Them Bones

by Howard Waldrop

  ‘Well, I don’t have a spear hole in my chest, for one thing. Your outlook will improve once you get a few days’ rest and some food in you,’ I said, with a cheerfulness I didn’t feel.

  ‘They’re going to get us,’ he said. ‘I have the feeling.’

  ‘Well, maybe. I’ve still got two grenades and two shots.’

  ‘One for you, one for me?’ he asked.

  ‘I won’t like it any more than you will,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be better than the slab.’

  ‘I meant to ask you about that.’ A bird squawked and flew away. We waited. Nothing happened.

  ‘Your people seemed ready enough to die in the plaza. As soon as you saw me, you got your spunk back.’

  ‘When you’re heading for the slab, in the chief city of your enemies, you might as well go as befits a man or a woman. When your god comes to rescue you, you fight.’

  ‘But it was just me in the woodpecker outfit, you knew that.’

  ‘I knew that, and you knew that, said Took. ‘But the Woodpecker God also knew that.’

  ‘And he approved?’

  ‘I don’t know whether he did or not, but he let you do it,’ said Took. Then he grimaced in pain.

  ‘As soon as we get past the Huastecas, I’ll give you something for the pain. It’ll make you feel like you’re flying. But if I give it to you now, you’ll be unconscious for a day. I can carry you when we’re past them, but not while they’re around.’

  ‘We’ll put out at nightfall,’ said Took-His-Time. ‘Go north, then east. When we get to the magnolias, we have to leave the canoe and go overland again. We should pass the last Meshicas before midnight.’

  He lay back in the boat, nodding, jerking awake, sleeping fitfully. The sun crawled like a bright slug across the sky.

  Feet pounded by on the bank once. The alligator came back, smelled us, and crashed back out of his run.

  The sun dropped, then it was night.

  *

  We pushed the canoe back out into the water and set off through the magnolia-scented night.

  ‘Home is that way,’ said Took, pointing. I couldn’t see where he meant. ‘We’ll join the path we followed to go to the Flower War last month, remember?’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘All night. Then home.’

  I turned and hugged him, careful of his shoulder. We were using rags ripped from my shirt to stop the bleeding now.

  ‘We’re going to make it,’ I said. ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘The night is long, Yaz,’ he said.

  Right on cue an arrow whizzed by, then the darkness was full of Huastec whoops and hollers.

  There were five or six of them and I got them with my last fragmentation grenade. I didn’t kill them all, just put them out of commission. That woke up everybody, though. The night filled with sounds after the echo of the explosion died.

  ‘Which way are we going?’ I asked Took. I’d pushed him down into the boat, and his shoulder was bleeding again.

  ‘That way.’ He pointed. The wind was blowing about thirty degrees off that direction from our backs, gusting.

  ‘They’ll be between us and home, won’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let’s give them something to worry about besides us. Stay down.’

  I took out my last grenade, a Wooly Pete. I waded to shore, walked a few meters into the open space ahead. I went to a position about twenty meters from where the grass and underbrush were thickest. I pulled the pin and threw the white phosphorus grenade that way, ran ten meters and jumped behind a tree.

  WP grenades are so heavy you can only throw them twenty meters but they have a splash radius of thirty.

  A firestorm bloomed on the night. I saw the bones of my hand through the skin, it was so bright. I hoped Huastecas for kilometers around had been looking right at it; they’d be blind till morning.

  The fire climbed up trees, over grass, along the ground in a great red-orange and white wall. In no time it was a hundred meters wide and growing, pushed by the churning wind.

  ‘Don’t mess with the Woodpecker God,’ I said to myself.

  ‘Wow!’ said Took, who was up and watching from the canoe. The curtain of flames marched off toward the east, crowning trees, lapping at their trunks.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

  *

  We found the trail at the same time the Huastecas found us.

  They were to our left, the fire was to the right in a blazing arc a couple of kilometers long. The air was filled with escaping birds. The woods glinted with animal eyes, stopping and bounding away.

