Salt River

The big mound was melting again. More than an inch of rain had fallen on the weekend, slicing gullies into the rim of the earthen platform. Mud slumped down the steep incline and fanned out across the caliche around the mound.

Schiller saw the damage to the big mound from where he parked his car behind the Visitor Center. The top edges of the platform were serrated by the erosion and he expected that the path on its top was eroded around its edges. No doubt, the excavation trench across one of the mound’s corners, left open for visitors to survey, was also damaged.

Nature tirelessly labors to destroy the works of man. Left unreconstructed, the pueblo with its ball court, two- and three-story tenements, and ceremonial mound would have simply dissolved into the featureless desert. Sometimes, the wind would sweep dust off the middens and bone-white shards of pottery might glisten in the hot sun. Under the caliche, traces would remain, rows of adobe bricks embedded in the clay, places trampled by hundreds of years of bare feet, corpse-bundles like big, brown seeds buried under the hard-pan desert pavement, inert and awaiting resurrection. Without modern repairs, none of the site would be visible to untrained eyes and Schiller had reached the moment in his career when he sometimes thought it would be better that way. He sighed and stretched, standing next to his Toyota Yaris, took a last sip from his coffee, and limped toward the employee entrance to the Visitor Center. The traffic incoming from Mesa had been congested this morning and his commute had taken almost forty minutes and sitting tensely flexed behind the wheel made his knees and ankles stiff.

The sky was featureless blue, bright enough to hurt his eyes. Beyond the high cyclone fences enclosing the old pueblo site, warehouses and self-storage lock-ups lined the boulevards. Eight or ten story airport hotels lorded it over the flat terrain, marking the crossroads of major thoroughfares. Other than the hotels, the highest points in the landscape were freeway overpasses, places where one highway arced over another. A procession of jets, staggered at half-mile intervals, hovered above the sandstone mountains. The jets were foreshortened and looked like spiky silver balloons and they didn’t seem to advance. But if you looked away from them for a minute, the array of aircraft had changed, planes skidding along the scorched runways under the beige tribune of the control tower. Schiller scanned the horizon – the mountains to the east of the city at the rim of the basin were veined with snow, an unusual thing to see.

In the visitor center, Schiller went to his cubicle behind the "staff only" door and tapped the keyboard of his computer to bring up his Windows. Dr. Germaine’s administrative secretary was hunched over her cell-phone furiously texting. Dr. Germaine’s door was closed which meant that he was late to work again. When he was in the office, Dr. Germaine kept his door open so as to better supervise his subordinates. Coffee was brewing and Schiller poured himself a cup. The Visitor Center was not yet open to the public and so he felt authorized to carry his coffee past the information desk to the small museum. The museum was dark, a horse-shoe shaped lay-out of three galleries: prehistory, history, and a demonstration of archaeological techniques and methods. Schiller flipped on the lights and the alcoves in the wall displaying pottery and weapons brightened behind their glass. He checked the exhibits to make sure that the glass protecting the displays was not unduly smeared or blurred with fingerprints. In the small room devoted to archaeological methods, he counted the shards, wooden planting sticks, and rabbit fur pouches stacked on a table. People were invited to handle these artifacts. It was restful to stroke the rabbit fur and Schiller had often observed people, particularly older men frazzled by the city traffic, calming themselves by petting the soft fur. For a moment, he closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers over the velvety fur. Then, he dug into a small bin next to the metate and spilled a handful of colorful Indian-corn kernels onto the grinding stone. He located the grey oblong mano used to crush the corn. It was like the remote on a TV, people always moved the mano into improbable locations where it would be momentarily lost. The stone was cold and smooth and indifferent, the opposite of the rabbit fur. Schiller hefted the mano, felt its weight and, then, put it atop the metate. The poster for the Kids DIG Archaeology program looked loose and so Schiller pressed at its corners where the tape adhered to the wall.

Emerging from museum, Schiller saw that the old volunteer who manned the information desk and sold tickets to the site was sitting on his stool, grinning broadly with his surgically inset teeth pointed in the direction of the parking lot. A couple of long Rvs had pulled up and were laboriously maneuvering to park. It was 9:00 still a half-hour before the Visitor Center and walking trails opened. The old man wore a polo shirt and beige slacks and he had a neatly trimmed white beard – he looked like a superannuated Eagle Scout, the sort of fellow who probably maintained a large and scrupulously mounted collection of arrowheads in a case in his rec room. The volunteer wore slightly tinted sunglasses that concealed his big and watery eyes. Schiller had spent some time walking the paths on the site and explaining the pueblo’s history and ceramic sequences. The idea was to train the volunteer to lead tours if one of the employees authorized to interpret the site was out sick. But the old man couldn’t keep the ceramic sequences straight in his memory and, even, wrote down chronologies inaccurately on the 3 by 5 card he used as a crib sheet. Furthermore, he had a tendency to improvise and the few tours that he had led were disasters – he used politically incorrect language, indulged in wild speculation, and, generally, confused the tourists. When Schiller tried to explain to him the difference between facts and interpretation, the old man looked at him skeptically: "It’s all interpretation," he said. Schiller thought about that for a moment and didn’t have a good rejoinder. This morning, the old man winked at Schiller and Schiller winked at him back.

The other volunteer was a white-haired lady, a snow-bird from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She was counting the till in the gift shop. The old lady wore a large turquoise cross around her neck. Schiller greeted her by calling out "good morning!" But she was quite deaf and didn’t respond to him. Outside the glass front door, two elderly couples were sitting on the concrete benches in the shade of the ramada, sipping water from plastic bottles. Between the entrance to the galleries and their exit a dozen feet away, a film loop played in a small dark room with carpeted floor and benches. There was nine-minute program on the pueblo with two minutes between showings. During the two minutes, plaintive Indian flute music played. Schiller triggered the loop and heard the first notes of the lonely-sounding flute. He didn’t like to see the program and, in fact, felt a little sick in the pit of his stomach when he heard the sound cue of running water, a faint, melodious gurgling, and, then, the flute. He hastened to shut the door to the screening room so that he would not have to hear the voices on the loop.

Schiller went to his computer to check his schedule and remind himself about the talks that he was slated to present during the day. There was a speech on the history of excavations at the site at 11:00. At two pm, he was scheduled to talk about prehistoric water engineering in the basin. Kids DIG was scheduled for the next day, between 9 and 11 – that is, before it became too hot. Dr. Germaine’s door was still shut. Schiller decided to go outside to survey the erosion – Dr. Germaine would require a report, he assumed, before mid-week. Then, he remembered the bones in his car – he would have to take care of that also.

　

2.

The sun was already warm and toasting the bones in the zip-lock bag in Schiller’s car. Some ragged flesh was still hanging on the small, delicate-looking bones and a faint aroma of the Colonel’s famous Original Recipe consisting of 11 different herbs and spices suffused the air. Schiller took the plastic bag between forefinger and thumb.

Behind the Visitor Center, a tarp sagged, belly sagging and pregnant with water impounded by the canvas. The site of the dig was a mess. The card table next to the excavation scuffed into the caliche had been blown over and tools were scattered on the hard ground. Schiller sighed and bent over to tilt the table back onto its folding legs. He put the baggy of chicken bones on the table and, then, picked up the half-dozen trowels with variously shaped blades that had fallen onto the ground. He lined-up the trowels on the table and, then, retrieved several small toothbrushes from where the wind had dropped them. The excavation site was under the canvas tarp supported at its four corners by aluminum posts. The dig was about two meters square divided into a grid of 20 centimeter sections bounded by slender red plastic survey pegs. A stainless steel bucket stood next to the square abrasion scraped into the pale, fissured desert pavement. The underlying soil had a faintly yellow cast, darker than the bleached white surface. Sieves designed to fit across the top of the bucket leaned against the stainless steel rim. The 2 mm sieve had fallen so that it made a circular imprint in the exposed subsurface soil. Schiller set it atop the bucket. Then, he stood and carefully massaged the tarp so that the water puddled in its pouch drained down the side of one of the aluminum stakes supporting the canvas. The water darkened the white alkali ground.

Schiller walked over to the platform mound. Some sediment had washed over the wooden steps embedded in the side of mound embankment sloping down to the honeycomb maze of knee-high adobe bricks and stacked stones where the houses had once been. On the top of the mound, the exhibition trench slicing into the packed earth was blurred, its edges washed down into the hole. The corners of the mound had been washed away by the rain and there were shallow, finger-wide ravines running down the steep incline to the ground twelve feet below. Pointing his cell-phone, Schiller took some photographs. He estimated that it would require three or four cubic yards of fill to repair the eroded edges of the mound. The soil washed down into the exhibition pit would have to be troweled-out and, then, re-packed around the sides of the trench. Schiller thought that wire-mesh might be inserted into the pit’s walls to shore them up.

Downtown’s skyscrapers were mirage blue, glinting a little in the relentless sun. In the other direction, planes were rising and falling over the airport. Next to pueblo site and the visitor center, a concrete trough channeled the Salado River between the warehouses and strip malls toward the city’s glass towers. Run-off from the snow in the mountains and the weekend’s rain darkened the bone-white concrete channel – several streams of water braided the canal, long fingers sometimes clasped together, sometimes flowing separately. Schiller looked at red bulbs of the big rocks crouching in the distance, wind sculpted bald sandstone knobs poised over the arboretum and distant zoo. In the opposite direction, across miles of suburbs, a conical volcano rose over the basin. It was certainly some sort of intentional alignment with the platform mound at its center, the rock formation with a wind-chiseled hole through its summit at one edge of the horizon and the volcano, now mostly hidden in the smog and heat haze on the other side of the valley. The thought soured in his mind and he banished it.

Dr. Germaine’s late model black Mercedes Benz SUV was now parked at its designated spot. Schiller went into the cool visitor center. Some tourists were gawking at the diorama in which the pueblo had been reconstructed as it existed at the age that it was largest and most impressive. The miniature pueblo apartments rose three stories over the oval plaza with little matchstick ladders protruding through the tops of the kivas. Nut brown Indians wearing cream-colored breech-clouts, each figure about an inch tall, stood stiffly in the L-shaped ball court or crouched on the roof-tops of the pueblo, women weaving baskets or painting pottery, men whittling arrows – there were even a couple of dogs that looked a little like yellow German shepherds gazing up at the racks where meat was drying.

