Laurie walked her to the porch and pointed her in the direction of the river. “Keep going west and you’ll hit it.” The porch rails had begun to crumble, the barn to sink into the ground. The land a slow quicksand, reclaiming and erasing. And Laurie—did she notice? Boyd made a promise to herself that after she found Isaac, she would make her way back here, that she would sit in the chair and read to Angie, speaking the words of others, both dead and alive, into a palimpsest of time and place. Boyd was starting to learn how this earth worked: everything that came before bleeds through.
She waved and set out walking, and the dog followed her, but only to the fence. Then she was untethered again, waist-high in bloodweed, heading in the direction of the river smell.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
So Many Animals Are Already Extinct Here
Well, of course there are a bunch. There was another time, practically another earth, once. A time of, as they call it, megafauna. The animals larger than the ones we have now, the oxygen concentration so high that it would support extraordinarily large life.
In this era alone, this time of megafauna after the land had emerged from the ocean, we had the great Columbian mammoths, an animal hard for a modern human to imagine: thirteen feet high at the shoulder, with hulking, curving tusks. The Camelops, a genus of camel so ancient that we cannot determine whether it was humped. Dire wolves. A crazy animal called a glyptodont, basically an armadillo the size of a Volkswagen. Saber-toothed cats and scimitar cats, and short-faced bears. All of these things disappeared before 5000 B.C.E., and most faltered in what we call the Quaternary extinction event. Storks and eagles and owls and woodpeckers.
There is a cave north of Austin, discovered when a highway was built. They drilled down to take core samples, trying to see if the spot could support an overpass embankment. Thirty-three and a half feet down, the drill bit hit open air. They drilled a bigger hole and lowered a man down, and he alighted on a patch of petrified bat guano in a vast room, part of a series of underground caverns that stretched for miles.
In the cave are bone sinks, the remains of prehistoric sinkholes. Animals fell into these and didn’t come back out. Forty-four species of bones, eleven of which are now extinct: a leopard frog, a saber-toothed cat, dire wolves, spectacled bears, mammoth, equus, peccary, glyptodont, ground sloth, four-horned antelope, camel. All of these animals were once here, and now they’re not. In this case, they have been preserved for us to study, bones underneath a highway.
3:45 P.M.
Carla followed in Boyd’s footsteps, trailing the scarecrow, too, though she didn’t yet know it. In her haste, she had stupidly worn yoga slings out of the house, and they were spectacularly unsuited for the mud, remaining behind for a split second after her foot. She had gone first to Boyd’s house, knocking on doors and windows. Getting no answer, she had tried the doorknob, and it had given way underneath her fingertips. Inside had been the dead air of an empty house: a stillness, a staleness. She crossed the threshold and knew at once that neither Lucy Maud nor Boyd was there.
Behind her, her own house waited, but what was there for her? No one. She didn’t know how, but Boyd was somehow bound up in this storm, along with the snakes and the lack of electricity and the way the sage smoke had hung in the air. More than anything else, Carla was curious—where had Boyd gone? More than this, however, was the sense of being propelled forward by the atmosphere itself.
That unnamed dread remained, that trick of the low air pressure that had driven her from her house, the sick feeling that had gotten her thinking that the world was out of balance and would need something to put it right. Now there was a mystery: the empty house but her own truck in the front yard. So she’d gone outside, seen the footsteps, and followed them. At some point, she’d become aware that there were two sets of footprints. Now she stood at the waterline, one hundred yards up the slope from where it usually stood, and the prints diverged: one set headed to the left, toward the dam, and one set headed into the bowl at the foot of the dam.
She couldn’t very well head into the water, so she followed the set of footprints that headed upriver, and soon she found herself in the field of boulders at the foot of the dam. Though it still drizzled, the water here was beginning to recede, and she was able to hop from great stone to great stone despite her poor choice in footwear. The dam was five hundred yards in front of here, slightly to her right, and the floodgates were open, a sight she hadn’t seen in years. The two twin towers on the dam were manned, she knew, and when she came within a certain distance to the dam, some warning system would be activated and she could be arrested. She veered left, just enough so that she could climb to the crest and see what she could see. With no footprints on the boulders, Carla had no way of knowing which way Boyd had gone.
