Twisted Tales of Texas Landmarks

Enjoy this excerpt from the story “Stone Man” by Alexis Glynn Latner:
Jay Willis never saw the apparition, because he stopped to watch Roberta sketch a cactus flower. Roberta’s husband Mike kept going up the trail. Mike disappeared around a huge boulder uphill while Jay looked over Roberta’s shoulder, fascinated by how her pencil strokes summarized the chubby cactus and its lavish pink bloom.
Suddenly Mike galloped back down the trail. “Gray guy! Big! Giant!” Mike shouted, waving his arms. “Walked right out in front of me—Gaack!” Mike’s boots slipped on the loose rocks that littered the trail. The rocks clattered nastily. Mike fell backwards and landed hard. “Mike!” Dropping her sketchpad, Roberta ran to him.
Flat on his back, Mike groaned. He waved up the trail. “Go. Look. S’incredible.”
“You go look,” Roberta told Jay, her eyes wide with alarm.
Jay ran up the trail to where it skirted the boulder. He warily peered around the boulder’s rough side. Thirty yards or so uphill, the trail was blocked by a heap of rocks, the end result of a minor landslide, ragged limestone sloughed off the higher terrain nearby. A furry brown tarantula ambled across the rocks’ splayed skirt of pebbles. Nothing else moved. Jay scanned the trail as it switchbacked up toward the top of Dead Horse Ridge. Seeing nothing but rocks and cacti, he returned to his friends.
Roberta had disentangled Mike from his backpack and laid him down in the thin shade of a creosote bush. Cradling Mike’s head in her lap, she stroked his flushed face with a wetted bandanna. Jay heard Mike mumble, “Robbie, apart from the nerve endings where my skin is scraped, I don’t feel bad.”
“You were seeing things. That’s bad.”
“It might not be heat stroke,” Mike said with a faint grin. “Maybe it’s just a brain tumor.”
Jay kneeled beside the two of them. “All I found was a small landslide. Plants have taken root in it, so it isn’t recent. It couldn’t have been what—”
“—stepped out in front of me,” Mike said emphatically.
The hot air carried pungent scent leached from the creosote bush by the midday heat. “Confusion is a symptom of heat stroke,” Roberta said in a low voice.
Mike laced his fingers together over his chest. “At first I wondered who the gray man was. I was thinking about drug smugglers or illegal aliens, somebody who’d waded, or rather wallowed, across the river where it runs low, and who was caked in gray mud.”
“I didn’t see any footprints,” Jay said.
“Then it looked at me.” Mike stared up at the sky. “It was not a human person. That’s when I ran back here.”
Roberta’s dark eyes telegraphed her fear to Jay. She held up the canteen to Mike’s lips. “Sip some more water. I told you that you were pushing too hard.”
Jay worried. Help was a good eleven miles away. They’d hiked that far since leaving the ranger station at Comanche Gap yesterday morning. Activating his Personal Locator Beacon would bring help in a hurry—but the PLB was supposed to be for “situations of grave and imminent danger.” Mike might fully recover if he just rehydrated. Jay said, “I spotted a place we can camp a little ways on up. It’s almost flat, and I can tie my tarp onto some ocotillos for shade.”
“That will do nicely,” said Roberta.
She set a slow and steady pace.
Whatever Mike saw when he first came this way, he had been alone. Jay blamed himself. Yet the three of them had taken many hiking trips together, and Mike always hiked ahead when Roberta paused to enjoy the scenery, and Jay, less gung-ho than Mike, kept a comfortable pace in the middle. Jay felt shaken by how this trip had taken such a weird turn.
But they were in Big Bend National Park. The Big Bend had never been safe, soft country, Jay reminded himself. It hadn’t been safe when Comanches and desperadoes came through more than a hundred years ago, and it wasn’t soft now.
Mike eyed the old rockslide as they filed past it. “That round stone might have been the head…and that pair of slabs might possibly have been the legs. I didn’t observe knees.”
“Come on.” Roberta radiated anxiety.
“I feel fine,” Mike said. “I could make it to Cottonwood Spring.” That had been the plan: hike up the west slope of Dead Horse Ridge, then in the heat of late afternoon cover some easy downhill miles in the shadow of the ridge, camp under the cottonwoods, and tomorrow morning wake up to see sunrise slanting across the Rio Grande River.
