The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “You didn’t miss him, Robert, you killed him,” Magdalen called loudly. “You got him with a good shot through the throat and up into the brain when he tossed his head high like they do. Why didn’t you bring him? Go back and get him!”

  “Get him? I couldn’t even lift the thing. Terrence and Howard, come with me and we’ll lash it to a pole and get it here somehow.”

  “Oh, Robert, you’re out of your beautiful mind,” Magdalen chided. “It only weighs a hundred and ninety pounds. Oh, I’ll get it.”

  Magdalen Mobley went and got the big buck. She brought it back, carrying it listless across her shoulders and getting herself bloodied, stopping sometimes to examine rocks and kick them with her foot, coming on easily with her load. It looked as if it might weigh two hundred and fifty pounds; but if Magdalen said it weighed a hundred and ninety, that is what it weighed.

  Howard Steinleser had cut poles and made a tripod. He knew better than not to. They strung the buck up, skinned it off, ripped up its belly, drew it, and worked it over in an almost professional manner.

  “Cook it, Ethyl,” Magdalen said.

  * * *

  Later, as they sat on the ground around the fire and it had turned dark, Ethyl brought the buck’s brains to Magdalen, messy and not half-cooked, believing that she was playing an evil trick. And Magdalen ate them avidly. They were her due. She had discovered the buck.

  If you wonder how Magdalen knew what invisible things were where, so did the other members of the party always wonder.

  “It bedevils me sometimes why I am the only one to notice the analogy between historical geology and depth psychology,” Terrence Burdock mused as they grew lightly profound around the campfire. “The isostatic principle applies to the mind and the under-mind as well as it does to the surface and under-surface of the Earth. The mind has its erosions and weatherings going on along with its deposits and accumulations. It also has its up-thrusts and its stresses. It floats on a similar magma. In extreme cases it has its volcanic eruptions and its mountain building.”

  “And it has its glaciations,” Ethyl Burdock said, and perhaps she was looking at her husband in the dark.

  “The mind has its hard sandstone, sometimes transmuted to quartz, or half-transmuted into flint, from the drifting and floating sand of daily events. It has its shale from the old mud of daily ineptitudes and inertias. It has limestone out of its more vivid experiences, for lime is the remnant of what was once animate: and this limestone may be true marble if it is the deposit of rich enough emotion, or even travertine if it has bubbled sufficiently through agonized and evocative rivers of the under-mind. The mind has its sulfur and its gemstones—” Terrence bubbled on sufficiently, and Magdalen cut him off.

  “Say simply that we have rocks in our heads,” she said. “But they’re random rocks, I tell you, and the same ones keep coming back. It isn’t the same with us as it is with the Earth. The world gets new rocks all the time. But it’s the same people who keep turning up, and the same minds. Damn, one of the samest of them just turned up again! I wish he’d leave me alone. The answer is still no.”

  Very often Magdalen said things that made no sense. Ethyl Burdock assured herself that neither her husband, nor Robert, nor Howard, had slipped over to Magdalen in the dark. Ethyl was jealous of the chunky and surly girl.

  “I am hoping that this will be as rich as Spiro Mound,” Howard Steinleser hoped. “It could be, you know. I’m told that there was never a less prepossessing site than that, or a trickier one. I wish we had someone who had dug at Spiro.”

  “Oh, he dug at Spiro,” Magdalen said with contempt.

  “He? Who?” Terrence Burdock asked. “No one of us was at Spiro. Magdalen, you weren’t even born yet when that mound was opened. What could you know about it?”

  “Yeah, I remember him at Spiro,” Magdalen said, “—always turning up his own things and pointing them out.”

  “Were you at Spiro?” Terrence suddenly asked a piece of darkness. For some time, they had all been vaguely aware that there were six, not five, persons around the fire.

  “Yeah, I was at Spiro,” the man said. “I dig there. I dig at a lot of the digs. I dig real well, and I always know when we come to something that will be important. You give me a job.”

  “Who are you?” Terrence asked him. The man was pretty visible now. The flame of the fire seemed to leap toward him as if he compelled it.

