The Romance of Certain Old Bones

by Holly Messinger

  “There wasn’t much to bury,” Matheson said, tight-lipped. “Just his shoes and, um, skull.”

  “Bastards tore him to pieces,” Duessler repeated, in a choked voice.

  “We made a casket for the remains,” Matheson said, nodding toward the professor’s tent, though Jacob’s eye was drawn to Timothy, who turned his back on the others, rubbing a hand hard across his mouth. “Ryan said to dump them in a ravine, but I thought he ought to go back to his family.”

  Timothy bent over and retched into the grass. Jacob noticed the way Matheson’s shoulders tensed, and none of them turned to look at their schoolmate. Timothy wiped his face with a handkerchief and then took up his cutting-cradle and walked off a few paces to hack at the hay.

  “Where is Ryan?” Jacob asked, and Matheson nodded again toward the tent, though Ryan was nowhere in sight. “All right. How long til you boys can be ready to move out?”

  Matheson gestured around at the half-built crates, the piles of rock and hay. “A day, at least.”

  “No. Not the specimens. Just you boys and whatever you can pack on the horses.”

  Matheson looked shocked. Hope said sharply, “Out of the question, Mr. Tracy!”

  “Professor, you lost a man already last night—”

  “It is not a matter for discussion!” Hope snapped, and Jacob quite literally saw red. At the same moment he felt Boz’s hand close on his bicep, warning him to calm. Hope must’ve seen the blood in Jacob’s eye, because he retreated half a step before continuing in a more wheedling tone, “My backers are expecting delivery of these fossils. If we don’t bring them back I am ruined and most of these men’s careers will be finished before they begin. I appreciate your concern, Mr. Tracy, but—”

  “All right, all right,” Jacob cut him off. “Get to it, then. We ain’t spendin another night in this place, so pack up the best pieces and get them down the trail.”

  He backed away from the crates as Hope moved in to critique the packing efforts. Jacob cast a desperate look at Boz and Stanley and they moved away from the others, toward the tents and the fire-pit.

  “So what you wanna do?” Boz asked.

  “Hustle ’em out of here as best we can, I guess. And keep Ryan away from ’em.”

  “Or arrange an accident for him,” Boz said, so mildly that the hairs stood on the back of Jacob’s neck, “and be done with it.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “I ain’t goin through another night like the last.”

  “It’s not only Ryan now,” Stanley put in, for the first time since they’d returned to camp. He looked pale and strained. “The bulukse’e ate all their hearts.”

  “But they can’t hear it,” Jacob protested.

  “It doesn’t matter. The bone-splinters make them listen to Ryan. They do what he wants. I don’t think they remember what happened—”

  “Christ on a crutch!” Boz exploded. “Of course they remember. It’s just folks are really good at tellin themselves It ain’t me. I seen the same damn thing in the army—men takin clubs and bayonets to women and children, then sit down with blood on their hands to write to their wives and kids. And all the while our Crow scouts is out trackin Sioux or Cheyenne or Kiowa, figurin we’d wipe out their enemies for ’em, cuz the white folks in Washington figure sendin nigger troops to fight Indians is killin two birds with one stone. Everybody tellin themselves It ain’t me, it’s the other one.” He spat in the grass. “You don’t need no monsters or demons in the world. Men do plenty evil on their own. And the two of you gonna get us all killed if you believe otherwise.”

  Jacob looked him up and down, at his arms akimbo and chin thrust forward. “You finished?”

  “Yeah?” Boz spat.

  “Good, cause this is me, tellin you I ain’t passin this off on nobody else. I don’t know what happened here last night, and I don’t intend to let them kill us if I can help it, but I promised to get these boys home safe and I aim to do it, if I can.”

  Boz’s head went back and a grudging respect came over his face. “Well ain’t you somethin special.”

  “And you’re not?” Jacob countered.

  It was manipulation, to be sure. But it was also sincerely meant. Boz scowled, knowing he was being played, but caught by flattery and logic. At last he ducked his head, shaking it in disgust, and Jacob knew he’d won.

  Boz waved a hand at Stanley. “What about him?”

  “He’s old enough to know his own mind.”

