My brother Larry will tell you he once roped a falling star. He will show you the scorch mark on his hat. What he will not mention is that I made the scorch mark with a pie tin and he bought the hat three weeks later.
So when he says he caught the luminous lizard of Starling Wash, ask him how long he held it. Ask him what he used for bait. Ask him, especially, who carried the spare rope.
It began with a notice nailed to the door of my stable in Tin Cup Crossing. Mr. Greeves, who owned a traveling cabinet of curiosities, offered forty dollars for the lizard, alive and unmarked. Its scales, he said, shone brighter than any lamp. Forty dollars was what the stable roof would cost me if the carpenter could stop laughing at its present condition.
Larry read the notice while rain dripped through the roof onto his boot.
“I’ll bring it in by supper,” he said.
“You don’t know where it is.”
“Starling Wash.”
“Starling Wash is nine miles long.”
“Then I shall be thorough.”
He rolled his best rope over one shoulder and set out on his horse. I saddled my mare and followed with water, a second rope, and a tin of beans. Larry called this lack of faith. I called it lunch.
We found our first witness at the old stage stop. Mrs. Hobb had seen a light moving along the wash the night before, low to the ground and green as a bottle held against the sun. She had also seen Mr. Greeves go that way with a burlap sack.
“He plans to beat me to his own prize,” Larry said.
“Maybe he wants to see what he’s buying,” I said.
Mrs. Hobb leaned over her fence. “Maybe both of you ought to leave the poor thing alone.”
Larry promised he would not hurt it. He meant that when he said it. He had once stepped over a rattlesnake in his own kitchen because he could not bear to interrupt its nap. Then he stepped back over it, ran outside, and asked me to remove it.
At the mouth of the wash we found boot prints, wagon tracks, and little marks in the sand that looked like a row of commas. Larry stared at them with the expression he uses when hoping a clue will arrange itself into a speech.
“The lizard has gone north,” he announced.
“The commas point south.”
“It travels backward.”
“Then so do Mr. Greeves’s boots.”
We went south.
Starling Wash bent between two shelves of red stone. At sunset, the walls held the day’s heat. The shadows rose, and the little comma tracks vanished under the wheel ruts. Mr. Greeves’s wagon stood half a mile ahead of us, tilted against a boulder. He was sitting beside it, fanning himself with a card that said WONDERS OF THE KNOWN WORLD.
“The axle’s gone,” he told us. “If you’ve come for the lizard, it went up the dry channel. If you’ve come for the wagon, I would be grateful.”
He showed us an empty wooden cage. Its door was open. Inside lay a crumpled cloth that smelled of peaches. He had brought fruit for bait, which proved he knew as little about lizards as Larry did.
“We’ll send someone for your wagon,” I said. “Can you ride?”
“I can walk.”
Larry was looking past him at the dry channel. There, under an overhang, a green spark appeared and vanished. He handed me his horse’s reins.
“Just one look.”
“Larry.”
“One look is not a capture.”
He went, taking the good rope. Mr. Greeves looked at me and then at the wagon.
“Is he always like this?”
“Only when awake.”
We could still hear Larry’s boots on the stones. Then we heard a thump, a slide, and the sort of language our mother used when the stove pipe fell down. I tied the horses above the wash and went after him with the spare rope. Mr. Greeves followed, though I had told him to wait.
The dry channel was dry only at its entrance. Farther in, a seep had turned the sand to black mud. Larry sat in it with one leg sunk to the knee. A narrow crack ran across the channel ahead of him. Beyond the crack, on a shelf, stood a lizard the length of my forearm. Its back gave off a steady green light. It looked at Larry as if he were a disappointing kind of insect.
“There,” Larry said. “I have it cornered.”
“You have yourself cornered.”
I tossed him the spare rope. He caught it and pulled himself toward me while I held the other end around a stone. He left one boot in the mud. Mr. Greeves offered to fetch it, but I said the mud could have it for its collection.
As we turned back, the lizard moved. It slipped through the crack and reappeared higher up on a shelf. Larry, who had now seen forty dollars with four legs, started after it again. Before I could catch his collar, it vanished into a narrow opening. Green light showed through the stone like a lamp behind a curtain.
Then another light answered from farther down the wash.
“Two,” Mr. Greeves whispered. “Eighty dollars.”
The second light was not a lizard. It was a lantern, swung from a wagon stopped on the old stage road below us. We heard a woman call for help. The road climbed out of the wash there, and its lower edge had crumbled. Her front wheel was jammed against a rock. The driver had brought three children home from a wedding and had lost the turn in the dark. Nobody was hurt, but the horses had backed toward the soft edge.
“Stay where you are,” I called.
“That was the plan,” she called back. “We are excellent at it.”
The lizard appeared again on the shelf above us. It crossed a strip of pale stone, stopped, and looked back. The green light made the strip visible all the way to the wagon. Larry followed it on foot, slowly for once. He found a broad way down that none of us could see from the channel. I took the second rope and led Mr. Greeves around by the same way. We could reach the wagon without going near the broken edge.
Larry spoke to the horses. I held the lantern while the driver helped the children out one by one. Mr. Greeves carried the smallest, who objected to being called small and insisted on bringing a paper bag of wedding cake. We walked them up the broad path, guided by the little green light moving ahead of us. By the time we reached the stage stop, it was gone.
Mrs. Hobb put the children at her kitchen table and handed me a towel for Larry, whose remaining boot squelched with every step. The driver asked who had shown us the way. Larry opened his mouth.
“A lizard,” I said. “Larry found it.”
“I nearly caught it,” he added.
“You nearly caught a mud hole.”
Mr. Greeves had no lizard for his cabinet. He had a broken axle, a borrowed horse, and a story he told for free at the stable while we waited for the carpenter. He gave me ten dollars from his travel purse for lending the horse. The driver paid for the rest of the roof repair because her wagon and children were safe. I tried to refuse, but she had already spoken to the carpenter, who stopped laughing at last and came on Monday.
Larry tells the story differently. In his version he ropes the lizard, and it leads him to the stranded wagon out of gratitude. In mine, he loses a boot and follows a creature clever enough to stay out of reach. You can decide which version is the taller tale.
I saw the lizard once more, a week after the roof was fixed. It crossed the yard after dark, green along its spine, and paused beside the new dry patch where the rain no longer fell. I put down a slice of peach. It walked past the fruit, caught a moth, and disappeared under the fence.
I never told Mr. Greeves. I did tell Larry, because I wanted to see whether he would fetch his rope. He fetched his other boot instead and sat beside me until the light went out of sight.
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