Come In and Cover Me (8 page)

“Did you sneak out?” he asked.

“What?”

“Of your bedroom. When you were a teenager. Climb out a window, shimmy down a tree, scale a wall, have a boy throw rocks at your window. Something like that.”

She turned her head toward him but closed her eyes against the sun. “Did you throw rocks at some girl's window?”

“No. I'd shine a flashlight under Hannah Hightower's window, and she'd come out the back door to meet me.”

“And then what?”

“We sat in the garage, and I'd see how far she'd let me get my hand up her thigh.”

“How far did you get?” She pictured a bleached-blond girl with heavy makeup hiding acne.

“I hadn't exactly honed my skills then.”

“Good for her,” Ren said. She allowed the girl clear skin.

“Hannah was a good girl.”

She opened her eyes. “Good girls don't let you slide your hand up their thigh?”

“Yes,” he said. “They do.”

She kept silent.

“I thought I would love Hannah Hightower forever,” he said. “That lasted for a few months. I think I thought the same thing about Jennifer Bixby in third grade and Kathy Wolfson in seventh grade. Which was weird—I don't know how I got to be a romantic. Mom and Dad weren't exactly touchy-feely about love and romance. I mean, Dad would kill the extra puppies with bricks to their heads sometimes. But I really wanted to love someone forever.”

“No luck?” she asked.

“When Hannah and I started having sex, I felt like it was love. But we lasted long enough that I got past the hormones. I could see how I'd been crazy about sort of an imaginary Hannah. When I calmed down, I could see the real Hannah. She was good to me. But if I was honest, when she talked I had trouble listening to her. On some level I was always wondering who else was out there.”

“So you broke up?”

“After senior year. In as friendly a way as possible. But it shifted how I thought. I let go of that teenage idea of there being ‘the one.' You know? I think loving someone forever is probably a choice, not some meeting of souls.”

She raised herself up on her elbows, squinting.

“I wish we could rush the lab,” she said. “It'd be great to get a couple of definite dates. Do you have any favors you could call in?”

She looked over and noticed that the wet sweat pattern on his T-shirt looked like a tulip.

“You didn't answer my question,” he said.

“Which question?”

“Did you ever sneak out?”

She watched him watch her and took her time responding. She did not want to search her head for an answer. She wanted to enjoy the warm ground under her palms.

“I never snuck out.”

“What were you like?”

There had been silences at home that lasted for days. Her mother and father had blank, smooth faces like masks. Sometimes her mother would tell her to do something—go pick up the shoes she'd left by the door or go put her cereal bowl in the sink—and there would be a pause at the end of the command, like a place where Ren's name should have gone. “Go answer the phone. . . .” Pause. Nothing. Sometimes she suspected her mother had forgotten her name.

“I liked Guns N' Roses,” she said.

He accepted it. “I lived on a ranch outside of Silver City,” he said. “We'd drive up and down Highway Ninety, and eventually we'd wind up at the Dairy Queen. We talked and drank tall boys. We'd see how long we could hold our breath before we passed out.”

“You'd actually pass out?”

“Well, yeah. Sure. After two minutes. That was my record. Dad told me I should be able to make two and a half—mind you, he didn't know about the beer part of the evenings, only the breath holding—but Mom told me I would kill myself.”

She never had to ask questions. He offered up whole pieces of himself as if they were unbreakable.

“We went to Allison Shum's basement and pretended to audition for MTV,” she said.

She had been something of a star at those slumber parties because of her talent for remembering lyrics. Scott had taught her. He had loved music—real music, he always said. He loved Springsteen and Dylan. He had tight, neat rows of cassettes lined up against his walls like dominoes. She liked the clicking sound they made when they rubbed against one another. He had carefully alphabetized them, and she liked the B's best:
Back in Black
,
Band on the Run
,
The Beatles
,
Beggars Banquet
,
Between the Buttons
,
Blonde on Blonde
,
Blood on the Tracks
,
Born to Run
. Each case held a tiny picture that she could pull out from under the shiny plastic. She would study those pictures—cheekbones and squinting eyes and clouds of hair—most of them just blurry enough to leave her looking for more. These were the men who made Scott's music.

She loved those men, too. When she tried to talk about songs in kindergarten music class, no one else even knew who Bob Dylan was.

Still, she was not allowed inside Scott's room when he was not there. Once she had unraveled some tapes, leaving shiny piles of ribbony spools all over the carpet. She didn't even remember doing it, but Scott had told her the story plenty of times. So his room was officially off-limits. Sometimes when no one was looking she would scan the hallway, then go bounce on his bed with one quick, serious leap and retreat. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly good mood, he would let her come in while he was there, and sometimes he would even play what she requested on his boom box. When she was inside, he sat on his bed and she sat cross-legged on the carpet, back against the bed. The carpet was green and yellow, thick and rough. She imagined grizzly bears would feel like Scott's carpet. It scratched her cheek when she tried to lie down on it.

