by Adam Johnson
Then my father lifted his glass high, a thin film of fish oil catching the light.
“To floods and hail and the Great Deductible,” he said, and drank alone.
In the Parkton landfill was Janis’ Art Deco cocktail set, complete with flamingo-pink martini glasses and a tortoiseshell shaker. Gone also were her Bakelite clutch purses, her collection of dime-store brooches, and a little library of vintage etiquette guides, which her mother had taught from in the days of elocution. Dad had lightened his heart by shedding—the house, the furniture, the car—and, as if Janis’ spirit was small enough to inhabit anything, nothing they’d shared was spared, not the nail clippers, the alarm clock, the plastic ice-cube trays. He even ditched his own glasses, because they had once brought her into focus. Now my father lived in a tiny apartment, and except for a fair amount of money he needed to give away, there was no evidence that my stepmother had ever existed.
I had two theories on my father.
The first held that he had fallen out of love with Janis at some point in their marriage, and that her death, while not pleasant for him to watch, was an overdue relief. This father before me now, yellow-tinted glasses, raw gold ring, was the man I’d always have known, had he not been hobbled by some marriage vows, a nine-to-five job, and a conscience as old and guilty as two men’s.
I sipped my martini—it tasted appropriately oceany, and though I wasn’t much of a drinker anymore, it struck a long, clear note in my head. The second hypothesis had to do with my mother, but it would get no sympathy in this room.
My father looked at his watch. “Okay, so where’s this Trudy?”
“She should have been here by now. I told her to meet us a half-hour ago.”
“She’s not like this caveman guy of yours, wearing pelts and crapping in the bushes? Jesus, let’s give the money to that poor fool.”
A long-ago ocean, that was the quality of my drink, but shot through with sonar pings of alcohol. On my tongue, the ancient brine of salted fish and olive mixed with the bright light of oniony gin.
“That caveman,” I told my father, “has a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. He won an outstanding-dissertation-proposal award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Then he goes and wins funding from the state Heritage Council and the Bureau of Land Management. Now my department chair has decided to give him our only graduate fellowship, the Peabody, so Eggers will have to acknowledge us in his book. And this kid doesn’t even spend money.”
“Does he wear drawers under those skins?”
“I don’t believe so, Dad.”
He cringed. “I suppose toilet paper’s out of the question.”
“Eggers used leaves for a while, and I’m sure there’ll be a chapter in his dissertation about the poison-oak incident. Now I believe he’s winging it.”
A waiter in a red jacket beckoned us, and I could see that atop a freshly linened table sat a pair of steaming porterhouses. The steaks had come so fast, they must have been cooked for other people, who would now have to wait longer.
“How much did you tip these guys?”
My father shrugged and began to make his way through the tables, drink high. As I followed, it became clear to me that most of the customers were farmers and ranchers from smaller towns, like Doltin and Willis, people who made the trip in for Glacier Days and were now having a late lunch at the one nice place in town.
My steak was closer to medium, but cooked to perfection, from marbled beef that was probably slaughtered that morning at Hormel. The veins of fat had melted away, and I alternated the meat’s flaky butteriness with shocks of warming gin. For a while, the two of us simply ate, and every few bites I had to lean back against the red, rolled leather of the booth to remind myself I was alive. In those moments, with my head near the wall, I could make out the faint pop-pop of people firing their pistols in the converted movie house next door. The sounds were no more disconcerting than the faint screaming you’d once hear if you ate during the horror matinee, so my digestion was unaffected. I’d never heard a gun fired in anger, let alone fear, and I had no way of knowing then that before that winter was out, an evening would come when all the people in our great nation would fire their weapons at once.
Finally, I set my fork aside. I hadn’t even touched the carrots, let alone the hot rolls, but my father lifted his bone with two hands. “So what do students have to do for this fellowship money?” he asked, and raked his bottom teeth along the underside of the bone.
