ALEX IRVINE

Vandoise and the Bone Monster

THEY WERE GOING TO HAVE to leave Colorado and go back East in the fall, and before they did, Jeff was determined that Cindy would see the old fort.

And she wanted to, so one Sunday afternoon in August they hopped in the car and drove up I-25 almost to Wyoming. They passed it on the way, a huge, lumpy, toothlike clump of pale sandstone jutting up out of the yellow grass on the east side of the freeway. At the next exit Jeff doubled back on a dirt access road. "Excellent," he said. "I couldn't let you leave Colorado without seeing this."

Cindy looked out the window as they got closer to it. Tall spires of wind-carved rock formed rough walls, and inside what looked like towers loomed above the outer barrier.

"Did you bring a girlfriend here before?" she said, to tease him. She knew perfectly well that he'd first come here on his way to Montana for a backpacking trip through the Absarokas with his college friend Drew, but she liked to poke fun at him about previous girlfriends. He'd lived in Colorado for a few years before meeting her during a trip to Florida to go cave diving at Ichetucknee Springs, and Jeff had a tendency to point out places he'd gone with other girlfriends before he could think better of it. Lucky for him Cindy had a sense of humor.

As they pulled into the parking lot -- just a wide spot in the road, really -- Jeff saw an older man wearing a highway worker's orange vest loading the historical marker into the back of a green Department of Transportation pickup truck. They got out and walked over to him.

"Excuse me," Jeff said. "Getting a new marker?"

"No, huh-uh," the CDOT guy said as he looked up at them. His eyes were a pale gray in the deeply seamed and creased angles of his face, and bristle-brush gray hair stood up from his high forehead. Seeing him, Jeff thought of Depression-era photographs of Civilian Conservation Corps workers. "Just taking this one down. Shutting the whole site down."

"You're kidding me," Jeff said.

"Too many people. That sandstone erodes right away, you know. State decided they had to shut it down until they could figure out some way to limit access. I'm just up here finishing with the sign, then I'm going to lock that gate back up the road a ways. You passed it on your way in." He settled a tarp over the historical marker and cinched it down.

"Man." Jeff was saddened by this. He'd told Cindy about this place ever since they'd first come back to Colorado together. It was a natural fort, and had been the site of a tremendous massacre sometime in the nineteenth century, or maybe earlier. After a harsh winter, a Blackfeet hunting party came down out of the mountains, trespassing on Crow land. The marker hadn't said whether their hunt was successful, but it did say that the Crow caught wind of the incursion and chased the Blackfeet to these rocks, where the Blackfeet holed up and fought until they were slaughtered to the last man. Nobody knew how many of them had been killed, but it was likely in the hundreds.

The place had always seemed to Jeff to capture something essential about the Old West, the pre-pioneer West, before it had industrialized and grown crisscrossed with railroads and reservations: the iconic rocks rearing up from the prairie, a battle between peoples who believed themselves enemies, and now the process of making it into history. It was different in the East, where suburban children had swimming lessons in Walden Pond and all that remained of the Boston Tea Party was a plaque on a building near the waterfront. Out here, the past hadn't yet been buried under brick and concrete, and history was as real as an arrowhead scuffed up from the side of the road. There might still be living people who had talked to men and women who had heard about this massacre when it happened. It was close enough to touch.

He'd spun it all out for Cindy before, and was about to do it again since the marker was under a tarp on its way to a warehouse in Denver somewhere, but before he could she asked the CDOT guy, "Are you sure we can't look around before you go?"

"Sorry, I can't let you do that. Site's closed." "Please," she said. "We're moving to Pennsylvania next week, and who knows when we'll get out here again?"

"Can't do it." She cocked her head and the wind blew her hair across her face. "What's your name?"

"Jarrett Bigelow." He stuck out his hand and watched her closely as she shook. Jeff watched both of them, knowing that some kind of negotiation was taking place but unable to quite figure out how. Bigelow had calluses the color of the dust that blew over the road. "Mister Bigelow," she said, "I'm Cindy Gellner, and this is Jeff Loville. Jeff and I have been together for a year and a half. I'm going to reed school at Penn starting in two weeks, and we're probably going to get married as soon as he finds a teaching job around Philadelphia. Then it's kids and careers, and by the time we're able to get back out here this whole thing might have blown away, you know what I mean? And besides," she pointed at Jeff without taking her eyes off Bigelow's face, "he's been here before. Do you want me to have to suffer through a lifetime of him saying, 'Jeez, Cindy, I sure wish you could have seen that old natural fort back when we were in Colorado'? You're a nice man; you don't want me to suffer like that, do you?"

He looked from her to Jeff and back. Then he sighed. "Tell you what. You go on up to Cheyenne, buy yourself a cheeseburger, kill the afternoon. Come on back down here around seven, and park off the side of the road by the gate. I reckon no one will know the difference."

She beamed at him, and Jeff found himself grinning too. "Thanks," he said. "If I ever come back here and find your names carved in these rocks," Bigelow said, "I'm going to come looking for you all the way in Philadelphia."

"We just want to see it," Jeff said. "Seven o'clock," Bigelow said by way of an answer. He got into his truck and sat pointedly waiting for them to leave.

It was about ten after seven when they pulled up to the locked gate. CLOSED BY ORDER OF STATE OF COLORADO. NO TRESPASSING.

"Trespassing on state property," Jeff said. Cindy got out of the car. "As far as the Indians are concerned, the people who put up the fence are trespassers too. Come on."

They walked the hundred yards or so down the road on the other side of the gate, Jeff with a strange jumpy feeling the whole time on the back of his neck. He'd done his share of sneaking into places he wasn't supposed to be, but it was different when you were stepping onto a mass grave, the site of a massacre. The story, like so many others from the Old West, lay thinly buried, needing only a scuffing footstep to jar it loose.

