Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

  “Sure, Bud. Sorry.”

  The foreman’s look grew softer again, heavier through the jowls.

  “Or that is,” he said, “if I say you should get another day, then it’s more than likely you’ll get another day.”

  Pinnerz opened his stance to try and catch whatever breeze there was. He broke off eye contact. The rest of the crew slouched without speaking, backs propped unprotected against jagged large pieces of pavement, faces shaded by their helmets’ short brims. The wrappers of their candy bars or donuts poked up stiffly from their meaty grips. Pinnerz thought of lizard-necked old card sharks settled in for a few serious hands. This at ten-thirty in the morning.

  But on an urban dig—so he himself had told the TV people, when they’d taped a spot a couple weeks ago— sometimes what mattered least was what you knew about archaeology. Particularly at a dig like this one, a rush job forced by an improvement in the public transportation. As delicately as Pinnerz broke down a soil sample, here, he had to be that much more delicate about when he chose to go over the foreman’s head. And no dropped button or coin was ever so iffy as Bud’s look. Those three-quarter-mast eyelids and the droop at the corners of the mouth, a loose-muscled scrutiny that might suggest a sneer at the visitor or might instead be a simple playing-down of the whole situation. Such calculations were measured in the fraction of a wrinkle. In fact a get-together with a crew like this, despite their beef and grime, could turn on something as tricky as the emphasis given a single syllable. By now Pinnerz got some enjoyment out of all the balancing necessary: PhD versus dropout, desk job against manual labor, a man who ate dry salad for lunch against those who had donuts or candy at every coffee break. He had to carry his point through these as if shepherding a bubble up a chimney.

  “Anyway, Henry,” the foreman said, “I thought you had them bones all figured out yesterday. I thought your son was going to do that.”

  “Didn’t work out.”

  The foreman’s eyes hitched up, and Pinnerz understood that he’d spoken too roughly.

  “Look, Bud. Bones are difficult. It’s not just a matter of radiocarbon dating, and anyway radiocarbon dating would take time too.”

  “You told us that already, Henry. You told us that two days ago.”

  Another bad move. With one hand Pinnerz opened the neck of his shirt a little more, and touched the sweat already in the hollow at the base of his neck.

  “Now we were planning to go in there today, Henry. We got some cables to get in there.”

  Pinnerz was nodding again, holding himself carefully eye-to-eye with Bud and letting the man have his say. Thank God he’d built up some goodwill before this. Thank God that when the TV people had come, he’d had sense enough to make sure they got Bud’s side of the story as well as his own. Indeed that visit had provided a kind of backdrop for today’s. A kind of rehearsal. For the cameras Pinnerz had dressed down, just a working stiff, while this morning he’d chosen a good white short-sleeve and pants with a crease, in order to have that extra hint of authority. More considerations very different from what he’d gone to school for. But he could tell the DPW’s men felt the same; he could hear the way Bud now plumped up the words “public servant.” Even Pinnerz’s first name had become a stage prop.

  “So, Henry. You can see my position, I hope. I’ve got to know what you’re going to do with the extra time that you couldn’t do already.”

  “Well I’m not chasing after anything impossible,” Pinnerz said. “Honestly. All we’ve got now is a tooth and a bit of that jaw, but with a human skeleton just one more bone is usually enough to make a, a more precise identification.”

  “Or you could find nothing. You could waste a day.”

  “Well there are the property records, too. If we don’t at least take the time to look them over, then that day’s work’s been wasted.”

  “Wasted?” Bud tipped his head slowly towards first one ear, then the other, as if the next words required special balance. “You said your son didn’t do the work.”

  “I said he didn’t work out. He did the work.”

  “Don’t start shouting, Henry. I get enough of that around here already.”

  Like that, Pinnerz decided to talk. Where had keeping secrets got him? Where, except stumbling into one wrong move after another? He wasted a moment freeing his shirt from the splotches of sweat across his back, but he’d made up his mind already. Because no matter how carefully he controlled the story—no matter how much he made it seem as if the story was only between the girl and his son—talking would get some part of it off his chest at least.

