5
Saturday, 5 July
Day Thirteen
Kate, Tonia, and a handful of other students successfully dragged Ben to a local pub not far from the camp where a live band played alternative rock on a small stage. Most students, including Tonia, were there to get drunk and flirt and dance. Kate just wanted to listen to the band and finally have a drink with Ben.
He’d been so elusive the first two weeks, barely speaking to her. But he was more relaxed now, clutching his third pint, slouched against the wall of the booth, watching the band. And he’d finally taken off his cowboy hat. His wavy, light auburn hair, trimmed just above the ear, was flattened from wearing the hat all day.
“Okay, I’ve gotta know,” she asked him. “Why a cowboy hat?”
He shrugged. “It blocks out the sun. Was my father’s. A friend gave it to him when he was in Wyoming.”
“Wyoming? Why Why-home-ing?” She laughed at herself.
“He worked there one summer. As a ranch hand.”
“Wow. Why?” She almost laughed again.
“Why not? He wanted to do it when he was my age.”
“Fair enough.”
After downing the rest of his pint, he asked, “So, why Norway?”
Kate gulped her beer, swallowed, stifled a burp. “I want to dig up bones.”
“You can’t do this in the US?”
She shook her head. “There’s this thing about human bones in America. Old bones, the ones that aren’t of European immigrants, they’re protected. You find one, and the site is shut down. I get it, though—oppressed cultures and all that. Anthropologists have done some real shitty things in the past, and the government continues to be shitty toward Indigenous people. But I want to dig up ancient human remains. I want to be the Bone Lady.”
He laughed. “Bone Lady?”
“Yeah, you know. Booone Lady! The one they all go to. For bone stuff.”
“To teach?”
“Yeah, to teach. Do you? Want to teach?”
“No. I want to dig. To teach others to dig.”
She nodded and kept nodding. “Cool. Cool, cool. Ben in the dirt. Dirty Viking Cowboy.”
“What?”
“Nothing…”
“You don’t want to be in the dirt?”
Heat rushed to her ears. “I don’t mind it. But I like labs. Cold labs. I hate the summer. It’s nice here, nice enough, but I prefer being cold. And clean.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“But you can’t be clean if you want to dig, Dirty Ben.”
“Then, I suppose”—his lips quirked up—“I will have to be dirty.”
She snorted. “While I play with bones?”
Ben sputtered out a laugh, and Kate tittered and hid her face behind her hand.
When his laughter subsided, he asked. “But why Norway? Old bones are everywhere in the world.”
She tipped her pint to him. “Vikings. I like Vikings. Except for, you know, the whole raping and pillaging thing. But exploration, shieldmaidens…” She took a sip. “And rebelling against religious proselytizers—I like that part.”
He grinned. “Okay, but just Vikings?” He swept his broad, upturned hand across the table. “Not Norsemen, Norwegian history…?”
“I didn’t know much Norwegian history before I got here. I knew there was a field school, and I like northern climates, and the language of the field school is English, so…” She finished her beer and banged the heavy glass on the wooden tabletop. “Want another?”
Ben, smiling, nodded at his empty pint.
“Okay. Cool,” she said before trotting to the bar.
Six or so beers in and laughing way too hard at everything she said, Ben was so red in the face that she wondered if he was breathing.
“I mean,” Kate continued, “warmth is nice, but it can get so hot in the summer. Like, you’d need to strip off a layer of your skin to be cool enough without air conditioning, but walkin’ ’round naked isn’t shosh—soshally acceptable.”
Ben hid his pomegranate face behind his hand.
“So if bein’ naked is illegal, how could walkin’ around without skin be assept—accept-bull. You know?” She sipped her summer berry ale. “It’s awful. Summer is awful. I hate it. I friggin’ hate summer.”
“Yes, I understand,” he whined through his laughter. “I am picturing…picturing people pulling off their skin.”
Ben had fallen into a fit of giggles from which there seemed to be no way out, and he was pulling Kate right down with him.
“It’s not that funny,” she managed to say between breathless laughs.
“No, maybe not.” He cleared his throat and sat up straight, fighting against further laughter. “No, but you are. Funny.”
“Ha. Am not.”
He looked at his pint as his thumbs made windshield-wiper arcs across the top half of the glass. “You are,” he countered, quieter. When he looked up at her, he had a tilted half-smile on his sleepy face.
“Hei hei!” Tonia hollered before thrusting herself against Kate on the bench. “Are you finished? I’m tiiired. I think they want to close. The band said ‘last song.’”
Kate glanced at Ben, who shrugged.
“Yeah,” she said to Tonia. “Let’s go back. I’m tired, too.”
—
Esben took up the rear of the group as the students strolled back to camp.
Kate discordantly serenaded the small village as she strode arm-in-arm with Tonia at the side of the street that was intermittently lit by streetlamps. They met up with students who had gone to the nearby disco, and Tonia meandered over to the other group. Kate stood alone, abandoned until Esben was at her side. She took a teetering step and lost her balance, but he caught her by the waist.
“Oops,” she said with a laugh, righting herself. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
They strolled lazily, tailing the pack of rowdy and drunk students.
“Viking Cowboy,” she muttered as she roughly grabbed his arm, which turned into a grab of his hand.
“What is a Viking Cowboy?”
“You. Your dad, too. Family of Viking Cowboys.”
“We are neither of these things, you know. A hat does not make a cowboy, and we have no ship. Or farm. My father was in the navy, though.”
Kate stopped in her tracks, gaping at him as if he had revealed some epiphanous secret. “He was a Viking!” She laughed and continued walking. “Are you in the navy?”
“No. I couldn’t bear being yelled at every day.”
She laughed again. When her gait normalized, she dropped his hand to swing her arms wildly from front to back, clapping each time they came together. The movement prevented him from wrapping his arm around her waist, which was probably for the best. He kept his hands in his pockets, just to be safe.