Celestial Inventories (28 page)

He felt stupid. “When is all this supposed to happen?”

“End of the term. Three weeks.” She looked up at him. “I’ll be moving away, Fred. I’ve spent too much time here; I’ve exhausted all the possibilities. I . . .” She looked at him sadly. “I can’t get what I need here anymore.”

He couldn’t meet her gaze. He walked around the kitchen slowly, looking at things. He knew it was a habit which infuriated her, but he couldn’t seem to help it.

“I . . . don’t want you to go,” he said finally. Then he tried to look at her directly, to show that he really meant what he was saying. He couldn’t quite manage it, but he thought he was at least close. Maybe she wouldn’t perceive any difference. “Don’t leave me,” he said in her general direction. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Fred. I really do. But that isn’t enough these days, is it?”

“It should be, but it isn’t. I’m not sure why.”

“I don’t know either; things are changing. Everywhere.”

He held her for a time, but he knew it was simply a gesture. A last, not-so-dramatic gesture for some kind of end.

They went to see her father’s gravesite anyway. It was a rough haul over broken land, and try as he might Freddy found it impossible to think about Melinda, the loss of her. As much as he cared, he found himself again thinking of dinosaurs, imagining serpentine necks rising up over the hills. Again he recounted the ways they all might have died.

Some thought the mountain-forming upheavals at the close of Cretaceous time must have killed them off. But why weren’t the other animals destroyed? A favourite theory used to be that disease, a series of plagues, wiped them out. Or racial old age. Some people claimed it was the wrath of God.

The most popular theory held that they were exterminated because the world became a colder place, maybe when a giant meteorite struck the earth, the resultant dust cloud obscuring the sun.

But no theory seemed quite adequate to explain such a complete, worldwide extinction.

Perhaps they had known it was their time. Perhaps something within their bodies or within their reptilian, primeval dream had told them that their era had come to an end. They had had no choice but to accept. The others had left them behind. He imagined them going off somewhere to die, their great bodies piling up. And the world had gone on without them.

His father’s massive head striking the floor, his great weight shaking little Freddy where he hid beneath the table. The large eyes rolling, the mouth loose and shapeless, groaning . . .

They went to her father’s gravesite holding hands, not saying anything. Douglas Mountain was beautiful, the broken land made to seem purposeful, aesthetically pleasing in its shape by means of the fields of grey-green sage. There was no one to disturb them; this was real back country. Tooley-wads, the old-timers called it.

The grave was well kept; they had spent a good deal of time during their courtship on the mountain, and frequently they puttered around the grave and its monument. An old tree crooked its branches above the plain stone, and hanging from it were her dad’s stirrups, lariat, a few of his leather-working tools, and a branding iron from his first job as a hand. Like a small museum. Artefacts already ancient-seeming and near-forgotten.

The wind picked up and lifted Melinda’s sandy hair off her shoulders. “Sow coon,” she whispered, and laughed softly. “Sow coon” was cowboy talk for a bad storm. Freddy thought he’d heard a horse, several, whinnying and pawing at the dirt behind them. He looked nervously around and saw nothing but a grey dust cloud spinning up with the breeze. His father used to say that the “signs” were always here if you just knew how to read them. Nature’s secret messages. You could tell what was coming if you just knew what to look for. Freddy imagined his father out there in the dusk with the long lost horses, dinosaurs all, hiding, watching him.

“Where’s the broomies?” he asked her.

“Here somewhere. They’re a bit shy these days.”

Freddy shivered and pulled closer to her. He looked back over his shoulder. A small column of the dust was settling, but for a moment it had looked like a horse’s leg, bending, then slamming into the dirt. He could hear fiery air being forced through large nostrils. Ghost sounds, he thought. Then all was silent again, the air cleared, and Freddy could see for miles around. No dust, no disturbance of the slopes or barren, windswept flats to be seen. No life.

“I think they’re gone,” he said to her, staring out over the bare slopes. “My God, I think they’re all finally gone.”

She looked up at him, but did not reply.

“Love won’t save us,” he said.

Again the enormous head crashed into unconsciousness.

