Skeleton Dance

That seemed to be that; for Beaupierre, after all, it had been a pretty long attention span. Gideon got to his feet.

'Well, thanks, Jacques. I'm off to see Pru; which way's her office? . . . Jacques. . .?

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Chapter 12

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'So tell me, what else is going to be in this book besides the Old Fart of Tayac?” Pru McGinnis asked. “Piltdown, I suppose?'

Her chair creaked under her considerable weight as she leaned back, ran her fingers through her already disordered red hair, clasped her fingernail-chewed hands behind her head, and propped her snakeskin-booted feet on an opened drawer, one over the other, clunk, clunk. After getting her doctorate from Northern California State, she had taught for four years at the University of Missouri, from which she'd emerged with a country-western drawl and a style of dress to match—jeans, boots, belt buckles the size of dinner plates. The accent had soon gone, but the Western garb remained.

'Piltdown, of course,” Gideon said. The Abominable Snowman, the yeti, the Tasaday hoax, the Formosan Psalmanzar story—'

'Ah, good old Psalmanzar. Well, I'll give you one I bet you don't have. What do you know about the Lost Hippopotamus of Lake Mendota?'

'I never heard of it.'

'Aha. See, that's because we kept it a secret till now. The world was not yet ready. But today . . . today at last, I break my silence.'

Gideon put down his note pad and settled back. If Pru was in the mood to tell one of her fish stories the only thing to do was relax and enjoy it because he didn't know any way to stop her. The Old Man of Tayac would have to wait.

'What are you putting your pen down for, are you crazy?” she asked. “This'll be the best part of your book. This'll make it a best-seller.'

'I figure I'll just memorize it. That way I'll get every word.'

'Sure, I can see how that makes sense. Okay, this happened when I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin. You went there too, didn't you?'

'A long time before you,” Gideon said.

'Not that much. Anyway, my roommate, Gloria Kakonis—she was track and field too—had this old umbrella stand that she got somewhere that was made from this humungous, motheaten old hippopotamus foot, you know? Gross. So late one night, in the middle of January, right after a snowstorm, we drop a couple of heavy books inside it, hook up twenty feet of clothesline to either side, and take it outside, up to the campus, right out in front of Bascom Hall. Then Gloria grabs hold of one rope, and I get hold of the other rope, and we start carrying this thing down the hill suspended between us, okay? Only every couple of feet we set it down in the snow so it looks like a footprint. But our footprints are so far away nobody connects them. What? What are you grinning at?'

'It's a funny story, Pru. I'm just imagining it.'

'Wait, it gets better. We carried that thing for an hour, till our arms were practically coming out of our sockets and we couldn't feel our toes any more from the cold. Then we go back home and wait for the next morning.'

'When everybody discovers to their astonishment that there was a hippopotamus loose on campus the night before,” Gideon said.

'Not exactly. Actually, they didn't know what the tracks were, so they brought in a couple of professors from the zoology department. They look at the tracks, they look at each other, and go, like, ‘Egad, Farquelhar, damned if it isn't the greater four-toed Hippopotamus amphibius!’ And off they trot, following the tracks, and by now there's a whole crowd with them, including some reporters. So. Down the hill they go, through town, and right out onto Lake Mendota, which is frozen, of course, under all the snow—and which also happens to be the water supply for Madison, if you remember. Out they all go on the lake, a hundred yards, two hundred yards . . . and suddenly the tracks stop.'

'Stop?'

'Stop. End. In a big, hippopotamus-sized hole.'

Gideon burst out laughing.

Pru threw her head back and cackled along with him. “Nobody wanted to drink the town water for a year—and even then everybody said it tasted like hippopotamus!'

When they finished chortling, Pru wiped her eyes and said: “Are you going to put that in your book?'

'Nope.'

'Why, you don't believe me?'

'Not for a minute. Okay, can we get serious now?'

'I'm always serious. When am I not serious?'

'Okay, seriously then, put me in the picture. I know what the Tayac hoax was about and how it turned out and all, but I don't have any feel for the way it was.'

'It was crappy.'