Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  Only when Eggers hefted the rodent stick did Gerry seem to realize what was happening. “Hey, hold it right there,” Gerry commanded. “Put that thing down.”

  “Call your dogs,” Trudy told Gerry.

  “Hold on,” Gerry said. “You can’t hurt those dogs. They’re already sold. We’re headed out to the airport right now.”

  “He’ll do it,” Trudy said.

  Gerry stopped. He cocked his head, seeming to notice, as if for the first time, that Eggers was dressed in animal skins. “What the hell is going on around here?” he asked. “What’s with the crazy getup?”

  Nobody said anything. We all looked at Eggers, who lowered his rodent stick.

  Gerry took a step closer to Eggers. “Just who the hell are you supposed to be?” Gerry looked at the cold firepits, the wallows of mud, all the stone tools lying everywhere. “What are you yahoos up to out here?”

  I looked to Trudy, then Eggers.

  “Well, it’s complicated,” Eggers said. “This is very scientific. What we’re doing here is . . . Well, it has to do with truth and discovery.”

  “Yeah,” Trudy said. “And humanity.”

  Eggers added, “We’re shining the light of inquiry into the darkness of prehistory.”

  My words had never sounded so stupid.

  Gerry turned to me. “What the hell are they talking about, Hanky?”

  Suddenly, a sharp, pain-stricken yelp sounded at the edge of the field. We looked in time to see the bent-over trunk of a sapling spring upright from a snare. The motion pulled a cord of sinew that sent a Pomeranian high into the air, high above the tree. I cringed as the dog rounded the pinnacle of its arc, and I was already backpedaling before its fall was cut short by the snatching grip of a noose.

  Gerry took a couple stunned steps toward the dangling Pomeranian, then broke into a run. Eggers dove inside his lodge, and for a moment there were only Trudy and I. She stood there, a true calm to her. She picked up a sack lying near the site and handed it to me. She made sure I held it, her hands clasped over mine. “Remember—we’re a team,” she said, then lifted the flap to join Eggers.

  I headed off through the snow, carrying her sack, and, believe me, I was picking up the feet. I marched on, the casino looming larger and larger, the beeping of delivery trucks and the air-brake hiss of tour buses coming to me as I jammed my hands in my pockets and leaned into the deeper drifts. Why look back?

  The giant marquee flashed the Thunderbird logo above a scrolling banner that had changed from “Welcome Parents” to “Welcome Meat Wholesalers.” I looked at the giant bird. Its wings flashed red, white, then blue, and its neon head swiveled left and right, nervously. There was no such bird as a thunderbird, really. It was a mythological creature that in Native American lore was the source of doom and destruction.

  At the wire fence, I paused to let my bladder go, a piss so fantastic I saw sparkly yellow lights at the edge of my vision. I pissed the ice off a green-and-silver fence stake, beyond which was the snow angel I’d made after falling the night before. You could see Eggers’ footprints, and frosted in the snow was an empty highball glass.

  Climbing over the culverts, I scrambled up to hardtop and came eye level with a frozen lake of dirty American cars. I couldn’t help looking back. I could see, far past the lodge where my larcenous students hid, a little man by a little tree, and I knew Gerry was cutting down his dog. Why don’t snow clouds ever swoop down when you need them? Out there was the scientific discovery of a lifetime, and instead of a full-scale excavation, all I could see were stains in the snow, students hiding under poached animal skins, and a man bent over his dog. Where was the cloud large enough to white out this scene, to obscure the havoc I had made?

  I passed the fat trunks and dented bumpers of sedans that seemed iced in place, as if their owners were inside drinking and gaming away the time until spring thawed those tires loose again. An unmistakable waft of burning meat floated toward me, making me think of the stockyard east of town, the way thousands of animals were corralled into their own lot of tight pens, icicles of snot hanging from their muzzles, frozen mud locking their hooves in place. I was hoping to find Bill Hasper, Parkton’s lone taxi driver, for a ride back home.

