by Beverly Bird
Chapter 10
Shadow fully expected Mac to work late, to put off such a decision as long as possible, but he surprised her. Her watch read only a little past four when he threw his brush into the dig with a wordless sound of disgust.
“There’s no midden here,” he said finally. “They didn’t follow the laws of reason this time.”
“Where will you look next?”
“The second most logical place.” He straightened and looked up. “Sometimes, if their apartments were big enough, they piled their dead and their refuse right up against the walls. These cliff dwellings are relatively large.”
Shadow felt a very cold finger trace down her spine. “You’re going to dig in there? You’re going to go right up there into the dwellings themselves?” She could think of nothing worse than being trapped in an enclosed space with lingering chindis. At least out here in the canyon she had the sense that she could run, could somehow defend herself if they appeared.
But Mac only shrugged. “I could save it until last, but I hate wasting time and that’s probably where their trash is.” Finally he noticed her stricken expression. “Hey, Sergeant, I’ve already told you that I’m not superstitious. I don’t believe in Navajo chindis.”
“But you said you were part Navajo,” she blurted, then she winced.
She had promised herself that she wouldn’t ask him any more personal, intrusive questions. Something about having made love with him changed her right to do that. He had made it clear that any woman he touched was...well, for touching only. When she had crossed the line between acquaintance and lover, she had somehow given up all her chances to know him better. He would place her in some little niche now and keep her there, wouldn’t risk letting her get any closer, wouldn’t let her become an intimate part of both his body and his heart.
For Mac Tshongely, that was simply too much.
“Sorry,” she muttered, getting to her feet. “None of my business.”
He watched her go back to her sleeping bag. “Is that where you’ve decided to sleep tonight?” he demanded.
Decided? She looked back at him. “You haven’t mentioned any other alternatives.”
Mac shoved his hands into his pockets. After a moment, he followed her.
She sat on her sleeping bag and dug through her belongings for an envelope of reconstituted stew. She tore it open with her teeth and poured it into a lightweight tin pot. It had taken him two trips to get all his stuff up the mountain, he thought, and he still didn’t have everything with him that would have made his stay comfortable. Sergeant Shadow, on the other hand, had brought one small backpack, and he had the feeling that if he asked her for a bathtub, she would have pulled that out from her little pile as well.
He chuckled aloud, a rough sound. She looked up, startled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. If you share that tonight, I’ll go out at dawn and see if I can find another deer.”
“Sounds like bribery.”
“It is.”
She shrugged. “It’ll work. I’m getting sick to death of this stuff.”
She waited for him to point out again that she could always go home, but he didn’t do it this time. Something moved in the pit of her stomach. She looked up at him cautiously.
“How about some more of those skinny little cakes?” she suggested. After all, he had already pretty much said that he would be eating with her. “I could go get some berries.”
“That’ll work, too.”
She went down the canyon and he went to his tent for the flour and the stones. He hefted one in the palm of his hand and stared down at it pensively.
His rules were fraying badly around the edges, he thought, and he didn’t even know which thread he should try to grab first to stop it all from unraveling. There was such a radiant warmth about her. He had the distinct impression that it was a solid warmth, something he could get his hands around and hold onto.
Fool. But as the day had passed he’d found himself wanting that more and more badly, wanting to be warm, to finally be warm inside again as he had been when he’d sank into her the night before. How had she put it? I’d lose something of myself into your darkness, and I wouldn’t be able to give you any light. But she had. In a few impossibly short days, she had lit up his world.
It was the little things, he realized with a start. Cooking together, tracking their prankster together. It was the silly stuff that wasn’t at all hard to do alone, but was so much better with company.
“Mac?”
He jolted, looking around at her. “Did you get the berries?” he asked. His voice sounded raw even to his own ears. He grimaced and cleared his throat.
“Not many. Most of them are sun-shriveled, almost rotten. I didn’t notice that before.” Small wonder, she thought, the way her head had been lately.
She had stopped at her own campsite and he went back there to join her. They worked in silence. A warm silence. He marveled again at the way she didn’t feel the need to fill it up with inane talk.
He was the one to finally break the quiet and when he did his own words shocked him.
“My mother had the Navajo blood. She was a quarter Navajo. She didn’t raise me.”
Shadow nodded simply, pushing one of the finished cakes into her mouth, poking at her stew with her finger and a dissatisfied frown.
“She left when I was ten,” he said.
She finally looked up at him. I’ve been left and I know better than to let it happen again. His mother, she thought. Of course it was his mother who had gone. She remembered now, the way he had steered the subject away when she had mentioned the woman before.
So why had he decided to tell her about it now? Suddenly she felt as if she was handling something very, very fragile, something her merest breath could break. She urged him on with another bare nod, just enough to let him know she was listening.
