Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck

Them Bones, pages 10-25, continued

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

Our main man, Madison Yazoo Leake, having passed through a time portal at the beginning of this chapter, finds himself separated from his Army companions and much further in the past than he had planned. Setting out, after several days of fruitless waiting, for the site of Baton Rouge, he is bathing in a stream (cleaning off several days of dirt and passenger pigeon poo) when a group of local people happen upon him.

The encounter, like so many first encounters between very different people, goes poorly. The three men who stumble upon Leake are obviously indigenous Americans, as their breachcloths, adornments, bows, and facial tattoos indicate. Their hairstyles remind Madison of the Three Stooges, so he names them Moe, Larry, and Curly, giving an air of absurdity to what becomes an anti-climactic exchange.

The three travelers are startled by Leake, and more so by his horse. They try to communicate with him by repeating simple stock phrases: "Nah Sue Day Ho" and "Cue Way No Hay." I don't know from what Native American language Waldrop borrowed these sentences, and Leake doesn't know either; the only non-English languages he speaks are Spanish and Greek, the latter learned during the Cyprus War. He tries English and Spanish greetings out on Moe and Co., then tries gestures, and at last, worried that one of them will hurt his horse, fires a warning shot. The carbine shot does not startle the Indians - perhaps they have heard such weapons before? - and with an air of disappointment, Moe says a short closing phrase ("Ah muy nu-ho") and he and his companions depart.

Waldrop did well to make this encounter disappointing but non-threatening. Leake now has an incentive to follow the Three Amerindian Stooges, and he trails them back to their village. This proves a small town near the Mississippi River, with a palisade enclosing fifty houses and two high mounds. A building, probably a temple, surmounts one of the mounds. Outside of the settlement stand fields of beans and corn, planted in rows. This is an unrealistic detail, by the way; Native Americans generally planted different crops together on raised hillocks, to avoid soil  depletion. Waldrop did get the crops themselves right.

It appears that the inhabitants are expecting M.Y.L. Nearly all of them have taken shelter inside the town palisade, watching Leake approach with their spears handy. One Indian man, however, remains out in the fields to welcome the stranger. He is simply dressed, has no tattoos and only one small earring as adornment, and is carving some sort of stone with - another anachronistic detail - a metal blade. The anachronism, I suspect, was one Waldrop intentionally included. The greeting is obviously an odd person, not only in appearance and disposition, but also in how he greets Leake: not in an indigenous American dialect, but in one of the languages Leake knows, the one he learned in Cyprus.*

Coming next: Warrant Officer Smith reports.

(Above image courtesy of the National Park Service:  http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/mounds/builders.htm)

* The greeting was most likely "Chairete," the Greek word for hello.
  

A Storm of Pigeons

Them Bones, 10-25:

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

Madison Leake, the viewpoint character for much of Waldrop's novel, first appears on the stage leading a horse through a time portal, from the war-ravaged future (the early twenty-first century) to the relatively undamaged past. He stumbles at the outset, landing with his horse in a meadow several unexpected inches below their old datum level. Leake expects to arrive sometime in the mid-twentieth century, right before construction began on the military base from which he and his human companions would later depart. He expects his 140 well-armed colleagues and their horses and gear to arrive shortly. He at least expects the landscape to look the same as it did back home, with some evidence of human habitation and a bayou nearby. (He finds neither.)

Leake doesn't expect a great roaring cloud to come out of the south, traveling at 60 miles per hour. He initially fears it is a tornado, but quickly realizes the cloud is a massive flock of birds, a kilometer wide and 120 miles long. They fly overhead for more than two hours, filling the sky with sound and covering the ground below – and Madison – with bird poop, thick as snow. And Leake realizes something has gone very wrong with his time-travel jaunt. The birds are passenger pigeons, extinct since 1914, and no-one has seen a flock this large since the nineteenth century.

