“It’s going to take months before we get back to normal,” Dalton said. “The day I flew home from Kabul, I took one look around and told the whole country to go to hell. I could do it because I was nobody. It wasn’t my problem anymore. When I got home, that place came with me. I was a mess for years. It ruined my marriage. Now I’m somebody, and everything collects on my desk waiting for me to sign off on it. I’d like to hop on an Osprey and take off, just disappear. Turn it off at the end like a movie.”
“They don’t do them like that anymore,” Tanner said. “There’s always a sequel. You shouldn’t start wanting something that won’t happen. Better off being okay with it.”
“Dying doesn’t even get you out of it. You probably wake up on the other side, and they put you to work. I’m not kidding. I just want a long nap. It’s not just the job. I’ve got a divorce to wrap up, and I’ve got to work up the courage to tell Karen I’m keeping the house.”
“Why don’t you take a slug of that soda before you start writing poems or folk songs or something.”
Dalton slid his drink closer. Before he could take a sip, the phone rang. Dalton lifted his eyebrows and looked at Tanner, then he answered. It was LaRae. “Hi, Sheriff, I’m sorry about this, but it’s Raylene. She said it’s urgent. She said she remembered something important.”
Tanner shrugged and mouthed the words “See you later,” then he left.
“Before you put her through, I wanted to tell you I put out a BOLO for your car.”
“You’ve got a lot to think about. The car can wait,” LaRae said.
“You shouldn’t have to,” he said.
“I’m putting her through now,” LaRae said.
“Raylene, how are you?” Dalton said.
“Patrick, could you come and get me?”
He didn’t know how to tell her he was off the case or if that would even be something she’d remember or if it would matter. He decided to say that he was going to have a hard time getting away.
“Oh, Sheriff. You can delegate.”
Dalton laughed out loud without meaning to. “I’d like nothing better than to run off.”
“What if I told you I had the answer.”
“To what?”
“To your mystery. I remember it now. I can show you the maps you wanted to see.”
“Raylene, we’re doing okay with that now.”
There was a long silence broken by Raylene telling someone to go away. “If you could pick me up, I could take you right to the maps you’re asking about. I’m not sure how long I’ll remember because, you know, things come and go, but I know where Bruce kept them. I know where these things are on the monument.”
Dalton sized up the papers on his desk. When a notification banner appeared on his monitor from the Arizona State Police, he looked at it, then waited for it to fade.
“Sheriff?” Raylene asked.
“I’ll be right there,” he said. “It’ll take ten minutes.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He took his soda and walked to LaRae’s desk. She looked at him and apologized. He raised his cup and headed out. As he left the parking lot, he passed through the black rubber skids and remnants of brake lights scattered on the road from yesterday’s wreck. Out-of-state cars drove past him, headed to the next stop on their vacations.
He parked in front of the Beehive House and went in. Raylene was sitting in the front room, with her purse at her feet, a basket to one side, and something small in her hands.
Dalton waved and signed her out, then helped her stand. She handed him a CD of Glenn Miller songs. “It’s called The Unforgettable. I pilfered it from one of the gentlemen in here who has been trying to put the moves on me.”
“Raylene, your house is just a couple of minutes away. Are we going to need all this stuff?”
She looked away and started wringing the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other. Dalton looked down and saw some apples inside the basket, a Ziploc bag of dinner rolls, silverware wrapped up in paper napkins, and two plastic cups stacked one inside of the other.
“Patrick, I feel like we won’t need those maps at all today.”
“I see,” Dalton said, then he helped Raylene stand. When she stooped to pick up the basket, he reached it first.
Day Twenty-Four
Copies of copies of copies
They drove out of town, southward toward the open desert, Sophia driving, Paul riding shotgun, and Reinhardt in the back seat, pressed against the window. The sun was low over the eastern cliffs, and the shadows stretched gently westward. Sophia turned to Paul and whispered, “How does he have so much vacation?”
