by Keith Rosson
I let out a little laugh, incredulous. “I’d like to speak to my dad, Traci.”
“I’m just saying, I think things might be kind of irreconcilable right now. He and your mom are in the thick of it, and he’s upset. He might take that out on you when he doesn’t mean to. You’re the last person he should go off on, but you know how he is.” This was Traci? This was the woman that Brooke spent hours concocting revenge fantasies against? Why, I suddenly wondered, would a twenty-four-year-old move to a nudist colony populated by people as old as her father? That was a loaded question, sure, but I considered the possibility that she might actually be in love, and able to find some avenue of tenderness or connection within the man that my mother hadn’t been able to unearth.
I asked Traci to let him know that I’d called. That I was out of town but would be home in a few days. That I’d to talk to him when he was up for it.
Before we hung up, I said, “So what’s life like out there?”
“Hot,” she said.
“Does he really do the Sun Salutation with his balls out?”
There was a moment of silence on the other end. Then Traci said, “Goodbye, Brian,” and hung up.
Sandoval, in the dining room, had the good sense to not say anything.
Ellis when I called was freer with his language. He picked up, wary at the international number, but once he found out it was me, unloaded with a seething, “Dude, what the hell is wrong with you? I’ve written you like ten emails! Not even kidding. Ten.”
I’ve been afraid to get near a computer, Ellis. Sorry. “Sorry,” I said. “Things have been crazy.”
“Where the hell are you? You’re seriously with Mark Sandoval?”
“Yeah. I can’t really say.”
“What, that NDA you signed?”
“Exactly,” I said.
Ellis sighed. “Your sister’s pissed. She came over here looking for you and just about blew a gasket when I told her you’d left the country. Especially with Sandoval.”
I took a grim pleasure at this. “Did she know who he was?”
“Of course she did. I think your mom is pretty freaked, and Brooke’s less than thrilled that she has to carry, you know, the banner of familial solidarity all by herself.”
“She’s used to it,” I said.
“Seriously, where are you?”
“Can’t say.”
“You asshole. What’re you guys looking for? Oh! Robert and I had some drinks and looked some up! Hold on, I’ve got a list right here. Is it Goatman?”
“I really can’t say, Ellis.”
“Loveland Frog? Momo the Monster?”
“You know what ‘not at liberty’ means, right?”
“Skookum! Old Yellow Top! Ogopogo!”
I said, “Even if you guessed it, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Ghost deer.”
“Nope.”
“Unicorn,” Ellis said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Holy shit!” he crowed. “It’s a unicorn! You’re looking for a fucking unicorn with Mark Sandoval, oh my God!”
Mindful of Sandoval in the other room, I said, “Let’s drop it, you’re never gonna guess.”
“Oh man, is he right there? He is, isn’t he?”
I said, “Glad we agree on that.”
“Gotcha. Okay, Brian. I will accept your apology for not answering any of my ten emails. Wow.”
“I am sorry about that,” I said. “We’ve been busy.”
“Call your momma, young man,” Ellis said. “Call your sister. They’re worried.”
“I will.”
“So have you officially just flamed out of school? Just crashed and burned?”
“Looks like it. But I’ll be heading home tomorrow.”
“Really? Did you find it? You must’ve found it! I know you can’t answer that, but give me something, Brian. Grunt once for yes, belch twice for no.”
In the dining room, I heard the various beeps that meant that Sandoval was cycling through the camera feeds on his laptop. “If Brooke gets in touch, just tell her I’ll be home soon.”
“So you’re not going to reach out to her yourself, huh? Damn. That’s cold.”
“We’ve just got a lot going on here before we wrap everything up.”
“Okay,” Ellis said. “For Christ’s sake, at least you called me. That counts for something. The second you get home, I want to hear everything, nondisclosure or not. Talk to you later. Safe travels, my dear.”
That done, I picked up the receiver again, ready to call my mom. And then Liza’s scream drifted from right outside the kitchen.
•
The children stood at the tree line at the rear of the house. Liza’s yellow slicker shone bright in the gloom. She stood with her back to me, and Gunnar crouched beside her. I was out the back door as fast I could, and I could hear Sandoval’s footfalls behind me.
I took Liza by the shoulders, gently, and crouched down. She turned to me, her face red, tears spilling off her chin. She tucked herself into me, tiny in my arms.
“What is it?” I said. “What’s the matter?”
“Holy shit,” Sandoval said behind me.
Karla came running out the back door in a robe, her wet hair in strings, eyes widened in panic. She called her daughter’s name and Liza ran to her, buried herself in Karla’s arms. I looked back and saw Sandoval and Gunnar crouched down before something in the churned mud.
I stood up and walked over to them. At their feet lay something that looked like clotted fabric, sheared in mud and moss. Something next to it: twigs, an old branch.
I should’ve known better, of course. Should’ve remembered the intricacies of a site, the careful way we cull the remnants of the past from the living world. And how, until we do that, the most striking remains can look like the blandest ephemera. A centuries-old pottery shard presumed to be a hunk of shale.
