by Adam Johnson
We both reached the same silent conclusion, then set out after Eggers, following his tracks in the snow, though the vaporous trail of his body odor left no doubt as to his course. By the time we reached the dean’s garden, we were abreast of him.
Trudy stuck her hand out.
“Let’s see this so-called spear,” she said.
She inspected the spear by pointing it toward the moon and turning the shaft to see if it was straight. Then she examined the blade. “It smells like mint,” she said.
“It does not,” Eggers said.
“Is this dental floss?” she asked. “You tied this point onto the shaft with dental floss, didn’t you?”
I was only half listening. In my head, I was animating Clovis points. They flew and flew, waves of them. What had seemed like abstractions were coming clear. I saw a spear fly from dark hands into a gleam of bright light before passing into the haze of its victim.
Trudy said, “Dental floss, unless I’m mistaken, is made from wax-infused monofilament, which is derived from modern polymers. Did the Clovis use petrochemicals, Dr. Hannah?”
“Listen,” Eggers said. “Do you know how long it takes to dry and string catgut? I’ve done it. I know.”
By now, we were in the Old Main’s colonnade. Across the street was Parkton Square, and the locked gates of the Glacier Days carnival. Eggers neared the tall fence and appraised it. With one hand, he shook the chain link, and a shower of ice beads rained down on him. He tried to climb it, but in fur booties could get no hold.
Trudy crossed to the gates and went to work on the lock that held the chain. “This is just a combo lock, like the kind for your school locker,” she said. “It would be easier if I had my tools with me. I could just pop it open with a prybar.”
Trudy knelt on the cold sidewalk and put her ear to the green-faced lock, while I looked through the fence to the dark carnival inside. From somewhere kept coming the keening of ravens, and though I couldn’t be sure, I felt I saw a flash of black wings. The raven was a medium-sized bird, with a great curving beak that drove straight into a heavy brow, giving it a look of constant judgment. I can’t think of many birds that were physically dangerous to humans, but to those with a guilty conscience, the raven could be a troubling omen.
“Voilà,” Trudy said as the lock opened, and it wasn’t until we were through the gate that the stillness of the place gave me the shivers. In the dark, all the funhouse faces were more personal, like people from your distant past. Each game seemed to stand waiting for its perfect customer, which wasn’t me. The Hammer Blow sat ready for a stronger man, and the Gypsy dared me to purchase its dark fortune. In the moon, all the overdrawn devils and clowns seemed cut from maroon-and-blue plastic, and I wished someone would shut those ravens up.
Eggers led us down a stretch of midway bordered on both sides by shooting galleries. At counter after counter were rifles and pistols mounted on rods, all pointing into dark tents toward rows of bears who stood when shot, ducks who fell back into nothing, and wolves who would grab their asses and howl at the moon when plinked.
We passed darkened trailers that dealt in Indian fry bread and twin funnel-cake carts that folded up like campers, and then we came to a huge pile of the night’s leftover popcorn, which had been thrown out in the snow. This is where the ravens were, pacing in the moon, gulleting down cold popcorn.
“God, I love popcorn,” Eggers said. “That’s one of the things I really miss.”
“Maybe Doritos will come out with a popcorn-flavored chip,” Trudy told him.
He said nothing, only steered us under the old roller coaster, the kind that packed up onto a couple of flatbed trailers. Its name was no longer visible, but Dragon or Sidewinder would be safe bets. Underneath, a lattice of shadows passed over our faces, and we could see the stains of oil that had dripped down the supports. When the light filtered down just right, you could make out the occasional flash of the nuts and washers that had worked themselves loose and now littered the ground.
Finally, Eggers came to a stop before a temporary corrugated shed the size of an aircraft hangar, hastily assembled on a bare parking lot. “Here we are,” he said, and we all looked at the sign above the great sliding door. It read “4-H.”
