Sandstone
by Rebecca Lawton
The paleontologist taught Erv that bones in a river settle parallel to the current. Erv hadn’t figured that out, though he’d worked at the quarry for twenty years before the paleontologist came, green as corn, from graduate school at Yale. It took Erv some time to get over his first impressions of the man. For good reason. For one, Dr. Case ran from the housing area to the river every day—rain, snow, or summer heat. Evenings, Erv saw him in his rearview mirror as he headed back to town and the paleontologist jogged along the quarry road. Dr. Case called running his meditation. “You mean medication,” Erv said, thinking of the pills Betty took to relax when she was his wife.
“No, Erv. Meditation.”
It was the first time Erv had heard that word used outside of church.
Until Dr. Case showed Erv the rock he’d been digging was old river deposits and the bones lined up the way the current left them, Erv didn’t see the connection between dinosaur days and the modern rock. He had noticed plenty about the bones he’d been finding at the quarry all that time, though. For one, he knew they showed up in little piles—or big piles, seeing that they were dinosaur bones. For another, most of the long bones—femurs, tibias, fibulas—lined up west-to-east. Erv knew it all meant something, but his job was just to dig.
He’d kept his job at the quarry forever in spite of not having a high-school diploma. He knew his way around a rock bar and sledge and how to handle a jack hammer at any angle. No wonder he was good—he’d started in the gilsonite mines when he was sixteen. His dad had left home, and though he didn’t feel ready to, Erv had dropped out of high school to work full time. When he got the quarry job years later, he learned to detail the bones right where they lay, with ice picks and soft-bristle brushes. Lord, that was the meanest work, the hunching over with tiny tools for hours at a time. It just about did in his back and legs. Still, he outlasted every one of a whole string of managers who ran the quarry for years before the paleontologist came along.
Sometimes when Dr. Case was running, his young wife, who’d also gone to college and even to graduate school, pushed their infant daughter in a stroller and followed along. She was out there even when afternoon winds blew up the river and kicked up dust and little bits of rock. Couldn’t have been too good for the baby, and Erv wasn’t not sure what the wife got out of it.
One thing that rankled him, because he grew up Latter-Day Saints, was that Dr. Case used to invite in the missionaries just to argue with them. He studied the Book of Mormon enough to figure he’d found the loopholes, and then he’d ask those kids into his home and debate their faith. He teased about Jehovah, who he called the God of the quick and the dead, and he got a big kick out of the Land of Moron and the angel Moroni, who led Joseph Smith to the golden tablets. Those things didn’t seem funny to Erv, and he sure never questioned them. But he resolved that a man of science probably can’t be called on to trust in the church or the mysteries of the spirit.
At work, Dr. Case got to watching Erv during the detailing. He put names to everything. Erv would clean off what he knew to be a shoulder bone; Dr. Case would put on his goggles and say, “Look, Erv, Apatosaurus scapula.” Or Erv would finish with a string of tiny neckbones that Dr. Case called “cervical vertebrae from a juvenile Stegosaurus.” Erv liked hearing the fancy names, and he remembered them. Sometimes, though, Dr. Case would hover, saying Erv should use a smaller-sized pick, or a bigger one if the work could go faster, or that it was time to clear away the debris. Then, one day: “Careful, Erv, you’ll gouge the socket.”
“I know it, sir, I’m being careful.”
“Shouldn’t you be using the number six pick?”
“No, Dr. Case, I shouldn’t. Believe me, I’ve done over a hundred ribs this way.”
“Maybe so. But let’s get this one right.”
That did it. Erv peeled off his safety glasses, threw down the pick, walked past the office, and continued out into the parking lot. Dr. Case followed him all the way, asking where he was going, what he was doing. Erv was too mad to answer.
Dr. Case dogged him to his truck. “Erv, stop! I didn’t mean it. You know me—I’m a paleontologist. I can be boneheaded.”
Erv leaned against the bed of his truck and pulled out his smokes.
