Bolt

by Siena West

  Bradfield’s tales of witchcraft and dying cattle intrigued her. Was there a web linking these unconnected events with the pot-hunting epidemic and the drug-dealing gangs? Don’t be stupid, María Elena, she told herself. There can be no connection.

  * * *

  Elena stopped in town for lunch and to fill up the gas tank. On a whim, she dropped in on Tinker Reidhead. He might know something about Carl Cimelli.

  An empty tourist van parked in front of the trading post indicated it would be busy. Tinker was up to his eyebrows showing jewelry and answering questions. Because it would be impossible to talk to him until the tourists left, she took an ice-cream bar from the freezer on the porch and sat on a bench. She listened to the tourists haggle and cackle as she ate the ice cream.

  Soon, the tour guide, who’d been on his cell phone since she drove up, gave a shrill whistle. “Time’s up, folks. Finish your transactions and let’s get going.” In a few minutes, the elderly group in shorts and sandals was back in the van and on the road.

  “Did you make out like a bandit, Tinker?” Elena called as she walked in, jangling the cowbells on the door.

  He doffed his horrid mountain-man hat. “Wal, howdy, Miz Vargas. Two visits already, and it ain’t even July yet! What brings you here today?”

  “Information, Tinker. I’m looking for information.”

  He growled like a bear. “The friggin’ FBI wanted information, too. Damned if they didn’t get a warrant to search my records. Cell phone, land line, email, bank account, hard drive—everything! Goddam bastards.”

  “I’m sorry, buddy. Why did they pick on you?”

  “‘Cuz I have old pots in my shop, I guess. Rodriguez must have seen them when he was here. And it weren’t just me. Damn suits did the same thing to every other dealer carrying pots.”

  “I hope the crowd just here made up for the trouble.”

  A broad smile showing tobacco-brown teeth transformed his expression. “Yup—it was a good day at the old tradin’ post.”

  Elena laid cash on the counter. “Here’s a little more for your coffers. I had an ice cream while I waited for the crowd to leave.”

  “So what information do you want?” Tinker said. “Better not be about pots and suchlike.”

  “No, nothing like that. A few days ago, a rather unusual character rolled into our camp in a van that’s older than you are. His name is Carl Cimelli. He wanted to buy Native American arts and crafts, and I told him to look you up. Did he come to see you?”

  Tinker growled once more. “I’ve met that guy, and he wouldn’t dare set foot in my place again. Last time, I told him to pack sand and ran him off the property. He wanted to know where he could buy prehistoric pots and other artifacts.”

  Gracias a Dios, I didn’t show him around our excavations. She had sensed he was trouble on the night he drove into the field school.

  “Cimelli also said he was an avocational archaeologist and worked at the O Bar Ranch field school. You know anything about that?”

  Reidhead grinned, stretching his weather-beaten, brown face into a maze of lines and crinkles. “Whoo, boy, yeah. Thought Samantha Edgar would bust a gut when she told me about it,” he said, referring to the woman who ran the field school for amateur archaeologists.

  “Don’t be coy, Tinker. What did he do?”

  “Sam told me she invited Cimelli to leave.”

  “Because?”

  “He stole artifacts from the site.”

  * * *

  Elena returned to a scene of chaos at the ranch. Linda Benjamin lay prone on one of the lab benches, and Sue had packed ice around her ankle. Even with the ice, the bruised ankle had swollen to baseball size. Tim hovered like an expectant father, raking his hair. He had driven Linda to camp in his hatchback. The rest of the ossuary crew was in the lab, looking glum.

  “What on earth happened?” Elena asked. She went to Linda’s side and removed the ice bags.

  “The ladder broke when Linda climbed out of the pit,” Tim answered. “She fell and twisted her ankle.” Elena probed the ankle as she listened.

  Tim’s hair was a rat’s nest of tufts and whorls. “I don’t understand,” he said. “We climbed all day on that ladder. Linda took a step, we heard this huge crack, and down she went. I feel horrible because I’m responsible.”

