work in. Basically, he had to come down to the site, agree that the weather was too rough, and let them go home- then he would go up to the site office and make a note on the contract, extending the due date.
He sure seemed too sharp to have made the mistake of putting a mall on a floodplain.
Larry glanced at his watch and finished his sandwich in a couple of bites. Lunch was about over, and you never knew when Calligan and his Beemer were likely to show up. Bad feeling or no bad feeling, there was more ground to clear before quitting time.
He shooed the rest of the guys off his dozer and started the engine, wondering where he ought to take her when this job was over. The powerful engine roared to life, drowning any other sounds, and filling the air with diesel fumes. The seat vibrated and rocked as he sent the dozer over the little hillocks they hadn't smoothed down yet. There were rumors that Rogers College was thinking of putting up another building-but weighed against rumors of a job around town was the certainty of work on the turnpike up around Miami way. . . .
He swung the dozer around to the place he'd quit, engaged the blade, and put her in motion. It sure was hot out here; he was more or less used to it, but he figured he must go through a couple of gallons of water a day. It kind of made him mad to be plowing up trees just so a bunch of yuppies from Tulsa had more places to spend their money.
Suddenly, the uneasy feeling he'd had built to a crescendo; there was something wrong with the way the earth felt under the blade-
He braked, and killed the motor-and looked down.
And froze, for the treads had stopped a mere inch away from a skull.
A human skull.
It must have been at least ninety-five out in the sun, but Larry still felt cold, chilled right down to his gut, which was in knots. He'd backed the dozer off, you bet, and damn fast when he'd turned up those bones. For one horrible moment, he'd been certain he'd uncovered some kind of dumping place for the victims of a serial killer or something, like the guy in Ok' City. The other guys had come at his yell of surprise and-yes, fear. They clustered around the dozer, and the place where the blade had stopped. There were more bones there, more skulls.
Only a closer look showed that the bones were old, really old, and what was more, there were broken pots and things mixed in with them. It was Keith Pryor, another Osage, who said out loud what had been trying to break out of Larry's own muddy thoughts.
'It's a burial ground,' Keith said flatly., 'We've been digging up sacred ground.'
That was when Larry realized that he had known, from the moment he'd seen them, what those artifacts were. They were Osage. He'd been digging up the graves of his own ancestors. Old tales flitted through his mind; there were terrible things that happened to those who desecrated graves.
'Oh, man,' he said, unhappily, wondering if old man Talldeer could be talked into an emergency ceremony. Not that he believed the Little People were going to take revenge for this, and it wasn't as if he'd done it deliberately, but-
-but he didn't care. He was Osage, and the Osage honored their ancestors. He needed someone like Shaman Tall-deer to let the ancestors and the Little People know that he meant no disrespect, no sacrilege. And then, to kill the trail from this desecrated site back to him.
One part of his mind was wondering how the hell you purified a dozer, while the rest of him stood back and watched the ruckus spread. About half the crew was Indian-or 'Native American,' as some of the activists liked to say-Osage, Creek, and Cherokee blood, mostly. Whatever, they were all Indian enough to be mad as hops about being asked to plow up a burial ground.
The foreman was as-white as you got, though, except for his red neck, and he was ready to fire the lot of them.
Rich was right in the center of it, nose-to-nose with the foreman, giving him hell. 'Look, you can't make us doze that lot over!' he yelled, his foghorn voice carrying over everyone's, even the foreman's. 'That'd be like asking Tagliono there to plow up the Vatican-or at least, the graveyard at St. Joseph's!'
That shut them up-at least for a minute. And Larry felt some of the chill leaving him as he saw that with that single sentence, Rich had managed to get some of the white guys over on their side. Because the graveyard at St. Joseph's church had been under threat for a while, back in the early eighties and the boomtown days of high-priced oil; and Tagliono and some of the other guys on the crew had been picketing the Skelly Building for wanting to dig up their grandparents and transplant them so they could put up an office complex. Transplant them to a city cemetery, riot a Catholic one; a cemetery without the blessings that old-fashioned people thought absolutely necessary for their rest to be in holy soil. Way to go, Rich! he congratulated, silently, as the dynamics shifted and some of the white guys, Tagliono in particular, took the couple of steps necessary to put them on the other side of the invisible line separating the foreman and the whites from the Indians. And when Tagliono came over, so, eventually, did everyone but the company suck-ups.
The foreman knew when he was outgunned. With a muttered curse, he stalked over to his truck and picked up his cellular phone.
Larry drifted over to the rest. 'What's next?' he asked no one in particular.
'Five to two he's callin' Calligan,' Tagliono said, and spat off to one side.
Larry nodded. 'I figured,' he said. 'Question is, what's Calligan gonna do about it?'
Silence for a moment; traffic noise from the highway nearby warred with the piercing wails of killdeers overhead. Then one of the dump truck operators spoke up.
'I was on a project that hit somethin' like this,' he offered. 'Feds made 'em close down.'
'Permanently?' Tagliono asked. The man shook his head.
'Naw. Just long enough for some college guys to get in there and dig the stuff up, like on TV.' He scratched his head, meditatively. 'But that was like, some old fort or something. I dunno what they'd do about somethin' like this.'
Neither did anyone else, it appeared. The foreman was deep in conversation on his phone, and the rest of them were at something of a loss. Not for the first time, Larry regretted that he hadn't popped for the cost of one of those phones.
He'd have liked to put in a couple of calls-to the Osage Principal Chief for one, and to old man Talldeer for another. But he didn't dare leave the site, because right now, from the dirty looks he was getting, it looked like the foreman would be willing to use any excuse to fire him.
The foreman shoved the phone back into his car and stalked back, the look on his face boding no good for anyone who got in his way.
'The boss says that he wants us to dig the stuff up and trash it-burn it or throw it in the river or bury it or something,' he said shortly. 'Otherwise the Feds are gonna get in here, drag in the college people, and start holding things up while they screw around.'
That was when Larry decided that no amount of money was worth violating a burial site. He got on his dozer, with a silent apology to those buried there, and backed up. Carefully. Doing his best not to disturb things any more than he already had.
The dozer was a cranky old bitch, and he used his long familiarity with her to kill her and flood her carburetor. She coughed and died; he made some elaborate 'attempts' to restart her, then held up his hands.
'Sorry,' he said, face carefully blank. 'I guess she needs some work.'
The foreman's face turned tomato-red, but there wasn't anything he could do if the dozer had stalled, no matter what the cause. The way he was glaring at Larry boded no good for the future, but he had no choice but to order a second piece of equipment forward.
He chose one of the dozers leased directly to the construction company. Unfortunately for discipline, he chose the machine normally driven by Bobby Whitehorse. Bobby was young-but Bobby lived at home with his parents. He was single. His car was paid for.
In short, Bobby could afford to get fired.
'No effin' way, man,' Bobby said, putting the machine in idle, and sitting back on the seat, arms folded over his chest. 'I'm not diggin' up nobody's ancestors.'
Larry got down off his dozer, for now that the center of conflict had switched from himself to Bobby, he thought he just might be able to sneak away, and call someone, though he wasn't quite sure just who to call. If they'd uncovered a nesting site for Least Terns, it would have been Fish and Game, but who would you call to get a staying order on a gravesite?
