BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  It was a Saturday morning in late March at the excavation site, and ten inches of new snow was melting under breezy blue skies. Ordinarily we might have worked that day, but Kidder decided that the mapping and classification of the eastern roomblock should be suspended until Monday, by which time the snow would likely be gone. I was back at the site after three days with Clara and Winnie in Santa Fe and had no interest in joining my colleagues when they decided to hop the supply truck into town for an extended afternoon meal.

  Instead I walked out to one of the unexcavated ridges at the northern end of the pueblo, then turned down the hill toward a spring-fed creek that flanked the site to the west. Water was brought to the camp in barrels from town, but this creek was a secondary source and there was always a reason to top off our supplies when time permitted. Carrying a three-gallon bucket and a shovel, in case I needed to break a layer of ice, I descended a trail to the drainage.

  Our usual filling site was at a pool further downstream, but I was pretty sure the trail I followed would lead to a crossing. Sure enough, two stripped pinon-pine trunks had been laid side-by-side across the stream, and I could crouch on the logs and dip the bucket into clear, knee-deep water below the bridge. But my eyes turned upstream instead, where a few feet from the bridge a dead rabbit lay on its side in a shallow rapid, its head pushed halfway under a thin shelf of ice.

  I crossed the bridge and approached it along the bank, crouching for a closer look. The rabbit didn't look old or emaciated, and its intact eyes implied that it hadn't been there long enough to attract scavengers. A red gouge on its scalp at the waterline suggested it was freshly killed. I stood up and looked around and saw that I was being watched. Standing on its hind legs under a sheltering dead pine, a white-furred weasel was keenly monitoring my discovery of its prize. It must have been hungry, because after I made eye contact it held its ground for a few seconds, wet nose sniffing beneath the coal-black eyes in its small triangular face. When I took a step in its direction, it chirped, turned, and ran.

  I knew that weasels inhabited the hills and washes that radiated out from the shallow Pecos River, and I knew that their brown fur turned white in the winter. But I'd never seen one at close range, and my lifelong affinity for wild creatures made me pursue it through the brush. I quickly lost sight of the weasel itself, but its tracks in the snow were easy to follow. They led past juniper bushes and uphill through a cluster of downed pinon branches, which I circled, to an abrupt earthen wall that was fronted by cholla and sage grass. The tracks disappeared where the snow had melted in front of the wall, but it was clear that the weasel had retreated into a hole in the wall's lower face.

  The hole was oval-shaped, its axis the length of my forearm, and as I bent toward it I felt cold air emanate from a larger space within. The wall itself was red-brown clay, a foot thick and instantly recognizable to anyone who had spent time studying the pueblos of New Mexico. This was an unexcavated ruin, probably a single dwelling or a small string of connected rooms. I headed back toward the spring to collect my shovel, then returned to the pierced wall.

  We followed a strict protocol for excavation and study at the Pecos pueblo, but based on the elevation and orientation of this dwelling, I felt confident it wasn't part of an important structure. And the hole meant that its integrity had already been breached. Having discovered it, I couldn't just walk away without even a cursory examination. I cut the hole's sides square with the shovel and tried to keep my pulse rate in check. When the hole was as broad as my shoulders and over a foot high, I slipped my upper body inside, then pulled my legs in after me.

  I'd moved to the southwest for college twenty years earlier and had spent almost fifteen years sketching and cataloging ancestral ruins under a series of accomplished archaeologists. And along the way I had gradually been able to subdue my fear of enclosed dark spaces. But my self-control dissolved as soon as my eyes adjusted to the limited light, and not because I saw an angry weasel about to strike. The weasel must have retreated into a connected chamber.

  Aside from my own, the only presence in this low-ceilinged room lay centered on the mud floor in front of me. The ashen remains of two human skeletons lying side by side. When I gently touched a burnt femur, it crumbled into dust beneath my fingers. And instantly, the twenty-plus years since Drew's death vanished, and I was back with the two corpses in Gig Garrett's burning cabin in 1902. A sudden lightheadedness was followed by a wave of nausea that left me retching on an empty stomach. Without stopping to wipe the bile and saliva from my mouth, I thrust myself back through the hole toward daylight.