  “I’m staying,” Stanley said.

  “Yeah, I figured.” Boz rotated his neck and shoulders a few times. “Fine. So waddya want me to do?”

  “I want you to pack up our plunder and our horses, and move ’em down the trail someplace we can hustle out of here quick if need be. And then get two or four of these boys to harness up the mules with drag-sleds, start haulin these crates down to where we cached the wagons. Don’t you two get out of sight, hear? And don’t let any of ’em lead you off alone.”

  “You want I should pack up separate provisions for us?”

  “I think that’d be a good idea.” Jacob suddenly realized he was starving and looked around to see that the chuckwagon was vacant, the cook nowhere in sight. “We ought to get some grub now, while we got the chance.”

  But as they approached the chuckwagon, Jacob saw the fire had not even been lit. The sacks of beans and coffee, flour and sugar, had been knocked over and spilt. The pots and pans were half on the ground.

  Jacob swore under his breath and told Boz and Stanley to get on with the packing, that he’d scrounge something for breakfast and put their provisions together. He gave the spellbook to Stanley, with instructions to stash it in his saddle-bags, and then set to righting the chuckwagon.

  He got a fire going, picked up the tumbled pans and crocks, and found a covered Dutch oven, undisturbed and full of beans soaking. That was the first good news he’d had all morning, and he poured off the soak-water, added fresh from one of the casks—the water-barrels had not been smashed, that was another mercy—and hung the beans over the sputtering fire.

  Some coffee was already ground, and most of the flour and sugar remained in their sacks. Jacob scooped some flour and cornmeal into a bowl, added soda, salt, and sugar, mixed in lard and a little canned milk. With the johnny-cake baking in a skillet, he went in search of the bacon. The pork was all packed in brine barrels and there wouldn’t be time to soak it properly, but he and Boz and Stanley needed meat in their bellies if they were to keep up with the Yalies—his mind touched on the meat they might’ve eaten last night and shied away. He focused on prying the lid off the pork-barrel; whoever had nailed it down last had made a mess of it, bending all the nails crooked so they bit into the wood.

  The lid came up abruptly and Jacob stared down into the ruddy brine for a moment, not understanding what he saw floating in there but knowing it wasn’t right, pale fatty pork belly didn’t look like that, it didn’t have eye holes for God’s sake—

  A rustle behind him and Jacob whipped around to see Ryan ten feet away, weaving slow but relentlessly forward through the grass, wearing a broad, close-lipped smile, as if he knew exactly what Jacob had found in the brine-barrel.

  “Tough eating, those old frontier types,” Ryan said. “Have to soak ’em a bit first. Young easterners are much more tender.”

  “You sick sonofa—” Jacob swung the hammer without thinking, an ill-advised backhand, and Ryan moved crocodile-quick under the blow, insinuated himself around Jacob’s legs and torso so they went down in a tangle. Jacob twisted and thrust back with an elbow as he fell, but Ryan simply coiled around him, sinuous and muscular, without any familiar angles that a man could get hold of and wrestle off. Panic and strain wore down Jacob’s strength in a matter of seconds, and he made himself stop struggling, to relax and wait for Ryan to make a move that he could counter.

  “Not such a tough guy now, are you?” Ryan sniggered in his ear. His breath was beyond foul—the smell of old blood and swamp-rot.
His fingers dug into Jacob’s chest and neck with points like rusty nails. “I could eat you right now—you and your friend and the young medicine-man. Can’t none of you do a thing to stop me. You know that, right?”

  “Why don’t you, then?” Jacob gasped, trying not to breathe deeply.

  “Cause I’ve got a notion to walk the world again,” the voice said, but it wasn’t Ryan’s voice alone. Something darker and rougher had spread through the timbre. “Ryan tells me there are crowds waiting to meet me back in Con-nec-ti-cut. Private shows with kings for him, my choice of the peasants for dinner. Can you make me that deal, maxpé-man?”

  “The only deal I’d make with you is to put you back in the ground,” Jacob said, and felt Ryan’s body chuckle as the loathsome breath raked his cheek. Warm rough needle-points of teeth closed around his ear, hard enough he said a mental good-bye to that bit of flesh, gritting his own teeth against anticipated pain.

