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.
OK, cat, you win, she thought. She got up and headed for the elevator.
“Heraclitus.”
“Huh?” She looked over at the desk clerk.
He scratched the cat’s neck. “He’s the resident philosopher.”
She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Got it. I’m dealing with another one upstairs.”
When she came back into the room, Osley was walking around, gesticulating and muttering. He started in as soon as she sat down and looked at him in the cautious way one regards a lunatic. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Professor Tolkien believed that every one of those pages he wrote was a promise of something real.”
“But he made it all up!”
“Hardly. Virtually everything in his stories was already out there. Straight out of Northern Mythology Central Casting. Wily dragons, wraiths, Merlin-like wizards, marching forests — remember Macbeth? Birnam Wood? Rings of Power — a staple of Norse mythology. The ‘Fell Winter’ echoes the historical fact of the Little Ice Age in the twelfth century. So, you see, a name is a covenant, as is a story.” Osley let out a breath and sat down. He suddenly seemed subdued, like a messenger burdened by ill tidings. He looked away from her and held out a handwritten page. “I finished this a few moments ago. The word haknuun, Elvish for sharpener or grinder, caught my eye.”
She took the page and began reading, involuntarily collapsing to a sitting position on the bed.
He was taken captive. He told them he was no more than a travelling sharpener of knives. They took him before a horrible band of orcs. The chieftain, grim and gaunt, put him beneath a long blade. “Tell me any information you have, tale or stone-cold fact, about a trove of writings. Perhaps it was given to you by others.”