Come In and Cover Me (2 page)

Her artist. She'd been here in this canyon. Silas insisted on going to start dinner before Ren could ask more questions, and, despite her impatience, she knew he was right to give her a few solitary minutes. A single sherd. She shouldn't get too confident. She should focus on asking the right questions and listening to the answers. And then she could get her hands in the dirt tomorrow, and she would see what the dirt could tell her.

She unpacked efficiently, lining up shirts, socks, and underwear in the dresser drawers. She could hear footsteps outside, heavy steps, and branches rustling. She brushed her hair until it was smooth and straight and her hands were steady.

Ed and Paul were sharpening green branches when she stepped onto the front porch. Silas stood a few yards away, adding a log to a small fire. Adirondack chairs and brightly colored foldable chairs were scattered along the porch and into the dirt yard. Ed flicked his eyes away from Paul briefly to smile at her.

“Seriously, he was this tall,” said Paul, one foot propped on the porch. “Have you ever seen a jackrabbit that big?”

“I've seen ones that'll look back at you at eye level.” Ed had a calm, serious newsman's face to match his newsman's voice. “There've been documented cases of jackrabbit skeletons up to four feet tall.”

“He's making that up,” Ren said. “You can tell when he's lying, because the left side of his mouth crooks the slightest bit.”

“Documented cases,” said Ed. A long shaving of wood fell to the ground with a flick of his pocketknife.

“The dreaded jackalope,” said Silas, approaching with a pack of hot dogs. He'd sliced a slit into the side, and grayish juice dripped into the dirt. “Sticks ready?”

“Almost,” Ed said.

“You know what you call a giant jackrabbit in Las Vegas?” asked Paul.

Silence.

“A blackjack-alope.”

“Did you make that up by any chance?” asked Ed. He handed a stick to Ren, one to Silas.

“Yeah.” Paul nodded proudly. “Pretty good, huh? I got a bunch of 'em. What about a seven-foot jackrabbit that plays basketball?”

“Shaq-alope,” said Silas. “You're well on your way to that postgrad degree, m'boy. Now, all of you grab a dog and start cooking. Buns and assorted condiments over there. We got Italian sausages, too. And bratwursts. Popsicles in the freezer for dessert.”

“Impressively phallic,” Ren said.

Silas gestured toward the sharpened branches. “Help yourself to a pointy stick.”

They stood as they cooked the hot dogs, then pulled folding chairs into a wide ring around the fire. They settled their drinks on flat sections of ground and balanced plates on their laps. Silas slid his shoes off, resting his heels on top of them. Ren noticed the lines and curves of his feet.

The sun had started to pinken the sky. Ren looked toward the deep green line of cottonwoods growing along the creek she could no longer see.

“I got one,” said Silas. “What do you call a giant jackrabbit that causes cavities?”

Ren chewed, blackened skin crunching softly against her teeth. “A plaque-alope,” she said after a moment. She swallowed. “What about a giant jackrabbit you can land a plane on?”

“Tarmac-alope,” said Silas.

“You guys got skills,” said Paul.

The wind kept shifting, blowing smoke into their faces. Ren's eyes watered, but there was something comforting about the smell and the thickness of it. They ate quickly, licking their fingers.

“So fill me in,” said Ren, when the urge to know overwhelmed the pleasure of the fire and the easy silence. “On this place. On where you found that sherd.”
On how you found her again when I couldn't,
she wanted to say. She had assumed if her artist showed herself again, it wouldn't be to some stranger. She felt somehow rejected, although the giddiness over the find had mostly tamped that down. The dead were so fickle.

“He's a storyteller,” Ed said approvingly.

“Oh, no need for the whole spiel,” Silas said, shrugging. “So Chaco was about two hundred miles north of us here at Cañada Rosa. And the Mimbres River Valley is about fifty miles to the east.”

Ren leaned forward. By the turn of the first millennium, the city of Chaco had been the epicenter of the world in what is now modern-day northern New Mexico and beyond. The first city built of permanent masonry, made to last. Homes and storehouses and public areas were impressively constructed. A few well-to-do elites ruled the common masses. It was a center of power.

