“He looked very strange and out of place,” Ellen said. And suddenly she laughed. “I thought he would be lonely,” she said, sounding incredulous.
She had spoken to this Jimmy Willie Hall in the lecture building hallway. Jim had said, in reply to her comment that he wasn’t from the East, that he was from Hall, New Mexico, and when she had asked where that was, he had said he wasn’t really from Hall, exactly, because their place was twenty-one miles northwest of there, in the foothills of the Oscura Mountains. It was just that they picked up their mail at Hall. He guessed he should say he was from Corona, which was larger and slightly closer.
The conversation had been inane and pointless, Ellen recalled, as exploratory chats with strangers tend to be. She asked why, if Corona was larger and nearer, they picked up their mail at Hall, and he had explained that there was no road from the Hall ranch to Corona. To get there you had to go through the Oscura Range and Jicarilla Apache Reservation or over the malpais—across seven miles of broken lava country. You can’t even get a horse over that, he had explained. The only time he had tried, his horse had broken a leg and he had been bitten by a rattlesnake.
“That sounds like he was trying to impress me,” she said. “But he wasn’t. A girl can tell about that. He was just telling me about a silly mistake he had made.” Ellen’s voice stopped. “I guess I knew right then he wasn’t lonely,” she continued, thoughtfully, “and that I had never seen anyone like him.”
He had seemed, she remembered, like someone visiting from the far side of the globe her father kept in the office of his pharmacy—someone completely foreign to all she knew. As different from the men she had dated as his empty Oscura foothills were from her family’s elm-shaded residential street in a Philadelphia suburb.
“You remember Othello?” Ellen asked suddenly.
“Othello?”McKee said, surprised.
“Yes. The Moor of Venice. We studied it that semester, after Hamlet. You remember how Desdemona was fascinated by Othello?”
“I remember,” McKee said, trying to remember.
“That was us,” Ellen said. “That was our private joke.
“Remember how it goes?” She paused a moment.
“ ‘A maiden never bold;
Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blush’d at herself; and she—in spite of nature,
Of years, of country, credit, everything—
To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on!
It is a judgment maim’d and most imperfect…’ “
“Yes,” said McKee, “I remember it.” He felt immensely sad.
“I would say that,” Ellen said, “and Jim would say Othello’s lines:
‘It was my hint to speak—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline….’ “
Ellen stopped again. And when she continued the voice was shaky.
“ ‘I loved him for the dangers he had passed.
And he loved me that I did pity them.’ “
McKee reached across the darkness and found her hand. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “We’ll get out of here and find him.”
“Can’t you understand?” she asked, and her voice sounded angry now. “Why should I pity someone like Jim Hall? Why should anyone pity anybody who has everything?”
McKee couldn’t think of an answer.
“Because he doesn’t know he has everything?” Ellen suggested. “Because he isn’t happy?”
“Sometimes he is, but mostly he isn’t. He’s angry. He says he’s caught in a system which keeps you on the treadmill. Forty years on the treadmill, he says. He talks about it a lot, about how it takes a million dollars to beat the system, to pay your own ransom, to buy back your own life.”
She laughed again, a bitter sound. “I guess he… Well, I guess Jim will make a million dollars,” she said.
“Not teaching on an engineering faculty,” McKee said.
“Oh, he’s not going to do that,” she said. “He’s going with one of the electronic communications products companies and he’s bringing along one of his patents, so it’s a very good job.”
“Is that what he’s working on out here?” McKee asked. “Trying it out.”
“Oh, no. This is another one, I think. I—well, I wish I understood it better. Something to do with very narrow-range sound transmission. He explained it to me—quite often—but I don’t really understand it.”
McKee started to ask her why she was looking for Dr. Hall and bit back the question. The answer was obvious, and none of his business. A woman who loves a man would simply want to see him.
“Dr. Canfield was nice, he was nice, a nice man,” Ellen said. “But he was too polite to ask why I was chasing after Jim. And you’ve been nice, too. But would you like to know?”
“It’s your private business,” McKee said. “No, I don’t want to know.”
“I want to tell you. I have to tell someone,” she said. “I came because I wanted to tell Jim—to tell him that I think he’s wrong, and he’s going to have to make a choice. He’s got to quit wanting a million dollars. He has to. I’ve come all the way out here. He has to understand.”
It sounded utterly feminine to McKee, the reverse side of Sara’s logic, and a simpler assignment. A brilliant, ambitious man could easily enough fail to make a fortune. But how could a Bergen McKee, a natural on the treadmill, make himself rich?
And, thinking that, McKee, after forty hours without rest, was suddenly asleep.
Now he was fully awake again. He pushed himself to his feet and surveyed the room. The floor was covered with a heavy deposit of dust. He could feel it, flourlike, under the soles of his shoes. But the condition of the room was surprising. It was virtually intact. The roof sagged only at one corner, where the ceiling beams had snapped with rot, and plaster still clung to most of the lower portion of the walls.
