Wild Instinct

34

Late that night, after the floodlights have been turned off and the equipment operators have padlocked the gates and left, Gale, Mendez, and Geronima Mills climb the chain-link fence surrounding the alleged perc test pit on the building site of the proposed city of Wildcoast.

The cranes loom against the sky in the moonlight, and the drilling rigs and earthmovers and backhoes cast faint shadows.

They come to the mouth of the pit.

“Look at this monster,” says Mills.

Gale sees that the pit has grown to three, maybe four times the circumference it was just a few days ago.

The grading around it is now level and cleared of boulders.

And a steel-stepped stairway disappears into the cavernous dark, its railings lined with day-glow green safety tape that reflects the beam from Gale’s flashlight.

From the top of the steps, he trains his light down, sees no water as before, just the steel stairway, anchored to darkness.

Mendez runs her flashlight beam along the far wall but it’s far enough away that Gale can’t make out much more than blurred, dark sandstone.

“I’ll stay here in case Tarlow security shows up,” says Geronima. “If they do, I’ll holler.”

The stairway is too steep to take into the dark, so Gale slides his flashlight into his belt, takes the railings in his hands and backs down.

Mendez follows.

Metal scrapes on stone as the stairway wobbles with their descent.

Gale sets his feet patiently.

“You have to catch me if I fall,” Mendez calls down to him.

“Gotcha, Daniela.”

Every four steps down, Gale feels the temperature drop. He counts the steps as he used to count steps on patrol in Sangin.

“Hold up, Mendez!”

“I’m holding up.”

“I mean stop.”

“I’m stopped, I’m stopped.”

Gale works his flashlight free and feels his vertigo as he turns, holding on to the railing with one hand.

The floor looks to be another fifty feet down. The walls shine in his beam, but he neither sees nor hears dripping water. There’s a dank, metallic smell — something between mold and blood.

Gale holds his light beam on a cavern, lined with enormous crystals.

The largest crystals he’s ever seen, or heard of.

Some of them fifty feet high. Some calved away like icebergs to lie on the cavern floor.

Gale circles his flashlight, in disbelieving awe.

Eighty enormous crystals, he guesses. A hundred?

They’re silver-white, softly luminescent in his flashlight beam.

Some are as big around as telephone poles, he sees, with tops tapered into neat points and bottoms thickly rooted into the beach-sand-colored cavern floor.

“What are they?” asks Mendez.

“I’ve never heard of crystals this big.”

“They shimmer. Who would know?”

“A geologist or hydrologist, maybe.”

Hal Teller or Kyle McNab, he thinks. Or the digger with the shovel, with his cracks about gold and big crystals worth a lot of money?

“I’m amazed,” says Mendez. “And I don’t amaze easily.”

The cavern floor is wet but firm under Gale’s boots. In the flashlight beam it looks like beach sand. He estimates they’re two hundred feet down. The darkness is complete and tangible.

They circle the cavern slowly, Gale in the lead, Mendez with her phone light, both reaching out to touch the crystal trunks. This close, in Gale’s flashlight beam, the crystals glow faintly with white particles, like dust motes.

Beam aimed down, Gale sees an angled white protrusion and, kneeling, picks it up. It looks like a bone shard, small and sharp.

Rakes his fingers through the pale mud, unearthing another, and, just a few inches away, another.

“I’m finding bones,” says Mendez.

“Me, too.”

“Bachstein the coroner knows his bones,” she says.

Gale rises, slips a handful of shards into his pants pocket.

They photograph the cavern walls with their phones, the flashes bright and sudden in the deep dark.

“Enough amazement for me,” says Mendez. “Kind of claustrophobic down here. I’m heading up.”

“I’ll be there.”

Gale uses his pocketknife to pry a miniature crystal from its larger sponsor, then another.

Puts those with the bone shards, then pushes his flashlight into a rear pocket and, heart pounding, follows Mendez up through the black.

Aboveground now, the night seems almost bright compared with the blackness below.

Gale gets waters from the Explorer, hands one to Mendez and one to Geronima, then guzzles his.

Mendez consults her phone, stepping away.

“I need to go,” she says.

“Do you need help?” asks Gale.

“Everything’s fine. Everything is going to be fine.”

Mendez boards her SUV and heads out, throwing road dirt.

“A cavern of crystals fifty feet high,” Gale tells Geronima. “They glow. Bones in the sand, possibly human. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I didn’t bring this flashlight just to look at excavators and backhoes,” says Geronima.

Gale considers the risks and rewards.

