Them Bones Read online

  Took-His-Time picked it up. ‘Not very good,’ he said. ‘Now, my dead uncle, he could really carve a pipe.’

  ‘Is that what you do?’

  ‘Carve pipes? Yes’ – he looked down at the floor – ‘they say I do.’

  ‘These are nice,’ I said.

  He smiled and said something to Sunflower. She looked at me and smiled, then laughed.

  ‘Supper will be a little while,’ he said. ‘Would you like a walk around the town? Perhaps it will help you remember your way.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  *

  The village, which overlooked the fields and the river, was laid out around a central plaza. On each end of the plaza was a large mound. On the rounded one was a hut, just a little bigger than the others. Opposite it across the hardpacked plaza was another mound, like a flat-topped pyramid. On top of it was a long low building made of big trees. On each end and in the middle was the carved effigy of a big crested bird with a long beak.

  ‘That’s our temple,’ said Took-His-Time. ‘Not much, but we like it.’

  ‘Who lives over there?’ I asked, pointing across the plaza.

  ‘Well, if we stay around a few more minutes, you’d see. That’s where Sun Man lives. He’s the chief. Every morning he yells the sun up, and he cries out in anguish every night when it goes down. All the Sun Men do that.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘Oh, every town has one. Thousands, I guess, maybe more. We belong to this confederacy, most of it’s on the other side of the River. To the west, that’s where the Huastecas, the Meshicas, live. They speak a language in which their god’s name sounds like a bird fart. They’re mean people, but we trade with them and have a few ritual wars.’

  ‘What do your people do most of the time?’

  ‘Hunt. Fish. Raise crops. I make pipes, others tan hides, make spears, stuff like that. We trade with other Sun Villages. Bury folks, raise kids, the usual things.’

  ‘And trade with these Traders and Northerners?’

  ‘Once a year or so. You missed them. Have to wait till the spring, just before the crops, before you can see them. We spend most of the winter making geejaws and doodads. They trade us cloth, axes, knives, beads, things we’re too lazy to learn how to make ourselves.’

  There was a group of people near one of the larger huts north of the plaza. Most of them, men and women, were tattooed heavily with weird designs. Like the ones on the three guys I’d seen in the afternoon.

  In fact, Moe and Curly were in the group. Curly waved to Took-His-Time.

  ‘That’s one of the hunters I saw this afternoon,’ I said.

  Another guy turned to stare at me. His face was a green design of lightning bolts and tears. A third weeping eye was tattooed on his forehead. He wore bear’s teeth earrings. His hands had outlines of hands incised on them, smaller and smaller in infinite regress.

  ‘Those are the Buzzard Cult people,’ said Took-His-Time, not looking at the man who stared back. ‘The man looking at you is Hamboon Bokulla, which means Dreaming Killer. He is their leader.’

  ‘Buzzard Cult?’

  ‘Our people, the Sun People, take death as it comes. We bury our dead in big piles of dirt, and put nice things in with them in death. But the Buzzard Cult people are something new. They worship Death itself, mourning, weeping, decay. All those hand and eye things. They don’t worship the Woodpecker.’ He nodded toward the temple.

  ‘But they’re still part of the village,’ he said. ‘They’ve sprung up everywhere. They think the world is going to end soon, and they dance a little dance to help it along.’

  ‘What do you believe?’

  ‘I believe supper’s ready.’

  *

  That’s how it started. That’s how I’m living in this village of two hundred huts on the Mississippi River, with people who worship a woodpecker, and who bury their dead in mounds.

  I didn’t mean to end up living here, but it happened. I was conscientious. I was trying to find out where and when I was, and nobody seemed to know.

  I moved the horse in near the plaza on my second day there. People piled food around it, and stood talking about it for hours.

