The Sixteenth Man

by Thomas B. Sawyer

  A few miles north Marjorie broke their silence, asked if he had any chewing gum. Charlie suggested she check the glove-box. She did, found his baseball instead.

  Charlie became wistful, eyes on the road. Finally: “I struck out the last guy of a no-hitter with it.”

  “Wow. High school? College?”

  “Minor leagues. Benton Harbor.”

  “And...?”

  “That was it....” Charlie was there again. The funny old wooden House of David ballpark with trees growing in the outfield. The fragrance of that summer night. The low-key amusement park atmosphere heightened by the whistle of the little steam-driven train that carried kids around the grounds. Fit again after last season’s disastrous slide into third base, then taking the line-drive on his forearm. It was tired, hurting, but the excitement, his visions of the future, of getting called up to the Show made it seem unimportant. One and two on the 27th batter. Charlie wound up, reared back – and let it fly. He felt something snap in his elbow – and suddenly the pain was gone – along with feeling in his fingers. For Charlie the ball seemed to take ten minutes to reach the batter. “...The last pitch, I wrecked my arm. But man, it was a beauty. Like it had eyes. It danced three, maybe four times, then suddenly just before it got to the plate it dropped about a foot. The hitter threw his back out going for it.”

  Charlie never looked over at Marjorie. He was grateful that she knew better than to spoil the moment with words. They drove on in silence.

  If someone had told Charlie Callan that his actions over the past several hours were a combination of gallantry and pure, unemotional pragmatism he would not have understood. Starting with the sight of Joe Bob Millgrim beating Marjorie Brodax, it had all been involuntary. For Charlie it was the only way it could have gone.

  He glanced at his left hand and realized it was still clutching the keys to Joe Bob’s pickup truck. He rolled down his window and tossed them.

  That’s when it hit Charlie – his premonition – how right he’d been about this job turning hinky. What he could not know was that it was only the beginning; it was about to take him way past anything he could have imagined.

  FIFTEEN

  Present Time

  Wednesday

  “...And when we trap these electrons in an excited state, the paramagnetic centers yield characteristic signals which we describe as ‘electron spin resolution.’ Now in the case of thermoluminescence...”

  The reporters’ eyes were glazing over. Packard resisted glancing to his left, at what would certainly be Rudy’s you-dumb-schmuck-did-I-tell-you-or-what? look.

  One of the women, a TV newsreader he’d seen on a Denver station, dared to break into Felix’s droning monologue.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Goldman, but I believe the question was ‘What is your reaction to the statement by Dr. Hans Merkel at the University of Basel that there is no way these remains could be one hundred thousand years old?’”

  Fully a third of the reporters’ queries thus far were intended to elicit Goldman’s comments about such skeptical pronouncements from rival authorities around the world, all of them disputing the age of the fifteen older skeletons. And more would surely be forthcoming. A lot of scholars with reputations – and book-royalties – on the line.

  “Or more,” he corrected. “One hundred thousand years or more. Ms. Varney, I don’t think I need remind you – or the esteemed Dr. Merkel – of how little in life is certain.”

  The loudest sound in the room was Goldman’s own chuckle at his ham-handed levity. Packard groaned inwardly, saw Rudy’s jaw-muscles flexing. He caught Leslie’s eye for an instant before she scornfully looked away. Kate Norris was in the back of the theater-like lecture hall. He wondered what her take was on all this.

  Goldman leaned into the bank of microphones. “As I demonstrated earlier the samples were subjected to the most rigorous testing and re-testing. The results were consistent. Frighteningly so. And still, in the face of this mounting evidence, I continued to do everything I could to discredit the data, to prove it inaccurate...”

  ‘I.’ Packard had known Felix far too long and intimately to not expect something of the sort. But Rudy’s predictions aside, even Leslie’s for that matter, he hadn’t anticipated the full reach of the Old Man’s chutzpah. For the past thirty-five minutes, Felix had blatantly misrepresented to the media, co-opting most of the credit, from choice of dig-site on through to the discoveries and testing procedures, casting Packard as a junior partner at best and Rudy as a lab gofer.