“Are you prone to panic?” he asks.

“I am not.”

“You’ll need two hands,” he says. “Keep the light in your pocket until we hit the floor. It’s a couple of hundred feet down and the steps are steep. Face the stairway, back down. It’s dark and damned scary.”

“I can do it. Lead the way.”

A few stairs down, Gale stops and watches Geronima lower herself, both hands on the railing as she descends.

Gale stands behind her as Geronima unlocks her front door and orders her yapping dog to shut up.

“Don’t mind Hulk,” she says. “He’s all bark.”

She lives in one of the small adobes on the east side of the mission that were built in the late 1800s. It’s on Acjacheme Court, huddled between 1920s cottages and bungalows.

Gale follows her into a small living room with a hardwood floor, adobe brick walls, and oak ceiling beams. Plein air landscapes, shelves of books, a framed Robbie Robertson poster, bold red-and-black Navajo print drapes. A red fabric couch and a steamer trunk for a table.

She gestures to the couch and Gale sits at one end. Hulk — a small terrier mix — launches onto his lap with a plush white shark in his mouth.

Geronima sets a whiskey glass on the steamer trunk near Gale and one for herself. Pours two fingers each and leaves the bottle midway between them, then sits opposite him on the couch.

“Oh, boy,” he says.

“How do I interpret that?”

Gale catches her scent mixed with bourbon as she passes. As soon as she’s seated, Hulk bolts onto her lap, with his shark.

“I say it when I’m presented with a choice that has an upside and a downside,” he says. “And I’m not sure how I’ll choose.”

“The bourbon.”

“Yes. Anyway, this is a nice place.”

“Thank you. I love it. Rent’s high, but worth it. My God, Lew — those crystals down there are huge. I’m still trying to process what my eyes saw.”

“Fifty, maybe sixty feet,” he says, hearing himself exaggerate like the fisherman he used to be. “Fifty, anyway.”

“The billion-dollar question — what are they?”

“No clue.”

Gale stands and fishes the bone shards and crystals from his pocket; leans across the couch and sets them on the steamer trunk near her glass.

“I got a few, too,” says Geronima. “Human?”

“My lab can tell.”

“The rounded ones look like the edge of a vertebrae,” she says. “Human size.”

“I thought that, too, or the tail end of a big dolphin or a young whale.”

Geronima shoos Hulk off her lap and picks from Gale’s collection a short, tubular bone about the diameter of a human phalange or a turkey leg. Smells it.

“This could be one of our distant relatives,” says Geronima.

“The ancient Acjacheme cremated their dead,” says Gale.

“Maybe the char got polished off by the sand and the centuries.”

“The cavern reminded me of the legend,” Gale says. “The room where the spirits waited.”

She sets down the hollow shard and smiles at Gale. “I have goose bumps all up and down my back right now, Lew.”

“Me, too.”

“What if the legends weren’t legends at all,” she says. “And the bones were purposely put there. The ancients talked about the crystal room because they’d seen it.”

“A cavern of light in an underground sea,” he says, hearing Luis Verdad’s words in his head.

They lean in, touch glasses, and drink.

Geronima dims the lights with a remote, and they sit in silence, each lost to the immense crystal cavern, the bones.

Gales catches her studying him from behind a half wall of thick black hair.

Geronima orders Alexa to play Robbie Robertson’s Music for The Native Americans.

Gale loves this music. Listened to it incessantly as he languished in the Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton, his manhood and his desire to live both undecided.

Now his worse angels try to take him back to that vast citadel of pain and mutilation, of awful sights and sounds, but Gale wills himself back from it, focusing on Geronima Mills and Hulk in order to stay in the here and now.

“Ghost Dance” comes on.

They listen to the song in silence, sipping the bourbon. Then “Skinwalker.”

Gale feels as if the music is pulling him into some faintly luminous place, somewhere much like the crystal cavern.

Music and silence now, except for Hulk tearing apart the shark.

“My heart wants to fly back to where we just were,” says Geronima.

She gets her phone off the trunk and swipes through the pictures.

Gale watches the light frame her downturned face. Her black hair shines. She hauls a handful of it over her shoulder, eyes still on the screen, then swipes to the next picture.

“Can I be blunt?” she says. “I get blunt when something interests me.”

“Blunt away.”

“Are you single?”

“Divorced, no one steady since.”

She’s still not looking at him. “Do you like it that way?”

“The divorce was the right thing. My bad, though. Well, our bad, really.”

She sets down her phone and looks at him now, eyes reflecting light from the kitchen. “Are you happy?”