Inside, a single propane heater kept the room just above freezing, though the asphalt floor was certainly colder. The room was lined on both sides with pens of varying sizes, some with straw on the ground, and others with little shelters inside. Maybe half held animals. We walked down the row in the dim fluorescent lighting, stepping over the hoses that were wound everywhere to spray down the waste. A little llama came out of its shed and nuzzled up to the rail. Its pen had a large blue-and-yellow handicapped-parking icon on its floor, and the furry little guy seemed intent on sucking everyone’s fingers. At the end of the room, where the heat barely reached, stood a pen larger than the others with what looked like a child’s fort constructed in the back. There was a piece of masking tape affixed to the rail in front of us, and on it someone had spelled “Sir Oinks A Lot” in straggling letters.
“Oh, you’re kidding me,” I said. “This isn’t right.”
Eggers clapped twice and whistled.
Something rustled in the fort, and its tiny walls shook.
“This isn’t happening,” I told them. “This is a child’s pet, that’s a name a child would think up.”
A giant brown-and-gray hog emerged from the fort, its head big as a beer keg. It was a pork-belly hog and must have weighed eleven hundred pounds. It snorted twice, and each time it exhaled, its white breath cleared circles of dust and straw from the floor. Its head floated, cranelike, from Trudy to Eggers to me.
Harder to describe than any bird is the pig. There was no animal quite like it. What defined it most were not its enormous dimensions, but the clack of its cloven feet on hard surfaces, the guttural horn of its squeal, the smack of its jowls bouncing as it walked, and the way the tugging weight of its face revealed the yellow undersides of its eyeballs. But what truly comes to mind when I think of the pig are sunsets over the river after the sky was blackened with the kerosened smoke of towering pyres of burning hogs. It’s true that I haven’t seen a pig in thirty years, but lately I have turned to petroglyph art in an attempt to document those events, and what I have discovered is that, despite its simple oblong shape, the pig is the most difficult figure to convey to a rockface.
Eggers bent over and touched his toes. Then he held the spear over his head with two hands, leaning forward and back, stretching side to side. Finally, he jumped up and down to get the blood going. “All in the name of science,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” I told him. “We should talk about this, we should realize what we’re doing here. At least let’s find some consensus.”
I turned to Trudy for a dose of sanity, but there was a wild look in her eyes.
“No one’s hunted with a Clovis point in twelve thousand years,” she said.
Eggers added, “This is the hunt. This is what connects us to the ancient ones, to the lost peoples of the world.”
Trudy touched my coat. “Look,” she said, “I know your critics think the last chapter in The Depletionists is New Age—y, but when you say that the reason we are drawn to the artifact is to know, without judgment, the heart of another, I believe it. That’s the whole reason I look at Paleolithic art. That’s why I came here to study with you.”
I took my glasses off and folded them. I rubbed my temples a moment.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“Wow,” Eggers said. “We’re joining the elect few.”
“Yeah,” Trudy added, “we’re making history.”
“Here you go, then,” Eggers said, handing me the spear.
“Me? Wait a minute.”
Eggers said, “It’s your Clovis point, Dr. Hannah.”
“I don’t know how to throw a spear,” I told him. “You’re the one living in the Stone Age.”
“That’s right,” Eggers said
. “A pig gets killed with a twelve-thousand-year-old spear. Who do you think they’re going to suspect? Yes, perhaps the authorities might consider the Paleolith living in the park.”
“He’s got a point,” Trudy said.
“What was with the calisthenics, then?”
Eggers looked shocked. “We’re all going to be running in a couple minutes.”
I hefted the spear and watched as Sir Oinks A Lot took a lazy turn around the pen, probably looking for a newer, more comfortable place to sleep.
“This thing’s heavy,” I said.
“Choke up on your grip,” Trudy told me.
Eggers pointed at the pig. “Aim just behind the shoulder blade. That’s home to lung, liver, and heart. You’ll get at least two out of three.”
I took an extra puff off my inhaler, for luck, then backed up a couple of steps, then a couple more. I don’t know why, but I scratched the soles of my shoes, one at a time, on the asphalt. I wiped a hand on my pants. The pig started to circle, the way a dog would before lying down, and I started to time my throw.
