“No,” he told me. “I want to get a sense of the construction.”
I shrugged and ducked through a little archway. Snug in a little canyon cave, I crossed my legs and then held up my hands, putting my thumb and forefinger together. The kind of position I remember my mama sitting in, concentrating with all her might. Hush, Anna Marie. Mama’s concentrating.
I opened my eyes and saw Touch, his hands on his hips, looking at me. I smiled at him, and he smiled back, but it wasn’t quite as twinkly as his smiles used to be.
“You got places like this?” I asked him.
He got another of those troubled looks across his face, then he jutted his chin toward the wall behind me. “Look,” he said. “Art.”
I stood up and took a good look at the wall. The cave that I’d crawled into was shaped differently than the other rooms, kind of round, and all of a sudden I had this strong realization. The reason I hadn’t seen the drawings straight off was that the walls were charred, different layers of black, and somehow I knew that this room had been a place of worship. The word “kiva” came into my head, a word I’d never heard before. If there ever had been a ceiling it was long gone. The sun warmed the top of my head.
The drawings on the wall looked primitive. Lines and circles and squares. I could make out different kinds of animals—bears and deer and wolves—plus people of different sizes, some of them with animal heads, some of them holding what looked like human heads. Staring at those, I had this feeling they were meant to stand as a warning. Like maybe I shouldn’t be in this little round room, staring at this art.
“Touch,” I said. “I feel a little bit afraid.”
“It’s OK.” His voice sounded very different to me just then. It sounded firm, no devil in it, with a certainty I hadn’t heard before. For a moment I felt like he knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. Like he had some sort of purpose beyond escaping from capture.
The world started to pulse around me. I couldn’t stop myself. I reached out toward one of the drawings, the tallest character. His head was surrounded by what looked like a sun, and he didn’t have any human head dangling from his hands. Still I could tell he was a warrior, or maybe even a god, with a crisscross shield drawn on his chest.
“Rogue,” Touch called out, and whether he meant to stop me or encourage me I couldn’t say. All I knew was that as soon as my fingers made contact with the drawing, my body shot through with something terrifying and powerful. Something warm and bright as the sun itself. It shook me to the core, the way even absorbing Cody, Wendy Lee, and the wildebears had not. I could see the very earth in all its newness surrounding me. My veins felt flooded with the red clay beneath my feet. A sort of knowledge that didn’t have any words attached to it took over, filling me to the rim of my head, having to do with the inconsequential nature of anything human, anything manmade.
Tawa. The word, a name, pulsed in my ears. In front of me, on the wall, the picture came to life. He lifted his shield and shook his fist at me, as if I’d done something very wrong. And then he knelt, right off the wall, and peered into my face.
“Touch,” I whispered. The whole world had gone blurry. My face was hot from the sun burning inside me. Touch’s voice came from very far away, and slow, so slow, like a recording on the wrong speed. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. But I did recognize something in the face of the picture—the moving, living petroglyph—in front of me. Tawa. That was his name, and I saw that he was searching my face, deciding whether or not I was worthy of what I’d just taken from him.
And then a whole world exploded inside me. It burst. It crackled so I thought my eyes would pop straight out of my head. I wanted to scream, but something else battled those cries down.
“Warriors don’t scream,” Tawa said. “Warriors stand firm and fight.”
“And gods?” I said, maybe out loud, or maybe in my head. “What do they do?”
“They don’t give away their powers,” Tawa said. “You cannot drain them of theirs.”
“That’s not what I mean… I didn’t mean…”
“Hush,” Tawa said. “Hush, little girl.”
I realized with both horror and comfort that I was still touching him. Beneath my fingers, the cave drawing trembled. It faded and grew bigger, then diminished, then disappeared altogether. Suddenly the red earth rushed up to meet my face. I felt a great surge, like a river current covering me, only it wasn’t water, but sun.
“Take what you need,” Tawa whispered, “and nothing more.”