In the evening light, with hardly any traffic on I-25 and the nearest house two or three miles away on a ridge to the east, the old rocks looked like they might just have thrust up through the ground the day before. A wind from the mountains ruffled the tall prairie grass, blowing hard enough to drown out the sounds of wheels on pavement from the interstate.

A seam in the side of the near wall, with worn hand-width grooves at waist level and a sprinkling of initials scattered around it like warning sigils, led them into the interior. Inside, the air was dead still and the sandy floor mostly empty of grass. The walls were scored with decades of initials and pledges, and charred stubs of firewood stuck out of the sand. Broken glass crunched under their feet. The rocks were laid out almost exactly like the plan of a castle: an external ring with towers spaced around it, a sandy courtyard just inside, and a central keep. If I'd lived around here when I was a kid, Jeff thought, you wouldn't have been able to keep me out of this place. Wonder why the local Renaissance festival hasn't tried to take it over.

Cindy climbed part of the way up one of the internal pillars and found herself a hollowed-out place to sit. Jeff climbed up next to her, and they looked out over the rolling plain to the east. On the other side of the dirt road, a barbed-wire fence ran north and south as far as they could see; at the crest of a ridge to the east, a low house looked out over a few head of cattle. If they turned around, they could see I-25, and on the other side of it more yellow grass and barbed wire, and a long way off the upthrust grays and greens of the Rocky Mountains. Longs Peak loomed huge in the southwest, its shoulders snowy even in August. The sun was low over the mountains; in another half-hour or so the sky would flood, slowly, from east to west, with that brilliant cobalt that existed nowhere in the world but the Front Range of Colorado, during a few minutes of a few evenings in the summer.

"Take away the freeway and you step back a hundred years," Cindy said wistfully.

Jeff imagined fleeing here and taking up positions along the walls, looking down the shafts of your arrows at the enemy you knew would kill you sooner or later. Below him, on that sand, men had fought and died because some of them were hungry. "Ghosts," he said. "This place is full of them."

"Ghosts are just history," Cindy said. "That's what this place is full of. Ghosts are what you feel when you realize how much bigger and older everything is."

"Okay," Jeff said, and thought she was probably right. But it still felt like ghosts to him. They sat for a while listening to the wind in the rocky spires and feeling the rock warm around them with their body heat. Jeff kept wanting to tell her things that he remembered from the historical marker, but he was smart enough not to. If she wanted to know, she'd ask, and if she didn't he would just be ruining the moment by spouting. This is the kind of moment that you remember, he thought. Sneaking into a historic massacre site just to sit with your girlfriend and listen to the wind in the old, old, worn-down rocks.

Then they heard footsteps, and looked down to see Jarrett Bigelow at the base of the formation where they were sitting. "Believe you're trespassing," he said.

"But you said --" Jeff began before Bigelow cut him off.

"A little joke, son. Relax. Didn't you see my headlights?" Jeff and Cindy looked at each other. "Some lookout you'd make," she said.

Bigelow chuckled. "I just checked back to see if you'd actually come back. Since you did, I thought I'd drop in and tell you a little story about this place." He looked at Jeff. "Did you tell her what's on the marker?"

"Everything I could remember," Jeff said. "It's been a while since I was here."

"But you got the Blackfeet and the Crow and the massacre, right?"

"He did," Cindy said.

"Okay." Bigelow paused. "There room for a third up there?"

"Sure," they said, and he climbed up and sat next to Jeff, who although not the jealous type was glad that he hadn't sat on Cindy's side of the rock.

"It seems a damn shame to close this place down," Bigelow said. "I used to come here when I was a boy. Found arrowheads all over the place back then, in the thirties." He shifted a little to point back toward the freeway. "See over there?"

Following his gesture, Jeff and Cindy saw another cluster of sandstone rocks, lower and more broken down than the one that offered them their vantage. "That one there used to be as big as this one," Bigelow said. "And there used to be a whole long series of walls and towers between them. This whole formation was huge back then, before they put the expressway in." He paused and gave first Cindy and then Jeff a long appraising look. "I'm retiring from CDOT next week," he said. "I asked them if I could come up and take the marker down, since they were doing it anyway and I hadn't been back here in forty years. I live down in Castle Rock now, and don't have any reason to come up this way.

"But I have a story about this place, and I've been carrying it around for about as long as I care to, and since you decided to come traipsing on in here, you're the ones I'm going to tell it to. Fair enough?"

"Sounds great," Cindy said, and Jeff was nodding with her. Bigelow nodded, ground out his cigarette, and stuck the butt in his shirt pocket. Then Jeff and Cindy leaned against the crooked spire next to a carved heart, and they listened to wind and passing traffic as Jarrett Bigelow told his story.

2.

I was working on the road crew when they built the highway through here in the fifties. Now the environmentalists would make 'em figure some way to cut it around, but back then they saw that it was a straight line on the map from Denver to Cheyenne and figured it might as well be a straight line on the prairie too. Course that meant we had to blast the middle out of the old fort here, but nobody cared about that except a bunch of dead Indians, and they didn't drive cars.

So we were out here one morning, and I was wiring up some dynamite in this old cave that used to be under there, and I heard some scuffing near the entrance. I looked up and this old boy out of the damn Wild West came skulking in. "Don't talk," he said, "until you've heard what I have to say."

"All right," I said. "I'm listening." He held out a canvas bag and I took it. "Look inside," he said. I did, and saw gold. Some coins, some nuggets, even some little oilcloth bags I figured must have been full of dust. I'm not sure what I would have said if I could have made my mouth work, but it didn't matter because I couldn't.

"All yours," the old boy said, "if you do one thing for me."

"What's that?"