At the admission desk, the elderly Eagle Scout was grinning at a couple of greying gay men. He asked them if they had been to Chichen Itza. – Of course, they said. Schiller knew he was about to describe the ball-court outside and would, even, suggest that the losing team had their heads cut off after the game. It was all nonsense, of course, but it helped to sell tickets and Schiller was already, tired and his head ached and so he wasn’t about to correct the narrative. He went into the office suite and saw that Dr. Germaine’s door was open. The park director was sitting at his desk, peering solemnly at his computer monitor. Schiller rapped on the door-frame and Dr. Germaine beckoned him to enter.

Dr. Germaine was South Sudanese with a last name comprised mostly of vowels and "l" sounds. No one could pronounce it correctly and so the boss encouraged people to use his first name, although with the honorific title. Born in Fargo, North Dakota to refugee parents, Dr. Germaine’s graduate work had been done at Penn State – he had a doctorate in art history, specializing in Benin bronzes. He didn’t know anything about the lowland Salado people or, upland Salado either and, indeed, had little or no interest in southwestern archaeology. His wife, who had come from Somalia, was a pediatric surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale and it was thought that the clinic’s influence accounted for Dr. Germaine’s employment. The Mayo Clinic sponsored weekly stargazing parties at the site, a well-meaning venture that was generally confounded by the smog and city lights around the ruins. The Clinic also was a major donor to the enterprise and, of course, corporate funding was not only welcome but decisive in keeping the park open. Dr. Germaine was a handsome man with beautiful spiky teeth and he was always exquisitely dressed and groomed. Some faint streaks of grey decorated his dark, tightly curled hair and he had hands with very, long sensitive-looking fingers. He was a most cautious man and he chose his words carefully and spoke with a faint British accent – he had studied on a fellowship to Oxford as an undergraduate. A ceremonial mace made from intricately carved mahogany hung over his head, displaced on a bracket on the wall. The mace was reputedly the scepter of an African king. No one knew how Dr. Germaine had acquired it and no one dared ask any questions.

Dr. Germaine listened politely as Schiller described the erosion damage to him. Sometimes he nodded and made a clicking sound with his tongue against his pointed teeth. "So what shall we do?" Dr. Germaine asked when Schiller had finished his account.

Schiller said that the park should scoop the platform steps free from the dirt washed over them. He recommended that the soil collapsed into the excavation trench be removed and re-packed around the edge of the hole. Schiller said that some reinforcing mesh should be inserted into the trench walls to shore them up.

Dr. Germaine nodded.

"We should shovel the dirt washed down from the sides of the mound back onto the slope and try to secure it there," Schiller said.

"I think we should seed the entire mound with grass," Dr. Germaine suggested. "We need to stabilize the ruin."

"But nothing will grow on this caliche," Schiller said.

"What is this caliche?"

"It’s the desert pavement, mostly alkali salt mixed with sand and hard as cement."

"It will grow if we water it," Dr. Germaine said.

"But the water erodes the mound," Schiller replied.

"Very true," Dr. Germaine said. He looked sad. His great black eyes seemed to droop.

Schiller broke the pensive silence and said: "I think it’s best just to pat the sediment down on the sides of the mound and, then, fill the gullies and erosion channels on the top rim of the embankment with clay. We’ll need about three cubic yards."

"So you recommend that we import clay?" Dr. Germaine asked.

"Yes, there’s a landscaping place just a mile away –"

"But the clay would not be indigenous to the site?" Dr. Germaine said.

"Not exactly," Schiller said.

Dr. Germaine was troubled. He massaged his fine chin with his fine fingers.

"The platform mound is sacred. So the soil is holy. We can’t bring in unconsecrated soil to rebuild the mound," he shook his head.

"The mound is like Theseus’ ship," Schiller said.

"What do you mean?" Dr. Germaine said. "Who is this ‘Theseus’?"

Schiller explained: " In the agora, the Athenians displayed the ship that Theseus had sailed in a great battle. As the ship rotted away, new planks and masts were substituted for those that had decayed. In the end, the ship was entirely comprised of restorations made with new wood."

"That is not the way to curate an artifact of that kind," Dr. Germaine said gravely.

"My point is that the mound has been reshaped and rebuilt so many times, I doubt seriously that any of the original earth remains," Schiller said.

"As always, you are perspicacious," Dr. Germaine said. "But what if Carlos protests?"

Carlos Sanchez was the tribal leader of the local Tohono O’oodham. He was also a city councilman and his people claimed the pueblo as the home of their ancestors. The Tohono O’oodham were flush with casino money and a year earlier, after attending a tribal dance in the old Ball Court, Carlos toured the museum and, then, filed claims for repatriation of several of the more imposing Middle Salado polychrome urns displayed there. The pots were now on display at the casino on the other side of the valley. Dr. Germaine shuddered a little when he mentioned Carlos.

"It would be best," Dr. Germaine said, "if you troweled the dirt into baskets and, then, restored it to the edges of the platform mound. After all, it’s holy soil."

"That will take too long," Schiller said. "We would have to cordon off the platform mound and that’s one of our major attractions."

"So will you prepare an appropriate memorandum," Dr. Germaine said nervously, "and confirm that you will take full responsibility for this reconstruction decision?"

"If you wish," Schiller said.

"You of all people should appreciate, the risk we run getting embroiled with the native people."

"Indeed," Schiller said.

"Can you have the memo on my desk this afternoon?" Dr. Germaine said. He paused: "Please?"

"Indeed," Schiller said again.

　

3.

After his talk on water engineering, Schiller took a water bottle and put on a hat with a flap that covered the back of his neck. The sun was high and very hot. He pulled on a pair of Columbia boots that protected his ankles from snakes and scorpions. Before wiggling his feet into the boots, he turned them over and knocked on their cleated rubber soles. When it rained, sometimes scorpions scuttled indoors and found dark places to hide.

Bracing himself for the heat, Schiller picked up a plastic tray and went outside. It wasn’t as bad as he expected. A brisk breeze was sweeping across the desert, mischievously twisting itself into little dust devils on the barren land across the river canal. Debbie, an intern from the University of Tucson, was off-trail, stooping to inspect a catch basin inserted into the caliche a few yards from the corner of the platform mound. She displayed her broad tan shoulders, bare under the yellow hard hat that she wore over her sun-bleached blonde hair. Debbie had a mannish face with a square jaw but otherwise was buxom. She wore the top half of a two-piece bathing suit over her chest, an elastic garment that looked like a pink sports bra. From atop the mound, a earnest-looking little family wearing baseball caps squinted down at Debbie. Schiller could see a yellowish slick of suntan lotion smeared on her back above the broad band of the bathing suit. She was armed with a yard-long plastic syringe that she inserted into the catch basin to withdraw water that she, then, expelled by pushing in a plunger’s plastic piston.

Debbie looked up at Schiller, using the tool to suck some muddy water into the tube. Then, she stood up, aimed the syringe over his head, and shot an arc of brown, foamy muck above him. The dirty water splashed with an unpleasant sound a few yards beyond him near the concrete embankment above the Salado channel.

"Didn’t see you," she said, setting her jaw. If it had been someone else, Schiller would have regarded the gesture as playful. But Debbie didn’t like him. A month earlier, Schiller had made some mildly derogatory comments about Debbie’s advising professor. Debbie was writing a thesis drawing connections between Tohono O’odham women’s societies and sacred cults that she surmised as existing among the upland Salado in the Gila Basin. Schiller had said something about standards of proof in academic writing and used the female professor’s paper, presented last Autumn at the Arizona archaeological convention in Sedona, as an example of surmise that he found objectionable. He said that he had seen the female professor on a trail leading up to one of the vortices in Sedona, sites where it was reputed that there was sacred earth energy spiraling up into the sky out of the red rocks. "Sort of New Age," Schiller remarked.

"But you were there too," Debbie said defensively. "After all, you saw her."

"But I was just out for my morning constitutional," Schiller replied.

"Well, maybe, she was too," Debbie said.

Schiller didn’t see any benefit to replying. Debbie, then, accused Schiller of sexism and applying a double standard, holding women scholars to a higher bar than men.

Schiller had flushed with anger. The accusation was wholly unwarranted, at least, as far as he could see and he made some remark about objective truth and the sciences, a comment that Debbie immediately misinterpreted. Schiller knew his shortcomings and he was outraged at being accused of one that he didn’t think he had. Debbie made a complaint to Dr. Germaine and Schiller had to answer to him. This was humiliating because Dr. Germaine often said things to the male volunteers and maintenance workers that were overtly sexist – in fact, he had even commented on Debbie’s propensity for removing her shirt when she worked outside in the hot sun.

"Of all people," Dr. Germaine had said to Schiller, "you should appreciate the fragility of our situation vis a vis our female colleagues."

"What do you mean by that?" Schiller had demanded.

Dr. Germaine winked at him and pulled an imaginary zipper across his lips.

Debbie squatted again and sucked up some more dirty water. "Watch out," she said this time, expelling the stuff more horizontally but behind him.

"Okay," Schiller said.

"I don’t think it’s fair that Dr. Germaine puts me on this duty," Debbie said. "One of the janitors could do this."

"I think he wants to make certain that the catch basins aren’t full of treasure," Schiller said. "You know, ancient idols, Sityaki polychrome."

"Fat chance," Debbie said.

She stood up and put her hand over her eyes to shade them from the glare. It looked to Schiller like an ironic salute. He saluted her back and she grimaced.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Across the river, collecting for Kids DIG." He gestured toward the four or five acres of flat, refuse-strewn fenced-in across the Salado channel.

Debbie approached him, shaking her head.

"I don’t think that’s exactly ethical," she said. "It falsifies the experience."

"The kids don’t know," Schiller said.

A metal bench stood on a place where the asphalt path flared. Debbie walked to the bench and sat down, sighing as if relieved to be off her feet. She cradled the plastic syringe in her arms like a rifle. She looked like a girl whose daddy had taught her how to hunt.

