Come In and Cover Me (4 page)

She would start with this room block, of course. But her artist could be anywhere. The sherd could have been brought over by a friend or neighbor. Or maybe the pot had been traded and her artist had never set foot on this site. Or maybe there was a treasure trove of artifacts within meters of where she stood.

She felt light-headed, which she took as a good sign.

It wasn't even nine a.m., so she could get in nearly a full day of digging. She turned in the direction Silas had pointed, and she could see clouds of dirt rising over the brittle shrubs. She headed toward the clouds and soon could hear the murmur of voices. As she drew closer, the voices grew more distinct and there was a metallic undercurrent—the shaking of the screener, the rattle of rocks against the wire mesh. When she rounded a clump of juniper bushes, the three men were only ten feet away. Silas was scribbling onto his notepad, and Ed was sifting a bucket of dirt through the screener. Paul was down in a room, only his shoulders and head above ground. He straightened, holding something in one glove.

“Silas,” he called. “Deer?”

Silas let the notebook fall to his side, walked over, and took the small bone from Paul's hand.

“No—wild pig. Probably a chunk of a scapula—see that curve?”

They hadn't seen her yet, and she stepped back into the shade of the bush. Paul kept digging, and Ed screened. They must have been near an ash pit, because they both found bone after bone.

Silas put down his notebook altogether and knelt near the edge of the pit, just out of the way of the rolling waves of dust pouring over and around Paul. He reached in occasionally, noticing a flash of white in the turned-up dirt that Paul missed. But mainly he sat on his haunches while Ed and Paul brought him bones, holding them out like offerings for him to interpret. Deer ulna, coyote joint, bird and rabbit and elk, vertebrae, piece of skull, toe, he called, handing the bones back before he'd finished speaking. He called their names with one quick narrowing of his eyes, easy and smooth as exhaling.

She watched him interpret the bones. This was what they did: try to rebuild lives out of broken pieces, bits of trash, gnawed bones.

It was difficult to hear over the screening. Paul held up a wriggling centipede nearly as long as his arm, and Ed said something that ended with “three feet long in my shower.”

“Fourth deer vertebrae in the last five minutes,” Silas said, as Paul held out another gray chunk.

She remembered the excavation of a huge ash pit in the Mimbres Valley. It had been like working in a crater full of printer toner, and she hadn't known any of the other archaeologists. Their first morning they'd all dipped their fingers into the black ash and drawn designs on their faces, like prehistoric warriors. She'd turned her face into a Mimbres bowl, and the others had reached to touch it. She'd felt their fingers on her face, and they had all belonged to one another absolutely. The dirt could make you belong so easily, so quickly.

She left the shade, although it was tempting to stay on the outskirts a little longer, to watch the gears and cogs turning so smoothly between them.

“You're fast,” she said to Silas, nodding at the foil envelope packed with bones at his feet.

“Hunted a lot growing up,” he said, tipping his hat back to meet her eyes. “I'm not much of a geologist, but I do okay with bone.”

Soon Silas took Paul's place digging, and Paul moved over to the screen. Ed blew his nose, took off his gloves, and walked over to Ren. He tipped his head at Paul.

“That kid's a hard worker. And smart. Good attitude. You'll like him.”

“I already like him. Is he even old enough to drink?”

“Apparently he manages just fine.”

“Apparently.”

“And listen to you, ready to check his ID. You don't look so different than you did when you bopped in with that college group a few years ago.”

She cut her eyes toward him. “Fifteen years ago, Ed. But you get points for flattery.”

“Only then you had that guy following you around. What was his name? The one who gave you that big rock?”

“He hadn't given me a big rock then,” she said.

“No big rocks from anybody else yet?”

She lifted her hand and wiggled her bare fingers.

“That one looked like a football player,” Ed said. “Not much of a neck.”

“Hey, look!” called Paul. “I found a pretty big sherd. Maybe Socorro.” He jogged toward them.

Ed held out a hand, took the sherd, pursed his mouth, and spat on the pottery, rubbing with his thumb until the surface was clearer.

“Tularosa?” he asked.

