Come In and Cover Me (5 page)

Then the forest was gone, along with the footprints. The creek had calmed. It was a beginning.

The next day they began the serious digging. The soreness never sank in on the first day of a dig. And in a few days it would be gone. But now Ren's body complained about the new routine. The entire length of her spine felt the strain of bending over the dirt, of scooping and shoveling on her hands and knees. The weight of the buckets pulled on her fingers and shoulder joint as she walked, and if she carried two full buckets, that ache spread to a strain across her shoulders.

Clouds of dirt flew when Silas dug. He made soft grunts as he swung the pick. His rhythm seemed effortless, and when he stopped and laid the pick on the ground, Ren was surprised—and gratified—to see him breathing heavily. He rolled his shoulders one at a time.

“Feeling it?” she asked.

He winced as he stretched his arms overhead. “Like a wet sponge.”

“Oh.”

When she took her turn hacking at the dirt, Silas stood, waiting for the buckets. A fringe of the juniper peeked around his knees and thighs, past his shoulders. He had a habit of breaking off tiny pieces of juniper and crushing them between his fingertips. She could smell the strong woody smell when the wind blew just right.

Paul and Ed joined them later in the day. They chipped in with carrying buckets, chattering as they carried.

“What did the Apaches make tiswin beer out of?” asked Paul.

“Juniper, I think,” said Ed.

“Silas, what was tiswin beer made out of?” Paul called more loudly.

“Sprouted corn,” answered Silas, without looking up.

Ren screened the buckets of dirt. Since the dirt was no longer soft, she wore one glove—Ed told her she screened like Michael Jackson—so she would have protection against the sharp rocks but could still feel the texture of the dirt. Her hands felt as if they would crack like arid earth.

“I thought they made something out of juniper,” yelled Ed. More softly, he said, “You've got to at least try to stump him.”

“Turpentine,” Silas called back, before Ed stopped speaking.

Later in the afternoon she hit a root, long dead, and pried at it, then hacked at it with the pickax. She splintered it but couldn't detach it. She paused to readjust her grip and catch her breath. When she looked up, Paul was kneeling, eyeing the root she'd been attacking. He flexed his biceps.

“Very nice,” she said, straight-faced.

“Can I interest you in two tickets to the gun show?” he said, deepening his voice. She thought it might be a movie reference.

She handed him the ax.

“Or one ticket to the ax show,” he said in the same voice. He rolled his sleeves up even higher. “I'm all about manual labor. It gives me a little something for the ladies.”

She vaulted out of the pit to give him room. “Girls do like muscles.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, dislodging some sort of gnat from the corner of her eye. “I would have noticed those muscles when I was in college.”

“Don't get any ideas, son,” said Ed, rummaging through the supply bag. “She's a long way from college now.”

“I can't imagine why you don't date more, Ed,” she said.

She turned back to Paul, shaking her head sadly. “But it wouldn't have worked out between us. You're a nice boy. I would have eaten you for breakfast.”

The boy blushed, actually blushed underneath his tan, and she arched an eyebrow at him. He ducked his head and started chopping at the root.

The truth was she did like nice boys. And she had eaten them for breakfast. Spat them out and left them bruised and battered. But even though that was the truth, when she said it to Paul, it was not real. It was only dialogue.

Later, as they began packing to head back to the bunkhouse, Ed and Paul bickered over when chilies arrived in the Southwest. Paul thought they had come up from Mexico at the same time as corn and squash.

“Hey, Silas, when did New Mexico get chilies?” called Ed.

“When the Spanish came,” said Silas. He'd been chasing a paper bag that was blowing across the site.

“Told you,” said Ed.

Later that night they sat on the porch, watching the darkening sky over the mountains. A jackrabbit bounded across the field near the grazing horses.

“So you know how some of the Mimbres pots have people with parrots perched on their heads?” asked Paul in the silence. “What's the deal with the parrots?”

“It taught good posture,” said Ed, unblinking, as if he were staring into the cameras, announcing a traffic jam on I-10.

