CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
"The Pond"
Beadles dug around in his ruck and pulled out three plastic water bottles, all full. They could easily run through those in the next couple of hours. Summer did the same. She had three more bottles and half a canteen. They looked at each other. Without more water it was doubtful they would last another day.
Vince laid seige.
"Well I'm down here if you want to talk!" he said, sitting down with his back to the grill in the shade provided by the vehicle. The sun lowered in the western sky.
Wordlessly Beadles rose and walked counter-clockwise. Summer joined him. The top of the butte was a flat, flinty surface covered with rocks and sand, the occasional withered cactus struggling to survive. It was not entirely flat. There were numerous depressions and holes that might represent molten bubbles that had burst to the surface. Beadles watched where he stepped. He did not want to encounter any snakes. It took them ten minutes to reach the opposite side and the strange half-chimney thrusting from the rim. The tower-like protrusion rose another fifty feet above the butte top. Most of it appeared to be volcanic upthrust but it had been augmented with carefully fitted stones and white mortar to form a cliff-dwelling in the sky. The entrance formed a crude triangular arch. Mayan influence?
Every cell in Beadles' body leaned toward the door. His heart banged a Neil Peart solo. This was it. The Big Time. The gold at the end of the rainbow. He'd gambled and he'd won. It was a better high than coke. Than sex. The sun cast his shadow in stark relief on the ancient walls. Faintly he heard a car door slam.
He couldn't die now, not with success within his grasp. Nor could he indulge in the luxury of exploring this ruin while the thug lurked below. It was only a matter of time before Vince discovered the chimney. He wasn't stupid. He knew there had to be a route to the top. And the crooked chimney provided no clear shot. Nor would Vince attempt the climb, fully cognizant of the danger of falling rocks. All Vince had to do was sit back and wait them out.
He moved on. Aside from the chute there was no way to the top. He and Summer turned their attention to the center of the butte where six cottonwoods incongruously grew. Their lushness gave Beadles the creeps. They should not have existed.
They scrambled over a low berm of scattered rocks and approached the center. The six trees were as evenly spaced as clock numbers. In the center a brackish pool of water. What was it doing there? If it was rain, how did it exist? It hadn't rained in that part of the desert in months.
Beadles knelt, cupped pond water in his hands and brought it to his face. Odorless. He dipped his tongue. Aside from a slight mineral taste it seemed fine but it was still unsuitable for drinking. Who knew what bacteria festered in that pond? If snakes could get up here so could mice and insects. He had a water purifier but he'd left it in the Jeep.
Summer looked at him hopefully. "Can we drink it?"
"I don't know. We may have to." His eyes swept the surface of the pond. It was about ten feet across. On the opposite side a series of ripples radiated from a disturbance in surface tension. Beadles walked around to the pond and crouched. It was a spring. The water bubbling up from the bottom of the pond was clear, unlike the brownish pond water.
Geologically it was an impossibility. What source of water could possibly exist 150 feet above the desert floor? There wasn't another source of water for miles in any direction. It was a miracle. A bonaroo medicine man miracle. A holy place. Only the divine could create such a miracle, and if it was a divine place, evil had no place. An invisible burden eased from Beadles' shoulders. It was going to be alright. God, Wankantanka, our Father the Sun, our Mother the Moon was watching over them.
Yeah right.
Beadles had no illusions. There were no miracles. There was some rational explanation for the spring. They were in a desperate situation but at least they had water, whatever the cause. Beadles looked around. There was plenty of fuel from the cottonwoods. They could always boil the water to rid it of bacteria.
If they could find something in which to boil it.
Repetitive honking ruptured the silence. Vince wanted their attention. They returned to the westernmost lip of the butte and looked down. Vince stood next to his vehicle and honked the horn through the window.
Beadles picked up small smooth stone and pitched it over the edge. It landed on the Hummer's roof with a faint crack. Vince laid off the horn and looked up.
"What?" Beadles yelled.
"I just wanted to give you a head's up, professor! About our little friend! Did she tell you she slipped me a mickey, stole my car and my money?"
