A memory rushed through him. He and his best friend. Inseparable, they were destined to escape their little village and conquer the world together. They stole from the first incoming circus wagon, Barren got caught, and then the circus suddenly packed up and took him with them. Barren remembered the stink of the dancing bear’s urine and feces and its low grunts as he lay tied next to its cage. He remembered the lolling wagons and ox carts trying to out-pace the plague. He remembered leaving his best friend behind to dance with the Black Death.
The memory passed. Barren had stationed himself here to complete his task.
He looked at Cadence and felt a hunter’s admiration for his prey. She was quick to move and selfless. A fair steward— worthy but fated — to the vile remnants of the Saga of Ara. For this moment only, he would stay his hand.
Cadence thanked the doorman. Her adrenaline was still in full flow. She needed to move. As the crowd dispersed, she decided to walk for awhile. What she really needed was to jog, find that solid, earnest conversation of feet and earth. But that would have to wait.
She walked the streets for an hour, then came back and sat in the hotel lobby. She was coming down. The adrenaline fading into an exhausted, pensive mood.
A cat, evidently a perpetual guest at the hotel and probably a mouser, watched her from its perch on the check-in desk. She purposely ignored it. Resting in the big, plush chair, enjoying the quiet and comfort, her thoughts turned to her father and his own absent, almost mythical father. She closed her eyes and felt a desert wind.
The man who was her grandfather and who was almost always gone, so the story went, sometimes came home. At those times he was quiet. Not morose, exactly, but subdued, as if gathering strength between the legs of the unfolding journey that took him, like an alcoholic, to drink on months-long benders of wandering in search of his soul. How his soul got lost was a story untold.
Nonetheless, in those times at home he had a country man’s eye for simplicity and unspoken elegance. Things he pointed out to his son, as simple as a knowing glance or a nod, were passed on, gesture for gesture, through that soundless language, to the son’s child. So might it be for generations, a kindred nuance, none knowing the source.
There was a day’s drive from their home in Western Colorado a sagebrush desert. It was set amidst low broken hills cut by tumbleweed-clogged arroyos that flanked the high green massif known as Grand Mesa. These hills and gorges, known locally as the Dobies, grew into larger canyons that dropped to the thick willow banks lining the brown flow of the Gunnison River. In some off-road spot, amidst these low hills, Jess pulled over. The jeep, rickety and open-topped, waited like a panting horse. He cut the engine and the tick and gurgle of the radiator measured the minutes as he and nine-year-old Arnie just sat there.
The air was warming up to the century mark as the shadeless silver gray desert readied to endure another blast-furnace day. The man sucked his pipe, got out and knocked out the dottle on the fender. He fingered the pipe, letting the calabash knot bowl cool, its seasoned yellow familiar in his hand.
He put on a battered straw hat and nodded. The boy got out, hefted the water bag, and they began to walk.
They went toward the river, with its distant promise of cool breeze. A high tumble of sandstone clefts — giants’ play blocks — stood in their way. There were scores of narrow cracks, man-sized and water-worn, leading into the maze of baking rock.
The man stood and looked and then picked one, otherwise unpromising and indistinguishable. The word for such, lemon-squeezers, was not said. Usually compressing to nothing, these openings offered just enough room to wiggle in sideways. Once in there — and one exhaled to squeeze in — one’s breath mingled with the smell of rock. Sometimes there was just enough room to get in and get caught, so the fear of getting stuck was always there.
Some hikers had tried this solo, gotten lodged in the vice, and felt the illimitable strength of all the earth pressing closer against them. Mother Earth’s strong hug refusing to let go. Adrenaline and panic expanding the body, cementing their imprisonment.
But the passage chosen by the man did not close, and they wriggled left, then right, as it turned and jogged. They came into an opening, a perfect secret hollow of a hundred foot radius, cut improbably into the middle of the tumbled rocks.
The top of the walls leaned inward, sheltering the sides. On these were etched thousands of pictographs: lizards, scorpions, eagles, vultures, people with two heads, bison, elk, deer, big cats with long teeth, rising suns with splayed rays. Archetypes of a world ruled by privation and magic. The library of a people that long ago decamped, never to return. Some of the figures were twenty or thirty feet up bare sandstone cliffs. Not a sign of “Jim Bob was here 1929” or “Class of ’42” or the like.
Dotting the enclosed field were large yellow-topped mounds. The yellow was the remnant rock layer left from eons of water and wind erosion.
They stopped at one of the mounds. It was full of shark’s teeth — big, medium, little, tiny. The sharks that left these ranged from Jaws down to trout size. The bigger teeth would span your palm, the serrated edges as knife sharp as the last day they tore into flesh, millions of years ago.
Holding such a tooth in your hand brought the picture into full definition. One saw a flat sea-lagoon stirred by warm breezes, lapping at a palmed shoreline, perhaps a fresh water tributary spilling in nutrients to create a cove full of life. Then the sea retreated one summer, never to return, and the cove beshored into a small lake over- populated with the sharks as alpha predators. The lake became a pond, concentrating all life as the food chain began to eat itself. Soon sharks ate sharks. All that was left was some boiling cauldron of thousands of thrashing sharks.
The teeth, the only hard parts of a shark, survived. And now they were left in a fossil hot spot in an eroding formation beneath the merciless sun.
As relentless curators, the ants were doing their thing — mining the gravel, creating ant hills of tiny teeth as meticulously cleaned as if worked by a lifetime of tweezers beneath a magnifying glass.
The man and boy picked through some teeth, each selecting only one. Then the man reached into a pouch in his khakis and pulled out a small, washed jar. This he filled with tooth-laden gravel, sealed the lid, and gave to the boy.
They returned to the jeep by mid-afternoon, looking back once at the small mountain of boulders and the lacework of lemon-squeezers.
Not a word had been said since they left home at seven in the morning. It was in the boy’s mind as perfect a day as he could imagine, and as he would ever experience.
The jar of gravel, its label inscribed in crayon by the boy’s hand to say SHARKS TEETH, with kid drawings of sharks on either side, sat sealed on a mantle in the house for years thereafter.
There was a companion to this day, years later, when Arnie took eleven year old Cadence to this same spot. Same parking area, same walk across the Dobies. Same searching around for the right lemon-squeezer.
Once he recognized the entrance around the rocks, he turned to Cadence and said, “Let’s stop and eat lunch.” They rested in the shade of the rocks, and he opened their backpack and took out two wrapped peanut butter sandwiches and two coca-colas. Sitting together with their backs against the cool sandstone, he pulled out a dog-eared paperback book that had lost its cover through long use. She looked at the first page, saw “Ace Edition” and the strange title: “The Hobbit.”
“That’s a silly word,” she said.
He looked at her, “Yes it is, but I think you’ll like it. Let’s read a few pages while we eat. We’ll start it today and maybe you will finish it later, even if it’s a long time and a long way from here. After we eat we’re going to squeeze up in here and get some shark’s teeth!”
The cycle of the moment and the place rolled on years later. After she had created her own series of dog ears though its pages, she lost the book. But she never forgot her own version of The Perfect Day. It was marked by another, a more modern style of jar, filled with that same gravel and labeled in Cadence’s neat fifth grade lettering: ME AND DAD 1993.
The desert wind blew.
She woke with a start, feeling the cat’s tail loop and caress her ankle. She looked around and saw the cat on the check-in counter, still watching her. She did a stare contest with it. Who hated whom the most. It didn’t blink.
