The Mystery Stone

The little river was dry and was nearly always dry. The two boys walked along the bed of crackled red clay, where patches of brittle desert scrub sprouted here and there, before sitting under a palo verde tree that stood like a twisted sentinel upon the bank. Some crows pecked at the ground not far from the tree, bobbing their whole bodies and cawing from time to time for no discernible reason. The boys rested their backs against the thin trunk of the mostly leafless palo verde. They picked at the earth with their fingers like the crows worried the earth with their beaks, and lifted their chins to produce raucous cries in imitation of the birds the sky absorbed like a sponge.

The one boy, Bear, which was short for Bertrand pronounced like his French mother used to, asked: “Got that thing with you?” He was a heavy-set kid with raven hair and deep sullen eyes, a quarter Navajo on the paternal side, and ordinarily not very voluble.

“What thing?” his companion asked. Everyone called this boy, who was lanky and whose surname was Waskowski, Wolf because his hair had already gone gray, and the alliteration with his last name sounded cool. Like Bear, he was only nine.

“You know. That rock you found.”

Wolf dug into the pocket of his trousers, brought out the little stone. He’d discovered it the other day while wandering around up here on the flat-top mesa when Bear had been absent for a dental appointment. It was a smooth, black object scored with an array of intricate symbols that resembled hieroglyphs.

“Lemme look at it,” Bear said.

Wolf handed the stone over to Bear. It really wasn’t a very big stone. Bear could hold it in his palm and cover it completely with his fingers. The incisions were minute, shallow, elaborate, and you had to angle the stone just so to see them clearly.

“I wonder what it means,” Bear said.

“Maybe your dad would know,” Wolf said.

“Why would he know? He doesn’t know anything.” Bear didn’t get along that well with his father, who worked long hours at the mill and came home in a mood to put his feet up and not much else. “What about your dad?”

“He doesn’t know anything either.” Wolf’s dad clerked at city hall in the water and power department. He cut people with delinquent utility bills off, after a series of increasingly menacing written and verbal notices. He’d started turning gray, too, at an early age. It was a hereditary thing.

“I think it’s from outer space,” Bear said, examining the stone. “A flying saucer dropped it on the ground blasting off. That’s why it’s burnt black.” He watched the crows, glistening in the sunlight, as they winged over to another spot. They flew haphazardly, landed, and started beaking the ground again. “Or maybe it’s a crow without wings,” Bear said. “A baby crow the parents left behind.” He thought some more. “A crow egg.”

“Thats stupid,” Wolf said. “Crow eggs aren’t black like crows.”

“It’s not stupid. The writing, it tells you everything about the baby crow inside. What to do. How to feed it and stuff. Instructions.”

“It’s dead,” Wolf said, making a kind of joke. He snatched the stone out of Bear’s hand and stuffed it back in his pocket again.

They waited beneath the palo verde tree for a while saying nothing. The afternoon sun beat down on them like a great yellow hammer of flame. There were all sorts of pebbles scattered everywhere and they began flicking them into the riverbed, where a few lizards were disturbed. The lizards scurried off to find fresh shadows. They were the same dirty russet as the scrub and soil and you had trouble spotting their motionless forms basking in the shade until they moved.

“Where’d you find it again?” Bear asked.

“Around here.”

“Yeah, but where?”

“Over by that mound over there, I think.” There was a dome-shaped ant hill about fifty feet away. Several of the insects were foraging in the dirt where they sat, some of them carrying huge loads.

“That’s an ant hill,” Bear said. “Maybe the ants made it.”

“Ants can’t make anything.”

“They made that mound.”

“Ants can’t write.”

“Maybe they can write. Maybe a million ants can scrape a message into a rock.”

“Doubt it.”

Bear liked the idea of mysterious messages. Ever since his mom died in a car wreck last July he expected some sign. A pickup driven by a drunk on a beer run ran a red light and broadsided her car. She was coming home from the supermarket with a trunk full of groceries.

“Let’s go over to the edge,” Bear said.

It was a hundred-foot drop from the mesa’s perimeter to the desert floor. The boys hiked up here by the zigzag trail on the northern slope almost every summer day. Now they rose, heading south before stopping about a yard from a sheer acantilado. After a moment Bear said, “Can I see it again, please?” Wolf sighed but handed his rare find over to Bear.

Bear went into the complicated windup he used in Little League, then fired the stone over the brink. It flew in a long arc, vanishing without a sound. Wolf was about to protest and even get angry, but it began to rain. Water shot down from the blue sky like a slew of silvery daggers and stabbed the ocher earth. Soon a legion of round, bug-eyed creatures sprung from the muddy soil. They leapt in all directions, speaking a croaking tongue Bear nearly believed he understood.

By the time the rain ceased the toads were all gathered in the countless pools that had formed over the flat-top mesa. And for the first time in a year, beckoning the boys from across the tableland in the melting voices of their dreams, the fugitive river flowed.

“You see,” Bear proclaimed, somehow satisfied. “We’re not alone.”