by Various
Years scatter before her like a school of minnows surprised. The rush of her passage causes eons to eddy. Wind sweeps down the canyon with the roar of combers breaking on the sand. The moon, full and newly risen, exerts its tidal force.
Moonlight flashes on the slash of teeth.
She drives for the surface not out of rational decision. All blunt power embodied in smooth motion, she simply is what she is.
Steve sat without speaking. Finally he said vaguely, "Things."
"That's right. You see things. It's an ability."
"I don't know...."
"We think we do. We all remember that night after prom. And there were other times, back in school. None of us has seen you since we all played scatter-geese, but I've had the resources, through the corporation, to do some checking. The issue didn't come up until recently. In the last month, I've read your school records, your psychiatric history."
"That must have taken some trouble," said Steve. "Should I feel flattered?"
"Tell him," said Ginger. "Tell him what this is all about."
"Yeah," said Steve. "Tell me."
For the first time in the conversation, Paul hesitated. "Okay," he finally said. "We're hunting a ghost in the Wind River."
"Say again?"
"That's perhaps poor terminology." Paul looked uncomfortable. "But what we're looking for is a presence, some sort of extranatural phenomenon."
"'Ghost' is a perfectly good word," said Carroll.
"Better start from the beginning," said Steve.
When Paul didn't answer immediately, Carroll said, "I know you don't read the papers. Ever listen to the radio?"
Steve shook his head. "Not much."
"About a month ago, an Enerco mineral-survey party in the Wind Rivers got the living daylights scared out of them."
"Leave out what they saw," said Paul. "I'd like to include a control factor."
"It wasn't just the Enerco people. Others have seen it, both Indians and Anglos. The consistency of the witnesses has been remarkable. If you haven't heard about this at the bars, Steve, you must have been asleep."
"I haven't been all that social for a while," said Steve. "I did hear that someone's trying to scare the oil and coal people off the reservation."
"Not someone," said Paul. "Some thing. I'm convinced of that now."
"A ghost," said Steve."
"A presence."
"There're rumors," said Carroll, "that the tribes have revived the Ghost Dance—"
"Just a few extremists," said Paul.
"—to conjure back an avenger from the past who will drive every white out of the county."
Steve knew of the Ghost Dance, had read of the Paiute mystic Wovoka who, in 1888, had claimed that in a vision the spirits had promised the return of the buffalo and the restoration to the Indians of their ancestral lands. The Plains tribes had danced assiduously the Ghost Dance to ensure this. Then in 1908 the U.S. government suppressed the final Sioux uprising and, except for a few scattered incidents, that was that. Discredited, Wovoka survived to die in the midst of the Great Depression.
"I have it on good authority," said Paul, "that the Ghost Dance was revived after the presence terrified the survey crew."
"That really doesn't matter," Carroll said. "Remember prom night? I've checked the newspaper morgues in Fremont and Lander and Riverton. There've been strange sightings for more than a century."
"That was then," said Paul. "The problem now is that the tribes are infinitely more restive, and my people are actually getting frightened to go out into the field." His voice took on a bemused tone. "Arab terrorists couldn't do it, civil wars didn't bother them, but a damned ghost is scaring the wits out of them—literally."
"Too bad," said Ginger. She did not sound regretful.
Steve looked at the three gathered around the table. He knew he did not understand all the details and nuances of the love and hate and trust and broken affections. "I can understand Paul's concern," he said. "But why the rest of you?"
The women exchanged glances. "One way or another," said Carroll, "we're all tied together. I think it includes you, Steve."
"Maybe," said Ginger soberly. "Maybe not. She's an artist. I'm a journalist. We've all got our reasons for wanting to know more about what's up there."
"In the past few years," said Carroll, "I've caught a tremendous amount of Wyoming in my paintings. Now I want to capture this too."
Conversation languished. The soda-fountain man looked as though he were unsure whether to solicit a new round of malteds.