“Yeah, Tularosa,” Ren said. “Nice job, Paul.” She reached for the sherd, holding it between her thumb and forefinger. There were certain oral elements to fieldwork: If you wondered what sherd you'd found, you spat on its surface. If you wondered whether you'd found bone or wood, you laid the bone on your tongue. Bone would stick, and wood would not.

“It was packed in a clump of dirt,” said Paul, words coming quickly. “And if I hadn't been scraping it pretty gently, I'd probably have broken it. But I saw just the edge of it, and see how it's a piece of the rim?”

“Definitely the rim,” said Ren.

“I'll go show Silas,” Paul said, already moving.

Ed stepped closer to Ren, and she was reminded of how he had a way of edging into your personal space that was comforting rather than intrusive. He leaned in to her in a way that felt like a confidence.

“You think we'll find her?” he asked. “Your artist?”

She answered without editing her thoughts. “Yeah.”

“If we do,” he said, “the hordes will descend. Journalists. Tourists, maybe. Universities wanting a piece of it. It'll be bigger than last time.” He swiped at his nose. “A lot of people wouldn't have called you here. A lot of people would assume you'd steal the spotlight.”

“I know. Did you tell Silas I don't care about the credit?”

“I didn't tell him that. He didn't ask.”

She nodded at Silas, who was peering at Paul's sherd. “You like him.”

“I do.”

“I've never heard of him.”

“I don't think he publishes much. He doesn't teach. He likes the data, likes digging it up and teasing out the patterns, but he doesn't care which journal it winds up in. But he's like you out here. You both walk around a site with a look on your face like a kid at Christmas. You're filthy and you've got bugs in your mouth and blood oozing out of a cut, and you feed off every second of it.”

She considered this and felt pleased by the assessment. When Ed returned to screening, she veered off toward Silas, who was kneeling at the edge of the hole. She looked at the walls of the room. “You don't think this room is Mimbres, do you?” she asked. “Too much rock.”

“Yeah,” Silas said. “Northern influence. They didn't have good rock to work with. This tiny river rock is like trying to stack ball bearings.”

She was studying the lines of the wall when she felt his finger on the inside of her knee. But not his finger—the leathery tip of his glove, barely skimming her skin.

“What's that?” he asked.

She had a thin red scrape from the top of her knee to mid-calf, like a mark from a teacher's grading pen. His fingertip followed the path of the scratch, not touching any longer.

“I don't know,” she said, watching his hand in the air. She stood up and brushed her hands against her shorts.

Silas offered to pair up with her on the T-shaped room block while Paul and Ed finished the room with the cache of bones. She and Silas spent the rest of the day working on the room that had already been started. The first ten centimeters were hard-packed, but the second and third layers were soft as beach sand. Silas dug, and Ren screened. She liked the feel of the dirt under her hands, so she screened and sorted bare-handed. She dumped each bucket onto the screen and spread it with her hands, feeling the silkiness of the dirt, the roughness of the rocks, the curves of broken roots. A breeze blew steadily.

They found a dozen small black-on-white sherds. Silas found a serrated stone blade, and Ren found a perfect projectile point. He took her back to the bunkhouse a different way, following a steep path through an arroyo. The descent looked vertical from the top. Ren watched Silas start down. He held a bucketful of bagged artifacts in one hand. He skidded, and she frowned, but he rode out the skid, skiing smoothly down the gravel.

“Okay with this?” he called back. ”It's much faster than the way we came.”

She took a breath and a sideways step. She lost traction immediately, but, like him, she leaned back, balanced with her arms, and relaxed into the slide. She careened downhill, riding the rocks. The lack of control was thrilling.

She reached the bottom of the arroyo right behind him. He watched her jog down the last few steps and grinned as she came to a stop. The edges of his two front teeth were slightly jagged, serrated like the stone blade he'd found.

That afternoon they finished up lab work, scrubbing pieces of stone and sherds with toothbrushes and water, then leaving them to dry in the sun. Bone and charcoal, which could be weakened by the water, were not cleaned. They remained in tightly wrapped foil packets. Once dry, artifacts were sorted into clean paper bags, labeled based on their type and location, recorded in a thick plastic binder, and tucked inside cardboard filing boxes. These bits of pottery, worked stone, and remains of meals would, at some point, be unpacked in a different lab room and organized more thoroughly.

