Bone Broth
I had an extra thumb when I was younger. I was born that way, of course, and the other kids tormented me, laughing and pointing, squealing and running away. I hated the look on their faces, as if I were disgusting. I wasn’t. I just had an anomaly. Doctors said it happened to one out of 700,000 cases, or something. I forget the right number, but it happened a lot.
My parents had it removed when I was eleven. It was part of me, and they were removing it. They said my life would be better. I knew that was true. I was always holding that hand behind me or trying to hide it. But it was my left thumb and I was right handed, so I was sure I could get better at hiding it. The night before it was removed, I thought how it was mine and it was me and how horrible it was to leave the remaining thumb alone, which is how I thought of it. I’d gone to the library and read about conjoined twins, but they weren’t going to try to save the thumb they were removing. It would be gone. It would be dead.
My parents were trying to transform me by removing that extra thumb, and I felt I was always just passing for one of them.
I thought for a long time that they had removed the wrong thumb. That I would have had a better life with the other thumb. I had been considered a freak before the surgery, and I had, against all reason, accepted that.
But I was a freak in hiding, and I carried the shadow of that missing thumb with me as an adult. I felt it twitch sometimes, and then I closed my hand into a fist until the feeling went away. I still do it for comfort when the days and nights seem too long, and the world too vast.
For over five years now, I’ve been living in one of the buildings Bill Linmonth owns, and I work for him too. I used to be a clerk in a stationary store, but they began to disappear when the internet made ecards popular. I went to Bill’s restaurant to hand in the check around then, and I asked if they needed any help.
I got the job through total indifference on Bill’s part. He was on the phone while he looked me over and asked a few questions. I hid my hand. I always hid my hand. I said I’d waitressed before, that I had been good at it but that I had a few other things and now come home to roost. He nodded.
I reminded him I lived in one of his buildings, and that seemed to interest him, but then he turned back to the phone.
It paid just enough. I got free dinners. I loved the derelict air, the smell of the river, even the garbage and the rats. It was splendid on foggy nights when anything could appear out of the mist. It was wonderful when the snow made everything clean, and the cars, still searching for hookers, slowed down and their windows steamed up.
I was a lousy waitress. I got easily distracted and forgot or misplaced orders. One day, after a full shift, I went home with two dollars in tips. Luckily the bartender always let me have a few drinks to lighten the disappointment, but $2 wasn’t going to pay the rent.
*
Bill never seemed to notice me, though I often found him standing in the doorway between the main room and the kitchen, just looking and watching. He was tall and broad and had a kind of permanence about him, like a tree or a rock—something not really moveable. And he stared without apology or explanation. He’d stare at people; he’d stare at things. I would follow his eyes, to see if there was a reason, and I couldn’t figure it out.
And then one time he looked up and caught me watching him. The abstracted look on his face shifted a little. His eyes focused; I felt he saw me for the first time. But he said nothing, and soon looked away, though I thought I saw the brown iris of his eyes looking at me sideways.
I was standing in the kitchen once, looking out the back door towards the river, which was a block away. It was dark and almost noir-like—the street lights, the cobblestone streets, the slam of a car door. The footsteps I heard could be anything.
“Hookers,” Tito the cook said, smirking.
The usual.
I turned back to watch him stirring. “You’re always cooking soup,” I said.
“Bone broth. I was raised on bone broth. It’s what makes the soup have substance.”
I had seen him shifting bones into the big pots, stirring them hour after hour. I had smelled the aroma—fleshlike and solemn—but I was a vegetarian. I knew where bones came from. Still, it was a job and he was a fellow employee, someone I had to work with.
Like working with cannibals, I often thought.
Bill came through the back door, adjusting his jacket a little. “Business good?” he asked, and the cook shrugged. “Just the usual,” Tito said. “Always the usual.”
“Go to the front,” Bill told me. “Go make the customers hungry.”
I went to the front, but there were still only four customers, and two of them were mad because I had forgotten to give them the check. I always cheated a little on the bill—I wanted them to think they were getting away with something, so they would feel expansive and generous. I doubt any of them realized that, though; they just glanced down and reached for a card or a couple of twenties. Like this one, they didn’t leave a tip, in order to teach me a lesson.
I knew the hookers were the reason I heard car doors slam off and on all evening, and why Bill sometimes came through the back door adjusting his clothes. We were a cheap dive on a cheap corner, but the river still made sounds out through the darkness, and the close call of a ferry or a tugboat made me think of souls broadcasting their needs. The world slipped around a little more loosely at night.
I saw cars pull up during the late afternoon, and Bill leaning down to them in deep discussions, and trunks being opened, and bags being brought in or out of the back. Bill would glare at me, and I would make sure I stayed out front, customers or no customers. I assumed the bags held money or drugs and that the restaurant was a front. It certainly wasn’t being kept open for the income on the nights I worked.
“What’s in those bags?” I asked the cook one night, after Bill had gone.
“Bones,” he says, stirring his pot. “Just bones.” I could see him smirking to himself as he stirred his broth.
