Burial Ground (21 page)

“Was he wounded?”

“Not physically. But he had a wild look, a restlessness. Inside of a year he’d quit the army and was driving trucks. First we heard from him every few weeks and then we stopped hearing from him at all. When Mom died I tried to get the news to him but nobody had heard of him at his last address.”

A breeze picked up and I heard the leaves of the trees rustle.

“Did you try the company he worked for?” I asked, but I thought I had a pretty good idea.

“The last record they had showed he’d delivered his cargo to New Orleans and then got another driver to take his rig back. As for him, well, he just disappeared.”

“Were the police called?”

“They couldn’t do anything. People disappear all the time. They said it wasn’t criminal. He was an adult.”

“So he just dropped off the face of the earth.”

She nodded. “That is, until my third year in graduate school. That year, I got a postcard. It didn’t have a word written on it, just my name and address. It went to my apartment in Cambridge and I found it in the mailbox one weekend. It was mailed from Monroe, Louisiana, and the address was in his handwriting.”

I exhaled. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. Besides, what other possibility is there? Who’d go to so much trouble for a joke? No, I’m sure it was from him. It was his way of letting me know he was still alive but for some reason he couldn’t make himself write any message.”

“So when you finished school, you decided to try to hunt him up.”

“Yes.”

“How did your father die?” I asked.

She swallowed hard. “I’m not sure. He never came back from Nam.”

“And you’re thinking it had an effect on your brother.”

She nodded.

And maybe
, I thought,
you’re thinking whatever it is that made him crack, you may have it, too
.

“Is it stupid to feel this way?” she asked.

I shook my head. “It’s not stupid at all.”

I held out my hand. The misting had stopped and I pulled off the poncho and laid it on the wet sand. We moved onto it and I reached over and put another limb on the fire.

“Now I understand why you’re in archaeology,” I said.

She gave me a funny look. “What do you mean?”

“Looking for your brother. It fits, doesn’t it? Hunting for things and hunting for people?”

“I never thought of that. Anyway, archaeology’s a science. It’s …”

“Yes?” I gave her my wise-owl look.

“Oh, never mind. Maybe you’re right.”

She really wasn’t as hard to take as I’d thought. Maybe all she needed was the guidance of a wiser colleague.

“Not that it isn’t scientific,” I lectured. “But there’s a difference between being scientific and being a science. The New Archaeology …”

“The New Archaeology is thirty years old,” she said dryly. “Just like hippies and antiwar demonstrations.”

“I was only going to say it wasn’t all that new,” I huffed.

“Well, I think I attended that lecture,” she said demurely.

I shot her a venomous look and saw she was smiling.

“You’re impossible,” I said.

“Not impossible, just a challenge,” she said obliquely. “Now that you’ve heard about me, what about yourself? Why did you end up in contract archaeology? Didn’t you ever want to teach?”

“I did once. University of New Mexico. But it didn’t work out.”

“Trouble with your colleagues?”

“No. With a woman.”

“Mind if I ask who she was?”

I shrugged. “An archaeologist. We met in Mexico on a project. I married her. But it didn’t work.”

She was staring at me now. “So that explains it.”

“What?”

“I thought you just had a thing against women professionals. It’s really because she was an archaeologist …”

The words rocked me and I couldn’t think of anything to say. My God, was she right? Had I struck sparks with her because of Felicia?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I talk too much sometimes.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

She looked off into the darkness and I followed her eyes to where the flames cast dancing shadows on the looming trees.

“Do you think this could really be an old Tunica cemetery?” she asked. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that they’re around us. It’s ridiculous, I know. I mean, it’s almost as bad as being superstitious, and I can trace the reasons for it. It’s just—”

“It’s just that you’re like every other archaeologist in the world,” I said. “You have an imagination.”

I stared into the trees, whose branches seemed to be beckoning as the shadows played their tricks.

“For whatever it’s worth,” I told her, “I feel it, too.”

For a frozen instant I thought I could make out the forms of warriors, watching, bows in their hands, trying to make up their minds whether these new beings with white skins were gods or demons, trying to decide whether the people by the fire were the future, and whether that future meant power to the tribe or its annihilation. For the briefest moment I was Tonti the Iron Hand, in search of LaSalle, and the shadows were people who had been dead nearly four hundred years.

“Alan,” Pepper said, breaking into my reverie.

“Yes?”

One of the shadow-warriors moved and I felt Pepper stiffen beside me.

I watched as he stepped out of my imagination and walked slowly to the other side of the fire.

Only it wasn’t a bow he was carrying but a rifle. And I’d seen him before, this warrior, only yesterday.

He’d been arranging artifacts in a display case in the museum on the Tunica Reservation. His name was Ben Picote.

“Just stay where you are,” he said.

N
INETEEN

Pepper’s hand clamped my arm.

“What’s the gun for?” I managed.

“I ask the questions,” Ben answered. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting till morning,” I said. “Somebody stole our boat.”

For a moment the only sound was the crackle of the fire.

“I took your boat,” he said finally.

“Did you kill the old man?” I tried to keep my voice calm.

“I didn’t kill nobody. I saw him on the beach, though. How do I know
you
didn’t kill him?”

“He’s been dead awhile,” I said. “We just got here.”

“But you’ve been here before.”

I nodded. “We were here when you chased us through the creek bed.”

