by Dan Pollock
“Tell me, Uncle Oscar, how did you get in? Wasn’t there a guard at the gate?”
“I told him I was your uncle, and they waved me through. You are a famous man now, Arqui. I saw you on television in a tavern in Maturín.”
“It won’t last, believe me, Uncle. I’ll be obscure again any day now. So, why didn’t I hear your truck?”
“I left it on the road about a kilometer from here.”
“Out of gas?”
“No, water. The radiator needed a drink, just like me. But I prefer Polar.” Oscar took a swig of the Venezuelan beer, working his lips in a simian way that occasionally exposed his teeth and gums. The old man needed major dental work.
“No problem. We’ve got plenty of both here. You can take a case of Polar with you, if you like.”
At this point Arquimedeo hesitated, sensing delicate ground ahead. The reason for Oscar’s visit was obvious. Just as obviously, the proud old man expected his nephew to broach the matter. Having made a clumsy start at this, Arquimedeo proceeded delicately: “But, Uncle, I’m afraid that’s really all I have to offer you. I mean, if you’re looking for a job—”
“A job?” The forehead furrowed down over tufted brows, but the gray eyes harbored slyness. “That is what you think, Arqui, that I came here to ask you for a job?”
Arquimedeo could only shrug.
Oscar regarded the dust, then glanced up, shaking his head sadly. “Arqui, I am thinking that you have heard too many stories about me—from your mother, eh?”
“I’m sorry, Uncle. I didn’t mean to—”
“Arqui, don’t apologize. I don’t blame you. In fact, now that the matter has been raised between us, it is true I could do many things here. If you need a cook, or a mechanic, I can do both. I can haul rock in my truck. I can dig. In the Caribbean I operated bulldozers, you know, also skip-loaders and backhoes.” He cocked his head thoughtfully. “Of course, digging with shovels is a different matter at my age. I am nearly fifty, Arqui, did you know that?”
Arquimedeo shook his head. In fact, he knew his uncle to be at least five years beyond fifty.
“Mind you, Arqui, I wouldn’t make an issue of salary. I leave it to you to be fair. To put all blood ties aside.” His palms spread, conveying his total trust in his nephew’s sense of justice. “Of course, it is true I have no degree from the university. The opportunity was never there for me. From the earliest age, I was forced to work in the streets, to help my family. But experience—as is well known, Arqui—experience is the greatest teacher of all. How can you put a price on this?”
“Uncle Oscar—”
“Yes?”
Instead of voicing his exasperation, Arquimedeo stood up and fetched two more beers from the cooler. He needed a moment to collect his thoughts. No matter how unassailable his arguments, as long as he continued in a diplomatic fashion, he was positive the old man would just keep advancing his request. Eventually, Arquimedeo must either give in, or abandon politeness and flatly reject his uncle. Oscar, naturally, would be betting on the former outcome, convinced Arquimedeo would not risk insulting the husband of his mother’s only sister. And, of course, if this was his strategy, it was diabolically good. To counter it, Arquimedeo would have to strike a tone respectful but very firm. He sat down again, sipped his beer, finally resumed:
“Uncle, I’d love to have you here. It would make me very proud. Wait, wait, please let me finish. The problem is that I cannot hire you. And not because of your lack of a university degree, believe me. We simply have no budget here. All the workers here, except for myself and my colleague Félix and few other poorly paid archaeologists, will be volunteers. We’ve already had many applicants. They’ll work all day in the trenches for a little bit of food and enough tent space to roll out their sleeping bags. And believe me, Uncle, this is not the kind of labor you would wish to do, nor I to ask you.”
The old man absorbed this, then nodded slowly. “I understand, Arqui.”
“You do?”
“Certainly. Let us forget the digging. I have a better idea. You have enemies, Arqui. Yes, this was mentioned on the television. Big and powerful capitalist enemies. Proteus and their paid lackeys in our government. These people would like to crush you.” As if to demonstrate, Oscar crumpled the empty blue-and-white beer can in his horny fist.
“And you can protect me from such enemies, Uncle Oscar?”
