Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  “Dr. Hannah, please,” he protested. “She’s a journalism major. She writes for the school paper.”

  I gave him one of my father’s grunts, and we set out across campus for my excavation van, which was a beauty—blue-and-white striped, with rear doors and blue-curtained windows all the way around. It had the total package—luggage rack, air-cushioned captain’s seats, and cup holders everywhere. I kept all my digging gear in it, and I had the thing rigged so I could live out of it for weeks.

  Of course, going somewhere with Eggers meant driving three miles an hour while he walked beside. I found that turning on my hazard lights and driving on the opposite shoulder worked best. That way, my van shielded him from errant cars, and I could roll down my driver’s-side window and conduct a fairly normal conversation.

  We crawled out of the university, and I had to honk ten times to get us safely through the downtown. Near the defunct mall, Eggers pulled out a piece of chert and began pressure-flaking some design, using a percussive back-cutting technique common to the Clovis of our area. My headlights were on, and there was enough snow to hit the wipers every now and then.

  “God, turn the station,” Eggers said.

  This was a familiar refrain. The country was too country, the pop too pop. I tuned the radio to a gospel broadcast and found the call and response soothing.

  “You’re killing me,” he said, doing some delicate strikes with the antler tip. “Try KROK, eighty-nine-point-one.”

  I turned it off.

  “Eggers,” I said, “do you think Old Man Peabody was a sexist?”

  Absorbed in his carving, he wasn’t even watching where he stepped, his furry boots trudging through snow and slush alike. “You mean the guy who made the Hall of Man and filled it with naked women?” Eggers shrugged. “I never met the dude, but you have to admit that he was an ankle man—that’s one thing that didn’t need to evolve, in his opinion.”

  We crept along for a while, passing the farm-equipment dealership, and after this it would all be frosted fields of broken stalks and strands of corn silk frozen to the fence lines. Cars shot past us on their way to the casino.

  “You ever try to make a fertility idol?” I asked.

  “Clovis weren’t really into the fertility thing, were they? Isn’t that more up the Inuit alley?”

  The visibility kept dropping. I had the van in low gear, so it idled at just the right speed. All I had to do was steer. I threw a foot up on the dash.

  “Yeah, I tried to make one, a long time ago,” I told him. “It came out more like a rabbit—you know, short arms, big legs. Without the ears, of course.”

  “This here’s a whale,” Eggers said. “You wouldn’t think it, but it’s hard as hell. A whale’s just an oblong thing, kind of formless. What’s to carve?”

  “What’re you making a whale for?”

  Eggers examined it closely—its shape was blocky and vague.

  “It was going to be a gift, but it looks like shit,” he said.

  He took the thing and tossed it off in a desolate cornfield.

  “Hey, I wish you wouldn’t pull stunts like that,” I said. “A tractor will plow that under the soil, and it’ll really screw with the mind of whoever finds it. Without any context, they won’t know that carving isn’t ten thousand years old.”

  “It’s a whale,” Eggers said. “We’re in South Dakota.”

  “All the more reason.”

  At some point, without my noticing it, the crunch of wheels on shoulder gravel had shifted to the shush of tires on snow that had given a new coating to everything. Ahead, in the flurries, appeared one of the new billboards the Tribe had put up, welcoming us to the Reservation, Home of Fun!

  Neither one of us said anything as we slowly passed it.

  “Eggers,” I said, “it was none of my business, what I said about the condoms. It’s just that there’s no way you can live a hundred percent Clovis, and I was concerned.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dr. Hannah. I didn’t take it personal.”

  “I saw you taking a bath this morning, so I know your technology pact suffered a little. But I understand your reasons for cleaning up. I’ve been struggling with it myself.”

  I was thinking about the pig, about the poor girl who’d lost her hog.

  Eggers looked at me funny. “You’ve been struggling with Parents Weekend?”

  “Parents Weekend?”

  “Yeah, you know, banquets, speeches, the big game,” Eggers said. “You know, my parents have no idea. I started this whole thing right after they came out last year, so they don’t have a clue how I’ve been living.”

