Come In and Cover Me (25 page)

He and Alex could both fish by the time they were six, and within a year or two after that, they could recognize the tracks of almost any animal that happened across the winding dirt driveway. Silas could change a tire long before he could drive. His father drilled him on multiplication tables and spelling words, emphasized the importance of saying “Please” and “Thank you” and helping their mother with chores.

His mother was just as competent as his father—she could wrap tamales as she made a pot of coffee, all the while asking just the right questions about Silas's homework assignments—but she had a joy about her. She made Silas's father laugh, a loud, coughing sound that seemed to surprise him each time it escaped from his mouth. Once his father laughed so hard he sprayed milk all over the platters of fried eggs and bacon and tortillas, and Silas's mother started breakfast over again.

Silas wanted to tell Ren these childhood stories, but the stories never came out as he hoped. They were so clear in his head, but they changed when they spilled out into the air. He would intend to capture his father's strength and goodness, but instead the stories captured something cold in the man, something Silas did not recognize. These stories of slaughtered animals and callused palms made people wince. Still, he could tell them to Ren. He could tell her any number of things. But he found that what he most wanted was for her to tell him something. Anything. For her to let her stories and her fears and whatever was bothering her at this very second spill out into the air. All she was giving him was ghosts. He needed something more substantial.

They were in the foothills of the Piños Altos Mountains, up above six thousand feet. They'd driven through Silver City half an hour ago, and since then, they'd seen only ranch land in the foreground and mountains in the distance. The asphalt highway had given way to a gravel road, and they hadn't seen another truck for miles.

After half an hour of gravel, Ren pointed to a blue sign nailed to a gatepost.

“Turn there,” she said. “Lanark Ranch.”

The land dipped and rose, with few trees, few houses, and endless blowing grass. They passed through two green iron gates with “Do Not Enter” signs, and when they came to a third, Ren gnawed her lip for a moment and peered across the fields. The rise and fall of the hills obscured the view. A small copse of juniper and scrub oaks, plus a few ash trees, paralleled a long line of barbed wire to their right.

Ren announced that they wouldn't be able to get the truck any closer to the site, so they pulled under the shade of a decent-sized oak and grabbed what they could easily carry. They walked along a rough path cut through the trees, passing close to the barbed wire and the juniper fence posts. They each carried a backpack and a duffel bag of supplies. Tiny talons from catclaw shrubs grabbed at the bags, at clothing, at the backs of their hands. They stepped over a single pile of hay-crusted horse droppings, and passed a tall dead yucca plant stooping like a sad long-haired woman. Already Silas could hear Crow Creek below them, a giddy sound with bubbling exclamations. It reminded him of high school girls during lunch period.

A flock of birds burst from undergrowth on the other side of the barbed wire, and Ren jumped, actually lifted both her feet off the ground, as she spun around.

“What is the matter with you?” snapped Silas.

“Maybe too much coffee,” she said, looking at her feet.

“Right,” he said.

When they came out of the woods, they were on a wide, flat plateau a few hundred feet above the water. It looked like it had once been good grazing land, but now it held only a few juniper and piñon and some particularly scraggly mesquite. The flat land dropped off suddenly, offering a view of the creek below. A trail wound down to the bank, through shrubs and cacti and stubby grasses.

Peering down, Silas could see the river terraces descending to the water. Grassy slopes and sandstone cliffs rose on the other side of the creek—despite its enthusiastic chatter, it was only a thin ribbon surrounded by sand and gravel and hopeful trees. The view was much better across the water: The willows and sycamores had turned white-silver in the afternoon sun, a fringe rising up against the vertical rock wall Silas faced. The rock was layered sandstone, the same distinctive outcroppings—Gila Conglomerate, the geologists called it. Some lips and ledges of it supported an occasional prickly pear or catclaw. From a distance the rock rippled, fluid as the water that had carved it. The sandstone cliff gave way to grassy, juniper-dotted slopes to the north, and farther along there was an impressive volcanic knob topping one peak.