“I could help, Arqui. I could be your bodyguard. I could also be a night watchman, and protect your excavations from sabotage and looting. I also would require very little beyond food and a tent. Perhaps only a few thousand bolívars a week.”
Arquimedeo hesitated—far too long to say no. He was thinking—as the old man obviously intended him to—that for little more than the national minimum wage, he could purchase family tranquility and, perhaps, once Proteus withdrew its perimeter security, actually protect the premises. It was still extortion, of course, but the price was surprisingly reasonable.
“Oscar, I really don’t think we’re in that kind of danger here. Proteus Industries is certainly trying to stop us, but they’re doing their dirty work in Caracas, not here. And I doubt if we will be digging up gold or anything else looters would want. Wait, I’m not finished. I’m not saying no. Perhaps we could use a night watchman. Some of the university volunteers might sleep better knowing you were guarding our perimeter.” The old man was smiling now. “But, Oscar, I can pay no more than eight-thousand bolívars a month.”
It was apparently enough. Oscar arose from the camp stool to bestow the traditional Venezuelan abrazo, throwing both arms around his nephew and thumping him on the back. Sweat-soaked and malodorous as he himself was, Arquimedeo was still not prepared for his uncle’s rank embrace. The old man would need to be quartered as far as possible from the digging crew, he decided, perhaps in one of Proteus’s engineering shacks.
Over a final round of beers they settled a few details. Oscar would begin in two days, but would require a week’s wages in the interim to procure a few supplies. Arquimedeo, anxious to have done with the interview and get back to work, agreed to everything.
And it was with considerable relief that he watched his uncle’s scrapyard pickup, with its radiator refilled, shudder and bounce down the dusty road. If the old man drank up the advance wages and was never heard from again, fine. If, on the other hand, he appeared as pledged, he could indeed go to work as night watchman. After all, what mischief could Oscar make that would equal the wrath of Arquimedeo’s mother, had the old man been turned away?
When the truck was lost to sight, Arquimedeo scrambled back into his own GMC pickup and fired it up. As he nosed it around toward camp, he was astonished to see two men on horseback emerge from the brush up the road and start walking their mounts directly toward him. Both faces were deeply shaded by broad straw brims. Then the man on the right lifted his hat in greeting, revealing a shock of white hair.
Chapter Six
The riders had to be from the La Promesa cattle ranch, which, Arquimedeo knew from the survey maps, bordered two sides of the Cerro Calvario federal property. The obvious deduction was borne out by their outfits—boots, chaps and rolled-straw ranch hats—typical of llaneros, the cowboys of the llanos, the Venezuelan plains.
Arquimedeo idled the truck as the horsemen drew abreast, then poked his head out: “Buenas tardes, caballeros. Looking for strays?”
“Buenas tardes, amigo,” the white-haired rider replied, replacing his straw hat and resting both hands on the saddle horn. Astride a big chestnut horse, with his rugged features and cowboy trappings, the rider reminded Arquimedeo of the Marlboro Man. The man’s Spanish greeting, too, while delivered rapidly with the r rolled, had sounded foreign accented. The horseman tilted his head toward his wiry, leathery-skinned colleague. “Since we seem to be neighbors, Enrico and I just wandered by to say hello. I hope we’re not trespassing.”
“You must ask the owners, Ferrominera Orinoco, to determine this, or perhaps their partners, the
engineers from Proteus Industries. As it happens, I am only—”
“Professor Laya López, I know. I saw you on the news last night, Professor.”
“Indeed?”
Both men, Arquimedeo noted, looked to be in their fifties, roughly his uncle’s vintage, though in far better shape.
“Caballeros, you must please excuse me. I don’t mean to be rude, but I must get back to work.”
The white-haired rider spread his palms. “I’m sorry, Professor, I certainly didn’t mean to offend you.”
“You saw me on the television, so you are aware of the controversy. We both know that my scientific activities here will prevent your ranch from selling beef to nonexistent mine workers in a nonexistent mining camp over there. All this is obvious. But none of it is my concern. I am here, and intend to remain, so long as the government supports me.”
“Hold on there, my friend,” Enrico said. “You assume many things. For me, more beef on the hoof means a lot more llaneros and much more work.”
