“We’re in a lot of trouble, Kimball.”
“Damn right you are.” He lowered the gun and re-engaged the safety. The screen door opened and he stepped out. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and gym shorts. He gestured to Sophia and Reinhardt. “I guess this one is the graduate student, and he’s the lost German.” He beckoned for them to come in, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Quit standing out here in the open.” He gestured to the stars with the barrel of the gun. “Keyhole satellites don’t miss a thing.”
Kimball led them into his small home, set the pistol on the kitchen counter, turned on a single lamp, then thought better of it and switched it back off. He gestured for them to sit, pulled his hair into a ponytail, and dropped into his recliner.
“Kimball is Paiute. Kaibab Band,” Paul said. “He also works with me for the Park Service.”
“I’m undercover,” Kimball said. “And nobody works with you, Thrift. You’re way out there, and nobody can walk fast enough to keep up. I have a question for you, not rhetorical. Do you know why this guy is after you?” Kimball asked. “The way Dreamweaver tells it, he’s probably not a serial killer.”
“He thinks we have one of Cluff’s maps. The one Bruce was using to keep track of everything he had us putting back.”
“He knows?” Sophia said. “I thought this was some big secret project.” After a moment she said, “The initials—PT and KT.”
Paul shrugged. So did Kimball.
“Knowing about this project and thinking it’s a good idea is two different things,” Kimball said, his unblinking eyes focused on Paul. “Which map is it?”
“The one that covers Antelope Flats up to Swallow Valley.”
Kimball pulled the recliner lever so his feet rose up, then he scratched his chin and swore quietly to himself, drifting from English into Paiute.
“I know,” Paul said.
“That ground took the Inter-Tribal Coalition five years to get into the proposal. The only reason for anyone to chase after that map is if they’re trying to rework the deal so they can sell everything off.”
“I know,” Paul said.
“And the whole time we had to sit there and listen to them tell us that using the Antiquities Act to protect our land made us bandits seizing property in the night.” His voice hardened and rose in volume. “How are we bandits when it’s our home? We’re losing White Pocket, Ovatsi, and Wïiatsiweap again,” he said. “You don’t have to be a genius to know you can’t steal from yourself.” Kimball shook his index finger. “When Cluff blew up the canyon on the way to Wïiatsiweap, my father wanted to kill that son of a bitch for deciding to jump in himself and protect our land without asking anyone. As per usual, every time something happens out there, they shut Native people out, tell us to mind our own business. You know, like we’re not involved. They tell us these aren’t our ancestors and then take over the story. They bring us to the table, then turn it around on us. Every time we make some headway, all of a sudden it’s another table in another room in another building. And we are the bandits.”
“We were just up there,” Sophia said. “We can use the archeological work and the courts to stop them.”
Kimball looked at Paul. “She’s new to this, isn’t she?”
Paul shrugged.
“Look at the Keystone Pipeline and Wounded Knee. Look at any of it, and you’ll see that the game is rigged. They told us, ‘Hey, don’t worry, everything up there is already gone. No sense saving land that’s already been ruined.’ That’s all anyone needs to know about white logic.” He swore another oath and tightened his fists. “Look, you want to save this place. We’re a little sick of saviors, but okay. I want to save it for different reasons. We’ve been trying to use white people’s tools to tear down white people’s walls. It works for a little while, then it stops. It always breaks down.” Kimball scratched his arm and sat for a moment. “It needs to be said—everything in those ruins belongs to the dead. You shouldn’t mess around with it.” He sat back in his chair and exhaled. “Once people start taking these things off the land, everything turns upside down. People start falling off. That’s what happened to us.”
Reinhardt reached down and felt the curve of his pilfered pottery shard with his fingertips, wishing he’d left it in the lava flow. He recalled the warning he’d been given at the gas station. What had the old man told him, that all of this desert was made by water. Now this place is shaped by other forces, he thought.
“You got us down to almost nothing. We’re not gone, but it’s pretty damn close,” Kimball said.
“I know, and I’m sorry,” Paul said.
“I know you know, which makes me ask why you brought this trouble to my door?”
“Dreamweaver thought—”
“I know what Dreamweaver thinks. I don’t want to talk about that lunatic right now. Why did you decide to come?”
Paul looked at Reinhardt and Sophia. “We had nowhere else to go. You know that.”
“I do know. And you should know I don’t have time for your white nonsense. I’ve got my own battles and I don’t bounce back from this kind of bullshit anymore.” He cranked the recliner forward and stared at Paul. “I’m going to regret this, but tell me what you need, then seriously, I’m done.”
“Can you give us a place to rest for a few hours?”
Kimball sighed. “Yes, but you can’t stay in the house. I don’t need it getting shot up. There’s a trailer on the corner of the property.”
“Whatever you’ve got,” Paul said.
“Thank you, so much,” Sophia said.
“Aho,” Reinhardt said.
“Aho?” Kimball turned to Paul. “Who is this guy?”
“He’s the German, remember?”
Kimball gripped his forehead for a second, then stood. “Is he saying hello or thank you? Does he even know?” When Reinhardt didn’t answer, Kimball walked them through the house, then led them out the back and across the open ground to a travel trailer parked behind a small cluster of juniper trees. Reinhardt looked to the sky for satellites. The eastern horizon was glowing.