Reinhardt overheard and said, “Democratic socialism. We also have family leave and still manage to provide the world with the Mercedes-Benz. America does it incorrectly.”
Paul said, “He’s not wrong.”
Sophia scanned the road for antelope, but only found the tall white grasses of high summer. Occasional birds wheeled above them, and ahead of them a red-tailed hawk perched in a dead tree scanning the land beneath. Reinhardt grabbed the front seats and leaned forward into the space between them. “It is amazing that you are free now, Paul,” he said.
Paul shrugged. “It helped that I quit my job before they could fire me.”
“I still think you didn’t have to go that far,” Sophia said.
“They wanted to put me on a task force, make me a desk ranger,” Paul said.
“Sitting can take two years or more off your life, Paul,” Reinhardt said. “The science is compelling.”
They drove through the monument to where the road came closest to Dreamweaver’s bus. They parked and rolled down the windows, and in a few minutes Dreamweaver’s head appeared above a boulder. He scanned the area with binoculars, then threw them a hand signal.
Paul said, “He wants us to get out.”
They stood outside of the vehicle with their hands to the side. Dreamweaver descended the hill in desert camo pants and a faded Denver Rockets T-shirt. He had a cardboard tube slung across his back on a length of clothesline like an empty quiver. They allowed him to approach and examine them.
Dreamweaver and Paul clasped arms like Romans. Sophia leaned toward Reinhardt and said, “That thing they’re doing right now is fake.”
“What is?” Reinhardt asked.
Sophia did the clasp with him. “Romans never did it. It’s fake.”
“It is still very cool,” Reinhardt said. “And it is authentic for them.”
Dreamweaver looked up and down the road. “How do I know you weren’t followed?”
“We were really careful, man,” Paul said.
Dreamweaver stared into the sky. Two vapor trails crisscrossed in the blue expanse. “In any given day, ten thousand satellites cross overhead.”
“Do you really think they are watching us?” Reinhardt asked.
“Watching us watching them watching us watching them,” Dreamweaver said, spinning his hands around each other like someone showing a child how a machine works. He stopped and grew serious. “I heard that the woman Frangos was found dead in her jail cell. They said she was strangled. No witnesses or anything. She was supposed to go before a grand jury this week. Now nobody is going to know anything about her.”
Paul and Reinhardt looked at each other. Sophia kicked a stone across the road. “Is anyone even surprised?” she said.
“That crazy assassin can probably get into anywhere he wants,” Reinhardt said.
Dreamweaver unslung the cardboard tube. “Okay, so here’s Bruce’s map, the one that set everything off. Are you sure you want it? I can keep it at the bus. It’ll be safe,” he said.
Paul took the tube and slung it across his shoulders. “I want to keep it close,” he said. “I went back for the inventory book. This map completes the set.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I know you told me before,” Sophia said, “but every time I start thinking about it, I lose track. So, Cluff gave Dre
amweaver a map that’s identical to the one that was stol—”
“For backup,” Dreamweaver interrupted. “He brought it to me, like, five years ago, in case something weird happened. Insurance.”
“I am lost,” Reinhardt said. Paul rested his hand on Reinhardt’s shoulder to calm him down.
Dreamweaver started gesturing with his hands. “Five years ago, there were two identical maps. Bruce made both. He kept one and gave the other to me. When Paulie started putting Bruce’s things back, Bruce made notes all over his copy and in that blue book. So, those two tell a very unhelpful story about what people will find out there now that all the stuff Bruce collected is back where it belongs.”
“Unhelpful?” Sophia said. “It tells the true story.”
“All truths are half-truths,” Dreamweaver said, then a thought came upon him. “Okay, maybe not exactly half, but a percentage. Truth is always watered down. Nobody can take it straight. It’ll kill you right where you stand.”
Sophia’s face hardened, and she stared at the ground, then lifted her head back up. “Okay, so when we left with Euphrenia, Dreamweaver went out to your vehicle and swapped the maps—his for the one I stashed?” she asked.
