“On tour here, are you?”
“No, I’m studying at Cambridge.”
“Archaeology, then?”
She shook her head. “I wish I were. The piano.”
Audrey Williams reached out and seized one of her hands. “You’ve lovely piano fingers. Long as tuning forks. Dig around in this dirt for a week, they won’t stay so lovely.” She looked at Grimes again. “Still, you can’t beat her back with a stick . . . She wrote letters to Mortimer Wheeler when she was a girl.”
“Ah. If Sir Mort could see you now I’m certain he’d write back. Have an interest in this sort of thing?”
“When I was a little girl I thought I’d mount an expedition to Syria. Find another Rosetta stone to decipher the Hittite hieroglyphs.”
“Ambitious.”
“Not ambitious enough, I’m afraid. Now I just play piano.”
Grimes looked off at an intact clock tower, fifty yards away. Otherwise the surroundings were a shamble of loose brick and standing water, the occasional lonesome wall. The random reach of bombs.
“I myself was a violinist, once upon a time. Not an unpromising one, either. But I caught the antiquarian bug young myself, from a schoolmaster. Went to work in a museum thinking it would ensure a life in the trenches.
“Now I mediate squabbles between the Corporation of London and the patrons of various antiquities societies. I conduct excavations mainly from afar. I placate developers and then explain it all to the press. I’ve become a bureaucrat, totally without intent.” Grimes looked at her. “Maybe should’ve stayed on with the violin.”
Catherine couldn’t tell if he was joking. His half smile never seemed to waver. She said, “Ever since I got here I can’t stay away. It’s not what I expected.”
“You must be serious about music, too. If that’s what brought you.”
Catherine smiled. “I’ve always thought I was . . . I’m certainly supposed to be.”
“Catherine, is it? Have you read any Forster?”
“George Forster? The naturalist on the Cook expeditions?”
His smile widened. “Beat her back indeed. E. M. Forster, the novelist. You might find him worthwhile. In archaeology, it’s helpful to remember it’s not all buried treasure and hieroglyphs. We’re also unearthing a bit of ourselves.”
A little later one of the excavators gave a shout. Audrey Williams and Grimes made their way through the warren of rubble and trenching. Catherine followed but kept to the side.
“Ah,” said Grimes. The excavator had unearthed a bit of stone foundation, straight sides jutting like no construction found in nature. “What I hoped. Let’s flag this and run a new trench here, see if we get the same run. Very good work.”
Grimes noticed Catherine scrutinizing the foundation from a dozen feet away. “Heavens child, it’s been buried a thousand years at least. You can’t hurt it.”
She stepped forward and knelt in the moist dirt. She put her fingers lightly on the textured surface of the exposed rock, felt the same visceral chill she felt at the site of the turret a few weeks earlier.
“We’re standing on a causeway, above the bank of a vanished river. I don’t mean this as metaphor. It shows on antiquated maps, in ancient depictions of Londinium. That standing water, there and there, welling up like blood through a scrape—that’s the remains of Walbrook. You can see the outfall still, west of the Cannon railway bridge. Walbrook was the drinking water for the Roman garrison.”
Catherine knew already the brook had run through the wall of the Roman settlement, hence the name. Her first day on the site the excavators told her the stream sprang from a marsh north of the city, flowed with other rivulets through a shallow valley finally to join the Thames.
“A thousand years later that had changed. The Walbrook had become a sewer, again no metaphor. The Romans were long gone and London had become a city, a teeming kettle of Normans and Saxons, Vikings, Celts, who knows what, sprawled beyond the old city walls. A metropolis even by our standards, but an entire nation to the medieval mind.
“Imagine the waste. Tons of it, century after century, through plagues and burnings and burials. Now imagine that waste cast into the rivers, not only the Walbrook but the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Thames itself.
“The Fleet and the Thames are still with us. The Walbrook simply stopped, by the sixteenth century no more than a legend. Even its river bottom disappeared.
