Bestiary

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“I’ve asked the police to move them back another hundred yards, but they say they can’t do it,” Gunderson fumed, glaring out the window at the picketers chanting and beating their drums on Wilshire Boulevard.

“The street is public property,” Carter said.

“Not the sidewalk in front of the goddamn museum!”

As Carter followed Gunderson’s gaze, he saw a TV station truck pull up outside. No doubt there’d be another evening news story, focusing on the tragic death of the unidentified victim they had dubbed “the Mystery Man,” a Native American driven to violence by the desecration of his people’s remains. Ever since the accident, the local news had been featuring the story prominently, following the search (so far unsuccessful) for the man’s body, along with lots of talking heads debating the pros and cons of anthropology: “Where does science end,” as one fatuous commentator had intoned, “and respect for the dead begin?”

Carter could only listen to so much of this gibberish. These were bones he excavated — not people. These were fossils — not souls, or spirits, or sacred vessels. Whatever immortal elements they might ever have possessed — and he wasn’t a true believer there, either — it was long gone, into the air, into the ether. There was nothing deader than a petrified bone.

“We’ve had another interview request,” Gunderson said, wheeling away from the window as if he couldn’t bear to witness that spectacle another second. “The Vorhaus Report.” It was a serious-minded cable TV show — so serious almost no one watched. “I said you’d do it.”

“You said what?” Carter blurted out.

“I said,” Gunderson explained coolly, “that the head of our paleontology field unit — the man who not only discovered the remains of the La Brea Man, but who was in the pit when this unfortunate man fell to his death — would be happy to represent the museum and explain our interests.”

“Why did you do that?” Carter said. He’d been ducking reporters, interview requests, even mikes shoved in his face when he got out of his car in the museum parking lot, for days.

“Because I’m tired of taking the heat, and because, frankly, this is your mess.”

Carter had to bite his tongue, or he knew he’d say something fatal. What had really happened here, he could see, was that Gunderson, who’d been only too happy to stand in front of the cameras initially, with a sorrowful face and a beautifully folded silk pocket square, had gotten burned. He’d thought this would be a little blip of a story, a chance to make his own name and face synonymous with the museum, but it hadn’t gone that way. The story had “legs,” it wasn’t going away overnight, and the more Gunderson talked, the more trouble he got himself, and the museum, into. Finally, he’d come to see that, and now he wanted to set up a new fall guy — Carter.

“But that’s not why I sent for you.”

Carter waited for the rest.

“I want to know what’s happening in Pit 91 now. How long is it going to be until we find that man, that Geronimo’s, body?”

Nobody liked calling him Geronimo — and on the air, and in public, they simply referred to him as “the victim,” or even “the Mystery Man”—but in private, they reverted to the early shorthand.

“We’re doing everything we can,” Carter said, “but it’s extremely difficult, for reasons I’ve already gone into.” And reasons Gunderson kept conveniently forgetting.

The body of the Mystery Man had been sucked down into the pit in a way Carter had never before seen, and even now could not explain. The tar normally didn’t work that way; hell, it hadn’t worked that way for tens of thousands of years. It trapped animals, it didn’t devour them. But something had changed; maybe it was a result of the high-power suction hoses (insisted on by Gunderson) or the steel sectioning plates that Carter had installed, or something else entirely — there was a theory that heavy construction work on nearby Curson Street had altered the underground geology — but whatever it was, it had caused the pit to behave in a totally anomalous fashion. And now, just when he was about to excavate one of the most fascinating and important finds of his career — the bones of only the second human being ever to be discovered in the La Brea pits — Carter had to find a way first to recover the body of a man who had somehow, impossibly, become its only modern prey.

“I simply do not understand this,” Gunderson went on. “Why can’t they just dredge the pit? How far down does it go? How far down can the body be?”

“We don’t know,” Carter said, as calmly as his growing impatience would allow. “Nothing here is going according to form. The pit has been agitated in a way we have never seen, and it’s possible — though unlikely — that the body has somehow shifted laterally.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means, the body may have been dragged sideways, into a subterranean pocket or asphalt seam that we didn’t even know was there.”