  In those first few days I checked my radio beacon locator every few hours to see if anything had happened at the time portal. Took-His-Time introduced me to Sun Man, a nice old thin guy, and his nephew, who is likely to be the next Sun Man. (When a Sun Man dies, all the women get together and choose a new one. The closest kin a new Sun Man can be to the old one is on the old Sun Man’s sister’s side.) I tried to find out what I could, which is the stuff everybody seems to know – how many Sun Villages there are, how long the River is, when the crops should be planted, the best places to fish, how to make babies. For all this, Took-His-Time, patient as his name, acted as interpreter. I was picking up a few words and phrases from him, and from Sunflower (‘kick,’ for instance).

  The village is called the Village, the river is the River, the sky the Sky, and the people the People. The third day I was there, Took and Sunflower had a conference, and asked me if I’d like to stay as a guest until I found the people I was looking for.

  I said yes. I began to help Sunflower around the hut, went on walks with Took, tried to see how he made pipes. I learned words and looked after the horse.

  At first, I oiled my rifle every night, and kept my knife sharp. I checked the beacon every few hours, then once a day, every two days.

  I put the carbine into an oiled skin, put it behind my place in the hut. I washed my fatigues in the River, learned the local customs. (On the second day, I’d asked Took about certain functions. He pointed outside the village to a bank leading down to the River. ‘That’s called Shit Hill,’ he said. ‘Watch your step up there. Piss anywhere past the crop lines.’)

  So here I am, learning about pipestone. Sunflower just made me a breechcloth. I felt silly, but took off my fatigues (behind a skin frame) and bundled them away with my military gear.

  I modeled the loincloth for them.

  Sunflower said something. ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘She says you’d never know your dong wasn’t whacked.’

  I smiled, I blushed.

  ‘Thank you, Sunflower,’ I said.

  THE BOX II

  Smith’s Diary

  *

  Oct 8

  We have music now, if you can call it that. Specialist Jones, against orders, brought his portable minicassette deck, and what he thought were twenty of his best tapes. He’d stashed it in his combat gear.

  Only before he left, somebody went through his stuff, took all the music he’d picked, and left him with three tapes.

  They are: Great Movie Love Themes sung by Roger Whitaker, 16 Hits by Glenn Miller and Rip My Duck by Moe and the Meanies. That’s about as eclectic as you can get.

  We know all this because Specialist Jones brought the deck to us on the sixth day of our exile. He wasn’t the only one who noticed people going out of their minds from boredom. He volunteered his music for morale.

  Sergeant Sigmo, the commo NCO, rigged it to the PA and alarm system. From 1400 to dusk every day, we have music.

  The Miller tape is getting the most wear. Moe and the Meanies drive you right up the tent walls in thirty seconds, but then, that was their stated aim. I’ve seen people jokingly ease the safety catches off their carbines every time Roger Whitaker comes on. It beats staring at the bayou, or filling sandbags, or feeding the horses, or whatever else there is to do while we wait for the scouts.

  *

  Spaulding just called an officer’s meeting. The recon from the north just returned.

  Leake III

  Call him Ishmael.

  We had gone down to the edge of the River to see what was there. The day was warm and the sun was bright, though by my reckoning it should be late November.

  Took had a fishing spear with him. Mounted on the shaft were three copper prongs. A rawhide thong passed through the head, through the shaft and ont
o a coil tied around his waist.

  He walked to the sandbar’s edge and studied the water, shading his eyes against the sun.

  Something large was moving under the water down the bank.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked. I thought it might be an alligator. Took turned, saw what I pointed at. He grabbed my arm, squeezed it in a sign for me to be quiet. He held out his hand for my javelin. I gave it to him.

  He walked slowly back off the sandbar, then turned into the grass alongside the River. I stayed where I was. I couldn’t see him for a few minutes, but knew he was moving slowly through the tall grass. I saw a few fronds bend.

  Whatever the thing was, it disappeared underwater from time to time, surfacing nearer or farther from the bank. I still couldn’t tell what it was. It looked like a dark lump in the shadows from the overhanging trees.

  I didn’t see Took until his fishing spear shot out on its thong from the last of the grass. It flashed in the water.

