Hudson Hendricks stood watch in the Greek and Roman Gallery of the Weingarten Museum. He stood off to the side to be unobtrusive. That had been one of the first things he had learned in his security guard training. Blend in. People are here to see the artifacts, not you.
Hudson wore an oxford blue shirt, unstarched yet pressed, although not very well pressed, a pair of gray slacks that fit him ten years ago, but now he had to leave the top button undone, and a blue blazer, which a friend had bought him at the thrift store just for this job. His feet (and all their problems) rested nicely in a pair of thick, crepe-soled, black shoes. His rayon blue socks bunched up at the ankles, but fortunately, no one could see this because his pants were about an inch too long. He didn’t have anyone to take the pants up. His friend had suggested he go to the Korean laundry, but Hudson wasn’t much of a driver. Actually, he’d never had a driver’s license.
The lights were low in the Greek and Roman Gallery, the walls wooden and honey-hued, the floor marble. There were four visitors in the gallery: a young mother and her child and a man and woman. The man looked bored and talked too loudly. Hudson had no idea what he could have been talking about. Obviously, he wasn’t taking the artifacts seriously. He cracked jokes. The woman he was with politely giggled. Then she would admonish the man with a play slap on the arm, and he would dial down the volume for a while.
The woman with the child looked Middle Eastern or maybe Hispanic, with raven black hair and pronounced eyebrows. Hudson liked a nice pair of eyebrows on a woman. (It reminded him of his mother.) The young woman wore a purple floral dress and had slender legs. Her shoes were no-nonsense flats. The child was definitely hers; he looked like her. He wore a T-shirt with the name of a baseball team on it, a pair of blue shorts, and tennis shoes with untied laces. One of his knees had a massive scab. He was young, probably six or seven. Hudson wasn’t sure about that. He had never had children. If pressed, he would have guessed six. The boy had a babyness about him that made Hudson think he might have been younger.
Hudson discreetly looked at his watch. Twenty minutes to closing. He stifled a yawn. That was in the training, too. Never look bored. How could anyone be bored? Watching other people watch things was so interesting.
The man and woman exited the Roman and Greek Gallery and entered one of the special exhibit rooms in back. Hudson wasn’t in charge of that room, and he thought it contained something about Buddhism. Some sort of prints, perhaps? He’d seen the employees install the exhibit last week and had glanced at the prints. They were done with ocher-colored ink on thick paper. They were apparently worth a lot of money because the head curator had personally supervised the hanging of the show. The prints had come from someone’s private collection in Delaware.
Now, there was only the mother and child in the room. Hudson hoped that no one else would come in and start looking, especially not one of those people who read everything. They were the worst. One time, it took a man two hours to walk through just the Greek and Roman exhibits. Of course, reading everything slowly, reading, digesting, looking, reading, and looking again. As if he were going to be quizzed upon leaving. If he passed the quiz, he could leave. If he didn’t...well, it would be straight to the basement, food for the two Egyptian vultures that were kept down there. Hudson laughed at his own humor and his wicked imagination. There weren’t any Egyptian vultures in the basement. “And we quit doing human sacrifice eons ago,” Hudson whispered to himself.
“Excuse me! Sir!”
The lady with the child stood in front of Hudson. It’s amazing how fast the mind works, how fast whole dynasties of ideas and images can pass through your head in an instant. The first thing Hudson thought was how petite the woman looked. Almost like a little doll. Up close, she was prettier than she had been across the room.
Hudson cleared his throat. He wanted to do a good job of fielding the woman’s inquiry. Hudson had only recently been moved to the Greek and Roman gallery from the Egyptian room. The previous Greek and Roman room guard had gotten broken. And the museum hadn’t had time to train someone new. They asked Hudson if he could fill in until they found the right person.
Hudson had been happy with that. He felt like he had guarded the Egyptian artifacts since the time of the last pharaohs. Hudson viewed the Greek and Roman Gallery as a big step up. The art was better. In the other room, all they had were mummies and a few items on loan from the Egyptian government. Here, in the Greek and Roman gallery, there were statues and etchings of real men and women, beautiful, athletic, proportioned.