  The Huastecas yelled. We saw them by the light of the flames. They saw us the same way. There were a dozen of them half a kilometer away.

  ‘Can you breathe smoke?’ I asked Took-His-Time.

  ‘Maybe.’

  We ran for the fire, met deer coming out the other way. Before we even got close, smoke and hot air seared our lungs. An arrow flew by, its feathers bursting into flames as it ricocheted from a burning limb.

  ‘They won’t follow us in here,’ I said.

  Took slowed, jumped some embers, slipped, fell into a smoking bush. The air was filled with cinders; burning leaves coaled into my cheeks as I bent over him.

  Now there was froth on the blood from his wound. I took out the morphine injector, put it into his arm, and punched.

  He went to sleep.

  I pushed a few more strips of cloth into the wound, picked him up and put him over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I walked with my burden through the ragged towers of flame that closed us in on every side.

  Trees groaned and fell, spouting sparks, throwing fiery branches onto others. A smoking owl flew by. A raccoon ran into a hedge of fire. Smoke curled up from underfoot.

  The world was orange, red, smoky. Feathers on the woodpecker costume began to singe and curl. I stepped on something live; I think it bit me. I staggered into cul-de-sacs of heat and fire, and back out again.

  I walked until the bottom of the costume floated up around my waist.

  I was surprised to find myself in water.

  *

  I carried Took for a long, long time. I was numb now, my lungs were burned, my legs had lost all feeling. I couldn’t feel anything under them either. I slogged on through the water.

  All the animals were there. Every bit of high ground was filled with eyes reflecting the fires, from the ground up to the tops of small trees.

  Snakes and alligators swam by in the red-gold glare, bumping into my legs, backing off and going around. Something huge blotted out the light from the fire on one side, then was gone before I could see what it was.

  The deeper I went into the swamp, the stranger it became. The glow was from both sides now. The fire had ringed or crossed the bayou somehow. Mist sprang up. I could no longer see the water, just a moving curtain two meters high in front of me. Overhead, the stars were obscured by roiling patches of smoke.

  It got cold in spite of the fire. My teeth began to chatter. I was so tired I was trying to nod off as I walked. Things flitted in and out of my vision. I would jerk fully awake and they would be gone.

  There was a third smudge of light ahead; when the mists cleared for a few seconds I could see a blood-red moon with a bite out of it hanging in the east, like a half-closed rabbit’s eye.

  I was carrying Took now between cypress knees and stumps, thick and close-growing. The mists closed in again. I knew I was okay as I walked toward the glow that was the moonrise.

  I entered shallower water. Took was an iron weight across my back. I moved him, shifting him only a few centimeters. I was too tired to put him down and try again.

  ‘Isn’t he heavy?’ asked a voice, long and low and booming through the mists.

  ‘He’s not heavy,’ I said, ‘he’s my brother.’

  The moon was gone. There was a shadow before me on the water, black and long.

  I looked up. A gigantic cypress tree stood before me. It had a
limb halfway up that grew straight out from the trunk.

  I looked down again, quick as I could. There was something on the limb, something half as big as the tree, something that blotted out the moonlight and threw the shadow over me and half the clearing.

  ‘Who are you to wear the raiment of a god?’ asked the voice. ‘You do not believe!’

  My mouth wouldn’t work.

  ‘WHO ARE YOU?’ it asked again. The long crested shadow before me turned, as if its great eye were scrutinizing me.

  ‘I believe now,’ I said. ‘I believe in this!’

  ‘You have burned my woods!’ it said, its voice edging upward. ‘The lightning can burn my woods. Whole nations of men can burn my woods. One man cannot burn my forests!’

  The shadow moved menacingly. I jumped backwards. Took whimpered.

  ‘No more,’ I said. ‘Never again.’

  The shadow moved left and right as if surveying the damage all around.

  ‘I didn’t mean to burn your forests,’ I said. ‘I’m bringing Took-His-Time home. I’m bringing the raiment back to the temple. I’ll never touch it again as long as I live.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ said the dooming voice. It was quiet a moment.