“Some of this is speculation. A tale I tell myself as I work, because we don’t know for certain the function or the form of the Walbrook, and that is why we’re here. That wall you’re touching—fascinating, but entirely secondary. Walbrook mattered to Roman London, influenced its layout, possibly its very purpose. We would like to find out why. We need to know the nature of a stream that no longer exists.
“Catherine, I don’t know you at all. I don’t know your nature any more than I know the Walbrook’s. But I do know it’s regrettably rare to work at something with genuine passion. Surely you know that Cambridge has one of the oldest archaeology institutions in the world.”
Catherine found herself nodding.
Grimes fished a writing pad and fountain pen from an inside pocket. He wrote a name and tore the page loose and handed it to her. “This is a chair at the archaeology college. If you like I’ll ring him on your behalf. Perhaps you can sit through a course or two, if you have the time. I don’t mean to divert your attention from your chosen field, but it seems a shame to be so close and miss the chance.”
She took the scribbled name as though this were the Rosetta stone itself. “I’m honored,” she said.
“The honor’s mine. I’ll tell him that what you need isn’t theory, but practice. If you know what I mean.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You can’t know how much this means to me.”
He fixed his half smile on her, eyebrows lifted to the sky.
By the middle of the week she’d dropped her music studies entirely. She told her Fulbright contact she’d forfeit if necessary but even through the hollow, impersonal detachment of a radiophone the woman seemed unsurprised. She said she’d see what she could do. Apparently this was not the first time Europe had altered the plans of a young American. Catherine knew she should call her parents as well but the very prospect torqued her stomach into knots. Finally she settled on a telegram.
She had one day of lectures each week. Otherwise she was steered right into practical field analysis, with a special focus on what had recently been termed rescue archaeology. A fittingly dire designation. Grimes himself requested she stay on with Audrey Williams in the London rubble.
She was promoted from mere volunteer with little ceremony. Audrey Williams set her on a mound of excavated mud with a spade and a small gardener’s rake. Simple enough, though to Catherine the implements held the symbolic power of a Scythian’s warhorse, a minuteman’s musket.
She took one last look at her hands, her smooth, unbroken hands, with their perfect fingers and pointed little nails. She sunk the spade into the earth.
She let David take her, very soon after she returned from England. She was a changed person and he knew it too and it was time. He had changed himself in her absence, wrought by the pace of his work and the tapering of his athletic life. He didn’t row anymore. His arms and shoulders had lost their stitch-splitting bulk.
His hands had softened as well and this is what she noticed first, particularly in contrast to her own after a year’s digging. Her fingernails were no longer tipped with fine little points but by blunt edges, her once-smooth palms and delicate fingers now callused and gouged and scratched.
David on the other hand had become deskbound, spending his time brokering deals by telephone or reading through contracts and negotiations. She knew this lack of physicality was a problem for him because he was restless, constantly twitching. He kept talking of joining a gymnasium once his workload let up.
They were walking near his apartment. She’d been back a week and they had dinner in the late
afternoon. He told her he’d missed her, missed her something fierce.
“I discovered myself, you know.” She meant it as a caution.
“I can tell,” he said. “It makes you beautiful.”
They planned to see a movie, Blackboard Jungle, about unruly teenagers and this new music they were listening to. Movie and music both were all the rage, but Catherine had a restlessness of her own. She knew what it was.
David had paused to buy a paper to get the show times. She wandered a few feet ahead, staring down at her kneecaps and her bare sharp shins beneath the hem of her skirt. She turned back toward him as he approached, walking with the paper in front of his face. She hooked the top of the page with an index finger and lowered it like a slip. He peered at her. Sunday, the sidewalk around them leaf-dappled and empty. Still she spoke quietly.
“I want you to undress me. I want you to not make me pregnant.”
She walked in her bare feet to his bed. She was restless still but nervous as a deer. She tilted her head back so he could kiss her neck, felt his mouth on the thin skin of her clavicle and felt his hand move to her breast. She felt her nipples fill with blood and stand like hard little stones.