The climb was arduous, and soon Carla found herself on her hands and knees, scrambling up a granite face, coming to the top, and finding herself face-to-face with pencil cactus and raccoon scat. She stood and dusted her hands and looked for the ways to scale the next bit of hill. Finally, she reached the top, looking first upriver toward Horseshoe Bay, then down to the lake, seeing her own house, along with Lucy Maud’s, on the finger of cove where the lake began. Nobody had come to get her, and brown water still coursed merrily through the floodgates, and the high windows at the twin towers of the dam were just as blind as ever, revealing nothing about who was inside or what those people thought or did.
Above her, the river was swollen, choppy like surf. The banks were submerged and the place where the river met the land was unused to this contact: it crumbled like a cookie dipped in milk. Ahead of her was Horseshoe Bay, and she knew that around a bend or two, she would find a house and a boat ramp. Carla faced a choice: forward, or back toward her house, toward the long stretch of river before it opened into Lake Marble Falls, and the river bend before her held such a possibility that, without much thought at all, she moved in that direction. Behind her was dread, the trick of the air pressure, the way she felt the storm before she saw it. Ahead was, if not hope, relief. She patted her pockets. She had nothing: no ID, no phone, not even her keys. She certainly had no water or sustenance, which seemed important only because she had no actual destination, only a direction that felt perpetual: up. Her first step off the limestone and granite found her shoulder deep in bloodweed, still able to see the river but just barely.
She heard them before she saw them and certainly before she felt them, their silky coursing bellies, the flicks of rattle-less tails. It was if the weeds were whispering to her. She could almost understand the language. Boyd would have understood it, understood what the earth was trying to say. Carla was so close to being that person, that conduit, but she must have gotten something wrong. Some communication wires must have been crossed, because with the next step, a flash of black, a flash of pain, and then two bright drops of crimson on her heel where the fangs had sunk. The snake gone, unidentified, Carla bleeding into the ground.
3:50 P.M.
Carla had not answered her phone, of course. Lucy Maud stood in Aunt Fern’s front yard, her soon-to-be ex-husband’s hand on her shoulder, Aunt Fern in her own little world on the porch, nodding to herself, Louisa May standing next to her, towering over. The bridge was out, the army had been there but was now gone, and Boyd was nowhere to be found.
“Well, now—” Kevin was gearing up to make a speech. Lucy Maud knew him too well, knew he didn’t have anything particular to add to their situation, but that he didn’t like this raw emotion that felt like panic, and he considered it his job to orate them out of it.
She placed her flat palm on his chest. “Listen, Boyd is probably at home. For whatever reason, she’s not getting a signal. I’m sure it’s just the weather.” She sensed her soon-to-be ex-husband deflating, the air in his chest releasing, a relief that he didn’t have to take control. “I’m going to call 911 and see if they can’t get someone out there to check on her. Lou, can I use your house phone?” Lucy Ma
ud didn’t wait for an answer but headed right inside.
They trailed her like cans stuck to a newlywed’s bumper, except for Fern, who laughed aloud, quick and staccato, then looked up to the sky. They milled around Lucy Maud in the kitchen as she dialed, resting her elbows on the countertop.
The dispatcher answered after the third ring. “Nine one one, what’s your emergency?”
Lucy Maud hesitated. “My daughter is stranded. A bridge is out.”
The woman, clinical and efficient, paused. Lucy Maud imagined her typing something, headset on. “Where is she stranded?”
“She’s at my house, down on River Road, but I can’t get to her because the bridge has washed out.”
Another pause. “Age of the child, please.”
“She’s eighteen.”
Another pause, and this time Lucy Maud sensed judgment. When the woman replied again, Lucy Maud sensed that the woman had gone off script. “Is the house underwater or something? Is it flooded, or about to be?”