“Nothing, really. It supports them while they study or research. They just keep doing what they’re doing. But this money is going to make a big difference to Trudy. She’s studying Paleolithic art. The Clovis is the only known culture in the world that left no art behind. There are just a lot of points and blades. Trudy believes that weapons were their art. It’s a whopper of an idea. She’s maybe going too far with her feminist angle, but the premise is sound.”
“Are you sleeping with her?”
I tossed my napkin on the table.
“Really, Dad. You didn’t just say that. This fellowship you’re endowing is going to make all the difference for her. She has to travel to the cave dwellings in New Mexico, see the petroglyphs in Arizona. She needs to do comparative blade analysis all over North America, France, and of course Peru.”
“Hell, I could use a trip to France.”
“Bon voyage,” I told him.
Two waiters walked by, carrying a single tray between them. On it was a cut of meat called “The Cattleman.” There was no shortage of pomp in its delivery, yet the steak was the real deal—beyond large, it was the size of a saddle. If you could eat it, it was free, and the steak’s new owner seemed embarrassed only by the fact that this indulgence was a public event.
“What’s she like?” my father asked.
“Trudy? She’s pretty dang smart, for starters.”
“What’s she look like?”
“Physically?”
“Yes, physically.”
I had no desire to explain Trudy to my father. Her application for the Peabody Fellowship had given me her racial breakdown: a mix of African, French, Korean, and Japanese. With her height, her close-cropped hair, and those shoulders, I occasionally imagined her as a prototypical Clovis woman. It was an inappropriate fantasy, I knew. Scientifically, it was flawed as well—real Clovis were certainly smaller, more compact, and probably poorly nourished. Yet I couldn’t help, at times, imagining her body in motion as she hunted down a giant Pleistocene glyptodont.
“She’s big, Dad. Five foot nine, probably a hundred eighty pounds.”
He worked the last bit off the bone, so all that was left was the white vertebral shank and the descending postilum.
“Big num-nums?”
I shook my head no.
“So this girl,” Dad says, “if she’s so needy, how come she can’t even show up for a free steak?”
“I think she’s a little mad at me right now.”
“You are sleeping with her.”
“No, no, she has a fellowship, the Peabody, but the school’s taking it away and giving it to the caveman. It’s just miscommunication. She doesn’t know about your fellowship yet, the Hannah.”
My father pointed the steak shank at his own chest.
“Well, what do I get out of this fellowship-donor thing?”
“Immortality, Dad. Your name gets to live forever.”
I expected him to laugh or smart-ass, but he said nothing, just set aside the bone and reclined, hands on chest, against the plush leather. He ran his tongue along his teeth, then asked, “You ever met anyone who really wanted to live forever, one person who just wanted to keep going and going?”
I shrugged. “I suppose not.”
Dad leaned forward. “Then no fucking plaques of me when I’m dead, okay?”
* * *
When the moon looked high in the sky, I set out from my little apartment by the river, and made my way to Trudy’s. She lived alone in a small graduate dorm by the ca
feteria, and you could still catch a scent of fried egg rolls in the air from the meal plan earlier that night. It began to snow as I walked, so softly at first that I couldn’t tell for sure when the flakes started coming down, but by the time I stood in her courtyard, there were yellow curtains of snow hanging under the campus floodlights.
When I knocked, the flimsy dorm walls shook, rattling the neighbors’ windows, and the sound off the hollow-core door was loud enough that three other students stuck their heads out to see if it was for them. But Trudy didn’t answer.
“Trudy?” I called.
“Go away, Dr. Hannah.”
“Please listen to me, Trudy. I know you’re upset that the university took your fellowship away, but we have a better fellowship for you.”
Inside, I could hear her pour a glass of water.
I spoke into the peephole: “If you could just listen to what I have to say.”
“There’s a fellowship in Arizona I could apply for,” I heard her say. “And that postdoc at Stanford, unless Eggers already has it spoken for. I was dragged all over the world my entire childhood. No need to put down roots here, I guess.”
My voice raised in pitch as I tried to reassure her. I even took out my inhaler, just in case I needed it. “Everything’s going to be okay, Trudy. This is a better fellowship. You’ll like it much better.”