Good for Waldrop, by the way, for including this detail in his book. Few people realize the density of wildlife in pre-Columbian North America, a feature Waldrop underscores later in the chapter when Leake, exploring a bit, sees countless deer, small mammals, and several other species of birds. No author writing about the passenger pigeon, incidentally, has reflected on the experience of standing beneath one or two billion of them (not an uncommon number in their heyday). Leake realizes he will need a bath fairly soon, and so will the other members of his Special Group, if they ever show up.

They don't.

Madison supposes he would find his separation from his team more alarming if he hadn't already seen some harrowing things, first in the Cyprus War (1992 – the author's near future) and then in the nuclear war that destroyed his world. But after waiting four days near the time portal exit, and deciding then to search for his companions at an alternate location (Baton Rouge), the scout heads eastward and finds something that does rattle him: the Suckatoncha Bayou, which has flowed southeastward since La Salle's day (1680), is “presently” flowing due eastward. Bayous flow slowly, and take centuries to shift their course. Madison Leake has accidentally traveled very deep into the past – not to 1942 as planned, nor to the 1880s, but several hundred years further back. Whoops.

After so many shocks, Madison seems unfazed when, a few days later, he comes across a human footprint, or more precisely moccasin-print. Not his own people*, apparently, but American Indians.

Coming next: is it Moe, Larry, and Curly, or Manny, Moe, and Jack?

* A relative term here. Leake tells us he has Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestors and appears phenotypically Indian himself, but notes that his own predecessors assimilated into the American mainstream in the nineteenth century. He himself speaks no Native languages.

One Could Hardly Spoil Them Further

A quick note for board game fans:

Contributors to Twitter have begun a thread describing how to #RuinABoardGame: by cleverly, and minimally, renaming particular "classics" so as to alter their themes. The best titles, in Your Humble Narrator's opinion, are these:

1) Neglect Four
2) Hungry Hungry Hipsters
3) Flight RISK
4) Sharts and Ladders
5) Cards Against Huge Manatees
6) Spousetrap
7) Nose Candyland
8) Custody Battleship
9) Dungeons and Drag Queens
10) Mahjong Is Bigger Than Yourjong

Most of these (5 and 9 excepted) are the mass-produced dreck many of us learned to despise as children, and whose association with spoiled childhood afternoons makes their re-purposing with adult themes particularly entertaining. #2, incidentally reminds me of this, and #9 would probably appeal to more people than the original.

The Horse We Rode In On

Them Bones, 1-10, 29-34:

Howard Waldrop's novel begins in 1929 with carefully-chosen details establishing the setting: a sultry night somewhere in the South, a tent lit by a sooty kerosene lantern, a record player “honking out 'Potato Head Blues,'” and the chapter's protagonist, Bessie, evoking an explorer or archaeologist in her khaki and "pith helmet.” Her first line, “There's a horse in the small mound,” tells us she follows the latter profession, while the mound reference indicates she and her partner Dr. Kinkaid are on a dig. The first paragraph on page two, describing “Louisiana swamp sounds,” lets the informed reader know why she is alarmed to have found the horse: no horses existed in America during these mound-building Indians' lives. In my account of Hiero's Journey I praised Sterling Lanier for establishing his novel's setting and describing the main character within two pages. Waldrop, an expert at short fiction, has worked even more efficiently here. By the middle of page two we have met two of the principal characters, established their profession and setting, and identified the research problem (an impossible anachronism) that proves key to the book's other two plot lines. Unlike Lanier, Waldrop makes this look effortless, the product of hints dropped in conversation or seemingly-minor details mentioned in passing. The apparent artlessness of the achievement belies, of course, the thousands of hours of writing experience that must have gone into so smooth an introduction. 

Waldrop's story flows just as smoothly forward from there. Bessie and Kincaid head out into the thick, hot night, past lightning bugs and cheeping frogs, to investigate the unusual find. They arrive at "mound 2A," which the book describes as a fourteenth-century (CE) platform mound surmounted by a conical burial mound. Bessie's black assistant William (who wears shoes with "bunion slits," a nice touch) ends any uncertainty about the bones by positively identifying them; he had visited slaughterhouses and tells us “Ain't no mistaking” a horse's skull (5). Waldrop then elides a dull skull-cleaning scene by having Kincaid order Bessie and the other crew members to sleep while he works through the night, saving his finds for the next scene.

