Muriel felt a tear well up in her eye. That absentminded, slightly lost expression was so much like her son’s. She hoped that whatever had gone wrong in his life would straighten itself out before too long.
The following morning, the Pearl Street Salvation Army store and soup kitchen received an anonymous donation in the amount of a quarter of a million dollars, and no one was more surprised than Muriel Page when she was told it was in honor of her work.
Carson and de Vaca walked silently down the trail and back to the Mount Dragon complex. Outside the covered walkway leading to the residency compound, they stopped.
“So?” de Vaca prompted, breaking the silence.
“So what?”
“You still haven’t told me if you’re going to help me find the notebook,” she said in a fierce whisper.
“Susana, I’ve got work to do. So do you, for that matter. That notebook, if it exists, isn’t going anywhere. Let me think about this a while. OK?”
De Vaca looked at him for a moment. Then she turned without a word and walked into the compound.
Carson watched her walk away. Then, with a sigh, he climbed the staircase to the second floor, stepping through the doorway into the cool, dark corridor beyond. Maybe Teece had been right about Burt’s secret notebook. And maybe de Vaca was right about Nye. In which case, what Teece thought didn’t matter as much anymore. But what concerned Carson most was that horrible moment on top of Mount Dragon, when he’d suddenly felt the strength of his convictions turn soft. Since his father died and the last ranch had failed, Carson’s love of science—his faith in the good it could accomplish—had meant everything to him. Now, if ...
But he wouldn’t think about it any more today. Maybe tomorrow, he’d have the strength to face it again.
Back in his room, Carson stared at the drab white walls for a minute, summoning the energy to switch on his laptop and begin sorting through the X-FLU II test data. His eye fell upon the battered banjo case.
Hell with it, he thought. He’d play a little; without picks, to keep the noise down. Just five minutes, maybe ten. Get his mind off all this. Then he’d get to work.
As he lifted the five-string from the case, his eye fell on a folded piece of paper lying on the yellowing felt beneath. Frowning, he picked it up and unfolded it on his knee.
Dear Guy,
I’ve always hated this infernal instrument. For once, how-ever, I hope you practice with regularity. You’ve apparently already left for the morning, and I can’t delay my departure any further. This seems the best—indeed, only—way to contact you.
As you know, I’ll be gone for a couple of days. Since we spoke, I have tried without success to learn where Burt might have hidden his notebook. You know the Mount Dragon complex, you know the surrounding area, and—most importantly—you know Burt’s work. It’s quite possible that, perhaps inadvertently, Burt left behind a clue to the whereabouts of the notebook. Would you please look through Burt’s electronic notes and see if you can find such a clue?
Do not, however, try to find the notebook yourself. Let me do that when I return from my journey. Meanwhile, please don’t mention this to anyone.
Had I felt there was more time, I would not have burdened you with this. I have a feeling you are someone I can trust. I hope I am not mistaken.
Yours,
Gil Teece
Carson reread the hastily scrawled note. Teece must have come looking for him the morning of the dust storm and, not finding him, left the message in the one place Carson would be most likely to find it. When he’d opened the case on the canteen balcony, the night had been dark and he hadn’t seen the note. He felt a momentary anxious stab as he thought about how easily the paper could have fallen unnoticed to the floor of the balcony, to be discovered later by Singer. Or maybe Nye.
He angrily shook aside the thought. Another couple of days and I’ll be as paranoid as de Vaca. Or even Burt. Shoving the note into his back pocket, he punched de Vaca’s extension on the residency intercom.
“So this is where you live, Carson? It figures they’d give you one of the better views. All I see from my room is the back end of the incinerator.”
De Vaca moved away from the window. “They say the way a person decorates their own space is a good barometer of personality,” she went on, scanning the bare walls. “Figures.”
She leaned over his shoulder while he booted up his residency laptop.