“It depends on what we think pottery means,” Ren said. “I mean, there were, in fact, parrots. The Mimbreños traded for parrots from northern Mexico. But are they drawing these pictures the same way we would take a photograph—to capture what actually existed? Or were the images just symbols—representations of an idea or emotion, or some historical allusion? An expression of faith?”

“So we don't know?” Paul asked.

“The only people who know for sure are long gone,” Ren said.

Paul frowned. “How many licks does it take to get to the bottom of a Mimbres bowl?”

“That doesn't even make any sense,” said Ed.

Paul rocked back on two chair legs. “Silas, how many licks does it take to get to the bottom of a Mimbres bowl?”

Silas had not been in a storytelling mood tonight. He had stayed quiet, sitting away from the rest of them, close to the fire. Zorro had fallen asleep on top of his feet. Silas didn't answer Paul, who waited for a moment and turned back to Ren.

“I like the animal hybrids on the pottery,” he said. “Macaw heads on women. Bear heads on turtles.”

Ren nodded. “Turkey men. Macaw women. Maybe that's where the jackalopes got started.”

“I think I saw a bear-elk the other night, by the way,” Paul said. “Body of a bear and the head of an elk. Better than Bigfoot.”

“People have made a lot of money off Bigfoot,” Ed said.

“I like money,” said Paul. “I should license it.”

“It'd sound scarier in Latin,” said Ed.

“Okay,” said Paul agreeably. “So ‘bear-elk' in Latin is . . . Who knows Latin?”

“Ursa-cervus,”
Silas said.

Ren turned. “You can translate ‘bear-elk' into Latin?”

He looked over, smiling, finally, at her, then not smiling, just looking. She looked back. She blinked. Before she blinked again, they both looked away. Paul said something else she didn't hear. She could feel Silas's eyes on her again; then she heard his chair creak and his feet slide against the dirt.

“Night, everybody,” he said. She turned then to say good night, and she saw his hand raised. She thought he might pat her back or squeeze her shoulder. But he brushed one knuckle along the line of her jaw, so brief she didn't register that it had happened until after the crunch of his footsteps had faded.

When she looked back toward the fire, she saw Ed watching her. She didn't recognize his expression. She thought he might tease her or tease Silas, but he kept quiet; his silent, speculative gaze unsettled her more than the touch of Silas's finger.

That night Scott woke her by leaning in close to her face, his nose almost touching hers—it was a trick their old terrier used to do when he wanted to be let out in the middle of the night. She opened her eyes and stared directly into Scott's darker brown ones. He seemed solid in the moonlight. She shoved at him and felt nothing but air.

“Go away, Scottie,” she said. “You're not the one I'm trying to see.”

Back in the days and weeks and maybe months right after the accident, she could feel him behind her without turning her head. The air felt different when he was nearby. For a while he was next to her bed most mornings. He seemed to be around every corner. Then, over time, she didn't see him as often. Eventually he stopped speaking, but he never stopped singing to her. Sometimes she couldn't make out the words, but she always recognized the tune. He sang the same music he had taught her.

He used to come to her in the in-between times—when she was rubbing the sleep out of her eyes in the morning; when she was staring at her bedroom wall, bodiless and mindless, forgotten homework spread over her bed. He came to her as she paced the empty house in the long afternoons before her parents came home.

Ren rolled back over, and Scott was still standing by the bed. The bad thing about these nighttime visits was that her mind was open and relaxed whether she meant it to be or not. She could never be sure which song might slip under her skin and where it might go. She hoped he'd stay quiet.

She sighed. “I really need to get some sleep. Really. Go haunt someone else for a while.”

Sometimes if she closed her eyes fast enough, she would feel only annoyance with him. She could pretend she would see him in the morning, eating breakfast and piling folders in his book bag. And if she was lucky, she could fall back asleep without feeling anything else.

three

If art is intended to communicate with others, artists are additionally constrained by the necessity of producing images that can be “read,” or understood by an appropriate audience.