“In my earliest memories of her, she was happy. So...loving. So full of joy at the simplest things. I remember when I was five or six or so, she took me to Salt Lake. She was raised in Utah, not on your reservation. She just took me. It was our own special excursion. We left my father and brother behind. She...she thought of things like that. She was full of ways to make someone feel special.” His face took on a pained, faraway cast. “She ran out into the water first that day. She had on a dress. The water...it buoyed her skirt up, billows of it, all gathered around her. She laughed. I can still remember her that way, her head thrown back, laughing, waving for me to come in....” It was, in fact, the only truly clear memory he had left of her.
He was quiet for a long time. Shadow finally cleared her throat carefully. “So what happened to her?”
“I’ll be damned if I know. I just—I have an impression of the warmth, the life, going out of her over the years. At some point it just didn’t seem like they loved each other anymore. And then she just...left.” This time his laugh was ugly. “You’ve heard the stories. Papa went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Only this time it was Mama, it was a loaf of goddamned bread and the station wagon, and that was that. She crumbled, fell apart...faded away. Whatever trials and tribulations there were in her life, I guess she just wasn’t strong enough to meet them.”
Shadow’s heart squeezed for him. She doubted, somehow, that it had been trials and tribulations. Maybe it had been doing...always doing for others. It could be exhausting to think up ways to make people feel special. Maybe, she thought, Mac’s mother had just gotten... tired.
She could almost understand it, then she looked at Mac. How could a woman get tired of a man she loved, of her sons? For one moment, for one horrible, fleeting moment, he was a little boy again, befuddled, lost and alone. Then the man was back, the man that little boy had become, and his face became stony, his eyes hard.
“Dad waited a while, and then he took us home to the Hopi Mesas. That was where he was from. But in the beginning, he would just go to the front door at odd times and stand there, s
taring down the street as though he still expected that damned station wagon to come cruising around the corner again at any time. I guess it took a while for him to accept that she wasn’t coming back.” Mac shook his head. “I never knew a man could hurt like that.”
Now you do. But she didn’t say it. Instead she asked, “Did the Mesas heal him?”
“I thought they would. But she destroyed him. When she gave up, when she ran, it ruined him. It was like the beauty had gone out of him. He was a jeweler by trade. He never bought his gems, his stones. He used what he found, whatever the land gave him. But after my mother left, he just stopped working and drew further and further into himself. It was almost as though he thought maybe the beauty just sank inside him somewhere, and if he went deep enough he could find it again.”
What an eloquent way to put it. Shadow lost her breath to a sharp pain, both for Mac and for this man she would probably never know.
“Finally he started drinking,” he went on. “Miller—my brother—was falling apart, too. And I guess Dad just wasn’t strong enough to take that on top of everything else.
“Miller started stealing things, stupid things. God only knows what he thought that could give him. It went on until he was about twenty or so. I was sixteen. Then the Hopi elders called a meeting and decided he would have to go. What he was doing completely contradicted the Hopi way. He needed help, he needed their wisdom, but they sent him away. So I got mad and righteous the way only a kid can do, and I left with him.”
“Where?”
“We wandered south and ended up in Phoenix. We lived on the street and Miller provided for us in his own warped way. But his stealing got bigger, worse. On the Mesas it was some old woman’s blanket hanging from a laundry line. In Phoenix it was cars, cash registers. The cops finally caught up with him. It had to happen sooner or later. They packed him off to jail.”
Shadow’s throat felt so tight she could barely swallow. “So they all left you,” she murmured, “all three of them.”
He looked vaguely surprised, then his eyes hardened. “It wasn’t their fault. My mother destroyed both of them. She set all of their failures into motion when she deserted us.”
Shadow decided she would leave that one alone. She knew there would be no swaying him from the conviction. It was far too old. “It’s a long jump from the streets to a master’s degree,” she said instead.
“How’d you know about my master’s?” He looked at her hard, suspiciously. His eyes were on the verge of closing down again.
“The computer.”
“Oh. That’s right. You were playing supersleuth.”
Shadow flushed, trying to hold his eyes. Don’t go. Don’t stop talking to me now.
Something from her heart must have reached him. After a moment, he went on.
“I was sleeping at nights under a highway overpass in the south part of the city. There was an old blind guy there too.” She thought she almost saw him smile. “I was following Miller’s way, doing anything to survive, when that old man realized what I was up to and smacked the hell out of me. I couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t even see, but no matter which way I tried to run from him, he’d find me with that damned cane and whale on my hide.” Until I sat down and cried. He had never cried again, Mac realized, not once after that sultry, dark night. But for some reason, he felt like doing it now.
“A few whacks with a cane doesn’t equal a college degree,” Shadow responded carefully.
“Those few whacks went a long way. He said it was one thing for him to sleep under the overpass. He was old and he didn’t have any good years left, anything to give. But I was only sixteen. I had a lifetime and a million potentials unless I squandered them all. I didn’t pay him any mind at first, but eventually I came to realize that it was safe enough to rely on myself. I got a job and my G.E.D. and a scholarship. And that was that.”
“Why archaeology?”
“The past endures.”
And people sure as hell don’t. She remembered the way he had said that and she understood now. “Some people do, too,” she answered quietly.
