Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  Haurrrnnnnnnnnk!

  Bennett looked at the window and saw that it had started to snow.

  For Percival Crowther (1913-1972)

  . . . and all other fathers, wherever they may be.

  JEFF’S BEST JOKE

  by Jane Lindskold

  Jane Lindskold is a full-time writer and a sometime archaeological volunteer. She is the author of over forty short stories and numerous novels, among them Changer and Legends Walking. Current projects include a new fantasy series, the first volume of which, Through Wolfs Eyes, is due for release in 2001. With regard to this story, the author would like to note that any resemblance between the characters and any archaeologists of her acquaintance should be regarded as wholly complimentary.

  The onyx frog didn’t start it, but it certainly continued it, and, in a sense, it ended it.

  At least the frog was there at the end, both witness and testimony to a decision that would reshape history. The onyx frog.didn’t do any deciding. That was left to two archaeologists.

  Jeff and Jim were colleagues, but more importantly, they were friends. Superficially, they couldn’t have been more different, but they were alike where it counted. Maybe this similarity of spirit was why Jeff was the only person—other than Jim’s immediate family—to get away with calling him Jimmy.

  Jeff was tall and rangy, clean-shaven, and fair—the perfect cowboy type. No one who met him was surprised to learn he’d ridden rodeo in his youth. Jeff wrote cowboy poetry, too, rhymed verse that often held a note of poignancy underneath the broad humor. He’d married young and in his mid-forties already had a daughter married and a son in high school. A devout Christian, he volunteered with elder hostels and at church events. Talkative and easygoing, he was the more approachable of the two.

  Where Jeff evoked the cowboy, Jim more resembled the mountain man. His long reddish-brown hair grew well past his collar, his thick beard covered jaw as well as chin—though it stopped short of descending in a Santa Claus cascade across his chest. He was a big man, though not overly tall, with broad shoulders and short legs. In his midforties, Jim had surprised those who’d cast him as a confirmed bachelor by venturing into marriage for the first time. He collected coins, made arrowheads, and enjoyed target shooting. Gruff and taciturn from a shyness that didn’t seem to fit with his outer appearance, he sometimes intimidated people who didn’t know him well.

  Two more different friends would be hard to find, that is if you didn’t know they shared a passion. Both were archaeologists—not merely by profession, but by avocation. The differences in their physical appearance were canceled by the invisible but irrevocable marks of their calling.

  When they walked, their eyes inadvertently scanned the ground for the tiny flakes of stone, sherds of pottery, scraps of bone that might mark the presence of past inhabitants. When they did look toward the horizon, it was to note the variations in the rise and fall of the land that might indicate a buried structure.

  Both had worked in New Mexico for so long that they no longer saw any feature, any structure, merely for what it was. They saw it for what it had been. Their minds were filled with fact, anecdote, and history regarding some three centuries of Spanish occupation, fanned out through the various indigenous traditions, and supported it all on prehistory.

  In a sense, every day they walked through time.

  Jim and Jeff were both field archaeologists. Neither could have traded hands-on contact with the material of their studies for a teaching post at some university than they could have walked with their gazes fixed on some distant horizon. Their advanced degrees were tools like their trowels and wheelbarrows, their writings—and both had written volumes—the means of recording and sharing their discoveries.

  At the time when the onyx frog entered their lives, both Jim and Jeff were employed by the same museum. Their primary focus was archaeological clearance—that is, removing and recording items of archaeological interest so that when the area was destroyed (usually to build a road, but sometimes for a structure) information about those who had lived there before would still be available.

  Their current project, of which they were co-directors managing a crew of a dozen or so, was along a rural road outside of Taos, New Mexico. The site—which rested along a bluff overlooking pastures on one side, lightly populated residential areas on the other—had proven incredibly productive. They’d found several pit houses and so many surface structures that when they packed up at night the ground looked as if it had sprouted tarps the way a damp forest floor might sprout mushrooms.

