“I’ve been thinking,” Paul said. “The guy who’s after us is on somebody else’s errand. If I arrest him, the trail to his boss will go cold. We need to tire him out. When we can run, we want him to think we’re trapped, and when we are near, we have to seem far away. We have to make him believe he is winning.” Paul stood and balanced himself. “Let’s keep moving before we stiffen up.”
They walked on through the nightmare landscape under the punishing midday sun with their heads downward, like pilgrims, watching each step with care. Paul led the way and Sophia followed. Reinhardt stayed between them like a lone calf being led back to the herd. The lava around them looked like a storm-tossed sea frozen in a photograph, but with each step along the path the going became easier. As they walked, their ears strained for the next round of shots that did not come. They began close together, but over time they spread apart, hiking in isolation.
Along the way, Reinhardt noticed a bright gray curve amid the rocks. He looked behind and saw Sophia walking with her head down. Quickly, he stooped and saw that it was a potsherd, glazed in gray and painted with narrow black pinstripes. He picked it up, slipped it into his pocket, and kept walking, letting his fingers rest along its contour. He imagined the look that would appear on Wolf’s face when he set it on his desk in the middle of his leather blotter. His body coursed with adrenaline.
Ahead, Paul stopped and looked back and waved to them. When Reinhardt and Sophia caught up, they saw Paul gesturing to an intact pitcher sitting in a natural stone alcove. Its whiteness was stark against the basalt, and it was covered from top to bottom with zigzagging chevrons.
Sophia removed her pack, took out her notebook, squatted, and began to sketch.
“The Paiutes have asked us not to,” Paul said.
Sophia closed her notebook and stood. “You’re kidding.”
“Not kidding. This place is important to them.”
“I’m okay with them not wanting us to document anything. I do have a problem with you being the one to enforce it. Your stewardship credentials are up for debate.”
“Fair enough.”
“Damn right it’s fair enough.” She threw the notebook in her pack and zipped it shut.
“I feel like we are moving backward through time or like the walls of time have become permeable,” Reinhardt said. “Why would they leave such a thing here?”
“It’s like a sign for a shop. There’s a natural catchment here. It’s seasonal. The pot lets people know that there could be water,” Paul said. Sophia climbed off the trail a bit and looked over the edge. A natural basin had formed that was half-full from the recent monsoons. “This rock will hold the water for a few days before it drains. Any water you find here will be fresh.”
When they had drunk and refilled their bottles, Sophia asked where they were going.
“I have a friend who lives out here, past the lava flow.”
“People can live out here?” Reinhardt asked, then he corrected himself. “I know they once did. But it is so empty now. These ruins all seem like something that should have worked but didn’t. I meant to ask if people were allowed to live on a national monument.”
“It’s an inholding. This guy owned the property before Obama made it a monument. When he dies, the property will go to the Park Service. Until then it’s private land.”
“How far is it?” Reinhardt asked.
“A few miles?”
“Why don’t the Indian people have an inholding?” Reinhardt asked.
“That’s a really good question,” Paul said.
“How do we know this killer won’t be waiting for us at your friend’s house?” Sophia asked.
“Dreamweaver is extremely private. That’s an understatement, actually. He protects himself. You’ll see what I mean.”
“Wait a minute. His name is Dreamweaver?” Sophia said.
“It’s not his real name,” Paul said. “He sort of gave it to himself in the sixties.”
___
Scissors slowed as he came to the narrow gap in the cliff the others slipped through. The rock walls closed in and shot up twenty feet to form a passage just wide enough for him if he turned sideways and held his rifle straight up and down. The tight corridor eventually flared out and opened onto a tawny sagebrush plain that had been almost entirely consumed by a massive bed of lava twenty feet high that rose up like a breaking wave. Behind it stood the collapsed volcanic cinder cone that spawned these heaps of serrated slag. It looked impossible to traverse. Anyone trying to climb up and cross it would have been slowed to a crawl.
