Eggers shifted, and his buckskin shirt raised enough that I could see his exposed ribs and the hollow of his stomach. Under all those thick pelts, the boy was skin and bones. His midriff was also covered with circles of scaly red skin — an advanced case of ringworm. Eggers had the stick poised below all those potato chips, and he kept trying a little push-twist-jerk motion to make the bags drop. They’d shimmy a bit, swagger with a good strike, but none would fall.
“So — what about Keno?” I asked. “What about his ball? Don’t tell me they’re gone.”
“Show a little concern, would you? I lost everything.”
“You’re a nomad,” I said. “You take nothing and use nothing, right?”
My tone was a little snotty, enough that Eggers looked at me like, What’s eating your ass? “I lost all my stockpiles,” he said. “Have you ever woven your own rope? Made bags out of sheep bladders? I had an entire pouch of sinew. Do you know how many roadkills you have to raid to get that much tendon? It takes a whole deer carcass to harvest enough sinew to make a single snare. You have to cut out the hamstrings, scrape the whole vertebral column, then strip the neck. You have to take the tendon, beat it into fiber, dry it in the sun, and weave it into cord by using glue made from hooves.”
Eggers was sounding pretty sore.
“Sorry,” I said. “Take it easy, would you?”
“Take it easy? Have you ever made glue from hooves, Dr. Hannah?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Have you ever been to the dog-food plant south of town, where Hormel dumps its hooves in those huge mounds? Have you seen the size of some of those raccoons? They travel in packs, you know.”
Now Eggers was totally worked up. He took his rodent stick and began slashing it around in the vending machine. The barbs tore holes in the bags, sending down a rain of Ruffles, Doritos, Fritos, and Funyuns, so that the dispensing bin filled with chips, and empty, torn bags hung from the racks. Eggers reached in and began devouring chips. I’d never seen someone eat like that, shoving them wholesale into his mouth, masticating them into an orange ball that he shifted as he chewed.
Eggers turned. “Look at me,” he said, lips shiny with spice. “Look at how I live.”
His eyes were a little wild. I put my hand on his bony shoulder.
“You’ve done enough science for one day,” I said. “You better get out of here before they catch you.”
He laughed, like I was an idiot, like I didn’t understand anything.
“I said I came here to see you. I brought you this.”
He opened the flap of his game bag, and from it removed one of Keno’s balls. This he handed over, then began scooping chips by the armful into the bag. The ball was warm and weighty in my hands. It was like being handed a baby.
Eggers said, “Trudy and I got this out of the Hall of Man this morning. We figured you put the first ball in there.”
“So Keno’s gone?”
“You know what happened to Keno,” Eggers said. “Some guys from the casino came out in the middle of the night, and they started shoveling him up. Right now, Keno’s probably in some cardboard box in the casino basement, never to be seen again. Ancestor? What ancestor?”
“How’d you get in?”
“To the Hall of Man?” Eggers asked. “We picked the lock. Though afterward, of course, the combo was obvious — your birthday. You know some freak put biohazard signs all over the place?”
I shrugged in a way that said, What can I say — I’m a Virgo.
Eggers took a long look at that ball in my hands.
He said, “You’re in jail, right?”
This I had to concede.
“And the cops trashed your office?”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Your career’s basically shot.”
“What’s your point, Eggers?”
“My dissertation is shit,” he continued. “All my work is gone. I’m talking a year of my life. And my parents? Forget it.”
“Eggers,” I said, “you’re worked up about the loss of Keno. That’s understandable, and I’m willing to pretend I didn’t hear the sauce on a few of your earlier remarks. But never forget this: out of sight is not out of mind. No one is ever truly gone, as long as someone out there still cares. It means nothing that Keno was shoveled into the trunk of a police cruiser or stuffed in some box in the basement of a casino. We specialize in bringing people back, across far greater distances, through geologic time, so the patience of an anthropologist must be limitless.”
“You really interrupted me that time, Dr. Hannah.”
“Sorry.”
“I was about to make a point.”
“Of course,” I said. “My apologies.”
“I was going to say: Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t open that ball, right here, right now.”
I looked at the ball, at the petrified handprints preserved in the surface. My hand, when I placed it atop a print, fit. “Come on,” I said. “Follow me.”
Without speaking, we made our way back across campus to the industrial-arts building. We were men of purpose, moving with a silent mandate, and when we reached our destination, we opened the door without hesitation. Inside, the place was empty, the machinery still. The floor had been swept, the tools returned to their places, and I have to say I admired Gerry for teaching his kids the proper respect for public property. Eggers and I walked among the machines, silent as totems in the dark hall.
“Which one should we use?” I asked him.
“Beats me. Why not just drop it on the floor?”
I grabbed a pair of shop goggles off a peg. When I put them on, the world grew cloudy. I adjusted the elastic straps as snugly as possible, for safety’s sake, and the dangling tails kept tickling my cheeks. Then I approached the bandsaw. I wished that Trudy were here. She’d know how to work these things. When I hit the power switch, the saw raged to life, the cement floor vibrating from its torque. I set the ball on the cutting table and turned to Eggers.
“What, should I just cut it in half?”
“Dude,” he said, “there is no Clovis orb-cutting manual. You’re writing it.”
Dude?
I studied him as he leaned against the table saw. He pulled a dry river reed from behind his ear, then opened the flap of his game bag and withdrew a little buckskin pouch, from which he extracted an herblike substance. After packing the reed full, he stuck it between his lips, and, James Dean — like, looked at me.
“What does it matter?” he asked. “Open the thing already.”
“What does what matter?”
Eggers withdrew his little firebox, which contained a single coal wrapped in corn husks, a fireproof material with great insulating power. He peeled back layer after layer, till he found the ember. This he blew on. “We dedicate our lives to anthropology,” he said. “And for what? To get crapped on? To have your shit rummaged through and stolen? I bet the Clovis had their version of the Fourth Amendment. In the late Pleistocene, there was no illegal search and seizure, I can tell you that. If someone’s sinew turned up missing, you can bet there’d be hell to pay. In the Ice Age, if you stole someone’s rodent stick, you could count on some serious Clovis justice descending on your ass.”
With a little effort, the reed took, and Eggers began puffing away.
As soon as I smelled the smoke, I lifted my safety goggles.
“Tell me that’s not marijuana,” I said, glancing around for security cameras.
He held the reefer out to me. Suppressing a cough, he said, “Homegrown.”
“Don’t insult me,” I said. “Do you realize where you are? Have you no respect for the penal system?” I had the ball poised before the blur of the bandsaw blade, but I needed to get a couple things straight with the boy.