  The crew had been in the field for months by then. They’d started in a winter so cold that everyone bundled into layers that could be stripped off as the day progressed, then resumed when the sun began to set and the thin air at some seven thousand feet relinquished the day’s heat too quickly. They’d progressed through a spring that brought winds that drove sand and grit into the pores of their skin, and continued into a summer so hot that the younger members of the crew—optimistically trading healthy skin for suntans—worked in shorts and the briefest of tops.

  Jim’s chestnut-brown hair was bleached to straw blond where it extended below the faded red baseball cap he had worn for so many years that the strap in the back was secured with staples and the museum logo on front was almost unreadable. Jeff—who was lucky in that Taos was his hometown and so he wasn’t separated from family and domestic comforts—was limping from a knee too long abused by extremes of heat and cold and the demands of hard labor.

  Given the general exhaustion of the crew, it really wasn’t surprising when the practical jokes started. At first they were little things—a person’s favorite shovel or trowel disappearing then mysteriously reappearing right where it should be, a goofy face drawn in the dirt where it would greet someone pulling back a tarp.

  Then the tricks started getting more clever and, while no one in the crew was unimaginative, Jim and Jeff proved themselves true tricksters. Jeff first hid the onyx frog in a wheelbarrow that Jim was using. As Jim was tossing the dirt up from six feet or so deep in a pit house, he had no idea the frog was there until he was screening and found the anomalous thing—clearly of modem Mexican manufacture—amid materials that should have dated no later than the year 1,000 AD.

  Jeff couldn’t hide his mischievous grin and so wasn’t completely surprised when the frog showed up amid the potsherds in his own grid. After that the frog went the rounds several more times before vanishing completely. By then, however, the tricks had become more complex.

  One weekend when most of the crew had dispersed to their various homes, Jeff drove out to the site. Carefully, so as not to disturb in the least the stratigraphy of the midden Jim was then digging, he slid a 1950s license plate into the packed trash and dirt. Jim’s profanities when he discovered the plate—and momentarily thought all his conclusions to that moment had become as much trash as what he’d been so laboriously removing—were eloquent.

  Jeff laughed loudly, one up in their unscored competition.

  Jim got even, though, taking advantage of Jeff’s absence one afternoon to salt Jeff’s current grid with a perfectly elegant arrowhead of Jim’s own manufacture. Some might think this unprofessional—after all, a modem arrowhead might well be mistaken for a prehistoric one. Indeed, so Jeff thought, crowing as the arrowhead appeared in its three or more inches of perfection amid the less noble remains of pots and broken tools.

  That is, so Jeff thought until he held the arrowhead up for closer inspection and saw the sunlight shining through the bottle glass from which Jim had made it. Obsidian—which is, after all, just another form of glass—is never so clear and flawless. Moreover, Jim’s broad grin, merry and wicked, gave him away.

  It was about time for the frog to reappear when the visitor arrived at the site.

  Visitors were not unheard of. Indeed, hardly a day passed that someone didn’t stop. Most merely wanted directions—most commonly to the Millicent Rogers Museum. Many, however, learning that these
were archaeologists at work, stayed to tour the site and ask questions.

  Public outreach was part of museum policy, so someone was detailed as tour guide. At first, Jim and Jeff as codirectors had taken most of the tours, but by now everyone on the crew could do the spiel, so someone who needed a break from dirt and buckets, shovels and screens, would take the visitors around.

  Jeff and Jim didn’t mind sharing the limelight at all. Directing the project provided enough distractions from the actual work of digging that they didn’t need another.

  This visitor, however, wasn’t about to be fobbed off on an eager assistant. Arriving at the site—and oddly enough no one saw him come—he marched up to a young woman who was pushing a wheelbarrow full of dirt over to the screens and announced in ringing tones:

  “Take me to your leader.”

  Cranks were also not unheard of at the site. Only a week or so before, the crew had been visited by a gentle vagrant who announced that he was King William, a prophet come to help the modem world. Would-be Native Americans, often college students bedecked in beads and leather, or former hippies with visionary histories they’d spent decades refining, showed up. As long as they weren’t rude or interested in damaging the site, they got the tour just like anyone else.

