Bestiary (34 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
“I need to look at that front cover again,” Beth said, going straight to it.
“Why?”
“I need to look for something.” Beth picked it up carefully and angled its edge toward the overhead light.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“I’m looking for a space between the beech board and the ivory.”
“A what?”
“Just tell me—is there any space between these two, where something like a page of parchment could be concealed?”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Hildegard said, though her curiosity was sufficiently aroused that she quickly cleared a spot on the table in front of her. “Put it down.”
Beth did, and Hildegard pulled the magnifying glass, which was mounted on a swivel, toward her. She studied the edge of the cover. “What makes you think we’ll find such a thing?”
“The catchwords,” Beth said.
“What about them?”
“They said that the identity of the artist would be lost forever, to sleep under a blanket of blue sky and white clouds.”
Hildegard looked at her blankly.
“The cover of the book is made up of white ivory and blue sapphires. And together they make up a kind of ornamented sepulcher, which were the last catchwords in the book.”
Hildegard didn’t look sold, but she didn’t look opposed to the idea, either. She took a scalpel from the drawer and probed the top of the cover.
“Nothing here,” she said.
“Check the inside edge, where the cover would be attached to the binding.”
She turned the cover sideways and bent her head low. All Beth could see now was the top of her gray bun, with a couple of long pins stuck through it.
“Well, I never,” Hildegard finally said. With one hand, she inserted the scalpel half an inch or so, as if nudging something loose. Then she reached out and grasped a pair of long-nosed tweezers, with which she ever so slowly drew something from beneath the ivory cover. Beth’s heart was beating fast as the tweezers emerged, with several faded parchment pages, fine as filament, clutched in their grip.
Hildegard sat back on the stool and gave Beth a very approving glance. “I’m not even going to look at these,” she said. “You found them, and you should be the first person in centuries to read them.”
Beth couldn’t agree more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
GREER GRABBED A beer out of the fridge, wandered into the living room, and flopped onto the matching Barcalounger facing the TV. It was Naugahyde, and even though it got hot after you’d sat there awhile, right now it was cool and smooth and the little footstool part came up when he leaned far enough back.
His mother was parked, as usual, in the other one, with a cat in her lap and her hand in a bag of Pirate’s Booty—another low-cal snack. Greer picked up the remote from the table between them, and was about to change the channel when she said, “I’m watching this.”
Greer stopped and watched for a minute. It was something called
The Vorhaus Report
, one of those crappy cable interview shows with a two-dollar set and a moderator in a bad toupee. The guests tonight appeared to be some scientist—the chyron said CARTER COX, PALEONTOLOGIST—and an American Indian named James Running Horse. The Indian was wearing a three-piece suit, and he looked to Greer like he had maybe one-sixteenth, or less, Indian in him; Greer snorted, thinking this was just another scam the guy used to score some government money or affirmative action shit. Maybe even a piece of some new multimilliondollar casino in the desert. Indians had it made these days.
The Vorhaus Report
, one of those crappy cable interview shows with a two-dollar set and a moderator in a bad toupee. The guests tonight appeared to be some scientist—the chyron said CARTER COX, PALEONTOLOGIST—and an American Indian named James Running Horse. The Indian was wearing a three-piece suit, and he looked to Greer like he had maybe one-sixteenth, or less, Indian in him; Greer snorted, thinking this was just another scam the guy used to score some government money or affirmative action shit. Maybe even a piece of some new multimilliondollar casino in the desert. Indians had it made these days.
He ought to tell Sadowski and his crew to look into it.
“What the hell are you watching this for?” Greer said.
“It’s educational.”
“You hate educational. You watch Home Shopping Network.”
“Not always. I’m watching this now.”
Greer sat back and listened for another minute or two. It looked as though they were discussing something about some bones that had been dug up in those pits over on La Brea. Wasn’t that where somebody’d just died? Greer had caught something about it on the local news—another Indian had fallen in or something and drowned.
But the show didn’t seem to be about this. It seemed to be about some really ancient bones that the Running Horse guy wanted returned, and the other guy—he was tall and in good shape, wearing khakis and an open-collared white shirt—wanted to study first. And they kept talking about something called NAGPRA.
“The NAGPRA provisions have been in place since 1990, for just such occasions as this,” Running Horse was saying now.
“What are they talking about?” Greer asked. “What’s NAGPRA?”
“Native American Graves something,” his mother quickly put in. “It’s about how when you dig up their bones or their . . . holy things . . . you have to give them back to the tribe.”
Greer took a long pull on the cold beer. “Sounds to me like a case of finders keepers.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” his mother said. “Just listen, Derek—you might learn something.”
“But these remains predate any of the known tribes by many thousands of years,” Cox was saying now. “Even if they were to be repatriated, to whom would they be given? What tribe? Where? These early peoples migrated, often over large distances.”
“They should be given to the tribe of which he was an honored ancestor,” Running Horse replied.
“Fine,” Cox said. “But unless you let us study the remains, we won’t even be able to determine that much.”
“Then perhaps you should have thought of that before you disturbed his bones.”
