Postcards

  But Loyal did not speak until the old man shook his arm again.

  ‘They want you to go in now, buddy. Can you make it?’

  ‘You bet.’ But the floor dipped like a ship’s deck.

  And in the other room saw a monster, left hand in a cocoon of bandage, feet in flapping basketball sneakers, a matted beard wet with the saliva of a swearing rage.

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ It was the patient who barked the question, not the doctor, a faded man with the widest wedding ring Loyal had ever seen. Loyal told the splinter story in one sentence.

  ‘What a fuckup,’ said Bullet Wulff, ‘what a pair of fuckups,’ while Goleman sluiced the injured eye with a saline solution.

  ‘You can take off, Bullet,’ said Goleman, ‘instead of giving my other patients a hard time. But I’d like it if you hung around town for a few days so I can look at you again. The King Kong Hotel is comfortable enough.’

  ‘You bet it is,’ said Wulff clawing at his bloodstained shirt pocket with his good hand. He pulled out a bent cigarette and lit it. Most of the tobacco had fallen out and the paper flared up like a torch. He stayed on the table, watching Goleman lave the eye.

  ‘You’re lucky, Mr.—’ Loyal could feel the heat of the lamp, smell the doctor’s stale breath.

  ‘Blood. Loyal Blood.’

  ‘You’re lucky, I think.’

  ‘That’s good. I never been this lucky, run a splinter into my eye.’

  Wulff laughed. ‘That’s telling him. Hey, do you like crab legs?’

  ‘Don’t know. Never had any.’

  ‘Son of a bitch! Never had no crab legs?’

  ‘Please don’t talk,’ murmured Goleman, pressing close to Loyal and peering. Finally he put a plastic flesh-colored patch over the eye, the patch secured by an elastic cord that pulled viciously at his hair.

  ‘Crab legs are Alaska’s gift to the human race. The King Hotel gets king crab legs – think that’s why they call it the King Hotel – flown in frozen twice a week and they fix those suckers up would make your granny whistle Dixie. You will think you died and went to heaven. I hereby invite you to come to supper at the King with me. For the crab legs. Croix de Guerre. We’ll talk about our war wounds. We’ll compare trades. You can tell me about uranium and I’ll talk dinosaur bones. I’d ask you too, doc, but you always want to talk about bowels and fistulas.’

  ‘You know something about dinosaurs?’

  ‘I know something about dinosaurs? Tell you a little secret – nobody knows nothing about dinosaurs. Crazy ideas, wild theories, hot-shot guys oughta think up movie ideas. I heard ’em stand in front of a sandstone cut, put their fingers up their ass and scream. They guess, they fight, they get snakebit, they haul heavy stones by hand for miles. They run the other guys down,’ throwing his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. ‘That’s what I do. I hire out to the guys from the universities and the museums. I find fossils, I dig ’em, I ship ’em to the paleontologists back east and let them figure out who ate who and how many teeth they needed to do it and what Latin name to slap on ’em. They write me letters all winter, great hands for writing letters. Then they come out in the summer with their assistants and graduate students. I’m the one makes the coffee. I’m the one that plasters the blocks and gets ’em loaded on the truck. I’m the one that crawls into the caves. You want a job? Make a nice change for you. The guy that was diggin’ with me better be crossin’ the California state line by now or he is goin’ to be dead meat tomorrow. Had about as much idea of what he was doin’ as a cog railway conductor at the ballet. We oughta be a good team, One-Eye and One-Paw. Maybe get up some kind of a sideshow act and not have to work no more.’

  Over the crab legs, swallowing the sweet meat, Loyal talked about uranium rambling, geologists and pitchblende, the way the mining investors were all over.

  ‘Like stink on shit,’ said Loyal. ’When I started out on the Plateau it was rim walking. You’d find the right beds, you’d know your background count and get out on there and walk along, old Geiger counter nipping along. Another good way was to get down below the cliffs and check out the rocks that had fallen off. That’s how Vernon Pick found the Hidden Splendor deposit. He didn’t know nothing about prospecting, he was sick, just about broke, worn-out. Stopped to rest at the bottom of a cliff and seen his counter licking off the scale. Turned it down to a lower setting, she’s still off the scale. Knocked her down to the cellar notch and it’s still right up there. For a minute he thought the counter was broken. Then he figured out the rock had probably fallen off the cliff face, so up he climbs up with his counter and he finds it. Today Vernon Pick is uraniumaire. Sold it for nine million dollars.

