The Book of Skulls

living ten thousand years. That part of it is crap, of course: unreal, idiotic. What is real is the heat. My guess is that it’s 95, 100, even 105 degrees out here. Not even April yet, and we’re in a furnace. The famous dry heat of Arizona that they keep teling you about; sure, it’s hot, hot it’s dry heat, you don’t feel it. Crap. I feel it. My jacket is off and my shirt is open and I’m roasting. If I didn’t have this crappy fair skin of mine I’d take the shirt off altogether, but then I’d fry. Oliver already has his shirt off, and he’s blonder than I am; maybe his skin doesn’t burn, peasant skin, Kansas skin. Every step is a struggle. And how much farther do we have to go, anyway? Five miles? Ten?

The car is a long way behind us. It’s half past twelve now, and we’ve been walking since noon, quarter of, something like that. The pathway is about eighteen inches wide, and in places it’s narrower than that. In places, actually, there isn’t any pathway at all, and we have to hop and scramble over tangles of underbrush. We plod single file like four freaked-out Navahos stalking Custer’s army. Even the lizards laugh at us. Jesus, I don’t know how anything manages to stay alive here, the lizards, the plants, baked to pieces like this. The ground isn’t really soil and it isn’t really sand; it’s something dry and crumbly that makes a soft crunching sound as we step on it. The silence here magnifies the sound. The silence is scary. We haven’t been talking. Eli plods ahead as though he’s rushing toward the Holy Grail. Ned huffs and puffs: he isn’t strong and this hike is using him up. Oliver, bringing up the rear, is, as usual, completely sealed into himself. He could be an astronaut marching across the moon. Occasionally Ned cuts in to tell us something about the plant life. I never realized he was such a botany freak. There are very few of the tremendous vertical cacti here, the saguaros, though I see a few, fifty or sixty feet tall, some way back from the path. What we have instead, thousands of them, is a weird thing about six feet high, with a gnarled gray woody trunk and a lot of long dangling clusters of spines and green bumpy things. The chainfruit cholla, Ned calls it, and warns us to keep far away from it. The spines are sharp. So we avoid it; but there’s another cholla here, the teddybear cholla, that’s not so easy to avoid. The teddybear is a bummer. Little stubby plants a foot or two high, covered with thousands of fuzzy straw-colored spines: you look at a teddybear the wrong way, and the spines jump up and bite you. I swear they do. My boots are covered with prickles. The teddybear breaks easily and chunks come loose and roll away; they lie scattered everywhere, a lot of them right in the path. Ned says that each chunk will take root eventually and become a whole new plant. We have to watch our steps all the time for fear of coming down on one. You can’t just kick a teddybear chunk aside if it’s in your way, either. I tried that and the cactus stuck to my boot, and I reached down to pull it off, only to get it stuck to my fingertips next. A hundred needles jabbing me at once. Like fire. I yelled. Most uncool screams. Ned had to pry it away, using two twigs as handles. My fingers still burn. Dark, tiny points are buried in the flesh. I wonder if they’ll get infected. There’s plenty of other cactus here, too — barrel cactus, prickly pear, six or seven more that not even Ned can put names to. And leafy trees with thorns, mesquite, acacia. All the plants here are hostile. Don’t touch me, they say, don’t touch me or you’ll be sorry. I wish I was anywhere else. But we walk on, on, on. I’d trade Arizona for the Sahara, even up, throwing in half of New Mexico to sweeten the deal. How much longer? How much hotter? Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

“Hey, look here!” Eli, pointing. To the left of the path, half hidden in a yellow tangle of cholla: a big round boulder, as big as a man’s torso, dark rough stone different in texture and composition from the local chocolate- colored sandstone. This is black volcanic rock, basalt, granite, diabase, one of those. Eli crouches by it and, picking up a piece of wood, begins to push the cactus away from it. “See?” he says. “The eyes? The nose?” He’s right. Great deep eyesockets are visible. A tremendous triangular gouge of a nose-hole. And down at ground level, a row of immense teeth, an upper jaw, the teeth biting into the sandy soil.

A skull.