His shirt was off and she touched him as though he were a stove that might yet be hot. He hovered over her, his tongue on her neck and in her mouth and briefly on the lobe of her ear. She felt the grip of his teeth. A spasm shot through her in a jolt.
He undid the foil on a rubber and her eyes went briefly to his member. A little missile. Scar of circumcision. A glistening bead had formed and it dripped now down the inverted V of his glans. She looked away and up to his eyes.
“Sorry,” he said.
She shook her head. “What do you mean?”
He fiddled with the condom. “I know it’s sort of indelicate.”
She thought to tell him he had the wrong idea about her, that she was simply quiet and this was not the same as demure. She couldn’t come up with the words.
He opened her legs and looked down upon her and said, “My God.” He lowered himself and began to push to get inside her. He was in the wrong place. He mumbled again, “I’m sorry,” and with that she knew he felt as nervous as she did. She shifted her hips and reached in between them and took in her fingers for the first time the tremendous hardness of a lust-driven man. She tried to imagine her mother in this situation and couldn’t. She put the tip of him where he needed to be.
After a moment she understood the slick ooze that had leaked from him, understood it by the absence of anything similar on the rubber that he wore. She gasped from a flash of pain and then cried out as he tore through her with a mighty push. He backed off a little but then couldn’t seem to help himself. He thrust and thrust and she thought surely he’s all the way in me now surely he’s all the way in me now, only to find that he wasn’t.
Her insides went raw. She gritted her teeth to keep from screeching and clenched the bed sheet in each fist. She lay as still as possible and knew with a sadness underlying the physical pain that this was not what men wished for in a lover. He finally finished with a series of sharp animal breaths and a low, lazy moan. His weight went dead and pressed her into the bed.
She was bleeding and in pain where before she had only been restless. He told her it was wonderful.
Catherine came awake, a battering at the front door rattling the panes in the window above her head. The little bedroom was a blare of sunlight. She wasn’t sure what time sleep finally took her but now with the morning clearly advanced she could barely get her eyes open.
She’d overheated and shed her pajama bottoms, had no recollection of this. She found them wadded in the sheets by her feet and pulled them on. The front door boomed again.
She parted the metal blinds in the living room. A man on the front porch peered back. He raised his eyebrows as though he really didn’t have time for this. Catherine opened the door.
“You the archaeology girl?”
He had cowboy boots and a long frame and the hotshot insolence of a fighter pilot. Catherine became highly conscious of her pajamas. “I’m Catherine. Lemay. You must be the wrangler.”
“I must be the wrangler. Otherwise answer to Jack Allen. Looks like you’re getting a fine early start to your day here in the great American West.”
“I had some trouble sleeping last night. Not quite settled in. I had a long day yesterday.” She wondered why she was explaining herself to this person she didn’t know.
“I guess the fat man told you to expect me.”
She assumed he meant Dub Harris. “His secretary said you know this country well. That you could guide me if I needed a guide.”
“That’s two for two. I know this country, you will need a guide. Ride horses at all?”
“I haven’t in years.”
“That’s gonna change. That Dodge of his can only get you so far.”
“So I found out.”
He narrowed his eyes at her and she saw faint crow’s marks appear, eroded remnants of wind and rain and sun. He was as lean and as wiry as the man in the canyon. “You found out how.”
She shrugged in her pajamas and she saw his otherwise unwavering eye flick to the fold of her neckline. She wished she could adjust her top without appearing to. “I drove into the canyon yesterday. To the river. Got a flat tire in the process, which I suppose proves your point.”
“You went alone?”
She shrugged again and slid her neckline farther north. “I had no idea how to find you. I didn’t even know your name. I didn’t want to wait to get started.”
He looked at her thin form swimming within folds of silk, at her green eyes and her hair pulled into a ponytail behind her face. He pointed at the ambulance in the drive. “You drove that into the canyon. By yourself.”