“And also more money,” Arquimedeo replied, “unless you’re just hired llaneros yourselves, which I somehow doubt.”
“Yes, a little more money, perhaps,” Enrico admitted.
“Enrico’s the foreman of La Promesa,” the white-haired man volunteered. “He was actually born in Brescia. That’s in Italy—”
“I know where it is. I did graduate work in the Dolomites. And you, where are you from? Texas?”
“Good guess. Very close. Folks mostly call me Blanco, by the way. I’m down here studying local methods of range management. But I’ve always been curious about relics and fossils and such.” The man glanced up at the red-rock shoulder of Cerro Calvario. “Would it be all right for us to see what you’re doing up there?”
“No, I regret that is not possible. Another day, perhaps... Señor Texas.”
The white-haired man nodded. “Well, Enrico, we better let our neighbor go back to his business, and do likewise. Until then, Doctor.”
The two riders waved and swung their mounts. Arquimedeo sat watching as the horsetails swished and the hindquarters sashayed massively down the dirt road, then cursed himself—not for what he’d just done, but for what he was about to do. It was his mother’s fault, this irrational fear of offending others. She must have stamped it into his infant psyche, saddling him with a lifelong curse while imagining she was inculcating a virtue. He slid the pickup into first gear and moved slowly ahead. The horsemen glanced around as Arquimedeo eased alongside. He couched his concession in brusque terms:
“Please, caballeros, you must understand. Suppose you were branding calves. Would you want me, a total stranger, riding along and asking questions? Wouldn’t this interfere in your business?”
“You make your point well, Professor.” The man sidestepped his horse, leaning down. “We don’t want to bother you further.”
Arquimedeo rolled past, then stopped, waiting for them to catch up. “If you can leave your horses here, I’ll take you up for a quick look around. But I won’t have time to answer questions, and you’ll have to hike back down.”
There, he’d done it, retreated once more from a prior resolve. Wasn’t that exactly what he’d done in hiring Uncle Oscar? The maternal curse was again fulfilled.
“Very obliging of you,” the white-haired man observed—quite unnecessarily, from Arquimedeo’s point of view.
“You go, Blanco,” Enrico offered. “I’ll watch the horses.”
“Thanks, compadre. I’ll make it quick.” Señor Blanco handed his reins to his companion and dismounted.
*
“Mount Calvary?” the white-haired American said as they jounced up the spiral track in Cerro Calvario’s steep sides.
“The summit is vaguely cruciform,” Arquimedeo explained—then added, “shaped like a cross.”
“Got you.”
“You can see it better from the air.”
They left the pickup at the end of the road and hiked up to the rocky shoulder where Félix Rosales, shirtless, with sweat and dust caking his muscled torso, was laying out a baseline for the excavation grid. He looked up, smiling under his sun-squint.
“Arqui, where are you finding all these folks?”
“Señor Blanco is a visitor from Hato La Promesa.”
“Glad to meet you, señor. Know anything about surveying?”
“A little. And I’ve dug a few ditches in my time.”
Arquimedeo, meanwhile, took the tape Félix handed him and stretched it out from the steel-pipe corner marker along a north-south compass marking. Señor Blanco watched a moment, then pitched in. As Arquimedeo measured off two-meter intervals along the baseline, the American handed him wooden stakes; then, as they were positioned, drove them into the ground with the blunt side of a hand axe.
In a relatively short time the three men had laid out a grid of stakes and stringlines. They called a brief halt while Félix went to fetch beer. Only then did the American ask his first question:
“Tell me, Professor. How do things get buried?”
“This is no mystery. Time buries everything.”
“I realize that. But how, specifically? The soil here looks the same as La Promesa’s.” He clawed up a handful of brick-colored sand, letting it crumble through his fingers. “It’s no damn good for agriculture, only for grazing—and mining. Full of iron.”
“Correct. That’s because heavy rainfall has washed out most of the minerals, except certain silicas and iron and bauxite. And high heat has baked these compacted mineral particles into what is called laterite—a bricklike clay of extremely low fertility.”
Señor Blanco nodded. “That’s what I thought. It’s basically the same stuff then, up here and down there? Only this is considerably harder?”
