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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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"I've got to teach my Arc-Intro," Eggers added. "There's more than this spear point. I'll show you, but I need to ask a favor first."
Doing a favor for Eggers was no easy thing. He didn't use money, ride in cars, or borrow music. He didn't need my fishing pole or want a letter of recommendation. He'd been an unexceptional kid as far as I could tell, one who sat at the back of my classes, dressed like a golf caddy, and probably smoked some reefer. Then he embarked on this project, and somehow he'd become a lean, clear-eyed young man who had no need for anything from you but time, muscle, and wisdom.
"All right, what is it?"
"Meet me here tonight, when the moon is high."
"Surely, you're joking," I told him. "What time is that? Midnight?"
"Midnight sounds right, though I'd have to check the moon."
"Midnight's my personal/leisure time."
"And bring Trudy," he said. His big, shaggy figure was already heading off to teach.
I stood there a moment with the pink Clovis point in my hand. It felt wrong simply to stick it in my coat pocket as if it was a pen or a throat lozenge, and it seemed more criminal to wander the campus wielding it in my hand. I probably shouldn't admit this, but my first, brief impulse was to show Janis, to walk up the hill to the plaque that I tried to think of as her, and tell her all about it.
I admit this because these events happened long ago, and it's more than ironic that a man who spent his career trying to bring the past to life would, around the age of thirty-nine, begin to communicate certain things to the dead.
That's when Eggers came walking back to me. I was still standing there, hand extended with a pink spear point, looking toward the river so as not to look toward my stepmother. As Eggers neared, I for some reason felt that when he came close he would keep coming closer and give me a pat on the back or clasp my hand. He might hug me, I thought.
Instead, Eggers said, "Are you okay, Dr. Hannah?"
"What?" I asked.
"I better hold this for now," he said, taking the point from my hand. "I'll give it back later tonight. And get some rest, yeah?"
Then he walked away again.
I set off through the quad, following the snowed-in cardio-track, with its frozen fitness stations, then tromped past the Carney Aquatic Center, standing like a cube of jade with its steamed-up walls of Depression-era glass. I could make out the silhouettes of dive platforms, could almost smell the endless drizzle of mildewy rain that dripped from the glass ceiling inside.
There was no getting around the fact that I would be late for lunch with my father downtown, but still I cut through the dean's courtyard and the president's garden-the ground winterized with rows of burlap-and it struck me as I passed among the stark colonnades surrounding Old Main that the school paper was right: all the squirrels had disappeared.
The campus opened onto Parkton Square, a one-block park surrounded by multi-story brick buildings erected by people who believed towns like Parkton and Sioux Falls would one day be Kansas Cities and St. Louises. Parking was free dur- ing Glacier Days, so I walked past green-hooded meters in front of businesses that were mostly alive, though the Bijou Theater was now an indoor shooting range and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge had been divided into the small apartments where my father now lived. If I looked up to the hill above downtown, I could see the library and buildings of Parkton College, the long-bankrupt Catholic school that was now home to the minimum-security federal prison camp.
I crossed the street at Bank, passed the statue of Har- old McGeachie, "The Farmers' Farmer," and watched a roller-coaster car swoop above the trees in the park. It climbed its white scaffolding, paused atop the hump to let its passengers fret and moan before the load of colored hats, thick parkas, and trailing scarves plunged screaming from view. Before I pushed into the brass revolving door of the Red Dakotan, I paused to read the movie marquee next door, which was billing a double feature of "His & Hers Pistol Special" and "Super Scope Sale."
The Red Dakotan had been built long before the dam, back in a time when Mississippi steamboats made it this far up the river, when wealthy passengers needed a place to freshen themselves and pass the time in luxury while military prisoners restocked the ships with coal. Inside, the wool carpets had a red fleur-de-lis design, and there was a staircase banister scrolled in the French style. Silver "smoker's companions" stood astride each chair. By the bar, below the Dakotan's wall-length gilt mirror, I spotted my father's houndstooth sportcoat.
When I joined him, he was holding the hand of a woman who was leaving. He bowed slightly to her, extended a business card between two fingers, and said, "Enchanté," before hailing the bartender with an order of two martinis.
He wore a new pair of eyeglasses with amber lenses, tinted like the safety goggles that shootists wear. He sported a mustard-colored vest, and he'd acquired a pinkie ring that was nothing but a huge nugget of gold. Here was my father, a man who in the six months since Janis' death had managed to liquidate everything they owned together, sell his State Farm office, and reappraise all of southern South Dakota with a look in his eye that said, I'm ready. Man, I am ready.
"Enchanté," I said.
He pretended not to hear me.
"Did you bring the Corvette?" he asked. "I may need the 'Vette later."
"Let me see one of those cards," I said, reaching for his breast pocket. "I mean, I take it you didn't just try to sell that young woman insurance."
He brushed away my hand. "You wish," he said. "It happens I will be escorting that new lady friend to the radio theater tomorrow."
I swiped one of the cards anyway. It read, "Frank Hannah," and below, in fine script, "Appraiser of Fine Goods, Objects D'Art, & Rare Beauty."
I said, "I notice you didn't mention the word 'Antiquities.'"
Dad gave me his "wise-sage" look, which consisted of lowering his head enough to eyeball me over the top rim of his glasses. "Son," he said, "every woman has something hidden and valuable she wants to show you."
"Like her underwear?"
He snatched the card back. "This wouldn't work for you," he said. "Look at your limp suit and mail-order spectacles. Who taught you how to shave? I woke up. I stepped out of the fire."
He thumbed the length of his lapels and tugged his cufflinks, as if to say, See?
"The fire? You mean the inferno that is marriage, fatherhood, and a career?"
"Hey," he said, "I'm still your father. Don't forget that. But here's a tidbit I woke up to. There's no such thing as insurance. You don't bet against doom. You can't sell policies your whole life and just hope disaster doesn't come. You got to tip your hat when it comes, because it's coming. So-send in the tornadoes. Let's have the locusts."
"I hope you've been drinking," I said.
At the sound of the martini shaker, Dad closed his eyes. To the music of ice and frothy gin, he said, "Oh, lighten up. These are just musings. This is only Philosophy 101. If I wanted to give you real advice, I'd tell you to find a young girl, ten years younger, and marry her young. That's as close as you'll come to insurance."
Of course he was referring to the death of Janis, but we had, at some point since then, come to a silent understanding: he never spoke my stepmother's name, and I never said my mother's.
Dad's eyes popped open. "Come to think of it," he whispered, "forget the Corvette. I may need the van tonight."
He smiled for the first time, and I saw that his two front teeth, which had always been a tad discolored and out of alignment, now gleamed perfectly white with new crowns.
The martinis came, both dressed to my father's exact specifications-a toothpick skewering an olive, then a folded anchovy, and finally a cocktail onion-so I knew my father had walked the bartender through a couple trial runs before I'd arrived.
Dad put some cash in the bartender's hand. "We'll want that booth over there, by the wall, and we'll need our steaks sent over ahead of time." He turned to me. "Two or three steaks?"
I looked around for Trudy, who was supposed to meet us for lunch, but she was nowhere to be seen. "Two for now," I told Dad.
"Two it is," he told the bartender. "Make them porterhouses, keep 'em rare."
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?"
"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 cafeteria, 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."