Celestial Inventories (27 page)

But tonight he did not forget about any of this. He did not forget about the babies, or the drama and magic of what did or did not happen in his brain. Even through dinner, and the companionable reading they shared after dinner, and the snuggle in bed, the spooning of their lives one against the other, he did not forget, and so just before they both fell asleep he asked her, “When you give Mrs. Stevens the high chair, would you ask her if we could have it back when they’re done with it?”

She didn’t reply at first, and after a time he decided she must be asleep, when she said, “of course.”

Where did the dinosaurs go?
The children looked down at their desks. A change of climate, ice age, caterpillars eating their food, disease, mammals eating their eggs. Freddy Barnhill was thinking these answers but was too self conscious to raise his hand. The teacher waited. But nobody’s really sure, Freddy thought. Nobody knows.

Sometimes he thought they might be lost somewhere. They couldn’t find their way. They couldn’t keep up with the others, the way the world was changing so. So they got left behind. They got abandoned.

Twenty years later, Freddy drove the fifty-nine miles between Meeker and Rangely twice each day thinking about his father and thinking about dinosaurs. Only occasionally were there changes in subject matter, although he would have expected both topics to be exhausted by now. People might call him obsessed; hell, people would call him crazy.

Along Colorado Highway 64, endless streams of yellow-blooming rabbit grass whipped by, each scrub-dotted washout and arroyo threatening to draw his eye up its channel and send him into the ditch. Almost as soon as he turned the pickup onto the road, he would start to see his father’s enormous hands pressing down at him from above the bar. He’d feel himself suddenly afraid of his father’s instability and scurry under the table to hide. Then he’d hear the sudden crash of his father’s huge head on the table as he passed out. An endless crash; his father’s head slammed the hard wood again and again the fifty-nine miles between Meeker and Rangely.

There seemed to be little life in the gullies and low hills. Harsh land which had to be struggled with, which swallowed any failed attempts. Early settlers had named this land with their complaints: Devil’s Grave, Bitter Creek, Camp Misery, Bugtown, Poverty Gulch. Rotted houses around clumps of tumbleweed leaned from the hillsides like aged throats, their swollen walls collapsing. The broken fingers of ancient windmills reached toward an empty sky.

Once he reached Rangely, the sense of lifelessness was even more pronounced—grey, lunar sandstone in ridges and flatlands as far as the eye could see. Wind-blasted landscape alive with sagebrush, little else. The oil companies’ reservation: new and old riggings, abandoned shacks. His father had spent most of his adult life here, working for one outfit or another.

Mel Barnhill had originally been a cowboy. A drifter. Then when things had begun to change with the oil wells coming in, he’d changed, too. He’d been a mechanic, construction worker, jack-of-all-trades. Freddy remembered seeing him work on some of the early crude equipment, even some of the steam operated earthmovers. Enormous brown hands working with rough-made wrenches. Smiling, singing—he always had been happy working with machinery. Freddy had helped him, sort of, as much as any very small boy might help his father in his work. But that time had passed. As had the life of the cowboy.

His father liked thinking of himself as an outlaw. “Don’t need no laws, no woman to tie me down. Like to do as I please.”

Freddy remembered following his father up the street after one of the man’s long drinking bouts. The swagger in the walk, he thought now, had been reminiscent of Butch Cassidy or professional killer Tom Horn, who used to hide out not far from there. Cattle were still being rustled at the time, and Freddy could recall more than once his father hinting that he had had a part in some of it. He’d wink at Freddy sometimes when he said this, but Freddy never could tell if that meant he was just joking, or that he really had done those things, and Freddy was supposed to be extra proud. The first time Freddy’d seen a John Wayne movie, he’d thought that was his father up on the screen. The walk was the same. After a time he began to wonder if his father practiced it.

Dramatic gestures seemed to be a lot of what the old-timers in the area were about. Gestures for a fading way of life. When he thought about it now, Freddy believed his father had known the life was rapidly becoming obsolete, the cowboy and rancher becoming extinct. It was the end of an era. Not long after his father’s time, they built that new power plant at Craig, and the old timers suddenly didn’t know every face when they came into town. People had to lock their doors.

“Dumb cowboys! Stupid sodbusters!” Freddy’s father had been drunk, screaming hoarsely in a corral outside a Rangely bar. Freddy remembered the incident vaguely; he’d seen only part of it through the bar window. But every time he ran into one of his father’s old friends, it was recalled.