When I opened my eyes, the sky stood blue and peaceful above me. The cave drawing of Tawa had returned to its spot, untouched and unchanged. Unmoving. My whole body felt wrecked and ravaged, like it had been though something enormous, something it needed recovering from. I sat up and blinked against the sunlight. My shoulder didn’t hurt. I pushed my shirt aside to examine the wound. It had disappeared, healed up, only an odd zigzag scar in place of the thread and blood. Almost as startling, the skin on my forearm and across my back had changed color, darkened, to a ruddy complexion, mirroring the landscape all around me.
“Touch,” I said, my throat hoarse, my insides drier than the semi-desert all around us. “Did you see that? Did you hear?”
But he didn’t answer me. Not exactly. He just said, “There. Just let them try to take you now.”
Time passed. I lay on the floor of the Kiva, not ready or able to get up quite yet. My limbs felt immobile, my body drained, like I’d just run a marathon, or recovered from a killing fever. This would have worried me if Touch hadn’t seemed so calm. He just stood in his same spot, arms crossed, watching me, like this had been his plan all along.
And something else. What I’d touched had been too huge, too powerful, to take whole. Maybe even to take at all. At the same time, I knew that a piece had been given willingly, added to my growing collection of life forces. Tawa. The tiniest piece of him was larger than a whole person, or two wildebears. However much the absorption had weakened me, I knew that when I recovered I’d be stronger than ever.
Finally I crawled out of there on my hands and knees. Then I stood up and walked over to Touch. The sense of recovering had started to lift, and I felt damn near recovered. In fact I felt better than fine. The canyon buzzed all around me, speaking to me, infusing me with more and more strength.
You would think Touch might say something, about what had just happened—me convulsing and hitting the ground, then standing up with skin a shade darker. But he just said, “There’s a canyon deeper than this, south of here.” Somehow I knew exactly what he meant.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s right on the way to Mexico.”
“We’ll head there in the morning.”
“Fine with me.” Of course I’d always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. I just wasn’t quite ready to ask Touch how the hell he knew about it. My body still felt strange and tingly, too crowded and at the same time strong and invincible.
The two of us made our way back to the boat. Maybe what I’d just been through, what he’d just witnessed, went too far beyond words to talk about. On the water, we puttered past all the rising rocks and ruins, both of us feeling a thousand ancient faces watching us. And we knew, somehow, that they wished us well.
When we got back to the boat rental pier, the Navajo guy returned the fake license Touch had given him; I guessed he’d kept a few from his friend in Smith Park. Of course I’d only ever had one form of identification, the real driver’s license that I’d burned back at the sand dunes. I wondered if I should think on how to get another one over the next few days. It wouldn’t take us much longer than that to get into Mexico.
Touch put the fake ID back into his inside pocket. The Navajo peered very carefully into my face. “Are you OK?” he asked.
“Sure.” I tried to sound casual. Like, Why wouldn’t I be OK?
“You look different,” he said. “Different than when you first came.”
“I got a lot of sun,” I said.
&nbs
p; He nodded, real solemn. “More sun than you’d bargained for, I’d say.”
There was no good answer to this. My shoulders went a little soft. I let myself lean into Touch.
“Here,” the Navajo said. He picked up a little silver chain with a sun pendant. In the center of the silver sun was a round piece of turquoise. “You take this. You keep it.”
“Will it keep me safe?”
“Listen,” he said. “When I was a boy, my grandparents told me never to go inside the ruins. ‘Look at them from a small distance,’ they always said. Because when you go inside, you never know what spirits might jump inside you. Good or bad.”
The foggy, fuzzy sense of fever came back to me, but pulsing far away, like a memory.
“What I’m saying is,” the Navajo told me, “you don’t need jewelry to keep you safe. Not anymore.” But he dropped the necklace into my hands all the same.
