by Annie Proulx
The ground was heaved up, a welt of soil like a crooked furrow snaking through the tree roots. Lightning stroke. He kicked at the seared earth. A heavy white bone protruded from the furrow. A dinosaur bone. The biggest he’d ever seen. A strange one. After all this time to find another.
He pulled and it stirred in the loam. With a stick he dug the soil away. Something bad in the back of his mind about a stick in the leaf mold, the smell of the rotten leaves. The shape of the bone flattened, thinned out a little like a scapula, a shoulder blade, but different. He looked at it, the great bone, glimmering greenish white against the earth. He could hardly lift it, this ancient thing. What the hell was the name of that guy he used to dig bones with? Cartridge, something like that. Big sweaty guy, what the hell ever happened to him?
The strange bone had to be worth money, and if he could manage it, Kortnegger wasn’t going to get anything from it. Funny, it wasn’t the kind of place he’d expect to find fossils, this deep farmland. But, excited now, he dug deeper in the churned earth hoping for the other bones, but found nothing.
He walked through the grove kicking at the soil, lifting fallen branches. Because he was looking for the shapes of bones he saw the tibia quite easily, and then the skull, and knew what drew the crows to the grove, for there were still fragments of flesh on these bones. Wads of rotten cloth, the feisty Mexican’s red shirt.
Forty minutes later, the truck idling in front of the post office, he wrote his postcard and dropped it in the blue humped box. He was out of town before the sun was up.
52
La Violencia
‘LA TRISTEZA DE MIAMI,’ said Pala, commenced in the year of the Mariel exodus, with the flood of demented people into the city. An old and murderously tense mood persisted. There were too many strange people, too much strange money in too few hands.
On a hot afternoon she heard on the car radio that the four white police accused of beating Arthur McDuffie to death had been acquitted up in Tampa. In minutes the city vomited blood.
She always drove home herself. Liked driving, liked the new business, the travel bureau, the people in a hurry. Dub was tired of it all but she still had the Cuban energy, the push and drive to make things work. She had to work. Couldn’t retire. Didn’t want to retire. Dub and his orchids.
She steered through the heated early evening, listening to the excited announcer. The sun struck her eyes and she hesitated at the top of the ramp feeding the highway. A swarm of men flailing bats sprang down on the car, heavy little chunks of windshield glass cascaded into her skirted lap, a stone smashed the fingers of her right hand clenched on the steering wheel and through the denting and shattering the voice of the announcer went on excitedly as though he were there watching, leaning into the car to notice how much blood there was, or if, perhaps, the tongue was cut out and a red rose jammed into the seeping orifice.
But the pirate tramped on the gas and scraped onto the howling throughway, accelerating, the wind plastering glass dust across her chest. She twisted the car, throwing off the men, except one who clung to the ragged edge of the windshield opening, his body stretched along the hood.
She steered the battered car through the commuter traffic, pounding on the horn. What else could she do? But the other drivers, transfixed by the same announcer’s voice, slowed in the flooding red of brake lights, cut into adjacent lanes for a few feet of progress, sped forward, and none seemed aware of her hood ornament. A black man. She could see his black fingers and the nails squeezed white. Still he hung on. In the center lane she accelerated, eyes slitted against the blast of air. When there was a clear patch behind her she stood on the brakes, saw the man vault ahead onto the roadway. She accelerated again, jolting over his legs. She stopped then, in midlane, turned the engine off and waited in the stalled traffic until the police came in a cacophony of horns and tape decks and the black man’s hoarse crying.
She did not want to drive alone in Miami again. Did not want to be in Miami. Thousands of people did not want to be in Miami. The glossy city emptied, the money-men and investors fleeing with condos unsold, office towers unleased, undeveloped properties foreclosed. Pala picked Houston. The travel agency was a natural for Houston she told Dub.
‘I would like to get out of real estate. All of it. We don’t need the money. You play with the orchids. This is my hobby. The travel business is fun for me.’
They left the month Christo began to fit the pink plastic around the bay islands. Pala had a bathrobe the same color of pink, thought Dub. Flamingo pink. There would be nothing like it in Houston.
