by Gin Phillips
When she looked up, he was looking at Silas, not at her. She wondered if he had followed her own gaze.
“How long will you stay?” he asked, surprising her. “If we don’t find any more traces of her?”
“I think I could swing another two or three weeks. I don’t know. I’ve put off calling the museum. But I’ll have to update them soon.”
“It might not be her.”
“It might not be.”
He looked at the mountains. “If you had to go back, we could handle this, you know. Call you back if we found anything.”
“You trying to get rid of me, Ed?”
“Never. But I don’t want you to worry that finding the Crow Creek artist depends on you staying. If you have to leave, we’ll keep looking.”
She had a second of doubt, a flash of thinking he really was trying to get rid of her, which made no sense at all. There was no one she was closer to in the world than Ed.
“Hey, Ren,” called Silas, still stretched out in his chair with his eyes closed. “I left my sandwich in there. I was thinking, you’re a woman; I’m a man. Go fetch it for me, huh?”
“Shut up, Silas,” she called back.
He smirked, never opening his eyes. She wasn’t even sure he knew Ed was there.
“Ed, go get my sandwich,” called Silas, who apparently did know they had company.
“You just wait there for it, Silas,” said Ed. “Just keep on waiting.”
Ren waited to see if Ed would say more about her leaving. But he only took a sip of his coffee.
“Remember that excavation along the Gila a few summers ago?” he asked. “With that older archaeologist who fell hard for that big blue-eyed grad student? He kept offering to rub her feet?”
“The really well endowed grad student?”
“Yeah.”
She pretended to think. “The one who turned out to be a lesbian?”
Ed smiled. “Yeah. Yeah. That was a good dig.”
And just like that, he was the Ed she had always known, the man who could name every insect in water, land, or sky. The man who could tell a tall tale like he was giving the weather. At times over the years she could almost imagine this was her father. A father she saw occasionally, who treated her with affection and professional courtesy. It was an appealing vision, a scenario in which fathers were without personal lives or expectations and existed only to be charming and kind and fatherly for as long as their presence was appreciated.
She’d walked past the swimming hole, farther into the canyon. The dirt road stayed close to the creek. Two sets of deer tracks crossed her path: The splayed, rounded toes of a buck smudged the pointed, compact prints of a doe. She turned a corner in the road, and the air changed: It sparkled around her, bits of light blinking past her face and hands and around her knees. She’d reached a huge cottonwood, towering, with thick green branches. The tree was snowing cotton bits, and the fading sunlight caught them, spun them glittering in the air.
She walked to the trunk and ran her fingers along its alligator bark. The trunk was thick and ropy, immense. She stood still, wind blowing, caught in its snow globe.
She heard breathing just behind her, low to the ground. Animal panting, like a dog needing water. She looked behind her, expecting to see Zorro wagging his tail. Nothing.
She stayed still. Again, the sound of panting, this time farther away. There was the sound of feet moving through leaves so loudly that they must have wanted to be heard. She looked and saw no one. The footsteps grew faster.
She did not know if she wanted to see whoever was moving through the woods. She made herself control her own breathing—deep and slow. She needed to see whatever or whoever was willing to show itself. She walked slowly back to the creek. For a while, the sounds stopped.
As she stepped through the creek, she watched the rocks—burnt orange, pink, black, deep gold, pale yellow, chocolate. Ferric oxide in the reds, limonite in the yellows, manganese in the blacks. When she reached the other side, she knew she was not alone anymore. She looked up and saw a man hunched in the tall grass with his back to her. He was strong and lean, and his hair was long down his naked shoulder blades.
It was only a flash, lasting maybe five seconds. She saw his black hair and an expanse of skin and a carcass at his feet. It was skinned and glistening—a deer, probably. She saw a small mass of what she thought were intestines in a clump of weeds. The man had a blade, a sharpened rock, in his hand, and he was cutting strips of meat, sawing along the whole width of carcass. He pulled off a strip maybe two feet wide and three feet long, the right size for jerky.
The meat was steaming slightly, and Ren thought she could smell blood. It was surprisingly pleasant. The man had blood streaked up to his elbows. He turned in her direction, pausing, looking at the creek but not at her. She thought he was coming to the water to wash. She looked at the dead thing and breathed in the blood.
Then he was gone and only the smell lingered.
She waited for several more minutes and saw nothing else. She tried to clear her head of the smell and make sense of what she’d seen. The man was obviously not her artist, and she couldn’t see how he would have anything to do with pottery. But she was glad to have seen him: He’d been part of this place. If he was here, others might be, too. She only needed to keep looking.
They’d all taken a long lunch break, because Ren felt she couldn’t put off checking in with the office any longer. It was the second time in her two weeks at the canyon that she’d driven off the ranch to the asphalt highway, watching her phone screen until she picked up reception. She’d answered e-mails, pulled off on the side of the road, windows rolled down to catch a breeze. As soon as she closed her phone, the whole conversation—her whole life on the other end of the phone—caught the wind and floated away.