She realized Silas would never know the girl who had daydreams about carpets. He would never know her at ten, when she'd eaten grass because that stupid Elliott Nash dared her. And she'd never see him fifteen and drunk and trying to make himself pass out. He would never hear her mother squeal as her father ran his finger up the back side of her knee. He would never know her as a girl with a big brother and two parents. And maybe that was as it should be. She didn't really know that girl, either.

“I chewed my nails,” she said.

Her nails had bled, the skin of her fingers white and soaked and sad. That was after the accident. She didn't think she'd chewed her nails before the accident. She had hated the sight of her hands. Her mother had beautiful hands. They were piano player's hands, artist's hands, even though her mother was neither of those things. For a while, the weeks after the accident, her mother would wrap two slender fingers around Ren's wrist and lift up her mangled fingernails. She would make a
tsk
ing sound with her tongue, and Ren never knew whether the sound was annoyed or sympathetic. After a few months, her mother did not notice Ren's hands anymore.

When Ren was little, her mother's hands were cool on her forehead. Her mother would rub her feet—and Scott's feet, too—with deep, long strokes. Her mother could curve her fingers and make an alligator shadow puppet with chomping teeth.

Ren did not tell Silas any of this. She said, “I chewed my nails even though my mother didn't like it. I think I disappointed her.”

When she had been silent long enough that it was obvious she was done talking, he sat up and leaned toward her, slowly. His hat fell to the ground. She forgot about the pleasure of the fine, taut string stretched between them. She could smell sweat and dirt, but when he touched her face with the whole of his hand, she could smell juniper on his fingers. She ran her tongue along the rough edges of his teeth, and he made a sound she enjoyed. He tasted of salt.

four

It seemed a daunting task at first to interpret the very subtle indications. To the untrained eye, much of the site appears to merely represent nothing more than the rocky terrain. . . . But with training, the . . . evidence became observable as [a] long-abandoned home.

—From “Rebuilding an Ancient Pueblo: The Victorio Site in Regional Perspective” by Karl W. Laumbach and James L. Wakeman,
Sixty Years of Mogollon Archaeology: Papers from the Ninth Mogollon Conference
, 1999

They had a couple of hours left before they needed to head back to the bunkhouse. Silas had gone to find Ed so he could take a photo of the floor level for this last room.

Ren stared at the mountain of sifted dirt looming over the screener. Kissing Silas had blown her concentration. He'd pulled away from her, touched her jaw, and said they should probably get back to work. So they had. But then they had spent a reasonable portion of the afternoon staring at each other's mouth. And that was exactly why she should stick to digging and screening and note-taking instead of sliding her hands under a man's shirt and cataloging the feel of his teeth at her neck and the dusty salty taste of his mouth.

It was a distraction. She reminded herself that the artist should be the most important thing. For all she knew, he fell in love on every dig. Or he spent his free time chatting up housekeepers and geologists. She was the only woman in the entire canyon, and their bedrooms were next door to each other. For all his words about himself, she had no idea what he really thought of her, what he really wanted of her. She was, she acknowledged, the low-hanging fruit.

And yet.

She lowered her head, rubbing at her face with both hands. The dirt coating her palms smelled almost pleasant. Complicated. She thought of his hand on her face. She could smell the detergent on her long-sleeved shirt. And she could smell juniper.

When she lifted her head, the pueblo was all around her. A living, thriving pueblo. As solid-seeming as Scott perched on the edge of her bed.

The sun was higher in the sky than it had been a few seconds before, and she squinted against the light. The ground was green, not brown, with patches of thick, tall grass swaying. Stalks of corn grew in the distance.

The air was cooler, and it felt moist. Ren crossed her arms over her chest and stood.

The even expanse of dry land that had seemed so wide open now felt hemmed in by the low buildings dug into the dirt, rising, squat and steady. The flat roofs came to Ren's eye level and above. The ends of horizontal wooden beams—vigas—protruded from the walls in straight rows just under the roofs. The flat tops of the structures were punctuated by ladders rising from the interior rooms and by the shapes of women working and children playing.

She felt the relief, nearly overwhelming—finally the ground was opening up to her. She wouldn't let herself acknowledge it. If she got back in her own head, she'd lose the vision. She breathed in the juniper, still heavy in the air, and her eyesight sharpened.

