Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  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 bother
ing 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.”

  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!”

&nbs
p; 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.