by Gin Phillips
“And you still are?” she asked.
“There’s something about hills,” he said.
She tried to imagine him small and uncoordinated. “Did your parents try to stop you?”
“Oh, Mom did. Dad was always impressed by bloody knees. He said it meant I had character.”
They were nearing the top, and for a while there was only the puff of breathing and the soft crunch of rocks and dirt.
“So when will you have to go back to your day job?” Silas asked. “I know you’re not a fancy-free new Ph.D. anymore.”
“Are you kidding? This artist is what got me the director’s spot at the museum. If the board thinks there’s a chance I can get out of here with more bowls, they’ll let me stay here until Christmas. Well, not until Christmas. But I have some leeway.”
She was in no hurry to get back. Not that she disliked her job. Her first couple of years at the museum had been intensely satisfying: She’d spent every spare moment cataloging the Crow Creek finds. There had been intense days and nights of sitting at a table, sifting through sherds, trying to fit pieces together, making sure each artifact wound up in the right bag with the right label. She selected fragments to ship to labs in hope of more information on clay and geography and time periods. Pulling things out of the dirt was the fun part—the hard data took much longer to unearth. The museum board had given her the time and the resources to continue her analysis on Crow Creek, had given her a place to showcase the results. They paid her salary. They occasionally let her take time off to chase after pottery. In return, she managed the very self-sufficient staff, planned exhibits, and strategized how to bring in more visitors. It was not a bad trade-off. Still, she preferred the sun and sky to fluorescent lighting and e-mails.
“And what about you?” she asked. “Why are you here?”
“It’s this place.” He took several steps, watching the trail, then glanced back toward her. “The unclaimed space. The outer edges. Not northern, not southern. Somewhere you could shed your skin and create a whole new existence. I want to know how it all came together. And it’s a nice thing to get paid to play in the dirt. Braxton—the guy who owns the place—has the money to fund this himself. He set up a foundation, just for his own curiosity as much as anything else. Last year, when he asked me to work out here full-time, I didn’t exactly argue.”
“It is a pretty nice gig.”
“He and my father grew up together in the middle of nowhere. I’ve known Braxton forever. So there was a little nepotism involved.”
“Sounds like the work here isn’t close to done,” Ren said.
“We can’t even begin to guess how much is here. Sites are scattered all over the canyon. When the populations at Chaco and the Mimbres River Valley were exploding during the tenth and eleventh centuries with all the rainfall, we got people trickling into the canyon. But by 1130, when the massive drought hit—and everything started falling apart—we really started seeing some action. The tributaries of the Rio Grande were drying up, but our spring-fed Rio Rosa held steady. Even during a drought, we’re getting two thousand gallons per minute from an aquifer that taps into a Pleistocene lake bed. It must have been very tempting here.”
They’d made it to the top, and the land was flat and brown. Nothing but juniper—great bushes of it towering over their heads. Ant piles like mounds of kitty litter were scattered across the landscape. And cholla, much of it dead, with the look of Swiss-cheese driftwood.
“We had this college kid last year,” Silas said. “No attention span. We warned him and warned him about the cholla, but he was always horsing around. One day he was talking to the kid behind him and ran straight into a cholla—smack into it, head to toe. Hugged it like a brother.”
“What did you do?”
“Went looking for the pliers.”
Away from the water source, it was one endless tan-and-brown landscape up here, broken only by the occasional burst of dark green. Silas pointed out sites previous groups had excavated, most still marked by rebar planted vertically in the ground, physical reminders of grid points.
They kept walking.
“Here,” he said. “There’s where we found it. Feature Forty-eight.”
There was a dead juniper in the center of the site, dense and wide and low to the ground, the smallest branches like gray toothpicks. The rooms seemed to spread from the juniper. Here, by her feet, was the only feature actually excavated. The entire hole was less than three meters across. Only dirt and the round circle of adobe at the hearth remained.
