Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  People started moving, heading toward their cars, talking among themselves and glancing back in the direction of Moonshine Hollow. Wendell’s daddy was walking our way and Wendell sort of scooched down behind me, but he went right past us and climbed into his old pickup truck and drove away, throwing gravel and dirt as he went up the hill. When he was gone, we went over and got our bikes, without speaking or looking at each other. There was a lot I wanted to talk about but I could tell Wendell wasn’t in the mood.

  “Lot of foolishness,” Daddy said that evening over supper when I told him the story. “Going to have a bunch of damn fool scientists, now, poking around and spouting off a bunch of crap.”

  Daddy didn’t like scientists because they believed in evolution. He used to ask me if Mr. Donovan was teaching evolution at the school. He said he could get him fired if he was.

  He said, “I’m not surprised, though. There’s a good many caves and holes up in that hollow. That’s why they call it Moonshine Hollow, you know, the bootleggers used to hide their whiskey there during Prohibition. Could be some bootlegger’s bones,” he said, “that hid in there running from the law. Or maybe a runaway nigger back in slave times. Probably not even an Indian at all.”

  “Mr. Donovan says the bones are a lot older than that,” I said, and Mama gave me a warning look. She didn’t like for me to argue with Daddy about anything. She said it wasn’t my place.

  Daddy said, “Oh, that’s a crock. Damn scientists know everything, to hear them tell it. I heard one on the radio telling how far it is to the moon.” He snorted. “Guess he’d been there and measured it off.”

  Mama said, “Who wants pie?”

  Later on Mr. Donovan told me how he happened to find the skeleton.

  He was hiking up in the hollow, looking for things he might be able to use in class next year. He was working his way along the foot of a bluff, where there were a lot of great big boulders that had fallen down from above, when he saw a snake of a kind he didn’t recognize. Before he could get a good look, it slipped in behind a boulder that rested against the rock of the bluff.

  So Mr. Donovan went up to the boulder, and after walking around it and pushing aside some brush, he found a gap between it and the bluff. He got out his flashlight from his pack and shone it into the hole, still looking for the snake, and saw what looked like a dark opening in the face of the rock. Without stopping to think about it, he squeezed himself through the gap to have a closer look.

  “One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done,” he told me. “You never, never go into a place like that alone. Don’t tell the school board, Raymond, but I’m a real idiot sometimes.”

  Behind the boulder, sure enough, a hole led back into the rock. The opening was so low he had to bend over double and then get down on his hands and knees and craw—“getting stupider by the minute,” he said—but then it opened up and he found himself in a small cave.

  The floor was covered with loose rock that he guessed had fallen from the ceiling. He squatted down and picked up a few pieces and looked at them by the light of his flashlight, hoping for fossils, but they were just plain old rock.

  Then he turned over a big flat slab and saw the hand bones.

  “It took a few seconds to register,” he said. “The light was bad and the bones were still half buried, just barely exposed. I started to poke at them, and then I realized what I was looking at and yanked my fingers back. Then I just sat there for a little while, as the implications sank in.”

  I said, “How’d you know they were so old?”

  “I didn’t,” he admitted. “Archaeology isn’t my field, after all. But they sure as hell looked old, and if there was any chance they were then they needed to be protected. So maybe I bluffed the sheriff a little. But that’s our secret, right?”

  Mr. Donovan didn’t waste any time and neither did his friends from the university. They showed up next Saturday afternoon.

  “I’m just an ignorant old country boy,” Tobe Nelson said, talking to a bunch of people in front of the church after service let out the next morning. “When that schoolteacher said some scientists were coming, I was expecting old men in beards and white coats, you know?”

  He shook his head, grinning. “Then here come this nice-looking young couple driving up in front of my house in a brand-new bright red Mercury, with a little house trailer hitched on behind. I took them for tourists that had lost their way, till they got out and came up and introduced theirselves and wanted to know if they could set up camp down by the creek.”

  Daddy said, “You let those fools onto your land?”