  We drove for a while in silence, the heater blasting on high. The glorious Thunderbird Casino began to materialize, in all its flashiness, on the horizon.

  A quarter-mile from the casino’s central parking lot, Eggers said, “We’re here.”

  I killed the motor and set the brake. Though the heavy snow had mostly subsided, enough had fallen to coat the van. When I opened the door, a wedge of snow dropped into my hair, packing my glasses and ears, slushing down my neck.

  Eggers tightened the strips of leather that held his poncho closed.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  Above us stood a vast billboard advertising Phase II, which boasted an architectural sketch for a second casino that looked exactly like the first one—hazy, then clear—in the distance. We walked under the sign’s great legs, and at the fence Eggers stomped down one strand of barbed wire while bowing up another so I could duck through.

  We set off across a field, fallow under snow that shone in the afternoon light with the bluish, old-wool hue of manganese. A few rabbit trails crossed the powder, suggesting they’d bolted as we arrived, and ahead, a small creek babbled through the snow. The cold air made your nose whistle, your breath plume glinty before you, and the light was enough to narrow your eyes.

  I turned to Eggers. “Okay,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Shh,” he said. “Listen.”

  In the distance, a couple of charter buses dieseled in the casino’s main lot. An occasional car chugged its way down the half-frozen road. Other than that, the only sound was the sleepy-talk of the little brook. I was about to ask What’s the big deal? again when it struck me how odd it was to hear running water in this intense cold.

  I began walking toward the water, Eggers following, giving me the lie of the land. “This is runoff from the casino,” he said, and, sure enough, you could see how the creek wound all the way back to the parking lots, where a pair of corrugated culvert pipes dumped their meltwater.

  We neared the little channel running through the snow. The water was only an inch or two deep as it tumbled lazy and black-hued over a bed of silica sand that had washed down the culverts. Sand gives cars traction in the winter, and they mix it with rock salt to fight the ice.

  “So it’s salt water,” I said.

  “Which is why it doesn’t freeze,” Eggers added, “and why it excavated this in the middle of winter.”

  A stick had been pushed into the sand, and where it rose from the water, a ribbon of corn silk had been tied. “Is that some kind of marker?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Eggers said. “That’s where the Clovis point was.”

  “Did you touch anything else?”

  Eggers shook his head no.

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what you were doing out here.”

  Eggers shrugged. “Just walking.”

  I sunk my hands into my parka and scanned the surrounding terrain.

  There was a slight slope to the land. This suggested an alluvial plain, and a small ridge in the distance could have been a glacier’s terminal moraine—both ripe settings for fossils. There were no boulders in the field, which comes from glacial plucking, a likely clue that any artifacts were deposited from someplace else. The creek strata revealed a foot of topsoil, and below that, a layer of diatom, followed by a striation of shale. Again, ideal settings—alkaline
and unmolested.

  Eggers didn’t speak. He silently studied the terrain with me, and if I’d taught him well, he’d hear everything the land had to say.

  I knelt at the edge of the creek. There was something in the sediment. I went to all fours, and then I lay down. Plainly visible at the bottom, downstream from the stick, was the ivory loop of a shaft straightener, a common Clovis tool. Time had eaten away the pockets of cellulose, leaving only the stronger honeycomb of bone. And half sunk in the sediment was what looked like the sacral bone.

  The oldest human remains in North America that had been dated in situ, with strata and artifacts, were those of Kennewick Man, from Washington State, at ninety-six hundred years. If these bones were associated with these artifacts, in this soil, it could be two thousand years older, making it the definitive site on our continent.

  I looked a few feet downstream. Rocking in the current were several tiny metacarpals, all trapped from washing farther by the protruding fin of a human scapula. I slid down into the ditch, so I was close to these minnowlike finger bones, schooling in the shadows.

  How old are you? I asked them.

  They wiggled quietly in the stream.

  Who are your kin? I whispered. Are you all alone?

  Eggers finally spoke. “What do you think, Dr. Hannah?”

  I looked up from the water.

  “What will you name him?” I asked.

  “You think it’s for real?”

  “He’s got to have a name,” I said.

