Bestiary

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Greer grabbed a beer out of the fridge, wandered into the living room, and flopped onto the matching Barcalounger facing the TV. It was Naugahyde, and even though it got hot after you’d sat there awhile, right now it was cool and smooth and the little footstool part came up when he leaned far enough back.

His mother was parked, as usual, in the other one, with a cat in her lap and her hand in a bag of Pirate’s Booty — another low-cal snack. Greer picked up the remote from the table between them, and was about to change the channel when she said, “I’m watching this.”

Greer stopped and watched for a minute. It was something called The Vorhaus Report, one of those crappy cable interview shows with a two-dollar set and a moderator in a bad toupee. The guests tonight appeared to be some scientist — the chyron said CARTER COX, PALEONTOLOGIST — and an American Indian named James Running Horse. The Indian was wearing a three-piece suit, and he looked to Greer like he had maybe one-sixteenth, or less, Indian in him; Greer snorted, thinking this was just another scam the guy used to score some government money or affirmative action shit. Maybe even a piece of some new multimilliondollar casino in the desert. Indians had it made these days.

He ought to tell Sadowski and his crew to look into it.

“What the hell are you watching this for?” Greer said.

“It’s educational.”

“You hate educational. You watch Home Shopping Network.”

“Not always. I’m watching this now.”

Greer sat back and listened for another minute or two. It looked as though they were discussing something about some bones that had been dug up in those pits over on La Brea. Wasn’t that where somebody’d just died? Greer had caught something about it on the local news — another Indian had fallen in or something and drowned.

But the show didn’t seem to be about this. It seemed to be about some really ancient bones that the Running Horse guy wanted returned, and the other guy — he was tall and in good shape, wearing khakis and an open-collared white shirt — wanted to study first. And they kept talking about something called NAGPRA.

“The NAGPRA provisions have been in place since 1990, for just such occasions as this,” Running Horse was saying now.

“What are they talking about?” Greer asked. “What’s NAGPRA?”

“Native American Graves something,” his mother quickly put in. “It’s about how when you dig up their bones or their… holy things… you have to give them back to the tribe.”

Greer took a long pull on the cold beer. “Sounds to me like a case of finders keepers.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” his mother said. “Just listen, Derek — you might learn something.”

“But these remains predate any of the known tribes by many thousands of years,” Cox was saying now. “Even if they were to be repatriated, to whom would they be given? What tribe? Where? These early peoples migrated, often over large distances.”

“They should be given to the tribe of which he was an honored ancestor,” Running Horse replied.

“Fine,” Cox said. “But unless you let us study the remains, we won’t even be able to determine that much.”

“Then perhaps you should have thought of that before you disturbed his bones.”

“We disturbed his bones, if that’s how you want to put it, doing what we do — excavating the tar pits for the fossils of early North American animals. Mastodons, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats. We didn’t exactly break into a sacred burial ground and start turning over tombstones.”

“We Native Americans,” Running Horse said, turning his attention to the neutral host seated between them, “have been treated like slaves, like chattel—”

Greer wondered if he’d just mispronounced “cattle.”

“—for centuries, ever since the genocidal invasion of the European explorers. Our most sacred places have been defiled, our most precious objects — pottery, textiles — have been plundered, and even our bodies have been removed from Mother Earth, where they were meant to rest, and put on display in glass cases in museum galleries.”

“The La Brea Woman is not on display,” Cox shot back.

“And she’s not in the earth, either,” Running Horse replied.

It was getting heated — Greer liked that.

“Where is she, in fact?” Running Horse continued. “Is she in a file drawer? A cardboard box? A safe?”

Cox didn’t seem to know how to answer that.

“There’s a difference, isn’t there,” the host broke in, “between repatriation and disposition? Shouldn’t we—”

“I’ll tell you where she is,” Cox said, totally ignoring the host’s question and leaning toward Running Horse. Greer wondered if his mother was watching this because she thought this Carter Cox guy was handsome.