  “Okay.” He squatted for the first time. “Okay, you might as well know. You see I’ve got this research assistant this summer. A woman. A girl, I mean; she’s my son’s age. She’s 23. Ah. And so you see Tripp—that’s my son—well he’s her age, like I say, and she’s, she’s not bad-looking.”

  “No kidding,” the talker in the crew said. “She’s the blonde, right? The one with the hair always blowing in her face. She hardly ties it back even when she’s over there working. And she’s got—”

  “Quiet,” Bud said. “I want to hear this.”

  In fact all the men were looking at Pinnerz. But before he continued he squinted back towards the dig a while, forearms on knees and one set of knuckles grinding against the other palm. A pause long enough for one of the crew to choke on his coffee and thickly spit.

  “So yesterday,” Pinnerz said at last, “I, I sent them over to the state records office. I sent them both over there. Ah. I sent them in order to get whatever material he, ah, in order to find whatever material they might find that could help us. I mean we have to know who owned this property to begin with. And then also since this used to be shoreline here, well I don’t want to get your hopes up but these could be Indian bones. These could be 400, 500 years old.

  “Anyway I, I sent my son and this girl over. To find out. And, ah. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a records office, but I’ll tell you, it’s just a big empty library. Essentially. It’s just, the stacks. These rows and rows of shelves and nobody ever there to bother you.”

  A couple chins started to rise. Some candy-stained teeth were showing.

  “Well so midway through, ah, sometime yesterday afternoon, I have to go over there. To the state records office. And there they tell me, my son and this girl—”

  The talker in the crew, his Mediterranean eyebrows and cheekbones emphasized by his glee, clenched both hands into fists and slapped the inside of one wrist against the back of the other rhythmically.

  Pinnerz managed a small grin himself. “Need I say more?”

  End of the card game. Helmets came off, faces cracked wide with laughter. A couple men even massaged their bald spots or, with goofy smiles, hooked the front scoops of their undershirts and yanked them down to reveal tattoos of stubby threatening knives or hearts fat as balloons. “Henry,” the foreman kept saying, “Henry.” A better relief than any breeze Pinnerz might have caught earlier. With the men laughing, he could wind up the story as fast and sloppily as he wanted. He could say that, since the state was paying for this project, it wouldn’t have been wise to let his son hang around after a scene like that. Nobody was going to forget a scene like that. So the boy had been asked to skip town; so the crew’s noise eased again as they followed his logic, the sniggers and chesty hoots drowned out by the traffic that went on circling just beyond the dry plywood walls round their excavation.

  And the girl?, someone asked

  “Well I, I do need a research assistant.”

  “Henry, Henry.”

  “And of course the money’s an obstacle for her. The summer’s almost over and a girl in her position doesn’t have many options.”

  Spoken like he was sorry. His wild story had resolved itself as an ordinary problem of hard cash, sorry. And the crew had quieted. The foreman even looked at his watch. But Bud’s half-smile showed more lip, and the corners of his eyes more white.

  “You kno
w,” the foreman said, “I useto have a place up in New Hampshire. Wasn’t much I mean, but my grandparents useto farm and we had the barn converted like. Well that didn’t work out after the divorce. Henry here being divorced, he’ll understand.”

  Pinnerz understood; now the foreman had to have his turn.

  “Before me’n’Charl, before we went our separate ways so to speak, my Eddie was up there practically every weekend, I mean all year round, up in that barn with a different girl every weekend. Regular cathouse we were running. So then about two months after I had to sell—and I don’t mind telling you that was some kind of shock, letting go of the place. I had to just sit and look at the papers for a whole weekend I think before I could sign ’em finally. But anyway like I was saying, two-three months go by after we sell. And then I get this phone call, from the police up there. It seems my Eddie broke in. They’d changed the locks on him but he broke in. And him and some girl, up there—”

  Bud nodded the conclusion. His crew didn’t so much laugh as shake their heads noisily, hitching their boots in closer, hooking their elbows round their knees. Pinnerz stayed in his squat and kept his eyes on his folded hands.