  A ton of foam shot into the air.

  ‘Hoo-eee! Hoo-eee!’ yelled Took. The thong stretched tight. The spear shaft went cartwheeling up the rawhide and slammed into the trees overhead.

  ‘Yaz!’ he yelled.

  Other men were already running out of the village and the fields.

  As I ran toward him I saw my javelin arc out into the frothing water. A huge coughing noise came from the River. As I ran through the grass I saw other large dark shapes, which I had not seen before, disappearing downriver.

  Some of the guys got there before I did. They threw their spears out. The water turned red and quit splashing before I got there.

  Others jumped into canoes at the landing, yelling, paddling toward where the other dark shapes had gone.

  I reached Took and grabbed the thong he was holding. Someone came over in a canoe, dropped a rope down into the bloody water, then threw the end to us. We heaved and hoed.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

  First came a flat forked tail, then wrinkled mounds of pink skin, then flippers with spears in them, and last, something like the head of a walrus without the tusks. The damn thing must have weighed half a metric ton.

  Its face was covered with bristles the size of No. 2 pencils.

  It was a manatee, the largest I’d ever seen. In the time I came from, they were nearly extinct. They were always (before the War) getting run over by assholes in speedboats, or shot by kids with .22s, or something. Once there had been huge numbers of them in the rivers of the south.

  Well, they’re still here. A couple of the canoes had harpooned one, and there was shouting all up and down the River as the rest of them got away.

  There was general happiness all around. A ton of meat was a ton of meat. They began to dress out the two manatees on the shore.

  I went around to the head of the one Took had harpooned. It still had a water lily hanging out of one side of its wide flat mouth.

  The whole village was ecstatic.

  This is a place for boys and girls who never grew up.

  Bessie III

  While they were waiting, the first of the trucks drove up.

  The crew led by Dr. Jameson arrived just after noon. Bessie and Kincaid had gone up to check the survey and the preliminary stakedown on the larger mound, and planned the trench to take them a few feet off center, from ten feet out to twenty feet beyond the mound.

  Jameson looked at the horse skulls and the cartridges, then without a word went down to the trench in the smaller mound and crawled under the tarp to have a look for himself.

  He came back wiping sweat.

  ‘I couldn’t see any goddamn intrusions,’ he said to Kincaid. ‘Uh, pardon me, Bessie.’ His sunburned face went redder. He was just over forty, already stoop-shouldered from crawling around digs with no headroom in them.

  He was dressed in dark brown jodhpurs, a khaki shirt and an old Marine campaign hat. Bessie knew that his role model (from the field of paleontology, not an archeologist at all) was Roy Chapman Andrews, whose spectacular find of dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia was the biggest news since Carter opened Tut’s tomb in ’26.

  Jameson had eyes the color of the dust he was always covered with.

  ‘It’s possible we’re dealing with two things here,’ he said, taking off his hat, spinning it and catching it repeatedly as he talked.

  ‘One, a post-Columbus survival of the culture, entirely possible, combined with a Spanish incident, perhaps de Soto, perhaps as late as the French. That would be rare enough itself.

  ‘And, two, an intrusive cartridge burial.’ He stopped.

  ‘Don’t say it. Someone shot a bunch of rounds into the mound, one of which just happened to hit one of the equines. Then the spent cartridges worked themselves down to that level in a few years.’ He looked at them.

  ‘It’s a hoax,’ he said. He looked at them a minute more, while they said nothing. On the desk before them were the skulls, cartridges, potsherds and field notes.

  ‘I need a drink,’ he said finally, and sat down on a camp stool.

  ‘It’ll have to be lemonade or water,’ said Bessie. ‘I don’t think Washington made a run to the bootlegger this week yet.’

  ‘Well, I did,’ said Jameson. He disappeared out the tentflap, returning a moment later with a hip flask. He offered them a drink, which they refused.

  He looked over the field notes again. ‘Goddamn Coles Creek rolled rim potsherds,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen enough in the last two weeks to keep me the rest of my life. I sometimes think all those people did was sleep, eat, bury their dead, and make pots.’