"When you blow this cave," he said, "I need to be in it." Just for a split second, I thought about it. Before the foreman blew the cave, he'd send someone through to make sure the coast was clear. I could probably make sure it was me, but then I'd have to come on back out and tell my boss that there was nobody down in the cave and stand there while he buried this crazy old man under a million tons of sandstone.

"You know I can't do that," I said.

"I know you can: Listen to me, boy. How old do you think I am?" I shone my flashlight on him. He had that kind of seamed face and bristly hair you get when you've spent your life outside, but his eyes were bright and there were still hard lines around his jaw. "Sixty," I said.

"Hell," he said, "I spent more than sixty years collecting the gold in that bag. You know how many abandoned mining camps there still are up in those mountains? My name is Vandoise Castleton, and I am one hundred and four years old. Born in St. Charles, Missouri, in eighteen hundred and fifty-one. My father was a trapper who lost a foot in one of his own traps and my mother always meant to be a schoolteacher but had me instead. And I am ready to die."

My breath sort of caught in my throat, and I looked around the cave. It was kind of a windy seam with a big bubble in the middle, and in that bubble was a little pond full of the blackest water you ever saw. The floor was all covered with tin cans and burnt ends of sticks. An old shirt wadded up on a rock. I was a young man. I wanted to marry a girl named Charlotte Cassidy whose father was a professor at the university in Fort Collins. I'd never killed anyone, or thought of it.

There was a damned lot of gold in that sack.

"Why did you have to bring this to me?"

"I brought this to these rocks, boy, and the ghosts of all them dead redskins," he said. "Don't have nothing to do with you."

"Well now it does," I said. "You're asking me to kill you." He reached out a hand and caught my shirt. "No. I am asking you to let me die."

Something in his voice caught me up short. I wasn't sure what to say, and finally I stammered out, "You don't look that old, mister. Why do you want to die?"

"There's something following me that takes death into itself," he said. "It'll kill me if it ever finds me, but until then it keeps me young. It eats death, I think. Every time it gets close to me, it eats a little bit of the death I have coming."

"Well, if you want to die, why don't you just let it find you?" In the darkness I saw an odd gleam in his eye. "'Cause I aim to take it with me."

I tried to look away from him and couldn't. Finally I said, "You get out of here, old man. I can't let you blow up in the cave. I'd lose my job."

For a long, drawn-out minute he just looked at me. "This thing won't let me alone," he said, "and I won't leave you alone either. You wait and see."

"You get out of here," I said again, braver than I felt. He did, and I finished up wiring the charge and came up out of the cave.

At lunch, old Skyler Vasquez came over to me. He'd been working the road crew since before I was born. "What did that old boy want?"

"You saw him?" I said. "You wouldn't believe it if I told you."

"Oh, I might," he said, "if that was Vandoise." Skyler's answer caught me by surprise. "You know him?" "Let me tell you a story," Skyler said. "Then we'll see who has trouble believing who."

3.

I was working in the Union Pacific freight yards back in the twenties,

before the Depression. One of the things we done in those days on weekends was head down to the old fort to drink beer up on the rocks and swim in the pool down in that cave. Me and them other fellows on the freightyard crew tried every way we could think of to get some girls to come down with us and swim in that pool. Most of 'em wouldn't do it. Either they was scared of the old Indian legends or they was just a little too goody two-shoes to be out on the prairie with us rough old boys. But some would. Especially some nights.

This one afternoon, I remember it was a Saturday because I had the next morning off unless I wanted to go to church, which I wouldn't unless I did something especially sinful with Inez Fuentes, who was my steady girl. Me and Inez had been swimming. She made me turn around when she got out of the pool and while I was trying to peek so she wouldn't notice, that was when I saw the wires poking out from under a rock.

I followed them and found a dozen sticks of dynamite wedged into a crack in the wall, and I don't have to tell you that took the starch right out of me. I went running up and out of the cave in just my skivvies and caught sight of them wires curling around the edge of this big formation we called the Castle. At the end of them, up on one of the Castle's ledges, was a plunger, and both wires was wrapped around its terminals.

Well I didn't have nothing to cut with so I set to work unwrapping them wires as fast as I could, and I had just got the first one off when a shadow fell across me and I looked up to see old Vandoise.

"Why do you have to do that?" he said. I hopped up and socked him in the mouth. He went down and stayed down, and if he'd gotten up I was ready to give him another one. "What the hell are you doing?" I shouted. If I'd had shoes on I'd have kicked him.

See, Vandoise was no stranger to the old fort. All the girls was afraid of him because of the way he hung around there and I'll admit I didn't like him much either. We'd been seeing him off and on for about a year then, mostly in the middle of the day, and he'd asked around about the old fort. All them Blackfeet slaughtered because they'd come too far down out of the mountains.

"I'm trying to save myself," he said. Lying on the ground with blood on his teeth.

I thought he was a religious nut. One of them Carry Nation types who went around busting up saloons. I got my old preacher's voice in my head, from when I was a boy: dens of iniquity, he always used to say. Maybe old Vandoise was blowing up the cave because he thought it was a den of iniquity. "Jesus don't want you to blow us up in that cave, you crazy old bastard," I told him.

Vandoise smiled. The late-afternoon sun caught the blood in his mouth. "Jesus forgot about me a long time ago, kid. I'm on my own."

"What for do you want to blow up the cave?" I shouted. He wasn't making any sense. I still wanted to kick him.

"I'll tell you,' he said. "I'll tell you, and then you won't think I'm so crazy."

4.

I was working for Professor O.C. Marsh in 1870, when we went out from Fort Wallace to dig along the banks of the Smoky Hill River. This was in Kansas. We found mosasaurs, great fishlike things with long bony jaws, and all kind of other things we'd seen before, but we also found a hollow bone like a bird's, and when we came back the next year we found enough more of those hollow bones to put them together into a flying dinosaur. A dragon! we all said. Dragons in America! I always thought of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse and them, or their ancestors, fighting against these monsters come out of the sky. I didn't know so much about how long ago the dinosaurs had been there.

