by Anne Valente
Three-point-two percent alcohol. We’re in Utah. Every beer on tap in the entire state is watered down. You can thank the state’s liquor laws.
How do you know about that?
Traveling on circuits. We stopped once or twice in Salt Lake City. It’s the same with buying alcohol in supermarkets. Only liquor stores carry regular alcohol.
I guess I wouldn’t have noticed when I was here with Mom in high school.
Rhiannon glances at a cluster of John Wayne photographs on the wall behind the bar. A small shrine to the American West of romanticized cinema. The last great American cowboy. Reminders everywhere that this land was colonized and made for men. Rhiannon looks away.
Do you remember anything else about your trip out here with Mom? Anything that would explain what that laser pointer means?
I just remember that we camped. The quarry’s in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t do anything but look at fossils. I don’t remember anything about the trip that had anything to do with a laser pointer.
Rhiannon glances at Billie. You want to talk at all about last night?
What about last night?
Nick. The guy from the bar. Did you get his number?
Not a chance. I’ll never see him again.
But you had fun. Why wouldn’t you call him again?
Because where could it go? He lives in Cortez. Cortez fucking Colorado, Rhee. We have nothing in common. It was just one night and nothing else.
How can you do that?
Rhiannon says it before she hears the judgment in her voice.
Billie looks at her. What, you’ve never had a one-night stand?
And you have, before last night? When would you have had time? You were with Tim and then you went to prison.
Right. Like I was a total celibate before I met him.
When? High school?
High school and college, too. God, it’s not a big deal. You act like marriage is a requirement for having sex. Nick was just one night. It was nice to be with someone who wasn’t interested in being a total asshole for once. Stop acting like such a prude.
I’m not.
You’ve never had sex with someone you didn’t love?
The corner jukebox blares to life across the tavern. The woman from the couple down the bar has slid quarters into the machine. Johnny Cash. A song Rhiannon doesn’t know but recognizes the voice. The woman returns to the bar and the man places a hand on her back and Rhiannon wonders if she could have been so open with Beth out here, the small towns of the West meant for men but also for men and women, a landscape she crossed on the racing circuit knowing it would never embrace her. A woman who would only ever love other women, no kind of western romance at all.
No, she says. I haven’t had sex with someone I didn’t love.
It doesn’t matter either way. And you can now. Why don’t you?
Because I don’t want to. And because we’re out here. We’re in Utah. My guess is that people like me aren’t too welcome here.
But they are in Champaign? Central Illinois is the liberal capital of the world?
It’s better than this. Look, I feel like shit, Billie. I feel like shit because I can’t tell if I’ve wasted five years of my life with Beth or if I just miss her. If I miss her terribly.
Why don’t you just call her?
I did. I told her I was sorry I left and she hung up on me.
It was just one phone call.
One phone call. One phone call and years of treating her like trash.
Is that what you think?
Rhiannon sips her beer. I know I’ve been a terrible partner.
I know terrible partners. I don’t think you’ve been that.
There are lots of ways to be a terrible partner.
And there are lots of ways to make amends.
The song ends and another begins, a Hall & Oates ballad Rhiannon remembers from their father’s record player when they were small. She glances up at the shrine of John Wayne photos. The West never a place for a driver like Bryson Townes, either. She imagines Bryson on the road this week shuttling across Kansas to Colorado, charting a career despite a wall of history against him. Not the same as her own path, but similar. And her mother, making a name for herself among so many male paleontologists, chiseling her small stake into the West.
I miss Mom, Rhiannon says.
She hears herself say it before she can take it back.
I know, Billie says.
I miss her. I don’t know if there’s anything else to say.
Of course there’s more to say.
Rhiannon looks at her sister. Then why don’t you say something? I’m out of words. And it seems like you want to talk about this more than me.
Fine. Billie smiles. Why a laser pointer? What the fuck do you think it means?
I have no idea what it means. To be honest, we don’t even know what a hawk feather means, or a stegosaurus tail bone.