“Erv, I shouldn’t have interfered. You’re the one who knows your job. Really, I need your expertise.”
That stopped Erv. Though he could’ve taught the paleontologist plenty, he knew Dr. Case would do fine if he chose to quit, which he didn’t, because he hated like hell to look for work. But Dr. Case was getting on his nerves on the rock. Erv lit a cigarette and turned to him.
Dr. Case’s dark hair blew in the afternoon wind. Behind him, Split Mountain stood out in the sun, bright and clean as you please. His eyes looked that deep blue color the river turns late in the afternoon.
“Dr. Case, I’m not going anywhere. But we’ve got to get a few things straight. Number one, Jehovah is not the God of the quick and the dead. He’s the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead.”
“Oh, I’ve been teasing, I—“
“And we say Morun, not Moron.”
“Fine, but—“
“And I hate to say this, Dr. Case, but what you don’t know about detailing bones could fill your library in there.”
Dr. Case stood a minute, squinting in the low-angle light. He looked at Erv, then down at his feet. He said, “You’re right, and I know it. I was wrong.” He held out his hand. “No hard feelings?”
“No, sir, I guess not.”
Erv took his hand and shook it.
After that, Dr. Case began to spend more time with Erv, asking questions and telling him things. Erv picked up the names of things fast, which probably wasn’t expected of a guy who’d never been farther from the valley than Salt Lake. Who’d had to quit school in the eleventh grade to help support his mother. Erv knew when he found something special, like the crocodile scute nestled behind the Camarasaurus toebone, and the almost-intact skeleton of the baby Stegosaurus. Then he called the paleontologist’s attention to those things, and Dr. Case put the names to them. Erv filed his facts in the back of his mind.
One day as Erv was enjoying a smoke, taking a break from the pounding of the jackhammer, Dr. Case sat nearby and dug quietly in the broken rock.
“Look at this stuff,” he said. “All sandstone, but all different. Layers on layers of sandstone.”
“That’s so?”
Dr. Case nodded. “An old river bed. Millions of years of sandbars building and shifting and changing.”
Erv pondered that. “But these dinosaurs didn’t live in rivers. Where’d the bones come from?” All these years he’d figured the quarry was a swampy place where the big lizards dragged themselves to die. Sort of like the elephant graveyard in Tarzan. Dr. Case’s river theory blasted that idea.
“Carried down from upstream. The Dinosauria probably lived and died throughout the basin, and the river in flood picked up their bones and moved them here.”
Erv thought a minute. “But bones don’t float, Dr. Case.”
“No, but they do roll on the bottom. Or they float if they’re still in a carcass. And a lot of these were probably carcasses shunted into eddies by side components of the main current. Picture it, Erv.” He reached out his arms like he was reaching for the Milky Way. “A river of floating dinosaurs.”
“Ah,” Erv said. “I can picture it all right. You mean bloating dinosaurs. You wait until spring—you’ll see enough puffed-up cows in the Green to scare you off steaks.”
That night after work, Erv walked to the public library to read about rocks, because he couldn’t get the notion of sandstone out of his head. He was amazed, because he’d been digging in the stuff for two decades. He found three good geology books and spread them on the wooden table near the magazine racks. He read about sandstone: that it forms in rivers and oceans and desert dunes. The rock can be full of calcium or quartz, tough or crumbly, gray or buff. In his digging, he’d felt the changes in hardness, and those were just in river rock. He couldn’t figure how different ocean beach or desert sandstone would feel.
On his way out of the library at closing time, full of thoughts of rocks and rivers, he walked smack into his ex-wife near the “Latest Arrival” shelves.
“Why, Ervin,” Betty said, hugging a hardbound book so close he couldn’t see its name. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d given up books.”
“True. But I’m doing a little research.”
Her eyebrows lifted slightly, and her mouth formed an О. Erv saw she was tan and lovely, just the right amount of plumpness in her pink summer dress. Her hair looked grayer but wasn’t permed as tight as before. It seemed soft and easy around her face.
