Bedlam and Other Stories (12 page)

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—”

“Hank,
Jesus!”
Zefira wailed. “You
old
. . . Jesus.”

He blinked, focussed. Apparently he'd been staring at the button of her jeans as he spoke. When he raised his eyes to her face, Pinnerz found a look so uncomplicated that at first he couldn't think of what it meant.

“I can't believe you,” she said. “I can't
believe..
. Look, tell me. How far are you going to take this?”

His forearms were back on his knees. He turned his hands as if trying to catch the last breath out of a restroom dryer.

“You know years and years from how, Hank, it's not going to matter how hard you tried to hang on. All that trouble yesterday, all the times I had to sneak around, it's not going to matter. And even what I got into with you, back at the beginning of the summer... I mean, I admit it was a wrong move. I made a wrong move, Hank. But you weren't married or anything. You were just, this very impressive older man who'd given me this wonderful opportunity.”

Deep sigh. Pinnerz watched her flick one big toe with the other.

“But Hank, how long are you going to think that gives you some kind of
hold
on me? Last night, you threw such a fit, I admit you had me bulldozed for a while. You had me talking to the walls in here today. But finally I realized that years and years from now all that's going to matter to me is, this was the summer when I met Tripp. Jesus, I hope so. I hope...” She cleared her throat. Then, louder: “So Hank, tell me. When can I go see him without sneaking
around?
When do we all stop acting like I'm some kind of
slave?”

Pinnerz couldn't answer. He couldn't even think what was practical, or begin trying to reckon her background against his. He knew only that if he so much as looked at Zefira, he'd have to deal with the same uncomplicated hatred he'd seen in her face a minute before, and seen last night in his son's as well.
Lying, scheming bastard
, he'd shouted at Tripp then.
All summer long you never cared what I was after, lying bastard kid
. Hard words that now emerged again to ache in his neck like mutant teeth. Between that new bony catch in his breathing and what this girl had asked, it was all Pinnerz could do just to manage a ghostly gesture with one hand. A signal that he wanted more time.

She had appealed to Grissom unusually, that woman. Even now, twenty-five years further on, he wished he could find a way to tell his wife just what the experience with that woman had meant to him. His wife Syl, Grissom believed honestly, had been a part of it. Because when he had first laid eyes on that woman, on that whore all dolled up in the nightclubby fashions of the mid-Fifties, she had appealed to him…unusually. She'd appealed to him as a kind of perverted lens through which he could see both himself and his wife more clearly, more specially.
Syl
, he wished he could tell his wife now,
you were up in that room with us
. And surely, after thirty years married to Grissom, Syl would understand a rising young executive's one-night layover with a pickup in another hotel. But during this month just past, the story had got out of Grissom's control. It had got out into the Chicago papers before he could find the words to explain it to his wife.

And Grissom knew also he wasn't your standard executive geek, high-powered and homeless. He'd been through all that crap already. He'd started out in consulting, one of the real ballbuster firms. But shortly after his experience with the whore, he'd switched to a job where it wasn't the Sharks vs. the Shits all the time. He'd gone to a place near Batavia, in the jet-aircraft line. In those days—Grissom wasn't then thirty-five—he'd told people in his circle he switched because the cross-country running around a man had to do in consulting took too much time from his wife and kids. And his wife and kids had been, in fact, part of Grissom's reasoning. Grissom's father had always said, in his heavy-tongued immigrant accent, work eats the legs but the family feeds the soul. Then surely, after all that and more, Grissom felt comfortable with himself. He was pushing sixty by now.

But the whore and her people, no denying, had thrown him badly. It hadn't been just the woman herself. The bottom line was, just when Grissom's career had been getting started, he'd been forced to step down to a position that cost him a minimum of $12,500 in salary and benefits alone over the first two years. The exact figures were important. He'd gone over them carefully with his lawyer.

The woman herself, well. When he had seen her alone in that hotel bar, the young Grissom had felt only the old and simple deepdown tug. He didn't try to fight it. The woman fit his imaginings. When she lifted the veil they wore in those days, by the flame of his lighter Grissom saw icy, dark features, the fineboned quality he'd always pictured on European women. And that bar where they met was of course nowhere near his brown home in Lake Forest, nor even near Chicago. This had all happened on his very first extended executive-level trek. Even when he and the woman were discussing money, him showing off his pre-credit-card wallet as hefty as the wrought-iron elevator they rode in, even that came out sounding to Grissom like avant-garde poetry fresh in from the Continent—or wherever, in the suddenly
very
wide world, they got avant-garde poetry from.

Grissom of course drank. A good Scotch firmly in hand could practically launch a career by itself, in those days, and the place he worked for was a world-class ballbuster. Afterwards (no surprise, considering) Grissom went on the wagon.

And she next did something strange. Yes, something as strange by its own lights as anything that followed. The woman actually let him have what he'd gone up there for. Together they got the juices going and took turns leering at each other from top or bottom. She let young Grissom have his satisfaction even though it was she who'd mixed the drinks—even though, in other words, she must have slipped him the stuff right away. She must have slipped him the stuff before he'd so much as got his shoes off. And naturally Grissom had belted down as many shots of courage as an empty stomach would allow. Moreover he did remember, odd detail, that the drink had left a coating of silt on the ice He remembered, because after the last swallow he'd held the glass up to one eye in order to watch her undress. He'd felt very lightheaded already. That nightelubby suit she wore, like Peter Gunn's girlfriend's, had seemed to blur with the fineness of her skin, which was sometimes indistinguishable from the ghostly ice. Yet the woman did strip, in silence. Soon enough she stood unusually naked, a glistening silt-creature he'd tuned in from a world of icebergs and runny, elongated stars. And then, still silent, she held out her hands to him.

He'd been looking for an adventure, sure. That much Syl could have understood. She could have appreciated her husband's yen for a night's adventure maybe twenty-five minutes after the fact, let alone twenty-five years. Sure. But also young Grissom had wanted…so many times, especially during this month just past, he'd tried to put this idea into words…he'd wanted to come by means of this experience to a more complete, more substantial idea of himself as an individual. Grissom
alone
, he'd wanted to see. Grissom as a separately defined person, as an
intensely
, separately defined person, something as unique and identifiable as a planet in a pale sky. That too was what he'd wanted from this woman. And given all the facts about what had happened, certainly in time he could have put the idea into words. He could have gentled the lonesome wanderer he was trying to define, and so in time he could have shared the whole experience with Syl.