It looks a thousand years old. We can see traces of more delicate carving, indicating cheekbones, brow ridges, and other features; but most of this has been obliterated by time. A skull, though. Unmistakably a skull. It’s a road marker, teling us that that which we seek is not much farther down the road — or perhaps warning us that we ought to turn back now, Eli stands a long time, studying the skull. Ned. Oliver. They’re fascinated by it. A cloud passes over us, shadowing the boulder, changing our view of its contours, and it seems to me now that the empty eyes have turned and are staring at us. The heat’s getting me. Eli says, “It’s probably pre-Columbian. They brought it with them from Mexico, I’d imagine.” We peer ahead, into the heat haze. Three great saguaros, like columns, block our view. We must pass between them. And beyond? The skullhouse itself. No doubt. Suddenly I wonder what I’m doing here, how I ever let myself into this craziness. What had seemed like a joke, a lark, now seems all too real.

Never to die. Oh, crap! How can such things be? We’ll waste days here, finding out. An adventure in lunacy. Skulls in the road. Cactus. Heat. Thirst. Two must die if two are to live. All the mystical garbage Eli’s been spouting now is summed up for me in that globe of rough black stone, so solid, so undeniable. I’ve committed myself to something that’s altogether beyond my understanding, and there may well be danger in it for me. But there’s no turning back now.

chapter twenty-two Eli

And if there had been no skullhouse here. And if we had come to the end of the path, only to find a wall of impenetrable thorns and spines? I confess I was expecting that. This whole expedition just one more failure, one more fiasco of Eli the schmeggege. The skull by the road turning out to be a false clue, the manuscript a dreamy fable, the newspaper article a hoax, the X on our map a mere pointless prank. Nothing before us but cactus and mesquite, a scraggly wasteland, an armpit of a desert where not even pigs would deign to shit, and then what would I have done? I would have turned with great dignity to my three weary companions and said, “Gentlemen, I have been deceived, and you have been misled. We have chased the wild goose.” With an apologetic half-smile playing about the corners of my lips. And then they seize me calmly, without malice, having known all along that it was bound to come to this in the end, and they strip me, they thrust the wooden stake into my heart, they nail me to a towering saguaro, they press me to death beneath flat rocks, they rub chollas into my eyes, they burn me alive, they bury me chest-deep in an anthill, they castrate me with their fingernails, all the while solemnly chanting, Schmeggege, schlemihl, schlemqzel, schmendrick, schlep! Patiently I accept my well-earned punishment. I am no stranger to humiliation. I am never surprised by disaster.

Humiliation? Disaster? As in the Margo fiasco? My most recent major debacle. It still stings. Last October, early in the semester, a rainy, foggy night. We had some first-rate pot, alleged Panama Red that had come to Ned through the alleged homosexual underground, and we passed the pipe, Timothy, Ned, and I, with Oliver, of course, abstaining, piously sipping some cheap red wine. One of the Rasoumovsky quartets played in the background, rising eloquently above the drumbeats of the rain: as we soared high, Beethoven gave us a mystic noise, a second cellist unaccountably seeming to join the group, even an oboe at odd moments, a transcendental bassoon below the strings. Ned hadn’t hyped us: the dope was superb. And somehow I found myself drifting, getting into a talking trip, a confessional trip, unloading everything, saying suddenly to Timothy that what I regretted most of all was that I have never in my life made it even once with what I’d consider a really beautiful girl.

Timothy, sympathetic, concerned, asked me who I’d consider a really beautiful girl. I was silent, contemplating my options. Ned, being helpful, suggested Raquel Welch, Catherine Deneuve, Lainie Kazan. At last, coming on with marvelous ingenuousness, I blurted, “I consider Margo a really beautiful girl.” Timothy’s Margo. Timothy’s goyishe goddess, the golden shikse. Having said it, I felt a swiftly sketched series of quick interchanges of dialog resonating through my cannabis-ridden mind, a lengthy passage of words, and then time, as it will do when it is under the influence of pot, inverted itself so that I heard my entire scenario being performed, each line arriving strictly on cue. ‘Timothy was asking me, quite earnestly, if Margo turned me on. I assured him, just as earnestly, that she did. He wanted to know, then, if I’d feel less inadequate, more fulfilled, if I were to make it with her. Hesitantly now, wondering what his game was, I answered in vague circumlocutions, only to hear him say, astoundingly, that he would arrange everything for tomorrow night. Arrange what, I asked? Margo, he said. He would set me up with Margo, as an act of Christian charity. “And would she—”

“Sure she would. She thinks you’re cute.”

“We all think you’re cute, Eli.” That was Ned. “But I couldn’t — she wouldn’t — how — what-—”