“We disturbed his bones, if that’s how you want to put it, doing what we do—excavating the tar pits for the fossils of early North American animals. Mastodons, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats. We didn’t exactly break into a sacred burial ground and start turning over tombstones.”
“We Native Americans,” Running Horse said, turning his attention to the neutral host seated between them, “have been treated like slaves, like chattel—”
Greer wondered if he’d just mispronounced “cattle.”
“—for centuries, ever since the genocidal invasion of the European explorers. Our most sacred places have been defiled, our most precious objects—pottery, textiles—have been plundered, and even our bodies have been removed from Mother Earth, where they were meant to rest, and put on display in glass cases in museum galleries.”
“The La Brea Woman is not on display,” Cox shot back.
“And she’s not in the earth, either,” Running Horse replied.
It was getting heated—Greer liked that.
“Where is she, in fact?” Running Horse continued. “Is she in a file drawer? A cardboard box? A safe?”
Cox didn’t seem to know how to answer that.
“There’s a difference, isn’t there,” the host broke in, “between repatriation and disposition? Shouldn’t we—”
“I’ll tell you where she is,” Cox said, totally ignoring the host’s question and leaning toward Running Horse. Greer wondered if his mother was watching this because she thought this Carter Cox guy was handsome.
“She’s in the air,” Cox said. “And in the ocean. She’s in the sky, and the clouds, and the rain. Isn’t that what you believe? That we all return to the universe, to the Great Spirit? Then that’s where she is. And her skeleton—what little we’ve got of it—is just the physical remains, the unimportant, insignificant, fossilized residue of a human life.”
“Then why do you want it?” Running Horse countered, but even Greer could see that was a bad move.
“Because by studying what remains, we can learn more about her. About how she lived, and how she died. We can find out where we all came from, and maybe where we’re all going. We can honor her—just as we can honor the La Brea Man now, too—in a way that simply burying their bones again will never do. We can honor them by paying attention not to their deaths—you’ve got to stop looking at these as dead souls—but to their lives. How they lived, how they survived, and how they prevailed, in a very hostile world. I can’t think of any greater tribute we can give them.”
“Than to lay their bones under bright lights and X-ray machines?”
Cox looked exasperated. “If that’s what it takes, yes.”
“The federal government thinks you’re wrong,” Running Horse replied, over the moderator’s raised hand, “and I’m going to prove it.”
“Thank you, thank you both,” Vorhaus was saying, “but we are unfortunately out of time. It’s been a very enlightening discussion, and a thank-you, too, goes out to our viewers for joining us tonight, on
The Vorhaus Report
.”
The Vorhaus Report
.”
The screen blipped and cut to a public service announcement a nanosecond later—guess the guy meant it, Greer thought, when he said they were out of time. “Can I change it now?” he asked.
“See what’s on AMC.”
Greer channel-surfed a bit—sometimes over his mother’s protestations of “Wait—that looked good” or “What was that—was that
Law and Order
?”—but he couldn’t find anything to watch either. At least on his computer he could get porn.
Law and Order
?”—but he couldn’t find anything to watch either. At least on his computer he could get porn.
He tossed the remote into her ample lap—the cat hissed at him—and said, “I’m going out.”
For a change, she didn’t ask where.
But all he could think of right now was the Blue Bayou.
AS SOON AS
the studio lights went down and
The Vorhaus Report
was officially off the air, Carter detached the microphone from the front of his shirt, shook hands with the host—he didn’t have to bother with James Running Horse, who had conspicuously turned his back and stalked out of the studio—and went out to the parking lot.
the studio lights went down and
The Vorhaus Report
was officially off the air, Carter detached the microphone from the front of his shirt, shook hands with the host—he didn’t have to bother with James Running Horse, who had conspicuously turned his back and stalked out of the studio—and went out to the parking lot.
He had deliberately parked his Jeep right below a halogen lamp, and his first thought was to check the tires. After that run-in at Temescal Canyon, he was only too aware of all the crazies loose in L.A.
He got into the car and started for home. At least at this hour—he checked the clock on the dashboard and saw that it was after 10 P.M.—there wouldn’t be much traffic. The Santa Anas were blowing, hot dry winds off the desert, stirring up the scents of dry sage and dry mesquite and dry soil. Dry everything.
He put on the radio, but he couldn’t really concentrate on it; instead, he kept turning over in his mind the last hour, much of it spent jousting with James Running Horse. He’d done his best to keep his temper, but he was so weary of this endless debate, this ongoing controversy between science and religion, which played out everywhere from the textbook wars over evolution to his own freedom to examine a precious and rare hominid artifact. He wished he’d said something more when Running Horse had demanded that the bones of this “honored ancestor” be returned to his tribe. Who was to say these bones were ever honored? Much of the evidence suggested that the La Brea Woman had had her skull crushed with a blunt instrument, and it was quite possible that her male counterpart had met an equally violent fate. Far from being honored, these people might have been murdered, or brutally sacrificed, and for all we knew today, their fondest wish, their
dying
wish, might have been to get away from their bloodthirsty fellow tribe members altogether.
dying
wish, might have been to get away from their bloodthirsty fellow tribe members altogether.
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