Bestiary (7 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
“What if I said it was probably a
Smilodon fatalis
?” Carter prompted her.
Smilodon fatalis
?” Carter prompted her.
“Oh, that I know!” she piped up. “It’s a saber-toothed cat.” Claude tried to applaud with hands coated with tar, and Miranda laughed. “I remember the name because it sounds like the cat is smiling.”
“But how can you tell it’s not some other cat, like a scimitar or a western dirktooth?” Claude asked. He’d been reading up on his paleontology, and Carter knew he liked to try it out.
“I can’t,” Carter admitted, “with any certainty.” He let his fingers probe a little deeper. “But something tells me I’m touching the hyoids, or throat bones. The fact that the saber-tooths had these is what tells us they could roar like a lion.” Along with the wolves, they were one of the most commonly excavated fossils at the site—a ruthless killer, with especially powerful forequarters for holding their prey while their massive fangs did the rest. While it had been commonly assumed that the cats attacked their prey by biting and breaking their necks, Carter believed they actually preferred to attack from below, ripping into the soft belly of their victims and then patiently waiting for the creature to expire from blood loss before devouring the remains. Over seven hundred saber-toothed skulls had been found at the La Brea site and only two of them had shown teeth broken with wear; if the cats had been lunging at other animals’ hard and strong-muscled necks, Carter reasoned, there’d be more missing and broken teeth.
But his was the minority view so far, and he hoped soon to finish the paper that would lay out his case in full.
“What about mine?” Rosalie asked. “What have I got?”
There were moments, like right now, when Carter felt a bit like a grade school teacher, with a bunch of eager, brown-nosing students. But he also knew that this was part of the deal: In return for their volunteer service glopping out the pit, folks like Claude and Rosalie and Miranda were promised a sort of tutorial, with a real-live scientist.
“I think it’s a limb of some kind,” Rosalie ventured, and not to be outdone by Claude, “maybe a femur.”
Carter doubted she would be able to distinguish a femur from a tusk, but he would never say anything to deflate their enthusiasm. He got up and walked slowly over to her quadrant, studying the mottled, lumpy surface of the pit as he went. It
did
look unusually uneven and, though nothing was moving but the occasional bubble of methane gradually swelling up and then bursting, it looked somehow agitated. He wondered if his little crew had come to some signal event, something that had triggered a feeding frenzy of extraordinary dimensions.
did
look unusually uneven and, though nothing was moving but the occasional bubble of methane gradually swelling up and then bursting, it looked somehow agitated. He wondered if his little crew had come to some signal event, something that had triggered a feeding frenzy of extraordinary dimensions.
“It’s about six inches over, and the same distance down,” Rosalie said. She leaned back on her haunches, in a dirty madras shirt and what looked like green slacks that had been cut off at midthigh. “You can’t miss it.”
Carter knelt down again—he was tall, with long arms, which gave him greater reach but sometimes left him precariously balanced, like a crane hovering over a construction site—and slipped his hand into the pit. The tar parted with an audible glug, and he slipped his hand farther down. He felt nothing so far.
“More to the left,” Rosalie said.
Turning his wrist to the left, he stretched his fingers out. Still nothing. A series of methane bubbles rose, iridescent in the sunlight, and broke with an especially gassy pungency. And then he felt it—and moved his fingers slowly, against the protesting sludge, along its length. Rosalie was right—it probably was a leg bone of some kind, and possibly from what was known as a short-faced bear, a precursor of the grizzly, who had entered the contiguous United States, and departed it forever, sometime toward the end of the last ice age. Though they stood even taller than grizzly bears—eleven feet when rearing up, and weighing up to eighteen hundred pounds—their legs were surprisingly long and slender, giving them the ability to break into a fast run for short distances and, presumably, catch inattentive herbivores, such as horses and camels. People were always surprised, when Carter happened to mention it in a lecture, that most of the evolution of camels had taken place in North America.
“Am I right?” Rosalie asked. “Can you feel it?”
“Yes, good job,” Carter said. “It could be from a bear.” Rosalie beamed, like a kid who’d just been told she was head of the class.
“But we won’t know for sure, of course, until we’ve glopped the rest of this out, and actually removed the fossil.” Even then it often wasn’t easy. Carter had an uncanny knack for guessing where a fossil might be located, and what it might turn out to be—that knack had served him well when excavating the Well of the Bones in Sicily, where he had first made his reputation—but he also knew that lab work was a painstaking business, where your initial assumptions could all be turned upside down with the discovery of one molar, an unexpected alveolus, or, as had happened to him on one occasion, fossilized blowfly larvae lodged in an ulna. Larvae could tell you a lot, if you were paying attention.
He pulled his arm back out of the pit, and held it up to let some of the goo dangle and then plop back down. By now it was clear that they had definitely hit a very fertile layer of the pit—a big cat and a monstrous bear, a dozen other sharp anomalies perceptibly (at least to Carter’s trained eye) disturbing the surface of the presently un-worked quadrants. Carter felt a prickle of excitement, the feeling he’d had on so many other digs, in places far more exotic than this, where discoveries far more significant than this was likely to be were begging to be made. But it was the same old feeling, nonetheless, and he suddenly realized how much he’d missed it. The post at the Page Museum was a great one—most paleontologists would salivate at the chance to fill it—but office work wasn’t what appealed to Carter. Even writing up his monographs and reports and arguments was less interesting to him than the sheer pleasure of being outdoors, in fields and mountains and long-lost riverbeds, surveying a strange landscape and making his best guess as to where its secrets lay hidden. The world, to Carter, had always been a kind of treasure chest, filled with odd things—stones and bones, shells and shards and petrified bugs—that most people didn’t even notice, much less want.
But that he did.