"I mean seeding the dig? It’s not ethical." She gestured at the plastic tray that he was holding.

"Dr. Germaine wants the kiddies to make discoveries, real finds," Schiller replied.

"But they’re not ‘real finds’, by definition," Debbie said. "He shouldn’t have you assigned to this program. It’s questionable and, you know –"

She paused.

"Are you angling for the job?" Schiller asked.

"– you know, you’re under a cloud," she said. "No offense, but that’s the only way to say it. You’re compromised and –"

She had taken off her hard hat and set it beside her on the bench. A red sweat band was wound around her temples. Her hair was unruly, a big stack atop her handsome, square head.

"I guess I ought to take offense," Schiller said. "But it’s too exhausting. It just gets too tedious."

"I’m not even implying it’s your fault," Debbie said. "But anyone can look at the internet."

"I think we flatter ourselves when we think people are constantly googling our name," Schiller said.

"It’s generational," Debbie replied, shrugging her shoulders.

The sun beat down filling the space between them with hot, hostile energy.

Debbie was silent for a moment and, then, she said: "Really, Dr. Germaine ought to assign the Kids DIG program to me. I’ve got a teaching certificate. Before I went to grad school."

"This isn’t teaching," Schiller replied. "It’s supposed to be fun."

"And you’re ‘Mr. Fun’?" she asked.

"I can be very fun."

She paused, fingering the plastic tube across her lap.

"Does Genius Brain’s son still come to your gig?" she asked.

"It’s his daughter," Schiller said.

"I’d like to meet Genius Brain," Debbie told him.

"It can be arranged."

Debbie got up, sighed again, and, then, replaced her hard hat on her head. She pointed the syringe at Schiller and said: "Be seein’ you."

Schiller left the path and walked to the concrete channel. He skidded down the 40 degree incline to the river bed. The river had split into a half-dozen six-inch wide streams twisting across the concrete slabs. The water splashed under his boots, kicking up droplets on his shins. It was snow-melt and ice-cold. He scrambled up the opposing concrete slope and stood on the barren caliche. Some plastic bags skittered across the hot desert pavement and he saw a couple of beer cans near a star-shaped burn mark on the ground. Sometimes, kids cut holes in the cyclone fence enclosing the site. Of course, the village had also occupied this side of the river, probably a moiety split off from the larger pueblo on the other bank. There wasn’t anything to see – the excavations here had been back-filled in the seventies. Schiller knew where there was a midden and so he strode to that place, carefully surveying the sun-bleached alkali.

To the practiced eye, the ground was littered with apostrophes and hyphens of broken ceramic. Two years before, Schiller had escorted the young people in the Kids DIG program to this area where they excavated shards and rabbit bones. But there were scorpions lurking here, concealed under the flat slabs of broken sandstone. Once, Schiller had found a beautiful half-moon shaped chunk of Mimbres black-and-white. The ceramic was decorated with spider motifs painted in iron oxide and, when Schiller carefully lifted the pot from where it was bedded in the caliche, he exposed a mama scorpion, as long as his thumb and very angry. The scorpion didn’t just scurry away. Instead, she chased Schiller, darting her sting at his boots. There was another danger also. If it rained in the mountains a dozen miles away, the Salado channel could suddenly flood, a brown hip-deep torrent of water abrasive with tumbling stones and brown saguaro ribs. When this happened, the sky was clear and, yet, the concrete trough was wild with turbulent water. There was no safe way to ford the river and, so, Schiller and the kids had to trudge up to the road, a quarter mile away, call the information desk, and, then, wait for someone to come with a metal shears to cut a hole in the fence so that they could get hike back to the Visitor Center. This took a half hour and the parents who had come to pick up their children were waiting angrily in the parking lot – now, they would be stuck in rush hour traffic.

Schiller collected three finger-nail-sized pieces of Jeddito yellow-ware. The ceramic was cool and very light, almost like the shell of a bird. It was elegant stuff and Schiller dabbed saliva on the pot shards to brighten them. He scraped at the caliche on the midden and found a stick that seemed to have a whittled end – it was some kind of tiny stake. A few feet away, he found a piece of Gila polychrome with a zigzag motif painted on the red shard. He put the shards and the carved stick in his plastic collecting tray and, then, walked back across the river channel to the dig site behind the visitor center.

Kneeling, Schiller dug several pits in the place where the ground had been scuffed open. He carefully embedded the artifacts in the pits and, then, shoveled dirt back into the holes, patting the fine, dusty soil smooth. He brushed off his hands and, then, remembered that he had forgotten the faunal remains. He opened the baggy full of chicken bones, scooped out some dirt, and, then, buried them as well.

Debbie came up the trail near the toilets.

She pointed at the excavation site decorated with the little red stakes. "Nothing good can come of this," she said.



4.

The elderly Eagle Scout was standing near the diorama. He looked down intently at the miniature pueblo with its little matchstick ladders, plaza, and ball court. His lips were moving silently. The volunteer from the Gift Shop stood beside him, also gazing at the pueblo. Her lips moved silently as well.

"So what do you count?" the Eagle Scout asked the lady from the Gift Shop.

"Thirty-three," she said.

"Exactly. That’s what I count also," the Eagle Scout said.

He looked over at Schiller. It was closing time, 4:30 pm, and Schiller had just come from the little carpeted screening room where he had shut-off the video loop.

"The caption is wrong," the old man said.

"What do you mean?"

The Eagle Scout pointed at the little brass plate labeling the diorama. Embossed on the brass were words explaining that a local orthodontist had built the diorama, a task that took him three years of his spare time, and that it accurately depicted the pueblo circa 1250 AD complete with 32 figures of the Native Americans who had lived there.

"There are 33 figures," the Eagle Scout said, "not 32."

"He’s right," the volunteer lady from the Gift Shop said. "I counted them myself. Twice."

"I never really paid any attention," Schiller said. He resisted the temptation to make a count himself.

"It’s really marvelous," the old man said. "Every time you look you see something new."

Schiller scanned the exhibit. The elderly Eagle Scout was right – today, he saw a stooped figure wearily approaching the pueblo on a curving trail edged with tiny stones. The figure was bent under a heavy backpack painted to resembled leather.

"I guess it doesn’t matter if its 32 or 33 figures," Schiller said.

A year ago, when the exhibit was cleaned, Schiller had removed some of the little figures. Their paint was flaking off and had to be retouched. They were surprisingly heavy, cast from some kind of metallic putty – the stuff that dentists used for fillings, Schiller thought.

"There are 33 Indians for sure," the volunteer lady said.

　

5.

The next morning, Schiller was late. There was a bad crash on 202 and the traffic was at a standstill. As he inched past the accident scene, he saw several ambulances, worried-looking EMT’s standing helplessly aside as State Troopers used a kind of can-opener apparatus to rip open the car. The EMT’s were wearing turquoise-colored latex gloves and someone had thrown a blanket over the windshield to conceal whatever was inside.

Dr. Germaine’s car wasn’t yet parked in its designated stall. Schiller took a plastic bag and hustled around the trails picking up some plastic water bottles discarded among the ruins. Someone had dropped an empty bottle in the ball-court pit. At first, Schiller hesitated climbing down to pick it up. But he felt ashamed of his aching knees and hips and ventured down into the hole. Some gravel trickled down behind him and he found it difficult to scramble out of the pit.

Debbie was standing with a stout woman inspecting the dig site under the canvas tarp. The stout woman was wearing a straw hat, stylish Lucchese cowboy boots, and a colorful ankle-length Tehuana dress with embroidered blouse. The stout woman crouched near the edge of Schiller’s play-excavation. Debbie squatted beside her and the two of them seemed to be brushing at the soil.

Schiller approached them, calling out "Good morning." The two women stood and turned toward him. Schiller recognized Dr. Vasconcelos, Debbie’s thesis advisor from the University of Tucson. He wasn’t sure whether she remembered him. Their only meeting had been brief and contentious.

"Just admiring your work," Dr. Vasconcelos said. Her chest was decorated with turquoise jewelry looped on silver chains. Schiller shook her hand so that the array of turquoise wobbled a little.

"It’s a kid’s project," Schiller said.

"He seeds it before every session. Insures that the kids have finds to report to their parents," Debbie told Dr. Vasconcelos.

"I don’t think you should do that," Dr. Vasconcelos said.

Schiller replied: "It improves the experience."

Dr. Vasconcelos frowned: "If you want them to have a real Raiders of the Lost Ark experience, you should put in some canopic jars, maybe some scarabs, and the eye of Horus. Make it a real Tanis. Why stop with chicken bones?"

"I don’t think my kids have seen that movie," Schiller said.

"Everyone’s seen that movie," Dr. Vasconcelos replied.

"I haven’t," Debbie said.

"Well, let me say this," Dr. Vasconcelos said. "I appreciate your working with children. Enthusiasm about field work is a good thing. I hope you’ve got some girls in your program."

"Yes, indeed," Schiller said.

Debbie took the professor’s arm and led her toward the Visitor Center.

The encounter baffled Schiller. He walked along the trail at the foot of the platform mound. A bench faced inward toward the plaza and the warren of waist-high walls huddled under the mound’s tilted rampart. The metal bench was cold and wet with dew. Schiller looked at the embankment. The rain had sliced away enough of the packed-earth hillside to expose a vein of ash and cinder. The sooty layer looked like the detritus of a campfire tamped down a half-foot below the top of the platform. Schiller knew that the stratum of burned vigas and woven reed mats extended throughout the site. If you knew where to look, the inch-thick vein of ash could be seen in the fractured adobe walls and below the rims of the kivas. Schiller supposed that layers of destruction ran through the whole world, buried at intervals between the pleasant places where people transacted their business. The burnt stratum was not visible at the ball court. After the pueblo was destroyed, the survivors had abandoned that structure, indeed, shoved debris into it until L-shaped hole was half-full of shattered timbers and charred adobes. If it’s happy, as they say, its not the ending. Sooner or later, every place made by men was destroyed by men.

He had been ruined several times. The fire had come for him as well. Schiller kicked at pebbles under his feet. What began with promise, ended in disappointment. His eye traced the wobbly anthracite-colored vein of soot and cinders exposed overhead where the earth had slipped down to huddle under the packed soil platform.

