by Mindy Klasky
Angela’s eyes narrowed as she peered at me. “You haven’t changed much,” she whispered.
I carried a few thousand years of care lines around my eyes now, but no, I hadn’t changed much in form or in attitude.
“What’s He want me for this time?” I asked, as if I didn’t care. Gabe and Ariel edged closer to me.
“The usual. Submission and repentance. Closing the bar would be a start.”
“Let the old guy have control over who goes to hell and who doesn’t?” I asked sweetly.
“Something like that. Redemption is a fine goal, but He determines who is salvageable and who isn’t.”
“Tell Him if He wants to talk, He knows where to find me. The door is that way.”
Angela gathered up all her photos and papers and returned them to the portfolio with the angelic logo on the front. She tapped them into a neat pile and reached for the drawing.
I kept my fingers on it, anchoring it in place. “I’ll keep this. It’s the only likeness of me. Somehow I don’t photograph well.” Or at all. Cameras recorded only static in my presence. The same for my crew.
“He told me to keep it safe.”
“Oh, I’ll keep it safe.”
“You won’t consign it to your master?” She looked meaningfully at the fire.
“That one is no more my master than the old man.”
“He won’t like it.”
“Then He can retrieve it Himself.”
Angela donned her pink coat and left the same way she came in, still glittering with sparkling snow.
“We’re out of special ingredients,” Raphe said on a panting breath. He looked as if he’d run around the property six times while looking for hidden stashes.
“Kitchen?” I knew I’d used some in the fish batter and the dough for the hamburger buns.
“Checked. We’re out!” Raphe panted harder, suppressing panic.
The fire shot higher and a distinctive bass rumble that might be mistaken for thunder but wasn’t, filled the room, echoing and compounding.
“I’ll call Three Kings Distributors and tell them you are on your way.” I whipped out my cell phone and speed dialed TKD.
Raphe looked at me askance. “That will take an hour at least. Do we have that kind of time?” His gaze shifted toward the fireplace. The eyes gleamed with avaricious hunger.
“We’ll make that kind of time,” I insisted.
For the first time since we’d established The Den of Iniquity, Michael flipped the open sign in the window to Closed and threw the deadbolt on the door.
The patrons kept singing and dancing. Ariel passed around the un-special ale, encouraging people to seek their homes and snug beds before snowfall trapped them inside all night. A few left. Most just kept up the party.
Then our impeccable and unimpeachable DA sauntered over to the mayor on her three-inch high heels and tighter-than-tight short skirt. Somehow her blazer had fallen to the floor, revealing a sheer white blouse that dipped way too low between her boobs. She planted a big open-mouthed kiss on the married-to-someone-else mayor. While they played tongue hockey, he slapped her well-rounded ass.
Maybe Willy shouldn’t have fixed his water heater.
I sniffed the air three times, seeking the source of this unusual behavior. Yep, a distinct flavor of brimstone emanated from the fire.
“Hurry!” I urged Raphe out the door.
Mike looked as if he wanted his flaming sword to set up a stronger barrier between our not-so-innocent sinners and the Hellmouth.
An opening straight into the arms of the Dark Prince himself.
Raphe dashed out the back. Gabe took up a seat in the center of the crowd and put on his professional advice-giver face.
I started scrounging for spilled crumbs of the specials in the dough.
The front door opened, despite the deadbolt.
Angela returned, still glittering. This time she helped a shivering short man with Mediterranean coloring hold up a heavily pregnant woman. She too had olive skin and a dark, exotic beauty. She waddled with the peculiar gate of someone about to give birth.
The room grew preternaturally quiet. Even the fire tamped down to a dull red, glow.
“This is Jose and his wife Maria,” Angela said. “I found them in the parking lot. Their car died on the way to the hospital. Can you help?” She looked up at me with pleading eyes.
This time there would be room at the inn.
All the patrons leaned forward, watching avidly. Even the mayor and the DA roused from their lustful explorations of each other to watch.
“The brew house is warm and clean. Private,” I said. “Through here, don’t even have to go outside again.” I looked askance at the soaked blankets Jose and Maria had draped around themselves and wondered if they even had coats. “Ariel, towels, first aid kit, blankets. Gabe, a round of beer on the house. Mike…you keep doing what you’re doing.” And pray that Raphe returns in time with the special ingredients.
And it came to pass that this baby was born in the way of all babies, when she determined the time was right, about two minutes after we got Maria settled on a crude pallet of piled blankets. She came into the world whimpering and pale. I worried for her, and for her parents. None of them looked overly healthy.
Ariel, bless her heart, knew what to do. She gave Jose a foaming tankard of beer from the tap—the last of the special—let Maria have a sip or three, and placed three drops on the baby’s tongue. They all perked up immediately.
I was too busy delivering the afterbirth and cutting the cord to partake. Good thing I always wear red. The blood stains didn’t show any worse than the grease and the batter and the beer already there.
I’d sat back on my heels and covered Maria with another blanket that had been heating by the fire beneath the mash. Ariel washed the baby with warm water from the Jordan River that provided one of the essential ingredients in my brew, then set the child to her mother’s breast.