Anyway, a few years later I happened to be working for Marsh again, this time keeping an eye on E.D. Cope, who was a Quaker and another paleontologist. He and Marsh hated each other. It didn't start out that way, but by the time I'm talking about, they'd developed a good healthy dislike, and they'd started sending folks like me around to the other's camp to see what could be done, if you take my meaning.

Well, in science publication means priority. We learned that early on, working for either Marsh or Cope. Both of 'em were mad to publish. In such a hurry that they weren't always able to check things out the way they might've in less pressing circumstances.

So one of the things that they hired fellows like me to do was maybe find a sample and tinker with it just a little bit. Move a bone that was here over there, maybe, or take away the middle toe from all four feet. If I was working for Marsh and I did this, then we'd leave sign all around the bones so Cope would come across them. He'd dig 'em out and publish with what he had, and then as soon as he'd done that Marsh'd come back with another publication that explained all of the things that Cope had gotten wrong. They did this to each other more'n once.

It happened once over in Morrison, Colorado, that I came across a site that bore unmistakable signs that Cope's men had been digging around. Marks on the rock, tracks everywhere, piles of sifted dirt. So I looked a little closer and damned if I didn't find a fossil, most of a Dryptosaurus. The one that Cope called Laelaps his whole life even after Marsh told him that was already the name of a spider. Dryptosaurus was a mean, jumpy-looking critter, all teeth and claws, and this one was in real good shape, practically all there except for Cope's boys had given it new anklebones that made it look like the extra toes they'd added belonged there.

I was perhaps a little too proud of having spotted this, even though I'd been in the dinosaur business fifteen years by that time -- this was 1884 -- and if I'd missed something like that Marsh would never have hired me again. So I decided I would let Cope's boys know that I was onto them. I was traveling with a wagon full of bones that we had all seen before, we being Marsh's boys, and I thought I could add a few of those into that old Dryptosaurus and have a fine time, and maybe add a little humor to the situation, which it could sorely use. Nobody was ever killed over them bones, but guns were drawn, I can tell you that, and there were plenty of fights.

What I had in the wagon were a whole lot of ribs from some damn thing I couldn't remember, most of a sail from a Dimetrodon, and a near-complete set of wings off a Pterodactyl. Nearly sixteen feet across.

The sun went down and I took them wingbones back to Drypto's resting place there. There was a big waxing moon, almost full, and I spent the night nipping a bottle of whiskey and adding a fine-looking pair of wings to Mister Dryptosaurus. I made them a little more substantial with some Dimetrodon spines, and just for fun I took out all Drypto's teeth and stuck in a few from a Hadrosaurus that were rattling around under the seat of my wagon.

Right before sunrise, I laid some dirt over him, stood up to brush off my hands, and nearly pissed myself when I saw the man on the ridge sighting down the barrel of his rifle at me.

"You step on back from there," he said, and I knew him right away.

"There's no call to bring guns into it, Farley Sheets," I said. "You left him there for me to see, after all, and I was just going along with your joke."

"No joke this time, Vandoise," Farley said. The rifle barrel never moved. "Step on back."

I did, and five or six other men came creeping out of the brush. "What did you do to it?" Farley asked me.

Well, there was no way I was going to tell him after he pointed a damn rifle at me. "Took a look to see what was what," I said, "but those new anklebones of yours wouldn't have fooled a blind man."

He kept looking at me, and there was a time there when I thought he was going to shoot. I don't mind telling you, that hurt my feelings; Farley and I went back a long way in the Bone Wars, and we had always kept it professional. Then he said, "Step on back," and I said, "I heard you," and I stepped further back, and saw that one of the men in Farley's party was an Indian.

The Indian was decked out like for a dance or a powwow, beads and furs and everything. His church clothes. It was a mystery to me what would get him out in the middle of the night wearing his finest. Eagle feathers in his hair, paint on his forehead, and something I'd never seen before: little bones woven into a braid that hung down over his ear.

Farley called down. "Should we check it out?"

Another of his men repeated the question to the Indian. It wasn't any Indian language I knew, and by that time I knew bits of quite a few. The Indian shook his head and said something back.

"He says no, the cover can't be disturbed when the sun's about to come up. We're gonna have to try it as is."

Hearing that, Farley looked like he might shoot me again. I stood real still beside my wagon and kept my mouth shut, discretion being-- as the poet said -- the better part of staying alive.

"Well, do it, then," Farley said. He looked over his shoulder. "The sun's about up."

Farley's man said something to the Indian, who put a drum under his arm and a kind of little wooden flute in his mouth. He started to sing around the flute while tapping on the drum, which had some kind of bangles hanging from it so it thumped and clinked at the same time, and then once in a while he quit singing and blew into the flute, which seemed like it changed notes even if he didn't finger the stops.

I was so busy watching him that I didn't even see the bone monster come up out of the ground. One minute he was singing, the next he was dropping the flute out of his mouth.

I looked where he was looking, and there was Mister Drypto. It was improved by the wings, I must say. Claw-footed and taller than a man, with pterodactyl wings that I'd added some meat to with spines from a Dimetrodon. And little peg teeth from a Hadrosaur. It was at the same time the most ridiculous animal contraption you ever saw, and a sight out of a fossil hunter's bad dreams. A bone monster.

It cocked its head like a bird, spread its wings, and flew. It had no flesh, but it flew.

The Indian was closest, and the first to die. It fell on him like an eagle on a rabbit, hooked its claws into him, and pulled him up into the air. When it bit down on him, those peg teeth crunched his skull like hard candy.

Right then everyone else started to run, and it caught every last one of them, not even flying really. It took long soaring bounds, caught them in its claws, and killed them.