The sound of the jukebox fills the bar, the television on mute. Rhiannon should be thinking of their mother and the laser pointer and figuring out what it means but she imagines Beth in Illinois instead, Beth stooped above her printmaking press. Beth carving a fine knife into Midwestern oak that would become the grooves of a woodcut. The book Beth kept on their coffee table: the Spiral Jetty somewhere in this state. An earthwork of basalt circling out into the Great Salt Lake, what inspired Beth, how art could work in tandem with the land. How Beth meant creation to be a gentle thing, her hands shaping the sleek divots of a woodcut. Rhiannon wonders if Beth has ever stood on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, the sculpture spiraling out before her, what Rhiannon never even thought to ask. Beth traveling to Detroit for a show in September. Beth making a name for herself too. Beth on the other end of the line from a bathroom in the middle of New Mexico before hearing Rhiannon’s words and hanging up.
AFTER THEY DRINK three more beers, the alcohol content low enough to keep them inside the tavern for two more hours, and after they’ve eaten so much popcorn that neither she nor Billie want dinner anywhere else, Rhiannon pays the bartender and they step outside the bar onto Moab’s quiet downtown streets.
I thought it would be busier out here, Billie says.
High season. Early risers for hiking. Early to bed.
Billie slides her arm into the crook of Rhiannon’s elbow and the feel of Billie’s skin against hers is a thin blanket against the desert night. They walk linked down the sidewalk, Billie’s forearm moving softly against her side. They pass over the creek, the water slipping through the dark and catching sleek slivers of moonlight. Rhiannon feels the weight of Billie’s head lean against her shoulder.
Goddamn, Billie says. Look at that fucking sky.
Rhiannon looks up and the sky is a dark canvas splattered with the glow of stars. Winking beacons. Summer constellations she’s sure Billie knows by heart.
What are we looking at?
Billie points overhead. Boötes. Crystal clear right up there. And that’s the hunter following the two bears across the sky. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
Where are those?
Billie slides her hand across the sky. There. Ursa Minor contains the Little Dipper and Polaris. The North Star. But you already knew that.
You’d be surprised at how little I know about stars.
When they reach the car, Rhiannon sits for a minute drinking the last of Billie’s water bottle stashed in the backseat. Buzzed from so many beers, but still sober enough to drive. She pulls the Mustang onto Moab’s main strip and guides the car down the street and into the Moab Valley Campground.
Billie strips her clothes inside the tent and pulls on a sweatshirt and leggings while Rhiannon sits in the dirt outside, the wash of sky above them like nothing she’s ever seen. Even before Illinois grew into a haze of low clouds, Rhiannon knows this about herself: she never thought to look up. Never thought to take interest in the fine detail of something like a Spiral Jetty. Her world always asphalt. Her eyes always to the ground.
&nbs
p; Billie emerges from the tent and sits beside Rhiannon in the dirt. Look at that, she says. She points up at a gauzed streak across the sky, what looks like a faint river of light pulsing through the stars. The Milky Way, Billie whispers.
We can see it from here?
That’s what it is.
Rhiannon watches its shimmering band, what looks like a thick cloud braided across the dome of the night sky. She watches the ether of light and something clicks, even through the lingering buzz of alcohol.
Where’s the pointer?
Billie pulls it from the front pouch of her sweatshirt.
Rhiannon takes the laser their mother left them and trains it up into the darkness. Despite how far the constellations are and how distant the long stretch of the Milky Way, the first time Rhiannon’s ever seen it, the green glow of the pointer’s vector extends from her hands and reaches the sky.
An astronomy laser, Rhiannon says. Not a pointer for classroom lectures at all.
Billie takes the pointer from Rhiannon’s hands. You’re fucking kidding me.
That’s exactly what this is.
Billie guides the pointer’s light along Milky Way’s speckled band.
Over two hundred billion stars up there, she says. Can you believe it?
Rhiannon can’t. Billions of stars, as unimaginable as her mother no longer here. A realization that punches her in the gut as Billie steers the pointer across the sky. Rhiannon falls silent in the dark. She lets Billie talk, lets her identify every star she sees. Nebula. Star nurseries. White dwarfs and red giants. Rhiannon has no idea what Billie means but knows their mother saw a sky just like this one when she was here. That she left them this pointer for a reason. That she too surely watched splashes of constellations over southern Utah. Billie palettes the pointer across the stars and Rhiannon leans back and looks up.