  “You know just last Saddy,” the talker said, “I was up by the rotary there, the one by Tufts there, when these two girls, I swear to God they looked like college girls, they—”

  “Save it, Rudy,” the foreman said. Bud was crumpling his coffee cup unnecessarily, folding it into something hard and wrinkled as a chip of granite. Pinnerz noticed that the black man in the crew was already on his feet. “We’ll have time for that kind of story at lunch.”

  Careful now. The space here at the top of the chimney was small as anywhere else, the bricks round his bubble as toothy and close as anywhere else. Pinnerz held his place while the men rose and chucked their papers past him into the nearest can. When he stood, likewise, he ignored them. Only after the archaeologist had stretched two ways and squinted back at his dig once more, after the black man and another worker had pulled on their gloves and wrestled one shoulder each under a massive loop of black cable—only then did Bud step deliberately into Pinnerz’s line of sight.

  “So it’s your professional opinion,” the foreman began, “that them bones might be Indian bones.”

  No such luck. Pinnerz would have liked this to be an older skeleton, and not only because a native American drew more attention in the field. Also an Indian could be anyone. This sense of possibility would always tickle at Pinnerz, whenever he worked with preliterate cultures. An opening in the past that seemed as large sometimes as the opening beyond his own future. But no; these bones were more recent. That very night, in his study, Pinnerz was astonished to discover that in fact he might know the corpse’s name. The records his son had dug out the previous afternoon revealed, after an hour’s cross-checking between old maps and new, that for thirty-two years this land had been used as a fitting-yard by one of the shipbuilders who thrived during the generation just after the Revolution. Thomas Handesyd Perkins. And like most Brahmins the man had been a tyrant when it came to keeping the books, insisting on the same careful records for slaves and indentures as for ship’s rigging and townhouse improvements. So, with that much to help date the findings made at the same level as the bones, the key for Pinnerz became the fragments of a pelvis his students had unearthed that afternoon. They’d never have found it if he hadn’t gotten them the additional time. First dusting the new bit of skeleton once more, Pinnerz now took a good half-hour working it over with a pair of calipers, and he checked each measure against the appropriate graph. No question, then. This had been a woman. Judging from the tooth and mandible found earlier, she’d been young, less than twenty-five; judging from the soil at the site, she’d lain underwater, kept from rising possibly by some length of rope or chain like those that had turned up throughout the old fitting-yard. Back to Perkins’s records. About midnight, just as the aches were starting to close round his spine, Pinnerz found her. An Irish indentured girl assigned to the dockside kitchens, Mary Chasuble or Chaseable. The name in either case no doubt had been invented, once she’d come to this country, so that she might have that much more of a fresh start. “Dissap’d,” the record read. “Thot Drown’d or run away. 21 Sep 1799. Ag’d 19 or 20.”

  The aches were starting to close round his spine. He headed for the stairs, for Zefira’s room. At first he climbed with one hand gripping the bannister, but the tight hold made him think of his mother and her walker. He let go and instead opened the neck of his shirt a little more.

  She wasn’t in bed. Of course she lived on all-nighters anyway, the driven star student, but it looked as if this one had been worse than most. Her desk lamp burned feebly inside the rough column of her smoke. On every side of her, books stood in stacks. Plus usually she played up her hair for all it was worth, teasing it to such a fine blond blowziness that the first time Pinnerz had met her he’d asked a classic roll-call question: was Zefira a Jewish name? But tonight she’d let herself go so badly that her hair’s snarled ends looked like a smearing of seafoam. As if Pinnerz’s son’s shirt, a couple sizes too big for her, had gotten stuck to her shoulder blades by a line of those dirtied bubbles.

  He’d been stopped in the doorway. At last her head jerked up, startled, and she turned from her papers.

  “You were right,” Pinnerz said at once. “They’re not pre-Revolutionary.”

  He kept his hand on the knob, carefully holding himself eye-to-eye with her.

  “They’re not?” Finally. “That’s too bad. Too bad for the old savage.”

  “Well they’re not bad, Zefira. They’re just not pre-Revolutionary.”

  She gave him what might have been a moment’s lead-in to a smile, then stubbed it out with her next cigarette. He took the three steps to her bed and sat.

