Come In and Cover Me (14 page)

Migrations and abandonments.

When Braxton first invited him to the ranch and he first tromped through the canyon, it had been out of fashion to talk about different groups of people coming and going. The popular notion had been that every group of people was shaped and transformed by the environment around them. Each group had a specific territory, a permanent landscape.

Silas was not sure that he believed in permanent landscapes. He was not sure he believed in one perfect match. Regardless, nothing had been permanent here. Ever-shifting groups came through this canyon, staying for a season or a year or a decade. They came because of water or game or enemies chasing them from a former home. The prehistoric world had been a web of connections: Trade routes allowed for an exchange of food and trinkets and materials across hundreds of miles. Parrots came from Mexico. Mollusk shells from the Gulf of California were shaped into smooth bracelets and worn by women in this canyon. You could trace the networks of connections by the objects you found.

Groups moved among one another, young couples intermarrying, because in a world full of small villages—maybe four or five families living as a group—the gene pool needed livening up frequently. So you had women moving for men, men looking for women, traders selling their merchandise, entire villages uprooting in search of food or water. Of course, there was conflict, a stronger group wiping out a weaker group for a prize section of land. The losers scattered. Or at times groups merged for the greater good.

It was a world of movement and change, souls shifting and drifting and severing ties to place after place. Amid all the paths crossing and families pulled together and apart, most things were left behind. There were no wagons, no pack mules, no wheelbarrows. No wheels. When these people moved, they brought what they could carry. Stone tools and tanned buckskin and a sharpening rock could be packed in a burden basket with a copper bell and a child's doll. What they chose to take with them, what strained their muscles and bowed their shoulders, were the treasures they couldn't bear to lose. If you didn't love it or need it, you left it somewhere along the way.

The medical examiner acknowledged that a prehistoric body had been found. Silas and Ren agreed that they would keep the bowl to study at least temporarily—they would contact the local tribes, who would probably want the bowl back in the ground with the body. But she could examine the bowl herself until they heard from the tribes. Silas wrapped up one of the sherds from where the kill hole was punched to be sent for an analysis of the clay.

They found nothing else around the body. After one last round of photos, they backfilled the room, dumping shovelful after shovelful back into the hole. Even through his gloves, even with his already concrete calluses, Silas ripped blisters into his palms. He poured peroxide on them at night, savoring the sizzling sound.

“Your hands are frothing,” she said, as she sank onto the bed. “Does it hurt?”

“No.” He frowned. “Not at all. Which sucks, because I feel more confident about it if it hurts. You have any rubbing alcohol?”

“Masochist.”

“I do have a bit of a puritanical streak.”

She shook her head. “I have no interest in pain.”

“Coward.”

She was still watching the peroxide bubble on his skin. “I have not noticed this supposed puritanical streak, by the way.”

He looked over at her thighs.

“It comes and goes,” he said.

She lay next to him and traced the ridges of his chest, finger sliding up and down over skin and muscle. Wearing a path over the bands of muscles covering his ribs. Hills and vales, she thought. Pectorals. Ribs. Abdomen. Ribs.

“What are these?” she asked once.

“Ribs.”

“No, the muscles.”

He shrugged. She traced, eyes shutting.

“They're the part of you that would make barbecue ribs,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I like this.” He ran his hand down her shoulder blades, pausing flat and warm at the small of her back, stopping at the curve of her hips.

“The dip of my back?”

“It's not a dip. It's a reservoir.” He traced the curve of it, the thin hardness of her spine and the soft flare. “It's geography.”

He talked another language when he slept. He fell asleep quickly, effortlessly, while she had to coax sleep to come. But his sleep was rarely silent.

“Snee,” he said, rolling over, one arm falling hard across her hip.

“Snee,” she agreed.

“You're a Volkswagen flip-top.”

She liked to repeat his words back and see if he would agree with them. “A Volkswagen flip-top?”