  “Hey,” Tobe Nelson said, “they asked me real nice, and they paid me some good money. The nice part would have been enough, but I sure didn’t turn down the money either.”

  He laughed his high-pitched laugh. “But I tell you what, if I was young and I had me a car like that and a woman like that, you wouldn’t see me spending my time digging up a bunch of old bones. I could think of a lot better things to do.”

  It stayed hot and dry. Wednesday afternoon I rode my bike down toward the little crossroads store to get myself a soda pop. On the way, though, I stopped by Tobe Nelson’s pasture gate and got off and stood for a while leaning on the fence and looking off down the trail toward Moonshine Hollow. The gate wasn’t locked now and I could have gone on in but I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to.

  Then I heard somebody pull up behind me, and when I turned around there was Mr. Donovan, sitting behind the wheel of the war surplus jeep he drove. “Hey, Raymond!” he called. “Be a buddy and open the gate for me, will you?”

  I went over and undid the latch and swung the big gate open and held it back while he drove through, and then closed it and pushed until the latch snapped shut. “Thanks,” Mr. Donovan said, stopping the jeep. “So what have you been doing with your summer, Raymond? Anything interesting?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Too hot to do very much.”

  “I heard that. Say,” he said, “how would you like to meet a couple of real scientists?”

  Would I? I said, “Sure,” and he got out and picked up my bike and tossed it in the back of the jeep while I got in, and off we went. That was when he told me about how he found the cave, while we were bumping across Tobe Nelson’s pasture.

  Pretty soon we were rolling down the hill toward the creek. Even before we got to the bottom I saw the red car parked near the creek bank, and, just beyond, a shiny bare-metal trailer.

  Mr. Donovan stopped the jeep in the shade of a big tree and we got out and walked toward the trailer, which I saw now had a big canvas awning coming off one side, with a table and some chairs underneath. A man got up from the table and came toward us. “David,” Mr. Donovan called. “Working hard, I see.”

  “To the verge of exhaustion,” the man said, and turned his head and yelled back over his shoulder, “Maddy! Bob’s here!”

  The trailer door opened and a woman came out. “Oh, hi,” she said, and then, looking at me, “And who’s this?”

  “This is Raymond,” Mr. Donovan said, “one of my best students. Raymond, meet David and Madeleine Sloane.”

  The man stuck out his hand and I took it. The woman came trotting over from the trailer and put out her hand too. “So,” she said, “you like science, Raymond?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and she threw her head back and laughed.

  “ ‘Ma’am,’ ” she said, “my God, you make me sound like your grandmother. Call me Maddy. Everybody does.”

  “Come sit down in the shade,” the man said. “We’re just taking a little break.”

  He was a medium-sized young man with blond crewcut hair and glasses. That was about all I noticed. He wasn’t the one I was looking at.

  The woman said, “Well, Raymond, would you like a Coke?”

  She was the prettiest lady I’d ever seen outside of the movies. She was taller than me and I’d hit five feet five right before my birthday. She had light brown hair, cut off short at the na
pe of her neck, and dark blue eyes and nice white teeth.

  She was wearing a red top thing with no sleeves, tied up so her stomach was showing, and shorts that I saw were blue jeans with the legs cut off. Whoever cut them off hadn’t left much. Her legs were tanned and they just went on and on.

  I said, “Yes, ma’am. Uh, Maddy.”

  “Bob? Anything for you? He shook his head and she went back to the trailer.

  We went over and sat down at the table under the awning. I noticed there was a noise coming from somewhere nearby, like a power lawnmower, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. “Generator,” David Sloane said, seeing me looking around. “You know, for electricity.”

  “Quite a fancy setup you’ve got here,” Mr. Donovan said.

  “Oh, yes,” David said. “All the civilized comforts money can buy.” His face got a little funny when he said that last part. “What a good thing some of us have it,” he added, so low I could barely hear him, and he looked off toward the trailer just as Maddy came back out carrying a bottle of Coke.