McKee flaked off a section of plaster with his thumbnail, broke it and examined it. Inside it was almost black—a mixture of animal blood and caliche clay used by the pueblo-building people. It was stone-hard and would last for centuries and so would the cedar poles in the roof when protected from weather under a cliff. But not for this many centuries. Left alone, the roof would have crumbled long ago and the top of the walls would have fallen inward. This ruin must have been partially rebuilt—restored by one of the later Pueblo people who used the canyon before the Navajos arrived and drove them out.
It was then he saw the face. He stood for a moment staring at it, putting together what it meant, feeling a sense of excitement building within him. The face was drawn on the plaster in something yellow—probably ocher. It was faded now and partly missing where chips of plaster had fallen away. A roundish outline with a topknot, long ears, and a collar. The figure was unquestionably a Hopi Kachina—either the Dung Carrier or the Mud Head Clown. And below it to the right were two more stylized outlines.
From the Hopi mythology McKee recognized Chowilawu, the spirit of Terrible Power, with four black-tipped feathers rising vertically from his squarish head and a horizontal band of red blinding his eyes. The third head had been almost erased by flaking. Only the dim outline of a protruding ear and the double vertical cheek stripes signifying a warrior spirit remained. Down the wall there were other markings—the zigzag of lightning, bird tracks, the stair-stepped triangles of clouds, and a row of phallic symbols. Undoubtedly, one of the Hopi clans had used this as a ceremonial kiva.
He stood absolutely silent a moment, thinking, and then squatted beside Miss Leon and put his hand on her shoulder.
“Time to wake up.”
She rubbed her arm across her eyes.
“Very domestic,” McKee said.
She looked up at him and then pushed herself up against the wall, trying to straighten her tousled hair wit
h her fingers. “Oh. What time is it?”
“About four forty-five,” McKee said. “We shouldn’t have wasted all that time. We need to get out of here.”
“Out of here? But I don’t see how we can.” Miss Leon looked up at the exit hole in the roof and then at McKee. “What do you mean? How can we?”
“The Hopis lived in this. They rebuilt it. Have you read anything about how the Hopis build their pueblos?” It occurred to McKee as he said it that he was showing off and the thought embarrassed him. Ellen looked puzzled.
“They always built an escape hatch at the bottom of a wall,” he explained. “A hole into the next room, and then they would fill it in with rocks that could be easily pulled out. Kept them from being penned up in part of the structure if they were under attack.”
“Oh,” Ellen said. “You think there’s a way out, then.”
“I think so. We can find out. It would be in one of the inside corners.”
And most likely, McKee thought, in the corner adjoining the cliff. Bracing over the escape hole would have been easier there.
The corner was littered with broken cedar sticks. Above, occasional moisture seeping down the cliff face had accelerated the slow work of decay. The builders had cut holes into the soft stone to support the ends of ceiling beams and here the rot had started first.
McKee selected one of the sticks and began pushing the debris away from the corner. He worked carefully, trying to avoid noise. But the powdery dust rose in a cloud around him. Ellen knelt beside him, pushing the dust back carefully with her hands.
“Don’t make any noise.”
“Do you have any idea what this is all about?” she whispered. “Why does he want you to write that letter?”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” McKee said. “Maybe they’re crazy.”
“I think you know about the letter,” Miss Leon said. She stopped digging and looked at him. Her face was chalky with dust. White and strained. McKee looked away.
“He explained why he wanted the letter,” McKee said.
“And if you believed him, you would have written it,” Ellen said. She sat back on her heels, still looking at him. “Why don’t you stop treating me like a child? You know as well as I do that if they were going to turn us loose they wouldn’t need the letter.”
“O.K.,” McKee said. “I think you’re right. They want the letter because they know that someday there’s going to be a search started for us and they don’t want the search to be in here. They don’t want the search to be in this canyon ever—or at least not for a long, long time.”
“But why not? Do you know why?”
“No,” McKee said. “Can’t even make a good guess at it. But it has to be right.”
He leaned back against the cliff and wiped the dust off his face.
“I didn’t think so at first. I thought that, whatever they were doing here, it was making them wait for something, and they didn’t know how long the wait would be, so they didn’t want interference. But that’s not right, because it seems to be happening today. They could just leave us here, and it would be a long time before anyone found us. A lot more time than they would need to get away.”
“That’s what I thought of, too,” Ellen said.
“Did you notice how they camped?” McKee asked. “No garbage hole. Put all the cans and stuff in gunny sacks. And Eddie, when he lit the stove, he put the burned match in his vest pocket.”
“I didn’t notice. I guess I didn’t think of that.”
“When they pull out of here there won’t be any traces left. Not after the August rainy season, anyway. Unless there was some reason for a search, no one could ever know anyone had been in here.”
Beneath the pile of debris in the corner, the plaster looked almost new. He jabbed it with his stick and cursed inwardly when the rotten wood snapped. For this he needed his pocket knife and the Big Navajo had taken it when he had searched him. Or had he?
McKee suddenly was aware of the weight of the knife in his shirt pocket. He had dropped it there with his cigarette pack when he hurried from their tent—hands full of odds and ends—in his futile race to escape. It was a ridiculous place to carry a pocket knife, and the Navajo had overlooked it.