"What now?" Steve said.
"If you'll agree," said Paul, "we're going to go back up into the Wind Rivers to search."
"So what am I? Some sort of damned occult Geiger counter?"
Ginger said, "It's a nicer phrase than calling yourself bait."
"Jesus," Steve said. "That doesn't reassure me much." He looked from one to the next. "Control factor or not, give me some clue to what we're going to look for."
Everyone looked at Paul. Eventually he shrugged and said, "You know the Highway Department signs in the canyon? The geological time chart you travel when you're driving U.S. 20?"
Steve nodded.
"We're looking for a relic of the ancient, inland sea."
After the sun sank in blood in the west, they drove north and watched dusk unfold into the splendor of the night sky.
"I'll always marvel at that," said Paul. "Do you know, you can see three times as many stars in the sky here as you can from any city?"
"It scares the tourists sometimes," said Carroll.
Ginger said, "It won't after a few more of those coal-fired generating plants are built."
Paul chuckled humorlessly. "I thought they were preferable to your nemesis, the nukes."
Ginger was sitting with Steve in the back seat of the Enerco truck. Her words were controlled and even. "There are alternatives to both those."
"Try supplying power to the rest of the country with them before the next century," Paul said. He braked suddenly as a jackrabbit darted into the bright cones of light. The rabbit made it across the road.
"Nobody actually needs air conditioners," said Ginger.
"I won't argue that point," Paul said. "You'll just have to argue with the reality of all the people who think they do."
Ginger lapsed into silence. Carroll said, "I suppose you should be congratulated for the tribal council vote today. We heard about it on the news."
"It's not binding," said Paul. "When it finally goes through, we hope it will whittle the fifty-percent jobless rate on the reservation."
"It sure as hell won't!" Ginger burst out. "Higher mineral royalties mean more incentive not to have a career."
Paul laughed. "Are you blaming me for being the chicken, or the egg?"
No one answered him.
"I'm not a monster," he said.
"I don't think you are," said Steve.
"I know it puts me in a logical trap, but I think I'm doing the right thing."
"All right," said Ginger. "I won't take any easy shots. At least, I'll try."
From the back seat, Steve looked around his uneasy allies and hoped to hell that someone had brought aspirin. Carroll had aspirin in her handbag, and Steve washed it down with beer from Paul's cooler.
GRANITE
PRE-CAMBRIAN
600+ MILLION YEARS
The moon had risen by now, a full, icy disk. The highway curved around a formation that looked like a vast, layered birthday cake. Cedar provided spectral candles.
"I've never believed in ghosts," said Steve. He caught the flicker of Paul's eyes in the rearview mirror and knew the geologist was looking at him.
"There are ghosts," said Paul, "and there are ghosts. In spectroscopy, ghosts are false readings. In television, ghost images—"
"What about the kind that haunt houses?"
"In television," Paul continued, "a ghost is a reflected electronic image arriving at the antenna some interval after the desir
ed wave."
"And are they into groans and chains?"
"Some people are better antennas than others, Steve."
Steve fell silent.
"There is a theory," said Paul, "that molecular structures, no matter how altered by process, still retain some sort of 'memory' of their original form."
"Ghosts."
"If you like." He stared ahead at the highway and said, as if musing, "When an ancient organism becomes fossilized, even the DNA patterns that determine its structure are preserved in the stone."
GALLATIN FORMATION
CAMBRIAN
500-600 MILLION YEARS
Paul shifted into a lower gear as the half-ton began to climb one of the long, gradual grades. Streaming black smoke and bellowing like a great saurian lumbering into extinction, an eighteen-wheel semi with oil field gear on its back passed them, forcing Paul part of the way onto the right shoulder. Trailing a dopplered call from its airhorn, the rig disappeared into the first of three short highway tunnels quarried out of the rock.
"One of yours?" said Ginger.
"Nope."
"Maybe he'll crash and burn."