  ‘Another thing I used to do, look at the maps real careful, look for names like Poison Spring and Badwater Canyon. You know why? Because a lot of times you find your uranium where selenium or arsenic shows up.’ He copied Bullet, squeezing the lemon juice on the crabmeat.

  ‘And Charlie Steen, found the Mi Vida in the Big Indian Wash area up at Moab. They say he got sixty million on that one. Then there was this truck driver started working an old abandoned copper claim with his brother-in-law, The Happy Jack, and damned if they didn’t get into uranium ore worth millions. Another guy was on his way to fix somebody’s stock tank and got a flat tire. While he was fixing it, he just turned on his Geiger counter. You guessed it. There’s a string of stories like that. It’s out there. Some get rich. Me, I found something looked pretty good once. Staked my claim, but I didn’t get it measured out right, it’s got to be six hundred foot by fifteen hundred, and I got that messed up somehow. This guy been watching me all along. I go off to town with bags full of ore, get the claim registered, and he moves in, stakes right over me, jumps my claim and it holds up because I didn’t measure right. I had it in my mind it was five hundred by five hundred. Live and learn. Another time I found a place seemed like low-grade ore, sold it to Uratex for ten thousand. Made something that time. Got myself fitted up good, nice new Willys Jeep, new sleeping bag, provisions, bought and mounted a thousand-dollar scintillator on the jeep and started out driving. Looking for more. I was sure I had the touch at last. Christ, I covered fifty thousand miles of the Plateau in that jeep. After a while it got tiresome. I don’t know why. I couldn’t keep my interest up. There’s thousands of guys still out there, pimply kids and bus drivers wearing snakeproof boots.’ He stirred at his salad.

  ‘What I seem to enjoy is the bones. I’ll turn up this old stone tree trunk, or I’ll find bones. Uranium, all right, but I hate to take ’em in to the AEC ore stations. I been taking the bones I find over to Donald in Spotted Dick.’

  ‘Donald! In the first place he undoubtedly robbed you blind, in the second place he was just a tourist trap no matter what he said, and in the third place where Mr. Donald B. Plenty Hoops is now he won’t buy any more bones for a long time. Donald is in jail.’ Wulff sucked at the end of a leg section until the meat shot into his mouth. He drank a little from the pitcher of melted butter. His mouth and chin were glossy with it.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Aggravated vehicular homicide. Couple of weeks ago. He got tanked at his own bar real good and drove home for something – what, six hundred feet down the road? – on the wrong side of the highway. Broad daylight. Hit a horse broadside and half tore off the kid’s leg that was riding it. Kept going. Said later he thought it was a tumbleweed. Bled to death. Not a scratch on Donald. Little girl was the daughter of the new owner at the IR and S. I’ve heard there’s a bunch would just as soon set the jail where Donald is awaiting his trial on fire and save some court costs. How about a steak? Surf and turf. I could do some damage to a steak, then I’m going to drink half a bottle of whiskey and lay down. This hand is starting to hurt like a son of a bitch. How’s your eye?’

  ‘Hurts like a son of a bitch.’

  ‘Hey! Two double whiskeys and two medium sirloins.’

  He dug with Wulff off and on for three summers. Wulff showed him what he c
laimed were the tricks of the trade.

  ‘Two rules, Blood. Get the fossil out of the ground and back home in the best shape you can. And write every fuckin’ piece of information about its location and bed and position that you can think of and include that information with the specimen. That’s about all there is to it.’

  With Bullet he learned a kind of patience, the slow search by eye and feel through obelisks of cream and oxblood mudstone, the crumbling peach bluffs, the white ravines, the eroding streams of milky water, violet mounds and domes in a burning heat that left him choked for something to drink besides the rubbery water in the canteen.

  ‘Goddamn it. Blood, if you can’t see a rabbit jaw from fifteen feet you are in the wrong business.’

