Come In and Cover Me

by Gin Phillips

  “Okay with this?” he called back. ”It’s much faster than the way we came.”

  She took a breath and a sideways step. She lost traction immediately, but, like him, she leaned back, balanced with her arms, and relaxed into the slide. She careened downhill, riding the rocks. The lack of control was thrilling.

  She reached the bottom of the arroyo right behind him. He watched her jog down the last few steps and grinned as she came to a stop. The edges of his two front teeth were slightly jagged, serrated like the stone blade he’d found.

  That afternoon they finished up lab work, scrubbing pieces of stone and sherds with toothbrushes and water, then leaving them to dry in the sun. Bone and charcoal, which could be weakened by the water, were not cleaned. They remained in tightly wrapped foil packets. Once dry, artifacts were sorted into clean paper bags, labeled based on their type and location, recorded in a thick plastic binder, and tucked inside cardboard filing boxes. These bits of pottery, worked stone, and remains of meals would, at some point, be unpacked in a different lab room and organized more thoroughly.

  Her hands and arms gritty from splashes of dirty water, Ren headed to the swimming hole Silas had mentioned on their way back from the site. She took a bag with shampoo and conditioner, a towel, her water bottle filled with lemonade, hiking down the main road to the creek. It was a narrow creek, and even the swimming hole was only four feet or so across. She set down her bag and stripped down to her bathing suit, walking close to the water, past fat black ants patrolling the shore. Carefully, she stepped off the bank—dried grass and leaves sticking to her feet—down into the slope of mud and moss leading to the creek bottom. The water was up to her waist, cold. Almost unpleasant.

  She sat down and leaned back into the flow of the water, feeling pebbles from the small of her back down to her thighs. She let the current support her. She and Scott used to see who could stay at the bottom of the pool the longest, sunk like a stone: The seat of her favorite purple bathing suit—with the fringe along the neckline—was always rubbed furry from the rough concrete. Sometimes they would toss some toy or bracelet into the pool and race to find the sunken treasure, or they would invent dives and floats, or they would play Marco Polo until she screamed because Scott always eluded her and usually dunked her two-handed like a basketball just to add insult to injury. Her mother could catch Scott because she had been on swim teams and still leaped and dove like a seal, and she would grab his ankle and pull him under and Ren would splash him in the eyes as he went down.

  Now she dipped deeper. She washed her hair in the rushing water, suds swept downstream almost immediately. She shivered—her teeth were chattering by the time she pulled out her soap and started rubbing her arms and legs. She thought of calling the office. She thought of the smell of juniper. She shivered again. As she rinsed, she clenched her teeth and tried to block out the cold. Block out the day, block out herself. There was only the water and the cool air, her clean skin and wet hair. The feel of the pebbles against her thighs. The pull of the current. She relaxed into it, feeling the water lift and stroke each strand of hair.

  When she stood, water running off her, she did not fight against the cold anymore.

  Their feet had stirred up this dirt and walked through this water. Here. Soft breeze and willows bending and dried bits of grass on feet.

  From her first dig when she was twenty-two, these were what had appealed to her: the constants. The scenes, the land, the chemical compositions—the moments—that remained the same now and a thousand years ago. There was a power to the constancy, to the connection through distinct, holdable physical things. It was a rock that astonished her at first. She’d been shoulder-deep in a room, and a piece of river cobble had fallen from the side of the wall, landing right at her feet. Someone, not Ed, had told her to toss the rock out of the hole. She’d reached to pick it up, and the same someone had yelled out, Wait, is it already drawn on the map of the wall, and she’d said yes. And he’d said, Okay, toss it. She wrapped both hands around it, and somewhere deep in her chest it struck her that other hands had wrapped around this same rock and fit it into the wall in the first place. The rock joined her hands to that set of unknown hands that had first placed the rock, and the simplicity of it had floored her.

  She’d chosen to specialize in ceramics because pottery intensified the connection to those who came before. The ceramics talked to her far more than a rock could. Each piece had a language, a message in pictures and design, or at least in form and composition. The pottery spoke with the voices of its makers. And she was eager to listen. If she decoded the right signals, she imagined she could disappear—for even a second—into those other lives, cross over the rock or the adobe floor or the ceramic dust and find herself living as another self, in another time.

  She reached into the water and came up with two handfuls of rocks, smooth and cool in her palms, then let them fall back into the water one by one. She could feel a pressure behind her eyes. This was when she could see things—when she got outside her own skin. And somehow also more deeply in her own skin. She opened herself and felt sun and air on her face. She sank into the sound of water.

  When she turned back toward the path, the landscape shifted. A thick wall of trees appeared where there had been a dirt path. A new grove of piñon stood in the distance. Swirling around her feet, the creek was deeper and wider. She could see it branch off, foaming, where seconds before there had been only dry land. She saw the imprint of bare feet in front of her. She heard a girl’s laughing and saw a flash of brown skin and bare feet and dark hair disappear into the trees.

  Then the forest was gone, along with the footprints. The creek had calmed. It was a beginning.

