Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  “If they have a phone.”

  “Yes, if.”

  “And if she’s still speaking to them, after that last beating.”

  “Of course she is. Yes, she’s been horribly abused by these Brother So-and-So guys, bartered off at ten to seal a business deal, but she didn’t hide under a porch Sunday night because she was afraid of going home to another beating. She’s a survivor, and the way she has survived is to think it’s her job to take beatings. No, she stayed put because she was there for a purpose and wasn’t going to leave without fulfilling it.”

  I made eye contact with Not Tom Latimer to make sure he was with me. His eyes flashed like distant beacons, and he gave me ten percent of a smile as he made a circling gesture with one hand that said, Keep going.

  I said, “She may look like a child, but she’s eighteen years old and as red-blooded as the rest of us. She went to George’s house that night with high expectations, expecting to get … sleep with her husband for the first time. She gets there expecting her long-delayed wedding night bliss, and wham, the place is running with cops. But she wouldn’t just leave again. She was devoted, eighteen, and determined. She hunkered down to wait for George.”

  The FBI agent rolled his eyes.

  I said, “Think about it, Ray. That girl’s under incredible stress, and when all else fails, survivors go on autopilot.”

  Ray said, “Meaning what?”

  “Tap the phone, Ray. Get yourself down here. And watch your back.”

  Ray was silent for a long while then said, “Give me the number where you are. And put Tom, um, Latimer on. It’s going to take me a few minutes to get this together.”

  20

  THE FBI AGENT TOLD ME HE NEEDED TO MAKE A FEW CALLS himself. He’d receive Ray’s message when he called back, then find me in the bar. I headed back through the inside door into the Mecca Club.

  The Allosaurus wake was in full swing. Geoscientists are a lone-wolf lot, given to long periods of professional and personal solitude punctuated by short bursts of intense socialization. Alcohol is the great antidote for shyness. In circumstances such as these, in which our basic hesitancy is exacerbated by both professional anxieties and personal emotions, we can get drunk on one beer and the power of suggestion; but cram seventy of us into a small hall belly-to-belly, thereby pressing our instinctive need for space and privacy up against our secret longing to belong, and we switch to an overgregarious jollity and are almost instantaneously plotzed.

  The room was concussed with the roar of conversation, each voice growing louder and louder in order to be heard over all others that were doing the same. Movement within the room was all but stalled, so orders for more beer were being volleyed hand over hand toward the bar, accompanied by folded money, and glasses of suds were flowing back. People who had studiously not noticed me until that moment were suddenly glad to see me, wanted to know what I was drinking, wanted to know if they could pass me overhead toward the bar, because maybe I could sing for them. I smiled pleasantly as I pressed my way slowly toward the front door, listening for interesting conversations.

  As I squeezed past the knot of people who were helping Vance gas his brain, I heard a young woman next to him shout over the din, “Well, there goes another critical piece of data. Bye-bye advancement of the science. Let’s just send everyone to the dinosaur theme parks or the movies, issue them their T. rex T-shirts, and give up on trying to educate them.”

  I paused a moment to listen.

  “Yeah,” a man with a nose like a shark’s fin mused at ninety decibels, “imagine learning everything you know about dinosaurs from Jurassic Park!”

  “Spielberg did okay,” shouted another. “At least he had Jack Horner there consulting. But Spielberg needed T. rex to be a predator to make the plot ugly, so that’s what the public gets.” Another said, “And let’s gloss over the fact that T. rex was Cretaceous, not Jurassic.”

  Vance screamed, “Fucking assholes!” about nothing in particular and everything in general, and took another guzzle of his beer.

  A nerdy-looking fellow raised an authoritative finger and roared, “You can’t write Spielberg off that easily, or Crichton, who, you’ll recall, wrote the book. Even Shakespeare understood the value of feeding some banal entertainment to the masses while he drove the plot toward a higher truth. It’s always the job of the brightest and best educated among us to raise the level of the game. Should we leave it to the least among us? Or the greediest?”