Drugs, I thought, and smiled. I love knowing secrets. It’s like a special door, one that I might open someday. It’s not that I would tell Bill; that would be risky. I have no threat in me; it would be posturing to pretend I could hurt Bill. And I know he could hurt me. You can tell by the way he stands in the dark, whispering to other big men. You can tell by the disinterested way he looks at me when he finds me near those talks, and the quick bark of “Go wait on tables!” when he wants me to disappear. Knowing he’s dealing drugs makes me feel subversive. Smart. Ahead of him. Like someday I could get even. Maybe, just a little, like I have some power.
*
Where I worked was close to the river, and where I lived was down a few blocks from that, in an area that used to be half industrial, years ago, and directly behind my building was an old carriage house-turned-garage that had collapsed. Bill owned that too (he owned a lot of things), and he was tearing it down. The neighborhood was going upscale, block by block.
For the moment, though, it was all pretty rough. The garage was down, now, and workers had cleared out most of the rubble and were starting to excavate. I had gotten used to a steady sound of machines and yelled instructions, and I knew they worked until sunset, which was around 7 p.m., when all of a sudden there was silence. I was home, on the third floor. I looked down from my rear window and I could see a bunch of men standing around the hole that had just been dug. Standing and gesturing and talking like fools.
So I went down.
The Village was fairly old—parts more than 200 years old—and the streets had mostly followed the contour of the land, and the row of buildings on the street behind my building were actually built lower. On my street, you went up four steps to get to the first floor of the building. On the street behind me, you went down two steps to the first floor. My building had a rock floor in one part of the cellar; and it was probably rock that dictated how things got built back then.
At any rate, there I was in the cement backyard, standing about three feet higher than the cement yard of the garage. There was an old, half-rotted stockade fence I stood behind, with lots of gaps for me to look through. I could hear them clearly, but my vision was haphazard.
“Yeah, that’s what it is,” I heard a voice saying. Everyone spoke in low but distinct tones.
“Maybe it’s just some weird rock.”
“Nah. You ever seen a rock that color?”
“I haven’t seen every rock, so I don’t know. Do you know?”
“You always have to argue. Just let’s get on with it. Slow and careful.”
There was more silence, and finally, the first one said, “I’m calling it. Get Bill over here. Brushes and brooms now. Slowly.”
They went on that way for a while. I could even hear the whisper of brushes, a strangely comforting sound, like leaves in the wind. I inched my way along the fence until it curved around to the lot next to the garage. It wasn’t easy; there was garbage and things that had fallen out of the windows (flower pots, pillows, window screens) and I didn’t want to make any noise, but I got far enough around to look through a board and see what they’d uncovered.
It was off-white with dark shading, and rough edging on the top. It tapered a little; at least the part I could see. It took me a minute to place the shape, and even then I doubted it. My heart sped up a little. I could see the men clustered together, discussing it all, and I heard a car pull up and a door slam and the men all stood straighter and went towards it. Bill. It must be Bill.
I inched my way back to my original spot, and looked through the slats as well as I could. Bill, followed jaggedly by his men, walked over, crouched down, looked very slowly and carefully, and nodded.
“All right,” he said. “All right. Did you get below it? Is it attached? Lenny?”
“No,” Lenny said. He was the first voice I’d heard, the authoritative one. “I felt around a little but no, it seems to be all on its own.”
Someone else snickered. “Just a tooth someone knocked out in a fight,” he said. “I don’t want to meet who did that.”
“Enough, Barry,” Bill said. He stood for a moment, lost in thought. “All right. How long to dig it all up and see what else is there?” he asked finally.
“Two-three days. Now that we got it going, no problem.”
Bill nodded. He looked slowly around the site. His dog, Coal, a black German Shepherd, was sniffing around the tooth, and he called it back. “Sit,” he said, but it kept its eyes locked on the tooth. Bill’s gaze traveled down and around, looking at everything.
“Cover it up,” Bill said.
I could almost hear their jaws drop. “Now wait a minute,” Lenny said uneasily.
“You don’t think we’re gonna dig it out and let everyone see it and anything else that’s with it?” Bill asked reasonably. “Let me get a tent or something. Give me a day or two. Come over tomorrow for a drink.”
There was a short burst of laughter and congratulations and a quick shifting of dirt over whatever it was, and then they left. Except for Bill.
Bill watched them leave, then he turned around and said, “You.”
I froze.
“I know who you are. What do you think you’re doing?”
I looked around. It was possible he could see me, and recognize me, and what was I to do? Run like a little girl? I sighed. “Hi, boss,” I finally said, hoping it was quick enough to sound casual. “Sounds like you’ve found something over there.” I picked my way to a bigger gap in the fence, thinking I would just be sociable for a bit and then get out of there. But before I even reached it, I saw his hand poke through and grasp a loose board, pushing it out of the way. His head showed now, scowling at me.
“What did you see?” he asked rudely.
“I didn’t see a thing.”
“What did you hear?”
“A tooth,” I said. “Someone found a tooth.”
He twisted himself around and pushed aside a board, his body halfway through. “Artifacts. Everyone finds odd things when they dig,” he said, and pushed himself completely up. “You’d be an idiot to report it. Why report it? You’d just get buried in paperwork.”
“I’m not a jerk. You’re my boss and my landlord. I can keep my mouth shut. I’ve kept my mouth shut all my life.”
The dog Coal stuck his head through the slot Bill had climbed through. His tongue hung out and he panted. He looked at me seriously, as if I might do something interesting.
“I know who you are,” Bill repeated.
“And I know who you are,” I said.