His father had been drinking with some of his cowboy friends; there’d been an argument. They’d accused Mel of turning his back on them, becoming a city boy, because he worked for the oil companies.

Little Freddy had shuddered behind the window. His father was dragging a cow out of the barn. Before anyone could do anything, he shot it. The big brown animal collapsed as if in slow motion, its head making a sick thud on the hard ground. One of the waitresses had held Freddy so tightly it scared him, but it had calmed him down.

This was the landscape Mel Barnhill had willed to his son. It provided the backdrop for most of Freddy’s dreams. And yet it was at the
outskirts
of Rangely that, every day, Freddy started thinking about dinosaurs.

Fourteen miles north of Rangely was the little town of Dinosaur. And twenty-seven miles west of there, just across the Utah border and above Jensen, was the big Dinosaur Quarry of the Dinosaur National Monument. One of the largest sources of dinosaur fossils in the world. Primitive land, or the way the earth might look after some catastrophe. Freddy didn’t go any more. Standing up there looking out over the canyons, where the Colorado Plateau had crashed up against the Uinta range, it was as if his whole life might disappear out there someday, pulled into the emptiness.

Over each street sign in the town of Dinosaur was a little red cutout of a stegosaurus. The streets had names like Brontosaurus, Pterodactyl, Tyrannosaurus Rex. The town looked old, almost as old as the surrounding land, with tar paper shacks here and there and rough board houses. It used to be called Artesia before the Interior Department set up the park.

But most of the tourists went over to Utah, to Jensen and Vernal. Dinosaur was just a place people passed through on their way to somewhere else; there was no restaurant, not even a half-decent service station. Only a few hundred in population—there hadn’t been many people in the first place, and most of them had gone a long time ago. The red on the dinosaur cutouts looked a lot like rust.

Freddy worked in Rangely, just as his dad had, but he lived in Meeker. He liked Meeker, although most of the other men his age complained that there was nothing to do. It was a quiet town; there weren’t too many cowboys, and it lacked Rangely’s construction and oil workers. Freddy was relieved.

The pickup slid in gravel, and Freddy fought to right it. You had to be careful driving the roads out here; they lulled you, made you careless. The truck seemed so easy to drive, it had so much power, that you sometimes forgot how dangerous one slip might be. One of the drawbacks to advanced technology, and to evolution. It made you reckless; it became too easy to lose control over the power. And that power could leave you upside down off an embankment.

Again, his father’s enormous head crashed into the table. The glasses fell in a rain of glistening shards. His father’s shapeless mouth opened to expose rough, broken teeth.

Dinosaurs used to walk the hills here, but it had been different then. Freddy thought about that a lot, how things used to be so different. And how they might be different again, with new monsters walking the barren land: giant rats and scavenging rabbits, but maybe rabbits like no one’s ever seen before—long claws and hind legs strong enough to tear another animal apart. Just before the dinosaurs came, low lying desert then, the early Jurassic Period. No animals. Great restless sand dunes towering seven hundred feet, snaking and drifting like primeval dreams. Fading, dying away in the distance.

The earliest home Freddy could remember was an old boarding house a few hundred yards from one of the early oil rigs. A whitewashed shack, really, several crate-like rooms strung together. He and his father had shared one. He couldn’t remember his mother, except as a gauzy presence, more like a ghost, something dead and not dead. He didn’t think she had ever lived with them in the rooming house, but he couldn’t be sure. It bothered him that he could remember so little about her—a hint of light, a smell, that was all. She had vanished.
She left us. She left me,
he corrected himself. His father had always told him that, but it was still hard to believe.

The land sank. An arctic sea reached in. Millions of years passed, and in the late Jurassic it all rose again. The dinosaurs were coming; the land was readying itself.

He sometimes wondered if he had ever known his mother at all. Maybe his memories were false. Maybe she had died when he was born. Maybe she’d gone away to die, her time done once she’d given him life.

The land just come from the sea was much more humid. Flat plains. Marshy. Great slow streams loaded with silt flowed out of the highlands to the west to feed the marshes and lakes. Dust floated down from the volcanoes beyond the highlands. Araucaria pines towered 150 feet above the forest floor, the tops of ginkgos, tree ferns, and cycads below them. Giant bat-like pterosaurs flapped scaly wings against the sky, maintaining balance with their long, flat-tipped tails. Crocodiles sunned themselves by the marsh.

