny bottle labeled “Bucolave Fresca” turned out to be an awful lemon-flavored mouthwash, and the jail-issue floss was like deep-sea fishing line. My gums bled as I used it, staring at that empty cell next door.
Farley entered in a blue suit — almondy tie, French cuffs, level in the shoulders — his haircut flat as a New Mexico mesa. In one hand, he balanced a slim manila folder and a cup of coffee — his was steaming — while the other held an all-purpose suit, wrapped in plastic. This he hooked in the bars by the hanger, then handed me the coffee.
“Look at you,” he said. “Taking fashion tips from that student of yours?”
I wanted to ask Farley if he’d viewed any evidence from the excavation site, if those yahoo deputies were playing bocce ball with Keno’s grave offerings. At this very moment, were they bowling down the DQ drive-through with the head of an ancient one? But did it really matter if they did? I kept seeing Sheriff Dan’s invisible needle, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would come for all of us, that tonight, while I slept, some deputy would back his van up to the side door, creep into my cell, and — and my story would conclude alone, without witness, without comment, the cell simply sprayed clean again, my few possessions thrown into an evidence bin like Keno’s.
“Are Trudy and Eggers okay?” I demanded.
He pulled a tie from his pocket, unfurled it. “You’re a mess, my friend.”
“I appreciate the help, but I don’t need it. Just tell me, did they find the Polaroids? What about the Hall of Man — have they been sniffing around there?”
Farley reached through the bars. He tapped my chin to make me look up, then pulled the tie behind my collar. “I tell you, I thought you were coping pretty well,” he said. “But you’re not. We got you fishing again. We played some serious gin rummy. There was that night we talked late. But it’s worse than I thought. You’re still trying to punish yourself.”
I stared at the ceiling. Preserved in the cement were patterns of rings and knots, a life history of the timber that had been used to form it. “I don’t need a lawyer, and I don’t need a psychologist,” I told him. “I need to know if they’ve disturbed the dig.”
Farley just kept talking, his eyes on his fingers as he looped the ends of the tie.
“Someone you care about is gone,” he said. “And the hurt is real. It must be somebody’s fault, right? I mean, someone must’ve messed up royal. But you’re the only person around to take the blame. Suddenly it’s like you’re the one who failed. And to move on, to do something good for yourself, well, that’s giving up, that’s quitting a memory, and now you’re the one who’s walking away. You become the one pretending someone didn’t exist.”
Farley cinched the knot and snapped my collar down.
“Look,” I said, “aren’t you listening? I’m guilty. I don’t need a lawyer.”
Farley pulled his hands back. “And so you start driving people away.” He peeled the plastic off the suit and passed the coat and slacks through the bars. When I took it, he opened the folder and read from a piece of paper: “Quote: ‘Before abandoning his weapon and fleeing, the perp declared, My students had nothing to do with this.’” Farley closed the folder. “You get queasy scaling fish, Hank; you’re afraid to uproot houseplants; yet you think a judge will believe you killed an eleven-hundred-pound hog with your bare hands?”
How could I explain that Eggers and Trudy were the best things that had ever happened to me? My tenure at USSD would soon be forgotten. My book was chaff. But Trudy and Eggers would go out into the world and train the next generation of anthropologists.
Farley tried a different angle. “You know he’s a billionaire, right? Certainly you’ve taken a moment to type his name into the Internet. So you know Brent Eggers can speak Japanese. You’ve heard about his fat book contract.”
“I believe in my students,” I said, with an undertone of Do you believe in me?
Farley looked unimpressed. Still, he reached through the bars and patted me once on the shoulder. “Sure, sure, of course you do,” he said. Then his face became grave. “But make no mistake, my friend. There’s no nobility in accepting the title ‘convicted animal abuser.’ Need we even speak of ‘grave-robbing’? Don’t punish yourself by weaving the words ‘cruelty’ and ‘desecration’ into the story the future will forever tell of you. You just put on that suit, do something about your breath, and pull yourself together. They’ll have you in the courtroom in twenty minutes, and I’ll do the talking.”
By the time he left, the coffee was cold. I put on Farley’s jacket, baggy in the shoulders and chest, then slicked down my hair with a product called Señor Pompo.
On the drive to the county courthouse, Sheriff Dan cracked all the windows, whistled “Western Wind,” and seemed oblivious to a snow rabbit that darted from a culvert and got lost in his tires. Before I knew it, I was in the building where Janis had spent her life.
The same fat man worked the metal detector in the lobby. The same little security badge dangled from everyone’s blue shirt. The lustrous marble floors were buffed to the sheen of burnt sugar, and the mahogany panels smelled of linseed wax. Sheriff Dan led me into the main hearing room, plopped me behind the defendant’s table, and, after cuffing me to a ring in the banister, headed off in search of coffee.
I looked around the room, and nothing I’d hoped to see was there. Missing were Keno’s artifacts, which I’d imagined would be spread across the discovery table. Where was the evidence against me — the dog pelts, cat skulls, and squirrel tails? No parade of Dorito bags, barbecued ribs, and dental-floss fibers? Where were Trudy, Eggers, and my father, not to mention my friends and neighbors?
Didn’t I have any friends and neighbors?
There were some retired folk in the rear gallery, the same group who haunted the benches back when I was in high school, back when Dad would leave on his weeklong sales circuits. I’d come here after classes let out rather than do my homework alone, in an empty house. Spreading my schoolwork — book reports, history outlines, workbook quizzes — on the gallery benches, I ate sandwich halves and daydreamed as dramas unfolded below. You’d be surprised how much of court life is spent searching for papers, rereading testimony, and stalling for time. There were lots of recesses, points at which Janis would make for the restrooms or slip down the hall to brew more tea in the bailiff’s kitchenette. Sometimes, she’d hydraulically descend to Records in the basement — a place that everyone, out of laziness, accessed with the wheelchair lift — so she could tend to a night-blooming cereus plant she had growing down there.