“You are,” he insisted. “You are, baby. Man. You're a baby man.”

“Baby man?”

“Shaped like a baby. Built like a man.”

Weeks passed. If Ed or Paul noticed where Silas was sleeping, neither commented on it. During the day, everyone stayed focused on what else the ground might offer up.

Sometimes at night Silas could tell that Ren wasn't sleeping, would know when he shuffled to the bathroom after midnight that she was still lying there awake. Her breathing was too shallow, and there was no sleep in her voice when she answered his hello. She would curl against him when he came back to bed, smiling against his shoulder blade. Sometimes in the mornings he would not remember her insomnia, but sometimes he would, and he would try to be quiet and let her steal an extra half-hour of sleep.

One of those mornings while she slept, Silas found Ed on the porch when he walked outside to sip his coffee.

Silas sank into the chair next to Ed.

“Morning, Silas.”

“Morning.”

“Ren still asleep?”

“I think so. I don't know how anyone who hates mornings so much can manage to do this every day of the week.”

“Stubbornness,” said Ed.

“Probably.”

“If I had a daughter, I'd want her to be just like that one,” said Ed. “Smart as a whip, never complains, never takes herself too seriously, kind, generous, willing to try anything.”

“You don't have to sell her to me,” said Silas. “You're preaching to the choir.”

“I think the world of her, is all.”

Silas was amused. “Are you asking me what my intentions are, Ed?”

Ed turned to him and held his gaze. Silas had never noticed that Ed's eyes were gray. A pale silvery color that seemed clear as glass.

“No,” Ed said. “I'm not. What I am telling you is that as much as I adore that girl, I wouldn't want to fall in love with her.”

Silas frowned.

Ed didn't break his stare. “There's something broken in her.”

Silas hoped, weakly, that Ed was making some sort of joke, even though it was clear he wasn't. “What are you talking about?”

“You'll make up your own mind,” Ed answered. “But I've known her for nearly twenty years now, and I've seen the men who follow her around, and I've seen how she looks at them. Something's broken.”

Silas's expression didn't change. “In what way, Ed?”

“I don't know. I don't know why she is like she is, but she's got some limits.”

“I know you mean well, Ed, but . . .”

“I don't mean anything. It is what it is. And I hope you'll act like we never had this conversation. I don't want to hurt Ren. But I see how you look at her.”

He left then, and Silas didn't go after him. He let his coffee grow cold between his knees. He wanted to work up some anger at what Ed had said, to deny it or disprove it or at least to laugh it off. Instead he thought of all that Ren had not said, of the avoidances and silences and nonanswers. She left nothing about herself unprotected. But that did not have to be brokenness. He wanted to believe it was no more than reticence.

He didn't like to talk when they were finished, lying wrapped around each other and trying to catch their breath. He would talk plenty before and during, telling her how she felt and what he wanted. Where he wanted her mouth and hands, whether he wanted her bent over or flat on her back or on her hands and knees. But when they were finished, he would keep quiet. He kept his eyes closed and memorized her touch. Her palm skimmed over the planes and curves of him, over his breastbone and paying careful attention at his ribs, rising and falling, a wave washing over him. If he lay alone in bed after she went to take a shower or get a drink, he could feel the undertow of her fingers.

When she was under him, her lips parted and her eyes nearly boiling over, he sometimes thought she wanted him to sink into her, into her skin and bone. Or maybe she wanted to sink into him. Yes, that was how she looked at him—as if at any moment she might leave her body behind, burst out of it and show herself as some new being altogether. She seemed, looking into his eyes, just on the verge of showing him what was under her skin.

six

The past speaks in a loud voice.

—From “The Role of Adaptation in Archaeological Explanation” by Michael J. O'Brien and Thomas D. Holland,
American Antiquity
, January 1992

It's raining its brains out,” Silas said, staring out over the dirt, now wet and shining. Raindrops tapped a light rhythm on the tin roof, and the willows by the creek were bending in the wind.