He scanned the barren waste, watching for movement. When he found none, he dropped his head to listen, hearing nothing but the drone of wind against itself and the heaving of his own breath. As he approached the imposing, jumbled slope, he looked to the sky for some sign, perhaps birds spooked from their nests, but there was only blank firmament bisected by a pair of contrails. Nothing vanishes, he thought. It’s always a trick. You move it, hide it, or never have it there in the first place. He did not know if he was angrier that they had given him the slip or that he could not tell how they had done it.
He fired his pistol twice into the air, hoping to startle them and flush them out. The echo of the shots radiated outward and decayed to nothing. He could chase them, but they would have the advantage of knowing the terrain. From where he stood, he identified a number of vantage points that would reveal their location, but getting there and back would make pursuit impossible. There was the possibility that they hadn’t come through the gap at all. The third misdirection. He could see these people getting him to run around that lava like an idiot, while they circled back and stole his car. He shot again, then shouted.
He hiked back through the gap, checking for hiding places along the way. As he walked back through the low area where the Ashdowns had been digging, Scissors spotted the box canyon the ranger had fallen into. There were rock steps that likely broke his fall and made a line of sight from above impossible. While he was piecing together what happened, he heard a shout echoing from the rocks. So, they were hidden, he thought. He ran back through the gap and surveyed the landscape and decided cat and mouse was a losing proposition, and he didn’t want to be here when this disaster was discovered.
Scissors made his way back to the vehicles, and at the top of the incline, he looked back to the gap. The cliffs obscured the lava entirely. He decided he wasn’t equipped to pursue anyone through this terrain, and if he tried, he would lose. He thought that leaving might draw them out and pressing them would push them farther into the desert, which they knew and he did not. Eventually, they would have to come off the monument, and he would be there to meet them.
He decided to look through the wreckage of the Ashdowns’ truck again, trying to find the map, and he came up empty-handed. The girl’s truck produced nothing as well. At the ranger’s Jeep, he knelt and sorted through the debris that was now collected on the inverted roof. Under some loose glass and stone, he found a folded slip of paper with Sophia’s name, address, and phone number on it, which he tucked into his pocket. He’d begin there.
On the way back to his car, he fired his pistol two more times to make them run. The constant jolts of adrenaline would exhaust and demoralize them. When the echoes died out, he stored the weapon and drove away.
___
Dalton drove toward Antelope Flats and Raylene talked. Something about the movement of the vehicle and the familiar landscape opened her up. After a while she asked Dalton to play some Glenn Miller. He responded with Hank Williams, and when the Hank ran out he switched to Patsy Cline. When “Crazy” came on, Raylene said, “I remember now. There was a woman.”
“Bruce was having an affair?”
Raylene looked at Dalton like he was an idiot. “The woman was a collector. She’d been calling Bruce because she wanted to get access to places that weren’t on the maps anymore, places that most people had forgotten about. Bruce told her he wouldn’t do it. He told me she had a reput
ation.”
“Famous or infamous?”
“A bit of both. When Bruce had enough of her pressure, he’d just hang up. A little bit after that—around the first of May—she just showed up during the dinner hour.”
“Crazy” ended, and “I Fall to Pieces” came on. Raylene settled back against the headrest and covered her mouth with one hand as she listened to the words. Dalton reached up to turn off the stereo, but Raylene intercepted him with her small liver-spotted hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “I want to feel it. Sometimes I know what happened and sometimes I don’t. I am not sure which state of things I prefer.”
“Okay,” Dalton said, “but if you want it off or if you want something different, I can do that for you.”
“This is better.”
The Bronco sailed down a slight hill into a wash strewn with sticks and braided sandy striations from the recent storm. They bounced out of the wash and climbed a hill that gave them a panoramic view of Antelope Flats and the mesas that encircled them. Dalton gripped and re-gripped the wheel a few times.
“What was I talking about, dear?” Raylene asked.
“The woman,” Dalton said.
