Burial Ground (2 page)

I was about to change my impression of him as a man with common sense, but before I could answer he was reaching under the table again. This time he came up with a paper bag, from which he removed several objects wrapped in tissue. With a glance around him to ensure that we were still alone, he reverently laid the paper-wrapped objects on the table.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Open them up.”

The tingling was reaching all the way to my belly now, as I reached with a trembling hand.

When I’d finished unwrapping the little parcels, I knew that T-Joe Dupont was as sane as I was. Because there, in front of me, under the fluorescent lights, were three glass trade beads, a tarnished copper bell, the rusted action of a flintlock pistol, and a marine shell that could only have been part of a necklace.

The last time I’d seen artifacts like these had been at the museum on the Tunica Reservation where the Tunica Treasure was displayed.

“And that’s only part of it,” he whispered. “I’ve got more at the house.”

I exhaled, to keep down the butterflies. I’d heard a rumor that the second Tunica village was still out there somewhere, but until now I’d merely shrugged it off as the gossip of locals.

I handed him back the artifacts. “How do you know these are from your land?”

He gave me a faint smile. “I got them from an old black man named Absalom Moon. Absalom’s hunted that land for sixty years. When he showed them to me, I asked him to take me to where they came from, but he pretended not to understand. Just said the
woods
. See, Alan, that’s the whole problem.”

“His memory?”

T-Joe shook his head. “Absalom’s got a mind like flypaper. He can tell you where a certain tree was growing fifty-two years ago, or how big a buck he killed in the winter of ’55. He knows every blade of grass on that land, every trail, and how high the water got in ’27. He collects arrow points, used to sell them at one of the stores. He knows where to go after it rains to find them. But when it comes to this stuff, his mind suddenly goes blank.”

“Interesting,” I said. “But it may not be the worst problem. The worst problem is if we find it.”

T-Joe made a face. “Yeah, I know. Wife and me talked about it. Poor bastard that found the first Tunica Treasure ended up with everybody mad at him.”

“It wasn’t because he found the treasure,” I reminded him. “It was because he dug on land that wasn’t his and destroyed the better part of a hundred Indian graves just to get the burial goods out of the ground.”

“Yeah, but you can’t tell me the whole tribe wouldn’t descend on me if we found something. I heard they’ve got a new law …”

“That’s right. You can’t disturb an unmarked burial or the burial goods with it without getting a special permit from the state.”

“Which nobody is going to issue.” He gave a tight smile. “Well, that’s okay. You see, Alan, I don’t want to disturb it. I just want to know where it is.”

He began to rewrap the little objects and replace them in the bag. My eyes lingered on them like I was losing old friends.

“I don’t give a damn about treasure. I’ve got all the money I need. I just think this is
interesting
. If there’s something like that on my land, I think it’s great. It’s something for my kids and their kids to be proud of. I don’t aim to tear up anybody’s graves, any more than I’d want my family’s graves tore up. I just want to know if it’s there, and I want to make sure it’s preserved. And afterward I don’t want every bastard in the state with a metal detector walking all over my lawn. I’d have to hire a private guard force to keep people away.”

“I understand. But you have to realize once we determined it was there, we’d be obligated to report it. That’s the law. But the records would be confidential, under the State Archaeologist …”

“Hell, there’s no such thing as confidential when you get the government into the act.” He looked forlorn, like I’d snatched away something he loved.

“Of course,” I said, “there’s another possibility: This may just be an isolated find. Maybe a trail crossed your property. The Tunica were great traders. This may have been a rendezvous point or something.”

“I’ve thought about that,” T-Joe said. “But it might not be, either. This land is about twenty river miles south of the first spot, at Trudeau, on the east bank of the river.” He sighed. “And the hell of it is, I’ll never know unless I get somebody out there to search for it.”

“I guess not,” I said. “Well, maybe you’d like some time to think about it.”

He sighed and nodded, suddenly looking glum.

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

We shook hands and I watched him walk away with his treasures. When he was gone I went over to the levee and climbed up the grassy bank to where I could look out at the river. A mile wide here, it had formed both a barrier and a highway in ancient days, connecting tribes as far apart as Louisiana and Illinois. It had seen the Spaniard DeSoto come in 1541, with his rag-tag party of conquistadors, and it had swallowed his body when he’d died of a fever on its banks. It had seen the French explorers after him, and had witnessed the founding of a new country. But most of all, it had seen the first Americans, the Natchez, Bayogoula, Houma, and Tunica. They had depended on it for the fertility of their crops and had traveled on its waters. And through the centuries it had whipsawed its way back and forth across the land like a great snake, wiping out all that had been.

What the hell was I thinking? The second Tunica village was in the river now. Or someone would have found it years ago
.

I drove back to our office, an old frame house in Tigertown, just outside the north gates of the university. Not exactly an upscale location, but convenient for research at the library and the university collections. We’d found drunks asleep on our front yard more than once in the ten years we’d been here, but we had a state-of-the-art alarm system, and the location made it easy for us to hire students.

As I walked in Marilyn, my tiny office manager, handed me a message slip.

“Bertha just called, and she sounded hot.”

I sighed. Bertha Bomberg, whom we all called Bombast, was our contract officer at the New Orleans District of the Corps of Engineers. A call from her was usually a trial by fire as she inflicted some new theory or demand. I nodded to the pair of students sorting artifacts at the two big tables in what used to be a living room and went straight to my office at the back. Even with the air conditioning the room felt warm, but I knew that when I spoke to Bertha it would get warmer. I leaned back in my chair and propped my feet on the oak desk I’d rescued at a yard sale. I was thinking about T-Joe Dupont and wondering if I ought to get involved. He wanted silence, but there was no way to ensure that. News traveled. So, in all, the work had the potential of getting us some publicity, but I wasn’t sure it was the kind of publicity we needed. Contract archaeology isn’t like academic archaeology: It’s a business where discretion is valued.