He gave a deprecating snort, but she could think of a handful right off the top of her head. Her family, to begin with, and so many of the People on the Res. Jericho might have forgotten her birthday, but she had no doubt that by now he had grilled Diamond Eddie six ways to Sunday about where she’d gone.
Something trembled inside her as she realized how very, very different they were.
Mac’s face was hardening again. “Don’t try to tell me you’re one of them,” he said tightly. “I won’t buy it. You’re not that strong.”
Her spine straightened defensively. “You don’t have any way of knowing that.”
“Sure I do. You’ve already left one man just because you wanted to go home.”
That hurt. The truth of it was like a slap in the face, and she answered without thought. “I didn’t love him.”
She knew it as soon as she said it, though it had never consciously occurred to her before now. It shook her and she hugged herself, feeling like a hurt animal that needed to slink off to some dark corner to examine its wound. But Mac wouldn’t allow her that. The moon was rising. It was a night for shared truths. She wondered where they would take them.
“You married a man you didn’t love?” he drawled. “Now there’s character.”
Suddenly she was angry. “Do you think I knew it at the time and married him anyway?”
“Why, then?” He wanted her to feel hurt too, wanted to pay her back for making him dig up old memories, even though she hadn’t actually asked him to. It was perverse, but he couldn’t fight the urge. Emotion had been unleashed inside him and it was violent now; it had been chained up for too long.
“I was twenty-two!” she snapped. “He was the campus jock. Everything we did together was fun, a good time, lots of laughs. It wasn’t until after we got married that I realized we really didn’t have anything in common. I was sort of like his...his Indian princess, I guess, like an exotic toy to show off to people, something he had that none of his friends possessed. He wanted me to play the role in company, but he didn’t want me to be it in private. He wanted me to bury my beliefs and embrace his because they were the only ones he could really accept. There wasn’t anything there to sustain me after we got married. He didn’t even want me to visit the Res anymore. There was nothing there to take the place of everything I did love, everything that I had lost because he wasn’t able to share it.”
“No sex like last night?” Mac queried cruelly.
Shadow flinched but then she met his eyes. “No. I’ve never known anything like last night.”
“Well, I have. I’ve had it with the best of them and that wears thin, too, sweetheart. It’s just not enough over the long haul.”
He said it because he needed to believe it. As soon as he did, he felt lower than a worm for lying.
She went pale. She tried to scramble to her feet and couldn’t quite manage it. She finally stood, swaying, then she looked at him through stricken eyes. Finally she stumbled around and headed for the far reaches of the canyon.
He had never hurt inside like he did at that moment.
In the days she had been here she had done nothing to threaten him, to bring him pain. She had not pressed too close; she had not wandered too far away. She had been true, solid, unflinching in the face of his temper. Why? And why did he need to hurt her for it?
Because no one else, no one other than a dead, blind bum had ever possessed that kind of guts where he was concerned, he realized. Because guts like that could last, could endure. And that scared the living hell out of him.
“Wait,” he called out hoarsely. “Shadow!”
At the sound of his voice, she started running. He had to let her go, yet he couldn’t let her flee down there into that pitch darkness alone. He couldn’t let her leave him. Not yet. It was too soon.
He was on his feet and running after her before he knew he would do it. He c
aught her arm to stop her and she turned on him like a wild thing, clawing and hitting.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized.
“Why do you have to...try to bring everything down...to your coarse, wretched level?” she gasped. One small fist connected hard with the side of his head before he managed to grasp both her wrists. “Can’t you just let anything be good?”
“I don’t know, Sergeant. I guess I just don’t know how.”
“Don’t call me that!”
She managed to pull away from him. He tackled her because it was the only way he could stop her from running again. He caught her ankles and she spilled into the sand, then he scrambled quickly up over her, pinning her arms over her head.
“Shadow, stop it. God, stop it. I didn’t mean it!”
But he did, she thought. In some scarred part of his soul he had meant every word, because he needed to believe them. She was out of her element here, couldn’t save him, couldn’t even touch that darkness inside him, because although he had opened the window to let her see it, he still kept bars in place to keep her out.
“Leave me alone,” she moaned, “please.”
“I can’t.”
She shuddered, then went very, very still. He moved his hands up her arms and felt the rigidity of her flesh. He forced himself to meet her gaze, though it was one of the hardest things he had ever done.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let me back in. It’s cold out here.”
She groaned and closed her eyes. He thought he saw the set of her jaw finally soften. He thanked every Hopi, Anglo and Navajo god and kissed her cautiously.
She would forgive him because it was her nature. She would try to give him warmth because he so desperately needed it. She opened to him because she believed him.
God help her, but she did.
He felt the exact moment when she changed. A spasm passed through her body. Yearning? Regret? He didn’t know and couldn’t care now. She had come back to him and he needed her heat right now as he had never needed anything in his life.
He was too grateful, too relieved, to try to stop her when she arched her back up from the sand and pressed into him, taking charge again. She twisted from beneath him with athletic grace, and somehow he found himself on his back in the sand again, her lean body on top of his. He caught a hand behind her neck and pulled her mouth down to his.