“There’s blankets and sleeping bags in the cupboards up top. Don’t be seen.”
“We won’t,” Paul said.
“I’ve got to be at work in three hours.”
“I owe you one.”
“I don’t want that responsibility,” Kimball said as he turned back to the house. “Seriously. I’m going to catch hell for this.”
___
Sophia bolted awake at the sound of a rap-rap-rap on the trailer door. Kimball stood on the other side, dressed in a park ranger’s uniform, his hair in braids, the wide brim of his campaign hat shading his eyes. She looked around the trailer. Paul was staring at the ceiling. Reinhardt slept facedown on the upper bunk with one arm dangling over the edge.
“Hey, Paulie. You’re in a lot more trouble than maybe you’re aware of,” Kimball whispered.
“More than the Denver stuff?” Paul said.
“You told me you went out there and barged in on a meeting because of your reports.”
“Yeah.”
“What you did not say is that you broke in on a meeting with the secretary of the interior, and apparently that didn’t sit too well with the muckety-mucks.”
Paul looked over at Sophia, who lifted her eyebrows in resignation and shrugged.
“And apparently pictures of your gunfight at Antelope Flats have hit the internet, and some people are saying it’s you who did it.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“They’re saying you did it because apparently some BLM guys found Cluff’s missing map in your vehicle and your M16 at the scene with, like, three or four empty clips all over the place. Which seems believable because you’re obviously a loose cannon who is trying to set up a smoke screen because you altered reports that were going to Congress. Then you lost your mind in a meeting you weren’t even invited to. This is exactly the story they need to prove that this land needs to be in
the hands of business guys.”
“Those reports were supposed to reset the record.” Paul said, then rolled over onto his back.
“Only the victors get to write reports,” Kimball said.
“They were the only weapon I had,” Paul said.
“Well, you burned all that down. To top it off, somebody on Twitter said you’re secretly working for Nancy Pelosi. When they saw your Jeep on the internet, dispatch sent someone down, and they found it all. “They say the truth will set you free, but these days once something hits the internet, it’s Katy bar the door,” Kimball said. “Truth has no shelf life anymore.”
“So, now we’re back into the fire again?” Reinhardt asked.
“If there’s something worse than fire, this might be it. I was on the computer since you got here. Eventually, I had to stop and get ready. Since it’s obvious that I can’t really do anything for you, I thought I’d at least bring coffee and fill you in.” He lifted a thermos into view, opened the door, and set it inside on the counter. The door piston hissed as it closed.
“Some people think Paul kidnapped you all, or something. You two can fix that part of the story, but I warn you. Don’t go out there online and look at anything. It’s a dumpster fire. You’ll lose heart. I already did,” Kimball said.
“We should call the police,” Sophia said.
“This is already on its way to the FBI,” Kimball said. “Paul might want to turn himself in, but it could be a good idea for you all to split up.”
“What do you think we should do?” Sophia asked.
“I don’t know. This is your thing. I got you staying out here because I don’t need my house getting teargassed.”
“Do you think Wïiatsiweap is lost?” Paul asked.
“We’ve been losing that place over and over again for a hundred years. They stole everything out of there and gave it back empty. They’re planning to steal it again. It was always gonna be that way. You all should move on, though. Anyone finds you here, my ass is grass. Who knows about this?”
“Euphrenia and Dreamweaver,” Paul said.
“Dreamweaver talks, man. To everybody. Plus, he’s crazy. You gotta stay away from him. You know he thinks Indian people came from outer space? Outer. Space.” Kimball was close to shouting, but he backed off, said goodbye, and left.
When they could no longer hear his footsteps, Paul said, “I’m sorry.”
Reinhardt climbed out of his bunk and poured coffee into mugs he found in the galley kitchen. He handed one to Sophia and Paul, each of whom sat, facing in opposite directions.
“I have one question for you,” Sophia said after a long silence.
“Only one?”
“Is Wïiatsiweap the Paiute name for Swallow Valley?” She spelled out the word for him, then said she wanted to be sure they were talking about the same thing.
“It is.”
“Have you ever heard of the Wïiatsiweap Hoax?”
Paul shook his head.
Sophia sat up straight. “How about Tom MacNair? Have you heard anything about him? Impresario, con man, provocateur from Glasgow?” Paul shook his head to all of it. “Well, Tom MacNair came through Ellis Island in the 1870s and ended up obsessed with these articles he’d read in the New-York Tribune about the pueblos out here. He wanted to see them firsthand, but it took him a decade to save up and make the trip. He sold everything he had and didn’t plan on coming back to New York. When he got to Colorado, he found the sites had already been ransacked.”
“Oh no,” Reinhardt said.
“While he was moping around, he met a guy who said he was selling property that was full of Indian stuff. He must have told a good story, because MacNair bought the land for two hundred dollars, which was almost everything he had left. He got the deed and a map, and when he got there, he discovered he’d bought an abandoned mining claim fifty miles outside of Cortez. MacNair didn’t throw in the towel, though. He spent years building a fake pueblo of his own so he could give tours. He’d charge people a dollar for every arrowhead they found. He called the place—wait for it . . .”