Gale considers. “Enough.”

“How do you know what enough happiness is?”

“I wonder about it,” he says. “Sometimes I feel good, but sometimes bad. Same day, sometimes the same hour. Even though nothing has changed. Does that make sense?”

“Totally,” says Geronima. “My Indian half thinks the right to the pursuit of happiness is a strange right. Strange as in, get out of my way so I can be happy — I’ll need your land, your daughters, your things. My non-Indian half says I should be happy enough to just survive.”

“That’s what I meant about feeling good. Just being here, surviving is enough.”

She pours them each another drink, picks her glass off the trunk, and takes a sip.

Gale drinks.

“Until it isn’t,” Gale says. “Just surviving, I mean. And I doubt it’s all worth it.”

She studies him. “That sounds serious.”

“I’m not impulsive enough to do anything final.”

“You seem about impulsive as a tortoise, Lew,” says Geronima. “I like that.”

“Thank you. I’m not good playing the room for laughs.”

“I’ve had plenty enough entertainers,” she says. “You and your ex get along?”

“Pretty distant,” Gale says. “When it was over, it was over. We talk now and then.”

“And what part of it was your bad?”

Gale feels the old black thoughts coiling around inside.

The fragments, and the fragments of fragments.

Always ready for another round.

“I brought back some wounds from the war, post-trauma stress for sure. Killed a man who turned out to be a noncombatant. Took him out thinking I was God himself. Other stuff. Lots of painkillers and mood stabilizers. Too much of this,” he says, tilting his glass. “Things just got darker and darker.”

“Until?”

“A breakdown. Almost pulled the plug. Had all the stuff ready. But I talked to a great doctor at Pendleton instead. He was a sniper in Vietnam. Let him keep me a month in the ding wing. Stopped the pills cold turkey. Back home I cut the drinking way back. Started putting one foot in front of the other.”

Geronima considers this, twirling her whiskey glass gently. “I remember that phrase from the Times profile on you — ‘one foot in front of the other.’ You look different now than in that picture.”

“I’d just gotten back when that picture was taken. Wouldn’t have let them run it, if I’d known they were going to.”

“Dress blues and a thousand-yard stare and your hair long and messed up,” says Geronima. “Chills up my spine, warrior-soldier. Am I making you nervous?”

“I think you’re bright and beautiful,” he says. “So, yes. Do I make you nervous?”

“Sure, Lew, but more just happy you’re still here. In this world and in my house. And that we got to see the crystal cathedral in an ocean of light. Souls in transit, you and me. I’d really like it if you said my full name. For the first time.”

“Geronima Mills.”

She looks at him in the dim light with a hopeful expression.

A long silence now, Gale staring through a serape-print curtain. A distant mission-bell streetlight spreads a cone of light on the empty street.

“I’ve lived my whole life in this town,” he says. “My ancestors helped build the mission.”

“Mine, too,” says Geronima. “They must have known each other, two and a half centuries ago. Maybe that’s why you seem so familiar to me. Like I’ve known you for a long time. I recognize you.”

“Those are nice words. I think I recognize you, too, Geronima Mills.”

Another silence.

“I don’t take this lightly,” she says. “And I invite you to share my bed tonight.”

“Oh boy.”

“I expected that!”

Gale again faces the stark future that the explosion gave him. The quick, sharp moment that reshaped him forever.

“I can’t do that,” he says. “Some of me didn’t make it back.”

“From the war,” she says.

“The war.”

“I’m so sorry, Lew.”

Gale watches a matte gray pickup truck glide by on Acjacheme Court, an electric one, nearly silent. Rivian, he thinks, very cool.

Hulk, perched on a chairback, watches through a window but doesn’t bark. Looks back at Gale like he can’t figure why this truck doesn’t make noise.

“I’m so very sorry,” she says.

Gale sips the bourbon. “Don’t be. It’s contagious. I don’t feel bad or empty, Geronima. I believe that my work is valuable. My life, too — and Mom and Frank and even Dad.”

“Oh, Lew, you are more than valuable. Invaluable. Incalculable. Priceless. I wore my shells and bone comb for you, to make you love me.”

To Gale, the long silence is a roar.

“I still can’t honor that bed of yours like a man should.”

“I want you there, anyway.”

“Thank you very much, but no. You made my day. A lot more than my day. It’s hard to explain. What you said was important to me.”

“I meant it. Every word.”

“I should go.”

“Need an Uber?”

“I’ll walk. I’m down off Rios, so not far.”

“Nightcap first?”

“Sure.”