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Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as it fell farther and farther behind, shrinking and dwindling until finally it disappeared altogether, and I felt my chest loosen and lighten.
Almost as if something in the air around us had shifted, Miranda now spoke.
“At least Hugh Glass had a fighting chance,” she said sadly.
“Who Glass?”
“No, Hugh Glass,” she said, and I was reminded of the old “Who’s on first?” joke.
“Who’s Hugh, and what are you talking about?”
“Hugh Glass, the mountain man. In The Revenant. You’re kidding, right?” Despite the darkness in the cab, I could tell she was staring at me. “Oscar-winning performance by Leonardo DiCaprio? In a movie that won two other Academy Awards this year, too?”
I shrugged, feeling sheepish. “I don’t see a lot of movies,” I said. “Kinda depressing to go by yourself.”
“Duh,” she said. “Tell me something I don’t know. But you should totally see this one.”
“Because?”
“Well, for one thing, the guy—this mountain man, Glass, played by DiCaprio—he’s torn to pieces by a bear, a big grizzly, and gets buried alive by the guys who are supposed to be taking care of him. So there’s a connection to our case, sort of. For another thing, the movie’s full of Arikara Indians.”
Now she had my full attention. “Arikara? But they’re all gone. Died out, mostly, and assimilated with the Mandans and Hidatsu.”
She made an impatient, clucking sound. “The film’s historical. Set in the 1820s. Along the Missouri River.”
I grinned. “Why didn’t you say so? That’s where all my skeletal remains come from!”
“Duh,” she repeated. “I know. That’s why I mentioned it. But the movie’s set farther north—up in North Dakota or Montana, looks like. Serious mountains.”
I turned off I-40 onto James White Parkway, to loop along the riverfront to Neyland Stadium. Across the Tennessee, streetlights and houselights on the south shore smeared and danced in the black, rippling river. I was puzzling over the plot of the movie Miranda was describing, worrying at it, like a dog with a bone. “What are Plains Indians doing up in the Rocky Mountains?”
“Good grief, Dr. B. Don’t pick it apart before you even see it. So this guy Glass is a guide for a bunch of fur trappers. The trappers get attacked by a band of Arikara Indians. The Indians are looking for an Arikara woman who’s been abducted by a white man. Maybe that’s what brought them to the mountains—the search for the woman. Anyhow, Glass spends a lot of time getting chased by them.”
“I thought you said he got killed by the bear?”
She sighed. “Just see it,” she said. “You’ll love it. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll thank me.” By now we had arrived back at UT. As I turned off Neyland Drive, Miranda said, “Don’t you want to take this stuff out to the facility? Put the bones in to simmer?”
I shook my head. “It’s late. Just do it in the morning, how ’bout?” Glancing over, I saw her shrug and nod.
I pulled in front of her pale green Prius, which was tucked beneath the stadium just outside the bone lab, and switched off the truck’s engine. “So, this mountain man, Glass—is he the one who abducted the Arikara woman?”
“Quit asking annoying questions. I’ve already told you too much.” She paused, then added, “You know what? Forget I mentioned it. Don’t see it. You’d probably hate it.”
Now, of course, wild horses couldn’t keep me from watching it.
As Miranda jolly well knew.
CHAPTER 4
OLD HABITS DIE HARD, I REALIZED AS I SETTLED into bed. Harder, alas, than people do.
Kathleen had been dead for a decade—more than a decade, in fact—but I still slept on “my” side of the bed. Actually, for the thirty years of our marriage, “my” side had also been “our” side: no matter where she started out (usually in the middle), Kathleen had always ended up crossing the midline, and I had always ended up on the edge of the mattress, sometimes hanging partway off.
For years I had grumbled about her Territorial Imperative. Now I would have given anything—everything—to feel her crowding me, nestling me, spooning me in her sleep. “Don’t it always seem to go,” I serenaded myself, pulling up the covers, “that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Truth was, though, I had known what I’d had with Kathleen. I’d felt lucky beyond all deserving to be with her, and bereft beyond all reckoning when I lost her.