Except me and Farley. We stood still, and when it had killed the other six men, it looked around, craning its neck and clacking the bones of its wings. Looking for us, but it couldn't see us when we weren't moving. Farley and I looked at each other, moving only our eyes, and I saw him understanding the same thing I was.

At that moment sunrise broke over the ridge and, I swear to the Lord, the bone monster disappeared. Sunlight struck it, and sort of shined through it, and then it faded away and was gone.

It was a long time before Farley or I moved, though, and when I finally spoke I was half-expecting to hear it invisibly leaping onto me.

"I am damned glad you didn't shoot me, Farley," I said.

"I will never forgive myself," he replied. "You put wings and peg teeth on my dinosaur I was going to sell to P.T. Barnum."

"Is that what you had your medicine man there for?" "You bet it is. He said he did this all the time, raised earth spirits and whatnot, and I said could you do it so it would listen to me, and he said he could, and I offered him ten percent of what Barnum was going to offer me." Farley gave me the fish-eye. "And if you don't think Barnum would pay for a walking dinosaur skeleton, you ain't got the sense God gave a mule."

"He might have," I agreed. "But not if it turned invisible and disappeared."

The rattle of bones shut us both up. It was closer to me now, much closer, and I thought how foolish I had been for assuming it was gone just because I couldn't see it. If those were the rules, it never would have come out of the ground in the first place. I froze and waited to feel its claws hooking around my ribs.

Another rattle, and another, and I figured out that it was still standing more or less where it had been when it disappeared. Could it hear us? Why wasn't it coming after us? Did the sunlight blind it? I could see all the same questions running through Farley's head.

"Farley," I said, "I don't think it can move right now, and I'm not waiting until it can."

"You go on ahead," he said, "and I'll see if you're right." I did, and Mister Drypto the Bone Monster didn't come after me, and I didn't see Farley again until 1906.

He surprised me in a saloon behind the post office in Vermillion, up in Dakota. I was slouched at the bar -- you get to slouching when there's an invisible bone monster chasing you for twenty-two years, it is a frost of cares, as the poet says -- and he walked right up, sat down, and ordered a whiskey before I could even notice who he was.

I had always figured on having to kill Farley the next time we crossed paths, since I had ruined his plan to strike it rich with what by 1906 had become Barnum and Bailey, but he didn't seem to have held a grudge. He sipped his whiskey as cool as can be, turned to me, and said, "Vandoise, I have beat that damn monster for twenty-two years. Know why?"

"If I were to guess, I'd say because it's been chasing me," I said. "Hell, no," he said, and sipped his whiskey again. That particular saloon wasn't known for the quality of its mash, and it was odd behavior coming from a man like Farley. I had difficulty picturing myself killing a man who sipped his whiskey. "I know what makes it hunt," Farley said between sips.

"Do tell," I said.

I had my own theory about that, which was that Mister Drypto was distracted by the presence of mass death. Because of this theory, for which my only evidence was the fact that I hadn't been dismembered that first day and had maintained possession of all four limbs during the years since, I had spent the years between 1884 and 1906 wandering from battlefield to battlefield, massacre site to massacre site, relying on intuition and what the poet calls man's inhumanity to man to keep the bone monster far enough off my trail that I could live. I had been to Wounded Knee and Tippecanoe, Shiloh and Little Big Horn, Sand Creek and every other place of misery I could think of, and somewhere in that time spent among the dead I had stopped living myself. I decided right then, with bad whiskey on my tongue and Farley Sheets hardly getting his mustache wet, that I had to get rid of that damned bone monster once and for all. Fare thee well, Mister Drypto. Back to the ground for you.

But I was right about it being distracted by death. Once in Wyoming I had fallen asleep under a scaffold, and when I woke up I could hear its weight on the planks over my head. Close enough to touch. Through the gaps I watched the bone monster become visible as the sun went down, and I saw it nuzzling the beam where the nooses were tied every Friday. The problem was, once it got used to a place, all the death didn't distract it anymore, so I had to keep leading it around until it started to forget places and I could start the whole route over again.

"During the day, when it's invisible," Farley said, "we're invisible to it too. It can't see the world, really, so it has to move real slow. Same thing at night, I think, only at night I think it sees a little better. It's gotten close to me then, but during the day if I'm moving fast, I can't ever tell it's around."

He looked like he was afraid to let go the next words on his tongue, so I did it for him. "But dawn and dusk."

His eyes locked onto mine. We understood each other. "Dawn and dusk," he said, and sipped at his whiskey. Then he had a thought. "That shaman. You know what he did to make that spell work?"

"Can't say I know too much about shaman spells," I said.

"There's a place down south of Cheyenne, a big natural stone fort. Long time ago, I'm not sure exactly when, a whole mess of Blackfeet Indians got themselves massacred there by the Crow."

Another massacre site. Another place where Mister Drypto could be distracted. I was grateful to Farley for letting me know about it. When he went on, though, I started to be more than grateful.

"This old shaman told me he was there when it happened. He said he lay among those dead redskins while the Crow had their fun, and this is what he told me. 'I felt all of their deaths, one by one, going into me and settling there,' he said. 'How many hundred dead men I carry around inside me.' We found him up in Montana when we was looking for someone who we heard could raise up the dead. One of the boys, I can't take credit for it myself, said 'Hell, we should raise up one of them dinosaurs and sell it to Barnum's show,' and once I'd heard that I couldn't think about anything else. So we went looking, and we found this shaman, and while we were riding down through Casper I got him drunk and he told me about all them dead Blackfeet he had inside him, how he thought he could pour them into the dinosaur bones and finally be rid of them. I thought that was fine, if it took a couple of hundred dead Indians so I could sell a dinosaur to Barnum's circus that was okay with me." He looked up at me with bleary gray eyes. "Then you had to come along with your damned joke."

