He tripped on the porch steps and I ducked under his other arm, helping Morgan.
“My wife won’t let me in my own house,” Howie said.
“Don’t worry about that now.” To be honest — I didn’t want to let him in either, but I did. I put fresh sheets on my bed for him since Morgan had the couch. When he passed out I staked a pup tent at the edge of the property for myself. It was too early to sleep. I sat on the front steps, worried and angry about the trip.
“So his wife cut him loose.” Morgan handed me a pilsner and sat next to me. “I don’t know what took her so long.”
“What do you mean?”
“He pulled funding from her clinic.”
“She does plastic,” I said. “Who cares if someone doesn’t get their lift and tuck?”
Morgan turned to me.
“Facial reconstruction, Constance,” he said. “She does that sort of plastic. She’s a surgeon.”
I couldn’t think of what to say, so I drank. We sat on the steps listening to the rock wrens and watched the storm flicker and boom miles south over the fields.
“Does that—” I began.
“Doesn’t change anything.”
Kneehill when it’s wet — the long grass around the river turns green, and the plains, dead for most of the year, creep with small blue flowers. We stayed on the veranda well past dark. The spaniel running somewhere, Morgan beside me. In the black I couldn’t see his face, and I assumed he couldn’t see mine.
Howie pushed the flight back to find the spaniel. I thought the dog was dead and told him as much, coyotes would have made a quick meal of her, but it was his call — if he wanted to re-book there wasn’t anything Morgan or I could do. We watched him stride through the ranchland grasses toward the canyon, groaned, and packed a lunch to follow.
The path jackknifed to the base of the ravine, where it travelled alongside ribbons of brown water — what was left of a river that had worn the sandstone, exposing grey and tan stripes of consolidated sediment that dated to the late Cretaceous. I wondered what Howie saw when he looked at it (three hundred metres below us sat the coal zone, and a constant fight between preservationists and big oil), but I suppose he only had his eye out for the spaniel. He wasted three days trekking.
The fourth day I refused to search. Morgan and I let Howie comb the hoodoos alone and drove the highway with the windows down. We didn’t have a set destination — anywhere to get away from the piercing whistles and the voice crying Violet. We ended up at the lab. It was a Sunday, and there was only one other person — a technician at the microfossil table, intent on his microscope. Morgan and I wheeled the sandbox containing the semi-jacketed false-saber (a wide, shallow Tupperware bin on a rollable island) to the centre of the room under the main fume hood and opened the lid. In planning the teratorn dig over the summer we’d lost interest in revealing the cat, and the jackets were only half-peeled from each section. I worked with an air scribe, much like a miniature jackhammer, and chipped away at the sandstone. Morgan started at the other end with brushes and a grinder. Because of our dust masks and the sound of the fume hood and the tools, I didn’t notice that a guest had entered the lab until I set down the scribe and took up a syringe of epoxy.
“A moment.” I finished with the consolidant (injected into a weak spot to help stabilize the fossil) and snapped a picture of the process, making a note of the action and time in the logbook. In the doorway — a black spaniel on a leash, the leash held by a short, well-dressed woman with thick brows and a wide mouth. The woman from the gala, Howie’s wife.
I took off my safety glasses and cotton gloves, and squatted to greet the spaniel. The dog smelled of lavender soap and her soft coat had been clipped.
“Howie will be glad.” Morgan shook the woman’s hand.
“Constance,” I greeted her, and added: “He’s not here. He’s searching the canyon. Where did you find the dog?”
“Near to our ranch.” The woman unbuttoned her blazer and sat on a stool next to the false-saber’s sandbox. “She was a black speck running the highway’s shoulder. She wouldn’t stop for me. I had to park up the road and grab her as she went by.”
She twisted the spaniel’s leash around her left hand and leaned for a better look at the false-saber. Three main jackets, and a couple buckets of smaller fragments where we might find missing pieces. In the first jacket, the pelvis and the right hind limb — thigh, shin bones, and foot — stretched half-uncovered in the matrix next to the part of the tail that had been preserved. The second contained the false-saber’s ribcage, front limbs and neck; the third held the long-toothed skull. An array of brushes, air scribes, epoxy, syringes, safety glasses, and gloves lay beside the cat.
“He could fund us both if he wanted to,” she said.
I straightened the row of scribes, and Morgan picked up his gloves.
“Thanks for dropping off the dog,” he said.
“I also brought—” She passed me an envelope. Howie’s name was written in silver sharpie on the front.
“We’ll give it to him,” Morgan said. I agreed — I knew we wouldn’t.
She looked at us like she knew it too, and unwound the spaniel’s leash from her wrist. “You do that, then.”
Morgan took the dog from her.
“It’s a mistake,” I said when she left. “Digging with him.”
Morgan stepped back from the false-saber and spread his arms. Are you sure of that, his reach said. A bird with six-foot flight feathers. It tripped me up imagining it, and it was my living to un-puzzle the bits and pieces we found buried in the coulees. That giddiness behind the jigsaw — that was why I did it, I suppose. I tested the weight of the envelope Howie’s wife had given me — photos, it seemed like — and I thought of her at the gala with her head tossed back, delighted at the absurdity of the huge femur. I opened it. It wasn’t pictures of her, although it was photographs. Each image showed a face (I won’t describe them) and underneath listed a procedure with a cash amount. I re-sealed it quickly. Morgan thrust his arms out a second time. The bright, overhead spotlight of the lab was unforgiving, and he looked old. Greying jaw-length hair, barrel chest, and thick brow. His boyfriend was gone, I remembered, and our lecture contracts were cancelled for the next year. We had the dog.
I trashed the envelope and began to pack the false-saber. We were stuck in this, whether we liked it or not.
Howie had meat on the grill when we brought the dog back and lied about her — we told him it was us who found her.
“She burned the pads of her feet on the highway,” Morgan told him. “The only time I felt sorry for a dog.”
“So you took her to a spa.” Howie closed the barbecue and eased himself into a deck chair. We’d forgotten the dog was groomed, scented, and leashed.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Well, we washed her at the lab.” Morgan unclipped the dog and looped the leash around the railing. The steak spit in the grill. The dog finished scouting the yard and clambered onto the veranda.
“It’s pricy to buy last minute.” Howie pinched the crown of his hat and set it on his lap. He was talking about our flights — we knew it, and backtracked. If we left tomorrow, Morgan reasoned, it would only cut short acclimatizing in La Paz and we could still make the other connections — the driver and such. I went so far as to tell Howie that if he wanted to trade the computer and NAV to make up the flight expense, that was all right with us. He took it quietly. Fanned himself with his Galveston, and agreed.
Then we were there: La Paz, Bolivia, where I tried to sleep. Morgan drank at the hotel bar, and Howie — Howie took us up on our offer and traded the tech for eighteen bottles of pisco. We barely had time to register the slap-down before all of us (spaniel included) were in the jeep headed to the high plateau and then dumped at the trailhead where our guide, Julia, met us with a string of alpacas.