Come In and Cover Me Page 8

  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.

  “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 tsking 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 s
econd. 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.