A blast of cold air from the outside announced Raphe’s return. He shook his head with his dismal news. The Three Kings were totally out of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. None to be had tonight.
My heart sank. A lot of sinners would suffer needlessly, without a chance at redemption tonight.
Unless…
I stared at the mess around me. Something old, something bizarre, and something oh so very wonderful tickled my brain.
I gathered up the afterbirth in a clean towel, poured the last of Jose’s beer over the bloody mass, and cradled it gently between my hands. “Jose, you need to be a part of this. Ariel will stay with Maria and the baby.” A girl child at last. I’d had enough of men mucking up my life.
We trudged through the connecting door into the storeroom and thence into the main room of the bar.
The fire roared and laughed with delight as frolicking patrons drank more and more, losing contact with their restraint and moral core. They danced closer and closer to the fire. Mike had his flaming sword out, beating back the drunken dance with the flat of the blade, much as he’d driven me out of Eden long ago.
I thrust him aside as I hadn’t dared do then. He obeyed.
With a prayer on my lips and reverence in my heart, I held up the now bloody towel and its contents and threw them both into the heart of the flames.
The fire died, leaving the bundle intact. The demon eyes went flat and black, just two more indentations in the surround. With a loud creak and groan, plaster shattered and the demon mouth snapped closed. The room grew chill but not cold. Silence reigned.
The patrons gathered their things and trooped outside into a still night. The little bit of falling snow remained light and fluffy, easy to drive on or walk over.
“You closed the Hellmouth,” Gabe whispered in awe.
“For now,” I replied, suddenly exhausted. “There will always be another one. Always those who are not wary. Probably time to move this Den of Iniquity to where it will be needed most.”
“Always more who need
your help than those who don’t,” Jose reminded us.
Outside Angela started singing in a clear and sweet soprano:
“Silent Night
Holy Night.”
Digger Lady
Amy Sterling Casil
The last of the Calico Early Man diggers, average age well past retirement, stood beside Dr. Vi Elliott looking down into the main pit. They raised red plastic cups to their lips.
For this final toast, the group had divided a two-liter bottle of sweet, caffeinated desert champagne: warm Mountain Dew. It was all in. Finished. No insurance, no sponsorship. The last of the money had run out.
“To Early Man,” Vi said.
“To Early Man,” the others replied.
In an act of defiance that broke every rule of archaeology, Vi tossed her empty plastic cup into the deep gravel pit.
Of course she was angry. And sad, and torn, and forlorn. If there were any other way—but there wasn’t. More than saying farewell to five decades of work, she was saying farewell to a dream, one she loved with all her soul. She, and a very few others, most of whom were sharing the final toast of Mountain Dew, shared this dream. They believed that the cracked and worn rocks they had found over the course of half a century in the unforgiving desert were not rocks at all, but rather, tools. Tools created by men and women who had lived an eon before in this place.
Vi knew in her heart that where they dug, a hundred thousand years before, primeval Lake Manix had provided the Calico people with water and sustenance. Today, the lake was a vast expanse of desert sand scarred by deep-cut washes filled with stones. It was a landscape that alternately bored or terrified most of those who saw it, speeding past on the road to Las Vegas at ninety-per.
What had the Calico people looked like? Vi did not know.
Possibly, they looked like Tim, she thought, the only one there who was not a retired archaeologist or anthropologist or at least semi-qualified volunteer. He stood awkwardly beside her, not partaking of Mountain Dew, exuding an eye-watering stench of sweat, stale beer, and greasy hair.
Tim called himself “The Last Prospector.” This was not precisely true, as there were half a dozen “Tims” scattered around this corner of the Mojave, all living in trailers parked in the middle of nowhere. His trailer was an Airstream, and his dream was not of Early Man, but something different: finding Pegleg’s black gold nuggets. These nuggets and their pirate-like namesake were one of the most enduring Mojave legends, featured in Desert Magazine and other similar publications.
It was impossible to determine Tim’s age underneath his tangled mass of hair and beard, but he could not have been much younger than Vi. Looking and smelling very little different, he had first started showing up around the dig in the late 1960’s. The golden age when the famous archaeologist Louis Leakey had been Vi’s champion. While the great man lived, Vi’s idée fixe got attention—and money.
In those early days, Tim’s unpredictable visits were presaged by a low cackle, and the refrain, “Hey, Digger Lady! You won’t find any gold here!”
He had always seemed quite insane.
But now, at the end of Vi’s life journey, she looked into the weathered prospector’s deep brown eyes peeking out from under his caterpillar brows, and she felt a kind of weird kinship.
“I guess I won’t be seeing you no more,” Tim said in a matter-of-fact tone.
Vi patted his grimy hand. “I’ll come out on my own,” she said. “Nobody can stop me.”
“Can’t dig by yourself,” he said.
“Oh yes I can!” Vi said.
“Won’t find nothing,” he said. “Why don’t you come out with me some time? The two of us—we could find Pegleg’s gold.”
“A lot of people think you’ve got a better chance of finding that gold than we ever had of finding early man,” Vi said.
“I don’t know,” Tim said, sucking on his lower lip. His eyes were shadowed. “They’re just shutting you down because you ain’t got enough money?” he asked.