  Less pleasant were the occasional enthusiasts who arrived to harangue the archaeologists for their disrespect in invading “sacred ground.” These weren’t dissuaded from their passion by the fact that several members of the crew were local Indians, quite interested in being part of the uncovering of their own history.

  At first, Jim and Jeff thought this visitor was going to be one of these disapproving ones. He crossed his arms across his chest and stared at them through narrowed eyes of an indeterminant shade. He was slightly shorter than Jim but stringy in build, with hair that grew weedily past his earlobes, mingling gray with what might once have been light brown. He was conventionally clad in khakis and a polo shirt.

  “So what do you have here?” the visitor asked, his voice nasal and aggressive.

  “A prehistoric site,” Jeff replied, his tones mild and measured, the same one he used for elder hostel tours, “probably dating to some nine hundred to a thousand years ago. We’ve found the remains of several pit houses—one of which may have been a kiva or sacred house . . .”

  “Like a temple?” the visitor interrupted, something in his inflection letting on that he knew—or thought he knew—the answer and was testing them.

  “More like a restricted club,” Jeff said, “used for ceremonial retreats or meetings, perhaps for educational purposes. Similar structures are still used today by the local Pueblos.”

  Jim, seeing the situation well in hand, had returned to his digging. He was deep in a pit house now, removing careful shovelfuls of dirt and tossing them without even looking up into the wheelbarrow. They landed with steady precision, but Jeff, who knew Jim well, knew that his codirector was still attending to the conversation and knew from this that Jim, too, had sensed that this visitor was something out of the ordinary.

  Jeff continued his well-practiced spiel.

  “In addition to the pit houses, we’ve found a good number of surface structures.”

  He gestured to indicate the closest. Unlike the pit houses which, having been dug into the ground were comparatively well-preserved, these had melted back to nothing much more than an adobe wall a foot or so high.

  The visitor sniffed.

  “They don’t look like much. Were the walls much higher originally?”

  Again, there was that note of challenge in the visitor’s voice, and Jim set aside his shovel and mounted the ladder to the surface. He made as if checking the dirt in the wheelbarrow for something, but in reality he was putting himself at Jeff’s disposal.

  “Probably so, and the adobe foundation was augmented by wood and brush—rather like a ramada with low walls,” Jeff replied equably, glancing over at Jim with the slightest of shrugs.

  “Nothing in this part of the southwest,” Jeff went on, “is as physically impressive as the stone ruins at Chaco Canyon up in northern New Mexico or the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. Folks are often disappointed. They figure the prehistoric people always did things on that grand scale. Fact is, they didn’t, any more than folks today build everything on the scale of Saint Francis Cathedral or the Santa Fe Opera House.

  “Usually,” Jeff concluded, “what we find are more like little towns, a gathering of a few dwellings, maybe lived in by an extended family.”

  The visitor sniffed, approvingly this time. Apparently, they’d passed some test.

  “So these people were Anasazi?”

  The term—deprived from a Navajo word sometimes translated as “ancient enemies” or, more politely, “ancient ones”—was falling out of fashion with the archaeological community, but Jeff was far too polite to correct a visitor.

  “That’s right,” he agreed. “They were pretty widely spread throughout New Mexico and into Colorado and Arizona.”

  “And then,” the visitor said, his voice thrilling, “they just disappeared. Where do you think they went?”

  Jim turned from his wheelbarrow, the restless motion of the potsherd he turned between thumb and forefinger the only indication of his annoyance.

  “They didn’t go anywhere,” Jim replied bluntly before Jeff could frame a more tactful reply. “They’re still here—just down the road at Taos Pueblo.”

  He gestured with a toss of his head to where two Indians were digging a surface feature.

  “Verne and Russ, they’re probably directly related to the people who lived here. Their own oral traditions support the physical evidence.”

