by Gary Paulsen
“I haven’t seen the skull, of course,” he said, thinking out loud. “So I can’t say much about it. But from what you say it looks old.”
Brennan nodded. “Very old.”
Homesley smiled. “Well, not very old. Not prehistoric or even much over a hundred years old. It had to be after guns were here—there is, after all, the bullet hole, isn’t there?”
Again Brennan nodded. “Yes. I’m sure that’s what it is. It’s neat and round in the front.…”
“And a large chunk carried away in the back.”
“How did you know?”
Homesley smiled, a small sad smile. “I was a medic in Vietnam. I know something of bullet wounds.”
“Oh.”
“So—there wasn’t any hair or tissue on the skull or around it, right?”
“Right. It was … clean.”
“That means, I think, that we can assume the skull wasn’t part of a recent murder and may not constitute evidence.”
“You sound like a lawyer,” Brennan said.
Homesley looked at Brennan, his eyes serious. “It may very well come to that—lawyers. If the skull does constitute evidence—you realize that, don’t you?”
Brennan tried not to think of it but he had realized it.
“And that doesn’t change your mind about contacting the authorities?”
Brennan hesitated. “It’s not … my … mind. Sometimes I don’t want to keep the skull but a thing takes over my thinking and I can’t do it. Can’t contact the police.”
Homesley nodded. “I see. Or maybe I don’t. But I think I know what you mean.” He pushed the plant away and stood, walked back and forth in the kitchen, thinking and talking as he moved. Brennan almost smiled. Homesley looked exactly as he did when he was teaching—striding excitedly left and right in front of the class.
“Facts are almost nonexistent,” he said, “so it’s really difficult to come at this with logic.”
Brennan nodded, but said nothing.
“So we take a few shots at probabilities here. Not very scientific but I think helpful. Jump in or correct me as we go, all right?”
Brennan nodded again.
“The skull was found in the canyons up by Orogrande.” He named the small settlement on the highway—little more than a gas station—north of El Paso.
“Near Dog Canyon,” Brennan added.
“So, Dog Canyon, if memory serves, is one of the last places where the Apaches and the soldiers fought.”
“Bill said there were several battles there,” Brennan said.
“Which means we can logically assume that there were probably fights in some of the other canyons—say where you found the skull.”
“And that it’s an Indian skull …” Brennan cut in.
Homesley held up his hand. “Not necessarily. We can guess that, surmise that, assume that, speculate that, but we cannot know that—not without examining the skull. Correction, without having an expert examine the skull. I’m not an expert at pathology but …”
“I thought you knew about these things,” Brennan said. “I mean it’s almost like a fossil, isn’t it?”
“But,” Homesley interrupted, and finished, “I do know an expert pathologist. No, Brennan, I do not know about these things.” He smiled. “There are some things even I don’t know.…”
Brennan frowned. “I’m a little worried about showing the skull to anybody else. Oh, God.” He shrugged. “Listen to me. I sound like I’ve got something to hide. This is crazy—just crazy.”
Homesley waited a moment, then sat back down at the table. “I know this is all troubling you, but if you’re going to learn anything you’re going to have to get help.”
“I am. You.”
“I’m not enough. But if it’s any help this pathologist and I are good friends and I think I can promise you he won’t tell anybody about the skull.”
Brennan leaned back, waiting, and realized with a shock that he was waiting for a voice in his mind to tell him what to do. Little voices in my mind, he thought—oh good, I’m waiting for little voices in my mind. Oh great.
None came.
“All right,” he said, standing. “I’ll go get the skull and meet you at this man’s place.…”
“Better yet,” Homesley said, rising. “I’ll call him and we’ll take the car and drive down there. It might make it a little easier for you if I’m with you.”
“What do you mean, easier. Where does he work?”
Homesley stopped with his hand on the door. “Where a lot of pathologists work—at the morgue.” And he moved out the door.
Brennan hesitated only for a moment—thought, oh, the morgue, of course—and followed.
15
The morgue.
There was a room with metal tables and bright overhead lights and Brennan did not want to be in the room.
Everything in flat white, with large sinks along the wall and drains all over the place and the constant sound of running water and Brennan followed Homesley into the room and really did not want to be there.
On one table was the body of an old man. He was nude, lying flat on his back with his eyes open staring at the ceiling, his body all sunken and old and very, very dead.
Homesley’s friend—who turned out to be named Tibbets—was tall and thin, wearing a smock spattered with blood and rubber gloves. He was leaning over the body holding a scalpel about to make a cut in the top of the dead man’s stomach and Brennan almost lost his lunch.
He did not, could not turn away—but couldn’t stand it either and he stopped.
Dead.
Tibbets looked up, saw them, and stood away from the corpse and Brennan thought, thank you, thank you, thank you …
“The boy with the skull,” Tibbets said. “The big mystery.” He and Homesley exchanged looks, then Tibbets came forward and took the tennis shoe box Brennan was carrying the skull in.