“Holy shit,” Sandoval said again, and—in a move that eschewed every goddamned bit of education and training he had most likely ever received from Don Whitmer—hooked a finger in the fabric that sat half-buried in the mud and pulled.
Gunnar let out a sigh: half wonderment, half disgust.
“Brian,” Sandoval said, still crouched. “Gonna wanna call the cops, bud.”
“What is that?”
And then I saw the yellowed, atrophied hand coming out of the mud-clotted sleeve that Sandoval pinched between his fingers. The waxy nails, the worming green veins. Desiccated and skeletal and skin-tightened.
A hand lay buried there in the mud outside their house.
•
Constable Jónsdóttir and a slab-faced male cop pulled into the driveway twenty minutes later. He was massive, this other guy, his blond hair shorn so close I could see his scalp beneath it. He introduced himself as Leifsson, and as Jónsdóttir examined the remnants, he unloaded gear—shovels and tarps and little numbers on sticks to delineate evidence locations—and deferred to Jónsdóttir in everything else.
Leifsson rooted around with the shovel at her direction, and we watched as the hand became attached to an arm. We—Sandoval and I—were not permitted to participate and stood there like children watching someone else play with our toys, as screwed up as that may have seemed. The actual children watched goggle-eyed from the kitchen window until Karla eventually lead them away.
The arm ended in a ragged stump of shoulder, a yellowed knob of bone, the sleeve scorched stiff.
I saw the mud-smeared insignia on the sleeve, pointed it out to Jónsdóttir, who crouched low and held the arm, grimly turning it this way and that. Fearless, unbothered. Leifsson stood with his shovel at the edge of the divot he’d created, only the occasional tremble of his lips showcasing his troubles.
“You know what this is,” Sandoval said to Jónsdóttir.
> “It looks like an arm,” she said drily.
“Look at that insignia. How old that thing is. It’s skeletal.”
“That’s one of Karla’s British soldiers,” I said. “Right?”
Sandoval nodded. “You got it.”
Jónsdóttir told Leifsson in Icelandic that they would need another car, two more officers. They’d be digging a while. He stalked off to the cruiser to radio it in.
“We can help,” I said. “It’s kind of what we do.”
“No thank you,” Jónsdóttir said, standing up and brushing the mud from her knees.
“Officer,” Sandoval said, letting one of those flashbulb-bright smiles go, “would you mind if Brian and I took some photos? I’m working on a new book, and I’d be thrilled to include you in it, if you were interested. I’m thinking that what you’re digging up there is at least marginally related to what’s brought us here.”
Again there was that curious type of celebrity at work—you could see Jónsdóttir wanting to say yes, but every notion of retaining a chain of evidence, of professionalism, flew in the face of it.
“I have some of your books in our car. My husband was hoping you would sign them.”
“And I’d be happy to. So this is okay? If I go get my camera?”
“I—”
Which was when Karla leaned out the back door, her face taut with worry, and said, “Brian. You have a phone call.”
I asked who it was.
“It’s Vaughn Keller.”
•
“What’s up, buddy?” Vaughn crowed. “Sounds like you got some wild shit going on over there at Karla’s place.”
“I . . . How do you know that, Vaughn?”
“Oh hell, it’s my day off. I listen to the police scanner when I’m bored. Nothing better to do. Nothing ever going on at the base, so if I need some action, I have to listen to Kjálkabein cops complain about drunks puking in the back seats of their cruisers. They found an arm?”
“They . . . Yeah, looks like it. Looks like it’s one of the soldiers who had been stationed here during the war.”
“Christ Almighty. Place is gonna be crawling with cops. You and Sandoval had better get the hell out of there unless you want to be pointlessly grilled for the next few hours about some Brit infantry asshole who’s been dead eighty years. Which is what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.”
I was reeling—a police scanner? Leifsson mentioned they’d found a human arm at the Hauksdóttir farm? Over the police scanner? And Vaughn was listening and decided to call us?
“Like, right now, you want to talk?”
“I can help you find what you’re looking for. That’s about all I want to say right now, but I strongly suggest you and Sandoval meet me for a drink at the same place we met last.”
“Really,” I said.
“It would benefit you greatly.”
“I have to talk to Mark about it. I’m not sure if the cops will let us leave.”
Vaughn coughed, and I heard the snick of a lighter. “Go talk to him. I’ll wait.”
I set the phone down on the island and walked out on the back porch.
Jónsdóttir was packing up the tarps, the shovel. Fury sparked off of her like static. Leifsson, looking ill, held the arm in a sheet of plastic. They walked around the side of the house.
“What’s happening?” I said.
“They got called off,” Sandoval said, his hands on his hips. He stared down at the riven mud where the severed arm had been. “They got some emergency call in Kjálkabein? That big blond cop just told the woman cop they had to go and she was pissed.”
“This isn’t an emergency? Some guy’s severed arm isn’t an emergency?”
Sandoval shrugged. “I don’t know. From the looks of it, he’s probably not missing it, right?”
“Listen, Vaughn wants to meet us for a drink. He says he can help us find what we’re looking for.” I did air quotes.