  I led Kidder back to the site the following day. He assigned two men to map and inventory the room a few weeks later, after I told him I wanted no part of it. The appearance of the walls and ceiling suggested that the bodies had been burned inside the room, but we couldn't determine if they had been cremated or burned alive. None of the other excavated rooms at Pecos had yielded such a grim harvest. Ted's wife Madeline (who worked alongside us) wondered whether the corpses belonged to criminals, and if so, what transgression they had committed. Other remains unearthed at Pecos were sent to a museum at Harvard, but the skeletons in the burned room were beyond preservation. We concluded that the hole the weasel guided me to must have been of recent origin, because extended exposure to outside air would have turned the scorched bones to dust.

  The night I found the skeletons I laid awake in my tent for hours, reliving the night of Drew's death. I saw him turn to offer me words of encouragement before creeping into the culvert under the canal. My thoughts unwound into a dream and I was following him into the darkness, listening to him talk as I crouched and stepped forward with my hands pressing the tunnel walls. He spoke calmly about what we and Henry should say to Garrett that night, but the sound of his voice was diminishing, and I could tell that even though I was trying hard to keep up, he was pulling further and further ahead of me. Then I couldn't hear him at all, and I was alone in the culvert, scuttling forward faster on my hands and feet and knees toward the other end. Where was the opening? Where was Drew?

  Suddenly I confronted an impenetrable tangle of dead branches and tree stumps where the exit from the culvert should have been. Drew was gone. Cool air carried the smell of kerosene through the wooden debris. I heard a footstep from across the tangle, then saw the flare of a struck match.

  "You ain't cut out for this kind of work," said a voice I'd never heard before. It was both warm and mocking at the same time, with a slight drawl I associated with the hills, and I knew it belonged to Gig Garrett. "You never will be." He lit a soaked rag stuffed into a kerosene-filled bottle and threw the torch on the woodpile as I fell backward into the creek and the culvert caught fire.

  I woke up sweating, tangled in blankets, and laid awake for the rest of the night, listening to the distant howl of coyotes.

  At first the dream didn't come every night. When it became more frequent, its plot and setting varied, but its constants were enclosed spaces, fire, and fear. Sometimes I was trapped in a burning hayloft, others I was lost in a lignite mine. My one or two companions were always dead, because I hadn't been able to save them. And there was inevitably a stranger watching from beyond the walls of my prison. Someone unwilling to help me, and confident that fear would prevent me from saving myself.

  Toward the end of last year these nightmares became entrenched, and when I spent three weeks in Santa Fe over Christmas, Clara seemed alarmed and frustrated when I repeatedly woke up thrashing in the middle of the night and then laid awake until dawn. I took to sneaking out of the room with a blanket around me and pulling a cushioned armchair up to the fireplace, sometimes adding a split log to the embers to warm my feet. Sleep would finally embrace me as the sky paled, and Clara or Winnie would find me slumped in front of a cold fireplace an hour or more after sunrise.

  "Owen, what's wrong with you?" Clara said, as she studied the contents of her purse before heading off to work. It was a few minutes past nine on January 2nd, and t
he public library was re-opening after the holidays. I was shuffling around the kitchen trying to assemble breakfast. While I'd been slumbering in the corner, Clara had cooked pancakes and bacon, eaten breakfast with Winnie, and sent her off to school. The irresistible aromas hadn't been enough to rouse me. Now the stove was cooling and the batter was gone as I scavenged a broken pancake and a few overcooked bacon remnants. Even in my groggy state, I could tell that Clara was annoyed at me.

  "What do you mean? Right now hunger is what's wrong with me."

  "In the middle of the night you thrash like an alligator, and then you spend the morning stumbling around half-asleep. When you're only home for a few days, I understand that it takes some time to adjust. But you've been back for two weeks now and you still seem agitated. Winnie sees you asleep in your chair every morning – she must think her father is either a somnambulist or a vampire. Why is being home with us so hard?"

  "It's not hard," I said, sidling across the kitchen to put a hand on her waist. "Being away from you is hard."