“You look great,” he said, in spite of knowing he shouldn’t.
She blushed.
He walked her back to the house, where he’d lived with her for almost twelve years. At the edge of the valley, piles of black-bottomed clouds and short curtains of rain hung over the mountains. The scent of sage blew in from the desert outside of town. He heard soft whinnies from the Searles’ horses beyond the high school basketball field and sharp zaps from the neon bug killers in the Rasmussens’ garden. As he and Betty passed under the quiet rustling of elms, he told her about Dr. Case and how the quarry was once a riverbed.
“There’s sandstone there where a river used to be, maybe even a big one like the Green.” She didn’t answer, but she was giving it some thought.
At the house, the lawn looked green and neatly trimmed. A single light shone in the downstairs window, where his reading chair once was. He wanted to open the door, walk inside, and sit and read as if time and disappointment had never pushed him from her. Instead he said, “Goodnight, Betty.”
He left her in the half-darkness, knowing she was beautiful and tender, but not knowing what to do about it.
In time, Dr. Case lost his pasty grad-school look. Maybe it was his meditation or just living in country with a wide, blue sky. He took up fishing. Every weekend he’d fish Flaming Gorge, or a mountain lake, or some part of the Green. He went after it whole hog, like he went after everything. In the quarry lunchroom, Erv found an article Dr. Case had clipped from the Vernal Express about Utah’s famous, oversized German browns. Fishing catalogues covered the paleontologist’s desk. Dr. Case bought hip waders, a canoe, one of those khaki vests with all the pockets, and a hat with the lambswool strip for keeping flies.
“I’m in heaven, Erv,” he said.
“No, Dr. Case, it’s Utah.”
He grinned, and Erv couldn’t help but grin himself.
Dr. Case was pulling in support for the quarry, too, calling professors and finding money for Erv’s work. Erv watched it all happen, impressed. He figured a man doesn’t get all the way to a Ph.D. in paleontology without a burning interest, and Dr. Case was on fire. He’d travel to conferences in Laramie, Denver, or Las Vegas, or invite guests to the quarry for his witty talks that earned standing ovations. Every time, Dr. Case gave Erv plenty of credit: “the man who knows the rock,” he’d say, asking Erv to stand, or “the fellow who does all the real work.” After a while, Erv got used to it, and he looked forward to going to the talks at the quarry and swapping tales with the visiting professors. Most of all, he looked forward to going to work.
One afternoon near quitting time, as Erv was working the jackhammer, Dr. Case waved him over. Erv shut down and took out his earplugs. The two men hunkered near a pile of ribs. “Look, Erv, see that little tail of sediment trailing east? That means the river here flowed from the west.”
“That seems likely.”
Dr. Case pointed to a big legbone. “And this stopped every other bone in this pile.”
“How so? Like a traffic jam on Main?”
“Right. When one unit stops, it almost always causes a pile-up. Or the bones can settle in an eddy behind a rock. Not a lot of isolated bones here, are there?”
“No, sir, I had noticed that.”
“Well, it’s no coincidence, it’s physical law.” He called the piles “waves,” so named by a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
That got Erv thinking. He climbed to a pile of bones he’d been detailing. “Here’s another wave, Dr. Case.” Erv pointed to the two huge sauropod ribs stacked against an end-up vertebra.
“And another,” Dr. Case yelled from the top of the quarry, where two femurs, each about five feet long, leaned together easy and neat as dominoes.
“Here’s the best one yet.” Erv kneeled near a string of neckbones that curved around a nest of skull plates.
“Wait,” said Dr. Case. “Don’t move! I’m getting my camera.” He climbed down the face of the quarry, trotted along a poorly lit ledge of sandstone Erv had been digging in all week, and—as Erv watched—stepped off the edge of the rock. Dr. Case tumbled fifteen feet down the steep path that bordered the quarry’s west end.
Erv scrambled to help him, but the paleontologist was already sitting up really tall, dusting himself off, by the time Erv reached him. “No sweat,” Dr. Case said. Erv helped him stand. “Just a little problem with my eyes.”