And yet he did remember his father complaining about her. How she never cleaned, never helped them at all. He held a mental image of his father throwing her out. Her screaming, crying, reaching. “I want my baby, my baby!” Freddy couldn’t be sure.

Apatosaurus raises its great head above the plants. Forty tons, plant eater. Cold eyes. Its head comes crashing.

Freddy loved a woman in Rangely. Because of her he allowed himself to stay overnight there on Fridays. But it scared him, loving someone like that. She might leave. She might vanish. And he didn’t like waking up in Rangely; the first thing you saw were those barren white sandstone hills.

He loved her. He was sure of that. His love filled him, and formed one of the three anchors of his life, along with the memories of his father and the thoughts of dinosaurs. But lately something felt lacking. Some crisis, some drama. Loving her didn’t feel like quite enough.

He wasn’t sure why they’d never gotten married. The time had never seemed right for either of them, but after a time he realized that the time would never seem right. One time she was going to have his baby, but she miscarried. No one else had known about it.
Wasn’t time for it, he supposed; its time had passed. He didn’t believe in God or heaven, but sometimes he wondered if the baby might
be
somewhere. Hiding from him. Or waiting for him.

It was the same all over. They had friends—lovers and married couples—and all of them seemed to be breaking up. Still loving each other, but unable to stay together.

Sometimes his drives from Meeker to Rangely were specifically to see Melinda, but he almost never thought about her during the trip.

He thought about his father, and dinosaurs.

Freddy looked out the side window of the pickup. Sagebrush flats, rising sandstone buttes, creek beds turned to sand. Old wrecks out in the fields. Before the oil men there had been cowboys, a few farmers. Before them, the outlaws hiding out. Before the outlaws, fur traders maneuvering through the canyons.

Before that, Indians trading along the Green and Yampa rivers. Before that, dinosaurs roaming the hot, wet lowlands.

Freddy had watched his father slowly become obsolete, running out of things he could do, running out of places to live. The drinking had grown steadily worse, his father had gone from job to job, they had moved from shack to shack . . .

His father’s great head, his enormous body falling, crashing into wood, Freddy scrambling to get out of the way of the rapidly descending bulk . . .

And then his father had left, vanished. Freddy had been seventeen. He had a vague memory of his father walking away, across the flat into dust-filled air. It had been early morning—Freddy had been trying to wake up, but couldn’t quite manage it, and had fallen back into the covers. He’d been abandoned.

Freddy did minor legal work for one of the oil companies. Easy assignments, dealing with the local landowners on rights-of-way, leasing, sometimes the complaints of an especially disgruntled employee. Most of the time he sat behind his desk in Rangely reading a book, or daydreaming. In the office he had a full library on dinosaurs and other mysteriously vanished races and species. Many days he saw no one, and he ate his lunch at his desk.

Today was Friday, and he would be staying over at Melinda’s place. Melinda taught school some distance from Rangely—rancher’s kids, mostly—and Freddy often wondered why she didn’t live closer to her work. But she said she liked Rangely. Over the weekend they would be visiting her father’s grave on Douglas Mountain. Her father had faded after a long, consuming illness. She’d been at his bed most of that time, waiting for him to leave her, but still not quite believing it when he finally abandoned her, his eyes going away into grey.

Freddy felt a bit guilty, but he had to admit he looked forward to it. The wild horses they called “broomies” roamed Douglas Mountain, one of the last such herds in the west. A dry and rocky highland there, over 450 square miles. The herd had been there for more than a hundred years, beginning with horses which had wandered off from the farms and ranches and gone wild. They were beautiful to see, wild and alive. Melinda’s father used to catch a few, work with them. Then he’d died.

Melinda’s old Dodge was already at her house. Something was wrong; she usually came in an hour after him. He walked inside; she was standing at the old fashioned sink, her back to him.

“They’re closing the school,” she said quietly, not bothering to turn around.

“Why?”

Now she turned, looking slightly surprised. “What do you mean
why?
It could have happened anytime; you know that. Enough of the ranchers have moved away . . . there aren’t enough to support it now. One of the ranchers bought it; I hear he’s going to turn it into a barn.”