Tribal Ways

“Hey, Ally,” Paul called softly. “Could you make more coffee?”

He didn’t speak loudly, partly out of consideration for Allison, but mainly to keep his own head from cracking open. They probably shouldn’t have drunk quite so much last night, he thought. Indeed, they shouldn’t have been drinking inside the RV at all, since it was contrary to university policy.

Not that it’s the only rule we’re breaking, he thought. And what the hey? We have proud archaeologist traditions to uphold.

Allison scowled. The spanking of the cold wind was making her cheeks red and her blue eyes water. “Why me?”

“Because you’re still mostly inside where it’s warm,” he said, “and we have the only coffeemaker that works.”

“Chauvinist,” she said. “Did your girlfriend who’s coming to visit make you coffee?” She turned and went back inside, banging the door.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he shouted at the door. “She’s just an old friend.”

Actually, Annja Creed was a young friend. She was a year or two younger than Paul. They’d met on a dig four years ago. Sparks had flown; the fire they kindled flamed up and flamed out. The end.

Now she was a semifamous cable-TV personality and globe-trotting archaeologist, coming out at his request to touch bases and look the dig over. Inviting her hadn’t even been his idea. It had been at the department’s request, in the probably unrealistic expectation that the resident expert on Chasing History’s Monsters might bring some good publicity their way.

“Women,” Donny said. He had emerged from the trailer to stretch and yawn, like an outsize nearsighted cherub with his dark curly hair and beard, his thick-lensed glasses and his belly sticking out between his green-and-white University of North Dakota T-shirt and sweatpants. He was a cold-weather guy and liked to show off his indifference to low temperatures. He wore sandals on otherwise bare feet. “You can’t live with them, you can’t—”

“We Numunu have an old tradition,” Eric said, interrupting him, using the Comanche word for his people. “We kill anybody says a cliché. Scalp ’em, too.”

Paul tried not to wince. Native Americans on campus usually believed, or at least said, all the right things. Outside the university those he met almost to a man and woman defiantly called themselves Indians and expressed contempt for political correctness in any form. You just had to get used to it. And for what it was worth Eric seemed genuinely friendly.

For one thing he let them dig his land—invited them to, when he accidentally unearthed the paleo-Indian site—in the face of rising rumblings of opposition from some of his people. For another he brought doughnuts. Even if they were bad for you.

Paul looked to Eric. “Really nice of you to be okay with us diggin’ up your ancestors, dude.”

“Not my ancestors,” their host said. “We didn’t live here then. Either we or the Kiowa ran off the people whose ancestors these were around three hundred years ago.”

He shook his head. “Well, one good thing about this damn cold wind—it’ll keep the professional Indians inside by their space heaters for a while. As much money as I give to the Nation every year the loafs-about-the-fort got nothing better to do than send me death threats and try to trespass so they can picket me on my own land.”

“Are you crazy, man?” TiJean’s voice, muffled by the layers of clothing he had donned before venturing forth again, rose perilously near to cracking. He was a freshman, only nominally out of adolescence. “Why don’t you got nothin’ on your feet?”

He was staring in horror at his roomie’s feet.

“Jesus, TiJean,” Donny said. “What, are you dressed to scale Everest?”

“For Sweden,” Ted added. The Floridian undergrad wore a blue-and-yellow parka with the fur-clad hood over his head.

Allison emerged from the RV bearing a tray with a pot of coffee and an assortment of chipped and colorful mugs. “All right, you big, strong, helpless men. The woman comes to the rescue.”

“Ah,” Ted croaked. “The stuff of life itself!”

Allison held the tray while the rest crowded around.

“Best leave some for me,” she said ominously, “if you don’t want to wind up wearing it. Whoa, does anybody hear a hissing?”

“Wow! Doughnuts!” Donny exclaimed, his eyes belatedly lighting on the two paper bags Eric had left on the grass.

“Yeah,” Paul said after a beat. “I do. Strange.”

Midway to the doughnuts Donny froze. “Don’t tell me there’s a snake?”

TiJean crowed laughter. “Who’s a wimp now, Eskimo Boy? Afraid of a little bitty old snake.”

“Whoever heard a snake hiss that continuously?” Allison asked.

“Or that loud, to hear it over this wind,” Paul said.

“Wait,” Donny said. “Did you guys see a shadow move? Off there to the left—”

“Shadow?” Paul said, feeling an inexplicable chill that had nothing to do with the wind.

“Yeah,” Allison said. “I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Like a dog or something.”

“Shit,” Donny said, “that’d be a big dog.”

They were all turning and staring around. Paul felt a little woozy. Maybe he was turning too fast, getting dizzy.

“We should all chill,” he said. Then he noticed that Eric James had drawn the slab-sided .45 automatic he wore on his hip and was holding it two-handed with its muzzle tipped toward the unfriendly sky. His face was the consistency of stone.

“This is starting to freak me out—” Donny began.

Allison’s scream, sharp as glass, made Paul spin toward her. As he did something hot splashed across his face.

For a moment he thought she’d thrown scalding coffee on him.

Then the darkness hit him.

1

It was all over the flat-screen TVs hung from the rafters and tuned to CNN when Annja entered the airport terminal. Five dead and one gravely injured in an inexplicable attack on an archaeological dig in western Oklahoma.

It’s so tragic about those other poor people, she thought as she headed to the baggage claim. Does it make me a bad person that I feel glad that Paul’s the one who survived?

She hadn’t been coming to rekindle any old embers. It had been good with Paul while it lasted. And when it was done, it was over. He was still a sweet guy, if a little bit of a player, and a good archaeologist on the tenure track at the university.

Now she just hoped he was still on any track at all.

She collected her single black bag. And I thought I was due for a little relaxation here, she thought as she walked briskly through the crowds toward the car rental desk.

Because of the severity of his injuries, Paul had been taken by helicopter from the site west of Lawton to the trauma unit in Norman, right outside Oklahoma City.

Finding the trauma center wasn’t hard. Once inside amid the bright lights and muted sounds and quietly purposeful traffic of the hospital, things got a little dicier. The staff initially tried to keep Annja from seeing Paul in intensive care.

It seemed to be a well-run facility, so Annja didn’t even try playing her journalist-cum-TV-personality card. It was never her first choice in any event. But Paul’s family had yet to arrive, given that the crime had actually occurred while she was in transit from New York to Houston. His next of kin, it seemed, would only arrive late that evening. Though the nurses wouldn’t say so, Annja got the sickening impression they didn’t expect him to live long enough to see them.

In the meantime, Paul was asking incessantly for Annja Creed so his doctors and the police officer in charge of the case agreed to let her in.