"Wasn't that after you punched her out?" Beadles said.
It was hard to tell but he thought Vince grinned.
"Did you ask her about her record? Drug dealing and prostitution? She's got a rap sheet longer than the immigration bill. You think you can trust her? She's a scorpion, Professor! She's going to stab you in the back. She can't help it. It's her nature."
Summer put her hand on his shoulder. "He's lying."
"I know that!"
"Hey professor!" Vince continued. He had a good voice. Deep and rich. Would have made a terrific announcer. "Right now she's telling you I'm a liar and that she's a virtuous angel! I'm just warning you, one man to another, don't turn your back on her."
Beadles looked at Summer. Her eyes had closed to furious slits. Her mouth was a grim line. What did he know about her, really? She was very beautiful. What kind of woman goes to sleep with some guy she just met in a bar?
Wasn't he being hypocritical? How many women had he talked into one-night stands? Vince's warning had a disturbing undertone of truth. Maybe she wasn't the damsel in distress. How easily she had manipulated him.
"Well folks it's gonna be dark soon. I'll just settle in for the night. Or maybe I'll find that path to the top you took. Come to think about it, you can't be sure I won't come up there in the middle of the night and blow your fucking brains out. You'd better take turns guarding."
***
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
"Chamber in the Sky"
Beadles and Summer huddled at the rim.
"Do you think he'll try and come up?" Beadles said.
"No. He knows we have no place to go. He'll just wait us out."
The burden was on them. What if Beadles were to descend in the middle of the night with Summer's pea-shooter and put one in Vince's ear while he slept? Beadles was no hero. He didn't relish the idea of approaching the well-armed Vince but they had little choice. Even with a water source if they stayed on top of the butte they would die from starvation. They'd only brought enough victuals for a couple days.
The sun sat atop the western peaks casting long shadows across the desert.
"Let's take a look at those ruins," Beadles said, cutting a path through the center of the butte. They skirted the pond keeping an eye out for scorpions and snakes. With the last rays of the sun striking the ruins horizontally every detail stood out in bas relief. The lintel above the arched entrance was a triangular rock with a carved motif: a circle radiating squiggly lines. Beadles had never seen it anywhere else. It was the symbol of the Azuma. The entrance itself was an astonishing seven feet tall--much taller than any other cliff dwellings of which he was aware. Taller than any temple entrance throughout Central America. This in itself constituted a startling archaeological discovery. Most Native Americans had been five and a half feet tall or less at the time of Columbus.
There were always exceptions. The great Navajo chief Narbona was six feet six inches. His son-in-law Manuelito was also well over six feet. Crazy Horse was said to be over six feet tall. But never before had anyone encountered archaeological evidence that tall Indians were anything other than anomalies.
Or had it been built for just one man?
Beadles entered and found himself in a shallow chamber, perhaps six feet front to back, approximately fifteen feet in length, with a flat, seven foot ceiling made of bleached timbers mounted crossways, woven branches atop them. The sun shown so brightly through the entrance Bedles did not need his flashlight. Two slot windows faced west. Ten feet away to the south lay the remnants of ancient ladder. Above them a round hole led to the next chamber. The back wall of the chamber bore petroglyphs similar to those they had seen in the canyon.
Beadles took out his cell phone and snapped pictures of those that lay in direct sunlight. He walked toward the nearest window. From the window he looked west across the butte to the distant mountains and the setting sun.
He was alone.
He walked back to the entrance and looked out. Summer stood with her arms wrapped around her shoulders shivering.
"What's the matter? Come inside."
"No," she said softly. "It's too old."
"What do you mean it's too old?"
Summer's eyes were round with fear. "The ancient--it frightens me. The earth is so old, this is so old, I'm afraid if I touch it it will suck the life out of me like a sponge! That's why nothing lives around here."
Beadles stepped outside and held her. "Come on. You've been walking on the earth that's just as old and that hasn't sucked the life out of you. It's just an old building! Haven't you been inside a cliff dwelling before?"
"It's not just an old building. I can feel it! It hates us. It wants us dead."