Their neighbors to the south were a quiet bunch of egalitarian farmers. The Mimbres people had no impressive structures like Chaco—they built with mud and river cobble, not a right angle in an entire site. No one talked about their architecture—they talked about their pottery. It was stunning, one-of-a-kind. And very valuable. It was also typically buried with the dead, which had not turned out so well for the dead. Ren had a snapshot on her desk—the work of some local paper—of a pothunter surrounded by piles of dirt, a bulldozer in the background. The pothunter was holding a Mimbres bowl in one hand and, with the other hand, tossing a skull over his shoulder.

The boy popped the tab on another beer. Ren wondered if he was old enough to drink.

“So you have these two ways of life spreading out,” Silas continued, “one from the south and one from the north. Cañada Rosa is an intersection point of the two
worlds. We're the frontier. We think we've found your lady's work up at the Delgado site, which was occupied off and on for about six centuries. We've got four hundred and eighty rooms there, spread over sixty acres. Just a fraction have been touched.”

“You have a large Mimbres site?” said Ren, straightening in her chair. “Untouched?”

“That's the beauty of this place,” said Silas. “It's the land that time forgot. Or that time didn't want to take the trouble to find. As you may have noticed, it's hard to get here. Even harder for bulldozers. The canyon was spared from massive destruction partly because of the inaccessibility. And it's on the edge of the known Mimbres world. Pothunters and looters didn't think to look here.

“This was life at the boundaries. Far away from the center. And the question I'm trying to answer is, what did people do when they abandoned their center? Did they create a new thing altogether, or did they cling to old habits?”

Silas's arms hung over the sides of his chair, relaxed, as he turned to Ren. “Now. Your turn to tell me about Crow Creek.”

She glanced toward Ed. “Ed told you about it already, right?”

“Ed told me some. And I saw your presentation in Albuquerque last fall. You never called on me to ask my question.”

“What was your question?”

“Tell me the story, and then I'll ask you.”

She told him the version she told everyone. She had told it enough by now that the words left her mouth as smooth as a recording. All emotion—shock joy relief—had detached itself and sunk deep down somewhere inside her rib cage.

“Some well-informed rancher down along the Gila—Crow Creek is a little offshoot—noticed rows of rocks and knew enough to know they could be fallen walls,” she said. “So he called the university. I'd just finished up my dissertation, had applied for a few openings, and my doctoral adviser called me and asked if I wanted to take a look. I did, and when the principal investigator had to get back for the fall term, I took over.

“Some of the crew stayed on with me, including Ed.” She smiled at him across the fire. “I'd sort of harassed him into coming out in the first place. We'd found a few large sherds that seemed very interesting. Mimbres pottery, clearly, classic black and white, but the slip was wrong.”

“Slip?” asked Paul. He was only a shape in the shadows. “These guys have mainly taught me how to dig big holes. We haven't gotten to pottery definitions yet.”

“He idolizes us,” said Ed.

“The slip is the coating on the ceramics,” Ren said. “It's put on before you fire or paint the piece. In the north, they polished the slip before they painted the piece. But the Mimbres polished the piece after it was painted. The sherd we found had a polished slip. And the designs had diagonal hatching.”

Ren paused and looked across at Paul's silhouette. “Hatching is a pattern of lines filling a shape. Northern groups—ones connected to Chaco—were known for diagonal lines. So the slip and the hatching were northern, while the overall style was southern. It was odd. Why was someone making bowls with both northern and southern elements?

“Still, we weren't finding anything significant. We were thinking about packing up. But then we moved to one of the smaller blocks, at the edge of the site. When we got to the bottom, we found a small storage room. We struck a stash of stuff: six parrot effigies, none bigger than a man's fist. They'd been painted in detail, although the shape of them wasn't exactly anatomically correct. Larger-than-life beaks, big eyes, short tails.”