Touch and I found our way back to the truck and drove just a little ways, till we found a campground. This time we were very careful to fill out the envelope with cash slipped inside, and the model and make and license of our truck. I felt a little nervous with the truck’s original license plate, but at the same time I had this hopeful feeling that whoever owned that truck had left it behind for the season and wouldn’t discover it missing till summer rolled around again. On the whole, I’d recovered from the incident at the ruins. My skin, though, stayed dark and ruddy, and my brain wouldn’t stop tingling. What’s more, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Touch had known exactly what he was doing when he walked me into those ruins. When I asked him about it, he just said, “How could I?” And since I didn’t have an answer, I left it at that.
We didn’t have a tent to pitch, so we just climbed into the bed of the truck and wrapped ourselves up in Joe Wheeler’s blankets. I pulled his big green duffel bag right in between us.
“What’s that for?” Touch said.
“You know what. You don’t want to end up like those wildebears, do you?”
“I can think of worse ways to go.”
At last that playfulness had come back into his voice. I sat up on one elbow and looked over at him. He had on about every piece of clothing we’d stolen, though to me the night felt pretty warm—warmer than it had been in Colorado.
“Touch?” I said.
“Rogue?”
“What happened back there? In the ruins?”
“I think,” he said, “that those cave paintings were more alive than we realized.”
“Did you know that was going to happen?” I couldn’t help but ask again. He didn’t say anything, and too quickly I added, “What did you mean when you said they couldn’t take me now?”
I wished right away that I hadn’t added the second question, because he chose to answer that one instead of the first. “It seemed like you became more powerful,” he said. “Now you’ve got the wildebears in you, plus the Anasazi. I’d say that makes you a very strong woman.”
Touch smiled at me, and I smiled back, even though smiling felt like changing the subject. It was dark, the sun had set, but above our head shone about a million stars. He looked from my face back up at the sky. Then back at me.
“Hi,” he said, like he’d just noticed I was here.
Then he did something I hadn’t expected. He took his top blanket off (he’d taken two versus my one) and threw it over me. It covered my whole self—my head, my face, everything. I felt an instinctive rush of fear, like he meant to kidnap me. Then I remembered I’d already been kidnapped. And that was just fine with me. I didn’t push the blanket away, though that was my natural reflex. Instead I just lay down, my head still under the blanket, the stars taken away from my view. And in the instant I knew what Touch would do next, he went ahead and did it: he climbed on top of the blanket, which meant he climbed on top of me.
The weight of a man, on top of me, his body fitted to mine—I’d never felt that before. It could have been a frightening thing, I guess, except for the fact that I trusted Touch. Even though I was confused by all that had gone on that day, deep inside I trusted him. And I loved him. There. I’d said it—or at least thought it. Part of me was afraid that if I said the word aloud he would get that confused look I’d come to know so well, like when I first said “air conditioner.”
But my whole heart told me no. He wouldn’t get that look at all. The blanket was made of cotton flannel, soft and warm, but thin enough that I could feel the heat of him, and smell the scent of him. He clasped his arms around me, and pressed his cheek against mine, and through the blanket I could feel his lips moving against my ear, whispering something in his own odd and beautiful language. And even though I couldn’t understand it, I liked hearing it. It made me feel close to him, a little less like there was a blanket between us. I concentrated on the weight of his body on mine.
Touch knew what love meant.
I didn’t care about seeing the stars, or if Touch had brought me to those ruins on purpose. I didn’t even care about breathing. I just pressed myself back up against him, relishing the feel of his stomach breathing against mine, and his lips by my ear, saying things I couldn’t understand but loved the sound of. I could’ve gone on like that all night long and forever, but finally Touch fell asleep, and very carefully I rolled him off myself, and put the duffel bag between us, because you never could be too safe. Not with someone you loved.