  Elena tucked the ice back into place around Linda’s ankle. “I think it’s broken, querida,” she said, patting Linda’s hand. “Must hurt like hell.” The tears increased with the sympathy. Linda knew her summer had ended.

  “I’ll drive her to the hospital,” Elena said. “Sue, will you find blankets and pillows so we can prop her up in the back seat of a carryall?”

  Tim protested. “You just got back, Tía. You shouldn’t turn around and drive to town again.”

  She laughed. “I’m fine. But I’d appreciate your company. Sue, will you also tell Norm we’ll miss dinner, and Linda will have to move into the ranch house? On the ground floor.”

  * * *

  The emergency room doctor took X-rays of Linda’s ankle. He gave her the bad news—the break required surgery, and she would have to stay in the hospital. Tim sat in the waiting room with his head in his hands, ignoring the calls coming over the sound system and the bustle of nurses, doctors, and orderlies around them. “Tim, sit up and look at me,” Elena ordered. “This was not your fault. It was a freak accident, and you did everything you could to protect the kids in the field.”

  Tim looked terrible with his red-rimmed eyes and pale skin. “I keep hearing that crack when Linda fell. It may have been the ladder, but it could have been her ankle.”

  Elena patted his hand. “It will pass, Tim. Go to the cafeteria and get something to eat. We’ve had nothing since lunch, and that was a long time ago.”

  “Okay. But Tía, the worst part is that Linda predicted this. Remember when she had the nightmare? Geez, I can’t forget about that either.”

  “Well, I’ll take director’s privilege and put the blame on myself. I’m the ultimate responsibility for everyone. Now scoot.” She pressed money into his hand. “Bring something back for me, too. A sandwich? And a cookie or a donut, whatever they have. I’ve got a need for sugar. And coffee—both of us need caffeine”

  Much later, they left Linda in the hospital and drove home. Tim tried to stay awake to keep Elena company on the drive home but soon succumbed to sleep.

  Alone with the maelstrom of her thoughts, Elena pondered on the incident as she drove home. She couldn’t remember any time a ladder into an excavation unit had broken. Was it coincidence it broke under the feet of the same person who foretold of dire things and dreamed of frightening long bones floating in the air?

  No doubt about it. Something swirled about the ranch, causing misery and pain. It was the oldest, most hackneyed story line in the world, Elena told herself. Archaeologist digs tomb. Archaeologist releases evil spirits and is cursed. Archaeologist dies and so does everybody else. A thousand apocryphal legends, movies, and novels had repeated the old trope. Despite its triteness, there must be a kernel of truth in the legend. But how could they, simple, earthbound archaeologists, cope with something unreal and invisible, a hidden force with wicked intentions?

  Chapter 11

  Lecture

  They sent Linda Benjamin home hobbling on crutches. Elena promised she would receive half credit for the time she’d spent at the field school. If she wanted to come back next summer, they would welcome her. If she wished to try another field school instead, Elena would give her a good recommendation. The director wouldn’t blame Linda if she didn’t come back. Tim wasn’t responsible for Linda’s broken ankle. Elena was, because it was she who had unleashed the malicious spirits from the pasture.

  Independence Day would mark the halfway point of the field season. Time seemed to break the laws of the universe, accelerating and leaving fewer hours in the day. They had finished excavations at the ossuary. The excavators had discover
ed, regardless of whether the units were in the center of the feature or on its perimeter, they were the same. First, the crew dug through charcoal, ashes, and dirt without artifacts and removed big boulders and cobbles. The bones were the last and lowest level. Splintered, smashed bones, disarticulated and scattered, covered the bottom of every excavated unit.

  They had talked about it at Sunday afternoon staff meetings. “I’ve inventoried the bones in each unit we finished,” Tim had said, “and it’s really strange. As far as I can tell, the ossuary holds only adults. No kids at all.”

  “Then it isn’t an ossuary,” Elena had said.

  “Why not?” Tim had wanted to know.

  “In a typical family cemetery, you’d expect the entire age range—the very young to the very old,” Elena explained. That there were only adults in the feature had added to Elena’s certainty that the remains represented something different from normal burials.