“Vaughn said that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What the hell is going on, Mark?”
Sandoval grinned. “We’re getting close.”
4
Keller sat at a corner table of the bar with a trio of pints and matching whiskey shots set out before him. Sitting with his back to the wall, he looked haggard and red-nosed, every inch the troll under the bridge. When he saw us, he smiled like he had a mouthful of safety glass. My skull throbbed like a siren.
Sandoval sat down, nodded at the glasses before him. He lifted his shot. “Thanks for the drinks.” He hadn’t drunk since we’d arrived in Hvíldarland, but I knew him well enough to know that there wasn’t a bridge he wouldn’t burn to get what he wanted. Internally or otherwise.
“Little early for me to be drinking,” I said. I didn’t like my back exposed to the bar like it was.
Keller rolled his eyes. “Just drink it, Brian. Come on.”
We drank. The whiskey lanced through me, roiling and hot. Keller winced, exhaling loudly and pressing a fist against his chest. “Pisser,” he rattled, and drank a third of his pint.
Sandoval lifted his pint glass and drank as well, wiped foam from his beard. “So, can we just get down to it? Without all the dancing around and grab-assing?”
Keller showed a mouth of little yellow teeth when he grinned. “Get down to what?”
“Whatever it is that you want to tell us. Whatever it is you think we’re looking for.”
“Well, I thought you were looking for a unicorn. That’s it, right?”
Sandoval stood up. “Let’s go.”
Pointing a stubby finger with the hand holding the pint glass, Keller said, “You sit your ass down.” There was a severity to it that I hadn’t seen from him before, and I expected Sandoval to do anything except what he did: smirked and sat back down. He beat a little rhythm against his glass.
“Can I make a prediction?”
“Go ahead,” Keller said.
“You’re going to ask us to leave. You’re going to say that we’ve become a nuisance, that we’ve worn out our welcome with the Hauksdóttirs. That it’s time to go home.”
Keller smiled at me. There was no humor there. “Give the man a prize.”
“And how is that,” Sandoval said, “exactly making it ‘worth our while’?”
Pulling out a sheaf of papers from inside his jacket, Keller’s eyes flat and snake-like while he did it, he pushed them over to me across the table.
A gold seal on the bottom, some official stationary. I leafed through them. “It’s . . . an interview? With a General Stanley Brewster, Commanding Officer of . . . what’s the Advanced Intelligence Threat Program?”
“That’s me making it worth your while,” Keller said, and turned to look at Sandoval. There was some dead-eyed staring contest between the two of them, while neither of them spoke.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
Without breaking eye contact, Sandoval said, “The AITP’s an urban legend, Brian.”
“What?”
“It’s an Army program that was supposedly started after the Roswell crash in ’47. They’re the folks that’ve been backward-engineering all the technology from the wreckage for the past seventy years. The guys in dark suits and glasses in all the movies.”
Keller said, “And Brewster’s willing to talk to you for an hour. In a rented office, in a state far away from where AITP is stationed. No names, and there’s a lot that he won’t talk about. But there’s a lot that he will. An exclusive sit-down with the head of the AITP. For you.”
“I still don’t get what this has to do with the unicorn,” I said.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the unicorn, Brian,” said Sandoval. “It’s a bone that Keller—or Keller’s people—are throwing our way.”
“Here’s the deal—” Keller said.
“There’s just one problem,” Sandoval said, and pushed the papers back across the table. “The Army’s AITP program is a bunch of bullshit, and the unicorn is real.”
Keller leaned forward. I saw his hands curl into fists on the tabletop. “Here’s the deal,” he continued. “You two have complicated things for that family. That farm’s hanging on by a thread, and Karla’s already a pariah around here, okay? Then you come in here with this unicorn thing? You’re not helping.”
Sandoval sipped his beer. “Who do you really work for, Vaughn?”
“This is the best deal you’re going to get.” Keller tapped a fingernail against the papers in front of him. “Exclusive access to a classified black project. That’s a gift. That’s a fucking book right there.”
Sandoval turned to me. “It makes you wonder why, doesn’t it, Brian?”
“Because,” Keller said, “with that arm you idiots just exhumed—”
“That was just Gunnar playing around, actually,” Sandoval said. “It’d have come up eventually whether we were there or not.”
“It’s true,” I said. “Karla says the kids are always finding stuff around the property. Bayonets, cigarette packs.”
“Jesus Christ, what is that between your ears? Can’t you two listen? That poor family is gonna have cops all over the place now, and then there’s you people looking for a made-up creature—can’t you just leave them the hell alone? Just go home.”
Sandoval gulped some more beer. He seemed to be enjoying himself now. “I feel like your altruism banjo’s only got one string, Vaughn. I don’t think you give a shit about Shane or about Karla Hauksdóttir or those kids.”
Leaning back, Keller swiped a hand down his face. “You’re not hearing me.”
“Who do you really work for? Who are you?”
Keller held out a hand toward Sandoval, as if to implore me. “How many people have to tell you to get the hell out of here before you listen?”