  “Sure!” shouted the young woman. “Feed ’em candy for the mind while you steal their lunch money. Just give me a job where I get to do paleontology!”

  “Who are you guys?” bellowed another. “The arbiters of who gets to learn what? That’s arrogant as hell!”

  I pressed onward through the wake.

  “This fucks everything. It’s fucking hard enough to work in this field without this kind of crap going on,” a paunchy man in his fifties was hollering to a confederate as he gesticulated sloppily with a full glass. Droplets of cold ale flew through the air. “Sherbrooke gets media-happy to compete with Dishey and what does it do? Drives the price of bones up even further. Good thing this is public land out here. If it was private, all the ranchers would sell to the highest bidder, and we’d never see another speciman. How the hell are we supposed to compete with this shit?”

  “I hear you,” his listener answered at the top of his lungs. “It’s fatuous, this business of making fossils a business. A fossil’s either priceless or worthless, unique in all the world or just another lump of rock. I’m ready to quit and sell insurance.”

  “Yeah, to hell with my doctorate,” shrieked a skinny man next to him. “Let’s just round up all the bones that are left and sell them to the Chinese for charms or something.”

  “Take dino-dust tonic,” squalled the paunchy man, imitating a B-movie Chinese accent. “Prease yo’ young wife!”

  I moved on. I didn’t want to know where the bones of the 149,000,000-year-old mother and child that had just been ripped from the naked desert were going to wind up. I wasn’t drunk, and couldn’t hope to be. I had too much yet to accomplish before the sun set on the San Rafael Swell.

  I was almost to the front door when a woman lost her balance as I squirmed by behind her. She took a fast step backward, pressing me facefirst into Earthworm Magritte’s broad chest.

  When Magritte recognized who had just been planted on him like a bug on a windshield, he smiled, reached his beer around my neck, and took a noisy slurp from beside my opposite ear.

  The woman behind me continued to lean on me. The room was so crowded that she had neither enough room to straighten up nor to slide to the floor. I grunted as the last of my oxygen supply was squeezed from my lungs, put my hands against Magritte’s chest, and steadied myself.

  Magritte brought his other hand up and found the tip of my chin. He lifted it and began to lean his lips down toward me. The mixed scents of man, pine, and beer washed across my face.

  I jerked my head back and shouted, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to kiss you!” he shouted back, his voice almost swallowed by the roar of the crowd even at this incredibly close range.

  “Why?” I pleaded.

  He smiled warmly. “Because I like you!”

  I gasped, “Let me go!” and pushed with everything I had, knocking the woman behind me who knew where. Magritte released me, and I headed for the door, but I was immediately caught in another box canyon of human bodies.

  Magritte grasped my arm. “I’m sorry,” he shouted, but at arm’s length, I was reduced to reading his lips.

  It was a long time since anyone had simply said that he liked me, or that he was sorry for an affront. I looked into his shyly inviting eyes. Being this close, this candid, was simultaneously comforting and deeply threatening. “No, I’m sorry,” I shouted, wondering what exactly I meant by that.

  Magritte stuffed his beer glass into a nearby empty hand guided me through the press of bodies an
d out onto the sidewalk. “What’s your hurry?” he asked hopefully.

  I could still barely hear him. My ears were ringing from the ruckus in the Mecca Club. “I gotta meet—” I stopped myself before speaking Ray’s name. It wouldn’t do to let this man, or anyone in this group, for that matter, know where I was headed.

  “Your Eagle Scout,” Magritte said, completing my sentence.

  I said nothing. Ray, my Eagle Scout. Yes, I was already thinking of him as mine, even though he was forever wedded not only to another but to a whole way of life I stood outside of.

  Magritte tipped his head in query and stared into me, pressing his suit. “Well, he isn’t here yet. We can just hang out here and get to know each other a bit,” he said, still holding my hand as if we were about to dance.

