by Paula Guran
Mummies in the USA? Discovered in 1940 near Fallon, Nevada, the “Spirit Cave Mummy” is the oldest human mummy yet found in North America. When the mummy was first examined at the Nevada State Museum, it was first thought to be between fifteen hundred and two thousand years old. The remains were kept at the museum’s storage facility until 1996 when an anthropologist tested some of the artifacts using mass spectrometry. The results indicated the mummy was approximately 9400 years old. In 1997, the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation and Colony made a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) claim of cultural affiliation with the artifacts and mummy. Legal battles continue.
American Mummy
Stephen Graham Jones
Garrett finally made himself just sit the hell down. The hotel was going to charge him for walking a bald spot in its carpet if he didn’t stop with the back and forth.
It was some time after nine, coming on to eleven.
He knew it wasn’t eleven yet because that was check-out, that was when housecleaning came through knocking. Because they didn’t have a clipboard of what rooms were going to be empty and which ones might be sleeping?
Garrett had some ideas for this hotel. Had there been an old-fashioned suggestion box at the registration desk? Maybe. This place didn’t even have computerized registration.
Garrett squinted, trying to see back to three nights ago at two in the morning, but all he could make out was his hand tracing the letters and numbers Lady had been feeding him. Every time they checked in, she was always the one with the truck’s license plate in her head. No matter the hour, no matter if they’d been drinking, no matter if this was the first topside air they were getting to breathe for the week.
The reason he knew it was after nine had nothing to do with the digital clock on the nightstand.
It had everything to do with the continental breakfast downstairs. The one Lady knew warmed up at six and shut down three short hours later.
It was the usual stuff, the microwave oatmeal and slightly too small apples and gumball machines of cereal, the six-slot toaster and foggy cabinet of cinnamon rolls and bagels, jelly packets for everybody.
What this hotel had that not all of them did, though, it was a steamer bin with a roll-top lid. On one side was the bacon that didn’t really check out as meat if you held it up to the light, but on the other side were those glorious eggs, poured on to some perfect griddle like pancake batter then graced with a slice of cheese, and folded over.
“So, an omelette?” Garrett had said their first morning, touching at the edge of his with the tines of his plastic fork.
“They come in frozen on a truck once a week,” Lady had said, and tipped back her coffee cup of cartoon cereal.
Because she was either Chippewa or Kiowa, depending on the day and who was asking, she ate her cereal dry, to keep her stomach from knotting up around the milk. For their first couple of years together Garrett had thought her no-milk cereal was just a taste she’d acquired, growing up without money. It turned out to have more to do with her being from a people who ate their buffalo instead of milking them, so never needed the enzymes Garrett came with from the factory. End result? Lady didn’t have much luck with dairy.
Or with damn clocks, Garrett told himself, bouncing in place on the edge of the bed even though their fight had been over for ten minutes now.
It had started when he tapped the face of his watch and told her they didn’t want to miss omelettes, right? That’s what he was still calling them because that’s what they were.
Lady had been over at the phone talking to her sister, who was too paranoid to trust her secrets to anything but a landline.
Instead of holding her finger up for him to wait she’d threaded her hair over the ear on the other side of the phone, and switched the phone across to it—away from Garrett. And then she’d angled her body away from him as well, giving him her back, trading him in for her goddamn sister Penny, who had a new drama every time Garrett and Lady surfaced from a month or two in the field. It usually involved Penny not being a punching bag. At least that’s what it sounded like from this end.
Garrett had nodded that this was fine, this was OK, this was part of it, and he’d made his way over to the window. Their room was on the second floor. It was just April but they still had to keep the air conditioner under the window running. That was Arizona for you.
The refrigerated air slid up his frontside, dried his eyes.
The dually was still out there, unmolested.
It was Garrett’s pride and joy. The camper on top, though, that was just temporary, that was just until he found a good one. It wasn’t for sleeping, it was for hiding what they were usually running in the bed.
What was in the bed now would just about pay the dually off, Garrett was pretty sure.
It had made him want to celebrate.
With, say, two or three plates of mini-omelettes.
He looked back to Lady but she was still bent over the phone, listening to Penny’s sob story.
He pulled the curtains as shut as they would get and made his way back to the bed, sat down on it hard enough that she had to look around. He tapped his watch again. In reply, she scooted over, presented the digital clock on the nightstand to him, showing they still had half an hour, what was he so on about?
Garrett clicked the television awake. It came on loud like he wanted, some local station’s news, and then an instant later it muted.
Lady, at the nightstand. With the remote.
He locked eyes with her for maybe three seconds and she didn’t look away.
“Omelettes,” he hissed to her.
“Penny,” she said back, covering the mouthpiece to say it.
And that’s how it had started. That’s how the morning fell apart.
Garrett should write a freaking book about it, he knew. One where he could showcase how put upon he was by women. One where he could make his case for how the gods were always punishing him by withholding things.