She’d been pestering Silas to take them up canyon to a previously excavated site called Apex, and he’d finally agreed. A jagged hill rose out of the flat ground, with edges of rock obvious along the outline of the hill. Ren could see the rocks were walls embedded along the peak. She could count room blocks, but they were packed in tightly, a prehistoric tenement apartment building. The families had built right on top of each other, all the way up the rock face. It was clearly Northern Puebloan.
“We’ve got six-foot walls, collapsed architecture, rooms—as you can see—all the way up that slope,” Silas said. “Obviously these guys were worried when they built here. You can see for miles and miles here, all across the canyon, so no one can sneak up on you. The other side of this hill is a sheer drop—absolutely no way to approach from that side.”
“Think they were afraid of the neighbors?” asked Ren.
He shrugged. “I think they were afraid of everyone. These guys got here around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The world was a dangerous place.”
Ren cocked her head and squinted against the sunlight. After the fall of Chaco, the city’s residents had spread into surrounding valleys, uprooted and unsure. The population had fallen into valley-to-valley warfare. Chaos and violence. In the Gallina Highlands, outside of Albuquerque, studies of human remains had suggested that sixty percent of adults and nearly forty percent of children had died violent deaths in those years after Chaco fell. Beheadings and dismemberments with dull flint knives; quick, brutal deaths during hand-to-hand fighting over land and food and survival.
“What’s wrong with the name Anasazi?” asked Paul.
Ren and Silas turned. Paul looked slightly surprised they had heard him.
“I mean, the northern groups, the ones with Chaco, they were the Anasazi, right?” he said. “From all the movies and books? You say Northern Puebloan, but it’s the same thing. Why don’t we call them Anasazi anymore?”
They were walking around to the back of the cliff, watching the cliff swallows darting through its shadows.
The back was unassailable, as Silas had said, a vertical wall of rock where nothing but birds and bugs could find footholds.
“It’s offensive to some people,” said Ren. “Anasazi is a Navajo term, meaning ancient enemies. It’s a little, oh, negative. Some of the tribal groups prefer ‘Ancestral Puebloans,’ but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. ‘Northern Puebloan’ works.”
“Cities of gold, weren’t there?” pressed Paul. “Treasure? Mass human sacrifice? Some of it has to be true.”
“Not so much,” Ren said.
“A little,” Silas said.
She rolled her eyes.
“No cities of gold,” said Ed. “But it’s hard to believe Chaco controlled hundreds of miles just with charm and good looks.”
“So maybe it was just the possibility of withholding food surpluses,” said Silas. “If you don’t do what we say, you won’t get food. But judging by what we’ve seen of their plazas and where there’ve been traces of human blood and remains, it was more than that. If you bucked the system, you got taken there and beaten in public. Humiliated.” He pointed a dusty finger at Ren. “Then, possibly, you were cooked. And eaten.”
She frowned. “They haven’t found that many boiled human bones. We don’t know that they were eaten.”
“Just how many boiled human bones would you say are required?”
“It’s a very Hollywood kind of explanation.”
“It was not a nice place,” he insisted. “Or, rather, maybe it was, but it was also ugly and brutal. And beautiful. Chaco made beautiful buildings, and they also probably ate people occasionally. Life is blood and death and fear and joy and fierce architecture, man.”
They walked deeper into the canyon, wading through the creek, only the soles of their shoes getting wet. The pebbles crunched under their feet. Ren was feeling irritated. Something about Silas’s tone was getting on her nerves.
“You should get that on a bumper sticker,” she said.
He stepped onto the shore and motioned toward the hillside rooms. “That’s always what life is. Esta casa es su casa.”
“Another good bumper sticker,” said Paul, still splashing through the water.
“This house is not my house,” said Ren. “My life is not blood and death and fierce architecture. And it may not be what life at Chaco was. You talk about it—joke about it—as if it were fact.”
“Oh, no,” said Silas. “Not fact. I’m very stingy with what I consider a fact. I believe in margins of error.”
She shook her head. “Violence is not inevitable. It’s not a given, not at Chaco, even. I mean, we don’t know that the Mimbres were anything but peaceful agrarians.”
“There’ve been references to fighting on Mimbres bowls,” he said.
“I know that.” She stopped, and so did he. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t peaceable people.”
“And it doesn’t mean they were.” He licked his lips and rubbed a hand over his chin. At first she took the pause as a reluctance to argue with her. Then she looked at his eyes and saw only pleasure.
“Look,” he said, “you’re trying to say that where we have gaps in our knowledge, there is nothing. We know the Mimbreños were farmers. We know that they were artists. So they are defined only by what we know. They are nothing else. I’m saying they can be anything until it’s disproven. They are everything that’s possible all at once. All those possibilities are out there, all existing at the same time, a million different variations floating around until we can prove they are not the case.”
“‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’” said Ed.
Ren exhaled. “Now you’re quoting Whitman at me, Ed? Are you saying you agree with Silas?”
“I find it interesting,” Ed said. “The idea that we are not filling a blank space. We’re not creating a people, creating a history. It all exists—we’re just trying to choose which reality is the correct one.”