“Let’s see …”
He took the box to a side table so that Brennan—gratefully—had to turn his back on the body.
Carefully, almost tenderly, Tibbets removed the skull. Brennan had wrapped it in a towel and Tibbets removed the towel gingerly. He put the skull on the table on a small foam pad and pulled down a large magnifying glass and light.
In the harsh white light against the metal table the skull looked very small and somehow sad, forlorn.
Tibbets must have felt it as well because he seemed to take extra care.
He first gave the skull a close visual examination through the magnifying lamp, turning it this way and that, over and around, humming songs from the sixties.
Brennan stood there and watched him and tried not to think of the body on the table in back of him.
Tibbets then took a hand-held magnifying glass and examined the skull again still closer and much more slowly. He spent a long time looking at the bullet hole and brought another small, high-intensity lamp into play, held it almost in the hole.
He nodded, broke the humming for a second, then started again.
He turned the skull over and studied the teeth one at a time.
All of this took close to ten minutes and Brennan fidgeted from foot to foot.
Finally Tibbets took out two sets of calipers and made measurements. He measured overall the size—drawing a sketch of the skull on a pad with the part that had been blown away in dotted lines—and marking the measurements in small, precise numbers.
Then he measured the eye sockets with an inner set of calipers, again writing the numbers on the sketch, and when this was done he put the instruments down and turned to Brennan and Homesley.
“Well?” Homesley asked.
“Well, I don’t think the skull is evidence, so you don’t have to worry. But he did die violently.”
“He?” Homesley rubbed his neck, stiff from looking over Tibbets’s shoulder.
“Definitely. I’ll tell you first what I know for certain, then the guesses, all right?”
Brennan and Homesley nodded
.
Tibbets put the skull in the center of the foam pad and brought the light close down upon it.
“First—the wound. It’s definitely a bullet wound. Judging by the size of it and the damage done to the back of the skull I would say it was a very large bore rifle. Say forty-five caliber or bigger.”
He paused, thinking. “The wound was done from very close range. Probably inches—less than a foot.”
“How can you tell?” Homesley asked.
“Because burned powder from the charge was actually driven into the bone of the skull. The scars are still there, the marks, and for that to happen the muzzle of the weapon has to nearly be touching the victim.”
Victim, Brennan thought. Victim. He felt suddenly sick, weak. Imagine how it must have been, he thought. To have somebody hold the barrel of a gun to your head and pull the trigger. “Suicide,” he whispered.
“What?” Tibbets asked. Brennan’s voice was so quiet, neither of the men understood it.
“Could it have been suicide?” Brennan asked.
“Almost certainly not.” Tibbets pointed to the hole in the skull and the damage done to the rear. “It was such a straight-line shot it just about couldn’t have been self-inflicted—the angles are wrong.”
“So this man was killed by a large rifle,” Homesley put in. “Shot from very close range.…”
“Not a man,” Tibbets said.
“But you said ‘he.’ ”
Tibbets nodded. “I did. But not a man. He was a boy.”
“A boy?”
Again Tibbets nodded. “It was an Indian boy—you can tell by the skull shape—about fourteen years old.”
Take me, spirit. Take me up. It rolled into Brennan’s mind and he reeled with it, almost fell over.
Homesley put out a hand to catch him. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t know. Air. Need air.”
Tibbets shook his head. “I forget sometimes where I work and how it gets other people. Let’s go out to the lounge.…”
But, Brennan thought, weaving as they led him out of the room—but.
But no. I am not sick.
I am not sick.
I am not …
Me.
I am not me.
16
“Here, have some coffee.” Tibbets held out a plastic cup.
Brennan shook his head. Slow, wobbly shakes that seemed to take forever. In the lounge, on the cheap couch, he thought—I’m here. “I don’t drink coffee.”
“Drink this anyway,” Tibbets said. “It will take the shock away.”
“A Murphy drip,” Homesley said, looking at Tibbets, who nodded.
Brennan took a sip. It tasted like oil drained from a car. Sludge. “What’s a Murphy drip?”
Homesley smiled that sad smile again. “We were both medics in Nam—that’s where we met. A Murphy drip is something medics use.…”
“But what is it?”
Tibbets cut in. “You boil coffee down to a thick black solution. It’s solid caffeine. When a man gets hit sometimes the shock—wound shock—will kill him even if the wound doesn’t. You need a fast, raw stimulant and when we didn’t have one we’d use the coffee.”
“But what if they couldn’t swallow?” Brennan was having trouble swallowing himself.
“No—you don’t understand. We gave it anally. That was the only way to get it into the system fast enough to do any good.…”
Brennan looked at Homesley, who nodded to him. “That’s right.”
“But that’s … that’s awful.”
“All of it—all of Nam was awful.”
Tibbets looked over Brennan at something nobody else could see and nodded. “All of it …”
Homesley coughed. A soft sound. “Well—back to the present. Or the past. Finish telling us about the skull.”
Brennan sat forward. Whether from the coffee or just getting out of the examining room he felt more alert.