Ren smiled. They had woken to the sound of the rain when the sky split open in the middle of the night. It meant a lost day's work at the site, but they had a table full of bags to clean and record. It did not need to be wasted time. Still, here they were on the porch in the late morning, watching the ground drink up the water. The land wouldn't swallow it all—rivulets were streaming across the hard dirt like rain tracks down a windowpane. There was no sun in sight.

Silas was lying at her feet, his arms cushioning his head, because he said he could hear the rain hitting the ground, that it vibrated though the porch floorboards.

“Comfortable?” she asked.

“Like a ripe sponge,” he said.

They were alone. Paul was listening to headphones at the kitchen table, and Ed was on the sofa, reading a thick hardback mystery. Ren had been in the canyon for two months. She would have to go back home soon, at least for a couple of weeks.

She did not want to leave, for more than one reason, but for now it was the pottery that gnawed at her. She had missed something. It was there, in the clay and the paint, something that had been shown to her and she had still not seen. Folding her legs under her, she lifted the bowl from its box padded with Bubble Wrap and frowned.

“It's not a magic eight ball,” said Silas.

“It sort of is,” she said.

“You've stared at it for weeks, and it still hasn't given you the answers.”

“That doesn't mean it won't.”

She knew every detail on this bowl, every crack and every indentation. Every slight smudge of a line. She had photos of the other bowls she'd found, but it was a different thing to hold this piece in her hands, to fit her palms where the maker had fit hers. Still, feeling it and seeing it only scratched the surface of what it had to tell her. There was the forensics of it, the science of its construction. Clay—maybe from somewhere along this canyon—had been ground into a powder; then water had been added to make it pliable. The clay itself was a clue. To keep the piece from cracking under high heat, temper—bits of stone, crushed pottery, or sand—had to be added to the clay. The temper was a clue. The slip—Mimbreños usually used fine clay that fired white—was a clue. The pigment—hematite-based, iron-laden and dark—was a clue. A sign.

One quick glance told Ren how the piece was made. The artist had rolled out ropes of clay, coiling the ropes around a base, then scraped and smoothed the coils. And the images were visible enough. They were the slipperiest clues, the ones that couldn't be tested and measured. She turned the bowl in her hands. The lightning bolts she knew. And the drawing of the feathers was not unique—straight-lined and geometric. Aerodynamic like an airplane instead of a living bird. It was the eyes that fascinated her, those diamonds inside diamonds with their solid black cores. Those symbols, too, she had seen before, although she had never seen them used as eyes.

The kill hole was small and tidy. Most people thought the hole was punched into the bowl to allow the spirit to escape. Possibly the spirit of the person, possibly the spirit of the bowl. But the hole was crucial to the burial process, to the rebirth process. Spirits had particular opinions about how they liked to conduct their business. Ren wasn't sure they ever really left the ground, though, that they weren't waiting, waiting to rise to the surface when the dirt was disturbed. Maybe they never wanted to escape.

Sometimes the absence of a thing held its own meaning. There were few signs of violence on Mimbres pottery. The archaeological record showed no signs of war, and ceramic images backed up the theory of a fundamentally peaceful people. They did not paint war because they did not know it, or perhaps because they did not want it. Or both.

Another standard absence: For all the imagery of animals, Mimbres artists rarely painted any elements of landscape. Ren saw no sign of place on the bowl she held—no trees or grass or creek or canyon. They were a people who were a part of the land, who lived off it and lived in it. They built their homes into the ground itself, forming the walls from mud and water. And for all their comfort with the earth around them, they did not paint it.

She scanned the landscape—lovely tans and browns and moss greens, all deeper in the rain—and remembered that this land was saved because it was unreachable. If these ridges and valleys had been an easier walk, an easier drive, the bowl sitting beside her would probably be in some private collection by now, the woman's bones tilled back into the soil.