“Wïiatsiweap!” Reinhardt shouted. “Ha, I know this one.”
“I said to wait for it,” Sophia glared at him. “Apparently MacNair got the name from some penny dreadful adventure—”
“Written by Krause, Sigmund F. Krause,” Reinhardt shouted. “I read it as a child. His stories of the Indian are very special in Germany. They are why I came.”
Sophia and Paul turned and watched Reinhardt do a small victory dance, then they looked at each other, shaking their heads, feeling that somehow, in this moment, they were sitting peacefully in the eye of the storm. Each of them drank in silence when a buzz-buzz-buzz came from Reinhardt’s bunk.
“What’s that?” Sophia asked.
“My phone,” Reinhardt said. “There is an outlet up there, so I charged it.”
“Shut it off,” Paul snapped. “But it’s probably too late.”
___
Dalton stopped at the front desk and set down his Diet Coke. LaRae handed him a stack of Post-its and said, “I’m just going to start by saying I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I didn’t put it on a note or anything, but someone from the FBI called and they want to assume control of the whole thing at Antelope Flats.”
LaRae watched a smile creep across Dalton’s face.
“So, you’re not mad?”
“Are you kidding? This is the happiest I’ve been in two weeks. Can I just send them everything?” he asked.
“I told them when you’d be in, and they said someone would call. They’re coming in from Phoenix.”
“Vegas is closer. That’s weird.”
LaRae shrugged. “That’s not how it works, I guess. Okay, I thought that was the bad news. You’ll see from those notes that maybe I was wrong. Okay, so the real bad news is Stan Forsythe has been calling, like, every ten minutes.”
Dalton read the notes. “So the German isn’t dead? He’s over at Pipe Spring?”
“Apparently.”
“Did you look up these Instagram pictures?”
She told him to come around, and she showed him a series of photos, all with the hashtag #herosjourney. As she clicked through them, Dalton said, “It just looks like somebody on vacation who crashed his rental car on the monument.”
“Probably feels different to him,” LaRae said. “So, we can put him on the not-murdered list, then. The German consulate would still like you to contact them.”
“Okay. It’s not like I have anything else to do. Call me when Chris gets in so we can close the loop.”
___
Paul and Sophia gathered away from the trailer to talk. They sat on a curve of sandstone that rose from the earth like the back of a whale. They faced to the south, where golden light filled the desert valley, and they looked at the distant escarpment that held the Swallow Valley in secret.
“Back there with Kimball, what was that? It felt like you two were talking on a different frequency than the rest of us.”
“It’s complicated.”
“No reason not to tell me. We’re all in this together now.”
“I’ve told you pretty much everything.”
“Pretty much is not everything. You barged in on the secretary of the interior?”
“I thought it was going to be someone else.”
“It doesn’t matter what you thought. Like how returning those artifacts destroys the sites,” she said.
“It’s the only way to save them. We can’t get into court any other way.”
“But the site is useless now.”
“To archeologists.”
“This isn’t a philosophical discussion anymore. People are getting killed over this, and I can’t figure out why. We will say we’ve found the real Wïiatsiweap—but you know what that actually means, right?”
“I do.”
“People will go up there and find a hoax just like MacNair’s DIY pueblo. It’s a f
orgery now because of your stunt with the bowl and the reports.”
“I prefer to think of it as repatriation.”
“You break a window, you can’t glue it back together. Everyone knows that. It’s Humpty Dumpty.” Paul didn’t follow, so she said, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men?”
Paul nodded. “It’s also called impermanence. The world is in flux. I worry that my whole job is to keep things from changing so the monument matches the photographs. Nature isn’t static.”
“This conversation is cute, but we’re trying to come up with a plan that keeps you out of jail. Did Cluff have any human remains?” Sophia asked.
Paul got uncomfortable and fussed with his arm. “Some,” he said eventually.
“Did you repatriate any of them?”
“We got the remains and some ceremonial items to Kimball,” Paul said. “Cluff had one stipulation: keep government out of it.”
“Neither of you are non-government. You know that, right?”
A shout burst through the trees, followed by a single short yelp that sounded like Reinhardt. Before Sophia could respond, Paul was already running south toward the trailer. “Get to Kimball’s house and call 911.” She took off east, watching Paul over her shoulder as he disappeared into the trees. Her pulse shot up, and she hoped she was running in the right direction. When she brought her head back to the front, she saw a clear space between two juniper trees and headed through it. The gunman appeared from behind one of trunks, his arms to each side. She tried to stop, but she crashed into him. His arms snapped around her, and he clinched her like a bear. She struggled to break free and he grappled her, spun her quickly, and clamped a hand over her mouth as they both dropped to the ground. She felt a prick in her neck, then a burning. She fought back, bit his hand, kicked. But in a few seconds, everything went black.
___
Dalton and Tanner got out of the Bronco in front of Kimball Tillohash’s house. The sun was white-hot and the air brittle.
“What’s he doing here?” Tanner asked. “Some German tourist can’t be friends with Tillohash, can he?”
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