“Think we saw you at Milk River.” Morgan sat beside him. I cringed, remembering the curses I’d shouted.
“That’s right.” Howie reached down and twisted his fingers in the black spaniel’s curls. “I heard you got a chance for something big in the altiplano. Does it have hope?”
“It used to,” I said. “The department vetoed it due to cost.”
Morgan slipped the Polaroid from his pocket, straightened a bent corner, and set the photo on the table. “But if you’re scouting—”
The photo, normally tacked to the corkboard in the lab, pictured a leather glove lying on a patch of dirt with the general location and year of the find pencilled underneath: Bolivian altiplano, 22/01/83. Red-and-grey rock surrounded a line of lighter, pinkish-tan vertebrae embedded in the tuff. The scale the glove provided, and the way the skeleton seemed situated, spoke of something huge and avian. Argentavis magnificens was our best estimate. A bird that pre-dated the mountain it fossilized in, and one of only two known specimens.
Howie turned the photo and leaned back in his chair, looking first at the line for the Apatosaurus femur, and then at us. He was either remembering, like I was, all the profanity we’d thrown at him from the hot canyon, or sizing us up — the over-bleached grin Morgan was proud of, and my denim and shitty blazer — versus the donor currently beside the femur: a woman, at most five feet tall; even standing on a chair her up-do didn’t reach the top of the mounted thigh bone. She looked at the brown, polished head of the femur arcing above her and laughed, and then hiked her gown (black, beaded, vintage) above her ankles so that the camera captured her heels.
Howie touched the photo again, and with his other hand still resting on the spaniel, told us he’d made a fortune in oil and retired. He had an interest in the “black stuff’s origins” and “just what the heck he’d cashed in for this life,” did we understand that? He’d already explored subterranean bitumen leaks, those asphalt pools that “made up tar pits and whatnot.” We’d dug on his land before, Howie claimed, though he didn’t think we’d realized. That slip of dry mud he’d spotted us on, it’d been him who signed the permissions.
“My wife wants me to pour more money into her clinic.” He nodded toward the woman in the black dress dismounting the chair beside the Apatosaurus. “She does plastic.”
Of course she does, I thought, look at her — she was at least a decade and a half younger than Howie. Although, now that I did look, she didn’t seem Botoxed. And if she’d had other work done, it must have been a reduction.
“But it occurs to me,” Howie continued, “if you’re confident in the reward, I’ve never toured the Andes.”
“You’re offering?” Morgan poured wine from a bottle that sat in the centre of the table.
“I’m offering.” Howie raised his glass.
“Then we’re confident.” Morgan turned to me.
Before I could respond, applause broke from the tables closer to the stage and the tux-clad “mourners,” returning from their smoke with the geoscience chair, picked up their cello and violins and filled the hall with fussy chamber music.
“Right, Constance?” Morgan pressed.
Having the photo come to life — to stand on the same patch of earth as Argentavis magnificens — would be prize enough for us. I wasn’t sure that was what Howie meant by “reward,” but the offer was too good to question. I raised my glass alongside theirs.
The third time we met Howie we had him tour the lab. We treated him to a dust mask and goggles, and for an hour or so he scraped calcite from the smooth, almost vitreous surface of the false-saber’s ribs. That visit cascaded into a fourth, and so on — it seemed Howie had taken our invitation as a universal one. Or, I don’t know, the six a.m. phone calls and unannounced drop-ins both at the university and my rental, all that could be commonplace for an oil baron.
Same time, Morgan left his boyfriend, and since it was July and we were set to leave for Bolivia early September, I let him sleep on my couch. For the next four weeks the three of us spent most evenings at my place, a one-bedroom bungalow on retired ranchland that edged the Kneehill badlands. The house had a veranda wrapped around three sides, an unkempt lawn, and a couple Saskatoon berry bushes the prairie dogs routinely stripped. The view, though, was what I paid for: farmland to the west and badlands parks to the east.
“The whole wide, flat world,” Howie would say, and then lean his chair back, set his boots on the veranda railing, and raise his drink to the horizon. I bit my tongue when he pointed out which portion of the land was his, and as he waxed on about life “pressed book-like” while his spaniel dug apart gopher holes. It was hard not to mock him. Maybe because I’d been wrong about the musicians back at the gala, or maybe because Howie’d brought his dog uninvited to both a dig and a memorial party, but I felt we couldn’t get on the same track. Like although we’d met and travelled next to each other, I was tensed for him to pull away. Pull his funding away — he’d never toured the Andes, he’d said.
We entertained him. We walked the badlands and tested the backpack core-drill we had him purchase. Morgan listened to Howie recount his fights with his wife about her clinic, and I excused myself to analyze maps and core samples, and photographs of the dig site. We were set to leave in a month, and we knew nothing about where we were going besides the date of the flight. Thank god our guide-to-be, Julia, was on top of things at her end — she’d sent the samples, booked us a place in La Paz and a jeep and driver for the road from the city to the foot trail where she planned to meet us. She promised enough pack animals for our gear, which, with Howie’s unchecked generosity, was growing. Besides the new drill we bought a portable computer (small as a briefcase), and a brand new ’83 Magellan NAV that could pinpoint our latitude and longitude give or take a couple hundred metres. All stuff we truly didn’t need, and had never used in the past.
Maybe the overspending added to our impatience. Summer felt both slower and more irritating than usuaclass="underline" Morgan’s evolving collection of coffee cups sidelined the fossilized corals and crinoids I had displayed on the windowsill, Howie blasted a thumbhole single-shot at the prairie dogs, and me — I couldn’t help but mention future digs. Places I wanted to go that would need Howie-level funding. We provoked each other and annoyed ourselves.
The night before we were scheduled to fly to La Paz — the only night Howie was actually supposed to join us for dinner and a chat — he was late. Morgan and I ate and turned off the grill. The evening cooled. We sat on the veranda and watched clouds — purple-blue, heavy — spit on the south. Our shadows stretched and then vanished with the sun, leaving the glow from the house behind us and a pair of headlights on the highway: Howie’s maroon one-ton. The truck swerved, and then — about a hundred metres from my house — caught the soft shoulder and jerked from the road to the ditch where it smashed the wood and barbed-wire fence (a remnant from a time when the property had cattle). Howie opened the door and fell into the grass. The spaniel bolted over the road and ran between canola swaths in the neighbouring field.
“Jesus, Howie.” I ran to the truck and pulled the keys from the ignition. “You hurt?”
“Violet.” He stumbled up the ditch. Morgan slipped under his arm, steadying him. I picked up the straw Galveston and slapped the dirt from it.
“Let’s get you inside,” I said.
“Violet, heel,” Howie yelled.
“Come on, Howie,” I said. The dog, scared and running, wasn’t going to stop. Or if she did, it would be so far into the field we wouldn’t be able to see her.