Come In and Cover Me (6 page)

“‘I am large, I contain multitudes,'” said Ed.

Ren exhaled. “Now you're quoting Whitman at me, Ed? Are you saying you agree with Silas?”

“I find it interesting,” Ed said. “The idea that we are not filling a blank space. We're not creating a people, creating a history. It all exists—we're just trying to choose which reality is the correct one.”

“But only one reality is correct,” said Ren. This seemed inarguable. She turned back to Silas. “The others are false. We just don't know which ones. We do not know that the people at Chaco were cannibals. You should not say they are cannibals when there is not substantive evidence. You're saying, I think, that until we have proof either way, they are both. They both are and aren't cannibals. The Mimbres were both peaceful and warlike.”

“Exactly,” said Silas, sounding satisfied. His face was lit up like he'd just found Atlantis at the bottom of the creek bed. “We can't know the reality, not for sure. There are always other possibilities. And I'm not sure reality is as concrete as you make it out. I think it can be, even in our current time, more complex. An entire person, much less an entire civilization, is not just one definable thing.”

“If we're not out here searching for one empirical truth, then what's the point of being out here at all?” she said. “If we can't know anything, what's the point of trying?”

“Because it's fun. Because it's what we have. But it's a puzzle we're trying to fit together knowing that we'll never have all the pieces. We can't avoid the blank spaces. They're a part of it.”

“I have to believe the pieces can fit together,” she said. “We owe them that—to tell the truth about them.”

Paul had been listening carefully. “Do you believe there's a truth?” he asked Silas.

“Several of them,” said Silas. He looked back to Ren. “But don't you think my way is less limiting?”

“I think your way is ridiculous,” she said, and he laughed.

If they were going to get any work done before sundown, they needed to get back to the site. When they turned back and stepped in the creek, Ren looked down at a school of minnows veering around her boot. She was not thinking about the relative sanity of his idea. She was thinking of what Ed had said about Silas not wanting to teach. The way he looked when he argued reminded her of professors, the good kind, at least—the look said if you don't challenge me on this, you're a boring sort of person.

She'd never wanted to teach, herself. She didn't particularly enjoy being questioned.

The planks of the bench were poorly spaced, and she could feel the edges of the wood biting into her thighs through her cotton skirt. It had been silly to wear the skirt. Still, she had been covered in dust for weeks, hair either clean and wet and plastered to her head or dry and dirty and pulled into a ponytail. Her face stayed clean for minutes at a time. So it was only natural that for this one afternoon when they made the trip to Truth or Consequences for supplies and a good dinner, she would want to look like a woman, not an archaeologist, to look feminine and attractive to the extent that a skirt and lip gloss and eyeliner could signify those things.

“Like the skirt,” Silas had said to her as they got in the van, not looking at her, and she had the unexpected thought that he seemed a bit shy. But then he turned his head and waggled his eyebrows, lecherously, goofily, and she was at a loss.

They'd been in T or C for only half an hour. Ed and Paul had each made a quick phone call, then headed to the grocery store to start the shopping. Silas was walking—pacing, really—along the sidewalk behind her as he took care of his own phone calls.

She was editing copy for an upcoming exhibit, which was not an efficient process by phone. Three short-lived desert colonies had coalesced in various bends along the Rio Grande during the late 1800s, and her first draft of exhibit copy was more than ten thousand words. The office manager, Sally, was reading the problem paragraphs aloud. Too much talk of spirituality. Not enough on agriculture. She needed to do this right, needed to prove that she could do her job long-distance. The museum board's patience wouldn't last forever.

She glanced at Silas, who had called his parents. He was speaking to his father, whom he called “sir,” and asked about a fence Silas had apparently fixed on some recent visit. He nodded at the phone frequently. Then his mother took the phone, and he teased her about something to do with watching
Jeopardy!
She made him laugh. He told her he had a book he wanted to bring her the next time he came. When he hung up, he looked over at Ren, phone still open in his hand.