  “Did you want a glass and ice?” she asked me. I shook my head. “Good,” she said. “I had you figured for a bottle man.” She dragged up a chair and sat down. “Bob Donovan, I’m going to strangle you, bringing company around when I’m looking like this.” I saw now there were some dusty smudges on her arms and legs. “Just look at me,” she said. “Like a field hand.”

  “Been grubbing away?” Mr. Donovan said, grinning. “How’s it going?”

  “Slowly,” David said, “As it’s supposed to.”

  “It’s quite a process,” Mr. Donovan said to me. “The earth’s got to be removed very gradually, just a little bit at a time, so as not to damage whatever’s underneath. And everything’s got to be measured and recorded. Takes a lot of patience and steady hands.”

  “Actually,” Maddy said, “we’re still working through that pile of loose rock from the ceiling fall. And having to examine every bit of it too, in case—” She stopped and looked at David. “Show them the point, why don’t you?”

  David started to say something, but then he grunted and got up and headed for the trailer. “Wait till you see this,” Maddy said. I sipped my Coke and tried not to stare at her. Around our part of the state you didn’t see very many grown women in shorts, because most of the churches said it was a sin. My Uncle Miles, who was the pastor of the Baptist church where we belonged, even said they weren’t supposed to wear their hair bobbed short.

  Just about the only women you saw dressed the way Maddy Sloane was right now were the trashy ones who hung around the pool hall in town, or the honky-tonks out at the county line. But it was easy to see that this one wasn’t trashy at all.

  David came back carrying a little flat wooden box and set it down on the table in front of me. He opened it and pulled back some cotton and said, “There. Look what we found this morning.”

  I tried not to look disappointed. I’d seen Indian arrowheads before, who hadn’t? People were always finding them along the creek banks, or turning them up plowing. A couple of the boys at school had regular collections.

  Now I looked closer, though, this one didn’t look like any arrowhead I’d seen. It was sure a beauty, made of some kind of shiny yellowish-brown stone with dark bands running through it, and really well made. It was pretty big, maybe three inches long, and it didn’t have the usual notches on the sides,just one big notch at the bottom. There was a kind of groove going up the middle.

  Mr. Donovan said, “I’ll be damned. Clovis?”

  “I’d bet on it,” David said. “And I saw enough of them last year, on that dig in New Mexico.”

  I said, “Do you know what kind of Indians made this kind of arrowhead?”

  “Not Indians. At least not the kind you’re thinking about. More like their prehistoric ancestors.”

  “And it’s a spearhead,” Maddy said. “Bows and arrows hadn’t been invented yet.”

  “Wow.” I ran my finger over the smooth stone. “Old huh?”

  David nodded. “Just how old, well, there’s still some pretty hot arguing going on. Well over ten thousand years, though.”

  “To give you an idea,” Mr. Donovan said to me, “that thing was very likely made to hunt mammoths with.”

  “Wow,” I said again. “But you don’t really know if it goes with the skeleton, do you?”

  They all looked at each other. “Damn,” Maddy said. “You’re right, Bob, this one’s sharp.”

  “That’s right,” David told me. “No guarantee the skeleton’s from the same time period. Not even safe to guess yet.”

  “Still nothing on that?” Mr. Donovan asked.

  David shrugged. “It’s damned old, all right. Just from a superficial examination of the exposed bones, I’m nearly sure there’s some degree of fossilization. But so far there’s nothing to date it.” He sighed. “Best would be the new radiocarbon test, that Dr. Libby’s been working on up at the University of Chicago. But half the archaeologists in the country are waiting in line for that. Could be a long time before we have an answer.”

  “But,” Maddy said, “now you see why we’re excited about this site. It could be really important.”

  David stood up and stretched. “And so we need to get back to work. Sorry.”

  He picked up the box and closed it carefully. I saw that there were some numbers marked on the lid. As he carried it back to the trailer Maddy said, “Raymond, it was great meeting you.” She reached over and put her hand on my shoulder. “Come back and see us again some time, won’t you?”

  “Sure.” My voice didn’t come out quite right. “I will.”