“What woman?”
“We can talk about it later.”
They drove on. The songs changing from “So Wrong” to “Strange” to “Back in Baby’s Arms.” They listened to them without speaking as they passed a lava field to the west that lay in a shattered heap upon the tan grass and sage scrub. The road curved away from the lava field to a cinder cone, then it descended to a cove in the rock, where the road was blocked by large boulders and a backhoe. Through the junipers, Dalton noticed three vehicles turned belly side up with all twelve of their tires pointing skyward.
“Well, what in the world?” Raylene said.
“I think we found Pete’s backhoe,” Dalton said. He parked and picked up the radio mic. “Kanab dispatch, this is Dalton.” When he released the button, there was static. He dialed in the squelch and listened. More static.
“Looks like we’re in the repeater’s blind spot,” Dalton said. He checked the location of his shotgun, then rolled down the windows and got out. “Be right back.”
“I’ll be a sitting duck in here.”
“I’m just taking a look. It doesn’t seem like anybody’s around.”
“Is this thing bulletproof?” Raylene said, knocking on the glass.
“Just between the front and back.”
“I didn’t sign up for some Wild West show,” she said.
“I could always take you back. No sense missing bingo.”
Raylene glared at him, no hint of a follow-up smile.
Dalton cracked both of the front windows. “If anything happens, get as low to the floor as you can.” Raylene scowled. Dalton walked to the backhoe and noticed blood on the floor of the cab and some streaks of it on the glass. He opened the door and felt for the key, which wasn’t there. When he hopped down from the machine, the putrid stench hit him all at once, and he started to gag. He buried his nose in the crook of his arm as he looked for the source.
He ducked under the junipers and came to the inverted vehicles with their crushed cabs and windows. When he arrived at the turquoise pickup, he heard the rustle of feathers, then saw the dark humped backs of six vultures hopping around on a human carcass, their naked heads glistening with blood. The birds scattered when they heard him. Dalton retreated to the road and tried to recompose himself. He went to Raylene’s side of the Bronco and put a hand on the open window. “You’ll want to stay put,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Won’t be sure until the vultures clear out.” Dalton looked around the Bronco until he found a bandanna and returned to the vehicles with the cloth over his mouth and nose. A truck and Jeep with federal plates. The other belonged to the Ashdowns. Three vehicles and one body didn’t add up. The bullet holes were consistent with a single shooter. He looked for vantage points, like he learned to do in Afghanistan. The cinder cone to the north seemed the most likely spot.
He left the vehicles and followed the backhoe tracks down the incline. The feeding vultures had reconvened and sounded more like pigs at the trough than he ever imagined. As he came to the mound of dirt and discovered the second body, he felt himself slipping into the past.
They were in the Maidan Wardak Province, west of Kabul, in a convoy investigating a Taliban attack that leveled a school. After they left the Kabul–Behsud Highway, they patrolled the neighborhood where the attack had taken place. Before too long they came upon a pack of dogs that scattered when they heard the Bradleys drive in. In the street was a small body, lying in an S-shape, the clothes torn away and the body partially devoured. They parked and fanned out, and Dalton led a group to a nearby house surrounded by a low stucco wall riddled with bullets and spray painted with a Pashto slogan. One of the guys told them it said LONG LIVE THE TALIBAN.
They fell into formation and went through the front gate. Everything was silent except for the chickens clucking behind a wire fence and a red wheelbarrow flipped upside down. One of the guys said something about a poem he had to read in college and somebody else told him to shut up. The windows in the house had all been shot out and when Dalton leaned in to get a look inside, he saw a row of bodies lined up and facedown, the blood gathering into a single pool at a low spot on the floor. More slogans had been painted across the interior of the house, and all he could remember thinking then was why they left the chickens.