“Don’t tell me ‘everything’s going to be okay,’” Trudy said. “Don’t tell me what I’ll like and not like. I want my Peabody back. That’s the fellowship I earned.”
“You’ll be the first recipient of this new fellowship. My father has established the Hannah Fellowship, in my stepmother’s name, and after careful consideration, you’ve been chosen as the first recipient.”
Trudy opened the door, her hand holding a tumbler of water, half full. She wore her usual paint-speckled jeans, a sweater of chocolate wool a shade darker than her skin, and she’d had her hair cut even shorter since I’d seen her last. My God, those cheekbones. I stole a quick puff off my inhaler.
“I’m the one who should be knocking on your door late at night, telling you how I feel,” she said. From behind her came a tide of warm air, smelling faintly of turpentine.
“Okay,” I said. “How do you feel?”
Trudy shifted in the doorway. She took a drink of water. I could see she’d been repainting the walls of her dorm room with ancient cave drawings and symbols.
“Well, I’m pissed off,” she said, sounding reluctantly justified. “I’ve got good ideas. My Clovis theory isn’t even out there in the literature. Nobody’s articulated it. And all I hear about is Eggers. What’s his idea? He doesn’t even have one. He has a gimmick.”
“Trudy, I recruited you, remember? I’ve always believed in you. I don’t know how you’ll ever prove it, but your dissertation hypothesis is brilliant. For a culture based on making animals extinct, to fuse weaponry and art only makes sense. The part about women carving all the spear points while the men hunted—well, you’ll maybe have to gather more data on that.”
“I’ve smelled Doritos on him,” she said and paused to let that sink in. “Dorito breath is unmistakable. Did you know he doesn’t read the textbooks he assigns? He doesn’t even use chalk, because it’s ‘technology.’ He gives his tests orally, and gets one of those girls of his to bubble in the grades on his grade sheets. Do you know how many bubbles I bubble in? And he’s Mr. Primitive? Look at how I live. I steal toilet paper from the faculty bathroom. I’m eating noodles and oil in here. If my car breaks down. I’m the one who has to fix it.”
“Doritos, huh?”
“Spicy Taco flavor.”
“Look, Trudy, I’m going to need a favor from you.”
“I’m not done yet,” she said.
I put my hands up, as if to say, No offense, I come in peace.
“That was my fellowship,” she said, pointing at me. “Mine.”
Trudy looked as if she was gearing up for a speech, but then, as if she’d heard her own words from afar and decided she didn’t like their tenor, she stopped. “Okay, I’m done now,” she said.
I waited a moment, to be sure she was through, then said, “This favor I need, it involves meeting Eggers, but the favor’s for me.”
Now she waited a moment, looking at me with her head cocked.
“Is that for real?” she asked. “That this fellowship’s named after your mother?”
The fellowship was in honor of Janis, but I didn’t correct her. I didn’t answer at all. Trudy seemed to see in my eyes that this was a subject about which I would not lie. She shook her head, as if disgusted with herself, then disappeared into her dorm room and returned with a heavy scarf.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
We crossed the courtyard together, passing a solitary picnic table frosted with white. Trudy steered me around the blanket of snow that hid the sunken volleyball pit. Black slush lined the edge of the Honor Roll Parking Lot, and as we trudged through it, heading for the quad and Eggers’ lodge, I couldn’t help noting the natural grace and authority with which Trudy moved.
It would be less than ethical of me if at this point I did not confess that I believed Trudy was the ultimate female specimen. Intelligence and beauty aside, and from a strictly professional anthropological perspective, her body was perfectly evolved—tall frame, thick bones, and long muscles—a decathlete’s physique. Her back flared into broad, square shoulders that framed a strong chest marked with small and unobtrusive breasts, and she carried just enough fat to optimize insulation and energy reserves without compromising mobility. I’d seen her body articulated once as she swam butterfly inside the jade cube of the Carney Aquatic Center, the points of her rotator cuffs launching each stroke, causing a wave that ran through pectorals, abdominals, and quadriceps before she cracked into a dolphin kick with the cablelike snap of her Achilles tendons. This was not the body of a gatherer. This was a person who could walk into any society, historic or prehistoric, and demonstrate abilities that were absolutely commanding. Of course I kept such thoughts to myself, lest I appear lecherous, or just plain old-fashioned.
