Picnic in the Ruins

by Todd Robert Petersen

  “You got here first,” Dalton said.

  “A leader’s gotta lead.”

  “If I get shot, who does the paperwork?”

  “You’re seriously the worst boss ever.”

  “There’s an old lady in there.”

  “All-time worst,” Tanner said.

  “Fine,” Dalton said. He cracked open the back door and went inside. They went room to room on the ground floor, passing through the crime scene, which still hadn’t been cleaned. The stench of it was uncomfortable. One of the evidence numbers on the desk had been tipped over. He walked up to it and noticed an empty rectangular spot in the dust and blood spray, not quite the size of a sheet of paper. He took a picture of it with his phone, then looked around more carefully until Tanner joined him. He showed Tanner the spot and said, “Let’s find Janey, then come through here a second time.”

  “Come here first.” Tanner brought Dalton over to the shelves, and he showed him a new blank spot in the dust. This one was round, about eight inches across. Dalton took a picture of it as well.

  They went upstairs and searched each room, calling each one clear when they were done. Nothing seemed to be out of order.

  “You still think we’ve got a suicide?” Tanner asked.

  “I’m not sure I want to know what’s going on,” Dalton said.

  They went back downstairs and found Mrs. Gladstone sitting on an old couch in the far corner of the basement. She was wrapped up in an unfinished quilt, talking to LaRae on the telephone with the cord stretching to the wall. When she heard them, she said, “Oh, they’re here now. I better hang up.” She got up and placed the phone on the hook. “He left,” she said.

  “When?” Dalton asked.

  “Well, a while ago. He went through a window and came down one of those trees. He’s quite the climber. I told that to LaRae.”

  Dalton and Tanner looked at each other. “Can you describe him?” Dalton asked.

  “Well I only heard him thumping around and shaking the trees.”

  Dalton sent Janey with Tanner to give a statement, then he went back to Cluff’s study. He’d seen plenty of burglaries, and there was always a trail of destruction. There was nothing like that here. Whoever came here was looking for something specific. He went to Bruce’s desk and lined himself up with the dried blood. He squinted to imagine the physics of it, trying to understand how it fit with the story. To the left of the bookshelves was a small standing table with a number of maps rolled out on it, the paper curled up around four large glass electrical insulators that held the maps in place. As he got closer, he saw that the top map was clean, and everything around it was misted in a fine brown spray. Two or three layers down, the maps were slightly rippled, like they’d been wet and dried back out. He lifted the insulators and the top three maps rolled up, taking back their original shapes. The fourth map down was covered in the same spray. Things had been moved around after the shooting.

  These maps were hand-drawn renderings of places on the monument. He’d heard about Bruce’s maps. His dad had talked about them, but Bruce kept them out of the public eye. He left notes all over the maps with pencil marks so fine and faint they looked like they’d been scratched into the paper with a needle. At the base of the table was an empty cardboard tube, also unsprayed. On the side, in black marker, Cluff had written Swallow Valley.

  ___

  Reinhardt Kupfer boarded the Bryce Canyon shuttle bus at the Agua Canyon stop. Hot and dusty, he found a seat near the back and scooted next to the window. A large man with muttonchops sat next to him, a walking stick with a half dozen fantastic human faces carved into its length resting between his knees. When the bus pulled out, Reinhardt opened his shirt pocket and dug out a small obsidian arrowhead, which he held in the palm of his hand and admired. It was a jet-black, nearly perfect, side-notched triangle flake, roughly the size of his thumbnail, more like a fighter jet than he would have imagined. He turned it over and over, testing the edge with the tip of his thumb.

  “Where’d you get that?” the man next to him asked.

  “I found it. On my hike.”

  “Can I see it?”

  Reinhardt set it in the man’s wide hand and watched him as he poked it with his finger. “It looks real,” he said.

  “It is, I think. I’m going to find the ranger who spoke to us yesterday and ask her,” Reinhardt said, reaching for the artifact.