He tried to keep his face impassive but I could tell from the flicker along his jaw that my guess had scored.

“Why?” I asked, but I thought I already knew.

“You’re archaeologists,” he said. “You came here to dig up our dead.”

I shook my head. “We came to find where the burial ground was, if there is one, but we told the land owner we wouldn’t dig them up. It’s against the law.”

He spat on the ground, a tall, skinny kid trying to show his manhood. “When did that ever stop you people? Do you think we don’t know about the bones they keep hidden in that museum down in Baton Rouge? About the burials they dug up at Bloodhound Hill, at Angola? About what you did at Trudeau? Do you think I didn’t know what you were all about in the museum when you tried to bullshit LeMoine?”

Pepper gave me a shocked look.

“You know each other?”

I nodded. “This is Ben Picote. He works for Frank Le-moine, the curator at the Tunica-Biloxi museum.”

“Oh,” Pepper said, letting her hand fall from my arm. “Well, I understand your feeling. I mean …”

“You understand?” His lip curled into a sneer. “How can you understand anything?”

“I know what it is to feel incomplete because I lost something. My father left when I was very young …”

“I’m talking about a million fathers. You people ran us out of this place, and now you want to come back and pull our dead out of the ground.”

“Well,” I said, “we haven’t found any evidence that there
are
any dead here, except for old Absalom. Any idea who killed him?”

“No, but I don’t care. He was stealing from our graves. Whatever happened, he deserved.”

“You’d better care, Ben,” I told him. “You just described a pretty good motive for killing him.”

Ben frowned as if this had only just occurred to him.

“How did you get here, anyway?” I asked, struggling for some kind of rapport. “Marksville’s a good little distance.”

“I came by boat,” he said, and I detected a trace of pride in his voice. “I drove down to the Old River Control Structure and put in there. I got a fifty-horse on my skiff. I’ve crossed over here lots of times. I’ve been to Trudeau. I’ve even been inside the grounds of the prison, to Bloodhound Hill, and they never even knew it.”

“That’s pretty impressive,” I allowed.

“So what are you going to do now?” Pepper asked.

His answer was a thrust with his gun. “Stand up,” he ordered.

I helped Pepper to her feet and waited. He came around the fire, staying an arm’s length away.

“Turn your pockets inside out,” he said.

“You’re robbing us?” I asked, but I knew what he was really after.

“Do what I said.”

I reached into a pocket and showed him a handful of change.

“Now the other one,” he commanded.

I took a deep breath and turned out the other pocket. The little brass bell fell into my hand and gleamed in the fire-light.

“Here.” He held out a hand. “Give it to me.”

I handed it over.

“So you haven’t found anything,” he accused.

“That was lying on the sand,” I said. “We looked all over this afternoon, but we couldn’t find anything else. I think Absalom may have dropped it.”

“You’re lying,” he said.

“I told you, it was on the sand. That doesn’t tell anybody where the original grave is. It could be ten miles from here, on either side of the river.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

“Look for yourself, then,” I invited. “But meanwhile I’d like my boat back.”

He glared at me from under an old baseball cap. “You better hope you get out of here alive.”

“You’re going to kill us?” I asked. “That wouldn’t be very bright, would it? I mean, first T-Joe Dupont, then Absalom, and now two more. Are you going to kill the whole world?”

He thrust out his jaw. “I never killed nobody. All I ever done was run people like you off this land. Because it’s our land, and my people are buried here.”

“Then give us our boat and consider us run off,” I said.

He sneered. “You’re slick, real slick. That’s the way they all were, when they got our land. Talk, always talk, just like a car salesman. Sign here, Chief. Oh, yeah, I know how that went.”

“Well, I wasn’t there when all that happened,” I said. “But I believe what you’re saying, at least about how the land got taken. But just remember, when everybody else wanted to kill the Indians, the anthropologists were defending them.”

“Defending?” He shook his head. “You call pulling up the bones of the old people defending? I’ve seen ’em in the displays. Like they was
things
, not real people.”

“He’s got a point,” Pepper said, taking me by surprise. “But now there’re laws and—”

“Laws—” Our captor spat again. “You just showed me how much the laws matter. You people are no different from that guard who dug up the first Tunica Treasure.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “You still didn’t answer my question, Ben. What are you planning to do with us?”

“I haven’t made up my mind.”

“Then it’s going to be a long night.”

“Be quiet! You’re making me mad. You’re just like some of the ones at the reservation, not interested in nothing but taking care of their own selves.”

“The casino,” I suggested.

“Hell yes,” he snarled. “They didn’t care a thing about the burials after all that.”

“What do you mean?” Pepper asked, but I knew what he was going to say.

“The old chief, Chief Joe, let the archaeologists dig wherever they wanted,” our captor said. “After he died, the new leaders wouldn’t allow it. Now they’ve sold out, too. They didn’t care if the developers put the casino on top of a burial ground on the reservation so long as the leaders made money.”

“Is that true?” Pepper looked at me.

“There were two archaeological surveys,” I said. “They didn’t turn up any bones. That’s all I know.”

“They didn’t look,” Ben said.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “Except the firms involved have good reputations. They don’t need to have an unlocated burial coming back at them.”

“You’re defending them,” he said.

“No. Just trying to be logical.”

“White man’s logic,” he said.