The Purple Pterodactyls

Far Babylon

Under the lucent moon, a man in a black cowboy hat was squatting by the stream, making a castle of sand.

I had given up trying to sleep. No matter how I squirmed and turned, there was always some stick or stone poking into me through the sleeping bag. At last I crawled out of the bag, pulled on my pants and shoes, and wandered off. Somewhere a coyote howled.

I marveled at the soundness with which Denise and the children managed to sleep. I thought: Wilson Newbury, you were a fool to yield to their pleas to go camping. You are past the age when sleeping out of doors is fun; you should have left such Tarzanism to scoutmasters and camp counsellors. But that's the hell of trying to be a good father.

The stream near which I had parked the station wagon was some obscure affluent of the Pecan. One difficulty with camping in a mixed party in that flat, open country is to find a place where the campers can perform their natural functions with decent privacy. We had finally found this place, where the little dry ravines and the screen of scrubby vegetation bordering the stream provided cover.

The weather was fair, even though, during the afternoon, a couple of distant puff-balls of cumulus cloud built up into thunderheads. The weather down there is deceptive. Because of the clearness of the air and the openness and flatness of the country, you often see little local thunderstorms twenty or thirty miles away and think it is going to rain. Actually, there is only a tiny chance that any rain will reach you.

I sauntered down the slope in the brilliant moonlight, pushed through the screen of brush, and stopped at the sight of this man in the broad-brimmed hat. I took a few steps towards him, to see what he was doing. He did not look up or seem aware of my approach.

By pinching and patting the damp sand, the man had built a square wall, about an inch high and a yard on a side. With his fingers, he had scooped a trench diagonally across the square, going through the wall on both sides and meandering like a stream bed. Along each bank of this depression, he had continued the wall from the break on one side to that on the other.

Inside the square, he had drawn a number of lines in the sand with his finger, dividing the area into polygons. Inside one of these figures, he was working on a couple of structures. One, completed, was an L-shaped block, a couple of inches on a side. Nearby, the man was building a pyramidal structure, several inches high.

"Howdy, mister," I said, trying to copy the local speech.

I have always moved warily in that part of the country. Many years ago, my father warned me to be careful. When he was young, early in this century, he and a friend were traveling through there. They stopped where a dance was in progress. The friend asked a girl to dance; she accepted. Then her boy friend appeared and shot my father's friend dead. The stiff was removed and the dance went on. This made a strong impression on my old man.

"Good evening, sir," said the man in a deep, soft voice like distant thunder. He turned towards me, but the moonlight on his sombrero cast his face into deep shadow. I could see nothing of his features but a blur. I had bought a similar hat in order to look more like a local, but I had not put in on to walk about on this balmy night.

"Nice weather," I said.

"Yes, sir, if the drouth doesn't spoil the crops." He added another story to the pyramid.

"It's none of my business," I said, "but would you mind telling me what you're doing?"

The shadowed face turned towards me again. "This is a model of Babylon."

"You mean Babylon, Iraq, not Babylon, New York?"

"Yes, sir. I hadn't even heard there was a Babylon, New York. This that I'm building is the great zikkurat of Marduk. That's what the Bible called the Tower of Babel."

His accent was local, but his grammar and vocabulary were those of an educated man. This did not astonish me. I have come upon too many cases of unexpected knowledge in unlikely places, like the Iraqi shaykh who could recognize most of Mozart's six hundred-plus tunes. I asked:

"Isn't it a little—ah—unusual for somebody around here to be interested in ancient Babylon?"

He shrugged. "The sons of bitches around here always thought I was crazy. But that's a place I always wanted to see. I used to dream about it and write about it. I can imagine it to this day." Softly, the rumbling voice began to chant:

"Whose poetry?" I asked.

"Mine. I used to make up these jingles. There wasn't any money in it, though, so I quit. But I still wish I could have seen Babylon."

"I saw it a couple of years ago."

"You did? Tell me about it, sir."

"It's just a big, flat area beside the Euphrates," I said, "with a few tufts of grass here and there. It looks like the plain in your poem, except where they've excavated the remains of the ancient buildings. These seem to have been all made of plain brown mud brick. Must have been a pretty monotonous-looking place when it was alive."

Even in the shadow of the sombrero, I saw a flash of teeth bared in a grin. "Reckon I'd prefer my dream Babylon to the real thing. But that's life. Still, I wish I could have seen it. I thought, when the change came, that at last I'd be able to go. It didn't seem much to ask."

"I don't quite follow you. What happened?"

"Turned out I'd violated some damn-fool regulation. Now they won't let me leave the county. So I've got to make my own. Every full moon, I come here to build my little Babylon." The hatted head turned away to glance up at the moon. "Well, sir, I've got to get back. Hope you have a good time, and don't worry about the people hereabouts. Some of you Northerners come down here with funny ideas about us."

"Is it as obvious as that? I thought I talked pretty good Southwestern."

"You do, but I saw your license plate. They think they're going to see cowboys shooting each other in the streets. Nowadays, the crime is all in the big cities; the little towns and the countryside are so peaceful, it's disgusting. What brings you down here, if I may ask?"

"I'm a banker, and we're thinking of opening a branch in Fort Worth. Since I had to stay here a couple of months, I brought the family along to make a vacation of it. We have to start back soon because of school."

"Well, have yourself a nice time. Good night, sir; nice talking to you."

"Good night," I said.

The man rose, big and bulky, and headed up the stream. The low water caused by the dry spell left a wide expanse of sand on either side, between the water and the screen of trees and shrubs. He walked up this strip and was almost at once out of sight.

The sun was breaking the horizon when Stephen and Héloise poked me awake. "Hey, Dad!" said the former.

"When you gonna get us some breakfast? I could eat a whole steer."

"I want to see Daddy make toast without a toaster," added little Priscille.

As I wriggled out of my sleeping bag again, I remembered the talk with the man in the black cowboy hat. I also remembered something else. This, strangely, seemed to have slipped my mind altogether during that nocturnal conversation.

In a small town through which we had driven the day before, I had gotten into talk with the garage mechanic, a garrulous oldster, while having an oil change. He corrected my pronunciation of the name of the Pecan Valley, saying:

"Mister, like we say here, a pe-CAHN is a nut; a PEE-can is something you keep under the bed."

He doubled over laughing; this was evidently his favorite joke. When he got over his guffaws, he told me about some of the local characters he had known. One in particular, he said, had wanted to be a writer. They said he sold a lot of stuff to the magazines, but my informant had not seen any of it.

"He didn't look like my idea of a writer," said the mechanic. "Writers ain't nothing but skinny little characters who couldn't punch their way out of a paper bag. This was a big, two-fisted guy. I think he was a little touched, always talking about old ruins and fooling around with stories instead of getting a regular job."

"What happened to him?" I asked.

"Dead. Shot hisself."

When I recalled this conversation, I told the family: "Excuse me a minute." I hastened back to the side of the stream, where the night's colloquy had taken place. There was, however, no sign of the model of Babylon or its zikkurat, nor yet of the stranger's footprints. I did see my own prints from an earlier passage that way.

I also remembered something I had long forgotten. Years before, when I was an undergraduate at M.I.T., I used to visit a fellow in Providence, who wrote for the pulp magazines. Once this friend told me about a pen pal of his, another pulp writer, who lived in the Southwest and wrote gory stories about heroes with muscles of steel and heads of oak. I did not remember the pen pal's name, but the description fitted.

When I returned and started to gather the makings for breakfast, Denise said:

"Willy darling, what is the matter? You look as if you had seen a ghost."

"Maybe I have," I said, fanning the fire with my cowboy hat.