53
The Fulgurite Shaped Like a Bone
YOU SHOULD HAVE CALLED, the receptionist said. Smooth Indian face, blue-tinted lenses and streaked perm. Dr. Garch keeps his own appointment book. Who knows if he’ll show up at all? He isn’t on the out-of-town list, but who knows? She told him he could wait in the hall outside Garch’s office. If he wanted.
Loyal sat there all morning, the dinosaur bone wrapped in newspaper and binder twine against the wall behind the wooden chair. It had been hard getting here. He’d been laid up in the truck for a week with the damn bronchitis again. His lungs were shot. Sleeping on the front seat. Still sick, confused about the time of year. Truck not in good shape, either. Timing off, engine about shot, exhaust system finished. Sounded like a bomber coming through town.
At noon the receptionist went out to lunch, her Chinese cloth shoes winking open with each step.
When Garch came, keys rattling in his hand, Loyal was asleep, his head resting on the wall, his mouth wide open. He woke and saw a short man in a ready-made suit, brown hair crinkled on the top and cut short on each side, a pencil mustache like a Mexican radio announcer, soft chin. Eyes gleamed watching Loyal dragging at the bone.
‘Got something?’ He waved at a green Formica table in his office. Underneath were stored boxes of bones, dusty concretions, ochre sandstone slabs, red lumps. Loyal coughed, the waking-up cough that left him breathless.
‘Used to dig dinosaur bones, used to look for tracks, Dakotas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, those places. What, twenty years ago. Been all over. But I never seen one like this one.’ He got the thing up on the table but stood back to let Garch unwrap it. Goddamn, he could feel himself shaking and wrecked. Garch was sure-handed, a fit and healthy man. The bone lay there, a polished stony glare to it. Garch leaned over, ran his finger along its length.
‘I guess,’ said Loyal, ‘I’m here for two reasons. I’d like to know what in hell the thing is from, but there’s also the question of value. I mean.’
Garch straightened up. Were the bright eyes a little wary? ‘Yes. You want to sell it.’
‘Well.’
‘It’s not a bone—.’
‘The hell it isn’t. There’s nothing else it could be. It’s a strange one, a strange anatomy, but there’s nothing else it could be. Don’t try to tell me it’s a rock. It’s no rock.’
‘No. I agree with you. It’s not a rock. I think it’s a fulgurite. I’m pretty sure.’ Smirking.
‘What the hell is a fulgurite?’ He didn’t like Garch. Smartass didn’t look like he’d ever been out in the field, ever sweated over easing fragile fossils out of the crumbling earth.
‘Lightning made this. A lightning strike can hit rock or sand or earth and vaporize it. Ten thousand degrees Kelvin, you know, that’s approaching the temperature of the sun’s surface. This is like a hunk of fused glass. There could be rare metals. It’s a big one, a very large one. I’d like to look it over for a few days. Buy it? I think the department or the Museum of Geology would certainly be interested. I don’t know what they’d offer, but if you want I’ll talk to them. Give me your phone number. I’ll be in touch with you in a couple of weeks.’
‘I’d sort of want to sell it today. See, I’m on the move and I want to get on my way. I want to get going as soon as I can. I’ve been sick and I want to get back.’ There was no place to get back to.
‘Look, you’ll have to
wait a few days. I’ll have to talk to some people, they’d want to make a few tests. Et cetera. You know, I just don’t carry acquisition money around in my pocket.’
God, he hated this little shit. ‘I’ll just take it somewhere else, then.’ He remembered Crazy Eyes and suddenly, the name Horsley, that paleontologist with the sunburned wife. The days with old what’s-his-name.
‘I’ll take it to Horsley.’
‘Horsley? Fantee Horsley?’ Garch squeezed out a sour little smile. ‘Horsley’s dead. He died in the St. Helena’s eruption. On vacation. Ironic. His work was in quite a different field anyway, nothing to do with fulgurites.’
‘I’ll just take it then.’