  The visitor showed neither the vague disappointment nor the curiosity expressed by most of those who received this explanation. All he did was sniff.

  Emerging from her pit house, Susie, a senior assistant with a sense for the passage of real time that both the codirectors lacked, called the lunch break. Her expression as she led the general exodus toward the trucks made quite clear that she—along with the rest of those in earshot—had been following the conversation and that she was hoping the break would cause their increasingly annoying visitor to depart.

  The visitor, however, didn’t take the hint, remaining in place even after Jim had brought his and Jeff’s lunches from the truck. Seating himself on an upturned five-gallon bucket, the visitor stated with what he clearly thought was sophisticated blandness:

  “What would you say if I told you that some of the Anasazi didn’t just move to Taos Pueblo?”

  Jim and Jeff exchanged glances, then Jeff replied diplomatically:

  “Well, there is evidence that they didn’t all go precisely there. What Jimmy meant was that the ones who lived here at this site probably were ancestral to the current residents of Taos Pueblo.”

  The visitor wasn’t to be distracted. He wiggled impatiently on his seat and lowered his voice into the confidential range.

  “I don’t mean just these and just here. I mean the Anasazi at large. I mean an answer to the mystery of why ruins like those at Chaco Canyon were abandoned so suddenly that food was left in larders, grinding stones with com in their troughs, sandals right where the people might have stepped out of them.”

  Jim made one last grab for common sense.

  “There is some indication,” he said, “that Chaco may have been less a residential center—like our modern cities—than a ceremonial center. If that was the case, then the items left behind may have simply been left on the assumption that the people would return in due course for the next appropriate event. However, drought conditions—for which there is ample evidence in the dendrochronological records—probably led to the abandonment of those centers. There simply wouldn’t have been enough water for a large gathering.”

  Jim paused, slightly breathless, his enthusiasm for his subject having banished his usual taciturnity.

  The visitor shook his head, dismissing this theory as of no consequence in t
he matter he wanted to discuss.

  “That may be true, in part,” he said mysteriously, leaning in toward them. “Certainly the part about the drought is undebatable.”

  “Glad that something is,” Jim muttered into his sandwich.

  Jeff hid a grin in a swallow of soda.

  The visitor continued on:

  “I know, I know,” he repeated, as if emphasis could substitute for fact, “that at least some of the Anasazi vanished through time, transported by aliens who had need of them.”

  Jim and Jeff traded glances that said as clearly as words, “Well, this fellow beats King William as our most memorable visitor.”

  “Need?” Jim said a bit faintly, picking one point out of a string of improbables.

  “That’s right,” the visitor replied matter-of-factly. “The aliens were related to the Grays who crashed near Roswell in 1949. Indeed, those Grays were what you might call advance scouts for the time travel element. As you certainly understand, time travel is a difficult business.”

  Jim and Jeff said nothing, though Jeff glanced at his watch. Lunch break still had twenty minutes to run. Now firmly up on his hobby horse, the visitor rushed on without waiting for a response.

  “However, the Roswell incident is only peripheral to what happened to the Anasazi. When drought threatened the extinction of a large portion of an intelligent and creative people, the Grays—as I will continue to call the aliens, though you of course understand that this is just shorthand . . .”

  He stared at the two archaeologists until Jeff managed a polite, “Of course.”

  “The Grays,” the visitor went on, “decided that this provided them with a solution for a labor difficulty. They offered sanctuary to a portion of the Anasazi and that offer was taken up.

  “They didn’t,” the visitor continued as if one of his auditors had offered an objection, “restrict such offers only to the Anasazi, of course. Traces of the alien presence can be found worldwide. Cave paintings showing figures with elongated bodies and oversized heads. Haloed figures—clearly meant to be depictions of spacesuits or force-shields. Repeated spiral motifs indicative of journeys, and, most tellingly perhaps, the Hopi ‘Man in the Maze’ are all evidence that the aliens and their time travel techniques were widely known.”