  Clara turned toward the door to hide her involuntary smile. "Get outside," she said, "and spend two hours splitting wood. If that doesn't tire you out enough to sleep tonight, at least you'll be able to keep the fire going until dawn."

  Later that day I did spend two hours splitting logs, and I'd like to say that it helped, but all it really did was ensure that I fell asleep as soon as we stretched out in bed, and that had never been my problem. Once again I woke up at two or three in the morning, struggling to escape a burning sepulchre. I slipped out of the bedroom with the spare blanket, and as I placed kindling in the fireplace and prodded the embers, the stiffness in my arms and shoulders reminded me of my afternoon at the woodpile. I propped the poker against the adobe wall, retrieved a quarter-full bottle of whiskey from the kitchen, and settled back into my armchair in front of the fire.

  When there was only an inch left in the bottle, I stared out the window at the moon rising over the foothill pines and thought about the people the Navajo had called the Anasazi, who built their first clay villages on these plateaus five hundred years ago. I imagined their terraces and plazas and forgot about my fears. When the bottle was empty, I stood it against the chair leg and staggered back to bed, then slept dreamlessly and got up with Clara at seven.

  The next day I stashed the empty bottle in my coat pocket and visited a small inn on De Vargas Street. After the Prohibition amendment passed in 1920, Ted Kidder had told the innkeeper we could be trusted. The restless-eyed proprietor sent me home with two full bottles, and for a while my problem with insomnia was solved.

  Chapter 7

  I soon realized that it made more sense to pre-empt my nightmares than to drown them after they'd struck. So during the remaining ten days of my Christmas holiday in Santa Fe, I began reaching for the whiskey bottle before we went to bed. It didn't seem to bother Clara at first, maybe because alcohol didn't make me angry or impulsive. It made me expansive and generous. Sometimes it encouraged me to explain the great significance of the work our team was engaged in at Pecos, or to contrast pueblo life in the fifteenth century with the way we live today. One night when I was three fingers of whiskey into my usual dosage, I described the mysterious shrine of the stone lions that Adolf Bandelier chronicled in 1880, near the ruins of the Yapashi pueblo on the Pajarito plateau.

  On one of the desolate mesas that ascend toward the Jemez mountains from the Rio Grande, two life-size mountain lions carved from tufa rock lie crouching side by side, posed as if ready to pounce. The people who made them lived thirty or more generations ago, before their descendants came down from the high ground to build pueblos along the river that remain today, at San Ildefonso and Cochiti. And now centuries later, the stone lions are eroding slowly into the ground beneath them, heads between their paws and tails stretched out behind.

  "None of us would ever have found that shrine," I told Clara. "Indian guides from Cochiti took Bandelier up there. The site is still sacred to them, and no one will tell us what it means. Maybe they don't know themselves anymore. To me the place was almost mystical." I paused to pour more whiskey. "Civilization paying homage to its predecessors. The lions symbolizing both the transient and the eternal."

  Clara cast a skeptical glance at the bottle on the floor beside my chair, arched her eyebrows, and turned toward the bedroom. "Good night," she said. "I'll leave you to your philosophical musings."

  Just over three months ago, in mid-January, Kidder's team reconvened at the Pecos ruins. I shared a ride out from Santa Fe to join them. Now that I'd discovered an antidote to my nightmares and insomnia, I began visiting a tinsmith in the nearby village who sold whiskey out of the back door of his shop. My mornings at Pecos were cold, bright, and unforgiving, and I usually crawled from my tent dry-throated and feeling like a mule had kicked me in the back of the head. But at least I started each day unburdened by haunting images from the prior night's dreams. A sip or two from my breakfast flask would loosen the knots encircling my skull, and after a short stroll in fresh air, I generally regained my equilibrium and was ready to work.

  Some days were spent walking roomblock perimeters to record dimensions, or cataloging excavated pottery and tools. On others I would copy a series of petroglyphs, or carry my sketch-book up a nearby hill for an elevated view of the ruins, then revise my ground plan of the pueblo to include a newly discovered kiva. We had two cameras as well, but photographs alone couldn’t tell the whole story.