Lucy Maud knew from this that no help was coming. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I can’t get down there.”
A beat. “Ma’am, I understand your concern, and on any other day I’d send somebody down there. But we are stretched thin this afternoon. With real emergencies. Did you know houses washed away in Wimberley? Whole houses. With people in them.”
The description of a real emergency did not make Lucy Maud feel better.
“Ma’am, unless there’s a real emergency, with a person in imminent danger, it’s not a call for 911. You might try 311, the nonemergency assistance line, but resources are being triaged. You’re not likely to get a welfare check today.”
Lucy Maud rested her forehead on Aunt Fern’s cabinet. “Can you take my information, just in case?”
The woman hesitated. “Sure. But nothing will come of it.”
When Lucy Maud gave her name and address, then a brief description of what Boyd looked like, she wondered if the dispatcher was even writing anything down. She thanked the woman—for nothing, she thought—and turned back to the group.
Kevin had his back to her, staring out the window. Fern was still on the front porch. But Lou stood with her hands clasped at her waist, eyebrows drawn together in worry. “I should never have left her by herself on the bridge.”
Lucy Maud shook her head. “You didn’t leave her by herself, though. You left her with the army.”
Interrupted from his window staring, Kevin said, “National Guard,” as if it made a difference.
“National Guard, then.” Lucy Maud tried to hide her frustration, then wondered why. Hiding her frustration with this man had not kept him faithful. “What the hell difference does it make?”
Kevin looked up, surprised. “They’re not the same.”
Lou said, “I left her with a soldier named Sam.”
“Thank you,” Lucy Maud said in exasperation. “And that soldier likely took her home, right? And he wouldn’t have left her anywhere it wasn’t safe. Wherever she is, which is probably home, she’s safe.”
Lou nodded, the movement both quick and grave. “I wouldn’t have left her otherwise.”
“I know you wouldn’t have. She’s fine.” Lucy Maud had hoped that Lou would reassure her, but instead, Lou’s hesitation had the opposite effect.
Lou nodded again, and outside, Aunt Fern laughed at who knew what, the sound musical and sharp, entirely out of context. What to do? What to do? Lucy Maud felt the need to pace, felt there would be some relief in a measured walk of the room, hands clasped behind her back. But she didn’t, and instead she thought of Ruben King, calling to get her to contact Isaac, spouting a bunch of nonsense about Maximilian and Pedro Yorba, names she’d heard before but couldn’t remember from where. She would call Ruben.
She patted her pockets, then searched through the purse slung over her shoulder. He had been so secretive on the phone. He’d found something, he’d said. Maximilian, he’d said. Pedro Yorba. When she pulled out her phone, she googled the name. She got nothing on Pedro Yorba, only pages about the Nigerian Yoruba diaspora. Then she googled Maximilian and Texas and she found a message board that simply read “Maximilian’s Treasure Found?” When she clicked through, she found a post that said that Maximilian’s treasure had been found by Jesse James and a group called Knights of the Golden Circle. The post’s author claimed that Maximilian had survived the firing-squad execution, that he had been saved by Dr. Frank James, that he paid the Knights of the Golden Circle ten million dollars to help him recover his treasure, and that he changed his name to John B. Maxey. The rest of the thread mocked this original poster.
Good Lord, was this what Ruben King had been talking about? She’d never taken him for a nutcase, just an old hippie who had fled to the Hill Country when Austin had changed, as so many of them had done. Was she supposed to take him seriously? And what if Boyd had gone looking for Isaac, who had been looking for Ruben? She dialed the last number in her phone.
“Isaac?” Ruben answered on the second ring, his voice breathy and high-pitched. She thought he was a fool for treasure hunting now, as the world was ending.
“No, it’s Lucy Maud, Boyd’s mother.” She made eye contact with Kevin, who watched her. She thought he might be impressed with her decisive nature, with how completely she’d taken charge. Well, fine. She liked to take charge, was good at it, even. He had just never let her.
“Is Isaac with you? How did you know to call me here?”