Beadles barked and walked to the wall. He slapped his hand against it. "This? It's inanimate matter. It's a rock! It's not going to hurt anyone. Come on. You've got that gun."
"No. You go. I'll wait here."
Shaking his head Beadles reentered the cliff dwelling. He stood beneath the ceiling hole, leaped and caught the upper rim with his fingers. He hoisted himself up. The floor was formed of ancient timbers laid front to back. Beadles stood and walked north to another slot window facing west. Heiroglyphs clung to the back wall. Shards of pottery lay in one corner.
Beadles' pulse pushed
adelante
. This was it. The Big One. He was right and they were wrong. He saw the TV interviews, the book tour, the awards. The women. He stooped to examine the drawings. The tall man stood in the center radiating squiggly lines warding off the strange invaders with bow and arrow. The invaders rode monstrous four-legged beasts and wore peaked helmets. Arrayed against them, behind the tall man was an army of scorpions and snakes.
The Maya had worshiped the feathered serpent Quetzacoatl.
Beadles stared at the display. And then it hit him.
The squiggly lines were snakes.
How had he failed to see it? The outer points consisted of rhomboids. The inner a series of perpindicular lines meant to indicate rattles.
The Empire of the Snakes.
A bone-dry rattling issued from the far end. Beadles backed toward the floor opening eyes riveted on the ground. It took a minute before he saw the rattler in the corner, eight feet away. It was coiled like a fat garden hose, thick as his wrist. A rattler can strike the length of its body. It that were a seven footer Beadles had nowhere to go but down.
He did so, lowering himself quickly through the vent and dropping to the stone ground. Beadles exited and found Summer seated on a rock hugging herself. Shadow had begun creeping up the rock face.
"Come on," he said, offering a hand. "There's a fucking rattler up there. We'll go back tomorrow. Maybe it will leave. Let's figure out how we're going to spend the night."
They'd left the tents and the sleeping bags in the Jeep. They'd expected to get in and out on the same day! They returned to the western rim and checked on Vince, who sat in the shade between the Hummer and the butte. Beadles looked around for a big rock. Maybe he could break the fucker's neck. Summer saw what he was doing and immediately ran off, returning with a boulder the size of a soccer ball. A series of tooth-like rocks formed a jagged crown around the butte.
The butte tapered toward the top. If Beadles were to drop the rock straight down it might strike a projection and go off course. It would be better if he heaved the rock six feet beyond the rim so that it came straight down on Vince's head.
If he could do it.
Beadles picked up the rock. It must have weighed forty pounds. He ran toward the rim and heaved the rock over like a free throw. He rushed to the edge in time to see the rock strike a protrusion and angle off to the SW. The rock landed with a thud.
Vince jumped, turned around and backed away from the butte.
"NICE ONE HEY!" he yelled through cupped hands. He got in the Hummer, started it up and backed fifty feet away from the butte. He got out of the truck. Shadow reached the desert floor.
***
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
"Witching Hour"
They gathered dead leaves and branches from the cottonwoods and made a sort of nest laying out their two sweatshirts as bedding. The temperature could fall into the forties in the desert at night. Beadles pulled out his lightweight cookpot and suspended it from a branch stretched between two rocks. He built a fire beneath the pot in a natural stone kettle. He boiled enough water to fill their canteens and then made soup from dry mix. They ate from a bag of trailmix and a sack of peanuts.
Night fell. They clung together for warmth and that led to sex. They put their clothes back on and lay in each other's arms gazing at the sky. In Creighton on a clear night you might be able to see a couple dozen stars. Light pollution hid the rest. The desert sky looked as if God had tossed up a barrel of diamonds. The stars were uncountable and the half moon lit the desert floor like a stage set.
Summer burrowed in. "Do you think there's life on other planets?"
Beadles barked. It was unexpected. He liked this girl. "Speaking as a scientist, I gotta say yeah. I mean look at that. We can't even count the stars we can see. There must be a hundred thousand stars that we see tonight. All those stars, all those planets, how self-absorbed would we have to be to conclude that we're the only intelligent life in the universe?"
