by Nino Cipri
Min waited until dessert to bring out the wooden box, maybe five inches wide on each side. She slid it across the table to him. “These are for you,” she said. “Well, not for you, but—”
He didn’t need to open them to know what was inside. “The oracle bones?”
Min nodded, the emotions on her face too complicated to pick apart. “I shouldn’t have taken them.”
Ray rested his fingers on the box, and unable to help himself, he took a look inside it. The three bones were all in there, the Teratornis tibias inscribed with the faint, dyed symbols. It was tempting to run his fingers down them, to touch the places where a long-ago neighbor had carved some message worth remembering. But it wasn’t written for him.
“Damian said he’d take us to the cave,” Min said softly. “If you want to go there tonight.” The location of the cave had been kept secret, in order to prevent tourists from overrunning it in the immediate aftermath of the discovery. There were still some weird cults claiming the cave was part of a secret tunnel to the center of the Earth.
“Okay,” he said. “You know that’s a seven-hour drive from Omaha, right?”
Min’s look of horror made him laugh. She was such a city kid. “You can drive for seven hours and still be in the same state?”
***
The old dig site hadn’t changed much in two years, and Ray felt profoundly grateful for that. It’s what they’d fought for, after all.
It was dramatic reenactment day, which, from what Ray could see, seemed to consist of fifteen people (some of whom were pulling double duty as crew members) dressed as either grungy hipsters or suit-wearing corporate guys to yell at each other on camera. It seemed a lot less dramatic than the fight had actually been.
Ray sat with Min in the bed of his truck a safe distance away, both of them watching as Damian dramatically reenacted a confrontation with the Energy and Oil Commission. Damian had a handful of papers and printouts that he would shake in the face of the guys in suits, then theatrically point at something off camera. They had to keep reshooting since the sharp wind kept blowing the papers out of his hands.
“Did this actually happen?” Min asked. She seemed calmer, relaxed and happy. “Like, before I got here, or when I was intently drooling over the oracle bones?”
“Are you kidding? Those guys never left Lincoln.”
The wind managed to tug the papers out of Damian’s hands again, and they could hear him cursing clear across the field. Ray and Min smiled at each other.
“Should I tell you that you could do better than him?” Min said.
Ray leaned back into his truck. He was a bisexual Indian who got professionally excited about antelope poop, and he lived in a small college town in Kansas. Choices were thin on the ground in Emporia. But to say that he deserved someone better than Damian implied that he also deserved something better than being alone. As if being alone was a punishment. As if there were only one kind of loneliness, and one kind of cure for it.
“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “And you really shouldn’t get your mother to tell me that either.”
Min pulled out her vape and sucked on it, then exhaled a plume of fruity-smelling vapor. “But he wants you? He gave you a key to his room in San Francisco.”
“He said it was in case we got thrown out of the hotel bar because we were arguing so loud.” At Min’s curious look, he added, “After the museum. You were off hiding somewhere.”
“I was contemplating,” she said grumpily.
“Contemplating punching his lights out?” Ray said with a grin. “That was a sorry-ass fight, by the way. I don’t know if I got a chance to tell you.”
Min gave him the stink eye. “We’re talking about you and Damian.”
“I’m not sure what he wants,” Ray answered. He thought even Damian wasn’t sure what he wanted.
“What do you want?”
“I want those bones back in the ground where they belong.” The sun was warm on Ray’s skin and clothing, and a burst of wind rocked his truck on its chassis. It had been colder the first time he’d come out here, nearly two years before, like the land was trying to hurry into winter. “Damian doesn’t think it’s possible, at this point.”
Min puffed thoughtfully on her vape. She kept opening her mouth as though she were going to speak, and then closing it around the fancy gizmo instead. It was horrible, but Ray kind of missed the days when people smoked real cigarettes. If you were gonna get some weird cancer in your mouth or lungs or whatever, get it from a plant.
Annika apparently got whatever shot she wanted, and Damian handed off his stack of prop papers to one of the crew. He shouted to them, “You all are up!”
The dramatic reenactment was anything but dramatic. It was, for Ray, a lot of staring into the distance and trying to school his features into an interesting expression, which apparently involved not blinking when the wind threw your hair into your eyes.
“Do you think you can maybe make your face...do something?” Kamal said. Annika was directing Min, who looked like a model, the prairie wind artistically tugging at her hair and scarf.
“Like what?”
“Maybe look less irritated,” Damian suggested. He was standing by the monitors.
“I’m standing with the sun in my eyes and being told not to squint,” Ray said.
They shot him in a variety of angles and poses, giving him weird, contradictory directions for how to shape his face into something compelling. Thankfully, they didn’t ask him to be part of the crowd of extras who were shuffled from place to place with their cardboard signs, prop handcuffs, and performative outrage.
“All right, can we get some chants?” Annika called. “Let’s get some chants going, please!”
“What should we chant?” one of them asked.
“It hardly matters,” Annika said. “I want to see righteous anger! Righteous!”
Someone started shouting Hell no, we won’t go, and the words echoed across the empty hills.
“This is so stupid,” Ray said to Damian. They were drinking bottled water and eating sandwiches in the craft tent.
