“Hey, Bones,” he said, using the nickname Carter had acquired years before. “Where you been? We’ve hit the mother lode.”
Carter had to smile. He and Del went way back, to grad school; Del had already been an assistant professor at the time, and he had helped to get Carter on a couple of prize assignments. Now he was a full professor up near Tacoma, and when he’d heard about the situation in L.A., he’d been among the first to heed the call.
“Hell,” he’d said upon arrival, “I was on sabbatical anyway, and I
still
wasn’t writing my book.” It was a running joke between them that Del had been working on his book—a revolutionary theory of the Permian extinction—all his life.
“Oh yeah? What have you found?”
“We’ve pulled up a six-pack of Tab—you know how hard that is to find these days?—and a Partridge Family lunch box.”
Carter laughed and said, “Don’t forget to catalogue them.” Crouching down, he said, “It looks like you’re making progress.” A thick white layer of plaster was coating a section a few feet square.
“Yeah, we’re getting there. But this plaster’s a bitch to work with in this heat.”
“Foam would have been worse.” A more modern method, which Carter had rejected, was to apply polyurethane foam to an aluminum sheath.
“Would have made a lighter cast,” Del replied.
“But the fumes would have killed us all down here.”
“True,” Del said. “But it’s a small price to pay . . .”
Carter took off his shirt, draped it over a rung of the rear ladder—the very one that Geronimo had descended—and borrowed a pair of safety goggles from one of the workers too hot to continue. He picked up a chisel and began to work away at an area just beyond the plaster, where what might have been a scapular was still concealed. He felt better the second he started. He felt like himself again—a scientist, doing fieldwork—and not a bureaucrat dodging interview requests. With his head down, and the chisel in his hand, he could forget about all the other distractions and concentrate instead on what he loved . . . and what he did best.
For the next hour, Carter simply worked, occasionally trading a word or two with one of the other diggers, swigging regularly from the Gatorade bottles that made the rounds, glopping tar into the heavy black buckets. As if by some unspoken consent, the other workers had left the prize area of the La Brea Man’s skull and upper torso to Carter, while they worked in the region of the man’s extremities. Overall, the bones appeared to be remarkably connected still, especially considering the wild frenzy that the man’s entrapment had apparently inspired. Bears, wolves, lions, every predator for miles around must have heard his cries, or seen him flailing to get out, and come running. Ordinarily, they’d have torn a limb loose, and dragged the meaty bone off to consume in safety elsewhere, but in this case the conditions must have been disastrous for all. The tar must have been heated and thick, the temptation of human prey too irresistible, and the fight for a piece of him too violent. All across the pit, the signs of an epic struggle were more than evident.
So why, Carter wondered, were the man’s bones laid almost horizontally? It was quite possible, of course, that they had just been pushed and pulled into that configuration over thousands of years in the tar—bones were scraped and scattered and broken and abraded all the time—but there was something about these that still struck Carter as strange. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed again the plastered dome where the skull now resided. He tried not to look right at it—skulls still had a peculiar resonance that made them hard to ignore, even for Carter—but looking now, he had the impression that the face had indeed been turned up toward the sky at the time of his death. That he had lain flat, surrendering to the tar . . . and offered himself to the animals that had come to kill him.
Had he just run out of strength and been pinned down by the hot tar? Had he simply given up and resigned himself to his fate? Or had he, out of some primitive atavistic sense, sacrificed his body and his spirit to what he might have perceived as the great chain of being?
“Now this might be interesting,” Del said, prolonging that last word.
Del, sort of the unofficial second-in-command now, had been working a few feet to his left, in the area of the hand.
Carter pushed his goggles back on his head to get a better look.
To a layman’s eye, it would appear to be no more than a lump of tar-covered rock, but to Del, or Carter, it was more than that. It had a special shape, a man-made shape, and it appeared to be cradled in the palm of his hand.
“Looks like something that mattered to him,” Del said, and Carter couldn’t have agreed more. He scooted closer. It might have been a weapon, used in his final struggle. Or simply the last thing, as the breath left his body, that his dead fingers had closed upon.
Or was it something the man might have cherished?
Carter had no more time to consider the possibilities before there was a shout from the other side of the pit. “Yo! We’ve got something.”
Carter turned and heard a high-pitched whine from the generator on the walkway as the pulley chains drew taut.
The other workers all stopped, too, took off their goggles, and waited.
The drag chain, with a steel claw on the end, had been submerged to a depth of twenty-five feet or more. The operator, his damp T-shirt clinging to his body, waved up to another fireman standing at ground level.
The generator rumbled, the chain tightened again and then, slowly, began to pull.
“We’ve got something, that’s for sure,” the operator said, staring down at the now turbulent tar. Methane bubbles pocked the inky black surface.