She took a breath. “And we found three perfect bowls—a complete set nesting inside each other. With the same traits as the sherds we'd found. One had a ring of parrots. Scarlet macaws. The others had parrots in the center of the bowls. On each bowl, the parrots were drawn very distinctively: Their beaks are too curved. Their wings are partially extended and diagonally hatched. Their claws are pronounced.”

“Whole bowls?” asked Paul. “I thought whole bowls were practically impossible.”

“Yeah,” said Silas, slowly. “And she found three of them.”

“It's one artist,” said Ren. “I know it is. The work is too idiosyncratic. The pieces are Style Three Classic Mimbres Black-on-White, dating somewhere after AD 1100. We know it all came to an end around 1150, so the artist must have lived in the first half of the twelfth century. Assuming the Mimbreños assigned the same gender roles as other Pueblo groups, the artist was a woman. So maybe this woman moved from the north to the south. Or maybe the daughter of a northern woman is copying her mother's style. But it's one woman. I know it. One set of hands made those bowls.”

She brushed nonexistent crumbs from her hands. She needed to stop talking. There was a temptation, always, to try and convey why this mattered, why the idea of one artist was so compelling. But she couldn't put words to it. Surely no one wanted to disappear. An archaeologist sought out those who couldn't tell their own story, and then, bit by bit, she tried to tell it for them. The Mimbreños were unusual for actually painting images of their world. They illustrated people and animals and insects—small snapshots of their lives. But for all the thousands of stories they may have painted into their pottery, no one knew how to read them. The meaning was missing. No one even knew what the people called themselves—
mimbres
was the Spanish word for “willow,” a label attached long after the culture had died out.
Mimbreños
, the Willow People.

But this artist was one person, one woman who would have felt the sun on her face and known the smell of her paints and laid her head on her mother's lap when she was small. The discovery of the bowls felt to Ren like a personal plea. She could bring this woman, piece by piece, back from the dead. She could make sure she was remembered. She could save her.

“And now it looks like she might have been here, too,” she continued, “fifty miles from Crow Creek. Or her work was taken here.”

“Our preliminary data suggests populations were migrating from up to seventy-five miles away. Maybe further,” said Silas.

“So why did the artist come here?” Ren asked. “Or, if she started here, why did she move there? What does it mean?”

She didn't expect an answer, and no one offered one. You assumed the dead wanted their story told, that they wanted their lives to be known and remembered and understood. You had to assume that. Only occasionally did Ren allow for the possibility that they were happy sleeping, that they didn't want to be known, that they didn't need their stories told by people who dug in the dirt. That maybe it was the diggers who needed the stories.

She looked down toward her feet, and the fire in front of her was all shining embers. Red and orange flashing. A long time ago her mother had a ruby ring that had fascinated Ren. It was huge and almost definitely fake. Ren would sit at the kitchen table as her mother cooked and just hold the ring in her hands, watching the light reflect off the stone. Not only off it but inside it. She imagined that if she were very, very small and could climb into the ring, she would hear a sound like wind chimes as the light moved through the ruby. She thought maybe there were, in fact, little creatures inside the ring that sunbathed in the red light and warmed their hands in the sparkle. She would tell this to her mother, and her mother would ask her what the creatures were called and what they looked like. One afternoon her mother came home with a set of wind chimes as a surprise. Ren walked out onto the porch with her mother's cool, soft hands over her eyes, her mother nudging her forward, and before her mother told her she could look, Ren heard the sound of rubies.

When she raised her head again, the fire was dead. Ed and Paul had melted away. She and Silas were left. He gave no sign that time had passed. Colors were always a problem: She could make herself forget conversations and feelings and entire months and years, but colors rose up clear and bright from the past. Still, she did not remember often.

“I told you that I wanted to ask you a question,” Silas said, head back, either resting his eyes or looking at stars.

She straightened in her chair. “Sure.”

“I've seen your map of the site. That room where you found the bowls was way off from the center. It looks like the room itself wouldn't even have been visible from the surface. What made you dig there?”

She looked at the sky herself, away from his face. A falling star streaked down.

“I was lucky.”