“It’s for a good cause,” Damian offered. He sounded doubtful, and when Ray shot him a look, he wilted a little. “Okay, yeah, it’s stupid. But it’ll get ossicarminis back in the news for a while.”
Was that enough? This felt like a desecration of the memory of what they had done, what they had been through. Ray had felt cold, scared, and wildly discombobulated during the months that he’d spent going back and forth between Emporia and this spit of land. They’d worked all hours trying to publicize their findings and keep the Commission from bulldozing the entire dig. What they found should have profoundly moved the world, but it had all...slipped away.
“Is that enough to ask for?” Ray said. “For people to remember that ossicarminis exists?”
Damian looked up from his sandwich—just tomatoes and mustard. He must have gone vegan again. “We’re going to have trouble doing even that much when we reinter the skeletons.”
Ray rolled his eyes, suddenly frustrated with that same stupid argument. “Oh, fuck off, man.”
“No, Ray, listen, listen!” Damian grabbed the sleeve of his coat. “I’ve called in every favor I have trying to get the museum to give up the skeletons, or for the state to rebury them. So far, everyone has laughed in my face. This process is going to take years, maybe a decade or more, and it might not work at all.”
Ray shook himself free. “So you’re telling me that an unpopular demand involving multiple, massive bureaucracies isn’t going to be immediately answered? I’m shocked.” What was it his students said? “Consider me shook.”
Damian, it seemed, had not been expecting that level of sarcasm.
“Did you really think we’d get the skeletons back in a couple weeks?” Ray asked. “How the hell did you study archeology and not learn to take the long view on this kind of stuff?”
Damian narrowed his eyes. “I barely graduated and beca
me an activist instead.”
“You’re telling me you expect immediate payoffs there?” Ray wasn’t an activist by any means, but he’d been born in the aftermath of AIM, the siege at Wounded Knee, and Leonard Peltier. They’d discovered ossicarminis less than a year after Standing Rock. You learned that surviving as a people meant being more stubborn than your oppressors, getting through one atrocity right as a new one was getting underway.
“A lot of the stuff I got called in for? Like this?” Damian gestured around them. “Is on a timeline of weeks. We were twelve days from getting escorted off the land via water cannons when I found the cave.” Damian’s face was dark. Ray had forgotten that he’d been out at the site for weeks before he and Min arrived, and from the stories Damian told, the state had been a lot nicer when they realized they were sitting on fossils worth more than shale gas.
“Getting them back in ten years is better than letting them stay where they are forever,” Ray said. “You don’t give up your dead.”
He expected Damian to come after him when he walked away, to stop him and argue with him some more. Ray kept walking, and Damian didn’t come after him, so he walked right up to his truck and got into the cab.
Yeah, I’m a member of the Sincagu Lakota. I grew up on and around the Rosebud Reservation. Which is actually pretty close to the dig site, maybe a couple hours of driving.
...I guess it was a little like coming home. The landscape felt familiar for sure. The hills and the buttes, pale gray dirt, the pine trees. The wind was the same. The situation—the protests and everything that was going on—that was pretty familiar too. It wasn’t bad, though. I’m glad I was there, and I’m proud that we saved that land.
Yes, I am aware of that phrase. No, you don’t have to explain what “all my relations” means. No, I’m not going to explain it to you. If you had thirty years, maybe you could understand it. Not in a sound bite.
You just want to hear some deep stuff about ossicarminis and the universe, right? Okay. Picture them, yeah? A species whose last common ancestor diverged from ours, what, a hundred million years ago? But between our ancestors and them, you’ve got convergent evolution of intelligence, tool manipulation, and language, less than a million years apart and on different continents. We don’t know how long they were around, and until two years ago, most white people couldn’t conceive of animals showing true intelligence. Some dinguses still can’t.
The state of Nebraska was two weeks from completely destroying the last trace of ossicarminis. And for what? For money.
We can’t know what ossicarminis thought. We can’t translate their messages. We don’t know what they thought was important, just that they valued something enough to carve it into bone and bury it with two of their people. We can respect that it was important without having to treat it as, as an episode of Law and Order, you know? We don’t have to go all Forensic Files on it.
The two skeletons that Damian found were put there with intent. An adult and a juvenile, maybe a parent and child. Someone mourned them. Someone put them in the earth so they could continue whatever journey they had started together. We should respect that, both the intentions and the journey.
...Good enough? Because I’m not gonna say it again.
***
Ray turned his truck into the long driveway of the Best Value Inn off Highway 71, which the Smithsonian crew had booked for all of them. His room smelled like the set of a porno mixed with cigarettes—not that Ray would really know what a porno set smelled like, but he’d watched enough of them shot in motel rooms like this one that the idea had seeped into his imagination. He turned on the TV to have some noise, pulled off his boots, and lay down on the bed.
He was lonely. He’d been lonely for years, and it wasn’t a bad thing. He enjoyed loneliness—courted it, even, with his little ranch house out on the edge of Emporia and his steadfast avoidance of most social media and all but the most necessary department meetings.