Schiller showed promise at the University of Utah. His faculty advisor in the anthropology department encouraged him to apply for graduate work at his alma mater at UC Berkeley. Schiller did some field work in Belize and wrote his dissertation on cult practices involving the scarlet macaw at Paquime and the American Southwest. While writing his dissertation, he worked at the ruins where he was now employed – his career had made a full circle: he would retire from site where he had first worked professionally. After two years in Phoenix, the National Park Service hired him to curate collections and supervise excavations at Casa Grande. The monument was popular, on the outskirts of Phoenix, and required new infrastructure. This meant construction work on roads and sewers and a new Visitor Center that, in turn, entailed some frantic rescue archaeology. Schiller managed the rescue project with efficiency and the requisite cultural sensitivity and, even, made some significant discoveries during the work. (His father had been a building contractor and, so, Schiller knew how to talk with construction firms.) At that time, archaeo-astronomy was fashionable and Schiller suspected that some of the alignments at the big house at Casa Grande were astronomically significant. No one knew why the big house had been built – it was a hulking forty-foot tall bunker with enigmatic round windows asymmetrically bored through the thick adobe walls. An aluminum canopy supported by graceful, metal struts protected the ancient building from the elements. The canopy was streamlined like the wing of a jet air plane and the ensemble of eroded grey walls, fissured by rain and wind, and the sleek aluminum shelter was striking. The building was hideous, monumental, a brooding excrescence on the flat landscape otherwise littered with pottery shards, shallow gravel-filled irrigation ditches, and shattered stone breastworks. The mysterious fortified tower had been unstable since the days of Coronado and thick iron bars like something you might see in a prison barred the entrances. Of course, Schiller had the key to the padlocked gate and, sometimes, he went into the building with structural engineers to assess the metal and timber shoring. Mexican short-tailed bats lived in the big house and they were a nuisance.

At the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, Schiller opened up the building and, with a friend who was an amateur astronomer, made various observations using Questar cassegrain telescope. He concluded that irregularly spaced eye-shaped windows were oriented toward locations on the horizon where Venus rose or set. After some deliberation, Schiller submitted a paper on these alignments to the Arizona Archaeological Society. The paper caused some controversy because several of Schiller’s colleagues were invested in the notion that the Big House was a sort of public utilities – the headquarters for the important priests who managed the acequia conveying water from the Gila River to the crop lands and Hohokam villages in the area. One of Schiller’s adversaries knew astronomers working at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff. These astronomers were professionals with excellent qualifications and Schiller was distressed when his opponent asked for permission to verify the alignments claimed to exist at the monument. Schiller authorized access and a crew came with a telescope and surveyor. They worked at the site for several days at the Spring equinox. A few months later, another paper was published by Archaeological Society. This paper disproved Schiller’s astronomical alignment claims and, further, derided them as "fantasies." Casa Grande stands aloof from nearby suburbs, where there are several strip malls within a half-mile of the ruins. One of those malls features a Walmart. Adding insult to injury, Schiller’s critics showed that one could use his methodology to establish "scientifically" that the Big House oculus on the structure’s northwest corner was aligned perfectly with the Walmart entrance. "Using Dr. Schiller’s theory, one could argue that the Hohokam priests anticipated this Walmart, today a conspicuous landmark in the area, by seven-hundred years and established a precise sight-line linking the entrance to that retail establishing with their ceremonial big house" – it was a debacle, a humiliation for Schiller and it soured him on the competitive world of southwest archaeology. So he applied for a research and field survey position at Effigy Mounds National Monument in northwestern Iowa, was offered the job, and relocated to Prairie du Chien, across the Mississippi valley in Wisconsin.

　

Schiller was a familiar with snow from skiing trips in Utah and Colorado but was unprepared for the cold and dark and ice. Winter in northeastern Wisconsin seem to last six months of the year. And the professional staff at the Monument were close-mouthed, suspicious, and unfriendly. An intern bluntly told Schiller that his boss, the superintendant, regarded him as a spy, someone sent by national park service to undermine operations at Effigy Mounds. Wilma Hendricks was the monument’s superintendent. She wasn’t an archaeologist or cultural anthropologist – her background was forest management. Superintendent Hendricks haled from northern Wisconsin and she had been employed by the Department of Natural Resources for several years as a conservation liaison with the Ho-Chunk tribes. The Ho-Chunk were prosperous casino-Indians with many small businesses and tribal enterprises and she had worked cooperatively with them on the management of their large tracts of woodland. She maintained a close relationship with tribal leaders after her appointment to Effigy Mounds and the Ho-Chunk often visited the bear and bird-shaped earthen mounds. They sponsored powwows and let her take pictures of their colorful ceremonies at the burial sites atop the river bluff, photographs prominently displayed in the visitor center. For two decades, she had been the assistant to William Grace, the previous superintendent. Grace was retired when Schiller worked at the Mounds, but he still visited Hendricks once or twice a week, conferring with her for hours behind closed doors. Schiller couldn’t establish Grace’s credentials but he seemed to be hard-wired into the park service’s Midwest Regional Office.

Some of the local people at Prairie du Chien mentioned a local dentist closely associated with William Grace. The dentist, Dr. Anderson, was said to have met Grace first as a patient. But, later, the two men were supposed to have been political allies. Steep switchbacks climbed from the visitor center up the bluff to the meadows overlooking the huge green valley where the largest and most dramatic mounds were located. The trail was hard to maintain – rain cut muddy gullies into its steepest grades and the retaining walls where the trail cut back on itself seemed to always collapsing. One warm afternoon in May, Schiller hiked up the trail to where a work crew was restoring a place where the path had washed-out. Gnats buzzed in the wet woods and the three workers had dragged wheel barrows full of gravel and sand up to place where they were repairing the trail. The foreman of the crew was using a yellow-orange Homelite chainsaw to cut down some saplings encroaching on the trail.

The kid with the chain saw told Schiller that he had a bad toothache and needed to take off an hour or so to drive into Prairie du Chien on the other side of the river to see Dr. Anderson, his dentist. Schiller’s kids needed a dentist for their annual check-up and so he asked about Dr. Anderson.

"He’s a weird dude," the kid said. "Do you know what Floo-ride is?"

"Flouride," Schiller said. "You mean ‘flouride’?"

"Yeah, they put it in the water to make your teeth stronger," the kid replied. "Anderson was really against that. This was when I was in elementary school. He’s still on that crusade. He’s got skulls that show that people’s teeth were a lot better before anyone knew anything about floo-ride."

"Skulls?" Schiller asked.

"Yeah, you have to ask Wilma about that."

The next day, Schiller talked to Superintendent Hendricks. She said that Dr. Anderson was a world-traveler and something of an anthropologist. She heard that he had some skulls, probably from India. But she had never seen them. "He thinks flouride in the water is a conspiracy, a government conspiracy."

Schiller decided against taking his kids to Dr. Anderson. A month later, his daughter mentioned Dr. Anderson at the dinner table. She said that the dentist had appeared at her health class with two human skulls. He used the skulls to demonstrate how the kids should properly brush their teeth. Schiller’s daughter told him that the dentist had introduced the skulls as "Tonto" and "Running Deer." His daughter said: "He said that the skulls were from burials at the mounds across the river."

Schiller was alarmed and, the next day, told Superintendent Hendricks about the human remains. She shrugged and said that she knew nothing about Dr. Anderson or his "anthropology collection", but that, perhaps, Mr. Grace could answer his questions.

William Grace was home-bound, recovering from pneumonia. It was a dark day with snow sifting down from the gloomy skies when Schiller called on him. Grace told Anderson that he didn’t think he had anything to loose and so he would explain the situation. The mounds were well-documented and had been looted by everyone. There was evidence that the French fur traders who operated an agency at Prairie du Chien had trenched the larger mounds looking for gold. Later, surveying expeditions to the upper Mississippi dug in the mounds and scrupulously recorded their location. European settlers plowed through the mounds that were located where they farmed and looted those earthworks located on more inaccessible river bottoms and hilltops. Researchers from Harvard and Yale, then, excavated at the burial sites. During his lifetime, Grace said that scout masters and high school history teachers sometimes conducted impromptu digs on the mounds. At first, there were thousands of them, an endless resource so it seemed, but, as the years passed, most of the mounds were destroyed and, so, the National Park Service acquired some of the bluff tops, steeply plunging hillsides, and river bottoms to preserve the most dramatic remaining monuments.

In the early days, Grace said, if you put a spade in the soil, bones bubbled up. When the parking lot at the Visitor Center was first constructed, a half-dozen skeletons were uncovered. Grace said that he called the National Park Service and was told to contact the Smithsonian Institute. The archaeologists at the Institute said that he should summon local law enforcement to the scene to verify that the skeletons were prehistoric and, then, photograph the bones in situ. After that, Grace was told that he should collect the bones, tag them as artifacts, and keep them in storage. At first, Grace followed these instructions, but, later, when building trails and resurfacing mounds damaged by trespassers, more bones surfaced. After a while, Grace stopped calling the sheriff’s department and didn’t take pictures. The skeletal remains were a nuisance and, so, he just scooped them up and put them in numbered garbage sacks. He kept the sacks in cardboard shipping crates, stacked in the back of the tool shed where the groundskeeper kept his little John Deere tractor and riding lawn mower. Grace’s dentist was Dr. Anderson and the two men were members of the local Kiwanis club. Grace’s memory was poor, but he seemed to recall loaning some of the bones to the dentist for, as he put it, "tooth decay research."

When he retired, Grace told Superintendent Hendricks about the skeletal remains. She said that she wasn’t sure about regulations governing this sort of collection and wasn’t inclined to make inquiries. Money had been allocated for a new foot-bridge over one of the creeks flowing through a deep, narrow coulee down to the Mississippi. The bridge accessed a trail to the so-called "String of Pearls" mounds located on a densely forested peninsula jutting out into the Mississippi swamplands. Money was allocated for an archaeological survey prior to the construction, but Superintendent Hendricks was concerned that the project would run over-budget and, so, she just let the contracts without performing any preliminary studies at the site. During the first week’s site preparation, a skeleton was found, crushed into fragments by the earthmoving equipment. Superintendent Hendricks was called, assessed the situation, and, then, told the contractor’s foreman to just re-bury the remains a safe distance away from the excavation for the bridge footings. An enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk tribe was on the construction crew. He snapped some pictures with his cell-phone and, then, asked for five-thousand dollars to keep things quiet. Superintendent Hendricks consulted with Schiller and he said that skeletal remains probably belonged to the Ho-Chunk tribe by virtue of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. Schiller told her to contact a National Park Service lawyer and explain the situation.