  “Tell me it’s for real,” Eggers said.

  “I think it’s for real.”

  Eggers’ gaze drifted to the casino. He studied its endlessly scrolling marquee: “Welcome Parents—Blackjack—Keno—No Hold ’Em-Slots.”

  “Keno,” he said.

  “Keno,” I repeated.

  I sat up, dusted the snow off my overalls. My boots had soaked through, but I didn’t feel it. My eyes scanned the scene—blank snow, an ivory tool, and the bones of the hand that had made it. Keno’s hand. I listened again. The stream seemed to talk a little, nothing I could make out, though I could almost see a set of footprints, faint in the snow, the trail of Keno’s last steps before he lay down and sank into the soil. I wanted to look into Keno’s eyes, note their wetness and intention, maybe hear the clip of his speech, but I could only see his tracks, barely, and that was half-dream.

  “I think you’ve really found something here,” I told Eggers. “Something amazing. It’ll be a battle, but don’t worry, we’ll get permission to dig.”

  Eggers was still looking off to the casino.

  “Permission?” he asked, turning to me. “We don’t need permission.”

  I thought he was trying to be funny or something.

  “Of course you’re joking,” I said. “We can’t do anything without authorization.”

  “Nobody owns history,” he said. “There’s no monopoly on the past.”

  “But someone owns this property.”

  “Keno needs us,” Eggers said, as if that were all there was to it.

  “This is tribal land.” I explained. “We have to get permission from the state Antiquities Board, the lieutenant governor, and the Bureau of Land Management, which operates under Federal Land Trust law. Then there’s the Tribal Council, and even if we get their permission, we have to find a judge who’ll grant us an exemption from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.”

  Eggers looked unimpressed. “I’m gonna start digging tomorrow,” he said.

  There was something both childlike and heroic in his obstinacy. He almost made me believe it was possible to dig in full view of all the authorities, in the middle of a South Dakota winter, exposed to ice storms and white-outs. On the horizon right now, a brooder of a storm was cooking—fat clouds ass-scooted toward us, pushing gusts of wind that groped their way through stands of trees, coaxing snow from limbs and stealing it back to the sky.

  “So you’re just going to set up shop right here?” I asked him. “You don’t think anyone’s going to walk out of that casino and ask questions?”

  Eggers didn’t have an answer.

  “Look,” I said, stomping the snow, “the ground is frozen solid. You couldn’t dig here if you wanted. Even when it thaws, you’ll be dealing with serious mud till spring. Trust me, son, you’re in no rush. By the time you’re done applying for a dozen permits, you’ll be thankful for the extra time. Then there’s a fleet of funding grants to be written. Have you stopped to think how expensive this will be?”

  “I have a plan, Dr. Hannah,” he said, “one that doesn’t need money or permits or judges. All it needs is you and Trudy.”

  “Are you listening to yourself?” I asked. “How will you authenticate the find? You can’t get published without proper excavation method. You’ve got to keep meticulous records to pass peer review. You have to win the esteem of your colleagues if you hope to sell your book and speak at the top universities. Anything less, and you can kiss the lecture circuit goodbye.”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” Eggers fired back. He stomped the ground himself. “Will you hear me out?”

  I looked into the approaching clouds.

  The storm was rolling in faster than I’d thought. Its leading edge was beginning to sweep by us, lifting as much powder as it dropped, driving old snow chips that pricked your face. Locks of Eggers’ bison fur stood sideways. My boots now sang with cold.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s hear it.”

  Eggers waved an arm, as if to erase an imaginary slate between us.

  “This has never been done before. We excavate with Paleolithic technology.”

  He studied my face for a reaction, but I had none; I was caught completely off guard.

  “We grid the site with homemade string,” he continued, “and we dig with stone tools. Our maps and site sketches—all charcoal. We cut our own measuring sticks and carve our own spades. Tonight, I’ll light some fires to get the ground thawing. Tomorrow, I’ll sharpen a couple bifaces and flint an extra adze. Wait till I show you the screens I’ve been weaving. Instead of using gravity to sift dry dirt through the air, we submerge the screens in the creek here, and let the water dissolve away the strata. If we cancel a few classes, I figure we can do the whole thing in a few weeks.”