“She’s in the air,” Cox said. “And in the ocean. She’s in the sky, and the clouds, and the rain. Isn’t that what you believe? That we all return to the universe, to the Great Spirit? Then that’s where she is. And her skeleton — what little we’ve got of it — is just the physical remains, the unimportant, insignificant, fossilized residue of a human life.”

“Then why do you want it?” Running Horse countered, but even Greer could see that was a bad move.

“Because by studying what remains, we can learn more about her. About how she lived, and how she died. We can find out where we all came from, and maybe where we’re all going. We can honor her — just as we can honor the La Brea Man now, too — in a way that simply burying their bones again will never do. We can honor them by paying attention not to their deaths — you’ve got to stop looking at these as dead souls — but to their lives. How they lived, how they survived, and how they prevailed, in a very hostile world. I can’t think of any greater tribute we can give them.”

“Than to lay their bones under bright lights and X-ray machines?”

Cox looked exasperated. “If that’s what it takes, yes.”

“The federal government thinks you’re wrong,” Running Horse replied, over the moderator’s raised hand, “and I’m going to prove it.”

“Thank you, thank you both,” Vorhaus was saying, “but we are unfortunately out of time. It’s been a very enlightening discussion, and a thank-you, too, goes out to our viewers for joining us tonight, on The Vorhaus Report.”

The screen blipped and cut to a public service announcement a nanosecond later — guess the guy meant it, Greer thought, when he said they were out of time. “Can I change it now?” he asked.

“See what’s on AMC.”

Greer channel-surfed a bit — sometimes over his mother’s protestations of “Wait — that looked good” or “What was that — was that Law and Order?”—but he couldn’t find anything to watch either. At least on his computer he could get porn.

He tossed the remote into her ample lap — the cat hissed at him — and said, “I’m going out.”

For a change, she didn’t ask where.

But all he could think of right now was the Blue Bayou.

As soon as the studio lights went down and The Vorhaus Report was officially off the air, Carter detached the microphone from the front of his shirt, shook hands with the host — he didn’t have to bother with James Running Horse, who had conspicuously turned his back and stalked out of the studio — and went out to the parking lot.

He had deliberately parked his Jeep right below a halogen lamp, and his first thought was to check the tires. After that run-in at Temescal Canyon, he was only too aware of all the crazies loose in L.A.

He got into the car and started for home. At least at this hour — he checked the clock on the dashboard and saw that it was after 10 P.M. — there wouldn’t be much traffic. The Santa Anas were blowing, hot dry winds off the desert, stirring up the scents of dry sage and dry mesquite and dry soil. Dry everything.

He put on the radio, but he couldn’t really concentrate on it; instead, he kept turning over in his mind the last hour, much of it spent jousting with James Running Horse. He’d done his best to keep his temper, but he was so weary of this endless debate, this ongoing controversy between science and religion, which played out everywhere from the textbook wars over evolution to his own freedom to examine a precious and rare hominid artifact. He wished he’d said something more when Running Horse had demanded that the bones of this “honored ancestor” be returned to his tribe. Who was to say these bones were ever honored? Much of the evidence suggested that the La Brea Woman had had her skull crushed with a blunt instrument, and it was quite possible that her male counterpart had met an equally violent fate. Far from being honored, these people might have been murdered, or brutally sacrificed, and for all we knew today, their fondest wish, their dying wish, might have been to get away from their bloodthirsty fellow tribe members altogether.

On the private drive up to Summit View, Carter saw not a soul — even the patrol car was missing, off on its rounds perhaps — and only the porch light was on at his own house. He opened the door quietly, in case everyone was asleep, and crept up the stairs. The night-light was on in Joey’s bedroom and he poked his head in there first. Champ, asleep on the crocheted rug that lay beside the crib, immediately raised his head, but upon seeing Carter just thumped his tail on the floor and waited for his ears to be scratched.

