Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  “Is it some sort of vessel?” Trudy asked.

  “Clovis Tupperware?” Eggers asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like it, though. There’s no evidence of Clovis being associated with pottery. Hunter-gatherers in general didn’t use clay. It’s heavy and bulky, and it wasn’t employed until people needed it, until they’d started agrarian lives and had things to store for long periods.”

  “It could be some sort of funeral offering,” Trudy said. “Maybe something for Keno to take with her to the afterlife.”

  “The problem is,” I said, shielding my eyes when Trudy pointed that light at me, “that the idea of taking material things into the next world really only comes about with the rise of agriculture, when people settle down and begin to accumulate things. That’s when cultures first start wanting to take it with them. It wouldn’t even occur to a hunter-gatherer to bring stuff to the afterlife. I have to say, this discovery bodes ill for the authenticity of this as a Clovis site.”

  “But we found a Clovis point,” Eggers said. “What better proof is there?”

  “Let’s say Keno was sort of an anthropologist, like us,” I answered. “A thousand years ago, Keno runs across a ten-thousand-year-old spear point, which she, I mean he, picks up and carries around until an untimely death.”

  “We’ll just radiocarbon the bones,” Trudy said. “If we get a Pleistocene date, then we know the Clovis used primitive pottery.”

  “What lab in the country would test artifacts without proper paperwork, especially if they just happen to turn out to be the oldest in the hemisphere?”

  “Enough mystery,” said Eggers. In one hand he lifted his torch, eyes shining from the fire, and in the other he hefted that spade. “Let’s crack this nut.”

  I pulled the ball close. “Don’t even joke,” I said.

  Trudy pointed the flashlight at the ball. “Maybe it’s filled with wampum,” she said. “You know, beads and shells. Or maybe even precious minerals, some raw quartz or obsidian, a cache of materials to flint-knap blades with.”

  Eggers said, “What if there’s a head in there?”

  We all stared at the ball. Nobody said anything for a moment.

  “We haven’t found the skull,” Eggers added. “It could be Keno’s mummified cranium.”

  We spoke in a flurry:

  “The shape’s too round,” Trudy pointed out.

  “The weight’s all wrong,” I said.

  “Plus, the size seems a bit too small,” Trudy added.

  “There’s no head in here,” I declared, holding the sphere away from me a little.

  Despite our efforts to convince each other to the contrary, there was suddenly no way to look at that ball without imagining a severed head at its center.

  “Look,” I said, “it’s time to be realistic. This job’s too big for us. This is a job for an entire research team, for Hatitia Wells at Harvard.”

  Trudy switched off the flashlight. Eggers just stared into the fire—the flames were low and clear as they wagged and popped above the coals. It was hard to believe he had made it from one spark, tindered from a stick and bow. There was nothing I could do about their disappointment.

  “Trudy,” I said, “let’s have that camera.”

  She pulled it from a bag in the snow and handed it to me. I didn’t even look at Eggers. I set the ball back, surrounded it with the contents of my pockets—change, nail clippers, as well as my watch—to provide scale, and then burned off all the Polaroids, getting the ball in situ from all angles. The bones were an important find, but all I wanted was a look inside that sphere. “I better get this back to campus,” I told them, hefting the ball again. “I’m going to be up all night.”

  “Wait, Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said. She touched me on the shoulder. “There’s one more thing,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I need your help.”

  Eggers pointed to a dark patch in the snow.

  “I think it has to do with that big set of chains,” he said.

  “The thing is,” Trudy said, “I have to get rid of that car. That cop said some detectives are coming tomorrow. I don’t have time to fix it. I don’t have anyplace to hide it.”

  “Sinking it in the lake was my idea,” Eggers added. “That water’s a hundred enos deep.”

  Trudy opened her mouth to make a plea, but already I knew I would fall for it. She could play up the mentor thing, or speculate on the many ways that car could jeopardize Keno. I nodded, and the next thing I knew, I was following her across the snow, carrying a petrified mudball that might or might not contain a human head. Within minutes, Trudy was wrapping a chain around the rear axle of my Corvette and securing it with a grappling hook, the kind you’d use to scale the walls of a bank. And then, like a dream, I was easing my car forward to take up the slack. I felt the tug of the GTO behind me, and I pulled away from Eggers and his fire, pale against the casino’s dazzle. Trudy ran the GTO without lights. Tractionless, it was a black ghost behind me, sleek and flat in the rearview mirror, floating side to side in the lane.

