BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (7 page)

Our usual filling site was at a pool further
downstream, but I was pretty sure the trail I followed would lead
to a crossing. Sure enough, two stripped pinon-pine trunks had been
laid side-by-side across the stream, and I could crouch on the logs
and dip the bucket into clear, knee-deep water below the bridge.
But my eyes turned upstream instead, where a few feet from the
bridge a dead rabbit lay on its side in a shallow rapid, its head
pushed halfway under a thin shelf of ice.

I crossed the bridge and approached it along
the bank, crouching for a closer look. The rabbit didn't look old
or emaciated, and its intact eyes implied that it hadn't been there
long enough to attract scavengers. A red gouge on its scalp at the
waterline suggested it was freshly killed. I stood up and looked
around and saw that I was being watched. Standing on its hind legs
under a sheltering dead pine, a white-furred weasel was keenly
monitoring my discovery of its prize. It must have been hungry,
because after I made eye contact it held its ground for a few
seconds, wet nose sniffing beneath the coal-black eyes in its small
triangular face. When I took a step in its direction, it chirped,
turned, and ran.

I knew that weasels inhabited the hills and
washes that radiated out from the shallow Pecos River, and I knew
that their brown fur turned white in the winter. But I'd never seen
one at close range, and my lifelong affinity for wild creatures
made me pursue it through the brush. I quickly lost sight of the
weasel itself, but its tracks in the snow were easy to follow. They
led past juniper bushes and uphill through a cluster of downed
pinon branches, which I circled, to an abrupt earthen wall that was
fronted by cholla and sage grass. The tracks disappeared where the
snow had melted in front of the wall, but it was clear that the
weasel had retreated into a hole in the wall's lower face.

The hole was oval-shaped, its axis the length
of my forearm, and as I bent toward it I felt cold air emanate from
a larger space within. The wall itself was red-brown clay, a foot
thick and instantly recognizable to anyone who had spent time
studying the pueblos of New Mexico. This was an unexcavated ruin,
probably a single dwelling or a small string of connected rooms. I
headed back toward the spring to collect my shovel, then returned
to the pierced wall.

We followed a strict protocol for excavation
and study at the Pecos pueblo, but based on the elevation and
orientation of this dwelling, I felt confident it wasn't part of an
important structure. And the hole meant that its integrity had
already been breached. Having discovered it, I couldn't just walk
away without even a cursory examination. I cut the hole's sides
square with the shovel and tried to keep my pulse rate in check.
When the hole was as broad as my shoulders and over a foot high, I
slipped my upper body inside, then pulled my legs in after me.

I'd moved to the southwest for college twenty
years earlier and had spent almost fifteen years sketching and
cataloging ancestral ruins under a series of accomplished
archaeologists. And along the way I had gradually been able to
subdue my fear of enclosed dark spaces. But my self-control
dissolved as soon as my eyes adjusted to the limited light, and not
because I saw an angry weasel about to strike. The weasel must have
retreated into a connected chamber.

Aside from my own, the only presence in this
low-ceilinged room lay centered on the mud floor in front of me.
The ashen remains of two human skeletons lying side by side. When I
gently touched a burnt femur, it crumbled into dust beneath my
fingers. And instantly, the twenty-plus years since Drew's death
vanished, and I was back with the two corpses in Gig Garrett's
burning cabin in 1902. A sudden lightheadedness was followed by a
wave of nausea that left me retching on an empty stomach. Without
stopping to wipe the bile and saliva from my mouth, I thrust myself
back through the hole toward daylight.

I led Kidder back to the site the following
day. He assigned two men to map and inventory the room a few weeks
later, after I told him I wanted no part of it. The appearance of
the walls and ceiling suggested that the bodies had been burned
inside the room, but we couldn't determine if they had been
cremated or burned alive. None of the other excavated rooms at
Pecos had yielded such a grim harvest. Ted's wife Madeline (who
worked alongside us) wondered whether the corpses belonged to
criminals, and if so, what transgression they had committed. Other
remains unearthed at Pecos were sent to a museum at Harvard, but
the skeletons in the burned room were beyond preservation. We
concluded that the hole the weasel guided me to must have been of
recent origin, because extended exposure to outside air would have
turned the scorched bones to dust.