Bessie returns to Kincaid's tent at daybreak. Ominously, the gramophone is silent, and the varnished horse skull glares at her from Kincaid's camp table. Kincaid has his partner examine a neat round hole in the skull, of the sort a high-velocity projectile might produce, then hands her his most alarming find: a corroded metal cylinder, caked in dirt, that Bessie recognizes as a “brass rifle cartridge” (10). Ain't no mistaking one of those, either.

Waldrop breaks from the 1929 archaeologists to start his other two plot lines, but for sake of continuity and elucidation I'll finish this entry with the next part of this storyline, “Bessie II.” We rejoin Bessie and Kincaid later in the day, as their crew, “look[ing] like a bunch of ants” (29) in the distance, dig deeper into mound 2A. By now they have found another six jumbled horse skeletons, buried with other grave goods and some potsherds datable to 700-1500 CE. This confirms Bessie's fears about the cartridge: it postdates the upper chronological limit of the associated Indian culture by 350 years.

It's not the only thing the archaeologists have to fret about. Waldrop uses another feature of the landscape, the sluggish Suckatoncha Bayou, to tell readers that the mounds sit on a floodplain, due to submerge in a few weeks when the state finishes its newest flood-control barriers. However, recent heavy rains have caused state officials to close the dams downriver, and the waters near Bessie's dig are already rising. She and Kincaid have to solve an unsolvable mystery within a shrinking time limit.

Kincaid tells us new crews will soon arrive to help with the dig and its interpretation. It's a good thing, too: both he and Bessie are completely stumped.  

Coming next: Madison Yazoo Leake is very lost.

**

(Image of Pharr Mounds, MS, courtesy of the National Park Service.)

Ain't Like No Workings of the Lord

Like so many enterprises, science fiction and fantasy have given big rewards to a few of their practitioners and a pittance, or worse, to many more. Longtime fans will recall stories of Philip K. Dick living on pet food, or H. Beam Piper choosing a quick death over slow starvation. Howard Waldrop numbers among the numerous SF writers who earn far less than they deserve. In Waldrop's case this results, in part, from his preference for short fiction, no longer a very marketable product, over novels and series, which pay better but don't match his talents or inclinations. This is a great pity, for Waldrop combines a well-honed talent for story-telling with erudition, a nicely-perverse folksiness, and fearless speculation. His story “The Ugly Chickens” speculates on the survival into the present-day, in a Faulknerian backwater, of the most famous extinct species of all, and includes one of the most vivid dream sequences it has been my pleasure to read. “Custer's Last Jump,” co-written with Steven Utley, featured nineteenth-century paratroopers, Lakota fighter pilots, and a massive bibliography of sources, all invented by the authors. In “The Effects of Alienation” Waldrop staged a “Hitler Victorious” alternate history scenario for the sole purpose of testing its impact on Peter Lorre. “Night of the Cooters” pitted a small-town Texas sheriff (a thinly-disguised Slim Pickens) against H.G. Wells's Martians. One could go on and on.

