The Water Museum Read Free

dark.
    “Sorry,” he says.
    “Basque,” says one of them—and a look that tells him to mind his own business. “Legal.” The men go back to their eggs.
    Professor: “And what you reading?”
    Ralph: “Paper.”
    Professor: “What’s it say?”
    Ralph: “Same as yesterday. Obama’s still a communist.”
    Miss Sally: “Oh now.” She still has an old Hillary sign in her front yard. The only blue campaign sign in the whole region.
    *  *  *
    Frankie’s in and out of the swinging door all day long. She tries to count her steps—Dr. Oz says to get in ten thousand a day. She could probably get there on a fairly busy shift. It reminds her of the old marching days. She can’t afford busboys right now, so she buses the tables, cooks, washes dishes, and takes the orders. A strand of hair has escaped her braid, and it is stuck to the sweat at her temple. She brushes it away with the inside of her wrist. Her eyes are still blue. No rings on her fingers.
    Professor: “You’re sweet as a spring daisy.”
    Frankie: “Sweet-talk me some more and I might run off with you.”
    She tops off his cup.
    “How’s the hunt going?” she asks.
    “Copacetic.”
    He loves big words like that. They only piss Ralph off. The three Basque sheep men in the corner eat loud and mumble in their space-alien lingo. They smell like lambs to Frankie.
    The Professor has a contract with a scientific catalogue to supply ants for ant farms. He finds a colony and inserts a straw down the hole and blows until the ants swarm out. When they come up with eggs, he knows he’s getting somewhere. Sooner or later they evacuate their queen, and he sucks her up in a pipette and puts her in a little plastic container. He makes a few bucks off each container, and he makes a few more for bottles with workers and eggs in them. He has to label the various colonies well so the ants won’t find each other when the jars are uncorked and tear each other apart. They go into a cardboard box with perforated holders and go out of Arco via UPS.
    He used to man a roadside stand this side of Taco John’s where he sold rock crystals and petrified wood he found in a secret canyon up the side of the butte. He had a little sign on his petrified dino dung box: COPROLITES ARE GOOD SHIT . People were probably offended. He sells his rocks on eBay now.
    Ralph: “Hunt, hell. Crawling around with your ass in the air. At your age.”
    “You’re a bold talker for a newcomer,” The Professor says.
    “Been here since nineteen seventy,” Ralph says.
    The Professor winks at Frankie.
    “Dear boy,” he says. “I painted the nineteen sixty-three number up on the butte. Used house paint and brand-new rollers that I stole from the janitor’s office at Benson Hill. You can’t top that.”
    Ralph rattles the page. He is sick of history. “Congratu-goddamn-lations,” he says.
    The tradition started in 1923, after the last Indian died up on the butte. They called him Joe, and some cowboy brought him down on a mule. His little valley was where the Class of 1923 made their ascent to paint their graduation date on the lowest available cliff. It was a scandal—the leader of this wild bunch, Billy Pepper, faced a night in the hoosegow until his pap and Mr. Benson himself came and bailed him out. He was mostly in Dutch for drinking, but the town leaders secretly saw a nice tradition being born. The butte knew, if they didn’t, that the top of the 23 was at the height where great sharks and whales once swam, and where the smoke of old Joe’s last chimney fire hovered as he burned all his letters from his dead wife and his Bible before he lay himself down on the floor of the cabin to sleep forever. Now there is no trace of his house except for the bulbs that break from the ground every April and start to bloom.
    The Professor always loved to lecture about the numbers when he subbed the history classes. They weren’t in any particular order—24 was right beside 23, but 25 was far off