Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Two of the crew
members, Bonita, who was called Bones, and a man who would be best man at
Crevalle and Stella's wedding, at the end of the summer—Bones would be her Maid
of Honor—then went to the beach cottage to give the crew's side of the story.
The
man had served three years in the Army, out of high school, to get his military
obligation out of the way. So he was a
veteran, like Crevalle.
I
don't know what they said.
I
don't know if they said, "It's him or us," but they explained what
had been happening, in the PI's absence, at the site, between the XO and
Crevalle, and how it had gradually just gotten out of hand, until a tragedy was
narrowly averted.
Was
Crevalle's self-restraint heroic? Had he
passed a test?
Or
had he failed a test? Was he a pussy
who, when push came to shove, backed down?
Was he pusillanimous? A
chickenshit?
When
you're young, manhood is important. Respect
is important. You can't let some paper
asshole with a necktie on diss you.
At
the end of the day, when the rest of the crew drove to the house, the XO was
gone.
He
had left the dig. For personal reasons.
The
PI ate everybody's ass out and told them Bones was going to be in charge the
rest of the summer and if there were any more acts of disobedience there would
be hell to pay when he got back.
Then
he left.
The
rest of the summer was the best dig Crevalle and Stella had ever been on.
The inmates
were running the asylum.
Morale
was high. They had esprit de corps. They moved some dirt.
There
was laughter. Meals were fun. They were giddy with freedom.
At
the end of the summer, Crevalle and Stella got married.
The
whole crew knocked off at
Then
Crevalle and Stella spent the weekend at the student garret they had rented
near Lafayette Park, on McDaniel Street, across from the house of Jerome Stern,
the popular young English professor, for their honeymoon, returning to the dig
Monday morning to backfill the squares, pack the shovels, machetes, and trowels
in Cosmoline, until next field season, and wrap up the excavations for the
year.
Crevalle
and Stella took two weeks off between the end of the dig and the start of the
new semester, in the fall, getting to know each other.
The
first day of school, they went in to the Anthropology Department, to the lab,
which they both had keys to, and their keys wouldn't work, in the lab door.
Crevalle
banged on the door.
The
XO opened it.
He
looked at Crevalle and Stella with a shit-eating grin, like an egg-sucking dog.
"The
lab is closed to unauthorized personnel," he said.
"You
are unauthorized.
"Should
you need to come in the lab, you must have the PI's written permission, to do
so, and you must be escorted by the lab administrator, me, at all times."
Crevalle
and Stella were on the PI's shit list.
Crevalle
wondered if this meant their membership in the Order of the Blue Trowel had
been revoked.
Later,
Bones told them the PI had told her he wished he had foregone a season's field
work rather than let some obstreperous interloper interfere with the
organizational structure of the program he was trying to build.
Crevalle
was an upstart.
His
name was mud in archeology at FSU.
In
fact, the principal investigator would do his best to see that neither Crevalle
nor Stella could go anywhere else, in archeology.
They
would never work in Southeastern Archeology again, if the PI had anything to
say about it.