Come In and Cover Me (7 page)

“I can't believe you wouldn't do a shot of Jäger with me,” said Paul to the car in general.

“It's like drinking motor oil,” said Ed.

Paul swung one foot onto the dashboard with a thud. Ed swatted it back to the floor.

“I spent some time at El Barrio Inglés in Roatán, Honduras, on this ethnographic research project,” said Silas.

Ren thought she could hear the slightest rustle of cotton against upholstery, the sound of them all settling back against their seats, anticipating a story. They could all surely feel the shift in his mood, the energy radiating outward once more, the light turned on.

“My dad had ordered me not to go, and I was in a rebellious phase,” he continued. “He said I should wait and go on a project where someone could watch after me. He said I'd get my head cut off and stuck on a stick. My dad hadn't really traveled much. And I was looking for any chance to prove that I was tough enough and good enough. I was supposed to be looking at how native diets had changed from historic times to present times.”

Ren wished he would say more about his father, and at the same time she wondered why he bothered to mention his father at all. The reference had been unnecessary.

“Anyway, they don't like outsiders too much in the barrio,” continued Silas. “I had a contact who was supposed to hook me up with the locals. It turned out he looked like a very tan Andre the Giant, and he took me on this never-ending tour of the surrounding hillsides. He didn't even bring water the first day. The second day he did the same thing, letting me get a feel for the land, he said, and this time I brought my own water and kept my mouth shut. I thought maybe it was some sort of test. Either that or he really was going to kill me and hide my body in the underbrush. The idea of my head on a stick did occur to me. On our way back to town the second day, he said, ‘So what are you going to do here?' I told him I needed to ask people some questions about what they ate. He said, ‘Then what?' I told him the answers would tell us if their diet was healthy. He shook his head and said, ‘No—what are you going to do after you ask the questions?'

“I thought about it and told him I didn't really have anything planned. He said, ‘Do you like rum?'

“The next morning he had a few dozen kids and adults show up. I talked to them, and then he and I drank rum—
ro
n
—for the next forty-eight hours. We set up a game of bowling with the empty rum bottles and a mango, and we actually had enough bottles for all ten pins. Let's just say that scenario does not have the appeal that it once did.”

Paul craned his head toward Silas. “Why a mango?”

The Jeep lurched into the creek again. Paul braced his hands on the dashboard, and Ren grabbed the door handle.

“You can always use the satellite phone at Braxton's, if you want,” Silas said quietly into the dark. He didn't turn toward Ren, but he was clearly talking only to her. “He likes the company. And he should be back this week.”

She frowned, knowing he couldn't see.

“Okay,” she said to him, considering what he might mean. “I'm not really big on talking on the phone.”

“It's not that you need to use the phone,” he said quickly. “It's not like I'm the phone police. But my parents are older, and they get nuts when they think I've disappeared into the wilderness. Sometimes people like to know you're okay. And you've dropped off the face of the known world for weeks.”

The Jeep jerked hard to the right.

“Okay,” she said, rubbing her neck.

“In case anyone will worry,” he added.

She nodded. He waited, expectant. She let her head fall back against the seat.

“No one knows I'm here,” she said.

“What?”

She knew how it sounded. That's why she avoided the subject—if she opened the door, people expected explanations. There was no point.

“I mean, people at work do, obviously,” she said. “But no one will worry. No one knows I'm gone.”

He nodded, his shadowed profile unreadable. Paul and Ed were quiet in the front seat.

She nodded, hoping he was satisfied.

“You do have family out there, right?” he said. “Parents still around?”

“I have family,” she said, and her tone must have successfully conveyed her lack of interest in elaborating. He didn't speak again.

Another lurch of the Jeep. In the pitch dark, with the ground and the sky shaking with every turn of the wheels, her thoughts wandered to Scott coming home from high school. Their parents were leaning against the kitchen counters, her mother cooking, her father talking, and Ren listening. She'd been in fourth grade. She could feel crumbs on the bare soles of her feet, so she rose to her tiptoes on the yellow linoleum, using one foot to scrape the crumbs off the other.