HSU, DAVID. PHD. “THE CLEVELAND-LLOYD QUARRY.” MAJOR SITES OF NORTH AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGICAL DISCOVERY. ED. ALICE SHAPIRO. MISSOULA: UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA PRESS, 1996. 25–29. PRINT.
CALL NUMBER: 561 PR425.16
THE CLEVELAND-LLOYD QUARRY
The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, located in the central Utah valley, contains the largest and densest concentration of Jurassic-era fossils in the world. Over fifteen thousand bones have been excavated and studied in this area, a mere fraction of what paleontologists suggest are actually buried in the region.
An alleged predator trap, the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry is speculated to contain so many fossils due to some kind of natural hazard that held herbivorous dinosaurs captive, attracting carnivores who also then succumbed. The cause of this natural hazard is still being debated among paleontologists. Due to the high concentration of allosaurus fossils in the area, a predator trap is speculated due to the pack-hunting behavior of these particular carnivores.
Beyond a preponderance of allosaurus fossils, other bones excavated in the area indicate the presence of marshosaurus, stokesosaurus, camarasaurus, and stegosaurus.
38.5725º N, 109.5497º W:
Moab, UT
When Billie wakes inside the tent, dry-mouthed with the lingering cotton of too many beers, Rhiannon is still bundled inside her sleeping bag. Billie unzips the tent’s front flap, the sun still hidden behind the tall buttes that line the Moab Valley Campground. She steps outside, the dirt cool beneath her bare feet, and watches the predawn sky mineral with streaks of coral light.
The scent of campfire. Diminished smoke. Small groups of other patrons clustered around morning fire pits heating coffee. Billie shoves her hands inside the pouch of her sweatshirt and her fingers catch on the laser pointer, still stashed in the folds of her clothing. She can’t believe it took them all night to figure out what it was for. She remembers standing in the backyard of their childhood home, her mother’s telescope a fixture among the lawn chairs and garden beds and clotheslines. What Billie hasn’t thought of in years, and what she almost forgot: while Rhiannon spent hours in the garage with her father and engines and a set of tools, Billie followed her mother outside to identify Illinois birds and moths in the yard, and at night, the Midwest’s constellations.
Every Dewey decimal number Billie has memorized first paved by the woodpeckers and sphinx moths and the bright point of Jupiter over the backyard’s dusk every June, everything her mother pointed out and Billie absorbed. Her mother and her father. Separate lives in the end and yet the one thing they did together was make sure their daughters were curious about the world, what she hates to admit about her father. Amid the coming sunrise, Billie realizes she’s the one who’s wanted to talk about their mother without knowing at all what to say. The hawk feather, stashed now at the bottom of her daypack. What her mother left her inside the plastic box in Carlsbad and what Billie assumed was a jab. But here, the laser pointer’s weight in her hands and the morning light creeping up the sky, it doesn’t feel like a dig so much as a reminder. Of what they shared. That Billie learned the woods and its trees and the shapes of its leaves from her father but she learned the sky from her mother, its stars and birds, what became Alabama’s weight alighting on her arm.
Hey, Rhiannon says behind her, emerging from the tent.
Wild night at Moab’s hottest tavern, Billie says. Hungover?
Hardly. I told you three-two beer was a good thing.
Sleep okay? I’m starving.
That’s what happens when you eat popcorn for dinner.
You want to grab breakfast somewhere?
Rhiannon nods. Places along the main strip should be open once we pack up the tent and get going.
Billie helps Rhiannon pull out the stakes and stuff the sleeping bags into the Mustang’s trunk. By the time Rhiannon pulls out of the campground, the sun has risen in sharp bands that break from the surrounding buttes.