“I’m going to sit here for a while,” she announced. “You don’t need to wait.”
The beginning of a question flickered across his face.
“Really,” she said, before the question took form. She tried not to sound like she was dismissing him. “You don’t need to wait. I’d like a little time to take it all in. But thanks.”
He nodded once. “Bueno. The guys will be up shortly. We’re working on the next-closest block. I’ll be three juniper bushes over.”
She stood by the excavated room, her shadow pointed straight ahead, shadow hat blanketing one stone. She knew people who loved the exactness of this, the mathematical precision of breaking a site down into a grid of square meters. Identifying each tidy square on the X and Y axis—this would be 500 N 1001 E. She remembered Ed staring out at Crow Creek four summers ago, saying every new site was like beginning a game of Battleship.
She did not see this as mathematical. She did not want to think of grids or meters or tape measures and string. She stared over the landscape, blotting out the rebar, the silver buckets, the folded blue tarp, the wooden frame of the screen already set up on the sawhorses. A branch behind her brushed the back of her knee. Beside her right foot was a string with a level, looped carelessly, tossed there probably the last time someone measured the depth.
She started with the dead juniper bush in the center. It would have been gone—she erased it, then erased the other bushes. The stones ran in curves and uneven lines, mazelike, wrapping under and around the other dead junipers rising out of the dirt and dry grass. The stones were walls, some obviously caved in, but an aerial map to what was below. There were a dozen rooms that she could see—uneven rings of stone, some with slight depressions. Not all of them connecting. Here she had a T-shaped room block with three rooms across and three down.
She stared until her vision blurred. The lines of rocks shifted. They rose from the ground, forming sun-baked walls. The walls wavered, unsteady, perhaps shoulder-high, more mud than stone. The flat roofs were rough with sticks and adobe, and the rooms themselves melted into the ground. It was architecture the color of dirt, springing from the ground as inevitably as shrubs and rocks. The adobe room blocks always made Ren think of prehistoric Legos, almost-cubes and almost-rectangles making almost-straight lines.
No people. They should have been climbing up ladders, chatting on the rooftops, bringing water from the creek. But she could never see the people at first. They hid and refused to come out of the dirt until she cajoled them. A movement to the left caught her eye, and without thinking she turned her head and focused on it. The image shattered. She could never hold on to them if she looked too hard.
She gazed down again into the room they’d already uncovered at the edge of the T. Neat walls dropped about eighty centimeters down to the original floor, which was slightly uneven with adobe wash. She lowered herself into the hole, landing on the protective yellow interlocking pads that covered most of the floor. She pressed her hands flat against the walls, feeling one large flat stone under her right hand. It was a smooth river rock, carried up from the creek to help anchor the walls: Ground rock had obvious striations that showed in the sunlight.
The river rock felt flat and cool as marble against her skin. Patches of adobe along the wall were solid as concrete. This was essential, getting the
feel of the site on her fingers. It was how she always started. An invitation. A summons. Her mind stubbornly turned to her father, as it sometimes did at the touch of dirt.
Her father would fill the back of his truck with small trees planted in burlap sacks, solid bags of dirt and bark, blocks of pine straw, endless flats of flower after flower, each one no bigger than Ren’s longest finger. Sometimes on Saturdays she would shimmy into the center of it all, tucking herself against the cab of the truck, the metal hard against her tailbone. She liked riding in the back with the flowers.
She was allowed to help him plant after he carried all the sacks into someone else’s yard. He carried them one by one, sometimes two by two, across his forearms, and his knees bent with the weight. Sweat would drip down his face, and when he took off his headband, he would wring the sweat out of it in a steady stream. He laid the sacks in complex configurations, and Ren pictured old-timey soldiers hiding behind the sacks with rifles. After the last bag was on the ground, he would raise his arms to shoulder length, bend his elbows, and twist back and forth. His back cracked like fireworks. Then he would reach to the sky, reach to the grass, and sigh, “Ahhh.” Ren could tell that all the weight he’d taken into his bones carrying those sacks had shot out through his fingertips and disappeared into the air. Then he’d tell her it was time to dig. She loved the first handful of cool dirt as she scooped out a hole for each petunia, but most of all she loved watching her father force out his pain into the sky and the ground.
