“Take deep breaths,” he said. “Slow and easy. It’ll pass.”
“Dude, that was so fucking cool,” Elise bubbled drunkenly. “I mean, shit, you must know kung fu or karate or something, right? You must have been in the Marines or something.”
“No,” he said. “I’m just a drunk with a stick.”
“My name is Chance,” Chance said and swallowed, trying to keep from throwing up again. Her mouth tasted like bourbon and bile, and her throat burned.
“Good to meet you, Chance. I’m Deacon,” the tall man said. “But I think we’d better get moving now. It’ll probably be best if we aren’t still here when the cops show up.”
“Yeah,” Chance said and heaved again.
“Better give me a hand,” Deacon said to Elise, and together they carried Chance back up the trail to the street.
Downstairs, Chance and Alice follow the collections manager past the Patagonian dinosaurs, between the legs of the Argentinosaurus, and Chance cranes her neck and stares up at the rib-hollow belly of the beast, suspended fifteen feet or more above her head.
“I only study things I can hold in my palm,” Alice says and waves a hand dismissively at the giants. “That’s my motto.”
“What is your specialty, Dr. Sprinkle?” Irene asks.
“Depends. Sometimes, it’s Ordovician brachiopods. Other times, it’s Oligocene bryozoans. I don’t like to be pigeonholed.”
And then Chance’s cell phone starts ringing, and “That’s mine,” she says quickly, fishing it out of a pocket of her overalls.
“Is that safe?” Irene says. “For the baby, I mean?”
Chance shrugs. The number displayed on the phone’s tiny, oil-gray LCD screen is nothing familiar, but there’s a 205 area code, so she knows it’s Alabama. She presses TALK and holds up one finger to show that she’ll only be a moment.
“Chance?” Deacon says, his voice faint and far away, stretched thin and flat by distance and digital electronics. “Are you okay? Are you at the museum?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m just fine. What’s up?”
“Nothing. I’ll tell you about it when you get home. It’s been a weird day, that’s all,” but Deacon’s voice has that brittle edge it gets whenever he’s anxious or afraid, the way he sounded the first couple of weeks he was sober. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“The downtown library. I thought I’d do some reading.”
Chance glances at Alice and the collections manager. Alice is staring thoughtfully up at the underside of the sauropod skeleton, and Irene Mesmer seems to be staring at its shadow on the stone floor.
“But you’re okay, right?” Chance asks him, turning the tables, and Deacon doesn’t answer.
“Deke?”
“Yeah, baby, I’m just fine. It’s not that. I promise. You know I’d tell you if it was that.”
“Honey, I gotta go. We’re about to have a look at the exhibit.”
“So, all the fossils got there in one piece?”
“As far as I know. Nothing’s been unpacked yet.”
“Well,” he says, and she can tell he doesn’t want to hang up, trying to squeeze a few more seconds out of the conversation. “I guess I should let you go. You’re busy.”
“You’re sure nothing’s wrong?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Everything’s jake.”
“I wish you were here. I’ll have to bring you to see these dinosaurs. They’re incredible,” and she looks up at the pelvis of the Argentinosaurus, big as a Volkswagen.
“I’m just gonna hang around the library for a while,” Deacon says. “I’ll head home before dark.”
“You should take the DART. It’s only fifty cents.”
“I’d rather walk.”
Alice is glaring at her impatiently now. “I really gotta go, okay,” Chance says. And yeah, he says, yeah, I know, but the reluctance easy enough to hear.
“I love you, Chance,” he says, and she still hasn’t gotten used to hearing that.
“You too, Deke. You stay busy, okay?”
He hangs up first, and Chance apologizes, returns the phone to her overalls pocket.
“Is anything wrong?” Alice asks, but she sounds a lot more irritated than concerned.
“No, Deke just wanted to be sure I was okay, you know.”
“Shall we?” Irene asks and motions towards the banner hung above a nearby doorway—AT THE OCEAN’S EDGE: FISH WITH FEET. Tall letters, swirling shades of blue and white and deep green on a canvas banner.