Miranda, who’d been patiently waiting, said, “I wonder what that leaves me with.”
“Pardon?” Carter said, who’d been lost for a moment in his own thoughts.
“If Claude has a saber-tooth, and Rosalie has a bear, I wonder if I’ve got something different over here.” She gave Carter her most dazzling smile—he knew she had a crush on him, and wondered what he could do to discourage it—and looped a finger under her silver necklace, unwittingly leaving a smear of tar on her neck. “Maybe a lion?”
Carter smiled and, stepping over Rosalie’s buckets, made his way to Miranda’s work spot. By now, his forearm was so crusted with muck it felt three times its normal weight.
“You’ve got to wear more sunscreen,” he told her, gesturing at the pinkish skin of her neck and shoulders. She blushed even redder, and he said to himself he should have kept quiet. Anytime he noticed something about her, particularly something so intimate as her skin tone, it only gave her hope. “And get yourself some cheap T-shirts like mine,” he said, showing off today’s Old Navy logo. “The paleontologist’s best friend.”
Miranda mumbled that she would, but hardly budged when Carter knelt down next to her. He’d expected her to make a little room, then kicked himself for thinking that. “So where’s your find exactly?” he asked.
“In the center of the square,” she said, “kind of deep.”
“If you glop from the side,” he advised, “it’s easier, and just as effective.”
Then he leaned forward and reached down, one more time, into the pit. He could feel Miranda’s eyes on him, and when she volunteered to hold on to him—and grabbed the back of his belt—he had to tell her it was okay, he wasn’t in any danger of falling in. He could only imagine the look that Claude and Rosalie were exchanging from their respective corners.
His own eyes flicked self-consciously to the upper observation deck—a small enclosure behind a Plexiglas shield—that allowed the general public to see paleontology in action. Today, they had but one spectator, but he was a regular—a Native American man in a buckskin jacket that he wore no matter what the temperature was.
The tar at first seemed to be fighting him, even more than usual; it was especially thick and sludgy here. But then, as if he’d hit a pocket of gas and looser material, he felt his wrist descend into the mire. Still, he hadn’t encountered anything of any substance. He reached deeper; the farther down he went the warmer the tar became, and as the methane was released, mephitic bubbles speckled the surface and released little exhalations of gas. Miranda giggled and said, “What’d you have for lunch, Carter?”
“Very funny.”
And then he did feel it. Or, to be more accurate,
it felt him.
His breath caught in his throat, and his arm stopped moving. His own fingers were spread wide, and for all the world it felt as if another hand—someone else’s fingers—had just slipped into his own, the way a drowning man might grasp the hand of his savior. Carter could feel the individual bones, the metacarpus, the phalanges. And, though he could never have even imagined such a thing, it didn’t feel inert. It didn’t feel dead and lost, as if it were lying there, inanimate, and waiting to be lifted from oblivion. To Carter, it felt as if the hand—too large to be a woman’s—had found his own, had sought it out, in order to be raised, after a silent eternity in the earth, from the dead.
it felt him.
His breath caught in his throat, and his arm stopped moving. His own fingers were spread wide, and for all the world it felt as if another hand—someone else’s fingers—had just slipped into his own, the way a drowning man might grasp the hand of his savior. Carter could feel the individual bones, the metacarpus, the phalanges. And, though he could never have even imagined such a thing, it didn’t feel inert. It didn’t feel dead and lost, as if it were lying there, inanimate, and waiting to be lifted from oblivion. To Carter, it felt as if the hand—too large to be a woman’s—had found his own, had sought it out, in order to be raised, after a silent eternity in the earth, from the dead.
CHAPTER FOUR
GREER COULD HEAR the TV blasting in the living room—sounded like Conan O’Brien—as he gathered his stuff together for a last check. He had his flashlight, with brand-new batteries, his wallet with complete fake ID (just in case he got pulled over or got into any trouble), a large black Hefty Sak with drawstring top, a pair of surgical gloves, glass cutter, and, finally, his Beretta handgun, loaded.
He was wearing black jeans and a black shirt, under a dark blue windbreaker with a lot of pockets for all his gear. He took one last glance in the mirror on the back of his bedroom door and thought,
Jesus, with a mask I’d look like Zorro.
Jesus, with a mask I’d look like Zorro.
He’d hoped his mother might be asleep when he came out, but she wasn’t. She was propped in her easy chair, with one hand on the cat in her lap and the other in a bag of Trader Joe’s soy chips; since the soy chips were low-cal, she thought that meant you could eat as many bags of them as you wanted. It sure didn’t look that way to Greer. She was getting fatter all the time.
“You’re going out?” she said, without taking her eyes from the big-screen TV.
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
Christ, he felt like he was sixteen again. “What do you care?”
“Derek, why would you say that?” she said, doing a good imitation of sounding hurt.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” He went to the apartment door, then said, dryly, “Don’t wait up.”
It was a California-style building, with an open courtyard in the middle and open hallways that looked down into it. But the place had been on rent control for years, and everything now was falling apart at the seams. The concrete floors were stained with God knew what, the plants in the courtyard were mostly dead, and the elevator stalled if more than two people had the nerve to get in at the same time. He wondered if his mother could stall it on her own now.
When he’d come back from Iraq, he’d moved into her back bedroom—where she normally kept her “collectibles”—with the full intention of staying just a few weeks, until he could get his act together and find a place of his own. But the weeks had gradually turned into months, and his disability payments sure lasted a lot longer when he only had to split the rent on a cheap apartment. His mother, who’d been a little put out at first, had also come to accept the idea—along with his cash. She lived on disability, too—for a bipolar disorder that made her no longer able to work for the Social Security Administration in Westwood—so between the two of them, they had things pretty much covered.
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