All he wanted was to eat a mini-omelette with a plastic fork, right? Was that too much to ask, after two weeks in a dusty red cave?
Apparently so.
Now, the fight Lady had been asking for done and over, Garrett turned the television back on. Just to keep himself from walking from the door to the window and back again.
He was sitting close enough to the set to have just reached out, punched the power button, but he had the remote now and he was going to use it, by God.
It was the local news, still, on some kind of insistent loop.
So he wouldn’t have to look around at the room, Garrett made himself focus on the reporter.
She was in a ditch west of town. Garrett knew it was “west” because right now it was a split-screen thing, with her on the left side, a map where she was on the right. The pulsing star was west of town.
Garrett didn’t think a star was in good taste for a fatality.
He had some ideas for the local news, too. A cross, a skull, a little mushroom cloud because it was a wreck, one involving multiple vehicles, multiple fatalities. The highway was shut down going both ways.
Garrett edged closer, trying to see around the reporter’s shoulder now that she had the whole screen. When he couldn’t quite make the truck out, he turned her voice down enough for her to start making sense.
She was apologizing to motorists about the shutdown. Apparently it was going to be a few hours until traffic could resume.
The screen split again, the reporter-in-the-ditch on her left side, the anchor-at-the-desk on the other side.
The anchor was saying “Hours, Jill?”
At which point the screen dissolved to a high angle of the wreck.
It was a green-on-white Ford king cab Garrett prayed he wasn’t really recognizing. A king cab currently spread across both westbound lanes. The only thing not crushed on it was the driver’s side mirror, standing straight up as if to show that it had made it through, that it was winn
ing.
The semi that was tangled up with the Ford Garrett did recognize had a bit of its trailer crossing the median, over into the eastbound lanes. It wasn’t enough to block eastbound traffic—not both lanes, anyway. Just set up some cones, some flares, direct around it.
But they weren’t.
Jill explained why.
Apparently the king cab had been carrying Native American artifacts.
“Pothunters, Jill?” the anchor asked, evidently a coached question, allowing him to turn to face the camera, explain to the tourists that pothunters weren’t amateur archaeologists or even cultural enthusiasts, as they liked to claim, but looters, thieves, trespassers.
Garrett peeled his top lip back from his teeth about that.
If Lady were here she would have laughed in that way she had, said, “Trespassing?”
Goddamnit.
Without her, how was Garrett going to have any reason to be on reservations any more?
Just because of the stupid folding eggs. The eggs that had already been wheeled back into the secret parts of the hotel by now, he knew. Taken away from him, like everything.
“Sorry, Bats,” he said to the dead driver of the green Ford, and reached across to turn the news off, to not have to look at Bats’s king cab turned inside out any more. But now the camera was back to Jill one more time.
She had her index finger pressed to one ear like for quiet, please, and was holding on to her mic for dear life, trying to carve out just thirty seconds more of airtime for herself.
She was still explaining about the shutdown.
Yes, the driver of the Ford had apparently been a black-market procurer or dealer of some kind, but the reason for the shutdown was so the Feds could sweep in. Not for the artifacts, but for the human remains. The ancient human remains.
“No,” Garret said, scooting forward on the bed to be closer to this. “You asshole, you didn’t, did you?”
Jill hadn’t said just “human” remains. She’d said ancient human remains. That could only mean one thing.
Bats had dug up some true American gold: a mummy. A leathery piece of human jerky ten thousand years old, its skin dark and drawn and wrinkled, lips peeled back from the teeth, hair so delicate that, carrying a prize like that out into the sunlight, the hair turns from black to red while you watch.
You can pull five grand from a basket in the right condition, to go into a private collection on some non-working ranch.
A mummy, though—holy hell.
For a mummy you could set up an auction, start the bidding at a hundred thousand, then ride it all the way to the top.
And, best of all, because the NAGPRA bible thumpers wanted to rebury all remains that turned out to be authentic, the mummy would never have to submit to museum scrutiny, lest word of it get out. Its only provenance would be the story you told the buyer, about how you punched through the wall of an old mineshaft and there was the chamber right there like it had been five thousand years before the pyramids.
Would the burial be pre-Clovis? Some Aztec or Olmec up here, looking around? Or, if you X-rayed it, would there be coins in the skull, fallen through from the empty eye sockets? Roman coins?
And what had those eyes seen?
Ten thousand years ago there’d been megafauna in North America.
“You bastard,” Garrett said to Bats. Because he’d spread the find of the century out across a quarter-mile of Arizona blacktop. He’d spread his own retirement out with the remains of what had been a pretty fine Ford.
“Not that you need it any more,” Garrett said, and turned to the bathroom as if for a response from Lady.
She was still lying there in the doorway like he’d left her. Lying there right where she’d fallen—well, where her head had hit the metal doorframe the first time. And the second and third and fourth times, too. And all the other times.
There was a pool of blood under her head. It came from her mouth and her ear and from her left eye.