—From “Picturing Differences: Gender, Ritual, and Power in Mimbres Imagery” by Marit K. Munson,
Mimbres Society
, 2006

For the first week, Silas drank his coffee black. On the seventh day, he was making his lunch while she fixed her coffee. He layered thin slices of ham, sprinkled them liberally with salt, then added the top piece of bread. He finished with one more shake of salt, straight on the bread.

He glanced at her cup as she poured in the cream.

“I'll take cream, please,” he said.

“You drink it black.”

“Not really.”

“You've drunk it black every day for a week.”

“Black coffee is manly,” he said, folding foil around his sandwich. “It makes a statement. I like the
idea
of black coffee.”

“You're not drinking an idea.”

“Exactly,” he said.

She added sugar to her own cup. “If you want to prove your manliness, there are ways other than coffee.”

“There are,” he said slowly.

When she looked up from her coffee, he seemed closer somehow, although she was sure his feet hadn't moved. The smile flickering around the corners of his mouth was both amused and challenging, and possibly other things. This was where she should say something clever. Or laugh it off. Clever would be better. But nothing came to her, and he filled the silence himself, his voice all easiness and self-mockery.

“It has a certain romanticism to it,” he said. “Black coffee. Out here in the prehistoric ruins. Wild animals gnashing teeth.”

She passed him the cream. “You really don't like black coffee?”

“Not really.”

He was impossible to decipher. “Seriously?”

“I have a variety of coffee moods.”

They walked through the front door, stepped off the porch, and Silas headed toward what had become their favorite folding chairs in the yard. She held her cup to her lips, lingering on the porch as Silas settled in his chair. She watched his shoulder muscles shift under his T-shirt as he stretched. She watched him close his eyes.

The door swung open behind her. Ed sipped his own cup of coffee—black. She had no doubt that he did actually drink it black. She'd been with him for months out of her life—a month during that first summer, three months at Crow Creek, and plenty of shorter digs in between—and every morning she'd seen him with his ink-black coffee.

“Morning, Rennie,” he said. He was the only one outside her family who had ever called her Rennie, and he seemed to have divined the name from thin air. She had certainly never told him.

When she looked up, he was looking at Silas, not at her. She wondered if he had followed her own gaze.

“How long will you stay?” he asked, surprising her. “If we don't find any more traces of her?”

“I think I could swing another two or three weeks. I don't know. I've put off calling the museum. But I'll have to update them soon.”

“It might not be her.”

“It might not be.”

He looked at the mountains. “If you had to go back, we could handle this, you know. Call you back if we found anything.”

“You trying to get rid of me, Ed?”

“Never. But I don't want you to worry that finding the Crow Creek artist depends on you staying. If you have to leave, we'll keep looking.”

She had a second of doubt, a flash of thinking he really was trying to get rid of her, which made no sense at all. There was no one she was closer to in the world than Ed.

“Hey, Ren,” called Silas, still stretched out in his chair with his eyes closed. “I left my sandwich in there. I was thinking, you're a woman; I'm a man. Go fetch it for me, huh?”

“Shut up, Silas,” she called back.

He smirked, never opening his eyes. She wasn't even sure he knew Ed was there.

“Ed, go get my sandwich,” called Silas, who apparently did know they had company.

“You just wait there for it, Silas,” said Ed. “Just keep on waiting.”

Ren waited to see if Ed would say more about her leaving. But he only took a sip of his coffee.

“Remember that excavation along the Gila a few summers ago?” he asked. “With that older archaeologist who fell hard for that big blue-eyed grad student? He kept offering to rub her feet?”

“The really well endowed grad student?”

“Yeah.”

She pretended to think. “The one who turned out to be a lesbian?”

Ed smiled. “Yeah. Yeah. That was a good dig.”