She would start with this room block, of course. But her artist could be anywhere. The sherd could have been brought over by a friend or neighbor. Or maybe the pot had been traded and her artist had never set foot on this site. Or maybe there was a treasure trove of artifacts within meters of where she stood.
She felt light-headed, which she took as a good sign.
It wasn’t even nine a.m., so she could get in nearly a full day of digging. She turned in the direction Silas had pointed, and she could see clouds of dirt rising over the brittle shrubs. She headed toward the clouds and soon could hear the murmur of voices. As she drew closer, the voices grew more distinct and there was a metallic undercurrent—the shaking of the screener, the rattle of rocks against the wire mesh. When she rounded a clump of juniper bushes, the three men were only ten feet away. Silas was scribbling onto his notepad, and Ed was sifting a bucket of dirt through the screener. Paul was down in a room, only his shoulders and head above ground. He straightened, holding something in one glove.
“Silas,” he called. “Deer?”
Silas let the notebook fall to his side, walked over, and took the small bone from Paul’s hand.
“No—wild pig. Probably a chunk of a scapula—see that curve?”
They hadn’t seen her yet, and she stepped back into the shade of the bush. Paul kept digging, and Ed screened. They must have been near an ash pit, because they both found bone after bone.
Silas put down his notebook altogether and knelt near the edge of the pit, just out of the way of the rolling waves of dust pouring over and around Paul. He reached in occasionally, noticing a flash of white in the turned-up dirt that Paul missed. But mainly he sat on his haunches while Ed and Paul brought him bones, holding them out like offerings for him to interpret. Deer ulna, coyote joint, bird and rabbit and elk, vertebrae, piece of skull, toe, he called, handing the bones back before he’d finished speaking. He called their names with one quick narrowing of his eyes, easy and smooth as exhaling.
She watched him interpret the bones. This was what they did: try to rebuild lives out of broken pieces, bits of trash, gnawed bones.
It was difficult to hear over the screening. Paul held up a wriggling centipede nearly as long as his arm, and Ed said something that ended with “three feet long in my shower.”
“Fourth deer vertebrae in the last five minutes,” Silas said, as Paul held out another gray chunk.
She remembered the excavation of a huge ash pit in the Mimbres Valley. It had been like working in a crater full of printer toner, and she hadn’t known any of the other archaeologists. Their first morning they’d all dipped their fingers into the black ash and drawn designs on their faces, like prehistoric warriors. She’d turned her face into a Mimbres bowl, and the others had reached to touch it. She’d felt their fingers on her face, and they had all belonged to one another absolutely. The dirt could make you belong so easily, so quickly.
She left the shade, although it was tempting to stay on the outskirts a little longer, to watch the gears and cogs turning so smoothly between them.
“You’re fast,” she said to Silas, nodding at the foil envelope packed with bones at his feet.
“Hunted a lot growing up,” he said, tipping his hat back to meet her eyes. “I’m not much of a geologist, but I do okay with bone.”
Soon Silas took Paul’s place digging, and Paul moved over to the screen. Ed blew his nose, took off his gloves, and walked over to Ren. He tipped his head at Paul.
“That kid’s a hard worker. And smart. Good attitude. You’ll like him.”
“I already like him. Is he even old enough to drink?”
“Apparently he manages just fine.”
“Apparently.”
“And listen to you, ready to check his ID. You don’t look so different than you did when you bopped in with that college group a few years ago.”
She cut her eyes toward him. “Fifteen years ago, Ed. But you get points for flattery.”
“Only then you had that guy following you around. What was his name? The one who gave you that big rock?”
