The Bone (Week 8)

The dinosaur dreams began without warning.

Ten years into Amelia's retirement, she was reading the collected letters of Edward Drinker Cope, the famously beleaguered self-taught paleontologist, who also happened to be her great-great-grandfather.

The hardbound collection was a recent gift from her daughter. She'd known very little about Edward Cope growing up, but someone in her family had told her, or maybe she had read somewhere, that the man had once dreamed of a flock of dinosaurs running across a plain like ostriches. He considered it a revelation. Dinosaurs weren't creeping lizards, but rambunctious birds! Imagine that!

The letters were as engaging as the correspondence of any nineteenth-century paleontologist could be. But they were also a glimpse into the bone wars and a narrow peek down the limbs of her own family tree. She was sure Paul would have loved to pontificate about everything they'd gotten wrong back then. Reading them was therefore an odd way of having him back for a little while, and she felt certain her daughter had known this, too.

And yet nowhere in this collection could she find any reference to his dream of the ostrich-dinosaur flock.

Her own dinosaur dream, when it began to recur, was similar. Or at least the conclusion of each dream was similar. When they started, it was the only part she remembered. First, the flock came. Then a dark puddle would form near them. Steam would begin to rise from it. Then a large shape rose, dripping with mud. Its growl increased in volume, then it shook off the murk to reveal a giant horned beast, like a mastiff crossed with a lizard.

Suddenly Amelia was in bed, gasping, listening to deep barks that seemed to vibrate along her walls and windows. She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, then rose to her feet almost in slow motion and pulled the curtain. At that exact moment, the barks ceased.

The streets were lined with pinyon pines and junipers with gnarled trunks. The light of sunrise hit everything; resinous shrubs and light poles aligned with the suburban grid, with its apartment buildings and ranch homes, stretching off to the foot (or maybe just the toes) of the Jemez Mountains.

She looked down into her neighbors' yard. Empty. She imagined a dog, much smaller than the beast in her dream, standing still, its head pointed forward, its body spasming with bark after bark. But all she could see was the doghouse, small and steepled and unpainted. Was the animal crouched inside? Had it sensed her awakening? She hadn’t known known of its existence until these morning disruptions began. Since Paul died she'd stopped talking to anyone who had lived in the neighborhood less than two years.

Something nagged at the edge of her mind, but she shook it away. Amelia took her morning tea in silence, then wrote the following note in flowing, calligraphic script on a piece of monogrammed Museum of New Mexico dinosaur paper:

Dear Neighbor,

I’m sorry to say your dog is disrupting my sleep. Might you please consider keeping your animal indoors until your neighbors are awake, maybe until around 8 o'clock or so?

Thank you,

Amelia Cope-Hansen

***

When she and Paul were living in their first home, a one-story brick-and-adobe bungalow on the Southside, they had a dog named Othniel, Oath for short. Oath had been a mixed lab, all black except for a white, hourglass-shaped patch on his chest. Oath's insistent personality meant Amelia had to tether him to the elm before sunrise every morning. This was so Paul could get a few more hours of sleep. Her husband worked long days. After breakfast he walked three miles to where he and his team would ride out to wherever their field site was that day. Most days he had spent more hours on the trail than at home.

Amelia bathed and dressed, then crept around to the front of her neighbors' duplex. On the doormat were the words "Welcome to the Marsh's" and some cactus silhouettes. (As a retired librarian and English teacher, the plural apostrophe bothered her more than the barking.) She bent over and pushed the envelope under the mat, where it stuck out like a tooth.

That night she dreamed of a flock of small Ornithischia darting across a field. She always thought they would make perfect mounts, with their handle-shaped heads and elegant spines, perfect for a saddle. The dream-flock amazed her with its strength and fury before the big brown horned dino-mastiff leapt into the middle of the flock and began to devour the creatures, who ran in circles and clicked and honked in alarm.

THUNK. The bedroom snapped back into her consciousness very quickly. It was still barely light outside. Amelia rolled onto her back. The dog was barking and the Santa Fe New Mexican had just been delivered. She got up and pulled the curtains.

The neighbors’ yard was empty again.

When she went downstairs and opened her front door, a large bleached bone was stuck in the ground next to the concrete threshold where her newspaper had been delivered by the paperboy. Her eyes ran over the object carefully, and the knowledge she had gained from marriage with a paleontologist told her it was probably a bovine femur.

She used her plastic gripper to bring in the paper, then gripped the bone tightly and wrenched it out of the earth. For some reason, she did not think it strange.

