In Wyoming I started driving toward places with good names. The 450 went through Thunder Basin National Grassland.

I ate lunch in Newcastle (about 10 miles to the South Dakota border) and lingered, still not knowing why I'd driven through Wyoming, which went against the rules of my driveaway car's company. It was keeping quiet, though, so I paid and went back into the grassland.

I saw real life wild antelope for the first time then, leaping around and running. I masturbated while driving for the first time, and came without stopping driving. Those are the main two things I remember from that part. For some reason they seem related.

A "Help Wanted" sign appeared on the side of the road pretty soon after South Dakota started. A lot of parked cars leading up to it. It was 4ish. September 3, I think. I was still curious about Wyoming so I stopped and asked if they still needed help.

I remember bandanas, long black braids and mirrored sunglasses. It was an archaeology dig that worked for the state, and they were pretty excited. They'd found something old in the springtime in a test before the road was going to be widened and had been working on the rest that summer. Some arrowheads or, as they called them, "points". Teeth. Maybe from a camel. They weren't sure yet. They said it's the end of the day but to "ask Ned, you might be able to get a room for the night."

(Later I learned they'd found other stuff from between the oldness and 1993 that summer, too, some coins, charcoal spots from younger fires, glass from a bottle from 1856 and beercans from the 1970s.)

He walked toward me tall and shouldery in a light blue button down shirt with scourpad hair under a red painter cap. I could have a room for the night at the Sundowner if I helped bag dirt the next hour. He grumbled about my having to leave early the next morning to deliver the car to Minneapolis. Underneath it all I was going wordless. I should've taken a vow of silence then; everything I've said since's felt askew.

I wanted to show him I wasn't a pushover so after a few minutes went back and said I thought I'd just head out tonight. He didn't say anything for a few seconds, just looked at me as I looked at the road.


Then he said


as you wish

on the t.v. news mount rushmore
was covered with blackbirds
indians dancing
below
i’d just walked in
unpacked
diet coke
meat
conditioner
and a vanilla shake
i’d been careful of
a long time
it slipped
when i picked it up
to give to you

easter was over
slushy out
you were sitting in the armchair
by the sofa
still in your coat and boots from work
you stood up
sounding disgusted
and actually i agreed

these
were stupid
things
to buy

all sticky
all over
the carpet

you don’t have a
good enough sponge ned

you looked down at me
then changed your mind and laughed
and opened the fridge and closed it and went back
to the chair

i love your hardness
it makes me all right
reminds me of something
a long time ago
but i just couldn’t have your baby
is what i tried to send
into the back of your head
out loud i said the change
was almost six dollars
i’ll put it on the counter

at work you were writing a report
for the south dakota department of transportation
about having dug up the oldest arrowhead
in the lower 48 states
the summer before,
when we met
“it’ll probably take fifteen years
to finish, but that’s pretty typical”
you said in the interview
for the rapid city journal

for some reason you let me stay in your bed that night
and even kept the radio off
but still it was hard to sleep
a car was tearing down mount rushmore road

we heard glass

and then birds

it was spring

I think his name was Dave.

He was about five feet tall, maybe 110 pounds, wore cords and acrylic sweaters, and had to have been in his late 40s or early 50s. My journal says he was a bad speller. He came into the cafe practically every day that winter. Gia said he had a PhD in Roman history and was unemployed in the winter, but gave tours of the Black Hills in the summer.

Tours were hard to imagine on him. I never heard him speak.

He had wispy copper hair that covered his head in places. His scalp might've had burn scars. He wore small round metal glasses and had moist lightblue eyes. His nostrils were red and peeling. His nose was large, sloping, phallic.

A good nose.

He looked like a crying twig. Like weakness. But had been in the area, unattached, for longer than anyone at the cafe knew. At least fifteen years, though my vibe was longer.


That didn't register as strength with me back then, but for about ten years after I left the state he clanged around in my head like a sweaty blacksmith god.


I know less and less, though, these days, what to make of anything. A lot of people are returning to their original sizes.



Except you. It had to have been about 300 feet, but I only remember you taking four steps, probably hungover, across questionable temps garbage-bagging tons of ancient campsite, to reach the Department of Transportation trucks pulling in to pour pavement, my first day in September.

You sent the mastadons away without killing them.



I'll keep that one.