"I'm sure he's just trying to make a living," said Paul mildly.
"Raping the land's a living?" said Ginger. "Cannibalizing the past is a living?"
"Shut up, Gin." Quietly, Carroll said, "Wyoming didn't do anything to your family, Paul. Whatever was done, people did it."
"The land gets into the people," said Paul.
"That isn't the only thing that defines them."
"This always has been a fruitless argument," said Paul. "It's a dead past."
"If the past is dead," Steve said, "then why are we driving up this cocamamie canyon?"
AMSDEN FORMATION
PENNSYLVANIAN
270-310 MILLION YEARS
Boysen Reservoir spread to their left, rippled surface glittering in the moonlight. The road hugged the eastern edge. Once the crimson tail-lights of the oil field truck had disappeared in the distance, they encountered no other vehicle.
"Are we just going to drive up and down Twenty all night?" said Steve. "Who brought the plan?" He did not feel flippant, but he had to say something. He felt the burden of time.
"We'll go where the survey crew saw the presence," Paul said. "It's just a few more miles."
"And then?"
"Then we walk. It should be at least as interesting as our hike prom night."
Steve sensed that a lot of things were almost said by each of them at that point.
I didn't know then....
Nor do I know for sure yet.
I'm seeking....
What?
Time's flowed. I want to know where now, finally, to direct it.
"Who would have thought...." said Ginger.
Whatever was thought, nothing more was said.
The headlights picked out the reflective green-and-white Highway department sign. "We're there," said Paul. "Somewhere on the right, there ought to be a dirt access road."
SHARKTOOTH FORMATION
CRETACEOUS
100 MILLION YEARS
"Are we going to use a net?" said Steve. "Tranquilizer darts? What?"
"I don't think we can catch a ghost in a net," said Carroll. "You catch a ghost in your soul."
A small smile curved Paul's lips. "Think of this as the Old West. We're only a scouting party. Once we observe whatever's up here, we'll figure out how to get rid of it."
"That won't be possible," said Carroll.
"Why do you say that?"
"I don't know," she said. "I just feel it."
"Woman's intuition?" He said it lightly.
"My intuition."
"Anything's possible," said Paul.
"If we really thought you could destroy it," said Ginger, "I doubt either of us would be up here with you."
Paul had stopped the truck to lock the front hubs into four-wheel drive. Now the vehicle clanked and lurched over rocks and across potholes eroded by the spring rain. The road twisted tortuously around series of barely graded switchbacks. Already they had climbed hundreds of feet above the canyon floor. They could see no lights anywhere below.
"Very scenic," said Steve. If he had wanted to, he could have reached out the right passenger's side window and touched the porous rock. Pine branches whispered along the paint on the left side.
"Thanks to Native American Resources," said Ginger, "this is the sort of country that'll go."
"For Christ's sake," said Paul, finally sounding angry. "I'm not the anti-Christ."
"I know that." Ginger's voice softened. "I've loved you, remember? Probably I still do. Is there no way?"
The geologist didn't answer.
"Paul?"
"We're just about there," he said. The grade moderated and he shifted to a higher gear.
"Paul —" Steve wasn't sure whether he actually said the word or not. He closed his eyes and saw glowing fires, opened them again and wasn't sure what he saw. He felt the past, vast and primeval, rush over him like a tide. It filled his nose and mouth, his lungs, his brain. It —
"Oh my God!"
Someone screamed.
"Let go!"
The headlight beams twitched crazily as the truck skidded toward the edge of a sheer dark drop. Both Paul and Carroll wrestled for the wheel. For an instant, Steve wondered whether both of them or, indeed, either of them were trying to turn the truck back from the dark.
Then he saw the great, bulky, streamlined form coasting over the slope toward them. He had the impression of smooth power, immense and inexorable. The dead stare from flat black eyes, each one inches across, fixed them like insects in amber.
