CHAPTER
BLLLWWWHAATTTT!
John awoke to the sound of a constipated elephant in its death throes.
“What is that?” he moaned.
“Reveille,” Page said as she rolled out of her cot and landed with a bump on the ground. “Miss Doyle likes to play her trumpet in the morning.”
She may like it, John thought as he crept out of the tent, but I don’t think anyone else does.
And he was right—even the rattlesnakes hid in terror when Miss Doyle sounded her daily yawp. Still, apart from the initial cacophony, John couldn’t really complain. Anything was better than copper mines and coffins.
It was a strange feeling to be getting dressed and eating breakfast and brushing one’s teeth in the desert. John had seen many landscapes on his travels with the Wayfarers, but none as alien as this. Walking with Page to the dig site was like walking across a lunar crater.
“Chip chop!” Miss Doyle called out. The sheen on her umbrella was shimmering like a mirage.
While Page clambered into the pit, John examined his new place of work. Though the sun was already scorching cracks into the ground, a sturdy canvas tarp had been strung up on poles to protect anyone working below. A very bored Boz was lounging under the edge, keeping an eye on the horizon.
“I want to get this outhouse cataloged before I go.” Miss Doyle pivoted and began climbing down a ladder. “Rich stuff to be found in people’s old poo,” she noted.
“Like what?” John asked, following her into an earthen room.
“Seeds, bones, bits, and bobs. What they ate, what they drank, what was crawling around inside them and eating their intestines . . .”
John looked over at Page. She was happily labeling what appeared to be a piece of stone dung.
“What they threw up and what they threw out,” Miss Doyle finished, handing John a box covered with a screen. “See this? This shard tells me that the Medapandac enjoyed a glass of goat’s blood with their evening meal.”
John examined the shard with care. No matter which way he turned it, he couldn’t understand what Miss Doyle was talking about. He chewed on his bottom lip. Making himself indispensable was going to be more complicated than he had imagined.
Then again, everything was complicated when you worked for Miss Doyle. His new employer, he decided, had more than one screw missing. She might spend hours removing the dirt from a femur, then suddenly seize a pickax and go at the ground with the fury of a hurricane. When she wasn’t instructing John about the eighty-two varieties of grain in the area, she was using Boz to explain how the Medapandac disemboweled their cattle.
She certainly didn’t sleep like any normal person. Every afternoon, bang on the dot of one, she’d curl up in the most convenient dig site—sometimes right next to a skeleton—and stay like that for an hour without moving. John almost fell on top of her one day. She simply flicked her long, reptilian tongue to the side of her mouth.
In spite of her idiosyncrasies, John did his best to be of service. Whatever the task might be, from counting stone flakes to sorting kneecaps, he was the first to volunteer. He asked intelligent questions and listened patiently to Miss Doyle’s three-hour answers. He squished scorpions with the air of a man who cared nothing for death.
But that wasn’t all. To sweeten the honey, he began to devise little improvements to Miss Doyle’s excavation. With a rope, his jackknife, and the heel of a bucket, he cobbled together a basic pulley system for shifting dirt. He fixed the axle on her wheelbarrow. He mended the ribs on her umbrella.
The goal was simple. He needed to persuade Miss Doyle that both Coggins were worth taking overseas. Like many in this world, John had finally reached the point where he no longer cared to imagine what could be. His only purpose was to survive what was.
There was one major stumbling block to his plan: Miss Doyle’s pride and pleasure in working alone. Three weeks into his labors, as John was cleaning cattle ribs near the tomb, he judged the time was ripe to ask her why.
“Never took much to live humans,” Miss Doyle told him matter-of-factly. “And they never took much to me,” she continued, picking a beetle out of her hair and popping it into her mouth. “It’s a hard cross to bear, being a woman of uncommon talents.”
She sniffed and resumed her analysis of the artifacts. As she had explained in great depth to John, her theory was that the cattle bones formed part of a ritual feast. Boz had labeled it the barbeque pit.
“I like living with you,” John hazarded. “And I love being an archeologist.”
Miss Doyle did not reply. John dug his knuckles into his thigh. Had he played his cards too early?
“In fact, I thought Page and I could come with you. To work. Overseas.” Where we can disappear forever, he added in his head.
Miss Doyle cackled. A very sere cackle.
“What’s so funny?”
She squatted back on her haunches and tilted her umbrella off her eyes.
“Look, I’m not the kind to spread mustard on a rotten cabbage, so I’ll be frank. You’re a terrible liar.” The force of her gaze compelled John to look to the ground. “You don’t want to be an archeologist. I’ve been observing you during your time here—you’d be much better off making things that people will dig up later.”
Sure, thought John, if they weren’t all blown to smithereens.
“I tried that.”
“You mean the chicken poo debacle?”
John reared his head. He was going to have Boz’s vocal chords for guitar strings. “Who told you about that?”
“Your sister. Now don’t scowl,” she said sternly. “I asked, and she answered. It’s an excellent and efficient way to get through the world.”
So Boz hadn’t told Miss Doyle. Well, that made him a little less of a pathological liar.
“Yes, I tried to make an oven run on chicken poo,” John admitted.
“Well, why not give it another go?”
“It won’t work. My inventions never work. It’s no use.”
“Then you’re just like your great-aunt wants you to be.”
“Really?” challenged John. “How?”
“Dead on the inside.”
“Am not!” John yelled, bouncing to his feet and hurling his brush to the ground.
“Are so!” Miss Doyle stood and barked back. “If you’re not out there learning, you’ve given up. Great lives are built on risk, John. You must accept the perils of existence.”
John was so angry, his hands were shaking and tiny red spots were obscuring his vision. “I’m not dead!”
“Not yet,” Miss Doyle said, squinting at the crinkles in John’s forehead. “But if you keep on reacting like that to an honest opinion, you might as well be. Breathe, boy, breathe.”
John took a deep breath, and the red spots began to fade.
“Are you okay?”
John nodded.
“Right,” Miss Doyle said, “then this conversation is closed. Back to work.”