  The man’s hand veered away. “I never saw one up close like this,” he said. “My cousin found one once, said it was real, but we all thought it was just some broken rock. I mean that’s what it looked like, but this one is for real.” Reinhardt set his hand lightly on the man’s wrist. “I’m not going to steal it,” he said. “It’s just cool to hold.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” Reinhardt said. “It’s just that I—I would hate for it to drop.”

  The man returned the arrowhead to Reinhardt’s hand.

  They went along the slow road, watching red rock flash through breaks in the pines. Reinhardt took out his phone and framed up a picture of the arrowhead as he pinched it between two fingers trying to catch the perfect light. He snapped the picture, then uploaded it to Instagram, typing the caption ENDLICH EIN GUTER TAG NACH EINEM ANSONSTEN KOMPLETT BESCHISSENEN URLAUB. ICH HABE AUßERDEM EIN MENSCHENLEBEN GERETTET. It was true that this was the first good day of an otherwise completely crappy vacation. Yesterday, he had been a very good Samaritan, but he thought that perhaps it was unseemly to mention that he had also saved a human life, so he deleted the second sentence, tagged the location, and added #indiancountry, which Reinhardt noticed had over 16,000 uses already. He had only one bar of service, so the image uploaded slowly.

  He dozed a little during the ride, his muscles sore from the hike. His long sleeves and pants left him feeling hot but protected from the intense sun. In his daydream, he replayed moments of his hike as short video clips, and as the bus came into a wide-open meadow, he woke, checked his phone again, and saw there was one Instagram notification for his post. It was from @doktor_tomahawk, Wolf, Reinhardt’s medical partner back in Germany.

  Wolf Messer had been in his sixties and looking to bring on a young doctor to help him prepare for retirement. As they sat in Wolf’s office, Reinhardt commented on the decor: a Haida moon mask, a hand drum with the painting of a buffalo skin on the head, a red Navajo blanket with two left-turning swastikas at the center, and many other treasures. Reinhardt was so distracted he couldn’t speak of his residency. He told Wolf that his own apartment was filled with posters of similar things, photographs taken by Ansel Adams of the American Southwest. He had purchased a few small items in gatherings he’d been to in Baden-Württemberg: buckskin trousers and a pair of beaded moccasins. At this, Wolf left all talk of dermatology. Their conversation carried on through dinner and well into the night. The next morning, Wolf called him personally to invite him to join the practice. When Reinhardt came to sign the papers, Wolf emerged from his office in a lab coat and a full Lakota warbonnet, the feathers fanning out around his balding head. He had spread out each hand dramatically and said, “Welcome, welcome, welcome.”

  The bus came to a stop at Sunset Point, and the others began filing off. The man sitting next to him said, “Have a good one,” and Reinhardt nodded to him.

  “You also,” he said.

  On the sidewalk, he checked his phone again. Wolf had sent him a photo of the walnut shadow box he kept on his desk. It was filled with a dozen stone points, each one a different material and shape. The message said this was an auspicious beginning. Reinhardt put his phone away and continued along the sidewalk, following the brown signs that pointed the way to the rim.

  In the gaps between the pines, white clouds piled on top of each other, and in the negative space of the clouds, cerulean pools of sky gathered. It was a color he’d seen many times in paintings, but never this intensely. With his eyes focused on the sky, Reinhardt approached the rim of what the park pamphlets called a “hoodoo-filled amphith
eater.” From those quaint words he expected to find a mere curiosity, a playground of geologic novelties. Instead, what he saw was hewn straight from the earth and scattered across the horizon like something built and abandoned by giants at play. In a single sweep of his vision lay every possible variation of standing rock: fingers, columns, teeth, pillars, knobs, turrets, toadstools, minarets, pilasters, and pylons. His breath left him all at once, and as he inched forward, the parallax of the scene shifted, and he began to sense, in the core of his belly before he actually saw it, the precipitous drop of the rim, hidden by an innocuous patch of tawny tufted grass. As he lifted his gaze, he took in each successive plane, the closer formations crisp and defined, and those at a distance becoming, by intervals, more impressionistic. At the horizon was a great silent dome, fading slowly in and out of the atmospheric haze. A hundred miles southward across the expanse, a hard black rain fell into the dry air, evaporating on the way down. A soundless arc of white electricity pulsed from the cloud and forked delicately against the flat colors in the distance. Reinhardt waited for a second strike, but it did not come. A few seconds later, the faintest rumble.