He was bored, though. He had a small life that was, at age forty-four, almost certainly half over. He thought he’d do better than his own father, who had died at fifty-eight, but probably not as well as his grandmother, who was still making fry bread and spoiling her misbehaving great-grandkids at eighty-seven.
Maybe that’s why, when Damian had slid his keycard across the bar in San Francisco and said they should talk privately, Ray had taken it. Damian had disturbed the comfortable patterns in his life, and Ray—Ray thought he needed a little disturbance now and then.
He pulled out his phone and sent the shortest, hardest text of his life.
Come talk to me.
Of course, asking didn’t erase the distance, and it was another hour and a half before there was a knock at the door. Ray started awake; he hadn’t meant to sleep, but he’d succumbed less than a minute after lying down on the lumpy mattress. He felt dizzy and disoriented as he pushed himself up and opened the door.
Damian had a tendency to fill a room. He looked claustrophobic framed in the narrow doorway.
“Hi,” Ray said. “Come inside.”
“Hi,” Damian said. He followed him in, looking nervous. He’d changed out of the reenactment getup, which Ray and Min had laughingly called Indiana Jones and the Sit-In at the Dean’s Office. He wore a flannel shirt that seemed comfortable but too clean, like he was still in a costume, jeans, and an ugly iron pendant on a leather thong.
“So,” Damian said.
“Yeah.”
They stared at each other.
“I think we should have sex,” Ray blurted.
“I think we should create a land trust for the dig site,” Damian said, speaking nearly at the same time.
They stared at each other again.
“What?”
“What?’
“How would a land trust work?” Ray asked. There was a chunk of trust land north of the Rosebud reservation, but he didn’t know much about the particulars.
“What do you mean we should have sex?” Damian said. “I thought—you were all—when did you decide this?”
Ray rubbed at the back of his neck, wishing that he hadn’t fallen asleep. His brain was still waking up, and it made his words feel awkward and ungainly.
“I miss you?” he said. “And I...miss sex?”
Damian blinked at him, looking confused and increasingly suspicious.
“Can we talk about the land trust?”
“No,” Damian said. “We’re gonna talk about how you propositioned me.”
“I’d really rather—”
“Come talk to me,” Damian read off his phone. “Not, come sit in my room and pretend we’re telepathic.”
Damian sat down on the other bed. Ray sat across from him. “I don’t really know what else to say besides that. I miss you. I miss sex.”
“When we broke up, you told me that we weren’t compatible.”
“We’re not,” Ray said.
“So what do you want with me?” Damian talked with his hands a lot. Right now, he appeared to be screaming with them.
“Okay, let’s calm down,” Ray said. “You already got into one fistfight.”
“It was more like a pillow fight,” Damian muttered. “And Min started it.”
“Look, I don’t want that much. I want to be friends again, though. I miss your...endless texting and commentary about movies I’ve never watched and never will, and I miss you swearing about politics.”
“You want to be friends,” Damian said, distressed.
“Why are you saying that like it’s a prison sentence? Yeah. I want to be friends.”
“Who have sex.”
“Sometimes, sure.” Ray was blushing and it irritated him. “Why is that weird for you? I thought Millennials were all like, nbd, no strings attached, whatevs.” He waved his hands in an approximation of Damian’s fluid gestures.
Damian snorted. “Sure, Ray. That’s what all the Millennials are saying.”
He was making fun of him. It had been a while since Damian ha
d done that. It felt good.
“Now can we talk about the land trust?” Ray said.
“Are you sure you don’t want to have sex first?”
Ray opened his mouth to argue, but then reconsidered.
***
You know, I tell my students that there are no stupid questions, but that’s a hilariously stupid question. Although I guess it’s better than insisting any civilization that wasn’t white and European needed help from aliens to get by.
No, I don’t think they went into space—at least not the way you’re thinking, in a big, shiny, dick-shaped rocket. But who doesn’t look at the stars and want to know them better?
I will say that “Space Weasels” would be a pretty cool band name, though.
***
The principle shooting took two more weeks. Ray spent a lot of his off time on the phone with various contacts who had law degrees or worked in public administration, asking them about the process of drawing up a conservation land trust. Damian—despite the fact that he had a much heavier shooting schedule—did the same. Annika, once they told her, fervently promised to get the Smithsonian’s institutional support for the project, as well as for the re-interment of the skeletons, which was now the primary focus of the documentary.
“She probably wants to protect the place where ossicarminis’s spaceship took off,” Ray said with a grin.
Damian huffed. “They’ve got serious money. I can put up with weirdos if it gets things done.”
Ray took a trip up across the state border, to the reservation, to drop off the oracle bones. He left them in the care of another cousin, a medicine man whom he trusted to come up with a good burial ceremony for them. The dig site was on old Lakota land, after all. Much as his family joked about the so-called smart weasels, they were considered kin around the rez.
After their last night of shooting, Annika treated them all to another dinner, this time at a diner in Rapid City, two hours north of the dig site. The waitstaff stared at the enormous group with open hostility, and the food took more than an hour to come out. When it did, Annika stood up and clinked her fork against her enormous plate bearing a lukewarm burger and fries.