“Hey,” she called, when Scott walked through the door.

“Hey,” he said, dropping his book bag on the floor.

Anna, stirring green beans, turned her cheek for a kiss when Scott reached for a glass. “Hi, Mom.”

“Good day?” asked their father. Harold had changed from his work jeans into soft, frayed khakis and a Pacers T-shirt with the lettering nearly worn off.

“Fine.”

“You have any homework?” asked Anna.

“Not much.”

Ren saw the mark on Scott's arm before her father did, and she was deciding whether to mention it. But her father didn't hesitate.

“What's that on your arm?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Scott, grabbing his left forearm with his hand. He wore short sleeves, and his hand couldn't quite cover the ink.

“Someone wrote on you,” Anna said, turning. She'd left the pots to simmer. “Who would write on your arm?”

“It's girl writing,” announced Ren.

“What did a girl write on your arm?” asked their father.

Instead of answering, Scott started backing toward the kitchen door, slowly, arm covered. The family advanced equally slowly.

“Nothing,” Scott said.

He turned to run.

Harold reached quickly, wide, strong hands grabbing. Scott looked over his shoulder, grinning, and feinted to the left. But their father had an endless reach—he caught Scott's shirt and reeled him back. Chaos broke out. Anna reached for Scott's arm, too slow, and he twisted away from her. Harold hauled his son closer, into a bear hug, his weight slowly pushing Scott to the ground. Once his knees hit the floor, Harold flopped on his side, taking Scott with him, horizontal now.

There was the sound of laughing and breathing, and shoes scuffing against linoleum.

“What does it say?” asked Anna, on the floor herself, reaching again. Scott wriggled and balked, red-faced, chuckling at them all and at the fingers Ren kept poking into his underarms.

“Stop it!” he gasped. “Dad, it's like having a house dropped on me! Get off me!”

They were all on the floor now, Harold with his hands on Scott's shoulders, one calf braced across his son's thighs, pinning him with sheer weight. Anna had caught his left arm under her leg and was using both her hands to pry away his right hand.

“Help me, Ren,” she ordered.

Ren stopped poking at Scott's underarms and added her small fingers to the struggle, pulling at Scott's thumb while her mother worked on his four fingers. Scott gave in with an “Uncle!” and a long laughing wheeze. His hand dropped to his side, Harold suspiciously eased his weight off his son, and they all stared at the writing.

Ren renewed her giggling, but her parents only stared, foreheads wrinkling.

“What's that mean?” asked Harold.

The message read “Scott is a QT” in curlicued writing with emphatic flourishes.

“What's a cut?” asked Anna. “A quit?”

“No,” said Ren, smirking at Scott. “I mean, I haven't done this since, like, third grade, but you read them like letters. Read it aloud and say the letters.”

Scott rolled his eyes at her.

“‘Scott is a cue-tee,'” Anna obliged. “Oh, ‘Scott is a cutie'!”

She looked delighted with herself. Scott stopped trying to look offended.

They lay still, side by side, flat on their backs, like they'd all been making linoleum angels. The floor was cool, and crumbs stuck to exposed skin in constellations. Harold and Scott breathed hard, chests like bellows. Anna rested a hand on her husband's chest, and her long, pink-tipped fingers rose as he inhaled. She stroked Scott's hair, once, twice, and Ren tried to maneuver closer to draw her mother's touch.

“Who thinks you're a cutie?” asked Harold.

“Nobody.” Then, after a long wait, “Elizabeth Roberts.”

“Do you like her?” asked Ren. She tried to imagine a fourteen-year-old girl in love with Scott. She was not in love with any boys.

“She's okay,” Scott said.

“You could have just showed us,” Anna said. She'd moved her hand to Ren's shoulder, lifting the hair off her neck with gentle sharp nails. The other hand she left on her husband's chest. He'd captured her hand with one of his own.

“Yeah,” said Scott. “I don't know why I thought you might harass me.”

“So is she a cutie?” asked Harold.