“Still the office?” he mouthed.

She nodded, rolling her eyes.

“My brother's next,” he said. He punched in numbers and said, “Hello, young man,” into the phone.

She tried to focus on the next paragraph Sally read. But she was aware of Silas asking someone named Skillet to record a game, because apparently football season was starting in two days.

She hung up just as Silas was sliding his phone into his pocket.

“I'm done. You need to make more calls?” he asked. “I can wait. Or go on inside while you finish up.”

“I'm done, too,” she said.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Just the office?”

“I'm a conscientious worker.”

A pause, then a grin. “No boyfriends to call? No ex-husbands? Current husbands? Boy toys?”

This, she knew with unusual certainty, was a joke but not a joke.

“If you wonder about my personal life, you could just ask me,” she said.

He looked surprised, and she watched the possible responses play across his face. His expression shifted from amusement to self-consciousness and then something that she would almost swear was embarrassment.

“Well, then,” he said finally, exhaling a short laugh. “Grocery shopping it is.”

She had not meant to chastise him. She didn't want him backing away from her. She wasn't sure what she wanted, but she knew it wasn't distance. At least not right now. She stood and put a hand on his arm as he started to turn. He stopped moving.

“And you had no girlfriends to call, either,” she said, voice light. “Unless Skillet is a girl.”

“Skillet is not a girl,” he said, and she couldn't look away from his face.

She took her hand off his arm and stepped off the curb. “Skillet is a friend I used to play pick-up basketball with,” he said from behind her. “The name's because when he shot, he sizzled.”

At the restaurant, the tamales were hot and perfectly moist, and when Ren finished her helping, she peeled the strips of leftover breading from the corn husks and dropped them into her mouth bit by bit. When she wiped her hands, she could feel the cornmeal under her fingernails.

“The bulldozers would turn up the bowls in a cushion of dirt,” said Silas, ripping a tortilla in half. “Along with turning up the bodies, of course, because that's where the bowls were. The landowner and Gardner would split the profits. Before the burial laws were passed, Gardner raked in the cash. Even reputable museums bought from him.”

Silas was describing Bob Gardner, the best-known pothunter in New Mexico during the seventies and eighties, whose construction business had served as a front for large-scale bulldozings of archaeological sites. A landowner could find a pot, call up Gardner, and he'd send out the appropriate number of men with the appropriate number of bulldozers.

“I was twenty,” said Silas, “doing an internship up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, and my boss wanted to go see Gardner about a cylinder jar he'd heard about. He told me I could come. A maid let us in the house, and when we walked into the living room, there were Mimbres bowls everywhere. Everywhere. In the entranceway, on the coffee table, on the shelves. On the mantel there was this one spectacular polychrome—a red-on-white-with-yellow misfire—with an image of a warrior. I bet it was worth more than any piece we had in the museum. And next to the mantel, there was a jaguar pelt stretched across the wall. I'd never seen a jaguar in the wild. It's been illegal to hunt them for as long as I can remember. Then Gardner walked into the room, using a cane. He told my boss he'd sold the jar already, and we sort of lapsed into silence. So I asked him if that was a jaguar pelt on the wall.

“He said he'd bagged it himself, and he asked if I hunted any. I said yes, but that I'd never seen a jaguar. He told me they weren't easy to come by.”

Silas sipped his beer, setting it back on the table with a soft clank. “I said, ‘Aren't they an endangered species?' even though I knew they were.

“And he said, ‘Everything has to die sometime.'”

He glanced around the table. “And that, in a nutshell, was Bob Gardner.”

“Not a good man,” said Ren.

“No,” said Silas, “he was not. Although I think sometimes the old-time pothunters get a bad rap. It wasn't always good versus evil. Some of them really loved the pieces and did what they could to preserve the pottery. They were in it for the art instead of for the money.”

“They kept it for themselves,” said Ren. “Whether it was the money or the art.”

“Didn't you manage to direct some of Gardner's pieces to the T or C museum after he died?” said Ed.