Gunderson ran his hand over his carefully groomed gray head. “So how do we ever find it then?”

Carter had wondered about that himself. “It’s possible,” he said, “that we could try some kind of ground-based sonar.” He’d actually started investigating the possibility, just in case everything else failed.

“Good Lord,” Gunderson muttered, more to himself than Carter, “what’s that going to cost?”

Plenty, Carter thought. But there was no point going into that now. He knew that there was a new Emergency Rescue Team, on loan from the San Bernardino Fire Department, down at the pit today, and he was due there to help oversee their activities. In fact, glancing at his watch, he realized that he was overdue.

“I’ve got to go down there now,” Carter said.

“When you leave the building, try not to call any undue attention to yourself.”

What would they have to do next, Carter thought — wear masks?

The moment he left the air-conditioned confines of the museum, the pounding of the drums became louder. It was another painfully hot and arid day, and in the pit it would be at least ten degrees hotter. He didn’t relish what he would have to do there.

As he walked past the pond of black asphalt near the entrance to the museum, where the life-sized replicas of a family of mastodons stood, someone shouted, “Grave robber!” at him. What grave? Carter thought. The La Brea Man had died a terrible, and probably solitary, death, either stuck in the tar and dying slowly of dehydration, or torn to pieces by predators, who had likely then died with him. For all anyone knew, he might have been happy to be found.

The LAPD had set up barricades that allowed visitors to the museum to go in and out, but blocked off all access, for now, to the parklike grounds where Pit 91 was located. Carter had to show the official pass that hung on a laminated card around his neck before the cop at the barrier would let him pass.

The pit, from here, looked like some kind of triage site. Where there was usually just one trailer, for changing and showering, there were now several, for coordinating the work of outside agencies, dealing with media requests, community outreach. The coroner’s department had a person there at all times, to make sure the body of the Mystery Man was handled with kid gloves, whenever it might finally be found. To Carter, it was all a massive case of overkill.

Down in the pit, there were maybe a dozen workers now, none of them his usual crew. Rosalie and Claude had been relieved of duty for the foreseeable future, and even Miranda — the poster girl for enterprising UCLA graduates — had been informally banned. The workers now were postdoc paleontologists, and even a retired professor or two, who knew how to do the painstakingly close labor that the extraction of the La Brea Man now required. This was delicate, highly skilled work that was tough to do right under the best of circumstances. But to do it now, with fire-men and cops and coroners looking over your shoulder, and rescue workers trying to figure out how to dredge a nearby quadrant of the site for a recent victim, was nearly impossible.

Carter could tell there was no news as soon as he started down the ladder into the pit. The San Bernardino crew had installed some kind of rope and tackle assembly, and their generator rested precariously on one of the wooden walkways; its operator, dripping with sweat, had stripped down to his navy, SBFD T-shirt and suspendered overalls. It made Carter sick to his stomach to think of what damage all this equipment might be doing to the as-yet-unrecovered finds that lay below.

The operator glanced up at Carter, and it appeared he knew who he was. Carter was having to get used to that, people knowing who he was without his ever having met them. “Nothing so far,” the guy called out over the thrumming of the motor.

Carter nodded.

Several neighboring sections of the grid had men and women with piles of tools and paraphernalia all around them. Most were on their knees, using chisels and hand picks and stiff brushes to isolate the fossils that had been partially revealed. Others were carefully applying the burlap strips, soaked in plaster of paris, to the areas already exposed; once the cast had hardened, the fossil would be removed, hopefully intact, to the labs, where the finer work would be done.

A couple of the workers looked up as Carter approached, but under their hats and headbands, and with their goggles over their eyes, it was tough to tell who was who. His friend Del, however, he could always pick out. A middle-aged guy with a mane of prematurely white hair (tied up today, quite sensibly, with a thick rubber band), he leaned back on his haunches and pushed his goggles up onto his head.