“As I said—it was a boy of about fourteen. The teeth show little wear. Death was instantaneous and probably happened between 1860 and 1890—I would lean toward 1865 or so.”
“You can tell all that from the skull?” Brennan was amazed.
Tibbets shook his head. “No. There is other knowledge involved, and I’m guessing a bit now.” He thought for a moment. “It’s a good bet that he was killed by soldiers—they used large-bore rifles and killed Indians. And the center of Indian—Apache—action in the canyon area was about 1860. It’s just a guess.…”
He looked at Brennan. “You didn’t say specifically where you found the skull—just in the canyons up by Alamogordo. Is it secret?”
Brennan shook his head. “Not from you. It was near Dog Canyon, a canyon south of it or maybe two. I don’t know the name of it.”
“All of those canyons are on National Forest land,” Homesley said. “It probably goes without saying but you’re not supposed to take things away.”
Brennan didn’t say anything, just looked at him.
“Well. In case you didn’t know it …”
“I have to get back to work.” Tibbets stood. “I have a suggestion—if you want some help.”
Brennan nodded. “I sure do.”
“You still know almost nothing about the skull—or rather about the boy who was the skull. You need more information.”
“Where do I get it?”
“You could ask the Apaches up at White Mountain Reservation above Alamogordo. They might be able to help.”
“I can’t get up there,” Brennan said. “I have to work.…”
“Or you can contact the other side—the army.”
Homesley stood up. “Better yet—I have a friend who works in Denver in the Western Historical Archives. We’ll write to him and ask him for any information he might be able to get us.”
Tibbets stopped with his hand on the knob to the examining room door. “Ask him for all military reports, especially after-action reports for the time between 1855 and 1885.” He nodded to them and went back to the body on the table before Brennan could thank him.
Homesley pointed to the exit. “Should we go do the letters?”
Brennan followed him out but stopped in the parking lot near the car. He held the box with the skull in front of him. Not like a skull, a bone fragment, but as a person. He felt a sense of urgency that he could not understand any more than he understood anything else that was happening to him.
Homesley looked at him over the top of the car. The sun was baking the metal and heat waves rose, made his face seem to move. “What’s the matter?”
Brennan hesitated. “Well, I don’t want to seem ungrateful but …”
“But what?”
“Do you think that if I paid for it we could call your friend in Denver? It will take days and days to send and wait for letters.…”
Homesley shrugged. “Sure. Why not? Let’s go.…”
And Brennan had one fleeting thought as he got in the car.
Why didn’t my mother meet this man and have me and he would be my father and …
He shook his head and sat back in the hot seat as they drove across El Paso.
17
It was easily the longest week in his life.
He worked hard with Stoney all week and called Homesley every night and when he learned nothing he ran, ran each night until he was tired and fell into bed and slept hammered into the pillow. There were no dreams.
“It takes some time to find all the stuff we asked for,” Homesley said the first time he called. “Be patient.”
It was easy to say, but very hard to do.
The skull was in his closet, in the box.
Waiting.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that it waited—sat in the box and waited for … for …
He didn’t know.
But the pressure was there, tremendous pressure, and just when it seemed he would explode Homesley called.
“It’s here.”
“I’ll be right over.”
&
nbsp; “It’s nine o’clock in the evening and there are several boxes.…”
“I don’t care. I’ll tell Mom I’m staying over—if it’s all right, I mean.”
“Of course it is.” Homesley didn’t hesitate. “We’ll put you on the couch in the music room.”
Brennan cleared it with his mother and was gone out the door, almost before she nodded.
He tried not to run fast the three miles or so to Homesley’s—tried to set an easy pace. But he couldn’t hold it. His legs, his mind, the skull took over and soon he was running at a dead lope and when he arrived at Homesley’s he was sucking wind, his chest heaving.
“You must have run hard all the way,” Homesley said, watching him try to catch his breath. “Are you all right?”
Brennan nodded. “Where is the stuff from the archives?” he gasped.
“In the music room.”
There were seven boxes, each about a cubic foot in size.
Brennan picked up one of the boxes, put it down, picked up another. He didn’t know where to start. He picked up another one and tore the top open.
Inside were photocopies of papers. Hundreds of sheets laid sideways in manila folders.
He pushed back the corner of one folder.
“Eighteen eighty-one,” he said aloud. “He’s dated each one. The work—the work he’s done. It’s incredible.”
“Like I said.” Homesley sighed. “He’s a friend.”
“He must be a very good friend.”
“The best.”
“Vietnam?”
Homesley nodded silently. “Were you all friends that way?”
Another nod. “Those of us who made it.” He turned away and picked up another box. “He has them in order—see? There’s a number on the side of each box. Also, there’s a letter.”
He opened a manila envelope and read aloud. “The boxes are in order by date. They start in 1855 and end in 1895. Inside each box the papers are also by date. There are army reports and letters and newspaper clippings. He goes on about some private stuff here, then he says he isn’t sure what we want but he thinks there might be something for us in the box marked number three.”