We stood there, the dog and the two of us watching each other.
“It’s an elephant’s tooth,” he said finally. “There used to be a circus around here. Late 1800s. It had an elephant.” He watched me carefully, rubbed his chin, and then nodded.
I supposed it was possible. “Can I see?”
He tilted his head a little. “You heard them cover it up. If you heard anything, you heard that.”
I nodded. “I’m like a kid sometimes,” I said conversationally. “I have too much curiosity.”
“Is that what it is? Keep out and keep your nose clean. And as for this—it’s not good to get something like this reported. Paperwork. Bureaucrats. Historians and politicians. You see?”
“I do.”
“And there’s a market for it. People love old things. So let me make it worth your while to shut up. How many days do you work?”
“Three. The slowest days. One better day would help a lot.”
He nodded. “One better day. You know what? Let’s see how it goes. Let’s see if you can keep your mouth shut. It might be possible.”
He turned and went through the fence—right leg first, then his shoulders and head, then the left leg, like some strange erasure. The dog followed, with one last look back. Even as I turned to go home, I heard cars pulling up and doors being slammed, and voices calling out, cheerful and exultant.
Whoever they were, they sure loved circuses.
*
The next day someone erected a big tent, and for a moment I imagined the circus was back. I walked around the block to see if there was a sign, and it said, Ripley’s Exterminations. I found a flap and lifted it up. Inside, there was lighting and the backhoe was going, and someone (Barry?) saw me and ran quickly up to me and pushed me outside. “You didn’t see the sign?” he asked, pointing to the Danger! notice.
“I can’t read anything that big,” I said. “Astigmatism.”
He scowled and went inside, and I could hear him tying one knot after the other on the inside of the tent flap, but I had seen enough. The hole where the tooth had been was opened wide, and tarps covered something in the back of a pickup. They continued to dig. Maybe they would find another tooth. Or a mouth, I thought, and shivered.
Maybe it was because I pictured a mouth big enough to fit because tooth that I suddenly thought that even for an elephant, it was an awfully big tooth.
I saw Bill a few times in the street, walking Coal. The dog was long and slinky and had a focused, wise gaze. Coal targeted things—his ball, a bird, a piece of garbage—and made some sense of it that was beyond my understanding. Bill let him sniff at everything. I saw him prowl around empty lots, once in an alley, once around a tree, and both Bill and the dog had the same theatrically intense look. Bill was hoping Coal would find something. What?
*
The hookers had a type, no matter what sex they were: short shorts, tight halters, high heels, and lots of makeup. Their arms often formed crooks, or waved straight up in the air like hypnotized snakes They bent over in exaggeration when a car drew up, leaning on their arms, pushing their heads into opened windows, getting in or standing back up again. They were businesslike when finished, already looking around to see if any new cars had pulled up. They called out to each other with warnings or triumphs and waved wildly when they recognized a repeat customer.
On a slow night I would sometimes see all this, though it made me sad. They always seemed to be playing at being hookers with their outsized gestures, that it reassured their clients.
I went back to my diners, impatient as always, mad at me, sniping at me or leaving no tips. I was used to it. I didn’t dislike them for it.
Sometimes cars pulled up with a couple in it or a woman, and then Bill went out to talk to them. Things would pass back and forth, and I assumed it was drugs—what else would it be?
I looked up the size of elephant teeth, and they were nowhere near as big as the tooth I had seen.
He was lying.
*
I watched Bill carefully as he looked out the back door into the alleyways and streets, moving out when a car stopped at the corner, bending down low, putting something through an open window, taking something back. Drug deals. When he was gone I waited for Tito to go out for a smoke, and I checked the store room. I searched behind and below and up near the ceiling, but it was in plain view—packages like bricks of flour, in brown paper, sealed like sugar. Innocuous. Quiet. I picked one up and pulled apart a fold and saw white powder.
I don’t do drugs anymore, and the drugs I did were things like acid and pot. But white powder—heroin? Cocaine? Something more lethal?
“Where is she?” I heard Bill say, and my heart thudded. I dusted the powder off on my jeans and shirt and went back out carrying a jar of mustard.
“Looking for me?” I asked.
His eyes checked the mustard and he winced. Nothing really required mustard. It was one of those things customers did—want things that didn’t go with the menu. A sore spot for everyone, like people who salted their food before tasting it.
The dog’s large, very pointed ears stood up like radar. He loped over and sniffed my shoes, then my pants, then my hands. He sat down and looked up into my eyes. If a dog could smile, he smiled.
I was holding the mustard in my right hand, and my left hand was holding the storeroom door. Bill’s eyes widened just a bit, and I shifted my left hand down. I hadn’t been thinking. My hand had been out and open and I had forgotten to hide my thumb.
Bill studied my face, my hands, my arms. He pet the dog absent-mindedly. He looked away for a moment, then his eyes swung back to me. He nodded slightly, and left.
*
I saw Bill on the street again, walking his dog, and I followed him carefully as they slipped around a corner and into an empty lot.
Bill had Coal on a leash, and the dog was sniffing everything. There was a point where the dog started digging and Bill pushed him aside and dug with a small shovel until he came across a tin plate, which I supposed still had some smells on it. He took it and threw it away. Coal watched it go sadly but then gave a dog shrug and went back to work, sniffing, sniffing, with Bill turning over objects or occasionally digging a little bit into the dirt. I could see the disappointment grow on both man and beast.