  “I came up here,” he told her, “and I said you were right.”

  She faced the bed.

  “Okay, Dr. Pinnerz. What else can you tell me?”

  He inhaled through his mouth and began about the bones. Right away he found that—in spite of the hour, his back, the unwashed closeness of this girl—he couldn’t keep down his enthusiasm. His two-way excitement, first at having done such good work, next at having found the work so rewarded. Together they picked him up like a spiral wind Now he could no longer look at Zefira, only let his eyes lock and talk on. He heard himself start to fumble for words and even, very unprofessional, to chase after ideas with no clear sense of where they’d lead. But Pinnerz let the awkwardness go. The rest of his life after all felt to him like a continually narrowing rat’s maze, with department chairs on one side and editor’s desks on the other. Yes he could get a rudimentary charge out of this everyday slog, just as this morning he’d found his own low-level relief in the nip-and-tuck with Bud’s crew. But tonight was inspiration. Another stumbling sentence and he was sure of it. Tonight, the reason he toughed out all the rest had whipped both his assistant and himself into its rising spiral. Because this woman he’d brought up, and named— there’d never been anything like her at an urban dig. Now she’d stand by him forever. The Pinnerz Case. “We’ll go on TV again,” he said, “you and I. We, we’ll have to break out the jeans and T-shirts again and—”

  “Hank, Jesus!” Zefira wailed. “You old . . . Jesus.”

  He blinked, focussed. Apparently he’d been staring at the button of her jeans as he spoke. When he raised his eyes to her face, Pinnerz found a look so uncomplicated that at first he couldn’t think of what it meant.

  “I can’t believe you,” she said. “I can’t believe... Look, tell me. How far are you going to take this?”

  His forearms were back on his knees. He turned his hands as if trying to catch the last breath out of a restroom dryer.

  “You know years and years from how, Hank, it’s not going to matter how hard you tried to hang on. All that trouble yesterday, all the times I had to sneak around, it’s not going to matter. And even what I got into with you, back at the beginning of
the summer... I mean, I admit it was a wrong move. I made a wrong move, Hank. But you weren’t married or anything. You were just, this very impressive older man who’d given me this wonderful opportunity.”

  Deep sigh. Pinnerz watched her flick one big toe with the other.

  “But Hank, how long are you going to think that gives you some kind of hold on me? Last night, you threw such a fit, I admit you had me bulldozed for a while. You had me talking to the walls in here today. But finally I realized that years and years from now all that’s going to matter to me is, this was the summer when I met Tripp. Jesus, I hope so. I hope...” She cleared her throat. Then, louder: “So Hank, tell me. When can I go see him without sneaking around? When do we all stop acting like I’m some kind of slave?”

  Pinnerz couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even think what was practical, or begin trying to reckon her background against his. He knew only that if he so much as looked at Zefira, he’d have to deal with the same uncomplicated hatred he’d seen in her face a minute before, and seen last night in his son’s as well. Lying, scheming bastard, he’d shouted at Tripp then. All summer long you never cared what I was after, lying bastard kid. Hard words that now emerged again to ache in his neck like mutant teeth. Between that new bony catch in his breathing and what this girl had asked, it was all Pinnerz could do just to manage a ghostly gesture with one hand. A signal that he wanted more time.

  Thirty Spot, Fifteen Back on Either Side

  She had appealed to Grissom unusually, that woman. Even now, twenty-five years further on, he wished he could find a way to tell his wife just what the experience with that woman had meant to him. His wife Syl, Grissom believed honestly, had been a part of it. Because when he had first laid eyes on that woman, on that whore all dolled up in the nightclubby fashions of the mid-Fifties, she had appealed to him…unusually. She’d appealed to him as a kind of perverted lens through which he could see both himself and his wife more clearly, more specially. Syl, he wished he could tell his wife now, you were up in that room with us. And surely, after thirty years married to Grissom, Syl would understand a rising young executive’s one-night layover with a pickup in another hotel. But during this month just past, the story had got out of Grissom’s control. It had got out into the Chicago papers before he could find the words to explain it to his wife.