  But the bulukse’e let him go—removed the teeth from his ear and loosened his grip on Jacob’s torso, although the nails raked bloody furrows in his shirt and skin as they withdrew. Jacob rolled to his feet quickly, turning to face the grinning thing that hunkered in the grass—not crouched, the way any land-animal would, but pushed up on two hands, the legs splayed out behind.

  It only stayed that way for a second. Its eyes had shifted to someone approaching over Jacob’s right shoulder, and then the monster quite visibly went away, the slavering craftiness submerging itself beneath an oil-slick of civility. Ryan put away the bulukse’e as if folding a coat over his arm, and stood up to meet Hope as the man limped into view. “Professor! Mr. Tracy was telling me of the narrow escape you had last night. Are you quite all right?”

  “I will recover, Mr. Ryan. I trust none of the specimens were damaged in last night’s chaos?”

  “No sir, the savages had no interest in the fossils,” Ryan said. “I’ve already seen that the mosasaur and the more valuable pieces are crated and ready to be carried to the wagons.” His voice acquired a solemn note. “I also saw to Ebury’s remains, that they may be transported back with us and given a decent burial.”

  “Good. Fine.” Professor Hope looked momentarily taken aback, and then peered at Ryan as if to make sure of whom he was speaking to. “Well done, Mr. Ryan.”

  “I’m more sorry than I can say for the loss,” Ryan added. “Ebury was a good friend and a worthy colleague. I know you always thought he had promise.” One jaundiced eye rolled toward Jacob in flagrant mockery. “Mr. Tracy was just telling me he knows of a different route than the one we rode in, that should get us back to water much faster. We should be ready to leave soon after noon. Right, Mr. Tracy?”

  “That’s the plan,” Jacob said, wondering if it shouldn’t be.

  “So if you just want to pack up your personal things, professor, I can see to the tent and the rest of the gear.”

  “Fine,” Hope said. “Yes, I will do that shortly. Is there any chance of breakfast? I suppose we have lost our cook, as well.”

  “I’m afraid he completely lost his head during the attack,” Ryan said smoothly. “I don’t think we’ll be seeing him again.”

  “I’ll take care of breakfast, professor,” Jacob put in, stepping between Hope and the gaping maw of the pork-barrel. “Whyn’t you go on and start packing, like he said, and I’ll give a holler when it’s ready.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Tracy,” Hope said gravely.

  Jacob waited until the professor was out of earshot before he said to Ryan, “You really think you’re slick, don’t you?”

  “I know how the world works.” Ryan’s tone was mossy gloat over a bedrock of bitterness. “For all this is supposed to be the land of opportunity, the truth is, brains and hard work don’t get most of us very far. Men with rich fathers give favor to the sons of rich fathers, and they hire bullies like you to make sure it stays that way.”

  “So you deal with the devil to get what you want.”

  Ryan laughed softly. “Oh please. No sermons about my immortal soul, Mr. Tracy. God’s been dead a long time and Darwin put the last nail in his coffin, as far as I’m concerned. If I’ve learnt anything from Hope, it’s that life is an endless cycle of chaos. That line of ash in the bluff, where we found our friend? That’s the mark of fire raining down from the heavens, only it happened a long, long time ago, and there was no Divine retribution. Life just shook itself off and took another form. Mammals instead of reptiles.” Ryan smiled. “But you haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about, do you, Mr. Tracy?”

  “I’m followin along well enough,” Jacob said.

  “Yes, I forget sometimes you’re an educated man—you try so hard to hide it under the bad grammar and rawhide trappings. But you must’ve come from decent family, to get into seminary. Hope thinks you’re some kind of Transcendentalist savant, like Thoreau, but I think you grub around in the wild with savages because they don’t have the worldly-wise to see you’re hiding something.”

  “I won’t deny it,” Jacob said slowly. “I guess you know the mosasaur’s been talkin to me, too. I figure it chose you cause you gave it Carruthers.” Ryan’s face went wary. “It seems to like those who’ll turn on their own. And of course it knows I killed my whole family, so—”

  “You killed your family?”