  When I turned left onto the river road, Trudy swung wide behind me, the haunch of her GTO busting a snowdrift high into the air, sending her shooting out of my mirror, into the other lane. Without a transmission, Trudy could only steer with the handbrake, and, trying to compensate, she pressed the brakes hard, making it seem as if my front tires were about to wheelie off the ground. When I hit the brakes, the chain went slack between us, sparking along the pavement like the Fourth of July.

  Heading toward Lewis and Clark Lake, I saw, every so often, the signal beacon of the Parkton air-traffic control tower. Alternating white and green, the beam seemed to sweep in vain. What was that lamp seeking with such seriousness, such ceaseless vigor? Of course the airport made me think of Julie, doing an about-face in the terminal, showing me her back. Oddly, though, my mind landed on that aluminum crate of little dogs. I pictured it still out there, forgotten on the pink runway, the airport grown dark and empty, no signs of life but the white breath of dogs through the vent holes.

  I eased off the gas as we neared the marina. We passed the old fish hatchery, its abandoned cement ponds lurking like pitfalls under snow, and then coasted along a field of empty boat trailers that looked in the moonlight like the graveyard of elephants they were always searching for in those old Africa movies. The chains rattled the ground as we passed Mr. Chippy’s Fish Ship, and the boat ramp’s speed bumps nearly tore the rear end out.

  The ice, when we put our wheels to it, was so white in the moonlight that it seemed like morning. Empty warming huts glowed blue-brown, and a layer of hoarfrost gave the lake ice a ruddy, purpled-over look. As we drove on the ice, everything changed. The GTO in my rearview mirror somehow coasted faster than I could drive. It kept closing on me, and the only way to avoid getting bumped was to speed up. I didn’t know which direction to head, the lake was so vast. But each time I sped up, that black car closed, the slack chains playing hell with the GTO’s undercarriage. Soon we were moving nearly fifty miles an hour, and when I sped up again, it only drew Trudy closer. To avoid the impact, I turned my wheel slightly to the left. When her car floated past me, I knew we were in trouble.

  Slowly, my car began to turn. Suddenly I was traveling at highway speeds—backward—as we began spinning in tandem, slowly rotating counterclockwise like a giant bola, which is the weapon ancient humans used to eradicate the large, flightless birds of Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand, and Madagascar in the mid-to-late Pleistocene. In great revolutions, our cars swooshed round each other. Tufts of loose snow fleeced my windows, while the tires kicked up fits of ice that riddled the fenders and hood.

  When we came to a stop, I was half in the passenger’s seat, sharing it with Keno’s mudball. I sat there a minute, the windshield a cataract of frost and snow, waiting to see if I would barf. I pushed off the passenger seat and leaned back, putting both hands on the wheel.

  I looked in the mirror
. The rear window was clear enough so I could see Trudy in the moonlight, examining the interior of her car one last time. She had a glove in her teeth, held by a fingertip. She flipped down the visor to remove her registration, then policed all the personal possessions from the glove box. She popped the trunk and got out.

  Trudy startled me by knocking on the window, which was so sheeted with ice I needed two hands to roll it down. She leaned her head in. “This’ll go pretty fast.”

  I got out and watched Trudy slide under the ’Vette.

  “You got some rust under here,” she said after she’d crammed her head and shoulder under the rear end. “You really should invest in some fresh undercoating.”

  I heard some clanking around under there, the rattle of links running over the axle, and then the hollow clunk of the big hook hitting the ice.

  “Shouldn’t we unhook the other end of the chain?” I asked.

  “I don’t need that chain anymore,” she said from under the chassis. “Do you?”

  “No,” I told her. “No, I guess not.”

  She wasn’t even greasy when she slid out. She walked to the open trunk of the GTO, where she pulled out a chain saw. She tugged its starter cord once or twice in the cold, adjusted the choke, then tugged some more. Blue smoke puffed as the saw tried to start, filling the air with the smell of unburned two-cycle oil.