The night I found the skeletons I laid awake
in my tent for hours, reliving the night of Drew's death. I saw him
turn to offer me words of encouragement before creeping into the
culvert under the canal. My thoughts unwound into a dream and I was
following him into the darkness, listening to him talk as I
crouched and stepped forward with my hands pressing the tunnel
walls. He spoke calmly about what we and Henry should say to
Garrett that night, but the sound of his voice was diminishing, and
I could tell that even though I was trying hard to keep up, he was
pulling further and further ahead of me. Then I couldn't hear him
at all, and I was alone in the culvert, scuttling forward faster on
my hands and feet and knees toward the other end. Where was the
opening? Where was Drew?

Suddenly I confronted an impenetrable tangle
of dead branches and tree stumps where the exit from the culvert
should have been. Drew was gone. Cool air carried the smell of
kerosene through the wooden debris. I heard a footstep from across
the tangle, then saw the flare of a struck match.

"You ain't cut out for this kind of work,"
said a voice I'd never heard before. It was both warm and mocking
at the same time, with a slight drawl I associated with the hills,
and I knew it belonged to Gig Garrett. "You never will be." He lit
a soaked rag stuffed into a kerosene-filled bottle and threw the
torch on the woodpile as I fell backward into the creek and the
culvert caught fire.

I woke up sweating, tangled in blankets, and
laid awake for the rest of the night, listening to the distant howl
of coyotes.

At first the dream didn't come every night.
When it became more frequent, its plot and setting varied, but its
constants were enclosed spaces, fire, and fear. Sometimes I was
trapped in a burning hayloft, others I was lost in a lignite mine.
My one or two companions were always dead, because I hadn't been
able to save them. And there was inevitably a stranger watching
from beyond the walls of my prison. Someone unwilling to help me,
and confident that fear would prevent me from saving myself.

Toward the end of last year these nightmares
became entrenched, and when I spent three weeks in Santa Fe over
Christmas, Clara seemed alarmed and frustrated when I repeatedly
woke up thrashing in the middle of the night and then laid awake
until dawn. I took to sneaking out of the room with a blanket
around me and pulling a cushioned armchair up to the fireplace,
sometimes adding a split log to the embers to warm my feet. Sleep
would finally embrace me as the sky paled, and Clara or Winnie
would find me slumped in front of a cold fireplace an hour or more
after sunrise.

"Owen, what's wrong with you?" Clara said, as
she studied the contents of her purse before heading off to work.
It was a few minutes past nine on January 2nd, and the public
library was re-opening after the holidays. I was shuffling around
the kitchen trying to assemble breakfast. While I'd been slumbering
in the corner, Clara had cooked pancakes and bacon, eaten breakfast
with Winnie, and sent her off to school. The irresistible aromas
hadn't been enough to rouse me. Now the stove was cooling and the
batter was gone as I scavenged a broken pancake and a few
overcooked bacon remnants. Even in my groggy state, I could tell
that Clara was annoyed at me.

"What do you mean? Right now hunger is what's
wrong with me."

"In the middle of the night you thrash like
an alligator, and then you spend the morning stumbling around
half-asleep. When you're only home for a few days, I understand
that it takes some time to adjust. But you've been back for two
weeks now and you still seem agitated. Winnie sees you asleep in
your chair every morning – she must think her father is either a
somnambulist or a vampire. Why is being home with us so hard?"

"It's not hard," I said, sidling across the
kitchen to put a hand on her waist. "Being away from you is
hard."

Clara turned toward the door to hide her
involuntary smile. "Get outside," she said, "and spend two hours
splitting wood. If that doesn't tire you out enough to sleep
tonight, at least you'll be able to keep the fire going until
dawn."

Later that day I did spend two hours
splitting logs, and I'd like to say that it helped, but all it
really did was ensure that I fell asleep as soon as we stretched
out in bed, and that had never been my problem. Once again I woke
up at two or three in the morning, struggling to escape a burning
sepulchre. I slipped out of the bedroom with the spare blanket, and
as I placed kindling in the fireplace and prodded the embers, the
stiffness in my arms and shoulders reminded me of my afternoon at
the woodpile. I propped the poker against the adobe wall, retrieved
a quarter-full bottle of whiskey from the kitchen, and settled back
into my armchair in front of the fire.

