Sophia’s shoulders slumped, and Paul sat cross-legged and picked up small stones one at a time, collecting them in his palm. Sophia sat as well, unscrewed the cap of her water bottle, and drank.
“I shouldn’t have kept my reasons for coming here from you,” he said. “I can see that now.”
“None of my business,” she said.
“No, it is a lot of your business. My secrets aren’t fair to you. You’re out here to measure impact on this place. I’m one of those impacts.”
“We all are.” She folded her arms.
Paul nodded, looked at her, and said, “The threads we don’t see are the strongest.”
“Come on,” she said. “You don’t have to turn this into a nature meme.”
“I’m not being literal. We’re part of a whole system,” he said.
Sophia nodded in a way that didn’t mean she agreed. The wind picked up and a raven coasted by them at eye level, its wings curled and its wiry black feet extended underneath. From the horizon came another flash, deep inside one of the clouds.
“Can I show you something?” he asked. “I found it this morning.” Paul stood and offered his hand. Sophia capped her bottle and got up on her own.
“Is it something else you returned?” she said.
Paul ignored the comment and started down the path they’d come up but drifted to the left into a thicket of scrub oak. Sophia followed. The rumble of thunder filled in around them, the echo decaying over the vastness of the monument.
“Sounds like it’s moving away,” she said, pushing a branch aside. Paul kept going.
In front of them was a continuation of the back side of the cliff wall that held the amphitheater. It went up almost vertically for a hundred feet, long striations of desert varnish painting the surface. The cliff had weathered in the center, leaving a nautilus-shaped void in the surface of the rock, which had been invisible on the hike in because of the direction of the light. Paul scrambled up a boulder and motioned for Sophia to join him.
“What are we looking at?” she asked.
“You see that spiral shape in the rock? Let your eyes drop just beneath it.”
Sophia saw a thin ledge, perhaps thirty feet long, with a small masonry wall above it. She gasped involuntarily. “A granary?”
“It’s got to be. I scouted it this morning, and there’s a good nontechnical approach. Shall we?” he asked.
It came across as a peace offering, but she didn’t care.
They found their way through the brush to the talus slope and scrambled up. They were able to zigzag their way farther up until they were on a wide shelf just below the granary ledge. The next level up was eight or nine feet away, the height of a regular ceiling. Paul studied the space and found a thin vertical crack. Right above it were a number of good, obvious handholds.
“Go up my back and stand on my shoulders.” He crouched down and tapped his thigh.
Sophia grabbed Paul’s neck and shoulder and climbed him like a ladder. She balanced herself against the rock and repositioned her feet so she was standing with one foot on each shoulder.
“I kind of want to step on your face,” she said.
“That would be fine. I deserve it.” Paul extended himself and stood taller, and Sophia rose another six inches, high enough to pull herself onto the ledge.
“I don’t know how we’re going to get down,” she said.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Sophia was about to ask Paul how he was going to get up, when he reached over the ledge and pulled himself over like he was climbing out of a swimming pool.
The granary wall was made of shaped stone bricks that had been mortared into place. The structure stood proud of the cliff wall about one foot, and there was enough space that they could cross to the other side without concern. Sophia looked back and realized they were now fifty feet or more above their starting point. They were above the tops of the cottonwoods, and they could see across the expanse to the storm clouds in the distance. It was a complete view of her research area.
“It’s such an interesting question why they put their corn all the way up here,” she said.
“Aesthetically, it’s the most gorgeous pantry in the world. Some theories say it was a theft deterrent, but it could be to protect the contents from flooding. Practically though, it’s bananas how hard it is to get up here.”
“Maybe they wanted to make sure people only broke into the stash if they were really hungry, like hiding the Oreos. Sorry,” she said, “Oreos are a sugary snack some people are obsessed with.”
“I know what Oreos are,” Paul said.
On the far side of the granary, there was a square half door with a Douglas fir doorframe. Paul stepped aside and let Sophia have the first look. She peered in. The interior was empty, but the floor was a latticework of sticks.