  Ahead was a modest commotion, centering on a column of smoke, and the black slush at my feet soon became littered with rib bones. I came across an old water tanker, which had been fashioned into a gigantic truck-sized grill, in the manner of those oil drums people cut lengthwise to turn into smokers. A man in a chef’s hat stood upon scaffolding over this thousand-gallon grill, scalding entire racks of ribs and briskets. He leaned to shuffle great mounds of meat over heat that rose a shimmery silver-black. The raised half-dome of the water tank read “You’ve Got a Friend in Beef!” and I was pretty sure that, if the dome slipped off the stick that kept it propped up, it would cut this man in half.

  As I walked past one gritty vehicle after another, it was on Julie that my mind settled. Sure, she was stuck-up and aloof, and her hair was a fright, but I couldn’t stand the idea of her going out into the world thinking I was a buffoon of a man, a scientific huckleberry. In universities across America were departments that had had only one encounter with Hank Hannah, and they will forever remember him as the jerk at the shrimp bowl, the ape at the lectern. But I wasn’t the same man who once entertained a dean with a cocktail-napkin diagram of the sacred Mactaw fertility dance. I wasn’t the same person who wore Highlander aftershave and walked around with a copy of my own book in my back pocket. I simply couldn’t let Julie return to UNND with such a skewed portrait of a guy who had since caught sight of some of his problems and was really trying.

  In the extremities of the lot was recreational-vehicle land. Here streams of RVs were parked in parallel lines, rather than rows. It was like walking down industrial alleys, colder somehow in these corridors of motor homes, and when the wind kicked, you could see lines of them rock like train cars. That’s where I caught sight of Farley Crow Weather, eating ribs from a Styrofoam container, admiring a Wind Reaper Mark V.

  Farley nodded, mouth full, at the sight of me, and beckoned me over. I could tell he’d just had his flattop trimmed—fine bristles dusted his forehead and ears.

  “Jeez,” he said, “where a guy couldn’t go in this rig.”

  Together we studied the camper. It was a three-axle model, with outriggers and built-in tow bars. A satellite dish pointed toward the Arctic.

  “You planning on a trip?” I asked.

  Farley tossed a bone under its rear bumper, grabbed another rib.

  “Never know,” he said. “A fellow thinks about it now and again.”

  “It’s a pretty big outfit for one person,” I said.

  “I suppose,” Farley said. “You think it could take the hills?”

  We examined the vehicle’s size and length. We bent to inspect the rear differential, and when Farley pointed toward the exhaust pipe, whose mouth was nearly six inches wide, we nodded that an engine that big probably could.

  “Out here for business or pleasure?” he asked.

  “Oh, both,” I said. “You?”

  Farley gave me a quick once-over, noting my wild hair, my jacket, the general animal hide of me. He eyed the raggedy gift-shop bag I held.

  “Serving some writs,” he said. “Plus, I know a guy out here who cuts my hair.”

  My scalp was really itchy. “Look,” I said, “I could use a ride.”

  “Yeah, sure, I s’pose,” he said, pointing a bone in the direction of his own four-door American sedan. This was his way of saying, Anything, buddy, anything.

  Farley’s back seat held two milk crates of legal briefs, both buckled down with safety belts; the passenger seat was a bin of soda cans and empty boxes of Vicks licorice cough drops. A police scanner on his dash flashed little red lights as it roamed all the emergency channels, looking for trouble. When I climbed in, Farley fired up the engine, then promptly powered down all four windows. He kept looking at me funny.
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br />   “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Farley said. Then, “You got a rash or something?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” Farley said, but as we turned onto the main road, he eyed me again.

  I was scratching behind my ear. “What?”

  Farley returned his attention to the road. Cold air flooded the cab, lifting a flurry of cough-drop wrappers as we picked up speed. Trudy’s GTO, crusted gray with road-swept snow, sat on the side of the road, but there was no sign of Gerry’s cruiser.

  “Farley,” I said, “it’s good that I ran into you. I’ve got an important question.”

  The police scanner stopped for some staticky talk, though we couldn’t make it out. Farley turned down the squelch, so the red light cycled and cycled in silence.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  I said, “Let’s say you have some friends, and these friends are probably doing something bad. You aren’t exactly helping, but you know it’s bad, and you haven’t turned them in, either. Are you in trouble?”