  “Guess we should change this thing’s name one more time,” Elena had said. “Let’s call it the bone bed.”

  Tim and his crew had covered the excavation units, and his students joined Mel’s dig. She was glad for the help because her crew rotated into the stabilization project. Extra hands meant getting the floor exposed quickly.

  Elena’s anxiety increased along with the approach of the monsoon rains. When they arrived, the rains would fill the open units in the pasture, and she imagined the human remains floating in a sea of muddy red water. They could do nothing until they heard from the Hopi, who would tell the archaeologists how to treat the human remains. Please, she pleaded to the cosmos. Please, let me hear from the Hopi soon.

  Elena was so discombobulated she had forgotten she had scheduled Christian Thomas to give a lecture at the field school. She remembered only when she saw a tall, stooped man emerge from a car parked in front of the ranch house. Santa María! She scurried to alert Norm there was an extra guest for dinner and to get a guest room ready. She was out of breath by the time she greeted Dr. Thomas.

  Although he was showing his age, the man’s stride was long and vigorous. Now retired, he had time to pursue his passions, which remained much the same as when he was teaching at Arizona State University. He was a physical anthropologist and an expert on ancient cannibalism in the Southwest. He had written the book on it—a book that created an absolute storm of controversy among archaeologists and Native Americans.

  Elena had scheduled Thomas to speak at the field school long before they discovered the bone bed. Now, she was grateful that he was there to inspect the bones and offer an opinion.

  The director explained the situation over dinner. She told him about the curious feature, the disarticulated and cut-up bones, the strange lack of burial offerings, and the absence of the typical debris found in pueblo rooms. She did not mention her strong, inarticulate reaction to the human remains.

  “You suspect it might be cannibalism?”

  “I don’t know what to think. If you can help—”

  “Your confidence in me is gratifying,” Thomas said, “but I doubt if the bones represent cannibalism. All the indisputable cases I’ve documented occur in a limited area on the Colorado Plateau.”

  “That’s good to know. But I’m a believer in multiple working hypotheses. If it’s not cannibalism, that’s something I can rule out.”

  “At least you’re open-minded. That’s more than I can say for most of my colleagues. If it proves to be cannibalism, it will be one more piece of evidence for my pet theory.”

  “What is your pet theory?”

  “Cannibalism was a form of social control by Mexicans.”

  * * *

  Elena had asked Dr. Thomas to talk about current issues in Southwestern bioarchaeology, or physical anthropology, in particular those that were controversial. She hoped Thomas could ignite discussion that would illustrate the warring emotional and intellectual aspects of the issues.

  Introductions past, Thomas asked to have the power point projector turned on and began. “I understand that you’ve discovered extraordinary human remains in an unusual context. So I’ll talk about the three major models bioarchaeologists use when archaeologists find disturbed and disarticulated human remains at sites.

  “All are controversial to a certain extent,” he continued, “but none more so than cannibalism. It’s an emotional topic, regardless of which side you stand on. My colleagues have criticized my work and called me a fraud and a racist. They don’t believe the cases I’ve documented represent cannibalism. Everyone has strong opinions, and I’m sure you will want to voice your own. Feel free to interrupt me with questions as we go.”

  The three models, Thomas explained, were warfare, cannibalism, and witchcraft. He began with witchcraft, or sorcery, giving them background. “The historical cultures of the American Southwest feared and persecuted witches. One of the most famous cases was that of Estéban the Moor. He was the slave who accompanied the Spanish friar Marcos de Niza on his exploration of the Southwest in the sixteenth century. Native Americans executed Estéban because they thought he was a witch. They cut his body into pieces and distributed them to prove he was dead.”

  Often, the executioners hung an accused witch by the hands or arms until the witch died, Thomas said. If death did not occur soon enough, they might beat the witch to death. As with Estéban, the executioners cut witches into pieces to prove they no longer had power to harm. They might also decapitate witches. Sometimes, they burned sorcerers, either to make the accused sorcerer confess or to dispose of the body after execution. Thomas had found illustrations of witchcraft trials in colonial New Mexico and used them to illustrate his points.