  A couple passed Reinhardt on the left, talking excitedly about the sublime view. Their teenage son lagged behind, typing something into his phone. Without looking up he said, “We came all the way here, for this?”

  “Put your phone away, Miles,” his dad said, but the boy ignored him.

  Reinhardt soon became aware of people passing him on either side. He followed the rim to the left and saw a great throng from the tour coming toward him. He looked for an escape route, but it was too late, people waved and shouted his name, so he waved back lifelessly. When the group came closer, they called out. “Hey, it’s Doctor Hero,” somebody shouted. Reinhardt smiled and waved. A man in a T-shirt that said IT’S NOT MY FAULT / I WAS UNSUPERVISED asked where he’d been all day.

  “I went down into the hoodoos,” Reinhardt said.

  “Too much hiking for me,” the man’s wife said. She wore a large-brimmed straw sun hat, a fanny pack, and white sandals.

  “Those are the hoodoos that you do so well,” the man said, chortling at his own joke.

  His wife said flatly, “Make him stop. He’s been telling that dud all day.”

  “You coming to the dinner? There’s supposed to be a whole show and everything.”

  “I’ll have to clean up first,” Reinhardt said.

  “Well, I hope I see you, so I can buy a hero a beer,” the man said.

  “Danke,” Reinhardt said. “I’ll see you there perhaps.”

  Reinhardt left the sidewalk and wove through the trees to the lodge and caught the shuttle back to the visitor’s center. The ride was short, so he stood. He stepped off the bus quickly and went into the building, looking for Sophia. He was thinking about the idea of provenance, how she had told them that the most important question anyone can ask of a thing is Who did it once belong to and who does it belong to now? His thought, who owns history, was at the forefront of it all, matched now with the question of who owns this park and the things inside it. He wanted to let her know that what she said hadn’t fallen on deaf ears.

  There was a desk in the center, near the back, past the T-shirts, baseball hats, and children’s toys, by the cash registers and the day’s weather report. A ranger with clear cat-eye glasses and a green tattoo of a Celtic knot on her forearm was sharing information about a trail with a young couple. From the green, white, and red tricolor patch on the tourist’s backpack he could see that they were Italian. When they were done, Reinhardt stepped to the desk, removed the arrowhead and placed it in front of the ranger. She looked down at it, then at Reinhardt over her glasses.

  “Hello,” he said. “Yesterday I was at the lodge for a presentation on antiquities. There was a young archeologist there, and I would like to ask her some questions about this arrowhead I found today on my hike in Agua Canyon.”

  The ranger picked up the arrowhead and turned it over a couple of times. “Sir,” she said, “it’s against the law to take things from the park. We have over two million visitors to this park every year. If everybody pocketed one thing, there wouldn’t be much of this park left to visit.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” he said.

  She set the arrowhead back down on the counter, and Reinhardt was not sure if he should take it back. “This is what we mean when we tell people to leave no trace, but in this particular case, I’m not going to cite you. This arrowhead actually comes from right over there.” She pointed to a rack of costume jewelry a dozen feet away in the gift shop, next to some multicolored scorpion refrigerator magnets. She pushed the arrowhead toward Reinhardt. “It’s okay,” she said. “Take a look.”

  Reinhardt accepted the false treasure and walked over to the display of necklaces made of fake leather cord and an arrowhead in the same perfect black triangle shape, with identical chips and ridges. He ran his hand behind them, like they were strands in a beaded curtain. He glanced back at the ranger, who smiled slightly and shrugged. “Sorry,” she said, “but thank you for leaving the trail cleaner than you found it.”

  Reinhardt left the visitor’s center, and on the way to the shuttle stop, tossed the arrowhead into the mouth of a green metal trash can. A small boy watched him do it. Reinhardt wanted to say something to him about the way this world can beguile and deceive us, but he spared the boy his nihilism.