  ‘Tell them all,’ it began, and its voice had changed, ‘tell them all a great judgment has come on them, and that I can’t help them any more.

  ‘All the gods are going tonight. We will not be back. Tell them they are on their own, tell them . . .’ And here the voice changed again, became a little less godlike, ‘tell them Hamboon Bokulla was right, he and the others. Tell them Death is God now; he is alive, he is walking. Tell them, Yazoo, that I wish them well.’

  The great shadow lifted from the water. The moon came back. The sound of flapping wings, huge, close, grew lower, farther away to the west, was gone.

  I heard its cry from far off, once, twice, sounding like ‘Good god, good god.’

  ‘Good God!’ I yelled. ‘Good God!’

  The sun was coming up. The fire was dying all around. I pulled Took from my left shoulder to change him to the other.

  He was dead.

  Bessie XIII

  They were losing the battle.

  Even with the highway crews and their machinery, the water crept up the dam.

  The state water people would neither close the gates upstream nor open those down. Rivers were out of their banks for miles, farms were being covered and lost. The Crimstead house across the way was swallowed up – the state police had come the day before to help them evacuate.

  Crowds had come to watch since the governor had paid his visit. LaTouche was charging them a dime apiece to watch. Two state troopers had been sent to keep them up on the bluff, out of the mound sites.

  Perch had caught a bad cold. They had made him go back to the Dixie Hotel. Their own work crews were reinforcing the dam. The highway crew was leaving; they were needed to save lives, keep bridges intact.

  ‘Just two more days,’ said Jameson. ‘Maybe we can find out in two more days.’ He looked up at the rain. ‘We’ll have both mounds down to the ground by then. It’s too damn wet to do anything right!’

  None of them, Thompson included, had had more than a few hours’ sleep for the last two days.

  Kincaid and Jameson had removed the conical mound, then started on the platform. All the grave goods were in two tents now. Broken pottery, pipes, weapons, the breastplate and head decoration of beaten copper, unidentifiable rusted things, more cartridges, shells, beaten gold ornaments were in the sorting tent.

  The second was full of skeletons, the first they’d exposed from the platform mound, one of the horses, the upright chief’s skeleton. Some of the skulls, exhibiting exit wounds, were in there among them.

  The weather had turned the others to powder as they were uncovered.

  The cook tent now covered the platform mound. Kincaid’s tent, and one other, were over the horse mound.

  Water had begun to trickle in through the sandbags. Kincaid sent the work crews to fill more and stack them.

  The crowd of onlookers squealed and moved back on the bluff. Their cars, trucks and wagons clogged the highway turnoff. Rumours ran through the crowd ten times a day – they’d found a mound filled with gold, with giants, with elephants, with a wagon made of silver. Washington brought the latest gossip from the crowd to them every hour or so.

  ‘How that stuff starts, I don’t know,’ said Bessie.

  Thompson was studying a long piece of rust. ‘This could have been a sword,’ he said.

  ‘Or a rifle,’ said Bessie.

  Thompson looked at her. She flipped her field notebook, making sure each specimen was catalogued by its proper grid mark. She put the book down on the camp table.

  ‘Dammit! We don’t know any more than we did the first day!’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got the chief, and the ID tags.’

  ‘That’s not the answer. That’s more the question,’ she said. There were oohing noises outside. Then yells near the mound. She stood up. She opened the tentflap. The skies were gray and rainswept. Down near the horse mound, several of the diggers were running back from the dam. A small jet of water curved out from it.

  ‘Pull the tents,’ yelled Kincaid nearby. ‘Get everybody up here!’ He stepped in, wet as an otter, his eyes red-rimmed. He slung his wet raincoat off.

  ‘It’s all lost,’ he said to Bessie. ‘We’ve got everything we’re going to find down there. The dam’s going. We’ll lose a few horse bones, some skeletons, maybe more grave goods. But there’s no answer down there. We’ll have to piece one together from what we’ve got here.’