“That’s not the title we agreed on,” Chance says.
“Oh, yeah. We decided that ‘ocean’ would sound better. It has a sort of romance that ‘river’ doesn’t.”
“But it’s not right. The earliest amphibians were almost certainly not marine. And all my Pottsville and Parkwood specimens are freshwater.”
Irene smiles a strained, slightly embarrassed smile. “Yes, but ‘At the River’s Edge’ just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.”
“Yes, but this is wrong.”
“Let’s see what’s inside, Chance,” Alice says. “We can work this out later.”
“I’m very sorry,” the collections manager says. “I didn’t think it would matter that much.”
“Well, it does. In fact, it matters a great deal,” Chance grumbles, and then she walks quickly beneath the mistaken, ocean-colored banner before Alice can tell her to shut up.
Her first date with Deacon a few weeks after the night in the park. Dinner at Pizza Hut, and then she drove them to Irondale for a movie, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, and Deacon snuck two cans of Budweiser into the theater. He pronounced the movie ridiculous, a hodgepodge of silly time-travel clichés dragged out to save the world, and afterwards they sat in the parking lot outside the multiplex and watched teenagers and talked. Deacon had four more cans of Bud stashed beneath the front seat of the Impala, warm, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“You drink a lot,” she said, and he nodded and opened another can of beer.
“Yes, I do. It’s sort of my chosen vocation.”
A Lincoln Continental, blaring rap music and loaded down with black kids, rolled slowly past, thump thump thump, and there was no use trying to talk until they’d gone.
“You don’t listen to that hip-hop Snoop Dogg shit, do you?” Deacon asked, and Chance shook her head. “Well, that’s good, ’cause I don’t date girls that listen to that junk.”
“I don’t listen to any music very much. Not since I was a kid.”
“Is that so? Damn,” and he took a long drink from the can of Bud and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
“So what do you like?”
“You mean besides beer?”
“What kind of music do you like?”
Deacon belched, excused himself, and stared out the windshield at the black sky above the strip mall. “Lots of shit, just not rap. Jazz, blues, Muddy Waters, Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. Joy Division. Nick Cave. The Clash.”
“I like Billie Holiday,” Chance said.
“Well, anyone who digs Lady Day can’t be all bad.”
“I was really into the Smashing Pumpkins for a while,” she said. “Back in high school, I thought Billy Corgan hung the moon.”
“But you’re all better now, right?” Then Deacon finished the Bud, crumpled the can, and tossed it out the window. It clattered loudly on the asphalt.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh hell, half of what I say don’t mean shit, Chance. Half of it you can just ignore.”
“How am I supposed to know which half I’m not supposed to ignore?”
Deacon turned around in his seat and stared at her instead of staring at the August sky, fixed her with his sleepy eyes the color of magnolia leaves and broken Coca-Cola bottles. “You’re smart,” he said. “You’ll figure it out eventually.”
“I need to tell you something important, Deacon, but you have to fucking promise me you w
on’t freak out or laugh at me or anything.”
Deacon rubbed at his chin, the dark stubble there like sandpaper, and “Darling,” he said. “I might not be the sort of person you want to start spilling all your deepest, darkest secrets to. Anyway, none of it matters to me.”
“Well, it matters to me.”
He nodded his head, and then reached beneath the seat for another beer. “Well,” he said. “Let’s see. Either you’re about to tell me you used to be a guy, or that you’re a dyke, or a Mormon or one of those—”
“Will you please just shut the hell up for a second?”
“Sure,” Deacon said, grinned, and opened the beer, which foamed and dripped all over his jeans and the Impala’s floorboard. “I just like to imagine all the worst-case scenarios up front. Kind of takes the sting out of whatever’s coming. And Mormons really do annoy the bejesus out of me.”
“I swear, if you fucking laugh at me, you’re gonna be walking home.”
Deacon sipped his beer and didn’t say a word, one way or another.