“About a month before he left Mount Dragon, Burt’s entries began to grow shorter,” Carson said as he logged in. “If Teece is right, that’s the time he started keeping the illegal journal. If there are any clues as to its whereabouts in Burt’s on-line notes, that’s where I figure we should start looking.”
He began paging through the log. As the formulas, lists, and data scrolled by, Carson was reminded irresistibly of the first time he had read the journal, a lifetime ago, on his first workday in the Fever Tank. His heart sank as he skimmed yet again the failed experiments, the recordings of hopes that were alternately lifted, then shattered. It all felt uncomfortably close to home.
As he scrolled on, the scientific notes were increasingly leavened by conversations with Scopes, personal entries, even dreams.
May 20
I dreamt lost night that I was wandering, lost, in the desert. I walked toward the mountains, and it grew darker and darker. Then a great light appeared, like a second dawn, and a vast mushroom cloud rose from behind the mountain range. I knew I was witnessing the Trinity explosion. I saw the wave of overpressure bearing down on me, and then I woke up.
“Damn,” Carson said, “if he confides stuff like this to his on-line notes, why would he bother keeping a secret diary?”
“Keep going,” urged de Vaca.
He continued scanning.
June 2
When I shook out my shoes this morning, a little scorpion fell out and landed on the floor all in a tizzy. I felt sorry for him and brought him outside. ...
“Keep going, keep going,” de Vaca repeated impatiently.
Carson continued scrolling. Poetry began appearing among the data tables and technical notes. Finally, as Burt’s madness emerged, the log degenerated into a confusing welter of images, nightmares, and meaningless phrases. Then there was the last horrifying conversation with Scopes; a burst of apocalyptic mania; and the end-of-file marker was reached.
They sat back and looked at each other.
“There’s nothing here,” Carson said.
“We’re not thinking like Burt,” de Vaca said. “If you were Burt, and you wanted to plant a clue in the record, how would you do it?”
Carson shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would. Teece was right: subconscious or conscious, it’s human nature. First, you’d have to assume that Scopes was going to read everything. Right?”
“Right.”
“So what would Scopes be least likely to read in here?”
There was a silence.
“The poetry,” they both said at once.
They scrolled back to the point in the journal where the poems first appeared, then paged slowly forward. Most, but not all, were on scientific subjects: the structure of DNA, quarks and gluons, the Big Bang and string theory.
“You notice that these poems start around the same time the journal entries get shorter?” Carson asked.
“No one’s ever written poetry quite like this before,” de Vaca replied. “In its own way, it’s beautiful.” She read aloud:
There is a shadow on this glass plate.
A long exposure in the emission range
Of alpha hydrogen
Yields satisfactory results.
M82 was once ten billion stars,
Now it has returned to the slow lazy dust of creation.
Is this the mighty work
Of the same God who fires the Sun?
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“Messier 82 is a very strange galaxy in Virgo. The whole galax
y blew up, annihilating ten billion stars.”
“Interesting,” said de Vaca. “But I don’t think it’s what we’re looking for.”
They scrolled on.
Block house in the sheeted sun
The ravens rise as you approach,
They circle and float, crying at the trespass,
Waiting for emptiness to return.
The Great Kiva
Is half-filled with sand,
But the sipapu
Lies open.
It empties its silent cry into the fourth world.
When you leave
The ravens settle back,
Croaking with satisfaction.
“Beautiful,” said de Vaca. “And somehow familiar. I wonder what this black house is?”
Carson suddenly sat up. “Kin Klizhini,” he said. “It’s Apache for ‘Black House.’ He’s writing about the ruin just south of here.”
“You know Apache?” de Vaca asked, looking at him curiously.
“Most of our ranch hands were Apache,” Carson said. “I picked up some stuff from them when I was a kid.”
There was a silence while they read the poem again.
“Hell,” said Carson. “I don’t see anything here.”
“Wait.” De Vaca held up her hand. “The Great Kiva was the underground religious chamber of the Anasazi Indians. The center of the kiva contained a hole, called the sipapu, that connected this world with the spirit world below. They called that world the Fourth World. We live in the Fifth World.”
