Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  In October, catching the placental odor of the Great Inland Sea, the gravid females (including Quaker Queen, Beverly Big, Mama Mountain, Hulga, Bertha, and several demure ladies from clans that had joined us after our run-in with Chatillon and Hopkins) split off from the males and led their youngsters into a coastal region of northern Montana. We went with the females rather than with the males because the females, seeing Button and me as one more gawky kid, matter-of-factly mother-henned us on this journey. Their bodies gave us protection, while their clarinet squeaks and oboe moans offered frankly unambiguous advice.

  Then, at an ancestral hatching ground, they dug out mud-banked nests that had fallen in or fashioned new nests near the old ones. Working hard, the ladies built these nests at least a body-length apart; each nest was about eight feet in diameter and four feet deep at the center of its bowl. When the nests were complete, the female duckbills squatted above the bowls and carefully deposited their eggs (as few as twelve, as many as twenty-four) in concentric rings inside the drying pits. Then they left, cropped ferns and other plant materials, waddled back, and conscientiously covered their tough-skinned eggs.

  Although I tried to discourage him, warning that he could get trampled or sat upon, Button got involved. He carried dripping loads of vegetation back to the hatching grounds to help Beverly Big and Quaker Queen incubate their lizardlings. And when their eggs broke open and baby hadrosaurs poked their beaked noggins out, Button not only helped the mama duckbills feed them, but also sometimes crawled into the muck-filled nests and hunkered among the squeaking youngsters. No mother seemed to resent his presence, but what almost cured Button of this behavior was having Quaker Queen drop a bolus of well-chewed fruit on him. Even that accident didn’t keep him from stalking the mud bridges between nests, though, watching and waiting as our dinosaur siblings rapidly grew.

  Button and I stayed with our corythosaurs for more than three years (if “years” beyond a discontinuity divide have any meaning). We migrated seasonally with our duckbill family, going from south to north in the “winter” and from north to south toward the end of “summer.” We saw the hadrosaurs mate in their breeding grounds, and, after the females had laid their eggs, we stayed in the muddy hatching grounds like bumbling midwives-in-training.

  On each seasonal trek, we saw animals for whom we had developed great affection—Daffy, Bertha, a host of nameless youngsters—run down and murdered by the T-kings and the albertosaurs that opportunistically dogged our marches. During our third year with the duckbills, in fact, I figured out that only 64 of over 800 hatchlings made it out of the nest and less than half the survivors reached the Arctic breeding grounds with their adult relatives. Agility, stealth, and even simple puniness often saved Button and me, but the hadrosaurs weren’t so lucky. Many of those that didn’t fall to predators succumbed to parasites, accidents, or mysterious diseases. The forests and uplands of the Late Cretaceous could be beautiful, but life there wasn’t always pretty. (Maybe our folks, escaping it so soon, had known true mercy.)

  As for human pioneers from the blasted twenty-second century, A.D., Button and I had no desire to consort with them. At times, we saw smoke from their villages; and, on each of our migrations, bands of human nomads, archers in lizard-skin clothing, helped the T-kings cull the weakest members of the herds, whether duckbills, boneheads, fleet-footed hypsilophodonts, or horned dinosaurs. In large bands, though, the archers sometimes risked everything and went after a tyrannosaur. Once, from a mountainside in eastern Alberta, Button and I watched a dozen Lilliputian archers surround and kill an enraged Gulliver of a T-king. Neither of us was sorry, but it isn’t always true that the killer of your greatest enemy is automatically your friend.

  Chatillon and Hopkins came into our lives again the year that Button—who had long ago given up talking in favor of playing duckbill calls on his harmonica—turned eight. Along with nine or ten other raiders, they targeted the duckbills’ Montana hatching grounds, shooed off as many of the mothers as possible, and killed all the mothers inclined to defend their nests. The men were egg gathering, for reasons I never fully understood—restocking the fishing villages’ larders, providing a caulking substance for boats—and Button and I escaped only because the men came into the nesting grounds shouting, banging bones together, and blowing triceratops trumpets. There was no need for stealth; they wanted the females to flee. So Button and I hurried out of there along with the more timid hadrosaur mothers.