It looked like he was deliberately looking for something. What had that tooth belonged to?
*
“I don’t believe it was an elephant tooth,” I told Bill when Tito stepped out for a break the next day.
I took a deep, measured breath. “I think it’s a giant.” I felt my face grow red.
“A giant,” he said agreeably. I could see his gaze travel over me—from my eyes to my cheekbones, nose, mouth. To my chin. My neck was bare. He considered my neck. Finally, he shrugged. “All right,” he said agreeably. “Let’s say it was a giant.”
It seemed both ridiculous and wonderful. I had to grin. “And you found one.”
“Found it? No. I searched for it.”
“Okay,” I said finally. “How and why were you searching for it? And what the hell is it?”
His shoulders relaxed. “Why wouldn’t I search for it? It’s obvious they existed. There have always been stories, and I believe stories,” he said. “We have Cronus eating his children, Cyclops and the sailors, and Jack in the Beanstalk’s giant. David and Goliath. Why do people think it’s all made up, when the evidence is all around the world? The whole world. Every continent has a story about them. Why isn’t everyone searching?”
His sagging eyes looked at me.
“Giants really existed?” It was a half-question, half exclamation. I had suspected, and then laughed at myself for suspecting. I was right! It was a relief.
He nodded. “Of course they existed. Some version of any universal story is true, and you can learn where the giants moved and what they did and how they changed if you follow the stories. That’s what I did.” He paused. “What we did. There are a few of us, here and there. We listen to the stories and the rumors and the claims, and we follow that. We find things. Sometimes just a little. And occasionally,” his face lit up, “we find a lot. Like this. I’ve trained Coal to sniff for them, for the particular scent of the bones. He can tell the merest whiff of it. Sure, it’s harder when it’s buried so maybe I have to buy some places and even then he can’t find anything. It happens.”
My mind was racing. “All the stories have normal people and giants. How did they evolve together?”
And here the grin twisted into a smile. “They didn’t. The giants came from somewhere else. You know those big blast circles—in South America; in Siberia? Asteroid crashes? What happens if it wasn’t an asteroid?”
He watched me eagerly, to see how I was adding things up. So. If the giants moved out from the circle, then the circle must have created or contained the giants. He was thinking that it wasn’t a meteor but something that acted like a meteor. Say an alien ship. A large alien ship—large because of the people it carried. Out of control, traveling at enormous speed, crashing.
“A ship,” I said and his face brightened.
But those blast sites were old. Could the aliens have seen the progression of protohumans? My mouth dropped open for a moment and I thought, could they be part of our ancestry and I heard him snort.
“But the size difference,” I said.
“It could still happen. What do we know about it? I mean, don’t rule anything out. I don’t.”
“But there are no giants now.” I was still thinking it through.
“No,” he said. “There aren’t.”
I liked the way he waited for me to catch up to him—he was telling me only enough to feed each idea, leading me to the next one. I was following along with his discoveries, and I enjoyed it. “That’s why you’re saying every origin myth has them. Because even if they weren’t alive when the oral tales were written down, the memory of them remained. So. All right. I’m with you. What else? You’ve figured out something else.”
“They were bipedal so they bore a resemblance to us but they didn’t necessarily have the same goals. You can see the figures in so many cultures—a sort of vertically flattened skull, a longer torso, somewhat proportionally shorter legs . . .
“And well, it looks like they might have been cannibals. That might not be the right word. They might have used our ancestors for food.”
“Oh. I don’t like that.”
“Millennia ago. And we do it to other animals, so maybe it just seemed logical to them. But our ancestors didn’t care for it.”
“No surprise. But all right, that part, the cannibal part, that’s speculation, right?”
“It’s a guess,” he said easily. “Because it just makes sense. We have Cronus eating his children, Cyclops and the sailors, and Jack in the Beanstalk’s giant eating children. But that’s not the point. You want to know how I got to this particular giant and what I’m going to do with it.”
I was swerving between thinking he was an idiot and thinking that I was part of an incredible breakthrough. “How did they get here? I know there’s a big crater in Siberia and another in South America somewhere—”
“Mexico.”
“That’s pretty far away.”
“Migrations. Trying to find a good place to live. I think there was something about the climate then—or even now—that made it hard for them. So they kept moving.”
“And ended up in Manhattan.”
That look again, with those hooded eyes. He was always appraising me, but I never knew for what. “Queens. I found a shoulder and a rib in Queens. And a foot four blocks away. I never found the middle, but it could be there, under the rock, say.”
I stared at him.
He sighed. “New York is mostly layers of rock that have moved over other layers of rock. That plate of rocks pushes things. Let’s say there’s something buried in Queens eons ago, but the rock shelf moved. Pushed it. And the push ended somewhere here. If it wasn’t crushed, then it would be pushed. Like an avalanche? That’s a good example, because an avalanche moves and buries. The great thing is that Manhattan is always digging up things and finding old cemeteries and old wells and old Indian remnants. For a long time, no one really cared. But now, people hide anything they find when they dig. If they report it, the site gets shut down while the authorities check it out. Most of it’s just from the past 200 years. That’s nothing. I’m interested in hundreds of thousands of years. Who cares about a hundred years? Not interesting,”
I was suddenly hit by the idea of hundreds of thousands of years. I had a vision of huge trees all around, tropical vistas, the scree of strange birds, a rumble of the earth moving, shifting. Arms pushing aside great trees. It was exhilarating to think about.