A critic aptly called Waldrop's work “brilliant and berserk.” One could also describe it as labor-intensive and uncompromising. The author never hinges a story on one idea when half a dozen will do, and he never tells the same story twice. This makes it impossible for him to churn out the serials and hackwork that provide other SF authors with their path to fame and, if not wealth, at least self-sufficiency. Indeed, Waldrop apparently finds it hard to write novels: his humor, intellectual games, Classical references, and cultural ephemera work much better in the confined space of a short story or novella. He has, however, left us one solo novel, Them Bones, and it shows that, whatever the cause of Waldrop's aversion to novels, it isn't lack of talent. It is a multi-plot book of time travel, alternate history, and apocalypse, involving baffled archaeologists, Mound-Builder Indians, mammoths, lost G.I.s, Aztec priests, and a heady evocation of the lower Mississippi Valley, a place more alien to SF writers than Alpha Centauri. I read it at just the right time: in grad school, just as I began my study of Native American history. I reread it when I took my first trip down the Natchez Trace Parkway, a journey that showed me the dense interlayering of pre-Columbian Indian culture and early American history in the Deep South. “The past...isn't even past,” one Mississippi writer famously wrote, and Waldrop, born in Mississippi himself, show that this applies just as readily to Coles-Creek Indians as Faulkner's peasants and nabobs. Lying at the intersection of my hobby and my vocation, Them Bones remains one of my favorite books, and over the next year or so I plan to spend some time on this blog revisiting it and its many charms. I hope my readers will enjoy the trip.

**

(Above image, of Waldrop in 2007, courtesy of The Jeff and Wikimedia Commons.)

Accursed Leng

Despite his other defects as a writer (and ample enough they were), H.P. Lovecraft had one gift that helped him surpass the limits of the pulp-fiction ghetto and endure to the present day: his power to describe the uncanny, horrifying worlds that lay just beyond the edges of our own. Who among his readers can forget the crumbling houses and fishy residents of Innsmouth, the distant shrieking of shoggoths on a wind-blasted Antarctic plateau, the locked library cabinets wherein potent grimoires waited for victims, the terrifying inscriptions one narrator found in a long-buried Australian ruin, the fungus-encrusted kingdom of the damned festering beneath Exham Priory? Poe could certainly craft better prose than HPL's, but he rarely matched his successor in crafting such evocative settings, such sublimely hostile and inhuman places perched on the very edges of our more comforting reality.

Lovecraft's influence on modern horror remains incalculable. His creations even bleed over into other genres, like techno-spy fiction and detective stories. Take, for example, one of his chillier minor references, to the Plateau of Leng. This deeply isolated land, situated in some mountain fastness on this world or near it, sheltered a race of barbaric near-humans who worshiped the demon god Nyarlathotep and ate human flesh. HPL first mentioned Leng and its “corpse-eating cult” in his story “The Hound” (1922). Later, he called it the “roof of a bloated and tenantless world” (“The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”), noted the yellow-masked, nameless high priest who dwelt at the plateau's center, and suggested (“At the Mountains of Madness”) that Leng and its “temples of horror” might actually lie within Antarctica. Part of Leng's mystery came from its uncertain location, suggesting it was an archetype rather than a fixed domain. “Dream Quest” situated Leng within the otherworldly Dream Lands, while “The Hound” placed it in Central Asia, and a 1935 letter from HPL to Robert Bloch suggested it was in Tibet, identifying Leng's inhabitants as the demihuman “Tcho-tchos” invented by Lovecraft's protege August Derleth. In all these tales, the devotion of Leng's inhabitants to evil remained a constant.

Later in the twentieth century, accursed Leng made its way into a number of stories written by HPL's admirers, like Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, and Marc Laidlaw, as well as novels by Brian Lumley and Stephen King and one or two mentions in the game Magic: The Gathering. As a concept, if not a name, Lovecraft's demonic mountain kingdom seems to have spread still further. In his novel Flood (2008), the physicist and sci-fi writer Stephen Baxter posited the catastrophic upwelling of a vast subterranean sea, more capacious than all the oceans of the present day. Over the course of four decades the floodwaters drown every city and inundate every forest and plain on the planet's surface. As the end approaches, a handful of wealthy or sufficiently desperate refugees made their way to Tibet. No longer the icy mountain kingdom of our own era, Tibet has become the last substantial piece of dry land on Earth. There, however, the travelers learn that murderous warlords had conquered the province, and would only allow in those they wanted to take as slaves or “harvest” as food. The human skulls adorning the gates to this hellish new realm told strangers what they could expect within.