  The next day, I crept back to the area to see what was going on. On a wooded hillside above the main nesting floor, I found an egg that had long ago petrified, hefted it as if it were an ancient cannon ball, and duck-walked with it to an overlook where the activity of the nest raiders was all too visible. Hopkins, his bald pate gleaming like a bleached pachycephalosaur skull, was urging his men to gather eggs more quickly, wrap them in ferns, and stack them gently in their sharkskin sacks.

  The sight of Hopkins’s head was an insupportable annoyance. I raised myself to a crouch, took aim, and catapulted my petrified egg straight at his head. The egg dropped like a stone, smashing his skull and knocking him into one of the hollowed-out nests. He died instantly. All his underlings began to shout and scan the hillside. I made no effort to elude discovery. Three or four of them scrambled up the overlook’s slope, wrestled me down, secured my hands with horsetail fibers, and frog-marched me back down to the hatching site to meet Duckbill Jay Chatillon.

  “I remember you,” Chatillon said. “Brett and I had a chance to kill you once. I’ll bet Brett’s sorry we didn’t do it.”

  It seemed likely that Chatillon would order me killed on the spot, but maybe the presence of so many other men, not all of them as indifferent to judicial process as he, kept him from it. After finishing their egg collecting, they tied my hands at the small of my back, guyed my head erect with a lizard-skin cord knotted to my bindings, and made me walk drag behind an ankylosaur travois loaded with egg sacks and another hammocking Hopkins’s corpse.

  At a village on the Great Inland Sea, I was locked for at least a week in a tool shed with a dirt floor. Through the holes in its roof, I could sometimes see gulls and pteradons wheeling.

  I had lost my parents, I had lost Button, I had lost our family of hadrosaurs. It seemed clear that Chatillon and his egg-hunting cohorts would either hang me from a willow tree or paddle me out to sea and toss me overboard to the archaic fishes or ichthyosaurs that yet remained. I was almost resigned to dying, but I missed Button and feared that, only eight years old, he wouldn’t last too long among the harried duckbills.

  The last night I spent in the tool shed, I heard a harmonica playing at some distance inland and knew that Button was trying to tell me hello, or goodbye, or possibly “It’s all right, brother, I’m still alive.” The music ceased quickly, making me doubt I’d really heard it, then played again a little nearer, reconvincing me of Button’s well-being, and stopped forever a moment or so later. Button himself made no appearance, but I was glad of that because the villagers would have captured him and sent him back through a discontinuity lock to the Here-and-Now.

  That, you see, is what they did to me. The sheriff of Glasgow, the fishing settlement where I was confined, knew a disaffected family who had applied for repatriation. He shipped me with them, trussed like a slave, when they made their journey back toward the Mississippi Valley Time-Slip, just across from St. Jo, Missouri, and the unappealing year known as 2111 A.D. Actually, because of a fast-forward screw-up of some esoteric sort, we recrossed in 2114. Once back, I was tried for Hopkins’s murder in Springfield, found guilty of it on the basis of affidavits from Chatillon and several upright egg raiders, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. I have just finished serving that sentence.

  From the few accounts that sometimes slip back through, Button grew up with the corythosaurs. Over there, he’s still with them, living off the land and avoiding human contact. It’s rumored that, at nineteen, he managed to kill Duckbill Jay Chatillon and to catch i
n deadfalls some of Chatillon’s idiot henchmen. (God forgive me, I hope he did.)

  Because of my murder conviction, I’m ineligible to recross, but more and more people in our desolate century use the locks every year, whether a gate to the Late Cretaceous or a portal on another continent to a wholly different geologic or historical time. This tropism to presumably greener stomping grounds reminds me of the herding and migrating instincts of the dinosaurs with whom Button and I lived so many “years” ago. And with whom Button, of course, is probably living yet.

  One gate, I’m told, a discontinuity lock in Siberia, debouches on an epoch in which humanity has been extinct for several million years. I’d like to use that lock and see the curious species that have either outlived us or evolved in our absence. Maybe I will. A document given me on leaving prison notes that this Siberian lock is the only one I am now eligible to use. Tomorrow, then, I intend to put in an application.