Carter looked into the crib and, just as he expected, Joey’s little gray-blue eyes were wide open and looking right back at him. “One of these days,” Carter said, leaning down to give the baby a wet smooch on his little forehead, “I’m going to catch you with your eyes closed. I’m going to come in so quietly that even you can’t hear me.”

Joey looked at him as if to say, Highly unlikely.

In the bedroom, Beth was propped up against the pillows with the TV on low, but she was fast asleep. Carter glanced at the screen — it was the same channel The Vorhaus Report was broadcast on, though now it was showing something about the dangers faced by illegal immigrants from Mexico. He picked up the remote, which was lying next to Beth’s hand, and flicked it off. The second he did, she stirred and opened her eyes.

“When did you get in?” she mumbled.

“Thirty seconds ago.”

“You were great, much better than that other guy.”

“He had a three-piece suit.”

She cleared her throat and sat up higher in the bed.

“But you’re taller.”

He laughed and took off his shirt. His arm, where Geronimo had cut him, was healing nicely. At least it had been a clean cut.

“Your boss’ll be pleased.”

“Gunderson’s never pleased. He’s just sometimes less unpleasant.”

“You hungry?”

“Nah, I ate at the museum before going over to the show.”

“Tell me you didn’t eat at one of the specimen tables, with all the bones and stones around you.”

“I ate with a very interesting guy that I’ve just recently met.”

Beth groaned, “Don’t tell me — the La Brea Man.”

“You said not to tell you,” Carter said, hanging up his shirt and then his pants.

Beth harrumphed. “I’m starting to think that James Running Horse had a point.”

Carter went into the bathroom, showered, put some antiseptic on his forearm, and by the time he came out in fresh boxers and a T-shirt, the lights were off and Beth was fast asleep again. He debated going downstairs to read for a while, but suddenly the day caught up to him and he fell on his back onto the bed. The air-conditioning was humming softly, and the room was almost completely dark.

He closed his eyes, tried hard not to think about The Vorhaus Report or Gunderson or even the La Brea Man, and succeeded eventually in alighting on some harmless memories from his boyhood — fireworks on the Fourth of July. He yawned, stretched his long legs out on top of the sheet, and let his mind just drift. Firecrackers, corn on the cob, catching fireflies in the backyard…

How long he’d been asleep he couldn’t even guess, but way off in the distance, as if from a world away, he thought he heard a dog growling… then a short bark. He was hoping it would stop — he was so damn comfortable — or that Beth would get up and see what was wrong. But when he heard it again, another bark, more frantic this time, but abruptly curtailed, he realized he’d have to get up himself and see what was wrong.

He dragged his legs off the bed, got up, and stumbled toward Joey’s room. His bare feet stepped into something wet in the hallway, but in the dim glow of the nursery night-light all he could see was what looked like a dark stain on the white wall-to-wall carpeting. Oh man, he thought, this was going to be expensive to clean up, whatever it was, nor did he want to have to tell the owner of the place about it.

Best leave that to Beth, he thought.

Crossing the threshold, he tripped on something, something heavy and furry, and when he looked down, he could see that it was Champ, that he was lying on his side… and his throat was torn out, hot blood spilling toward the door. His breath stopped, and when he looked up again he could see eyes — three or four pairs of them — staring at him from all corners of the nursery. They were yellow and malevolent, and the worst of them, the ones that were fixed on him the most intently, belonged to the big gray coyote who had led the pack.

And who was now inside Joey’s crib. Standing over him, panting fast.

How… Carter’s mind could barely accept what he was seeing. A warm draft blew up the stairs and onto the back of his legs; he could hear the front door banging, loose and open, in the foyer downstairs. Had he…

He didn’t dare move.

The other coyotes were perched around the room, one on the crocheted rug that Champ used to occupy, one on the window seat, a third in the corner near the closet, nosing now under the dresser.

Carter didn’t even want to shout to Beth — he didn’t want to do anything that might disturb, in some unpredictable way, the terrible tableau before him.