“Correct,” Dreamweaver said.
“The FBI have the map from Dreamweaver’s wall,” Paul explained. “It’s completely untouched, doesn’t say anything about what I did out there, and it makes everything look like it’s always been there. The map we have here with Bruce’s notes is the only record of our plan.”
“But those forty or fifty years matter,” Sophia said.
“I couldn’t think of any other way to save this place. Neither could Bruce. Now people will have a map of artifacts they can use to make a case for preservation. If we had a time machine, we could fix it. This is the next best thing,” Paul defended.
“A fake is a fake is a fake,” Sophia said.
“Authenticity won’t mean anything if they tear this place apart looking for oil, or gas, or—”
“Uranium,” Dreamweaver said. “Definitely uranium.”
“Yeah, or whatever,” Paul said. “If you want to call it a fake map, fine. If a fake map points people to real things, then we might just have a shot at saving the monument. A real map that helps them make a case that it’s already ruined—that’ll just shut the whole thing down. It’s a parlor trick. I know that.”
“It’s postmodern, you know—a copy of a copy of a copy—then the original disappears.” Dreamweaver made a puff-of-smoke gesture.
“Plato is spinning in his grave,” Reinhardt said.
“You know, this is not even close to the right way to do anything,” Sophia said.
Dreamweaver squinted at her until she apologized. “Nobody’s going to be wise to what happened. I rode out to Paul’s rig and swapped the maps, roughed mine up to give it some patina. Nobody’s going to know what the old bastard put us up to. It’s possible I made some additions of my own, sites Cluff didn’t know about. There’s bodies out there, man, people older than anyone has seen before. And there’s strange alloys out there, too. Radiating patterns fossilized in the sand consistent with fusion propulsion drives.”
“Please say you didn’t put UFO stuff on the map,” Sophia said.
“Anyway, all of this confusion is going to slow the energy czars down to the speed of federal gridlock.”
“There’s no UFO stuff, though, right?” Paul asked.
“Why would I put that in there?” Dreamweaver asked.
“A hundred years from now, someone like me will have no idea what really happened,” Sophia said.
Paul rubbed his hands together and tried to change things up. “A cool thing is that Sophia is going to wrap up her grant with a full report on Wïiatsiweap. We’re going up there to get more pictures and notes for that. The Senate hearings for retraction of the monument are in a month. It should all time out just right,” Paul said.
“At least I don’t have to fabricate data,” Sophia said flatly. After a pause, she added, “You know I really hate all this Machiavellian garbage.”
“We hate it, too,” Reinhardt said, the look on his face pure and true.
Dreamweaver handed over the map and stepped back. “You know how this is going to play out, right? You make your report, and there’s a public outcry. Because it’s an election year, they’ll look for some distraction, get people looking the other way. They’ll save this place for a season. Build roads, toilets, fences, and signs telling people to keep off the fences. Some social media a-holes will geotag it on Instagram. A million more of them will come. Then they’ll close it down, pave it, put a fence around it. The only good that will come from federal involvement is wheelchair access. Joni was right about everything.”
Sophia leaned over to Paul and whispered, “Tell me he’s not talking about Joni Mitchell.”
“He is talking about Joni Mitchell,” Paul whispered back, then he said, “Cluff knew this was coming. That’s why he called us.”
“Yes, he did. There is no government anymore, only the Petrostate.”
Dreamweaver hugged everyone, his musk surrounding them, then he walked up the hill and was gone.
They drove to the trailhead and loaded their gear. They hiked without speaking, following the same route as before. The trail took them higher and higher above the valley floor. They rested and took in the long view of the monument, utility lines, lava field, Carvertown, Short Creek, all of it. Sophia led, so she could set the pace, take photographs, and record the trip. Paul brought up the rear, coming ahead only to set up the ropes. Reinhardt stayed between them, giddy at each turn of the trail.
