Dead Echo

by C.G. Banks

  *

  Early one Monday morning a backhoe excavating a short canal to the city main dug up a mass of dirt and deposited it into a waiting dump truck to be ferried over to a low spot on the far west end of the property. A human skull rolled free of the bucket and shattered on the side of the tire well. Robert Baskin, the foreman, happened to be on-site and was nervously called over to investigate the find. Though the skull lay in pieces it was very obviously human and all work at the site immediately ceased for the day. The area was subsequently cleared of all workers under the assurances proper authorities were being informed and the actual witnesses were sequestered in the site trailer until these men arrived.

  By three o’clock that afternoon a forensics expert from the nearby university was on hand. He appeared in a nondescript four-wheel drive and exited the driver’s side in the standard apparel of a television anthropologist: a T-shirt bearing the logo of his university, blue jeans, and boots. He first visited the men in the trailer, those who’d been on-site when the skull was discovered, and after a brief interlude headed out to the site where the dump truck waited, its bed full and the skull lying by the side of the road where one of the more astute workers had set it down. While the mass of engineers, architects, and foremen gathered in a half-circle near the dump truck, the forensics man walked over and squatted down beside the broken, mud-caked relic. He spoke a few words into a hand-held recorder he drew from his jeans back pocket and then preceded to take a multitude of snapshots with the Polaroid camera he had slung around his neck. The contingent of men paced nervously in the hot afternoon sun, kicking at stray rocks, talking quietly among themselves, until he finished, each one adding up the time and money lost and wasted due to the grisly find. Baskin was on his fourteenth cigarette and the sun was by then a hollow spot in the sky when the university man gestured toward the group and sent one of them over to fetch his truck. While the underling went about his duty the man withdrew a large, Ziplock bag from his other back pocket and slipped the skull, in its many pieces, into it. The truck arrived and he walked over to Baskin (called earlier from his trailer), motioned predatorily toward the silent dump truck as the foreman nodded his head in perplexity and flicked the butt of his cigarette into the hole that’d caused all the trouble.

  As the last of the sun faded behind the gauntlet of trees, the university man climbed back into his truck, said a few more words to the foreman, and cut a wide V back to the main road. The men watched him go, endlessly smoking, all praying the find didn’t hit the news. Baskin holed-up in the trailer, talking long into the night to his superiors, suggesting avenues and dropping names in the hopes someone could thwart the coming storm.

  By the grace of modern economics, construction was allowed to continue the next day, but the entire area surrounding the dig and dump truck was cordoned off until some sense could be made of the mysterious find. The discovery crew was called in and briefed that everything was under control and nothing should venture outside the bounds of the construction site. This was a Tuesday. Bigwigs in the upstairs offices of Smith and Fields burned up the phone lines, offering and securing confidences of utmost participation from officials all the way up to the senatorial level. By Thursday the original crew of five (the dump truck driver and four laborers) was looking for work elsewhere, the two Mexican laborers on their way back to Matamoros, Mexico after discrepancies were suddenly discovered in their work permits. On Saturday there was not much else. Tests were being run on the skull, the whole gambit of dental and forensics, but nothing had so far turned up. From decay and calcium content the skull was determined to be in the neighborhood of fifteen to twenty years old and records were being searched for any missing persons and unsolved disappearances in the area from that period. The only thing certain was the skull belonged to a long-departed twenty-something male with bad teeth and, not surprisingly, no dental records. The bones showed no sign of violence and with that the investigation hit a snag. The lawyers for Smith and Fields kicked into overdrive in the lull, arguing against slowing down their companies’ progress when tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, were on the line with every day lost during this unfortunate episode. When the university balked at this assertion, the company offered to investigate on its own, hiring private forensic investigators who would, of course, keep the original investigators updated on a daily, perhaps weekly (it was hinted at) basis. Of course, this was rejected by the powers-that-be and oaths were sworn to alert the news agencies. Even though this was a multi-million dollar project for the intangible benefits of an unknown man, long dead and forgotten, proper channels must be investigated to put the whole matter to rest, or so that side of the argument went. In the end it came to nothing. With the lawyers hedging at every conceivable corner, the investigation limped on. Regardless of the fact that the head of Smith and Fields happened to be an old fraternity brother of both the Louisiana coroner and several influential congressmen. There were, it seemed, certain things that money just couldn’t cover up, and murder, even if it was years old, was one of those things.

  Bright and early the next Monday morning another, more expansive rig arrived on-site to the further chagrin of Robert Baskin. Yell and curse as he did, amid a glorious chain of telephone calls and threats of other more volatile actions, the men from the university were allowed to continue. There was still a threat of publicity hanging as thick as October fog along the ground, and multi-million dollar project or not, people would not come later if an avalanche of negativity descended now. Baskin, choking back his rage, relegated himself to the trailer and was seen no more that day. The men from the university once again hovered around the site of the skull discovery like vultures on a long-dead kill. The dump truck was unloaded on the ground around the tires by a whole contingent of graduate students who fast lost their initiative under the relentless sun and shovelful after shovelful of dirt and rock. The hole was scoured for twenty feet on either side, six more feet down, and not another shard of bone proved forthcoming. Baskin was radioed in the shack of the crew’s disappointment, and right at nightfall, with the site lights blazing around the area, did he finally withdraw from the trailer and make his own inspection. He couldn’t help but smile at the results of the digging, and with the plague upon the leader of the expedition, the self-righteous university anthropologist who’d been first on the scene when the shit went down, the imperative fell away. As the anthropologist filed past him to his four-by-four Baskin couldn’t help but ask what the “experts” had found, and as if by chance, wonder aloud how much longer their work would be side-tracked by “the bunch of dirt-hounds sniffing through their ditches.” This inquiry was met with silence, which further boosted his confidence, and Baskin was quick to assure the man, as he tried to close the door on his adversary, that the site was open for them tomorrow as soon as they could get off “their university asses” and let the “real men” get back to business. He took great relish in the plume of dust that heralded the team’s departure.

  Phone calls were made, lawyers rousted from their beds. Time was money and as of now that one lost skull had cost more than the sonofabitch who’d ever owned it most likely made in his lifetime. As was suggested, most vulgarly by the lead shark in the Smith and Fields arsenal, it was “time to shit or get off the pot.” It was here the senator’s influence finally began to make an impact. Law was law, but for God’s sake, you couldn’t expect a company to shut down its business for the sake of one poor soul long since forgotten by the community at large, and most probably, by his own family. The university, pressured on all sides now, reluctantly withdrew its objections and the whole thing slid into the past, relegating itself to an unsavory aspect of the adventures of large-scale construction. By Wednesday, it was as if the whole thing was a figment of someone’s imagination.