“You called me from this number earlier. And Isaac is not with me.”
A hesitation. “When you see him, will you tell him to call me? Listen, I found—I need to talk to him. I’m at Allen Potivar’s, on Nameless Road. We found something, but we don’t know what it is.”
Had Ruben always been like this? She didn’t remember thinking before he was so flaky. Eccentric, yes—to Lucy Maud, Ruben’s obsession with history bore an amateur mark; he was not the scholar that Kevin was. “Ruben, I haven’t seen Isaac. And to tell you the truth, I haven’t seen Boyd. I’m looking for them.”
On the other end of the phone, he sucked in a breath. “Oh, yes, if you see Boyd, tell her to come, too. This is really quite a find out here, and I want Boyd to be part of it. Even if it’s not exactly treasure per se, it’s something. It’s history. Boyd would—well, I don’t have to tell you that she would love to be part of it.”
Lucy Maud rolled her eyes, but Ruben couldn’t see. She couldn’t imagine being married to this man. “Yes, Ruben, I understand that she might be excited about whatever it is that you’re doing right now, but the fact remains that I have not seen her.” Lucy Maud decided not to tell him about the bridge, or even too much about the storm, but she couldn’t resist a passive-aggressive dig. “And it’s raining, if you haven’t noticed.”
A silence on the other end as he considered this point. “I left a message for him,” Ruben said finally. “I expect him to be here soon. We’ve hardly slept or eaten out here. We’re trying to get down to this thing. Isaac should be here anytime.”
“Ruben,” she cut him off. “When did you leave the message? When was the last time you heard from Isaac?”
Another silence. “I haven’t talked to him for a couple of mornings. I left that message—well, I guess I left it yesterday.”
Isaac had left on the morning of the rehearsal dinner, and as far as Lucy Maud knew, he had not been seen since. Something was dreadfully wrong, and Lucy Maud didn’t know what to do about it.
She felt a restlessness born of frustration. “I’ll call you if I hear anything.” Before she hung up, she added, “You do the same.” Then, absently, her thoughts elsewhere, she went back to the message thread.
—Does the treasure even exist? Would anybody know it if they found it? Do we even know what it was?
—It was supposed to be 45 large barrels filled almost to the top with gold. Some jewels and some silver. On top of this was a layer of flour in case the group was caught. This was Maximilian’s own fortune,
the one he wanted to smuggle it out of Mexico and to Europe. But of course, he never made it.
—Do any of the stories say where it is buried?
—Where the mountains make a V. You look through a window rock that lines up with Castle Mountain, and this window will tell you where the treasure is buried.
Again she thought, That old fool. These hills weren’t mountains. She’d never even heard of a Castle Mountain. Yet it was hard to ignore that high pitch in his voice, a voice that usually had the slow and pleasant drawl of a longtime stoner. She closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to figure out what to do next.
7:45 P.M.
Boyd came across the body just as it was getting dark, the light low, centered behind the trees. For some time, she had noted debris in the canopies: twigs and sticks and branches and trash all caught in the short mesquite, all pointing the same direction, washed by the flood and laced almost deliberately wherever they had caught. An order to the chaos, but then, there had always been.
And then there was the man, draped around the trunk of mesquite, caught on what her mother called river teeth, the place where stuff snags. His shirt was missing, but his pants were still there, cornflower-blue jeans with Wrangler tabs sewn to the pocket, and his shoes were still on, leather chukkas of a nondescript taupe and no particular brand. The body was swollen with water and facedown, but Boyd knelt to look at the open eyes, brown and clouded over. The man’s mouth was agape, revealing the silver line of a dental bridge, the glint of golden molars. A smell to the open mouth, almost like respiration, but the body otherwise odorless, despite what she would have expected. She circled the body, wondering what to do, noticing the hook-shaped scar on the shoulder blade, glossy yet precise, almost surgical, though she couldn’t imagine what surgery had been performed in such a location. She guessed his age to be late sixties, the size of the belly revealing something about his health, though nothing else did, except for the scar.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 12