The night smelled of cigars, steeped coca leaves, and fried cuy, and wouldn’t end. The body was stripped, washed with tea, and wrapped in white muslin. It looked — for all my unfamiliarity with everything else — like the bones we plastered and jacketed in the field. The dead man’s grandson poured alcohol in the doorway and again said what sounded like a prayer to the house and dirt. Men blew more smoke on the door frame and windows and over the corpse. In the kitchen women lifted the rocks from the backs of the fried cuy and served bowls of meat and diced yams.
Julia poured Howie a mug of warm goat’s milk and took away his shot glass. “Make sure your friend doesn’t smoke,” she told me.
We sat on the furniture pushed against the walls. I turned my dish, trying to find an approach to the cuy. Howie, the oxygen mask pressed to his face, pulled the spaniel off piles of food scraps and settled her beside his chair. Julia poured Morgan and me glasses of clear pomace brandy — her sleeve unrolled as she did, and she stopped to correct it. The bones of her wrist were wider than the forearm, and her hands, stained brown from peeling yams, were also wide-boned and thin.
Howie coughed into his mask and waved her toward him. She leaned close. When she was near enough that he could whisper, he reached out and set his fingers on her birthmark.
“If you came back with us,” he said, “my wife could fix that.”
“Jesus Christ.” Morgan said.
I set aside my plate — the cuy were crunchy and fatty with not much meat.
Julia held Howie’s gaze, then pulled her braid aside and showed him the mark went well behind the ear. “Too much scarring. Too painful.”
“She could do it,” Howie said. “But she’s leaving—” He stopped abruptly, bent double, and puked a great fan of goat’s milk onto the floor. Morgan and I stared at the mess. The spaniel lapped the vomit. Julia lit a cigar and took her turn with the sheep’s knuckles.
“Thinking the dog will make it rich?” Howie wiped his mouth. And when we looked confused he reminded us of how we thought anything he touched turned to cash.
“I’m done for the night,” I said.
“Take him with you when you go.” Morgan pointed his fork at Howie. “Make him lie down.”
Cigars, smoke. More wood on the bonfire. The sheep knuckles clattered on the packed dirt in a sort of game that, I suppose, wasn’t a game.
In our tent I lit a lantern. Moths buffeted the screen door — there were so many, they must have bred in the loose shale of the mountains. Howie crawled into bed and touched the tubes at his chest. He reached for the water I offered him but closed his fist too early. I held the canteen and he drank. The pisco bottles shone in the corner with the knee pads, gloves, a sharpening stone — all the gear we’d hauled in.
“The NAV and the comp — why didn’t you trade for something better than pisco?” I asked.
He sputtered, but managed some cynicism: “You think there’s something better than toys and alcohol? You two, you and Morgan, you want what my wife wants — only money.”
“It’s not true,” I said, although it felt like a half-truth.
“What’s money anyway?” he asked.
I took the shin fragment from my pocket. Howie pinched the shard and turned it in the lamplight. The majority of the fragment was dark grey, with one end worn pink where — before Julia found it — it must have protruded from the rock and been exposed to rain and sun.
He seemed to drift, and I took the bone back thinking he would sleep, but he pushed his mask up and continued.
“Prospected and found,” he said. “Oil. Years ago.” His eyelid drooped and twitched. He raised his hand, palm forward. A surrender, I thought, but he held up three fingers. “My second wife,” he said. “Third, with the common law. But I’ve the likes of you two pulling at me now.”
“You really think that?” I remembered the envelope of photos, our lie about the dog, and I crossed the tent and uncorked a pisco. He waved the drink aside and twisted the tubes at his face.
He was afraid, I realized. The petroleum guru, Howie with the straw Galveston who’d rambled on under the hoodoos about how he built his fortune between layers of silt. He was terrified. And I thought of the spaniel, running the pads off her feet beside the highway before Howie’s wife found her — the ridiculous stream of dust the lonely thing must have trailed in the heat. Howie brushed his nose and held his knuckles to the light. I could have laughed I was so surprised, only looking at his blue fingers clinging to the oxygen tubes, I was afraid too.
I started to stand and he grabbed my arm. His grip shocked me — the nails in my wrist. He didn’t want me to leave. Or, rather, he didn’t want to be left alone. Who I was had little to do with it. I set the pisco aside, wet a piece of burlap, and tried to clean the vomit from the stubble on his chin. He relaxed his hand a little, and I pried his fingers from my arm and moved them to the spaniel.
“We’ll stay,” I said, and he closed his eyes.
The moths buffeted their soft, meaty bodies against the screen. I lowered the gas on the lantern and crawled into my cot.
I woke to Julia standing over me in the tent — her brown hair, the red stain on her cheek.
“Do you want to see this fossil?” she said. “Or do you want to take your friend back to La Paz?”
“How long will his oxygen last?” I asked. Howie’s colour had improved — the mask covered his lower face, but the bags around his eyes had lost their swelling and the brown tint from last night. At least he slept.
“The tank is empty now,” she said. “If you don’t tell him, he could be all right.”
She and I loaded a single alpaca with a pannier of the basics — backpack core-drill, marsh pick, trowels, plaster, burlap, gloves, water, etc. — and took a path between the houses. The hamlet looked different by day — more kids. Gardens. A single, visible power line. When we reached the edge of the houses we found the grandson, the man with his unbuttoned shirt, Morgan — his Neolithic profile, his arm around the man with the hairy gut — and a few others digging a grave on an open plot of land. Morgan peeled away from the gathering and joined me and Julia.
The trail led us up a slope, where we had a view of the hamlet’s corral — alpacas and goats, tufts of wild millet. Beyond the corral, all those switchbacks we’d hiked in the dark. We stopped when we found loose float where Julia had found the shin bone, and she pointed to the source: a series of ledges a couple hundred metres above. I pinned a flag into the area. Morgan and I hiked, and she headed back to the hamlet. We were damp and breathing heavily when we reached the shelf. A curl of pinkish-tan vertebrae, lightened by the sun, stood out against the grey dirt and rock. Morgan ran his thumb over one, then tapped the surrounding ground with the marsh pick.
“Tight,” I said. “Probably whole. Guess on the age?”
“Young,” Morgan said. “Seven, eight million based on location.”
I measured. From the first bone to the last visible — over three metres.
“Core sample,” I suggested.
Morgan blew dust from the drive pins and aligned the extensions and secured the bit in place. We checked the water circulation and I placed my foot on the bit, notched the rock sideways, then eased the angle and drilled downward. The soft, layered sediment took barely fifteen minutes to breach. Morgan smoothed a square of burlap and I knocked the core sample loose, reaching the catcher in the hole to tong a couple snapped bits. We squatted and poked through the core. The consolidated ash was wiry — porous. A metre or so of light-grey, medium-grained tuff that was amply flecked with dark-brown and greenish-black mica. The base of the sample was full of shale and sandstone.