Ren's feet crunched over the pebbles behind him, and he felt her hand at his waist.

“Turtle Rock,” she said, nodding at the volcanic knob. He could see why the name had stuck. “People say the Apache kept the women and children up there when they went raiding.”

Silas stepped away from her hand. They followed the perimeter of the cliff until they spotted where the ledge had buckled. The collapse had uncovered a row of walls—four walls, so at least two rooms—that had been buried completely. It was too late to set up equipment and start measurements. They began setting up camp before the sun set.

The process did not go as smoothly as they had hoped. The ground was hard and resistant to the tent pegs. One of the pegs was missing altogether, though they found a large rock to use as an anchor. And when Silas reached for his lighter, his pocket was empty. He decided it must have fallen out somewhere along the hike to or from the truck. A quick search turned up an old pack of matches in his jacket pocket. He left Ren unrolling the sleeping bags while he went searching for dead wood for the fire.

More out of curiosity than efficiency, he decided to try the trail down to the creek. He jogged the first few nearly vertical steps; then the ground flattened slightly. For the first few yards, he was on solid bedrock. Volcanic sandstone, he thought. The Gila Wilderness was once a huge volcanic cauldron—hot springs were still bubbling up all over the place. Eventually waters washed all the volcanic ash and debris down into what became the creek bed.

The bedrock gave way to more greenery as he worked his way down—the shrubs grew thicker, and he could see tall spears of yucca off to his right. He enjoyed the steep walk, enjoyed noting the level of each terrace, the change in the flora around him. He would be glad to start hacking at the earth tomorrow. He was ready to feel tools in his hand, to stretch a string taut for a measurement, to sketch a meter-by-meter map. Though he hadn't said anything to Ren, he was ready to be out of her house. He was ready to get away from her dining room table and his laptop. He had started to feel ungrounded in her space, especially as she put in full days at the museum and he drifted through her house while she was gone. He could forget at times, when he was comfortably settled into a routine of sifting through dirt and studying outcroppings of stone and scrubbing at sherds with a toothbrush, that it was possible to feel ill at ease or out of place. Not that he didn't make mistakes in the field. Not that he didn't guess wrong or miss connections sometimes. But he always fit. He knew the right steps. There was a flow and an order to things, and he was in it and a part of it, like the yellow lichen growing on the rock just in front of his foot or the willows below, drinking from the creek. When he was on-site, he felt only sureness.

Ren was not as easy, not as readable as a wall of rock or the layers of a trash heap. He lay next to her at night, but there was still this wide expanse of open sand and gravel between them, just as there had been in the early days of the canyon. The last few days had deepened this feeling of separation, but the separateness had been there all along. He had grown more and more aware of it. He did not know how to bridge it.

He had learned the basics of flint-knapping, of shaping rock into tools. More specifically, using one rock—a hammerstone—to whack little pieces off a second rock until you'd made a dart point or a knife or an ax or such. He liked shaping obsidian, although it inevitably made him bleed. But if you wanted to break obsidian, you needed a soft rock to use for your hammerstone. Too much force would shatter the obsidian.

He watched Ren, and it was like walking up to the sheer pink walls of the canyon, craning your neck and trying to comprehend the lines and scope and sculpture of this thing that you could never quite see all at once. Or watching just one small piece of that same rock in the palm of your hand, catching the sun and throwing off colors that were unnamable, until you realized that it had ceased to be a known object. To watch her and feel his reaction to her—it shook him.

The downhill walk jarred his knees. The trees grew bigger as he got closer to the water: The junipers towered thirty or forty feet above him. He worked his way down onto the last terrace before the floodplain. He found what he was looking for and made his way back to Ren.

She was watching for him when he reached the top of the trail.

“Why do you have dead sticks?” she asked.

“They're seep willows.”

She nodded, obviously waiting for more.

“The Spanish called them
yerba de pasmo
,” he said.

“Okay, herb,” she said. “Herb of . . . what?”

“Chills. People used the leaves to make a remedy for chills. And I think they chewed the stems for toothaches.”