“I know that,” Carson said. “But I still don’t see any clues here.”
“Read the poem again. If the kiva was filled with sand, how could the sipapu be open?”
Carson looked at her. “You’re right.”
She looked at Carson and grinned. “At last, cabrón, you learn to speak the truth.”
They decided to take the horses, in order to be back in time for the evening emergency drill. The sun had passed the meridian and the day was at its hottest.
Carson watched de Vaca throw a saddle on the rat-tailed Appaloosa. “I guess you’ve ridden before,” he said.
“Damn right,” de Vaca replied, buckling the flank cinch and looping a canteen over the horn. “You think Anglos have a monopoly? When I was a kid, I had a horse named Barbarian. He was a Spanish Barb, the horse of the Conquest.”
“I’ve never seen one,” Carson said.
“They’re the best desert horse you can find. Small, stout, and tough. My father got some from an old Spanish herd on the Romero Ranch, Those horses had never interbred with Anglo horses. Old Romero said he and his ancestors always shot any damn gringo stallions that came sniffing around their mares.” She laughed and swung herself into the saddle. Carson liked the way she sat a horse: balanced and easy.
He mounted Roscoe and they rode to the perimeter gate, punched in the access code, then reined toward Kin Klizhini. The ancient ruin reared up on the horizon about two miles away: two walls poking up from the desert floor, surrounded by mounds of rubble.
De Vaca tilted her head back, gave her hair a shake. “In spite of everything that’s happened, I never get tired of the beauty of this place,” she said as they rode.
Carson nodded. “When I was sixteen,” he said, “I spent a summer on a ranch at the northern end of the Jornada, called the Diamond Bar.”
“Really? Is the desert up there like it is down here?”
“Similar. As you move northward, the Fra Cristóbal Mountains come around in an arc. The rain shadow from the mountains falls across there and it gets a little greener.”
“What were you, a ranch hand?”
“Yeah, after my dad lost the ranch I cowboyed around for the summer before going to college. That Diamond Bar was a big ranch, about four hundred sections between the San Pascual Mountains and the Sierra Oscura. The real desert started at the southern edge of the ranch, at a place called Lava Gate. There’s a huge lava flow that runs almost to the foot of the Fra Cristóbal Mountains. Between the lava flow and the mountains is a narrow gap, maybe a hundred yards across. The old Spanish trail used to go through there.” He laughed. “Lava Gate was like the gates of hell. You didn’t want to go south from there, you might never come back. And now here I am, right in the middle of it.”
“My ancestors came up that trail with Oñate in 1598,” said de Vaca.
“Up the Spanish trail?” Carson asked. “They crossed the Jornada?”
De Vaca nodded, squinting against the sun.
“How did they find water?”
“There’s that doubting look on your face again, cabrón. My grandfather told me they waited until dusk at the last water, and then drove their stock all night, stopping at about four in the morning to graze. Farther on, their Apache guide brought them to a spring called the Ojo del Águila. Eagle Spring. Its location is now lost. At least, that’s what my grandfather said.”
There was a question Carson had been curious about for some time, but had been afraid to ask. “Where, exactly, did you get the name Cabeza de Vaca?”
De Vaca looked at him truculently. “Where’d you get the name Carson?”
“You have to admit, ‘Head of Cow’ is a little odd for a name.”
“So is ‘Son of Car’ ”
“Forgive me for asking,” Carson said, mentally reprimanding himself for not knowing better.
“If you knew your Spanish history,” de Vaca said, “you’d know about the name. In 1212, a soldier in the Spanish army marked a pass with a cow skull, and led a Spanish army to victory over the Moors. That soldier was given a royal title and the right to use the name ‘Cabeza de Vaca’.”
“Fascinating,” Carson yawned. And probably apocryphal, he thought.
“Alonso Cabeza de Vaca was one of the first European settlers in America in 1598. We come from one of the most ancient and important European families in America. Not that I pay any attention to that kind of thing.”
