A Wilderness of Stars

You'd guess by looking at Charlie that he was approaching his 70s. But he was only 53. It was the sun, of course. It seared whatever wasn't shaded. I once saw Charlie bathing in the horse trough back of Elmer's Stable and was surprised to note how the skin he usually kept covered was surprisingly pink and youthful-looking. When you consider that the surface temperature out there could reach 120 degrees, you understood why keeping the sun away from your most sensitive spots was essential. Even desert creatures sought shelter from the inhospitable climate.

'I'm like an old juniper,' Charlie would tell me. 'I grope an' twist for the sky, my hide is pitted by wind-blown sand. You get crazy with thirst for the little rain that's squeezed out of the air. But you live on. You an' the old juniper. We keep at it, me an' the old juniper, because there ain't nothin' either one of us can do about it.'

It was maybe six weeks since I had last seen Charlie. He pushed into the Tabloid office, covered with trail dust, his face as white as limestone. He plopped down into a chair by my desk and took out a parachute-sized bandanna with which he rubbed the back of his neck. Then he blew his nose into the oversized handkerchief, meticulously avoiding a large wart on the left side.

'You're really gonna think me crazy this time,' he said. He played abstractly with his fingers, avoiding my eyes. 'Maybe you're right, Mr. Whittaker,' he continued, moistening his cracked lips with his tongue. 'Maybe I been goin' into them canyons too much. Maybe it's time I settled down an' go live with my sister Kate in Tucson like she's always been askin' me to do.'

He mumbled a few more words and then lapsed into silence, not once taking his eyes from the floor. After a while, he jerked up his head and said: 'You got any...any...you know.'

I opened the top desk drawer and pulled out a fifth of Seagram Seven. He twisted off the cap nervously; it slipped out of his hands, bounced on the floor and rolled under my desk. I retrieved it for him, and he quickly tossed down about four ounces from it. 'I'm usually a pretty steady feller.' he reminded, coughing up his words. 'I don't go makin' nothin' up, an' you gotta admit my eyes are pretty good for an old buzzard.'

'They're good, Charlie,' I said, leaning back in my chair. He rubbed the knuckles of his free hand against his eyelids and moaned: 'Well, I don't know no more.'

I watched him with amused curiosity as he struggled for his words. Finally, he raised his head, thumped the bottle on my desk and cried out: 'Dammit! I do know! I know what I seed!'

'What did you see, Charlie?' I said, playing the game.

He glanced down at the backpack he had dragged into the office that was now propped between his feet. He stared at it as if expecting whatever was concealed in there to squiggle out and bite one of his legs. He reached down for it. I smiled tolerantly, expecting him to remove maybe a fairly sizeable gold nugget. Instead, he extracted a rust-colored, wedge-shaped object about a foot in width that appeared to have a graduated arc on one side.

'There!' he said triumphantly, dropping the object with a clunk onto my desk. I stared blankly at it for a few moments, then picked it up and turned it over in my hands. 'What's this?' I asked.

'What does that look like?' Charlie prodded me, his face aglow. I turned it over a few times. 'A rusted sextant,' I said. 'That's exactly what I thought. I found it out there in one of them canyons,' he said, jerking a thumb in a general southwesterly direction, '--on that there boat.'

'Boat? What boat?'

Charlie became mute again, as if reluctant to be drawn out any further. He took another swig of whiskey and rattled out his next words like water from a downpipe during a sudden squall.

'The one I found. In them there canyons. Off Cedar Mesa. Stuck in there. Real tight. Craziest thing. Don't believe it. But I seed it.'

I studied Charlie blankly, the old sextant cradled in my hands. 'She's wedged upright between them canyon walls, you see-- as if she had floated in there an' couldn't go no farther. Goddamnest thing I ever did see!'

'I'm sorry, Charlie,' I said, 'but you lost me somewhere. What the hell are you talking about?'

He inched closer to me, as if about to divulge a family secret. 'There's this boat, I tell you,' he rasped. He spread his arms out wide. 'A big boat! It's wedged between walls of one of them canyons.' 'What boat? What canyon?' I said, annoyed over his seeming reluctance to come to the point.

'I can't tell you exactly where it is,' he went on. 'I'd have to show you. It's in a side draw an' it's real big. Hundreds of feet long, maybe 50-60 feet wide an' high as the water tower on Rattlesnake Hill!'