That eye was still open.
“Thirty minutes,” Garrett said to her, and tipped his head at the clock she’d set back while talking to her sister. Like Penny’s drama was more important than breakfast.
And then Garrett noticed that the phone was still hanging from its cord, off the nightstand. Because, when he’d straight-armed Lady into the headboard, the lamp had dislodged and he’d darted a hand out to catch it, keep from paying for it.
He’d forgot about the phone, though. About Penny.
He lifted it to the side of his head.
“Where’s my sister, you bastard?” Penny said. She’d waited half an hour to say it.
Garrett hung up gently.
When housekeeping came to the door he cracked it open enough to shake his head no, then slipped the PRIVACY PLEASE placard out, hooked it on to the doorknob. And then he walked across in front of the dresser, to the window, and then he walked back again, spun back around for the hundredth time, like he could come around fast enough to catch the solution to this morning. The answer to what to do with Lady.
She was just staring at him, her mouth slightly open, the teeth not lining up any more.
Because Garrett wasn’t stupid—and because a man needs a bathroom at some point in the day—he peeled Lady up from the floor after an hour or so. Some of her hair stayed with the blood that was already clotting up. The blood that he was going to be charged for, he knew.
The reason it was smart to peel Lady up, not let her lay there all sprawled out like she’d fallen three stories to get here, was that soon enough rigor was going to set in, and he might need to be rolling her up in some version of a rug.
He didn’t want her on the king bed, though.
The corner, then. He propped her up and she sloughed down into herself, sat like a five-year-old sits: butt-down, knees up.
When her head was hanging back behind her, her jaw all slack and broken, Garrett took her by the hair, pulled her face forward so it could rest on her knees.
Would she fit in a duffel like that?
Maybe. If it was late enough. And it wasn’t like Garrett didn’t know every crack and crevice in the sandstone for three hundred miles in every direction. Hidden in the right place, she’d dry out, turn to leather inside of a year. Let her sit a couple thousand more, and she’d be a mummy herself.
“Gonna make an artifact of you yet,” he said to her, and went out to run down some lunch, which turned into an afternoon at the bar, which turned into a liquid dinner as well.
The next time he saw Lady, it was three in the morning.
He’d cranked the air conditioner down before he’d left. The room was a refrigerator now.
He sat on the bed and stared at her. At the top of her head.
“Sorry, girl,” he said, his voice slurring more than he’d heard, telling himself he was all right to drive home.
Calling her “girl” was his joke on her name. Used to, she’d smiled about it.
Dropped just inside the door was the cargo bag he’d been able to scrounge in town. It was either that or a laundry bag, and a laundry bag was going to require a saw, or at least a chisel and hammer. And he didn’t even have an apron.
The cargo bag was the kind for strapping on to the top of a car. It was supposed to be weatherproof, had double-zippers, reinforced corners, the whole deal.
Except, now that Garrett got to studying on it: did he really want to Ziploc a bag of rotting meat in where it couldn’t breathe?
It made him gag, thinking about how he would definitely gag somewhere down the road, unzipping that body bag alone in a pasture. Ten steps later he was knelt in front of the toilet, splashing the day’s peanuts and pretzels and boiled eggs into the toilet.
“Fuck it,” he said, and pulled himself up by the shower curtain. It popped its rings one by one, shot them across the bathroom. They rattled for long after.
Garrett tried to wait their spinning plastic sound out but finally couldn’t, had to just lie back into the dry bathtub.
Because Lady was out there.
The goddamn clock was still wrong.
Garrett had bet everything on it again, like an idiot, and now he’d missed the hotel’s breakfast again.
He sat on the edge of the bed, right where Lady had sat talking to Penny, and tried to reprogram the time, his hands shaking with fury each time he set the alarm, not the goddamn time.
When the proper hour kept slipping past he finally just yanked the clock’s cord from the wall.
“This is your fault,” he said to Lady.
She still had her head down, her hair spilling down along her calves.
Some of it was pressed between her arms, and some of it was spread over them.
Garrett had to cock his head at this.
He tried to replay her ass-sliding down the wall to her current sitting position.
Why would he have posed her like that?
“Lady?” he said.
She just sat there.
Tendons in the shoulders drying up and contracting, he told himself. Muscle memory.
To prove he could, he stepped across, pushed her shoulder.
She was already stiff. Her whole body tipped a bit, settled back down. Just that tearing sound, where her fluids had seeped through her pants, stuck her to the stupid carpet.
She was like an egg was what she was. Put a shell around her.
Garrett went back to the window, stepped back from it all at once.
La Migra was parked by his truck, its green-and-white paint clearing the parking lot all around it.
The officer had his flashlight out, was shining it through the camper’s tinted side-glass.
“No no no no,” Garrett said.
It worked: five breaths later—what would have been breaths, had Garrett been breathing—the officer saw no illegals back there, continued on his way. Into the hotel?