‘Look, Mr.— I don’t know your name.’ He waited, but Loyal said nothing. ‘Look, this is just not the way it’s done, old-timer.’ The forced patience. ‘You can’t just walk into a university off the street and sell something, no matter how interesting it is scientifically. There are departments and budgets and acquisitions procedures. Channels. This is out of my field. I specialize in cranial osteology of the hadrosaurians. I’d have to find out who’s interested in this kind of thing – maybe one of the petrologists. Maybe a geologist.’
Loyal began to wrap the thing in newspaper again. That gink with the cowboy hat out in Utah who used to buy bones. He’d buy it. He’d buy it as soon as he saw it. Loyal remembered just where the place was, could see it clear, the way the dusty road hooked left as you came down from the mountains, then opened out into tumbled low hills and the river flats and after a while there was the bone man’s bar and the back room full of boxes of these things, the fulgurite bones.
‘If that’s the way you feel,’ said Garch, ‘but I think you’re making a mistake.’
‘No mistake,’ said Loyal and left. He hoped he had enough gas to make it to the bone man. If his place wasn’t in Utah it was in Montana. He’d know the road when he saw it. That was clear, as clear as yesterday.
The receptionist looked up from her computer, a glowing screen of colors like a geometric movie.
‘Find him?’
‘That’s where I’m going now. Find somebody who doesn’t stand with his hand on his ass for a year. What town is this?’
‘What town? It’s still Rapid City, same as it was this morning.’
54
What I See
He is on the wrong road, caught in heavy traffic. He cannot make out the route signs until he is abreast, too late to get into the right lane and maneuver the exit. Where in hell is he? There is fog. Water. Thousands of geese fly over him, cross the road obliquely on set wings. They float in ditches and lakes, skim the bending river, nasal, unchanging cries like crowds of angry petitioners marching through the water weeds. He drives slowly. CONSTRUCTION NEXT 48 MI. The road dwindles to one lane, streaked with clots of earth, metal-legged barriers force him to drive half on the shoulder. Power lines dip and climb, dip. White wire.
Ahead of him, going north, pickups hauling trailers loaded with mud-spattered ATVs, cars pulling motorboats, grinding their tires across distance. The land erupting with sores, bulldozers tearing.
The voice on the radio warns that tests show the drinking water in Fan Hill is polluted, residents should contact someone. Over a crumbling bridge, exposed cable in frayed rust flowers, past twisted mufflers and black half-moons of tires. The geese fall away into the smoking distance. Traffic crawls as arterial roadways feed in more cars and hissing trucks with lofty airfoils. In the filthy air he cannot tell in what direction he travels.
A diner hangs over the road. Traffic sucks into its entrance funnel, enticed by painted roof, promises of steaks and home-cooked breakfasts. He manages to pull in. The fog will bum off while he gets some coffee. Coffee to clear his head.
The customers lean on a golden counter. Men read sports news. A couple slumps, hands on melamine coffee cups. The men wear caps, the hair of the women is curled. Laminated scenes of hunting dogs, packhorses in distant snowy mountains are screwed onto the wall. The wall simulates knotty pine. Loyal orders coffee. He cannot eat. But there is a little money for coffee and some gas. If he sleeps on the front seat. There will be a wait, says the woman. The cook has not shown up and they are shorthanded. He wants to ask her where he is but she turns away.
Motorcycles drone like sick bees. The riders come in chaffing their hands, snapping their arms. The woman is enormously fat. Her feet disappear into scuffed engineer boots. The others wear cowboy boots. The skinny man leads them to a table in the center of the room. He pushes back his Harley-Davidson cap and lights a cigarette.
‘Shit, remember that guy? What the hell was that place? Man, I went in there, said “Man, what the hell is old Larry doing in a place like this?”’ The men speak to each other in hard voices, the women lean forward and laugh.
‘Well, I figured after a while the goddamn thing is gonna get hot.’
The woman brings their menus. She carries a coffeepot in her right hand. Loyal’s coffee is lukewarm and low in the cup. He beckons to the woman.
‘Put a little of that coffee in my pocket, will you?’ Tiny fluted cups of nondairy creamer from her apron pocket. Loyal feels the heat of her body in the white stuff.
‘Was you there when goddamn Tom had that there goddamn cream of wheat yesterday?’