Hours later, Freddy was ordering another beer, staring at the sleeping cowboy at the table next to him. He hadn’t been inside a Rangely bar since his father had disappeared. He hadn’t been drunk in years.

The bar was lit by a few yellow lights. Cowboys and oil workers shifted in the dimness, each becoming the other, losing resolution. The darkness of the bar absorbed most of their vague individual shadows, but those Freddy could see seemed much too bulky. They shouted, almost howling, their mouths wide, cavernous, and it hurt his ears.

He found himself examining the tabletop. Ever more closely the more he drank. What he saw there, finally, scratched into the surface, seemed to be some sort of pictograph. Picture writing. Kokopelli, the flute player. The Fremont Indians, what was it . . . 
AD. 1000? Freddy glanced up into the shadows, trying to find someone who might have carved it. He thought he saw a face darker than the others, a painted face, but then the area seemed to soot over again, two cowboys moving into the space. He fingered the carving gently . . . old, worn. Down around the Cub Creek area Freddy had seen a number of them. As teenagers, he and some of the guys used to camp out there, shooting at the pictures. He felt hot shame now, just thinking about it, and even at the time he had felt as if he’d done something dirty. The Fremonts had gone away around AD. 1150. Vanished into the hills. No one knew why.

“It was their time,” he whispered to no one. “Their hearts weren’t in it any more.”

The shadows in the bar were moving, dancing up the walls. Horses thundering in the dark. Fremont Indians. The cowboys and oil workers seeming to dance with them. And behind them all, the awesome bulk of an ancient, thundering reptile, tilting, falling . . .

“Hey, boy, you look rode hard an’ put away wet.” A tall cowboy was slapping Freddy on the back. He blinked, and looked at him. The cowboy grinned back. “Buy you a drink?”

“Sure, sure,” Freddy said blearily. It was hard to keep the old fellow in focus.

The cowboy sat down. “Been huntin’ coyote up on the White River, thought I’d come into town an’ stay out with the dry cattle.” Freddy stared at him blankly. “Have a night on the town, don’t you know.” The cowboy looked around. “Been up too long, I reckon. Last night I was sufferin’ the mill tails o’Hell, boy, drunk too much I ‘aspect, and all the she stuff was just them old sisters . . . 
made me so swole had to pick a fight with one o’those riggers, just a youngun, put ‘em down till he hauled out callin’ me to the street. Beat ‘em fine, rimfired the kid, but Lord! Stove up today!” He looked at Freddy and winked.

“You . . . trap coyotes? You can make a living doing that?”

“Middlin’, for what she’s worth,” he said. “Hell, it’s a life.”

“A life . . .” Freddy said sadly, guzzling the beer. “Not much left . . .”

“Now that’s a fact! Cobbled up way to live, but it was a livin’. After I’m gone won’t nobody know what happened, won’t nobody know how I lived!”

Freddy stared into the tobacco-stained teeth. The smile growing wider, expanding, growing lopsided, the rugged, enormous face falling, falling . . .

But it was Freddy’s face falling, crashing into the wooden tabletop.

Freddy woke up on Monday with the sun burning his face. He rubbed his dry skin, afraid to open his eyes, certain someone had just dragged him out of the Rangely bar and left him lying in the desert. Then the ground seemed to soften a bit beneath him, he opened one eye, and found himself in his own bed in Meeker, with all his clothes on. “How . . .” he mumbled, then realized the old cowboy must have driven him home.

Freddy stumbled out of the bed and looked around the house, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Freddy’s pickup was parked in the front yard. The cowboy must have hitched back into Rangely. Or gone out into the mountains or the prairie, back into hiding. Vanishing. Dying.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his neck. The bed table clock said two. Hardly worth going into work now, but he supposed he should. He didn’t have any appointments today, so he doubted they had missed him.

The house seemed unusually quiet. A light breeze ruffled the curtains over the open window, and there were no sounds from outside. No car engines, no children playing. He felt vaguely agitated. A sudden ripple of anxiety washed over his upper body. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. Strange feeling.

His coal black cat walked into the room. She stopped suddenly, turned her head, and stared at him. He saw her tensing, her back rising. She pinned him with her eyes, unmoving. He started to approach her, but she raced away with a sharp cry. Freddy couldn’t understand it. It was almost as if she hadn’t expected to see him.