"Paul!" Steve heard his own voice. He heard the word echo and then it was swallowed up by the crashing waves. He felt unreasoning terror, but more than that, he felt — awe. What he beheld was juxtaposed on this western canyon, but yet it was not out of place. Genius loci, guardian, the words hissed like the surf.
It swam toward them, impossibly gliding on powerful gray-black fins.
Brakes screamed. A tire blew out like a gunshot.
Steve watched its jaws open in front of the windshield; the snout pulling up and back, the lower jaw thrusting forward. The maw could have taken in a heifer. The teeth glared white in reflected light, white with serrated, razor edges. Its teeth were as large as shovel blades.
"Paul!"
The Enerco truck fish-tailed a final time; then toppled sideways into the dark. It fell, caromed off something massive and unseen, and began to roll.
Steve had time for one thought. Is it going to hurt?
When the truck came to rest, it was upright. Steve groped toward the window and felt rough bark rather than glass. They were wedged against a pine.
The silence astonished him. That there was no fire astonished him. That he was alive — "Carroll?" he said. "Ginger? Paul?" For a moment, no one spoke.
"I'm here," said Carroll, muffled, from the front of the truck. "Paul's on top of me. Or somebody is. I can't tell."
"Oh God, I hurt," said Ginger from beside Steve. "My shoulder hurts."
"Can you move your arm?" said Steve.
"A little, but it hurts."
"Okay." Steve leaned forward across the front seat. He didn't feel anything like grating, broken bone-ends in himself. His fingers touched flesh. Some of it was sticky with fluid. Gently he pulled who he assumed was Paul from Carroll beneath. She moaned and struggled upright.
"There should be a flashlight in the glove box," he said.
The darkness was almost complete. Steve could see only vague shapes inside the truck. When Carroll switched on the flashlight, they realized the truck was buried in thick, resilient brush. Carroll and Ginger stared back at him. Ginger looked as if she might be in shock. Paul slumped on the front seat. The angle of his neck was all wrong.
His eyes opened and he tried to focus. Then he said something. They couldn't understand him. Paul tried again. They made out, "Goodnight, Irene." Th
en he said, "Do what you have." His eyes remained open, but all the life went out of them.
Steve and the women stared at one another as though they were accomplices. The moment crystallized and shattered. He braced himself as best he could and kicked with both feet at the rear door. The brush allowed the door to swing open one foot, then another.
Carroll had her door open at almost the same time. It took another few minutes to get Ginger out. They left Paul in the truck.
They huddled on a naturally terraced ledge about halfway between the summit and the canyon floor. There was a roar and bright lights for a few minutes when a Burlington Northern freight came down the tracks on the other side of the river. It would have done no good to shout and wave their arms. So they didn't.
No one seemed to have broken any bones. Ginger's shoulder was apparently separated. Carroll had a nosebleed. Steve's head felt as though he'd been walloped with a two-by-four.
"It's not cold," he said. "If we have to, we can stay in the truck. No way we're going to get down at night. In the morning we can signal people on the road."
Ginger started to cry and they both held her. "I saw something," she said. "I couldn't tell—what was it?"
Steve hesitated. He had a hard time separating his dreams from Paul's theories. The two did not now seem mutually exclusive. He still heard the echoing thunder of ancient gulfs. "I'm guessing it's something that lived here a hundred million years ago," he finally said. "It lived in the inland sea and died here. The sea left, but it never did."
"A native...." Ginger said and trailed off. Steve touched her forehead; it felt feverish. "I finally saw," she said. "Now I'm a part of it." In a smaller voice, "Paul." Starting awake like a nightmare, "Paul?"
"He's—all right now," said Carroll, her even tone plainly forced.
"No, he's not," said Ginger. "He's not." She was silent for a time. "He's dead." Tears streamed down her face. "It won't stop the coal leases, will it?"
"Probably not."
"Politics," Ginger said wanly. "Politics and death. What the hell difference does any of it make now?"