  Why not tarry here awhile and get to know Magritte? He was not unattractive, in a stocky sort of way, and the contents of his mind interested me intensely. For all his bluster, he had an innocence to him, a vulnerability that came with candor and openness, rare in a man. I hesitated. If I gave in to him, then what might Ray think? Ray, who had married in the Temple, a big stone edifice that scared me, married for time and eternity to a woman who had gone on into that eternity ahead of him. Was she waiting there, as Mormon beliefs suggested, or had she already been reborn on another continent, as a Tibetan lama, perhaps? And was she the only woman Ray had ever touched in the deepest earthly sense, the only woman who had shared his bed?

  Magritte’s hand moved gently against mine, massaging it with hope. Feeling a sympathetic body touch mine warmed me like liquor, soothed me, inspired a thousand nerve endings to ask, Why not? Magritte blended with Ray in my mind, in my soul, making one man, a superman, a mixture of traits so powerful that my stomach began to flutter. What if I could have the body and charisma of the one joined to the openness of the other?

  Ray in bed. I would have gone there with him, had he asked me; I knew that now. I had known him only two short days, but they held a year’s experience and shock, and we had moved together through it. But now I felt drawn to Magritte. Was I running from Ray, just as I now pulled from the limits of Magritte’s reach? As I stared into Magritte’s hungry, unguarded eyes, I wondered how many women he had had. Ten? One hundred? Where was the specialness in that? There was strength and sanctity in Ray’s chastity, and I longed to be as innocent, longed to be his one special mate. “Listen,” I said, “I got to take one thing at a time.”

  Magritte’s face softened. “You can’t hitch up with a Mormon.”

  “How do you know that?” I demanded.

  “Because you seek your own answers.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “Nah, I’ve watched you both. You always lead, and he follows. And look at the work you do. Geologists think in probabilities, patterns, and overlapping fields, not in straight lines from A to B. Mormonism is a religion designed by engineers. They’ve got an answer for every question and a chicken in every pot. It’s not just a religion; it’s a tribe, a way people live. I’ve got nothing against that for folks who want that, but even if you could jam yourself into the slot they’ve got waiting for you, you’d die of boredom being told what to think.” He pulled my hand now up against his chest.

  I felt his heart beating. “It wouldn’t have to be like that,” I said wishfully. “Ray has a loving family, and they all seem to pray directly to God … .”

  Magritte looked sad. “They talk to God and get their own revelations—is that the language? Hey, so do I. If your Eagle Scout went on a mission, then he’s a member of the Aaronic priesthood. That’s important to him. He has experiences there that reinforce his faith. We all do. I’m on this field trip today to get new revelations and reinforce my faith. The thing is, the human mind seeks a context for these experiences; we all do. Ray probably figured he had things wired, and then he met you, and you’ve made his wires smoke.”

  I tugged at my hand, trying to pull away.

  “Oh, don’t be so damn humble,” he said. “You’re incredible. Bright, quick, soft, and fierce. Your Eagle Scout wonders if your magic isn’t somehow greater than his. He’s got to pull you in, just to find out if that’s true.”

  I screwed up my face in disbelief. “Me? Magic?”

  “Yeah, you have the stuff, Em Hansen; you’re just young yet. Ask yourself: would you really have the freedom of thought and motion you’re accustomed to, or would they seek to influence you at every turn?”

  “I think they believe that’s right.”

  “You think. They believe. What about what you know?” Engulfed in his own, he thumped my hand gently against his massive chest.

  My mind pitched and reeled through its impressions of Mormonism, Ray’s unnervingly serene family gathering, the grid of city streets that always told me where I was relative to the Temple, the Temple itself, with its architecture … . “What is it about the Temple, Magritte?”

  “It has no windows,” he said softly. “No windows. It’s a crypt, like they don’t want you seeing in. They’re keeping secrets.”

  A lack of windows. All other churches opened their eyes to the sky, drinking in God’s light, but the Salt Lake Temple looked inward. Shaken, I focused on Magritte, staring in through his impossibly thick glasses to the telescopically small eyes he trained back on me. “Why does that scare me?” I asked.