Two women were sitting on the nearest roof, crushing something on a grinding stone. Ren could see the muscles working in their tanned, bare backs—one had loose hair falling around her shoulders, and the other had thick circles curved around her ears. She could hear them laughing as they dusted powdery meal into brown bowls. One of them raised a hand and gestured toward a little boy playing. There was a jangle of a bracelet—shell or maybe bone. Ren hadn't noticed the boy before, but there he was, aiming a pointed stick toward a circle drawn in the dirt.

She turned and surveyed the landscape. Other children were scattered around the cubical buildings. A little girl was coming around a corner, carrying a basket bulging with wood. Her mouth was wide open as she called something, but the specific sounds were blurred.

She heard footsteps. An older boy with his own stick joined the smaller boy at target practice. Before they threw a single stick, both boys looked up, squinting in Ren's direction. They held their pose, frozen deer, for a full second. Then they went back to watching their target halfheartedly. Heads tilted down, they cut their eyes toward Ren.

She frowned, taking a step back, nervous. Then she turned around, looking behind her. And she saw whom they were watching. Past a nearby plaza and another block of rooms, a woman was approaching. She was tall, with broad shoulders. Ren thought of a story about Lozen, sister of the Apache chief Victorio, who had killed an antelope as it stampeded through camp. She had jumped on the galloping antelope's back and slit its throat with a knife.

The woman walking toward Ren was strong and straight-backed. She looked as if she could kill an antelope with one smooth movement of her arm. Her black hair was loose and wet, clinging to her bare shoulders and fanning across her naked chest. A thick mark of red—closer to berry than blood—was painted across each cheek, highlighting her wide, dark eyes.

She wore a band of fur low on her waist. Hanging from the fur were red and yellow and blue strips that shifted against her thighs as she walked. Feathers, Ren realized. Macaw feathers. And then the woman's bearing made sense—she was someone who had power. Only a person of power would have these feathers at all, much less wear them to simply walk to the creek and back. Only someone of power would make these boys stare without staring.

The woman drew closer, taking long, easy strides that covered ground quickly. Her feet made no sound. Ren stepped toward her, trying to memorize her face, her skirt, the lines of her arms and hands. She noticed the woman had lines around her eyes—she was not as young as Ren had first thought. Small straight scars marked her arms like scattered sticks, none of them even an inch long.

Before she reached Ren, the woman veered toward one of the taller structures and reached for a middle rung of the ladder. She called to someone inside, patting the wall with her hand. Ren noticed that the women on the roof next to her were above a room that had already been excavated. The woman with the macaw apron was maybe ten feet to the east.

In that moment of calculation, the woman reached the top of the ladder, the bottoms of her feet coated with dust. She stepped onto the roof and everything vanished.

Back to nothing but flat land and shrubs and lines of stones on the ground.

Ren walked to where the woman had reached for the ladder. She stood on one of the stones that had formed the wall. She felt slightly dizzy.

“Ready?” asked Silas from behind her. “It'll be dark soon.”

She turned, and he saw something on her face.

“What?” he said.

“Have you found any macaw feathers here?” she asked. Casually, she hoped, although she was aware that the question was bizarre.

“No.”

She took a breath and pointed to her feet. “I'd like to open up this room.”

She could hear Ed's voice and Paul's laughter headed in their direction. She waited.

“You saw something, didn't you?” Silas asked.

She swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“I assume you saw something—or found something—on the surface that caught your attention. Show me.”

They were both standing still, feet slightly apart, waiting for her answer, when Paul and Ed found them.

“Ready?” asked Ed. His T-shirt read “I Make Stuff Up.”

Ren still didn't say anything.

“I need someone to hold the tarp and even up the shadow if I'm gonna take this photo,” added Ed. “The wind's really picked up.”

“I'll hold the tarp,” said Silas, shrugging. “Then I want you guys to give us a hand for the rest of the afternoon. Ren wants to see how much of this room we can take down.”

She moved the tools and their backpacks to the other room while Silas and Paul wrestled with the tarp in the wind, and Ed tried to catch the right light. The tarp kept billowing, letting sunlight into the shadows exactly where the hearth lay, ruining the shot.

The rustle of the tarp quieted, and Ren felt Silas behind her again.

“I don't have any problem with going with your gut,” he said. “We've got the entire canyon and the entire history of existence to work with—you need a little gut to find what you're looking for. This room's as good as any other.”

“I could be wrong,” she said. Even as she said it, she pictured the feathers attached to the dark pelt and knew that she was not.