  “Father, stepmother, wife.” Jacob saw the greedy grin start to contort the young man’s face, but Ryan fought it down behind a frown of worry. “And a whole heap of other people, besides. Fact is, most folks I get close to don’t last very long. I never have been sure what brings it on, if it’s God’s retribution, like you said, or just evil spirits followin me cause I got too close to death one time.”

  “Spirits,” Ryan repeated, a sudden hollow note in his voice. “You see them too?”

  “Since the war.” Jacob spoke with as much sangfroid as he could muster, though his blood was thumping with rage and the sweet dangerous surge of the curse. It always seemed to be on the verge of spilling over when he got tempted like this, floodwaters battering a dam, and he had no confidence of being able to contain it again once it got out. “And every time I talk to them, or try to figure out how to banish them, or even tell somebody about it, that person winds up dead. I guess your demon would find that real appealin, given its taste for carrion.”

  Ryan’s face was a study in conflicting emotions. Greed, fear, jealousy, and doubt rippled across his features. At last he settled on contempt. “Better to be the devourer than the devoured, Mr. Tracy.”

  Jacob nodded. “I think you bit off more than you can chew, Ryan. How long you think you can hold that thing back, before it hollows you out from the inside?” He noted the flicker of uncertainty before turning away with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Get on with your packin—you’re remindin me I’m hungry.”

  He went back to the cook-fire with a show of indifference, though every fiber of his skin was standing alert, listening for the attack. Instead, he heard Ryan turn and stride away through the grass.

  Jacob supposed there was nothing more to say, since they had just agreed they intended to kill each other.

  17

  By mid-afternoon they were on the trail. The Yalies worked like men possessed (the phrase kept swimming round and round Jacob’s brain like a goldfish in a bowl) to get all the fossils crated and carried down to the wagons, either by mule-pack or travois or in some cases on their own backs. They took no break for dinner at noon, though they did drink a tremendous amount of water. The water-barrels were dangerously low by the time they set out, and Stanley said they were unlikely to reach the watering-stream unless they pushed through past nightfall.

  “It won’t matter, though,” Stanley added, when only Jacob could hear. “Storm coming. Near sunset, I think.”

  Jacob turned in the saddle to scan the horizon. He and Stanley were riding out front, just as they had led the way into the Badlands, but this time Boz was riding just behind them instead of bringing up the rear of the column. There had been
no discussion involved in this change, Boz simply took up that position and none of the three of them said a word, although there was a certain amount of joshing and jeering from the Yalies about whether Boz was afraid of getting left behind and how they’d never find him in the shadows with that dark skin.

  “Problem, Mr. Tracy?” Hope called, from his own horse behind Boz’s. He was keeping close at their heels, as well, rather than falling back along the line to scope new fossils or berate his students to be careful with the wagons. The man sensed there was something sinister afoot, even if he was too stubborn to admit it.

  The mist of the morning had burnt off. The sun was a burning coin overhead, the sky an inverted blue bowl. They were down in the low canyons of the rock now, so much so that Jacob couldn’t see anything of the far horizons.

  “All clear!” Jacob hollered back. “Keep up!”

  The Yalies relayed this order, calling it back and forth in sing-song variations like demented mockingbirds. They had been doing it since they’d left the butte. It was designed to get on his nerves and it was succeeding.

  “Why do you keep mentionin this storm?” Jacob asked Stanley, quietly enough that Boz wouldn’t hear. “Is it gonna help us or hurt us?”

  “Not sure,” Stanley said, after a moment’s pause. “Both. Either. Big medicine… a storm is a lot of powers coming together. Wind, water, fire. Connection between earth and sky. It can wash things clean or it can destroy them.”

  “So you think this might be our chance to destroy this thing?” Jacob prodded, hopefully.

  Stanley hesitated again. He looked so fey and distant that Jacob resisted the urge to give him a shake. “I think there will be change.”

  Jacob sighed. “What’d you do with that spellbook of Ryan’s?”

  Stanley reached into the bag he wore slung round his neck, pulled out the book and handed it over. Then he urged his horse a few lengths forward, so Jacob could loop the reins over the horn and steer with his knees, letting Blackjack follow Stanley’s pinto while he scanned the pages.