I wondered if Bombast would be at her desk now. Today was Friday and she wasn’t known for her long hours. Maybe she’d gone home early. Or maybe I could manage to call while she was down the hall at the candy machine, and thus avoid her until Monday. It was eleven o’clock. If she left for lunch at eleven-thirty and didn’t return …

The phone rang and my spirits sagged.

I lifted the receiver like a man under water and told myself to keep my cool.

“Moundmasters,” I said.

“Christ, when are you going to change that goofy name?” a male voice whined. It wasn’t Bertha.

“Hello, Freddie,” I said. “How did I luck out? First a call from Bombast and now the president of Pyramid Consultants.”

“Bombast?” he snorted. “What did you do, fuck up your last delivery order? I told them they should’ve given us that contract. You can’t run a business with part-timers and students.”

“Is that what you told them when you protested the award?”

“None of your business what we put in our protest. But I didn’t call to argue with you. I called because we’ve got a mutual interest. We need to work together.”

“You and me?” My laughter brought Marilyn to poke her head in the doorway. “Freddie, we do
fieldwork
around here. You know, that stuff with shovels and trowels, that gets dirt on you.” I had an image of him, across town in his carpeted office, relaxing in his padded executive chair. The last fieldwork he’d been personally involved in was the expansion of the golf course at a country club in Mississippi, and rumor had it he’d supervised his crew from the bar.

“I’ll overlook the insult, Al. I know how it is when you get hungry. I’m just trying to make sure neither one of us starves.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means there are three contract firms in this parish. Us, you, and CEI. Naturally, we get most of the work, but there’ve been some crumbs for you and CEI despite your prices. But the fact is we’re at about saturation point.”

“What do you propose, Don Corleone? We carve up the territory?”

“Very funny, Al. You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth if she gets a foothold.”

“She
who?
”

“This
woman
, for God’s sake! The one who’s come down from Yankee land who’s setting up a new firm here.”

My belly did a little jump. He was right: Competition wasn’t welcome in a market that was already on the ropes.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I see I’ve got your attention. I didn’t hear a ‘Thank you, Dr. St. Ambrose,’ but never mind. I understand.”

“Stop babbling, Freddie, and tell me what this is all about.”

“I’m
trying
to, Al.” His voice rose an octave. “There’s a new player in town. She calls herself—now get this—
P. E
. Courtney. She’s from Massachusetts, of all places. Got her doctorate from Harvard. Now you tell me what a Harvard Ph.D. is doing down here scraping up jobs in contract archaeology? I’m telling you, Al, something smells.”

“It
is
unusual,” I agreed.

“Her dissertation was some kind of study of contact sites in the Yazoo Basin. Christ, why doesn’t she take a job at some little pissant college in Mississippi?”

“Jobs are hard to get.”

“Well, she’s going to find that contract archaeology in Louisiana’s a hell of a lot tougher. If we stand together on this the jokers at CEI will have to go along …”

“Stand together? What do you mean?”

“Freeze her ass out. She came by here to introduce herself and I already told her she wasn’t welcome. I assume I spoke for you, too.”

“Wait a minute …”

“Listen, Al.” His voice had that low, earnest tone that meant somebody was about to get screwed. “If we make it hot enough for her, she’ll go away. I know what women are like. I’ve been married three times. We can freeze her ass out with low bids, just you and me. CEI can’t touch us—their overhead’s too high. But I’ll let a couple of people go if I have to, take a temporary loss. If you’ll do the same …”

“I think that’s illegal,” I said.

“It’s
business
, for Christ’s sake.”

“Not my kind.”

“Al, you’re a born sucker.”

“And you were born to be hanged.” I slammed the receiver down, which was par for the course after talking with Freddie St. Ambrose for more than two minutes. Still, this wasn’t good news. We existed on the thin line between survival and bankruptcy as it was. Another player could tip any of us right over.

P. E. Courtney
.

I ate a bag lunch at the sorting table with Marilyn and Gator, our gap-toothed field boss, so named for his tendency to abandon survey to wrestle alligators when he saw one basking. A good man, and so far indestructible. I was wadding up my lunch papers when David Goldman returned from the library. An ex-rabbinical student from New Orleans, David had surprised his family by dropping his theological studies to take up anthropology. He’d come to Louisiana State for a master’s and had joined me the year before his graduation, first as a part-timer and then as a full-time archaeologist. His specialty was lithics, and he’d written several papers on the sources of the stone used in some of the tools found at the great Poverty Point site in the northeastern part of the state. I told him about my meeting with T-Joe and he shrugged.

“Probably nothing to it,” he said. “He could’ve gotten the damn things anywhere. I’ve seen them being sold in curio stores in the French Quarter, in New Orleans.”

I nodded reluctantly. “I don’t think he’s the kind that would fall for a hoax,” I said. “And he seemed honest himself.”

“Maybe,” David said and headed for his own office, a remodeled bedroom next to my own lair. I started to mention my conversation with Freddie, but it seemed unnecessary.

I read through the printout of the
Commerce and Business Daily
, looking for bid solicitations on newly announced government projects. I found nothing but a request for a cultural resources survey in Hawaii, and turned to the draft of a report we’d done for a construction company on a pipeline right-of-way. I was midway through the boilerplate chapter on prehistory when I heard voices in the lab. A few seconds later a frowning Marilyn appeared in my doorway.