When there was only an inch left in the
bottle, I stared out the window at the moon rising over the
foothill pines and thought about the people the Navajo had called
the Anasazi, who built their first clay villages on these plateaus
five hundred years ago. I imagined their terraces and plazas and
forgot about my fears. When the bottle was empty, I stood it
against the chair leg and staggered back to bed, then slept
dreamlessly and got up with Clara at seven.

The next day I stashed the empty bottle in my
coat pocket and visited a small inn on De Vargas Street. After the
Prohibition amendment passed in 1920, Ted Kidder had told the
innkeeper we could be trusted. The restless-eyed proprietor sent me
home with two full bottles, and for a while my problem with
insomnia was solved.

Chapter 7

I soon realized that it made more sense to
pre-empt my nightmares than to drown them after they'd struck. So
during the remaining ten days of my Christmas holiday in Santa Fe,
I began reaching for the whiskey bottle before we went to bed. It
didn't seem to bother Clara at first, maybe because alcohol didn't
make me angry or impulsive. It made me expansive and generous.
Sometimes it encouraged me to explain the great significance of the
work our team was engaged in at Pecos, or to contrast pueblo life
in the fifteenth century with the way we live today. One night when
I was three fingers of whiskey into my usual dosage, I described
the mysterious shrine of the stone lions that Adolf Bandelier
chronicled in 1880, near the ruins of the Yapashi pueblo on the
Pajarito plateau.

On one of the desolate mesas that ascend
toward the Jemez mountains from the Rio Grande, two life-size
mountain lions carved from tufa rock lie crouching side by side,
posed as if ready to pounce. The people who made them lived thirty
or more generations ago, before their descendants came down from
the high ground to build pueblos along the river that remain today,
at San Ildefonso and Cochiti. And now centuries later, the stone
lions are eroding slowly into the ground beneath them, heads
between their paws and tails stretched out behind.

"None of us would ever have found that
shrine," I told Clara. "Indian guides from Cochiti took Bandelier
up there. The site is still sacred to them, and no one will tell us
what it means. Maybe they don't know themselves anymore. To me the
place was almost mystical." I paused to pour more whiskey.
"Civilization paying homage to its predecessors. The lions
symbolizing both the transient and the eternal."

Clara cast a skeptical glance at the bottle
on the floor beside my chair, arched her eyebrows, and turned
toward the bedroom. "Good night," she said. "I'll leave you to your
philosophical musings."

Just over three months ago, in mid-January,
Kidder's team reconvened at the Pecos ruins. I shared a ride out
from Santa Fe to join them. Now that I'd discovered an antidote to
my nightmares and insomnia, I began visiting a tinsmith in the
nearby village who sold whiskey out of the back door of his shop.
My mornings at Pecos were cold, bright, and unforgiving, and I
usually crawled from my tent dry-throated and feeling like a mule
had kicked me in the back of the head. But at least I started each
day unburdened by haunting images from the prior night's dreams. A
sip or two from my breakfast flask would loosen the knots
encircling my skull, and after a short stroll in fresh air, I
generally regained my equilibrium and was ready to work.

Some days were spent walking roomblock
perimeters to record dimensions, or cataloging excavated pottery
and tools. On others I would copy a series of petroglyphs, or carry
my sketch-book up a nearby hill for an elevated view of the ruins,
then revise my ground plan of the pueblo to include a newly
discovered kiva. We had two cameras as well, but photographs alone
couldn’t tell the whole story.

Late afternoons were for washing up and
chores around camp, and dinners in the mess tent were occasions for
spirited debate on everything from politics to pueblo life to the
peyote rituals of Indians along the lower Pecos River. By nine
o'clock I was well into my whiskey cure and by ten asleep in my
tent. If a full bladder woke me up in the middle of the night, it
was from a dreamless sleep, and a clay pitcher in the corner of my
tent spared me from venturing out into the night to piss.