  Packard was angry, but it wasn’t anywhere near the surface, and that’s just where he wanted it. It simply didn’t matter. He was, even more than before, involuntarily somewhere else.

  Felix concluded his response: “...as well as the Acheulian tool tradition apparently represented by the artifacts we had previously found in the area.”

  Packard was unable, unwilling now to even try to stifle the rush of his mind. The sifting, sorting, questioning of what he and Kate Norris had talked about far into the night. That’s what mattered to him – the fascinating, increasingly scary puzzle of the sixteenth man, the new dimensions added by Kate. Was the skeleton that of her grandfather? If so, did Meg Brady’s murder really follow from his death? And if it did, why? What was the thread? Beyond Kate’s limited knowledge, who was Charles Callan, anyway? What could he have been doing in 1963 that would take him to a lonely, rocky trail high in Muleshoe Canyon in Utah – and leave him dead in an ancient burial chamber with a bullet in his wingbone and no clothing or ID? And supposing it was related, after so many decades what in the world could “they” regard as still unfinished business?

  And of course, the capper. Who were “they?”

  Or, on the other hand, was it a fantasy – nothing more than a series of disconnected occurrences and mistaken assumptions? And then he remembered the other question – the one that had jarringly come to him in the middle of the night. The one he’d resolved to ask Kate in the morning, but forgot between their haste and the nonsense with Leslie.

  Packard felt the nudge of Rudy’s elbow, became dimly aware that the press people were looking at him expectantly. He wondered why Felix was expansively waving him to the microphones. Then he got it. “I’m sorry. Could you repeat the question?”

  “How does it feel, Dr. Packard, to be part of such a history-making find?” It was a very young reporter from Boulder.

  Rudy’s look hid none of his disdain for question and questioner.

  “Tremendous. Really exciting. But I assure you, none of it would have happened – we wouldn’t be here – were it not for the vision of Dr. Felix William Goldman, and the willingness of the University of Southwestern Colorado to stand behind our work.”

  Packard thought he heard a groan from Rudy. There were more questions – including a few that were archeologically informed. Packard was careful to credit Felix as often as possible, so that when the CNN stringer moved – inevitably – into dicey territory, asking if – in view of Meg Brady’s brutal murder – either of them considered themselves derelict for having left her and the others on their own, the by-then beaming Goldman was – after he shouldered Packard aside – almost cuddly.

  “We feel terrible of course. Terrible. Ms. Brady was a fine young woman, a brilliant student. And Dr. Packard is---”

  “Felix. I’d like to address this.” Packard was surprised the subject hadn’t been raised earlier.

  Goldman’s face went briefly dark before he re-assumed his gracious-act, again surrendered the microphones to Packard, who breathed deeply before giving his solemn answer: “Do I feel that I was negligent? No. Guilty for not being there? Yes. That is something I shall carry with me for the rest of my life.”

  “Don’t bullshit us, Dr. Packard. You’re damned straight you were negligent. If you’d been there Meg would still be alive!”

  All eyes turned to the distraught young woman standing in the middle of the fourth row, crying, wiping at her eyes with a wad of tissues.

  �
��Unfortunately, Amy, we’ll never know that for sure...” Packard’s voice caught. He paused for a moment. “Everyone, this is Amy Whiteside, Meg’s roommate...” Packard had tried to phone her before he left home for the press conference, but her line was busy. “I’d like to discuss it with you, Amy. Can we do it later?”

  She’d already pushed her way out of her row, striding toward the exit. Felix Goldman tapped one of the microphones.

  “May I have your attention?” He paused till heads turned back toward him. “That concludes our interview. Thank you.” To punctuate, he squared up his stack of papers by banging them loudly on the podium, glanced blankly at Packard, moved off. Several reporters shouted requests for clarification, further statements about his opinion of the historical implications, but Goldman ignored them, exited through the side door. The press people immediately turned to Packard.