“But only one reality is correct,” said Ren. This seemed inarguable. She turned back to Silas. “The others are false. We just don’t know which ones. We do not know that the people at Chaco were cannibals. You should not say they are cannibals when there is not substantive evidence. You’re saying, I think, that until we have proof either way, they are both. They both are and aren’t cannibals. The Mimbres were both peaceful and warlike.”
“Exactly,” said Silas, sounding satisfied. His face was lit up like he’d just found Atlantis at the bottom of the creek bed. “We can’t know the reality, not for sure. There are always other possibilities. And I’m not sure reality is as concrete as you make it out. I think it can be, even in our current time, more complex. An entire person, much less an entire civilization, is not just one definable thing.”
“If we’re not out here searching for one empirical truth, then what’s the point of being out here at all?” she said. “If we can’t know anything, what’s the point of trying?”
“Because it’s fun. Because it’s what we have. But it’s a puzzle we’re trying to fit together knowing that we’ll never have all the pieces. We can’t avoid the blank spaces. They’re a part of it.”
“I have to believe the pieces can fit together,” she said. “We owe them that—to tell the truth about them.”
Paul had been listening carefully. “Do you believe there’s a truth?” he asked Silas.
“Several of them,” said Silas. He looked back to Ren. “But don’t you think my way is less limiting?”
“I think your way is ridiculous,” she said, and he laughed.
If they were going to get any work done before sundown, they needed to get back to the site. When they turned back and stepped in the creek, Ren looked down at a school of minnows veering around her boot. She was not thinking about the relative sanity of his idea. She was thinking of what Ed had said about Silas not wanting to teach. The way he looked when he argued reminded her of professors, the good kind, at least—the look said if you don’t challenge me on this, you’re a boring sort of person.
She’d never wanted to teach, herself. She didn’t particularly enjoy being questioned.
The planks of the bench were poorly spaced, and she could feel the edges of the wood biting into her thighs through her cotton skirt. It had been silly to wear the skirt. Still, she had been covered in dust for weeks, hair either clean and wet and plastered to her head or dry and dirty and pulled into a ponytail. Her face stayed clean for minutes at a time. So it was only natural that for this one afternoon when they made the trip to Truth or Consequences for supplies and a good dinner, she would want to look like a woman, not an archaeologist, to look feminine and attractive to the extent that a skirt and lip gloss and eyeliner could signify those things.
“Like the skirt,” Silas had said to her as they got in the van, not looking at her, and she had the unexpected thought that he seemed a bit shy. But then he turned his head and waggled his eyebrows, lecherously, goofily, and she was at a loss.
They’d been in T or C for only half an hour. Ed and Paul had each made a quick phone call, then headed to the grocery store to start the shopping. Silas was walking—pacing, really—along the sidewalk behind her as he took care of his own phone calls.
She was editing copy for an upcoming exhibit, which was not an efficient process by phone. Three short-lived desert colonies had coalesced in various bends along the Rio Grande during the late 1800s, and her first draft of exhibit copy was more than ten thousand words. The office manager, Sally, was reading the problem paragraphs aloud. Too much talk of spirituality. Not enough on agriculture. She needed to do this right, needed to prove that she could do her job long-distance. The museum board’s patience wouldn’t last forever.
She glanced at Silas, who had called his parents. He was speaking to his father, whom he called “sir,” and asked about a fence Silas had apparently fixed on some recent visit. He n
odded at the phone frequently. Then his mother took the phone, and he teased her about something to do with watching Jeopardy! She made him laugh. He told her he had a book he wanted to bring her the next time he came. When he hung up, he looked over at Ren, phone still open in his hand.
“Still the office?” he mouthed.
She nodded, rolling her eyes.
“My brother’s next,” he said. He punched in numbers and said, “Hello, young man,” into the phone.
She tried to focus on the next paragraph Sally read. But she was aware of Silas asking someone named Skillet to record a game, because apparently football season was starting in two days.
She hung up just as Silas was sliding his phone into his pocket.
“I’m done. You need to make more calls?” he asked. “I can wait. Or go on inside while you finish up.”
“I’m done, too,” she said.
He cocked an eyebrow. “Just the office?”
“I’m a conscientious worker.”
A pause, then a grin. “No boyfriends to call? No ex-husbands? Current husbands? Boy toys?”
This, she knew with unusual certainty, was a joke but not a joke.
“If you wonder about my personal life, you could just ask me,” she said.
He looked surprised, and she watched the possible responses play across his face. His expression shifted from amusement to self-consciousness and then something that she would almost swear was embarrassment.
“Well, then,” he said finally, exhaling a short laugh. “Grocery shopping it is.”
She had not meant to chastise him. She didn’t want him backing away from her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she knew it wasn’t distance. At least not right now. She stood and put a hand on his arm as he started to turn. He stopped moving.
“And you had no girlfriends to call, either,” she said, voice light. “Unless Skillet is a girl.”
“Skillet is not a girl,” he said, and she couldn’t look away from his face.