“Don’t miss, Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said. “That point’s irreplaceable.”
I ran at the pen and thrust my arm high, but my arm wouldn’t let go.
I stood there with the spear still in my hand.
The truth came to me cold and swift: I was no hunter.
“Oh, give it here,” Trudy said, loosening up her shoulders.
“Give the woman the spear,” Eggers said. “She holds an all-military-school record in track and field.”
“Trudy,” I said, “we can’t ask you to throw this spear. I’m a white male professor, and you, you know, you’re an African American female student.”
“Oh, Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said, “you’re so cute.”
She took the spear from my flaccid grip, and Eggers winked at me.
Trudy hefted the weapon, felt its balance point, then raised it high.
“What’s the bumper sticker?” she asked. “‘You can have my spear when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.’”
The pig cocked its head curiously.
Then it happened. Trudy rotated her body and, drawing back, charged a throw that began in the ball of her foot. The leg followed, the hip lifting, rotating the torso around so the arm whipped like a sling. The spear launched, and the follow-through was complete enough that it left her facing sideways, hopping on one foot.
Almost as quickly as it was thrown, the spear crossed the pen and landed with a great thuk that opened a gaping, pleated wound, from which escaped a gurgly hiss as the lung pushed and pulled air through the puncture. The handle of the spear bobbed with the breath of the hog, and with every little movement, the blade walked itself deeper into the cavity of the chest. The pig let out one faint whine before its front legs crossed, almost daintily, and it went down, rolling to its side so that its final breaths sent up mists of blood that speckled the wall a steaming pink.
Eggers looked stunned. He climbed over the rail and walked cautiously to the pig. He leaned over it. “Holy shit,” he said.
“Wait,” I called. At any moment, that hog could jump up and slay us all. If one thing was constant in the history of the world, it was the notorious danger of pigs. They were the bane of early Mesopotamia, and in African folklore there is no more dangerous beast. Even the Clovis could not handle them. The Clovis eradicated the American lion, the saber-toothed tiger, and the dire wolf, but the wild boar was one of the few animals to live through that age of eradication.
Trudy joined Eggers. She was still shaking out her arm from the throw as she approached the pig. She crouched above a pool of blood gelling against the cold asphalt. She reached for it.
“Don’t,” I murmured. “Think of the parasites, the trichinosis, the bloodworms.”
Trudy placed her palm in the blood, then, dripping, showed it to me.
“This is the first art,” she said. “This is the original ink.”
On the wall of the shed, Trudy drew a horizon line in red. Below it, she fashioned a circle, the sun of the underworld. Above the line, she used her fingers to make a set of antlers, pointing down. I recognized the symbol, haunting and primordial. She drove around Parkton with it painted on the black hood of her beater GTO.
Eggers pulled a flake from his game bag and cut the spear point free of the shaft. He brought it to me and placed it bloody in my hands, still warm from the pig.
“Here you go, Dr. Hannah,” he said. “One Clovis point, as promised.”
Then Trudy came toward me, face flushed from the cold, hands red, that great staticky blue light of death around her, and I thought, Yes. Perhaps my father’s rakish thinking had infected me, but my hands were shaking for her.
“Are you ready?” she asked, and when I nodded, we all started running.
* * *
In bed that night, I woke to a roar from the Missouri as a shearing expanse of ice broke away. It sent a wake underneath the whole ice sheet, so that, when the wave reached the shore, you could hear fifty-five-gallon drums leap from the frozen grip of the river as, one by one, everyone’s docks cracked free. I knew a great ice raft, large as a lecture hall, was spinning its way downstream.
I sat up in bed, and slowly, by starlight, began to make out the dark tendrils of all the silent houseplants that hung in my room. I checked my bedside table, and, sure enough, there was the stained Clovis point from earlier, right where I’d set it—beside a plaster cast of my mother’s leg, removed just before she left us for good. Though I hadn’t heard from her in thirty years, I felt pretty confident that, with the cast and maybe an X-ray of the break, I’d be able to identify my mother if I ever came across her.