  The Tigers of Hysteria Feed Only on Themselves

  TRAPPER’S FARM LAY TO THE EAST OF THE FOOTHILLS shadowing the red gas pumps and the corrugated tin roof of the general store in Bay Hamlet, two miles down the road. The nearest towns were Harriston and Bladed Oak.

  On the morning of his stepson’s return from the war, Trapper, a thin man with a sharp nose and a balding head, stood in the gravel drive waiting for his dead wife’s son to appear in a tornado of dust on the hedged-in road in front of his clapboard house. Behind him, his repair shop seethed in the summer heat. Its darkness contained a clutter of rusted barrels, deer and moose antlers, twisted automobile parts, and oil-stained girlie calendars commissioned by farm-equipment companies.

  Trapper kicked at the gravel with his boot.

  An hour went by.

  Then the faint churning of heavy tires told the lean old man that his stepson had turned the corner by the Primitive Baptist Church, off toward the foothills. Between the road’s hedges drifted the yellow cloud both concealing and ratifying the existence of a car. Soon enough, this car bounced into the drive and swayed there in the heat, like a B-52 set down on a jungle airstrip for an emergency stopover.

  “Hello,” a voice said. “Hello, Trapper.”

  Sonny, the old man’s stepson, gave the impression that he had appeared not from the interior of the car but by parachute from the cloudless white sky. He wore civilian clothes but still looked like a soldier. His hair bristled. His lined but solid jowls were tan. Blue eyes burned out of his combatant’s face, and he pulled Trapper to him with intimidating strength for a hug. He had served as a first sergeant in the army, but three days ago his retirement had gone through.

  “You don’t look a bit different, Trapper—maybe skinnier, is all.” Sonny turned to the silver automobile. “Hey, I want you to meet Joe Luc.”

  An Asian youth who looked sixteen or seventeen walked around the silver car’s hood with grim fury in his eyes. Slender and supple, he halted six feet away and stared at the embracing father and son.

  “I’m trying to adopt him, Trapper. Hell of a job getting him into the States at all—but people over there owe me plenty, some of em colonels n generals. Anyway, until we get some stuff straightened out, I’m calling him Joe Luc.”

  The white sun incandesced. The smell of pesticides drifted in to them from the cotton fields behind the shop.

  “He looks a tad old for adoptin,” Trapper said.

  Joe Luc leaned against the driver’s door and thrust his fisted hands in his trouser pockets. “I am too old for adoption, Mr. Trapper.” Trapper’s last name was Catlaw. “I am in August only twenty-one.”

  Sonny led Trapper over toward the young man. “Last year, when I started trying to escape that hellhole, he told me, ‘I am in August twenty-one.’ He doesn’t know what years are. He says the same to everybody, don’t you, Joe Luc?”

  Trapper Catlaw and Joe Luc stood eyeball to iris. At last the old man put out his hand and the Asian kid took it. The smell of insect-killers in the cotton burned Trapper’s nostrils. Sonny and Joe Luc had to notice it, too.

  “I know what years are,” Trapper said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  They ate in the kitchen, at the wooden table that Sonny’s mother had always kept covered with sweetbreads, fried pies, and open plates of vegetables, usually in vinegar. Trapper served his visitors pork chops left over from the previous day and iced tea made from mineral-laden farm water. (The water always made Sonny think of tin dippers and broken pumps.) Joe Luc ate and drank matter-of-factly, unoffended by the bad water or too well mannered to mention it. After the meal, Trapper scraped the chop bones into a slop pail and slid the dishes into the sink.

  That evening they watched the color television set in the living room. They did not really converse, for Sonny told two different war stories three times each, waving his arms as if commanding a platoon of goldbricks. On CBS, Roger Mudd substituted for the regular news anchor, Walter Cronkite; he introduced several war stories that a host of videotaped pictures illustrated. After the news, they watched a quiz program, and Joe Luc answered some of the questions. Later they watched Mannix, a show about a private detective in a garish plaid coat.

  After that, Trapper hitched across the hardwood floor on his game leg to change the channel. “There’s a shoot-em-up-Tony I want to see.” Trapper called westerns shoot-em-up-Tonys. The shoot-em-up-Tony was in black and white.

  “Oh, Trapper,” Sonny said, “you don’t want to watch that shit.”

  “What do you want to see, knothead?”