“And then I found one,” he said. He sounded matter of fact, but he was watching me, waiting to see my reaction. The sound of that sentence burst on me, and I felt a greatness in life, suddenly, a springing forth. Wonders still existed—or had existed, once.
“And I’m not alone,” he said. “Would you like to meet some of the others?”
I would.
*
The 14th Street subway station links a couple of lines together a few avenues from the Hudson River. The lowest platform contains the L train station, the last stop of a line that runs from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Bill took me there on a Sunday night, when the station was relatively empty, with just a few kids waiting for their link to Williamsburg and Canarsie. He walked slowly and casually to the west end of the station, where a metal door was covered in warning signs to stay out, and he opened the door and entered without a word to me. Perhaps the area inside had been used for storage while the line was being built and had fallen into disarray. Parts of Manhattan are always being forgotten.
The room inside was cinder-blocked, but there another rough doorway directly ahead, and I could hear voices coming from it. Bill headed for it.
The room was shored up by rock and timber and there were lights along the wall so it was dim. I’d never been claustrophobic, which was lucky because I could see the bottom of huge slabs of rock forming the ceiling at the low spots.
A few dozen people were moving around and looking at items spread on folding tables. There was a lamp or lantern at each one. The tone was convivial and interested, and some waved and said hello as we entered.
Bill led me around and made a few introductions. It was the first time I heard him use my name.
When he fell into conversation, I looked at the nearest table, which had an assortment of what looked like toe bones, maybe wrist and ankle bones—things that were relatively small and delicate, compared to the other tables. There was even a partial hand, though I didn’t know how many fingers were missing, or even if it was a hand rather than a foot. What animal was it?
The woman who was selling at the table smiled at me and said, “Hi, I’m Muriel. Bill told me about you. Welcome! As you can see, I like small bones.”
I suppose they were likeable, actually, though I couldn’t stop wondering about who or what had once owned them.
“Poor things,” I said.
The woman nodded. “I know what you mean, but these are old. Some of them, I think, were experiments. Things nature tried and decided against. You see this?” She picked up a strange treelike bunch of bones. “Fingers. I do love fingers. These are interesting because they’re twin fingers. See? Each finger has another finger right behind it. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” She held it out to me and I moved both hands to hold it carefully. I almost never did that. I was careful not to show my thumb so openly.
She smiled at me, and her eyes dropped to my hand. “Your thumb. Did you have an extra thumb?”
“I did,” I said after a moment.
‘Did you want it removed?”
“No. I was a child.”
She touched me gently. “That’s what’s so strange about biology. You still have nerves for that extra thumb. You can move it even when it’s not there. You feel that, don’t you?”
I had been hiding it all my life, so I smiled uncomfortably and moved on. I had been ashamed of having it; I didn’t want to be ashamed of losing it.
The tables had fragments of bones of all shapes and sizes. Bill led Coal from one to the next, lifting up items for him to sniff. When Coal was interested, Bill was interested.
There were also small spines, from small mammals. I was told that some of them were prehistoric, ancestors of our common rodents, and that there were weird variants—extra toes, curled toes, toes that were all in a line and toes that radiated like spokes. Some were for perching, some were for walking, and some might actually have been hands.
The only one who seemed friendly was Muriel, so I went back to her table. It was nice, watching her arrange her bones, which apparently wasn’t as haphazard as I first thought. She brought them out, placed them, frowned, moved some. I liked that each bone was important, and then felt a bit of a tingle because each bone represented an animal who had not wanted to die. It was odd how we became abstract so quickly. A fur was not an animal. A strip of meat was not an animal. A bone was not a part of life. I wonder if that’s universal? That we don’t revere the spirit and self-consciousness of the animals that we use.
“Some of these are human,” Muriel said, as if reading part of my thoughts. “Old, of course. We don’t—none of us—deal with anything less than, say, six hundred years old. Oh, yes, we can check age. We’ve got a remarkable range of talents in our group. Of course we would. We’re interested in the past, in what changed, in what continues. It takes a lot of different skills for all that. We even have artists who can reconstruct faces from skulls.” She stepped back and looked at her table again. “I’ve found some remarkable bones in my life. You can feel the age in them. Like an old rock that’s been warmed by the sun. Almost alive.” She was a little older than me, lean and tough, with short hair and a few tattoos. I liked how she never dropped her eyes when she spoke to anyone; most women did. I liked her respect for the animal remains in front of her.
I touched the bones and held them and placed them back carefully. “Animals? Human?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to define. Where one stops and the other begins.”
I felt Coal’s wet nose sniff my hand and then Bill showed up. “I bought this room at auction after Coal started digging here when I came to check it out,” Bill said. “He found a bone fragment, and then another one. Coal is the only dog who can tell an alien bone from a human one.”
“All he has to do is sniff,” Muriel agreed, and smiled. “He recognized you. You have the scent. You’re one of us. He can smell the scent of giants on you.”
