“What are they?” asks Mendez.
“I’ve never heard of crystals this big.”
“They shimmer. Who would know?”
“A geologist or hydrologist, maybe.”
Hal Teller or Kyle McNab, he thinks. Or the digger with the shovel, with his cracks about gold and big crystals worth a lot of money?
“I’m amazed,” says Mendez. “And I don’t amaze easily.”
The cavern floor is wet but firm under Gale’s boots. In the flashlight beam it looks like beach sand. He estimates they’re two hundred feet down. The darkness is complete and tangible.
They circle the cavern slowly, Gale in the lead, Mendez with her phone light, both reaching out to touch the crystal trunks. This close, in Gale’s flashlight beam, the crystals glow faintly with white particles, like dust motes.
Beam aimed down, Gale sees an angled white protrusion and, kneeling, picks it up. It looks like a bone shard, small and sharp.
Rakes his fingers through the pale mud, unearthing another, and, just a few inches away, another.
“I’m finding bones,” says Mendez.
“Me, too.”
“Bachstein the coroner knows his bones,” she says.
Gale rises, slips a handful of shards into his pants pocket.
They photograph the cavern walls with their phones, the flashes bright and sudden in the deep dark.
“Enough amazement for me,” says Mendez. “Kind of claustrophobic down here. I’m heading up.”
“I’ll be there.”
Gale uses his pocketknife to pry a miniature crystal from its larger sponsor, then another.
Puts those with the bone shards, then pushes his flashlight into a rear pocket and, heart pounding, follows Mendez up through the black.
Aboveground now, the night seems almost bright compared with the blackness below.
Gale gets waters from the Explorer, hands one to Mendez and one to Geronima, then guzzles his.
Mendez consults her phone, stepping away.
“I need to go,” she says.
“Do you need help?” asks Gale.
“Everything’s fine. Everything is going to be fine.”
Mendez boards her SUV and heads out, throwing road dirt.
“A cavern of crystals fifty feet high,” Gale tells Geronima. “They glow. Bones in the sand, possibly human. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I didn’t bring this flashlight just to look at excavators and backhoes,” says Geronima.
Gale considers the risks and rewards.
“Are you prone to panic?” he asks.
“I am not.”
“You’ll need two hands,” he says. “Keep the light in your pocket until we hit the floor. It’s a couple of hundred feet down and the steps are steep. Face the stairway, back down. It’s dark and damned scary.”
“I can do it. Lead the way.”
A few stairs down, Gale stops and watches Geronima lower herself, both hands on the railing as she descends.
Gale stands behind her as Geronima unlocks her front door and orders her yapping dog to shut up.
“Don’t mind Hulk,” she says. “He’s all bark.”
She lives in one of the small adobes on the east side of the mission that were built in the late 1800s. It’s on Acjacheme Court, huddled between 1920s cottages and bungalows.
Gale follows her into a small living room with a hardwood floor, adobe brick walls, and oak ceiling beams. Plein air landscapes, shelves of books, a framed Robbie Robertson poster, bold red-and-black Navajo print drapes. A red fabric couch and a steamer trunk for a table.
She gestures to the couch and Gale sits at one end. Hulk — a small terrier mix — launches onto his lap with a plush white shark in his mouth.
Geronima sets a whiskey glass on the steamer trunk near Gale and one for herself. Pours two fingers each and leaves the bottle midway between them, then sits opposite him on the couch.
“Oh, boy,” he says.
“How do I interpret that?”
Gale catches her scent mixed with bourbon as she passes. As soon as she’s seated, Hulk bolts onto her lap, with his shark.
“I say it when I’m presented with a choice that has an upside and a downside,” he says. “And I’m not sure how I’ll choose.”
“The bourbon.”
“Yes. Anyway, this is a nice place.”
“Thank you. I love it. Rent’s high, but worth it. My God, Lew — those crystals down there are huge. I’m still trying to process what my eyes saw.”
“Fifty, maybe sixty feet,” he says, hearing himself exaggerate like the fisherman he used to be. “Fifty, anyway.”
“The billion-dollar question — what are they?”
“No clue.”
Gale stands and fishes the bone shards and crystals from his pocket; leans across the couch and sets them on the steamer trunk near her glass.
“I got a few, too,” says Geronima. “Human?”
“My lab can tell.”
“The rounded ones look like the edge of a vertebrae,” she says. “Human size.”
“I thought that, too, or the tail end of a big dolphin or a young whale.”
Geronima shoos Hulk off her lap and picks from Gale’s collection a short, tubular bone about the diameter of a human phalange or a turkey leg. Smells it.
“This could be one of our distant relatives,” says Geronima.
“The ancient Acjacheme cremated their dead,” says Gale.
“Maybe the char got polished off by the sand and the centuries.”
“The cavern reminded me of the legend,” Gale says. “The room where the spirits waited.”
She sets down the hollow shard and smiles at Gale. “I have goose bumps all up and down my back right now, Lew.”
“Me, too.”
“What if the legends weren’t legends at all,” she says. “And the bones were purposely put there. The ancients talked about the crystal room because they’d seen it.”
“A cavern of light in an underground sea,” he says, hearing Luis Verdad’s words in his head.
They lean in, touch glasses, and drink.
Geronima dims the lights with a remote, and they sit in silence, each lost to the immense crystal cavern, the bones.
Gales catches her studying him from behind a half wall of thick black hair.
Geronima orders Alexa to play Robbie Robertson’s Music for The Native Americans.
Gale loves this music. Listened to it incessantly as he languished in the Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton, his manhood and his desire to live both undecided.
Now his worse angels try to take him back to that vast citadel of pain and mutilation, of awful sights and sounds, but Gale wills himself back from it, focusing on Geronima Mills and Hulk in order to stay in the here and now.
“Ghost Dance” comes on.
They listen to the song in silence, sipping the bourbon. Then “Skinwalker.”
Gale feels as if the music is pulling him into some faintly luminous place, somewhere much like the crystal cavern.
Music and silence now, except for Hulk tearing apart the shark.
“My heart wants to fly back to where we just were,” says Geronima.
She gets her phone off the trunk and swipes through the pictures.
Gale watches the light frame her downturned face. Her black hair shines. She hauls a handful of it over her shoulder, eyes still on the screen, then swipes to the next picture.
“Can I be blunt?” she says. “I get blunt when something interests me.”
“Blunt away.”
“Are you single?”
“Divorced, no one steady since.”
She’s still not looking at him. “Do you like it that way?”
“The divorce was the right thing. My bad, though. Well, our bad, really.”
She sets down her phone and looks at him now, eyes reflecting light from the kitchen. “Are you happy?”