  I had to admit that digging with stone technology was sort of brilliant. Old Man Peabody would have kicked his heels at the challenge. There was just one problem.

  “It’s illegal, Eggers. It’s against the law to remove these things.”

  Here he beamed large, snow dusting his sparse beard.

  “Oh, but that’s the beauty,” he said. “We’re gonna put it all back.”

  “Eggers, don’t even say things like that. Talk like that could cost you your reputation, your whole future.”

  “Reputation? This isn’t about reputation, Dr. Hannah. I’m not in this to become a star. My future doesn’t include driving a macho car and lusting after students.”

  “That was uncalled for.”

  Eggers said: “Paleo-anthropology is about shining the light of inquiry into the darkness of prehistory, about unearthing the truth of who we are.”

  Of course, those were my words he was quoting.

  He stared at me, waiting for a response.

  “That trick won’t work this time,” I said. “This is different. Other scholars need our research, and they need to be able to trust it. Even a rumor of you tainting a site like this would finish your career.”

  “I don’t care what anybody says,” Eggers told me. “Think about it, Dr. Hannah. You, me, and Trudy. No red tape, no money, no attention. Just the joy of discovery, of hearing Keno’s story. We put everything back, and if you want to get your name in the paper, then you’re welcome to dig him up later.”

  Finally, the real snow began to fall, the kind that was in for the long haul. It flurried our field, making the casino vanish behind weighty, billowing tracts of white. The flakes fell like reams of p
aper, confident as propaganda fliers. I imagined these snowy leaves as the now worthless pages of every Clovis article we could debunk with Keno. I put my hand out, the flakes falling sure and steady as outdated books from the shelves of libraries.

  “Stop this,” I said. “Stop it. There is a system, and the system exists to prevent grave-robbing. We invented the red tape, Eggers, we did, the scholars, to stop grave-robbers.”

  Eggers didn’t reply.

  “I won’t go along with this,” I told him. “If Keno’s for real, he’s been sleeping for a dozen millennia. He can snooze another couple months.”

  “That new casino breaks ground in a couple of months,” Eggers said.

  In the distance rose a muted roar, a dull clapping that made Eggers stop and listen. Slowly we began to make out the cracking blades of a helicopter, swooping in low and fast from the east. It thumped heavy in the damp snow, the sound growing sharper as it neared. I figured it was just some high roller choppering into the casino, or maybe Club Fed receiving a new batch of white-collar criminals, but Eggers couldn’t stop scanning the snow-dumbed sky.

  When the pitching blades whacked violently above, I, too, craned my neck back and squinted to catch sight of it. With a shock, the helicopter broke from the clouds, swinging round and past us, showing the green-black of its belly, and only when it had flashed on toward town could you hear the roar of its jet turbines.

  “Shit,” Eggers said. “My parents are here.”

  Chapter Three

  A note from Dad was waiting on my kitchen counter.

  “Pooped from ice fishing,” it said, “but meet you later at the Parents Weekend mixer. Might be a few minutes late, so don’t tizzy your feathers. Your dear old dad.”

  The keys to the ’Vette were still missing from their peg on the wall, a sign that Dad’s activities from the previous night—silver dollars and song requests, ice buckets and aphrodisiacs—would truck on into this one.

  I’d hung Janis’ portrait over the key peg, so he’d have to look her in the eye every time he took the car. The photo was taken on the day we surprised her with a cat to replace Roamy. It was a handsome, broad-headed Burmese that would in a matter of days spray every piece of plastic in the house, pull down a half-dozen birds from the feeder, and make a latrine of the shower stall. Janis had spent several nights searching the farm roads for Roamy, and in the photo, her eyes still seemed focused on the horizon, so the arrival of this cat was a too-sudden conclusion to the last holdout of hope in her expression. What could be had been tempered by what would do. At the time, a part of me was glad she finally knew how it felt. I’d hoped this feeling would transfer to my father, but he’d long since developed an immunity to that.