Silas nodded. “A few.”

“How'd you get them?” asked Ren.

“His housekeeper knew of some smaller pieces he kept in storage. He hadn't made arrangements for them.”

“How did you know about them?” she asked.

“I went out to his house after he died and asked her if there were any pieces unaccounted for,” Silas said. “We drank a few cups of tea and talked about her two daughters in high school. One was hoping to be an engineer. It was a nice afternoon.”

Ed snorted. “Silas flirts with women, men, cats, dogs, sometimes lizards.”

“And houseplants,” added Paul.

“I do not,” said Silas, with some dignity. “I am not attracted to houseplants. And I did not flirt with that woman—I talked to her. Nicely.”

“You flirted with that geologist when she came out to the canyon,” said Paul. “She was in her sixties.”

“I did not flirt with that geologist. That's ridiculous.”

Ren thought he sounded annoyed now. She watched his face, although he wasn't looking at her.

“You don't even know when you're doing it,” said Paul, and it occurred to Ren that Ed had grown quiet. “It's like breathing. You can't help it.”

She remembered that when Scott was in middle school, her parents had devoted entire dinner conversations to trying to teach him when a joke was no longer funny. To explaining how to read your audience. But the more Scott wanted to impress someone, the more he beat a dead joke into the ground.

Paul turned to her. “Ren, he flirts, doesn't he?”

And now they were all looking at her. She held her glass in front of her mouth, not drinking. “I hadn't noticed,” she said.

Silas was folding his napkin. Paul kept looking at her. Ed did not.

“But I'm not a houseplant,” she added.

“We're just giving him a hard time,” said Ed, a little loudly. “It's not like we've seen him with a constant stream of women coming through the canyon.”

“Hence the houseplants,” said Paul.

“Enough,” said Silas, flatly, and everyone became interested in their napkins. Ren watched him in her peripheral vision, and he did not move, not even a jostle of his knee or the twitch of a fingertip.

She wanted to say something very quickly, something utterly fascinating. “Paul,” she said, “when did you get interested in archaeology?”

It was sufficient. They moved on. She and Ed and Paul chatted easily enough until the waitress brought the checks. Eventually Silas picked up his beer again and nodded his agreement at a comment or two.

Until they pulled off onto the dirt road into the canyon, the ride home had been almost completely silent. Ed loved to drive, even on these roads, and Paul sat beside him. Ren and Silas sat in the backseat, seat belts buckled, jerking forward and back as the tires hit ruts and rocks. Ren pressed her cheek against the cool glass to watch the sky in early evening. She had a takeaway sack of tamales still warm against her foot. Her forehead smacked the window as Ed drove through the creek, and she pulled back slightly. The sky was deep and rich just after sunset, tactile as velvet or raw silk. She saw a small movement along the edge of the road.

“Jackrabbit,” she said, pointing.

“The bunnies love running across the road this time of the day,” said Ed, taking a quick look. “It's suicide alley.”

Silas was removed in a way she was coming to recognize. He was transparent at times, and at other times he completely disappeared. One second he could be joking and holding court, filling up the car or the porch or the open air with the force of his presence. Then that very presence that drew them all to his every word would collapse like a star turned—what did stars turn into? Supernovas—no, black holes. In any case, he would be gone, vanished into his own head. He'd been gone ever since the restaurant. She disliked feeling him turn inward. She herself was skilled at not getting caught in her own head.

Another creek crossing. Then another. The water was solid black, reflecting nothing, and even though she knew its shallowness, Ren could not shake the feeling that each time the wheels tipped into the water, they were all plunging into an abyss.

She wished this were not an excavation she cared so desperately about. To get involved with someone on a dig risked the entire project—all the drama and emotion of the personal contaminated the professional. She'd seen it happen to others, but she had never been tempted. She resented the timing of the temptation. This dig, more than any other, she did not want to risk.

She looked over at Silas. She enjoyed how his mind worked and the length of his eyelashes. She thought about houseplants.