Hudson cleared his throat a second time. “Yes, of course; what can I do for you?”
The woman smiled. She had regular but large teeth, and her gums showed when she smiled, like a horse’s does when it whinnies. “I was wondering if you knew anything about those objects in the case across the room?”
One of the first things they tell you in training is not to answer questions. You’re simply not qualified. But Hudson felt he was somewhat qualified. For the past year, he’d been spending his evenings studying Greek and Roman art and history. He knew about Livy. He had read some Ovid. His friend had bought him a compendium of Greek and Roman art at a yard sale last year. It was a large, coffee table-sized book. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, for instance, was from the Hellenistic period, if memory served. It stands at the top of a wide flight of stairs in the Louvre in Paris. Now there’s a museum you can sink your teeth into. Better, Hudson thought, than the British Museum. Hudson had downloaded an app to his phone a few months ago to learn French. At night, when he couldn’t sleep in his cramped quarters, he went through the lessons. He dreamed of leveling up someday to a real museum like the Louvre. If only. Even just to visit.
Hudson glanced at the two security cameras in the ceiling across the room. He was being watched and recorded. “Well, a bit,” he said, smiling, answering the woman’s question.
The woman’s eyes were very dark, almost black, and they actually did twinkle, or was it just the lights in the ceiling reflecting off them? She smiled again.
“Which case are you interested in, and what object?” Hudson asked.
The woman walked across the room to the display case, and Hudson followed. So far, he had done nothing against regulations, the cameras with their little beady-eyed red lights be damned.
“This one,” the woman said. She pointed to a terracotta figurine of a man holding some sort of four-legged animal. The figurine’s bottom was cracked.
“Yes,” Hudson said. He cleared his throat. Glancing up at the security cameras as he spoke, he said, “Early archaic period, around seven hundred BEE-CEE-EEE. It’s got a hole in the top of the figurine’s head.” Hudson rose onto his toes to see the small hole at the top of the little statue.
The woman rose up, too, but she was too short to see. No matter. She smiled at Hudson anyway.
“It’s supposed to be a worshiper bringing an animal to be sacrificed. Found on the island of Cyprus, I believe. We only got this artifact a few months ago. Do you like it?”
“My son does,” the woman said. “He says it looks like a cartoon figure.”
“I want to see the hole, Mommy!” the little boy pleaded.
The woman bent down and picked up her son.
“Higher!” the boy said.
The woman tried to lift the boy higher, but she was too short, and the little boy was too squirmy to get high enough. She put her son down.
The boy tugged at Hudson’s trousers. “Can you lift me up, Mister?”
Hudson had been told during training that under no circumstances should he ever touch anyone, and that went double for children. He shook his head, no.
“Oh, it’s fine,” the woman said. “His father is quite tall.”
Hudson wasn’t sure what the father’s height had to do with anything, but the woman looked so relaxed, and the little boy was pleading. Also, he looked like he might start wailing if he didn’t get picked up to see the hole. So, balancing out everything, Hudson thought it best to pick the little guy up so he could see. Which he did.
The little boy was heavier than Hudson thought, but he didn’t squirm. Hudson wrapped his arm around the little boy’s waist, leaving one hand free to point to the hole. “See it there?”
The little boy nodded that he did, and Hudson put him softly back down on the polished marble floor.
“Do you know what that hole is for?” Hudson asked once the boy was safely in his mother’s protective sphere.
The little boy put his finger on his chin as if he were thinking. He was obviously a smart little guy. At least he acted smart. And, unlike some children who came through the Greek and Roman Gallery, he knew how to behave.
“Not sure!” the boy finally said.
Hudson looked at the mother. She shrugged and raised her perfect eyebrows up a notch to indicate that she didn’t know, either.
Hudson bent down slightly. “Well, of course, no one can know for sure, but the experts think people used to attach a string there and hang the figurine up.”
That made the little boy frown. “Why?”