  “Oh, I’m just a rich old poor man who keeps following and hoping and asking. There is one who is worth it all forever, so I solicit that one forever. And sometimes I am other things. Two hours ago I was the deer in the draw. It is an odd thing to munch one’s own flesh.” And the man was munching a joint of the deer, unasked.

  “Him and his damn cheap poetry!” Magdalen cried angrily.

  “What’s your name!” Terrence asked him.

  “Manypenny. Anteros Manypenny is my name forever.”

  “What are you?”

  “Oh, just Indian. Shawnee, Choc, Creek, Anadarko, Caddo, and pre-Caddo. Lots of things.”

  “How could anyone be pre-Caddo?”

  “Like me. I am.”

  “Is Anteros a Creek name?”

  “No. Greek. Man, I am a going Jessie, I am one digging man! I show you tomorrow.”

  Man, he was one digging man! He showed them tomorrow. With a short-handled rose hoe he began the gash in the bottom of the mound, working too swiftly to be believed.

  “He will smash anything that is there. He will not know what he comes to,” Ethyl Burdock complained.

  “Woman, I will not smash whatever is there,” Anteros said. “You can hide a wren’s egg in one cubic meter of sand. I will move all the sand in one minute. I will uncover the egg, wherever it is. And I will not crack the egg. I sense these things. I come now to a small pot of the proto-Plano period. It is broken, of course, but I do not break it. It is in six pieces and they will fit together perfectly. I tell you this beforehand. Now I reveal it.”

  And Anteros revealed it. There was something wrong about it even before he uncovered it. But it was surely a find, and perhaps it was of the proto-Plano period. The six shards came out. They were roughly cleaned and set. It was apparent that they would fit wonderfully.

  “Why, it is perfect!” Ethyl exclaimed.

  “It is too perfect,” Howard Steinleser protested. “It was a turned pot, and who had turned pots in America without the potter’s wheel? But the glyphs pressed into it do correspond to proto-Plano glyphs. It is fishy.” Steinleser was in a twitchy humor today and his face was livid.

  “Yes, it is the ripple and the spinosity, the fish-glyph,” Anteros pointed out. “And the sun-sign is riding upon it. It is fish-god.”

  “It’s fishy in another way,” Steinleser insisted. “Nobody finds a thing like that in the first sixty seconds of a dig. And there could not be such a pot. I wouldn’t believe it was proto-Plano unless points were found in the exact site with it.”

  “Oh, here,” Anteros said. “One can smell the very shape of the flint points already. Two large points, one small one. Surely you get the whiff of them already? Four more hoe cuts and I come to them.”

  Four more hoe cuts, and Anteros did come to them. He uncovered two large points and one small one, spearheads and arrowhead. Lanceolate they were, with ribbon flaking. They were late Folsom, or they were proto-Plano; they were what you will.

  “This cannot be,” Steinleser groaned. “They’re the missing chips, the transition pieces. They fill the missing places too well. I won’t believe it. I’d hardly believe it if mastodon bones were found on the same level here.”

  “In a moment,” said Anteros, beginning to use the hoe again. “Hey, those old beasts did smell funny! An elephant isn’t in it with them. And a lot of it still clings to their bones. Will a sixth thoracic bone do? I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. I don’t know where the rest of the animal is. Probably somebody gnawed the thoracic here. Nine hoe cuts, and then very careful.”

&nbs
p; Nine hoe cuts; and then Anteros, using a mason’s trowel, unearthed the old gnawed bone very carefully. Yes, Howard said almost angrily, it was a sixth thoracic of a mastodon. Robert Derby said it was a fifth or sixth; it is not easy to tell.

  “Leave the digging for a while, Anteros,” Steinleser said. “I want to record and photograph and take a few measurements here.”

  * * *

  Terrence Burdock and Magdalen Mobley were working at the bottom of the chimney rock, at the bottom of the fluting that ran the whole height of it like a core sample. “Get Anteros over here and see what he can uncover in sixty seconds,” Terrence offered.

  “Oh, him! He’ll just uncover some of his own things.”

  “What do you mean, his own things? Nobody could have made an intrusion here. It’s hard sandstone.”

  “And harder flint here,” Magdalen said. “I might have known it. Pass the damned thing up. I know just about what it says, anyhow.”