Not until he had figured out exactly what to do.

The leader’s jaws were wet with blood — Champ’s, no doubt — but Carter could see that Joey was so far unaffected. He was lying on his stomach, eyes open, in a blue sleep suit. His little toes curled, and Carter could see him now lifting his head to get a better look at this big stuffed toy that was sharing his crib.

No, Carter thought, no… don’t move. Please God don’t move.

The rank smell of fur and blood permeated the room.

The leader lowered his head, until his snout was just inches above the baby’s head. But his eyes remained on Carter, as if taunting him.

Carter inched closer, hoping that he might get near enough to make a lunge for the baby and get him. But the coyote on the rug stood up on all fours, and with his head down and back arched, snarled loudly.

Carter looked around for anything he could swing, but there was nothing. Even the lamp on the dresser was only a little round ginger jar in the shape of Dumbo.

Joey gurgled, and perhaps sensing his father was in the room, started to make noise. Happy, meaningless burbles. He kicked his legs.

The coyote in the crib growled, and snapped in Carter’s direction; his yellowed fangs, one of them badly broken, glistened wetly above the baby’s back.

The others were on full alert now, and Carter could sense them moving closer from all directions. His mouth was so dry he could barely speak, but in a low voice he said, “Okay now, okay now… that’s right, that’s right,” as he moved another few inches toward the crib. “Yeah, that’s right…”

But just when he was close enough to pounce and grab his son, the alpha coyote raised its hackles, then vaulted over the bars of the crib, leaping straight at his throat. The impact sent Carter crashing back toward the door, his feet sliding on the bloody floor, his hands scrabbling at the beast’s jaws. He could feel its hot breath scouring his skin and the fierce teeth biting and snapping. Carter slid down the wall, holding the beast just a fraction from his face, but he could feel the others now jumping in, one on each leg, another tearing at his shoulder…

“Carter!”

No, he didn’t want Beth anywhere near this. She needed to get away, she needed to grab Joey and get away!

“Carter!”

His shoulder was still being shaken by the coyote. He flung it out, trying to free it from the animal’s teeth.

“Carter! Watch it — you’re going to kill me!”

The shaking stopped.

There was a bright light in his eyes, and Beth was saying, “Carter — wake up. Wake up, honey.”

His legs kicked convulsively, one more time.

“You’re having a nightmare.”

He opened his eyes; he could barely swallow.

“You’re having a nightmare.”

Beth was kneeling over him on the bed, looking very, very concerned.

“Whew,” she said when she saw that he was at last coming to. “For a second there, I thought you were going to punch my lights out.”

He took a deep breath, and then another.

“You alright now?”

He nodded. The sheet had been kicked off and was trailing on the floor.

He propped himself up on his elbows and looked around the room, bewildered.

“Whoa,” he said, exhaling.

“You can say that again.”

“Worst dream I ever had.”

“You want to talk about it?”

He sat up, legs bent. “No, not yet.” He swiveled off the bed. “I just want to check on Joey.”

He padded across the hall — the carpeting was clean and dry — and into the nursery. Champ was curled up on the rug, and Joey was just as he had pictured him in the dream, lying on his tummy in blue pj’s. But he was alone, thank God, in the crib.

Beth followed him in and, seeing that Joey was awake, lifted him up and cradled him.

“See,” she said to Carter, “fit as a fiddle. And getting heavier all the time. Here,” she said, “you hold him.”

Carter took the baby in his arms.

“I had this terrible dream, of coyotes,” was all he said. Joey looked up at him with solemn eyes.

“Not surprising. They were howling in the canyon, and I have this terrible feeling they caught somebody’s cat. They started Champ barking, too.”

Carter nodded, rocking the baby. The muslin curtains were pulled back, and he could see outside into the deep dark canyon, where the dry trees and brush rustled in the night wind. And even now he could hear a coyote’s distant wail.