  “Dr. Packard, could you carve out a half-hour, perhaps in your office, for---?” “...your reaction when you first saw the---” “...with the Rocky Mountain News and I’d like to set up a one-on-one---” “...comment on the identity of the anomalous skeleton, the one with---” “...some questions for our nightly news show---”

  Packard held up his hand. “Please – please. If you’ll e-mail me, or call my office, I promise I’ll---”

  “Just a couple of---?”

  Rudy jumped in, playing the heavy. “Hey! You heard the man!”

  That seemed to quiet them. The hard core began to disperse. Rudy placed a hand on Packard’s shoulder. “It’s okay, amigo, this isn’t the end of the---” He stopped in mid-reassurance; Leslie had arrived in Packard’s face, her own contorted with vitriol.

  “You fucking asshole. I can’t believe you let him do that to you.” She turned, nearly knocked over a video cameraman who was stowing his equipment, shoved her way past another, stalked up the aisle.

  Rudy grinned. “That’s the family you can hardly wait to marry into?” He looked down questioningly at the object Packard had placed in his hand. It was the postcard from Moab, the one with Charlie Steen’s picture on it. The one that Charles Callan mailed to his daughter.

  “I want you to run the DNA from the back of the postage stamp. ASAP.”

  “What for?” Rudy turned the card over, looked at the red six-cent airmail stamp with its image of a bald eagle.

  “Because I’ll bet you my Calvin and Hobbes Sunday page it’ll match what you’re going to take from number sixteen’s hair and bone.”

  Last night after Kate Norris’s revelation about her parents’ murders Packard had asked to borrow the postcard, announced that a DNA comparison would be his next move. Kate told him she’d hoped he’d say that, admitted she’d been amazed to learn such a thing was possible.

  The young woman had done her homework.

  Kate rose from her seat, met Packard in the aisle. “Wow. I had no idea this was such a big deal.”

  “In certain tiny circles, yeah.” He took her arm, moved toward the door. As he and Kate exited the lecture hall, he failed to notice the unobtrusive man standing near the center of the next-to-last row, buttoning his dark raincoat.

  Nor was Packard aware of the elderly, somewhat overweight woman in sunglasses, seated in the far corner.

  As Packard and Kate emerged from Krassner Hall, Campus Security was still restraining the twenty-or-so demonstrators. Kevin LaPierre was at the front, waving the largest placard, his voice the loudest of the all-or-part Native Americans protesting Packard’s exhumation of their ancestors’ bones. They’d been there since dawn. The security people had prevented their entering – and disrupting – the press conference. Packard saw that it was too late to duck back inside, immediately turned, guided Kate laterally along the front of the building, hoping to avoid a confrontation. It was not to be.

  “There he is. The defiler!”

  Packard sagged as Kevin and his group pushed the cops backward.

  “Hey, Doc, how would you like it if we went an’ dug up your family’s bones? ‘Oh, they’re old, so we can do any goddam thing we want with ‘em. What the hell, we’re scientists!’”

  Packard sympathized with Kevin who, despite his annoying stridency was basically a good kid, stimulating to have in class because he asked hard, iconoclastic questions. Precocious, he’d graduated high school two years earlier, at age 15. Kevin was also a creature of his teenage passions, whether the subject was his heritage, the ozone layer, fossil fuels, national politics, or the building of tract-houses in Borrego Junction.

  Packard put on his most serious face. “Hi, Kevin. Look, I don’t blame you and your friends for being upset, but as I promised the tribal councils over in Four corners, we will take great care to return the remains to as close to their original state as we can.”

  Kevin didn’t have a chance to keep the argument going. Several of his fellow picketers, all of them older, turned on him scornfully as others began to disperse. “Hey, Kevin, you didn’t tell us that.” “Christ, what did I listen to him for?” “And I passed up two hours’ sleep and a fucking psych lecture for this?”

  Packard glanced at her tall cola, salad, and two slices of pizza. Kate was defensive. “For the road. I figured I’d better eat something substantial after all.”

