Lizard Man

More about Lizard Man

The Yokuts used to dwell in the area until the gold rush turned them all into ghosts. History said they vanished, but that’s only a polite lie the living tell themselves so they don’t have to feel watched. They didn’t go anywhere. They just changed neighborhoods, moved into shadows, dust, and the hollowed-out wind that blows between orchards. The lizards talked to them, because lizards have good manners and understand continuity better than people. The ghosts didn’t answer with words, but the land listened anyway.

There was a telephone pole in the Central Valley outside of Turlock that served as a little apartment building for lizard families. Sceloporus occidentalis clinging like old photographs nobody throws away. Generations lived on that sun-baked wood—great-great-grandparents, distant cousins, and whatever drifted in on heat waves. Even an immigrant, a Philaeus chrysops, who didn’t seem to mind being foreign. A Colaptes auratus came by sometimes, like a visitor who never leaves enough explanation behind. Down at the base of everything, burrowing owls had their levee homes and blinked with the slow patience of librarians guarding the dusty shelves of existence.

Tommy was there too, a human comet forever circling the pole. He loved honey the way some people love religion, endlessly sticky with devotion. He followed the telephone lines like rosary beads stretched across the land—one pole to the next to the next—looking for little parcels of bird-of-prey vomit like presents from the sky. He collected skulls the way the future collects lost causes. Mice skulls, delicate bones, and sometimes the fragile remains of a fence lizard, a small and perfect cathedral of calcium.

Every time he bent down, he felt them: the Yokuts, humming under the soil like a low radio signal from another century. He imagined them standing behind him, politely existing. He wondered if sorrow could turn into weather. He wondered if they felt lonely or if humans only ever assume ghosts are sad because we’re afraid of removing ourselves from storylines.

The pole glowed in the sun, a monument no one acknowledged, a lighthouse stranded in an orchard sea. The lizard man basked, motionless, like a face carved from ancient patience. The ghosts leaned in. The wind held its breath.

And everything stayed exactly where it was, because someone had to.