It embarrassed me. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I stood there, my head lowered, pretending to look at bones, until Bill tapped me on the shoulder and we went back up to the street. He stopped for a moment and looked around. “That tooth I found? I just bought a parking lot on 18th Street. Maybe I’ll find a toe there.”
“They’re that big?”
“Depends on the age. They diminished. That tooth was from an early one, so yeah—that big. I find buying and selling real estate easy; I don’t know why I’m so good at it and others aren’t. I can keep it or sell it and whenever I sell it, I always make money.” He stopped and studied me. “What’s next for you? Do you want to be part of the future? Do you want to make the future happen?”
I said I didn’t know yet. This was new and wonderful and I had a lot to think about.
We were nearing the restaurant. “You on tonight?” he asked.
“Well no—or I couldn’t have gone with you. It’s almost ten.”
“Don’t be a smart mouth. Have a drink, then.”
I hesitated. What would a drink mean? For a woman, no drink was free or arrived without strings. He saw my hesitation and laughed. “I just want to hear what you think,” he said.
Whitey was at the bar. His glance ticked an extra second as we entered together, but then he lowered his head, waved his cloth to clean the bar, and filled a glass with whiskey for Bill, then pirouetted his hand and gave me a glass of white wine. Sauvignon blanc.
I didn’t notice until then that Bill had a bag with him. It was unobtrusive; a plastic bag with the handles tucked into his pocket so his own hands were free and his jacket covered it. He nodded and went back to the kitchen.
Where, I assumed, Tito was making bone broth. I sipped slowly and carefully.
Bill had brought back bones. He had collected them while I was talking to Muriel.
I felt very still.
My head was clicking, but it was hard to know how all these things added up. The aliens, if that’s what they were, and the bones. And Bill of course, with his hookers and his drugs. I liked new experiences, but the drug scene required more camaraderie than I liked. You had to know people to score drugs, and invariably you had to share with someone or help someone find drugs, or bail someone out or call 911—I wasn’t that fond of people.
Bill had drugs and met with people in cars, and had whispered conversations. Or was it drugs? I hadn’t tried any of what was in those bags in the storeroom. But I’d made sure to dust some on my clothes because I knew Coal liked it, and that made Bill accept me.
And there was bone broth. Made from those bones Bill brought back.
I shrugged, took another sip of wine, and turned slightly to see that Bill was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, just watching me. He came over and asked, “So, do you want to work next Tuesday?”
I did.
*
Tuesday was quiet for a while, but then the man I’d seen at the dig—Lenny—came in and sat at the bar. I saw some vague-looking people who asked for a menu and stood by the bar discussing it. Tourists. Most likely, they came to see the prostitutes.
Then came some I recognized from the bone swap. Muriel said she was happy to see me again. “So you’re staying?”
I glanced around the room. “It’s my job. Yes.”
“I mean with the group.”
“Oh yes. Sounds good.”
She winced a little. “He hasn’t really explained, has he?”
“About the giants? The aliens? Yes, he did.”
“I mean, about what we do.”
I took my orders the old-fashioned way, with a pad and pen. I even wore an apron. Sometimes I thought of snapping gum, but I had a loose tooth. I pretended my pen didn’t work and fussed with checking my pockets. What did her question mean? What did they do? What was I missing?
“Soup?” I asked.
She laughed a little. “It’s why we’re here. Why each one of us is here.” She raised her eyebrows. “You understand what the soup is made from, don’t you?”
My smile froze and I said I had to take the orders to the kitchen.
“You didn’t mark them,” Bill said, looking at the slips of paper.
“Mark them how?”
He bit his lower lip lightly. “Well, whether they’re from the community or not. You know, the people you met the other night, and people like them.”
I raised an eyebrow. “How would I know if they’re ‘like’ them?”
“It’s in their voice, in the way they look. You’re not stupid. Now, tell me which is which.”
He was right, of course; I could tell.
They tipped well, these friends of Bill. I had never made so much money and for a while I deluded myself into thinking that I was, indeed, a good waitress. I just needed the right crowd to bring out my talents. They were delighted to be together and their voices mingled and one would lean over from his table and say hello to the next table, or a woman would get up and move to a friend’s table for a chat. They were always pleased to see me when I brought their orders, saying, “It’s so nice to see you again” or “Bill thinks you’re great!”
I felt taller, brighter, sweeter, smarter. I had found my people, I thought—or these weren’t my people but showed me that there could be people, that I could belong and be welcomed. It was heady stuff. My cheeks ached from smiling.
All this because of bone broth. It required a bit of a leap, but they liked me and I didn’t care that all these people dealt in bones, stolen I suspected, hidden, traded and potentially turned to soup. I didn’t care about morality or mortality or anything because they were so nice. And they must think I’m nice, I told myself over and over.
Each special table had bone broth in ceramic bowls. The tourists had bone broth in plain gray bowls. I thought I could detect a difference in smell between them—the bone people’s broth was deeper, headier, I thought. Earthier? The liquid in the bowls was clear and fragrant. It looked innocent. It looked pure.
For a moment, I accused myself of heresy. They were animal remains.
I saw Bill watching me a few times, in between chatting with people at tables and checking on the orders in the kitchen. He nodded at me encouragingly, waved me over to introduce me to someone who wasn’t in the swap when I was there—all as if I were special, valued, needed.
It was perhaps the most successful night of my life. My pockets were stuffed with tips, and the sweet sound of laughter and joyful goodbyes kept me company all night.