And just like that, he was the Ed she had always known, the man who could name every insect in water, land, or sky. The man who could tell a tall tale like he was giving the weather. At times over the years she could almost imagine this was her father. A father she saw occasionally, who treated her with affection and professional courtesy. It was an appealing vision, a scenario in which fathers were without personal lives or expectations and existed only to be charming and kind and fatherly for as long as their presence was appreciated.

She'd walked past the swimming hole, farther into the canyon. The dirt road stayed close to the creek. Two sets of deer tracks crossed her path: The splayed, rounded toes of a buck smudged the pointed, compact prints of a doe. She turned a corner in the road, and the air changed: It sparkled around her, bits of light blinking past her face and hands and around her knees. She'd reached a huge cottonwood, towering, with thick green branches. The tree was snowing cotton bits, and the fading sunlight caught them, spun them glittering in the air.

She walked to the trunk and ran her fingers along its alligator bark. The trunk was thick and ropy, immense. She stood still, wind blowing, caught in its snow globe.

She heard breathing just behind her, low to the ground. Animal panting, like a dog needing water. She looked behind her, expecting to see Zorro wagging his tail. Nothing.

She stayed still. Again, the sound of panting, this time farther away. There was the sound of feet moving through leaves so loudly that they must have wanted to be heard. She looked and saw no one. The footsteps grew faster.

She did not know if she wanted to see whoever was moving through the woods. She made herself control her own breathing—deep and slow. She needed to see whatever or whoever was willing to show itself. She walked slowly back to the creek. For a while, the sounds stopped.

As she stepped through the creek, she watched the rocks—burnt orange, pink, black, deep gold, pale yellow, chocolate. Ferric oxide in the reds, limonite in the yellows, manganese in the blacks. When she reached the other side, she knew she was not alone anymore. She looked up and saw a man hunched in the tall grass with his back to her. He was strong and lean, and his hair was long down his naked shoulder blades.

It was only a flash, lasting maybe five seconds. She saw his black hair and an expanse of skin and a carcass at his feet. It was skinned and glistening—a deer, probably. She saw a small mass of what she thought were intestines in a clump of weeds. The man had a blade, a sharpened rock, in his hand, and he was cutting strips of meat, sawing along the whole width of carcass. He pulled off a strip maybe two feet wide and three feet long, the right size for jerky.

The meat was steaming slightly, and Ren thought she could smell blood. It was surprisingly pleasant. The man had blood streaked up to his elbows. He turned in her direction, pausing, looking at the creek but not at her. She thought he was coming to the water to wash. She looked at the dead thing and breathed in the blood.

Then he was gone and only the smell lingered.

She waited for several more minutes and saw nothing else. She tried to clear her head of the smell and make sense of what she'd seen. The man was obviously not her artist, and she couldn't see how he would have anything to do with pottery. But she was glad to have seen him: He'd been part of this place. If he was here, others might be, too. She only needed to keep looking.

They'd all taken a long lunch break, because Ren felt she couldn't put off checking in with the office any longer. It was the second time in her two weeks at the canyon that she'd driven off the ranch to the asphalt highway, watching her phone screen until she picked up reception. She'd answered e-mails, pulled off on the side of the road, windows rolled down to catch a breeze. As soon as she closed her phone, the whole conversation—her whole life on the other end of the phone—caught the wind and floated away.

She'd been pestering Silas to take them up canyon to a previously excavated site called Apex, and he'd finally agreed. A jagged hill rose out of the flat ground, with edges of rock obvious along the outline of the hill. Ren could see the rocks were walls embedded along the peak. She could count room blocks, but they were packed in tightly, a prehistoric tenement apartment building. The families had built right on top of each other, all the way up the rock face. It was clearly Northern Puebloan.

“We've got six-foot walls, collapsed architecture, rooms—as you can see—all the way up that slope,” Silas said. “Obviously these guys were worried when they built here. You can see for miles and miles here, all across the canyon, so no one can sneak up on you. The other side of this hill is a sheer drop—absolutely no way to approach from that side.”

“Think they were afraid of the neighbors?” asked Ren.

He shrugged. “I think they were afraid of everyone. These guys got here around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The world was a dangerous place.”