She sat at her kitchen table and read an article about Reagan and Gorbachev's summit in Reykjavík. There was also an article about the local efforts to conserve water, which was dwindling at an alarming rate due to groundwater overuse and the ongoing drought. The bone sat on the table, patiently awaiting her attention.

She folded up the paper. Where had the Marshes gotten it? Surely it was a response to her note. But what did it mean? Was it a metaphor? Did they use metaphors? Minutes before, she thought it might be bovine. Now she was not so sure. Perhaps it was a Hadrosaur, like Edmontosaurus. A young one. Were either of the Marshes paleontologists? Was this a joke, maybe someone from the university? What could this mean?

So many question marks. She could not wait. She pulled on her overcoat and stepped outside.

Mr. Marsh, a thin, dark man in his 30s, opened his door slowly. Soap and aftershave wafted out behind him. Amelia had expected a more chaotic greeting, but their dog had not appeared. She told the man her name, and where she lived, and he introduced himself as Eddie, Eddie Marsh. He glanced at the bone she carried. After a pause, he invited her inside.

Sally Marsh stood up stiffly from their kitchen table and introduced herself to Amelia. She seemed to have been expecting her. Both Marshes invited the old woman to sit. Eddie began:

"Mrs. Cope-Hansen -"

"Amelia."

"Amelia, I think there's been a misunderstanding."

"A mistake," Sally interjected. "We don't have a dog. You might be thinking of the Perez family down the street. They have a rottweiler."

Amelia paused. Her words came out slowly. "But I've heard him. In your yard." She rubbed her eyes. "I've heard him," she said quietly.

The Marshes exchanged a glance, then Sally said:

"We had a dog. We lost Chuck last year. He was a tiny little guy. Terrier and Chihuahua mix. He didn't go outside."

"Your doghouse. Was that his?"

"He never used it," said Eddie. "It was here when we moved in."

"His name was Chuck Waggin'," said Sally. She moved her finger back and forth. "Waggin', like a tail?"

Amelia smiled and shook her head. "I can assure you I heard barking coming out of your yard. Enough to shake my house, almost. And I've been hearing it for weeks, every morning. And this morning..." She held up the bone. "This was at my front door. Sticking out of the ground."

The Marshes leaned back. Eddie put his hands up and shook his head. They knew nothing about the bone and had not heard any barking. Still, they apologized profusely. Amelia felt their gentle condescension and lifted herself to her feet. She thanked them both. Sally said that they would keep an eye out for any stray dogs. And Eddie added that he’d been working double shifts and hadn't been sleeping well, but that she was free to come back later in the week if she just needed someone to talk to.

***

Amelia was alone with silence, with dark, with ticking. She took the bone with her into bed that night, leaned it against her second pillow, and examined its contours. It was not a bovine femur. It was not an anything-femur.

She drifted off and dreamed of Santa Fe in the 1920s, with the dirt roads and horses and long patches of desert and adobe and brick and wood. She dreamt that she and Paul were riding double around Caja del Rio. They watched birds fly in patterns across the sky, then watched them skitter across the earth before taking off again. There was somehow a bench here, amidst the cacti, next to the dry riverbed. She sat and listened while Paul spoke about Pachycephalosaurus, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaur.

Far above, a massive creature lumbered across the land. She could feel the thud as each of its large pedes struck the earth. Each step was another year. She could see a grid of copper pipes under the earth growing, expanding, pumping water into the ground, into the homes, into the sky. Each step of the beast brought them closer to her own time.

All airborne water fell to the earth eventually; in another age there'd be no green, only polygonal desiccation, which she’d always thought had a mathematical beauty. The monster bent low, where Amelia could only see its rugged spine and the tip of its monstrous head as it passed the range. Then it raised itself up and opened its jaws to accept a drink from an irrigation sprinkler. A flock of ostriches came bounding through the wash, their necks aligned like a row of question marks. The beast swiped at them with his feathered fist and the birds scattered, flapped, chirped and hissed.

She laughed and laughed and laughed, clutching the bone in her hand. She felt a strong desire to bury it. The sun moved quickly in the sky and descended, looping with the monster’s progress. She looked for Paul. He had gone home while she watched the beast; she would ride in his wake and find her own way back.

Amelia awoke late that morning after the contours of her room slowly revealed themselves to her. She got up, pulled the curtain, looked out over the Santa Fe Basin, then descended the stairs for late breakfast, newspaper, and tea.