Now it was Hudson’s turn to shrug. “I don’t think anyone knows for sure, but I’ve read that maybe these figurines were used in some sort of religious ceremony.”
That made the little boy smile.
Hudson’s phone, which he kept in his jacket pocket, buzzed. It was his alarm, and it was set for five minutes before closing. Every room in the museum had a security person like Hudson in it. And, at five till the hour, the security people in the back would begin their sweep toward the front. They started in the back of the museum and ended up either in the Greek and Roman Gallery or the Babylonian Gallery across the way, depending on which side of the building they were on. If a visitor were straggling, a guard would politely walk up to that person and explain that the museum was about to close and could they move along.
The Greek and Roman Gallery was the first gallery people walked through upon paying their entrance fee. So, it would be the last gallery to be emptied on Hudson’s side.
“Unfortunately, the museum is about to close,” Hudson said to the woman and her son. He smiled as he did so, and he meant it. She was nice, and the boy well-behaved.
The woman thanked Hudson, and her son insisted on shaking his hand, which Hudson didn’t want to do because of germs, but he did anyway. He didn’t want to hurt the little guy’s feelings.
“What’s that on your hand?” the little boy asked.
Hudson looked down and saw a twisted piece of linen that had fallen out of his shirt sleeve. He pushed the linen back into his sleeve. “Nothing,” Hudson said.
“Are you hurt?” the little boy asked. “That looks like a bandage.”
“You’re a very smart young man,” Hudson said, smiling at the little boy. “Actually, I hurt my elbow, and part of the wrapping has come loose. I’ll fix it as soon as we close the museum.”
“I’m a nurse,” the little boy’s mother said. “I can help you if you want.”
Hudson blushed. “It seems worse than it is. I’ve got it. The doctor told me to wear the wrap a couple more days. But I’m tired of it.”
The woman smiled at Hudson, and then she and her son left. They waved at Hudson as they walked out of the gallery. Hudson waved back. He liked them. They were polite and had treated him well.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
After sweeping the museum to make sure all the visitors were out, security guards had a variety of duties. Hudson’s was to activate the alarm in the Greek and Roman gallery as soon as everyone, including museum personnel, had exited. Hudson waited for the other security guards to leave. He then typed in the code to the alarm and shut and locked the door. Hudson always felt a little pang of regret when he locked the door and shut off all but a few lights. He missed most of the visitors at night. He would miss the mother and her little boy a lot. They were his type of museum-goer.
Dr. Craic, the head of the museum, was the one who had hired Hudson. He’d found Hudson in a dig close to five years ago. “I’ll give you a job, but you have to learn English,” he had said. Hudson had told Dr. Craic that he was quite good with languages. “And you’ll need an American-sounding name. Preferably one we can write with our letters.” Hudson understood. It felt like he had been waiting for this opportunity for millennia, and maybe, in a way, he had. “But you must never reveal our secret,” Dr. Craic had said. He had tapped the side of his nose like old Europeans do when they have a secret to keep. Although Hudson had never seen the hand gesture, he understood it intuitively. Don’t let anyone know!
Hudson glanced around the gallery one more time, then shuffled through it back to the Egyptian room. The room really was a snooze. Ten sarcophagi lined one side of the room, a few artifacts from wildly different eras lay displayed on tables and under protective glass out in the middle, and a condescending looped documentary about the place where Dr. Craic had found the artifacts played on a monitor hung on the wall opposite.
Hudson’s sarcophagus was the third from the front. He pushed the monstrously heavy stone lid over. Inside, Hudson had everything a 21st-century mummy needed: a tablet, a mobile device, a small lamp, a writing desk, and even a few snacks. Hudson liked those cheese puff things, although for someone who had no spit, licking his fingers always posed a problem. Hudson doffed his museum clothes. As he took off his shirt, the linen that wrapped his arm started to unravel. That’s what the little boy had seen. Hudson wrapped it around his upper arm better and tried to secure it. He’d already talked to Dr. Craic about it, but the man had to attend his son’s soccer game tonight. “I’ll drop by and re-wrap it next week. In the meantime, mummy’s the word.”
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