That place is open, Rhiannon says as they approach a single-room diner. She parks behind the restaurant and tells Billie to bring her daypack, what Billie knows means bringing the journal inside to map their next coordinate. Beyond the restaurant’s front door, six of seven tables are already taken. Rhiannon was right: early hikers. She motions for Billie to take the last table in the corner while she orders at the counter. Scrambled eggs and sausage. Sunny-side up and polenta for Billie. From the table Billie watches her sister take charge, Rhiannon a commanding presence accustomed to overseeing a pit crew, what Billie notices she mostly hides now in the regularity of daily life.
Rhiannon approaches the table with two mugs of coffee. Billie pulls the journal from her daypack, the hawk feather somewhere inside the bag with the laser pointer and the locket and the stegosaurus tail bone and Billie wonders how many more items they’ll collect before they return home. She places the journal on the table between their two coffee mugs and flips it open to the page past the coordinates for the Mill Canyon Trail and its accompanying drawing of dinosaur tracks. On the next page: what looks like another dinosaur. Tall. Standing upright.
Another T. rex, Rhiannon says. We already found one in St. Louis.
Billie rotates the journal away from her sister and recognizes the shape, its large jaws and forelimbs.
It’s an allosaurus, Billie says. Similar to a T. rex.
How would you know?
Billie points. The forelimbs are larger. The T. rex had notoriously small arms.
You can tell that from a drawing?
Billie flips back to the first drawing and coordinate, her mother’s scrawl of the T. rex statue in Forest Park. Can’t you tell?
Not really.
It doesn’t matter. At least we know this is the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry’s coordinate. That we’re headed directly there.
A server arrives with their breakfast and drops the plate of polenta in front of Billie, the eggs and sausage in front of Rhiannon. Hot sauce? he asks. Ketchup?
Rhiannon asks for both and looks at Billie when the server walks away. How do you know for sure this is pointing us to the quarry?
Allosaurs are Jurassic dinosaurs, Billie says as the server re
turns with two glass bottles. Just like the stegosaurs Mom studied. The T. rex came almost a million years later, in the Cretaceous period.
That’s a nice PBS lesson. Rhiannon shakes Tabasco over her eggs. But it doesn’t tell me anything about the quarry and how you know it’s what Mom means here.
A predator trap, Billie says. Mom told us a million times. I don’t remember much from my trip out there in high school, but I remember that most of the bones in the quarry are allosaurus fossils. They were predators. Mom studied stegosaurus fossils there because the allosaurs preyed on them. That’s why there were so many of them there.
Fine. Rhiannon spears her sausage. But can we still check the GPS?
Billie pulls out the handheld device and taps in the coordinate.
North, she says. Two and a half hours. Exactly where the quarry should be.
Rhiannon smiles. We’re finally almost there.
Billie slices her polenta. She doesn’t know if this is the last coordinate. She refuses to flip the page though she suspects this entry is the last one. She imagines her mother sketching a final page in her hospital room while Rhiannon slept in the armchair beside her, Billie miles away. She imagines her mother drawing the bones of a dinosaur she spent years with in the quarry, bones she knew she’d never touch again.
THE STRETCH OF road between Moab and the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry is their shortest distance but also the most desolate. The landscape flattens past Green River from southern Utah’s buttes to the central plains of the state, a wide visibility that reveals distant mountains ridged off Highway 191. Billie counts twenty-six mile markers, one to the next to keep her brain occupied, not a single gas station or rest stop along the road between them. Her fingers clutch the Mustang’s armrest only when Rhiannon veers into the oncoming traffic lane to pass slow cars. From the map on Rhiannon’s phone, Billie can see the indirectness of their route: they nearly pass the quarry on the way up, plateaus to the west impassable and preventing their quick cutover. They’ll bend northwest and route back down, directly south again to Cleveland-Lloyd.
Rhiannon keeps the radio on until the airwaves flatline, enough time to hear the news. Nearly every airport in the world reopening, airlines avoiding the risk of losing revenue. Two commentators debate the pull of capitalism against the ethics of safety and Billie notes no mention of the Colorado wildfire, so many other droughts and tornadoes drawing larger headlines. A mile-wide twister in central Mississippi the night before. A prolonged summer drought in Southern California, testing the watershed. Greater devastation than wildfire. Greater property damage and economic loss.