I’d been welcomed in, and it felt good, even if it didn’t last. I knew I didn’t belong, not really. Bill and Muriel trusted Coal, but I had cheated by dusting myself with powder.
*
I was still thinking about the powder the next night. Tito was, as usual, boiling his soups when I went to work, and I could hear the bones rattling around. I hadn’t been paying attention to what and how he cooked, but now I confirmed that there were two bone broth pots. The bones had been removed from the big pot, and the other had bones rattling and was the soup he used for ordinary orders.
Since there was a difference in bowls, there was obviously a difference in bone broths. “Wow, that was a busy night last night,” I began.
He sucked his teeth (he always did that). “Always is on Tuesdays. His friends, the history buffs.”
I nodded. “They’re a happy bunch.”
He laughed. “I like them too.”
I watched him do prep for the evening—dicing, washing lettuce, preparing meats.
“So there are two bone broths?” I asked casually.
He stopped and gave me a quick look. “Well,” he said. “Sure. Old and new.”
My heart quickened a little, but I was expecting this so I just nodded. “Old bones and new bones,” I said, and he said Uh-huh and banged the bones around.
It was a slow night, with only a few customers, and Bill had left. I decided to keep my eye on the soups every time I came in with an order. The pots stayed there all night, and the big pot cooked down lower and lower. It was almost a syrup by the end of my shift, when I saw it had been poured into metal bowls and left out to cool. By the end of the night, the pot was full again with fresh bones and water, boiling away. Starting all over.
The next time I worked, there was a fresh bag of what I had thought were drugs in the store room.
I looked out the kitchen door, which was open to let in some fresh air, and noticed that there weren’t any cars stopping for hookers. There was only one hooker, who looked forlorn. I went back to the front, and Muriel was at the bar. She waved at me and I sat with her. I was glad to see her.
“So,” she said, lifting a finger for the bartender, who nodded and brought her a beer. “Are you in or out?”
“What would I be in, if I were in?”
She laughed loudly and rocked back a little. “God! Bill isn’t doing a good job of explaining, is he? He’s got his uses, but maybe not as many as I thought.”
I realized suddenly that I had made a mistake. Bill wasn’t in charge; Muriel was.
“Maybe you can tell me, then,” I said. “I never get told anything directly. So what if there were aliens? So what if you make soup from their bones? So what if Coal smells aliens on me? What am I missing?”
She looked at me steadily, thoughtfully. “About the aliens,” she said gently. “This planet couldn’t give them what they ate, what requirements they had for living, for breeding, for raising their kind. They were stuck on a world that wasn’t meant for them. Of course they suffered. I think—we all think—they barely managed to survive. And who knows—gravity? Air?—this world wasn’t exactly what they needed. They ate humans, but they have a very different DNA. For whatever reason, their DNA adapts. Maybe they decided to eat the people they found not only because they were hungry but because it was the only way the whole bunch of them, the whole species of them, could adapt. They began to incorporate the human part, I think. We think. We knew there was cannibalism, but it took a while to determine that the cannibalism itself was a means to an end. They became more human as they ate the protohumans. We’re sure of it. We don’t know everything, but we know that.”
“What else do you know?” I asked. “Something you’re sure of but no one else is sure of?”
She grinned, a wide open marvelous grin. “I think they were a matriarchy,” she said. “I think there were more women than men when they arrived, and that it caused a population explosion for a while, and that’s why they dispersed and moved to so many areas. Because, think about it—if it had mostly been men, with very few breeding women, not much would have happened. A few children, who had no choice but to breed in, and then a lost species. So there must have been enough women to start a society.”
Every time Bill had said “giants” I had thought of men. He said “aliens” and I thought of men. I hadn’t thought whether there were women, though there must have been. And now Muriel suggested that the women were key.
“Imagine a world where women were significant!” she said. Her grin caused her cheeks to rise and she sat tall and straight.
“So what exactly do you do?” I asked. “Why do you drink that soup?”
I saw Whitey nod to some tourists who were standing at the door, and he waved them over to a seat and gave them menus.
“Wherever they came from, they had the ability to incorporate local DNA. Their genes mixed with ours. Added their pairs to our pairs. Not only that, their DNA survives. Even in bones thousands of years old, their DNA can be collected and used. We’ve tested this; it’s true. When we drink the soup we make from their bones, we add a fraction, a sliver, of them to our own makeup. And we can pass it on!” She was triumphant. This was what thrilled her. I felt a slight dizziness, and a temptation. A great temptation to believe and to revel in the belief.
“So you’re breeding giants,” I said. It might have been a little high-pitched, because Muriel gave me a long, slow stare.
“Oh, sweetie,” she said, “don’t disappoint me. Us. This is an adventure.” Her voice was rich and soothing and she tapped my shoulder. “A lot to take in, I know. But—you’re a loner, aren’t you? Never quite fit in? Never quite got what everyone else was impressed with? We all understand that. It’s just that little bit of alien DNA in you; it has been to the stars—hell, it came from the stars!” She sighed. “Stop and think about that—close your eyes.”
I did.