  “What it says? What do you mean? But it is marked! And it’s large and dressed rough. Who’d carve in flint?”

  “Somebody real stubborn, just like flint,” Magdalen said. “All right then, let’s have it out. Anteros! Get this out in one piece. And do it without shattering it or tumbling the whole thing down on us. He can do it, you know, Terrence. He can do things like that.”

  “What do you know about his doings, Magdalen? You never saw or heard about the poor man till last night.”

  “Oh well, I know that it’ll turn out to be the same damned stuff.”

  Anteros did get it out without shattering it or bringing down the chimney column. A cleft with a digging bar, three sticks of the stuff and a cap, and he touched the leads to the battery when he was almost on top of the charge. The blast, it sounded as if the whole sky were falling down in them, and some of those sky-blocks were quite large stones. The ancients wondered why fallen pieces of the sky should always be dark rockstuff and never sky-blue clear stuff. The answer is that it is only pieces of the night sky that ever fall, even though they may sometimes be most of the daytime in falling, such is the distance. And the blast that Anteros set off did bring down rocky chunks of the night sky even though it was broad daylight. They brought down darker rocks than any of which the chimney was composed.

  Still, it was a small blast. The chimney tottered but did not collapse. It settled back uneasily on its base. And the flint block was out in the clear.

  “A thousand spearheads and arrowheads could be shattered and chipped out of that hunk,” Terrence marveled. “That flint block would have been a primitive fortune for a primitive man.”

  “I had several such fortunes,” Anteros said dully, “and this one I preserved and dedicated.”

  They had all gathered around it.

  “Oh the poor man!” Ethyl suddenly exclaimed, but she was not looking at any of the men. She was looking at the stone.

  “I wish he’d get off that kick,” Magdalen sputtered angrily. “I don’t care how rich he is. I can pick up better stuff than him in the alleys.”

  “What are the women chirping about?” Terrence asked. “But those do look like true glyphs. Almost like Aztec, are they not, Steinleser?”

  “Nahuat-Tanoan, cousins-german to the Aztec, or should I say cousins-yaqui?”

  “Call it anything, but can you read it?”

  “Probably. Give me eight or ten hours on it and I should come up with a contingent reading of many of the glyphs. We can hardly expect a rational rendering of the message, however. All Nahuat-Tanoan translations so far have been gibberish.”

  “And remember, Terrence, that Steinleser is a slow reader,” Magdalen said spitefully. “And he isn’t very good at interpreting other signs either.”

  Steinleser was sullen and silent. How had his face come to bear those deep livid claw marks today?

  * * *

  They moved a lot of rock and rubble that morning, took quite a few pictures, wrote up bulky notes. There were constant finds as the divided party worked up the shag-slash in the mound and the core-flute of the chimney. There were no more really startling discoveries; no more turned pots of the proto-Plano period; how could there be? There were no more predicted and perfect points of the late Folsom, but there were broken and unpredictable points. No other mastodon thoracic was found, but bones were uncovered of bison latifrons, of dire wolf, of coyote, of man. There were some anomalies in the relationship of the things discovered, but it was not as fishy as it had been in the early morning, not as fishy as when Anteros had announced and then dug out the shards of the pot, the three points, the mastodon bone. The things now were as authentic as they were expected, and yet their very profusion had still the smell of a small fish.

  And that Anteros was one digging man. He moved the sand, he moved the stone, he missed nothing. And at noon he disappeared.

  An hour later he reappeared in a glossy station wagon, coming out of a thicketed ravine where no one would have expected a way. He had been to town. He brought a variety of cold cuts, cheeses, relishes and pastries, a couple of cases of cold beer, and some V.O.

  “I thought you were a poor man, Anteros,” Terrence chided.

  “I told you that I was a rich old poor man. I have nine thousand acres of grassland, I have three thousand head of cattle, I have alfalfa land and clover land and corn land and hay-grazer land—”

  “Oh, knock it off!” Magdalen snapped.

  “I have other things,” Anteros finished sullenly.

  They ate, they rested, they worked the afternoon. Magdalen worked as swiftly and solidly as did Anteros. She was young, she was stocky, she was light-burned-dark. She was not at all beautiful (Ethyl was). She could have any man there any time she wanted to (Ethyl couldn’t). She was Magdalen, the often unpleasant, the mostly casual, the suddenly intense one. She was the tension of the party, the string of the bow.