“There’s a ventilation system in here,” she said, “for humidity control.” She looked up and confirmed that this granary had been built using an alcove in the cliff for the main structure. In the dim light, she could not see how the adobe was connected to the sandstone of the cliff. She stepped back and gave Paul a look.
“Wow,” he said. “Just wow.”
Sophia sat down on the ledge and wrapped her knees with her arms and watched the clouds part enough to show patches of blue sky.
Paul stepped around and sat next to her. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “nobody has recorded this structure. Cluff didn’t. I’ve read what I could about this site, and they talk about an amphitheater and the dwellings, but not in this kind of detail. That makes us the first.”
“On record.”
“Well, right. On record,” he repeated, making air quotes around the last two words. “It’s pretty amazing, though. This whole plateau is full of sites like this. It seems empty, but it’s not.”
“My heart is racing,” Sophia said, looking around. “I want to shout, but that seems stupid.”
“It’s not,” he said. “I get it.”
“What you just said about this place being empty. I feel like I’ve seen all kinds of empty since I left Princeton.”
Paul nodded. He fell into thought and after a time nodded again. “If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell anyone? I mean it doesn’t really matter anymore, but out of respect would you keep it to yourself?”
Sophia did not like this arrangement or any of the other times he asked for her secrecy, but she was beginning to see that furtiveness was the lingua franca of the times. She traced an X across her chest but she wasn’t sure she meant it.
“Before this place became public land, Cluff knew people would come. He knew they had come before and cleaned it out. He’d done his share of damage, and he admitted it. Before it all changed hands, he came up here on horseback with some dynamite. He told me he meant to make this one of the hardest places to get into, because most pot hunters would be too lazy to climb.” Paul stretched each of his legs and brought them back into the same position as Sophia’s. She looked at him as he stared out across the monument. “It is pretty hard to get here, but who knows how long that will last. Most days, I think we’re doing this work all wrong,” he said, lowering his head onto his knees, “but I’m not sure if there’s any better way to get it done.”
___
Reinhardt Kupfer awoke in his motel room from a dream in which he had been fitted with a pair of giant wings fashioned from buffalo skin and a frame of bent willow branches. They had been laced to his body on something like a corset. As he stared at the barren ceiling, with white glare pouring in around the curtains, he recalled that he could control the crude flapping of his rough and halting flight with two knobs of gnarled juniper that protruded from each side. He had been using these wings to view the desert from above.
Without moving Reinhardt thought about how he was not yet halfway through his Ranches, Relics, and Ruins adventure. In the last five days he’d seen collections of baskets, pots, kachinas, masks, flutes, real
arrowheads under glass, fake arrowheads on the trail, atlatls in the hands of one-quarter-size hunters, theatrical lights in museum dioramas, re-creations of kivas cut away to reveal the inside architecture, scale models of geological features, video presentations about the changing seasons, push-button lectures about ethnobotany, voices reading pioneer journals, wheels children could turn to depict the water cycle, signage, quotations, wall-sized facsimiles of historical documents, enlarged photographs, and kiosks. But there had been neither ranches, nor relics, nor ruins.
He rose and folded his clothes, thinking again about the cost of cutting it all short and flying home. The logistics weren’t a problem, but he didn’t know how to tell Wolf that this country was just a cheap illusion. As a boy, Reinhardt was enraptured by the Indian novels of Sigmund F. Krause. They fueled his dreams of the American Southwest. But this was nothing like the books.
He left his packing and stood in the bathroom under the blue-tinged fluorescent light. As he lathered his face, he considered his red-and-black dreamcatcher tattoo with a saying written underneath. It had been a North Star for him since before medical school. The first time someone read the tattoo and asked him, “What does ‘your land is where your dead lie buried’ mean?” Reinhardt told him it was his plan for fighting the modern world. Not much of a plan, he thought, then shaved, rinsed his face, and finished dressing.