“Imagine looking out a portal at the vast blackness studded with stars. So many it seems insane. Layers of them, near and far, revolving by you as you pass them. Far off, a planet, and then another. It’s impossible! You strain to visualize all that’s out there. Nothing like this—” I opened my eyes and she waved her hand around the sad-looking bar, the grinning bartender, the tourists hunched together. All of it suddenly looked . . . small.
From then on I seemed to live in two different worlds. I walked among the general order of people, the people I thought I’d belonged to though I never felt completely comfortable with them—and the alien mix. When I went to the swaps, they smiled at me, and I could trace a certain cheekbone or eyebrow or short legs through their forms. Or maybe I just wanted to see some kind of physical likeness as the last sign of our heritage.
As for the bone broth, it was made from those bones that Coal showed the most interest in, which were the bones likely to be from those who had more giants’ blood in them. Over the centuries, and as the globe burst with homo sapiens, the percentage had dropped. Older bones had a higher percentage of giant DNA.
“Bone broth uses bone marrow. That’s what we look for,” Muriel said. “Bone marrow contains stem cells.”
“They’re dead,” I said.
She shook her head. “If you test our soup, you’ll find regenerated cells.”
I had once taken a science class in high school and what little I remembered argued strongly against this concept. But I wasn’t sure. “So what if we eat regenerated cells? It still passes through us and out.”
“Not these. We want our bodies to absorb the giants’ marrow, adapt to it, and then we’ll reproduce and we’ll gradually populate the earth again. And this time, we’ll survive.”
I had to think this through. I had to check a few basics in genetics—of course, that would only relate to human genetics. We didn’t know what alien genes did.
“Okay,” I said. We were at the restaurant, before the doors opened. Muriel often stopped by to see me, and we discussed the places where bones had been discovered, the way the aliens had grown smaller over time, and how the bones told a story. My feelings about the broth kept changing.
“We have a few other groups we’re in touch with,” Bill said, coming up behind me. “If they can’t come and eat the soup, we ship out powdered soup.”
“I thought those bags held drugs,” I admitted.
He laughed; Muriel laughed, too, looking around with amusement. “A different kind of drug, maybe. But there’s more to it than the soup alone. You see, as our bodies accumulate more giant DNA, that’s great, but it won’t change us. It will change our descendants. We have to mate within our population to increase the chances of actually producing more and more giants each generation. You see?”
“This is a breeding program,” I said, finally unable to avoid saying it.
“It’s an improvement of the race. Our hidden race,” Muriel said. “There’s nothing scary about that. Don’t be swayed by human history. That’s their species, not ours. A species that eliminated us. We’re just trying to get back to our basic genetic code. We were bred out; we want to be bred back in.”
“But then what? What happens after giants roam the earth again?”
I could feel the emotions rising high. I could feel hope and expectation and a certain amount of gloating.
“Why, then we’ll win,” Muriel said. “We’re tired of being small, when our steps should thunder and the lesser animals scatter away. That’s what we’ll return to—not us, but our children’s children, our ancestors and future at the same time. Can you see that? What a wonderful thought.” She shook her head.
I was caught, for a moment, between the implications of what was at its heart a race war, and the thought of it, and of the community I belonged to. I admit it; I liked them no matter how questionable their beliefs were.
Because of them, I was uplifted. I dreamed of a different world. I dreamed of something bigger, firmer, unlike the world the humans were destroying.
Of course I would eat the broth. After all, the bones were thousands of years old. Soil was made up of decayed plants and animals, and I ate things from the soil. To a certain extent—not that I was sure of it—these were no longer bones but minerals that looked like bones. Just like a fungus that consumes a fallen tree but keeps its shape.
“We’ll refine our genes,” Muriel said, her voice warm and inspired. “I wish we could live to see it. We have to be content with our role, with our purpose. The world is going to shit because we’ve been diminished, because the wrong genes got the upper hand. Think about it. We came, a superior being, and got trapped here with lesser beings and over time, over centuries, we became them. It should have been the reverse. They should have been absorbed into us!”
“How many of us are there?” I asked, and I realized then that I was already one of them.
“It varies from continent to continent, or land mass to land mass. South America has a high percentage, as does Russia. Less so in India and Africa. None in Australia. You can start with the crater and track the journeys based on the percentages. It’s a marvel.”
“It is,” I said. “I’m astonished.”
“And look here,” she said, pointing to a box on her table. “A perfect alien thumb.” She lifted the lid and took it out reverently. “I’ve been searching for it, for you. And here it is.”
It was a double thumb.
The last of my doubts flew off like swans. I had found my order of being. I would be the mother of giants and the head of a new race, propagating generations of daughters, stronger and taller in each iteration, daughters who would make the earth tremble with their stride.
Bill approached me with a bowl of broth. Muriel stood up beside him. It was Tuesday, and the room had filled with the members from the bone swap. I knew every face in the room, and every face was watching me. Whitey had kept out the tourists.
Tito poked his head through the doorway. “Best soup in the universe,” he said, and ducked back into the kitchen.
I told myself I was not eating animals but incorporating my own kind. It was a communion, a confirmation of possibilities. If nothing else, I could stop dusting myself with the powder in the storeroom. Coal would sniff the giants on me once I drank the broth.
And I would be a giant! It would be a purer version of me, as if I were whole again, as if the thumb that had been ripped away from me were still there and thriving. I sipped politely at first, but then I raised the bowl and gulped it down.
And asked for more.