“No money, no insurance, lots of reasons,” Vi said. It was hard to know what made sense to Tim. If he thought about things like ordinary people, he wouldn’t have been living in an Airstream trailer in the middle of one of the world’s harshest deserts.
Then again, she told herself, if you had thought like ordinary people, you wouldn’t be an old failure, watching your life’s work whimper to a close. Vi may have been many things, but self-delusional wasn’t one of them. The dig was over—she’d wasted her entire life.
Tim’s eyes brightened. “If you just need money, you could try selling stuff on eBay,” he said. “Lots of people I know make good money at it.”
“Oh, Tim,” Vi said. The thought was absurd. Lots of people? As far as she knew, the only people Tim knew in addition to her were his fellow prospectors.
“I got me a couple of friends make plenty of cash,” he said. “I’ll hook you up with them if you want to give it a try.”
“Well,” Vi said, deciding it was best to humor him. “That’s mighty nice of you. But I don’t know what I’d sell,” she said.
He grinned at her, showing a mouthful of healthy, square, yellow teeth.
“They’ll give you a list. They take stuff on consignment and such. I sold my second Bowie knife and paid for all this dental work,” he said, lifting his grizzled mustache and curling his lip so she could get a good look.
Vi was more than usually distracted—who wouldn’t be under such circumstances? She noticed, but didn’t really think much about the unusual length and curve of Tim’s incisors.
“That’s some good dental work,” she said.
“Right, cost a lot. I never thought I’d get that kind of money for my old knife.”
“Good for you, Tim,” Vi said. She sighed, relieved, when the other diggers approached and Tim retreated. He didn’t like crowds very much, and when pressed, would never stay.
The day’s task was to sort and catalog a dozen boxes of pack rat middens that had been retrieved from a canyon twenty miles east of Calico. “We’d better get started,” Vi told the four young volunteers who’d shown up at the museum that Monday morning to do the appalling job.
The rat middens proved that the Calico area had once been wet and lush, filled with grasses, flowering plants, and other riches. Such proof lay in the fossilized rat dung and its seed and pollen contents.
To have come to the end of a long archaeological career teasing seeds from ancient rat shit—
It was an almost welcome surprise when the new Museum Director invaded the archaeology lab and called Vi out.
Wallace Webster had a Master’s Degree in Public Administration. He was known for his financial efficiency, which was why the tired, desperate Museum Board had hired the man two months before.
Vi disliked him on both principle and fact.
“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” Webster said, leading her to the coffee cart. This was one of his fundraising innovations—overpriced, lukewarm imitation Starbucks.
Vi told him that she preferred her own brew, having just fixed a pot of hot black sludge down in the lab.
With a patronizing smile, Webster got a large, sweet, chocolate drink with whipped cream and led Vi on a tour of the museum designed to torture her arthritic knees. They headed upstairs to the massive egg collection—one of the largest of its kind in the world—theoretically the Museum’s biggest attraction.
On the way, they passed Louis Leakey’s mannequin. This representation of the famous discoverer of early man and sponsor of young, nubile primate researchers had once been a more popular attraction than the eggs. Vi noticed that Leakey’s glued-on wig was dusty. An enterprising kid had removed Leakey’s glasses and placed them rakishly on top of his head, while also unzipping his khaki shorts.
Midway to the top floor, Wallace stopped at the tall window overlooking the picnic area at the rear of the museum. He indicated the expanse of brownish grass and concrete tables and benches with a sweep of his arm. “This is
where the new wing will go,” he said. “The youth exhibit and children’s art rooms.”
“Great,” Vi said. “Do you think we could refresh the Leakey exhibit?”
“That’s just what I was meaning to talk to you about,” he said.
Vi hadn’t thought that at her age, she could get excited so easily. But her heart jumped, and she smiled. “What could we do? Perhaps put some of the tools on display. The real ones—”
“The Board has voted to take the exhibit down,” said Wallace. Vi’s heart deflated. “I’m sure you’ll understand,” he continued. “It’s a bit embarrassing. The Leakey figure is dated, and nobody—”
“Take it down!” Vi said, too late realizing she was yelling. “People have given money for the exhibit. They—”
“Dr. Elliott, the money has long since been spent,” he said.
“Well,” she said. She had to admit this was true.
Wallace persisted. “You shouldn’t be worrying about fundraising at your age. You should take time to rest. Maybe write a book. I’m sure that young people would love to read—”
“What do you mean?” Vi’s throat tightened. Her cheeks felt fiery.
“The Board has decided that the museum can no longer afford a full-time archaeologist. You’d be welcome to come any time and work in your lab. We’d be glad to offer you a generous—”
“I’ll never!” she exclaimed. Concerned faces peered around the railing. Ignoring them, she turned her back on Wallace. Slowly, she made her way down the ramp, ignoring the pain in her knees.
She would never let that man see tears in her eyes.
He was calling after her. She heard footsteps behind her. Was it more money? Her medical insurance? Perhaps a part-time appointment? She would not turn. She would not speak to him or look at him.
He followed her to her office in the basement, still harrying at her heels like a small dog.