“Hey, Bones,” he said, using the nickname Carter had acquired years before. “Where you been? We’ve hit the mother lode.”

Carter had to smile. He and Del went way back, to grad school; Del had already been an assistant professor at the time, and he had helped to get Carter on a couple of prize assignments. Now he was a full professor up near Tacoma, and when he’d heard about the situation in L.A., he’d been among the first to heed the call.

“Hell,” he’d said upon arrival, “I was on sabbatical anyway, and I still wasn’t writing my book.” It was a running joke between them that Del had been working on his book — a revolutionary theory of the Permian extinction — all his life.

“Oh yeah? What have you found?”

“We’ve pulled up a six-pack of Tab — you know how hard that is to find these days? — and a Partridge Family lunch box.”

Carter laughed and said, “Don’t forget to catalogue them.” Crouching down, he said, “It looks like you’re making progress.” A thick white layer of plaster was coating a section a few feet square.

“Yeah, we’re getting there. But this plaster’s a bitch to work with in this heat.”

“Foam would have been worse.” A more modern method, which Carter had rejected, was to apply polyurethane foam to an aluminum sheath.

“Would have made a lighter cast,” Del replied.

“But the fumes would have killed us all down here.”

“True,” Del said. “But it’s a small price to pay…”

Carter took off his shirt, draped it over a rung of the rear ladder — the very one that Geronimo had descended — and borrowed a pair of safety goggles from one of the workers too hot to continue. He picked up a chisel and began to work away at an area just beyond the plaster, where what might have been a scapular was still concealed. He felt better the second he started. He felt like himself again — a scientist, doing fieldwork — and not a bureaucrat dodging interview requests. With his head down, and the chisel in his hand, he could forget about all the other distractions and concentrate instead on what he loved… and what he did best.

For the next hour, Carter simply worked, occasionally trading a word or two with one of the other diggers, swigging regularly from the Gatorade bottles that made the rounds, glopping tar into the heavy black buckets. As if by some unspoken consent, the other workers had left the prize area of the La Brea Man’s skull and upper torso to Carter, while they worked in the region of the man’s extremities. Overall, the bones appeared to be remarkably connected still, especially considering the wild frenzy that the man’s entrapment had apparently inspired. Bears, wolves, lions, every predator for miles around must have heard his cries, or seen him flailing to get out, and come running. Ordinarily, they’d have torn a limb loose, and dragged the meaty bone off to consume in safety elsewhere, but in this case the conditions must have been disastrous for all. The tar must have been heated and thick, the temptation of human prey too irresistible, and the fight for a piece of him too violent. All across the pit, the signs of an epic struggle were more than evident.

So why, Carter wondered, were the man’s bones laid almost horizontally? It was quite possible, of course, that they had just been pushed and pulled into that configuration over thousands of years in the tar — bones were scraped and scattered and broken and abraded all the time — but there was something about these that still struck Carter as strange. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed again the plastered dome where the skull now resided. He tried not to look right at it — skulls still had a peculiar resonance that made them hard to ignore, even for Carter — but looking now, he had the impression that the face had indeed been turned up toward the sky at the time of his death. That he had lain flat, surrendering to the tar… and offered himself to the animals that had come to kill him.

Had he just run out of strength and been pinned down by the hot tar? Had he simply given up and resigned himself to his fate? Or had he, out of some primitive atavistic sense, sacrificed his body and his spirit to what he might have perceived as the great chain of being?

“Now this might be interesting,” Del said, prolonging that last word.

Del, sort of the unofficial second-in-command now, had been working a few feet to his left, in the area of the hand.

Carter pushed his goggles back on his head to get a better look.

To a layman’s eye, it would appear to be no more than a lump of tar-covered rock, but to Del, or Carter, it was more than that. It had a special shape, a man-made shape, and it appeared to be cradled in the palm of his hand.