  Almost instinctively, I began backing up.

  Right then, the saw caught, and Trudy opened the throttle, racing the little motor till the smoke blew out. Then she put the saw to ice. Where was my inhaler? I patted my pockets.

  The saw, when Trudy sank it, drew from the ice a jet of material that kicked high and low, depending on how she rocked the blade—a curtain of water ran from the bar when she plunged deep, and a sleet of ice chips kicked when she got the saw to bite. I scanned the horizon, taking in the slate-white lake, limned with an intangible shore that could be dark green or purple, depending on how you squinted. The noise from the saw was like radiation in the cold; it penetrated all things, fled all directions, and there was no echo.

  I wrung my hands as the saw raced and stalled in the thick ice. The teeth bucked and dug while Trudy cut her way around the passenger side of the GTO. She worked the blade into a turn when she reached the trunk, and I was ready to leap into my two-seater and speed away from this dark business. The whole scene was straight out of the old whaling days, a scrimshaw tableau where a figure traversed the white expanses of whale belly sinking a blade into an up well of fluid that wallered his boots and oilskins.

  Then it happened. Trudy had cut around three-quarters of the car when the saw froze up, bound in the ice. Things suddenly went quiet, and there was only the sound of her huffing and straining to pull the blade free. Then the great cracking came, like a limb cleaving from a tree.

  The ice breached, and Trudy ran. Behind her, a great rectangle of ice tilted back, the GTO rearing with it like an old cowboy showboating his horse. The slab of ice heeled higher, grinding loud as a manhole cover, and almost lost in the noise was the cracking snap of a chain and the clanging as it hooked something in the undercarriage of my Corvette.

  The GTO began to go down. A surge of water washed out of the hole in all directions, an ankle-deep wave that turned the frosted ice clear black. Only as the water soaked my boots, making them seem perched atop a sheet of smoked glass, did I realize that something else had happened, that, as the black of a hot rod slipped into the abyss of the lake, my Corvette had started to baby-crawl backward toward the hole.

  Silently, the GTO slipped from view until there was only an oily froth of bubbles and a Corvette following in a strange, halting dance across the water-slicked ice. In the moonlight, the ’Vette sashayed backward in starts and fits, the rear end stuttering one way, then reversing, the headlights sweeping this way and that across the ice. When its tail reached open water, and the chain hung straight down, the car stopped. Below, we knew a beast of metal hung by its nose ring in the black static of the lake. There was only a steady bubbling of air as the GTO filled with water, making it heavier and heavier. The ice let out a low, patient moan as the burden grew on the back of the ’Vette, the rear tires flattening, the front end threatening to rise up.

  “Keno’s head,” I shouted. “Save the head.”

  Trudy started running toward the ’Vette, half slipping in the skein of water.

  “Come on, Dr. Hannah,” she called, skidding to the car. She put her weight on the front bumper. Still the car wanted to rise, the shock absorbers becoming visible in the wheel wells. The ice around her began to grimace under the strain—fractures shot out that prattled and chatted. Over the years, I’d become comfortable working shoulder to shoulder with the dead, but how it stunned me to see Trudy leap into the lap of death itself. I had no intention of hopping into a Corvette to ride shotgun with the reaper. But what was I to do? I can’t say I ran, exactly. It was more like a trot. There was only an inch of water over the black ice, but this film somehow magnified the well of black below, made it feel as if the ruminant deeps were intent on me.

  At the passenger door, I paused.

  Trudy was bent over, her arms brought to bear on the fender, while, below our feet, the ice seemed to glow with stress. If you could see microwaves or hear nerves fire, that’s what it was like.

  “Open the door, Dr. Hannah,” she told me. “Save Keno’s sphere.”

  I pulled the handle and swung the door wide, the interior looking small and sad: the Eagles poked from the tape deck, my keys dangled from the ignition, and with the clutch and yawn of the ice below me, a sermon on impatience, it was as if I could see the whole history of my car at once—from the salesman in Sioux Falls who first showed me the yellow “lady slayer” on his showroom floor to the linger of gin my father had left two nights before. I felt the rumble of the engine, smelled the hot gear oil, heard the kiss of the clutch. Oh, my willing V-8! Those worn leather seats, the custom dash, the heated glove box where I kept the old trowel Peabody’d given me, ready for any emergency!