“Sure you could,” said Silas. She couldn't help but notice that he was staying several inches away from her. He hadn't joked, hadn't smiled, hadn't given her even a sideways look that hinted at the memory of skin against skin. He was being completely professional. That was good, she told herself.

Paul was nearly as efficient with the pick as Silas was, and dirt flew as the ground dropped by inches. They checked at each level, looking for signs of artifacts, but the first forty centimeters went quickly. When the number of sherds increased—finally, they'd reached the dirt that had been lived in and lain in and worked in—they switched to trowels.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” asked Paul. “I know Silas wants pieces of corn. But I don't get the feeling we're looking for corn.”

“No, I'm the corn guy. She's onto something else,” Silas said, face totally hidden by the shadow of his hat's brim. Finding two pieces of corncob in an ash pit the week before had been like striking gold. Unlike wood, which could be collected and burned long after it was dead, corn plants lived for only a year. Their carbon traces could be analyzed more reliably. Charcoal, corn, the right kind of tree rings—those would get him within a couple of years of a specific date of occupation. The real story of the canyon would be told by bits of corn.

“I'm looking for feathers,” said Ren. “Maybe a feather apron.”

“Well, that's specific,” said Ed.

“Yes, it is,” said Silas. He wrinkled his forehead—he had one vertical line between his eyebrows—but he didn't seem to be frowning at her. More like he was trying to read very small print.

She didn't want to lie. She could just say she saw a small bit of feather, maybe, right at the surface, mostly decomposed, and it blew away before she could look at it. She could say she thought she saw something—anything, really—and maybe that would be enough to buy her time. Maybe they would just hit something soon and she wouldn't have to say anything at all.

“She gets feelings sometimes,” said Ed, before she could speak. “That's how it works.”

Maybe Silas would have said something else, but Paul spoke first. “How would feathers last this long?”

“They're slow to decompose,” said Ren quickly, encouraging the thread of conversation. “But we'd have to get lucky.”

“Like a roof cave-in or a piece of pottery collapsed over the feathers,” added Ed. He was working with just his hands, running his gloves over a pile of loose dirt. “So the space under it would be protected, and you have little treasure troves of sealed-off space. Little time capsules.”

Ren's fingers twitched, watching Paul and Silas in the dirt. Every swipe of their hands, every scrape of the trowel, could leave them holding her apron. She did think there was an apron. It could be something else, but the image that had stayed etched in her mind was of that apron. She thought that must mean something.

“Can I switch out with you?” she asked Paul.

The light had started to fade, and she told everyone else they could stop and leave her to dig by herself, but they all stayed with her. And just when she thought they would have to call it a day or risk being stuck on the mountain in the dark, she saw a flash of pale red in the dirt.

She reached for the whisk broom. It could even make dirt interesting, brushing out lovely islands and continents from nothingness. The broom could sometimes let you see anything you wanted to see, but she was not hallucinating now. A piece of the adobe roof had fallen over this red bit of feather. It was a protected space, just as she had wished for, just as Ed had described, and she could see Ed and Silas exchange a look.

She made short, firm strokes, brushing away until the outline of the adobe fragments was clear, with a small bit of feather protruding. She tossed the whisk broom off to the side and lifted the pieces of roof. The frail, wispy tips of the feathers sprang into the open air for the first time in centuries. The garment wasn't whole, but six feathers were lying together, some still attached by what had once been buckskin straps. The pelt the straps had hung from was partly decomposed, with a few patches of disintegrating fur visible through the dirt.

“Rabbit, I think,” Silas said from behind her.

They did not have time to uncover the apron fully, and none of them wanted to risk damaging the find. They barely had time to speak. They covered the apron with a few shovelfuls of dirt for protection from the elements, anchored the tarp over the hole, and headed back down the mountain. All of them were too focused on their footing in the near dark to discuss what they'd found.

“Who would wear that?” asked Paul, when they were back on flat ground. “I mean, was it actually worn?”

“Maybe something ceremonial,” said Ed. “Ritualistic.”

“Maybe,” said Ren.

She did not want to say anything about the apron or the woman until she could sort her own thoughts. Macaws were certainly ceremonial. Images on Mimbres ceramics showed women holding the birds, sometimes with a curved stick presumably of some procedural or training importance. Women could have trained the birds, cared for the birds, handled the birds in spiritual observances. A single feather was considered a sign of prestige in burials, on the same level with turquoise or shells or copper bells. To wear macaw feathers was surely a mark of importance, of accomplishment, of skill or uniqueness.

Who was this woman who clothed herself in such importance?

And where was the artist? Ren had not come here to find this straight-shouldered woman striding around the canyon, leaving wide-eyed boys in her wake. She had come here to find a woman who painted ceramics.