The camp consisted of eight men: two archaeologists, a primatologist, two diggers, a research assistant, a medical doctor with sundry skills, and a historian who really had nothing to do with the excavation except that he was an investor. When the geneticist came, they had big expectations for her. They had been up in camp for months, away from civilization with nothing to look at but dirt, bones, and one another's bristly faces.
Her back to them, she tugged the laden mule over the shallow creek toward them. Her guide lumbered by lazily, merely serving the purpose of a compass-holder.
The large, sandstone boulders and scratchy brush shaded her, but most of the men, sitting and eating their canned lunches, saw she was not what they expected. She situated the mule, walked panting past the historian and the research assistant, and approached one of the archaeologists, a middle-aged man who still wore khaki shorts and was the foreman of the excavation.
As she and he muttered the necessary debriefings, the research assistant said to the historian, "Eh. She's not what I had hoped for."
"Why?" asked the historian, chewing a piece of dried fruit. "Not your type?"
He shrugged.
"What's your type? Blonde, leggy, Victoria's Secret model with a PhD from Stanford who happens to be attracted to skinny mouse-faced grad students?"
The research assistant flushed at the idiocy of his teenage expectations. The geneticist's long black hair, parted on the side and tied back in a bun that evinced a Spanish finesse, her tidy body, large almond-shaped eyes, the proud elegance with which she carried herself despite having just tugged a laden mule up the rocky hills without the male guide's help...well, this made her a classic beauty. A nerd-goddess hybrid who disguised what might have aroused men with little effort had she just worn something less...academic.
"I don't know," shrugged the historian, a 36-year old named Jack who loved funding these digs at ancient Native American sites, "I find her quite beautiful. But that's not the point. I'm not spending my money to hire scientists on the basis of how horny they make me."
"Alright, alright, righteous man," said the research assistant, and threw back the rest of his soda. "Eh, she's okay I guess."
A digger came up to sit by them, with a cheesy grin on his face. "So, who do you think'll bag her first?"
Jack let out an exasperated sigh. The research assistant perked up, and began to scan his colleagues. "Hmm. Most likely David. Hell, he's so smooth and gorgeous, sometimes I kinda hope he'd bag me," he joked.
Jack threw his arms up and left. The digger groaned and punched the research assistant in the arm, warning him to never joke like that again.
It was sort of true what he said about David. He was the primatologist, hired for his adept skills in osteology; he could identify a pea-sized chunk of bone from a mile away. Of Mediterranean descent, curly black hair, bad-boy eyes that would scare any man but melt any woman, it would have been anyone's guess that he was the one who could get her into his tent first. She was at a premium and could have her pick of the lonely men up there; the closest thing to an outlet they had for a couple months was when the occasional nudie magazine that was brought to camp by the Indian who transported their supplies from Northern New Mexico every week. They would tear out the pages and divide them amongst themselves, trading regularly so that each man had a different girl every day.
And, as is the power of anticipation, things pretty much turned out the way they had hypothesized: David putting the moves on her, because he had the best chance, he was the best-looking, the most virile, the most likely to pummel another male if he approached her, and various other nonsensical evolutionary crap that really shouldn't have applied to educated human beings.
What they didn't expect, though, was that he wouldn't succeed, and that at the end of three annoying weeks of being treated like the last piece of meat on earth, she told him, in front of all the other men: "What don't you understand? I am not in the least bit interested in you!"
A low "Ooohhh" from David's colleagues summarized their sympathy for his shameful failure, and ushered in a gradual change in the dynamic of the group. Suddenly, David wasn't the Adonis everyone thought he was. Thankfully he took it like a man, though sometimes he grumbled about why
she
would turn
him
down.
One by one, they started poking their heads out of their holes and giving things a shot; perhaps she liked the poet type (so one wrote her a poem about deer frolicking in a meadow), perhaps she liked the pacifist type (so one talked endlessly about his days volunteering at a homeless shelter), perhaps she liked the genius type (so one would frequently bring up "Those days at Harvard...") and on and on and on, until finally, she told them, "Look. I'm a lesbian, okay?"
"Why didn't you tell us that before we embarrassed ourselves!" the research assistant said in agony.
She shrugged. "Because people aren't too tolerant of homosexuals."
The only ones who hadn't solicited her...feminine abilities were the foreman (he was too old for her and mature enough to know better) and the historian, Jack (thinking "These assholes are making me look bad").
The geneticist pretty much kept to herself. Bent over microscopes, doing various tests, complaining that there is only so much she can do with old shards of bone.
One time, seated alone at one end of the camp, the digger said to her, "Why don't you pull up a chair when you use your microscope? We're sick of staring at your ass when you're bent over like that."
Snickers. She continued eating her beans and ignored him.
But the digger pushed. "Say, how long does it take a lesbo to get unbearably horny? I guess it's only a little while until she asks one of us to put on a dress and eat her up!"
Only the brave dared to laugh. Jack stopped eating his Spam sandwich only long enough to point his finger at the digger. "Josh, get your ass off this camp. I don't care if you have to hitchhike to Albuquerque. I'll mail you your paycheck. Andy, you're helping with the digging until I can get someone else up here."