  “Dr. Hannah,” Trudy groaned.

  “Right,” I said. I scrambled into the passenger seat and reached under the dash, where I found Keno’s ball, still warm from the floorboard heater. My inhaler was in the driver’s-side console, but I couldn’t reach it. I grabbed Keno’s ball, locked the door, and slammed it shut.

  Trudy let go. The Corvette executed a perfect backflip into the water, showing us its dingy belly before crashing white and vanishing. We watched through the black ice as a twirl of headlight, fractured and swooshy, illuminated mushrooms of surfacing air. Ropy umbilical cords of motor oil floated up and pooled under us. Then the lights dwindled as two hot rods, their fates linked forever, raced to their graves.

  We just stood there, looking past our wet feet, waiting, I suppose, for the crash as they hit bottom. They ghosted silently through my imagination, spinning ancient and celestial. If they struck the bottom of the lake, this hammer and mace, we didn’t hear, and they were left turning in my imagination.

  “My car,” I exclaimed. I dropped to my knees in the cold, a ball of mud under my arm. I just sat there, looking through the ice, though there was nothing to see. When Trudy put a hand on my shoulder, I shrugged it off. “It was more than just a car,” I said. “It was a part of me.”

  Trudy took my arm and helped me up. “Come on, Dr. Hannah,” she said.

  She straightened my collar and dusted imaginary snow off my parka.

  I didn’t want to be consoled.

  “That was crazy,” Trudy said. “No one could have predicted that.”

  “That wasn’t crazy,” I said. “You sank my car.”

  “It was a fluke,” she said, softly. “The way that chain popped up and caught the axle—one in a million.” She looked me in the eye. “But what matters is, you were there for me, Dr. Hannah. I needed you, and you were there. Warrior peoples like the Bantu, the Cherokee, and the samurai know a debt like this can only be repaid with an equitable act of
heroism. I trace my lineage back to the buffalo soldiers on one side and the Kaesong Brigade on the other, and I just want you to know this: whenever I can be of service to you, anytime, anyplace, and no matter what engaged, I will assist you.”

  Trudy’s pledge, ringing like an ancient warrior’s call to arms, humbled me. She deserved more than a washed-up professor who ogled the breadth of her shoulders. She deserved a mentor worthy of her code of honor. There, on that dark, frozen lake, my Corvette sinking to its final resting place, I couldn’t even meet her fierce gaze. To acknowledge such a pledge was to commend myself worthy of it. Instead, I stuffed my hands in my pockets, leaned back in my wet shoes, and turned into the wind.

  We began walking, cinching cuffs and turning up collars against the cold. My boots were freezing stiff already. There was no conversation as we headed for the marina, our eyes trained on the brief stretch of skiddish ice before our feet. We grabbed each other every so often to keep our balance, but there was nothing sexual in this sudden groping. Rather, we were merely two people reaching out to steady one another.

  It was as if I were crossing that galactic glacier I’d imagined the other night, except I was not alone now; my fate was not to bump into humans once a decade, but to move with them. Anytime, anyplace. No one had ever said those words to me, and it’s laughable how quickly they solidified in my heart, like the notes to posterity kids write in wet cement. On my personal glacier, when I was lost in a crevasse, there was someone who would come looking for me, no matter what engaged.

  When the moon went behind the clouds, the ice seemed underlit somehow. When the moon appeared again, the water once more darkened. There was something reassuring in this rhythm. At the boat launch, the ice clawed into the grooved incline of the ramp like the first ooze that pulled itself from the seas, and, as we crossed from ice to cement, the footing felt a little too trustworthy for my taste. Buildings appeared abandoned in the late indigo, as if summer would never come, and no one would ever rent a paddleboat again or ever lie back in the itchy grass, waiting for the Coney Dog Hut to open. Past the igloos of upturned canoes and a two-man ranger station, we moved single-file through this ashen woodcut of summer, Trudy, then me.