As Dalton circled the mound of displaced earth now, he made a mental note of the way the second body was twisted at the waist, and how the head and shoulders were closed up in the dirt like somebody had thought through what they were doing and why. He saw potsherds and corn cobs in the soil, along with bones of those long dead. He inched closer to the newest body and pulled a wallet from the man’s back pocket. He stepped away and removed the driver’s license. It belonged, as he thought it would, to Byron Ashdown.
Well, Pete, Dalton said to himself, which are you gonna want first, the good news or the bad?
___
They emerged carefully from the narrow maze of stone, everything wrapped in a white phosphorescent flare. The heat of the lava field broke as they left it for the open grassland. A helix of turkey vultures rotated and lifted in the distance like shattered bits of creosote. In front of them, a wide sloping plain populated with rabbit brush, sage, and wizened juniper scrub extended as far as they could see. Behind it was a wide band of green, then deeper still ran a belt of orange and purple cliffs. Beyond that lay the blank white dome of the desert sky.
Paul led them onward in single file. They were grateful for the give of packed soil after spending so long on stone and cinders. Paul lifted his arm and adjusted his sling. Their clothes were crusted in the salt from their sweat, and Reinhardt had fashioned the dust cover of Mythstructures for Blockbusters into a hat. He held on to each side of his head to keep it from blowing away.
“Where does your friend live again?” Sophia asked.
“Not far.”
“Not far for you, or not far for normal humans?”
“Not far for someone with broken ribs.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “What do we do when we get there?” she asked.
“Not sure. But he’ll be able to help us figure out what’s going on.”
“Does he have a phone?”
“Not likely, but he’ll have internet access or some version of it.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“Dreamweaver helped invent cyberspace.”
“So, he’s a hermit Al Gore?”
“No, he’s for real. He helped design the internet, ARPANET, or whatever it’s called. He had a PhD from Stanford, and he still talks about the network of networks. Working for the Defense Department drove him out here.”
“Had a PhD? How does that work?”
“In the late nineties he erased himself. He’s pretty much a ghost now. I think all that’s
left is his passport, maybe a social security card. He doesn’t talk much about it.”
They walked on, crossing the open plain, which now rose gently like the belly of a sleeping giant. They passed a cluster of pink cactus flowers that had run their course and were crumpling in the heat. They passed dead trees and the fanned-out spines of yucca. There was bitterbrush, broom snakeweed, Mormon tea, scorpionweed, red penstemon, and the pasakana, which seemed like it came from another planet altogether. At some distance, an ocotillo’s sinuous thorny arms reached skyward. For Paul, the landscape was a kaleidoscope of these familiar names. Sophia knew the shapes, colors, and textures. For Reinhardt, it was a strange loop of unclassifiable and unfamiliar marvels.
As the heat of the day grew, their shadows shrank down to small off-register halos, then turned and grew outward in the opposite direction. They each focused their attention inward, keeping their eyes down to avoid confronting the distance. It seemed at first like they were wandering randomly over the open ground until Sophia noticed they were following a nearly invisible path through the grasses, a trail that followed the contours and took advantage of them rather than cutting straight across. A small lizard ran onto the trail from a tuft of tawny ricegrass, felt her footsteps, then froze. As her shadow fell across its scaled body, the tiny creature turned back and disappeared.
Paul stopped at a wide oval boulder and took stock of where he was. After a few seconds, he left the impressionistic trail at a right angle, and after twenty paces he stopped and motioned for Sophia and Reinhardt to follow.
“We have to stand here, in this exact spot,” Paul said.
“All of us?” Reinhardt asked.
“Those are Dreamweaver’s instructions.” Paul gathered them together with his good arm, then asked Sophia to move a certain flat rock near them. She pulled it to the side, like a manhole cover, and underneath was a large can buried all the way, so the rim was level with the ground. “There’s a mirror inside,” Paul said. “Can you get it out?” Sophia handed it to Paul, who turned and aimed it toward the green band in the distance, tilting it up and down. “He already knows we’re here, or he knows somebody is here, and we want to make sure he knows it’s me.”
Picnic in the Ruins Page 27