  Magritte smiled wistfully. “Because you’re a Middle American Protestant, like the rest of us poor schmucks, taught to believe that it’s all been written, that all has been created, that all you have to do is read the book. We don’t mess with anything we can’t see, or something dark and dirty will happen. Then along come the Mormons. They take your deck of cards, reshuffle it right in front of you, and slip a joker into it. They talk to God, have revelations, do faith healings, tell you they have the answer and you don’t. To a Puritan, that’s conjury; that’s fingernails on the chalkboard: If you went around talking about visions and the power to heal, your church elders would call you a witch and burn you at the stake.”

  I leaned into Magritte’s grip. He was right, I was hopelessly a Puritan. Virtue is its own reward, but we’re all getting punished anyway, our motto. Woe betide me, I was just as stuck in my beliefs as a creationist.

  He tipped his head closer to me. “Think it through,” he whispered into my ringing ears. “He may have a hot line to God, but he’s probably never had an original thought in his life. How long would you last with that?”

  I patted him on the chest and pushed myself away again. “Fine,” I said. “You may be right, but I don’t know that. I got to go.”

  “Why?”

  I could have answered diplomatically, offering some timeworn excuse, but a serving of bullshit was not what Magritte had asked for. So instead, I told him the truth: “Because I need someone more stable than I am.”

  Magritte looked deep into my eyes. “So do I,” he whispered sadly back. “So do I.”

  THE DRIVER OF the second bus was standing on the sidewalk, eyes shut, her hands slowly caressing an unseen form in front of her. Allison Lee stood beside her, arms folded across her chest, watching.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, looking over my shoulder to make sure Magritte had made it back into the club. He had.

  “Artemis here is clearing the bladder meridians of a Camarasaurus,” she answered.

  “Come again?” A bus driver named Artemis? In Utah? She didn’t look Greek.

  “Its aura,” Allison explained. “She’s rolled it onto its back so she can work with it.”

  “It’s so sweet,” said the bus driver. “Like a golden retriever!”

  I wondered if the din inside the Mecca Club had done something to my ears. “We don’t have this sort of stuff in Wyoming. What’s a meridian, and why’s she stroking it?”

  Allison explained, in her Lawn Guyland glottal drawl, “It’s Chinese medicine. The subtle energy pathways of the auric body get clogged.”

  “In whose aura?” I asked. I was beyond subtlet
y myself. I was reeling. Having just had my emotions hit by a truck wearing MAGRITTE license plates, I wasn’t sure I could handle a dinosaur aura in the middle of Main Street.

  “This dinosaur here,” Allison said, pointing into the empty space in front of the driver.

  “But there’s nothing there,” I said doggedly. “Come on, Allison; the last dinosaurs died sixty-four million years ago. Camarasaurus almost a one hundred and fifty million years ago.”

  “Time means nothing in metaphysics,” said the bus driver. She giggled. “I’m stroking a dinosaur tummy, so I should know.”

  “No, you’re—”

  “Sure, the animal’s body died a long time ago. I’m hip,” said the driver. “But it got stuck thinking its soul was dead, too. But the soul never dies. This one needs to go on to the astral plane, where it can get what it needs.” To the invisible dinosaur soul, she said, “There now, sweetie, can you find some friends to help you through? Here, I’ll open a passageway for you.” She rotated her hand clockwise, waited, then rotated it counterclockwise. Then she turned to Allison. “Okay, the big long-neck is on its way; now let’s go after that pack of carnivores.”

  “What are you talking about?” I persisted.

  Allison said, “Aw, I went on one of the preconference field trips, and we visited the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry. This camarasaur died there, and at least forty-four allosaurs. The big leaf-eater was being hunted by the fang guys when they all got trapped in the mud at the bottom of a lake. Nasty way to die.”

  “They all died in terrible fear,” said the driver soberly, “and couldn’t let go of the earth energy.”