“Do you have a toothache?”

“No. The dead sticks are perfect for roasting marshmallows.”

She raised her eyebrows. “We have marshmallows?”

“
Sí.
Lucky for you, I packed the groceries.”

Night fell, and the temperature dropped. They'd brought sandwiches but needed a fire for warmth, and they took their time cooking and savoring the marshmallows. The melted sugar and the heat and the view of the stars left Silas content and lethargic. Ren was pressed against his side, and he felt affection return full force, trumping frustration. It was difficult to stay angry with her when she had marshmallow, inexplicably, in her eyelashes.

The thought made him swipe at his beard; he located a sticky patch and scraped at it with one finger. Then he could feel her eyes on him again, and when he turned, she looked away. He felt his contentment evaporating.

“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” he asked again.

“I'm not looking at you.”

“Do you think I don't know when you're looking at me?”

“Obviously you don't.”

“Aurenthia,” he said, exhausted.

“I'm not looking at you. Not at you.”

He caught the distinction. “So what are you looking at?”

A pause. “Nothing.”

He stood, twisting at the waist, popping his back. She seemed startled by the sudden movement.

“You're a terrible liar,” he said. “And you're driving me crazy.”

She only looked up at him. He made one last effort.

“Tell me what's bothering you,” he said evenly.

Objectively, he couldn't help but be fascinated by the workings of her face in the firelight. She wanted to tell him. She wanted him to leave her alone. She didn't want him to be angry with her. She was pissed off that he was pushing her. Her jaw and lips moved, just tiny pulses of movement, and her eyes slipped and slid.

“This will be a mistake,” she said. But now her gaze was steady, holding his, and he knew he had won. He sat beside her again.

“What will be a mistake?”

“To tell you.”

“Try it,” he said.

She didn't pause at all, and later, when he thought back on it, he was impressed that once she made up her mind, she didn't flinch.

“You saw Lynay the other night,” she said. “Or maybe you just felt her.”

“What?”

“Lynay. At my house. In bed two nights ago. She was leaning over you, and her hair brushed against your face. It made your nose itch, and you sniffed. Then you said, ‘Who are you?'”

He kept his face empty as his mind whirred. So this was what she had been watching and waiting for: this moment of revelation when he would show that he did not believe in her ghosts and never had. He looked at her as intently as she looked at him, the blue-black sky around her face, and knew she had been preparing for him to fail her test. Or for her to fail his. He wasn't sure which.

“I told you it would be a mistake to tell you,” she said.

“I didn't say anything,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“I know this won't really raise the level of our discourse,” he said, “but you're being such a girl. Quit reading too much into a few seconds of silence.”

“You don't have to pacify me,” she said. “You don't have to believe me. But you asked me what happened, and I told you. So don't blame me for this whole awkward situation.”

Her jaw was jutting slightly, and her eyes looked too big for their sockets.

Silas shifted slightly in the dirt. He felt a rock digging into his thigh. The truth was that he did not believe in actual ghosts that wandered around sites and haunted lovely archaeologists. He did not believe that spirits mimed little dramas, trying to get someone to pay attention. He did believe in spirits, but he believed these spirits were subtle, prone to whisperings and nudges and inspirations. Intuition.

“You know about Eilean Donan, the Scottish castle?” he asked.

Now she looked less defensive, more annoyed. “What?”

“In the early nineteen hundreds, a stonemason in Scotland claimed to have had a vision of the Eilean Donan castle as it had been in the fourteenth century. The castle was in complete ruins by that time. But it was rebuilt according to the stonemason's vision, and when the actual plans for the castle were found years later, they matched his vision down to the slightest detail.”

She looked less annoyed.

“And there was a geologist who found a fossil, some sort of prehistoric fish,” he continued. “Agassiz was the man's name. He couldn't figure out how the fish had looked, the bone structure was so bizarre. Then he had a dream for three nights in a row that showed him the fish, and he finally sketched what he saw in his dream. It matched the fossil perfectly.”