Two days after he spoke with Superintendent Grace, Schiller noticed a U-Haul moving truck backed up to the groundskeeper’s shed. Schiller wasn’t aware of the boxes of bones in the shed. He saw a frail-looking old man leaning on a cane and directing activities by the shed. A week later, federal agents locked-down the Visitor Center. The tourists were turned aside and the staff was sent home. Computers were tagged and bagged and the filing cabinets in Superintendent Grace’s office were seized. That afternoon, federal agents served a search warrant on Dr. Anderson. He was wealthy man and owned several boats and SUVs. The back of his four-stall garage was stacked high with boxes full of bones – sixty-five boxes in all containing, at least, 95 individual skeletons. Dr. Anderson said that he was keeping the bones in storage because there was no place for them at the Effigy Mounds Visitor Center. He claimed that the bones were in his possession at the request of William Grace and Superintendent Hendricks. Schiller’s house in Prairie du Chien was searched under subpoena as well. The agents recovered a stone axe with some filaments of hemp string dangling from the place where it had been attached to a carved wooden handle. Schiller had brought the club home to show his wife and daughters a few years earlier – it was something that he had discovered during the construction of a nature trail. Schiller said he had no intent to retain possession of the axe-head, but had simply forgotten about it. He received criminal charges by first-class mail and had to hire a lawyer. The lawyer negotiated a deal with the prosecuting attorney at the Federal building in Cedar Falls. In exchange for rendering assistance to the prosecution, Schiller’s charges were reduced to misdemeanors. He cooperated and pleaded guilty to the lesser offenses. The Federal Judge was stern and reminded Schiller of his ethical obligations as an archaeologist. Schiller apologized. "From where I’m sitting, this looks like looting pure and simple," the Judge said. He was sentenced to conduct ten hours of seminars on the provisions of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act for his fellow professionals.

Dr. Anderson was convicted of various felonies. He was sentenced to pay a $10,000 fine and provide 100 hours of community service in the form of free dental work for underprivileged children. Anderson was retired and no longer insured for his dentistry work and, so, the authorities looked the other way when it came time for him to account for the community service. Anderson did conduct three public forums, all quite well-attended, on the dangers of water flouridation. William Grace died before he could be sentenced. Superintendent Hendricks was fired. After her conviction, she spent six months in a minimum security facility at Waseca, Minnesota.

Schiller no longer remembered the exact year that these events had occurred. He tried not to think about them. Criminal charges had been lodged against him during the Spring, at a time of unprecedented flooding in the river valleys. The river overflowed at Prairie du Chien and Schiller recalled standing in ankle-deep mud dragging sand bags to levees protecting the historic buildings on the lower river terrace. The river was not vibrant with rapids, rather it was a silent, glass smooth embankment of water sweeping downstream without so much as a ripple disturbing its vast, muscular surface. Three times, hearings in Cedar Falls were canceled because the Federal Court building, set on an island, was under water. When he pleaded guilty, the bailiff showed him the high water-mark on the courtroom walls – it was a brownish stain, speckled with green mold, that ran along the corridors at chest-height. At the national monument, Schiller was acting superintendent, even though he had been charged with theft. On the darkest day, Schiller parked his car at the place where the loop road vanished under an apron of black, still water. He hauled on his trout-fishing boots and waded through the knee-deep pond to the foot-bridge spanning the creek next to the String of Pearls. The foot-bridge was handsome with cherokee red girders and it arched above the water drowning the forest. At the crest of the bridge, it was dry and Schiller gazed down into the dark flood, caramel-colored and veined with white foam. The sun emerged from behind a fat overhead cloud greasy with rain and, for an instant, Schiller saw his features reflected in the wet moving darkness below him. The tops of the conical mounds comprising the String of Pearls rose over the water and sparrows were sheltering there. Schiller watched the little birds, felt his courage returning a little, and, then, splashed back to his car. Later, the flood water receded, leaving the sides of the mounds marked with a foot-wide slick of mud and leaf-litter showing where the river had crested.

At the pueblo, the burnt vein snaked across the walls and marked the places where the platform mound was eroded. During the CCC excavations during the Depression, skeletons had been found supine in the layer of ash and soot. These were obviously not burials. Many of the skeletons had broken forearms, so-called "parry wounds," and three skulls were found neatly stacked in the center of the ball court. Many of the skeletons were missing their hands or feet. Schiller rose wearily and went into the building. The sun shone overhead like fire from an acetylene torch. The children enrolled in Kids DIG would be arriving in the two hours. Schiller ate the sandwich that his wife had packed for him at his desk.

　

6.

Schiller recognized Genius Brain’s black Mercedes Benz SUV. The big vehicle had glass tinted so that it was impossible to know who was driving. Schiller noticed that Debbie, stripped again to her bathing suit top, was raking gravel near the place where the SUV stopped. Banana, Genius Brain’s eleven-year-old daughter, climbed down from the SUV. Schiller wasn’t sure what to call her – was her last name really "Brain"?

Banana was tall and skinny, built like an incipient track star specializing in the high hurdles. Her hair was coiled very tightly into cornrows, pale scalp showing between lustrous black braids. Genius Brain was a well-known local rapper and community activist. Schiller had never met him, but knew his appearance from TV news – when the police shot a black man, Genius Brain, who was something of a community activist, was often among the protestors, marching at the forefront of the crowd. He was a handsome man with an angular face adorned with a little neatly groomed goatee. Genius Brain had beautiful slender hands with long expressive fingers, a trait that Banana also possessed. He was married to a famous fashion model who lived in LA. Schiller had never listened to his music, but his records, apparently sold hundreds of thousands copies – Schiller wondered what it sounded like.

Debbie came from where she was working and exchanged some words with Banana. Then, she waved at the SUV, prowling slowly along the turn-around at the front entrance to the Visitor Center. A few minutes later, some African-American kids from the neighborhood appeared, riding low-slung bicycles. Amit Kumar’s mother parked her Lexis SUV in the parking lot and walked with her son to the door into the Visitor Center. She bent to embrace the boy who struggled against her hug. Then, she turned on her heel and went back to her car.

The assembled kids stood laughing and fumbling at one another, little rabbit punches and some of them shaking hands or tickling each other or wiggling back and forth as if dancing. Banana Brain, if that was really her name, stood by aloof, eyes closed and swaying to the music playing on her head-phones. The volunteer Eagle Scout grinned at the kids. The old lady in the Gift Shop glared at the children as if daring them to come into her store. Terrance, a fat white kid, joined the others. The heat was hard on him and sweat was puddled under his eyes and on his protruding lower lip – he was wheezing as if he had asthma. The other girls seemed to be late.

Schiller greeted the kids and said that he had to attend a brief meeting with Dr. Germaine before they could return to their excavation. He said that there was some dispute about the number of figures in the diorama. "Count them," Schiller said, "and tell me how many Native Americans you see in the pueblo."

Dr. Germaine thanked Schiller for coming to see him. His eyeglasses in their steel rims reflected something brightly colorful on the computer screen turned away from Schiller. Dr. Germaine said that he had two things to discuss with Schiller but that time, probably, limited him to only one of these subjects. Schiller nodded.

"I’d like you to fold Debbie into your Kids DIG program," Dr. Germaine said.

Schiller nodded.

Dr. Germaine said that Debbie had asked him to include her in the program so that young women would feel encouraged to become archaeologists. Schiller said that he had a number of girls enrolled in the program including Banana, Genius Brain’s daughter.

"Oh, I know," Dr. Germaine said. "But Debbie wants to be a model. She thinks girls will be more encouraged if they see a professional working archaeologist of their gender." Dr. Germaine paused: "And, you know, I can’t say that I disagree with her."

Schiller said that he had no objections to Debbie’s involvement. "Will you ask her to join you then?" Dr. Germaine inquired. "Of course," Schiller said.

"The other thing involves the little introductory film that we play as a loop in the screening room. But I can talk to you about that tomorrow." Dr. Germaine nodded very slightly, indicating that the meeting was complete.

Schiller went to the information desk. The other girls had arrived and they were standing with Banana, peering into the diorama.

"There are 33 little people," Chastity said. She was chewing gum.

Banana shrugged. "They are hard to count ‘cause they all look alike. All of them except this dude."

She pointed to the hunched man carrying his backpack along the S-shaped trail leading to the plaza.

"He’s a trader from another tribe," Schiller said. "You know, I can’t recall seeing him before."

"He’s always been there," Banana said.

Schiller opened the door to the screening room and made a low whistle. The boys came out, prancing and nudging one another.

Terrance said: "Dr. Schiller, we figured it out."

"What did you figure out?"

"That guy who talks about the pueblo on the movie. It’s your son. We thought he looked familiar. Now, we know – he’s your son."

Terrance looked pleased with himself and the other boys nodded their heads vigorously.

"Close, but not exactly right," Schiller replied.

His son, Raymond, worked as a software developer in San Mateo.

They went outside to the dig. The sky was overcast but the sun’s heat was abroad, nonetheless, in the humid suffocating miasma hanging cream-colored between heaven and earth.

The kids gathered under the low-hanging belly of the canvas tarp. "Let’s remove about an inch of soil today. We want to proceed very carefully, scientifically. It’s just looting if you don’t properly record and preserve your finds. Do you understand: It’s just looting unless you proceed as scientists."

Amit Kumar repeated his words: "It’s just looting."

Schiller gestured to the shallow area scuffed into the caliche. "Clear off about an inch," he said, assigning the kids different parts of red staked grid. The group divided into two member teams. One kid held a notebook to record finds; the other squatted close to the ground, brushing at the excavation with the side of a trowel.

