At least now she'd have time to see Kenny. She'd driven straight from the airport to the canyonlands, no detours, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 kisses. 200 anything. She felt that warmth again, deep in her belly.
*~*~*
The crowded halls felt weird, after the empty open lands of the reservation, after the broad horizon of Stonefort's bay and the sun rising out of the sea beyond. Everything was hard and sharp and claustrophobic and full of noise. Students. The whole damn world was full of students.
She knew there were more people in this single building than in all of Stonefort, even counting the graveyard vote. More people on the campus than in the whole of Sunrise County. And every one of them seemed to possess four elbows.
Caroline threaded her way through the mindless jostling conflicting mob of students rushing between classes. Hell, her own brain was just as empty, still circling with the vee-winged silhouettes of turkey vultures on their thermals. Every time she came in from the field, it was the same. She wouldn't be here for another three weeks.
She ducked into the refuge of a dead-end corridor, all offices so the swarms passed by, and then into the once and future faculty lounge that budget cuts had divided into eight cubicles for grad students. Space was tight enough that she'd soon know exactly what her fellow inmates had for dinner for the past three nights.
She nodded at Rajiv Balakrishnan, physical anthro, and Sandy Moore, another ethnologist, waving off their greetings and questions. She wasn't up to that. Wasn't back yet. They'd understand. They'd been there.
Besides, the first thing she'd have to talk about would be Grandmother Walks. That hole was still too large.
And then she faced her desk. Chaos of books and papers, shelves and shelves of more books, a bleached coyote skull serving as a paperweight, the spiny ovate of a sea urchin shell hollowed out by hungry gulls and reminding her of the smell of salt, it was the same mess she'd left months before. With another stack of papers waiting on the hard oak swivel chair. Caroline muttered curses in three languages — Anthro 102. Shit.
She'd made the mistake of calling ahead, and look where it got her. Essays to grade. Welcome back.
She could quote half of them, word for word. Not just the ones plagiarized from frat files, or pulled straight off the web — the ones that took Prof. Stevens' lectures and recent papers and parroted them back to him. Sometimes it nearly made her scream. No thought, no synthesis, no outside opinions for comparison. And she was supposed to aid and abet flunking at least twenty out of the lecture class of a hundred — freshman-level courses culled the herd, a weeding ritual. But which twenty?
Skip that. First she had a call to make. She cocked her head to one side, thinking, shifted a Navajo basket to the top of another stack of books, moved a tourist Kachina to one side, and found her phone.
Five rings and then a female voice, "Hello?" No department name or anything — had to be Beth with two other calls on hold.
"Hi, it's Caroline Haskell. Is Doc Stevens in?"
"Lemme check." Click, pause, another click. "Yeah. He's got a student with him, shouldn't be a minute. How'd everything turn out?"
"My aunt's getting a little better. I really should still be there. She tries to do things . . . ."
"Oh." Another pause. "Well, I dunno if Boss Man will swallow any more time off. I've heard Mutterings in High Places. You have been warned. How's things out in the sagebrush and sand?"
"Grandmother Walks died yesterday."
"Oh. Sorry to hear that. But she was really old, wasn't she? Not much of a surprise?" Click, pause, another click. "Okay, he's free now. But he's got a grant meeting in five, down in Claussen. Don't expect more than half his brain." And another click, and a booming male voice.
"Hey, welcome back! I should have left half an hour ago, so save the chit-chat for later. Tomorrow. What's so urgent?"
Doc Stevens ran through life at least half an hour late — anthro grad students went with "Stevens Standard Time" when they made appointments. Caroline gathered her thoughts.
"Two things. Look, can we list Grandmother Walks as one of the authors of that paper?"
She could hear his head shaking in the phone's silence. Then he sighed. "Can't do it. Look, if Dean Johnson had his way, you wouldn't be listed. To quote His Imperial Majesty, 'That young woman needs to decide whether she wants to be an anthropologist or an Indian.' Objectivity, dear Caroline, objectivity is the foundation, nay, the very cornerstone of our science. That's a paraphrased and condensed version of a rather longer sermon. Count yourself lucky that I'm filtering his words. Bottom line is, you're on probation."
Shit. The grad school dean and the department head worshipped "objectivity." They treated people as lab specimens — the observer did not interact with the observed. You sat off on a hilltop and watched their lives through binoculars, taking notes. You might record their songs, but you didn't join the singing. Damn sure you didn't join the peyote circle.
"Okay. Second thing, my brother just came up with a lead on some artifacts from the Four Corners area, collected in the 1930s. Might be data for your diffusion study. Can I get another couple of weeks free to check it out? The museum's in Maine, I'll pay my own expenses."
In other words, no grant or department money spent. In other