I wanted to say something to distract him, to get him to stop thinking about this place down south of Cheyenne where the shaman had breathed death in. I was afraid that if he thought about it for too long he'd start thinking exactly what I was thinking, and I was thinking that if I could get Mister Drypto there and distract him, maybe I could be rid of him once and for all. He had come from there, really, or at least the infernal energies that gave him his horrible life had, and it seemed just that he should end there too.

Then I reconsidered. What if Farley and I could work together to trick Mister Drypto?

"Farley," I said. "We have to go to this old fort, you and I." His eyes grew big as platters and he looked around like the bone monster might be under the piano. "You're crazy," he said. "Go back there where its power came from?"

"It's always distracted with massacres. We could get the drop on it. End it where it began."

"What if that massacre don't distract it, though? What if it gets stronger? What if we go there thinking it's going to do what it always does and find out that all of a sudden it can see us in the daytime? You want to take that chance?"

I looked at him for a long time, watching the little tremble at the corner of his mouth, the way the pupils of his eyes didn't seem like they were quite the same size. "I think I do," I said. "I think I would risk quite a damned lot to be rid of that bone monster once and for all."

"Well, you go ahead then," he said, and took another dainty sip of whiskey. "I'll notify your people when it gets you."

"Goddamit, Farley," I said, "I'll stand you another one if you'll just drink that one like a man."

"Don't mind if I do," he said, and drained his glass, and at that moment I figured out that Farley Sheets was churchmouse poor. And even though he had tried to leave me to be eaten by a bone monster that his own Indian shaman had brought to life, I felt sorry for the man. As it says in the Good Book, let him drink, and forget his poverty.

A man reads the Bible some when he's being pursued by a bone monster.

When I left Farley Sheets in that saloon, I made a beeline for the old fort with Mister Drypto hot on my heels. Death is thick around here, and he's very much interested. Rattles his wings and sniffs around like a bloodhound tracking Jesse James. I looked everything over well enough to have an inkling of a plan and then got out of there while I still could. I knew Mister Drypto would follow, and I knew that eventually he would forget that place and I could lure him back.

I was right, but it took me nearly twenty years, and at some point during those years the bone monster got Farley Sheets.

The bartender at a saloon in Deadwood told me, and I am man enough to say I cried a little bit, and mine own tears did scald, as the poet says. I cried not so much for drunken double-crossing Farley Sheets as for myself. It was just Mister Drypto and me now. It had taken him thirty-five years to get Farley, and now he had just me to concentrate on before he would have killed everyone who was there when he rose up out of the ground.

Through years of being chased and watching the landscape of the West grow crisscrossed with fences and speckled with cities, I had developed certain ambitions. Most of them I have never realized. At one point I thought of killing Farley Sheets myself, but then I figured out that without him, Mister Drypto would be able to focus all of his attention on me. Then I wanted to kill that medicine man, but I remembered that Mister Drypto had already done for him, and I had to admit that if Farley Sheets had offered me a handful of gold to raise up a dinosaur, and I knew how, I would have done exactly as he did.

Gradually my desires pared themselves down to a few bare essentials. I wanted Mister Drypto not to be around anymore. I wanted to settle down in one place. Get married. Be able to wake up in the morning without listening for the sound of that damned rattling, that clacking. I haven't had a good night's sleep in more than forty years, and just once I want to lie down at night without worrying that I'll die when the sun rises next. A frost of cares.

That bone monster is around here right now. I've lured him back. And if I'm in that cave come sundown, he will be too, and I can end it for the both of us. That's all I want to do. He's been chasing me for so long, and I've been running from him for so long. It must stop.

Clear the girls out of there and just leave me alone tonight. Please. That's all I'm asking.

5.

Well, I couldn't believe that story, and I was still half-convinced that this old man was just a pervert come sniffing after the girls that was swimming down in the cave. And I didn't much like the way he'd said redskin. There's Indians in my family on my mother's side.

So I said, "You get out of here, old-timer, or you're going to find more trouble than some bone monster. Go on. Get."

He looked at me and I realized how I was talking to him. I wasn't no angel when I was a boy, but my parents still brought me up right, and here I was shaming this old man like he was a stray dog. "You can't just blow up the cave," I said, trying to make amends a bit. "You just can't."

"I wouldn't have blown it up with you or the girls in it," he said. "I wouldn't."

"I know," I said. He sighed, long and kind of shuddery, like he was trying not to cry. "It's a long time before I can come back here," he said. "It takes Mister Drypto a long time to forget a place, and I can't bring him back here until he has forgotten. What if it takes another twenty years? What if he kills me before then?"

There wasn't much I could say to that. "I'm real sorry."

The sun touched the mountains right then and I heard a whirring, rattling kind of noise that had my balls creeping right up into my collar. Over on the wall of the old fort, the one that faces out toward the mountains, I saw something silhouetted against the setting sun. The light was too bright for me to get a good look at it.

"Don't move," old Vandoise said. "Don't even breathe if you can help it."

I didn't. I shut my eyes and held my breath and waited.

When I couldn't hold my breath any longer, I opened my eyes. The sun was nearly gone and I couldn't see no bone monster. Vandoise was gone too.

Now I'm a bit of an amateur historian and I did some checking over the years, but I never found anyone named Vandoise in any records. So I figured this old boy was just pulling my leg. The thing wouldn't let go of me, though, and a few years ago, 1950 I think it was, I heard of an old collection of newspapers at an estate sale up in Edgemont, South Dakota. I went up to check it out. And I'll be damned if I didn't find an article clipped out of the Black Hills Prospector talking about a man named Farley Sheets who was found dead on the banks of a creek out in Buffalo Gap. The article decided wolves or mountain lions must have done it even though it was 1919 and there weren't many of either left in those parts anymore. My eye was caught by a particular detail: wedged behind the hinge of Farley Sheets's jaw was a fossilized brontosaurus tooth. The reporter speculated that it had been tied on a cord around his neck and was crushed in there by the force of whatever bit him.