  “Anteros!” she called sharply just at sundown.

  “The turtle?” he asked. “The turtle that is under the ledge out of the current where the backwater curls in reverse? But he is fit and happy and he has never harmed anything except for food or fun. I know you do not want me to get that turtle.”

  “I do! There’s eighteen pounds of him. He’s fat. He’ll be good. Only eighty yards, where the bank crumbles down to Green River, under the lower ledge that’s shale that looks like slate, two feet deep—”

  “I know where he is. I will go get the fat turtle,” Anteros said. “I myself am the fat turtle. I am the Green River.” He went to get it.

  “Oh that damned poetry of his!” Magdalen spat when he was gone.

  Anteros brought back the fat turtle. He looked as if he’d weigh twenty-five pounds; but if Magdalen said he weighed eighteen pounds, then it was eighteen.

  “Start cooking, Ethyl,” Magdalen said. Magdalen was a mere undergraduate girl permitted on the digging by sheer good fortune. The others of the party were all archeologists of the moment. Magdalen had no right to give orders to anyone, except her born right.

  “I don’t know how to cook a turtle,” Ethyl complained.

  “Anteros will show you how.”

  * * *

  “The late evening smell of newly exposed excavation!” Terrence Burdock burbled as they lounged around the campfire a little later, full of turtle and V.O. and feeling rakishly wise. “The exposed age can be guessed by the very timbre of the smell, I believe.”

  “Timbre of the smell! What is your nose wired up to?” from Magdalen.

  And, indeed, there was something time-evocative about the smell of the diggings; cool, at the same time musty and musky, ripe with old stratified water and compressed death. Stratified time.

  “It helps if you already know what the exposed age is,” said Howard Steinleser. “Here there is an anomaly. The chimney sometimes acts as if it were younger than the mound. The chimney cannot be young enough to include written rock, but it is.”

  “Archeology is made up entirely of anomalies,” said Terrence, “rearranged to make them fi
t in a fluky pattern. There’d be no system to it otherwise.”

  “Every science is made up entirely of anomalies rearranged to fit,” said Robert Derby. “Have you unriddled the glyph-stone, Howard?”

  “Yes, pretty well, better than I expected. Charles August can verify it, of course, when we get it back to the University. It is a non-royal, non-tribal, non-warfare, non-hunt declaration. It does not come under any of the usual radical signs, any of the categories. It can only be categorized as uncategorized or personal. The translation will be rough.”

  “Rocky is the word,” said Magdalen.

  “On with it, Howard,” Ethyl cried.

  “‘You are the freedom of wild pigs in the sour-grass, and the nobility of badgers. You are the brightness of serpents and the soaring of vultures. You are passion of mesquite bushes on fire with lightning. You are serenity of toads.’”

  “You’ve got to admit he’s got a different line,” said Ethyl. “Your own love notes were less acrid, Terrence.”

  “What kind of thing is it, Steinleser?” Terrence questioned. “It must have a category.”

  “I believe Ethyl is right. It’s a love poem. ‘You are the water in rock cisterns and the secret spiders in that water. You are the dead coyote lying half in the stream, and you are the old entrapped dreams of the coyote’s brains oozing liquid through the broken eye socket. You are the happy ravening flies about that broken socket.’”

  “Oh, hold it, Steinleser,” Robert Derby cried. “You can’t have gotten all that from scratches on flint. What is ‘entrapped dreams’ in Nahuat-Tanoan glyph-writing?”

  “The solid-person sign next to the hollow-person sign, both enclosed in the night sign—that has always been interpreted as the dream glyph. And here the dream glyph is enclosed in the glyph of the dead-fall trap. Yes, I believe it means entrapped dreams. To continue: ‘You are the corn-worm in the dark heart of the corn, the naked small bird in the nest. You are the pustules on the sick rabbit, devouring life and flesh and turning it into your own serum. You are stars compressed into charcoal. But you cannot give, you cannot take. Once again you will be broken at the foot of the cliff, and the word will remain unsaid in your swollen and purple tongue.’”