Preservation

They would kill us if they knew what we do here, in the turtle pit. Her hands clench behind my neck like a second bundle of optic nerves, giving my eyes the strength to withstand the intense glare of this place – black rock walls, washed-out sky. Above the turtle pit, the fields sweep out for gold miles all the way to the town where everyone lives. We crawl under the truck. Its shadow is the only escape from the heat. Underneath, it smells of oil, dust and our sweat. All the fossils in the turtle pit lie in heaps around us. The sharp mouths of rocks bruise us as we roll and our cries echo back for millions of years.

Once, after we make love, she reaches across my body and takes a trilobite from beside my shoulder. She holds it over us – a small prehistoric creature, its back patterned like a brain. I run my finger along the black contours of its form, then around the lines of her body. We scramble into the hot light and pull our clothes over our bodies. I jump into my jeans. She buttons up the long skirt that she has to wear, even in summer. She slides the trilobite into my pocket where it bulges beside my wallet.

“Wait, wait,” I say and rummage in the truck for my camera.

“No, no,” she protests, smiling, then afraid.

“Just stand there.”

This is the image of her that I will keep. Arms akimbo, her wild smile, like a kid posing with Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, one of the turtles at her side. The black shape absorbs all light, bends all space toward it. Then a long sequence of her standing at mock attention, hands linked around her slim stomach. As I click the shutter again, again, she stares solemnly into the camera’s small eye, the fossilized turtle resting at her side. Then she bends and kisses its blunt black top, hard, falls to her knees with her arms around it. My laughter bounces and shines off the rock walls.

My dad and my stepmom, Anne, named it the turtle pit. The pit was dug out by a logging company to get rock to grind up for roads, then abandoned. The walls are loaded with fossils – once, it must have been a riverbed or cove, protected and fertile. My dad found the turtle pit on the way back from a camping trip. He took Anne, an amateur fossil nut, then me. We stared at the turtles coming out of the earth like tumours or diamonds. I ran my fingers over them, feeling something garish and magical in me.

A few months later, they drove out there in the truck of a friend who works in construction and used his equipment to lift two of the turtles into the back of the truck. They set one turtle down on either side of the door to our house. Door ornaments or prehistoric sentinels. A real hoot, they said. Walking between them for the first time, I couldn’t help but feel judged by the ages. The week before, I had met her.

It was my idea for us to start going to the turtle pit. It was just two hours out of town and at the end of its own abandoned road. In the back of my mind, I was reassured that a place made of rock couldn’t keep a record. All soft surfaces could betray us with the marks of our bodies.

Every afternoon after we made love for those first few weeks in her house, we stood in the laundry room while the washing machine churned the sheet clean. It was our ritual. Hip against tilted hip; breast against breast; the white metal edge of the machine against her back or mine. The basement room barely lit by the sun that worked its way through the ground-level window. We listened for her father’s footsteps above us. Once, I had to scramble out the window and crawl along the side of the house to walk the mile to where I had parked my truck.

It was only a matter of time before someone walked into the empty house when her bedroom was live with the sounds of us.

“It’ll be safe there,” I told her. I drove her past our house quickly, once, and she craned her neck to see the turtles by the door. My stepmom, Anne, waved at my truck from the front window.

We’ve been coming here ever since, for months now, to the turtle pit. One narrow road leads down into it. The tire marks from my truck wrinkle the dust. After every visit, I walk up and down, checking for others, then kneel and wipe ours away.

All the houses on our side of town are full of stuff found on the beaches – foam buoys the weight of volcanic rock, smoothed glass and shells printed with galaxies. Glass floats, beautiful as bathyspheres, picked from kelp beds. Cans of pop that drifted, unopened, all the way from China. Someday a researcher will go around and collect all this stuff, put it together and write a true report about everyone who lives here.

An archaeologist. That’s what I’m going to be. I can dig through and pull out what matters, I tell her. I have a way with layers. She laughs, pulls the back of her hand across my cheek, then holds it around my breast. “Sure you are,” she says. The piping of the truck’s belly shines above her like the dark network of a body. She hates making love in front of the turtles. “I feel like they’re watching us,” she whispers.

In her part of town, decorations harvested from beaches are absent from porches and mantles. Wooden houses like cabins stand side by side, cut from the same tube of frozen cinnamon-coloured cookie dough. We met at the Halloween dance at the skating rink – the only chance for kids from the high school and the Traditional school, the thumper school, to meet. The ice had been melted off for repairs, revealing a dance floor of concrete that was unbelievably smooth. She stood with the girls from the thumper school. They looked like the backup singers for a kitschy German band. They bent down and held their noses above the skin of the punch, suspecting liquor.

I watched her walk onto the dance floor. Her movements to the song were all off. Anyone could tell that she had never danced before. Her legs bowed and swayed under her long skirt. I began to measure time by the movements of her body, not the beats in the music. People stood in a circle around her. The thumper kids backed up. She danced until a tall boy about my age strode forward and stilled her with a finger on her elbow. Oh God, I thought. Not this. Not her.

I can smell my dad from the front door. He sits in the underwater light of the living room, feet up, his fingers around his bottle like a cradle of dirty white rope.

“What’re you doin’ now?” he says. I hear it wrong, as “What’re you gonna do?” because it’s all I think about – when I will leave town and how I can take her with me. I can’t stay around here wearing jeans and driving a truck after graduation. No woman can do that, here.

“I’m going to be an archaeologist,” I say.