On the same page there was an article about Eisenhower going across the country to scout out ways to move armies or some such. He spent a few days in Wyoming before arriving on the West Coast on September fifth that year. Just thought it was a little odd because we're both working for Eisenhower building the interstates. A historical coincidence. That newspaper connects us to Farley Sheets. And old Vandoise.

6.

It was about time to get back to work, and I wadded up my lunch bag and threw it in the ditch. "A fossilized brontosaur's tooth, huh?"

Skyler nodded. "That's what it said."

"That old boy was crazy."

"You would be too. Anyway, that's why he came up to you today. I'll give you dollars to pesos that he wants you to kill him, and don't be surprised if he comes back."

Skyler paused like he was about to admit to something shameful. Then he said, "I thought about that old boy being chased by that bone monster, and I felt a little bad that I didn't blow him up the way he wanted me to." Then he looked up at me and bared his teeth. "I stood right over there and waited for that monster to come for me, Jarrett Bigelow. You watch out what you let old Vandoise get you into."

I nodded at him, but I didn't tell him about the gold.

Two weeks later, everything was different. It had rained a bit so the blasting was rescheduled, and we hadn't set off the charges I'd laid in the cave. And Charlotte was late, if you take my meaning. It looked like I was going to be a father. I wanted to marry her before her father found out -- not that I was worried he'd do anything, since it never occurred to me to worry about being shot by a history professor, but still I wanted him to think of me as a man who would do the right thing by his daughter. And this was all begging the question of what my mother would think. No sir, it was best to marry Charlotte right away, run off and do it and then fudge the math on the other end when the baby came due. She was all for it; the only problem was I didn't have any money, and neither one of us wanted to live with a set of in-laws.

What with all this, when Vandoise showed up next to me while I was taking a leak out on the other side of the old fort one day, I was a little more ready to listen to what he had to say.

"You look me in the eye and tell me you want to die," I said. He looked me dead in the eye and said, "More than I have ever wanted to live, I want to die tonight."

"Now tell me something else. Do you have family? I won't do this if you're going to leave people."

"I have survived all three of my sisters," he said, "and thanks to Mister Drypto I never married."

I couldn't believe I was saying it, but I was saying it. "All right then. A man has to make his own decisions."

"A man does," Vandoise agreed. "At least I am left that."

"The cave's wired to blow, but I don't think we're supposed to do it today." I had reset and checked the charge myself that morning, and I'd be lying if I said that bag of gold didn't cross my mind a time or two. Well, here was my second chance to do the right thing. "If we are, I'll figure something else out. When do you want me to do it?"

"At sundown," he said. "Right when the sun touches the mountains, you count to one hundred, and then you push that plunger. You hear me?"

"Sundown," I said. "Count to one hundred."

Vandoise caught my wrist as I went to leave him there. "If this dynamite doesn't go off when I want it to, boy, this thing that's going to kill me? It'll have your scent next. You make sure and blow this cave."

"I will," I said.

"All right then." He let go of my wrist. "I may not seem grateful, son, but you are doing me a kindness. Remember that."

I couldn't say anything else to him; my mouth was seized up again. Holding onto the canvas bag, I worked my way around the rocks to a good place to hide the gold. Then I came out and told the foreman that the charges in the cave were all wired. He said all right, we'll check it again and blow in the morning. I started to argue, but then I thought how that would look, and I thought of all that gold hidden in a crack in the rocks. "That sounds good," I said. "We knocking off then?"

There were a few things to clean up, but it was late in the afternoon and everyone was in a hurry to get on home. Right as the foreman was padlocking the shed where the blasting equipment was, I realized I needed an excuse to stay. I'd hitched a ride in with some of the boys from up in Cheyenne, and it was a ten-mile walk.

A friend of mine named Barry called from his old pickup. "You go on ahead," I called back. I jogged over to the truck. "I'm going to look around a bit for arrowheads." My girl in Fort Collins had a younger brother who could never get enough arrowheads.

"How you going to get back to Cheyenne?" Barry asked.

"I'll give you five dollars to come back and pick me up in two hours," I said.

"And beer's on you tonight?"

I thought of all the gold in that sack. "Beer's on me. Give me a cigarette."

He shook me out a Chesterfield and I lit up as he roared away.

I climbed up to a high spot in the old fort and looked out across the plains toward the Medicine Bow Mountains. On the other side of them was a town called Walden. Sometimes I headed up that way to fish in the Michigan River. As I smoked Barry's Chesterfield I thought about that old man, down there in the cave waiting to die, and I almost got down off the rocks and went to tell him I wouldn't do it. But that look in his eye.

He wants to, I told myself, and I spent a long time turning that thought over in my mind, trying to see if it was a real belief or something I was trying to convince myself so I wouldn't feel so guilty when I dropped the plunger.

It seemed real. That look in his eye. There's something following me that takes death into itself, he'd said. What kind of something was that?

The sun was low over the mountains. There would be long shadows over the Michigan River, and it was time to break into the blasting shed. I worked the lock with a piece of wire and took the plunger over to a little hollow about a hundred yards from the cave entrance. It only took a minute to wind the wires around the plunger's terminals, and then I just sat there watching the sun settle toward the mountains. There was a wind in the grass, and I imagined I heard the voices of all the dead redskins whose ghosts still lived on these plains. One, I said softly. Two. Three.

Over by the cave I saw something, and then in the next instant I thought I'd just gotten grit in my eye. I blinked, rubbed my hand across my eyes. While they were closed, just for a moment, I thought I heard a rattling sound. A clacking on the breeze, like the maracas the Mex girls played sometimes. When I opened my eyes again, there was just a flash of movement by the cave entrance. If that's the old man, I thought, and he's just chickened out, I'm keeping his damn gold. He can just try to take it away. But there was nothing after that first ghost of motion.