  “Grim stuff, isn’t it? Death for witchcraft is a form of punishment and social control accepted as justifiable.

  “Okay, now let’s talk about warfare. It’s also a controversial topic. We view Native Americans such as the Hopi as peaceful farmers. But is this true? The Hopi themselves destroyed Awat’ovi, a village of their own people. At Awat’ovi, violence and witchcraft are mixed. Hopi accounts relate that the inhabitants had fallen from the simple way of life prescribed by the spirits. Taawa—the Hopi’s creator deity—and Maasaw, the Guardian Spirit who led them into today’s world, had showed the Hopi how to live proper lives. Instead, they became popwaqt, or witches. The village fell into chaos, madness, and corruption.

  “Certain archaeologists believe a set of characteristics shows warfare in prehistory: sites in defensible locations, such as cliff dwellings and fortified sites on top of hills. They also include burned villages, unburied and disarticulated bodies, forensic evidence for violence, and more.”

  A hand shot in the air. “Who was fighting? And why?”

  “Good question. Archaeologists used to think nonpueblo people—Athapaskans such as the Navajo or Apache, perhaps Utes—swooped down and invaded the peaceful pueblos. The timing is wrong for that, however—the Athapaskans didn’t arrive until long after the prehistoric people abandoned much of the Southwest. At least, most archaeologists think so. We aren’t sure when the Utes arrived or if they were descendants of ancient hunter-gatherer groups.

  “We can attribute violence to conflict among the prehistoric pueblo people themselves. When many of these cases of violence occurred, the climate was deteriorating—a severe dry period called the Great Drought swept the Colorado Plateau, and food supplies were scarce. The people were starving, and hungry people steal food and fight for it.”

  The third model for disarticulated human remains—cannibalism—was the most controversial, Thomas said. Cannibalism pitted its proponents against Native Americans who claimed it was disrespectful and even racist to think ancestors of modern Indians would have engaged in such despicable acts.

  “My theory,” Thomas said, “is that cannibalism was a type of systematic terror used to control and subjugate the Ancestral Pueblo farmers of the Colorado Plateau. People from central Mexico, who may have built the famous towns at Chaco Canyon, introduc
ed cannibalism to the Southwest. Archaeologists have documented human sacrifice and cannibalism in pre-Columbian Mexico. Cannibalism is just as controversial among Mexican archaeologist as my work.” Thomas clicked through illustrations of Aztec blood sacrifices and Maya sacrifices in cenotes, the bottomless pools sunk in limestone bedrock.

  Another student spoke. “Hold on—you’ve lost me, Dr. Thomas. The people who built Chaco Canyon were Mexicans? How do you know?”

  Thomas smiled. He was in well-known territory. “It’s a long story, and many categories of evidence exist. Much of the Southwest and Mesoamerica represented a unified cultural system. Genetics and biology related the people in these areas, and they shared everything from pottery styles to crops. Archaeologists have discovered residues of cacao—chocolate—inside black-on-white pottery vases made at Chaco. They’ve found macaws, also native to the tropics and not indigenous in the Southwest, at Chaco, along with headdresses and clothing made from the feathers. Most definitive is the bioarchaeological evidence. Patterns in the teeth and DNA match to Native Americans living south of the border.”

  The restless students were quiet and attentive, focused on Thomas. Another question rang out in the quiet. “How can you tell if it’s cannibalism and not something else?”

  “I was just going to talk about that. So here goes: six key features of perimortem damage—that is, damage occurring around the time of death—signal cannibalism.” Thomas ticked them off on his fingers. “Breakage, cut marks, burning, many missing vertebrae, pot polishing, and anvil abrasions. When all the attributes are present on skeletal remains, they are the signature of the deliberate butchering and consumption of human flesh.”

  The room was so quiet, crickets chirping outside the ramada were loud. The deliberate consumption of human flesh—it was terrifying to consider.

  “Some of you may find these images disturbing,” Thomas warned. “Shattered and splintered bones mean intentional human activity.” He clicked on a photograph of bone splinters that were scarcely recognizable as human.