“Looks like something that mattered to him,” Del said, and Carter couldn’t have agreed more. He scooted closer. It might have been a weapon, used in his final struggle. Or simply the last thing, as the breath left his body, that his dead fingers had closed upon.

Or was it something the man might have cherished?

Carter had no more time to consider the possibilities before there was a shout from the other side of the pit. “Yo! We’ve got something.”

Carter turned and heard a high-pitched whine from the generator on the walkway as the pulley chains drew taut.

The other workers all stopped, too, took off their goggles, and waited.

The drag chain, with a steel claw on the end, had been submerged to a depth of twenty-five feet or more. The operator, his damp T-shirt clinging to his body, waved up to another fireman standing at ground level.

The generator rumbled, the chain tightened again and then, slowly, began to pull.

“We’ve got something, that’s for sure,” the operator said, staring down at the now turbulent tar. Methane bubbles pocked the inky black surface.

Stepping around the other workers, Carter crossed to the section of the grid where Geronimo had gone down. The chain was still pulling something up, and Carter found himself thinking, to his own shame, that he was worried it might be a priceless fossil, now damaged beyond repair. Lucky, he thought, that the media could never guess what was going on in his head.

“Hold it a second,” the operator shouted. “We’ve got a snag.”

The guy up top signaled back, and the operator actually leaned out over the pit and shook the heavy chain, the old-fashioned way, before kicking up the generator again. A tiny plume of smoke, or steam, escaped from a valve on top.

“Should it be doing that?” Carter shouted over the whine.

“Does that all the time,” he said, before looking back into the pit.

Carter looked, too, as the chain, swathed in black asphalt, continued to rise. The fireman appeared pleased, like a fisherman who’s just caught a big one. Carter’s feelings were certainly more mixed — relief, if it came to that, and dread, at the grisly sight that was probably about to unfold.

“Okay, any time now,” the operator shouted as he watched the clanking chain. Coated in tar as it was, Carter could only guess how he knew they were about to reach the claw end at last. Across the pit, Carter could see Del, his white hair blowing loose now in the afternoon breeze, waiting expectantly.

And then something emerged from the mire. Something caught in the claws of the dredge.

A slender object, wedged between two of the prongs. Carter leaned closer. What was it?

The chain pulled up, slowly, another few inches, and now Carter could see that it was a foot. In some kind of shoe.

A moccasin.

The fireman looked at Carter, who said, “Keep on going.”

Another prong had apparently snagged the end of Geronimo’s trousers.

The body emerged gradually, the tar seeming to reach up and hold on to it until the last possible second before rolling back off and plopping into the pit. The corpse, hanging upside down like a slaughtered animal on a meat hook, was glistening black from head to toe, the arms hanging listlessly in the fringed buckskin jacket. It twirled languidly on the hook, until it had come around to face Carter at eye level.

The fireman quickly looped a nylon cord around its waist to keep it from slipping off the hook and into the pit again.

Geronimo’s long black braid had a knot at one end and hung straight down, like an exclamation point, all the way to the surface of the pit. His face was entirely covered in tar, which only now began to ooze and drip off the skin. As Carter watched, transfixed, the man’s features began slowly to emerge. The chin, the nose, the cheeks. The hot tar gleamed in the late-day sun.

Apart from the whine of the generator, there was no noise in the pit. Everyone was dumbstruck by the horror of the sight.

Then, just as the fireman reached out to pull the dangling corpse over the walkway, more of the tar seeped off the face — and the eyes, sealed tight, were slowly revealed.

Carter was reminded of the slitlike eyes of a mummy.

And then, perhaps due to the pull of the falling tar, or simply gravity, the eyelids opened.

In the blackened, slack, and silent face, the whites of the eyes were now like slivers of light. Carter looked directly into Geronimo’s eyes; he couldn’t stop himself — and it felt, in some strange way, as if he owed him that.

But as he stood there, in the stifling confines of the pit, a sudden chill coursed down his spine. He knew it was impossible — what could be more so? — but it seemed as if Geronimo, even now, was looking back at him.