Of course, compared with the Hall of Man, the Tomb of the Unknown Indian was an inferior installation, hastily assembled, poor of theme, and though the exhibits were ethnographically accurate, they lacked the little flourishes — track lighting, dioramic painting, mood music — that truly ignite the imagination. Still, I took the steps two at a time.
When I pushed through the fire doors at the base of the stairs, I encountered not a portal into humanity, but a room full of vending machines. Strips of fluorescent tubing hung from a low ceiling, illuminating a room ringed with all manner of snack and soda machines. Glowing panels advertised sodas I’d never even heard of, like Splash and Quirst. One soda was named Jolt, and took as its logo the universal icon for accidental electrocution. LED panels flashed, and metallic dispensing screws gleamed. I had to turn in place to take it all in. I approached a tall, ominous machine that sold snacks called Bugles, Bangles, and I swear, Curdles. I peered into the machine. Hanging there on a rod, admittedly alluring, was a bag of those Doritos Eggers and Trudy were always talking about. Alas, I had no change.
In the center of the room was a pair of twin vinyl benches that had been pushed together, the way they do in an art museum. I took a seat and studied the machines, each a climate-controlled, perfectly lit gallery of goods. On an ottoman of vinyl, I reclined. Above me, pipes lined the basement ceiling, some color-coded, some crusty with fireproofing, all of them wound through with fiber-optic cable and coaxial cord. This room had been a repository of the meekest of cultures, a few tattered remnants of now extinguished peoples, saved as tokens by the people who had vanquished them. Now they were gone. I wondered if, in a thousand years, a perfectly preserved soda bottle — tinted green, curvy, slightly opalescent — wouldn’t speak as much about us as an Algonquian baby rattle, made from the amber-clear shells of baby turtles, or the translucent horn ladles the ancient Manitobans drank with. Wouldn’t a Mars Bar candy wrapper, cut from silky, shiny Mylar and printed with the planets of our system, speak as much of us as a Spokane baby swaddle, handwoven and dyed the Five Colors of the Universe?
But who had use for ancient things? What had happened in this room was all too common. What had been done here was repeated the world over whenever one group came into possession of something that was burdensomely sacred to another. The Midwest was full of stories of construction crews unearthing mammoths, or city contractors trenching up burial mounds, only to till the artifacts under so that building wasn’t halted for the troubling process of investigation and “repatriation.” Here’s what the prison had surely done: one night, a backhoe opened a hole somewhere on campus, a truck backed up, and a few unlucky inmates were forced to shovel out Aleut spirit totems, Lakota “tomorrow” suits of heavenly buckskin, Crow death masks made from beetle wings, and a hundred other accouterments to the afterlife of native peoples. This was what would probably happen to Keno if the casino had its way.
Two inmates came into the room to stock up on candy bars, but I didn’t look up. Blackfoot fireboxes were sparking in my mind. Narragansett death flutes sang in my ears. After death, the former lit your way to the other side, and the latter whistled you back if you weren’t ready. Reclining, I heard my fellow inmates drop quarter after quarter, followed by the whir of the dollar-bill changer, and finally the mechanical twisting of the selection screw that sent a run of Milky Way bars into the pan below. Perhaps they were headed to see The Birds.
Dear anthropologists of the coming millennium, when you come across the grave of the Unknown Indian, dumped to the brim with unwanted artifacts, what will you make of this grave of graves, filled with the soup of a hundred cultures? Perhaps you have already encountered this oddity and developed a complex theory, the source of much debate among the common people. Don’t let it become another footnote in the literature of yesterday. If the site is yet undiscovered, the resting place of the Unknown Indian shouldn’t be hard to find. The prison was on a hill above the river, right near the forty-third parallel. I charge you to locate this grave, liberate these objects, and place them in a hall you shall name the Hall of Humanity, which will also house all the artifacts you can find from the eradicated peoples of the earth. This Hall of Humanity should be climate-controlled, tasteful in its lighting, “hands-on” in its general approach, and perpetual in its charter.
Someone entered the room and began messing with a vending machine.
I was still trying to picture this new Hall of Humanity, up on a mountain, with lots of pillars perhaps, or maybe in the center of a great plaza. But someone’s interminable banging on a vending machine was ruining my concentration. I sat up. There, squatting in front of the potato-chip machine, was a man in a filthy fur coat, feeding a stick up the receiving door of the drop bin.
“Eggers?” I asked.
Eggers turned to look at me.
I asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see you, Dr. Hannah,” he said. “What happened to your hair?”
“Don’t change the subject. Just what are you up to?”
He looked at the rodent stick in his hands, half swallowed by the gleaming machine. “Gathering,” he said.
I pulled myself together and, nearing Eggers, crouched beside him.
What the heck was he doing? Soda spearing? Chip fishing?
“Hold this,” he said.
I grabbed the switch, freshly cut from green willow, as Eggers pulled off his heavy parka in preparation for some serious concentration. “They took my other rodent stick,” he volunteered. “I spent all day making this one.”
He took the stick from me, then continued worming it up the dispenser flue, working the thing by instinct and feel, the way you floss a hard-to-reach crown. He nestled his cheek against the glass, wrapped his free hand around the machine. Through finesse, Eggers sent the barbed head of the stick rising, cobralike, up through the rows of gum and mints, past the candy bars, toward the top row, where the real calories hung — in bags and bags of potato chips.
Eggers grunted and muttered to himself as he coaxed the stick, and I must admit, there was something sexual about the process. How long had it been since the poor boy’d known a woman? I’d never questioned his reputation as the campus paramour, but there was certainly something desperate here.
“What happened to Keno?” I asked.
Eggers scrunched his face at me, as if I was breaking his concentration.
I said, “I’m in jail here, in case you haven’t noticed. Nobody’s exactly taking the time to keep me posted.”
Eggers returned to his delicate work. He began twisting the stick, to help it clear the rungs of Twinkies and HoHos. Through the glass, the stick was right before our eyes, threatening to snag on the plastic rim of a Ding-Dong package.
Easy, I kept thinking. Easy.
Eggers gave the stick a little jiggle, and, simple as that, the triple-barbed head slid up to the next level. Then he spoke again. “I crept back to the casino last night,” he said. “Everything was gone. They confiscated all my tools. They impounded my lodge. They took my rodent stick. Can you believe it? Everything. There was only an evidence receipt, staked in the snow.”