In my life, I’d known plenty about guilt even before what happened with Cody. I guess it’s an emotion everyone has, and with me it sure didn’t help having Aunt Carrie harping on the evil that lived inside me. When I started heading toward the teen years, she warned me about men, and the parts of my body that nobody was ever supposed to touch. Including me. Maybe if she hadn’t warned me against touching myself, it never would’ve occurred to me to do it. But all her yammering got me curious, and there I was one night—in the dark with nobody looking—so I gave it a try, and what do you know if it didn’t feel kind of good. So it became my new way of falling asleep, touching the places I wasn’t supposed to, and not long afterward breasts started sprouting up on my chest, and then hair in places where there hadn’t been any. I felt sure I’d brought it on myself, that if I’d listened to Aunt Carrie my body would’ve stayed the way it used to be. So I stopped cold, but the damage was done. I kept growing up, into a woman. And even after I figured out that of course it wasn’t my fault, and my body would’ve changed anyway, I never could start in on that habit again. Something in my mind made it wrong, dirty. Even the feelings I had for Cody sometimes made me feel like I was doing something wrong. Impure.
Maybe by the time Touch came along, I felt catapulted so far out of my own world that those thoughts never entered into my mind at all. I never felt a bit guilty. Or maybe it was because the pull toward him was so strong that it obliterated everything else. Love. Yes. There was no other word for it. I’d loved Cody, too, but this was different. It was bigger. More grown-up. More permanent.
And that’s what did it: brought the guilt back. Because of my little spasm of puppy love, Cody lay in a hospital bed, drained of his past and his future. And me, I’d just decided to move on to the next guy.
Probably these thoughts were why I had a dream about Cody that night, sleeping in the back of the blue pickup truck. Cody would’ve loved that truck, and in the dream he and I were sitting in its bed on either side of a little campfire, roasting marshmallows. Cody was patient with his marshmallow, turning it round and round real slow, letting it get just the right shade of pale, bubbly brown. Whereas I would just light mine on fire, blow it out, and peel off the charred layer. It burned my tongue a little every single time.
“You have to slow down,” Cody said, turning that marshmallow carefully as could be. “There’s no hurry, Rogue.”
It sounded very funny to my ears, hearing him call me Rogue instead of Anna Marie. “How’d you know my name?” I asked him.
“I’ve known you since the beginning.” I saw his eyes fall on my hands, the ring
he’d given me.
The dream felt so real. Not in the way my other dreams had. It lacked the dreamlike quality, but felt just like normal life, except somehow deeper than real life, like I had to be carefully on the watch for hidden meaning. Cody looked just like he always had, very young and alive, but he spoke much more precisely. I remembered all the times when he’d been the only person I could talk to. He took the marshmallow out of the fire and held the stick out to me.
I said, “No. You have it, Cody. You worked so hard on it.”
“It’s yours now,” he said. “It’s important that you have it.”
It felt rude to say no when he held it out to me that way. Like a gift. So I took the stick from him and pulled the marshmallow off real careful, remembering what he’d told me—I had all the time in the world. The marshmallow tasted wonderful, crispy on the outside, meltingly sweet on the inside, and I closed my eyes for a minute to savor it. When I opened my eyes, Cody still sat across from me, but the fire was gone, and he had pulled his knees up to his chest. His arms were around his legs, hugging them, and his face was buried in his knees, and he was crying, shaking, sobbing.
“Cody,” I said. “Please don’t cry.”
Before I could stop myself, I reached out to touch him, not remembering until the last second that I shouldn’t. But Cody remembered, and he pulled away just in time, like he’d never done in any of the other dreams.
“Careful, Rogue,” he said. “That’s the most important thing. Careful while you’re here. Careful while you’re there.”
The tears were gone. He was standing up, looking down at me. He looked very serious, but not angry, and not scared.
“While I’m there?” I said. “Where’s there?”
Cody said, “Listen. There’s only one world for you.”
This made me kind of mad, considering all the plans I had in my head. So I opened my mouth to ask him how he knew that, and why he’d said it, and just then the scene changed, and I was Cody, a tiny little toddler, setting in a baby swing, and his mama was pushing me. Every time I came toward her, she’d grab my feet, and rub her nose against mine, and I would laugh and laugh, loud peals of baby laughter ringing in my ears.
Rogue Touch Page 15