McKee fished it out and pulled open the blade—noticing he could hold it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand with little pain. With the knuckle back in joint the swelling must be going down. There would be no chance now of persuading the Navajo that he couldn’t write.
The plaster chipped away in sections, revealing a rough surface of stone with mud mortar chinking. A moment later a yard-square sheet crumbled and McKee saw he had guessed right. The fitted stonework ended in a crude half-arch in the corner two feet above the floor. The first stone he pulled on was jammed tightly, but the second slipped out easily.
McKee rocked back on his heels, looking at the stone. It was about the size of a grapefruit and felt clumsy in his left hand. He tried to shift it to the right, but it fell into the dust.
Miss Leon looked at the stone and then at him.
“I think we can get out,” he said. “We can if the room on the other side hasn’t fallen in and buried this crawl hole under a lot of big rocks.”
“What do we do if we get out?” Her voice was very small.
“Did you hear them come back during the night?” McKee said.
“No. I didn’t hear anything. But we don’t even know if they left. Maybe just one climbed down.”
“The Big Navajo said he had to leave,” McKee said. “And he said he might not be back until tonight. If Eddie didn’t stay up here on the ledge, we’ll try to find a way off.”
Miss Leon looked skeptical.
“Come on,” McKee said. “The Hopis lived here long enough to rebuild part of this place and they didn’t like being in places where they could be boxed in. There’s a good enough chance that they had some sort of escape route off the cliff. They always had a hidden way out if they could.”
There was another alternative. If they found no way off the cliff, he could try to keep Eddie and the Indian from climbing back up. He might surprise them, catch them on the ladder—defenseless from a rock dropped from above. With surprise it might work. But there was a rifle in the Land-Rover. They would be good with it—probably very good.
“But what if Eddie stayed up here?” Ellen said. “I’ll bet he did.”
“I don’t know,” McKee said. “Just let’s hope he didn’t.”
He tried to make his grin reassuring without much success. He was thinking of the way Eddie handled the pistol. For the first time it occurred to him exactly what his problem might be. He might have to find a way to kill a man. He turned away from the thought.
Outside the hole he stood tensely, listening. The ravens had flown away now and the only sound was the morning wind and the faint whistling of a horned lark on the canyon rim high above him. The Hopis had repaired this room, too. He could tell from the remnants of plaster. But a slab of stone had fallen from the cliff, crashing through the roof and tumbling much of the east wall outward. Denied this support and protection, the roof had collapsed and centuries of wind had drifted a hump of sand and dust against what remained of the wall. Over this hump, McKee surveyed what he could see of the east end of the ruins.
The shelf gradually narrowed to the east. From what he remembered seeing yesterday from the canyon bottom, this entire east end was filled with ruined walls, ending just short of the point where a structural fault split the canyon wall from floor to rim. That would be the place to look for an escape route. That narrow chimney would be the only possible way up. The thought of it made his stomach knot. As a graduate student, he had climbed down such a slot to reach a cliff house at Mesa Verde, and the memory of it was an unpleasant mixture of fear and vertigo.
He climbed cautiously over the rubble of the exterior wall at the edge of the shelf and looked down into the canyon. The Land-Rover was not in sight. That should mean the Navajo had not re
turned from wherever his business had taken him. Nor was there any sign of Eddie. That meant nothing. Eddie might be sleeping below him in any of a thousand invisible places. Or Eddie might be only a few yards away on the cliff.
Here the Anasazis had crowded their building almost to the edge of the cliff, leaving along the lip of the precipice a narrow walkway, which was now buried under debris. McKee moved along it gingerly, keeping as close as the fallen rocks would allow to the wall of the storeroom. At the corner, behind a water-starved growth of juniper, he stopped.
When he looked around the corner, Eddie would be standing there. Eddie would have the pistol in his hand and would—without any change of expression—shoot him in the head. McKee thought about it for a moment. Eddie might look faintly apologetic, as he had when he had introduced himself at the Land-Rover. But he would pull the trigger.
McKee stood with his back pressed against the stones and looked out across the canyon. It was almost full dawn now. Light from the sun, barely below the horizon, reflected a reddish light from a cloud formation somewhere to the east onto the tops of the opposite cliffs. A piñon jay exploded out of a juniper across the canyon in a flurry of black and white. He heard the ravens again, far up the canyon now. It was a beautiful morning.
McKee leaned forward and looked around the wall.
Eddie was not in sight. The stretched tarp was there, and the stove, and other equipment. Both sleeping bags were gone. So was the ladder. McKee felt himself relaxing. Eddie must have climbed down and left them alone on the shelf.
McKee was suddenly aware that he would be plainly visible from below. He moved back behind the juniper and stood, thinking it through. He glanced at his watch. Five A.M. Then he heard Eddie whistling.
Eddie walked around the jumble of fallen rock at the west end of the shelf, not fifty feet away. He was carrying his bedroll under his right arm and his coat slung over his left shoulder—whistling something that sounded familiar. He dumped the bedroll, folded the coat neatly across an outcrop of sandstone, and squatted beside the stove.
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