“Look, Eggers,” I said, “you let me worry about that. You just meet me here tomorrow with that corn. Right now, I have to make a phone call.”
“To Hatitia Wells?” Eggers asked. “You’re going to bring in Hatitia Wells, aren’t you?”
“That’s not your concern. You just safeguard that corn, and we’ll finish this tomorrow. In the meantime, no stunts, no improv, and none of that ‘Clovis creativity’ of yours.”
“What?” he innocently asked.
“I know you, Eggers. Do not plant, grind, or ingest any of that corn.”
Eggers didn’t say anything.
“I’m serious,” I said. “No baking, boiling, cooking, or chewing, okay? And do not get anyone else to do it. And no smoking it, either. You bring that corn back tomorrow, intact.”
“You really think Clovis could have eaten corn?”
“I’m going to bring in the best paleobotanist in all the Dakotas to find out.”
* * *
Outside, darkness had fallen. How was that possible?
The only public phone I could find was in the movie house. The lobby smelled of salt and butter and the must of old velvet, and the prisoners working snack-bar duty were watching the movie through breaks in a curtain that had once been purple. I sat in one of those old-fashioned phone booths, and through the door I watched hot dogs slowly turn on the rotisserie as I waited for Dr. Yulia Terrasova Nivitski to accept the charges. A collective gasp rose from within the theater. When Yulia finally came on, I could tell she wasn’t too happy about the collect call.
“Hank?” she asked. “From where are you calling?”
“That doesn’t matter right now,” I said, trying to strike a note of authority. “I have an important question to ask you.”
“There is something chaotic going on,” she said. “Is there an emergency?”
She must have overheard the movie score in the background — there were a lot of insane, shrieking birds.
I decided to get to the point. “You love plants. That’s your calling. You love plants because—”
“I am hanging up now.”
“Wait,” I said. “I’ve called for a reason.”
“As I guessed. You did not call to talk to me. You only want something from me.”
“No,” I said. “Yes.”
“You do not even speak ‘hello.’ You cannot even engage in chitchat. Always it is the same kind of man who calls me — one who reverses the charges, then makes no small talk, no foreplay. The kind who wears coveralls and has a crate of motorcycle parts in his bedroom.”
I tried to not picture Yulia in another man’s bedroom, strewn with oily cranks and manifolds, maybe some weightlifting equipment. “Listen to me,” I told her. “We have made a discovery, a grand one. It will shake the foundations of paleobotany. We need your help. I need it.”
Yulia harrumphed. “Maybe you need Hatitia Wells,” she said. “All of the men fall down for her. Hatitia, your thesis was brilliant. Hatitia, can I freshen your drink? I know, I have been to the conferences.”
“I didn’t call Hatitia Wells,” I said. “I called you.”
“Yet you do not even talk to me, let alone listen. I happen to be very conversant. But is there any Have you read any good novels lately, Yulia? What about Did you get the committee chair you were hoping for? Do you say, I like to karaoke, Yulia; do you? Do you remember speaking to my son yesterday? Do you ask, How is Vadim?”
“Please, hear me out. It has to do with corn….”
I waited for the line to disconnect, but it didn’t. I knew that would pique her interest. “We have found some maize,” I said, “Some very, very old maize, and I need you to catch the next flight to South Dakota.”
I waited for Yulia to say, I just left South Dakota, but she didn’t.
That corn had her. I mean I owned her. It was time to set the hook:
“We believe this corn dates from the late Pleistocene. We need you to verify it.”
“The Pleistocene?” Here Yulia laughed. “That is impossible. That cannot be. I see you have been selling me a cartload of dung.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but we’ve found maize, a kilo of it, in situ with Clovis remains.”
“I am flattered that you would concoct such foolishness on my account, but let me tell you something, Dr. Hannah: desperate men are not sexy. Please, now, stop this. I will thank you to say goodbye. I must return to my evening, which just might be quite scheduled. In fact, I might be watching a rental video at this very moment with my masculine boyfriend.”
“The kernels look perfect,” I said. “Completely viable. They were stored underground, in even temperatures, wrapped in layers of airtight velum.”
“It is just not possible,” was all she could say. “This cannot be.”
“I need you,” I said. “I need you to come here. If you get in your car right now, you’ll be here before dawn.”
There was a pause. I could hear her breath.
“It is just not possible,” she said again.
I was silent.
“Tell me,” she said. “You must tell me. Is this about corn? Or is this about me?”
I had nothing to lose. “Yulia,” I said, “I’m no catch. No one reads my book. My phone doesn’t ring. Though I have heart and good intentions, I ultimately fear I do a disservice to my graduate students by teaching them. They could be someplace else, where real research is being done. Right now, I’m calling you from a minimum-security prison, where I’m being held until jury selection begins on my grave-desecration trial. Now I have found what looks like a kilo of the oldest maize on earth, and I have a grad student who, I fear, might try to eat it. I don’t know if this Clovis corn is real or not, but my gut tells me this is the biggest thing ever to happen to me, and all I know is that my first instinct was to include you. When a sheriff’s deputy strangled me unconscious, I thought of you. When a pack of condemned dogs ate my hamburger, I thought of you. And now that I’ve opened a door into the previous eon, I want you to step through with me.”
I could hear Yulia breathing. “I’m coming,” she said. Then the line went dead.
When I hung up the phone, I could see that a prisoner working the concession stand was preparing for Psycho by popping a fresh batch of popcorn. Inside a box of yellow Plexiglas, the smoking metal drum turned and turned, a snow of puffy white falling into drifts below.
* * *
I couldn’t bring myself to seek out the small bunk that awaited in my “cell.”
Yulia, I kept thinking. Yulia. This was the time when you were vulnerable. This was when Hope snuck up on you, slipped an arm around your neck, and slapped a sleeper hold on your ass. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about her.
Already, I could picture Yulia’s hair, frizzy and wind-driven as she descended the steps from the airplane. Her eye shadow was Ukrainian midnight, her lipstick Chernobyl red. Behind her ear was a fresh-cut Draculunus vulgaris, a blossom I imagined as flushed and fiery as an inflamed genital. I watched her hips sway under a Soviet-gray skirt as she strode across the pink tarmac, through the hot terminal, and toward a taxi whose driver would speak to her of rapture all the way to the spectral, stained-glass light of the visitor-processing center.
From there, heedless, she would come to me.
I needed to walk around. I had to clear my head!