Eight-four. Eighty-five. Eighty-six.

A shout came from the cave, but I couldn't understand the words. Then there was another noise, and I don't know what it was, but if I live to be a hundred I don't ever want to hear it again.

One hundred, I said to myself, and depressed the plunger.

Smoke and dust shot out of the cave entrance, and there was a big damned boom even though it was muffled from being underground. Then that whole part of the old fort just sort of slumped a little bit. A couple of the big spires cracked and fell sideways, throwing up more dust, and the sunset caught it all in this brilliant orange, and I sat there thinking that I'd just killed a man. Right then it didn't make any difference that he'd asked me to.

Then I snapped to. Whether he'd asked for it or not, if anybody found out I'd have a hard time explaining myself. I unwound the wires from the plunger terminals and clipped off the curled ends before stashing the plunger back in the shed and locking the door. The boys would take a hard look at everything tomorrow morning, but I'd just tell them that the dynamite had gone off. Wouldn't be the first time that had happened.

I caught myself thinking like a guilty man, and just for a second there I hated myself for what I'd done. But he'd wanted it, I told myself, and it was true, and besides I couldn't undo it. I thought of how Charlotte would get big with my baby, and I thought of the house I'd buy her with all that gold. And he'd wanted me to.

The sack was right where I'd left it, in a hollow at the bottom of a high five-pronged spire. Partway up the spire was a scooped-out spot where you could sit like you were in the palm of a stone giant. You could see a good way out over the plains from there, and if you turned around the mountains were something else.

7.

The spot we're sitting in right now, Jeff thought. Forty years ago Jarrett Bigelow hid a sack of gold here and killed a man and left him buried under sandstone and graded dirt and asphalt. How many thousand people drive over Vandoise Castleton every day and don't know he's there?

"That clacking sound," Bigelow said. "I don't think I'll ever forget that." After another long pause, he went on.

"The part I always liked about Skyler's story was the way he remembered all of Vandoise's quotes. 'As the poet says,' you know? I've walked around for forty years hearing old Vandoise saying that even though he never actually said it in front of me. And I wasn't there, but I can see that bone monster coming up out of the ground just as clear as I can see my own face in the mirror. I had to pass it on. And --" Bigelow's voice caught, and he swallowed. "I killed a man here, and I guess there's part of me that wanted to confess. Even though he asked me to, and even though I think I did the right thing. Every year fewer and fewer people know about the Blackfeet that died here, and every year I'd hear about this or that person I used to know who had died and I would think that I was the only person in the world who knew what happened to old Vandoise. I never told anybody."

Jeff and Cindy looked at each other. He just confessed to a murder, Jeff thought, and he could see Cindy thinking the same thing. Here we are in the middle of nowhere listening to the stow of a murderer who is annoyed at us for trespassing on the scene of his crime. I bet he killed Skyler Vasquez, and I bet there never was any bone monster. He probably found some gold, or Vasquez found it, and they argued and Bigelow blew him up in the cave under the old fort. Jeff started to feel around near his feet for a rock, in case Bigelow made some kind of move.

Then, out of the blue, Cindy asked, "Did you marry Charlotte?" Bigelow nodded. "We were married thirty-six years, until she died a year ago this October."

"And you never told her?"

"No. We had four kids, and now seven grandkids, and I won't tell any of them either. I used that gold to take care of all of them. I bought land down south of Denver, I put my kids through college in Boulder. And I got a couple of accounts that no one's going to know about until after I'm gone. A little surprise for the grandkids." He cracked a wrinkled smile and stood, accompanied by sharp pops in his knees. "Well. Getting dark. Guess you two ought to get out of here, and stay on that side of the fence next time." He paused for a long time, looking at the sparse traffic on I-25.

"I think about them sometimes," Bigelow said then. "That old boy Vandoise and the monster down there. I wonder if they're really dead, either of them. Wonder if maybe they'll get out someday, and that bone monster'll start chasing the old man again. Seems almost like it ought to happen." He shook his head. "Other times I think I'm just making this whole story sound good, and I killed a man for a bag of gold."

There was a pause, and Jeff thought again of how far they were from anything. Then it passed, and he said, "Wish I'd seen that cave." He was full of imaginings about underground rivers, winding seams that led for miles under the parched prairie. Now it was all dynamited and buried under asphalt. If that story is true, he thought, some archaeologist in two thousand years is going to have one hell of a puzzle on his hands.

"Yeah," Bigelow said. "I wish you had too. I don't know whether you believe me or not," Bigelow went on, "but thank you for listening. Shit," he chuckled, "whether it's true or not, that's too good a story to let die with an old man like me."

"You can say that again," Cindy said.

"This is for hearing me out," Bigelow said, and he held out a hand palm-up. On the open palm rested two gold coins bearing the stamp PIKES PEAK GOLD and the date 1881. "When you two get old, you can be like me and old Vandoise, hanging around out here until some likely-looking kids come along, and then you can pass the story along. Then you give 'em these to make sure they remember."

"We would have remembered anyway," Cindy said.

"Still," Bigelow said, and they each took a coin, and Jeff thought Now we are in it too. This whole story, from the Blackfeet through dueling paleontologists through Vandoise and Sheets and Skyler and Jarrett Bigelow and Mister Drypto the bone monster. Now we're part of it too. Accomplices, perhaps...but no. It was old blood, long soaked into the ground. History, or ghosts. And I guess I was both right and wrong: some stories are buried under concrete out here. But they get out anyway, despite the weight of neglect and age and failing memory. And they are still close enough to touch.

Jarrett Bigelow touched the bill of his Colorado Rockies baseball cap and trudged through the sand and out of the old natural fort, leaving them in shadow with the faint gleam of gold and the brilliant darkening blue of evening sky.