Ren cocked her head and squinted against the sunlight. After the fall of Chaco, the city's residents had spread into surrounding valleys, uprooted and unsure. The population had fallen into valley-to-valley warfare. Chaos and violence. In the Gallina Highlands, outside of Albuquerque, studies of human remains had suggested that sixty percent of adults and nearly forty percent of children had died violent deaths in those years after Chaco fell. Beheadings and dismemberments with dull flint knives; quick, brutal deaths during hand-to-hand fighting over land and food and survival.

“What's wrong with the name Anasazi?” asked Paul.

Ren and Silas turned. Paul looked slightly surprised they had heard him.

“I mean, the northern groups, the ones with Chaco, they were the Anasazi, right?” he said. “From all the movies and books? You say Northern Puebloan, but it's the same thing. Why don't we call them Anasazi anymore?”

They were walking around to the back of the cliff, watching the cliff swallows darting through its shadows. The back was unassailable, as Silas had said, a vertical wall of rock where nothing but birds and bugs could find footholds.

“It's offensive to some people,” said Ren. “
Anasazi
is a Navajo term, meaning ancient enemies. It's a little, oh, negative. Some of the tribal groups prefer ‘Ancestral Puebloans,' but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. ‘Northern Puebloan' works.”

“Cities of gold, weren't there?” pressed Paul. “Treasure? Mass human sacrifice? Some of it has to be true.”

“Not so much,” Ren said.

“A little,” Silas said.

She rolled her eyes.

“No cities of gold,” said Ed. “But it's hard to believe Chaco controlled hundreds of miles just with charm and good looks.”

“So maybe it was just the possibility of withholding food surpluses,” said Silas. “If you don't do what we say, you won't get food. But judging by what we've seen of their plazas and where there've been traces of human blood and remains, it was more than that. If you bucked the system, you got taken there and beaten in public. Humiliated.” He pointed a dusty finger at Ren. “Then, possibly, you were cooked. And eaten.”

She frowned. “They haven't found that many boiled human bones. We don't know that they were eaten.”

“Just how many boiled human bones would you say are required?”

“It's a very Hollywood kind of explanation.”

“It was not a nice place,” he insisted. “Or, rather, maybe it was, but it was also ugly and brutal. And beautiful. Chaco made beautiful buildings, and they also probably ate people occasionally. Life is blood and death and fear and joy and fierce architecture, man.”

They walked deeper into the canyon, wading through the creek, only the soles of their shoes getting wet. The pebbles crunched under their feet. Ren was feeling irritated. Something about Silas's tone was getting on her nerves.

“You should get that on a bumper sticker,” she said.

He stepped onto the shore and motioned toward the hillside rooms. “That's always what life is.
Esta casa es su casa.
”

“Another good bumper sticker,” said Paul, still splashing through the water.

“This house is not my house,” said Ren. “My life is not blood and death and fierce architecture. And it may not be what life at Chaco was. You talk about it—joke about it—as if it were fact.”

“Oh, no,” said Silas. “Not fact. I'm very stingy with what I consider a fact. I believe in margins of error.”

She shook her head. “Violence is not inevitable. It's not a given, not at Chaco, even. I mean, we don't know that the Mimbres were anything but peaceful agrarians.”

“There've been references to fighting on Mimbres bowls,” he said.

“I know that.” She stopped, and so did he. “That doesn't mean they weren't peaceable people.”

“And it doesn't mean they were.” He licked his lips and rubbed a hand over his chin. At first she took the pause as a reluctance to argue with her. Then she looked at his eyes and saw only pleasure.

“Look,” he said, “you're trying to say that where we have gaps in our knowledge, there is nothing. We know the Mimbreños were farmers. We know that they were artists. So they are defined only by what we know. They are nothing else. I'm saying they can be anything until it's disproven. They are everything that's possible all at once. All those possibilities are out there, all existing at the same time, a million different variations floating around until we can prove they are not the case.”