“I just wanted you to know you’re the…” and she trailed off and slumped forward, resting her forehead against the steering wheel.
“The cat’s meow? The bee’s knees?”
“No,” Chance said, beginning to get annoyed with him, and she took a deep breath and slowly let it out again. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever been out with. I’ve never been on a real date before tonight.”
And then both of them were silent for a long, uncomfortable moment. Chance with her forehead pressed against the steering wheel, Deacon sipping at his beer, another car stuffed with teenagers rolling past in a bass-heavy thundercloud of noise.
“I’m flattered,” Deacon said finally. “A little surprised, but flattered.”
“It just never seemed important enough,” Chance said, lifting her head and looking at him. “I always thought it would be a distraction. I was always so busy with school.”
“You know what they say. All work and no play—”
“You think I’m dull?”
“No, I don’t think you’re dull. If I thought you were dull, I wouldn’t be here. I hate dull even more than I hate rap.”
“Jesus,” Chance whispered. “Life is so goddamn weird.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Deacon said and finished his beer in a single, long gulp, crushed the can and stared at the wad of red and white aluminum in his hand.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t mean anything at all. I guess it’s safe to assume you’re a virgin?”
Chance reached across the seat and punched him in the arm, not hard enough to hurt, but he yelped anyway and tossed the crumpled beer can at her.
“You’re not shy, are you, Deacon Silvey?”
“No ma’am,” he said, reaching for the last can of beer. “Shy ain’t nothing but a waste of time. And life’s short.”
And then, quick, before she lost her nerve or he started talking again, she asked “Are you an alcoholic, Deke?”
He set the unopened beer can down on the dash and cracked the knuckles of his right hand, and already she wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
“No,” he said. “Alcoholics go to meetings and twelve-step support groups and therapists. I can’t afford that shit, so I’m just a drunk. Is that a problem?”
“Why? I mean, why are you a drunk?”
“Maybe someday I’ll tell you,” and he picked up the Bud and popped the pull tab. Loud beer hiss, but this one didn’t foam over. “If you stick around long enough.”
“I think I’d like to try. But it’s something that we’re going to have to talk about, sooner or later. It’s something I don’t understand.”
“Nothing mysterious about drunks, Chance. We just move a little slower than sober people, that’s all.”
“You didn’t move slow that night in the park.”
“Well, I have my moments.”
She smiled and changed the subject, talking about the movie instead, confessing that she’d sit through almost anything with Brad Pitt in it; Deacon admitted he didn’t go to too many movies, or watch much television, either. She talked about school, and he complained about the teenagers and their crappy music, and in a little while she drove them back to Southside.
Chance is standing with Alice and Irene in front of the huge coal forest scene, smiling even though she’s still pissed off about the banner. “It’s very nice,” she says. “I’m impressed.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Alice says and pats her gently on the back.
At least half the gallery space is occupied by the Pennsylvanian diorama, like an impossible snapshot of the tropical peat swamps that spread out north and south of Birmingham almost three hundred million years ago. Swamps along a vast delta created by an ancient river, wide as the Mississippi, as it flowed down from the newborn Appalachians across coastal lowlands to a shallow inland sea. The scene is dominated by a dense grove of bizarre vegetation as tall as tall trees: the lycopods Lepidodendron and Lepidophloios, both towering, cone-bearing plants with bark like the diamond scales of garpikes, along with the giant horsetail Calamites and the tree-sized gymnosperm Cordaites with its long, razor-strap leaves. Alien trunks expertly cast in plastic and airbrushed to life, rising up to meet the ceiling and the painted illusion of a rain-forest canopy spreading out a hundred and fifty feet overhead. An understory of ferns and pteridosperms among the gnarled roots, the most minute details of the fronds and seedpods so well sculpted that Chance can identify half a dozen familiar genera at a single glance. The forest seems to run on for miles and miles, as though the museum’s wall has simply dissolved in some warping of time and space. There’s a dragonfly as big as a crow, spiders and millipedes and giant cockroaches.