We followed a thin column of woodsmoke toward Eggers’ lodge, which lay in the darkness ahead. Janis was a shadow in the trees uphill from us, and the whole campus was quiet except for one soul. Out in the quad, a lone student was running the fitness track in the late cold. He jogged in his parka until he reached the pull-up station, where his breath plumed upward each time his chin crested the bar. After a certain number, he ran on.
Eventually, we reached the muddy, snowless circle that surrounded the lodge, and were met with the charring smell of an odd, sour meat. With a lift of the flap, Eggers emerged in a bizarre set of pantaloons and a huge serape of black fur. He saw we were looking at the strange hat of rabbit hides on his head. “It’s not finished,” he said. “Come on. I spend half my life gathering wood, and the other half melting snow.”
“Here we are, Eggers,” I said. “What’s this favor?”
“It involves our new Clovis point,” he said.
Trudy narrowed her eyes at him.
“There are no new Clovis points,” she said. “Unless you think you’re the one person in the world who can make them.”
“I have a real one,” Eggers said, “and we’re going to use it.” He ducked into his lodge and returned with a heavy spear, about two and a half meters long, the pink Clovis point bound to the end with some kind of thin fiber.
“Are you crazy, Eggers?” I asked. “This is an artifact. It’s invaluable.”
“No, sir,” he said. “This is a tool, made to be used, and the only thing I still need to do for my dissertation is bring down a large herbivore. This is your idea, Dr. Hannah. This is straight out of The Depletionists. I don’t care what your critics think. I read that book ten times. Your book is why I’m doing this.” He gestured at his lodge, his clothes. “Don’t you want to see if it’s true, if this point can really do it?”
“There’s no need,” I
told him. “These points have been found lodged in mammoth and mastodon bones. There is no doubt they kill.”
“You can shoot an African elephant ten times with a rifle and it will only get angry,” Eggers said, gesturing a little wildly with the spear. Trudy and I backed up a step. “Fifty years later, when that elephant dies of old age, it leaves bones with bullets in them. Maybe your mastodons were the ones that got away. You ever think of that? But how can you know, without research and testing?”
Trudy laughed. “And where are you going to find a mastodon?”
Eggers turned to me. “All I need is an animal that weighs at least a thousand pounds. Isn’t that right, Dr. Hannah?”
“Well,” I said, “I suppose.”
My head was starting to spin a little. I kept seeing pink spears flying into the future—where would they land? Most of my colleagues believed climate change at the end of the Ice Age had killed off all the big animals in North America, which caused the Clovis to starve and disband; but I’d staked my whole career on the belief that a Clovis point could take down any animal. Yet Eggers was right—I’d never seen a kill.
“Where are you going to find a thousand-pound animal that no one’s using?” Trudy asked. “Those guards at Hormel mean business. They’d grind you up and turn you into an Eggers burger.”
“Don’t you worry about Eggers burgers,” Eggers said. “Eggers has this all planned out.”
I put a hand on Eggers’ shoulder. “Is this the bad news?” I asked. “You know, the bad part of the good-news/bad-news thing?”
“The bad news comes tomorrow,” he said. “This is the celebration part.” With that, Eggers began backing into the darkness of the quad.
Trudy and I stood there a moment, looking at each other.
“Did you see that Clovis point?” she asked. “A woman made that. I know it. It took her hours, sitting around a mineral deposit with her friends. She talked and told stories while her hands worked the quartz. She chose the material for its beauty, because this was her art, and the design was taught to her by her mother—the keeper of a thousand years of hunting technology.”
While Trudy spoke, I pictured her hands working the quartz, holding the point up to the light to search for imperfections, then testing its edge with her thumb.