“Does she know how to spell?” asked Anna.

No one seemed to want to expend the energy to stand, so they stayed on the floor until Anna said she thought the beans were burning.

It was Ren's favorite memory. She wished she could cut it from her head like a tumor. She wrapped her arms around herself and pressed against the cold, hard side of the Jeep, absorbing the jolts into her body.

They were always in the heat and the light, and sometimes Ren craved shade.

More than a month in the canyon, they had opened a dozen rooms, and still no sign of her artist. She had driven back to Valle de las Sombras twice, rushed through her to-do list, then returned. What they'd found seemed to back up Silas's original theory: Northern and southern groups had been here at times, separately, but there was no evidence of the kind of intermingling that distinguished her artist.

She knew the pace of these things, the slowness and the monotony. You had to get through the first layers—the real answers were usually at the lower depths. Once in a while the secrets came to the surface early on, offered up as gifts by tunneling rodents or erosion. And sometimes one well-placed blade shone sunlight on a revelation. But most of the time the truth was doled out piece by piece, after many hours and many square meters. Level by level, if the ground was kind, you learned its story.

The ground was not being kind. She had spent weeks thinking it was on the verge of telling her something: Now she was beginning to wonder if instead of being perceptive, she'd only been desperate to believe something was here. The evidence pointed to repeated migrations and abandonments, as Silas had said, but there was no combined culture, no hybrid of north and south. No artist.

She kept hoping, but it was getting harder.

They had developed a routine. At the hottest part of the day, Silas and Ren sat under the juniper while they ate lunch and jotted notes with dry, filthy fingers. Since two people could fit in a single pit, they had split into groups again. Ed and Paul were working at a room block a few hundred yards away.

The heat sucked the pleasure out of the sandwiches and granola bars. They ate quickly. The water, though, they savored, passing a bottle back and forth. Neither one of them was willing to stand up to get the other water bottle. The ice had melted long ago—which Ren was thankful for, because Silas had a habit of crunching ice steadily and loudly between his molars—but the water still felt cool.

Silas lay on his back, hands cushioning his head, elbows jutting. He pressed the water bottle against his cheek.

“I feel like a ripe tomato,” he said sleepily.

She looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“That's right,” he said. “A ripe tomato.”

They were close enough that she could hear him breathe.

“Why did you leave Indiana?” he asked. He made occasional forays into her past, scouting out the territory. He pulled back when he sensed she was about to close up; then he'd approach from a different direction. She enjoyed observing his strategy.

“I wanted to see something new,” she said. “I liked the university.”

He shot her a look that told her he found this answer to be lacking. “That's what you tell someone during a job interview. Give me a real answer.”

“That is a real answer. I felt like I needed space.”

“From what?”

“Doesn't every eighteen-year-old want space?”

He gave her another look. His hat was tipped back, barely hanging on his forehead. “You get home much?” he asked.

“Enough.”

“Family still there?”

“My mom is.” She had decided to give him small pieces, just broken-off tidbits. She wanted to give him enough to keep him from thinking that there was something wrong with her.

They'd taken off their boots and socks to shake out the sand. Their pants covered their ankles, but their toes pointed and flexed in the open air. Silas propped one foot on top of the other leg, ankle against kneecap.

In the beginning she wished they had met at some dinner party, in line at a coffee shop, at a conference. That would be simpler. There would be no professional ethics involved, no chance of ruining the project. But if they had met over coffee, she would not have witnessed him chanting his litany of bones as they were pulled from the earth. She would not have seen him show Paul how to create an obsidian dart point with a chunk of limestone. She would not have known how his mind absorbed and tabulated as he looked over a room block.

The flaw in her earlier concerns about getting involved with him was that they were already involved. They had hardly touched, but that had not decreased the intimacy. Instead they sat in the sand with this tight cord of anticipation strung between them, rib to rib. It thrilled her and worried her: She didn't know when it had attached itself, and she didn't know how to cut it, even if she wanted to. She didn't know how quickly he might be able to cut it.