Stepping around the other workers, Carter crossed to the section of the grid where Geronimo had gone down. The chain was still pulling something up, and Carter found himself thinking, to his own shame, that he was worried it might be a priceless fossil, now damaged beyond repair. Lucky, he thought, that the media could never guess what was going on in his head.
“Hold it a second,” the operator shouted. “We’ve got a snag.”
The guy up top signaled back, and the operator actually leaned out over the pit and shook the heavy chain, the old-fashioned way, before kicking up the generator again. A tiny plume of smoke, or steam, escaped from a valve on top.
“Should it be doing that?” Carter shouted over the whine.
“Does that all the time,” he said, before looking back into the pit.
Carter looked, too, as the chain, swathed in black asphalt, continued to rise. The fireman appeared pleased, like a fisherman who’s just caught a big one. Carter’s feelings were certainly more mixed—relief, if it came to that, and dread, at the grisly sight that was probably about to unfold.
“Okay, any time now,” the operator shouted as he watched the clanking chain. Coated in tar as it was, Carter could only guess how he knew they were about to reach the claw end at last. Across the pit, Carter could see Del, his white hair blowing loose now in the afternoon breeze, waiting expectantly.
And then something emerged from the mire. Something caught in the claws of the dredge.
A slender object, wedged between two of the prongs. Carter leaned closer. What was it?
The chain pulled up, slowly, another few inches, and now Carter could see that it was a foot. In some kind of shoe.
A moccasin.
The fireman looked at Carter, who said, “Keep on going.”
Another prong had apparently snagged the end of Geronimo’s trousers.
The body emerged gradually, the tar seeming to reach up and hold on to it until the last possible second before rolling back off and plopping into the pit. The corpse, hanging upside down like a slaughtered animal on a meat hook, was glistening black from head to toe, the arms hanging listlessly in the fringed buckskin jacket. It twirled languidly on the hook, until it had come around to face Carter at eye level.
The fireman quickly looped a nylon cord around its waist to keep it from slipping off the hook and into the pit again.
Geronimo’s long black braid had a knot at one end and hung straight down, like an exclamation point, all the way to the surface of the pit. His face was entirely covered in tar, which only now began to ooze and drip off the skin. As Carter watched, transfixed, the man’s features began slowly to emerge. The chin, the nose, the cheeks. The hot tar gleamed in the late-day sun.
Apart from the whine of the generator, there was no noise in the pit. Everyone was dumbstruck by the horror of the sight.
Then, just as the fireman reached out to pull the dangling corpse over the walkway, more of the tar seeped off the face—and the eyes, sealed tight, were slowly revealed.
Carter was reminded of the slitlike eyes of a mummy.
And then, perhaps due to the pull of the falling tar, or simply gravity, the eyelids opened.
In the blackened, slack, and silent face, the whites of the eyes were now like slivers of light. Carter looked directly into Geronimo’s eyes; he couldn’t stop himself—and it felt, in some strange way, as if he owed him that.
But as he stood there, in the stifling confines of the pit, a sudden chill coursed down his spine. He knew it was impossible—what could be more so?—but it seemed as if Geronimo, even now, was looking back at him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“JESUS,” GREER SAID, “that hurts.”
Indira laid the leg down slowly onto the table. “You must not neglect your home exercises.”
How many times had he heard that? But it wasn’t as if the damn leg hadn’t been getting a workout lately.
“Maybe we should do some ultrasound,” she suggested.
“Yeah, ultrasound,” Greer said, “that’s always good.”
In honesty, he couldn’t say it ever accomplished a thing. But it didn’t hurt, which was one thing you could say for it, and it didn’t require any exertion on his part, which was another.
Indira first went to get some hot packs and wrapped the leg in them, while Greer lay flat on the table. He knew he should say something, there was a lot of stuff hanging in the air, but he just didn’t know where to start. Indira’s feelings were hurt, he could see that without even asking. She’d probably been wondering why, after their first “date”—if you wanted to call it that—he had never suggested they go out again.
But Christ, hadn’t she been there, too? It had been a mistake, right from the start, and Indira had acted like it wasn’t a date at all. And then there’d been that humiliation at the restaurant, when the girl tripped over his leg and Indira flew to his defense . . . well, shit, did she really think any man was going to want to relive an experience like that?
“Thanks again,” he said as she bent over the leg, tucking in the hot towels.
“For what?”
“Having dinner with me, you know, the other night.”
Even under her coppery skin, he thought he saw a slight reddening. Shit, maybe he should have just let it go. It wasn’t as if she’d thrown herself at him or anything. God, he could not read women.
“I was happy to do it,” she said, still not looking him in the eye. “Now, I will be back in ten minutes for the ultrasound.” She set the egg timer, and he turned his head to see where she was going so abruptly. Mariani, in his wheelchair, was having some trouble navigating out of a tight spot.