  But as it turned out I didn’t see the Sloanes again for quite a while. I rode down there several times over the next few days, but there was never any sign of them, just the trailer sitting there and the generator running. I guessed they were up at the cave, working, and I thought about going up the hollow and trying to find them, but I didn’t know the way.

  By now everybody was talking about them. Especially about Maddy. “Parades around practically naked,” my Aunt Ethel, who worked at the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store in town, said to Mama. “She was in the store yesterday. Looked like a you-know-what.”

  Uncle Miles even worked them into his sermon the next Sunday. “I’m reminded,” he said, “of the old colored spiritual, ‘Them bones, them bones, them dry bones, now hear the word of the Lord.’ Some people need to quit worrying about a lot of dry bones and start hearing the word of the Lord.”

  Next morning I woke up with a head cold. It wasn’t all that bad, but it was enough for Mama to keep me in bed for a couple of days and indoors for the rest of the week. I spent the time reading and listening to the radio and mostly being bored and wishing I could go see David and Maddy again.

  Daddy came in from town one evening with a big grin on his face. “That schoolteacher of yours,” he said to me, “I got to say one thing for him, he’s no sissy.”

  “What happened?” I asked, and Daddy laughed.

  “Damnedest thing,” he said. “Floyd Haney came up to him in front of the diner, drunk as a skunk as usual, and started cussing him out—still going on about that land across the creek—and when the schoolteacher tried to walk past him, Floyd took a swing at him. Next thing you know Floyd was flat on his ass. I saw the whole thing from across the street.”

  “Mr. Donovan hit him?”

  “Fastest left I ever saw. Deputy Pritchard drove up while Floyd was still laying there, but the schoolteacher said he didn’t want to press charges. Probably right,” Daddy said. “It never does no good, locking Floyd’s kind up. Some folks are just the way they are.”

  Finally I got to feeling better and Mama let me out of the house again. Naturally I took off right away for the creek.

  Mr. Donovan’s jeep was sitting there when I came down the hill, and as I stopped the bike I saw they were all three up by the trailer sitting under the awning. As I walked toward them I could hear Maddy talking,
sounding angry.

  “I don’t believe this,” she was saying. “The most important discovery of the century, and you’re acting as if it’s a bomb that’s going to explode in your face.”

  “It is,” David said. “Oh, sure, maybe not for you. Your tight little rich-bitch ass isn’t the one on the line, is it? Nobody pays any attention to graduate students.” His voice was getting louder. “I’m the poor son of a bitch with the ink still fresh on his doctorate. If I blow this I’ll be lucky to get a job at City College of Rooster Poot, Arkansas.”

  They looked up and saw me, then, and they got all quiet and embarrassed-looking, the way grown people do when kids catch them quarreling. After a second Maddy said, “Why, hello, Raymond.”

  I said, “Maybe I ought to go?”

  “No, no.” Maddy waved her hands. “I bet you’d like a Coke, wouldn’t you? Why don’t you just go help yourself? The box is just inside the door, you can’t miss it.”

  I went over to the trailer and climbed up the little steps and opened the door. Sure enough, there was a refrigerator, the littlest one I’d ever seen, just inside. I could see up into the front part of the trailer, which was mostly taken up by a bed that needed making. I got myself a Coke and went back out just as Mr. Donovan was saying, “Anyway, I hope these are all right.”

  I saw now that there was a big yellow envelope on the table and a couple of stacks of big glossy photographs. David was holding a picture up and looking at it from different angles. “Oh, yes,” he said, “this is really first-class work. Thanks, Bob.”

  “Been a while since I’ve done any darkroom work,” Mr. Donovan said “Took a couple of hours just to dig out my old equipment and get it dusted off. Glad the prints turned out okay.”

  I walked over and looked at the photos while they talked. One of the ones on top was a close-up shot of a skull, half buried in the ground. Another one looked like a full-length view of the whole skeleton. I picked that one up for a closer look and then I saw something that didn’t make any sense at all.