He brought his packed bag to the motel lobby, which was full of polished rocks and rubber tomahawks. The rest of his group were eating their pasteboard breakfasts and checking their schedules, their luggage herded together next to the bus outside. He added his bag to the mass and decided he would skip the paltry meal. Next to him, two of the tour organizers began a hushed conversation.
“The Korean guy bought the farm last night.”
“Kwon?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought he was fine.”
“So did everybody.”
“I think they want us to re-route through Cedar City to deliver their luggage to Mrs. Kwon. She thought they were going to come back to the tour once he was given a clean bill of health.”
“Re-routing will throw everything off.”
“Right?”
“We’ll never hear the end of it.”
Reinhardt tapped one of them on the shoulder.
“Yes?” he said, turning around.
“That man was an entire life, not just something on your checklist,” Reinhardt said. He didn’t wait for an answer but sped past the buses, crossed the parking lot, and walked down the sidewalk until he came upon a campground made of teepees set on concrete pads. A small boy emerged from a teepee wearing Spider-Man pajamas and a green Incredible Hulk mask. In his right hand, he held a stick that was taller than he was. He pounded it against the cement, then hurled his bludgeon into the road.
Someone said, “This is the wrong place for teepees.”
Reinhardt turned to find Kenji wearing the same clothes from before, leather jacket and everything. “This is all wrong for many reasons. We have enthusiasts in Germany, and we camp in teepees that we have made and decorated ourselves. Seeing something like this is hard on the heart.”
“I spent the night in a similar false teepee once, in Nikko, Japan. It was in a place called Western Village.”
“Did you enjoy it? What did you say the other night at the dinner? Was it corny?” Reinhardt asked.
“Western Village is abandoned. Now it is—what’s the phrase—a ghost city?”
“On the tour they call it a ghost town. We haven’t been to one but we have talked about them.”
Kenji lit a cigarette. “Nikko has people in it. I’m just talking about Western Village. Listen, I heard you’re the hero who saved a man’s life in the lodge. Nice work. I saw you walking, and I thought I would say something about it.”
“He died last night.”
Kenji exhaled and flicked his ash. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I wish I could tell his wife that I did what I could.”
“You should.”
“She is alone now in another town with none of her things.”
“You should deliver them to her.”
“How? I have to get on that bus going to Faketown, U.S.A. And I don’t want to say anything in front of these people.”
“I can drive you,” Kenji said, stubbing out his cigarette on the sole of his boot.
“But I’ve paid for everything,” Reinhardt said.
“Eat a bad meal and you suffer twice. Let’s do it.”
Kenji stared at Reinhardt until Reinhardt nodded, then he nodded back.
They returned and saw the buses loading. Reinhardt pulled his duffel bag from the pile just before someone grabbed it for loading. Kenji reached out for Reinhardt’s bag and sent him for the Kwons’ luggage. As he approached a small group of tour organizers, one of them spoke through a tiny megaphone: “I HAVE GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS. THE BAD NEWS IS THAT MR. KWON HAD A SECOND HEART ATTACK IN THE HOSPITAL IN CEDAR CITY LAST NIGHT AND HE DID NOT SURVIVE IT.” The crowd interpreted the message to themselves, and a few seconds later, an audible sound of lamentation moved throughout the group. “THE GOOD NEWS IS WE’RE NOT GOING TO THE GRAND CANYON TODAY, BUT INSTEAD WE’RE GOING TO RE-ROUTE TO CEDAR CITY, HOME OF THE UTAH SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL. THIS WAY WE CAN DELIVER THE KWONS’ LUGGAGE TO MRS. KWON.” This time the crowd was silent.
“Is there a Target in Cedar City?” someone asked.
The tour organizers looked around at each other, and before they could answer, Reinhardt said, “I will take the luggage.”
“Really?” the woman with the tiny megaphone said, but not through the megaphone.
“I will go.”
“DR. KUPFER IS A HERO TWICE IN ONE DAY,” she said, and the crowd cheered.