“No way,” Roberta snapped. “Jay’s found a perfectly good campsite.” Mike sighed.
The campsite was small. It would be close quarters for two tents plus paraphernalia. The ocotillo plants—thorny stems seven feet tall—though sturdy enough to hold up a tarp for shade, would lacerate anyone who blundered into them.
Mike said, “Let’s go on.”
“No!”
“But there are trees, a spring, and a view of the river at our appointed camp site.”
“Maybe tomorrow!” Roberta said with finality.
Mike settled down in the tarp’s shade. He expressed mild satisfaction in lazily watching the others set up camp. A hot breeze gusted up. Roberta and Mike’s tent, after she had assembled it but before she tied it down, almost lofted away. Jay lunged to catch the wayward tent. Laughing, Roberta reclaimed it from him, which reminded Jay how much fun it could be to go camping with Mike and Roberta, especially in Big Bend.
This was an OK place to camp, Jay decided. It accommodated their tents, and it had Big Bend scenery. To the northwest, the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains jutted into the sky. Eons ago, this land had been the floor of a wide warm sea, piled deep in sediments. But the Chisos peaks were ancient lava, the hot blood of the earth that bubbled up through the sedimentary deposits to the surface of the planet, and froze into the jagged shape of the mountaintops.
The lesser heights and hills were weathered old sedimentary rock, limestone. Dead Horse Ridge bulked up south of the campsite. With a ragged, convex spine shimmering in the late day’s heat, the Dead Horse Ridge looked more like a deceased sea monster. The monster had shed scales in its aeonian decay. Jay tossed a dozen flat edgy rocks away from where he put his own tent.
“How about a nice early supper?” Roberta suggested. Jay obliged, producing his backpacker stove. Mike, who had not spoken for a while, suddenly said, “It had eyes. Not pebbles. Not cactus buds. Eyes. I had been just about to strike up a conversation… But not with something with eyes like that.”
Jay caught Roberta’s look of renewed alarm. Mike reclined, ankles crossed and fingers laced behind his head, a typical pose for him. But he sounded disconnected from the here and now. “Eyes like what?” Jay asked.
“I once saw a silversmith use a blowtorch to melt silver. In the crucible the torch flared brilliant orange. Eyes,” Mike said, “like bowls of fire.”
* * * *

Roberta fussed over Mike. Mike complained about the change of plans and the grit on his person and not having enough water to do a decent job of washing up. If going for a long walk in the desert had been an option, Jay would have done so. But the stove resisted being lit, delaying supper as Jay struggled with it.
The sun settled toward the western horizon, flooding the Big Bend with yellow glare. Desert plants that stood in the sunset’s way cast long sharp shadows on the ground. The shadows made Jay think of weapons. Giant dagger yucca plants threw down bunches of knives. There were shades of spears too, smooth lechugilla spears and thorny, crossed ocotillo ones, and cholla cactus maces. Jay knew this was hard, wild land, but never before had he sensed the desert’s hostility like this.
They ate supper in glum silence except for utensils scraping aluminum plates. Halfway through the meal, Jay resolved to get their minds away from here. Jay told Mike, “You said something about wondering at first who that gray man was. Back home in South Carolina, on the coast and the Sea Islands near Charleston, there’s a legend called Gray Man.”
“Oh? How does the legend go?”
“Toward the end of summer, there would come a day when the palm tree branches were rattling in the wind from the sea, and the waves were running fast from the southeast, and somebody would see a gray figure walking on the beach. It was a phantom. Indistinct around the edges. Some people swore it was the ghost of a Confederate soldier, gray uniform and all.”
“Mine was hard around the edges. Stony,” Mike said.
“People took the legend seriously as recently as when my grandparents were my age. If word went around that Gray Man had been seen on Pawley’s Island or up around Bull’s Inlet, families headed for higher ground. Because when Gray Man walked on the beach, it meant a hurricane was coming.”
Roberta’s eyes sparkled. “That’s a good legend.”
“I like it,” said Jay. “Anyone who sees Gray Man will escape from harm—provided they leave the low-lying areas before the storm hits.”