Her hands and arms gritty from splashes of dirty water, Ren headed to the swimming hole Silas had mentioned on their way back from the site. She took a bag with shampoo and conditioner, a towel, her water bottle filled with lemonade, hiking down the main road to the creek. It was a narrow creek, and even the swimming hole was only four feet or so across. She set down her bag and stripped down to her bathing suit, walking close to the water, past fat black ants patrolling the shore. Carefully, she stepped off the bank—dried grass and leaves sticking to her feet—down into the slope of mud and moss leading to the creek bottom. The water was up to her waist, cold. Almost unpleasant.

She sat down and leaned back into the flow of the water, feeling pebbles from the small of her back down to her thighs. She let the current support her. She and Scott used to see who could stay at the bottom of the pool the longest, sunk like a stone: The seat of her favorite purple bathing suit—with the fringe along the neckline—was always rubbed furry from the rough concrete. Sometimes they would toss some toy or bracelet into the pool and race to find the sunken treasure, or they would invent dives and floats, or they would play Marco Polo until she screamed because Scott always eluded her and usually dunked her two-handed like a basketball just to add insult to injury. Her mother could catch Scott because she had been on swim teams and still leaped and dove like a seal, and she would grab his ankle and pull him under and Ren would splash him in the eyes as he went down.

Now she dipped deeper. She washed her hair in the rushing water, suds swept downstream almost immediately. She shivered—her teeth were chattering by the time she pulled out her soap and started rubbing her arms and legs. She thought of calling the office. She thought of the smell of juniper. She shivered again. As she rinsed, she clenched her teeth and tried to block out the cold. Block out the day, block out herself. There was only the water and the cool air, her clean skin and wet hair. The feel of the pebbles against her thighs. The pull of the current. She relaxed into it, feeling the water lift and stroke each strand of hair.

When she stood, water running off her, she did not fight against the cold anymore.

Their feet had stirred up this dirt and walked through this water. Here. Soft breeze and willows bending and dried bits of grass on feet.

From her first dig when she was twenty-two, these were what had appealed to her: the constants. The scenes, the land, the chemical compositions—the moments—that remained the same now and a thousand years ago. There was a power to the constancy, to the connection through distinct, holdable physical things. It was a rock that astonished her at first. She'd been shoulder-deep in a room, and a piece of river cobble had fallen from the side of the wall, landing right at her feet. Someone, not Ed, had told her to toss the rock out of the hole. She'd reached to pick it up, and the same someone had yelled out, Wait, is it already drawn on the map of the wall, and she'd said yes. And he'd said, Okay, toss it. She wrapped both hands around it, and somewhere deep in her chest it struck her that other hands had wrapped around this same rock and fit it into the wall in the first place. The rock joined her hands to that set of unknown hands that had first placed the rock, and the simplicity of it had floored her.

She'd chosen to specialize in ceramics because pottery intensified the connection to those who came before. The ceramics talked to her far more than a rock could. Each piece had a language, a message in pictures and design, or at least in form and composition. The pottery spoke with the voices of its makers. And she was eager to listen. If she decoded the right signals, she imagined she could disappear—for even a second—into those other lives, cross over the rock or the adobe floor or the ceramic dust and find herself living as another self, in another time.

She reached into the water and came up with two handfuls of rocks, smooth and cool in her palms, then let them fall back into the water one by one. She could feel a pressure behind her eyes. This was when she could see things—when she got outside her own skin. And somehow also more deeply in her own skin. She opened herself and felt sun and air on her face. She sank into the sound of water.

When she turned back toward the path, the landscape shifted. A thick wall of trees appeared where there had been a dirt path. A new grove of piñon stood in the distance. Swirling around her feet, the creek was deeper and wider. She could see it branch off, foaming, where seconds before there had been only dry land. She saw the imprint of bare feet in front of her. She heard a girl's laughing and saw a flash of brown skin and bare feet and dark hair disappear into the trees.