“He hadn’t given me a big rock then,” she said.
“No big rocks from anybody else yet?”
She lifted her hand and wiggled her bare fingers.
“That one looked like a football player,” Ed said. “Not much of a neck.”
“Hey, look!” called Paul. “I found a pretty big sherd. Maybe Socorro.” He jogged toward them.
Ed held out a hand, took the sherd, pursed his mouth, and spat on the pottery, rubbing with his thumb until the surface was clearer.
“Tularosa?” he asked.
“Yeah, Tularosa,” Ren said. “Nice job, Paul.” She reached for the sherd, holding it between her thumb and forefinger. There were certain oral elements to fieldwork: If you wondered what sherd you’d found, you spat on its surface. If you wondered whether you’d found bone or wood, you laid the bone on your tongue. Bone would stick, and wood would not.
“It was packed in a clump of dirt,” said Paul, words coming quickly. “And if I hadn’t been scraping it pretty gently, I’d probably have broken it. But I saw just the edge of it, and see how it’s a piece of the rim?”
“Definitely the rim,” said Ren.
“I’ll go show Silas,” Paul said, already moving.
Ed stepped closer to Ren, and she was reminded of how he had a way of edging into your personal space that was comforting rather than intrusive. He leaned in to her in a way that felt like a confidence.
“You think we’ll find her?” he asked. “Your artist?”
She answered without editing her thoughts. “Yeah.”
“If we do,” he said, “the hordes will descend. Journalists. Tourists, maybe. Universities wanting a piece of it. It’ll be bigger than last time.” He swiped at his nose. “A lot of people wouldn’t have called you here. A lot of people would assume you’d steal the spotlight.”
“I know. Did you tell Silas I don’t care about the credit?”
“I didn’t tell him that. He didn’t ask.”
She nodded at Silas, who was peering at Paul’s sherd. “You like him.”
“I do.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“I don’t think he publishes much. He doesn’t teach. He likes the data, likes digging it up and teasing out the patter
ns, but he doesn’t care which journal it winds up in. But he’s like you out here. You both walk around a site with a look on your face like a kid at Christmas. You’re filthy and you’ve got bugs in your mouth and blood oozing out of a cut, and you feed off every second of it.”
She considered this and felt pleased by the assessment. When Ed returned to screening, she veered off toward Silas, who was kneeling at the edge of the hole. She looked at the walls of the room. “You don’t think this room is Mimbres, do you?” she asked. “Too much rock.”
“Yeah,” Silas said. “Northern influence. They didn’t have good rock to work with. This tiny river rock is like trying to stack ball bearings.”
She was studying the lines of the wall when she felt his finger on the inside of her knee. But not his finger—the leathery tip of his glove, barely skimming her skin.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She had a thin red scrape from the top of her knee to mid-calf, like a mark from a teacher’s grading pen. His fingertip followed the path of the scratch, not touching any longer.
“I don’t know,” she said, watching his hand in the air. She stood up and brushed her hands against her shorts.
Silas offered to pair up with her on the T-shaped room block while Paul and Ed finished the room with the cache of bones. She and Silas spent the rest of the day working on the room that had already been started. The first ten centimeters were hard-packed, but the second and third layers were soft as beach sand. Silas dug, and Ren screened. She liked the feel of the dirt under her hands, so she screened and sorted bare-handed. She dumped each bucket onto the screen and spread it with her hands, feeling the silkiness of the dirt, the roughness of the rocks, the curves of broken roots. A breeze blew steadily.
They found a dozen small black-on-white sherds. Silas found a serrated stone blade, and Ren found a perfect projectile point. He took her back to the bunkhouse a different way, following a steep path through an arroyo. The descent looked vertical from the top. Ren watched Silas start down. He held a bucketful of bagged artifacts in one hand. He skidded, and she frowned, but he rode out the skid, skiing smoothly down the gravel.