She looked down and noticed Silas had one bare foot dangling off the porch. The rain had covered his toes like dew. He was asleep.

Along with strange absences in the pottery designs, there were strange inclusions. Water animals—fish and turtles and water birds—showed up much more in Mimbres art than made sense for a people who lived in a dry land. But maybe that was because water was a highly prized thing—sacred, even. Perhaps artists' heads were filled with visions of what they couldn't have. They also admired symmetry—an odd thing, really, in a world dominated by chaos and weather and uncertainty. Even their walls were uneven. If life was utterly without pattern, they nonetheless created a perfect balance in art.

These bowls could no doubt hold longing. They could hold all kinds of emotion. Artists loved exaggerating the length of a heron's neck, stretching it into ridiculous loops and curves. The artists' amusement was as thick as the paint. They combined animal bodies to comic effect. And there was something like awe when they drew the curve of the moon into the body of a rabbit, an animal intrinsically linked with the celestial body.

There was a famous Mimbres bowl filled with an image of a potter. It was a meta-bowl, a bowl drawn inside of a bowl, with a human figure that blended into the outline of the bowl. The hands were different, the nose was different, the geometry was different—the artist of that bowl had a very different style from Ren's artist. But she suspected the intent was the same: An homage. A tribute. A remembrance. The potter's bowl was a burial bowl, and no one disagreed that the dead face it covered was likely the face of the potter herself.

What did Ren's artist feel for the woman she painted?

A sudden movement from Silas caught her attention. He'd jerked in his sleep, throwing his arm over his head. She looked down just in time to see his hand knock his empty coffee cup off the porch. His eyes popped open as the cup fell into the dirt with a loud crack. It hit a rock—the one rock in all the endless dirt—and shattered.

She shook her head, ready to tease him. He was, for the most part, quite athletic, but he had a definite clumsy streak. As she opened her mouth, he swung his legs off the porch and reached out to pick up the broken shards. She leaned forward to help him, still smiling; then she stopped moving altogether. Her smile slipped away. Silas's wrists turned and flexed as he collected the handful of pieces. She felt the rush of a new thing, spreading warm under her skin.

The last man before Silas had arms twice as big as hers, with wrists and ankles that seemed solid as biceps and thigh. Silas's wrists looked breakable. She was mesmerized by the fragility of his bones. She could see the wide muscles in his back shift, the hard lines of his forearms, unyielding—head turned away from the rain, he reached for the last shard—and yet his wrists could break like coffee cups.

She worried he would cut his fingers.

What Ren did all day, every day, for the last fifteen years, was read signs. You could see a drought in the tree rings. Hearths indicated rooms of habitation. The lack of domestic features, especially in a long room, could mean a storage space. Interlocking walls meant rooms were built at the same time, as opposed to one of them being added on at a later date. Red-on-white instead of black-on-white meant a misfire, too much oxygen in the pottery-firing blaze. Wolfberry preferred disturbed soil, so it could be an indication of caved-in rooms.

An awareness of the pleasing shape of a man's foot, the uneven edges of his teeth, the size of his wrists—she suspected what it meant. It was steadying to focus on the pottery.

As Silas settled back by her feet, she picked up a photo from the chair next to her. She'd taken the photo years ago—it was one of the nested bowls she had discovered at Crow Creek. She called it the twin parrots. It was a bilateral design with a zigzagging black-and-white border. One parrot was in each lobe of the design. The complicated border had two of the same diamond-in-a-diamond symbols that served as the woman's eyes in the newest bowl.

Ren turned the photo in her hands, then reached into a manila envelope to pull out another photo: This bowl she called the practice bowl. It was only six inches across, and Ren hadn't mentioned her unsubstantiated guess to anyone, but she suspected this was one of the earlier bowls the artist had painted. It felt less confident, less complex. There were three thick lines around the rim of the bowl, framing a parrot in the center of the bowl, perched on what seemed to be a branch or a stick. It was a small parrot, maybe three inches tall. Disappearing behind the border, the stick was only partially shown, an outlined shape with what could be leaves or twigs sprouting from one end. The bird's claws wrapped around the stick in two smooth lines.