  When the shuttle came, he boarded and went straight to the back. The bus left the front gates, and soon they were out of the park and on their way to the small town that lay outside of it. He watched the tourists, each one concluding the day’s adventures. They all seemed happy, thirsty, and satisfied.

  Reinhardt opened his phone and found the photo of the arrowhead and deleted it, then he went to Instagram and deleted his post. He thought about returning home and having to explain to Wolf how he’d been taken in by the false front of America. He wanted more from this trip than it promised, and now he was ashamed at his naïveté. He might as well have spent the afternoon looking at dioramas or IMAX films. He could have done these things without leaving Berlin.

  The bus pulled off and stopped in front of a cheap amusement park version of an Old West main street. The bus emptied, and when Reinhardt stayed brooding in his seat, the bus driver’s voice came over the PA. “End of the line,” he said. “That’s it. This bus is going out of service.”

  Reinhardt waved and stepped onto the pavement and wandered numbly to his hotel. There was no smell of pine, and the air conditioning chilled him. He bought two bottles of water at the front desk and went to his room, drinking one bottle on the elevator. As he showered, he thought about calling the whole thing off, but the idea of leaving was just as overwhelming as the thought of continuing on through a B-movie rendition of America. He dried off and lay on his bed, and before he could gather his thoughts, a knock at the door jolted him from his melancholy. “Dr. Kupfer. It’s time for the chuckwagon dinner,” the voice said. It was someone perky from the tour. There was a pause followed by more knocking. “Dr. Kupfer?”

  “Ja,” he said. “I am almost ready.”

  “Oh, good. We’d hate for you to miss it,” the annoying voice said.

  Reinhardt dressed, thinking that perhaps spending the evening alone in this depressing motel room would do him more harm than good. He met with the group in the lobby, and they all walked together in a gaggle across the motel parking lot, toward the back-lot town, which was the gateway to an establishment called the Young Family Chuck Wagon Dinner Theater and Country Emporium.

  The air was filled with the scent of roasting meat and the din of guitars and cowboy song. To one side was a stage featuring a covered wagon and a theatrical campfire made from red, orange, and white LEDs, pulsing in a slow, hypnotic rhythm, not at all like the quick dance of real flame. The band was clearly not cowboys but theater students from a nearby university doing their summer internships. Reinhardt imagined this was probably very exciting and fresh for th
em a month ago, but as he looked around, he could see that they and everyone else in the Emporium were on autopilot.

  The Korean contingent of the tour had formed a subgroup. So had the Poles, and everyone else, all lapsing into the comfort and familiarity of their own languages, showing each other pictures of their version of the day on their phones. There were plenty of faces he did not recognize. Families with small children. Older couples, and a long-haired Japanese man wearing a leather jacket despite the lingering heat of the day. This man sat at a table by himself, sketching in a black notebook, his plate of food untouched.

  The rest of the Emporium looked like a movie set seen from the wrong angle. The wood was new and bright, and the fake fences built with shiny brass drywall screws. Reinhardt queued up for his meal, and as the line advanced, the songs gave way to a melodrama. A college kid with a glued-on black mustache tried to steal the gal of a different college kid who was clean-shaven with a blue bandanna tied swaggeringly around his boyish neck.

  The whole thing escalated quickly. There were words, a shove, and a flamboyant stepping back. More words. Hand gestures. The bad guy drew on the good guy, and while the good guy’s hand was going to his gun belt, there was a shot. The bad guy clutched his stomach and sank to his knees. The girl’s skirt was up, a thigh holster exposed, and a smoking nickel-plated derringer in one hand.

  “Clementine,” the villain said, “my only crime was loving you too”—he coughed and fell forward—“much.”

  The girl and the dandy embraced and sang a duet of a pop song Reinhardt did not recognize from the cowboy canon.

  As he came to the buffet, he took a coarse paper plate. Dollops of food appeared on that plate with neither grace nor ceremony: meat, red beans, half a corn cob, a square of corn bread, another square of sheet cake, with a shot of whipped cream from a can. He took his plate to the only empty seat in the Emporium, which was next to the sullen Japanese man, who did not notice him when he sat. Reinhardt ate one bite of everything, then pushed the plate away.