The wind coming through the window seemed to rise, the temperature to drop, so that suddenly he was feeling sharp and cold gusts penetrating the room in an almost rhythmical pattern. He walked to the window to shut it, but stopped and stuck his head outside. The position was too awkward to see very much, but no matter how much he strained his head this way or that, he could see no one, hear no one. A few dogs moved quietly through the streets. Cars were parked, empty.

It took him only a few minutes to slap some water onto his face and get ready for work. He didn’t bother with a shower. He slid into the pickup, started the engine, and pulled out onto Meeker’s main street, waiting for the images of his father to come once again.

He stopped after two blocks. He got out of his truck.

Cars and trucks were parked awkwardly on both sides of the street, straddling alleys, parked in the wrong direction, pulled up on the curb, stopped too far out in the street. The engines had been turned off, the doors shut firmly, but it seemed as if the drivers hadn’t really cared where they left them. Maybe it hadn’t mattered where they had left them.

There was no one in sight. He walked around the main part of town; two dogs raced away when they saw him. The doors to the stores and cafes were wide open. Food still on the tables, but the grills and coffee pots had been turned off. Someone had left the radio on, but there was only static. On all channels. “Where are you hiding now?” he whispered softly.

Freddy ran out to the pickup and spun the wheels. He stopped, took a deep breath, then headed out toward Rangely. Off in the distance, a tall figure in battered hat and faded jeans was walking toward the mountains.

“Hey! Hey!” Freddy shouted, but the figure did not turn.

The wheels took the curves on edge, the arroyos drew him, the washouts beckoned him. He flashed on his broken body, twisted under the wreck down in one of the deeper gulleys, but still he pressed down on the accelerator, spinning the steering wheel.

But the receding figure was always too far away, and the road did not lead there.

“Hey! Cowboy!” Freddy shouted.

The cowboy did not turn, but continued to go away, to vanish.

He passed other vehicles abandoned at the side of the road. He saw no one on the hillsides but an occasional rabbit.

For the first time he could remember, the image of his father did not come to him.

Miles later—he had not kept track of the time—he stopped
just within the city limits of Rangely, unable to drive on. A cold wind filled the streets with dust. There were no lights in the buildings, even with the overcast skies. A door banged repeatedly. At the periphery of his vision he was aware of the oil wells pumping on, unattended, unwatched.

He would not go to her house only to find her gone. He would not look at her things, the relics left behind.

It was well past dark by the time Freddy reached the top of Douglas Mountain. He had seen no human beings along the way. He hadn’t expected to.

Where did the dinosaurs go?
the teacher asked again. Most of the standard answers were covered. The cute little girl in front of Freddy, the one he had such a desperate crush on, said that God had done it, and several in the class agreed. Freddy gave the answer about the plague of caterpillars. He liked caterpillars.

He stood above the old horse breaker’s grave. Her father’s grave. She wouldn’t have a grave. None of them would. There wouldn’t be anyone left to bury them. But maybe there’d be a quarry full of bones, and whatever might be there in the times ahead would dig them up and arrange them in display cases and dioramas.

The metal relics in the tree clanged together in the high wind.
It was dark below, but Freddy thought he could see shadows moving there. Reflections of himself, maybe, inverse shadows. He was sure he could hear the wild horses thundering, the Fremont Indians calling to them, the trappers, the outlaws—or maybe that was his father’s face in the darkness? Maybe that’s where he went . . . 
all those years . . .

“I’m really the most ignorant of dinosaurs,” he whispered to the shadows. “We’re already extinct, and here I am talking to the dark. Here I am, again the one they’ve left.”

He crouched down and leaned forward, straining his eyes.

Nothing.

“Don’t leave me behind!” he shouted. “Don’t
abandon
me!”
He touched his head softly, then scratched at his cheeks. He had not heard an echo. “I love you . . .” he whispered, but he had lost the names.

The wind seemed to rise, colder, but then he knew it was a wind inside him, and he imagined it starting somewhere near the base of his spine, sweeping up over the intestines, the liver, the heart, picking up odd cells of flesh and bone as it went, taking old memories to the brain . . .