  Late afternoons were for washing up and chores around camp, and dinners in the mess tent were occasions for spirited debate on everything from politics to pueblo life to the peyote rituals of Indians along the lower Pecos River. By nine o'clock I was well into my whiskey cure and by ten asleep in my tent. If a full bladder woke me up in the middle of the night, it was from a dreamless sleep, and a clay pitcher in the corner of my tent spared me from venturing out into the night to piss.

  When Clara and Winnie came out to the pueblo in February, three days of unremitting wind stirred up whirls of dust, and Winnie developed a cough that kept her confined to the tent. I gave up on my plan to spend the weekend at a cabin on the upper Pecos River, where it rolls over ice-covered rocks as it comes out of the mountains.

  Instead we read books by the fireplace in the mess tent, and in the evenings my whiskey bottle found a home beside my chair leg. I noticed that Clara seemed a bit preoccupied and distant, and I attributed it to her concern about Winnie's health. She had little to say about recent goings on in Santa Fe, which wasn't like her, since working at the library kept her at the crossroads of local news and gossip. And while Winnie's presence meant that I hadn't expected a free-wheeling conjugal circus, neither had I expected complete abstinence. An empty tent and cot were available for the taking, but I felt lucky to even make eye contact with Clara before she and Winnie were ready to go home.

  In mid-March I rejoined them in Santa Fe for a few days. Back in sheltered surroundings, Winnie had overcome her cough, and she seemed happy to see me. After she came home from school, we went sledding on a hill near Fort Marcy, and on Sunday we took a carriage ride up Canyon Road.

  But I could tell that some kind of fissure was forming between Clara and me. Until recently, my sojourns in Santa Fe had been celebratory affairs. They began with getting reacquainted in bed, and then proceeded through ritual events like a hot shave and haircut on De Vargas Street, a welcome-home lunch of eggs and elk sausage, and Clara's inevitable presentation of a new shirt, jacket, or pair of gloves. Before Winnie was born, we would occasionally hire a car and drive with another couple to Jemez Springs for a few days of soaking in the thermal pools.

  Six weeks ago, none of that awaited me when I came home from Pecos. Instead our conversations seemed perfunctory and practical, and more than once I felt Clara's appraising eyes on the back of my neck. It had been a raw winter, and I realized that I might have looked a bit more weathered than usual, but I was otherwise unprepared for the chill I encountered.

 
"Owen, what's wrong with your hand?" Clara said as she watched me attempt to fill a teaspoon with sugar for my coffee on my first morning home. My fingers had been trembling for the last few months when I asked them to perform small-bore tasks in the morning. I knew that a gulp or two of whiskey would immediately steady them, but I decided that such a gesture at breakfast might trigger alarm.

  "Nothing serious," I said. "Just a passing tremor. I sometimes get those from steering-wheel vibrations." I was pleased with this answer, since I had in fact caught a ride from Pecos with another worker and had shared the responsibility for driving the rutted road to Santa Fe.

  Clara squinted at me. "It's not just your hand," she said. "What about your eyes? They look like bloodstains! And the skin underneath them is dark and hollowed out."

  "It's the wind," I said. "Remember how relentless it was when you were there in January? It blew like that again the last few days, and I noticed a small hemorrhage in my left eye yesterday. It's not lasting damage – they clear up after a week or so."

  "Owen, it's not the wind," Clara said. "And it's not the steering wheel. It's the whiskey – and it's you. You're turning into someone I don't recognize anymore. Someone I'm not even sure I want to recognize."

  I winced and squinted back, unable to reply for a few moments. She sounded serious, and I hadn't seen this coming. She'd waited for Winnie to finish breakfast and retreat to her room before confronting me. My uncooperative fingers drummed the side of my chair.

  "Clara, I haven't been myself lately. I know that. I went through that stretch where I couldn't sleep and had nightmares every night, but I'm getting better now. For a while I kept remembering the night Drew died, and I think I was still blaming myself. The whiskey helped me forget and start living in the present again. So I don't think I'll need it as much from now on." Even as I uttered these last two sentences, they sounded fraudulent to me. "Things will get back to normal for us. I think that's happening already."