“Something like that. Cerro Calvario is composed of ancient ferruginous sandstone, like the great table mountains of the Guayana Shield. The iron-oxide deposits are extensive, but the richest ore concentrations here are buried under what the mining geologists refer to as canga, a conglomerate of other silicas—quartz, manganese and other minerals. This is why this ore wasn’t discovered decades ago, when U.S. Steel found Cerro Bolívar.”
Señor Blanco scuffed the rocky surface. “Canga, sandstone, whatever you call it, it’s still pretty tough stuff, right? So wouldn’t artifacts, even thousands of years old, be pretty close to the surface, or maybe washed down gulleys to the plains? I still don’t see how they get themselves buried.”
Arquimedeo examined the white-haired norteamericano. “What are you suggesting? That we are lying about our discoveries, or where they were made?”
“No, I didn’t mean anything like that. Like I said, I’m just curious.”
“Then I will tell you we do expect to find objects washed down the talus slopes. And we have found artifacts near the surface. But the most promising finds thus far have been at a depth of several meters, in areas initially exposed by the mining engineers’ core drilling.” Arquimedeo paused. “Would you care to see an example? Something we discovered, in fact, only this morning?”
“I’d love to.”
“It’s in my tent—this way.” Arquimedeo led off on a winding track around a knob of eroded red rock, which artfully resembled the crumbling ruin of a castle turret. Once beyond this they encountered Félix coming back, swinging a plastic bucket loaded with cans of cold beer.
“Going to show him our latest treasure, Arqui?”
“Yes. Do you think Señor Blanco will be more impressed than the skeptical Señorita Estévez?”
“Good question. Have a Polar first, caballero.” Félix handed out the chilled cans. “And what about your friend?”
“Enrico will survive a while longer. He’s got water.”
Farther on, the path slalomed through a rockfall, then ended at two patched and faded work tents in the shadow of monumental boulders. Beside some fifty-gallon gasoline drums, a portable generator hammered away, with power cords snaking into the nearest tent. Outside the tent fly
was a plastic garbage pail covered with a round screen, which was threaded by a plastic hose. Arquimedeo slapped it as they passed: “That’s for wet-sieving our soil samples. It helps us recover small particles of organic matter.”
Arquimedeo walked upright into the tent, while the other two had to stoop. Most of the interior was taken up by a long plywood table. Arquimedeo fumbled with a clamp-on lamp, illuminating the surface clutter: an unfolded survey map scribbled on in colored inks; a Toshiba laptop; plastic trays full of potsherds, mineral fragments and organic remains; an El Nacional sports page, presumably of recent vintage; mapping pens and bottles of waterproof ink; a sidelighted microscope and micrometer calipers. One tent wall was lined with plastic storage crates and rock-filled buckets, while plank shelves opposite sagged under a burden of books, magazines, ring-binders and yellowing newspapers. In a far corner a small refrigerator hummed, fed by the generator; in the other, behind a tripod-mounted Polaroid camera, two wood-and-canvas folding chairs faced a TV and VCR.
Arquimedeo ducked below the work table, rolled aside a canister vacuum, dragged out a rusty, padlocked ammunition case. He opened this and took out a sealed plastic bag, then stood and held it to the light.
Inside the clear pouch, embedded in rock, was a bone fragment shaped like a human finger and only slightly longer. One end was jaggedly broken off. But the other had been carved into the unmistakable semblance of a mouthpiece—something to blow into—while the tubular shaft had four evenly spaced, neatly drilled holes.
It was a tiny flute.
Chapter Seven
Sam Warrender, alias “Blanco,” moved closer to study the ancient artifact. Here before him was history, or pre-history, not in the form of a droning lecture or a textbook timeline, or even an illustrator’s fanciful rendering, but in the handiwork of some early artisan. Someone had played upon this ingenious instrument, perhaps generations of musicians had done so, before it had been consigned to its millennia of silence. What would it have sounded like? But why theorize? Why couldn’t it be freed from its fossilized prison, repaired and actually played again? Sam turned to Arquimedeo. The archaeologist met his glance with undisguised pride.