  ‘Well, it’s good that they did,’ said Kincaid, ‘or we’d all be out of jobs.’

  ‘Gillihan at least got that rock shelter down by the river,’ said Jameson. ‘He was real pis – very upset that you wanted him pulled out of it. He’s got the students with him, of course, and this is the best shelter we’ve ever seen. It had some big cat bones with it.’

  ‘Well, the real question is,’ said Kincaid, ‘do we start on the mound trench now, or do we wait for the director?’

  ‘I don’t want my shovels to cool off,’ said Jameson.

  ‘Bessie?’

  ‘Let’s do it. Only thing is, we’re going to have to answer some questions all over again when Gillihan gets here.’

  ‘We’ll leave a note on the tent telling them to look over this stuff before they come down.’

  ‘By the way,’ said Jameson, ‘you know it’s been raining up north for two days straight now?’

  THE BOX III

  Smith’s Diary

  *

  Oct 13

  Let me tell you about the dog.

  The second day at the old airfield, which will someday sit right up there on the bluff, Spaulding noticed that one of the men had an old Dalmatian (which he was of course calling Sparky) with him.

  The soldier said he’d found him when we arrived, and that the vet needed to look it over, if that was okay.

  Spaulding told him yes, but not to become too attached to it, as there was no way he could keep it on the mission.

  The vet looked Sparky over, kenneled him, as the dog was all banged up and emaciated. Every day the soldier came to talk to Sparky and play with him.

  Then Heidegger got here a week later, and started sending the mice back, then the monkeys, calibrating the portal. How he kept track of the comings and goings, I don’t know. Heidegger’s so far out of it nobody could talk to him.

  Anyway, Heidegger needs something to really calibrate the machine, looks around and sees Sparky over in the vet’s office. What does he know? So one night he takes Sparky and puts him into the machine.

  Sparky knew something was up, tries to chew Heidegger’s arms off (I don’t blame him). Heidegger wrestles him into the machine. Sparky goes wild, throws himself into the walls, hurts himself. Heidegger throws the switch.

  Five days earlier, or whatever, Sparky hadn’t shown up.

  Heidegger’s blown it
(since Sparky was over there in the cage, Heidegger didn’t know what he was waiting for). After Heidegger sent the dog back, the soldier shows up to play with Sparky. Sparky’s gone. Where’s my dog? he asks. The vet doesn’t know. They go to Spaulding. Spaulding goes to Heidegger.

  ‘Lost, I guess,’ says Heidegger. ‘I’m sorry I lost your animal. I thought it was for the experiments. And I’m sorry I hurt it.’

  ‘Hurt him? Just what the hell did you do?’ asked the soldier, crying.

  ‘While he was trying to bite me, he hung his dewclaw on the machine and tore it. There was some blood. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thanks a whole fucking lot,’ said the soldier. ‘I’m going to kill you someday.’

  The vet jumped in and calmed the soldier down. When he left, the vet turned to Heidegger.

  ‘Wherever Sparky is,’ said the vet, ‘he won’t have any more dewclaws to hang things up on.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Heidegger.

  ‘Well, I took one of his dewclaws off, myself when the soldier brought him in the first time. It was barely attached and infected.’

  Heidegger looked him squarely in the eyes.

  ‘Which dewclaw was that?’ he asked.

  ‘The left one. He only had the right one when you handled him.’

  Heidegger took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘The dog had two dewclaws when I put him in the machine. And,’ he said, turning back to the machine and looking at it with a new respect, ‘it was the left dewclaw which hung up on the wall and tore before I sent the dog back.’

  *

  Spaulding said that’s when Heidegger knew it would all work, and that’s when we should have been worried.

  *

  It takes all kinds.

  Leake IV

  ‘Gravestones tell truth scarcely fourty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.’

  – Browne, Urn Burial, 1658

  Sunflower was in labor and there was a hell of a storm coming.