“I wish the soundtrack were finished,” Irene Mesmer says. “Then you could get the full effect. But we’re still trying to get the insect noises right.”
“Still working the bugs out,” Alice says, and Chance laughs.
A broad streambed winds between the trees, no water in it now but the collections manager says there will be later, just pebbles and dry sand for the moment, the pretend decay of fallen lycopods. And at the edge of the stream, a wide patch of fiberglass mud and Chance immediately recognizes the creature sprawling there, staring back at her, ink-black eyes the size of Ping-Pong balls set in that wide, flat skull, her own Megalopseudosuchus resurrected after three hundred thousand millennia. A dying lungfish dangles from its toothy jaws.
“That’s him,” Chance says. “My god, Alice, that’s really him.”
“Yeah. Ugly bastard, isn’t he?”
“Are you kidding? He’s absolutely gorgeous,” and she leans awkwardly over the railing, difficult because her belly’s in the way, and strokes the amphibian’s bumpy snout. “Hello there,” she says.
There’s another, much smaller amphibian nearby, peering cautiously out at the Megalopseudosuchus from behind a Calamites stalk. The temnospondyl Walkerpeton, another primitive tetrapod that Chance discovered in a Walker County strip mine her junior year. Eight webbed toes on its splayed front feet, and “I see you, too,” she says.
“I’m so glad that you like it,” Irene says. “The artists and technicians followed your notes and instructions whenever possible.”
“It’s almost like going back, isn’t it?” Chance asks no one in particular. “I can almost imagine the way it would smell.”
“Like a stinky old swamp, I expect,” Alice says.
“It’s so real,” Chance whispers, ignoring Alice, and then a dark trickle of blood leaks from the mouth of the Megalopseudosuchus, from the plastic lungfish trapped between its plastic jaws, and spatters on the fake mud.
Chance gasps and takes a sudden step backwards, bumping into Alice.
“Is something wrong, Dr. Silvey?” Irene asks anxiously, and Chance stares at her and then back at the diorama.
“I’m okay,” Chance replies, but she hears the quaver in her voice and kn
ows she must sound anything but okay.
“Well, you’re white as a sheet,” Alice says. “You look like you just saw a ghost.” And then she puts a hand to Chance’s forehead like someone checking for a fever.
They don’t see it. They don’t see anything there at all.
“Do you feel ill?” the collections manager asks. “Do you need to sit down?”
“No,” Chance says, brushing Alice Sprinkle’s hand away from her face. “I’m fine,” but the fish is still bleeding, and she turns her back on the Pennsylvanian diorama. The rest of the gallery is cluttered with other related exhibits in varying stages of incompleteness—a wall devoted to the economic importance of coal, empty display cases to hold her fish and tetrapod fossils, a Cordaites stump for the kids to touch. The walls have been painted the color of moss.
“Are you sure?” Alice asks.
“I’m fine,” Chance says again. “Really. It’s silly. I just got a little too excited, that’s all.”
They don’t see it, because there’s nothing there to see.
“Let me get you a glass of water,” Irene says and is already hurrying out of the gallery before Chance can stop her. When she’s gone, Alice sighs and “Well, at least we’re rid of her for a few minutes,” she says quietly. “Maybe it’s time we got you back home.”
“Yeah, maybe so,” Chance whispers and glances back over her shoulder at the coal forest, bracing herself, expecting more of the crimson splotches like the stigmata of some inexplicable Catholic effigy.
But if the blood were ever there, it’s gone now.
CHAPTER THREE
Haunted
Narcissa Snow parks the black Oldsmobile at the dead end of Cullom Street and sits watching the house a moment before she gets out of the car. Only the second time that she’s seen it, the first just yesterday, but the real estate agent wouldn’t shut up, so she couldn’t really see it. The fat, smiling woman chattering on and on and on about things that would never matter to Narcissa—new kitchen appliances, work on the roof, the fresh coats of white paint.
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