Often when I couldn’t sleep, I’d pick up that knee-high cast and trace the shape of my mother’s calf, feel the shadows left by the fine bones in her feet, but tonight I reached for the Clovis point. The quartz was smooth and warm in the dark, and instead of its conjuring in my mind the story of a people older than civilization, I thought of Trudy. How natural this point had seemed in her hand, and with what kinship did she speak of its fashioner. Trudy seemed to know its song, and the shameful arousal I felt for her, for one of my students, as I replayed the way she launched that spear was eclipsed only by the horror of where it had landed.
Did the Clovis people know the glaciers were on the move? Did the dinosaurs comprehend the impending comet? Janis didn’t know what the universe had in store. I heard the ice again, and imagined white rafts slowly floating down thousands of miles of river, a history of ice, and on these barges in my mind, I saw things and people, floating backward, away from me, into the dark. Our old dog Roamy was on one, and another was piled with the sagging boxes of Junior, index cards and notepads spilling into the current. I looked for Old Man Peabody, for Janis, for the father I used to know. Who floated by instead, alone on a piece of ice big enough for all of us, was my mother, frozen the way I last saw her, the way I would forever imagine her—in a pale-blue housecoat, holding a pale-blue handbag, leaning on aluminum crutches—and the farther she floated from me the less I was sure whether she was facing toward me or away. My imagination took a bird’s-eye view as I attempted to follow her into the dark, flat landscape, cut only by the cold river of history. At the edge of sleep, I, too, was on the ice, riding it into darkness. I was not cold on this ice, only seized by the notion that if I floated far enough I’d ride the river back in time, back to the Pleistocene, a place where men and women lined the banks with pink spears. As I floated by, they shouted messages for me to deliver to their ancestors.
Chapter Two
I woke before dawn feeling unaccountably alone. The last of the moon was ghosting through the windows, and as my eyes came into focus, I expected to find myself in a distant and unknown place. Then I recognized the duck pattern of my sheets, realized I knew which dark doorway beyond my bed led to the closet and which to the bathroom. Houseplants materialized around me.
My hand was sore, the one I’d gripped the spear with,
and I flexed it open and shut before pre-empting the alarm clock, which was set to go off any minute now. I was due to meet Farley, my old friend and lawyer, at the lake for the opening of the Glacier Days Ice Fishing Derby. The only reason, it occurred to me, to head out to a giant floating ice sheet, slip a silver hook into a cricket’s chest, and then lower him into a trillion gallons of freezing water was to remind yourself of the true rarity of warmth in this world. With a thumb, I pressed my palm, and the bones in my hand felt vulnerable and nervy, the way your teeth do after a trip to the dentist.
I washed my face with warm water, rubbing my eyes, holding my breath to avoid the smell of pig on my fingers. I pulled some cold long johns from the dryer and, ducking under some hanging houseplants, ate a bowl of cereal under the kitchen light, my blizzard overalls hanging open to the waist. This is what thirty-nine-year-old professors did in the morning when their careers had basically tanked. I rinsed the sink when I was done, flossed one more time, and into a five-gallon fishing bucket tossed a few tilt-up rods, a handful of split-shot sinkers, and a thermos.
Outside, as I clomped down the stoop of University Village, the USSD faculty housing, I saw that I was mistaken—the faint light was not the last of the moon but a first glimpse of sun. Or maybe the two had traded places. All the other professors and lecturers were asleep as I crossed the courtyard, cutting through campus toward the lake. The new snow moaned under my boots, and I cut a sad figure in the cold—there were no other footprints in the powder, and the purple frost of my breath simply vanished into the brittle stars above.
I had a bucket in one hand, a sandwich in each pocket, and, crossing campus, the air sharp in my nose, I felt outfitted for a lifetime alone. Farley kept setting me up with local women from town—a string of evenings with single mothers that never got past pink wine, balsamic vinaigrette, and, from the other side of the couch, invitations to grab some thigh. Farley meant well, but I couldn’t explain to him that if you’re feeling lonely and misunderstood it’s best to avoid other lonely people who misunderstand you.