‘No, what was it, lumpy?’
‘Jesus Christ. Yeah, was like gravel.’
Now the worn tires pound across seamed cracks, a rock shaped like a castle stubs through the fog. The radio says a man arrested on rape charges has escaped.
He is on a back road. The traffic is thinner. But it’s all wrong. He is turned around in some way. He should be moving into the dry country, but instead sees cemeteries, dots and pots of plastic flowers. Names spring at him from white stones, Heydt, Hansen, Hitzeman, Schwebke, Grundwaldt, Pick. A corncob lies on a grave. These roads are wrong. He turns onto dirt that cuts away through the black fields of Schwebke and Grundwaldt and Hitzeman.
Red-winged blackbirds flare, the shadows of clouds flow over the soft country, storefronts, corrugated metal of machinery repair shops, grain storage, farm chemicals. Tractors churn. God, it has to be Minnesota. He’s going east, must have driven northeast all the way across South Dakota. Turned around. Completely turned around.
The color of the soil changes to deep, deep blue. Jets of herbicide spray from the behemoth tractor tanks. An old farmer carries a chair from his kitchen into the field. Painted stones balance on fence posts and stumps. The rows of poplars, wind harps behind the farmhouses.
And beside an empty field, on an empty road taut as stretched wire, with a final stutter of worn-out pistons the truck breaks down. Worn out, worn down, used up. That’s all, folks.
55
The White Spider
WHEN LOYAL OPENED his eyes he was looking at a white spider crouched in the petals of a daisy. The round cream-colored abdomen reflected the buttery pollen rods. No wind. Daisies floated in the grass like doll plates. He could not remember what they reminded him of, something like wafers. Or another spider, not white.
He had slept badly; the cough wrenched through deep now. With his tongue he felt there was a festering sore in the corner of his mouth, the kind made by a diver of fine grass sunk so deep in the flesh that it became invisible, the kind from eating handfuls of unhulled wild strawberries raked out of the grass. It was not the season for strawberries. He braced his forefinger against his thumb and suddenly catapulted the white spider into the air. It fell, a brief, pale dot.
He walked along a narrow road bordered by arched trees, almost a lane, except for tire tracks in the dust. On his back the bedroll, a few utensils, a change of ragged clothes, wad of paper, pencil stubs, jar of instant coffee, plastic razor with a dull blade. Miles behind him the fulgurite was buried in a secret grave. Only he knew its location.
The pieces of sky that opened above were pallid. He could get no grasp of the day except a feeling of dry chill. When he saw a meadow above him through the trees h
e headed for it instinctively, drawn by the possibility of a high, searching view.
The air sweetened with flooding light as he labored through birch and poplar. Breathless, coughing, when he reached the meadow, he was disappointed to find it was only an opening in the woods, a clearing of lichen and red-tinged strawberry leaves, but he could not tell what he had expected. He had come around so many corners they all looked the same.
The meadow was what he imagined summer in Russia was like, frail and empty. Now he could see half the sky. Mare’s tads and mackerel scales, ice-crystal streamers. It was a high sky, windswept cirrus in the stratosphere like paintbrush strokes. At the end of the strokes were gleaming scribbles like Arabic writing. The cloud spread north in sweeping waves, a vast fan tipped with plumes. He turned on his heel to look into the south where cirrocumulus packed the sky with dense pearl ripples. Fair weather and clear.
‘When the bird’s flight is over,
When the tired wings fold,’ he mumbled.
He took up a half-rotten branch from the edge of the field. ‘Dance, honey? “When the bird’s flight is ooooover,”’ he bleated, stumbling in the moss cushions, holding the branch at the waist, pumping it to and fro, tipping it in a way that would have had a woman’s hair loose and down, small jumps and whirls, an old man with bees in his sleeves. He half-fell. ‘Trip me, you bitch. Get out.’ Panting, retching with the cough. And hurled the branch, glad to see it break in a spray of red pulp. His loneliness was not innocent. Under the blows of the cough he vibrated as though his body had been struck, as a taut anchor rope struck by iron, tears crept along the channels of his contorted face, he stood in the silent meadow without even a rotted branch.