  The lime dust, the fine sand scoured their skin, inflamed their sore eyes. The heat sprang up from the white earth like an electric charge. Often they would go out after a rain hoping the freshets dashing down the coulees and draws would have torn away fresh layers of sandstone, exposing new fossils. He learned to walk bent toward the ground, casting his eyes for ridges and bumps of bone working up to the surface. He winnowed anthills for tiny rodent teeth and bones, screened small seashells out of sand, shellacked shells of crumbly bone protruding from weathered slopes, and later, at camp, sat with Bullet picking at encrusted bones, cleaning surfaces with a dentist’s scratch brush, or packing the plastered specimens for shipping back east.

  The front of the truck was a mare’s nest of bundles of geological maps printed in turquoise and salmon. Beer bottles rolled on the floor. His hats were stuffed behind the seat, under the sun visor. Broken sunglasses all over the dash, pretzel bags. The back of the truck filled up as well with the fossil-hunter’s gear, plaster, burlap sacks, chisels, rolls of toilet paper, newspaper, gallon cans of glue, shellac and alcohol, whisk brooms and paintbrushes, tape, picks and dental tools and a box of notebooks. The Indian’s book, a cheap spiral notebook, lined pages stained with grease, lay buried in the pile. He wrote in it once in a while.

  Every September, a few days before elk season, they would pack up the fossil gear and head north. Bullet had a camp in the Black Hills, and they went up into the pines to hunt until elk fever was satisfied or the first heavy snows forced them down. Bullet, who had a built-in compass when he was working fossil grounds, got lost in timber country.

  ‘I don’t know what it is, the trees throw me off, I get down in one of them damn gullies and I get turned around. The trees make it all look the same. You can’t see far. It’s not like you can get a bearing on some butte and tell where you are, just climb up high.’ Part of the disorientation, Loyal thought, was because the old fossil hound slept like the dead in the higher altitude. In the mornings he would crawl out and nod over a cup of black coffee for an hour before he tottered into life. He dribbled evaporated milk into the cold coffee.

  ‘“Carnation milk, best in the lan’, comes to you in a little red can. No tits to pull, no hay to pitch, just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.”’

  He would head off into the hills late in the morning and be lost by noon. Once, after he’d been out all day and the next night, Loyal found him by the sound of a shot from Bullet’s scarred old 30.06. He answered the shot and hiked until he met him toiling up a dry wash with flapping shoe soles, cradling a broken wrist in an improvised sling.

  ‘Well, I learned something,’ said Bullet. His mouth was so dry and swollen the words blurred. ‘I learned never to shoot a fucking 30.06 like you would a pistol. Goddamn, I was being casual, just pointed the sucker up in the air like you would a pistol and pulled the trigger. Dammit, the Indians do that in paintings of Custer’s Last Stand. See it in the movies, too. Like to broke my hand clear off my arm.’

  One season two or three inches of good tracking snow fed the day after the trucks wheezed up the wash to the cabin. Loyal was out early, easing the plank door closed on Bullet’s breathing. The grey air was resinous, stinging his nostrils after the stink of the closed cabin. He felt violent with life, and cast out to the north. Less than a mile from the cabin he picked up elk tracks, five or six moving in a long trot. He followed the straight line for a few hundred yards before he came on pellets. He imagined they were faintly warm to his touch, and settled in for a long tracking walk. In the late morning he came up with a young bull standing in the timber and facing back along his trail as though waiting for death. Loyal put up the rifle, and the elk fell with grace as though acting a brief but much-rehearsed part in a play. It was that easy.

  The overclouded sky was as dull as old wire when he reached the cabin. There was a light inside. His shoulders felt cut through by the hauling straps, the weight of the hindquarter. He hoped Bullet was in shape to help drag the rest of the elk out, then saw the black shape of a smaller elk hanging from the branch. Inside, Wulff hunched at the table gobbling canned spaghetti. Hecks of sauce shone in his beard. There was a smell of red wine.

  ‘Get one?’

  ‘Yeah. How’d you get it out. Bullet? That elk?’

  ‘It was a miracle. I went straight up through the trees behind the camp, jumped a helluva big elk about ten minutes after I started. I was so goddamn surprised I hadn’t even loaded the gun. He’s just standing there, broadside. He don’t see me. So I reach in my pocket and get a cartridge, dip it into the rifle, bring it up and son of a bitch she don’t fire. Just click. The elk snorts and takes off. I open it up and you know what I done? I put a goddamn tube of Chapstick in the damn rifle.’ He laughed, a rough gurgle like a throat-cut hog, thought Loyal who had heard the Chapstick story twenty times, not just from Bullet.