  We passed the old skating rink, a gang of crows keening along its saddled roof, probably casino-bound to scavenge all those bones. Farley shook his head. “You know, Hank, I’m your lawyer. You can tell me things, and it’s confidential. That’s how it works.” Farley raised the windows, asked, “Would this have anything to do with an article I saw in the paper that someone killed a little girl’s pig over at Glacier Days?”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt something sharp on my ear, like I’d been bitten. I slapped at it.

  “Your school didn’t start giving Ph.D.s in hog butchering, did it?” Farley joked.

  Beyond the tractor dealership was Parkton’s one sleazy motel, the Lolly gag, and there, in the parking lot, was my van. How many vans have custom-painted tire covers that read “King of Spades” above a playing-card anthropologist that held a shovel instead of a scepter? Of course, everyone in town would think it was me in there. I craned my neck as we drove past. Was my father really in one of those rooms getting laid? I’d need scientific notation to figure out the last time I got laid. I’d need an Aztec calendar to find that date.

  I turned to Farley. “Do you think I’m washed up?”

  Most friends would say, Hey, buddy, what’s eating at you?

  But Farley meditated on the answer. “It depends,” he said, after a while.

  I didn’t ask, On what? I let the clapboard farmhouses shoot on by.

  Farley eventually said, “If you’re comparing yourself to the hotshot Hank who got his theory published and started living too high-hog to spend time with his friends—well, compared to that jerk, you’re doing pretty good. If you’re comparing yourself to the Hank I knew at Mactaw, the pimply kid who drove our sociology teacher crazy, who wrote articles in the Tomahawk about making the world a better place, who talked over lunch at Burger King about history and truth in a way that this reservation kid had never heard before . . . Compared to that guy? Well, you tell me.”

  When we pulled up in front of University Village, Farley held my eye as I grabbed my bag and swung open the door. This meant that he wasn’t done with me, and, standing out in the snow, I leaned in the window, because sometimes Farley could say some pretty dang wise things when you least expected it.

  His foot rested lightly enough on the brake pedal that the car wanted to pull away. He waited until I’d closed the door, then unwrapped a Vicks cough drop. “Try to avoid those store-bought flea powders,” he told me, popping it in his mouth. “Start by bathing in baking soda. If that doesn’t do the trick, you’ll have to use vinegar and tomato juice.”

  Then he rolled away.

  * * *

  Inside, there were no messages, no notes, no pets to greet me. Janis’ face, when I passed it, pretended not to see the state I lived in. I grabbed a tumbler of water and sat in the living room, the light through the windows frail but clear as I reclined in a chair that had belonged to my father. A parade of hypotheticals overtook me—flashing from Julie to Keno to Peabody to a woman in a motel I’d never met—making it seem as if their lives were accessible, open to influence, coexisting in a realm of simultaneity, of possibility, with mine. In my animation of them, we were all in a room together, or at a picnic bench, laughing, talking, and Peabody could toss peanuts that Keno would catch in his mouth as easily as Julie and Janis might reminisce on fate. But really I was as remote from them as Ivan, in his own chair in Siberia, wondering why he was all alone.

  I absently tugged at the gift-shop bag Trudy had given me. I pulled out clear baggie after clear baggie, each of them containing a bone. Most looked like metatarsals and phalanges, though one cracked section might have been part of the radius. Each bone was tagged with a numbered marker and individually sealed with an instant photo of the bone in situ, next to a metric ruler. At the bottom of the sack was a receipt from the casino gift shop for a Polaroid camera, a roll of toilet paper, and a box of Ziplocs. On the back of the receipt was a note in Trudy’s handwriting:

  Dr. Hannah—I need your help to pull this off. Eggers can never know.

  I got up and walked to my bedside table. Here was the Clovis point Eggers had given me, and his battered, annotated copy of my book, as well as the cast of my mother’s leg and a pair of Janis’ blocky eyeglasses. I placed Trudy’s note among these things. I knew Trudy and Eggers’ excavation was still wrong, that the whole project was undertaken in bad faith, but I must admit that a feeling of well-being had spread over me at the idea that Trudy had learned a thing or two, that I’d taught her something.