"Mr. Spaceman," Beadles sang in a spot-on falsetto, "won't you please take me along, I won't do anything wrong."
Summer giggled and snuggled closer. It was cool verging on cold. "Do you believe in God?"
"I don't know. My folks were Episcopelian and dragged me to church every Sunday but I don't think it took. I think maybe I'm part of a generation that's too sophisticated and self-aware to believe in God, which doesn't mean God doesn't exist! It just means I lack faith."
"You're smart enough to know what you don't know," Summer said.
"Exactly."
They lay in each other's arms swapping heat. "I believe in God," Summer said. "I don't know if it's that old white guy with the beard, but there's got to be a higher power in charge of all this. I mean, humanity, civilization, love, it can't just have sprung forth from the void! There's too much order--the seasons, the birds and the bees."
"The way the sunlight plays upon her hair…" Beadles sang.
"Huh?"
"'Good Vibrations.' The Beach Boys!"
"Oh. I couldn't tell. Do you believe the universe just happened? Like what do they call it, the Big Bang?"
"I try not to think too big."
"Well that's the beauty of God," Summer said. "You can trade your doubts in on faith."
Beadles shifted to relieve irritation from a stick that poked him in the back. "What kind of God created scorpions and rattlesnakes?"
”The same God who created violets and sunny days. We can't know His purpose."
"Or Hers."
Summer giggled. "That's right. Don't they derive some sort of syrum from rattlesnakes?"
"Yeah. For rattlesnake bites. I might be able to see a case for the rattlesnake, but the scorpion? What possible purpose does it serve? Just looking at it makes most people queasy. What kind of god would make such a thing?"
"The Lord works in mysterious ways. We should try and get some sleep."
"I'm going to need your gun."
Summer got up on an elbow and looked at him. "Why?"
"I'm going to go down there in a couple hours and take care of Vince."
"Really? How are you going to do that?"
"I'm going to sneak up on him, stick the gun in his ear and blow his brains out."
Summer laughed. "Have you ever killed anyone before?"
"There's a first time for everything."
"Are you serious?"
"Of course I'm serious."
Summer turned away and rustled around in her backpack. She handed the tiny pistol to Beadles. It didn't even feel like a real gun, it was so light. "It's got a really hard loading mechanism but if you push this button the barrel pops open." She did so. "And you can load a cartridge directly into the firing chamber. After that it works just like any other automatic."
She handed the gun to Beadles who ratcheted one into the chamber, dropped the magazine, and ratcheted the cartridge out. "Got it."
"You sure you're up for this?"
"Do I have a choice?"
Summer sighed and laid down. "Try to get some sleep."
Gradually her breathing relaxed and she slept. But Beadles could not sleep. He was entirely focused on the task at hand. In a way he was pleased. Vince had left him no choice but to prove himself as a man. Most things in life came easy--his athletic prowess, women, the climb up academia. He didn't kid himself that he was special--no more than hundreds of thousands of other young men fortunate enough to be born into wealthy, white nuclear families. It was better to be lucky than good.
He would move as silently as the scorpion. He would catch the thug asleep and blow his brains out. They would avail themselves of Vince's largesse and when they had the proof he needed they would drive out in Vince's Hummer.
Beadles checked his watch. It was only eleven-thirty. He tried to sleep but it was no use. This was the place where his storylines and ambition converged. This was the nexcus of all his ley lines. Shipapu. He reached into his pocket and withdrew the gold medallion, easily visible in the bright star light. He ran his finger over the embossed snakes. It might as well become his family crest. If he survived he would make it so.
A healthy fear prevented him from sleeping. He lay on his back and feasted on the galaxy of stars, spotting familiar constellations, wondering about those tiny stars that lay at the very edge of his sight. There must have been a million.
He thought about good things. The rewards, the book, the TV show, wealth, women. He told himself not to count his chickens. Beneath it all beat the steady pulse of healthy fear at what he had to do.
The hours dragged by like a garbage truck. Finally it was three a.m. The Witching Hour. The hour which studies showed most people were most deeply asleep. Careful not to disturb Summer Beadles rose and headed for the rim.
***