Ren stared at the two smooth lines. The odd thing was the intersection of the claws and the branch. The claws were off-center from the bird's body. Why would there be such deliberate skewing of anatomy, not in a way that seemed artistic or surreal but simply sloppy?

Ren put down the photo and looked again at the bowl in her lap. Her gaze landed on the curve of the parrot woman's wrists, palms up, the white bracelets on her arms. The angle of wrist and arm made something prick at Ren's thoughts, an unease, like seeing a familiar face but not remembering the name. She lifted the bowl closer, inches from her nose. The talons on the woman's hands were painted as slightly curved triangles on the tips of the fingers; the fingers themselves were thick and unjointed. They looked more like a stick figure's hands.

Stick.

She felt her body thrum under her skin. She flexed her legs, her muscles suddenly aching to move. Without the shoulders and head and body, the top half of the woman's hand and arm could look very much like a branch. The fingers could look like a tuft of leaves.

Her hands clumsy, Ren grabbed the practice bowl photo again, scraping her knuckles against the wooden bench. She squinted at the abstract lines drawn under the bird's body: It could be a hand. And if so, those weren't the parrot's claws. If that was a hand and an arm, the two white circles in the photo were bracelets just like the shell bracelets worn by the parrot woman on the bowl in her lap. And just like the shell bracelet they had found in the parrot woman's grave. The repetition of the diamond design—in the border on the twin parrot bowl and as the eyes on the newly discovered bowl—could be dismissed as a coincidence. But the bracelets added up to something more. Back when she was crafting bowls at Crow Creek, the artist of the bowls had seen a parrot held by someone with two bracelets on her arm.

The photo fell to the ground, landing next to Silas's shoulder. Ren saw a sharp white flash from the corner of her eye, like the sun glinting off a body of water, like a lightning strike or a tree caught fire, but when she turned, there was nothing but hard rain.

“The artist knew the parrot woman at Crow Creek,” she said.

Silas opened his eyes and sat up quickly, leaning back on his palms. He cocked his head, and she showed him the bracelets, holding up the photo next to the bowl itself. She explained the similarities, the way that the branch could just as easily be an arm.

“It explains why the claws are so misaligned,” he said. “I think you're right. It's an arm, not a branch.”

“It's the parrot woman's arm.”

The lines on his forehead deepened. “Maybe all parrot handlers wore bracelets.”

“But you know we've seen several images of parrot handlers with no bracelets.”

“Just because other artists chose not to paint them doesn't mean there weren't bracelets on other handlers.”

“She knew her at Crow Creek,” she repeated. “The artist who painted the woman buried up on Delgado saw that same woman handling parrots at Crow Creek.”

“I'm not ready to agree to that,” he said.

Part of her was glad that he said it, glad that the force of her belief would not sway him. Glad that he had his own force that she would have to navigate. But another part of her thought that he was so clearly wrong, that she could feel the truth of this in her bones, that she was inhaling it in the damp air.

She put down the bowl, carefully, slowly sliding it into its padded box. She opened the screen door and set the box against the wall inside. The door swung shut, and she turned back to him, toward the ridges of the canyon.

“Ren?” he said, when she did not say anything.

It was too small here on this porch. Everything was out there, out where she couldn't see it, beyond the gray haze of the rain. She did not want to stare at the bowl anymore. She knew what it had been trying to tell her. Anything else she needed to know was out under the sky, where the parrot woman had come to her and where she had seen the pastures shift to forests and dry land turn into creeks.

Her tone was playful when she spoke, as if the last five minutes had not happened.

“Want to play in the rain?” she asked.

“Not particularly,” he said slowly, confused.

“Come on,” she said, and stepped off the porch into the downpour. She was soaked before he could answer.