Chastity and her friend, Sela, found the chicken bones. At first, they didn’t want to touch the tiny skeletal remains, vulnerable and brittle-looking in the dust.

"Bones," Sela announced.

The kids squealed, stopped work, and moved to look over Chastity’s shoulder. Schiller handed her some latex gloves.

"Don’t touch without taking a picture," Schiller said. He unzipped a case and removed a camera. He handed the camera to Chastity. Sela earnestly made notes in her journal. Chastity took one picture. Then, Schiller reminded her to set the centimeter scale in the soil next to the find. "We need to supply dimensions," he said. Sela knelt and put the little black and white scale next to the half uncovered bones. Chastity took several pictures.

"Now, remove them," Schiller said.

Chastity carefully lifted the bones from the dirt and set them in a find tray.

"Faunal or human?" Schiller asked.

"Faunal," Terrance said. "They look like chicken bones."

"If they were human bones, we would not disturb them," Schiller said. "We would photograph them n situ, record the time and date of the find, and, then, communicate with local law enforcement. It could be a crime scene."

The pueblo had been sacked and, then, burned around 1380. Skeletons were found in the debris, half consumed by fire, and hacked apart. In fact, the place was a crime scene, albeit an ancient one.

"Remember NAGRPA?" Schiller asked.

"Native American Graves Repatriation Act," Banana said.

"Exactly," Schiller replied. "Human remains must always be treated with the utmost respect."

"But these are chicken bones," Terrance said, huffing and puffing a little because of the heat.

"Not chicken," Schiller said. "It’s a native domestic turkey. The people who lived here raised turkeys."

"Looks like chicken bones," Amit Kumar said.

The kids found most of the ceramics that Schiller had seeded in the plot. They lifted the shards from the earth and wet them down, drizzling water from a bottle. Then, Banana cleaned the shards with a toothbrush. Schiller called the kids around him and showed them photocopied pages from the definitive treatise on ceramic sequences among the Hohokam as well upland and lowland Salado people. They identified the shards and Schiller had them put stickers on each pottery fragment bearing a letter and number.

The boys dug several trowel-fulls of caliche out of the hole. Schiller told them to use a 4 mm sieve to sift the soil. They found more chicken bones in the sieve.

"Much evidence is very small," Schiller said, "but it all must be noted and catalogued. We don’t know what significance these finds might have. Maybe, a hundred years from now someone will be able to draw meaning from what we have discovered that we can’t know today."

The heat was oppressive and the attention of the boys was flagging. They were taunting each other and mock-wrestling. Schiller decided that it was time to go back inside. He had a cooler full of ice and soda pop in his office. He was about to announce that the dig was finished for the day when Amit Kumar cried out: "I see something!"

The kids lounging about on the ground rose to their feet and rushed to the side of the excavation. Schiller followed them over to the shallow hole. Something black and shiny was extruding from the edge of the opening cut in the caliche. At first, Schiller thought it was piece of broken glass. Amit Kumar reached toward the artifact, but Schiller took his hand and restrained him.

"Let’s follow protocol," he said. "First, we put down a measuring stick to establish scale and take a picture of the object where we found it."

Sela found the centimeter ruler and set it next to the black, sharp edge of the object. The artifact looked very sharp, so razor-edged at its facets, that it seemed to shed soil. Banana handed Schiller the digital camera and he took a couple pictures. Then, he told Amit to use a fine brush and free the artifact from the earth. Amit knelt and began to scrape the brush over the sharp-looking glass.

"Carefully, carefully," Schiller said.

The find was eccentrically shaped, about 3 inches long and half that dimension wide. The glass had been carefully flaked to create a plump oval form, scalloped on its side. At one end of the oval, the sharp glass was cut into a shape like two horns. The other end of the artifact was hook-shaped, a barbed glass curve that ended in a dart-like, arrowhead. The body of the object was intricately carved into diamond facets.

"It’s a scorpion made from obsidian," Schiller said. His voice trembled a little.

Amit Kumar reached for the artifact, but Schiller knocked away his hand. The boy looked up at Schiller with his lip quivering.

"I’m sorry," Schiller said. "But this has to be handled very carefully."

He dropped down on his belly and eyed the obsidian scorpion. Then, Schiller took a mechanical pencil from his breast pocket and scraped gently under the scorpion’s belly. He lightly tapped the glass facets to knock off some of the alkali dust caked on them.

"Get me a small find tray," he said. Terrance set the tray next to him.

Schiller gingerly lifted the obsidian scorpion from the caliche. It bound at a couple of points, resisting removal from its bed of alkali soil. Schiller was using his left hand to free the scorpion while probing around it with his mechanical pencil. The glass was razor-sharp and Schiller winced as the edges of the object sliced into his fingers.

Schiller put the carved scorpion in the find tray. A couple of tiny droplets of his blood vibrated on the edges of the artifact. He told Banana to take the tray and set it on the table. At first, Schiller couldn’t get up. Finally, he had to roll onto this belly and, then, kneel to rise. He was off-balance and staggered a little as he got to his feet.

"What is it?" Amit Kumar asked him.



"I don’t know," Schiller said.

Kumar took some pictures of the scorpion with his cell-phone. The kids stood in tight half-circle and Kumar photographed them with the artifact.

"I want to hold it," Kumar said. "For a picture."

"It’s very sharp," Schiller told him. But he found a way to use his fingers as a tongs, lifting the obsidian scorpion by pinching it’s back and belly.

"I don’t think it looks like a scorpion at all," Terrance said.

"It’s stylized," Schiller told him. He carefully set the knife-like scorpion on Kumar’s moist, open palm.

"Wonderful," Schiller said.

Terrance was holding Kumar’s cell-phone. He took some pictures.

Amit Kumar grinned at the camera and said: "I found this."

　

7.

It wasn’t real. Someone was playing a prank on him. He was being trolled.

The traffic near the airport was bad. Several times, Schiller had to brake hard to stop in the queues of cars inching forward. His left hand throbbed where the obsidian had sliced into the base of his fingers. Once, when he slammed on his brakes, the bubble-wrapped scorpion skidded forward on the seat. Schiller was afraid that, if it were flung from the passenger seat onto the floor, the tail and sting might break. The volcanic glass carved into the hooked tail was only about a quarter inch thick.

The sun blazed on chrome and glass and made a million mirrors on the freeway.

Of course, the scorpion’s state of preservation was another reason that the object wasn’t real. In museums, he had seen Mayan "eccentrics," as these artifacts were called, and, invariably, the obsidian or chalcedony showed signs of being mended. Nothing came through the centuries intact. Even granite spalled away and obsidian glass was very fragile and readily broken. The Anthropology Museum in Mexico City had a collection of these items, several of them large and intricate, with spiny thorns of semi-precious gem. But all of them showed signs that they had been retrieved from earth’s embrace in fragments. In the museum in the old prison in Belize City, Schiller recalled seeing a Mayan eccentric made from black obsidian and cut to resemble a centipede. The object was intact and glistened darkly in its cabinet and, to Schiller’s eye, there was something wrong with the artistry – he was sure that the centipede was fake. It seemed wildly improbable, of course, that such a thing could survive hundreds of years buried in the ground.

Schiller’s cut hand flashed hot. He would have to look at the internet and see if there was a market in Mayan eccentrics. Of course, real artifacts were priceless and the patrimony of the country where they were found and, so, anything offered on the internet was either contraband or counterfeit. Presumably, someone had purchased a forgery and hidden it in his dig site for the purpose of humiliating him. Someone wanted him to end his career in embarrassed shame. The scalding flash in his hand rose to his face and his ears burned and the fumes from the cars tugged at his eyes and made him weep hot tears of rage.

Mayan eccentrics generally dated to about 600 to 800 common era. Mayan culture flourished in the Yucatan, hundreds of miles south of Mexico City, and, therefore, 2400 miles from Phoenix. The pueblo’s ceramic sequences began with a horizon around 1250. So the eccentric would have been about 500 years old when it reached the pueblo. And it would have migrated north more than 2000 miles from the place it was made. Schiller had never heard of a Mayan eccentric found north of Mexico City. So, of course, in time and place, the object was an impossibility. It couldn’t exist and, therefore, didn’t exist – the thing on the passenger seat beside him was a snare someone had set for him, it was a man-trap.

Schiller knew that he had enemies. He was a mild-mannered, civilized, polite man but there were people who hated him – he felt a feverish certainty about this. The bad business in Iowa had stained him. He recalled the flood and the foul river pouring over its banks and an ooze of mud everywhere and, then, snow and sleet falling into the sleek muscles of the terrible current floating timber and shacks and roofs of barns downstream. His testimony had put people in prison and, perhaps, ruined their lives and this shadow had followed him back to the pueblo in Phoenix and he knew that Dr. Germaine despised him and that Debbie felt that he was a misogynist and that it was time for him to retired. Perhaps, planting the Mayan eccentric in the dirt behind the Visitor Center was the instrument that would force him to quit his job. And, then, what?

Over the airport the planes rose and fell like pistons.

Even if the Mayan eccentric were real, could be proved, somehow, to be genuine, the find would merely incite his foes to jealousy and he would have to explain why the kids were digging in the caliche at the pueblo and why he had seeded their excavation with ceramic shards and other small artifacts, something that, he assumed, was probably forbidden, probably even illegal, and, then, there would be the scholarly disputation, the give and take, and, of course, no Mayan artifact could be validated without involving the people at the University of Texas, the world premiere Mayan scholars, better even than the crew at INAH in Mexico City and these archaeologist were, as a group, arrogant and aloof, sure of their superiority since it was one of their number that had broken the Mayan code and learned to read their glyphs and the subject of this study, charismatic Mayans, had it all – human sacrifice, great lords and ladies, not just prehistory but history as well, dynastic struggles right out of Shakespeare or Game of Thrones, and, then, there were immense temple complexes and overgrown pyramids in the jungles where brilliant scarlet macaws fluttered like immense butterflies and where vines dangled down into wet sockets of cenotes and monkeys howled in the trees – Schiller would have to consult with the Mayan specialists at Austin and they would shame him either as a fool or a charlatan or, even, someone perpetrating a hoax and all of this controversy would last for years and, indeed, probably outlive him. No, the find was a nightmare, a tragedy and a nightmare, and it would have been far better that the eccentric in the form of the scorpion had not been extracted from the earth, had not bit into his hand, had not filled him with this terrible anxiety that seem to grow and grow with each minute

Schiller was too tired and scalded by terrible thoughts to cook supper. He stopped at Arby’s and brought home sandwiches with curly fries. Schiller’s wife was playing with his dog in the backyard. She remarked that Schiller looked terrible, that he seemed to be exhausted.