I have no idea if Baxter was a Lovecraft fan, but the similarities between his future Tibet, a land of cannibalism and murder, and HPL's Leng, a mountain kingdom of flesh-eaters at the roof of a seemingly empty earth, appear greater than coincidence can explain. Perhaps Lovecraft was so adept at evoking geo-cultural archetypes that even a hard SF writer, not known for his flights of fancy, could not help describing the same dreamscape when his narrative called for it. As with Carcosa, Leng has a real substance to it that transcends the imagination of a single genre author.

Pop Goes the Space Miner: Outland Still Entertains

On its release in 1981, Outland received poor reviews from critics like Roger Ebert, who dismissed it as “High Noon in space,” and sci-fi critics who pointed out its technical and scientific flaws (such as the spacesuit helmet lights that would actually have blinded the wearers). In the longer term, the film became lost in the glare of other contemporary SF classics, like The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Blade Runner (1982). Yet the film repays careful viewing, and watching it again recently I was struck by Outland's high technical quality and super-competent acting.

The movie's plot is nothing fancy. Space marshal William O'Niel (Sean Connery) wonders why workers on a distant mining colony are going crazy; when he uncovers the reason, mining company officials target him for assassination. As in many other sci-fi pictures, the plot of Outland takes a backseat to the setting, into which writer-director Peter Hyams and his crew clearly infused most of their creative energy. They present the mining station as a tense, dirty, fully realized world. Battered scaffolds cling to vertiginous mining faces. Grimy white corridors distinguished only by stenciled numbers remind us that the station's builders had no concern for individuality. Stacked sleeping cubicles, where miners sit or lay exhausted, evoke a giant insect hive. Inside, fluorescent lights glare and, outside, welding arcs paint sharp-edged shadows on the dangerous landscape. Even the walls of station manager Mark Sheppard's (Peter Boyle) subdued, well-appointed office seem to press in on him, as he tries to push back against them with rounds of virtual golf. Station 27 is, in short, a tightly-sealed world barely containing itself against the hellish environment outside, a world on the edge of exploding – as O'Niel explodes with anger on the station's squash courts, as miners explode with violence when they go buggo, as bodies explode (with, admittedly, unrealistic velocity) when exposed to the near-vacuum outside.

Hyams clearly drew some of the inspiration for Station 27 and its denizens from Ridley Scott's Alien, whose grimy, cavernous spaceship and mundane freight handlers contrasted sharply with H.R. Giger's baroque, sleekly-deadly monster. Outland, however, has no alien monsters. Here man's enemies are the deadly environment and the people it warps and torments.

Outland also stands in sharp contrast to earlier sci-fi films in the age and disposition of its characters. Movies like Star Wars, Logan's Run, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture assumed the denizens of the future (or of a space empire) would be young, athletic, and forward-looking. Alien challenged this convention by featuring a predominantly older cast, but ensured that the two youngest actresses, Veronica Cartwright and Sigourney Weaver, would number among the final survivors. Outland has no place for youth or optimism. Its miners are uniformly grim and surly, its cops depressed time-servers, its only cheerful character Mark Sheppard, whose bonhomie masks his exploitative and murderous designs. O'Niel, after his wife and son leave for Earth, spends much of the film wondering if a washed-up mediocrity like himself can make a difference, or if he should just serve his tour and keep his mouth shut. Ultimately, Hyams reveals that one old marshal probably can't make a difference, but two has-beens probably can: the station doctor, Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), who describes herself as an old “wreck” and who spends her free time kvetching and drinking, not only helps O'Niel solve the mystery of the exploding miners but helps save his life in the film's closing scenes.

That aging losers can make a difference, that they still have a place in a forbidding future, was a clever message to send to sci-fi fans, many of whom were Baby Boomers approaching “the Big Four-Oh” and real or imagined midlife crises. Certainly it became a central feature of many of the Star Trek films, to the point of ridiculousness in the case of Generations*, and more recently of John Scalzi's Old Man's War series. The young, of course, will always dominate the other SF and fantasy franchises, if only because they are more desirable to advertisers.

* The climactic scene of which one of my friends characterized as “three old white guys fighting on a rock.”