The Book of Skulls

chapter twenty-one Timothy

I try to be cheerful, I try not to complain, but sometimes I get pushed too far. This trek through the desert at high noon, for example. You have to be a masochist to impose something like this on yourself, even for the sake of living ten thousand years. That part of it is crap, of course: unreal, idiotic. What is real is the heat. My guess is that it’s 95, 100, even 105 degrees out here. Not even April yet, and we’re in a furnace. The famous dry heat of Arizona that they keep teling you about; sure, it’s hot, hot it’s dry heat, you don’t feel it. Crap. I feel it. My jacket is off and my shirt is open and I’m roasting. If I didn’t have this crappy fair skin of mine I’d take the shirt off altogether, but then I’d fry. Oliver already has his shirt off, and he’s blonder than I am; maybe his skin doesn’t burn, peasant skin, Kansas skin. Every step is a struggle. And how much farther do we have to go, anyway? Five miles? Ten?

The car is a long way behind us. It’s half past twelve now, and we’ve been walking since noon, quarter of, something like that. The pathway is about eighteen inches wide, and in places it’s narrower than that. In places, actually, there isn’t any pathway at all, and we have to hop and scramble over tangles of underbrush. We plod single file like four freaked-out Navahos stalking Custer’s army. Even the lizards laugh at us. Jesus, I don’t know how anything manages to stay alive here, the lizards, the plants, baked to pieces like this. The ground isn’t really soil and it isn’t really sand; it’s something dry and crumbly that makes a soft crunching sound as we step on it. The silence here magnifies the sound. The silence is scary. We haven’t been talking. Eli plods ahead as though he’s rushing toward the Holy Grail. Ned huffs and puffs: he isn’t strong and this hike is using him up. Oliver, bringing up the rear, is, as usual, completely sealed into himself. He could be an astronaut marching across the moon. Occasionally Ned cuts in to tell us something about the plant life. I never realized he was such a botany freak. There are very few of the tremendous vertical cacti here, the saguaros, though I see a few, fifty or sixty feet tall, some way back from the path. What we have instead, thousands of them, is a weird thing about six feet high, with a gnarled gray woody trunk and a lot of long dangling clusters of spines and green bumpy things. The chainfruit cholla, Ned calls it, and warns us to keep far away from it. The spines are sharp. So we avoid it; but there’s another cholla here, the teddybear cholla, that’s not so easy to avoid. The teddybear is a bummer. Little stubby plants a foot or two high, covered with thousands of fuzzy straw-colored spines: you look at a teddybear the wrong way, and the spines jump up and bite you. I swear they do. My boots are covered with prickles. The teddybear breaks easily and chunks come loose and roll away; they lie scattered everywhere, a lot of them right in the path. Ned says that each chunk will take root eventually and become a whole new plant. We have to watch our steps all the time for fear of coming down on one. You can’t just kick a teddybear chunk aside if it’s in your way, either. I tried that and the cactus stuck to my boot, and I reached down to pull it off, only to get it stuck to my fingertips next. A hundred needles jabbing me at once. Like fire. I yelled. Most uncool screams. Ned had to pry it away, using two twigs as handles. My fingers still burn. Dark, tiny points are buried in the flesh. I wonder if they’ll get infected. There’s plenty of other cactus here, too — barrel cactus, prickly pear, six or seven more that not even Ned can put names to. And leafy trees with thorns, mesquite, acacia. All the plants here are hostile. Don’t touch me, they say, don’t touch me or you’ll be sorry. I wish I was anywhere else. But we walk on, on, on. I’d trade Arizona for the Sahara, even up, throwing in half of New Mexico to sweeten the deal. How much longer? How much hotter? Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

“Hey, look here!” Eli, pointing. To the left of the path, half hidden in a yellow tangle of cholla: a big round boulder, as big as a man’s torso, dark rough stone different in texture and composition from the local chocolate-colored sandstone. This is black volcanic rock, basalt, granite, diabase, one of those. Eli crouches by it and, picking up a piece of wood, begins to push the cactus away from it. “See?” he says. “The eyes? The nose?” He’s right. Great deep eyesockets are visible. A tremendous triangular gouge of a nose-hole. And down at ground level, a row of immense teeth, an upper jaw, the teeth biting into the sandy soil.

A skull.

It looks a thousand years old. We can see traces of more delicate carving, indicating cheekbones, brow ridges, and other features; but most of this has been obliterated by time. A skull, though. Unmistakably a skull. It’s a road marker, teling us that that which we seek is not much farther down the road — or perhaps warning us that we ought to turn back now, Eli stands a long time, studying the skull. Ned. Oliver. They’re fascinated by it. A cloud passes over us, shadowing the boulder, changing our view of its contours, and it seems to me now that the empty eyes have turned and are staring at us. The heat’s getting me. Eli says, “It’s probably pre-Columbian. They brought it with them from Mexico, I’d imagine.” We peer ahead, into the heat haze. Three great saguaros, like columns, block our view. We must pass between them. And beyond? The skullhouse itself. No doubt. Suddenly I wonder what I’m doing here, how I ever let myself into this craziness. What had seemed like a joke, a lark, now seems all too real.

Never to die. Oh, crap! How can such things be? We’ll waste days here, finding out. An adventure in lunacy. Skulls in the road. Cactus. Heat. Thirst. Two must die if two are to live. All the mystical garbage Eli’s been spouting now is summed up for me in that globe of rough black stone, so solid, so undeniable. I’ve committed myself to something that’s altogether beyond my understanding, and there may well be danger in it for me. But there’s no turning back now.