garden,” I said.
He offered me a weak smile and continued: “Officially Professor Sweet was studying the eating habits of postwar American families. He called his summer course Digging the Fifties: The Roots and Realities of Conspicuous Consumption. But he’d joke that he was just an old beatnik reliving his wasted youth-at the expense of his students. ‘Your parents’ tuition money, your hard labor and my boyish joy,’ he’d say.”
“Do you think he was really joking-or really telling the truth?” I asked.
“I think he was really doing both,” he said. “Archaeologists, if they can manage it, work in the historic periods that fascinate them the most.”
The wind was picking up. I zipped my jacket as high as it would go and pulled in my neck like a snapping turtle. “You consider the 1950s an historic period, do you?”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “No offense, but, yeah, I do. Treating the recent past like the ancient past is what the field of garbology is all about.” He gave me a primer on the subject: “The guru of the whole movement is Dr. William Rathje of the University of Arizona. He made his bones studying the burial sites of the ancient Mayan Indians. Then in the early seventies he started the Garbage Project. He applied modern archaeological techniques to studying present-day waste in landfills. He studied what households were buying and discarding. What impact modern consumption habits were having on the nation’s health and on the environment.”
I felt a few sprinkles of rain on my face. I dug the plastic rain hat out of my pocket and pulled apart its accordion-like folds. I wrapped it around my head. I can only imagine how ghastly I looked. “Well, it sounds like a lot of fun,” I said.
Andrew was much too young to carry emergency rainwear with him. He let the drops soak his hair. “It’s also a lot of hard work. Tedious work. In order to get to the stuff from the fifties we have to dig down through the garbage from the sixties and seventies. And there was a lot of garbage in those decades.”
“How well I remember.”
My joke went right over his head. “And you can’t just toss the stuff from the sixties and seventies aside,” he said. “It’s got to be sorted through and cataloged just like the fifties’ stuff. The way you draw conclusions about one decade is to compare it to other decades.”
“That makes sense.”
He had more: “And the layers of garbage aren’t predictable. Garbage was dumped and bulldozed. Older stuff pushed up, newer stuff pushed down. So it’s easy to get decades mixed up.”
I tried another joke. “You’re telling me.”
That one sailed as high over his noggin as the first one.
We circled through the excavated squares, as if there was actually something to see. The raindrops were getting fatter. “You think it’s really necessary to burrow into stinky landfills to learn that America is happily eating itself into oblivion?” I asked.
“Perception is an important tool, but it can’t hold a candle to a trowel,” he said. “There’s a big difference between what people consume and what they think they consume.”
He was in teaching mode. I knew I’d have to stand there and listen no matter how waterlogged I got. “I suppose that’s true.”
“You bet it’s true. For example, Mrs. Sprowls, what percentage of the waste put in landfills do you suppose is made up of disposable diapers, Styrofoam and fast-food packaging?”
I hate those kind of questions, don’t you? No matter what number you guess, high or low, you’ll be wrong and feel like an imbecile. “One hundred percent?” I asked sarcastically.
There was a flash of annoyance in his eyes. “Actually, it’s just three percent.”
I acted quickly to repair the damage. “That’s amazing.”
The rain was coming down harder. Without saying a word we agreed to head for the car. “So while plastic is a problem it’s not the real problem,” he said as we hurried along. “The real problem is paper. It makes up forty to fifty percent of the waste stream.”
“Any idea how much of that is newspaper?” I asked.
It was an opportunity to get back at me and he took it. “Too much.”
We reached the rim of the landfill and started down, once again past the spot where someone had skillfully put a bullet in the back of Sweet Gordon’s skull. More than likely someone he trusted. “Tell me, Andrew, did you ever get the feeling that Gordon was digging for something in particular?”
“That may have gotten him killed, you mean?”
“Well, yes.”
His entire body seemed to shrug. “I’ve been wondering about that like everybody else.”
“Everybody else, Andrew?”
“The police. Professor Glass. That woman from the bookstore.”
“And just what do you tell them?”
The annoyance seeped back into his eyes. “Like I said, Professor Sweet was interested in everything from the fifties.” Before I could apologize for my inquisitiveness, he conjured up a memory that made him smile. “Every day he’d walk from square to square, asking the dig teams the same question in that same Mr. Rogers way he had: ‘Anything interesting today, boys and girls? Old soda pop bottles? Betsy Wetsy Dolls? Perhaps an old cocoa can or two?’ We all knew it so well, we’d say it along with him, like a mantra.”
We reached my car. We were soaked. By the time we reached the main road my threadbare car seats were soaked, too. We splashed through the puddles and headed north toward Hannawa. I was still full of questions: “You must have been frantic when you couldn’t find him.”
“Not really. It was odd that he didn’t show for his eight o’clock class but-”
“Friday morning, right?”
“Yeah. I just figured he’d overslept or he was sick or something.”
“You were a student in that class?”
He nodded. “ The Making and Breaking of Archaeological Doctrine.”
“So what did you do when he didn’t show?”
“You know-the old ten minute rule.”
“If the professor doesn’t show up in ten minutes you take off like a P-92?”
I’d succeeded in baffling him again. “Take off like a P-92?”
I laughed at myself. “If I get any older I won’t be able to communicate at all. It’s an old saying, Andrew. The P-92 was a real fast airplane when I was a kid.”
He said “Oh” and I said, “So where’d you take off to?”
“I figured I’d better check in with Karen, the department secretary. I thought maybe if he was sick he might’ve left word for me to teach his one o’clock.”
“He wouldn’t have called you directly?”
“He’d never missed a class before. I wasn’t sure.”
“So you were just being a dutiful graduate assistant?”
“Right-but Karen said she hadn’t heard from him either.”
“Was she concerned?”
“She’d figured he was in class.”
The rain had slowed enough for me to put my wipers on low. “Is that when you started looking for him?”
“Sort of. I called his house and left a message on his answering machine. And then I hung out in his office for a couple hours and studied, in case he showed up. Then I had a quick lunch out of the vending machines downstairs.”
“Then taught his one o’clock class?”
“Babysat was more like it. Then I taught my own two o’clock and after that I drove over to his house. The doors were locked and the porch light was on and his car wasn’t in the drive.”
“You try to talk to his neighbors?”
“No-I still didn’t think anything was wrong.”
“But you were looking for him,” I pointed out. “You must have been a little worried.”
“I guess I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong. But who knows? Maybe he had a family