  “Not that. They’re all the same. You know how it’s going to come out. Hell, I’ll bet you’ve already seen this one.”

  “We’ll watch the shoot-em-up-Tony,” Joe Luc said.

  In the dim living room, lit only by the TV’s monochrome eye, they watched the predictable shoot-em-up-Tony.

  At the second commercial break, Sonny levered himself up off the couch and shuffled into the bedroom where he had slept as a boy. Trapper watched the door shut behind him. In that room, a featherbed awaited his stepson, and next to the bed hung the ancient pelt of a bear, moth-nibbled and stiff. Outside, a pickup clattered by. It sounded like the advance vehicle in an army convoy, growling through the night on a rutted alien highway.

  That night, Trapper sat up in bed and listened to the voices drifting across the living room from Sonny’s room. What time was it? Trapper got up early, but never at two or three in the A.M.

  It sounded as if Sonny and Joe Luc were exchanging insults in his stepson’s cramped “hunters’ den,” which was what Sonny had called the room as a boy. Straining to hear, Trapper cocked his head, but the darkness muffled the men’s voices, which bore a distinct gookish flavor and carried only faintly. Trapper’s hands began to shake. He sat bolt upright against his headboard and looked toward his open door. Even in June, he rarely sweated, but damp patches had formed under the arms of his ribbed tee shirt and a fever had enflamed his earlobes. He waited.

  A bump. A half-smothered shout. An abrupt wash of light on the living room’s deep-purple planking. And then—the slamming of a door.

  Trapper did not sleep again that night.

  In the morning, he put crispy-edged fried eggs with unbroken yolks in front of Sonny and Joe Luc. Sonny had a long, crimson-lipped cut over his left eye. No one had tended to the cut, and flakes of blood had dried in the brow. A brownish smear marked Sonny’s temple; a blue swelling, his eyelid. Joe Luc, trim and exotically clean-cut in his white shirt, ate with his head down.

  Buttering a piece of toast, Trapper said, “What happened to that eye?”

  “Nothing happened to it,” Sonny said. “What’s wrong with it? Do you see anything wrong with it?”

  “It’s blooded up pretty good.”

  “Yes,” Joe Luc said, looking up. “It is.”

  “You’re both out of your heads—prolly the heat. You never could think straight in summer, Trapper.”

  “Know a blooded eye when I see it.”

  “It ain’t blooded, old man.”

  J
oe Luc set his fork aside and launched into a speech using words that Trapper found perplexing: “In the mountains in my country live a people who refuse to admit their pain when they suffer a hurt from themselves or others. They pretend nothing has happened. They put their faith in the hysteria of the community; out of this emotion, they believe, will come an avenger—someone who molds their pain, anger, and madness into a beast-shape. This creature rages at and destroys the source of their pain. The mountain people fear only one thing, Mr. Trapper—that the creature formed from their hysteria will turn upon them.” Joe Luc wiped up his egg yolk with a crust of bread. “They fear that it will forget who ought to be the object of its recompense.”

  Joe Luc sounded just like a preacher. “If I was those people,” Trapper said, “I’d go on a hunt.”

  Sonny pushed his chair back and knocked his plate to the floor, where it rattled but did not break. “Listen, Joe Luc,” he said, “do you want me to adopt you or not? Shut up that stupid claptrap! You hear me?”

  “For adoption,” Joe Luc said, “I am now too old.”

  Sonny clenched his fists and hyperventilated. In a matter of minutes, even as the three men regarded one another in the sun-streaked kitchen, his left eye closed and glued itself shut. Sonny did not even seem to notice.

  Trapper cleaned up the mess, dumped it into the sink with last night’s dishes, and limped out to his shop, where a neighbor named Spurgeon Lester waited patiently for him to begin repairs on his ’62 John Deere tractor.

  Before noon, the sky clouded over. Thunder sounded in the east, like distant artillery.

  July arrived, and even greater heat.

  Almost every night, Trapper heard arguments from the hunters’ den: high-pitched bickering that usually ended in the explosion of a slammed door. Trapper never got up to see what prompted or sustained these arguments. It was none of his business—except that they ought to have more sense than to rattle the brass bedposts and to slam doors at two in the morning.