We left Louisville two weeks after Daddy died and spent all summer digging
for dinosaur bones at the bottom of a dried up creek in the backwoods of
Dowagiac. Dirt and rock and large picks and small picks and trowels and
measuring tape and bruised skin and bloody bandages and blisters. There
were never any fucking bones. She was such a stupid bitch, Sherry was,
I wanted to tell her that there were no dinosaur bones in Michigan, that
people would dig and sift for a hundred more years but nobody would ever
find them, that the movement of glaciers back and forth scraped away the
layers of rock that contained all their remains. And erosion you stupid
whore, what about erosion? But I loved her then, or maybe I just didn't
know shit about paleontology, so I kept digging.
It was a little yellow pop up tent made for two. We built fires and
roasted frogs and crawfish and waded knee deep in Dowagiac Creek hunting
carp with sticks carved into spears then took turns cutting leeches from
our bare skin when we made it back to camp. At night we slept side by side,
sweating into each others pores and counting stars and watching them fall
while we made wishes that wouldn't come true.
Lying beside us in the tent was a loaded .22 rifle she kept wrapped in
an old wool blanket next to the flashlights. Some nights I heard snakes
coil themselves around the strong branches of maple trees, and wolves grow
massive claws and fangs by the magic of a full moon, so I'd unwrap the
blanket and rub the barrel of the gun against my cheeks and chest which
should have made it safer to sleep but didn't.
Sometimes I slept the other way, with the side of my face pressed against
Sherry's chest, listening to her heartbeat. I counted them when I couldn't
sleep, when I thought about Daddy helping me use the gun to scare away
rodents and chase wild turkeys through the green grass of Kentucky. Sometimes
her heart beat too fast or too slow or sometimes not at all. It was always
working and not working. Sometimes I shook her awake so it would beat again.
She'd push the back of my head harder into her breasts and kiss the top
of my head then I'd fall asleep.
Sherry slept naked every night. Her skin was dusty. Always dusty and
sooty and silky and soft and the dust made me sneeze into the back of her
hair so I washed it for her every morning after the sun rose and she cooked
us eggs and pancakes on a thin slice of sheet metal overtop the near dead
fire from the night before and we ate while the chickadees and juncos sang
and the silence of southern Michigan came to life all around us. By the
end of the summer her skin became my skin, her breath and blood and breasts
and bruises and black rings around her eyes, all became mine.
&&&
We dug every morning after breakfast. Arrowheads and old coins and jewelry
and broken pottery but never dinosaurs.
"I found one. It's a bone, look."
"No it isn't Daisy."
"It's a fossil then. It looks really old. We should keep this,
right?"
"Hand it here." I did. She crumbled it between her thumb and
forefinger and sprinkled it into the dirt like pixie dust.
"They're pseudofossils. They're not real." She wiped the corners
of my eyes and sucked my tears from her thumb and explained the differences
in fossil types while I tried to stop crying. Pseudofossils are formed
when small spaces exist in rocks and they fill up with organic material
and leave false impressions that mimic the real thing. She talked about
living fossils and micros and macros and resin and compression and trace
fossils, which we found quite frequently, which really meant dried shit.
"Everything we take from the earth has to be returned Daisy. It
makes us all stronger." I grabbed my hand pick and kept digging.
That night I dreamed we finally found bones. Squamo-occipitals and scapulas
and sacrums and a single skull. It was Daddy's skull full of maggots and
carrion beetles feeding away where his brain should have been and both
eyes were still in his sockets and I dug the hole deeper and dropped him
back in and covered him with dirt and then I woke up. By the end of the
summer I could almost make it twenty-four hours without sleep.
&&&
"Wake up Daisy, it's time to go."
"Where's the flashlight? I can't see anything."
"We can't. Just hold onto my arm. Are you dressed?"
"No. Why do we-" She put her hand over my mouth and held my
wrist and led me out of the tent and into the creek where we waded upstream
a half mile before I got out and sat cross legged on a large log beneath
an elm tree.
"Stay quiet and don't move." She disappeared. The sun rose
and set and I kept sitting.
&&&
Sherry was carrying the .22 rifle when she found me the next day, still
sitting cross legged on the large log beneath the elm tree. We never made
it back to Dowagiac. She rented a one room shack from a one-armed walleye
fisherman less than a mile from an abandoned mine near the mouth of the
Manistee River on Lake Michigan where we spent the better half of September
sifting for gold with plastic pans and screens and shovels and sluice boxes
we borrowed from the fisherman's only friend, Linford, a homeless man who
smelled like Smartweed and looked like Daddy, with dark hair and dark eyes
that watched me while I worked; always in expectation of something he couldn't
have unless he took it and he never did.
Sherry and I slept together under a black and blue blanket on a blood
stained queen sized mattress in the corner of our room. The wind blowing
in from Lake Michigan made the nights unbearable, so Linford lent us his
kerosene heater and we let him sleep on the floor beside it. He owned lots
of things for a homeless man: old carnival bumper cars and bird cages and
Korean binoculars and empty egg cartons and two more kerosene heaters,
both black, both ending up in our shack as September ended and the nights
grew colder and my space in the bed grew smaller. I slept with the front
of my body pressed hard against the weather-beaten wood wall while Sherry
pressed hers against my back and breathed and bucked and braced and bit
into my shoulder blades while Linford dug his dirty fingernails into her
bare hips and fucked her.
She made scrambled eggs and sausage and blueberry muffins for breakfast
and we ate them while Linford put his blue jeans on overtop his long johns
and filled the kerosene heater before he left. Sherry wrapped her arms
around my neck when she heard the door close and whispered, "he did
it Daisy, he found gold." She repeated the word gold and we both cried.
We sifted through sand and rocks and gravel for most of the morning,
watching the mud spill over the sides of the plastic pans, but the bottoms
were always empty after the water washed everything away. Sherry found
a fishing pole with a spin cast reel and a brown tackle box full of flies
and fishing line and lures and fake worms when she went to take a piss.
They were underneath an upside down paddle boat left alone along the edge
of the lake, so we put it in the water and pushed it a little ways from
shore and got in while the salmon fishermen heading out to the docks watched
and whistled when Sherry's shirt got wet. We sat quiet and floated for
hours and listened to the sounds the sky made and counted the clouds as
they passed by us or we passed by them and I wondered if Daddy knew I was
looking up hoping to find him. I wonder if he knew about Linford and the
gold.