But Carson could see from the proud look on her face that she paid a great deal of attention to that kind of thing.
They rode for a while, saying nothing, enjoying the heat of the day and the gentle roll of the horses. De Vaca rode slightly ahead, her lower body moving with the horse, her torso relaxed and quiet, left hand on the reins and right hooked in her belt loop. As they approached the ruin, she stopped, waiting for him to catch up.
He drew alongside and she looked at him, an amused gleam in her violet eyes.
“Last one there is a pendejo,” she said suddenly, leaning forward and spurring her horse.
By the time Carson could recover and urge Roscoe forward, she was three lengths ahead, the horse going at a dead run, its head down, ears flattened, hooves throwing gravel back into Carson’s face. He urged Roscoe on with urgent, light heel jabs.
Carson edged up on her and the two horses raced alongside, leaping the low mesquite bushes, the wind roaring in their ears.- The ruin loomed closer, the great stone walls etched against the blue sky. Carson knew he had the better mount, yet he watched in disbelief as de Vaca leaned close to her horse’s ear, urging him forward in a low but electric voice. Carson jabbed and shouted in vain. They flashed between the two ruined walls, de Vaca now half a length ahead, her hair whipping like a black flame behind her. Ahead of them, Carson saw a low wall rise suddenly out of the brown sands. A group of ravens burst upward with a raucous crying as they both took the wall at a leap and were suddenly past the ruin. They slowed to a lope, then a trot, turning the horses back, cooling them off.
Carson looked over at de Vaca. Her face was flushed, and her hair wild. A fleck of foam from the sweaty horse lay across her thigh. She grinned. “Not bad,” she said. “You almost caught me.”
Carson flicked his reins. “You cheated,” he said, hearing the peevishness in his own voice. “You got the jump on me.”
“You have the better horse,” she said.
“You’re lighter.”
She smirked. “Face it, cabrón, you lost.”
Carson smiled grimly. “I’ll catch you next time.”
“Nobody catches me.”
Reaching the ruin, they dismounted, tying their horses to a rock. “The Great Kiva was usually in the very center of the pueblo, or else far outside its borders,” de Vaca said. “Let’s hope it hasn’t collapsed completely.”
The ravens circled far overhead, their distant cries hanging in the dry air.
Carson looked around curiously. The walls were formed from stones of shaped lava, cemented together with adobe. Walls and room blocks rose on three sides of the U-shaped ruin, the fourth side opening onto a central plaza. Potsherds and pieces of flint littered the ground beneath their feet. Much of it was covered by sand.
They walked into the plaza, long overgrown with yucca and mesquite. De Vaca knelt down by a large fire-ant hill. The ants had fled inside to escape the noonday heat, and she carefully smoothed the gravel with her ringers, examining it closely.
“What are you doing?” Carson asked.
Instead of answering, de Vaca picked something off the mound and held it between thumb and forefinger. “Take a look,” she said.
She placed something in his palm, and he squinted at it: a perfect little turquoise bead, with a hole no wider than a human hair drilled through its center.
“They polished their turquoises using blades of grass,” she said. “No one is really sure how they got the holes so small and perfect, without the use of metal. Perhaps by twirling a tiny sliver of bone against the turquoise for hours.” She stood up. “Come on, let’s find that kiva.”
They moved to the center of the plaza. “There’s nothing here,” Carson said.
“We’ll separate and search beyond the perimeter,” de Vaca replied. “I’ll take the northern semicircle, you take the southern.”
Carson moved out beyond the edge of the ruin, tracing a widening arc, scanning the desert as he did so. The huge storm and drying winds had erased any signs of footprints; it was impossible to tell whether Burt had been there or not. Centuries before, the subterranean kiva would have had a roof flush with the desert floor, with only a smoke hole on the surface revealing its presence. While it was likely the roof had collapsed long ago, there was a chance that it had remained intact and was now completely concealed by the shifting sands.
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