“Sir?”
“I don’t understand it myself, but I can’t see much in the half-light.”
“There’s an eye doctor from Salt Lake who gets to town once a week, Dr. Case. You ought to go see her.”
“I’ll do that.” He fetched his camera from the office.
The two men stayed at the quarry until well after midnight, logging the waves of bones and understanding for the first time what they meant. “This is it,” said Dr. Case, his face weary but his blue eyes bright. “This is the beginning of something. Don’t you agree?”
“I sure look at this rock a whole new way.”
Dr. Case was quiet a moment. “Erv, I want you to come to Denver with me in September.”
It took a minute for that to sink in. “Oh no, sir, I’m no professor. I’ve never even seen the outside of a conference hall.”
“No matter. You know more about detailing than anyone I’ve ever met. You could contribute a lot to the meeting.”
“Well, I’d love to, but—“
“Then it’s settled. I’ll authorize travel for us both.” He checked his watch. “Oh, jeez, I’m out of here. Tell you what—take tomorrow off. I’m going to. I feel like going fishing.”
They agreed to that. Erv gathered up his things and walked outside. Dr. Case was still in his office when Erv turned from his truck to admire the quarry lights against the Utah sky. Then the big lamps switched off. In the starlight, he saw Dr. Case lock the gate and cross the parking lot.
“Erv? You there?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?”
“Sure is, Dr. Case.”
“On a night like this, I could almost believe there’s a heaven up there.”
“My heck, you mean you don’t?”
“No. I don’t think so—I haven’t been able to reconcile religion with my work.” He opened his jeep door. “What about you? You quit the church, do you believe in God?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Of course. I always have, especially in hard times.”
“But what about the bones? You believe in fossils. Aren’t they an indication that life evolves? That earth wasn’t made in six days?”
“Dr. Case, those are the details. I figure the Spirit is big enough to work them out. Or that evolution itself is His doing. To me what counts is prayers. I couldn’t have gotten through any other way when my dad left and I had to quit school. Or when Betty and I split up. The church might’ve got on my nerves, but I’ll always believe in the Almighty.”
There was a long pause. Erv wondered if he’d gone on too long. Then Dr. Case said, “You’re lucky, Erv,” and waved good night. He drove down the hill—to his wife and baby girl and their three-bedroom home in the housing area.
Erv stood by his truck a minute. Cool air from Split Mountain washed down around him. Below the light burst of stars, he spotted a satellite on a north-south course and remembered what Dr. Case had said about the conference. And that he’d called him lucky. “Thank you,” Erv said to the heavens that were up there above the darkness.
The phone call from Sheriff Hatch came the night of Erv’s day off, just before dawn. He was sound asleep in his apartment. Hatch said he’d heard from Dr. Case’s wife: the paleontologist had gone to Flaming Gorge and wasn’t home for dinner. It had happened once before, she said—he’d stayed out fishing after dusk, too excited to quit, and couldn’t see well enough to drive home. He always carried a sleeping bag in the jeep, just to be safe. But he had a CB radio, too, and this time he hadn’t called in. The wife was beside herself by midnight. She’d asked Hatch to call Erv.
Erv had spent the day in the library reading paleontology papers sent in at his request from the University of Utah. Toward closing time, he’d looked up to see Betty standing opposite his reading table.
“Hello, Ervin,” she said. “You’re spending a lot of time here.”
“More and more.” He removed his reading glasses. “I’m preparing for a paleontology conference in the fall. Dr. Case invited me.”
“My. Well, it’s good to see you reading again.”
He walked her home. They passed lawns and sprinklers and water-filled gutters. At the house, lilacs filled the air with sweetness. The same light brightened the window where his chair used to be.
“Betty,” he said. “I’m feeling better.”
“I know.”
“I’m thinking maybe I can be somebody.”
“But, Ervin. You always were somebody. I tried telling you that.”