“Well it was actually once on Tuesday, and then now,” he said, but nobody heard.
While people shook his hand and clapped Reinhardt on the back, another tour organizer wheeled a great black suitcase across the parking lot and set it in front of him.
“You really saved our bacon,” she said.
“Where do I take this?” Reinhardt asked.
“DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHERE HE SHOULD TAKE—” the woman asked through the megaphone.
“To the hospital,” someone else on the tour staff interrupted. “There’s only one.”
As Reinhardt hauled the roller bag, Kenji pulled up behind him in a red Mustang convertible. “Put that in the back seat,” he said. “Our things are in the trunk.”
Kenji pulled out of the parking lot so fast Reinhardt’s body flattened against the seat. The rest of the traffic was keeping to the speed limit, so the car’s engine growled and purred a dozen times in the half-mile drive to the state highway. Some kind of Japanese heavy metal was playing, which disappeared into the wind once Kenji got the car going.
The small municipal airstrip and ramshackle trailers and billboards and small independent motels appeared in the distance, grew to full size, and pulsed by in rapid succession. Once they passed these vestiges of civilization, Reinhardt let his gaze lift to the horizon, something he could never really do in Germany because one was always surrounded by forest. Here you were out on the surface. Over the eons, the skin of everything had gone thin, and the earth’s orange bones jutted like they’d worn through the dry olive-green garments of the high desert. In the blue distance, clouds piled on themselves with an orderliness that kept him from comprehending the distances. Reinhardt took out his phone, trying and failing to take pictures of the vast landscape.
“It never works,” Kenji shouted.
“I know, but you have to try,” Reinhardt said, and posted a shot of the clouds and a small gas station to Instagram. He geotagged it with BRYCE CANYON, UTAH, and added the caption SKYSCRAPER CLOUDS.
They drove on, the hills dropping to the road on the west and the valley spreading for a dozen miles to the plateaus to the east. Orange hulking cliffs faded into the distance. There was a turn and the highway ran fo
r a while parallel to a sinuous river. They drove for some time with the racket of the music radiating into the dry mountain air before Kenji reached up to switch off the stereo. “As a doctor, you must be well acquainted with death,” he said.
“Did you say death?”
“The mortal coil.”
“I am a dermatologist.”
“For the skin?” Kenji asked.
“Yes.”
“Like rashes and pimples?”
“And cancer,” Reinhardt said. “Skin cancer is no small thing.”
Kenji nodded. “Not so common in Japan. We have other ways to die.”
Reinhardt looked out the window at the green valley and the sparse habitations. He thought of Mr. Kwon and the crowd of people surrounding him as he performed the chest compressions. Reinhardt’s patients often died under another doctor’s care, leaving him to consider death at a distance. He referred the problems away.
“Death creates sorrow for the living, not for those who are gone,” Kenji said, then after a pause, he broke his attention and pointed to a gas station ahead. “Shall we refresh ourselves?” He downshifted, and the car’s engine roared. The deceleration flung a book forward from the back seat, which Reinhardt picked up. It was called The Hero’s Journey for Screenwriters. When Kenji noticed Reinhardt had rescued the book, he asked him to return it to the back seat, then signaled and pulled off the road, stopping next to a gas pump. Reinhardt spotted three more books just like the first in the space next to the Kwons’ gigantic suitcase: The Monomyth on Screen, Mythstructures for Blockbusters, and There and Back Again: The Hero’s Journey Case Studies Vol. 4. He set the book on top and got out to help wash the window.
“So, you’re a screenwriter?” Reinhardt asked.
Kenji squinted at him. “Sort of. I make video games.”
“Oh, like Doom and Grand Theft Auto?”
Kenji laughed and shook his head as he inserted his credit card. “I made River Horse.”
Reinhardt’s face lit up. “With the hippopotamus? I have that on my phone.”
“You and fifty million other people.”
“You must be rich, then.”
Picnic in the Ruins Page 16