“Yes, by myself.”
“You got a flat and still made it home again.”
“Yesterday.”
He said, “Where’s the flat now?” But before she could answer he was already striding off the cement porch and across the ground toward the ambulance. She felt as though her story were being checked for veracity before her very eyes and she stepped out of the house and after him in a flash of indignation. Her bare heel found something sharp in the grass, something that smarted like a hornet’s sting.
Jack Allen sprung the latch on the rear doors of the ambulance and swung them wide. He observed the tire, pierced and impotent on the floorboards. “I may have been wrong about you, Miss Lemay.” He squinted at her. “Silk pajammies or not.”
“What do you know about the Crow Indians?”
“What do you need to know?”
“Where to look in the canyon, for starters. Frankly to my eyes it doesn’t appear very habitable but supposedly it’s special to them. Sacred, I guess. If I learn why I might have a place to begin.”
“Reckon you’ll have to get yourself an Indian to figure that one out. Provided you can peel him off his barstool.”
She cocked her head.
He pulled the flat from the rear of the Dodge. “Feds lifted the prohibition on Indian liquor sales three years ago. Tavern’s the only thing most of them find sacred these days. Nothing against taverns, of course.”
“What are you doing with my tire?”
“Taking it. I’ll drop it to get fixed.”
“I can drop it myself. I know the service station attendant and I need to take his gas can back anyway.”
Jack Allen shook his head. “Fat man has his own garage. I’ll handle it.”
She didn’t press the issue although she knew she was effectively barred from the canyon until he brought the tire back. At his mercy. Maybe that was the idea. She would not go down without making a nuisance of herself. “I’m going to need to get back into the canyon. Obviously.”
“Obviously. When.”
She looked down the street, at the line of newish, smallish houses that so resembled her own. The homes of roughnecks and drilling engineers. Company people, riding for the b
rand. But she could not imagine Jack Allen as a neighborhood denizen. “Soon, within the next day or so.”
“Tomorrow, then. I’ll be here at five. With horses.”
“A.M.?”
She swore he smirked. She got the sense he was baiting her for a protest. “What should I bring?”
He balanced the tire on a knee and fished something out of his shirt pocket. Aviator glasses. He settled them on the bridge of his nose and she knew in a flash Jack Allen was the man with the pipe by the side of the road. The mustanger. He fixed his mirrors upon her and she saw distorted twins of herself, misshapen and ridiculous in her pajamas in the yard. He said, “Boots and a big hat. Warm clothes. I’ll have rain gear for you.”
He seemed about to go on but then he glanced at the lettering on the door and now it was his turn to appear flummoxed. He pointed at the yellow palm print, its fan of fingers across the company logo. He said, “Who did that.” He dropped the tire to the ground and stepped closer. He looked back at her.
Catherine was hugging herself, her own hands tucked beneath each opposing arm. Her feet had gone cold but her heel still stung.
“Not you,” he said. “Not any woman. This is a man’s hand.” He put his own outstretched fingers atop the paint for illustration. “Knew a guy in the war used to do this. Carried a tin of paint, everywhere he went.” He looked at her, or perhaps beyond her. She couldn’t tell which. “We called these rigs meat wagons.” He laughed a little. “Takes me right back to Italy.”
Jack Allen went back to the fallen tire and set it again on edge. He wheeled it for the street and she noticed then his stake-side truck parked at the curb, roof still crumpled from the hooves of the horse. How had she missed that.
He looked back at her. “Five,” he said. “Don’t be in bed.”
Catherine went for the house.
She set out for Agency later that morning. Such a stark name for a town. She debated swinging by the service station to fish for some notion of what she might expect, but a surge of self-consciousness caused her to drive on by. She saw Mr. Caldwell in his coveralls, dispensing fuel into a Mercury sedan. Once past she remembered his gas can and swung around at the next crossroad.
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