  ‘But I see you got one, just the same. What I want to know is how you got it back here by yourself.’

  ‘Oh, that. Yes, well, that was a funny thing. I was so goddamn discouraged I come back down here, and on the way I crossed over your track, but I wasn’t the only one that did and damned if there wasn’t an elk that had seen your moccasin print and keeled over with a heart attack at the knowledge you was out there. Right outside the door. All I had to do was string him up. Whyn’t you open a can of spaghetti and pull up a chair?’ He was a good-natured old bastard.

  After the elk hunt they went separate ways for the winter. Loyal picked up short-term jobs with a sheep or cattle outfit, good enough until the snow went off the hills. Wulff headed for Las Vegas.

  ‘And I come back in the spring with a hell of a lot more money than I had the last fall, too,’ he said smugly, ‘I lead a wonderful, clean life. I got a laundry there in Vegas. My town partner, George Washut, how’s that for a name for a guy works in a laundry, runs it the summers whilst I’m out poking around the rocks, then I come in in the fall with a big elk up on the top of the truck, not that I like to eat it that much, but it looks good, and then George takes off for Palm Springs where he has got some kind of a deal going and I run the laundry, keep regular hours, yes ma’am, no ma’am, don’t waste my good money on gambling, take care of my two apartment houses, catch up on my bookkeeping, see my kids, Barbara and Josie, see my ex-wife, see my girlfriends. Them two little girls is thirteen and fifteen now, but I got enough socked away so they can go to the best college in the country. Them girls are smart. They are gonna amount to something. Josie wants to be a scientist, but what kind she don’t know. Biologist she thinks. She’s gonna come out next summer and dig bones with me. Barbara plays the piano as good as Liberace. I’m not kiddin’, either, she’s real good.’

  Each spring it took them a month to get used to each other. At first they worked side by side, but nobody could work close to Wulff for long without feeling roughed up. Wulff said he got sick of Loyal’s silences.

  ‘Christ sake, it’s restful to have a hardworking, quiet partner, but I feel like I got to do the talking for both of us. I ask a question and you just grunt. I gotta think of the answer myself.’

  Loyal sickened of hearing Wulff say the same two things whenever they came into different country. He’d say I got a feeling there’s fossils in that rock,’ or ?
??My omnidirectional seat of the pants dinosaur locater says there’s nothing around this place.’

  Gradually they worked farther and farther apart until they had to shout to tell where the other was.

  His own feeling for where to look he couldn’t explain. It was like trapping, part instinct for the way animals might move through a country, part feeling for the millennial landscape, an interior knowledge that suggested where lakes and mud wallows, where sinkholes and fissures had been in that vanished world.

  ‘Damn it, you can smell fossils,’ said Bullet.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Loyal. ‘Smell like burned flour.’

  But what he liked were the tracks. How many times had he stopped cold, and dragged Wulff away from his own work?

  ‘What the hell, it’s just tracks.’ Wulff’s plaster-coated hands stiffened into claws as he stood looking at the tracks. ‘We can’t dig up tracks, for God’s sake. It’s a sequence, know what I mean? What do you want to do, dig up two hundred footprints? Each one as big as a warshing machine.’

  ‘I want to see where they go. It’s not like the bones. The bones are dead, just remains, but the tracks – look, something alive, a living animal made the tracks. It’s like hunting. We’re on the trail of this animal and I get this feeling of it moving along on its own business before the first humans came out of the glue.’ He was startled at his own intensity. ‘See here, how the toes dig in deep but you don’t see the back of the foot? Whatever made these tracks was running. Look at the size of the print. It’s a foot long. Some big red-eyed bastard with big claws. How’d you like to have that coming down on you, charging out of the bushes? Or maybe something bigger was after it and it was going hell-bent-for-leather to get away. Think of it, Bullet, think of it.’

  ‘Whatever turns your burner on.’ But Wulff passed the word to Fantee Horsley at the Beinecke American Geological Museum that he was digging with a maverick interested in tracks and did anybody want, say, a mile-long footprint sequence?