The Archimedes Effect

“Gonna make a move?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Howard toked on his cigar, letting his silence speak to that.

Kent took a couple puffs of his stogie. He had checked out Jen’s ex—at least he was pretty sure he had the right guy. There couldn’t be that many cello players named “Armand” who had recordings out and had just gotten married recently to a much younger woman. Or maybe there could and they didn’t have a presence on the net. He’d known a guy once, Ted McCall, who wrote a book about, of all things, barbed wire. Apparently there were thousands of different kinds produced over the years, and a bunch of folks snipped off foot-and-a-half pieces and mounted them on boards and collected them. Paid real money for some rare kinds. McCall had quite a collection, so he’d written a book about how to identify the various kinds. He’d called it Twist and Shout: Putting a Name to Unusual Varieties of Barbed Wire.

One day, ole Ted had logged onto the Internet site that sold his book and tapped in his name to see how sales were doing. Up popped the title Barbed Wire Varieties, by Ted McCall. Look at that, he’d thought, the stupid sons of bitches had gotten his title wrong! He’d clicked on the link to see what else they’d screwed up, and found himself looking at a picture of somebody who wasn’t him. Seemed there was another Ted McCall who had written an entirely different book on the same subject. McCall wasn’t that uncommon a name, but what were the chances that there would be another man with the same name who was also a collector of fence wire and who had written a book on it? It boggled his mind.

So it was possible that there were two Armands—or even more—who fit the bill, but it was highly unlikely. The closer the match, the more likely it was that this guy, this Armand, was Jen’s ex. So Kent had read all about him. There were some indications that Armand was “somewhat difficult” to work with, and something of a perfectionist, and that went with Jen’s description of him.

Why had Kent bothered if he wasn’t interested in Jen? He wasn’t sure about the answer to that one.

12

Greenville, South Carolina

“I’m glad we decided to drive,” Thorn said.

“Good thing I know how,” Marissa said. They were in her SUV, a small and sporty Honda, with enough weight to make the ride comfortable, on the highway between Charlotte and Greenville.

“Just because I don’t need a car doesn’t mean I never learned how. Having a chauffeur lets me get a lot of work done while I’m in transit.”

“So would taking the bus or a train,” she said.

“What, and ride with you rabble?”

She laughed. “I’m glad to see you loosening up, sweetie. I’d sure hate to have my grandparents think you were a stick-in-the-mud. Bad enough you are so melaninly challenged.”

“I’ll work on my tan,” he said.

“Even with your Native American blood, you’re always gonna look like a pale pink sock mixed into a load of new blue jeans, at least around my family.”

He chuckled.

“You travel much by car before you got so rich and started taking private jets to buy your hamburgers?”

Thorn smiled. “Oh, yeah. You want the condensed version? Or the full-length travelogue?”

“Tell all, Tommy. We have a ways yet to go to Grandma’s house.”

“Okay. When I was young and heading toward the height of my stupidity—this was the summer I turned thirteen, so I was still a couple years away—my grandfather took me on a road trip. Though our people were mostly from around Spokane, we had some distant cousins and great-aunts and -uncles who were Choctaw, and Grampa allowed as how I should meet them.

“I don’t know if you know the history. Along with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, the Choctaw got rounded up and sent along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, as part of the white man’s land grab. My distant relatives somehow managed to escape into the swamps along the way, down in Louisiana. There, they hid out and pretended to be black Dutch or something. Nobody ever came looking for them, people left them alone, and most of them became farmers or fishers. Nobody got rich, but nobody died cooped up on a dust-bowl rez in Oklahoma.

“Anyway, my grandfather decided it was time to go and introduce me to them. So he loaded up his old Chevy pickup truck, and off we went.”

Thorn smiled again at the memories that floated up.

“It was a long trip. About twenty-five hundred miles each way. My grandfather didn’t have much use for the Interstate system, so we took state highways wherever possible, sometimes county roads. Went through Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas on the way to Louisiana, and added in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and Oregon on the way back to Spokane.

“My grandfather did a lot of knocking around as a young man. We’d be tooling along at sixty in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas, and all of a sudden he’d pull over. We’d get out, and he’d talk about the place: ‘These are the Smoky Hills. That over there, that’s Pawnee Rock. The Spanish came here, the French. The Americans didn’t show up until 1806. The wind always blows.’

“We’d stretch, pee, hop back in the old truck, and hit the road again. Hot and sunny, pouring rain and thunder-storms, saw a tornado once. We made stops like that all across the country. We’d pull into a country store, buy a loaf of bread and some cheese and lunch meat, make sandwiches, have an apple, drink a soft drink, like that. At night, we’d crawl into sleeping bags, either in the back of the truck or on the ground. Look at the stars, and my grandfather would tell me stories. Places he’d been. People he’d known. Bars he’d gotten drunk in.”

The memory was fine and green in Thorn’s head. He smiled.

“There was a long and rich history here long before white men sailed the Atlantic. My grandfather knew some of it, and told it to me. I missed a lot, being full of myself, but some I remember.”

Marissa nodded. “The white men were hauling my people here belowdecks in chains back when they were slaughtering your kin,” she said. “Come Judgment Day, a lot of them will have a lot to answer for.”

Thorn nodded in return. “Bad times for a lot of people.

“Um. Anyway, I didn’t really understand how big this country is until I spent a couple weeks driving across it. Passing through the little towns, the long stretches of nothing between them. We stopped at Cherokee trading posts in Oklahoma; stopped at bars in Texas; we camped on the prairies, in the woods, fields, once in an old one- room schoolhouse that had been boarded up for years. One of the highlights of my life, that trip.”

“You loved your grandfather.”

“Oh, yeah. We didn’t talk about such things, being men and all, but he was always there for me. I miss him.”

“I’m sorry. I’m happy my grandparents are still around.”

“You didn’t tell them I saw those pictures of them on your wall, did you?”

She laughed. “Tommy, they know you and I sleep together, being as how they taught me that when it was time to get married I needed to be sure things worked in that arena before I tied the knot. So they’ll know you’ve spent the night at my place, and they know I’ve got those paintings on my walls.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess.” The paintings in question were of her grandparents, Amos and Ruth, as young adults, and her grandmother was altogether undressed in the one of her. Quite the looker as a young woman.

“Granny’s in pretty good shape for a woman heading toward eighty” she said. “Maybe if you ask, she’ll take off her clothes and let you see how well she’s aged.”

“Jesus, Marissa!”

She laughed. “Still a little bit of stick-in-the-mud there, sweetie. We’ll have to work on that.”

Circle S Ranch