Since Kathleen’s death I had slept with only two women—just one time apiece—and both those women were dead now, too. It wasn’t as if I were responsible for their deaths, any more than I’d been responsible for Kathleen’s, but all the same, I sometimes wondered if I might carry some sort of jinx, or bad karma. Could it be that immersing myself, day after day, year after year, in death, dismemberment, and decay, had somehow tainted me? That I had steadily absorbed, and now subtly emanated, mortality—and not just its faint odor of it, but its essence as well? That I was a carrier, like Typhoid Mary? Mortality Bill, I thought.
The absurdity of it almost made me smile. Almost, but not quite.
As I reached for the switch on the bedside lamp, my eye happened to light on a card that lay on the nightstand. It had arrived in the previous day’s mail, sent by a California woman whose father’s remains I had identified a few weeks before. His skull had recently turned up on a riverbank a few miles downstream from Knoxville, years after he’d gone missing. The man had long struggled with depression, and the general consensus, once we’d identified him, was that he had probably committed suicide by jumping from the Gay Street Bridge, Knoxville’s favorite suicide spot. “Thank you for giving me closure at last,” she had written. “It saddens me to know, once and for all, that he’s dead, but it helps me, too. Not knowing was worse. I know I speak for others when I say how much I appreciate the work you do. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“No, thank you,” I whispered as I snapped off the light, grateful for something—anything—that could counter my sense of being a jinx. “And good night.”
I HAD A DREAM, AND IN MY DREAM, I WAS WALKING, slowly and heavily, as if I were wading in waist-deep water or weighted down. After a while, I realized that indeed I was weighted down. A heavy chain wrapped around my neck and trailed behind me. Despite the difficulty, I kept walking, but soon I realized that I was walking in a circle, covering the same ground again and again. So I stopped.
As I rested, uncertain what to do next, I became aware of someone nearby. It was a young man—a boy, really—and like me, he was wearing a chain and walking in a circle. After he had made several turns around the tree to which he was chained, I noticed that he was being followed by an immense black bear. I opened my mouth to warn the boy, but I found myself unable to speak.
I tried to reach him, so I could turn him around, show him the bear, but my chain was too short
, and he remained just out of reach. He kept walking, faster and faster, and then he began to run, as if he sensed danger even though he had not seen the bear. And then, as he ran, he began to scream, louder and louder, until his shrieking woke me.
As I lay in my bed, my heart pounding, the sheets soaked with sweat, I realized I could still hear the boy shrieking.
But the shrieking was not from the boy in my dream; the shrieking, I finally understood, was from a fire truck—a rare sound in my quiet neighborhood—and as the pounding of my heart subsided, so, too, did the wail of the siren, and I was left, awake and alone, on my side of a bed that felt as empty as a black hole in space: a void so vast and dense, not even light could escape.
CHAPTER 5
GROGGY AND OFF KILTER FROM MY RESTLESS, NIGHTMARISH night, I drove on autopilot, winding behind UT Medical Center and through the staff parking lot, then parking beside the twin gates of the Body Farm: an outer, chain-link gate, topped with razor wire, and an inner, wooden gate. The chain-link fence that surrounded our three wooded acres was there to keep out trespassers, and it worked well, although not perfectly. Occasionally fraternity boys—either as an initiation rite or as a show of bravado—tried to break in, but being drunk, they usually got snagged in the barbed wire. More seriously, we’d had one damaging robbery: someone had made off with half a dozen skulls, though the police eventually recovered three of them when the thief, who was a drug addict, tried to sell them. The inner wooden fence—eight feet high, made of pine boards butted tightly together—was there to shield the corpses from prying eyes . . . and to protect squeamish hospital employees (if there were in fact any of those) from the sight of my dead and decomposing research subjects.
I unlocked the metal gate and took a step inward to the wooden gate. The padlock’s shackle clasped both ends of a loop of chain, which was threaded through a hole bored in each half of the gate. As I lifted the lock and felt the heft of the chain, I couldn’t help thinking of the Cooke County victim, his neck encircled by hard, cold links, dragging that fifty-pound length of chain around and around that tree. The Tree of Death.