“The difficulty of getting here will surely protect the place,” Reinhardt said.
“It might,” Paul said as he repacked the climbing gear. He moved slowly and with a little hesitation. “I can see somebody wanting to put in ladders.”
“Why not an escalator?” Reinhardt said. He stepped on a small rock with one foot, grabbing the air like a handrail. “You just ride to the top.”
They hiked on through the next section, Reinhardt asking questions about the place where Bruce Cluff had used explosives to close off the way. He wanted to know if that could be done again, and Paul said, “Anything is possible.” When they came into the amphitheater, the majesty of it crashed over Sophia, and she watched the sensation move across Reinhardt’s body like the shadow of clouds parting.
“Worth the trouble?” Paul asked.
Reinhardt could only nod.
“That’s why it doesn’t really matter what we do with the approach. There’s always going to be someone who wants to get here. And there’s always going to be someone to sell them the hiking boots to do it in,” Paul said.
Sophia set about her work, and Paul helped. Reinhardt followed them for a time, then peeled off and went through the ruins on his own. After an hour, he found them, guided them to the pool of water and gestured to it. “This is all just as Krause described it in The Rifle and the Tomahawk. I will show you.” He unzipped the top of his pack and took out a book. “I bought this and reread it last week to prepare myself.” He rifled through the pages. “Here it is. The main character, Winnetonka, has been chasing cattle rustlers who killed his wife and children. When he catches them, he tries to subdue them and take them to the marshal for justice, but they overpower Winnetonka and threaten his life.”
“Oh, Reinhardt,” Sophia said. “These books are—”
Reinhardt scowled. “Let me read. ‘The rustlers Winnetonka shot died faceup in the white gravel, his arrows pointing skyward from their blood-soaked Confederate shirts, agony etched into their faces like men burning in one of the deepest circles of hell.’”
Paul scratched his chin and tried to keep a kind face.
“Winnetonka spat upon them and continued up the trail to the abandoned dwellings of Wïiatsiweap.” Reinhardt smiled and nodded until they acknowledged the word and gestured to the ruins around them. “Winnetonka continued past the silent adobe hous
es to a small pool fed by a spring. He stripped off his buckskins and dove into the cold water.” Reinhardt turned and pointed to the still pool beneath the willows at the base of the cliff. “Winnetonka swam like a giant frog through the darkness, until a bright shimmering spot, like a submerged sun, revealed itself. His lungs burned as he continued through the narrow dark passage. When he emerged on the other side, he quickly burst through the surface into Upper Wïiatsiweap, where he was met by a dozen of his band, who raised their hands to celebrate his victories over the encroaching enemy.”
Reinhardt snapped the book shut and looked at them. “You see,” he said. “Krause says there is another place, a second world where Winnetonka’s people retreated to live in peace.”
“I know you love it, Reinhardt, but it’s fiction. A potboiler. It’s a story written by somebody from somewhere else. Winnetonka isn’t even a Paiute name, is it Paul?” She turned to look for backup on this, but Paul had already stripped to his underwear and was wading into the water.
Reinhardt was next, and Sophia followed. The water was not cold and clear, but after she dove, a white portal appeared, and she swam toward it. The walls narrowed around her, and she put her hands on the rocks as she passed through.
When she emerged on the other side, she saw the dripping backs of Paul and Reinhardt. Around them was an entire complex of dwellings three stories high, wooden ladders still leaning against the structures. They were set back under the protection of the cliffs, impossible to see from the air.
Day Seven Hundred Eighty-Four
Epilogue
Sophia grabbed a stack of papers and her briefcase and left her office, almost running. She merged with the throng of students traveling between classes and descended the stairs until she shot out of the building into the upper quad. She looked up at the clock on the carillon tower and saw that she had one minute to be in class.
She hurried along, her thoughts on her lecture, the new-faculty orientation session later that afternoon, and the package of books she’d just received from Paul.
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