“Uh huh. Drove us both nuts telling me.”
She looked startled for a moment, then leaned back and laughed. “Not that you ever listened.”
“Well, you know me—too thick to plow.”
When he bent to kiss her hair, she looked surprised again. Her hair felt soft and smelled of the same lavender shampoo he remembered. Then it was all he could do to step down off the porch, with Betty only half hidden behind her front door. But he wasn’t ready, so he walked across town to his place. He sat up reading more of the dinosaur papers until early morning.
When the sheriff called, Erv had been asleep just a few hours and woke kind of panicky.
“Erv? It’s Jim Hatch. I need your help. There may have been an accident.”
Rays of sunlight were just touching the mountains when Erv met Hatch and his search-and-rescue team downtown. The men were standing in front of the station in their hunting colors, drinking steaming coffee from Styrofoam cups. They rode together in a van to Flaming Gorge. Erv listened to the police radio, its static and garbled messages, and tried to calm his stomach. Hatch asked him some questions, which he answered as best he could.
“Do you know where he’d be, Erv?”
“What kind of fishing does he do?”
“His wife said he’s got bad eyes—did he tell you that?”
“He’s new in the valley. How well do you know him?”
They parked near the dam, next to Dr. Case’s white jeep. Hatch guessed as soon as he saw it that no one was inside—the windows weren’t at all steamed up. Erv wiped a little bit of dew from the cold windshield. The CB was turned off and the mouthpiece hooked in place on the dashboard. A sleeping bag sat on the front seat, rolled up in its blue cover. Hatch used a megaphone to call for Dr. Case, with no luck, while the sickening feeling grew in Erv’s stomach.
Hatch headed to the lake while Erv led a few men downstream.
A little fog hung on the river. The water smelled fresh and cool. The Green flowed fast and shallow, with narrow eddies. There were sudden deeper spots behind boulders. Erv pondered how Dr. Case would have known better than anyone about the holes but maybe not seen them if he’d been fishing at dusk.
The first thing Erv found was Dr. Case’s plastic lunch cooler, right by shore, with just an apple core and sandwich wrappers inside. Erv called again, and tried to run, but the boulders were slippery with dew. He had to walk instead, near shore with the other men. They called for Dr. Case as they searched. Erv was hoping to find him sitting up really tall, brushing himself off.
Erv did find him. He knew where to look—Dr. Case had taught him. Sure enough, the paleontologist was in the river, his waders full of water. He’d washed into an eddy, where his arms trailed upstream parallel the current in the backwater. Erv pulled him to shore and turned him over. An eerie paleness had settled under his new tan. And his blue eyes—which for a while Erv figured missed nothing—were open, but the light was gone.
That afternoon he called Betty. She said, “I heard.”
They met at the library and sat out back at the picnic tables. The air was full of the sound of cars cruising Main and the smell of fresh-cut alfalfa from beyond the neighborhoods. Erv’s stomach hurt the way it had since morning. He kept seeing those young eyes with nothing in them, a sight he wished he hadn’t seen.
“He was it,” Erv said. “He was the engine. I wasn’t ready for him to leave.”
Betty picked pieces of cottonwood fleece from the picnic table. “I’m sorry.”
“And there’ll be no conference now. No being somebody.”
She didn’t speak right away. When she did, her voice trembled. “I think you’re wrong, Ervin. I think he’d want you to go to the conference.”
“By myself?”
She nodded.
They sat for a time without talking. Erv was grateful for the silence, which she never used to allow.
After a while she stood and smoothed her skirt. She asked if he’d like to come for coffee later on. Erv nodded, barely. Then she walked home across the big lawn behind the library, arms swinging, flowered skirt swaying. Beyond her, light changed on the buff-colored cliffs of sandstone. Erv couldn’t stop staring at them—would he ever? They stood this side of Flaming Gorge, with its legendary German browns and its cold, rushing stream below.
(First published in THEMA. Metairie, LA: THEMA Literary Society. 1995.)