Schiller put the obsidian scorpion on the kitchen table. Schiller’s wife was the head of nutrition at a nearby nursing home. She always complained to him of injustice in her work place. Schiller had told her: "All workplaces are unjust."

She asked him to remove the scorpion from the bubble wrap. The sharp edges of the artifact has slit some of the bubbles in the wrap and deflated them. Schiller carefully unraveled the bubble wrap so that the scorpion sat poised to strike at the center of the table.

"Don’t touch it," Schiller said. "It’s razor sharp." He didn’t mention to her that the thing had cut his hand at the base of his fingers.

"It’s beautiful in its own way," Schiller’s wife said. She took off her glasses and leaned close to the obsidian to peer into the black, reflecting surface.

"Menacing," Schiller said.

"What is it?"

"No one knows what they were for," Schiller told her. "I think they were ‘masterpieces’ in the sense that a master craftsman, someone skilled in cutting semi-precious gems, would make a thing like this to show his art. To demonstrate his craft. I’m guessing they were presentation gifts."

He explained to her that the eccentric had no business being where it was found. The epoch and place were all wrong.

"It’s a fake," Schiller said. "I’m convinced of it. Someone is trolling me."

"Why?"



"They want revenge for all the bad shit that went down in Iowa," Schiller told her.

She grimaced and bit her lip.

"Or Debbie wants to force me out of my job. I saw her at the dig. This was just before I found the thing."

"You’re paranoid," Schiller’s wife told me.

"Or one of the kids put the thing in the ground. Put it there for me to find," he said.

"I thought you liked those kids," Schiller’s wife asked.

"Some of them. But, on the whole, they’re sneaky bastards," Schiller said.

"Don’t get mean on me."

Schiller asked her if she had any mercurochrome. "What?" she asked.

"You know, iodine disinfectant," Schiller answered.

She looked in the cupboard near the sink and, then, in the medicine cabinet. Schiller carefully re-wrapped the scorpion.

"We don’t have any," she said, standing in the doorway.

She asked him if he wanted her to go to Walgreen’s and get some.

"No, I’ll be alright," Schiller said.

He had trouble sleeping. He remembered the bridge spanning the flooded creek and, beyond, the top of the mounds like a serpent’s spine above the foamy crest of the brown waters. He saw that the creek was full of bones hurtling downstream with the flood.

　

8.

Schiller sat in front of Dr. Germaine. He looked from Dr. Germaine’s face and his inexpressive eyes, mostly white as abalone shell, up to the mace in its display case. Although he had not been drinking, he felt hungover.

Dr. Germaine’s lips were moving and Schiller assumed that he was speaking, but his words came only intermittently and as if from a great distance. The chill air in Dr. Germaine’s room sent an icy shiver down Schiller’s spine.

Someone had concluded, or, perhaps, not concluded, but suggested, or intimated, that the film loop showing in the screening room was antiquated, loaded with suspect phraseology and outmoded ways of thinking. Nothing is eternal and, probably, it was time to produce a new introduction to the site, one that was consistent with the best, modern ideas on the subject.

Schiller felt his head nodding.

Dr. Germaine said that, perhaps, a celebrity could be recruited to read the new narration and, even, appear as a spokesperson on the short introductory presentation – a local rapper, for instance, someone with appeal to young people. Dr. Germaine used the word "agency" several times – of course, ancient people had agency, their traditions and religious practices evolved, the status of women, although sometimes problematic, changed over the years. Many of the modern pueblos are matrilineal, Dr. Germaine said. Schiller agreed with that proposition. And –

"How old were you when the film was made?" Dr. Germaine asked. Schiller tried to remember. He counted winters in his head. "You appeared in the film...talking in the film... thirty-two years ago," Dr. Germaine said. "A lot’s changed in those years." Schiller agreed that a lot had changed. "It’s a memento of my youth," Schiller said.

"Well, don’t you agree it’s time for a change?" Dr. Germaine asked.

Schiller said it was time for a change.

He went to his office and sat at his computer trembling a little.

The screen showed him that a company named Lithic Arts offered facsimile Mayan eccentrics. The objects on display were larger than the scorpion that he had bubble-wrapped in plastic in his drawer. The obsidian eccentrics were expensive, said to be carved from black onyx, and, if someone were pranking him, then, the stakes were high – it had cost his enemies a lot of money to order the scorpion and, then, conceal it in the caliche at his dig.

The sun was white-hot. Schiller led the tourists on a guided walk around the pueblo. At the ball-court, he backed too close to the edge of the entrenched playing field. Some gravel crumbled under foot and drizzled down into the hole. A beefy old man wearing a cowboy hat reached forward, seized Schiller by the upper arm, and yanked him back away fom the pit. Schiller twitched as if an electrical shock surged through his body.

They were going to replace him. Soon, his name would be forgotten.

After the tour, Schiller sat alone in the cold screening room. He watched the image of his younger self on the screen and was confused. Where did that enthusiastic, glib, handsome young man go? What happened to him? How could he have possibly been so certain about the things that he said to the camera? Didn’t he understand thirty years before that nothing really could be known, that the past was a limitless, obscure mystery? His eyes looked so bright and his speech was so animated and his teeth looked white and straight? Had he really been that handsome devil gesticulating happily on the screen?

His joints ached and a loose filling in his teeth seemed floating a sea of decay hidden under his gums. When he tapped the tooth with his tongue, there was a detonation in his skull.

Schiller told Dr. Germaine’s administrative assistant that he didn’t feel well and that he was going home for the rest of the day. It didn’t matter: Dr. Germaine had already departed.

Schiller took the bubble-wrapped obsidian scorpion from the drawer. He put the thing in his pant’s pocket. Then, he went outside to the dig. He put on a pair of latex gloves and unwrapped the scorpion. It felt heavy in the palm of his hand.

Schiller walked over to the edge of the Salt River canal. He, then, flung the stone scorpion in a high arc over the concrete canal. Mid-air, the scorpion seemed to take flight and it soared up and up and, then, twisted at the apex of its climb spiraling down to bounce several times in the alkali dust on the far side of the river.

"Be gone," Schiller whispered.

　

9.

Schiller went to bed in the late afternoon. He took some Nyquil to help him sleep. In the middle of the night, he woke up, feverish and soaking with sweat. Schiller went to his computer and sent an email to an old friend, Dr. Bosewich, chief of archaeological staff at the Heard Museum of the American Indian. Schiller attached a couple of cell-phone photographs of the Mayan eccentric to his message.

To his surprise, Dr. Bosewhich answered almost immediately: "Congratulations, Dude – This is consistent with another find last year at a nearby upland Salado site in the Gila basin. That find was part of a cache, intentionally buried circa 1350. Please keep this close to your vest. The first find hasn’t been published yet due to concerns about authenticity. I think your discovery closes that question. It now seems undoubtedly true that Mayan eccentrics, a half millenium old, were circulating among the upland Salado and Hohokom mid-14th century. You’re the other shoe that just dropped. Of course, this just begs more questions than it answers. Please don’t disclose yet to anyone."

Schiller put his head back down on his pillow. He seemed to pass out for awhile. Then, he was on the three-lane freeway between Mesa and the pueblo. He was driving the speed-limit because he was law-abiding but the traffic on both sides of him was zooming past. The headlights got entangled in soul-stuff and he kept becoming the light that was either to his right or left. This made him dizzy so that he would revert to the center-lane, driving there for a dark mile or two only to become entangled again with the headlights blazing around him. Schiller felt that his left hand, cut by the obsidian scorpion, had swollen to the size of a flabby insensate baseball mitt. When he looked at his hand on the steering wheel, it was the shape of a bear’s paw, wet and oozing.

His key-code got him through the perimeter fence. He had to find the thing. Schiller parked near the Visitor Center and, then, stumbled around the buildings, skirting the amateur dig. It was very dark. He slid down the concrete apron into the channel, kicked his way through the braids of flowing water, and climbed up onto flat-land on the other side of the cement river-bed.

Head down, Schiller paced in circles in the dark. He had forgotten his flash-light and so he had to grope at the caliche underfoot. A cold wind swept the desert floor and was strangely invigorating. His wet skin felt electric. He decided to crawl in a tight spiral around the place where he thought that obsidian eccentric had fallen. The trail that his hands and knees scuffed in the alkali dust made a cosmogram – it was the shape of the universe. Then, he saw the eccentric, a glint of light flashing in the dark. Schiller carefully reached for the obsidian artifact using his still-enervated right hand. As he touched the object, sharp pain seared between his finger tips. Had he slashed himself again? The pain was stabbing, a deep injection into his index finger, something like a wasp sting. A scorpion scuttled away from the place where he had tried to pick it up. The creature’s little eyes, honey-colored crystals, caught the starlight again and glittered.

Schiller shook his scalded right hand. Adrenalin surged and his heart beat swiftly in his breast and he knew that the venom was now surging through his veins. The idea made him dizzy and he decided that he needed to go the emergency room. But a stumbling block of memories intervened: suddenly, it was the day that he pleaded guilty years before in Iowa. He had returned from Cedar Falls, put aside his grey wool suit, and gone to the river-front to help with sand-bagging. He wondered if his volunteer-work would count as community service. The shovel bit into the wet, cardboard-colored pile of sand. He stood on the islet where the antebellum Villa Louise was endangered by the water racing by. The flood-boss told him not to over-fill the burlap sand bags – four shovel-fulls per bag, no more, no less. Many historic buildings were at risk. He worked until his hands were blistered. Sometimes, Schiller was fighting the flood, but other times he fell into the water and became the flood – sometimes, he saved artifacts, other times, he swept them to their destruction.

