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Letty had always been attracted to lanky men, tall, thin, V-shaped, third basemen and shooting guards and wide receivers. This guy looked like he did squats for entertainment and could roll a Prius if he could get a grip on it. Square face, heavy shoulders, thick neck. He wasn’t quite scowling but had managed to make himself totally unattractive.
As she went past him, he ran a hand through his wet hair and asked, “The Pershing Bridge. You still carrying a gun?”
“Maybe,” she said, and kept walking. She turned right toward Fossils. When she glanced back, she saw that he’d kept going straight toward Human Origins. She was used to having men pay attention to her, at least for a while; this guy was paying no attention at all.
Which was the beginning of an improbable sequence of events that found her, three weeks later, naked, flat on her back on his bed, a vanilla-scented candle burning in the corner, while Jackson Nyberg slowly stroked her with his tongue.
This was inappropriate for an initial sexual episode, she thought—or rather, she laterthoughtshe thought—and she later thought she tried to say, “Let’s not go there yet,” but remembered herself, dimly, saying instead, “Ark, ark, ark,” like Sunny the Seal. Then she’d stopped thinking about anything in particular, although she was aware of her heels drumming on his lank white bachelor sheets...
Variations of which happened more than once that night. Thenext morning, perhaps the tiniest bit dazed, she arrived at the Senate Office Building carrying her briefcase and a gallon jug of margarita mix for an upcoming office party.
A freckled, redheaded female friend glanced at her, then looked again, and said, “Wow.”
Letty stopped, turned: “What?”
“You look,” the redhead said, “like the most thoroughly fucked woman in Washington, DC. That takes someseriousbutter-churning.”
Letty blushed, an automatic but unfamiliar reaction. “Janet! Jesus!”
“Hey, it’s not a bad thing,” Janet said. “But you rarely see somebody who breaks into the top ten, much less hits number one.”
“Shut up,” Letty said as she unlocked her office door, smiling down at the key.
Janet: “Am I hearing a denial? I think not.”
Jackson Nyberg wasan archaeologist who specialized in the preservation, and occasionally the excavation, of ancient Native American sites. He was half North Dakota Swede and half North Dakota Sioux—or, as he said, North Dakota Dakota—enrolled as a member of the Spirit Lake band.
One reason they got along, Letty thought, was that they’d grown up only a couple of road hours apart, in a cold, bleak, sparsely populated part of the country, and in equally tough circumstances. Simple survival had made them equally stubborn and equally independent.
A week after they began dating, Nyberg had met Kaiser, who later said, “I like him. I believe he’s a good guy. Doesn’t know shit about guns, though. Interesting that he doesn’t drink at all.”
“He told me two of his grandparents were alcoholics,” Letty said.
“That’s a problem for a lot of Indians...”
“Actually, it was his Swedish grandparents,” Letty said. “He told me that in the old days, out there on the prairie, in the winter, there was nothing to do but drink and screw, and you could only screw so much. He said at the end, his grandfather committed suicide by chugging three bottles of homemade rye whisky. He died on the living room floor of acute alcohol poisoning while his drunk wife sat there on the couch, looking at him.”
“Nice story,” Kaiser said. “Different times.”
Then Kaiser tried to hit her with a stick. Letty parried with her cane, which she’d kept when she got home from California. Kaiser was ready for that, deflected the parry, and whacked her on the ass. She said, “Ouch!” and “Cheater! We were talking!”
“Making sure you’re alert,” Kaiser said. “America needs more lerts.”
He was joking, but he was serious about improvised weapons: she’d have a bruise. When they’d finished the stick-fighting drills, they changed into street clothes and walked out to a Starbucks.
Their street clothes included guns, of course. They didn’t even have to think about that.
Letty and Nybergwere in Nyberg’s bed at nine o’clock one night, Letty’s head in the crook of his shoulder. He’d been in Colorado, looking at a roadside cut that might have uncovered an ancient burial ground, and had gotten back in town at six o’clock.
They’d smoked a little weed, were bathed in the odors of marijuana and melting vanilla candle wax—Nyberg only had one candle, so vanilla was what you got—and were talking about nothing,when her cell phone buzzed on a bedside stand. She picked it up and looked at the screen.
“Girlfriend,” she said. Cartwright. “You back home?”
“For the time being,” Cartwright said.
“How’s Sovern?”
“Sovern is Sovern. In his own terms, he’s just fine.”