The last time we danced, it was nighttime in his shaded apartment. We were both drunk. We didn't dance together all that great, and hardly ever tried, and when we did our awkwardness was very moving to me. We were dancing in a high school way to the Rolling Stones, I think it was the "she's a rainbow" song, and we were drunk and things were spinning. We were from different times, and I imagined my high school dances in the 1980s, what if he had been loping those carpeted, overbright halls? Or what if I'd haunted some echoey gym dance of his in the 60s? I mean, what if we had been of the same time? And in the middle of the whirling I asked if he’d be my high school boyfriend, and he said I’ll always be your boyfriend





aside from the commercial at the beginning this is actually fairly accurate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zphAHMPtu4g

9-15-93



MAGGIE,

RICK HANSON IS GONA PICK UP THE THINGS ON THE TABLE BUT IF HE FORGETS TO SEE IF ED CAN TAKE THE THINGS DOWN TO RAPID FOR US AND PUT THEM IN BEN'S OFFICE.
THANKS
JOHN & TRESSA MARTIN


IF YOUR COMMING BACK TO WORK LOOK US UP.
108 GUMBO DR.
BOX ELDER, S.D. 57719


P/S Maggie, We Left 2 pkg's of franks and a pkg of meat in the freezer, and others things. If you want, you can have it or give it to some one that could use it.


Thanks

Figure 1





IN CONCLUSION


Since the mitigation project began more new data has been recovered concerning the older components of the site. A number of lanceolate projectile points associated with Paleoindian period groups indicated that the fourth cultural layer includes multiple occupations. A Folsom point located approximately in the center of cultural layer 4 indicated an occupation dating to approximately 10,500 years B.P. This aided in the identification of the lowest component as Goshen which dates to approximately 11,000 years. Ned expects to continue excavations until the middle of September.



References Cited


Donohue, James A., and Ned Hanenberger

1993 Archaeological Mitigative Research Design for Sites 39CU1142 and 39CU1144. State Archaeological Research Center, Rapid City.


McDonald, Jerry N.

1981 North American Buffalo: Their Classification and Evolution. University of California Press, Berkeley.

I asked an archaeologist
if he'd hold me through the night
if I gave him ten dollars.
He said all right.
There's long black hair in his cactus
and the stop sign spins in place.
And he already has a woman he says
I don't replace.
And he points to the proof, there it is on the wall,
the proof, the proof, the proof.


There's people you can see.
People you'll never see.
We made one of them, didn't we?
Believing in both he leaves to me.
"Archaeology starts from the known," he says,
"that's how it's going to be."
And he points to the proof, there it is on the wall,
the proof, the proof, the proof.


He likes to think he's a lonely chief.
I like to think I'm a troubadour.
But he's just an alcoholic shovelbum for the state
and I'm just a girl who walks this beautiful world without proof.

Patty came in the middle, but that's okay.

She must've been 40 or so, and it was 1994, so her old-hippie thing must've been firsthand. Although 40 isn't old now, I know. It kind of was then, though.

She had long brown hair, olive skin, and was of Italian descent but has a Waspy vibe in my memory. Maybe it was from the 1950s when she must've been a child. Anyway, she was the new cook at the Sixth Street Deli, in downtown Rapid City (I mean Rapid), after Amber, the teenage goth vegan cook got pregnant and was offered a job cooking for a family with money that had just moved to the state onto a ranch somewhere east of Rapid.

I'd been in the Black Hills about six months. But we'll get there. It's just that that was long enough to start seeing other people besides yourself brought in by only partially visible strings.

Patty chopped a lot, and her answer was usually to pray about it. Though to me she said the same stuff everyone did (he's an alcoholic, he loves the bottle first, you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, etc). That disappointed me, it couldn't lift anything.

She was in a relationship with a guy who grew organic vegetables somewhere south of Hermosa. It turned out I'd seen him before, he sold produce to the cafe, and had noted him as cute in a restless, middle-aged, sideways-glancing-at-you kind of a way.

She felt a lot for him, but there was a problem. I think maybe he was a widower, or his last girlfriend had died.

She told me about a drive they'd taken to some mud flats when she'd had bad period cramps, about walking around naked and unbraiding her hair and "just bleeding into the mud."

I thought, if I tried that, I would never feel the simple power of it she seemed to. It sounded like the kind of thing I'd try after hearing about it in a magazine. But for me there'd be biting fleas. Or the mud would burn. Something would complicate it.

I hate that.

Anyway, Patty was kind and sensible and now says to pray about it, though I lost track of her soon after.