Schiller’s wife wanted to cheer him up. His hands hurt where the shovel had blistered them. "The worst is over," she told him. There was an old-style road-house a couple miles north of Prairie du Chien. The road-house occupied a renovated barn building with antique timber joists and rustic walls and it was very popular: people went there for birthdays and other special occasions. The restaurant had a great salad bar and featured prime rib. The road to the restaurant ran close to the river between the groves of wet woods on the banks of the slough and a nine-hole golf-course. Where the road slumped toward the river, it was flooded, a deep half-mile long pond of stagnant shit-colored water. They backed up at the pond and found another route, more inland, around the drowned fields. At the restaurant, Schiller let out his wife at the front door and parked the car. It was raining and he felt the cascade drenching his hair and shoulders.

Schiller opened his eyes and found that he was lying face-down in the cement channel where the Salt River flowed. The ice-cold braided strand of stream was bathing his cheek and shoulder. Schiller groped for the cement under his belly and pushed himself up. Then, he crawled out of the concrete canal and stumbled to his car. It was still several hours before dawn.

The lights at the intersections stabbed his eyes and he was drenched with sweat. He parked his car aslant near the Emergency Room and staggered up to the receiving desk. Some big men in white toppled him over onto a gurney. He told them he had been stung by a scorpion and waved his numb right hand at them.

There was nothing that could be done about the scorpion’s sting. But such injuries are not life-threatening unless they induce anaphylactic shock. More problematic was the systemic blood-poisoning originating in an infected laceration at the base of Schiller’s fingers in his left-hand. An IV was started and the big men in white buried him under blankets because he was in shock. Schiller asked someone to call his wife.

In the ER, Schiller was treated in a small alcove shielded from the rest of the facility by something like a shower-curtain. The curtain was intended to be calming and was adorned with an image of a tropical beach with white sand and palms lazily nodding over a blue lagoon.

A Ruby Tuesday’s was near the hospital. The sign for the restaurant remained lit and bright red in purplish pre-dawn. Schiller thought that it was odd that the place was still open. A tall nurse with a long brownish face told Schiller that the bar remained open around the clock because staff and patients from the hospital often went there at all hours to have after-shift drinks. "Some people think it calms their nerves," the nurse said, implying some slight disapproval.

"It’s strange to think that people are having a jolly good time just a few hundred feet from all this suffering," Schiller said to the nurse.

A baby was crying inconsolably somewhere in the labyrinth of the ER, an unseen elder was coughing uncontrollably, and, at intervals, a woman muttered a deep, eerie moan.

"It’s the way things are," the nurse said to Schiller.

"Of course," he replied. "The nature of being human."

"It’s literally a hundred paces from where you are working to stabilize a child who’s been terribly burned to a tavern where people are all as happy as can be," the nurse said.

"The nature of being human," Schiller said again.

The nurse worked to set an IV in his right arm. She said: "A little pinch." Schiller felt the pinch.

"Now, just try to relax."

　

10.

Infection almost killed Schiller. His left arm turned black and green. Schiller was feverish and sedated. He struggled with the nurses and said that a scorpion was stinging him. The scorpion’s sting wounded his arm where the IV was located and, several times, he ripped it out. The surgeon said he had developed "compartment syndrome" in his infected arm and performed a fasciotomy from wrist to elbow. When Schiller’s wife saw the fasciotomy incision trenching his arm to the bone, she burst into tears and had to be escorted from intensive care into the corridor by the elevators. The doctor amputated a couple of fingers and, ten days later, when the swelling was reduced, grafted cadaver skin onto the open wound. More infection ensued and the graft failed. A split-thickness graft was, then, attempted, harvesting skin from Schiller’s thigh. That graft was successful. Schiller lost fifty pounds and, when he was released from the hospital, his legs were weak because of the long bed-rest and he had to walk with a cane.

His FMLA leave was exhausted but he still had a little vacation time and sick leave that he applied to his convalescence. On his first day back at work, he read that a colleague had published an article in KIVA: the Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History. The article was illustrated with several pictures of obsidian blades and eccentrics discovered at a highland Salado village site in the Gila River basin. The blades had been buried in a cache, marked with a post, and there was evidence that the villagers had opened that cache on, at least, three occasions across a 200 year time period to inspect the obsidian artifacts and, even, manipulate them into a slightly different array. Carbon dating and ceramic sequencing showed that the cache had been first buried around 1250, committed carefully to a small underground chamber lined with rose quartz and calcite crystals. A footnote identified a personal communication between the curator at the Heard Museum and the authors of the note. The footnote said that it was rumored that another obsidian eccentric, possibly scorpion shaped, had been recently discovered "at a site within metropolitan Phoenix." In fact, Schiller recognized that the impetus for publication had been his email to Dr. Bosewhich at the Heard Museum – the authors of the article wanted to get ahead of any publication that Schiller might make. Hydration dating confirmed by secondary ion mass spectrometry established that the Highland Salado cache contained blades fashioned by flaking around 800 AD. The specimens were traced to a quarry in what is now Guatemala at San Martin Jilotepeque.

Schiller felt the fever returning to his face and ears when he read the article. He asked if someone would help him cross the Salt River canal so that he could search the middens in that place. But the canal was running at full spate, hissing with knee deep chalky-colored water. The snow-melt was underway in the mountains thirty miles away and, the preceding night, another thunderstorm had pounded the high country, driving rain that cut through the snow-pack and sent hillsides toppling down onto the mountain roads. Schiller opened a folding chair next to the diorama and counted the miniature figures going about their daily activities around the scale-model of the pueblo with its ceremonial platform mound and ball-court. He seemed to recall a foot-sore trader hunched under a deer-skin back pack approaching the pueblo plaza on a curving trail shaped like a flattened "S". But there was no trader inside the glass case today. He noticed that little fingers had smudged their prints onto the protective glass and that it needed cleaning.

The lady who volunteered in the gift shop looked at him sadly. The old Eagle Scout who had manned the information desk was gone, dead and buried as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage while Schiller was in the hospital. A new volunteer, an old fellow with long braided hair and a gold ear-ring had taken his place.

"Have any figures been removed from this case?" Schiller asked.

"Why?"

"I don’t know – for cleaning or repair," Schiller said.

"Not that I know," the hip old man with the braided pony tail replied.

The next morning, Dr. Germaine called Schiller into his office. When Schiller was seated, Dr. Germaine officiously rose, patted him on the shoulder, and, then, went to shut the door. Dr. Germaine said that it would be problematic to question Schiller about his health, vaguely citing concerns about "federal and state law." "Tell me anything you want," Dr. Germaine said. Schiller said that he was still having physical therapy but that he felt well.

Dr. Germaine said that he "didn’t want to pile on", but that there had been concerns expressed when Schiller was absent. "Do you know a boy named Kumar Amit?" Dr. Germaine asked.

Schiller corrected him.

Dr. Germaine made a dismissive gesture, as if brushing away a pesky fly. It was all the same to him what the boy was named.

"The young man says that he found an important artifact during the Kids DIG program. He claims that you took the artifact from him and took it home."

Schiller shook his head. "No," Schiller said, "I seeded the dig, as you know, to make sure every child found something each session."

"I don’t recall knowing about that," Dr. Germaine said suavely.

"What the boy found was seeded," Schiller told him. "I put it back after he dug it out."

"An obsidian blade, an eccentric?" Dr. Germaine asked.

He rotated his laptop computer so that the screen faced Schiller. Pictured on the laptop was Amit Kumar pointing excitedly to the obsidian scorpion lying across Schiller’s open palm.

"The thing cut me," Schiller said.

"So where is it?"

"It was a hoax, something bought on the internet and planted in the Kids DIG trench to shame me."

"But where is it now?" Dr. Germaine persisted.

Schiller said: "I threw it away."

"A potentially valuable artifact?"

"It wasn’t real," Schiller said.

"But someone will have to independently verify what you’re saying here," Dr. Germaine said. His voice now sounded sorrowful and his Oxford accent was more pronounced.

"It was just a counterfeit bought on the internet," Schiller said.

"Did you tell this boy that it was real?"

"That was part of the schtick, you know, the sales pitch," Schiller said.

"Well, you’re being accused of unethical conduct, looting in fact," Dr. Germaine said.

"That’s absurd," Schiller said.

"But do you see how this looks?"

"I see how it looks."

"I’m afraid I’ll have to –"

"You’ll have it tomorrow," Schiller replied.

There was no point looking for obsidian scorpion. It was gone, had been taken away.

Schiller went home and wrote a letter announcing his retirement effective immediately. He had trouble typing the letter because of the fingers missing on his left hand. He was angry and his hands trembled. Finally, his wife had to type the resignation letter for him.

Over Easter, Schiller’s son from San Mateo with his wife and two children visited for Easter. Schiller’s son had sat for an hour in the ICU at his father’s bedside. But Schiller had no memory of that visit.

Schiller’s son brought a new granddaughter. Schiller held the baby on his lap and looked across the basin where innumerable houses were crowded together between broad, empty boulevards flanked by strip malls and cactus growing in beds surrounded by pink gravel. Far away, he saw the dull glint of the Salt River moistening the concrete canal where it flowed.

The baby gurgled and made cooing noises. At the edge of the basin, the mountains hovered above mirages in the heat haze. Schiller’s grandson stood a few feet away from the old man. He pointed at Schiller’s mutilated, claw-like left hand. The skin graft on his forearm was pale, hairless, and a little bit wrinkled. The little boy was fascinated by Schiller’s wounds.

The child called out to his grandma.

"Why does grandpa look so sad?" the little boy asked.

"Sometimes, he just feels sad," Schiller’s wife said.

"He’s crying," the little boy.

"There’s dust in my eye," Schiller told his grandson.

Dr. Germaine ultimately had the platform mound repaired by a contractor from the Tohono O’oodham reservation, one of Carlos’ nephews. The repairs were made in a culturally sensitive manner. After the repairs, the Pueblo invited representatives of local tribes from as far away as San Carlos to attend an inter-tribal pow-wow. It was wonderfully picturesque. Genius Brain appeared and, even, made some rhymes while the drummers pounded on their instruments so that the old walls and the visitor center resounded with a rhythm like a beating heart. Schiller was not invited.