  Packard grinned. “It wasn’t a comment.” He had been thinking about this being the beginning of their last few minutes together. And the hard question. A part of him didn’t want to pose it, didn’t want a disappointing answer. They placed their trays on a table in a quiet ell of the Student Union cafeteria. The place resembled a mall food-court – the usual franchised fast-foods, but minus strollers and noisy children. And pre-lunch hushed.

  “Okay, professor. What’s the story with the drawing table and cartoons and stuff?”

  “Me first. Kate...” Driving over to campus for the press conference, Packard had appreciated her not getting into it, her respect for his internalized turmoil over Leslie and her father. But now wasn’t the time, either. “...About your story. These people – they seem to be able to find anybody, anytime they want to...”

  She nodded. He stirred his coffee, continued. “...Why d’you suppose they didn’t come after you and your father’s parents?”

  “God, I was so glad you didn’t ask me that last night. I was afraid you’d think I was piling on, that I was really a headcase.” She averted her eyes, then: “I’m almost certain they have – did, I mean...”

  Packard waited for her to continue, half-knowing the rest of it – and chilled by it. And hoping he wasn’t simply projecting.

  “...It’s nothing I can say with any certainty, I mean that would convince anyone else, or that I can prove, but I think there have been people checking up on me – just in youknow the last few years. And – that made me think back to Vermont and high school, and then college. Stuff I never thought about at the time. Hearing that some stranger was asking about me, or – or seeing some anonymous-type man or woman glance away when I’d look at them. Funny clicks on my telephone. Look, I know how way-wiggy this makes me sound---”

  Packard put up a hand. “Nono. It’s okay...” Then: “Forty-eight hours ago I might’ve thought so – but Jesus, now...”

  “Another thing. The suits. That the people who killed my parents were wearing? You’re the first person I ever told.”

  Packard stirred his coffee. He could think of no more ways to shoot holes in it. It was a lot to finally accept, but he liked what it said about her.

  After a couple of beats, Kate smiled. “Okay, I showed you mine...”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Your drawings.”

  “That, it’s – it’s a whole thing...”

  “No kidding. C’mon, an archaeologist who draws funny pictures? Are we talking moonlighting or what? Wait, I know – you’re still in the closet.”

  Packard laughed. Uncomfortably. “Close. It’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. Write and draw a comic strip. Be Bill Watterson – or Charlie Schulz.” It was odd, puttin
g it into words again after so many years. But the move to another topic was welcome.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Packard briefly considered explaining himself – wanted to, actually. Something he was rarely tempted to do with Leslie. “A lot of reasons...” He opted for the short-form. “Anyway, a few weeks back, I wrote and drew a month’s worth of comic strips and sent them off to a newspaper feature syndicate. I haven’t heard.”

  “Except from---” Kate caught herself, shook her head. “Sorry. I can be a serious pain in the ass.”

  “Don’t fight it.”

  She hesitated, then: “Well, as long as I’ve gone this far...I’ve got this theory – that short of having a disability or some kind of deformity – we get from life what we think we deserve.”

  Packard grinned, impressed. “Go on...”

  “Uh – no. I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. Those sketches on your drawing table – the little boy and the big schlumpf with the beard?”

  Packard nodded. “That’s the strip. Giddy and Smythe, it’s called.”

  “And?”

  “You really want to hear this?”

  “You don’t really want to tell me?”

  “Christ, you don’t give anyone a place to hide, do you?”

  “It’s why the polluters love me so.”

  “Okay – Gideon, that’s the kid, he’s got this secret pal, Smythe, who’s an illiterate blacksmith from the middle ages that Gideon dug up in his backyard. Smythe was in suspended animation and Giddy revives him. And then hides him from the grownups.”

  “It sounds adorable.”

  “From your lips...”

  “What happens if they buy it?”

  “My rehearsed answer, delivered with a dash of bravado, is ‘I’m outa here.’”

  “How about your honest one?”

  He shot her a look, then: “Honestly? Terrified.”

  “Of – failure?”