  I flossed and shaved, and in the shower I used double the shampoo, going after my scalp with a hive of fingernails. I put on a spiffy sportcoat while I steeped a cup of tea, though all I had was an herbal brand called BabyDreams, the only kind Janis could drink near the end. It tasted a little like candy canes, but I didn’t mind. I stood there a minute, sipping it. Her plants draped the room, and in the sideways light you could see the veins in leaves that look X-rayed.

  Then I took off the sportcoat, the slacks. I suppose I’d been planning all along to attend Julie’s lecture. In the back of my closet was a suit I’d worn only once, when I was invited to sit on a panel at Harvard. It was chocolate-brown, cut smart, with a faint windowpane pattern and a three-button breast. For a while, I’d lacked occasions to wear it again, and then, as time went by, the more I thought about that day, the less I wanted to remember it. The best minds in anthropology were there—Stanford’s Hatitia Wells, the Rogers-Klugman team from Princeton—but all I could think about was how the other panelists kept interrupting me, cutting me off, and when I finally got my chance, my mouth became a device whose sole purpose was to blab about my theory, my book, me. I honestly can’t remember one thing anybody else said. Maybe now, I figured, I could meet a new day in that suit.

  I didn’t so much put it on as step into it. The jacket hung perfectly—shoulders snug, vents loose, buttons custom-fit-and the slacks looked creased by cardsharps. “Julie,” I said, snapping the cuffs. School was only a block away, but I fired up the ’Vette. There’d be no parking, of course, but I could usually squeeze into that little zone reserved for motorcycles.

  On campus, I was struck by the void where the helicopter had been. Its absence was overwhelming. I had Trudy’s bag and about thirty minutes to get to work before Julie’s lecture, but I stood in the quad, just staring at the snowless zone where that chopper had been.

  Inside the anthro building, I needed a secure location to study Keno. The answer, when I nosed around a little, was obvious: the Hall of Man. It was the only place with serious locks on the doors, and students, unless forced to enter, avoided the place like the plague. Peabody had also installed temperature and humidity controls to maintain his exhibits. The lighting was great. From my office, I grabbed a fine-work kit, complete with detail tools, most of them dental, and a couple of bottles of light acid for etching.

  With all my gear, I crossed campus for the biology depart
ment. The white lawns were nearly empty on a late Saturday morning. A lost Frisbee lay half exposed in the rotor-washed snow, and a pair of moon boots hung from the bough of a diseased elm, slowly turning in the bright light reflected from the newly iced river. This side of campus was home to all the “hard” sciences, like engineering and physics, and all the buildings had been constructed in the sixties with the same lust for broad expanses of cheap, overly red brick.

  I used an old master key Peabody had left me to get upstairs into the dissection lab, which was also where they stored all the veterinary pathogens. I needed a gurney, and, luckily, lined up at the edge of the room were several stainless-steel autopsy tables. Any of these would be perfect for storing Keno, as Eggers and Trudy unearthed him piece by piece. I’d begun to wheel one away when I spotted one of those tall, rolling stools that lab techs use; I’d always wanted one of those, and this baby was chrome. I sat on it, lifting my legs to push off the cabinet. I rolled across the room toward the bovine-virus freezers, where I came face to face with a pair of big orange biohazard signs that warned of imminent, deadly contamination. I liked those swirly, spiky biohazard symbols—so threatening!—and when I pushed off and rolled back, I had these signs in my hand.

  The biohazard signs, when I’d taped them to the doors of the Hall of Man, had quite an effect. No one was going to bother Keno in there. He’d be safe on his personal autopsy table, though I didn’t like to think of it that way—we were reconstructing Keno, not the other way around, even though all we had of him were some bones from his left hand, half a forearm, and a shoulder blade. Ninety percent of his skeleton was still missing, and somehow I loved the knowledge that the other pieces would come, that he’d no longer be lost as the three of us brought him in from the cold. When I looked at those six empty feet of brushed steel, I didn’t see the metallic void where a person should be but, rather, the place where we were going to make the remotest of humans materialize.