And the girl? someone asked
“Well I, I do need a research assistant.”
“Henry, Henry.”
“And of course the money’s an obstacle for her. The summer’s almost over and a girl in her position doesn’t have many options.”
Spoken like he was sorry. His wild story had resolved itself as an ordinary problem of hard cash, sorry. And the crew had quieted. The foreman even looked at his watch. But Bud’s half-smile showed more lip, and the corners of his eyes more white.
“You know,” the foreman said, “I useto have a place up in New Hampshire. Wasn’t much I mean, but my grandparents useto farm and we had the barn converted like. Well that didn’t work out after the divorce. Henry here being divorced, he’ll understand.”
Pinnerz understood; now the foreman had to have his turn.
“Before me’n’Charl, before we went our separate ways so to speak, my Eddie was up there practically every weekend, I mean all year round, up in that barn with a different girl every weekend. Regular cathouse we were running. So then about two months after I had to sell — and I don’t mind telling you that was some kind of shock, letting go of the place. I had to just sit and look at the papers for a whole weekend I think before I could sign ’em finally. But anyway like I was saying, two-three months go by after we sell. And then I get this phone call, from the police up there. It seems my Eddie broke in. They’d changed the locks on him but he broke in. And him and some girl, up there—”
Bud nodded the conclusion. His crew didn’t so much laugh as shake their heads noisily, hitching their boots in closer, hooking their elbows round their knees. Pinnerz stayed in his squat and kept his eyes on his folded hands.
“You know just last Saddy,” the talker said, “I was up by the rotary there, the one by Tufts there, when these two girls, I swear to God they looked like college girls, they—”
“Save it, Rudy,” the foreman said. Bud was crumpling his coffee cup unnecessarily, folding it into something hard and wrinkled as a chip of granite. Pinnerz noticed that the black man in the crew was already on his feet. “We’ll have time for that kind of story at lunch.”
Careful now. The space here at the top of the chimney was small as anywhere else, the bricks round his bubble as toothy and close as anywhere else. Pinnerz held his place while the men rose and chucked their papers past him into the nearest can. When he stood, likewise, he ignored them. Only after the archaeologist had stretched two ways and squinted back at his dig once more, after the black man and another worker had pulled on their gloves and wrestled one shoulder each under a massive loop of black cable — only then did Bud step deliberately into Pinnerz’s line of sight.
“So it’s your professional opinion,” the foreman began, “that them bones might be Indian bones.”
No such luck. Pinnerz would have liked this to be an older skeleton, and not only because a native American drew more attention in the field. Also an Indian could be anyone. This sense of possibility would always tickle at Pinnerz, whenever he worked with preliterate cultures. An opening in the past that seemed as large sometimes as the opening beyond his own future. But no; these bones were more recent. That very night, in his study, Pinnerz was astonished to discover that in fact he might know the corpse’s name. The records his son had dug out the previous afternoon revealed, after an hour’s cross-checking between old maps and new, that for thirty-two years this land had been used as a fitting-yard by one of the shipbuilders who thrived during the generation just after the Revolution. Thomas Handesyd Perkins. And like most Brahmins the man had been a tyrant when it came to keeping the books, insisting on the same careful records for slaves and indentures as for ship’s rigging and townhouse improvements. So, with that much to help date the findings made at the same level as the bones, the key for Pinnerz became the fragments of a pelvis his students had unearthed that afternoon. They’d never have found it if he hadn’t gotten them the additional time. First dusting the new bit of skeleton once more, Pinnerz now took a good half-hour working it over with a pair of calipers, and he checked each measure against the appropriate graph. No question, then. This had been a woman. Judging from the tooth and mandible found earlier, she’d been young, less than twenty-five; judging from the soil at the site, she’d lain underwater, kept from rising possibly by some length of rope or chain like those that had turned up throughout the old fitting-yard. Back to Perkins’s records. About midnight, just as the aches were starting to close round his spine, Pinnerz found her. An Irish indentured girl assigned to the dockside kitchens, Mary Chasuble or Chaseable. The name in either case no doubt had been invented, once she’d come to this country, so that she might have that much more of a fresh start. “Dissap’d,” the record read. “Thot Drown’d or run away. 21 Sep 1799. Ag’d 19 or 20.”
The aches were starting to close round his spine. He headed for the stairs, for Zefira’s room. At first he climbed with one hand gripping the bannister, but the tight hold made him think of his mother and her walker. He let go and instead opened the neck of his shirt a little more.
She wasn’t in bed. Of course she lived on all-nighters anyway, the driven star student, but it looked as if this one had been worse than most. Her desk lamp burned feebly inside the rough column of her smoke. On every side of her, books stood in stacks. Plus usually she played up her hair for all it was worth, teasing it to such a fine blond blowziness that the first time Pinnerz had met her he’d asked a classic roll-call question: was Zefira a Jewish name? But tonight she’d let herself go so badly that her hair’s snarled ends looked like a smearing of seafoam. As if Pinnerz’s son’s shirt, a couple sizes too big for her, had gotten stuck to her shoulder blades by a line of those dirtied bubbles.
He’d been stopped in the doorway. At last her head jerked up, startled, and she turned from her papers.
“You were right,” Pinnerz said at once. “They’re not pre-Revolutionary.”
He kept his hand on the knob, carefully holding himself eye-to-eye with her.
“They’re not?” Finally. “That’s too bad. Too bad for the old savage.”
“Well they’re not bad, Zefira. They’re just not pre-Revolutionary.”
She gave him what might have been a moment’s lead-in to a smile, then stubbed it out with her next cigarette. He took the three steps to her bed and sat.
“I came up here,” he told her, “and I said you were right.”
She faced the bed.
“Okay, Dr. Pinnerz. What else can you tell me?”
He inhaled through his mouth and began about the bones. Right away he found that — in spite of the hour, his back, the unwashed closeness of this girl — he couldn’t keep down his enthusiasm. His two-way excitement, first at having done such good work, next at having found the work so rewarded. Together they picked him up like a spiral wind Now he could no longer look at Zefira, only let his eyes lock and talk on. He heard himself start to fumble for words and even, very unprofessional, to chase after ideas with no clear sense of where they’d lead. But Pinnerz let the awkwardness go. The rest of his life after all felt to him like a continually narrowing rat’s maze, with department chairs on one side and editor’s desks on the other. Yes he could get a rudimentary charge out of this everyday slog, just as this morning he’d found his own low-level relief in the nip-and-tuck with Bud’s crew. But tonight was inspiration. Another stumbling sentence and he was sure of it. Tonight, the reason he toughed out all the rest had whipped both his assistant and himself into its rising spiral. Because this woman he’d brought up, and named— there’d never been anything like her at an urban dig. Now she’d stand by him forever. The Pinnerz Case. “We’ll go on TV again,” he said, “you and I. We, we’ll have to break out the jeans and T-shirts again and—”