“Sure you are,” he says, his eyes fixed on Dr. Phil. “Ark-ee-oil-oe-jist. Last job I did was cleaning out someone’s basement. The pipes were broke. Not the water pipes. The shit pipes. That’s a bad job to have. Shovelling out a basement of half-frozen shit. I pretended it was cookie dough.” He drains the rest of his beer. “Isn’t that what an ark-ee-oil-oe-jist does, though? Digs through everybody else’s shit.”

I have been reading about fossils in the magazine Anne subscribes to.

Fossil comes from the Latin fossus, meaning “having been dug up.” A living fossil is an informal term – a living species that’s a lot like a species that is now living. A trace fossil is activity left in the rock. A fossil isn’t something that worked to get that way. All it takes is the right place, minerals, compression, and then millions and millions of years. Also, I spent part of the summer reading On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin.

I see myself in a basement, shovelling shit out a window.

“What’re you just standing there for?” I have discovered recently that he hates it when I look at him.

“You’re a living fossil,” I say.

He gets up, steps toward me.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

I drive the truck as fast as I can across the town to her house. People on the sidewalk stop and look at my truck. I stop pounding on her door when a man opens it. I recognize him from her stories.

“Can I help you?” he says.

I take a step back. My ears are stuffed with tiny violins. Trees bristle with the static of wings – birds on their way out.

“Is she here?”

“Is who here?”

I say her name.

“Yes, she’s here. Can I tell her who’s looking for her?”

He looks past my shoulder at the truck.

“Where do you live?” he says. “How do you know her?”

She slides up, beside his elbow. “What’s going on?”

“Do you know this girl?” her father asks her.

He angles his logger’s body toward hers. More than half the men in town are loggers and the other half work in the mill. On windy days, the mill blankets the town with a smell exactly like rotten eggs burning in an old cast-iron pan.

“No,” she says. “I don’t know her.”

“Sorry,” he says. “It seems you have the wrong house.”

The next afternoon, she folds socks in the laundry room and pretends not to hear my fingernails, palms, then knuckles against the glass. She opens the window an inch.

“Are you crazy? The neighbours will hear.”

“Let me in.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” My clothes are filthy from sleeping in the truck last night.

“My father heard about the dance.”

“Does he know about us?” She doesn’t answer, holds her arm against the window so I can’t open it any further. “What did you tell him?”

“He saw how you were looking at me. But he already knew.”

“How?”

“Please leave. The neighbours will hear.”

“How?”

“Last year. They wanted me to leave. He told them it wouldn’t happen again.”

“You told me I was the first.”

“Was I yours?”

My knees are numb from kneeling and fear.

“Yes.” I put my fingers through the small opening in the window. Her skin feels like stone. “Please let me in.”

“I’ll be cast out,” she says.

I push the window the rest of the way open.

“Hell.”

I climb onto the laundry machine and then down onto the floor.

“Close the window,” she says. “The neighbours will hear.”

I close the window. It is as if all of the muscles in her body give up and stop when I touch her. She lets me lay her back on the pile of laundry to be washed. His laundry. All the smells of this place rise around our bodies. Wood shavings, sweat. I grasp fat handfuls of her skirt, her everyday uniform.

During those hours in the pit as we made love under the truck, she often raged against this skirt, against the husband her father has chosen. I saw him at the dance. He was the one who led her out of the cheering circle on the floor. He was lean and as caramel-coloured as an adolescent deer. I am humiliated that he is the one who will have her. Her hands clench together behind my neck. There is a permanent bruise where her thumbs dig in. When that dark imprint fades, I will have lost her from my body.

I fall again and again into her and we are back in the turtle pit, protected by dark walls. I fall again and we sink farther, into the rock, and all the way down. Her hair lies across the floor like a vein of brilliant ore in the linoleum floor.

“I can’t leave. This is my home,” she says.

“What does that mean?”

She looks at me closely, as if she pities me.

“It means that this is where I’ll stay until I die. It means that this is where I want to be buried.”

It is raining when I climb onto the surface of the earth. I drag my legs out of the window behind me like thick, wet roots. A smear of white paint on dark glass – a face watches me through another basement window.

The sun makes the black pit into an oven. I carry armfuls of rock to the middle of the pit and pull them apart. I sit and study the imprints inside, preserved there like an ancient form of plate photography. A pit of fossils is a good place to be desperate for messages. I stare at the insides of rocks until my eyes sting and run. A large chunk falls into two parts in my hands. Inside, a network of marks like light scratches on a blackboard, too small and faint to identify. Were they tiny worms, or the last traces of something bigger that wasn’t preserved? I search for a pattern until I realize that they were still in motion when this happened to them. I open more rocks. A fern’s tip, the torso of a prehistoric insect. Her curved neck, the hourglass of her body.

The truck coming sounds like an avalanche in the distance. I watch the four men come down the steep road. When I see what her father holds in his hand, I stand. I hold my fossils up like weapons.

The first blow brings blindness. The sky lunges upward and darkness crumbles off the world like a wall of rock. My body falls again and again. Every time I fall, I open my eyes and see the turtles watching this. They tell me the story of when it happened to them – how the cloud of dust came and covered their earth in a day, put their bodies far under the layers of the earth. The enormous green ocean they swam through, the fish and creatures that were their world, patterns of leaves, patterns of tide, the banks where they mated under the moon that stayed safe from the fire. It happened without reason. There was no warning except for a change of temperature in the air. It happened to us and now it is happening to you, they tell me. What you are, we once were. 

A former features editor for Canadian University Press, Alex Leslie says this short story was inspired, in part, by her childhood trips to North Vancouver Island. When not writing fiction – look for one of her short stories in a future issue of Descant – she’s completing her Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia.

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