  ‘I’ve come to the same –’ she began.

  There were whoops and hollers down the bluff. Kincaid stepped into the rain, yelled. ‘Get those kids outta there! The dam’s gonna go! Hey you! Troopers! Get –’ He began to cough, great coughs that turned into ragged sobs.

  Bessie held him while he cried.

  ‘Jameson, I need a drink,’ said Kincaid after a moment. ‘People let their goddam kids down there. They want them killed, I guess. I’m going to have a big drink and watch the dam burst. Coming with me?’ He and Jameson left.

  In a minute, she heard ‘Potato Head Blues’ crank up on the phonograph.

  She turned. Thompson had his head turned at an odd angle. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  He went to the table, turned her field book right side up.

  ‘Oh, I see. It’s the tents. For a minute, I thought you were drawing a defense perimeter.’

  Something went through Bessie like it had the night Bob Basket disappeared in the storm.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I see now. Nothing.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Your notebook. I looked at it upside down. It looked like a defense perimeter, a pentangle. Center command post, five bunkers around it. For defending ground like this. I see now it’s the mound, and two of the tents on the bluff, and these three things marked “shallow pits”.’

  ‘If you were in one of those, and wanted to hide something, where would you put it?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean in combat? Under siege?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked at the page a moment. ‘One of the bunkers. Under a bunker wall. They’d go by it on the way in. They’d search your command post with a fine tooth comb.’

  ‘Grab your shovel,’ said Bessie.

  *

  They could hear the water, up higher than their heads. They were in the one shallow pit beyond the mounds inside the dam wall. The dam loomed like a frozen wave, its sandbagged top like bad teeth.

  The crowd watched them expectantly. There were kids’ footprints all around where they dug.

  ‘Little hellions,’ said Bessie.

  ‘Uh, I don’t like that breach in the wall over there, Bessie,’ said Thompson. The small gurgle was now a steady dirty flow. Rain fell into their faces. The top of the bluff was a mushroom bed of umbrellas and sheets with face
s under them.

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Anything,’ she said. ‘We won’t find it. Give a yell when the wall gives way.’

  ‘Before then,’ he said.

  They worked on in the rain. ‘Potato Head Blues’ floated from the camp, made them work faster. The drainage pit the highway people dug was filling. Soon the water would rise and creep into the pit where they dug.

  ‘How will we know when we find anything?’

  ‘You’ve been digging through post mold for the last five minutes,’ she said. ‘Lots of it, more than for a wall.’

  There was a scream from the bluff. Some sandbags slid down the inside of the dam wall. Water sheeted in behind them.

  ‘Bingo!’ said Thompson. He put down his shovel. ‘Keep digging,’ said Bessie. He picked his shovel back up, dug in the wet earth.

  There was a crash behind them.

  They lived there for a year, Basket had said. They raised crops.

  ‘Look out!’ yelled a state trooper from above. They heard the dam tear.

  They thanked the catfish and the crow, he had said.

  Her shovel scraped something.

  ‘Help me,’ she said.

  Their shovels scraped. ‘Help me!’ she said.

  She found The Box.

  They grabbed at it, lifted. It cracked. Water sloshed into their legs. They held the box together and ran. Water hit the backs of their knees.

  ‘Kincaid,’ she yelled. ‘Help!’

  The dam burst.

  The trooper’s face was all eyes and mouth. Bessie fell. Something pulled her by the feet, upside down, up the bluff face. She didn’t let go of her hold on the box.

  A million gallons of water smashed the bluff face below her head.

  Upside down, she saw skeletons and horse bones flying around like tumbling dice.

  There was a small sign, too, that said SEE ROCK CITY.

  Leake XVII

  ‘Some bones make best skeletons, some bodies quick and speediest ashes.’

  –Browne, Urn Burial

  The village was quiet and there were no guards out.

  Then I saw the buzzards, some flying low, some sitting still in the trees nearest the walls.