  The next day they began the serious digging. The soreness never sank in on the first day of a dig. And in a few days it would be gone. But now Ren’s body complained about the new routine. The entire length of her spine felt the strain of bending over the dirt, of scooping and shoveling on her hands and knees. The weight of the buckets pulled on her fingers and shoulder joint as she walked, and if she carried two full buckets, that ache spread to a strain across her shoulders.

  Clouds of dirt flew when Silas dug. He made soft grunts as he swung the pick. His rhythm seemed effortless, and when he stopped and laid the pick on the ground, Ren was surprised—and gratified—to see him breathing heavily. He rolled his shoulders one at a time.

  “Feeling it?” she asked.

  He winced as he stretched his arms overhead. “Like a wet sponge.”

  “Oh.”

  When she took her turn hacking at the dirt, Silas stood, waiting for the buckets. A fringe of the juniper peeked around his knees and thighs, past his shoulders. He had a habit of breaking off tiny pieces of juniper and crushing them between his fingertips. She could smell the strong woody smell when the wind blew just right.

  Paul and Ed joined them later in the day. They chipped in with carrying buckets, chattering as they carried.

  “What did the Apaches make tiswin beer out of?” asked Paul.

  “Juniper, I think,” said Ed.

  “Silas, what was tiswin beer made out of?” Paul called more loudly.

  “Sprouted corn,” answered Silas, without looking up.

  Ren screened the buckets of dirt. Since the dirt was no longer soft, she wore one glove—Ed told her she screened like Michael Jackson—so she would have protection against the sharp rocks but could still feel the texture of the dirt. Her hands felt as if they would crack like arid earth.

  “I thought they made something out of juniper,” yelled Ed. More softly, he said, “You’ve got to at least try to stump him.”

  “Turpentine,” Silas called back, before Ed stopped speaking.

  Later in the afternoon she hit a root, long dead, and pried at it, then hacked at it with the pickax. She splintered it but couldn’t detach it. She paused to readjust her gri
p and catch her breath. When she looked up, Paul was kneeling, eyeing the root she’d been attacking. He flexed his biceps.

  “Very nice,” she said, straight-faced.

  “Can I interest you in two tickets to the gun show?” he said, deepening his voice. She thought it might be a movie reference.

  She handed him the ax.

  “Or one ticket to the ax show,” he said in the same voice. He rolled his sleeves up even higher. “I’m all about manual labor. It gives me a little something for the ladies.”

  She vaulted out of the pit to give him room. “Girls do like muscles.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, dislodging some sort of gnat from the corner of her eye. “I would have noticed those muscles when I was in college.”

  “Don’t get any ideas, son,” said Ed, rummaging through the supply bag. “She’s a long way from college now.”

  “I can’t imagine why you don’t date more, Ed,” she said.

  She turned back to Paul, shaking her head sadly. “But it wouldn’t have worked out between us. You’re a nice boy. I would have eaten you for breakfast.”

  The boy blushed, actually blushed underneath his tan, and she arched an eyebrow at him. He ducked his head and started chopping at the root.

  The truth was she did like nice boys. And she had eaten them for breakfast. Spat them out and left them bruised and battered. But even though that was the truth, when she said it to Paul, it was not real. It was only dialogue.

  Later, as they began packing to head back to the bunkhouse, Ed and Paul bickered over when chilies arrived in the Southwest. Paul thought they had come up from Mexico at the same time as corn and squash.

  “Hey, Silas, when did New Mexico get chilies?” called Ed.

  “When the Spanish came,” said Silas. He’d been chasing a paper bag that was blowing across the site.

  “Told you,” said Ed.

  Later that night they sat on the porch, watching the darkening sky over the mountains. A jackrabbit bounded across the field near the grazing horses.

  “So you know how some of the Mimbres pots have people with parrots perched on their heads?” asked Paul in the silence. “What’s the deal with the parrots?”

  “It taught good posture,” said Ed, unblinking, as if he were staring into the cameras, announcing a traffic jam on I-10.

  “It depends on what we think pottery means,” Ren said. “I mean, there were, in fact, parrots. The Mimbreños traded for parrots from northern Mexico. But are they drawing these pictures the same way we would take a photograph—to capture what actually existed? Or were the images just symbols—representations of an idea or emotion, or some historical allusion? An expression of faith?”

  “So we don’t know?” Paul asked.

  “The only people who know for sure are long gone,” Ren said.

  Paul frowned. “How many licks does it take to get to the bottom of a Mimbres bowl?”

  “That doesn’t even make any sense,” said Ed.

  Paul rocked back on two chair legs. “Silas, how many licks does it take to get to the bottom of a Mimbres bowl?”

  Silas had not been in a storytelling mood tonight. He had stayed quiet, sitting away from the rest of them, close to the fire. Zorro had fallen asleep on top of his feet. Silas didn’t answer Paul, who waited for a moment and turned back to Ren.

  “I like the animal hybrids on the pottery,” he said. “Macaw heads on women. Bear heads on turtles.”

  Ren nodded. “Turkey men. Macaw women. Maybe that’s where the jackalopes got started.”

  “I think I saw a bear-elk the other night, by the way,” Paul said. “Body of a bear and the head of an elk. Better than Bigfoot.”

  “People have made a lot of money off Bigfoot,” Ed said.

  “I like money,” said Paul. “I should license it.”

  “It’d sound scarier in Latin,” said Ed.

  “Okay,” said Paul agreeably. “So ‘bear-elk’ in Latin is . . . Who knows Latin?”

  “Ursa-cervus,” Silas said.

  Ren turned. “You can translate ‘bear-elk’ into Latin?”

  He looked over, smiling, finally, at her, then not smiling, just looking. She looked back. She blinked. Before she blinked again, they both looked away. Paul said something else she didn’t hear. She could feel Silas’s eyes on her again; then she heard his chair creak and his feet slide against the dirt.

  “Night, everybody,” he said. She turned then to say good night, and she saw his hand raised. She thought he might pat her back or squeeze her shoulder. But he brushed one knuckle along the line of her jaw, so brief she didn’t register that it had happened until after the crunch of his footsteps had faded.

  When she looked back toward the fire, she saw Ed watching her. She didn’t recognize his expression. She thought he might tease her or tease Silas, but he kept quiet; his silent, speculative gaze unsettled her more than the touch of Silas’s finger.

  That night Scott woke her by leaning in close to her face, his nose almost touching hers—it was a trick their old terrier used to do when he wanted to be let out in the middle of the night. She opened her eyes and stared directly into Scott’s darker brown ones. He seemed solid in the moonlight. She shoved at him and felt nothing but air.

  “Go away, Scottie,” she said. “You’re not the one I’m trying to see.”

  Back in the days and weeks and maybe months right after the accident, she could feel him behind her without turning her head. The air felt different when he was nearby. For a while he was next to her bed most mornings. He seemed to be around every corner. Then, over time, she didn’t see him as often. Eventually he stopped speaking, but he never stopped singing to her. Sometimes she couldn’t make out the words, but she always recognized the tune. He sang the same music he had taught her.

  He used to come to her in the in-between times—when she was rubbing the sleep out of her eyes in the morning; when she was staring at her bedroom wall, bodiless and mindless, forgotten homework spread over her bed. He came to her as she paced the empty house in the long afternoons before her parents came home.

  Ren rolled back over, and Scott was still standing by the bed. The bad thing about these nighttime visits was that her mind was open and relaxed whether she meant it to be or not. She could never be sure which song might slip under her skin and where it might go. She hoped he’d stay quiet.

  She sighed. “I really need to get some sleep. Really. Go haunt someone else for a while.”

  Sometimes if she closed her eyes fast enough, she would feel only annoyance with him. She could pretend she would see him in the morning, eating breakfast and piling folders in his book bag. And if she was lucky, she could fall back asleep without feeling anything else.

  three

  * * *

  If art is intended to communicate with others, artists are additionally constrained by the necessity of producing images that can be “read,” or understood by an appropriate audience.

  —From “Picturing Differences: Gender, Ritual, and Power in Mimbres Imagery” by Marit K. Munson, Mimbres Society, 2006

  * * *

  For the first week, Silas drank his coffee black. On the seventh day, he was making his lunch while she fixed her coffee. He layered thin slices of ham, sprinkled them liberally with salt, then added the top piece of bread. He finished with one more shake of salt, straight on the bread.

  He glanced at her cup as she poured in the cream.

  “I’ll take cream, please,” he said.

  “You drink it black.”

  “Not really.”

  “You’ve drunk it black every day for a week.”

  “Black coffee is manly,” he said, folding foil around his sandwich. “It makes a statement. I like the idea of black coffee.”

&n
bsp; “You’re not drinking an idea.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  She added sugar to her own cup. “If you want to prove your manliness, there are ways other than coffee.”

  “There are,” he said slowly.

  When she looked up from her coffee, he seemed closer somehow, although she was sure his feet hadn’t moved. The smile flickering around the corners of his mouth was both amused and challenging, and possibly other things. This was where she should say something clever. Or laugh it off. Clever would be better. But nothing came to her, and he filled the silence himself, his voice all easiness and self-mockery.

  “It has a certain romanticism to it,” he said. “Black coffee. Out here in the prehistoric ruins. Wild animals gnashing teeth.”

  She passed him the cream. “You really don’t like black coffee?”

  “Not really.”

  He was impossible to decipher. “Seriously?”

  “I have a variety of coffee moods.”

  They walked through the front door, stepped off the porch, and Silas headed toward what had become their favorite folding chairs in the yard. She held her cup to her lips, lingering on the porch as Silas settled in his chair. She watched his shoulder muscles shift under his T-shirt as he stretched. She watched him close his eyes.

  The door swung open behind her. Ed sipped his own cup of coffee—black. She had no doubt that he did actually drink it black. She’d been with him for months out of her life—a month during that first summer, three months at Crow Creek, and plenty of shorter digs in between—and every morning she’d seen him with his ink-black coffee.

  “Morning, Rennie,” he said. He was the only one outside her family who had ever called her Rennie, and he seemed to have divined the name from thin air. She had certainly never told him.